I remember that too. I remember at the time that everyone was worried Google was going to start adding ads. And they did it so soo sooo slowly. They did it so slowly that even today they haven't been able to do a 30 second forced spot yet, like TV. It's interesting actually, someone should write a book about the way they introduced ads on YT. They did it so carefully that you could tell they were very very carefully balancing not having any protest greater than a few hundred people at any time.

That was essentially the major reason people thought it was a bad deal - that you couldn't monetize because people would run to the next platform, I mean it was essentially a doomed business idea because the belief was you couldn't get the advertising dollar above the storage and staffing costs.

As someone who's been using ad blockers for years and was watching YouTube a long time before ads, it was quite a painful experience suddenly having ads pop up on every video when I started using YouTube on my tablet.

This isn't just YouTube though, the internet as a whole has slowly shifted in the direction of more ads and more pay walls. I get it, but as someone who vividly remembers the internet before ads and pay walls I still find it odd how people growing up online today just seem to accept it.

> but as someone who vividly remembers the internet before ads and pay walls I still find it odd how people growing up online today just seem to accept it.

I find this odd - you're saying that you're only fond of the way things were when you grew up, but that it's odd how people growing up now accept their own reality?

Yep, that's the nature of things. I'm 41 but I feel like, I don't know, 26 maybe. But I'm definitely not. If I was 26 right now, I would probably have instagram, fb, etc... whereas I have no social accounts, except, I suppose HN.

I have literally no way of knowing what it would be like to have been born in 1994 instead of 1979... it's so crazy how fast things change. What would it be like if the internet was just a given when I was born instead of getting on BBS's and then the internet slowly leaks in.

>If I was 26 right now, I would probably have instagram, fb, etc...

Lol no. Not if you're a nerd, anyway. You'd mostly be on Reddit and HN. ; p The only people left on Facebook in the West are around your age.

Get Discord and Spotify and you're all caught up.

I read the comment differently. I think it is marvelling at how users who first begin using the internet during a time of pervasive internet ads learn to tune them out, while users who first began using the internet during the time before pervasive internet ads lack this ability. The later group are more likely to block the ads to restore normalcy. The former are more likely to see ads as normal.

It’s not just that it’s different, it’s worse. The Internet in the early 2000s was a magical time of unsustainable sharing.

So it’s not just older == better. The early 90s and before were all shit for video and being bombarded with ads as well.

> unsustainable sharing

Indeed, that was another point I wanted to make but refrained from. Having so much content and functionality for free, with absolutely no cost (like your data being mined for pofit) is simply unsustainable... In a way, the early 2000s were the odd time, not today. Maybe that'll look different when/if humanity manages to overcome the major issues we face today and we reach an age of plenty.

It is possible to pay for YouTube nowadays. That will get rid of ads.

If you don't want to see ads, why don't you pay for youtube premium? How else do you expect Youtube to a sustain itself if you wont' block the ads or pay for the premium ad-free subscription?

I now pay for premium, but many YouTubers have taken to do sponsorships. It's getting pretty egregious. There's a YouTube channel I won't name, where every video is a full 2+ minutes of sponsorship, paid content, please click like and subscribe, also we have Patreon, we sell merch. Even YouTube premium doesn't get rid of that.

Those can be manually skipped to some degree by jumping header or speeding up. I wonder if someone could write a browser extension to skip them automatically. I wonder if it could use AI or heuristics, or a crowdsourced database.

Your best bet for skipping this with machine learning would be to use a textual language model and the closed captions.

On desktop you could be interested by this: https://sponsor.ajay.app/

It's just like cable tv, millions of channels and nothing's on. Draped head to toe in ads, and this time its easy to block ads.

How long until the streaming services become comglomerated into one or two cable-like packages? Can't be long now and it will break apart again and reform over a hundred years with better tech ... again, maybe?

people growing up online today would rather skip ads after 5 seconds than watch commercials on traditional television or listen to advertisements on the radio. It isn't odd in my opinion.

Maybe you're not using a good ad-blocker then. I don't see ads on YouTube.

Are there adblockers that work on iPads? Or do you have to use a pihole type setup?

Brave browser blocks most, if not all YouTube ads, one of the main reasons it's my default browser on iOS

Not with the YouTube app, but with the browser, you somewhat can.

I used adguard and it works for like 80 to 90% of the time. For the time where ad did show up, I just reload the page and it is gone.

A DNS based blocker like pi-hole, nextdns, etc, can't block YouTube ads. Or at least it's very hard to it without breaking something as YouTube often uses the same subdomain(s) to load ads and videos.

I use Adblock Plus on iPhone - can be downloaded in App Store and works fantastically with mobile Safari. I even replaced the Youtube app with a home screen bookmark and I haven’t seen an ad since

DNS-based adblock is mostly, but not totally, effective.

Two 5 seconds ads on youtube feel worse than 30 seconds commercial on tv for a reason. The paradox of having 'free' on demande video you cannot actually watch on demand.. until the ads are over.

What is bizarre to me is that I have one google account and on a PC there are relatively few ads and they only occur after watching one or more videos. However, on mobile or a tablet I find that I have ads even before the first video and they are constant (every 10 minutes of video or so) and offer there’s more than one spot in each break... it's unwatchable so I don’t.

