Stop your whining before they charge us directly!

I dislike advertisements just like everyone else. But I do accept the idea that advertisers will spend billions on advertising and pass those costs onto us as consumes. And our role is to promptly ignore those ads, pretending that we saw them.

It is all part of the delicate balance we call capitalism. But we do get one thing out of the bargain: creative people will make lots of things for us to watch because they will get paid.

So why are YouTube viewers saying that they will not tolerate 3-second pre-roll ads in front of any video clips? OK, to be technically correct, according to a Harris Poll released yesterday, 42% are saying they would visit a little less often and 31% say a lot less often.

Granted, if I had a vote I would say that those ads go after the clip - like they do at Metacafe or Revver. But really, what are 3-seconds in the grand scheme of things. After all, all those servers, and disk space, pathetic user interfaces and video sharing software costs YouTube something that will have to ultimately be covered by someone other than VC's or Google. But what scares me more is the prospect that video providers will Someday choose to charge us a monthly subscription feeinstead!