Ads Start Appearing on Some YouTube Videos

Posted on August 22, 2007

YouTube blogs that they have started running YouTube InVideo ads on some of the YouTube videos for "select partners."

Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that we've been working with select partners to improve YouTube's presentation of advertising on their videos in a manner that brings you creative, compelling content and should also increase revenue flow to artists and content owners.

So what's new? Today we're offering select partners the ability to incorporate YouTube InVideo ads into their content. These are animated overlays that appear on the bottom 20 percent of a video. If you're interested by what you see there, clicking on the overlay launches a deeper interactive video ad that we think is relevant and entertaining. (The video you were watching is temporarily paused.) If you choose not to click on the overlay, it will simply disappear, so that you're in full control of your YouTube experience.

Google spent a long time trying to come up with this ad concept and it seems like they went for a concept that is fairly unobtrusive. The ads can easily be turned off and appear at the bottom of videos. A last100 post which says the YouTube ads "are not that bad" has screenshots of a few of the ads including an ad for The Simpsons movie that shows Homer chasing after a donut. The Homer donut ad can be seen on Madina Lake's "House of Cards" music video. The Crime Mob - Rock Yo Hips music video contains an ad from Warner Brothers. The YouTube ads start up 15 seconds into the video and take up the bottom 20% of the screen.

The San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times have more details about the YouTube ad concept. The comments on YouTube's post about the ads range from those grudgingly accepting the ads to outright annoyance.

Some people will tolerate the ads:

The negative comments indicate some YouTube users may even unsubscribe from videos that contain the ads. Updates: Matt Harding from the popular "Where the Hell is Matt?" videos doesn't like the new YouTube ads. And a post on Wired's Epicenter blog says the Chief Marketing Officer from VideoEgg says Google's new YouTube video ads are just like theirs.



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