I rarely use YouTube to watch videos. A few of my clients have YouTube accounts attached to their Google+ accounts for which I am a "manager," and they send me videos to edit and upload; but I don't have a personal YouTube account and I rarely watch YouTube videos unless they're embedded in other pages.
A few days ago a friend of mine sent me a link to a YouTube video he'd made, and I just got around to viewing it yesterday afternoon. Holy crap, the service has become practically unusable. It's almost as if they want to repel users.
First of all, practically every video has a pre-roll or other intrusive ad. Okay, if that's how they choose to monetize it, it's their right to do so. But intrusive ads certainly don't endear users to a content provider's service. Many users will either click out or try to block the ads.
The other thing I noticed, however, is that if the video is part of a playlist, it auto-plays the rest of the videos in the playlist, with no way to disable that "feature." So apparently if you want to comment on a video that you just watched, you have to go back, reload it, and pause it.
Worse yet, though, is that even if a video isn't part of a playlist, it still autoplays the next video in the series of whatever videos YouTube's robot decides are relevant to the one you just watched, apparently endlessly. Unlike the playlist situation, you can disable that functionality, but it's enabled by default.
I found out that they were defaulting to autoplay accidentally. The video from my friend that I'd been watching was almost over when I went downstairs to put some laundry in the dryer. Then I remembered that I wanted to gas up the snowblower because more snow was being predicted, so I went outside and did that. Then I noticed that the village plow had piled a bit of snow at the end of my driveway, so I started up the snowblower and cleared it up before it froze. Then I refilled the windshield washer in my car, also in anticipation of more snow, and checked the oil while I was under the hood. So all told, we're talking maybe 30 to 40 minutes that I was AFK.
When I went back upstairs, much to my surprise, videos were still playing. I don't know if there's some sort of stop built in, but it looks like YouTube will just keep playing videos ad infinitum unless the user switches the option off or closes the window.
For the life of me I don't understand why YouTube / Google would want to force or default to autoplay. Aside from being annoying, it must burn through an enormous amount of bandwidth to play videos that no one's watching because they happened to walk AFK as I did. Google may have endless money to pay for transfer, but more and more ISPs are metering and throttling their users' bandwidth. Burning up bandwidth playing videos that no one's watching because the user forgot to close the window after watching a friend's dopey kitten video isn't likely to engender warm and fuzzy feelings among users.
The only thing I can figure is that some of their ads are PPM now, so YouTube / Google don't especially care whether anyone's actually watching them. If so, that would be a new low even for Google. An advertiser has the right to a reasonable assurance that an ad is being displayed on a page or video that was opened by an actual human being, not by a snippet of JavaScript.
Other than that possibility, I can't think of a reason why Google / YouTube would want to burn through their own and their users' bandwidth this way. It makes no sense at all to me.
Rich
A few days ago a friend of mine sent me a link to a YouTube video he'd made, and I just got around to viewing it yesterday afternoon. Holy crap, the service has become practically unusable. It's almost as if they want to repel users.
First of all, practically every video has a pre-roll or other intrusive ad. Okay, if that's how they choose to monetize it, it's their right to do so. But intrusive ads certainly don't endear users to a content provider's service. Many users will either click out or try to block the ads.
The other thing I noticed, however, is that if the video is part of a playlist, it auto-plays the rest of the videos in the playlist, with no way to disable that "feature." So apparently if you want to comment on a video that you just watched, you have to go back, reload it, and pause it.
Worse yet, though, is that even if a video isn't part of a playlist, it still autoplays the next video in the series of whatever videos YouTube's robot decides are relevant to the one you just watched, apparently endlessly. Unlike the playlist situation, you can disable that functionality, but it's enabled by default.
I found out that they were defaulting to autoplay accidentally. The video from my friend that I'd been watching was almost over when I went downstairs to put some laundry in the dryer. Then I remembered that I wanted to gas up the snowblower because more snow was being predicted, so I went outside and did that. Then I noticed that the village plow had piled a bit of snow at the end of my driveway, so I started up the snowblower and cleared it up before it froze. Then I refilled the windshield washer in my car, also in anticipation of more snow, and checked the oil while I was under the hood. So all told, we're talking maybe 30 to 40 minutes that I was AFK.
When I went back upstairs, much to my surprise, videos were still playing. I don't know if there's some sort of stop built in, but it looks like YouTube will just keep playing videos ad infinitum unless the user switches the option off or closes the window.
For the life of me I don't understand why YouTube / Google would want to force or default to autoplay. Aside from being annoying, it must burn through an enormous amount of bandwidth to play videos that no one's watching because they happened to walk AFK as I did. Google may have endless money to pay for transfer, but more and more ISPs are metering and throttling their users' bandwidth. Burning up bandwidth playing videos that no one's watching because the user forgot to close the window after watching a friend's dopey kitten video isn't likely to engender warm and fuzzy feelings among users.
The only thing I can figure is that some of their ads are PPM now, so YouTube / Google don't especially care whether anyone's actually watching them. If so, that would be a new low even for Google. An advertiser has the right to a reasonable assurance that an ad is being displayed on a page or video that was opened by an actual human being, not by a snippet of JavaScript.
Other than that possibility, I can't think of a reason why Google / YouTube would want to burn through their own and their users' bandwidth this way. It makes no sense at all to me.
Rich