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Comment by vbtemp | Hacker News Reader

The thing I love about youtube is that there is never any problem loading the pre-video commercials for Cox internet or whatever. They always come through in HD and without any lag, ever. And then more often then not, I have to turn down the quality of the actual video because it can't stream at a high resolution. Suffice it to say, I don't really use youtube.

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For the love of crap, THIS. I'm glad I'm not the only one who's somewhat miffed that the advertisements are getting preferential treatment to the actual content (the reason people actually GO to youtube).

If I wanted to watch advertisements at the expense of content, I'd subscribe to cable again.

The preferential treatment is more likely that an advertisement used across many videos is much more likely to be cached at a location near you than a specific video. Still sucks, but it makes sense.

An implementation where the ad is shown only after buffering a certain amount of contents would have been interesting.

You'd wait longer before anything happens, there would be less ad impressions, every metrics I can imagine would be lower than the current behavior, but it sounds so much more sensible. I'd love a service doing that.

While annoying, you have to put things into perspective. You don't have to pay for youtube, and you can watch 30+ minute videos with usually only one or two 15 second ads. Compare that to TV where you're stuck with 5+ minutes of ads for the same 30 minute content. Alternatively, watch Vimeo or something instead, which (correct me if I'm wrong) doesn't show video ads and focuses on higher quality artistic content anyway.

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