That's not true. We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.
The YouTube ads are hated because that's the whole point. YouTube has something we want (the video), and they're keeping it from us until they we do something we don't want to do (watch an ad). We dislike these ads almost by definition. If we liked them, we'd seek them out, and we'd call them something else, like "movie trailers" or "Super Bowl ads."
And it's rapidly getting worse
Glad you're cool with it though, I guess? Cuz I've considered running for office on the sole platform of having them perpetually removed and perpetrators prosecuted.
There are literally signs advertising to hire people to place more signs.
> Go to church or the devil will get you!
This is, of course, completely ignored.
There are also signs stuck on wire next to freeway exits or other prime traffic areas. Typically they're on public land because a property owner would want permission or would just remove it.
There are people who angry enough about the sign proliferation that they cut the sign in half so you can't read the phone number or address or whatever.
You should be able to go online and pay a small fee (like $1 or even $.25) per sign that you put up for your garage sale or business. The money could be divided among the city, the pole owner, and people who are paid by the city to remove signs that don't have a QR code or has one that expired.
The fee could be adjusted so that garage sale signs cost much less than business signs. Business signs could only be allowed for businesses who started less than X days ago. Etc.
1. I saw one last week advertising a halloween party, so it's been in the ground for over 6 months. It is on a sidewalk near the university and is passed by about 1000 people per day, and in 6+ months not ONE SINGLE PERSON said "Oh, I should talk this down".
2. I once saw a city employee get off their riding lawn mower to move one of these signs out of their way, cut the grass, then get off the mower again to put the sign back!
And echoing the GPs comment, what really gets me about these is that we all have our lives diminished so that one person or company can earn a little extra...maybe. Or in other words, 1000's of people are subjected to this and perhaps 1 person might bite?
I'll close with my favorite interpretation of advertising: Advertisers essentially steal your sense of self-satisfaction so they can sell it back to you.
Weren't you one of those people? Why didn't you do it?
Earlier you indicated nobody noticed (yourself excluded). Now 1,000s of people are being subjected to it?
Why wouldn't they? It's not their job to remove the sign and dispose of it. By leaving it in place, taking up space, eventually enough of these signs will pile up and cause such a problem that the powers-that-be will be forced to deal with the situation.
Just to be clear, the advertisements that I'm referencing are ones like this (https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-signs-at-roadside-advertis...), where the goods being sold are sold on the property the sign is on, ie, they're basically shop signs. They are usually pretty small too, with larger ones needing the approval of the local authority. There does seem to be pretty good enforcement on this too. I'm definitely against advertisement billboards: those big slabs that are just there to distract you with any arbitrary advertisement that paid to be wallpapered onto it.
You can still find your way around, and discover things, but looking around feels like you are finding things instead of looking at things yelling at you to find them.
I think that rule helps strike a decent compromise: Adjacent local businesses can draw attention to themselves, but it blocks the business-plan of erecting a forest of billboards to auction off, flogging cell-phone providers or prescription drugs etc.
Except digital billboards, especially those that can switch to blinding white backgrounds at night. Those can rot in hell.
If you read the rest of the paragraph it becomes clear that this is what was meant by irrelevant.
The ad that convinces you to buy something you hadn’t thought of before (while watching a video related to that topic) would be considered relevant by the ad industry. But that’s still irrelevant in common usage because you were watching a video, not shopping.
Well, I don't complain about road signs.
That value still needs to be compared and evaluated for delivering information vs delivering annoyance. If information were delivered by giant, flashing, multicolored road signs every 50 meters the answer would be different. My 2c.
Road signs are relevant so we dont complain about them despite being an ugly eyesore.
While relevance has some correlation to value, that correlation is pretty weak; it is easy to find examples of high relevance and very negative value. We should not conflate those.
Your opponent (with whom I agree) argued that the problem with most YT ads and billboards is negative value. Which will stay even if google makes them relevant. My 2c.
Regardless, we all agree: roadsigns are ugly but ok, billboards are just plain bad.
There are places where billboards act as rather effective sound barriers, shielding quiet neighborhoods from road noise.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.[1]
That’s not how the economy works.
Kind of seems like how the economy works quite a lot of the time
I don’t mind watching a video with an ad. My child and I can preoccupy ourself. When it’s a 90 second ad we are forced to watch just to watch a 45 second video I’m gonna make certain we don’t watch that ad
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no...
Elaborate.
