Google to Mess With YouTube Success

While sharing revenue with users is laudable -- given its inevitability -- what's troubling about it is how YouTube will generate the revenue it plans to share: the dreaded pre-roll, according to a report from the BBC.

A pre-roll is video advertisement that you'll have to watch before you can see the video you came to YouTube to see in the first place. All evidence to date suggests that pre-roll ads are powerfully repellent to viewers, driving them to other sites. YouTube's pre-rolls may be only three seconds long, according to Hurley, but that may be enough to turn users off from them.

Last fall, Forrester Research announced a survey that said 80% of people are annoyed by pre-roll ads, and that 75% simply ignore them. Those numbers were far higher than other ads, such as banners adjacent to videos or the text link favored by Google in its search results.

Text-link ads in Google's search results work for three reasons: they aren't mandatory, they aren't intrusive, and they're more likely to be relevant. Pre-roll ads are none of the above.