If you’ve ever experienced the StumbleUpon effect, you know that counting clicks can be misleading. You wake up one morning to find that your traffic numbers have skyrocketed after your blog post became a featured item on the popular bookmarking site. 12,000 hits in 24 hours! Amazing. But the majority of those people only stayed as long as it took to hit the Stumble button again – maybe 2 seconds. No engagement, which means no ad views and they’re probably not coming back.

This is why YouTube is now looking at Time Watched as the main component for ranking a video’s popularity. Now, instead of being rewarded for people who click then move on, content creators will get points for viewers who stay with the video to the end.

For years, TV networks have been selling commercial time based on the estimated number of people who watch a show on TV. Want to advertise on a popular show with a successful track record? It’s going to cost you. And since there are a limited number of spots on any single TV show airing, you may have to fight and give up other concessions in order to secure your space.

After the show airs on TV, in many cases, it moves to the internet. Only in this case, advertisers aren’t banging down the doors, offering up big bucks to run their ads on the show. Why? Mostly because of the notion that only viewers aren’t as valuable as TV viewers. And though that may have been true a few years ago, it’s not true anymore.

In what sounds like a contrarian action, YouTube is allowing viewers to skip pre-roll ads on mobile videos after 5 seconds and doesn’t make it to the end of the ad. If the user does that the advertiser doesn’t pay.

This seems contrarian because most would say that no matter how the ad is served or for how long there is value to the advertiser so they should pay. Nice thought but YouTube gets that the user experience trumps that and will ultimately help them make even more money from advertisers.

According to AdAge

YouTube is bringing its skippable video ads to mobile phones and tablets, hoping to build on the success the company says the ads have found with PCs.

Whenever online video is discussed in business the question always arises about the level of professionalism required to make the video effective. Some say in the business world it should be professionally produced while others feel that a certain amateurish touch lends more personality to the video.

Regardless of your stance, the folks at YouTube are interested in helping people move away from the complete amateur production by introducing their first Creator Space in London. Take a look at the video of the new offering.