Virtual reality ads make their way to Facebook's Oculus headsets

Re:Virtual reality ads make their way to Facebook's Oculus h... by selfhoster11 on Thursday June 17, 2021 @10:17AM (#27539816)

> Maybe it's just that no one wants to pay their captors for golden ear-muffs and blinders when they themselves are the ones responsible for the poor user experience.

I vehemently refuse to pay for YouTube Premium for that exact reason. I get ads that amount to something like "You know how we just stuff ads down your eyeballs constantly? You know how it's really annoying? For just X.99 a month, we'll no longer do that!"

These enrage me to the core. Now that I have NewPipe and other methods of watching YouTube without ads and artificially freezing the stream when I switch away from the app, the official app is useless.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Virtual reality ads make their way to Facebook's Oculus h... by recursive on Thursday June 17, 2021 @10:41AM (#27540083)

I don't understand this. Would it be better if YouTube "Free" didn't even exist? No one's forcing anyone to use youtube. How is this different from any subscription service that has a hobbled "lite" version?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Virtual reality ads make their way to Facebook's Oculus h... by freeone3000 on Thursday June 17, 2021 @11:23AM (#27540598)

YouTube doesn't provide the content, the people I watch do. I send them money. A youtube subscription to them, of which youtube takes a cut, doesn't disable ads -- only a second service, paid to youtube itself, does. Apparently $15/mo gets rid of ads, but $5.99 a month (less 20%, thanks youtube) actually creates the content I care about watching. Youtube has inserted themselves in the middle, and are extracting rent from both sides.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Virtual reality ads make their way to Facebook's Oculus h... by floatboth on Thursday June 17, 2021 @08:33PM (#27546032)

> youtube subscription to them, of which youtube takes a cut, doesn't disable ads

This is a really stupid oversight.. Twitch did subscriptions first and there they do disable ads on the channel you subscribe to (if it has them).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Virtual reality ads make their way to Facebook's Oculus h... by freeone3000 on Friday June 18, 2021 @01:29AM (#27547646)

This isn't an oversight. YouTube allowed this from 2018-2020, but no longer allows creators to disable ads on their channel.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Virtual reality ads make their way to Facebook's Oculus h... by selfhoster11 on Thursday June 17, 2021 @05:58PM (#27544893)

Precisely. I want to compensate content creators for their content, and YouTube for their bandwidth, discovery and video storage with some markup on top. YouTube wants too much for what they do.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Virtual reality ads make their way to Facebook's Oculus h... by selfhoster11 on Thursday June 17, 2021 @05:56PM (#27544881)

It's the sheer aggression in their advertising that they introduced recently. There are memes that you have 2 ads every video, and that is closer to reality than parody these days.

My touchstone for excessive advertising is a Polish TV station called Polsat, which often had very good programming but also lots and lots of ads. We often joked that Polsat programming was "all ads, sometimes broken up by a few minutes of actual TV". It wasn't quite that bad, but it was true that you would get just under ~10 minutes of adverts per every 15-25 minutes of programming.

YouTube exceeds that ratio, these days. And when that happens, I'm almost positive it's time to start packing your toys and looking for a different source of entertainment.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Virtual reality ads make their way to Facebook's Oculus h... by recursive on Friday June 18, 2021 @12:03AM (#27547237)

I wouldn't know. I've been a premium subscriber for longer than that.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Virtual reality ads make their way to Facebook's Oculus h... by matheusmoreira on Thursday June 17, 2021 @11:29AM (#27540662)

> No one's forcing anyone to use youtube.

No one's forcing YouTube to send me the videos either. If it gives me ads, they will be deleted before they even make it to my screen. If they don't like that, they are free to return 402 Payment Required instead of giving me stuff for free.

[ Parent | on HN ]