> Nothing is wrong with billboards, I can look the other way. When the billboards show up on my dashboard and I have to stare at it before I can turn off my exit then we have problems
> I don’t mind watching a video with an ad. My child and I can preoccupy ourself. When it’s a 90 second ad we are forced to watch just to watch a 45 second video I’m gonna make certain we don’t watch that ad
I like these things but I do not seek them out.
To be clear, this is my primary point because I’m driving, not shopping. Something that gets close to maybe agreeable (I would still dislike it) would be an advertisement for a gas/charging station on a long highway. But even then we already have official roadsigns that only show logos and are otherwise relatively unobtrusive. Similar ones for fast food, actually.
Such signs seem agreeable given there is some relevance (I legitimately might be low on gas/battery charge/food satiation levels in a context which I am actually likely to have a specific product need from one or more of the advertised businesses) and they are small enough to be ignorable when they are not actually relevant. The biggest issue I think about with that is how a business gets themselves on the sign but it’s probably not that hard once they are operating next to a highway exit.
(I loathe advertisements, so when I say “agreeable” I mean something like “not wholly disagreeable”.)
Driving-related products like tires are annoying on a billboard on the side of the road because I am obviously not going to look at my tires while I am driving, and it is usually not something you have an urgent need for. They are however relevant (and therefore less annoying) in a gas station, where you can check your tires as you are filling up your tank. It may even give you the idea of checking tire pressure, which is a good thing. One of the most clever driving-related ad was a letter I received from the garage I did car maintenance with, reminding me a couple of weeks before the next scheduled maintenance that it was to be done (with, of course, an offer on their part). It was useful, yet 100% an ad.
And yeah, we usually call things "ads" when they are annoying and by some other word when they are not, and advertisers tend to avoid the word for this reason. Calling it "sponsored" for instance. But it doesn't change that fact.
Ads are just mental warfare against you. Its someone trying to manipulate you for profit.
If I drive somewhere I know where I want to go. If I need supplies I can pull over and check on the map where the nearest store is.
In such case I don't care what store it's, just it's proximity.
So you'd go to a hardware store for food? Surely you need to know what they sell.
Or is it natural?
If advertising has hammered in to me that Tesco sells food and Screwfix sells power tools then my brain has a ready made map of what those chains sell. I don't have to visit and find out for myself.
Yes, I would. When I'm looking for something, I search for it until I find it, and then after that I'm not looking for it anymore. I don't go for a drive through the countryside in the hopes that system76 have put up a billboard which blocks the view of the countryside but shows me the specs for their latest laptop model.
You can tell me you can pull over and look at a map, or program it on your navigation app. Not only it is not the most convenient, maybe even unsafe, but how do you think that gas station ended up on that map? Most likely the business paid for that, making it an ad.
That's the idea, we dislike that laptop ad because we usually don't buy laptops while we are on the road, it is an irrelevant attention grab, especially when that billboard is disproportionately large. But a gas station, restaurant or convenience store is relevant to a significant fraction of the people on the road, and when the sign is reasonable, we don't usually call it a billboard, even though it is an ad and not a sign like a speed limit.
Gas and another restrooms.
Mucking with apps while driving isn't particularly safe.
Well, actually, in all serious travel I do, I tend to know exactly where I'm going to stop for fuel before I ever set off. It's programmed into my gps as part of my route. And I'm going to find it using my gps software.
If I'm doing a less-serious trip somewhere and I don't pre-plan my stops, the way I find places to stop for fuel is I drive along on my route, and if I need fuel, when I see a "gas" station, I stop there. Again, no billboards needed.
> You can tell me you can (snip) program it on your navigation app. Not only it is not the most convenient,
I find it super convenient. Much much more convenient than running out of fuel or not knowing if I have enough to make it to a particular place.
> how do you think that gas station ended up on that map? Most likely the business paid for that, making it an ad.
Well, that's debatable. It's a listing for an amenity of a certain type (fuel station) on openstreetmap. To be in the "Fuel" category that shows up on my gps software, you'll need to sell fuel (or your entry will get edited and you'll show up in a different category). In much the same way as a sign saying "public toilet, this way" isn't an ad.
But the debate about the blurry lines of "what is an ad?" is beside the point: have you noticed how that pattern of: "I want a thing, I search for it, I find it, and then I'm not looking for it anymore" holds true here? And also how no obnoxious billboards were involved?
