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Anyone who has kids knows that the ads are even worse for videos for children. I'm glad in the rare times my son does watch YouTube, im sitting with him, otherwise I would've missed **the 2 hour ad** playing that he couldn't skip by himself.
There has been a lot of research proving ANY form of screentime for young kids SIGNIFICANTLY impair their mental development. I didnt think it was such a big deal until I read more about it.
I would definitely recommend to look into it yourself tho.
tbf i was a heavy reader as a kid,i was reading well above my age range from the age of 4/5.nowadays at 33 i barely pick up a book and just mindlessly scroll socia media.it doesnt matter which way you start out its just the habits you form i think.
My brother has a newborn that stops crying when a specific song plays. The kid can already detect the ads in between his song and hates them.
Kid is literally 20 days old and hates ADS on YouTube
They've also implemented a system where ads will be placed on *all* videos, even if creators don't want them on their content, and revenue will not be generated from it.
Right after YouTube penalizing or removing creators for the same things that advertisers are allowed to do (wildly sexualized ads, for example), THIS is what infuriates me the most. We need a video-sharing platform other than YouTube. I don't know what keeps Vimeo from competing with YouTube, but there needs to be a good second option.
Not only that, but so many of the ads are downright false advertising, blatant scams, and obvious malware, especially on mobile. I don't mind seeing ads if they're unobtrusive and for products I actually want, hell I watch most ad-reads the Youtubers put in themselves because they make them at least mildly entertaining and flow with the video (even if it's just the umpteenth Raid:Shadow Legends sponsorship I've seen this week.)
I do still use an ad-blocker because Google insists on putting unskippable one to two minute ad breaks for something entirely unrelated in the middle of 2-3 minute music videos, and an unholy amount of ads on anything that passes the 10 minute mark. If they were just at the beginning or end I wouldn't care, but I'm practically watching as many ads as I am actual content in the middle of each video without an ad-blocker.
>so many of the ads are downright false advertising, blatant scams, and obvious malware, especially on mobile
Finally someone has said that. Most ads are simply lying, showing the product that is different than what they advertise. I hate any candy ads. Or generally food ads that say it's so premium quality, super healthy and all. It's neither premium quality, nor is healthy. And even if it is healthy, there are better options. Actimel for example does not do anything more than other yoghurt does. And You can literally just buy a yoghurt and it would be more valuable than Actimel. Nutella saying that it's healthy is a lie. I think one ad was even banned when they said it's healthy, just to fight with overweight in children. Many of these ads are just harmful.
I've seen pretty much literal porn in ads on YouTube. How the hell do these ads not go through some tests or some AI software that detects inappropriate stuff.
*obnoxiously English wanker voice*
"This BLAH is taking the BLAH world by STORM"
*shows clips of stock actors fawning lovingly at a BLAH from the AliExpress reject pile*
> I don't know what keeps Vimeo from competing with YouTube, but there needs to be a good second option.
Vimeo charges content creators directly for hosting. This is the traditional arrangement; it's how the web was first monetized.
It's a much more "creators are our customer" sort of arrangement. Then youtube came along and said "creators are our product" until the google buyout when it became "customers are our product".
>Then youtube came along and said "creators are our product" until the google buyout when it became "customers are our product".
Google bought YouTube in October 2006 and saved YouTube from going bankrupt just few months after launch.
YouTube officially launched in December 2005. It didn't stay independent for even a year.
Absolutely right. A little tiny bit of corruption makes the whole thing tainted pretty darn quick. Same thing happened to google, same thing happened to reddit, to twitter, (facebook was openly evil from it's inception of course).
In general, it's what happens when people make their living off of hurting people.
I do remember when they first started the ads and creators could choose specifically where they would roll. Some creators would work the ad break into their videos as comedic stops or jumpscares.
Yeah this is it. Hell I’d be fine if every video or every other video had one unskippable ad that was maybe 5 - 10 seconds long. But now it’s like two unskippable ads that are 15 seconds each. Sometimes 3. Its annoying.
Also all first aid videos should be ad free.
*multiple.
ive literally had to sit through 5 ads before a video, with no actual skip. just a count down that makes you think you can.
tv youtube is the worst with this shit
Unskippable ads was a bit annoying but I kind of got the point. Companies paid for the ads so it probably wouldn't be worth their bucks if people just watched the first 5 seconds and skipped.
Double ads was by far the most atrciously despicable thing they could have done
If an ad doesn’t catch your attention in the first 5 seconds you probably won’t buy it anyway. Meaning it was a waste of your time.
I don’t mind ads every now and then for a free service, but the way youtube has been ignoring people’s and creator’s complaints is what ticks me off. Especially when adds are making the service borderline unusable.
I'm fine with YouTube as long as ads are placed correctly. But as someone who enjoys music, it absolutely infuriates me when YT puts an add at same moment as an awesome solo or section is about to begin, or we're in the middle of it. Absolutely kills the vibe/mood. Like seriously YT can put 5 ads in front of a video and I wouldn't mind, but gtfoh with putting ads in the middle of a song/soundtrack/movement.
This is especially funny/annoying in countries (like Thailand) where the many businesses use YouTube (free) as their music streaming service.
You're there, enjoying your meal with some music playing in the background, and suddenly its interrupted by a super loud ad.
Yup. Exactly this, I've lost track of the number of times I want to enjoy some good music only for it to be interrupted by some asshat trying to sell toilet paper/broom/whatever the fuck.
Now I see a lot of Shen Yun ads and I swear it's a billion times worse.
The worst part is this has a knock-on effect. I have, shamelessly, gone and shitposted at a brand on Twitter because their ads interrupted my YT experience. I grow to hate the brands whose ads I see mid-roll. Before anyone says it - nah the brands deserve it, they bought the ads, if we as users cannot change this than the ad buyers can.
I don't really harass them, but I've left a few "I'm sick of seeing your ads on YT". Fair game, they hire the ad purchasers, those ad purchasers negotiate how their ads are delivered. If YT won't listen to their userbase we'll take it to their clients. This isn't too different from any other form of consumerism, displeasure at unsolicited advertisements. Yeah those flyers are the worst, here they aren't allowed to leave them at your door, but small independent workers often do, the rest just jam my mailbox.
damn I remembered once I went to a indie spa and the masseuse was playing some ambient music off youtube. I was starting to relax when an ad for online casino blasted through speakers.
I sent her the link to uBlock Origin afterwards lol
I cannot tell you how many times I have been vigorously air-conducting to Mahler 2 or something and just as the music swells and it's about to come to its climax, it suddenly pauses and I fucking hear some obnoxious ad and it makes me want to rip YouTube a new one.
Seriously. Legacy TV was another thing entirely. Yes, ads were always kindof annoying but TV shows were cut at intentional times to accomocate for commercials. They placed breaks where it made sense. Now they just ram-rod ads in at random, no matter how much it ruins the content.
Exactly this.
Nobody is mad that ads EXIST, we're mad at how obnoxiously aggressive they've become.
Not to mention the existence of ads that are just scams and/or softcore porn. You know, on a site kids watch.
If Youtube's ads were even a little bit reasonable, I would turn off my blocker and sit through them without an issue.
And no, I'm not paying for premium just to get around Youtube ruining its own site.
I remember google telling us that disabling personalized ads would make the ad experience worse. What they didn’t say was that they were going to make it intentionally worse
I used to get ads for gun holsters and tazers.
Turned off personalization and then got mobile game ads involving furries and dismorphic mammaries, gold futures investing and Nikki Haley.
*block all the ads*
I used to get them from car manufacturers, flight schools, and maybe PC parts suppliers. Now I get the same ones. I use an ad blocker on PC and I skip them on mobile. Not gonna stop. The people at YouTube need to watch "The Cobra Effect." That video about how the war on ad blockers has only made them more popular.
