Today I was reminded how bad YouTube ads are

Tibert@jlai.lu to Technology@lemmy.world – 567 points –

I watched a Warframe (game) YouTube video on the Steam integrated browser, without beeing connected to my account and Holly s* it was horrible.

In a 14 minutes video, I got 5 ads. 1 (or more skippable once) at the beginning, 1 during the first half of the video, 2 during the second half, and 1 at the end.

All were skippable after 5 sec.

2 were close together at about 1 min interval during the second half of the video.

But that is not the only issue. 4 of those ads (not the last one at the end), were Israeli hate/war anti-hamas propaganda.

I consider these ads horrible and they should not be allowed in my opinion.

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Most people, including myself, seem to agree, that ads were never the problem. When YouTube started, it had ads too and nobody cared. But the ads got worse and websites started to shove them down our throats. I miss the times of a single banner below a video. I don't think Google and all the others realise just how much determined nerds can achieve. So far the ad blockers seem to win the race, minus some minor setbacks.

Some of those that work ad tech are the same that write filters.

Yep. My day job is providing tools to marketing folks and improving lead gen. It pays me well.

But I also contribute to open source projects to unfuck the internet. I know the tricks people like me use.

Real heroes have shitty day jobs. Checks out.

Except Batman and Iron Man. Those guys also have mansions, hot chicks, cars, and sarcasm.

Should be good to bad, not bad to good

It was October Spooky when Microsoft dropped the GetWinX.exe icon on everyone's Win7 and Win8 taskbars. The first time, we all followed the directions and dove into the registry to remove it, because it wasn't enough to just delete it. The icon would self restore.

Then Microsoft reinstalled their adware in a critical security update Big Mic also started using dark patterns making upgrading opt-out, and hiding the onay anksthay toggle.

Thats when an engineer, UltimateOutsider, I think, created the GetWinX Control Panel which not only did the full remove in a wizard but also monitored on boot to see if it came back.

It was a reassuring day. I think no matter how much the companies enshittify, it will only drive pissed off engineers to write hard bypasses. It's how we got the GCP. It's how we got Windows Loader for every release since XP's activation process.

That kind of shit is why I run GNU, and so should everybody else.

You don't run gnu; you probably run Linux. In the same sense, you don't mention how you ride the tires to work but you probably mention riding a bicycle, bus or car. You go to see art, not the tools used to create it, and this is why van gogh's art is on display and not the brushes he used to such great effect.

Keep it in perspective no matter how hard the feet-picker wants to distract you.

No, I run GNU. I don't give a fuck whether the kernel is Linux or HURD, but I do care that as much of the system as possible is copyleft instead of merely permissive.

Well this whole exchange was definitely the dumbest pedantry I've seen today.

Well done.

When youtube started, the ads would load perfectly every single time and the video was a tiresome afterthought that would load in fits and starts if it loaded at all.

I use an ad blocker but I cringe when I see my wife viewing a short recipe online, on a page with 10+ ads.

Why don't you help her? Do you not like her??

She's drowning and you're just standing there watching :( :(

Not OP but I run a Pi Hole for the home network, but don’t intrude to install software on her laptop.

I get to choose what software my wives PC runs and how, and she gets to not worry about problems on it.

We'll, for the most part. She insists on Windows and I insist that every time something is wrong it's Windows fault.

I'm totally shocked when I see people using browsers without an ad blocker, mind blowing

Now on mobile they even open up the sidebar where the playlist normally is and puts an extra ad there too. Then it breaks your fullscreen and youre left with the comments open and a banner ad. So dumb.

This. Ads can be somewhat okay as long as they don't interrupt or otherwise hinder the functionality of the website or application I'm using.

YouTube's video ads interrupt the main functionality of the website for the full duration of the ads (some are skippable after 5s).

In the early days of the Internet, ads were ok.

Then the popups came.

Then came the popup blockers.

It's been an arms race since the beginning. The ad-throwers get greedy, not knowing when to stop pushing. That's how things escalate.

The pop-up divs annoy the fuck out of me. And most websites have gotten smart about them by creating the div ids on the fly so ublock can take them on.

I'm getting close to completely disabling JavaScript at this rate.

I started using noscript on my phone despite how annoying it is to use day to day. Desktop have more tools to manage pop ups better, but on mobile the only reliable way I've found is to nuke everything and just re enable what you need.

As a matter of principle I will doff my headphones and look away or hyperfocus on the specific area to skip the ad waiting for it to become available.

Greed

While I think this may play a part, YouTube was unprofitable for more than a decade and probably still is right now. It's not greedy to want to pay server costs

My company is heavily considering raising premium prices because ad revenue is now equal to the subscription cost, and we're still very unprofitable. That's not greedy, that's basic business

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How about you just pay for services then?

We do, look at all this data we let them harvest

It’s not the most appealing option, but it might just work as long as the service is good.

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if they come for yt-dlp i will record their videos with a fucking VCR and clip out the ads so help me god

If I'm provoked to retaliation, my tactic would be to start aggressively mirroring other people's content to PeerTube.

