YouTube keeps serving this obnoxious ~5m ad

some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 119 points –

YouTube wants me to watch a 4m30s ad for middle-aged men who want to stay healthy. I won't watch it. Hence, it never goes away.

I suppose this makes sense… I won't play almost any video that has an ad that doesn't have a 5s timeout button. I even skip those, most of the time.

I download videos using Downie, youtube-dl, or yt-dlp, and I watch them offline. So, the result is that I never complete the super long ad that YouTube wants me to watch, hence, it never stops being offered. I think that's what's going on here.

I just wanted to run a sanity-check to see if others agree that this is why this extreme garbage is being served. It can't be that YouTube is serving ~5m ads to lots of people on a regular basis and people let them play, right? I think people would be outraged if this was common. But I'm not sure.

Background (unnecessary info to provide context):

I live in a nearly ad-free world because I deliberately cut them out with software. Thus I don't really have a good sense of what average people tolerate. I haven't tolerated ads for over 20 years. That's when I cut the cord on television and switched to pirating content, later buying from iTunes, then streaming when that became available.

I live in a bubble and was offended at the idiocy of TV ads when I'd visit family for the holidays back when the iPod was on every single ad-break (and I'm an Apple / Mac user). I been un-desensitized for so long that TV ads have seemed alien and offensive for a long time.

It has to be that I keep getting this ad because I won't complete YouTube's stupid challenge-quest of "watch a super long ad one time," right? I won't complete the challenge to confirm that it goes away, so I need others to tell me if they think I'm right that this is why I keep seeing it. If I let it play, do you think they'd serve short ads again and it would be rare for such a long ad to be served? I'm not going to do so either way. Fuck YouTube and fuck ads.

Aside: when I can no longer download videos to avoid ads, I'll stop watching YouTube videos. Spare me your lectures on them needing monetization to pay for servers. We won't agree for reasons beyond the scope of this question.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

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Just pay the $10 for ad free. It’s a shitty answer, but one of the only services that’s still worth it if you use it enough.

YouTube is the only streaming service I pay for at all and haven’t had to deal with ads in years

$10-14 (whatever it is) per month for music, podcasts, informational vids/diy, etc. Then just pirating any shows is the only way to do it nowadays. No ads and still exponentially cheaper than tv 20 years ago which was pretty much 50% ads.

Pretty sure Google doesn't need my money. That money goes to creator's patreons and projects I love and use

So, you just want free shit?

It’s like $15 a month now. I paid for premium when it was $10 and included music streaming. When the raised the price 50% I immediately cancelled. I use Smart Tube Next on my Sheild and have Firefox focus on iOS. + PiHole, + unlock Origin. Ads can go screw themselves.

So you stopped using YouTube right?

I mean, surely you don’t think everything you have should be free?

Google data mines the fuck out of me, even with all my blocking of ads. So yeah I think YouTube without ads is fair trade for all the money they've made off my data. They don't get my money as well as being able to do whatever they want with my data.

Decent rebuttal. I like it and can even accept it.

You are the very first person to have a reasonable answer, other than the guys that are like me and just say that I’m too cheap to pay for it, I can totally at least respect the honesty therein.

I mean nowadays I just use ad supported versions.

Other than the Hulu Disney combo, but I think that’s worth the money with Fox, Marvel, and Disney movies on it.

I used to have prime, Netflix, and Hulu but then they got greedy as fuck

No but I don't think I must enrich billion dollar corporations with my valuable attention span either so they can continue to exploit and extract labour value from the working class if you want to get philosophical about it.

So … taking people’s work for free is what you’re criticizing them for?

You dont negotiate with terrorists.

Yeah, it's a shitty answer, when there are multiple free options that eliminate the problem.

Totally agree. For-profit platforms won't exist if they can't generate revenue, either from ads or subscriptions. If I use a commercial offering I expect to pay for it.

If you use the platform and sidestep paying, you're just foisting the expense off on paying customers.

It's only like 2.25 a month of you vpn to India before signing up for premium

Ouu good call. I’ll have my girlfriend sign in and set it up next time she goes home. This is a great hack for subscriptions that I never thought of.