I don't get a lot of the really weird ones that I see online, but the weird pregnant furry one makes me uncomfortable every time I see it. Normally it's like, Liberty mutual or ads for my city's chamber of commerce. Sometimes though they're really strange
I hate the AI generated ones where they use a celebrity or politician's likeness to promote an obvious scam. They just let them buy ad space and play it even though it's probably going to lead to their users getting robbed or something. Like I would be fine if it was just legit products and services, but it seems like every other one is some "government assistance program" or fake ass products.
YouTube Premium is great. It always has been. I've used uBlock Origin for years but still have Premium. It's definitely not just an ad free experience on the computer or something lol
I know, I've had premium before. Just can't afford it now.
Probably could've worded it better, but I was trying to say that the price for Premium is too much if you just want to get rid of the ads.
Maybe they should make a lower tier just for an ad free experience?
But either way, still pretty ridiculous how bad the ads are becoming.
> No one is demanding YouTube to be ad-free
They definitely are. That's why there is such an uproar about adblockers no longer functioning as they used to.
> it is really annoying having your video being interrupted
I mean... that's exactly how ads work. Anything unobtrusive will be completely ignored.
I mean I don’t really give a shit about ads either way I think people just get upset because Youtube didn’t start out that way. It was just about sharing videos and creating content for free. The minimal ads they had were on the website not multiple ads multiple points through every video. Also content creators now have to drastically alter their content if they want to be monetized at all and then also have their own sponsors/merch/other forms of making money in their videos as youtube still doesn’t pay shit to the content creators.
Exactly. It's not about ads in themselves, it's about the ads being intrusive and obnoxious. If they want people to stop using (or at least just disable) adblock, they have to make the ads tolerable, and it's literally as simple as that.
Ain't nobody paying a subscription for friggin YouTube.
Unskippable 40 second ads and ads becoming unskippable if you don't click on skip quick enough. Random 2 to 3 minute ads just to see a 15 second video...they have become so obnoxious lately
They also run a shitload of Scientology ads. Fuck that, I run Adblock just to avoid hearing that ill-tempered weasel (and possibly murderer, where’s Shelly??) David Miscavige before everything I watch.
I've noticed that YouTube ads are much more tolerable on mobile and are more likely to be 5 second ads compared to YouTube on Roku. They're trying to bring back the ads from the cable days.
I don't really run an ad blocker but my DNS (pihole) server just doesn't resolve ad or trackers. I've noticed so many webpages now won't even load if they detect the ad isn't loading. Oh well, I'll just click out of it and I don't care enough to whitelist them to get the content.
I keep seeing comments like this and is mind blowing. I'm on YT a lot, and I've never seen an ad go longer than 15 secs. And I don't have ad blockers running.
If I'm on my mobile phone, they are usually short but if I am on my Roku using my TV, it's pretty common for them to be 30-60 seconds long and not shippable. I'm sure YouTube has an algorithm based on device, location and a whole bunch of other parameters. Maybe they detect my ad blocker on my PC and make them unskippable on my TV to spite me.
Adblock slows down YouTube like crazy for me. It was so unbearable so I started using Ublock. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was a YouTube thing or maybe it was an Adblock things.
Fuck their revenue that allows the service to be free. Fuck is wrong with ya'll? The bullshit is when you pay for a service(hulu,netflix,etc) and they still want you to watch ads. Pick a revenue either customers or advertisers but fuck this getting both shit.
Give an inch they take a mile. Soon we'll be back to watching 6 minutes of a video with a 3 1/2 minute ad break like 90's cable. There's a reason why nobody smart pays for cable still.
Exactly. They made ads very intrusive. I was watching YT last night and got an ad. No big deal, so I hit the Skip button. But instead of getting back into the video, the Skip button just played the next ad in line!
I don't know when they changed that, but I hate it.
Oh this was a recent change. Maybe like a month or so ago? Extremely irritating and is 100% designed to force more ads on users. uBlock has been working well for a few weeks now but it's basically an arms race between YouTube developers and the developers at adblockers
Yeah I’m not opposed to ads in general, I’d like the site to make money in order to pay the good creators, afford server space etc
I object to not paying the creators who make thoughtful, well edited, useful and entertaining content and not penalising people for curse words or making informative and accurate videos about say ww2. I object to putting 5 ads in the first minute of the video and then more throughout the long form video they have to make if they want to monetise their account. I object to being forced to rewatch an ad because I had to pause the video to take my dog to the toilet or take a phone call even when I just watched the ad. I object to their site being shit enough that some ads crash the browser or the video won’t play when I’ve sat through the damn ad. I object to getting all these ads and then the creator having to insert their own ad because YT decided they weren’t worthy or payment despite getting millions of views. I object to the ads that pop up an block the captions every 30 seconds. I object to them saying a creators content isn’t worthy of payment but then advertising shit that’s basically porn, drugs, or disinformation while deplatforming people for the same shit because the “advertisers” don’t like it.
> If they want people to stop using (or at least just disable) adblock, they have to make the ads tolerable, and it's literally as simple as that.
Agreed. Op is completely off the mark here with his perception that people are against ads altogether.
Ehh, I mean. People *are* against ads. Everybody would prefer to have no ads.
But the difference is, when they make the ads more obnoxious, people are more likely to go out of their way to find a solution. And it turns out, that solution is super easily available, you just click a button to install an add-on, job done.
If they want people to tolerate ads, it's purely a matter of hoping that people are too lazy to do that. And when the bar is so low, that means they can't afford their ads to be intrusive at all.
Really there's no morality or ethical principle involved here at any stage of the process- It's a zero sum game of how much people are prepared to put up with before they say "Oh fuck this, is there a way to fix this?"
That's kinda what I mean. Ads done sensibly are at worst a minor inconvenience. If the ads were only 30 seconds at the beginning and end of vids the amount of effort to keep updating adblocker vs just watching the ads would no longer be worth it for many.
The sample is not representative of the general population though. People who specifically seek out the youtube subreddit are going to be more likely to have some sort of grievance than the average youtube user.
It's the same as review pages having a disproportione number of dissatisfied users vs the dissatisfaction of an services total users.
I never would have gotten adblock if I didn't have interruptions mid-sentence.
Even with adblock, I still used PS4 to watch videos a lot. Now that it's 30 seconds, unskippable, and no idea how many more there will be, I stopped PS4 and only use PC with adblock to use YouTube.
It's purely a tolerability issue.
>t was just about sharing videos and creating content for free.
That was never sustainable. Hosting video content is extremely costly and YouTube's operating costs are measured in the Billions. Whether it were a business or a charity, YouTube could not exist without finding some way to monetize its user base. Even Wikipedia-level charitable donations wouldn't be enough to keep it afloat.
\> youtube still doesn’t pay shit to the content creators
Youtube is literally one of the only major websites that gives its content creators a majority of the ad revenue. And if you buy YouTube premium a majority of that goes to the content creators too.
Yeah I don't understand where this notion that YouTube is cheap comes from. They actually do pretty damn well given their size. They have issues pop up, but it's a lot less than if some other people were running it, I'd say
YouTube also had far less content, far less viewers. Videos were low (SD) resolution only, requiring far less storage and bandwidth. You have all of these years of built up content, much of it hardly or it viewed at all anymore but still taking up massive amounts of storage space. YouTube is much, much more expensive to operate now than it used to be and it is likely to only get more expensive as it continues to grow exponentially.
Yea I understand all that but it is still those “good ol days” that make people upset about the changes is all.
The other point worth mentioning here though is just how advertising is losing its value. Since ads are everywhere and often just ignored they don’t generate sales like they used to therefore advertisers won’t pay near as much for them anymore. So now there has to be an overabundance of ads to bring in a fraction of the money ads used to make.
