Dark Pattern: How Youtube Makes Sure You Don’t Always “Skip Ad”
9th May 2022
YouTube get paid by the advertisers when they insert video ads. And they get paid even more when they let the advertisers insert longer video ads. On the other hand, YouTube needs to make sure their users are not too bothered by the long ads, so they created the “Skip Ad” button. However, the advertisers don’t have to pay YouTube when their ads are skipped too soon (via). This means YouTube can’t just let everyone click on the “Skip Ad” button all the time. After all, any additional click on the “Skip Ad” button is going to impact the revenue. Furthermore, if skipping ads was too easy, it would hurt the sales of YouTube’s ad-free subscription as well. So while YouTube offers the “Skip Ad” button, YouTube ultimately wants the users to stay away from clicking the “Skip Ad” button.
At present, if I go to a YouTube video and the initial image suggests that I’m going to have to wait through part of a video ad before I get to my desired content, I just leave.
Life is too short to spend even five second listening to how the American taxpayer can be forced to pay for you to install solar panels on your house with no up-front cost, or having some person who I would avoid on the street tell me about the great deal he got on life insurance.
May 17th, 2022 at 22:15
I will endure a short ad that I cannot skip, in order to watch a longer video that I’m interested in. But there have been a few times that the unskippable ad was much longer than the video, which makes no sense.