YouTube Tries Choose-Your-Own Ads
By Jared Newman | Monday, June 15, 2009 at 4:57 pm
In a clever move by Google, some YouTube content will present viewers with a choice: Select from two advertisements to watch at the beginning, or intersperse a grab bag of ads throughout the video.
This idea, which is being tested on a small number of premium YouTube videos, is far more preferable to those floating ads that slide into the bottom portion some videos. But that’s not the only reason I like the idea.
Allowing user control over the advertisement engages the viewer in a way that television commercials cannot. If marketing groups create Web ads that are worth watching, and sell the ads themselves with a provocative title and screenshot (okay, the examples seen above aren’t what I had in mind, but give it time), we’re well on the way to seeing more value in online advertising.
That’s important, because Big Content’s reservations over online content are due in large part to how little online ads make compared to their offline counterparts. It’s the whole “analog dollars for digital pennies” argument for which NBC CEO Jeff Zucker was famously quoted. This imbalance explains why NBC’s Olympic coverage will be crippled next year and why Hulu’s content providers bend over backwards to prevent you from watching through the television instead of a PC. If it becomes viable for online video to cannibalize cable, sites such as Hulu and YouTube will evolve much faster.
Granted, there are other roadblocks — the thorny issue of licensing agreements between cable and content providers, for example — but choose-your-own ads are welcome in my queue.
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Web Media Daily – Tues. June 16, 2009 | Reinventing Yourself... Says:
June 16th, 2009 at 12:17 am[…] YouTube Tries Choose-Your-Own Ads […]
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40Tech | Tech for those over 40, but not over the hill Says:
June 18th, 2009 at 6:06 pmYouTube’s “Choose Your Ad” isn’t Really About Choice…
When is choice a bad thing? When the choice comes from YouTube, that’s when. Over on Technologizer, Jared Newman discusses a new advertising model that YouTube is trying out on a limited basis. Let’s get one thing out of the way- ads aren’t going a…
June 16th, 2009 at 6:58 am
Will this be a choice that you have to make before anything plays? The problem I see from an end-user experience is that I often will open videos in another tab, and pause them, and then tab away while they buffer (since sometimes I like to scrub through a video instead of watching it from start to finish). Now I foresee added steps to view the video – tab over to the video, choose a video, tab away while the ad plays (which Youtube won’t want, so maybe it won’t play if the video isn’t in an active tab), tab back to pause the main video once the ad is done playing, tab away while it buffers, and then tab back to watch the video. With the bandwidth costs that Youtube must rack up, you can’t fault this advertising attempt, but it has the potential for annoyance.
June 16th, 2009 at 8:14 am
well, when a company is losing millions of dollars like youtube, it has to try something…