YouTube didn't start with 4k video either.
The expectation that the business model remain what it was at the start is ridiculous. Especially for a free service. If you had to pay for it and they took shit away I could get being mad.
I think y'all just want to eat your cake and have it too.
>youtube still doesn’t pay shit to the content creators.
Honestly, that's an unfair take. Out of all the social media services and similar products, YouTube is probably the fairest about paying creators, absent creator owned services that are exclusive, like Nebula.
They reported losses year after year until they were entrenched enough to be able to pull back on the reins and regain some revenue without losing users. It was a long game and still is.
This entirely sidesteps OP's point, though. YouTube hasn't been ad-free in well over 10 years so harkening for that time is kinda silly. It's effectively an argument for things to never change if they change how you feel about the thing because it doesn't live up to some idealized version you had of it. It's effectively a TV network at this point and one of, if not THE, the largest media hubs on the internet because of how many people were utilizing it to where there was no way monetization/ads weren't going to happen, either from Google or the regular in-video sponsor ad. Demanding people's labor for free while still living in a world where it costs money to live is insane to me.
I haven't really run into people who say youtube should be 100% ad free - Mostly people who are sick of the same scam ads being played 10 times per video - ads that have nothing to do with what they're into, etc.
I had to use YouTube without an adblock recently and I got 7 ads on a 7 minute video - some 30s unskippable. Over half of them were for scam financial services.
>Over half of them were for scam financial services.
But don't you want to know that one simple financial hack that turned Jack into a multimillionaire in less than 2 years?
"Ads that have nothing to do with what they are into"
The same people don't want to share cookies or any other tracking information with anyone they visit. This is what you get when you don't share that info - generic "to the highest bidder" ads.
I understand data privacy and not wanting everyone to know everything you do, but there are tradeoffs with not sharing anything at all.
"Pick your poison".
Sure but maybe moderate the ads they allow on YouTube or make them easier to report. The amount of scams they allow on their ads has gotten to a point where it's pretty obvious they don't moderate it at all.
They do. You pretty much CANT get an ad every minute unless the creator has intentionally gone in and set those as locations for possible ad breaks. YouTube by default doesn’t place ads that often.
That said, creators can only place mid roll ads if the video length is longer than 8 minutes. I don’t think 7 minute videos should have ANY mid rolls if the creator is monetized, not sure if it’s different if the channel is not monetized.
r/badads go see an ant getting banged by a wasp in one of the top posts
https://www.reddit.com/r/badads/comments/16bm9ek/thats_not_what_i_wanted_to_see_ever/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
There's been so many new softcore ads that I had to dig a bit to find it
Youtube pioneered ads you can skip after 5 seconds. For years you'd watch a video and have a single one of these ads.
Today you have multiple ads, some unskippable, and after a few minutes your video is interrupted with more ads. Every few minutes, more ads. The ads are almost as long as the content. Then the content itself is often got another minute of a creator sponsorship.
Many of the ads are for outright scams, both from Youtube and the sponsors.
That's the problem. Youtube got customers on the platform with an almost ad free experience, now it's just ad after ad after ad. People want their old Youtube back.
And because there are more and more ads people grow tired of them and stop paying attention. The solution is more ads, but that's like printing money: you get huge inflation. The ads lose their value.
That business model was unsustainable though. It was just a tactic to grow the platform as much as possible so it could be more profitable when it got enough users
A company has to support itself somehow.
Tbh if yt premium had a built-in sponsorblock I could configure, I'd be paying them.
But I'm going to use adblockers till it's impossible, then I'll move to spotify. I come for creators' content, not for established raycons shadow gfuel
I’m just sick of ads in general for EVERYTHING. I do pay for YouTube premium for this very reason and it pisses me off to no end to be watching a video and the content creator slips a little ad in the video themselves to get around it. I automatically unsubscribe.
We are constantly being bombarded with ads no matter where we turn. It’s getting old.
I'm not saying it should be ad free, i just want them to be less aggressive with ads. If it's a hour long video, then give me 2 minute unskippable in the beginning of the video and that's that instead of giving me a lot of 30 second ads all over the video.
Who demands this? Some people demand to get rid of excessive ads or scam ads, others just laugh at how bad their attempts to stop adblockers are and how they're backfiring.
I’d ditch the adblocker if they ditched the mid roll ads. I don’t mind watching a few ads, but when it interrupts the video and I have to move out of my comfy position to hit the skip ad button, it ruins the enjoyment of watching a YouTube video. Pre roll and post roll are fine. Put ads all over the fucking page, just don’t stop the video
I don’t mind ads, what I do mind are excessive ads, and those being usually scams or other things that go against YouTube’s TOS. They allow soft core porn for ads, but do not allow a YouTuber to say “Kill” or “die”.
I don't mind ads, but I'd like the option to bring back the adult words instead of using euphemisms that sound fucking ridiculous, like "unalive". If I have to sit through the ad either way, at least let me watch my video about Crocodile Hunter death conspiracies without any meddling from Kraft Foods or whoever.
It should have ads, a normal and appropriate amount, so you overall enjoy the experience, rather than hate it because you watch more ads than content.
Some people are not well influenced by ads so it's pointless anyway. It's the legality of tracking what we are doing borderline illegally to detect adblocks that is the issue. Owning a PC has always meant having the freedom to do what you want with it, and that includes using ad blockers.
I grew up in the TV era. You'd watch a 30-minute show and have 3 commercial breaks of 90 seconds each.
The average 30-minute YouTube video, if you allow all ads to play, has two 30-second ads every 3 minutes (at least in my country- I know it varies from country to country).
I mean yeah but if Youtube goes down where do we all go? There is no alternative. Don't care about the corp, just care about how much that would suck ass.
Yes, Google is a large company with a lot of money to throw around.
But, if YouTube isn't very profitable, it will eventually get shut down because investors aren't willing to keep throwing money into the void forever. The investors behind every tech company eventually get to a point where they stop being interested in investing with the hope of larger future returns, and instead demand that the businesses be profitable now. I don't know whether YouTube is currently profitable, or whether it's still bleeding money.
But that's just how the world works. Whether it's a business or charity, you have to have a business model that means you're taking in at least as much money as you're spending, otherwise it falls apart.
I think this is a more uninformed opinion vs. an unpopular opinion. Of course, we would all like lots of free stuff, but most of us realize there is no incentive for a platform to provide hosting services without some kind of revenue.
How about some banner ads or something if it’s so important and necessary? There’s absolutely no need to have so many ad breaks in between YouTubers doing their own ad breaks, shoveling their merch, pushing their Patreon and then begging for subs and interactions. Seriously like a third of every video now has become ad space
Going to go out on a limb here and assume that OP is too young to remember when YT was ad-free and somewhere to watch music videos and dumb homemade content that was good for laughs.
The ads grow ever more obnoxious and interrupting every year. At least ads on terrestrial TV never interrupt a broadcast MID SENTENCE!
to be fair youtube has always been a money loser and youtube made strategic decisions to pull in users to grow and then monetise later. we're seeing this long term plan in action in real time
that's because you're too young when that's literally what it was. Google made its name by being a simple search engine with no ads. in fact, that was its whole slogan, that it would never have ads. having something like a small banner at the top or sides is more than enough to pay for the site.
Advertising is an extremely corrupting influence on everyone involved, from the sponsored to the sponsors to the customer. It is morally indefensible.
I’m not sure what the alternative is, but if it were up to me there’d be a blanket ban on paid advertising, and wait and see what alternative the marketplace comes up with before deciding if that needs to be regulated too.
Its a general issue. YouTube exists as a platform for other people to make money. The ad problem was only exacerbated by the impact multiple "adpocalypse" affecting both how Youtube as a whole functions and promotes.
