7 ms·

The problem is not that Google wants to put Ads on YouTube. The problem is that they are putting too many ads there, a disproportional amount of them. Based on

The problem is not that Google wants to put Ads on YouTube. The problem is that they are putting too many ads there, a disproportional amount of them. Based on the money they are pulling in, they could easily put fewer, less intrusive ads on the platform and still make a healthy profit. The fact that they are going above and beyond is what makes people angry. YouTube may be the property of Google but they got so successful due to all of society and most people have the intuitive sense that Google is taking more than their fair share from society now. The problem is not technical, and as long as Google continues to make their profits soar beyond what they deserve, people will continue to use adblockers.

93po 3y ago
Kids will endure any amount of ads and there are a ton of them using YT. Adults will pay for premium.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  We should not have a near-ubiquitous social phenomenon like YouTube showing advertisements to children. One might respond that it is up to the parents to limit this, but what will become of society with the children who do not have such parents? It may be the responsibility of the parents BUT regardless, we will all suffer the effects of hyper-comercialized children.
  - kkkkkkk 3y ago
    TV was a thing for decades and they showed more ads than YouTube does today, at least in the US.
    - vouaobrasil 3y ago
      True, and ads were damaging back then as well, and I believe that was also quite problematic for society. However, we should also note that ads have gotten worse, more insidious, and personalized with tracking and that's rather creepy.
    - RunSet 3y ago
      Youtube resembles TV but the apparent commercial breaks aren't. Much of the purported content on youtube is shilling less thinly-veiled than the '80s most toyetic TV shows. "We now return to your regularly-scheduled commercial." "Oh good, I didn't miss a moment of this week's episode of Product Unboxing." "This week's episode of Product Unboxing features the limited edition Thneed Premium but first I gotta give a shout out to my sponsor..."
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      This is why my parents only permitted me to watch public broadcasting until I was 13. I didn't appreciate it at the time but in retrospect they were right. It's utterly bizarre how much time most kids spent watching commercial propaganda.
      - 93po 3y ago
        I spent half a day with a family (friend of a girlfriend) many years ago and was blown away by their home and parenting, which was very much what I'd want if I was ever a parent (which I won't be). No screens visible except a TV that I never saw turned on, no computers visible, no electronic toys, and very few toys in general. Their child, maybe age 9, was amazing - didn't ask for anything, wasn't pleading for sugar or TV time or toys or attention. She was having a lot of fun politely socializing with adults and amusing herself with drawing, crafts, and reading. It's wild to see a lot of parenting in contrast. Kids come home from school, instantly sit down on phone or tablet, will complain incessantly or throw a tantrum if it's taken away for any amount of time, and eat whatever they want whenever they want and also tantrum if they can't. Usually involves a lot of yelling by parent with zero effect on child.
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      Which consumerist propaganda video on TV was your childhood favorite? My favorite is a tie between Trix and Cookie Crisp -- two cereals so good you had to protect them from thieves. Now that I think about it, maybe Lucky Charms is my favorite because in those commercials the children were the thieves!
- ItsBob 3y ago
  Perhaps some kids, maybe, but not mine. Not a chance. I've explained the purpose of ads and how nefarious they can be and they now hate seeing ads. At all. When they play a game on their phones, when an ad appears, they put the phone down and look away or do something else.
seymore_12 3y ago
This! I don't mind seeing some ads. In fact, they could be very useful, if they are relevant. Google knows enough about me to do this.Instead, I am regularly getting things I really don't care about, plus increased amount of videos where Roger Federer look alike is being held in cuffs. Who does that and why Google is not filtering them.
cptaj 3y ago
You know what I consider slow load time? 3 unskippable ads before a 2 minute video.
- pnutjam 3y ago
  Streaming video has been terrible for this. I miss the days when you could easily pause and ff with a traditional DVR system. Now, even the "DVR" systems will revert to streaming instead of recorded items and the ads become un-skippable.
- esalman 3y ago
  They've ruined rickroll.
  - benjijay 3y ago
    The greatest tragedy of our time
- jkmcf 3y ago
  ...ESPN+ has entered the chat... How about a 30s ad before a 10s video?
- qwertox 3y ago
  And don't forget that if you reload the page after watching the video for a couple of seconds, it will restart with the ad-presenting ritual anew, as if I hadn't already seen it. This is like changing the TV channel during an ad break only to have them restart from the beginning once you switch back to it; wait, it's worse than that. Absolutely nuts.
- throw0101b 3y ago
  > 3 unskippable ads before a 2 minute video. Demand your money back for such horrible service you are receiving…
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  AFAIU the video owner decides whether there are ads and how many ads there are. Ask the owner to lower their ads or you'll stop watching their videos.
laweijfmvo 3y ago
