Presenting the second instalment about talking about a fellow student’s blog, so for this one I’ve decided to talk YouTube with Alex. When YouTube was founded large revenues were not a priority but ever since its purchase by Google ads have become more and more common on YouTube videos. With the growth in the YouTube ad sector comes growth is the annoyed population sector as well, with a constant bombardment by ads YouTube clients are getting annoyed and see too much change from the way it used to be. It is understandable for their to be ads cause most people understand that companies have to make money to keep providing the service but sometimes it goes to far; on a few occasions I have gone onto YouTube to watch a funny commercial just to get hit by another ad before I can watch the video, this double advertising is a bit ridiculous. Yet YouTube is a marketers paradise, with extremely high traffic and simplified methods of targeting specific markets.
What to do with this problem with overexposure to advertisements? The consumer want no ads, but corporations are pro-ads, a compromise should be achieved. One compromise is already in place, the skip function, after a set time, 5-10 seconds, the viewer can chose to skip it. In addition to that, tagging a video that has advertisements can enable viewers to see when they will be exposed to advertisements before they go to that video’s page.
Things are probably not going to change as companies want to place more and more ads on YouTube videos whose viewers are their target market or that video has content similar to their products. Maybe sometime all YouTube videos with have commercial breaks built in.
YouTube is such a frequently visited site, it’s great to see such strong opinions and discussion on something we all use so often!