Advertising's new way to ruin the internet: Video ads before EVERYTHING
 

I just got done watching 3, 1 minute long videos previewing this week's spisode of The Office. Each was preceeded by 15 or 30 second ads. Each one. For a minute of video.

Regarding this, my brain broke.

Why are there suddenly ads before, seriously, nearly every video of even mild popularity on YouTube and embedded on various Web sites. CNN makes you sit through 30 seconds of ad content before you watch ANY video, even if it's shorter than the ad.

It's too much. It's getting out of hand. I like The Office enough to tolerate it, but it was excessive. It didn't even recognize that I was a visitor on a sustained visit to the site and had seen an ad already. Just kept slinging them at me.

It's to the point where I'm ready to start investigating extensions and add-ons to enable skipping through this s#it. I am sure someone's working on a way. It's not rocket science.

Anyone ready to join the revolt with me?

All kidding aside, it is ridiculous.

It really is a pain. I was thinking the same thing last night when I was on youtube. Guess anything for them to make a buck.

I typically don't watch most internet videos because of this. A lot of the times I'll click a news link, as soon as I see it's a video and not an article I back out of it.

Not only does that advertising on videos bother me, but many websites now have these big, obnoxious banner advertisements that change size (I'm looking at you ESPN.com). Drives me nuts...

agree with you 100%, i also immediately click away from any news article that turns out to be video. Then you have the ads that get larger and you can't figure out how to get rid of them because the "close" button is hidden or camouflaged so well it's impossible to see.

Yeah agreed... advertisements before a news video is a huge turnoff and the biggest reason why I don't watch them. Heck it's really a lot faster just to read a news article than it is to watch a video anyway.

OTOH, I like watching shows on Hulu. The ads are pretty short compared to commercial TV. I know I'm a lot older than most of you guys. But Hulu has a lot of old shows I used to watch as a kid and I've been going back a capturing a bit of my youth from the 60's. Shows like "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea", "The Time Tunnel", "Sea Hunt", and even "Lost in Space".

I have been in advertising for a long time and I would advise my clients to stay away from this type of advertising. They are being sold a bill of goods, I don't care the video is being clicked on 10000 times per day, the response from the average viewer is that of rage so their advertising is associated with negative feelings. Although at least some ads give you the advantage of clicking off the ad within 5 seconds which I guarentee 99% of the people do. I bet the advertising companies keep that info to themselves lol

If I am on CNN.com and see a compelling headline or something, if it has the little video icon I almost never click on it. And for what it costs to produce video vs just written content - that's INSANE. I do some video production and management of video production in my career and video is astoundingly expensive. So, while it is CNN, and they have a leg up in terms of video, it's still a bad thing if people aren't clicking on it.
Interesting perspective. I'm hoping that what you say is true. I am also hoping that this situation resolves itself based on what you've said. People will start to rumble about the time wasting of ads, the captive audience aspect, and the annoyance, then formal complaints will come - and my bet is that they go away soon, with advertisers going back to the drawing board; trying to aggravate us in completely different ways.

The real sham is that most people pay for TV so they can watch ads every 7 minutes. Personally I don't own a TV. I'll take free content online and if ads are excessive I don't need it. For everything else AdBlock works well enough. Won't buy anything from annoying ads shoved in my face, those companies go on my blacklist.

look into installing an add-on call ad blocker plus for you web browser. It'll block most of the side ads, advertisements etc.

youtube pays the uploader of the video per click through a google partnership. and if you use a copyrighted song google will place an ad on your youtube video.
i almost never use copyrighted material and have denied googles partnership multiple times, so yall wont b seeing ads on my videos :)

I don't have any problems with dynamic content that has it's own real estate on the sites, like this site with banner ads for example. I think what google is doing by displaying user relevant advertising (based on your search history) is a very good way of doing it that I can accept. They are not intrusive and they pay the content provider for the space. Seems fair to everyone.