I haven't done so yet out of respect for the creators, but my patience with Google is wearing thinner and thinner...

I've got a vcr in my closet, I don't know why, but maybe their days are coming back.

I've got a Betamax at home. One day I'll pick up a tape, to see if it works.

I can’t watch YouTube without getting ads with some gravy seal in camo walking around in the woods telling me there’s a storm coming.

Who’s allowing these clowns to spread their propaganda?

I don't know what a "gravy seal" is, but I'm trying to picture it and I'm kinda laughing to myself

Imagine a fat, old, or otherwise unfit civilian who has purchased tactical-looking gear and weapons, which he uses for aggressive posturing. That's my understanding of the term.

Pretty much spot on. This imaginary man also owns a truck too big to park and will assault you for being gay and/or brown. People just like him populate moderate swaths of the American South and make other minor appearances farther north.

People just like him populate moderate swaths of the American South and make other minor appearances farther north.

People like him populate rural America everywhere. The South is just slightly more rural than other parts of the country.

Seriously!! I don't mind the frequency so much as the absolute SHIT they're serving up. Conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory. I've been skipping some of my favorite creators because I just don't have the emotional wherewithal to deal with the bullshit every five minutes. It is truly enraging.

I also got a Nebula subscription. It's not perfect, and I wish more of the people I follow were on there, but it helps so much, mentally. I don't have to see crappy ads I didn't sign up for, or feel guilty for using an ad blocker, because the people I follow are getting paid through the subscription.

Ads are the reason I stopped listening to regular FM radio. I used to live in a more rural town and it was at least half an hour to get to any city I would have to go to for more than basic groceries. Once when I was coming back somewhere that takes a whole hour drive to get home, I heard nothing but commercials the entire drive. Not one fucking song (aside from ad jingles) for a whole fucking hour. Ridiculous.

I switched to Sirius. And it was great.... Until they got bought/merged with XM. Now they have a monopoly on satellite radio, they immediately cut features and jacked up prices. They also started playing ads. So I cancelled that.

I've been using Spotify Premium ever since. It started off pretty great; they've recently been cutting back features and jacking up the price tho. So I may end up cancelling Spotify, too, if shit keeps trending downhill. Especially if they put ads in the premium service I pay for specifically to not have ads.

I've been adding music to my mp3 collection since Napster got started. It feels old fashioned now but I have yet to see a reason to use an alternative method. I actually have a lifetime subscription to SiriusXM. So I pay nothing, and I still don't listen to that shit.

Hearing new music is why I like Spotify. Sure, there are ways to find new music without streaming, but it takes actual effort, where Spotify can just make it happen.

Remember the time when people used to have a stack of CDs in the car? Some cars even had a a fancy player that could hold multiple discs.

Yeah I wish I still had a cd player or an aux jack. At least I can load up mp3s on a flash drive.

At least those flash drives can easily store your entire library these days. You only need one, and it doesn’t even have to be an expensive one.

I do have a little 1TB drive I got for 50 bucks on sale. It works great. The car software not so much. It picks up right where I left off in a song when I turned the car off but when the track finishes it skips to the first song of the next album then begins to play normally. Never had that issue with a CD player.

poor people still do, at least older poor people

Older poorer people. Younger poorer people stuff a bunch of songs in an USB stick.

I just emptied out an apartment of an old lady and she had sleeves of DVD's and newer DVDS too

What features has Spotify cut? I've had premium for like 5 years and I think I've seen a dollar raise in price.

Idk I pay for Spotify family premium and it's only gone up $1 since their launch in 2011... I think that's pretty good. Now if it becomes and annual thing then fuck'em.

If you ever give up on spotify, ViMusic is an FOSS app on F-Droid that is compatible with androod auto (you have to enable developer options first for 3rd party apps but it is fairly easy and quick to do)

For me it was TV. I stopped watching TV when I became aware of the amount of ads for cars. There's at least one ad for a car in every "commercial break". So I just stopped about 15 years ago.

I filled the entertainment gap with internet and lately I've been using YouTube a lot. However it's also becoming annoying with the sponsors inside the videos as well. I was not using SponsorBlock before but I installed it a few days ago.

If I'm ever forced to watch the awful ads on YouTube, I'll quit too. My life is just gonna be better for it.

YouTube Ads: "You are a MAN with a GUN and you will MURDER EVERYONE if it means you can PROTECT your FAMILY"

I don't even know, or care, wtf they are selling but they missed the target audience with that one. That's the cringiest fetishism I've ever seen in my life.

Google must be scraping the bottom of the barrel of crazy that's also stupid enough to pay for ads, I think it's common knowledge now that Google games analytics to artificially inflate the appearance of ad impact.

Honestly, I don't really think they could be any more impactful with ads than they actually are, though. Might have to side with them against the advertisers on that front. YouTube Sponsors should know by now exactly how effective Google is. If Google attempts to be even more pushy, like with the banner that disables video player, the only thing they get is massively reduced user engagement as people either log out or leave the site.

