YouTube tests a pop-up window that forces you to watch ads or subscribe to Premium

YouTube is testing a way to prevent users from watching videos without ads. This is a pop-up window that interrupts the video and displays a timer indicating when the next ad will play. Users would have to accept ads on YouTube or subscribe to YouTube Premium in order to remove the pop-up.

YouTube seems to have 2 main reasons for doing this. One is to convince these users to switch to the Premium service, which offers more benefits in addition to removing the ads. The other is to ensure that content creators are compensated for their work and that advertisers have greater reach.

Advertisers will have to be more careful not to over-saturate users, as they may be annoyed by the constant ads, and it may affect their user experience, and end up affecting the performance of campaigns.

Some users might look for other ways to watch YouTube videos without ads, such as extensions to download them, but YouTube says it is also combating these practices. On the other hand, I don't think this practice would be a big concern for advertisers and creators, since downloading the videos seems to be more tedious than simply watching the video with ads.

How the budget change affects Facebook Ads / Meta Ads campaigns

Changing your Facebook Ads / Meta Ads campaign budgets too often can negatively affect your results. Every time you change the budget, the algorithm needs some time to adapt to the new spending level. This time is shorter the higher the budget because there will be more impressions per day. Therefore, making gradual and proportional changes to your ad budget, rather than raising or lowering it all at once, should be a generally positive practice. This way, you can better measure the effect of your changes and optimize your campaigns to achieve maximum ROI with your audience.

Occasions when it's better not to use Audience Network

Audience Network is a channel within the ad set section.

Our ad, if enabled, would be displayed on external websites and applications, i.e. outside of Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.

There would be several locations where our ad would be displayed on these external sites, either in banner or video format, etc.

One of the problems with Audience Network is that it tends to deliver a lot of low quality clicks and traffic, where low quality clicks and traffic are understood as clicks that have been made by bots rather than real users, or even clicks from competitors.

All this does is waste the advertiser's money inefficiently.

However, the biggest problem with the Audience Network is that many of the clicks that are generated from the Audience Network are accidental. This is because Audience Network ads are going to appear on these types of web pages where there is an excess of ads everywhere, and therefore there is a high probability that these accidental clicks will be generated, especially if we are talking about mobile devices that have small screens.

If one chooses to make the decision not to show ads through the Audience Network, I don't see how that will cause any problems.

There are occasions where using the Audience Network may be acceptable, in general it will depend on the objective of the campaign, in campaigns with traffic, reach or engagement objectives, I would exclude Audience Network. However, with conversion campaigns I would see it valid, putting it in automatic locations, because if you generate low quality clicks that do not convert, Meta will automatically not put resources there (it is quite common for this to happen).

In short, if you want users to take an action beyond the ad in your campaign, it would be best to exclude the Audience Network.

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