I tend to watch a lot of Lets’s Plays, and recently I’ve noticed a lot more ads for seeming health scams, such as a mineral you just chew every night to fix cavities and gum disease, and the apparent fact that African-Americans have a suppressed gene that can cure diabetes? Plus NewsMax and videos telling me to embrace Jesus and Prager U. Anyone else seeing an uptick in this kinda stuff? Ok, perhaps Prager and NewsMax are only weird to me.
There are a lot of weird ads on YT, but I haven’t noticed an uptick in the ones you mentioned. I get ones about Medicare, retirement benefits, real estate, and vehicles. I only own or have present interest in the last one, and that’s used, not the new ones I get ads for.
Presumably, these are somehow or other linked to what you’re watching. Alledgedly. I have no clue how ads get picked, but I do know different people get a different “menu” of them.
So… somehow something you’re doing is leading YT to select those for you personally.
Huh. I’ll have to take a look at what I’m viewing and figure it out.
YouTube ads are targeted by geography, among other things. When I use the app, I get ads for European lottery tickets, for example.
So maybe your neighbors are wackos.
YouTube ads may or may not be personalized, depending on your settings, whether you’re logged into your Google account while watching (on all your devices), other viewing activity in your same household or network, etc. And yes, geography can play into it too, as well as the demographics Google associates with you. It’s all hyper algorithmic and it’s unlikely that any two people watching the same playlist will have all the same ads.
You can also disable personalized ads and get more generic ones, but IMHO those are even worse.
Or just use an ad blocker or pay for Premium…
This is the answer.
Until I was helping a friend with their computer lately, I didn’t even realize there even were ads on Youtube. Get uBlock Origin.