A much bigger issue is that Google has either Monopoly or strong Oligopoly on serving online ads, and they set their rates accordingly.

I don't think they need to be pushy, just the quality of product decisions has been going down as time goes on. Monopoly a bigger issue for sure, If not for the massive decline in value to both users and advertisers, we wouldn't mind the monopoly so much.

These ads make it impossible to use YT as a free learning platform anymore.

When I want to dig into a subject, I want to do it focused and without being distracted, and YT makes it impossible. The only content one can tolerate ads on is entertainment, which makes YT just another TikTok.

Currently sharing piped.video with every single educator there is. There should NEVER FUCKING EVER be ads on educational videos. Youtube is run by POS's and greedy shitfaces.

Then pay for your learning ;)

Call me a dirty communist but I think education should be accessible to all regardless of socio-economic status.

A well educated population is better for Democracy, better for the human species and society.

I completely agree, but that's what a government is for.

Your original post definitely implied that it's the individuals burden.

Where I come from, education is free. So, nope!

YouTube is free as well ;)

Or that could be the number one thing that the government subsidizes, instead of how to kill more people. Learning should be the first thing that's free after food, water, and shelter.

I live in the Philippines and get ads for cock fighting.

Not only the way they keep pushing more and more ads is becoming way too much, they don't have any standards for what sort of ads they push. From blatant political propaganda to petty false advertising of apps. A reckoning is way overdue.

Weirdly, and annoyingly, I get this same thing when watching YouTube on my TV (the quantity thing, not the war propaganda stuff. Just regular ads). Whether via Roku stick, Chromecast or anything. It's sometimes an ad every 2 minutes. However watching the same thing on a laptop or my phone even without any adblock and the video will play far better. Maybe 1 ad at the halfway point and nothing else.

I don't know why the TV version of YouTube is such an arse for ads. They're not even in clean places - I get an ad mid-sentence.

Honestly, for a 20 minute video I'd be perfectly ok with a 30 second ad or so. It helps the creators and isn't that much of a pain for me. But getting adverts every 2 minutes, even if they're skippable is just a horrific experience.

The time and set duration for their ads is based on viewer habits, so they are basically banking that you are too lazy to skip it or are out of the room and they can still claim they ran the whole ad.

Recently in a 5 minute video an ad came up that showed it was an hour and 10 minutes long. There is no good reason for that garbage

Dude with kids cartoons it’s horrible. 5+ min ads disguised as cartoons for 2min videos. It’s absurd.

If you use the kids YouTube app then there are no ads. On tv, you can use the regular YouTube app to switch to your child’s account and then no more ads.

I've noticed that as well. Its like YouTube is adding in extra ads for Roku et al. for their own profit..

This is why I avoid the steam in-game web browser like t͟h͟e͟ P͟L͟A͟G͟U͟E͟

Well we learned from COVID that a lot of people don't really avoid the plague much. Time to update the idiom I think.

Avoid like... the doctor ? like the urgent warnings of the scientific community ?

Chumba casino ads are the so dystopian and bleak it's like I'm listening to an ad in a GTA game.

I just found a new app called Grayjay, it combines all the platforms, haven't used it much, but it doesn't have ads, or at least is not supposed to

Grayjay is awesome. Found out about from Louis Rossmann, I think he's involved in the project

I just downloaded it from the play store but can't figure out how to add YouTube to it. I see I can add sources but it wants me to scan a QR-code. Do you happen to know how to add YouTube or at least where to find these add-ons?

There should be a tab at the bottom labeled sources

Also I didn't realize it was on the play store

Thanks, it looks like the issue was that I was using the play store version which was more limited.

I would get it from their website just in case. In the video where Louis announced it he talked about another app he promoted, FOSS stuff, that people download from the play store that had malware in it. So I went straight to futo for it. That and I figured Google would probably not like it.

Yhea, O just I'd that and it seems like the clear winner. Thanks for letting me know though. Was half asleep while watching the video last night.

Of course it is, why am I not surprised...

I don't even look for apps on the play store anymore, to many malware infested versions of open source apps (as evidenceed by Lois rossmans video talking about grayjay)

Reminds me the first time watching a movie on TV in the UK in year 2000. 4 long ass commercial breaks and... News in the middle.

The reason your ads are of terrible quality is because it doesn't know who you are. You're not logged in and it doesn't have any cookies to go off. If I open an incognito window at work and watch a YouTube video it is HORRIBLE. Get rich quick schemes, cheap Chinese scam products, etc. There are a tonne of employees behind this IP and it's a blank slate browser, so they give untargeted ads.

Think of it this way: Tech companies want to know everything about you, why? Because it helps them sell you for targeted advertising. If Dove wants to show their shampoo commercial to women age 14-30 then Google will gladly offer that for a price. Untargeted ads are literally bottom of the barrel ads and can be considered the "junk mail" of advertising. That's what you get when you use YouTube without an account. It's honestly despicable what Google will allow to be sent out in this category and it's clear they don't do any human reviews before approving the ads for distribution.

BS, even while logged in, when I don't adblock, the ads are actual trash, literal scams.