Have Youtube adverts got longer??

A 2 minute advert for a 2 minute video this morning with no option to skip and it’s not the first time I’ve noticed it recently.

Is this the beginning of the end of a good thing and trying to push everyone into paying?

Yes, just noticed that too. Really annoying.

Brave Browser

For now, at least.  Let’s see how it deals with it once server side ad injection becomes a thing.

uBlock Origin for Chrome / Edge / Firefox.

Or buy a cheap YouTube Premium sub via VPN.

Not just longer but less gaps between them on a smart TV making it borderline unwatchable.  Ad-free on the laptop through  Chrome with Ublock Origin and Adblock installed 😎

I’ve got blockers on the browsers but yes I’ve noticed when I’m watching on the big telly that they’ve massively ramped up the frequency and length of adverts.

They are extracting the urine, seeing how long they can make them before people hit the skip button.

Some like my better half are blinded by letting these ads play out, because it helps the YouTube channel. If the remote is in reach, I hit skip immediately if the ad countdown says 90+.

I don’t know why people are so reluctant to pay for premium. The service has to be paid for somehow either through as revenue or direct subscriptions. It includes YouTube music so you can offset it against not needing Spotify if you’re really tight.

I was going to post a whinge about adverts of my own, but ill tack it on the bottom of here.

Do Spotify, and others, play the same advert back to back on purpose?

Every half hour or so, you have to listen to two or three adverts, for being a free version peasant. Im ok with that. Its annoying, but i get it.

But mine finishes the “you crossed the line” trackside safety warning once, and then just loops straight back into it, and plays the same advert all day. If i was an advertiser i wouldn’t consider this good value for money, nay I might be concerned that the listener might avoid my product because its pissed them off.

Or do Spotify know its annoying, and do it to encourage your to pay up for premium?

I don’t know why people are so reluctant to pay for premium. The service has to be paid for somehow either through as revenue or direct subscriptions. It includes YouTube music so you can offset it against not needing Spotify if you’re really tight.

I’d pay a reasonable amount to skip the ads but I don’t want YouTube music or the rest of the package they’re trying to drive me towards so I think the cost is disproportionate.

They’re increasing their pay for ad free as well, so guessing the two will be linked, youtube is just hunting more money.

I subscribe to a few channels and a third of the subscription costs go straight to YT.  Drop a super sticker/super like?  YT grab a third of that also.

Then I get blasted with a load of ads or pay £13/month to get rid?  I like to support my favourite channels but I think YT are taking the piss somewhat.

To me it seems like a bit of a bait and switch and outside of the original spirit of Google. Sad but inevitable I guess. I pay but it leaves a sour taste.

I always thought it was funded by the billion dollar ad network behind the scenes.

Most of the content is essentially ads too so it feels like I’m being charged to watch an ad of my choice, so I’m not presented with a totally irrelevant ad.

Late stage capitalism, yay.

I mean the EU likely had a hand in this with cookie legislation and are not blame free.

YouTube is like my TV really – I don’t watch many series on Netflix or whatever, but spend hours on YouTube just to tailor my content to myself really. But somehow I am still loth to pay for it, despite ads. The usual pattern for me is a 15 second ad, followed by a skippable one. Any longer I get absolutely raging. Watching 2 x 30 second ads back to back before a 3 minute video is ridiculous. Fair enough if it was a 20 minute video with a couple ad breaks like TV.

The parent company is publicly listed so they are legally bound to act in the best interest of their shareholders. Why is it so surprising that they want to squeeze as much revenue out of it as possible?

I’ve been paying YT Premium for a while now as the ads got too intrusive (and I mostly watch via TV app so don’t have an easy way to evade the ads…). I actually think it’s a pretty reasonable cost (for the time being at least) but I do watch a fair bit of content (more so once I subbed as the ads were a big turn off), my attention span seems to be getting worse so sub-30 minute stuff to watch is quite appealing.

