I think one of the more frustrating issues with advertisements is with the overlay ads as opposed to the pre-play ads. While the pre-play ads cause the same fru

I think one of the more frustrating issues with advertisements is with the overlay ads as opposed to the pre-play ads. While the pre-play ads cause the same frustrations that TV/radio ads do (obnoxiously loud compared to the content you mean to watch, often irrelevant even when you allow all advertising trackers to run), the overlay ads are exceptionally frustrating because they often obfuscate content. Instructional videos or videos involving subtitles are particularly victimized by overlay ads since it's not just a mild interruption at that point, the ads often are completely blocking important content in the video. Truthfully, with all of the great minds that are at google, it's a bit shocking they haven't found a way to make the advertisements at least a bit more amicable to their viewing audience. In my mind, there's no reason that some sort of content analysis couldn't be done during the upload to check the overlay boundaries and see if "crucial content" like text is present, and set flags in the meta-data so that the ad software can avoid those time stamps. Or on the sound issue, do some advertisement audio balancing based on the volume of the previous and following video so you don't suddenly get audio blasting through speakers/headphones. To me these seem like relatively simple user experience tweaks that really would make it easier to digest advertising through the service. Consequently, using Safari on mac and click-to-plugin, you can force an HTML5 player, which seems to not allow the pre-play ads or the overlay ads at all. I've found the experience much more enjoyable via this method.