Technology

Imagine being on the YouTube ad team...that has to be the most depressing team in tech history. Your whole existence revolves around peddling ads before people can watch the ads they want.

The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I'd rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.

Once upon a time Google used few and non-intrusive ads. The ads were soo well-placed and relevant, that they almost seemed like a service to the user, rather than being forced upon you. Some of us even added exceptions for Google ads in our ad blockers, so we would not miss out.

I miss those days.

I’ll never understand the entitlement of these companies when it comes to ads. You send the content freely to my computer along with BS ads. It’s my computer. I’ll display what I want using programs I want.

If you want me to pay for that content with $ or by watching ads - then put up a hard paywall and stop sending the content for free. You can’t get uppity and complain about ad blockers - it doesn’t make any sense…

The real problem is your content sucks and nobody is willing to pay for it. And that’s your problem - not mine.

Here’s some free apples. There’s a newspaper ad stuffed in there as well. Oh you ate the apples without reading the newspaper? Foul ball! /facepalm

Edit: never mind the fact that many ads have been served that are downright malicious code…

Good.

Youtube is a wonderful thing. It's a wealth of knowledge and resources unlike anything this world has ever seen.

And it's ran by one of the worst, most predatory corps on the planet.

i consider unblockable ads to be direct attack on my psyche, trying to worm in and make me think in a way they want. I will never tolerate them and would rather see anything relying on them burn. My mind is my own and no one else has any business influencing me without my permission.

Despite all of their machinations my strategy of simply ignoring literally everything they say and continuing doing the same old same old appears to be flummoxing them.

I've literally not done anything and have never experienced any inconvenience. Are we sure they're doing anything at all?

"Should we moderate our ads and get rid of 2 hour long ads, disinformation, porn,scams and fake products?"

"No, no. Thats to much effort. Lets spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to force people to watch our 2 hour long ads, disinformation, porn, scams and fake products. Thats clearly the way forward."

This decision process brought to you by Prager U proceeds into 30 minutes about how slavery was good for the black man and he should be grateful for it

I'd rather not watch YouTube videos at all than videos with ads.

Good fucking riddance.

The sooner they realize the enshittification isn't working, and is only increasing the amount of people participating in the largest global consumer boycott ever, the sooner they'll actually try to improve the platform, or die resisting.

YouTube has continuously made the experience worse, adding more and more ads to users not using ad blockers, to compensate for those using them. Guess what, genius? People block ads because they suck. Adding more won't stop people from using ad blockers!

And they have the audacity to try selling YouTube Premium for a whopping $14/mo (nowhere near the actual revenue generated from a user watching ads,) then don't even provide any real benefit past ad blocking, after they deliberately killed YouTube Originals because it didn't instantaneously bring in immense profits.

And the content creators I personally know have shown me the amount of money they get from Premium users, and it's sometimes less than the value of an ad-supported user, even though the Premium user generates more revenue than an ad-supported one.

I would pay for YouTube Premium if it was a reasonable rate, and actually came with exclusive content, similar to Nebula, but it doesn't.

Instead, YouTube has continued to make the interface more and more bloated, slow, and inefficient, and increased the incentives for low-quality, mass-produced content, all while not paying creators enough to support themselves on YouTube's own platform.

YouTube can't see itself as being the cause of its own issues, because it's blinded by bad ad-driven fiscal policy that has only been a proven failure.

YouTube is also aggravating customers who use their official apps by increasing the frequency and length of the ads. In just 4-5 months, I've seen YouTube ad lengths on Roku go from 10-15 seconds to 30 seconds, to a minute.

They're trying to recoup lost ad revenue by pissing off the one demographc most likely to sit in front of the TV the longest.

Gotta love when the article saying adblock-blocking doesn't work is itself preceded by a notice to disable your adblocker

The ads have reached a breaking point.

If I can't block them, I'm just not watching the YouTube. I'll never pay.

