YouTube, the number one video-sharing site currently available to anyone with an Internet connection, is available in 61 languages and visited by over 1 billion unique users each month. The videos offered on the site range from parodies of music videos to clips from movies, from video game play-throughs to piano recitals. Anyone can watch and comment on the plethora of videos on the site, but they all must endure one thing, advertisements. These small informative clips are nuisances that are YouTube’s only source of revenue, albeit a source that provides around $3.6 billion a year.

Everyone who watches YouTube knows the advertisements put on their favorite videos or channels. They promote a wide variety of products from Gucci clothes to Old Spice deodorant.   They range from 15-second clips to videos varying in length of 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Although many ads offer a skip button after a reasonable amount of time has passed, many patrons of YouTube wonder why these advertisements persist.

YouTube’s main purpose is to entertain us, as much of its content is user-generated, created by those who simply wish to amuse viewers with cat videos or clips of people failing miserably at everyday tasks. However, YouTube must also make money in order to support these functions. Over a million advertisers use YouTube as a median to convey their products or services to the billions of viewers, which makes YouTube very profitable as it does not have to produce a physical product, only maintain employees to keep the website up. YouTube also lives up to its desire to entertain us by taking popular video makers or YouTubers and joining with them in a partnership. This partnership allows the creators to partake in a portion of the revenue made by advertisements on their videos. Some YouTubers make over $100,000 a year with this pursuit and so this is an incentive for them to continue producing quality content for an extended period of time. With more videos being posted, more people will watch the videos and unavoidably, watch the advertisement immediately before.

YouTube does not wish to drive away its support base with excessive advertising. It does not interrupt a video with an advertisement for paint at Home Depot or force viewers to suffer through political infomercials. Over 6 billion hours of videos are watched on the website each month, showing that despite these ads, YouTube manages to entertain a huge portion of the planet’s population by the way of video content. The service provided by YouTube is access to an almost unlimited quantity of videos for free with the presence of advertisements being the fulfillment of the saying, “No pain, no gain.”