Not that I’m complaining. But I’d think if you were paying for an ad you wouldn’t want to offer people a button they can click to skip it. Is it just because they are afraid that if they don’t offer that option they will lose too many visitors to their site? I’m doubtful that there could be a legal reason for it.
The more annoying ads are, the more people use the freely-available and increasingly well-known ad blocking software. This is why Google won so big with ads that are just a few lines of plain text: For a lot of people, they aren’t annoying enough to block. (They also trade on Google’s search engine skills and concomitant ability to target advertisements, but if they were commonly blocked nobody would even know they were targeted.)
There’s no good reason not to have the ‘skip’ button there. A person is either going to click the ad or not. If they’re not then websites provide the functionality to skip them and continue.
Its not like some people really need all that long to decide to be curious about the ads’ offerings.
As a side note; you will probably start to see more and more ads be enabled to to provide the advertiser negative feedback as well. Think of a “this ad sucks” button. Advertisers are hoping that if you are sufficiently turned off by an add, you will click on the button and provide them with valuable feedback.
Oh I don’t envy the guy that came up with that bright idea. This is the Internet we’re talking about here.
It may also be the web site owners who are pushing advertisers to offer it. There are plenty of sites on the web that I’ll skip if I can’t skip their ads. In particular, I’m thinking of some of the YouTube competitors* that make you watch a 15-second commercial before you can watch cats playing piano. I don’t object to ads in principal, but if I can’t skip those, I’ll go find another site to waste time with.
- I can’t actually remember their names. I haven’t been back.
I’m confused by this statement - YouTube has exactly the same kinds of unskippable commercials before videos that you mention (granted, not on all videos, but on many of them). How are its competitors any different?
Its not entirely brainless. Getting negative feedback is oftentimes just as valuable as positive feedback.
Of course the companies that are advertising would rather have someone click on the ad rather than tell them it sucks. However, for the many companies that specialize in ad optimization (of which there are many), getting actual data of either sort is very valuable.
Many of its competitors’ ads aren’t blocked by adblock.
IME, most of youtube’s ads are only in front of commercially released videos. movie trailers, music videos (Vimeo is the big culprit there,) etc…
Your average “cat playing with a ping pong ball” video is less likely to get a random ad than a lot of the youtube kockoffs.