How YouTube Advertisements Damage Your Brand

How YouTube Advertisements Damage Your Brand

This weird advertising model has led to an unruly rat race where every Tom, Dick, and Harry would throw their intrusive YouTube ads to disturb the content viewers. 

Survey Findings

83% do not prefer to see ads in YouTube videos

85% feel disturbed with YouTube video ads

75% stop watching content videos that show video ads

80% develop a dislike for brands that appear in YouTube ads

By Rakesh Raman

If somehow the YouTube advertisers are allowed to watch the fate of their ads when viewers skip them with disdain, they will hang their heads in shame. 

Some of these advertisers will never advertise on YouTube after experiencing regular insults on the video sharing platform.

In an ongoing RMN Survey to know the preferences of YouTube users, a whopping 83% of respondents say they never want to see ads in YouTube videos. The ads are so disturbing that most people stop watching the videos and instead start doing other useful tasks in their homes or offices.

While there is no reliable data available to establish a correlation between a video ad and the promotion of a brand, most companies and individuals advertise on YouTube because the ad pricing depends on their budgets. That means, you can set your budget for a period of time and stop advertising when that budget is exhausted. 

[ Also Read: Your YouTube Subscribers: Real or Fake? ]

This weird advertising model has led to an unruly rat race where every Tom, Dick, and Harry would throw their intrusive YouTube ads to disturb the content viewers. 

The individual advertisers are naive who do not understand the advertising and marketing techniques. But it is shocking to see some corporate advertisers who push their disturbing ads on YouTube. Almost all YouTube ads are highly repulsive.

Such ads that break the viewing experience of consumers defeat all advertising principles and invite consumer anger and dislike for the brands or corporates.

In the RMN Survey, 85% of consumers say that they feel disturbed with YouTube ads and 75% stop watching content videos that show ads. The brands must feel alarmed as 80% of the survey respondents reveal that they develop a dislike for brands that appear in YouTube ads.

It may be a compulsion for YouTube to show a surfeit of ads in the videos because of its declining ad revenues. But there is no such compulsion for corporate brands which are trying to hurt their own interests with the torturing ads on YouTube.

There is also another dubious side of YouTube advertising, as some rogue video creators make money with their false popularity. The video makers make misleading thumbnails with their funny photos to deceive the viewers and artificially inflate their number of subscribers, views, likes, and comments.

The fake YouTube subscribers are openly on sale or you can even hope to get free subscribers. Along with subscribers, you can also buy views, likes, comments for your YouTube videos no matter how good or bad your videos are.

In this fraudulent ad ecosystem, many brands are getting damaged. In order to make YouTube an effective ad platform, there is a need for a complete revamp of the advertising model while protecting the viewing rights of consumers.

By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning journalist and founder of the humanitarian organization RMN Foundation. Earlier, he was writing an exclusive edit-page tech business column (named Technophile) regularly for The Financial Express (a daily business newspaper of The Indian Express Group). He had also been associated with the United Nations (UN) through the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) as a digital media expert to help businesses use technology for brand marketing and business development.