Youtube is a company that was started by three PayPal employees in February 2005. The company became so popular that it was bought by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion. The video-sharing website now operates as one of Google’s subsidiaries. Google itself nets $115,150 of revenue in one minute and converts $23,509 of that into profit (around 20.4% profit). I have done some calculations myself and found out that in a YEAR Google nets $61,683,552,000 Billion. Therefore in total, Google profits approximately $12,336,710,400 (20%) annually.

So Google, a billion-dollar worth company that recently has a new parent company called Alphabet, has made it mandatory for someone using one of their services (Youtube) to constantly flood them with advertisements from their sponsors. The issue is not the fact that there’s advertisements on the website, but that between almost every video you click there is a 30 second ad. There can be 15 second ads which you cannot skip and 30 and 1 minute ads which you usually can skip. Sometimes the ads may not bother you, because honestly a 30 second ad that requires you to watch 3 seconds of it before being able to skip it is not THAT bad. However, I will tell you about some example scenarios that can happen in everyday life that will make you hate advertisements.

You’re on your way to work and you decide to take the train. You manage to connect to the stations platform WI-FI and scuffle to wait for the train. You get onto Youtube and search for your favourite song for the train journey as being in a stuffed train carriage with sweaty people and random chatter can inevitably lead to a headache and cause a bad start to the day. The train is coming soon and the video is loading when all of a sudden…BOOM you’re hit with a 15 second ad that you cannot skip. These 15 seconds seem to be the longest 15 seconds of your life and by the time you manage to get on the train, it has left the platform and you no longer have WI-FI. So you’re stuck with a music video that won’t load and have to listen to the noisy chatter of every other commuter. Bad start to the day.

The second situation would be probably irritate more people than just yourself. This situation is set in the middle of a party where there’s a lot of people enjoying themselves to the party music. The person controlling the music is using Youtube to play the songs and the current track is about to finish. As it finishes, the web page refreshes to go onto the next song when all of a sudden…BOOM a 30 second ads plays and the whole room goes quiet. People become confused, get annoyed and blame the person controlling the music. It also kills the party mood.

The problem with the advertisements is not the message that they are displaying, but the amount of times that they are displaying it too. With the amount of gross profit that Google make, they still let companies advertise their products in exchange for more income. If you were to look at it in the way that a business owner would do, then you may agree that the better income the better. However, the advertisements can bring a negative impact on the website itself as it becomes less desirable. It has gotten to the point were if a video is more than 6 minutes long it might have 2 advertisements. One of which, will interrupt the video halfway through to promote itself!

In conclusion, I think that that Youtube has to fix the the vexatious nuisance that is ‘Youtube Advertisements’. Does it help as a form of income for Google? Yes. Do people enjoy them? No. My solution is to reduce the amount of advertisements there are on the website, as it is obvious that although that Google makes $12 billion, they still need the income. So it would be ‘almost” a win-win situation. I say “almost” as they might lose a bit of income but if they truly care about improving their services as (as they have a spare $12 billion) it should not be a problem.