"Skip The Ad"

Who can't wait for that few initial seconds to be over so you can get to see the content that sparked your interest in the first place - the short answer is circa 90% of us?

Which is why 'YouTube' (Google) in August last year introduced a feature that prevents you and me from skipping some of those ads, and if that wasn't bad enough the ones you have to view are going to be 15 seconds long, which if you are made to watch the 6 second ad today, will feel like an eternity.

The biggest change in the ad program is that any channel monetizing its videos from ads can now choose to implement non-skippable ads. In the past, only a very select few in the channel partner program were able to run non-skippable ads, but starting this week, every channel monetizing from ads can benefit from the option.

So what will be the impact on UX, and the credibility of the advertiser be once this has been running for sometime?

I'm eagerly awaiting the data results from YouTube to see how the last 12 months have faired, but nothing seems to be surfacing at time of writing.

The whole purpose of 'YouTube' is to encourage 'Content Discovery', it's USP is based on 'dwell time' and the longer the dwell time, the more interest they can garner from advertisers.

Personally speaking I use the platform quite a lot, particularly because of all the user generated stuff, but also it's back catalogue archive which really showcases the huge swathes of server farms that can provide a really great stream with the annoying buffering.

That said, I can't help but think that they are compromising the UX in favour of chasing those ad revenues.

I would love to get your thoughts on the matter.