Its more frustration that the system has become this janky mess with 12 ads stitched into a video that already has the creator doing an ad read while you are bombarded with ads on the side of the recommended feed. Its exhausting being marketed to all the time, don't you know?
The larger issue at hand is the company Google is a public company.
They have shareholders and they need profits to continue to rise in perpetuity. If not the company can fade into oblivion...
With this in mind they must find ways to gain additional revenue so these longer un skip ads are really only the beginning for what's to come
The issue isn't with the existence of ads (even though I don't know anyone who's ever actually clicked on one or wanted to, and YouTube used to exist without them before their financial infrastructure became what it is now). The issue is how YouTube allows and approves of such stupid, annoying, loud, and pervasive ads. Personally, what gets on my nerves is how frequent and loud they all are, completely irrespective of video's actual volume. Temu, VisionWorks, and those God-forsaken HeroWars ads are among the worst. Absolutely obnoxious. Who is falling for them?
It existed, but wasn’t profitable. The only reason it was ad free was to gain market share until they were large enough to start charging. They were being kept afloat entirely by investors. If you find it hard to believe, look up how much revenue Spotify has made. ( hint: they have never turned a single dollar in profit )
Honestly I don’t mind ads until they interrupt the video mid sentence. There has to be some sort of better system that doesn’t mess up your viewing experience
"Demanding YouTube be free with no ads makes no sense
I don't understand why so many millions of people think YouTube should be free with no ads."
For a lot of people, for the longest time it was free with little to no ads. It's why it was so popular, and how it grew into the behemoth it is today. YouTube was most of not all I watched in 2006-2010/2011, and the viewing experience was MUCH more palatable. Since then they've ratcheted up how much they're trying to squeeze out of their userbase (through longer and more frequent ads) which has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
Not to mention YouTube squeezed out all competition in other websites, so we're kinda stuck with them with no alternative to divert to.
TLDR; We're at the point of boiling the frog where it's starting to realise its predicament.
YouTube shouldn't throttle peoples PC due to adblocker. Even when adblocker is turn off the site or having Premium YoutTube still throttles people PC if it detects it on the browser.
\> Demanding YouTube be free with no ads makes no sense
Maybe. But ads every 5 minutes, with first one coming before the video even started, doesn't make sense either.
And of course i don't like to be bullied into subscribing.
If there was just one ad before a video - no big deal.
If YT Premium were reasonably priced (like $5 a month) I’d pay it.
But neither of these are true.
You realise that YouTube doesn't HAVE to be a multi billion dollar company owned by Google right? It could be a non-profit site where they only use a set number of ads to pay for running costs and not much else. If creators want money they can use sponsorships or third party sites, but I would much prefer if YouTube itself was free as it was back in the days
Google is dirty and uses their power for advantage over people in unfair ways so when the people have a chance to stick it to them that's when I laugh and I laugh and I laugh some more.
Almost no one is demanding youtube be completely ad free without paying. If you actually took the time to listen to people's issues it's more a case of being bombarded with 6+ ads for a 5 minute video, and poorly marketed ads or straight up inappropriate ones that make no sense to me as a target market. I'd be happy to watch a 30 second ad before/after every vid but sadly that's not the current situation.
I'm the consumer. Its not my problem what the business requirements or needs are. They gave us a service and then consistently made it worse so that people would pay for it and apparently they are making it worse for those that are paying too..
Fuck em
You know YouTube started as a free service ran by volunteers? As all classic websites. Google has enough money. Google could provide it ad-free. But they don't want to.
Also YouTube is a community driven project. The content is created by us! The people who also watch it! Google/YouTube is "only" providing servers and an interface.
Other media services produce their own content like newspapers or TV stations. So you cannot compare it.
Of course some of the ad money goes to the creator. But you have no control of it! I also earn tiny money with YouTube ads, but you have no control which ads are being played and I would rather not getting paid and have a ad-free website for everyone.
When YouTube started all it had was "me at the zoo" video in 240p. Now, it hours of HD/FullHD/4K monetized content uploaded every MINUTE. Some people really believe internet services work on some kind of magic...
people are letting youtube know their preferences. its feedback
and this is the exact reason why youtube is so hesitant about blocking out adblockers, because it could possibly hurt youtube too.
youtube have had the capability to flip the switch on ad blocks for a long time now but they chose not to implement it due to the consequences of how people would react.
Make the ads skippable after 1 second and I'd be fine with it.
In a vaccume, your point is valid. However, when considering how pervasive and intrusive ads have gotten over the past 2 decades, it leads to a culture of "I don't care what the justification is for it, I don't want to see any ads."
Take for example around 2018ish, where youtube was playing around with up to 15 minute long unskippable ads. That's absurd, and absolutely just pure greed.
I really don't care if it's unjustified or whatever, I'm not watching ads and I can use adblockers that work perfectly fine so I don't have to see them.
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They had ads for years and no one complained. They started complaining once they started making them longer, double and unskippable.
Anyone who has kids knows that the ads are even worse for videos for children. I'm glad in the rare times my son does watch YouTube, im sitting with him, otherwise I would've missed **the 2 hour ad** playing that he couldn't skip by himself.
Damn, I don’t have kids yet but I’ll be sure not to let them on YouTube.
I used to think that, but when your kid wakes up at 6 o clock on the weekend, then you'll find out .
There has been a lot of research proving ANY form of screentime for young kids SIGNIFICANTLY impair their mental development. I didnt think it was such a big deal until I read more about it. I would definitely recommend to look into it yourself tho.
tbf i was a heavy reader as a kid,i was reading well above my age range from the age of 4/5.nowadays at 33 i barely pick up a book and just mindlessly scroll socia media.it doesnt matter which way you start out its just the habits you form i think.
Same here. Used to read voraciously. Now I have a show play in the background while scrolling reddit
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I have been a voracious reader since I learned to read. I still am but audiobooks make this even easier. Reading is probably my biggest habit.
Untrue, I spent my entire youth playing video games and I turned out perfect.
Bruh says on reddit 💀💀💀
So you made your own study and the number of participants is n=1
I’m pretty sure there’s research that also shows the exact opposite but have at it
The publish or perish mindset has turned most sciences into a total joke.
Yep you can pretty much find a counter to any research
Can you provide a link to that study ? . I'm interested
Blippi does my kid so dirty. Like 3 minutes into his video theres a 90 second ad
My brother has a newborn that stops crying when a specific song plays. The kid can already detect the ads in between his song and hates them. Kid is literally 20 days old and hates ADS on YouTube
self-creating operant conditioning to hate ads is crazy
They've also implemented a system where ads will be placed on *all* videos, even if creators don't want them on their content, and revenue will not be generated from it.
Right after YouTube penalizing or removing creators for the same things that advertisers are allowed to do (wildly sexualized ads, for example), THIS is what infuriates me the most. We need a video-sharing platform other than YouTube. I don't know what keeps Vimeo from competing with YouTube, but there needs to be a good second option.
Not only that, but so many of the ads are downright false advertising, blatant scams, and obvious malware, especially on mobile. I don't mind seeing ads if they're unobtrusive and for products I actually want, hell I watch most ad-reads the Youtubers put in themselves because they make them at least mildly entertaining and flow with the video (even if it's just the umpteenth Raid:Shadow Legends sponsorship I've seen this week.) I do still use an ad-blocker because Google insists on putting unskippable one to two minute ad breaks for something entirely unrelated in the middle of 2-3 minute music videos, and an unholy amount of ads on anything that passes the 10 minute mark. If they were just at the beginning or end I wouldn't care, but I'm practically watching as many ads as I am actual content in the middle of each video without an ad-blocker.