I recently have been hitting the "Disable your ad blocker" roadblock. I needed to watch a video to repair my bike, so temporarily disabled my blocker. I watched 2 ads before the video (ok I guess), and then it loaded 2 more ads after 30 seconds...
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  It makes me wonder if Youtube is double dipping and trying to send twice as many ads to users who they know run adblock to make up for the previously "lost" ad revenue.
jklinger410 3y ago
> The problem is not that Google wants to put Ads on YouTube. The problem is that they are putting too many ads there, a disproportional amount of them. Ah, ok. Just let YouTube know how many ads they are allowed to run and we can clear up this whole issue.
- Larrikin 3y ago
  Ads at the beginning and at the end of videos. Sometimes. Ads in the middle of a music video is only something a bad human would think of as acceptable.
- baz00 3y ago
  I was only watching it because it was possible to block ads. Now they take it away, the value to me is less than my attention is worth. The product is worth 0 ads.
  - jklinger410 3y ago
    > The product is worth 0 ads. I really doubt the acceptable number of ads on a really well-crafted video player and search engine sitting on top of a nearly infinite amount of content is zero.
    - baz00 3y ago
      Well it is only as valuable as its users feel it is.
      - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        That's ostensibly what Youtube is, a big pile of users AKA consumers that Google promises to smartly match with relevant ads to improve the chances those consumers spend money with a company they saw an ad for. It fails to live up to this goal constantly, and seems to just barely check if an ad is relevant anymore. Google essentially holds creators hostage in this arrangement. Creators provide content the consumers want, but they only get paid well if the consumers don't skip the ads. So creators have to pander to what Youtube as a platform "seems to want" (thumbnails with :O face are so hot right now) in hopes that the algorithm will deliver videos to consumers who want them AND they are shown ads they don't immediately hate and skip. If any of those things fails to happen, they don't get paid as much as they should and it's not even their fault.
clnq 3y ago
The quality of ads also differentiates YouTube from other platforms (like proper TV) and even burned in sponsored messages. Ad reads in popular podcasts are miles ahead in terms of quality. The average ad on YouTube is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of creativity, cinematography and appeal to people in general. I’m talking about the average ad with personalization off — the mobile game “mafia boss”, slightly pervy, and really weird shock value ads, or the get rich quick schemes, or even straight up crypto fraud. If some better advertisers are targeting you - consider yourself very lucky. I do enjoy a good ad every now and then. Something creative and well executed. But that’s not what YouTube is serving. And you might hate all ads — it’s ok, everyone is different. Though I think some people would be ok with ads that are respectful of their time as I am one of them.
- rchaud 3y ago
  > Ad reads in popular podcasts are miles ahead in terms of quality. It depends. Podcast syndication services like PocketCast and Apple Podcasts now programmatically splice in ads into the audio files. You could be listening to some podcast from years ago and it would have ads for [present-day-thing]. Sometimes even in the middle of a sentence, because these dynamic ads can't event detect silent segments.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Insertion is often at designated points to avoid cutting off a convo. So you'll hear them announce the break, then hear up to date and geolocated ads.
tehbeard 3y ago
I've tried to meet YouTube in the middle, adBlock, but disabling it on the regular channels I view. Last night, 1 minute of preroll ads in front of a 4 minute video.. In fact when I went back just to check the video length, I switched off ad block: It wanted to play 2 ads, first one being 1:37 ... I think I'll go back to the to blanket adblock and see if I can spread a little of the loose change I have among those channels I truely get some worth out of.
jasode 3y ago
>Based on the money they are pulling in, they could easily put fewer, less intrusive ads on the platform and still make a healthy profit. Not disagreeing/agreeing with you but just want to point out that Alphabet Inc only publicizes Youtube's revenue and not the profit in their financial reports. So we as outsiders really can't say with 100% certainty whether Youtube is still losing money, or break-even, or profitable. And if they are profitable this year (or recent years), does it make up for all the accumulated losses over multiple years since they acquired it in 2006? We don't have the raw internal numbers to calculate that.
- chongli 3y ago
  Also I think it’s fair to say most people have absolutely no idea how much video gets uploaded to YouTube every day and how much it costs to host and serve all that video. The best number I could find is that over 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. That’s 720,000 hours of video uploaded per day or 263 million hours per year. At a modest estimate of around 1.5GB/hour for 1080p video (I think this is a very low estimate, since YouTube has much higher quality available now, and also stores different versions of each video), this works out to 376PB per year! Other factors to consider: * Transcoding. YouTube servers are constantly transcoding video into many different formats, given a single input file. * Serving. YouTube isn’t served from one central data centre. They operate a huge CDN in order to serve users at the edge of the network. This means some percentage of that 376PB figure must be duplicated many times across many different data centres.
