14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube struggle to drum up revenue to match the huge costs of serving billions of videos every day isn’t anything new. The video site has been experimenting with numerous ad types and even with a rental system. Yet, YouTube is saying it now plans to introduce skippable ads later this year. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, the feature, which has been in testing, has proven quite successful from an advertiser’s point of view as well.
The idea is to give users a choice in what ads they watch and when. YouTube has been serving pre-roll ads for longer videos and these are the type of ads that users will be able to skip to get to the actual content. While it may seem that, given a choice, everyone will just skip every ad they get, testing has shown that this is not the case.
Obviously, many ads do get skipped, but the ones that the users choose to watch serve the adevertiser much more, since the viewer is actively involved in the process. YouTube has found that some ads fare better than others in this context and the key seems to be the creative part. A good quality ad will not get skipped as much.
YouTube has been testing these skippable ads for three quarters now, having introduced them in November last year. Obviously, the site wants to get them right and is now satisfied enough with the results of the tests to introduce the feature sometime this year.
The site is said to be on track to become profitable this year, but still needs to experiment with any type of revenue model to see what sticks. That said, YouTube will focus on ads for the time being though subscriptions and other models will eventually be introduced as well.