If you haven't noticed yet, YouTube has finally gotten around to a scalable business model with ads now appearing during some videos. The unobtrusive overlays reserve ten seconds of time 15 seconds into a clip. My favorite part of my source article was the findings of Google's market research:
YouTube has spent months testing different ad formats ... It found that viewers abandon videos that include pre-roll ads at a rate of more that 70%, so it ditched pre-roll commercials.
Pre-rolls are those nasty ads that you are forced to watch -- in full -- before accessing any content. ...
twitter.com/dougw