It used to be funny to link a relevant YouTube clip, but it's not funny if you have to sit through half a minute of ads just to see something silly.

It's also not really a long time streaming service like TV channels or netflix etc., because the homemade content sucks in comparison to an actual documentary that I can also watch without ads on other services.

It's like Google completely misunderstood the point of the service they initially made. Also following a decade of users attempting to "monitize" their fucking crap, you can be sure that there's nothing worth watching on YouTube that couldn't have been better presented in a gif or in text.

Then the player is also fucking up lately. Usually if I go there, I'll check the written description while the ads play, just to see if the content is worth the wait, but nooo.... you can't even do that anymore, because the app will start reloading between the multiple ads and the screen scrolls around and minimizes the description and comments. They're literally hiding any information on the clip except the title until you've watched the ads.

It's fucking garbage. Enshittified to death.

Repeating: Google, if you're listening: I'll never pay for YouTube, no matter how intrusive you make the ads. Enshittification is not encouraging me to pay.

Who could have foreseen this? s/

I'll stop using YouTube altogether before I disable my ad blocker. My time is simply more valuable than whatever video I'm watching.

Wheres the data to back up this claim? That article is purely opinion

Fuck em, they're just greedy fucks that'll blame us for everything.

If they kept the ads to 10-15 seconds at the start of a video and didn't interrupt my videos for them, I would never use an adblock on Youtube (i'll even give them an allowance for one 10 second ad interruption for every hour in the case of super long videos). But for as long as they keep trying to squeeze every goddamn penny out of me that they can, I will fight back and do everything in my power to prevent them from being allowed even a single ad impression off me.

I'm not unreasonable, but I refuse to accept unreasonable offers.

potential account suspension.

What account?

I pay for Nebula and try to watch as much as I can there. The content is more "pleasant department store" and less "Mexican public market".

I do watch YouTube regularly when channel-surfing, but if I ever see an ad (which happens only on mobile devices), I close it immediately and do something else. It's not that I don't think I should be able to watch everything for $0, but YouTube ads are so jarring, random, irrelevant and just make me sick. They literally ruin whatever I was watching and make me sad to exist.

It can be exhausting to wade through the absolute meat market of click bait titles and thumbnails to find something that not only looks interesting but won't abuse me with infomercial-form audio/visuals.

YouTube enables and promotes the "content creators" who abuse human psychology to accumulate views, likes, subscriptions, etc. The best thing that could happen is they continue to be exposed as the drug dealer they are.

I've been downloading my subscriptions and loading them into Plex. Plenty of room for improvement in that system, but I get a nostalgic hit of YouTube long ago. Man, it's fallen so far over the years.

Also related, I've hit 2.4TB of internet use for the first time last month doubling my previous record.

I want the statistic on how many Google employees use ad blockers now. It's basically a necessity.

I'm starting to think our entire economy is built upon ads.

Edit: Word missing

Ads suck, but the type of ad is what is sucking the most. All I'm getting are ads for get rich quick schemes. You never see big name brands advertise on youtube anymore.

I was looking at the comment section from the article and the following comment made me laugh loudly, thinking on how bizarre our current world is:

So a platform that is blocking adblockers is delivering an ad piece advertising an adblocker. Ha! That's an ad I'd love to watch 😂

Ads overall take up a good amount of time now. I would rather not use Youtube at all if I have to watch long ads.

The ads have become too long. Some of them are 40 seconds long, for a 3 minute video. That's unacceptable. I have thought about it, and I think the best would have been a single 8 second ad, unskippable. But never more than that. That, I could take. But multiple ads (even if they're just 5 secs each but you have to be vigilant to press "skip"), or long ads, or interrupting ads, are just too much to accept.

I'm surprised that Vimeo hasn't decided to take advantage of the enshittifcation of YouTube. They have been a social video platform for years, and are probably the best placed platform to come close to overtaking YouTube - should they choose to move away from the professional space and embrace the social aspects of video.