I was watching clips from the Late Show in the gym a little bit ago. I was on an elliptical with handles, so I was just letting the ads play in between clips, when one just didn’t end. At first I thought it was part of the show because the opening graphics looked more like one Colbert’s intro spoofs than a real commercial (think flaming skulls and words spelled out in digital bones). It was about the some conspiracy called R1s3 of the B3@st (in l33t to avoid google searches pointing to this thread) that seemed to be total conspiracy theory, bible prophesy, anti-Catholic nonsense.
Luckily, it was skippable, but what the fuck? Why would youtube even accept a commercial that long? The content needs to be reported, but I did not see a way to report the ad instead of the video.
Is this a new thing? Are there more of these things out there?
…Strassia said it was skippable, but was letting the ads play between the clips, and then one ad just didn’t stop. Its all right there in the OP which you apparently read. And you’ve linked to AdBlock Plus, not AdBlock. There is a big difference: which the wise user of the internet should learn before choosing between the two.
I have decided in my old age that I want the media I enjoy to have an income stream. I value the video enough to watch 42sec of commercial. I do not value it enough to sit through 22min of paranoid conspiracy bullshit.
Just for completeness of information - not all YouTube ads are skippable - there are at least two types (in-stream and bumper) that must be be just sat through if you want to get to the content.
There’s one I see regularly for an app which supposedly helps you track mileage you drive and categorize it as “business” or “personal.” Their ad takes two fucking minutes to explain what I just did in one sentence.
I feel like I’ve been getting less of these lately. But once I was shown a YouTube ad that was something like 45 minutes – it was literally a guy giving a powerpoint presentation, like a seminar recording. I can’t remember what it was about, but it was nothing world shattering or particularly interesting. Did they really expect people to sit there and watch all that prior to their desired video?
there have beena couple high-profile “old media” attacks on very visible YouTube posters. The Wall Street Journal did an attack piece on “Pewdiepie” for supposed anti-semitism and the Mail did an underhanded hit piece on Joerg Sprave of “The Slingshot Channel” accusing him of various horrible and implausible crimes against decent society. IIRC, YouTube lost advertising revenue up to a value of about US$750M, and many channels (especially firearms-based) were forcibley demonitized. In light of that, many advertisers checked where their ads were running, and didn’t like what they found.
I don’t know anything about this Slingshot Channel, but the way Pewdiepie was so casual with antisemtism was just something that would predictably bite you in the ass. That he thought it was a good idea to pay people to say racist, vile things, no matter what the justification, shows a lack of understanding of the issues and the people involved. You can prove people will say crappy things for money without jumping to antisemitism.
That’s not to say he’s actually an antisemite. I think he’s just privileged as fuck and didn’t realize the actual implications. He seems like I was as a kid–completely unaware that antisemitism is still a real thing that hurts real people. He thought it was far enough gone that he could joke about it.
I will say one thing about this whole thing, though. It’s stupid as fuck. How in the world doesn’t everyone online realize that the ads are not connected directly to the content, and that there’s no way that the company who makes the ads supports the message? I’ve never seen an ad for Coke on a YouTube video and thought it meant they supported what the guy said. I’ve even seen ads for one product while the actual content promoted their competitor. It’s just not how Internet ads work.
I do think that all the companies will come crawling back, because there’s really nowhere else for them to go. They’re losing a lot of views for their ads. What are they gonna do, go to Blip? Oh, yeah, YouTube killed them. Dailymotion? They have even more provocative content. Vid.me? Nowhere near enough viewers.
They’re just responding to people being stupid for a while, and will slowly come back in. It won’t be worth it to stay gone for too long, and this will stop being news.
I agree OP. Anyone who makes anything more than 10-15 second commercial for online advertising simply does not understand their audience. 22 minutes? They are deluded.
The online culture is a blip culture with attention deficit disorder. They will not read more than 200 characters and will not pay attention to something they do not like for more than the time it takes to move their hand and click.
You gotta be fast and smart with the new era of communication.
While we’re on the topic of intrusive ads…I recently got a new phone with a metric shit-ton of storage space, which means I can finally install some new apps. I’m amazed by the number of supposedly high-ranking, popular apps that interrupt the action to show a video ad, or force you to repeatedly watch ~4 minute or so ads in order to score enough in-game currency to continue playing. How in the hell are so many people putting up with platformers that grind to a halt mid-level to show you an ad???
It’s not new. Maybe a couple years ago, I saw a similarly long ad. The content surprised me even more. It was a long, official looking, pro-Russian propaganda piece about the annexion of Crimea.