ITV's excessive pre-roll video advertising

The video clips from Britain's Got Talent on itv.com are  each preceded by a 30 second preroll from general advertisers and a 5 second preroll from the main programme sponsor. For video clips that are 1.5 minutes long, that is too long - enough to drive a man over to YouTube, despite my knowing that most of the YouTube videos are stolen. Moreover, the YouTube video clips are longer, some over nine minutes. So if I have around 10 minutes to waste watching these clips:

• On YouTube, I get 10 minutes of actual content.
• On itv.com, I have to watch 5 clips, giving me 7.5 minutes of actual content. And I have to endure 2.5 minutes of (the same) ads.

ITV's real killer is that they don't recognise that I already watched the ad on my first clip, and that I shouldn't be forced to watch it for every clip thereafter. 

The irony is that the most popular BGT clips on YouTube belong to ITV. That's an interesting dual strategy - I'm all for ITV being on YouTube to catch that traffic, but getting rid of the ads on its own website would stem the "pre-roll frustration" traffic that's going to YouTube in the first place (and helping to add value to a competitor's property).

How much money is ITV making from those ads? The YouTube videos have been watched 2.5 million times, so let's assume the same for the itv.com videos (a completely random guess). What's the CPM rate? For such a new medium, it depends on the negotiating skills of their sales team, but based on £35, $50, $25, video websites I know that are getting £10-£20, and a perhaps not so comparable $1 and $5, let's say ITV are getting £20 CPM. And 2.5 million views, so about £50K in revenues. Every little helps, but hardly a game changer.