YouTube's audience size and advertising metrics have long since gone through the point where individual creators or groups of them matter little. If a creator walks off the platform there are more who will fill the place, in search of potential monetisation, so youtube will still have somewhere to hang adverts off. An advertiser leaving is harder to replace than a content provider.

eBay has a similar flip some years ago: they realised that there was more value caring for buyers needs than sellers: sellers swarm in attracted by the number of buyers and are difficult to put off for long as there are often few other options, buyers need to feel safe to hand around.

I get so many repeats in stuff I'm not interested in at all, and completely unrelated to what I watch.

I don't know if it's a matter of those ads bidding the highest or what. But YouTube's ability to show something I'm interested in is worse than even what the daytime TV ads were back in the day.

Twitter (when I downloaded my info, they were still called that) classified me as speaking three languages I know zero words of, and as having interests in several sports (I care for none); my YouTube ad experience is like yours; my Facebook experience today was about renouncing my US citizenship (I'm a British national); the Instagram ads are only marginally less bad — I do find myself liking them, but I have no idea what they're selling because what I get shown are all uplifting landscapes or cute animals with no sales pitch.

Edit: also, a friend of mine was just playing a game, advert popped up in a language neither of us could read. I had to open Google Translate just to find out it was Romanian and which button was "close" (and also to discover that it was an ad for "easy and fast international payments"?)

Youtube is indeed a monopoly -- but it's not actually addictive. Since they started this war against adblockers I have found that I can perfectly live without it.

When I absolutely would like to watch an informative video (for example, about how to fix something on my bike, etc.), I first try to open the video in a private window (with ublock on); if that also doesn't work I try to use yt-dlp.

But I have completely stopped mindlessly watching videos that are not the result of a search.

There's nothing necessary about youtube.

Youtube is definitely addictive to a large population of people. If you can live without it, the only thing we can infer is that it's not addictive to you.

It's great that you're in the majority of people who aren't addicted to Youtube, but that doesn't mean everyone has the same experience that you do.

Not everyone, sure, but a majority. People can get addicted to anything; yet we don't just call any activity addictive -- only those where most people have a hard time controlling their behavior.

I don't think watching youtube qualifies (not just being on your phone, or watching tv).

But the real problem is that Youtube makes all this money but it still took a decade+ to start looking profitable. It's extremely hard to compete with them even if you somehow got over the network effects because it's hard to make money while also paying content creators. Google could do it because they could commoditize youtube's early unprofitability to their ads revenue.

Ideally, something like Netflix spawns and lets "amateur" content creators host as well, which solves many problems. But netflix doesn't seem interested and the few competitors doing that are still in the discovery phase.

The economics of supply and demand disagree with you.

A lot more people want to be creators, than there is money in the ecosystem to support them.

If you want to hold platforms responsible for scams being advertised on them, you're going to need to rewrite a lot of law.

What I'm wondering is: Does YouTube not have enough quality advertisers? You'd think they'd turn away the scammers, because actual business doesn't want to be on the same platform as some shady "buy/sell gold" or similar. If they don't, is that because there's no money, or not enough honest business buying ads in a sufficient amount? Or is it that YouTube just makes more on the scams?

Of the ads that recently slipped through my adblockers, one was a xenophobic piece of Hungarian propaganda against illegal immigrants. It was shown in the middle of a Minecraft video (a game without binary gender); that was made by a disabled person; to people living in a city where ~50% of the population was born elsewhere. Google does have all of that context, and yet this is what their ad selection algorithm picks.

This is one among many reasons why I have absolutely zero moral reservations about blocking YouTube ads. (inb4 ad money: I do support creators directly, as my budget allows.)

Yes, this is the same math that scammers run on - because fascism is a scam category, alongside advanced-fee fraud, refund scammers, and fake tech support companies. Your grandpa thinks the immigrants are invading the country for the same reason he thinks he needs to wire $10,000 to the 'bank' of a Nigerian 'prince'.

also

> It was shown in the middle of a Minecraft video (a game without binary gender)

For the same reasons as above, the creator of Minecraft went from "I don't want gender in my game" to "all women are evil", because he isolated himself in an LA mansion and read nothing but Twitter. He also had a girlfriend he broke up with. This makes you vulnerable to being fed bullshit that agrees with you - in the same way that expecting a UPS package might make you vulnerable to clicking a fake UPS text that steals your login info. Either that, or Notch was a trans inclusive radical misogynist[2] the whole time!

Now, let's say you're a scammer. Your 1-in-a-million odds suck - but what if you could pay more money to find more vulnerable people to send texts to? Like, even if you went from paying $1 CPM[3] for 1-in-a-million odds to $10 CPM for 1-in-ten-thousand, which is mathematically identical, you still get an advantage because less people can see what you're trying to steal. Targeted advertising lets you do this[4], and for unrelated reasons, legitimate advertisers will pay more to target their ads to a smaller but more lucrative cohort as well. So Google inherently makes more money the more they build out tools for scammers to do their scamming.

You are perfectly in the right to block ads. I pay for YouTube Premium but I won't yell at anyone who uses uBlock Origin.

[0] To be clear, we don't know exactly where the money comes from, though I can guess either Russia or Saudi Arabia

[1] The core irony of fascism is that the most efficient way to demonize the other is to point out that the other also has a fascist wing. e.g. in America, Christofascists yell and scream that we need a Muslim ban to keep Islamofascist terrorists out.

[2] See also: James Somerton

[3] Cost per French thousand

[4] If you read between the lines I'm accusing Google for the last decade of democratic backsliding.

Facism or not, those heavy ad campaigns come from the most extreme ends of the spectrum. And the new age will adapt to new tech faster. It's no suprise this is the result of it all, especially when platforms can claim article 243 to prevent any litigation against them.

>For the same reasons as above, the creator of Minecraft went from "I don't want gender in my game" to "all women are evil", because he isolated himself in an LA mansion and read nothing but Twitter.

ehh, who knows. 10 years is a long time and the first statement was made some 8 years prior to the 2nd. Could be bad experiences IRL or on the net, or both. Could be wounds much much older than Minecraft coming up.

>You are perfectly in the right to block ads. I pay for YouTube Premium but I won't yell at anyone who uses uBlock Origin.

Google has plenty of money and adtech as a concept is the antithesis to how I operate (let's COMPLETELY TANK the performance of your web browsing because people will pay us to be hostile t the user. And then tank it more so we have proof that the user actually got successfully harassed).

But from a purely logical perspective, I don't like the argument of "google has bad ads, therefore I block all ads". That just doesn't track well.

> especially when platforms can claim article 243 to prevent any litigation against them

CDA Section 230 (or just "CDA 230"), and this actually isn't the reason why platforms get away with this shit. All CDA 230 says is that moderating your platform doesn't mean you're liable for defamation that you miss. This is because of a prior court case that litigated the opposite. The Wolf of Wall Street[0] sued two online services for not taking down speech he wanted to censor. One of them was ruled as not liable because they didn't take down anything; the other was ruled as liable because they took down something.

So taking away CDA 230 would do is turn every forum more moderated than 4chan into a censorship hellscape as rich people perpetually demanded any speech they didn't like be taken down, or worse, sued companies into oblivion for hosting your own speech. You would not be able to sue Google because they served you a fake Elon Musk crypto grift ad any more than you already are able to.

What you really want is to copypaste EU GDPR into US law. This would make ad targeting illegal, which thus would make scam advertising ineffective, because scams rely on surveillance in order to scale.

[0] As in, the guy the movie was about

It’s wild that they couldn’t advertise a sponsor but YT allows scam ads to roll before their videos