Embedded Youtube Videos Remove Ads Overlay

I have zero experience with this. I've actually always just used a custom video player on my sites and just hosted my own videos in a folder on my webserver. Then, in maybe 2005 another web developer called me stupid for not streaming from youtube. His advantages seemed to trump anything reasons I had for using the custom player. I mean optimization and bandwidth are still concerns. Well, he made me feel like I was cheating my customers by using up their bandwidth and causing their stream not be optimized not to mention all the SEO misses. I still just said if my customer wants youtube then he can just upload the same videos to youtube as well. The issue as a whole was still not a big deal to me. I thought either one would work but still couldn't find many arguments for NOT using youtube. Well, yesterday I hit a big problem especially for using youtube for a small business. The problem is Google is a advertising cash cow. For all their successful projects they likely have 2 that fail. They stay afloat from online advertising. So, it came as no surprise that I really feel that there isn't a solution because Google 1. just doesn't care 2. this is the nature of the beast.

I work for a small business now and all my technology know-how is focuses on their sites etc. So, today I double checked all the sites and noticed that the other web developers have been uploaded our company videos through the CMS and streaming from our own webserver. GREAT! The problem yesterday, was one of the developers, in a hurry, designed a page and embedded a youtube video, probably more for filler content than anything. Well, in no time I got calls asking why we were advertising our competitors!? Of course, the people complaining had no idea what they were looking at and it was the biggest debacle trying to get them to describe for me exactly what they were seeing because at first I'm thinking user error when dealing with known idiots, right? I finally find the page they are talking about and right away notice that when the embedded youtube video plays on our site a GoogleAd overlay pops up with some advertisements. My ads were pretty standard stuff but it just so happened the ads the people complaining saw were our competitors.

I'm not familiar with youtube but are there legitimate ways around this. For instance, is there a yearly fee we can pay to cut ads from linked videos or even someway to set the category of the ads? I think my company can get right with ads for GMC trucks, etc... just not our competitors. I feel the answer is that there is no way around it thereby making using linked/embedded videos on our company site is out of the question because the slight possibility it may have an unwanted ad.

Well, it only took me about 7 years to get a reason why not to use youtube in a business/professional environment and it's a pretty big reason that kinda trumps any streaming optimizations or bandwidth arguments. Now, if only I can remember stupid's name.

Though, I wouldn't be totally upset if someone replies to this post and says, "hey stupid, login to your youtube account, create a playlist of the videos you want, scroll down, down, down unclick show all ads button." I'll just have to wait a little longer to get my revenge.

I am not sure if this will work for sure, but when you login to the Youtube account where you uploaded the video click on your username in the top right hand corner. Then click on "Settings". Once in there you should be on an "Overview" page. Towards the bottom of that page it will say:

"Advertisements"

By default I believe it is set to:



Try changing it to:



See if that helps!

Well, that's good and bad.

That turns off monetization.

Good: Because that actually solves using Youtube as a repertoire for your own intellectual content. We have videos the company owns and with this option we should be able to host our videos on Youtube and embed in our site without a bunch of ads accidentally popping up for competitors.

Bad: It doesn't do anything for you embedding a video that is not yours which is unlikely the case in a business environment but not out of the question. A company may want to embed a relevant clip but the owner has elected to monetize the clip or is just unaware that ads are 'on' by default and so the clip gets ads.

This makes sense because if you're going to use someone else's content then you're going to pay for it. In this case, with ads.

I have some guys setting us up a test page to link some of our own videos but I bet there won't be any ads because I've turned it off. I understand not being able to toggle this on videos that aren't ours but being able to turn this off on our own videos is a big plus.