Ok, so if you are reading this, you have probably watched our MineCast videos thus far. We were invited this afternoon by YouTube to monetize our videos. What does this mean? It means that YouTube wants us to put ads on our videos, for a small monetary compensation. We did activate an ad type called "Overlay in-video ads" which are the ones that pop up at the bottom of the video, during the video. We activated this because YouTube does it themselves already, so there really isn't really much point in not doing those ads. We, however, are asking your opinions on whether or not we should activate the "TrueView in-stream" ads. These are the ads that play at the beginning of the videos for about 15-20 seconds. Jabr and I HATE these ads as much as the next person, but the TrueView ads are a different beast all together. The overlay ads give revenue on a per-click basis, but in-stream ads give revenue on a view basis. This would bring in some more money for sure. Now just to clarify, unless we end up making ludicrous amounts of money (we won't) we do not plan on keeping anything we get from the MineCast, and all the revenue we get would be put straight back into the Empire. One way we are thinking of doing this would be to give away a free supporter membership each time we make enough to do so. We don't really know for sure if we can do this, and if not, then the money would be donated to the Empire. In other words, these ads are for the good of the Empire, not for any monetary gain on Jabr and my part. In order to keep to Justin's policy of keeping ads to a minimum, we decided to ask all of you about this before we did anything about this.
Hey if its for the good of the Empire i'd sit through an ad. Besides your vids are good and not like 30 seconds so that ads arnt to bad.
I say go for it. I mean, if I didn't have time to watch a twenty second ad then how would I have time to watch a whole video. If it helps EMC and y'alls videos then definitely put those ads in.
some of them are defaults. The ones next to the videos we have no control over, as well as one kind of overlay ad, but when the overlay ad is for a specific product, or if there is a video at the beginning it is a monetization scenario.
I can live with the in-stream ads, but I hate those overlays. They cover so much of the video are that you really need to close them. And then still the re-open button disturbs the video...
Unless anyone has some strong objection to it... it looks like we'll be adding those ads when we finally get the next video up! (we've tried like 4 times and had problems, so no guarantee about when that'll happen. It's uploading now, so hopefully it'll work this time)
I find those ads on youtube REALLY annoying but if it helps the server and you make more awesome videos I think it is a great idea!