Even if it is an "ad", it's in an appropriate place - on openstreetmap, in the "fuel" category, and searchable by gps coordinates. I can toggle whether I want things in the 'fuel' category to be visible in my gps software very easily - I can turn that "ad" off with exactly 2 button presses if it bugs me. It's not a huge obnoxious billboard blocking my view of the countryside, lit up with 10000W of lights at night time.
I don’t want AR glasses for productivity or the social media bs they want to push; I want them to blight out every f’n ad that is everywhere. When they can do it in-device with no internet connection and I’ll fork over 1k for glasses immediately.
(I too would love there to be AR glasses that you can put arbitrary software on, only under your control, rather than that of some rapidly-enshittifying company that has the device locked down. I suppose it's not strictly impossible that that might happen, but it doesn't seem like it's the way to bet.)
If an ad is placed in a way that forces you to look at it you have every right to want to remove it. If it's in my personal power, I do.
Cheap signs along the road don’t trip that heuristic because they cost so little it doesn’t change the underlying economics.
I was actually interested in some of those privacy/info removal services but after doing research found those to - as you said - lack value for the money.
When I am at a laptop or desktop I am online. When I am not, I am offline.
However when you’re advertising a VPN on a cooking channel the cost per customer is quite high so they need to recuperate that high cost by charging extra. This is more true the longer the advertising campaign runs and the less a channel is related to the product, each of which drive up new customer acquisitions costs.
Obviously it’s not a perfect predictor, but it doesn’t need to be.
Being the value option is enabled by lower advertising spend but it also needs less advertising spend because it doesn’t look overpriced in comparison. PR firms for example may be able to get a few articles written quietly pushing your product. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html However spending 100x as much doesn’t get you 100x as many articles. Diminishing returns hit hard and YouTube or other mass market advertisers is low on that list.
Companies can employ multiple strategies, Lexis and Toyota are car brands under the same entity targeting essentially completely different customers bases with two completely independent advertising budgets.
Well that's the only place I ever hear of them. They all say they're great! I've never seen them or had anyone else attest to it except ads that all came out of nowhere. Seems like a play to make big moves in the headphone market. They sure did spend a lot on marketing, I hope enough went to design to make em actually good.
Now, I don't own any raycons because as I said seeing this behavior makes me skeptical of the product.
Meanwhile the main headphones I use I've never seen an ad for once. A friend recommend the m50x's when we were djing. I tested em and loved em. After getting them I notice they are basically an industry standard for audio which is my work. I suspect the quality product with savvy ads in appropriate places lead to this situation. No doubt in audio magazines audio technica runs ads.
When every YouTuber has done an incogni, nord, raid shadow legends, or a few others, I have to suspect they spent more on marketing than they did their product which makes me think(and has been shown a few times) that these products kinda suck.
Advertising intensely to us is the absolute best way to lose us as a customer.
If person X says "ads don't work on me", the state "I experience no influence from ads because they don't work" is indistinguishable from "I experience no influence from ads because they're so sneaky that they only affect me subconsciously".
Unfortunately, it's very hard to get individual-level evidence. You can get population-level evidence, but sometimes that evidence shows that the ads don't actually work (for instance, The Correspondent's 2019 articles about the subject).
They have always had powerful psychological tools but they are next level nowadays. Best to just avoid.
* https://i.imgflip.com/2yg87r.png
(I don't think pokemon intentionally wants such a toxic secondary market tbf)
I however can confidently stand by my no purchase claim. I'm guessing you arent actually clicking facebook ads(if u don't run adblock for some odd reason.) It's not difficult to avoid that.
Fixed that for you.
Oh and I pay for plenty of services just not from vampires like youtube who rip off the actual talent and hold their audience captive.
Arrr Matey, the sails may have been luffin but they be full again!
I like billboards when I'm driving down an interstate and I want to decide if I should get off at the next stop and I want to know what food options there are. (example: Driving down I5 from SF to LA). I like billboards when they tell me about an attraction coming up. (Winchester House has a billboard) I like billboards when they advertize concerts/entertainers. (Driving down the I15 from Ontario to Oceanside there are ads for who's playing at Yaamava (https://www.yaamava.com/yaamava-theater), Pala (https://www.palacasino.com/entertainment/upcoming-concerts/), etc...
It’s pretty clear that companies can’t stop salivating over how lucrative ads are, and will continue to shove ads down our throats inside of paid products as long as we live.
Many hybrid products/services exist to lower costs by taking on some ads. The low tier Netflix plans and $200 smart TVs are examples of this.
