• Maverick604@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    2 days ago

    I tried watching a 30 minute video on YouTube the other day and it injected ads every 1 minute for the entire video. Fuck Google. Fuck YouTube. Fuck Alphabet.

    • Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 day ago

      I used to watch YouTube with ads since they added ads. It wasn’t too bad.

      Then during the start of Covid tons of people watched YouTube and googles greedy eyes lit up… they went from 1-3 (skipable) ads per video to ads every minute of video. I was like WHAT THE F&$@… then installed U-block.

      I couldn’t believe their greed.

      I also spent Covid downloading (yt-dlp) every video I wanted to archive for offline (never know if they will someday block downloads), I’m also worried for a time we loose YouTube. 99% of the things I loved about the internet is dead now, someday it will happen to YouTube too.

    • AnarchistArtificer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 day ago

      An interesting component here is that it’s possible that the video creator is responsible for this silly level of ads, but it’s impossible to know. Creators can select points in the video where ads will happen, which they can use to preserve the video’s flow as much as possible. In theory, you can even select to not monetise your video at all, which is a useful tool if the topic is something particularly dense or sensitive. In practice, I’ve seen plenty of creators apologizing when an inappropriate ad plays at a sensitive part of the video, despite them having tried to disable ads on the video. It must suck to have so little power over one’s own work.

      In your case, I suspect this was a creator choosing to maximally monetise their video, given the regularity and number of ads. However, it’s possible that this is a 100% “Fuck Google” situation, given how opaque they are. I find it frustrating that when we have poor experiences like yours, we don’t even have a clear target to get angry at. It leads to accountability so diffuse that it’s like homeopathy. Getting angry doesn’t necessarily help change things (at least individually), but it can be incredibly cathartic even then