I pay for YT premium because the ads were getting ridiculous (I think this is partly their goal to push people to premium subscriptions) and I want to support the creators. However, now every video has a damn host read ad embedded in it. I find it incredibly frustrating that my $15/mo isn't enough. I watch on my TV mainly so I can't use one of those plugins that skips host read ads. I just manually skip them. Maybe that makes me an asshole and anti-creator, but I already pay for premium and its getting ridiculous when a 10-15 minute video as a 60 second host read ad in the middle of it.
In general, I don't mind sponsor reads in a video for a couple reasons:
1. They're produced much more mindfully in context of the video your watching. At their most basic, they're a small ad read at the beginning of a video, at their best, they're a much more likely to be relevant to me (the consumer) ad that doesn't cause me to lose focus on the video's original context. When a YouTube ad plays on my iPad while I'm listening to something during my daily shower, I don't really fear that a sponsor read is going to cause me to lose focus on the topic, largely because the automated ad inserter isn't going to accidentally cut out a second or two before a natural break, or even worse, in the middle of a sentence.
2. I know the proceeds of the ad are going directly to the creator, instead of to a machine that does ads in a way that myself, and a slough of psychologists, believe is damaging to a human.
I would much rather pay for YT Premium, or other services for ad free content viewing, however a lack of job security has lead me to sock away that and other funds that would go to paying for content like this to my rainy day fund. If it were a binary choice of pay for YT or not right now, I wouldn't, and I'd miss out on some fun, informative, and entertaining content, but in a way, I wish that was the case. It'd come with some awful consequences for an entire ecosystem of content creators, but ultimately that's the consequences of pedaling tech drugs, and that's a whole different conversation.
My first inclination is that embedded ads happen because individual creators are having difficulty wrestling the algorithm to funnel enough views and subscribers their way and because not enough of the Premium subscription fee goes to creators.
This isn't always true as there are a few giants that do embedded ads too, but most of the sponsor reads I see on YouTube are from smaller or more niche channels.
I’ve gotten the impression that for some creators, part of the reason is how easy it is to be demonetised on YouTube. The monetisation filter has become sensitive and puritanical that people even self-censor confronting words now, like “murder”, or “rape”, or “suicide”… I don’t know what TV news or current events shows are like today, but from what I remember watching when I was younger, I doubt any of that would be monetisable on YouTube today.
I don’t find live-read ads nearly as offensive. They at least have some personal touch to them and they often vary each time (they are live, after all). I tend to listen to those in podcasts when they are truly one-off live reads (TWiT has historically done pretty well at this, for example).
What are terrible are the tone-deaf pre-packed injected ads that blare out of your speakers into your skull.
> I tend to listen to those in podcasts when they are truly one-off live reads (TWiT has historically done pretty well at this, for example)
TWiT uses pre-recorded ads pretty often, and has admitted to trying AI-read ads which mimic the host. I prefer either to the meandering before and after banter that bookends the off-the-cuff ad reads. Thankfully it appears their paid Club TWiT excludes both ads and annoying wind up / wind down around them.
(Full disclosure, I work for a company that facilitates ad-free podcast offerings)
100%. A couple of the podcasts I'm listening to are moving more towards pre-packed ads and they are horrible. I think what advertisers don't realize is how much more the live ads are worth. I'm much more likely to listen through the hosts riff while doing an ad read vs someone who sounds like they are talking through a forced smile.
That's partially why I don't want to pay for YT Premium right now... The ads are getting really bad, always being placed at the worst moment of a video, and I don't want to reward YT for destroying my user experience. They made their product worse, just to force me to pay $15/mo because I'd get so frustrated with how bad it has gotten.
