Problems of Youtube advertising

Advertising is everywhere, from the real world to the many sites people visit while on the web. One of the most popular sites right now is Youtube. With supposedly a billion visitors every day, that kind of traffic draws a lot of advertisers. Specifically, it draws video advertisers that put their ads before and after videos. One article by Isaac Rudansky (found at http://www.searchenginejournal.com/whats-problem-youtube-ad-keyword-targeting/146014/) discusses some of the problems with Youtube’s native advertising and his experiences with it. He created two ad campaigns for his outside site called Udemy and studied how well they worked against each other. The first type of ad was in-stream, which would play before a video. The other type was in-display, which would pop-up at the top of a search result. He found in-display worked better, most likely because viewers were not forced to watch the ads. I am not surprised by this: I find the instream ads tedious because I want to watch the video clicked on, not an ad. In-display ads do not feel as forced and if it catches my eye, I am more likely to feel that it is my decision to watch it. Now, in his study Rudansky found that the keyword searches that were matched with his ads were not of the same topic. Often people searching for music videos would find his ads for his site on marketing. Even when he tried to clear this mistake up with Google, the results did not change much. These kinds of programming mistakes can often mess up a marketing campaign and cost the marketers unwanted money. This is something Youtube still has to work on or smaller businesses will not use their site for ads.