Because it's easy to block ads on PC, even for 50+ people. They can't push it hard there.

But there is a solution for phones aswell, YouTube Vanced. https://github.com/YTVanced

> that you couldn't monetize because people would run to the next platform

My anecdotal experience with ICQ in the 90's was the same. It was dominant, but when they updated to include a modest banner ad at the bottom of the message window, a substantial number of my friends took that as the last straw and moved (mostly to MSN). A shame, since ICQ was a pretty decent messenger for its time.

I still vividly remember that "uh-oh" sound, it's been seared into my brain.

Lately it's extremely disturbing. Maybe they did it slowly, but now they are pushing it. Too many and too loud too disturbing ads. I finally gave up and now use Vanced on phone and have adblocker on for YT.

They are playing the slowly boiling frog experiment with ads, for sure.

YouTube is the only platform that I've seen 15 and 30+ minute ads on.

Ever been to a movie? There's about 15 minutes of previews before the movie starts. And you already paid for the movie ticket.

YouTube shoves them in the middle of the video in a way the creator clearly didn’t plan for though - cutting someone off mid sentence usually. Though the ridiculous minute/hour long ads have always been skippable in a few seconds in my experience, and I’m pretty sure I’d just stop watching the video if they weren’t.

>YouTube shoves them in the middle of the video in a way the creator clearly didn’t plan for though - cutting someone off mid sentence usually.

It's possible for the creator to manually place ads in the middle of the video or to let YouTube automatically place them. In both cases you will likely get ads that are in the middle of a sentence, because the ad placement tool is poor. It can be laggy and imprecise, but most frustratingly, it tends to break if you play around with it for more than 30 seconds. At that point you lose track of where you were and have to do it again. It's been broken like that for a long time. My guess is that the state of that tool is part of the reason why creators don't place their ads precisely. Going from a full fledged video editor with great seek and all that, to a poorly functioning web UI is very frustrating.

I think they do it kind of on purpose. Sometimes I'll put videos on in the background while I cook, do the dishes, or brush my teeth. Then an ad starts, but my hands are dirty and I can't touch my phone for a few minutes. Has me wondering if they pick the moment for the ad knowing that I haven't touched the phone for a few minutes.

I don't recall ever seeing a preview for a single movie that lasted for 15 or more than 30 minutes. However, I've seen single commercials on YouTube that last 15 minutes, and some longer than 30 minutes.

Unskippable too, of course!

This isn't quite the same, but sometimes Spotify gets stuck in an ad loop for me, and I'll get a long wall of shorter ads that can only be removed by restarting the app.

Broadcast television?

Also it’s interesting that Google is the only company (except, perhaps, Amazon), that could pull off running and growing YT. YT is strongly subsidized by getting cost reduction by using shared Google infrastructure. Also billions of dollars where spent for years to support YT without return in sight. Probably the longest, or, at least, biggest, “eventually we’ll corner the market and make it profitable” scheme.

Yeah. My impression from the outside:

It's largely been the advertising people/tech that has made Youtube profitable. Not infrastructure effectiveness. (Sure, I imagine infra cost effectiveness was very important during a few key growth years pre-acquisition.)

My point is more nuanced:

YT is worth so much because it is a monopoly. To make it monopoly it is today, Google had to have: extremely deep pockets, efficient infrastructure. Very few other companies could have accomplished that.

AIUI, they had to sell. There was no way they could build out the needed infra to maintain the growth rate another year, let alone pay for it.

I thought they had to sell YT because they were starting to get sued into the ground because it was mainly hosting SNL and South Park clips at the time

Okay, agreed.

Same with android, bought for $50M and is now one of the most used operating system globally.

https://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/google-exec-android-was-b...

Hasn't it made Microsoft more money than Google?

How Microsoft made money from Android is quite interesting, and very ORACLE-like: Microsoft went around threatening OEM companies to pay up for a bag of patents it claimed Android infringed, but wouldn't publicly disclose which patents those were. Meaning OEMs couldn't create work-arounds. The mobile IP-wars were something.

I don't know, but if so, is that relevant? The question was whether or not it was a good deal for Google. It's not zero-sum.

Your argument was it was a good expense because it is popular, yet an uninvolved company is making more, so perhaps the purchase was unnecessary.

Were the objections about the size of the opportunity or whether they could have out competed it with Google Video at a fraction of the cost?

They had a very strong engineering mindset - how many times have you seen in HN about how someone can write an Uber in a few weekends and literally replace Uber. We tend to think it's about the codebase, but it's not. The market position isn't gained by writing a loop and displaying content you're storing. It's literally 0.00001% of the total cost of acquiring customers.

The TGIF doubters were eventually right about later, even more expensive acquisitions that did not pan out, like Nest.

What didnt work out with nest?

Google bought it for $3.2 billion and I doubt it's worth even that much today, certainly not 100x that much like YouTube. It was rumored that Alphabet tried to sell it in 2016 and couldn't find a buyer.

I would have guess it was a success, but not like youtube. Plus with their push on everything is nest, it seems like they are betting on that as a solid competitor

I loved having a nest thermostat and will definitely buy one for my next place