Free video ads for YouTube creators

Apparently unscathed – and possibly unbothered – by the substantial furore and backlash about recent changes to the commenting system, YouTube has announced free video advertising for its users.

Labelled “Fan Finder”, the site is permitting channels to make their own video ads and submit them for playback across the website ahead of other people’s content, just like “normal” video adverts do.

Viewers will have the usual option to skip after 5-seconds so creators are being urged to make their ads compelling and snappy – a lesson that frankly some of YouTube’s commercial advertisers could do with learning.

Intriguingly, YouTube is promising that the ads will be played back in a way that reaches the people most likely to engage with them – in other words, if you run a channel about gadget reviews, your ad presumably will show up before other gadget review videos. This leads inevitably to the possibility of competing channels advertising ahead of each others’ content, so what they’ll think of that remains to be seen…

For the moment Fan Finder is free and there’s more info at http://youtubecreator.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/introducing-youtube-fan-finder.html