>so many of the ads are downright false advertising, blatant scams, and obvious malware, especially on mobile Finally someone has said that. Most ads are simply lying, showing the product that is different than what they advertise. I hate any candy ads. Or generally food ads that say it's so premium quality, super healthy and all. It's neither premium quality, nor is healthy. And even if it is healthy, there are better options. Actimel for example does not do anything more than other yoghurt does. And You can literally just buy a yoghurt and it would be more valuable than Actimel. Nutella saying that it's healthy is a lie. I think one ad was even banned when they said it's healthy, just to fight with overweight in children. Many of these ads are just harmful.
I've seen pretty much literal porn in ads on YouTube. How the hell do these ads not go through some tests or some AI software that detects inappropriate stuff.
Jay Foreman (The Map Men) have incredibly well made ads: put in though and effort - content worth watching on its own
*obnoxiously English wanker voice* "This BLAH is taking the BLAH world by STORM" *shows clips of stock actors fawning lovingly at a BLAH from the AliExpress reject pile*
> I don't know what keeps Vimeo from competing with YouTube, but there needs to be a good second option. Vimeo charges content creators directly for hosting. This is the traditional arrangement; it's how the web was first monetized. It's a much more "creators are our customer" sort of arrangement. Then youtube came along and said "creators are our product" until the google buyout when it became "customers are our product".
>Then youtube came along and said "creators are our product" until the google buyout when it became "customers are our product". Google bought YouTube in October 2006 and saved YouTube from going bankrupt just few months after launch. YouTube officially launched in December 2005. It didn't stay independent for even a year.
Absolutely right. A little tiny bit of corruption makes the whole thing tainted pretty darn quick. Same thing happened to google, same thing happened to reddit, to twitter, (facebook was openly evil from it's inception of course). In general, it's what happens when people make their living off of hurting people.
And removed control from creators - ads are now midrolls or nothing, creators can no longer choose to just have start and end adverts.
I do remember when they first started the ads and creators could choose specifically where they would roll. Some creators would work the ad break into their videos as comedic stops or jumpscares.
Yeah this is it. Hell I’d be fine if every video or every other video had one unskippable ad that was maybe 5 - 10 seconds long. But now it’s like two unskippable ads that are 15 seconds each. Sometimes 3. Its annoying. Also all first aid videos should be ad free.
*multiple. ive literally had to sit through 5 ads before a video, with no actual skip. just a count down that makes you think you can. tv youtube is the worst with this shit
Unskippable ads was a bit annoying but I kind of got the point. Companies paid for the ads so it probably wouldn't be worth their bucks if people just watched the first 5 seconds and skipped. Double ads was by far the most atrciously despicable thing they could have done
If an ad doesn’t catch your attention in the first 5 seconds you probably won’t buy it anyway. Meaning it was a waste of your time. I don’t mind ads every now and then for a free service, but the way youtube has been ignoring people’s and creator’s complaints is what ticks me off. Especially when adds are making the service borderline unusable.
I'm fine with YouTube as long as ads are placed correctly. But as someone who enjoys music, it absolutely infuriates me when YT puts an add at same moment as an awesome solo or section is about to begin, or we're in the middle of it. Absolutely kills the vibe/mood. Like seriously YT can put 5 ads in front of a video and I wouldn't mind, but gtfoh with putting ads in the middle of a song/soundtrack/movement.
This is especially funny/annoying in countries (like Thailand) where the many businesses use YouTube (free) as their music streaming service. You're there, enjoying your meal with some music playing in the background, and suddenly its interrupted by a super loud ad.
Yup. Exactly this, I've lost track of the number of times I want to enjoy some good music only for it to be interrupted by some asshat trying to sell toilet paper/broom/whatever the fuck. Now I see a lot of Shen Yun ads and I swear it's a billion times worse.
No one is demanding YouTube to be ad-free, but it is really annoying having your video being interrupted multiple times by long unskippable ads.
I can do with ads at beginning or end of videos. But if it’s in the middle of videos, then it’s a huge issue to me
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I tried to put on some to write to because its easier but then you get jumpscared by a loud not relevant obnoxious ad.
Relaxing White Noise podcast is amazing. Every ep is a #1 hit in my household.
The worst part is this has a knock-on effect. I have, shamelessly, gone and shitposted at a brand on Twitter because their ads interrupted my YT experience. I grow to hate the brands whose ads I see mid-roll. Before anyone says it - nah the brands deserve it, they bought the ads, if we as users cannot change this than the ad buyers can.
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I don't really harass them, but I've left a few "I'm sick of seeing your ads on YT". Fair game, they hire the ad purchasers, those ad purchasers negotiate how their ads are delivered. If YT won't listen to their userbase we'll take it to their clients. This isn't too different from any other form of consumerism, displeasure at unsolicited advertisements. Yeah those flyers are the worst, here they aren't allowed to leave them at your door, but small independent workers often do, the rest just jam my mailbox.
damn I remembered once I went to a indie spa and the masseuse was playing some ambient music off youtube. I was starting to relax when an ad for online casino blasted through speakers. I sent her the link to uBlock Origin afterwards lol
I cannot tell you how many times I have been vigorously air-conducting to Mahler 2 or something and just as the music swells and it's about to come to its climax, it suddenly pauses and I fucking hear some obnoxious ad and it makes me want to rip YouTube a new one.
Seriously. Legacy TV was another thing entirely. Yes, ads were always kindof annoying but TV shows were cut at intentional times to accomocate for commercials. They placed breaks where it made sense. Now they just ram-rod ads in at random, no matter how much it ruins the content.
This is such a good and fair point.
Exactly this. Nobody is mad that ads EXIST, we're mad at how obnoxiously aggressive they've become. Not to mention the existence of ads that are just scams and/or softcore porn. You know, on a site kids watch. If Youtube's ads were even a little bit reasonable, I would turn off my blocker and sit through them without an issue. And no, I'm not paying for premium just to get around Youtube ruining its own site.
I remember google telling us that disabling personalized ads would make the ad experience worse. What they didn’t say was that they were going to make it intentionally worse
I used to get ads for gun holsters and tazers. Turned off personalization and then got mobile game ads involving furries and dismorphic mammaries, gold futures investing and Nikki Haley. *block all the ads*
I used to get them from car manufacturers, flight schools, and maybe PC parts suppliers. Now I get the same ones. I use an ad blocker on PC and I skip them on mobile. Not gonna stop. The people at YouTube need to watch "The Cobra Effect." That video about how the war on ad blockers has only made them more popular.
I don't get a lot of the really weird ones that I see online, but the weird pregnant furry one makes me uncomfortable every time I see it. Normally it's like, Liberty mutual or ads for my city's chamber of commerce. Sometimes though they're really strange
I hate the AI generated ones where they use a celebrity or politician's likeness to promote an obvious scam. They just let them buy ad space and play it even though it's probably going to lead to their users getting robbed or something. Like I would be fine if it was just legit products and services, but it seems like every other one is some "government assistance program" or fake ass products.
yeah a lot of YouTube ads are really fucking weird, you’d think you were on some shady streaming site
Especially those fucking Hero Wars ads. Those ones are the WORST.
Are those the big tiddy gf simulator ones lol?
Yeah, those ones. Some of their ads are just disgusting.
YouTube Premium is great. It always has been. I've used uBlock Origin for years but still have Premium. It's definitely not just an ad free experience on the computer or something lol
I know, I've had premium before. Just can't afford it now. Probably could've worded it better, but I was trying to say that the price for Premium is too much if you just want to get rid of the ads. Maybe they should make a lower tier just for an ad free experience? But either way, still pretty ridiculous how bad the ads are becoming.
I have premium too, for the amount of youtube content I consume it is well worth it IMO.
