Thankfully YouTube offers a quick and convenient way to opt out of advertisements then.

In which case the app still does not bring any benefit.

The ads are nowhere near as bad as cable TV. Even after the recent change where ads are now much longer.

They are every bit as bad as cable TV, IMO. They are more frequent and they don't even have a transition from the video to the ads, it just interrupts mid-sentence half the time. And for some reason three 30 second ads isn't nearly as bad as a single 1:30 ad. Sure sometimes you can "skip" but then they just interrupt you more often until you watch the whole damn thing.

Seems? That is exactly the point of an advertising company's product.

YouTube sells ad-free access for $14 a month. It's as easy to avoid as can be.

For now. I guarantee they will start putting ads in your premium membership plan. It's already happening in other services. They will do it using the boiling frog method. There is no way they will pass up a chance to make even more money. This is not a slippery slope argument either, this is what has happened over and over throughout history.

Even easier: Brave Browser. ad-free YouTube for $0/month

Well, at some point they pretended to care about user experience. They could not have got their user base if they were that user hostile from the beginning.

> YouTube began running in-video ads in August 2007, with preroll ads introduced in 2008.

Google bought YouTube in 2006.

YouTube began running in-video ads in August 2007, with preroll ads introduced in 2008.

User and usage growth since introduction of ads in 2097/2008 suggests your assertion is not correct.