I think I heard it put like this once (paraphrasing):
Ads aren’t to make you buy the product. Few people are gonna see a regular commercial about chocolate and go out and buy it. That’s not their intent. They’re meant for brand recognition. They’re about that moment in the supermarket when you have 50 choices of what soda to get. 40 of them are noname and store brands. You’ll almost never try them unless you want to save some money and/or aren’t interested in what you’re buying. But then you have your coke and pepsi. The old reliables - the names that are stuck in your head since forever. And sometimes you’ll want to check out the new mountain dew or dr pepper flavors, cause you’re curious. But when you’re not in the mood for new, when you just want a soda and don’t wanna think about it, you’ll get a coke or a pepsi or one of the few brands whose name you recognize.
After 1000 raid shadow legends ads, guess what you’re gonna feel like trying in 3 months when you get bored of your current mobile game and are scrolling through their top picks for games? “Hmm, Raid shadow legends? I’ve heard about this before, maybe I give it a try”
Sure, it backfires sometimes - for example, I always make it a point to not try out a game if I feel it’s been in too many ads - I don’t wanna waste time in something that blew its entire budget on marketing. But with most people this doesn’t happen. And I’m pretty sure even I tried some item from an ad that I said I’d never get - the name probably just got stuck in my head and I got it without even realizing it.
Marketers make a shit load of money based on human psychology. They wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t work.
From what I understand, they’re already getting paid pennies by youtube, which is why many of them constantly shill for patreon/nebula/curiositystream/whatever on top of sponsored content. So youtube is shit for the creators, shit for the consumers, and a net loss for google. It’s the same non-business model as food delivery apps: nobody profits, yet it still somehow keeps going because modern economics is make-believe.
There are alternatives for the people who make money off the YouTube.
The Youtubers who do get paid enough to make a living from YouTube also make production quality content and have great gear and staff. They might as well sell their production to any other streaming service.
Something like Veritasium might as well be on Netflix as YouTube. Mr.Beast would fit in on Mtv…
Those both require subscriptions for access though instead of offering an ad based tier so that already excludes a majority of viewers from being able to move over from yt and those producers are unlikely to abandon their current audiences for a possibly bigger audience under a different corporation. I think that’s going to be necessary for a majority of viewers and producers to switch to another A/V distribution platform. If Netflix or MTV had an ad-only based tier and released apps for phones, Roku, browser, etc and allowed producer uploads then I suspect they could take a big chunk of Google’s yt viewership and profits.
At what point do content creators stop creating content for this?
When they stop getting paid.
Does anyone even buy anything because of these stupid ads?
I think I heard it put like this once (paraphrasing):
Ads aren’t to make you buy the product. Few people are gonna see a regular commercial about chocolate and go out and buy it. That’s not their intent. They’re meant for brand recognition. They’re about that moment in the supermarket when you have 50 choices of what soda to get. 40 of them are noname and store brands. You’ll almost never try them unless you want to save some money and/or aren’t interested in what you’re buying. But then you have your coke and pepsi. The old reliables - the names that are stuck in your head since forever. And sometimes you’ll want to check out the new mountain dew or dr pepper flavors, cause you’re curious. But when you’re not in the mood for new, when you just want a soda and don’t wanna think about it, you’ll get a coke or a pepsi or one of the few brands whose name you recognize.
After 1000 raid shadow legends ads, guess what you’re gonna feel like trying in 3 months when you get bored of your current mobile game and are scrolling through their top picks for games? “Hmm, Raid shadow legends? I’ve heard about this before, maybe I give it a try”
Sure, it backfires sometimes - for example, I always make it a point to not try out a game if I feel it’s been in too many ads - I don’t wanna waste time in something that blew its entire budget on marketing. But with most people this doesn’t happen. And I’m pretty sure even I tried some item from an ad that I said I’d never get - the name probably just got stuck in my head and I got it without even realizing it.
Marketers make a shit load of money based on human psychology. They wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t work.
Yes, otherwise companies would not spend their money on them.
I wouldn’t as that’s just asking to get screwed
From what I understand, they’re already getting paid pennies by youtube, which is why many of them constantly shill for patreon/nebula/curiositystream/whatever on top of sponsored content. So youtube is shit for the creators, shit for the consumers, and a net loss for google. It’s the same non-business model as food delivery apps: nobody profits, yet it still somehow keeps going because modern economics is make-believe.
When there is a viable alternative
There are alternatives for the people who make money off the YouTube.
The Youtubers who do get paid enough to make a living from YouTube also make production quality content and have great gear and staff. They might as well sell their production to any other streaming service.
Something like Veritasium might as well be on Netflix as YouTube. Mr.Beast would fit in on Mtv…
Those both require subscriptions for access though instead of offering an ad based tier so that already excludes a majority of viewers from being able to move over from yt and those producers are unlikely to abandon their current audiences for a possibly bigger audience under a different corporation. I think that’s going to be necessary for a majority of viewers and producers to switch to another A/V distribution platform. If Netflix or MTV had an ad-only based tier and released apps for phones, Roku, browser, etc and allowed producer uploads then I suspect they could take a big chunk of Google’s yt viewership and profits.