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    How did it survive pre-aquisition?
    - acdha 3y ago
      They burned a lot of VC, getting market share until Google bought them and shutdown “Google Video”. They had some media deals but I don’t think they would have survived very long without the huge infrastructure support Google could offer.
Greenpants 3y ago
Simply put, ten years ago the ads on YouTube were fine, we used adblockers back then as well, and Google still made a profit. What we see today can only be described as greed.
danpalmer 3y ago
> profits soar beyond what they deserve, people will continue to use adblockers How do we as a society decide whether these profits are "deserved"?
- hellenist 3y ago
  Pass tax laws?
- cheeseomlit 3y ago
  Not concerned with what society thinks, but personally I think Alphabet were only ever able to buy youtube out due to lack of anti-trust enforcement so IMO 0% is deserved and I feel no guilt whatsoever blocking their ads. If I like a content creator I'll support them specifically, the corporate vultures who bought the platform are owed nothing
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    Google bought YouTube, and so many years ago that most current Google products didn't exist. I can't personally see anti-trust having been an issue at all at the time.
  - itsoktocry 3y ago
    >If I like a content creator I'll support them specifically, the corporate vultures who bought the platform are owed nothing I absolutely love the YouTube ads discourse. Sure, you will support all of the creators independently, but you're too cheap to pay for no ads for a great product (which shares fees with creators and provides them with tools, by the way, plus other features) to "stick it to the corporations". Meanwhile, you likely subscribe to at least one of Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music etc. This is the perfect example of "if you like the product, pay for it." There's a ton of value YouTube Premium, both on the creator and consumer sides.
    - cheeseomlit 3y ago
      It's not a "great product", the creators are the only thing that gives it value. The platform itself is a parasitic monstrosity that only serves corporate interests, which are the motivation for every change they make. The dislike button removal being a recent example, not to mention the insufferable advertising practices, their complicity in DMCA shenanigans, and the rise of ridiculous language like 'unalived' instead of 'kill' because it hurts ad revenue, it goes on and on. Their behavior as the stewards of youtube has been utterly reprehensible and I won't be paying them for it
no_wizard 3y ago
If they front loaded the ads it would be a better experience. What I hate when I'm watching YouTube on a device without an adblocker is that they show ads in the middle of a video. Thats a bad user experience IMO. I could be more passive in my stance if they simply had all the ads in the beginning and showed some at the end before transitioning to another video or something, but I do not enjoy having my time interrupted during the video, that is the most annoying thing ever
- lxgr 3y ago
  > What I hate when I'm watching YouTube on a device without an adblocker is that they show ads in the middle of a video. Thats a bad user experience IMO. I've had this happen during fitness videos, which is quite ridiculous indeed. If they'd at least slot them into a break between exercises...
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Then again, when you don't want to be exercising... I love it when I'm winding down from work, in the middle of nice chilled out relaxing music, and suddenly some roided-up asshole comes in at 10X volume SHOUTING at me "You want to get ripped in the gym?!?! Follow my workout method and crush it!!!!" Thank you, YouTube, for destroying the entire last 20 minutes of relaxation I just enjoyed.
itsoktocry 3y ago
>The fact that they are going above and beyond is what makes people angry. No, this is not the reason. People hate ads, generally. Go ahead and block ads. I use a PiHole myself (but also subscribe to YouTube Premium, so..). But stop complaining when companies try to do something about it, or acting like there's some optimal amount of ads. Just as it's your right to block ads, it's their right to block ad-blockers. This is the game, it's been played for 20+ years.
- feoren 3y ago
  > stop ... acting like there's some optimal amount of ads Why are you dismissing offhand the idea that there is an appropriate level of ads that users will feel is a fair trade for the content they're getting? You're just completely rejecting the idea that there's any middle ground at all. Why would it not be the case that some reasonable limits on ad volume, content, maliciousness, and total percent of time covered by ads, could restore some goodwill toward ads? People hate ads because ads are unbelievably fucking terribly awful. Ads are as awful as they could possibly be, and nobody seems to be making any effort to sit down and say "what if our ads weren't fucking awful tooth-pulling assaults on human reason and consciousness? What if we actually changed that?" Nobody is saying that, and people like you are simply dismissing the idea that it even matters.
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    I would rather have a banner ad at the bottom of the video than ever have the video interrupted.
- stemlord 3y ago
  >stop complaining when companies try to do something about it Why are companies trying so hard to do something that their customers hate? We all know the answer, we know we aren't "the customer", it's this perversion of incentive that people are complaining and should complain about