The running costs of YT are immense and compared with something like Twitch (where the no-ads sub costs more than YT) YT has much more content (and much more variety)

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I don’t know why people are so reluctant to pay for premium. The service has to be paid for somehow either through as revenue or direct subscriptions

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It’s not like Netflix where your paying for creation. A huge chunk of Youtube is content with no revenue to the creator

I think they are upping adverts to drive people to subscribe. They made 31.5 billion from adverts last year and you wonder why I’m relcuctant to pay them?

“It’s not like Netflix where your paying for creation”

But you are paying for something. Or you can have it for ‘free’ by paying with your time (spent watching adverts). If neither of those work for you, you aren’t being forced to use the service at all.

How much revenue would they need to make for you to not feel reluctant to pay them? 20bn? 10bn?

Nothing?

It’s just a business like any other, businesses exist to make money. End of the day it’s only 11.99 a month which buys you 2 pints of beer if you’re lucky.

Youtube has become ubiquitous for all kind of things from instruction videos for products to replacing some traditional news media with dedicated news and analysis channels.

At the same time it’s business model seems to be to find out what leanings a person might have and then drive them towards more and more extreme content.

I don’t really want to give my money to a company that will try to push me to watch an Andrew Tate video because I watched a clip of Joe Rogan interviewing Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Youtube has made itself unavoidable but that doesn’t mean I have to give them money or put up with their increasingly intrusive adverts.  If they eventually find their business model is untenable then something else will fill the void.

Ad-free on the laptop through  Chrome with Ublock Origin and Adblock installed 😎

I would strongly recommend uninstalling adblock.  You’ve got two plug-ins doing the same thing and ABP consumes shitloads of memory.

Running uBlock in Chrome on the desktop, I’ve never seen a single YouTube ad.

I see that i have a 3 way choice. But I’m allowed to be annoyed about it

Youtube are the only company that i know of that make money from my content

What ad blocker works on YouTube with Safari? I’ve got Adblock but I’m now getting the ads as sound without video.

On this subject,  how much do you think Grammarly have spent advertising on Youtube?

On this subject,  how much do you think Grammarly have spent advertising on Youtube?

All I see is Grammarly ads, I think because I use Youtube to listen to music during the day while I work. I suspect they have certain ads at certain time to appeal to people that are working etc..

I would use an Adblocker but don’t think I can get one on a work computer.

Premium here – I find the content really useful so I’m happy to pay. Exactly the same as I find the content here useful so I pay a subscription despite the mag it’s self usually sitting unread

habing a premium YouTube account means I can quickly dip into a video when I need guidance completing a new task (it was pouring self leveling compound this week) and not only get to the content quickly but also find out if the YouTuber is a moron before I’ve communed 90 seconds of my life to watching an ad

As a family we subscribe to all the main platforms, for me YouTube gives me the most utility

Cougar

Running uBlock in Chrome on the desktop, I’ve never seen a single YouTube ad.

Enjoy it while it lasts…They’ve been A/B testing rolling the ads directly into the stream making them (for now) unblockable.

Whatever they do, I’m sure somebody clever will come up with a solution for blocking them eventually.

I don’t know why people are so reluctant to pay for premium.

Because everything is moving to a subscription model and something has to give, it’s just not possible to sub to absolutely everything.

For me personally, I watch trivial videos on YouTube when I’ve run out of anything else to do.  I have little desire to pay a premium subscription in order to watch someone pick locks and see Americans reacting to UK chocolate.

The service has to be paid for somehow either through as revenue or direct subscriptions

It never used to be.

Some of the channels I watch now seem to be asking viewers to join Patreon.  Maybe that’s a viable option for paid subscribers who don’t want to see a load of ads.

Certainly another round of A/B testing going on.  Some of what they are testing will royally screw things up.

I use either Brave browser with its built in features, or Firefox with uBlock.  I’m noticing quite a big delay before vids start playing.  Or on the TV / Firestick I use Smarttube.  All the above with sponsorblock too. If I pay, it’s “direct” to those youtubers via patreon etc. and I refuse to watch all the factually inaccurate VPN ads.

