Nope, same here. They used to have either one 5s ad or a skippable 20s+ ad. At some point they've started to roll two 5-10s ads back to back, or unskippable 10-30s ads, and only the 30s+ are skippable. The topmost video in the app is always an ad as well, in addition to all the text ads you mentioned. I get that video hosting costs beaucoup bucks but the amount of ads is getting ridiculous..

Its happening on other sites in other ways as well (either dark patterns or vast amounts of ads) and it has gotten me to the point where I actively take pleasure in extracting the maximum value for me as customer (so blocking ads, using VPN to pay in rubles or rupees, etc) as most companies these days see you as nothing but entities to suck as much profit out of as possible, with no regard for a reasonable middle ground. Sucks for them, that's a two-way street.

It's gotten so bad that I installed Newpipe instead.

Basically I tolerated Youtube ads up to a point, but now that I'm using Newpipe instead, neither Youtube nor the creators get anything.

I wish there was a better way, since it's not pracitcal to contribute to all channel's patreons.

Subscribe to Youtube premium?

Like many others mentioned, they don't completely stop nagging you simply because you subscribe.

youtube has served me an hour + ad. The non skippable ads keep getting longer as well. But the ad AI is so bad it won't take a full watched ad as a signal, rather it keeps pushing things I want have previously skip over/ simular where they will be skipped.

You have to press report and select irrelevant, or not interested, it helps after a while, it is not immediate. I used to get tons and tons of mobile game ads but after doing this to 10-15 of those amount of those is almost none. I get one occasionally, so it definitely works in a way.

I don't think it is possible to get no ads by banning all the categories this way, it will just become random at that point I guess.

Most companies are trying to find the "second act" and need to bump up ad impressions and revenue until they find that next source of revenue. For Google, it's been cranking up the number of Youtube ads displayed per video and also making various changes to the way Google search results are displayed (the ads seem to blend more into the results than before). But I've definitely noticed this myself.

Yeah this feels quite right with what I'm experiencing. Surely it must risk creating an opening for competitors to show up with far fewer ads.

I think the problem here is that YouTube alone isn’t profitable. I think the only thing keeping it going is as an additional vector of ad placements for Google. YouTube is an extremely expensive service to run as well. No one really has a chance to compete with the sheer volume of content and inertia of YouTube.

What I would like to see instead is a return of self-hosted videos from creators’ own websites plus a site like YouTube that is really just an aggregator of those videos. That way you can also have smaller businesses that provide YouTube-like services for those that don’t want to self-host, but those videos still get included in that aggregator. I think that would be the best ecosystem for competition.

However, I have no idea how feasible that is. It’s just an idea that came to mind.

Just /s/YouTube/Peertube (a federated video host) in your second paragraph, and it turns out to be a thing already:

"What I would like to see instead is a return of self-hosted videos from creators’ own websites plus a site like Peertube that is really just an aggregator of those videos. That way you can also have smaller businesses that provide Peertube-like services for those that don’t want to self-host, but those videos still get included in that aggregator. I think that would be the best ecosystem for competition."

You’re right. PeerTube is sort of what I was imagining. Thank you for mentioning it.

I use Firefox on Android. YT app is unbearable.

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