93po 3y ago

Kids will endure any amount of ads and there are a ton of them using YT. Adults will pay for premium.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
We should not have a near-ubiquitous social phenomenon like YouTube showing advertisements to children. One might respond that it is up to the parents to limit this, but what will become of society with the children who do not have such parents? It may be the responsibility of the parents BUT regardless, we will all suffer the effects of hyper-comercialized children.
- kkkkkkk 3y ago
  TV was a thing for decades and they showed more ads than YouTube does today, at least in the US.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    True, and ads were damaging back then as well, and I believe that was also quite problematic for society. However, we should also note that ads have gotten worse, more insidious, and personalized with tracking and that's rather creepy.
  - RunSet 3y ago
    Youtube resembles TV but the apparent commercial breaks aren't. Much of the purported content on youtube is shilling less thinly-veiled than the '80s most toyetic TV shows. "We now return to your regularly-scheduled commercial." "Oh good, I didn't miss a moment of this week's episode of Product Unboxing." "This week's episode of Product Unboxing features the limited edition Thneed Premium but first I gotta give a shout out to my sponsor..."
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    This is why my parents only permitted me to watch public broadcasting until I was 13. I didn't appreciate it at the time but in retrospect they were right. It's utterly bizarre how much time most kids spent watching commercial propaganda.
    - 93po 3y ago
      I spent half a day with a family (friend of a girlfriend) many years ago and was blown away by their home and parenting, which was very much what I'd want if I was ever a parent (which I won't be). No screens visible except a TV that I never saw turned on, no computers visible, no electronic toys, and very few toys in general. Their child, maybe age 9, was amazing - didn't ask for anything, wasn't pleading for sugar or TV time or toys or attention. She was having a lot of fun politely socializing with adults and amusing herself with drawing, crafts, and reading. It's wild to see a lot of parenting in contrast. Kids come home from school, instantly sit down on phone or tablet, will complain incessantly or throw a tantrum if it's taken away for any amount of time, and eat whatever they want whenever they want and also tantrum if they can't. Usually involves a lot of yelling by parent with zero effect on child.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    Which consumerist propaganda video on TV was your childhood favorite? My favorite is a tie between Trix and Cookie Crisp -- two cereals so good you had to protect them from thieves. Now that I think about it, maybe Lucky Charms is my favorite because in those commercials the children were the thieves!
ItsBob 3y ago
Perhaps some kids, maybe, but not mine. Not a chance. I've explained the purpose of ads and how nefarious they can be and they now hate seeing ads. At all. When they play a game on their phones, when an ad appears, they put the phone down and look away or do something else.

