[blecch]

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I've seen lots and lots of people on the Net who think music should be free, software should be free, and content should be free. These people typically have no grasp of basic economics.

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Basic economics says that in a competitive market the price of a good will be driven towards the marginal cost. As the marginal cost - the cost of making one more copy of a song, computer program, YouTube video, etc. - approaches zero, so should the price.
Perhaps the communists that you seem to be criticizing (FSF? Grateful Dead? Wikipedia? archive.org? Linus Torvalds?) are really ultra-capitalists who just want more competitive markets. ;-)

[tallscot]

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Reading both yours and Jeff arguments I have to side with Jeff on this one. Advertisement has become so prevalent that even laws have had to be put in place to curve it a bit. At lest here in Houston their are city ordinances prohibiting the displaying of commercial signs above a certain hight.
tallscot: Who in their right mind would like to have the content they are interested in viewing covered by as much as 20% by some obnoxious ad. Sorry, but I don't think Jeff is alone on this one.

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Actually, you agree with me. My point is that anything that gets too intrusive will be met by irate consumers and a solution or alternative will be found. So the public hates all the billboards, they tell their representatives, the representatives create legislation.
Jeff's position was that consumers just sit by and let crap happen to them.
So I guess I didn't communicate my point of view on this very well if you think I support obnoxious ads. I even said right off the bat that I hate the obnoxious Flash ads on Web pages.

[tallscot]

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I've seen lots and lots of people on the Net who think music should be free, software should be free, and content should be free. These people typically have no grasp of basic economics.

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Basic economics says that in a competitive market the price of a good will be driven towards the marginal cost. As the marginal cost - the cost of making one more copy of a song, computer program, YouTube video, etc. - approaches zero, so should the price.

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Yeah, good one! Of course, that's complete hogwash in so many aspects. It completely ignores perceived value on the part of the consumer. It's also flawed in its application to YouTube since YouTube's costs are based on the amount of traffic they have, which dictates the amount of technology they need to invest in, not "one more YouTube video".

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Perhaps the communists that you seem to be criticizing (FSF? Grateful Dead? Wikipedia? archive.org? Linus Torvalds?) are really ultra-capitalists who just want more competitive markets. ;-)

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No, I'm criticizing the idiots I see on these forums who think they have a right to music and content and justify stealing because they don't agree with the price of what they want.
Linus isn't a hacker distributing stolen content. He's someone who created a different model for developing and distributing software. And just like communism, it hasn't succeeded much.

[macnews]

I don't like the ad over the video. At the end won't do the advertisers much good thus not generate much money. I don't understand why they don't place it below the video for 10 seconds vs placing it in the actual video.
I work with students who post their work on YouTube and we constantly have to consider where we place lower thirds so when we copy the player to embed in our site it doesn't overlay the lower third. Now we have to consider this for ads? Totally sucks.

[bigpics]

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Actually, I would prefer product placement to intrusive advertising.

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I'm inclined to agree, so long as it does not materially alter the content. The Macintosh itself has been used in product placement in a number of feature films -- either by design or simply because the Mac is favored in the film industry.
But even product placement can be taken to extremes.

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The last (and maybe only) instance of p. placement I remember enjoying was in Star Trek IV, when Scotty, on 20th Century earth, was frustrated by why he couldn't talk to a computer (a mac, no?). Someone helpfully pointed out the computer mouse to him, and relieved, he picked it up and spoke into it. "Computer....."
Since then it's all been downhill for me. United Stateses where every car in on the streets is (pick your fave big 3 manufacturer here) -- not only distracting but a Twilight Zone level of unreality. Compressing and/or speeding up the credit roll when you want to see who the actors were, but instead get the fifteenth promo for tonight's schedule.
And when the nets, not satisfied with having cut content from an average of 52 minutes per hour down to 44 over the decades (led by the cable nets, which were supposed to FREE us from commercials because we were PAYING for a subscription), began inserting those horrid animated promos WITHIN the content of the post commercial break resumption of the shows, totally preventing you from having the experience the creators intended, my TV watching began to plummet.
The latter sounds kind of like I suspect the new Google plan will work, and while I know many people rant and rave when they first get sucked further into soul-numbing schemes, and then settle down like good Pavlovian dogs and take it, and while I'm aware that every pundit of note's been talking since it happened how "we'll never be evil" Google will "monetize" their $1.6B YouTube purchase, I think this truly sucks a.s.s.
I'd love a post-roll solution to this, but that's bloody unlikely, and I'd reasonably happy deal with a pre-roll that had a "skip this ad" button, even (or better) a "skip this ad for (name of product I MIGHT be interested in)" button, thus ensuring at least one mention of the product for their money, but I'm going to feel used each and every time part of my sensorium is trying to absorb content I want while another portion is being hijacked trying to screen out what I don't.
So I guess there's minor hope that the Big G can be influenced to go a different way on their right to pursue a profit for services rendered, however....
....appeals to boycott or complain to advertisers who invade our heads this way seldom work, and YouTube's 80%+ marketshare and virtual Xerox/iPod/Google branding on the concept of user-posted videos isn't likely to be challenged soon, especially with the all the built-in links to the whole family of Google products, and tie-ins to products like iWeb and the iPhone, so I'm not hopeful much more than temporary venting is going on here.
Abraham Lincoln had it partly right with his "you can fool some of the people all the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time," but he sadly left out that you can get by nicely by fooling enough of the people enough of the time......
Alas silly, time-wasting, sometimes profound, sometimes ignorance-spreading YouTube of yore. We knew ye well.