Sports TV is just a monopolist scam though.
To be clear, it's not only Google, all the big providers have so much information on all of us, but they don't seem to take advantage of it at all. I've turned the AD "customization" on/off for all kinds of things and it doesn't seem to matter in the slightest. Nearly everything I see is irrelevant to me.
If a geeky movie studio pays X to show an ad to people of your profile, while a car manufacturer pays X*2, Google is better off showing you the car, even if they are internally 100% sure you'd buy the movie instead.
Even if you pay-per-view of an ad, a company selling tampons will not pay as much for 1 thousand views of their ads on a youtube channel for construction workers, as on a youtube channel for girl's fashion. Because the former drives no clicks/revenue, and the latter does.
So yes relevance is extremely relevant to make money.
No it doesn't. Google is highly restrained when it comes to using what it knows about you to serve you ads. Way more restrained than for example Meta or the newer Chinese apps like TikTok.
Target is a fun example - they had cases where they revealed pregnancies through targeted ads. Now, they'll put an ad of a lawnmower (untargeted) next to the bassinet (targeted) and customers are less creeped out
My XP at an ad-tech is that there is only so many targeted ads, and the advertisers cap how many times they want to show you an ad. When it comes time to bid to show you an ad, all of the targeted ads might have exhausted their campaigns (shown you the ad X times already, or the campaign ran out of spend). In this case, all the advertisers that would bid a _lot_ in auction are sitting out. There are still other bidders, but these are less targeted and are bidding less money. Because the highly targetted ads are exhausted, these lower targeted ads might look random. Their targeting might be instead of based on gender, city, income, the targeting might be based on just geography. The fewer targeting parameters, the lower the bid.
In effect, once all the highpy targeted campaigns are done with you, they stop bidding, and the ads with less targeting which have cheaper bids are now the auction winners. If those are exhausted too, then there is a very large pool of low rent ads which have even less targetting.
https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-t...
For one thing, if you're suddenly in the market for a truck, you'll see the brand that was in an ad a long time ago and you think "Oh yeah I've heard of Ford, never heard of Isuzu, let's look at the Ford much closer.". Even a tiny nudge that the ad did helps, when selling to millions. Obviously a truck is a big purchase, and you individually probably would do more research, but the nudge applied to millions might move the needle in the heads of a few dozen people.
Well, yeah. Those companies will pay to send their ad to all middle aged men. Those companies could slice and dice more to get better demographics, but they don't think it's worth it.
Google's business isn't to slice and dice the demographics to show you better ads. It's to slice and dice the demographics in any way that the advertisers will pay for.
Because the people who are willing to pay money are, ultimately, the customers.
There is zero situation where this technology doesn’t get co-opted by adverse interests to make your life measurably worse.
Better to keep them dumb and then grow a regulatory spine to put a stop to the endless proliferation of ads. It was done for advertising on other media.
Managers want their rewards that are tied to earnings and stockholders want to earn more.
And once they both get their money, the next year reward will be tied to even more earnings. And stockholders will want to earn more.
Anyway, not there yet. Frog is boiled slowly, slow enough that people dont notice until it is to late.
First they need to kill ad blockers tier. Then you increase number of ads to unbearable (they are already doing that) and get as much people as possible to paid content. Also market must be ripe enough, so there will be no more ships to jump. Then you will get ads, different tiers to pay, segmentation of content etc.
And there is more content in the world right now than any single person will ever be able to consume. I have zero concerns about dropping a service.
For Google, don't worry. You have payed them, with your data, thousand times over. And if you stop providing today, your existing data will be exploitable for years to come.
On top of it, by paying, you create a direct trail from watched video (data) to your account, from there to your credit card and from credit card to physical person. So you are giving them even more data.
Anyway, if Google goes bankrupt, because of you, you can consider yourself a saint.
Someone who has really done something very good for the whole planet and human society.
I will lit a candle each day into your honor.
If everyone just paid like you pay for anything else in life, YouTube would work for users, and be dramatically better.
Unsurprisingly, the people who consume resources while giving nothing back are the ones making it suck the most.
They had so much time to do that, yet TFA is about ads getting more aggressive, not less.
I struggle to see the difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.
It's the same shitty recommendation algorithm. It's the same "you will watch shorts or else". It's the same nerfed unusable search. It's the same "we randomly decided that your bandwidth isn't enough, here's a 480p version of the video you're currently watching".