seymore_12 3y ago

This! I don't mind seeing some ads. In fact, they could be very useful, if they are relevant. Google knows enough about me to do this.Instead, I am regularly getting things I really don't care about, plus increased amount of videos where Roger Federer look alike is being held in cuffs. Who does that and why Google is not filtering them.

cptaj 3y ago

You know what I consider slow load time? 3 unskippable ads before a 2 minute video.

pnutjam 3y ago
Streaming video has been terrible for this. I miss the days when you could easily pause and ff with a traditional DVR system. Now, even the "DVR" systems will revert to streaming instead of recorded items and the ads become un-skippable.
esalman 3y ago
They've ruined rickroll.
- benjijay 3y ago
  The greatest tragedy of our time
jkmcf 3y ago
...ESPN+ has entered the chat... How about a 30s ad before a 10s video?
qwertox 3y ago
And don't forget that if you reload the page after watching the video for a couple of seconds, it will restart with the ad-presenting ritual anew, as if I hadn't already seen it. This is like changing the TV channel during an ad break only to have them restart from the beginning once you switch back to it; wait, it's worse than that. Absolutely nuts.
throw0101b 3y ago
> 3 unskippable ads before a 2 minute video. Demand your money back for such horrible service you are receiving…
Ferret7446 3y ago
AFAIU the video owner decides whether there are ads and how many ads there are. Ask the owner to lower their ads or you'll stop watching their videos.

laweijfmvo 3y ago

I recently have been hitting the "Disable your ad blocker" roadblock. I needed to watch a video to repair my bike, so temporarily disabled my blocker. I watched 2 ads before the video (ok I guess), and then it loaded 2 more ads after 30 seconds...

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
It makes me wonder if Youtube is double dipping and trying to send twice as many ads to users who they know run adblock to make up for the previously "lost" ad revenue.

jklinger410 3y ago

> The problem is not that Google wants to put Ads on YouTube. The problem is that they are putting too many ads there, a disproportional amount of them. Ah, ok. Just let YouTube know how many ads they are allowed to run and we can clear up this whole issue.

Larrikin 3y ago
Ads at the beginning and at the end of videos. Sometimes. Ads in the middle of a music video is only something a bad human would think of as acceptable.
baz00 3y ago
I was only watching it because it was possible to block ads. Now they take it away, the value to me is less than my attention is worth. The product is worth 0 ads.
- jklinger410 3y ago
  > The product is worth 0 ads. I really doubt the acceptable number of ads on a really well-crafted video player and search engine sitting on top of a nearly infinite amount of content is zero.
  - baz00 3y ago
    Well it is only as valuable as its users feel it is.
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      That's ostensibly what Youtube is, a big pile of users AKA consumers that Google promises to smartly match with relevant ads to improve the chances those consumers spend money with a company they saw an ad for. It fails to live up to this goal constantly, and seems to just barely check if an ad is relevant anymore. Google essentially holds creators hostage in this arrangement. Creators provide content the consumers want, but they only get paid well if the consumers don't skip the ads. So creators have to pander to what Youtube as a platform "seems to want" (thumbnails with :O face are so hot right now) in hopes that the algorithm will deliver videos to consumers who want them AND they are shown ads they don't immediately hate and skip. If any of those things fails to happen, they don't get paid as much as they should and it's not even their fault.

