During June 2014 I performed an experiment on Youtube, where I changed the inline ads (appearing in the bottom of the video) for Preroll video ads. As we all know, preroll video ads are really annoying, but how does that annoyance affect the viewer? I will take a look at how my income, number of views and the average viewing time was affected by the ads.

The main reason I haven't had Preroll ads enabled prevously was of fear of losing viewers. However, according to my experiment my fears seems to lack reason. During the month with the preroll ads active, I actually made an all time viewer record on my channel! And as expected, my income from the ads increased drastically.

Certanly views is not all! Most people only care about views, as views = income. I want to care about my audience, and I do not want them to feel frustrated or stressed. A way to measure their stress level is probably how much time they spend on the video, or audience retention. However, my auduence retention didn't seem to change either. It actually increased from 26% the month before to 28% on the month of the experiment.

Below I have attached a couple of graphs showing my channel stats for your reference.

Now that the fear of loosing viewers is gone, will I start using preroll ads on my videos? No, I am a Youtube user myself, and I know how annoying the preroll ads are. If every and all videos on Youtube would contain Preroll ads, people would probably be more frustrated, which could cause more people to install Adblock in order to get a less painful experience on Youtube. Then all content producers lose.