How do you do the advertisement on YouTube?

What explains the difference in "advertisement policy" between Spotify and something like youtube?

• I find Spotify's general approach towards their advertisements particularly aggressive, irritating and down right "uncool". A policy I find hard to digest/deal-with given an otherwise fairly refined and "cool" end-product (that I otherwise enjoy using). I understand that my grievances are likely subjective (though many/all of my friends share them) but I am trying to understand what causes Spotify to be so aggressive in their advertisement policy? Specifics : 1. As an example YouTube allows you/me skip ads fairly often, unheard of in Spotify. 2. Spotify pauses the ad if I were to mute or lower to volume of my speakers to a minimum (in an effort to skip/avoid the ad). YouTube I would like to think would never "sink to this level". 3. Of late Spotify has these hideous advertisements hover over my playlists and I have to click (somewhere within Spotify) to make these disappear. Even worse sometimes "focus"/control just shifts to the spotify window for no apparent reason (seems to be a timed/recurring/cyclical thing), taking focus away from my coding. 4. The quality of ads in general always seem very tacky, even advertising open positions at Spotify in the middle of tracks! I can never imagine YouTube advertising open developer positions in between videos! 5. Hulu (which after noting the first response claiming the unfair comparison) would possibly make for a "fairer" comparison : even Hulu seems to have a more "agreeable" ad experience. They ask you which ads are relevant to me, this is brilliant in my mind. Spotify constantly bombards me with jobs promising "A Brilliant Web Developers Paradise!" (I am sadly neither :D) or for music that I obviously (on the basis of my track history) have zero interest in. 6. I recently heard that they are a Swedish company. I am in the US, am wondering it there is a difference in advertisement-policy/approach between the two markets? Note : I have a free/unpaid account with Spotify. ( But then YouTube is "free" as well)

• Answer:

  Before answering, I must say that I REALLY recommend the paid experience, especially if ads can make you write long, ranting questions on Quora. :) It's ad-free bliss for the cost of a beer per month. Anyhoo - a few reasons the approaches to ads might different on the two services. They have different consumption patterns, so comparing the ads of the two is a bit of an apple and oranges comparison. Spotify has no other revenue streams than Spotify, and must therefore make money off it. Google is still taking a loss on YouTube, to my knowledge. Spotify pays for all their content. YouTube only pays for some, and it's mostly in the form of a percentage cut to the authors, not a fixed fee like Spotify. Unlike YouTube, Spotify has an affordable premium option that removes all the ads. People that really hate ads can opt out by buying a subscription on Spotify, the ads on YouTube, everyone are stuck with. They also have an incentive to make ads a bit irritating to get you to pony up for the subscription. :) As for pausing the player when volume is lowered: YouTube does not have a standalone video player, so they have no way of detecting volume changes in the system. Also - Spotify plays audio, YouTube plays video. Lowering the volume is essentially ad-blocking of Spotifys content, while video ads are often designed to be effective even with volume turned down (something ad producers learned long ago) Tackiness: Neither Spotify nor YouTube produces much ads themselves, so if you find the level tacky, it might be that your regional advertisers are still... finding themselves. Some users doesn't have a problem with them at all: Targeting: Spotify requires almost all new users to sign up with Facebook - this gives them targeting options that are different from YouTube (which is mostly based on your browser history). This might why Spotify can and does deliver an open-position ad to you. Having strong engineers is the lifeblood of Google at least as much as Spotify, so I'm sure that Google advertises their job positions very heavily as well, but they have other, more suitable channels to do it, perhaps. You might also be in a market where Spotify is growing heavily (such as the US) but isn't as strong brand-wise, so the need to advertise open positions are greater.