| Kippreport.com

Future moving more to ‘Skippable’ ads: YouTube

December 6, 2012 12:28 by M. Aldalou

There are really only a select category of people in the world that like ads – the advertisers themselves and the channels that make money off them. That’s not to say that no user could ever enjoy watching a creative campaign or be grateful that they caught an airline advertisement just in time for the holidays, but the general notion is that ads are becoming more invasive, troublesome and irrelevant.

At a private Google breakfast this morning, that notion was echoed again. Still, for interactive websites such as Facebook and YouTube to continue to exist and be free (that’s the key element), advertising is necessary. In fact, it’s a lot better than the alternative. Funnily enough, Mohamad Mourad, Regional Manager at Google tells us that the most watched videos in the region are in fact ads.

“Of course, the number of people that skip video ads on YouTube is high, sometimes as high as 80 percent but there are 4 billion daily views on YouTube all over the world so we don’t really need all of them to click,” he says. For the first time ever, they released a UAE-based study that reveals – among many other stats – that the average user in the Emirates is 33 years of age. There are 260 million daily views from the Middle East and North Africa and about two hours of uploaded content every minute. Sixty six percent are men while 34 percent are women.

“Globally speaking, Google sees the Arab region as the biggest bet for YouTube,” Mourad adds. When the topic of invasive and irrelevant advertising popped up, he said that the future is moving more towards ‘skippable’ advertising rather than the historic alternative. Still, what was gnawing at Kipp’s mind is that in spite of video ads being skippable and – in turn giving users more power, why is it that television still holds the biggest advertising share in the region.

“Obviously, it’s because it gives a quick and instant reach to a wide audience. TV is not going away anytime soon, the distinction between video content and TV will change but as a medium, it is here to stay. On the other hand, advertisers realise that a website like YouTube offers incremental reach whereas if you wanted to advertise to 50 different countries on TV it would be a complicated and expensive process.”

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Tags: google, Youtube, youtube uae