Arguing Against Ads on Twitter and YouTube
Twitter and YouTube want to make it impossible to block report, or ignore ads. The reason I dumped Facebook and Instagram is that I saw more ads than content by friends. In fact I saw posts by five to ten friends, out of four hundred, but unlimited amounts of ads. This reminded me of how small my Instagram reality was, but also that others were wasting my time to make money for themselves. This is an awful business model.
Twitter has started to flood our timelines with strangers and ads, and in so doing are getting in the way of personal conversations. Twitter was built up around the art of conversation and that has been lost in favour of algorithmic junk.
YouTube wants to force users to view ads, or pay for premium, but I think this is a mistake. When we watch YouTube we watch people playing GTA 5, hiking trails, camping in strange places and more. Each of these videos is promoting products, whether directly or indirectly. If we’re watching videos of GTA V game play this should be counted by Rockstar Games as advertising, or at least promotion.
It should be the brands that are mentioned and promoted in content that foot the bill, rather than customers. If I am watching a video about one thing and I see a promotional video about something else, then my time is being wasted. I am already showing direct interest in a product, by watching a review. Showing me an ad encourages me not to watch the review and then two brands lose out. The content producer loses out because I tune out before I watch the content, and the advertiser loses out because I have navigated away from the content within two seconds of the ad starting.
With all this talk about user tracking, demographic tracking, and more, it seems a shame not to see “This is a video about the Apple Watch SE so let’s charge Apple for this review of their product, rather than adding a third party video that neither the viewer, nor the brand being reviewed have an interest in.
When I watched live television I stopped watching shows during adverts. With YouTube videos if I am forced to watch an advert before seeing if content is worth watching I will give up. If an advert break is put in the middle of a YouTube video I will stop watching.
Even iPhone games expose us to too many adverts. You play a game, solve a puzzle, and you see an ad. The longer you play the more ads you see. These ads are awful, and they’re for games that you have to pay to play. If these games stopped paying for adverts they would be more enjoyable to play in the first place.
If adverts were intelligent, or relevant, people wouldn’t mind them so much. Most of the time I find that we see the same three or four ads hundreds of times over a week or a month. The ads are for crappy games that we would never have an interest in. In some cases we play the games and they’re awful. I felt like installing the games, just to give them a one star review, for having awful adverts.
Instead of forcing people to see adverts, and reminding them to turn off ad blockers, advertisers should rethink how they promote content and products. In the age of online reviews, play-through videos and more, wouldn’t it make more sense to reward people for creating content that benefits brands, rather than having a third party ad?