No worries, and no apology necessary. 
I ranted about these ads for ages. My wife seemed to get triple the number of ads that I got, which shows that they do have an algorithm that gives more ads to some than others. I figured it was either her demographic or my fast “skip” trigger finger.
Then one day as I was struggling with new Adblock issues on my Mac with YouTube, I realized that for a relatively cheap price I could have premium for our family. It was so much easier to pay than to spend the effort to bypass the ads.
My current beef: all of the ads that the content providers themselves insert into their videos. “Before we get going on today’s topic, let me tell you about [some game I don’t care about]”, “And if you find that interesting, you will definitely find [documentary streaming site] interesting…”, “These are complex engineering topics, and if you want to do work like this, you need to know math, and you can go to [some learning site] for that”
I understand that the guy recording the video is supported by those live-read ads, but it frosts my cookies that I pay YouTube so that their official ads are removed, only to have this second layer of ads there.
If it’s music or a movie or the like, I download the video and play them all on my freeware MPC-HC video player. I usually save them, or delete as it were. Otherwise I turn the sound off or skip at the 5 seconds.
It’s telling that the commercials that are actually interesting (and fairly rare) usually have the 5-second skip button, while the annoying ones do not.
It’s also strange to know that face book something-or-other could only afford only two ads for their product, and they alternate between one selling little boxes and another selling her face or maybe some sort of plastic on a ring. (Yeah, that’s all I gained from their interruptions.)
Okay, one more comment. Sometimes they split the video at a semi-logical spot, but usually they cut the buildup and the punchline at precisely the wrong place, making me rewind after it lets me return.
A bit off the you tube complaints, but a similar vein: “doomscrolling” on my phone all the (google? chrome?) news list, I click on an interesting news bite. Some news site article, but before I get to read it, a popup! Desperately wanting me to let us send you constant stories to your wherever, before I even get to see if your news is something I want to read. Yeah, I need more news from some podunk newspaper…
I don’t really have any sympathy for people who complain about or bypass ads on free services. It’s generally up front that the “price” of the service you want is viewing some ads, and bypassing ultimately means that such free services will cease to exist.
Now actively malevolent ads, like those that SDMB served up for years, are different. Protecting yourself from those kind of ads is obviously sensible, but I don’t agree that people should be using services of places and bypassing their benign ads.
I think the You Tuber has some ability to choose how many ads to place and whether you can skip or have to watch the full ad. You can’t even have any ads until you have so many videos on your channel with a certain number of total views.
It’s a choice between “I can not pay you now, or I can not pay you later.” Because I’n NEVER buying anyting I see on a YT ad. Mostly, but not entirely, because every ad I see is for crap.
YouTube Premium is well worth the cost. Ad blockers could give you half the benefit, but there are others, like using YouTube Music with Android Auto, playing music on the phone with YouTube the background while using other apps or navigation or whatever. The total lack of ads is just the icing on the cake. YouTube integrates perfectly with Google and all the “Hey Google!” voice queries. Any random song that pops in my head, I just ask Google to play it for me. Sure, other apps can do that. But it’s all conveniently wrapped in a YouTube package. No complaints.
A lot of things/apps/whatevers are worth the cost. The problem is that I can’t afford all of them on my income. So I have to pick and choose where I bypass some of this crap.
I hope the free but ads business model dies, taking google and facebook with it, and then something else comes along to replace it.
Youtube has recently starting putting ads in front of videos even when the creator didn’t request it. Also, they won’t be paying the creators anything.
The early TV shows used to have ads baked into the story line of the episode. If you’ve never seen that, look up some Burns & Allen episodes for examples.
One tactic that I’ve been noticing has been they will keep playing ads. I’ll sometimes be scrolling through the comments at the end of a video and an ad will play though, and then another and another until I press skip ads. At least on my phone. Fortunately I don’t seem to get any on my laptop.
Not likely. Look at cable/satellite: in a couple decades, it went from a few commercials in each show to heavy commercialization of lower-quality material, along with liberal use of the “time machine” to squeeze down the length of the content to make more room for more ads. On top of the subscription for the service. There is no space for a better model, only more ads.
Yeah, the ads that are longer than the video they’re attached to are the ones that boggle my mind. Really? You think I’m going to watch a half hour video about your idiotic supplement drink attached to a 3 minute music video? Good luck with that. I’ll take the liberty of the first few minutes to walk away from the machine to do something such as: use the bathroom, do the dishes, make a sandwich, smoke a cigarette, or something like that. I can be confident they’ll still be yammering about something I’m not going to buy when I get back and press “Skip Ad”.
That sort of thing is balanced by the weeks where YouTube gets confused and about 50% of the ads I see are in a language I don’t understand. I kind of like that.
I’ve found if you open Google Apps from your gmail home page (the 9 dots in the upper right) and launch YouTube from there, you don’t get ads.
no kidding? I have to try that.
I reject the idea that I’m obligated to pay a company to stop doing things that are annoying or unethical. The vast majority of ads aren’t ethical: they use psychological tricks to try and make you want their product. But even if all the ads were the ethical kind, the way they insert them is utterly annoying.
Using adblock is no different than the channel surfing we did back in the day when commercials were on. Or skipping them in recordings. And doing that didn’t harm the free over-the-air networks. But, even if it did, why would that give them the right to tell me what I have to watch?
It’s not even like YouTube tries to stop adblockers. Other video sites at least try. Heck, other sites do a pretty good job, like WaPo, which just means I don’t read their content.
Finally, I have an issue with paying YouTube when they keep making decisions that harm the content creators. I pay the content creators directly on Patreon, ordered by need so my money goes the farthest. They get more money in a month than they’d get from me from watching every ad ever run on their channel anyways.
And, yes, I don’t ever buy things from unethical ads (which I rarely ever see now): if they convince me, I look up their competitor.
Does YouTube track when I keep reloading the page rather than wait through even five seconds of a particularly annoying ad until something more tolerable shows up? Are there data gathering operations getting a hint of how many of us would like to see LiMu Emu fed into a meat grinder feet first?
I certainly hope they are tracking my keylogs so they can see that I M-for-mute every ad that I can’t skip.
Exactly so. The only ways to monitize content is either charge for it, or put ads all over it. And a lot of people don’t want to pay for additional services.. so you get a lot of ad base stuff. Ads certainly haven’t slowed down YouTube’s growth. But if Google ever charged to get basic access, the traffic would slash in half (prbably more) overnight.