How ad-free can a popular YouTube video be?
April 4, 2013 12:58 PM Subscribe
I hear that creators of very popular YouTube videos get paid for advertising. Normally they would welcome this, but I'm curious about what options a person has for keeping ads off their YouTube video, especially in the case where the video has been viewed very many times. Is it possible to keep ads off such a video altogether? And what would an effort to minimize advertising do to a video creator's ability to earn money (from YouTube) by posting videos on YouTube? (I imagine it would destroy it, but I don't know for sure.)
Response by poster: Including ads on the page, outside the video player?
posted by Koray at 1:31 PM on April 4, 2013
posted by Koray at 1:31 PM on April 4, 2013
From what I can tell, you'll still see ads in the margin when you search, but not on the video page itself. I'm not sure if their really are any "conscientious objector" videos where someone has a million views and no ads, so I can't speak to that.
posted by Oktober at 2:42 PM on April 4, 2013
posted by Oktober at 2:42 PM on April 4, 2013
The minimum youtube advertising experience is an ad-free video with a youtube logo and link on control bar of the player that you embed in your own (or other known-to-be-adfree) webpage. This is to say that I believe you can also remove the YT logo link in the video itself.
posted by rhizome at 2:54 PM on April 4, 2013
posted by rhizome at 2:54 PM on April 4, 2013
The story of the takedown and reinstatement of Buffy vs. Edward might give you a small glimpse into a popular video with no ads (with a large side helping of copyright shenanigans)
Currently the video is back on Youtube with 3.5 million views and no ads.
posted by Hactar at 2:55 PM on April 4, 2013
Currently the video is back on Youtube with 3.5 million views and no ads.
posted by Hactar at 2:55 PM on April 4, 2013
I subscribe to an IDM channel (WomanElectroSounds) which never, ever has any ads on it. Because i like to watch makeup videos, i never buy makeup i just like to watch women and cats groom themselves (there's probably a cosplay subspeciality for people like me, god knows) everything else i watch is plastered with adverts for stuff i will never, ever buy, i have to watch long ads in front of everything etc (i usually just keep clicking), but this channel never ever has a single advert. So, i'm certain a channel maker can fix the settings permanently to no ads ever.
posted by maiamaia at 3:49 PM on April 4, 2013
posted by maiamaia at 3:49 PM on April 4, 2013
In-video advertising is something you have to enable, and I believe new users with hardly any views don't even have the option of showing in-video ads. (I seem to recall a clearance process when I experimented with them.)
Embedding the video in your own page without advertising will keep some people from seeing advertising when they watch it on your page, but it doesn't keep another person from embedding it on their page that's covered in ads. Probably 99% of my views come from pages that aren't mine. There's no way to limit who embeds your videos on youtube, embedding is either on or off.
Vimeo offers embedding filtering so that you could restrict the web sites that embed it, in this case to only yours. (And as far as I know Vimeo doesn't have any advertising anyway, they make money on subscription services.)
A person needs roughly 7 million views a month to make a living from YouTube advertising. Not a lot of people can do that, for the vast majority of people YouTube advertising is a small supplemental income, not something they depend on. If YT advertising went away completely the content woud remain almost identical. However YouTube it's self (and parent Google) would have to change how it makes money since it pays for the service by taking most of the money spent on ads. Without that it would be too expensive to run. (And would have been closed down a long time ago if Google, with its deep pockets, hadn't bought it and supported it long enough to figure out how to make money with it.)
(Source: I have over about 1.5 millionYouTube views on my channel, some of which have YT ads. I also create videos for another channel that has hundreds of millions of views, but they don't do YouTube advertising, just direct in-show sponsor ads embedded in the video. "This show sponsored by..." stuff. )
posted by Ookseer at 5:45 PM on April 4, 2013
Embedding the video in your own page without advertising will keep some people from seeing advertising when they watch it on your page, but it doesn't keep another person from embedding it on their page that's covered in ads. Probably 99% of my views come from pages that aren't mine. There's no way to limit who embeds your videos on youtube, embedding is either on or off.
Vimeo offers embedding filtering so that you could restrict the web sites that embed it, in this case to only yours. (And as far as I know Vimeo doesn't have any advertising anyway, they make money on subscription services.)
A person needs roughly 7 million views a month to make a living from YouTube advertising. Not a lot of people can do that, for the vast majority of people YouTube advertising is a small supplemental income, not something they depend on. If YT advertising went away completely the content woud remain almost identical. However YouTube it's self (and parent Google) would have to change how it makes money since it pays for the service by taking most of the money spent on ads. Without that it would be too expensive to run. (And would have been closed down a long time ago if Google, with its deep pockets, hadn't bought it and supported it long enough to figure out how to make money with it.)
(Source: I have over about 1.5 millionYouTube views on my channel, some of which have YT ads. I also create videos for another channel that has hundreds of millions of views, but they don't do YouTube advertising, just direct in-show sponsor ads embedded in the video. "This show sponsored by..." stuff. )
posted by Ookseer at 5:45 PM on April 4, 2013
Perhaps a "donate bitcoins" hash or PayPal link in the video description would alleviate the need for advertising to some extent.
posted by oceanjesse at 7:30 AM on April 5, 2013
posted by oceanjesse at 7:30 AM on April 5, 2013
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Oktober at 1:04 PM on April 4, 2013