I’ve got a great revenue model for you:
Take a minute-long commercial from a major brand and put it on YouTube.
Then put someone else’s ad prominently to the right of it. Make sure it flashes and sparkles a lot so it distracts you from the commercial that consumers are going there to watch.
Then, 8 seconds into the video, run an overlay covering the bottom quarter of the screen. Animate the hell out of the overlay. And run the overlay for a full 20 seconds – so it’s there during one-third of the time you’re watching the commercial.
If this is the best online video can bring, everyone might as well give up and let marketers’ budgets stay on television.
It’s not just YouTube. The Internet Movie Database runs pre-roll ads before movie trailers. You can wind up sitting through a 30-second ad before watching an ad for a movie.
This is how bad online advertising gets, and it’s from our biggest and supposedly best publishers out there. And for now, consumers let them get away with it.
People in online advertising complain that standards for online ads are set too high. Apparently we’re not setting them high enough.