I subscribe to a few channels and a third of the subscription costs go straight to YT. Drop a super sticker/super like? YT grab a third of that also.

Even worse if you pay for that via iphone… Apple take a 35% commission first for payment handling, then Youtube a 40% commission I think on the remaining 65%, before the rest gets shared out to the content creator.  Crazy how these richest companies in the world have made 35-40% commission the new normal now, when years ago, 10% would be a typical margin.

I use ublock/ff working okay for YT, have noticed some issues recently such as video image randomly getting stuck while audio plays on – but I hasn’t updated my Linux system for ages.

Don’t watch that much on the TV. Prime for instance forces  adverts so I mute the sound and cover the window so only the ad countdown timer is visible. Maybe childish but keeps me happy!

Been like this the last week or so. Now 50 secs regularly until can skip.

Really annoying when watching daily lots .

I’ve had three bids in a row with 40-50 secs ads consecutively

They are extracting the urine, seeing how long they can make them before people hit the skip button.

Certainly another round of A/B testing going on.  Some of what they are testing will royally screw things up.

Indeed. To think they have people whose whole job is to think of different tweaks and subtle methods of getting people to watch more ads, build them, then run mass experiments to see what works a tiny bit better. Great life contribution to the world.

Well I’m glad it’s not just me.

And maybe I’ll have to install Chrome just for YouTube so I can run uBlock?

Although reading up there it’s going to stop blocking them soon, how soon?

Anything for Safari that will successfully block them?

On the TV if a long ad comes on I find it quite easy to press BACK then OK to reselect the video. This triggers a new ad. Sometimes it takes a couple of goes to get a 5 second skip or a survey that can be instantly skipped. A bit faffy but once you get the measure of it then it only takes a few seconds.

On a side note, why are the ads so poorly targeted? I’m logged in, Google knows all about me, but the ads are usually no where near what I might be interested in.

Although reading up there it’s going to stop blocking them soon, how soon?

One reason I use Brave.  It’s a fork of Chrome with built in features very similar to uBlock. I thought one of the devs worked on both but could be wrong there,  Chrome will abandon Manifest v2 and go to v3 which will break lots of these tools.  Brave etc. will support the existing standard for some time. Not sure about Firefox.

Ultimately it’s whack-a-mole, so every time someone thwarts these tools, the tool finds a work around.  Youtube is just different in that it will drive some people off the system for good. The only losers will be the content creators.

Give it 2 years and those that pay for no ads, will pay and get ads. Evidenced by Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft Windows…

Give it 2 years and those that pay for no ads, will pay and get ads.

Enshittification should be word of the year.

Edit: Actually, it already has been:

The American Dialect Society recognized the term’s relevance and impact by selecting it as its 2023 Word of the Year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Some of the channels I watch now seem to be asking viewers to join Patreon.

In my mind the solution is to charge content creators to store/stream their content.  However they decide to pay for that is up to them.  So they can fill up their videos with ads for how to become a member of the aristocracy or dodgy VPNs if they want or ask people to become Patreons or the ‘Buy me a coffee’ function some websites have.

Adguard works on IOS for YouTube but only in a browser, you might have to refresh it a few times till it loads the video without starting with an as but then there’s no ads for the rest of the video.

Don’t worry, it won’t be long before every bit of ‘content’ will include a 10 minute thanks to our sponsors; Vivobarefoot, Athletic Greens…

…..Car vertical……I don’t mind them as IOS can jump forward in 10s increments so they are easy to skip.

I follow LRTime – a humorous German husband and wife duo who are into tinkering with Landrover’s. Christian is always making tools/work aids and has very detailed instructions and info, this is available for Patreon subscribers. I think this is a good model – non LR owners like me can happily watch a non sponsored video whereas if I ran a Discovery 3 or 4 their information would be useful and I’d happily bung them a few quid via Patreon.