Youtube advertising fail


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    Frequently when I work, I have something going on another monitor. YouTube videos, Hulu, Netflix, etc. Today, I start a YouTube video and go back to my work. The advertising pre-roll starts and a minute or two goes by and it is still going...

    I take a glance and of course the "Skip Ad" button is up there, but I notice that the advertising video still has 10:12 left to go. Who the hell is going to watch an ad that is more than 10 minutes in length??



  • Those susceptible to subliminal suggestion?



  • Nobody. YouTube has no length limit on ads. If you don't skip, they just play forever.

    In fact, I once accidentally made an "ad" out of a literally hour-long video, YouTube didn't question it, they ran it to like 750 users before I took it out of rotation.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    Did you make any money off of it? You should have left it up.



  • YouTube had some dumb promotion where they gave me a free $100 advertising credit, so I just picked a couple of random Robots in the News videos and ran them as ads. (I was too lazy to edit together an actual ad.)

    Anyway, one of the videos I picked was Legendary episode 1 which was like 57 minutes long or something. Another was 15 minutes long. They both went through YouTube's ad approval process, and no flags were raised.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    You mean the approval process that is probably just a drinking bird clicking a mouse on someone's desk?



  • Probably. But that bird is slow as shit, it takes like 5 business days.



  • Well, it doesn't really make any sense for YouTube to put a length limit on the ads. The capability is there for users to skip the ads, so the total length doesn't really matter.

    On a related note, they should - but don't - have an ad content filtering method in place. I occasionally let my daughter watch videos on YouTube with all sorts of parental restrictions setup. Those restrictions limit what videos are available to her. Now, I know that YouTube isn't perfect, so I still keep an eye on what she's watching. Anyway, while she was on the other day, and ad came up for KY Yours & Mine. I mean come on YouTube! You have ways to filter the main videos, at least apply those same filters to the ads!



  • I should mention, if you watch let's play-style videos, DarkSydePhil is running 1.5 hour ads on those keywords right now. That guy's a total douche.



  • @abarker said:

    The capability is there for users to skip the ads, so the total length doesn't really matter.

    Not always. In general, short enough ads (15 seconds or less) aren't skippable, and YouTube does like to throw some unskippable longer ads out a certain times (like around the Super Bowl, there were over one minute long Budweiser ads that couldn't be skipped).


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    I have run in to the same thing with my son. The other day he is sitting at the kitchen table eating his breakfast and watching Peppa Pig and the exact same ad ran.



  • @abarker said:

    Anyway, while she was on the other day, and ad came up for KY Yours & Mine.

    [cue the targeted advertising joke]



  • @ChaosTheEternal said:

    In general, short enough ads (15 seconds or less) aren't skippable

    I think that the skip option doesn't come up for like 15 seconds, so that makes sense.

    @ChaosTheEternal said:

    YouTube does like to throw some unskippable longer ads out a certain times

    They probably charge extra for that.



  • @abarker said:

    I think that the skip option doesn't come up for like 15 seconds, so that makes sense.

    The skip option is generally available after 5 seconds (this is on computer, iPad, and Android YouTube, other devices may vary), except on short ads, which don't offer it at all.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    This is what I get for running without AdBlock on.


  • BINNED

    I ran into an "ad" that's 45 minutes long the other day. I think it was some kind of a documentary or something. Not an ad for it, the whole thing!

    And from little I saw it seemed like a legit deal, high production and all, not like someone is just being a douche like @blakeyrat mentioned.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    For some reason, my comment reminded me of this:

    Of which I have witnessed a variation of this in person at a client's location. I had to wonder if they read the article.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    I just got another one, this one only around 8 minutes in length. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns1OLcnXb7w&feature=trueview-instream


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @ChaosTheEternal said:

    In general, short enough ads (15 seconds or less) aren't skippable

    I always assumed the sponsors just paid more to keep you from skipping. TRWTF, I've always thought, were the ads that don't give you a hint of what they're advertising before you can skip.



