How to make YouTube viewers skip fewer ads on your channel.

As YouTube users, we all have a love/hate relationship with adverts.

Most of us understand that creators need to generate revenue from ads to keep producing the awesome content we consume from them. However, we see ads as an inconvenience and to some, they are just annoying – plain and simple. This is why Mobile adblock adoption has grown by 64% since December 2016. According to an extensive study by Magna (IPG’s research arm), 65% of people skip online video advertising. The numbers get worse when people watch ads on the go on a smartphone: a whopping 84% skip the ads.

This presents a huge dilemma for YouTube content creators as you want your viewers to enjoy your content without getting bothered or turned off by ads but you also need to make money. This was where we found ourselves at my startup, Helium Media, earlier this year as we prepared to launch our 2020 roster of YouTube web series. 

For those who don’t know, YouTube's TrueView for reach ads are considered the “traditional” YouTube advertising model because they are quite common. Those are the skippable ads that oftentimes pop up at the start, middle or end of YouTube videos.

For the YouTuber to make money from these ads, the viewer must ‘engage’ with the ad. The definition of engagement is watching at least thirty seconds or interacting with the ad (e.g. by clicking a link). If the ad is shorter than thirty seconds, the viewer will have to watch the whole thing for it to count as an engagement.

I did some research back then and discovered that 76% of people skip ads because it's ingrained behaviour. In some instances, we can impact skip rates by targeting the right people. However, it is hard to move the needle on skip rates by changing the ad or where it runs. Since we couldn’t influence the type of ads that showed up on our content and the position of the ad did little or nothing to change the skip rate, we were left with a major problem:

How do we as YouTube creators, make our viewers skip fewer ads on our channel?

Some days before launching the first episode of our web series, an idea popped up in my head – why don’t we just tell them? As an independent production company, we certainly didn’t have deep pockets and we needed every dime we could get from ads – why couldn’t we create our own ads to tell our viewers just that?

Of course, we didn’t have funds to produce the ads, my initial idea was to literally scribble our plea on a piece of paper, film it with my iPhone and stick it in-between episodes. But I got some inspiration the day before we went live and called on my skills from a past life where I worked as a designer at a creative agency. I went from Adobe Photoshop to After Effects, Premiere Pro, iMovie, Garageband, Adobe Audition and finally, Handbrake. In about 90 minutes, our first ad was ready.

Next stop was our legal team. As cool as the idea was, I wanted to make sure we wouldn’t get in trouble. Of course, the legal guys had comments and they made me change quite a bit but at the end of the day, we were ready to go live.

The Ads

The Result

For the first episode, we got absolutely no comment about the ad. It was almost as if it wasn't there. One person noticed the ad on the second episode but by the third episode, the comments came pouring in.

People could not get enough of the ads and sometimes it felt like that was the major attraction for viewers. We kept on pushing and seven weeks later, I felt it was time for us to try and see if we had done enough to change influence our audience. We placed a real advert and the feedback blew us away

Not only were the ads celebrated, but our audience had also become invested in our quest to secure ads. While I can not share revenue data at this time, I can also confirm that our little experiment definitely had a positive impact on how much our viewers skipped ads on our channel. But don't take my word for it, here’s one of the recent comments on our channel. 

Wale is a senior marketing professional with over 10 years of experience in media, digital, digital publishing, partnerships, and e-commerce. He is currently Marketing Partner, Africa @ Diageo and also the founder of Helium Media - a content production company dedicated to telling original African stories.