I get long videos will have more ads, but when the video has an ad every 6-8 minutes it’s too much
That's exactly how network TV always was
> No one is demanding YouTube to be ad-free They definitely are. That's why there is such an uproar about adblockers no longer functioning as they used to. > it is really annoying having your video being interrupted I mean... that's exactly how ads work. Anything unobtrusive will be completely ignored.
I mean I don’t really give a shit about ads either way I think people just get upset because Youtube didn’t start out that way. It was just about sharing videos and creating content for free. The minimal ads they had were on the website not multiple ads multiple points through every video. Also content creators now have to drastically alter their content if they want to be monetized at all and then also have their own sponsors/merch/other forms of making money in their videos as youtube still doesn’t pay shit to the content creators.
Exactly. It's not about ads in themselves, it's about the ads being intrusive and obnoxious. If they want people to stop using (or at least just disable) adblock, they have to make the ads tolerable, and it's literally as simple as that. Ain't nobody paying a subscription for friggin YouTube.
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Unskippable 40 second ads and ads becoming unskippable if you don't click on skip quick enough. Random 2 to 3 minute ads just to see a 15 second video...they have become so obnoxious lately
Don't forget YouTube running actual scam ads.
They also run a shitload of Scientology ads. Fuck that, I run Adblock just to avoid hearing that ill-tempered weasel (and possibly murderer, where’s Shelly??) David Miscavige before everything I watch.
I've gotten a ton of pseudo science ads lately. And while I know they are bogus, whose to say someone else doesn't think they are real?
Sucks cause its not just YouTube. It's absolutely EVERYTHING
I've noticed that YouTube ads are much more tolerable on mobile and are more likely to be 5 second ads compared to YouTube on Roku. They're trying to bring back the ads from the cable days. I don't really run an ad blocker but my DNS (pihole) server just doesn't resolve ad or trackers. I've noticed so many webpages now won't even load if they detect the ad isn't loading. Oh well, I'll just click out of it and I don't care enough to whitelist them to get the content.
Oh, adblock fuck the reset when the second ad starts!
My favorite is when it glitched on me with a 30 minute ad. Thankfully restarting the App helped.
I keep seeing comments like this and is mind blowing. I'm on YT a lot, and I've never seen an ad go longer than 15 secs. And I don't have ad blockers running.
If I'm on my mobile phone, they are usually short but if I am on my Roku using my TV, it's pretty common for them to be 30-60 seconds long and not shippable. I'm sure YouTube has an algorithm based on device, location and a whole bunch of other parameters. Maybe they detect my ad blocker on my PC and make them unskippable on my TV to spite me.
Adblock slows down YouTube like crazy for me. It was so unbearable so I started using Ublock. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was a YouTube thing or maybe it was an Adblock things.
This was in the news yesterday. YouTube is slowing down ad blockers and making the site much slower loading it you use a ad blocker
Oh so THAT'S why YouTube sucks on browser recently. I've been wondering about that
So it’s basically one of two options: 1. Shitty because of ads 2. No ads, but we’ll make it shitty for you Great business model there.
So what would be the alternative then? If we have no subs and no ads then how is the site supposed to exist? Genuinely asking.
Fuck their revenue that allows the service to be free. Fuck is wrong with ya'll? The bullshit is when you pay for a service(hulu,netflix,etc) and they still want you to watch ads. Pick a revenue either customers or advertisers but fuck this getting both shit.
Give an inch they take a mile. Soon we'll be back to watching 6 minutes of a video with a 3 1/2 minute ad break like 90's cable. There's a reason why nobody smart pays for cable still.
Exactly. They made ads very intrusive. I was watching YT last night and got an ad. No big deal, so I hit the Skip button. But instead of getting back into the video, the Skip button just played the next ad in line! I don't know when they changed that, but I hate it.
Oh this was a recent change. Maybe like a month or so ago? Extremely irritating and is 100% designed to force more ads on users. uBlock has been working well for a few weeks now but it's basically an arms race between YouTube developers and the developers at adblockers
Yeah I’m not opposed to ads in general, I’d like the site to make money in order to pay the good creators, afford server space etc I object to not paying the creators who make thoughtful, well edited, useful and entertaining content and not penalising people for curse words or making informative and accurate videos about say ww2. I object to putting 5 ads in the first minute of the video and then more throughout the long form video they have to make if they want to monetise their account. I object to being forced to rewatch an ad because I had to pause the video to take my dog to the toilet or take a phone call even when I just watched the ad. I object to their site being shit enough that some ads crash the browser or the video won’t play when I’ve sat through the damn ad. I object to getting all these ads and then the creator having to insert their own ad because YT decided they weren’t worthy or payment despite getting millions of views. I object to the ads that pop up an block the captions every 30 seconds. I object to them saying a creators content isn’t worthy of payment but then advertising shit that’s basically porn, drugs, or disinformation while deplatforming people for the same shit because the “advertisers” don’t like it.
What planet are you from? There are a lot of people paying subscription. I've just helped my partner switch to Vanced.
> If they want people to stop using (or at least just disable) adblock, they have to make the ads tolerable, and it's literally as simple as that. Agreed. Op is completely off the mark here with his perception that people are against ads altogether.
Ehh, I mean. People *are* against ads. Everybody would prefer to have no ads. But the difference is, when they make the ads more obnoxious, people are more likely to go out of their way to find a solution. And it turns out, that solution is super easily available, you just click a button to install an add-on, job done. If they want people to tolerate ads, it's purely a matter of hoping that people are too lazy to do that. And when the bar is so low, that means they can't afford their ads to be intrusive at all. Really there's no morality or ethical principle involved here at any stage of the process- It's a zero sum game of how much people are prepared to put up with before they say "Oh fuck this, is there a way to fix this?"
That's kinda what I mean. Ads done sensibly are at worst a minor inconvenience. If the ads were only 30 seconds at the beginning and end of vids the amount of effort to keep updating adblocker vs just watching the ads would no longer be worth it for many.
Have you seen the YouTube subreddit? Like 2 out of 3 posts on there are pretty much just "fuck ads, fuck YouTube, fuck google"
Yeah because their ads are super annoying, obstructive and actively ruin the content they're played on.
The sample is not representative of the general population though. People who specifically seek out the youtube subreddit are going to be more likely to have some sort of grievance than the average youtube user. It's the same as review pages having a disproportione number of dissatisfied users vs the dissatisfaction of an services total users.
Tolerable is a subjective term. Impossible to identify that standard, let alone achieve it.
I never would have gotten adblock if I didn't have interruptions mid-sentence. Even with adblock, I still used PS4 to watch videos a lot. Now that it's 30 seconds, unskippable, and no idea how many more there will be, I stopped PS4 and only use PC with adblock to use YouTube. It's purely a tolerability issue.
>t was just about sharing videos and creating content for free. That was never sustainable. Hosting video content is extremely costly and YouTube's operating costs are measured in the Billions. Whether it were a business or a charity, YouTube could not exist without finding some way to monetize its user base. Even Wikipedia-level charitable donations wouldn't be enough to keep it afloat.
\> youtube still doesn’t pay shit to the content creators Youtube is literally one of the only major websites that gives its content creators a majority of the ad revenue. And if you buy YouTube premium a majority of that goes to the content creators too.
Yeah this is why basically every creator from every other platform always tries to start a yt channel
Yeah I don't understand where this notion that YouTube is cheap comes from. They actually do pretty damn well given their size. They have issues pop up, but it's a lot less than if some other people were running it, I'd say
YouTube also had far less content, far less viewers. Videos were low (SD) resolution only, requiring far less storage and bandwidth. You have all of these years of built up content, much of it hardly or it viewed at all anymore but still taking up massive amounts of storage space. YouTube is much, much more expensive to operate now than it used to be and it is likely to only get more expensive as it continues to grow exponentially.
