The video ads are in hot water

Is YouTube Playing with Ad Blockers? Observational Constraints on YouTube and Other YouTube-Sponsored Websites

These measures show that the site is taking a tougher stance against ad blockers and it is justifying the move by saying that ad spots are necessary for creators to be compensated for their content. “YouTube’s ad-supported model supports a diverse ecosystem of creators, and provides billions of people globally access to content for free with ads,” the company’s statement says.

For $11.59 per month or $11.98 annually, you can get YouTube Premium, a service which removes ads from the service and also provides offline downloads and YouTube Music Premium. Last November, the company announced that it surpassed 80 million combined subscribers across YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. So while protecting creators’ earnings is a charitable excuse to go with, the company has every interest in steering more people toward its recurring monthly subscription.

Since experimenting with a higher ad load in recent years, the patience of its users has become increasingly tested. In one of their experiments, the company served up to 10 un-skippable clips within one ad break. And in May, YouTube announced that 30-second ads were coming to TV platforms.

There are many other concerns here, including low-quality ads. Some of the websites where they run ads seem to be against the criteria of the Video Ad Safety Promise that google uses in vetting third-party partners. In particular, Adalytics calls attention to several reports about Google surfacing ads on Android apps that aren’t available on the Google Play Store, some of which were from developers based in countries sanctioned by the US government, including Iran. Concerns about whether advertisers had been inadvertently paying sanctioned entities have been raised by this.

While the Journal notes that Google promises that these ads will appear on “high-quality sites, before the page’s main video content, with the audio on,” Adalytics found that this wasn’t the case 80 percent of the time based on data from 1,100 brands from 2020 to 2023.

As of September 30, 2021, new Video action campaigns that you create in Google Ads use Google video partners automatically… To ensure you achieve the best performance across all Google networks, you won’t be able to opt out of Google video partners for Video action campaigns [emphasis ours].

Check My Ads wants advertisers to seek permission from the partner sites before running ads, and wants the search giant to reveal how it vets these websites.