The latter is a statement posted by one of my Facebook friends several months ago. It caught my attention as I absolutely agree. It was like someone stating the gross obvious; however, nobody I knew at the time had stated it yet. 

Researching the statistics on how many YouTube visitors actually watch these ads was the natural next step. My foundlings then, and again now, bear great significance to how adverts are objects which casually shift to the web visitor’s blind spot.

Why Did We Start Disliking Ads So Much?

Television advertisers, before the days of Internet and PVR, conditioned viewers into accepting the presence of adverts, because they had no choice but to. It had become “normal”, and the viewer’s frustrations with interruptive adverts had been subliminally tamed.

With the birth of online video came the revolution of “viewer’s choice” regarding video based content consumption – and the tolerance started wearing off.

How Many of Us “Skip the Ad”?

Statistics released in the first couple of months since the release of YouTube skippable pre-roll ads:

Statistics released in 2013, two years after the first appearance of skippable pre-roll ads:

TrueView actually charges for video views that complete the whole ad OR at least 30 seconds, whichever comes first (Read More).
So a paid view on a 5 minute video doesn't necessarily mean that somebody sat through the entire thing.

Provide the Video – Not the Video’s Accessory

What advertisers should be considering is breaking away from the primitive models of marketing. To be a successful advertiser in the digital space, one has to be the provider of the actual video instead of the provider of its preceding advert. The nature of the marketing video changed to suite the viewer’s requirements.

For example:

The average viewer is not interested in an advert featuring a new bread making machine; how cool it looks and how pretty the model is that’s standing next to it, smiling at the camera. The average viewer wants to know how one would make bread with this machine. The viewer would rather want to know how it works. This kind of information would be of true value to someone considering buying a bread maker.

In Closing

It is greatly appreciated that users are given the option to skip the ad. However, given the option, YouTube advertisers should have known that the great majority of users would wholeheartedly take the opportunity to… “indeed skip the ad” to get to the content that they intend to view.

Marketers should strive to create the content that viewers want to, and will, view because adverts are, and will always be inherently intrusive and will never be the actual “searched item”.

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