YouTube: ads but free vs no ads for a fee

Pay to Play: YouTube may offer Paid Subscriptions Soon

I often think about advertisements, and why not they're as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.  I look to them for their business purpose and creative genius, and with the advent of YouTube it is easy enough to search and find commercials I love from watching TV and browsing online.  There, I can enjoy them further and even study them a bit.

However, I think about advertisements for their annoyance factor, too.  Watching NFL games is fast becoming tedious for me, because the commercials are just excessive.  In recent weeks also, I've begun to listen more regularly to The Score (AM 670) Chicago radio, for its in depth sports analysis and conversation.  Just like that, though, I find myself annoyed at how long its commercial segments are, maybe five minutes a break and overly frequent breaks an hour.  I flip channels and stations often anyway, but I find myself not even turning on the TV for Sunday or Monday Night Football, and I find myself losing interest even in checking in on The Score.

By contrast, every video I see on ESPN is preceded by a commercial.  While the same narrow set of commercials is annoyingly repeated at times, I don't feel bothered by the advertising model of my favorite sports site.  Why?  Because it is often only a matter of seconds, not minutes at a time.

Then, there is the matter of YouTube.  Besides the fact that it's an extraordinary forum for all kinds of videos that interest me, its advertising model is intriguing.  In particular, with the majority of ads I see before videos, I can opt to Skip Ad after five seconds.  Depending on what I see in those five seconds, on occasion I have actually opted to watch the entirety of it or searched the actual video and bookmarked it.  There is often an ad bar at the bottom of the screen that is present through the viewing, but I can exit out of that as well.  Otherwise it is all something that feels unobstrusive to me. 

So I'm not likely to subscribe for a fee, in exchange for an ad-free (and cost-free) experience, because relative to everything else I visit and consume, I honestly don't mind what YouTube is doing.