How to make YouTube viewers skip fewer ads on your channel.

As YouTube users, we all have a love/hate relationship with adverts.

Most of us understand that creators need to generate revenue from ads to keep producing the awesome content we consume from them. However, we see ads as an inconvenience and to some, they are just annoying — plain and simple. This is why Mobile adblock adoption has grown by 64% since December 2016. According to an extensive study by Magna (IPG’s research arm), 65% of people skip online video advertising. The numbers get worse when we watch ads on the go on smartphones: 84% skip the ads.

This presents a huge dilemma for YouTube content creators as you want your viewers to enjoy your content without getting bothered or turned off by ads but you also need to make money. This was where we found ourselves at my startup, Helium Media, earlier this year as we prepared to launch our 2020 roster of YouTube web series.

For those who don’t know, YouTube’s TrueView for reach ads are considered the “traditional” YouTube advertising model because they are quite common. Those are the skippable ads that oftentimes pop up at the start, middle or end of YouTube videos.

For the YouTuber to make money from these ads, the viewer must ‘engage’ with the ad. The definition of engagement is watching at least thirty seconds…