Pre-Rolls and Post-Rolls Appearing on 2-Minute Clips
The latest development: we found clips uploaded to the site in the past few days that include unmutable, unskippable pre-roll ads. Those we found appear to all be from CBS. While YouTube has experimented with pre-roll ads before, these videos include 30 second pre- and post-roll ads on a 113 second Letterman clip - in short, 1 minute of advertising around a video lasting less than 2 minutes.
The video, entitled Letterman - Denis Leary on Dave's Marriage, has one of the lowest ratings of all CBS clips and a string of comments complaining about the ad (warning: lots of strong language in that thread - partial, censored screenshot below).
Other clips carrying pre-roll ads include Heckle U, Survivor and Overcoming the Odds, while videos embedded on external sites don't carry the ads yet.
Rock, YouTube, Hard Place
It's a conundrum: losing hundreds of milllions of dollars a year isn't sustainable, and yet YouTube has an audience that's conditioned to receive unlimited content for free, without interruption.