Comment by addaon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by addaon | Hacker News Reader

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I think you're being unnecessarily adversarial here.

Sponsored ads in videos are everywhere, and well delineated. Third party tools exist to skip them already -- and YouTube already has the data on where they start and end. They even show them on the timeline, although they call "end of sponsored advertisement" "most replayed"… presumedly because of everyone skipping the ad, losing their place, and then having to step back to try to find where the content begins again.

Here's how this could work. I would pay an additional $10/month for YouTube Scarlet. Content creators would have three options -- declare that their videos have no sources of revenue outside of YouTube revenue; provide start and end time stamps for any external-revenue-generating segments; or do nothing.

For my $10/month, videos in the second category would skip their promotion. In exchange, some portion of my $10/month would go to the video creator, just like ad/Premium revenue does today, and the metrics on number of videos where this segment was skipped would be made available in analytics for sharing with sponsors. Finally, I'd have access to a user preference to suppress videos in the third category for appearing in recommendations, ever.

Does this deal with every case? No. Would it make YouTube more pleasant for me and potentially others who share my values, without impacting current regular and Premium users, and with a neutral or positive impact on content creators? I assert yes.

Would it have a negative impact on the businesses who promote those videos?

Yes.

If it's a negative impact on the businesses who promote videos, how can you say your idea doesn't impact content creators?

Why would it have a negative impact on either the promoted businesses or the content creators?

Promoted businesses currently pay based on (an estimate of) the number of views that the video will get. This would trivially adjust to paying based on the number of views that the sponsorship within the video gets -- that's why I mentioned the requirement to make this available through analytics. If the cost per view stays the same for sponsors, they're now paying for a self-selecting audience of people who are not actively bothered by their ads. (I doubt I'm the only person who, if I as going to pay money for a VPN, would choose literally anything other than Nord VPN just as petty "revenge" for how much of my life they've wasted.) If this slightly-reduced audience does not sufficiently eat their marketing budget, they can find new creators to sponsor.

For the content creators, presumedly the target amount paid directly per skipped ad would be chosen to slightly exceed the expected payout of showing the ad. This is the same conceptual model Premium uses today. So even though the sponsor may be paying them for a 9.5 M view video instead of a 10 M view video -- the payout should more than cover the difference.

I agree that these marginal wins run into systematic concerns if more than, say, 5% or so of users start opting out of embedded advertising this way. But besides being incredibly unlikely -- what would it say about the business model of embedded advertising if 5% of YouTube customers were willing to pay to avoid it!?

So, you appear to dismiss my concerns completely, demand a feature, and then insist... that hardly anyone will use it? And that because hardly anyone will use it, that means promoters are safe... unless they're not, in which case, they had it coming?

A sponsor pays $10,000 to a content creator.

And then, they get zero views of their embedded ad in the video.

They got literally nothing for their $10,000 investment.

And let's say, for the sake of argument, that YouTube does not pay $10,000 for the same video, or ones like it.

Now, the content creator gets less money than they would have before.

It's almost like content creators have already done this calculus, and concluded that the best way to create content is to promote things.

It's funny to me when someone is like, "Why doesn't YouTube do X," and then they answer their own question, but then they still act like it's weird that YouTube doesn't do that thing.

Sponsors don't pay a fixed amount to creators. They pay for (estimated) views.

What I'm proposing is exactly, 100% symmetric to how advertisers who pay Google for YouTube ad placement are already treated -- they pay for views, and YouTube can and does choose to not show those ads to some users, those who pay for Premium. Is that unfair for the ad buyers? Sure, if you squint right… but they're not being deprived something they paid for, they're just not being offered the option to put in ads in front of that particular market.

Before Youtube Premium, I would have said the same thing about blocking first-party ads in YouTube. It was weird they didn't do that thing. And then they did it. So now it's not weird I guess?

> Sponsors don't pay a fixed amount to creators. They pay for (estimated) views.

This can't be right, I've seen many videos from creators that say the opposite, it is a fixed amount per contract which can be one or more videos. Maybe it is different with creators that have more than 1M subscribers.

You're correct, for at least a large fraction of the sponsored videos I've ever seen.

The estimation is on the front end of the contract, not the back end -- the amount offered to a creator whose videos average 10M views is 10x than what is offered to one whose videos average 1M views, in general. If you think about it from the advertiser's point of view, this is the only sane way to manage the risk of a video going viral and exceeding expected number of views, while still providing a reasonably constant valuation of a view event.

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