Yeah. That's the difference. That's literally it, the rest is window dressing. You are choosing the monetization strategy: ads or money. If you're not living paycheck-to-paycheck, and you watch a lot of YouTube, paying $13 or whatever is the sensible choice.
Yes, lots of things about the product suck, as you've described. But the content on it is good and the recommendation algorithm is pretty good, at least in its obvious goal of bringing me to new-to-me channels on a regular basis.
Content creators have no loyalty to YouTube and will share their content elsewhere when YouTube annoys their paying fans.
What will happen is, that content creators will spread to different providers, that also have managers and stockholders/owners.
Look what Netflix was like and how many various payable video streaming providers you have now. More than you are prepared to pay for content.
In few years, you will be torrenting content that today you watch for free.
And only because people decided to pay, showing the world that there is money to be made in YT model.
None of that helps you if you want it to be free, but for those of us willing to pay, we can happily ally with creators if YouTube gets shitty.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s a good deal now and I’m happy to take it. None of that matters if you are comparing it to piracy… obviously.
Again, this is nothing new. It already happened with video streaming, where Youtube now is Netflix then.
Yes, it ain’t perfect. The alternative is the creator literally stop making videos. YouTube is already not serving ads for demonetized videos. People doing it for the love of filmmaking can already do it for free.
And now you will tell, that people are not disciplined enough for that, that majority wont pass the marshmallow(2) experiment? That some Mike Judge movie was actually documentary?
Yes, I know.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_trap , A common trick is to provide victims with a simple solution to a problem, for example, leaving only one door open in an otherwise secure building, luring them straight toward the firing mechanism
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
They already get 55% of revenues at YouTube which is basically the highest percentage in any creator industry. How do we pay creators under your rubric and allow them to be discovered?
Classic consumer-only socialist. You have no model for production except business is bad. If you care about labor then you care about labor getting paid. So far you've demonstrated that you have no model of paying content creators. You would rather they go away then actually pay for their services. You pretend you should be able to get it for free. If you have no model of production, then you have no model.
And in our case, it is paid in current model (actually even in model with less ads). It doesn't need any growth of profit.
Everything else is pure greed. Now the question opens, are you paying for videos or greed?
> And in our case, it is paid in current model (actually even in model with less ads). It doesn't need any growth of profit.
Who are you to decide that?
The whole thing about Google is that they are not software company (as people like to falsely believe), they are advertising company, financing everything else from ads. Including search, youtube, android, gmail and all other side projects.
And those side projects brings them data, to advertise more efficiently.
Now, seeing a trend to monetize their side toys is just pure greed, they don't really need that.
This is also the reason, why no one can compete with them. As competing with free products is impossible unless you have side financing.
By the way, did you (and everyone else) maybe read this study? https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/leave_my_br... It is very eye opening.
Don't be afraid, they have calculated people not paying into the strategy.
And it wont stop working because you wont pay Google extra money. But it will become worse for most of people, including you, if you set yourself into position of slave and pay, confirming their theory that they can exploit you so much more.
Btw, did you check the link? You should really learn from it.
Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.
No they are the decipline you are talking about, the delusion is, if everyone used paper straws we would save the ecological destruction of the oceans. The structural problems of endless profit maximization machines can not be addressed by appealing to individual action.
> Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.
That depends on the amount of pieces, don't you think?
Or said differently: plastic straws are only a minor part in ocean pollution, while people not voting with their wallet is the main reason for all corporate shenanigans we are experiencing.
And yes, I agree it depends on number of pieces, but I don't put any trust into USA as state, even without Trump, being able to persecute billion $ corporation.
That's what I'm getting at is wrong. The paper straws are an analogy, if everyone stopped driving cars and lived in the woods we could reduce carbon emissions significantly, therefore the reason we can't stop climate change is people not voting with their wallets. Everything is people not voting with their wallets, it applies to everything, that's why it applies to nothing.
If you pay premium: they'll add ads to premium too.
If you watch ads: they'll add more ads.
If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video.
If you use another platform: the said platform will need to monetize and you are back to square one.
Someone will eventually make an AI adblocker that will dynamically update the video with all ads removed or replaced. For example, let's say that I specify to my AI streaming video editor that "detect all bottles and glasses with alcohol and replace their contents with water and their labels with Liquid Death"
Similar technology will be/is already used to e.g. display a Coke can for some markets and a Beer can for other markets, depending on who paid for that market.
