<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nI was planning on going back to Blip.Tv<\/a> after a few weeks and re-visit the service, but there’s one point about my original tirade<\/a> that’s been eating away at me. I want to set the record straight, and I don’t want to wait a few weeks to do it. While the over-saturation of ads on Blip was really aggravating, it wasn’t at all fair to heap the blame on them the way I did. We talked about this in the comments, but I want give this correction its own post where everyone can see it. <\/p>\n One of the important things about Blip is that the content producer (people like Nostalgia Critic<\/a>, The Spoony One<\/a>, and SF Debris<\/a>) sets what kind of advertising they want to use on their videos. They can choose to have pop-over ads, pre-roll ads, or both. Or neither<\/em>. So the number of ads you’re exposed to has everything to do with the choices made by the producer, not Blip. They will let you host an ad-free show on their dime, and they will let you ad-bomb your viewers into madness. <\/p>\n The impact of this varies greatly depending on the length of the show, because Blip plays ads at the beginning and end. (And I imagine most people escape the one at the end with the back button.) So, if you’re watching a half-hour show this is very mild. One 30 second commercial per half hour is less advertising than any broadcast station. On the other hand, if the show is broken into ten-minute chunks, then you’re going to be watching an ad every ten minutes. Even if the ads are short, that density will try anyone’s patience. (The frequency of commercial breaks is arguably more important than length when it comes to advertising. Note how over the decades, TV stations have made their ad breaks longer, but the total number of breaks per hour hasn’t really changed. (Keeping in mind I haven’t really watched any television in 7 years or so.)) <\/p>\n If we’re going to blame Blip.tv for the density of advertising, then we need to place the same blame on every webhost in the world. (Discounting those occasions when the stream stalls and you have to re-watch an ad to get it going again.) If I turned this site into an insufferable wall of advertising, the blame should go on me<\/em>, not my webhost. The only thing Blip is guilty of is giving content producers enough rope to hang themselves with. And really, too much freedom is better than too little in that regard. I’d much prefer this to the YouTube system where they don’t give you any<\/em> advertising options until the video has been up for a few days, and then they don’t give you any control over how much or when or even help you to understand what your viewers will see or how much you’ll get or what percent of the revenue they’re sharing with you. <\/p>\n A contributing factor to my frustration was that I was trying to watch a show that had originally been carved up into the old YouTube-sized ten-minute chunks, which greatly multiplied the number of ads I had to deal with. <\/p>\n Part of this problem is one of perception. While it wasn’t fair for me to lay the blame for “too many ads” on Blip (again, discounting the malfunctions that made me repeat ads) it’s a mistake that a lot of people are going to make, because video advertising doesn’t usually work like this. When a show doubles up on the ads, we don’t blame the cast of House<\/em> or CSI: Spokane<\/em> or whatever show we’re watching. We blame the network. Ideally, there needs to be some way to communicate this to viewers. (I have no idea how to accomplish this.) There needs to be a feedback loop between viewers and producers, so producers can get a sense of how much (or how little) advertising impacts viewer experience. <\/p>\n For shows migrating from YouTube, I’d suggest that producers only enable pre-roll ads once per episode. If you’ve got a half-hour show in three segments, put the pre-roll on parts two and \/ or three. That way people can settle in and enjoy the show for a bit before they get hit with an ad. This has less of a chance to driving people away who aren’t yet invested in the show, and will make things less painful for people going through the archives looking for a particular episode. (I can’t begin to tell you what a painful proposition that<\/em> is.)<\/p>\n