Online Video Ads Need To Die
Sep. 23rd, 2009 05:22 amFor quite awhile, I've been a fan of The Nostalgia Critic and his less-active counterpart Nostalgia Chick. I watch videos from them on a regular basis, and I enjoy nearly everything they put out. However, I have a major issue with the site: Ads embedded in the videos.
Now, I understand how the internet works, and I'm quite aware that any website has to generate income somewhere once it gets a certain level of activity. I don't particularly like it, but the reality is that the internet we know today is built to cater to commerce over creativity. And, for sites that don't inherently sell anything, selling advertising is a somewhat reliable, if dubious, way to generate the income necessary to continue to exist. I block ads as much as possible, of course, but website ads aren't usually very intrusive anyway. Video ads, on the other hand, are the absolute bane of my existance.
I'm not talking about ads that play before the video; as annoying as those are, they're easy enough to mentally tune out, and they only last for 30 seconds or so before a video of 5-30 minutes (depending on what you're watching). Kinda like TV commercials, which I tune out so easily that it's actually more annoying to pick up the remote and fast-forward through them on my DVR. I'm talking about banner ads embedded in the video itself.
The Nostalgia Critic's site uses Blip.tv to host their videos. Not many people use that video hosting service, but anyone who's used Youtube is familiar with their advertising technology, which can overlay pretty much anything over the videos (Youtube uses it for those comment boxes in videos). And when I first started watching their videos, their ads were actually tolerable. The video player overlaid a translucent black rectangle over the bottom chunk of the video containing a text ad. Not exactly ideal, but not overly distracting either.
However, a few months ago, they really ramped this up. The translucent black rectangle still appears, but instead of containing text, it now contains full-colour banner ads. Usually animated. And there are animated ad overlays without the box that open to a full-screen ad if your mouse so much as grazes the edge of the video window (not just mousing over the ad itself). Aside from full-screen interstitials, I don't think I can imagine more intrusive and distracting advertising for online video content.
But the real kicker in all this, and what prompted me to write this post, is that Blip.tv's video player and advertising are so resource-intensive that no browser can run or interact with the video plus ads smoothly. It was bad enough when the ads were just text-based, they lagged a little during fade-in and fade-out, but not enough to really affect anything. These new fully-animated ads, though, are unbearable. The video stream typically lags for almost a full second when an ad appears, and if I dare to try to close a particularly annoying one by clicking the little X in the corner of the ad, the video and audio come to a dead halt for upwards of five seconds, followed by several seconds of unwatchably choppy video as it tries to re-sync.
Of course, this is on my desktop computer, which is on hardware that was top-of-the-line seven years ago, runs constantly, and hasn't had Windows reinstalled in about four years (I think, I can't remember the last time I did it). So, despite being surprisingly powerful and usable for its age, it does tend to chug a bit with things like video anyway. So, I hooked my laptop up to my TV to watch some internet video on the big screen, starting with a new Nostalgia Critic review. My laptop, if you don't recall, is a hypothetical future-computer from space that cost more than the value of my car, and it absolutely pwns at video. Games that are unplayably laggy on my desktop (not necessarily new ones) run with perfect framerates on my laptop. So, theoretically, I would expect such a powerhouse of computing superiority to handle a Flash video player, even a notoriously laggy one, with the same ease that my desktop PC handles Notepad. While this normally would be the case, Blip.tv's ads are so intrusive to the video player that even my laptop lagged for a half-second before displaying each one.
Watching videos on my TV also illustrated a quirk that would be rather amusing if it weren't so irritating. Normally, webpage-embedded video plays at about 640x480px, regardless of the size of the browser window. But, Flash video players also have fullscreen mode, and can be embedded elsewhere at other sizes, so logically, something that overlays an image over the bottom of a video should expect this. Not Blip.tv. In fullscreen mode, their new ads display at the bottom of where the video would be if your monitor were the same size as the web player. Which was really hilarious to watch on my 42" TV at 1080i, but its charm wore off quickly when I realized it was now rendering banner ads in the prime section of the window, where all the action in a well-made video is supposed to be.
So, I'm not pleased with Nostalgia Critic or Blip.tv about this. Blip is of course responsible for the technical problems with their video player, but I also blame Nostalgia Critic for choosing these ads in the first place. Blip allows content posters to choose what type of advertising (if any) to display, and the content owner gets a cut from the proceeds. So, Nostalgia Critic had to have specifically chosen these types of ads. And, I mentioned Nostalgia Chick in the beginning of this post, but her videos don't have nearly as many of the troublesome animated banner ads. Instead, she has a full-screen commercial at the very beginning of the video, and just old-style plain-text banner ads in the rest.
