Analysis

          Through my data analysis of the archival research that I conducted, I found that a majority of the people who watched videos on YouTube were willing to put up with the fifteen to thirty second ads that pop up on YouTube occasionally. On average, each of the videos had 5.25 comments that liked the video, 1.5 comments that disliked the video and 3.45 comments that were neutral about the video. These numbers represent the first three pages of comments on each of the videos. An example of one of the comments that appraised the video is “Youtube wise, this song is kind of old, but it's one of those songs that never gets old. =)” (Robert). Through comments that were similar to this one, we can see how people who view videos with an attitude like this are willing to put up with the cost of watching them. It is easy to infer this because the people are able to overlook the advertisements because of a desire to see these videos. On the other hand, there are comments such as the following quotation that show a sense of despise for the advertisements on YouTube, “Ugh, I agree with you all! Not only is the new channel hard to use, but it deleted my old background and I could not reupload it. I HAVE FURY! CHANGE THE CHANNELS BACK!” (Rebecca). Through this comment it is obvious that the person does not like to put up with the advertisements that come up every once in a while and for this reason he or she probably does not desire to see the videos. Finally, there were some comments that neither liked or disliked the advertisements. The following is an example of this, “I prefer the old channels but the new ones aren't as bad as i thought. i dont mind what happens now”  (John). The people who made comments that were similar to this showed that they were neither for nor against the advertisements. Since these people seemed to be oblivious to the advertisements, they probably stilled decided to watch the videos. The following chart shows the distribution of comments from all of the videos that I looked at:

This data concurs with the information that I got from the qualitative data that I got from the comments. Through my archival analysis, I found that a majority (85%) of the people were willing to put up with the advertisements and probably continued to watch the videos. These people wanted the material so bad that they overlooked the inconvenience of the advertisements.

          Through my auto ethnography analysis, I found that television spent a lot more time only showing advertisement than the Internet. On television, I found that for the hour of television that I watched, there was fifteen minutes and thirty seconds of commercials. When these commercials came on while I was watching television, a majority (63%) of the time I was not paying attention to the advertisements. I found this information by using two stop watches. One that recorded how long commercials were on instead of the program and the other recorded how much time I spent watching the commercials. For the second part of this, I decided that if I was doing anything else, such as spending time on my computer, going to the bathroom or making something to eat, I would consider it as not paying attention to the commercials. Therefore, out of the fifteen minutes and thirty seconds that commercials were playing on television I watched a total of five minutes and forty four seconds. On the other hand, while I was watching videos on the Internet there was always two ads while the video was playing and every couple of times that I switched videos an advertisement popped up. For the advertisements that popped up, you had to watch from fifteen to thirty seconds of the advertisement. Throughout the hour that I spent watching videos on YouTube, there was a total of three minutes and fifteen seconds of advertisements. During the time while these advertisements were playing, I did not do anything else. I believe that the reason why I did not doing anything else during the fifteen to thirty seconds was because it was such a short amount of time that I decided to just wait until the advertisement was done playing. 

          From my archival and auto ethnography analyses, I found that although the advertisements on YouTube were inconvenient they cost the consumer less than the advertisements on television. I believe that the combination of these two forms of analysis correctly answer my question because they provide multiple different ways in attempting to answer the question.