YouTube first spoke about pause ads last year when it started trialing them in select regions. At the time, the company said that when you pause a video, it will shrink, and an ad will appear next to it.
“In Q1, we saw strong traction from the introduction of a pause ads pilot on connected TVs, a new non-interruptive ad format that appears when users pause their organic content,” Schindler noted. He went on to share that YouTube’s pause ads are “driving strong brand lift results” and “are commanding premium pricing from advertisers.”
Schindler didn’t share any timelines for when pause ads will start appearing on YouTube, but we know they’ll first roll out on smart TVs. The nature of these ads, including their duration, skippability, and more is still unclear. We also don’t know if Google plans to introduce these ads on YouTube’s mobile apps.
Yes, but that doesn't excuse trying to force an infinite number of ads on people.
Podcasts are supported through ads and you don't see people complaining about it, programs to block them, and Podcasts trying to subvert ad blockers. Why? Because they have a reasonable number of ads, with clear ad breaks, that are indistinguishable code wise from the rest of the podcast so you can fast forward through them. Oh, and when I turn it off it doesn't keep paying audio at me.
This is like a service charging 10x as much and you defending it saying "you have to pay for the service somehow." Yes, there's paying for the service, and then there's the service being greedy and milking every last bit of money they can out of it.
YouTube made $31.5 billion in ad revenue last year, and they're still demanding more. Will these "pause ads" reduce the number of other ads users see? Will it help find other improvements of the service? Or is this just an attempt to keep building infinite growth in a finite system?
At this point I would be thrilled if YouTube went out of business because too many people were using ad blockers.
I can skip through podcast ads with ease.
Yup, and somehow Podcasts still manage to be successful.
Yet for some reason people expect me to believe YouTube will go out of business if the ad doesn't force me to stand up in front of my webcam and say "McDonald's" before the video resumes.
Just saying people don’t complain about ads in podcasts because they’re skippable.
Bandwidth is expensive.
Google does not make a lot of information available on their operating costs, but from what I was able to find it looks like people are estimating Google spent over $2 billion for servers and bandwidth in 2018 for its network services including YouTube.
YouTube generated $31.5 billion in ad revenue in 2023.
YouTube is covering it's costs just fine and doesn't need to force more ads on everyone in order to turn a profit.
Alphabet has a profit margin of 25% and most of it is adsense, so I can guarantee that YouTube does not have a 93% profit margin.
First, the revenue is split and more than half goes to the creator. Plus you have other costs than bandwidth and servers, which I listed above.
Mind linking a source for the 2B? Seems low, I'd love to see how much they pay per GB.
I hear this, but I'd like some stats, particularly considering I'm already paying for my bandwidth.
YouTube (and every datacenter user) needs to pay per GB sent to the internet. And it gets quite expensive, like 5 cents a GB. For small users it's more like 10 cents per GB, but YouTube is a pretty big one so it's gonna be less. That's like one hour of 720p content.
I for one, watch like 3 hours a day, at least one hour of that is 4k on the TV. So I cost YouTube like 20 cents per day let's say, 6 bucks a month, 72 bucks a year.
Not counting power, ac, storage, compute for compression, redundancy, staff, etc.
And for $130 a year you could get it ad free! Only an 80% mark up!
I already get it ad free. I have a premium family plan, works out to about 5 euros per person for our 4 person family. Per month.
As I mentioned, this is just bandwidth. Add servers, storage, power, real estate, staff... And then give like 55% or whatever to the creators. The 80% markup is way off for myself, youtube might actually be losing money on my outlier case. My kids and wife are probably much more profitable.
For context going to the movies is almost 20 euros per person just for the ticket, for 1 hour and a half of entertainment. Not including snacks, drinks, gas, parking... I wonder if people here also sneak into the movies because they are annoyed at the cashier.
The movie theater provides the screen, seating, AC, and Sound system. Not to mention that the movie theater does not stop the movie multiple times in the middle of a sentence to play an ad. People do sneak into movies, and strangely the theaters don't seem to be going out of business because of it.
I have no problem with ads. I listen to podcasts with ads all the time. I have an issue with how YouTube does their ads (and that it never seems to be enough). If YouTube wanted to it would be trivial to avoid ad blockers by making the ad indistinguishable from the rest of the stream: Comes from the same source, and does not modify the user's control of the page. But to do that YouTube would need to vet and be responsible for the ads they show (can't have that) and users wouldn't be forced to sit through an ad they aren't interested in (can't have that).
An ad before the video starts that is skippable after 5s is fine. But it's never enough, and Advertisers will always push further until people get sick of it and get an AdBlocker. This falls firmly into the territory of "Piracy is a service problem": They make the site shittier and shittier and there is an easy and free alternative to make the site significantly better. And you want me to feel bad for the poor Billion dollar company that is actively making its service worse to try to wring more money out of it?
Oh, they don't play ads in the 1h30min that I pay 100 bucks for?? Actually they do, a whole half an hour of them, before the movie.
PS; do you think an advertiser would pay 20 cents for a 5s of ad? If the creator takes half, and Youtube has more costs than bandwidth, it's the price it would take to have one ad per video. That's multiple times more expensive than a super bowl ad.