Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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Yup, and this is the fundamental challenge Youtube has yet to overcome. Why is it worth $40,000 for a company to run a commercial on a TV show with half a million viewers but only $1,000 to spend on rolling their add before a Youtube video with half a million views?

There is the temporal bit, a TV show ad hits all viewers at the same time and on a particular date so you can put time specific information in it. And there is a diffusion bit, you can spend $40,000 for your ad across all videos that are rolling with > 1M subscribers so your ad money hits a bunch of different people rather than one person.

If Google could convince advertisers to pay more for advertising, they could compensate their content creators more. But they can't so they don't.

There's also ad effectiveness to toss more variables into the mix. There's also the huge difference in the amount of possible content and time slots for a youtube vs a TV ad. There's a very limited amount of commercial time available in primetime popular shows vs the huge number of videos uploaded each day to youtube.

I jist wish I could tell youtube "I've seen this ad more than 200 times. I am well aware that if I ever want to lose a bunch of money and feel shitty about myself, I can download Trading212. Please sell me different things."

Then again, I can't convince gmail that I'm not interested in local singles, despite the fact that 70% of my emails are sent to another gmail user that I share bunches of calendar events with.

If you're logged in, you can blacklist specific topics on Google's Ad Settings page[0] quite easily (you can also turn off tailored ads completely).

https://www.google.com/settings/ads/

So the ad has worked, in that it has raised awareness and you know of the product.

For the record I do find those annoying, but I often let them roll so the content creator gets that cash.

What I do find annoying are the really long ads, ones that are several minutes long and are played before a short several minute video.

Sure, but the opportunity cost of making me aware of a product repeatedly seems pretty high. I wish I could make the ads more targeted.

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