I was watching a video on landscape mode on my phone on YouTube. And then when a wild midroll ad appears, the ad thinks it’s a good idea to play a ultrawide-screen video inside a TikTok style vertical phone window, and then puts that in a widescreen video. The whole thing also got smaller to display the CTA at the right.
Which reminds me, I hate how YT ads on mobile try to forcibly cover up the entire screen. It’s like seeing a billboard that suddenly expands to fill most of your vision. They didn’t used to do that, instead they just took over the video portion of the screen, but you could keep browsing comments while the ad plays.
I’m really wondering: is this working?
Like, does this approach yt is taking really increase viewership, revenue, watchtime, whatever the metric is?
I seriously can’t imagine, that it works. If you’re savvy enough, you’ll use AdBlock of some kind and for the less techy people it gets insufferable. That can’t be good for yt.
The solution for YouTube is right in your comment: it used to be the case that only tech savvy people would install AdBlock.
With more ads though, the incentive to install an ad blocker is suddenly there for more, even not so tech savvy people.
YouTube‘s reaction is already visible as they are now trying to block ad blockers: Try to make it more difficult to get an ad blocker at all, so not as tech savvy people won’t get one and continue to watch ads as they used to.
The thing is, YT is a de facto monopoly. Yes, there are alternatives, but most people don’t know about or use them. I’m not talking about short TikTok-style videos, I’m talking about longer-form video content. Sure, there is stuff and other sites. I go to Vimeo and DailyMotion sometimes to watch things, but YouTube is where the vast majority of the content is. They don’t need to worry about losing viewers right now, because they know viewers have nowhere else to go. So they can do whatever the hell they want. I wish I knew a good solution.
I imagine us taking the high seas is “inconsequential”. Until it isn’t at least, all that matter is quarterly earnings, the rest “is next quarter”.
I suspect it’s like video games, they don’t give a shit if pay to win mechanics drive away interest for the game, they make more than enough off those who do pay. In the long run it will worsen the platform until eventually there will be a crisis (similar to some banana looking motherfucker on reddit), and the CEO of google Sundae Pichu is going to start cutting on pencils and printers at YouTube, while asking government for subsidies lest they slack off a chunk of their workforce and buyback they stock.
The fucking world we live in