YouTube moving "skip ad" button

YouTube ads are the bane of my existence.

Could I pay a small monthly fee and remove them? Yes. Will I? NO. At this point, it feels like I’ve made a principled stance (in my head) where I don’t want to pay for YouTube if there’s an option to get it for free. My workaround is to avoid using YouTube altogether when possible.

YouTube prints money with ads, so my guess is they’ll only get sneakier with how they implement them in the future. This got me thinking about the metrics product teams are optimizing for. They want to increase click-through rate, but more than that, they want to make sure free users watch enough of the ad to justify advertisers spending money.

There used to be a feature where you had to watch a certain amount of the video before skipping an ad. Most ads are super short now, and you have to watch the whole thing. I wonder if making the skip button move would incentivize people to watch the ad for longer.

Part of me thinks people would watch the whole ad to see if the button ever hit the corner. Another part of me thinks this would distract from the ad because people would watch the button. Either way, I think the idea of gamified ads is interesting and should be explored more deeply.

Have a friend who uses old photos for dating apps? Send them this newsletter. https://sorens.beehiiv.com/