And, if anyone reading this puts videos online: I understand the need for advertising to support your work, but do your audience a favour and check the impact of the ads on your videos when choosing what to display.
Now, I understand how the internet works, and I'm quite aware that any website has to generate income somewhere once it gets a certain level of activity. I don't particularly like it, but the reality is that the internet we know today is built to cater to commerce over creativity. And, for sites that don't inherently sell anything, selling advertising is a somewhat reliable, if dubious, way to generate the income necessary to continue to exist. I block ads as much as possible, of course, but website ads aren't usually very intrusive anyway. Video ads, on the other hand, are the absolute bane of my existance.
I'm not talking about ads that play before the video; as annoying as those are, they're easy enough to mentally tune out, and they only last for 30 seconds or so before a video of 5-30 minutes (depending on what you're watching). Kinda like TV commercials, which I tune out so easily that it's actually more annoying to pick up the remote and fast-forward through them on my DVR. I'm talking about banner ads embedded in the video itself.
The Nostalgia Critic's site uses Blip.tv to host their videos. Not many people use that video hosting service, but anyone who's used Youtube is familiar with their advertising technology, which can overlay pretty much anything over the videos (Youtube uses it for those comment boxes in videos). And when I first started watching their videos, their ads were actually tolerable. The video player overlaid a translucent black rectangle over the bottom chunk of the video containing a text ad. Not exactly ideal, but not overly distracting either.
However, a few months ago, they really ramped this up. The translucent black rectangle still appears, but instead of containing text, it now contains full-colour banner ads. Usually animated. And there are animated ad overlays without the box that open to a full-screen ad if your mouse so much as grazes the edge of the video window (not just mousing over the ad itself). Aside from full-screen interstitials, I don't think I can imagine more intrusive and distracting advertising for online video content.
But the real kicker in all this, and what prompted me to write this post, is that Blip.tv's video player and advertising are so resource-intensive that no browser can run or interact with the video plus ads smoothly. It was bad enough when the ads were just text-based, they lagged a little during fade-in and fade-out, but not enough to really affect anything. These new fully-animated ads, though, are unbearable. The video stream typically lags for almost a full second when an ad appears, and if I dare to try to close a particularly annoying one by clicking the little X in the corner of the ad, the video and audio come to a dead halt for upwards of five seconds, followed by several seconds of unwatchably choppy video as it tries to re-sync.
Of course, this is on my desktop computer, which is on hardware that was top-of-the-line seven years ago, runs constantly, and hasn't had Windows reinstalled in about four years (I think, I can't remember the last time I did it). So, despite being surprisingly powerful and usable for its age, it does tend to chug a bit with things like video anyway. So, I hooked my laptop up to my TV to watch some internet video on the big screen, starting with a new Nostalgia Critic review. My laptop, if you don't recall, is a hypothetical future-computer from space that cost more than the value of my car, and it absolutely pwns at video. Games that are unplayably laggy on my desktop (not necessarily new ones) run with perfect framerates on my laptop. So, theoretically, I would expect such a powerhouse of computing superiority to handle a Flash video player, even a notoriously laggy one, with the same ease that my desktop PC handles Notepad. While this normally would be the case, Blip.tv's ads are so intrusive to the video player that even my laptop lagged for a half-second before displaying each one.
Watching videos on my TV also illustrated a quirk that would be rather amusing if it weren't so irritating. Normally, webpage-embedded video plays at about 640x480px, regardless of the size of the browser window. But, Flash video players also have fullscreen mode, and can be embedded elsewhere at other sizes, so logically, something that overlays an image over the bottom of a video should expect this. Not Blip.tv. In fullscreen mode, their new ads display at the bottom of where the video would be if your monitor were the same size as the web player. Which was really hilarious to watch on my 42" TV at 1080i, but its charm wore off quickly when I realized it was now rendering banner ads in the prime section of the window, where all the action in a well-made video is supposed to be.
So, I'm not pleased with Nostalgia Critic or Blip.tv about this. Blip is of course responsible for the technical problems with their video player, but I also blame Nostalgia Critic for choosing these ads in the first place. Blip allows content posters to choose what type of advertising (if any) to display, and the content owner gets a cut from the proceeds. So, Nostalgia Critic had to have specifically chosen these types of ads. And, I mentioned Nostalgia Chick in the beginning of this post, but her videos don't have nearly as many of the troublesome animated banner ads. Instead, she has a full-screen commercial at the very beginning of the video, and just old-style plain-text banner ads in the rest.
And, if anyone reading this puts videos online: I understand the need for advertising to support your work, but do your audience a favour and check the impact of the ads on your videos when choosing what to display.