Online videos have positioned themselves as one of the preferred media for many brands and advertisers. The data of innumerable investigations and studies show its great popularity and its increasing consumption by the users of Internet. One of the latest reports from comScore confirmed once again this trend when last September reached another milestone after reaching a new record in relation to the number of videos seen.

As expected, Google was at the top, thanks to its online video portal YouTube, where advertising and video ads have become popular among advertisers.

However, as this sector evolves, debates about the effectiveness of this type of ads and the perception of the users themselves towards them are once again resurgent. It seems that despite efforts to innovate, video ads are still considered intrusive to users.

In YouTube, for example, many of your videos show your ads prior to the content of your videos, giving users the ability to skip or skip that ad after a few seconds. On other occasions, users are forced to wait for such ads to end or be fully watched. This practice is also common in other sites and media that offer content in video format and whose ads can not be omitted at any time by users.

In the end, despite the proliferation and boom of these media and formats, it seems that we are again making advertising something intrusive and annoying, more typical of a model like television advertising, or worse, and that ends up affecting To the experience of those who consume this type of content.

In addition, we tend to confuse the success of the ads with the support itself, which is not the same, and we think that this type of advertising is generating a real impact on users, when this conclusion is far from reality. Most online video ads are skipped, and a large percentage of those that were played in their entirety did so because users take advantage to perform other tasks while viewing. As if it were an inheritance received from the habits of television audiences who take advantage to do anything else or task while advertising lasts.

That said, we should not confuse concepts and approaches. Pre-roll ads that appear before the content are not the same as other proposals such as interactive videos, almost always with a promotional or advertising objective, but are intended to innovate with the multimedia properties of such media.

Other studies reveal that consumers pay more attention to ads incorporating online video. These are ads in themselves and not ads prior to a certain content by which we can show some interest.

Be that as it may, the most widespread trend continues to be that of the popular “pre-roll” ads. The big problem comes after the boom of mobile devices, through which users want to access information quickly and directly form and where such ads could be considered more annoying than ever.

That said our question is: Is it really a breakthrough in innovation or do we go back to the usual interruptions? Do you consider these ads annoying?