I can watch a three-hour Q&A session from Drachinifel or the live stream of a waterhole in Namibia without a single interruption for ads.
But a ten minute video on invasive species will get two breaks with multiple ads or an eighteen minute travelogue on Zzyzx Road can get three. What’s up with that?
I’m watching this space, because I can’t watch WWE’s AAA Lucha Libre promotion replays without being interrupted by ads every 2 minutes. I have to watch it live or never.
The Drach sessions are recorded so streaming vs. recorded isn’t it.
Ads can be set by the uploader or copyright holder. Options include “this video has a paid promotion I’ll record myself, so no need for midroll ads” to “I have compensated YouTube to cover the lack of ads” to “I will let YouTube place ads at moments I specify” to “I will let YouTube place ads wherever they want” and more besides.
And it depends at least partly on whether the content creator wants to be paid for it. You can get at least some slice of the total ad revenue (how big a slice depends on how viewed your content is), so there’s an incentive for content creators to have more ads, but some might not care about that for various reasons (maybe it’s just a hobby to them, maybe they’re a nonprofit, maybe they have other income streams from it).
And the creator can choose how many ads to include.
If it’s a creator that focuses on discussion, or educational content, they tend to go with fewer ads because more is genuinely annoying when the viewer needs to concentrate, so it is more likely to turn people away.
Whereas mashups of quick clips can get away with more frequent ads.
And sometimes it’s mental, where the time bar has so many gaps it looks like a barcode.
I have an app that lets me watch youtube with no ads. To my knowledge it’s not illegal (it’s been on play store for years, with over 1m downloads), but I’ll refrain from posting the name for now.
So the content creator does have control over YT shows ads or not. I didn’t know how much control they had. For the ones streaming old TV programs I wish they’d assert it. There are natural breaks where the original ads were but so often they are ignored then five minutes into the next act everything comes to a screeching halt for two minutes..
The answers make sense for the Namibia stream. “Gondwana collection” is a company, or a consortium – it’s hard to tell – that has lodges in the vicinity of the camera. In fact at night you can sometimes make out the lights of two of them about five miles off.
OTOH Drach quit his day job a few years ago so he presumably is getting at least some income from YT but he has a self-made ad only once a week for Squarespace where he does a two or three minute demo on using it to set up a website, loading pics with captions or embedding videos for example. Other than that the only visible stream is possibly when he shows the play on some naval miniatures game or another.