I came across some articles about YouTube’s plan of getting
rid of 30 second advertisements that were unskippable in 2018. YouTube can reach a very wide audience with some of the most popular
videos getting hundreds of millions of views. Each and every one of
their users have to deal with the design of their site and the ads. Video Ads – The
bane of the consumers but necessary for the producers of the content, be it
ones who produce television shows or videos or any sort of content on the
internet. (I’m going to ignore the discussion of ad blocking software and
whatnot because that’s a whole other can of worms)
But that’s huge right? Since we’re talking about YouTube
here, if I had a choice of ads on their site, I’d rather pick the skippable
after 5 seconds deal instead of waiting a forced 30 seconds before viewing the
content I expected from the video. As a user, when I do see those unskippable
ads I would often groan, which probably isn’t good for the user experience
side. And judging from Google’s own page for YouTube’s “Non-skippable in-stream
ads” it even says that the abandonment rate, basically the amount of people that don’t
watch an ad from start to finish, is higher for these types of ads specifically.
These days people enjoy much more bite-sized content that
they can complete in a rather short amount of time. Think of gifs nowadays, these are short videos that people enjoy (Often much shorter than 30
seconds). Imagine having to sit through a mandatory ad that is the length of
multiple gifs before you finally get to what you want; I would at the very
least try to avoid this as much as possible...
(What was that? A distraction! and it was just chosen because it was on the front page of /r/gifs). If I wasn't talking about gifs this wouldn't even have been relevant, and even barely so. That gif itself was a huge break in the text, a large distraction don't you think?
(P.S. I apologize for the gif as it is very distracting but it is a good example.)
Now from a design perspective for the user, I would have preferred if I was given the option to view it, "i am lion." gif, like so instead of having it pop up in the middle of the text since viewing it doesn't necessarily enhance the text surrounding it.
If you think about it, this choice does make sense. People, as users,
enjoy a feeling of control. They want to be valued, not seen as just consumers. They want to feel like they are given options and can then choose the most preferable one. In addition to this is the prevalence of
users using their mobile devices as, more often than not, you can’t even talk to your
friend on Skype or browse Twitter while you wait for that ad to finish playing.
They are limited on both time and have much more restricted mobile bandwidth on the
go.
I mean sure the ads can be annoying but they are businesses and they have to make money in order to keep operating. And even though the other <30 second unskippable ads remain I think this is a step in the right direction. With all the various forms of media nowadays available and competing for consumption, YouTube should be constantly changing in order to best fit the needs of their user base. So what is the answer? Well if I knew I'm sure I would have a bunch of people from the advertising industry on my doorstep. But, in my opinion, a good change would be having "acceptable" ads. Ads that aren't intrusive (Large popups that fill up the entire screen anyone?) and aren't embedded into the content (Like the gif above which is constantly restarting which I'm sure was very distracting.) would be a great start.
But this removal will give control back to the user faster and should leave the users at least slightly happier (or less annoyed perhaps) while watching videos.
Bibliography
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/humans-have-shorter-attention-span-than-goldfish-thanks-to-smart/
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