YouTube Launches Audio Ads and Ad-Targetable Music Lineups, Taking Aim at Spotify

YouTube claims to be the world's biggest jukebox -- and now it wants to wring more ad dollars from the platform's music fans. From a report: The video giant is launching 15-second audio ads, the first format designed to reach YouTube users who listen to music or podcasts ambiently (i.e., in the background). YouTube also is introducing the ability for advertisers make buys across dynamic music lineups, including the Top 100 charts by country and collections of channels in popular genres such as Latin, K-pop, country, rap and hip-hop. Marketers also can buy ads targeted by moods or interests like fitness or relaxation/meditation. YouTube expects the moves to boost ad revenue it generates from music on the platform, which includes over 70 million official tracks plus remixes, live performances, covers and other music content. And it stands to put YouTube in more head-to-head competition with Spotify, which has been selling audio-only ads and offering targeting by music genres for years.

Lyor Cohen, global head of music for YouTube, positioned the new ad push as "trying to help artists in the industry earn more revenue from ads -- period." YouTube's focus on increasing advertising revenue for music content ultimately benefits its record label partners and their artists, he said. "Subscription revenue is important, and now [music companies] understand the advertising opportunity," said Cohen. "They love that we're building muscle on both sides."

It was kind of cute

[rsilvergun]

when Pat The NES Punk had some adverts in his podcasts, since he did them like old time radio adverts from when I was a kid.

This is not going to be cute. And since most of the revenue won't go to the podcaster it'll just be annoying. Also Audio isn't difficult to host in 2020 (though I do remember the Retroleague having issues due to the sheer number of episodes and the resulting bandwidth, also I miss those guys).

So yeah, thanks but no thanks. I'll just download the MP3.

Re: It was kind of cute

[Anonymouse Cowtard]

I'll just download the MP3. Yep. It's moments like these I 3 my Ampache server.

Re:

[weilawei]

Tidal is nice. Pandora is nice. Spotify is an unknown to me.

Also, torrents still work. The harder YouTube makes it to listen to music without being raped for subscription fees and ads constantly, the less listeners they'll have, and therefore, less customers buying their ads.

Re: It was kind of cute

[Malays2 bowman]

I used audio ripping services to download ad free, connection required free music to my nice, roomy SD card to enjoy in any device I please.

Of course, in order to protect Youtube from trying to shut these services down, I won't mention any names.

Thanks Youtube!

PS. I've already payed for my music through the "Hollywood tax" on blank media.

Re:

[Rockoon]

About 10 years ago I got a program (saver2?) that would nick the mp3's from Pandora as it was playing, and name them well (artist, album, name, year) and dedupe.
I then went on a little 4 month adventure where I created about a dozen reasonable stations and then saved a weeks worth of each to their own directories.

I now have an amazing collection of MP3's, complete with meaningful playlists and the like, and it was almost no effort at all.

Just what I want

[Bethany_Saint]

Oh to be listening to relaxation/meditation sounds only to have 15 second ads blasted at me.

Re:

[warkda rrior]

"We interrupt our 24-hour track of The Sounds of Rain for a message from our advertisers..."

"Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Mega Monster Truck Rally"

Re:

[rtb61]

I have actually experienced that with peaceful walking through visual interesting places video, very peaceful and then the cunts at Google target me, a known diabetes 2 individual with a screaming candy commercial, think about that, they targeted a diabetic with a screaming candy commercial, on fucking purpose, really sick cunts (logged in, seriously, target a diabetic with a candy commercial, as psychopathic as it gets).

Will Google take down their own Ads?

[doesnothingwell]

The RIAA will certainly send a DMCA takedown, sooner or later, what then?

ongoing destruction

[Dale512]

YouTube continues down a dark path. They must have hired a bunch of cable TV folks or something. They made YT unusable on the Roku with the amount of ads they've been showing (including mid-video ads). My household finally gave up the ease of the Roku remote and had to go back to a computer browser window controlled with a mouse solely due to the amount of ads. I suppose it is nice they are consistently trying to make their services unusable across the board.

Re:

[sound+vision]

In the last couple months I've noticed ads (or at least a greyed-out video box with the "Skip" button on it) appear for me on YouTube when I load a video. I use Adblock Plus, always have, and I never saw even a hint of an ad unless I was using someone else's computer. Until now...

Don't remember the details, whether an ad actually played - the last time it happened (this morning) it was on some tab I accidentally left open when the session restored, so I immediately closed it.

I hear from the normies that the

Re:

[NewtonsLaw]

Yep, they've jacked up the ad-count alright... but don't blame YouTube alone. Content creators have been given the opportunity to load up their videos with mid-roll ads and some have gone totally overboard. There are still creators that don't use mid-rolls and when I encounter one of these I let the pre-rolls run to completion in appreciation.

I have unsubbed from a *heap* of my regular channels over the past few months because they've gone mid-roll mad. NOBODY's content justifies two unskippable ads eve

Re:

[antdude]

I hate Roku's RCs with missing number keys for HDTVs like TCL's brand.

15 second ads! No thanks

[srlebed]

15 second ads are way too long. Of course 5 second ads are too long too.

Wring, fuck, pork, gouge, milk

[Malays2 bowman]

That's what these parasites do these days, Use people up, rip everything of last value out of them, and throw 'em away.

This shows we have too many useless eaters (said parasites) in the world, and the gene pool really needs some good cleaning.

Yay, more ads!!

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"Yay, more ads!!" said no one ever.

YouTube is Tone Deaf

[Geodesy99]

A music playlist stream is an immersive experience, I can't imagine anything worse than having my train of thought interrupted by some random advert for brand exposure of a company I've heard about a billion times over twenty years. Can't they go back to the sixties and just whisper subliminal messages over the sound tracks?