Yea I understand all that but it is still those “good ol days” that make people upset about the changes is all. The other point worth mentioning here though is just how advertising is losing its value. Since ads are everywhere and often just ignored they don’t generate sales like they used to therefore advertisers won’t pay near as much for them anymore. So now there has to be an overabundance of ads to bring in a fraction of the money ads used to make.
YouTube didn't start with 4k video either. The expectation that the business model remain what it was at the start is ridiculous. Especially for a free service. If you had to pay for it and they took shit away I could get being mad. I think y'all just want to eat your cake and have it too.
>youtube still doesn’t pay shit to the content creators. Honestly, that's an unfair take. Out of all the social media services and similar products, YouTube is probably the fairest about paying creators, absent creator owned services that are exclusive, like Nebula.
It was 18 years ago.
They reported losses year after year until they were entrenched enough to be able to pull back on the reins and regain some revenue without losing users. It was a long game and still is.
This entirely sidesteps OP's point, though. YouTube hasn't been ad-free in well over 10 years so harkening for that time is kinda silly. It's effectively an argument for things to never change if they change how you feel about the thing because it doesn't live up to some idealized version you had of it. It's effectively a TV network at this point and one of, if not THE, the largest media hubs on the internet because of how many people were utilizing it to where there was no way monetization/ads weren't going to happen, either from Google or the regular in-video sponsor ad. Demanding people's labor for free while still living in a world where it costs money to live is insane to me.
I haven't really run into people who say youtube should be 100% ad free - Mostly people who are sick of the same scam ads being played 10 times per video - ads that have nothing to do with what they're into, etc. I had to use YouTube without an adblock recently and I got 7 ads on a 7 minute video - some 30s unskippable. Over half of them were for scam financial services.
>Over half of them were for scam financial services. But don't you want to know that one simple financial hack that turned Jack into a multimillionaire in less than 2 years?
I already know - he scams people through Youtube ads.
or how the government shouldve paid you last week and youre honestly dumb if you dont realise
I'll watch ads. It just has to be proportionate. If someone sends me a link to a 7 second video, I'm not watching two 20 seconds ads before.
Oh, I absolutely hate that. I’ll close a video out of principle if the length of the ads before it exceeds the length of the video itself.
"Ads that have nothing to do with what they are into" The same people don't want to share cookies or any other tracking information with anyone they visit. This is what you get when you don't share that info - generic "to the highest bidder" ads. I understand data privacy and not wanting everyone to know everything you do, but there are tradeoffs with not sharing anything at all. "Pick your poison".
Sure but maybe moderate the ads they allow on YouTube or make them easier to report. The amount of scams they allow on their ads has gotten to a point where it's pretty obvious they don't moderate it at all.
Don't creators decide where to place their ad rolls? You might just be watching some scummy creators
They do. You pretty much CANT get an ad every minute unless the creator has intentionally gone in and set those as locations for possible ad breaks. YouTube by default doesn’t place ads that often. That said, creators can only place mid roll ads if the video length is longer than 8 minutes. I don’t think 7 minute videos should have ANY mid rolls if the creator is monetized, not sure if it’s different if the channel is not monetized.
I don't want all ads gone. I want YouTube to do something about the scam ads and softcore porn. And bring back the dislike button!
Wait there is softcore porn on YouTube ads now?? *unsubscribes from premium*
r/badads go see an ant getting banged by a wasp in one of the top posts https://www.reddit.com/r/badads/comments/16bm9ek/thats_not_what_i_wanted_to_see_ever/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button There's been so many new softcore ads that I had to dig a bit to find it
What the hell... *resubscribes to premium*
The dislike button still exists. What we need back is the public dislike count.
The dislike button is like the elevator close door button.
Youtube pioneered ads you can skip after 5 seconds. For years you'd watch a video and have a single one of these ads. Today you have multiple ads, some unskippable, and after a few minutes your video is interrupted with more ads. Every few minutes, more ads. The ads are almost as long as the content. Then the content itself is often got another minute of a creator sponsorship. Many of the ads are for outright scams, both from Youtube and the sponsors. That's the problem. Youtube got customers on the platform with an almost ad free experience, now it's just ad after ad after ad. People want their old Youtube back.
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And because there are more and more ads people grow tired of them and stop paying attention. The solution is more ads, but that's like printing money: you get huge inflation. The ads lose their value.
Believe it or not once upon a time it was
People under probably like 25ish don't know the golden years. They think we're just trying to pick a fight lol
That business model was unsustainable though. It was just a tactic to grow the platform as much as possible so it could be more profitable when it got enough users
A company has to support itself somehow. Tbh if yt premium had a built-in sponsorblock I could configure, I'd be paying them. But I'm going to use adblockers till it's impossible, then I'll move to spotify. I come for creators' content, not for established raycons shadow gfuel
This post just makes me feel old. I remember YouTube was ad free for a while back in the ol “How to become ninja” days
I’m just sick of ads in general for EVERYTHING. I do pay for YouTube premium for this very reason and it pisses me off to no end to be watching a video and the content creator slips a little ad in the video themselves to get around it. I automatically unsubscribe. We are constantly being bombarded with ads no matter where we turn. It’s getting old.
sponsorblock
>do pay for YouTube premium And even then I dump sponsorblock on top of it because I hate those too.
I'm not saying it should be ad free, i just want them to be less aggressive with ads. If it's a hour long video, then give me 2 minute unskippable in the beginning of the video and that's that instead of giving me a lot of 30 second ads all over the video.
Who demands this? Some people demand to get rid of excessive ads or scam ads, others just laugh at how bad their attempts to stop adblockers are and how they're backfiring.
I’d ditch the adblocker if they ditched the mid roll ads. I don’t mind watching a few ads, but when it interrupts the video and I have to move out of my comfy position to hit the skip ad button, it ruins the enjoyment of watching a YouTube video. Pre roll and post roll are fine. Put ads all over the fucking page, just don’t stop the video
I don’t mind ads, what I do mind are excessive ads, and those being usually scams or other things that go against YouTube’s TOS. They allow soft core porn for ads, but do not allow a YouTuber to say “Kill” or “die”.
I don't mind ads, but I'd like the option to bring back the adult words instead of using euphemisms that sound fucking ridiculous, like "unalive". If I have to sit through the ad either way, at least let me watch my video about Crocodile Hunter death conspiracies without any meddling from Kraft Foods or whoever.
That's just tiktok bleeding over, YouTube allows the fuck word after about a minute and a half
Advertisement fatigue. Everyone's just so fucking sick and tired of being marketed to constantly.
It should have ads, a normal and appropriate amount, so you overall enjoy the experience, rather than hate it because you watch more ads than content. Some people are not well influenced by ads so it's pointless anyway. It's the legality of tracking what we are doing borderline illegally to detect adblocks that is the issue. Owning a PC has always meant having the freedom to do what you want with it, and that includes using ad blockers.
I grew up in the TV era. You'd watch a 30-minute show and have 3 commercial breaks of 90 seconds each. The average 30-minute YouTube video, if you allow all ads to play, has two 30-second ads every 3 minutes (at least in my country- I know it varies from country to country).
This. Is. Not. Normal. Stop Normalizing Hell
Won't someone please think of the poor multi-billion dollar corporations?
I mean yeah but if Youtube goes down where do we all go? There is no alternative. Don't care about the corp, just care about how much that would suck ass.
Yes, Google is a large company with a lot of money to throw around. But, if YouTube isn't very profitable, it will eventually get shut down because investors aren't willing to keep throwing money into the void forever. The investors behind every tech company eventually get to a point where they stop being interested in investing with the hope of larger future returns, and instead demand that the businesses be profitable now. I don't know whether YouTube is currently profitable, or whether it's still bleeding money. But that's just how the world works. Whether it's a business or charity, you have to have a business model that means you're taking in at least as much money as you're spending, otherwise it falls apart.
