On that note, I haven't watched network TV in over a decade because to the ads. None of the content on offer on cable and satellite TV is worth the asking price of both a subscription fees and ads, especially when most of it can be found in other legitimate sources, usually in higher quality.
There's no evidence of that though. Users will easily close a tab because the preroll ad is too long, because there are plenty of other immediate things on the internet. In a way that TV viewers had no choice, because the other channels are just as bad.
Yes, YouTube ads have been getting longer. But YouTube has also been extremely conservative in that direction, as they know they're walking a fine line. The idea that ads will get as bad as broadcast TV seems exceedingly unlikely.
I swear that listening to a 3 minutes content I am played at least 6 ads of at least 20 non-skippable seconds and in volleys of 2 or sometimes even 3 ads one after another.
It's not "getting terrible", they're already way past that.
I've watched YouTube for years and years and I've never in my life encountered more than 2 ads in a row. I've never encountered an unskippable ad longer than 15 seconds, and every ad that is skippable is skippable after just 5 seconds. And while ads are often included at the start, once they've played I've never seen ads get inserted before the 3-minute mark -- they're usually around minute 4 or 5.
(It's true that after a 3-minute video finishes playing they've started playing another set of ads, but you can just hit pause and navigate to your next video. You never need to watch them.)
I've never encountered anything even remotely close to 2 minutes of ads to watch 3 minutes of content as you're describing. It's usually 10 or 15 seconds total. But I'm in the US, maybe there are countries where it's different?
I'm particularly curious if there are objective stats around this. It's crazy to me that our experiences could be so completely opposite.
But not on YouTube. They're just commercials like you've been watching on TV for decades, except you're able to skip a lot of them after 5 seconds, and sometimes you get 15-second spots, and occasionally a 30-second spot.
TV in the US usually has 8 minutes of commercials against 22 minutes of content in a standard 30-minute block. If you skip ads when given the option, my experience with YouTube is more like 1-3 minutes of commercials against 22 minutes of content (usually about 10-30 seconds of ads every 5 minutes or so).
So in this particular case with YouTube, "taking miles when given an inch" doesn't seem to apply at all.