  • The best thing is they don't even let you skip forward or backward in the ad. Why can't I, in the extremely unlikely chance that I do like an ad, rewatch a part of it?

    YouTube ads are the Worst of the worst ™ .



  • @boomzilla said:

    I always assumed the sponsors just paid more to keep you from skipping

    That could be the case.

    As far as I know, right now, there's only two ads I generally see that are 15 seconds, and both are unskippable, but every other ad I get is at least 45 seconds and can be skipped after 5 seconds. But I felt this was always the case (with exceptions like the Budweiser ad I mentioned before).



  • @boomzilla said:

    TRWTF, I've always thought, were the ads that don't give you a hint of what they're advertising before you can skip.

    Why is this a problem? It’s an ad, so I skip — don’t care at all what it’s for. (Not that I find myself watching a YouTube video more than a couple of times a year, but I apply this principle pretty much everywhere: TV, newspapers, web sites of any kind, and so on.) Ads you can’t skip at all I find far more annoying.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Gurth said:

    Why is this a problem?

    It's not a problem for me, obviously. I'm just amazed at how many firms must be wasting advertising budgets like this.



  • @boomzilla said:

    It's not a problem for me, obviously. I'm just amazed at how many firms must be wasting advertising budgets like this.

    Indeed. They'd probably have at least marginally fewer skips if they indicated their product near the beginning of the ad. And that could translate into a measurable increase in sales.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    After cutting the cable, I now get annoyed when I am somewhere like a hotel watching real TV where ads cannot be skipped. Last weekend my family and I were out of town and there were multiple ads that my wife and I literally had no idea what the product actually was. They were just esoteric bullshit with a business name at the end. That does not make me want to buy your product. Hell, I do not even know what your fucking product is. The only thing I know is that said product or service took a page from the Twitter playbook when naming their business with a nonsensical word.



  • Ah, misunderstood — I thought you were complaining that you couldn’t tell whether you wanted to skip the ad or not and then perhaps automatically hit Skip when you can.



  • @boomzilla said:

    ads that don't give you a hint of what they're advertising before you can skip.

    Those are my favorites. (I was going to say I like them, but that is not accurate; I just dislike them less.) Dumbshit company is out the money for running the ad, while I remain blissfully unaware of whatever useless trinket they failed to peddle.



  • Boeing used to run a bunch of TV ads around here. Maybe they still do, I dunno. I could never figure out the audience they were intended for. All I can think of is maybe they were a feel-good campaign for Boeing employees?


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @blakeyrat said:

    Boeing used to run a bunch of TV ads around here. Maybe they still do, I dunno. I could never figure out the audience they were intended for. All I can think of is maybe they were a feel-good campaign for Boeing employees?

    I see those if I am watching live TV late at night. Apparently late night viewers spend their money on get rick quick schemes, telephone "party lines", high-interest loans from Indian reservations and jumbo jets.



  • Maybe PR to soothe eardrums of the people who live near Paine Field by reminding them of how much good Boeing's money does in the community? Dunno; haven't seen them, but that seems like a reasonable guess.



  • Fuck people who live near Paine Field. Do you know how much it SUCKS to have to drive either to Bellingham or Sea-Tac to board a plane to PORTLAND? Buy the time you've driven to either, you're halfway freakin' there.

    It'll never cease to amaze me how a few whiny people can hold up a project that benefits thousands.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Fuck people who live near Paine Field.

    Hey, I resemble that remark! Far enough east, though, that I don't get noise.

    @blakeyrat said:

    It'll never cease to amaze me how a few whiny people can hold up a project that benefits thousands.

    I'd be quite happy not to have to drive to Sea-Tac. I probably would anyway; flying to/from a local or regional airport like Paine, if it had scheduled commercial flights, is a lot more expensive than major airports like SEA, at least in my experience.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    You'd probably end up flying to SeaTac for a connection.



  • My last non-contract job, they had a huge office in Portland and I have to travel there all the time. Portland is one of those cities where once you factor in the Sea-Tac security and checkin bullshit it's already questionable if you aren't better off just driving.