clnq 3y ago

The quality of ads also differentiates YouTube from other platforms (like proper TV) and even burned in sponsored messages. Ad reads in popular podcasts are miles ahead in terms of quality. The average ad on YouTube is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of creativity, cinematography and appeal to people in general. I’m talking about the average ad with personalization off — the mobile game “mafia boss”, slightly pervy, and really weird shock value ads, or the get rich quick schemes, or even straight up crypto fraud. If some better advertisers are targeting you - consider yourself very lucky. I do enjoy a good ad every now and then. Something creative and well executed. But that’s not what YouTube is serving. And you might hate all ads — it’s ok, everyone is different. Though I think some people would be ok with ads that are respectful of their time as I am one of them.

rchaud 3y ago
> Ad reads in popular podcasts are miles ahead in terms of quality. It depends. Podcast syndication services like PocketCast and Apple Podcasts now programmatically splice in ads into the audio files. You could be listening to some podcast from years ago and it would have ads for [present-day-thing]. Sometimes even in the middle of a sentence, because these dynamic ads can't event detect silent segments.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Insertion is often at designated points to avoid cutting off a convo. So you'll hear them announce the break, then hear up to date and geolocated ads.

tehbeard 3y ago

I've tried to meet YouTube in the middle, adBlock, but disabling it on the regular channels I view. Last night, 1 minute of preroll ads in front of a 4 minute video.. In fact when I went back just to check the video length, I switched off ad block: It wanted to play 2 ads, first one being 1:37 ... I think I'll go back to the to blanket adblock and see if I can spread a little of the loose change I have among those channels I truely get some worth out of.

jasode 3y ago

>Based on the money they are pulling in, they could easily put fewer, less intrusive ads on the platform and still make a healthy profit. Not disagreeing/agreeing with you but just want to point out that Alphabet Inc only publicizes Youtube's revenue and not the profit in their financial reports. So we as outsiders really can't say with 100% certainty whether Youtube is still losing money, or break-even, or profitable. And if they are profitable this year (or recent years), does it make up for all the accumulated losses over multiple years since they acquired it in 2006? We don't have the raw internal numbers to calculate that.

chongli 3y ago
Also I think it’s fair to say most people have absolutely no idea how much video gets uploaded to YouTube every day and how much it costs to host and serve all that video. The best number I could find is that over 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. That’s 720,000 hours of video uploaded per day or 263 million hours per year. At a modest estimate of around 1.5GB/hour for 1080p video (I think this is a very low estimate, since YouTube has much higher quality available now, and also stores different versions of each video), this works out to 376PB per year! Other factors to consider: * Transcoding. YouTube servers are constantly transcoding video into many different formats, given a single input file. * Serving. YouTube isn’t served from one central data centre. They operate a huge CDN in order to serve users at the edge of the network. This means some percentage of that 376PB figure must be duplicated many times across many different data centres.
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  How did it survive pre-aquisition?
  - acdha 3y ago
    They burned a lot of VC, getting market share until Google bought them and shutdown “Google Video”. They had some media deals but I don’t think they would have survived very long without the huge infrastructure support Google could offer.

