It's fun that we consider 3 minute clips to be "long form" nowadays. When YouTube was being bought people said that it only consisted of short amateur clips and copyright violations; two things advertisers would supposedly not be interested in.

Now I'm not saying that Vine is the next YouTube or even that it is monetizable, just that "we haven't figured it out yet" is not a convincing argument, and surely its userbase would be appealing to some buyer.

Well to be honest I'm not a hive mind. When I said long form it's quite likely I was mistaken. I was under the impression YouTube started with 15 minute videos which is infinitely longer than 6 second clips or whatever vine is.

"We're losing money on it and have to fire people from the main company we should probably not keep this thing alive and we dont want competitors to our main product now it does videos neither" is definitely a convincing argument

What in Twitter's past makes you believe that b/c they are making this decision that it must be the right one? What decisions in their past instills this confidence?

I think Twitter is just failing hard right now and the shit has hit in the fan with investors. They are now on the "let's focus on our core product" phase of failing and hey, maybe it'll work, but that doesn't mean Vine is worthless.

For a very very long time, YouTube wouldn't let you upload videos longer than 10 minutes.

And then for quite a while after that, you had to "unlock" the capability by uploading a few videos.

Maybe show ads once every 20 videos ?

They could sell one-second blipverts, offering the option of two seconds to advertisers with a history of positive engagement.

That's probably a very grey area heading towards subliminal advertising (at least, some lawyer somewhere could claim so). I'm not sure on the legal status of that sort of thing.

I'm noticing very short ads on YouTube (about 5sec) which are cheaper and more effective (ime) than the longer ones, which are usually skipped before they communicate the message and cause (more) annoyance.

I've seen a few like that, and they're good. I've seen some which cram a lot into 5 seconds, and then tell you you can skip the rest.

But I've also seen weirdly long ads - 10 minute ad on a 7 minute video, 30 minute ad on an hour long video.

I'm also noticing some ads have a loud noise at the beginning of a 30 second skippable ad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxg7fse74MY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1crwU9aUNHE

It's really annoying.

This is the kind of thing that drives people to ad-blocking.

We're in the realm of speculation here, not a lawyer etc. 5 seconds is a fairly decent amount of time if you count it out. Plenty of time to register what you're seeing.

1 second (and below) it might be possible to argue it's too short to register the advert consciously, making it a subliminal advert. Again I don't know if this is true and I'm completely making this up. It'd be interesting to find out the answer.

A second is enough time to consciously register an ad. To prove it, they could run a bit where someone shouts "50 percent?!" with a picture of an iPad and "Tap! 50% off". I'll bet people start tapping by the second or third impression (even though it's obviously a scam of some kind).