Everyone loves YouTube, but nobody likes seeing a thirty-second, unskippable ad when they just want to watch a cat dive into a box, especially when it’s still not clear just how much of that ad revenue the video creator sees. YouTube has heard the complaints and there’s some good news: while unskippable ads aren’t going away, the 30-second ones are toast come 2018.
Why? Campaign, which broke the news, seems to find a consensus that YouTube is worried Facebook might steal their viewers, and is experimenting with ads that are slightly less intrusive. 15 and 20 second ads will be allowed to become unskippable, and those six-second ads you keep seeing pop up will probably be more commonplace (and also unskippable). But at least the full thirty appears to be off the table once this year ends,
While this may be cause for celebration among viewers, it does bring up questions about the future of ads on videos and how video sites pay for them. The appetite for online video is enormous: A seventh of the world’s population goes to YouTube every month. But the appetite to pay for it is not particularly large, and it seems unlikely Facebook will avoid this problem either. So the question really becomes, for both, how to get video paid for without annoying their audiences.
(Via The Verge)