User:Elominius/Essay on online advertising

Wikimedia is in a unique position of being able to largely crowdfund itself. Not many sites are blessed with this privilege, so they need some other source of income to survive.

Especially video platforms like YouTube and Dailymotion, which give users the freedom to upload as many videos as they wish, face an enormous burden on storage costs, and also bandwidth for more popular channels. Through advertisements, the videos can pay for themselves.

In comparison, advertisement-free video platform Vimeo imposes strict upload limitations on its users: half a gigabyte per week and five gigabytes in total to unpaid users, whereas paying users get higher limits. Vimeo funds itself through a freemium model, and is targeted towards professional filmmakers and businesses rather than social video sharing.

In my opinion, online advertisements are tolerable so long as they are not too intrusive. Video advertisements with much louder sounds than the currently playing video are painful and therefore unacceptable. There should be no more than one advertisement per five minutes, and no more than a second of advertisement per one minute of video. This means, for example, at most a ten-second break for ten minutes of video.

In some countries, YouTube lets users watch usually paid movies for free, but in return with many advertisement breaks, which is a fair trade-off.