Recently Google has been testing out pre-roll advertisements. In English, the ads that play 15-30 seconds before you can watch the video. There’s been a lot of complaints lately about this, and data now shows that 70% of people will click away from the video before having to sit through the ad.

Now Google decided to add the “skip this ad” button for certain popular videos for an indefinite period of time. If you didn’t know this, Google only gets paid for the ad if it’s seen all the way through. So one might deemed this as a questionable move by Google.

After all, exactly who would choose to sit through the entire ad when they could just click it away? Well, that’s exactly what the company wants to know. Google is using this as a test to gather user data with hopes of it leading to a new advertising model based on YouTube users’ behavior. This is similar to how pricing and placement is determined for search ads.

The instant a pre-roll ad is shown nearly 70% will abandon the video.

With the abandonment rate of 70% being so high Google is looking into how to lower those numbers. Further research showed a variety of factors that could decrease those numbers. For example, keeping the pre-roll ads down to only 15 seconds and the abandonment rates dropped to as low as 15%.

Google and YouTube hopes that these efforts will be useful in launching a cost per action advertising scheme. This is where advertisers pay only for a completed view of the ad. However, it would be at an increased rate and another step closer to YouTube becoming profitable.