    People who live in Bellingham can get to Portland from their airport in a moment's notice.

    People who live in Snohomish County are just fucked. There's no airports that serve us. Oh, there are airports with runways big enough, and facilities complete enough, and basically everything needed to fly 737s or little those Bombardier suckers to Portland, but they're just not allowed to by the fucking FAA.

    There's a huge tendancy of people in Washington State to just stick their heads in the ground and pretend the population hasn't changed since 1975. Well, it has. It's going up and up and up, and our infrastructure is going to get much worse before it gets better. The Paine Field debate is the perfect example of that. I wager the whole Seattle-Tacoma-Everett conglomeration is the only urban area of its size to be served by only ONE airport. Which is goddamned ridiculous.

    I'd also like to mention that:

    1. Jumbos already take off from Paine, so it's not like they don't currently get noise, and
    2. Paine Field is pretty old (1936) and predates most, if not all, of the residents bitching about the noise.


  • @boomzilla said:

    You'd probably end up flying to SeaTac for a connection.

    Maybe. I mostly fly to SFO/SJC/OAK, so a direct flight to one of those is a reasonable possibility, especially if Alaska were to operate from there. They're one of the (three, I think?) airlines that have expressed some level of interest.



  • Alaska wants to fly to Portland 3 times a day from there. Of course, they never were able to in the 2 years I actually NEEDED to fly to Portland once a month or so.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I'd also like to mention that:1) Jumbos already take off from Paine, so it's not like they don't currently get noise, and2) Paine Field is pretty old (1936) and predates most, if not all, of the residents bitching about the noise.

    No kidding. Did you happen to not notice the airport when you were buying/renting your house?

    @blakeyrat said:

    they're just not allowed to by the fucking FAA.

    I thought it was the county, which I think owns the airport, that wouldn't allow commercial aviation.



  • The county actually went to the FAA and asked them to revise the rules (which had been written in like 1972 or something) to allow it. Then the FAA got a bunch of noise from an attorney Mukilteo hired to bitch at them. The FAA basically threw up their hands and said, "fuck it, you guys deal with it and come back to us when you know what you want". That was for like 2 years or so.

    They finally came back and approved the project, so I think it's set to go now... they just have to build a new terminal building. Like I said, too late to help me, but.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Alaska wants to fly to Portland 3 times a day from there.

    And they have lots of flights from Portland to the Bay Area. Sounds good to me.



  • Thanks. I'm still fairly new in the area, so I don't know all the history. I only know as much as I do because I remember seeing an article in the Herald recently.

    @blakeyrat said:

    an attorney Mukilteo hired
    Typical NIMBY.





  • Here's some 10 minute BMW ads from a while back. Fairly well made, some big names.

    M5
    Z4
    Another Z4



  • @Nexzus said:

    Here's some 10 minute BMW ads from a while back. Fairly well made, some big names.

    M5
    Z4
    Another Z4

    🤤



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Fuck people who live near Paine Field.

    Living near Paine Field sounds... painful. Almost as bad as living in Slaughter Beach, DE.

    Filed under: places to avoid if you find yourself in a horror movie



  • @abarker said:

    On a related note, they should - but don't - have an ad content filtering method in place.

    Adblock Plus can block all YouTube advertising and more annoyances besides. Just sayin'. I would not want to suggest that anybody reading that observation should take the law into their own hands in such a fashion, nosirree. Failure to demonstrate boundless eagerness to gobble the pap you're forcibly spoonfed is immoral and unpatriotic.



  • Speaking of YouTube adverts, I just got this alongside a video:

    Has something gone seriously wrong with Google's targeted advertising? I'm not Muslim, I'm already married and I've not visited any site which might suggest otherwise.

    EDIT: Also, being muslim is not an excuse for bad grammar in advertisements! Auntie's*



  • Too much banter with @Nagesh and @Arantor



  • Wait, what, I don't even....?



  • Is @Arantor muslim or are you referring to his non-married status?

    Also, what happened to @Nagesh? :(



  • @Arantor said:

    Wait, what, I don't even....?

    We're on to you.


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