Worried about annoying viewers with ads?

[Vossy96]

May have been mentioned before, but I started a channel 2 weeks ago, and I'm about to hit 200 subscribers, and I'm at 8.75k views so very close to YouTuber partnership. Problem is, I do have a lot of loyal viewers already and a bit worried if I start throwing ads in front of the videos they might just think I'm in it for the money or whatever.

I probably won't advertise yet anyway, as I'm probably managing around 20k views per month at the moment and, as far as I'm aware that only totals around $30 I think? May be wrong, but that's not worth throwing ads at my viewers for.

When you guys started showing ads, did you see a decline in subscriber growth & likes/dislikes? Thanks!

 

[TheSwedishTraveler]

I think most viewers are used to ads a this point, and those who doesn´t like the ads would use Adblocks, but from what I could tell, they are a minority!
I did put ads right away, and it was a very slow growth, which has stagnated, but the subs slowly grew.

 

[Dewmonic Abyss]

I'm a little skeptical on growth from monetization. We all know that YouTube likes to promote content they make money off of. And a lot of people have reported to have decreased views from videos that receive limited or no ads. But would YouTube promote a video that isn't monetized over a video that has limited or no ads? That's an interesting question to explore. In any event, though, other than that bit of speculation, monetization doesn't really have any correlation to engagement. People don't care if you have ads on your videos or not. Just don't be obnoxious about it. Don't stretch a video out to 10 minutes just for the sake of having extra ads. If you're gonna do that, make the entire 10 minutes entertaining. And I personally wouldn't put any more than 3 ads. Any more than that, and it comes off as annoying.

 

[Xynudu]

As has already been said, viewers are used to and expect ads. It won't affect your growth if they like your content, which they obviously do.

After I switched to ads the channel continued to grow as before. Had no negative effect what so ever.

Do it and use the cash to buy some more ISP time or whatever.

 

[Highfalutin' Low Carb]

Monetize as soon as possible. Doesn’t affect growth at all.

And even though it’s all speculation, I’m from the camp that says YouTube is in business for one single reason: to make money for shareholders. All things being equal, if you had two channels making a video about XYZ topic and the two channels had equal views, equal subscribers, equal watch time and engagement, ALL factors identical except one video is monetized and one isn’t, then why would Youtube recommend the non-monetized video over the monetized video they can make money on? That makes absolutely zero business sense. I’m not saying that’s what happens, but it sure makes sense to me.

I’ve seen nothing but steady subscriber and view growth after monetizing the channel at 10,000 views.

 

[Johnny Dee]

Regular TV has ads, people expect them and can just click them off after 4 seconds

 

[Kenyanese]

Ads don’t affect nothing in my opinion. Rich content draws subs regardless of the ads

 

[EVO]

I turned on ads before I posted my first video. Im doing OK.