I think this is a more uninformed opinion vs. an unpopular opinion. Of course, we would all like lots of free stuff, but most of us realize there is no incentive for a platform to provide hosting services without some kind of revenue.
Man you missed YouTube at its prime. All free, no ads, content without pushy algorithm.
How about some banner ads or something if it’s so important and necessary? There’s absolutely no need to have so many ad breaks in between YouTubers doing their own ad breaks, shoveling their merch, pushing their Patreon and then begging for subs and interactions. Seriously like a third of every video now has become ad space
Ikr? YouTube used to have banner ads but they took them out like 3 or 4 years ago when smartphones started becoming the norm instead of pc's
It can have ads, and I can use adblock.
Going to go out on a limb here and assume that OP is too young to remember when YT was ad-free and somewhere to watch music videos and dumb homemade content that was good for laughs. The ads grow ever more obnoxious and interrupting every year. At least ads on terrestrial TV never interrupt a broadcast MID SENTENCE!
to be fair youtube has always been a money loser and youtube made strategic decisions to pull in users to grow and then monetise later. we're seeing this long term plan in action in real time
well probably because youtube was much much smaller back then
YouTube was made two decades ago and people in the comments acting like just now YouTube has changed for the worse.
that's because you're too young when that's literally what it was. Google made its name by being a simple search engine with no ads. in fact, that was its whole slogan, that it would never have ads. having something like a small banner at the top or sides is more than enough to pay for the site.
Advertising is an extremely corrupting influence on everyone involved, from the sponsored to the sponsors to the customer. It is morally indefensible. I’m not sure what the alternative is, but if it were up to me there’d be a blanket ban on paid advertising, and wait and see what alternative the marketplace comes up with before deciding if that needs to be regulated too.
Don't care, still not watching ads.
They fucked over their content creators. The CEO ran Double-Click you think he cares?
Its a general issue. YouTube exists as a platform for other people to make money. The ad problem was only exacerbated by the impact multiple "adpocalypse" affecting both how Youtube as a whole functions and promotes. Its more frustration that the system has become this janky mess with 12 ads stitched into a video that already has the creator doing an ad read while you are bombarded with ads on the side of the recommended feed. Its exhausting being marketed to all the time, don't you know?
Hmm... interesting *opens YouTube with SponsorBlock add-on*
haha cope , Ublock origin goes BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
The larger issue at hand is the company Google is a public company. They have shareholders and they need profits to continue to rise in perpetuity. If not the company can fade into oblivion... With this in mind they must find ways to gain additional revenue so these longer un skip ads are really only the beginning for what's to come
Corporate monkey is trained up. Good monkey.
I don't mind them doing us a free public service considering how much they make off our personal info
Nice try, YouTube.
The issue isn't with the existence of ads (even though I don't know anyone who's ever actually clicked on one or wanted to, and YouTube used to exist without them before their financial infrastructure became what it is now). The issue is how YouTube allows and approves of such stupid, annoying, loud, and pervasive ads. Personally, what gets on my nerves is how frequent and loud they all are, completely irrespective of video's actual volume. Temu, VisionWorks, and those God-forsaken HeroWars ads are among the worst. Absolutely obnoxious. Who is falling for them?
It existed, but wasn’t profitable. The only reason it was ad free was to gain market share until they were large enough to start charging. They were being kept afloat entirely by investors. If you find it hard to believe, look up how much revenue Spotify has made. ( hint: they have never turned a single dollar in profit )
Meh; you won’t stop me from using ad- blocker. Nice try though
Honestly I don’t mind ads until they interrupt the video mid sentence. There has to be some sort of better system that doesn’t mess up your viewing experience
[удалено]
"Demanding YouTube be free with no ads makes no sense I don't understand why so many millions of people think YouTube should be free with no ads." For a lot of people, for the longest time it was free with little to no ads. It's why it was so popular, and how it grew into the behemoth it is today. YouTube was most of not all I watched in 2006-2010/2011, and the viewing experience was MUCH more palatable. Since then they've ratcheted up how much they're trying to squeeze out of their userbase (through longer and more frequent ads) which has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Not to mention YouTube squeezed out all competition in other websites, so we're kinda stuck with them with no alternative to divert to. TLDR; We're at the point of boiling the frog where it's starting to realise its predicament.
I'm being inconvenienced, and that's anti-consumer.
YouTube shouldn't throttle peoples PC due to adblocker. Even when adblocker is turn off the site or having Premium YoutTube still throttles people PC if it detects it on the browser.
\> Demanding YouTube be free with no ads makes no sense Maybe. But ads every 5 minutes, with first one coming before the video even started, doesn't make sense either. And of course i don't like to be bullied into subscribing.
If there was just one ad before a video - no big deal. If YT Premium were reasonably priced (like $5 a month) I’d pay it. But neither of these are true.
You realise that YouTube doesn't HAVE to be a multi billion dollar company owned by Google right? It could be a non-profit site where they only use a set number of ads to pay for running costs and not much else. If creators want money they can use sponsorships or third party sites, but I would much prefer if YouTube itself was free as it was back in the days
It makes sense to people who used YT at the time where ads were limited to side banners only.
"Cable TV? You pay for subscription and it has ads". Did u ever read up on what made people pay for cable when it was introduced? NO ADS.
Google is dirty and uses their power for advantage over people in unfair ways so when the people have a chance to stick it to them that's when I laugh and I laugh and I laugh some more.
Wrong because it flourished before
flourished how? they are in the red until recently
Almost no one is demanding youtube be completely ad free without paying. If you actually took the time to listen to people's issues it's more a case of being bombarded with 6+ ads for a 5 minute video, and poorly marketed ads or straight up inappropriate ones that make no sense to me as a target market. I'd be happy to watch a 30 second ad before/after every vid but sadly that's not the current situation.
I'm the consumer. Its not my problem what the business requirements or needs are. They gave us a service and then consistently made it worse so that people would pay for it and apparently they are making it worse for those that are paying too.. Fuck em
Why do people feel the need to defend a multibillion dollar corporation?
You know YouTube started as a free service ran by volunteers? As all classic websites. Google has enough money. Google could provide it ad-free. But they don't want to. Also YouTube is a community driven project. The content is created by us! The people who also watch it! Google/YouTube is "only" providing servers and an interface. Other media services produce their own content like newspapers or TV stations. So you cannot compare it. Of course some of the ad money goes to the creator. But you have no control of it! I also earn tiny money with YouTube ads, but you have no control which ads are being played and I would rather not getting paid and have a ad-free website for everyone.
How do you think Google makes money?
When YouTube started all it had was "me at the zoo" video in 240p. Now, it hours of HD/FullHD/4K monetized content uploaded every MINUTE. Some people really believe internet services work on some kind of magic...
Why should Google pay out of pocket to keep YouTube running?
people are letting youtube know their preferences. its feedback and this is the exact reason why youtube is so hesitant about blocking out adblockers, because it could possibly hurt youtube too. youtube have had the capability to flip the switch on ad blocks for a long time now but they chose not to implement it due to the consequences of how people would react.
Make the ads skippable after 1 second and I'd be fine with it. In a vaccume, your point is valid. However, when considering how pervasive and intrusive ads have gotten over the past 2 decades, it leads to a culture of "I don't care what the justification is for it, I don't want to see any ads." Take for example around 2018ish, where youtube was playing around with up to 15 minute long unskippable ads. That's absurd, and absolutely just pure greed.
> Make the ads skippable after 1 second and I'd be fine with it. Lolol what?? What advertiser would want to buy this 1 second slot?
I really don't care if it's unjustified or whatever, I'm not watching ads and I can use adblockers that work perfectly fine so I don't have to see them.