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I’m glad YouTube banned ad blockers so we can all see quality sponsors like this.

devjab 3y ago
My wife uses the YouTube app on her iPad and I don’t understand how she can stand to have 3 commercials during a 10 minute Graham Norton clip. I’m happy the adblockers still work in Firefox, but I’m also not sure you can really fault the advertisement company for not allowing you to use advertising blockers in their own products.
- dspillett 3y ago
  Yeah, I'd need more breaks than that. An average 2.5 minutes of Graham Norton between breaks is a bit much! Though more seriously, when I get sick of the adverts, which is fairly soon, I just leave. There is very little, if anything, on youtube that I can't live without watching, I'm usually only there because of a link posted by friends/family or in an open forum. Other uses, like film/TV trailers tend to be embedded and there are less (no?) adverts that way. Of course I'm likely not the target audience so they are not going to miss my attention much, but if enough people could resist the attention sink enough to just leave after a couple of adverts, perhaps there would not be so many of them before+during+after each clip. The adverts tend to be of low relevance too (often things like “this miraculous heater” scams, or yet another blast from Temu). When they claim tracking means you get more relevant adverts, this doesn't mean you get less adverts if they don't have anything relevant in the paid-impressions-waiting-to-be-used queue, you'll just get a few maybe relevant adverts per 1,000 instead of less, you'll still get the 1,000 with the remainder being less than relevant.
the_third_wave 3y ago
Use a Youtube proxy and ads are a thing of the past until they are directly inserted into the video stream. In that case Sponsorblock will help to skip those parts until they start randomising ad position in streams. Once that happens it is either the end of Youtube as far as I'm concerned or time to employ some machine learning to create an advertising recogniser which can take the place of Sponsorblock. Ads are there to be blocked, not endured. Hell hath no fury but a content blocker scorned.

My wife uses the YouTube app on her iPad and I don’t understand how she can stand to have 3 commercials during a 10 minute Graham Norton clip. I’m happy the adblockers still work in Firefox, but I’m also not sure you can really fault the advertisement company for not allowing you to use advertising blockers in their own products.

dspillett 3y ago
Yeah, I'd need more breaks than that. An average 2.5 minutes of Graham Norton between breaks is a bit much! Though more seriously, when I get sick of the adverts, which is fairly soon, I just leave. There is very little, if anything, on youtube that I can't live without watching, I'm usually only there because of a link posted by friends/family or in an open forum. Other uses, like film/TV trailers tend to be embedded and there are less (no?) adverts that way. Of course I'm likely not the target audience so they are not going to miss my attention much, but if enough people could resist the attention sink enough to just leave after a couple of adverts, perhaps there would not be so many of them before+during+after each clip. The adverts tend to be of low relevance too (often things like “this miraculous heater” scams, or yet another blast from Temu). When they claim tracking means you get more relevant adverts, this doesn't mean you get less adverts if they don't have anything relevant in the paid-impressions-waiting-to-be-used queue, you'll just get a few maybe relevant adverts per 1,000 instead of less, you'll still get the 1,000 with the remainder being less than relevant.

the_third_wave 3y ago

Use a Youtube proxy and ads are a thing of the past until they are directly inserted into the video stream. In that case Sponsorblock will help to skip those parts until they start randomising ad position in streams. Once that happens it is either the end of Youtube as far as I'm concerned or time to employ some machine learning to create an advertising recogniser which can take the place of Sponsorblock. Ads are there to be blocked, not endured. Hell hath no fury but a content blocker scorned.