Check My Ads: YouTube is Hardening its Stand Against Ads on YouTube-Promoting Video Platforms and Its Vets
These measures indicate that YouTube is hardening its stance against ad blockers, and it’s justifying the move by saying all of those ad spots are critical for creators to be compensated for their content — and for the platform to remain free. “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 the price of $11 a month, or $11 a year, you can get YouTube Premium which excludes ads from the service. YouTube announced last November that it had over 80 million subscribers. The company is always interested in steering more people towards its monthly subscription, regardless of how charitable it is.
Heavy ad loads have been tried out on the site by testing the patience of its users. Last September, the company served up to 10 unskippable clips within a single ad break in another of its experiments. In May, the company announced they were launching 30-second ads to TV platforms.
Nandini Jammi, the co-founder of the advertising industry watchdog group Check My Ads, spotted a pretty big inconsistency with the language Google used in its response to the research. Google’s blog post says that it offers “the option to opt out” of running ads on third-party sites “at any time,” but Jammi found that this isn’t the case according to Google’s own support page:
According to the Journal, these ads will appear on high-quality sites before the main video content with the audio on, but they weren’t the case 80 percent of the time.
Google spokesperson Christopher Lawton tells The Verge that “there are multiple types of campaigns and we offer opt outs of Google Video Partners for each of them.” If advertisers are going to exclude third-party sites from their performance campaigns, they need to work with their account reps.
Check My Ads is also calling for advertisers to ask Google to make running ads on partner sites opt-in only, as well as for the search giant to share how it vets these websites.