Greenpants 3y ago

Simply put, ten years ago the ads on YouTube were fine, we used adblockers back then as well, and Google still made a profit. What we see today can only be described as greed.

danpalmer 3y ago

> profits soar beyond what they deserve, people will continue to use adblockers How do we as a society decide whether these profits are "deserved"?

hellenist 3y ago
Pass tax laws?
cheeseomlit 3y ago
Not concerned with what society thinks, but personally I think Alphabet were only ever able to buy youtube out due to lack of anti-trust enforcement so IMO 0% is deserved and I feel no guilt whatsoever blocking their ads. If I like a content creator I'll support them specifically, the corporate vultures who bought the platform are owed nothing
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Google bought YouTube, and so many years ago that most current Google products didn't exist. I can't personally see anti-trust having been an issue at all at the time.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >If I like a content creator I'll support them specifically, the corporate vultures who bought the platform are owed nothing I absolutely love the YouTube ads discourse. Sure, you will support all of the creators independently, but you're too cheap to pay for no ads for a great product (which shares fees with creators and provides them with tools, by the way, plus other features) to "stick it to the corporations". Meanwhile, you likely subscribe to at least one of Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music etc. This is the perfect example of "if you like the product, pay for it." There's a ton of value YouTube Premium, both on the creator and consumer sides.
  - cheeseomlit 3y ago
    It's not a "great product", the creators are the only thing that gives it value. The platform itself is a parasitic monstrosity that only serves corporate interests, which are the motivation for every change they make. The dislike button removal being a recent example, not to mention the insufferable advertising practices, their complicity in DMCA shenanigans, and the rise of ridiculous language like 'unalived' instead of 'kill' because it hurts ad revenue, it goes on and on. Their behavior as the stewards of youtube has been utterly reprehensible and I won't be paying them for it

no_wizard 3y ago

If they front loaded the ads it would be a better experience. What I hate when I'm watching YouTube on a device without an adblocker is that they show ads in the middle of a video. Thats a bad user experience IMO. I could be more passive in my stance if they simply had all the ads in the beginning and showed some at the end before transitioning to another video or something, but I do not enjoy having my time interrupted during the video, that is the most annoying thing ever

lxgr 3y ago
> What I hate when I'm watching YouTube on a device without an adblocker is that they show ads in the middle of a video. Thats a bad user experience IMO. I've had this happen during fitness videos, which is quite ridiculous indeed. If they'd at least slot them into a break between exercises...
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Then again, when you don't want to be exercising... I love it when I'm winding down from work, in the middle of nice chilled out relaxing music, and suddenly some roided-up asshole comes in at 10X volume SHOUTING at me "You want to get ripped in the gym?!?! Follow my workout method and crush it!!!!" Thank you, YouTube, for destroying the entire last 20 minutes of relaxation I just enjoyed.

itsoktocry 3y ago

>The fact that they are going above and beyond is what makes people angry. No, this is not the reason. People hate ads, generally. Go ahead and block ads. I use a PiHole myself (but also subscribe to YouTube Premium, so..). But stop complaining when companies try to do something about it, or acting like there's some optimal amount of ads. Just as it's your right to block ads, it's their right to block ad-blockers. This is the game, it's been played for 20+ years.

feoren 3y ago
> stop ... acting like there's some optimal amount of ads Why are you dismissing offhand the idea that there is an appropriate level of ads that users will feel is a fair trade for the content they're getting? You're just completely rejecting the idea that there's any middle ground at all. Why would it not be the case that some reasonable limits on ad volume, content, maliciousness, and total percent of time covered by ads, could restore some goodwill toward ads? People hate ads because ads are unbelievably fucking terribly awful. Ads are as awful as they could possibly be, and nobody seems to be making any effort to sit down and say "what if our ads weren't fucking awful tooth-pulling assaults on human reason and consciousness? What if we actually changed that?" Nobody is saying that, and people like you are simply dismissing the idea that it even matters.
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  I would rather have a banner ad at the bottom of the video than ever have the video interrupted.
stemlord 3y ago
>stop complaining when companies try to do something about it Why are companies trying so hard to do something that their customers hate? We all know the answer, we know we aren't "the customer", it's this perversion of incentive that people are complaining and should complain about