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Getting REALLY Tired of Video Ads

March 27th, 2016

In an age where more and more is being expressed in video over the ‘net, I am watching them less and less.

Seriously, you try to watch a 15-second video, you are forced to sit through a 30-second ad, which as often as not also has a banner ad at the bottom about five seconds into the video. Some ads allow you to skip the ad after 5 seconds or so, but more and more I have found these to malfunction, with the ad’s audio continuing over the video.

Not to mention that a lot of these ads are running over private content, even ones that have a very short running time.

This is why I started using ad blockers for web pages. Ads are okay, but ads which overrun the content are simply just asinine.

For all the time I have run this blog, I have kept it ad-free. I am considering starting up a parallel blog along with my new community Facebook page, and perhaps to have ad content there—but would only want “acceptable” ads to run. However, the more I look at things, the more I suspect that it would be very difficult indeed to find such an ad source.

What are “acceptable ads”? I blogged in detail on them last October. AdBlock created a mode where it would allow only “acceptable ads” to show. I tried it for a while, but discovered that—at least at that time—the ads were anything but “acceptable.”

Here are a few of the criteria:

  • no animation or auto-running video/audio
  • preferably text-only ads
  • unobtrusive ad positioning (reasonable size, never within the text)
  • clearly marked as ads
  • no links that lead to redirects
  • no misleading links (e.g., disguised as “next page” buttons)

If I can find a reliable source for that, I might opt into i. If I knew a site was firmly adhering to such principles, I would gladly white-list it.

Many sites disable content as much as possible if an ad blocker is running, most notably site comments, but more and more the whole page fails to load properly. I understand that, and care very little if I don’t see your page. Crash my browser, you make me want to not visit your site. Put up a notice that you strictly adhere to an acceptable-ad policy, then you have my business.

Video ads break most of the “acceptable ad” rules. They fail to recognize the length of exposure—there should be no ads for content under 10 seconds, only banner ad for video under a few minutes, and no video ad running more than one-third of the content length.

I have to start looking for a popular alternative to YouTube. It is just turning into an ad bazaar and little else.

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