If they do this then the right arrow becomes your best friend. If it's part of the stream then they have no way of blocking things so you can't skip past them. If they embed some way of notifying the app that it needs to block skipping here or there then that's what adblock would start triggering from. I'm assuming that's why they don't do it now.
If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
Reminds me of the early justification of Napster where people would complain the latest B. Spears song was garbage and not worth paying for, yet it was the most downloaded song.
The most common throughline of all pro-piracy discourse is that there's a lot of people who feel completely entitled to free entertainment, and they will come up with all sorts of bizarre mental gymnastics to justify that as something other than "I want free entertainment and don't want to see ads."
I don't think anyone could articulate a coherent logical argument as to why they feel they should get YouTube's services, and the entertainment produced by the creators who are on YouTube, while not paying either of them through any means, other than pure selfishness.
Maybe because it was not monetized originally, and so those who were around back then argue it must remain that way?
Not really. I cancelled netflix and I went back to torrents. And I'm sure there were many like me.
I don't think I deserve it free, but by doubling the price for the adfree option they just got to the point where I didn't care anymore.
And since I'm taking what they are giving me for free, then whether or not I decide to watch the parts they try to force on me to try to entice me to buy something I have no intention of buying is none of their business.
If they didn't leave this door wide open then I would be forced to decide if it's worth enough for me to pay to use it. But since they do I do what I want. It's not up to me to make sure that YT's and creator's business models are making them money.
This is a big part of it. It drives the price up a lot but I don't want it so I pay for nothing,
> If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
I don't pay and I use adblock and sponsorblock. I don't watch enough to make it worth it and with ads YT is literally unwatchable now. I watched a mentour pilot video the other day without the blockers and every 2-3 minutes there was an ad interruption, every time for the same stupid car. Not even relevant because I don't buy or use cars.
And there is no competition for YT right now.
Also, I really don't care about the ethics. I don't care if you think it's wrong. I'm just saying why I do it, not trying to justify it ethically. Because I have no ethics when it comes to big corporations. Just like they don't towards their customers.
* I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it.
* I pay for youtube but I don't always get to use my account. Other people's houses and devices exist. Other people's accounts exist even on my own device.
* I pay for youtube and still have to get all the baked in ads.
* I pay for youtube and have a wonderful black screen with no suggestions or discoverability because I have history turned off. (the feature does not depend on the history data, because for years this was never a problem, only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows). This even after I partially gave in and subscribed to a bunch of channels, which previously I never did.
* I pay for youtube and still have no control to disable shorts. (don't tell me about browser plugins. The world is far more varied than one browser on one pc. There is no youtube browser plugins for roku or the 100 other platforms that have youtube players. And even on a pc, you're not always on your own pc where you are free to hack on the browser.)
Here is the value you get from paying for youtube:
It's having only 8 of your fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.
"then don't use youtube" is a non-sequitur to that.
After all the creators already get paid more for premium views.
Answer is paying does not make it nice. Paying does one thing, which is significant, but the experience ovarall still sucks, including even that one thing, ads, because you still get ads.
I'm extremely skeptical that the company that makes most of it's money on the collection of data isn't still collecting data on your viewing habits (and other assorted account-related activities) just because you clicked a checkbox. I don't have a lot of great evidence to back this up but I would still see videos related to my viewing history in the after-video suggestion grid as recently as a few months ago ( before I realized I could zap it with Ublock)
But the checkbox claims that they aren't logging, and so by clicking it they know your intention is not to cooperate in their fundamental business model.
It's just yet another little deniable dark pattern pressure, making the service suck a little when you don't do what they want.
And my outrage point is you get this dark pattern pressure even while you are actually paying money at the same time.
They make more money from the free users and ads than they do from subscriptions. They actually don't want paying users, they just kind of hsve to offer the option to keep those users pacified.
The whole point of YouTube is watching your subscriptions or recommendations based on your previous history. What is your use case if you don't even want to be logged into it?
Subscriptions less and less. I can think of two that I regularly watch, and even those I'll just binge their most recent 2-3 every couple of months.
For me it's Ctrl/CMD+L "y [thing I'm searching for]" Enter.
I've dabbled with tools like PinchFlat to archive/stream via Jellyfin but there's niggles I haven't tackled.
maybe, hard to say. but the people who make videos, and get 55% of the revenue (give or take a bit), frequently are not (unless you insist on watching mega channels only).
For example, there's a guy who rebuilt a early-1900's sailing boat from scratch, funded almost entirely by revenue from his channel. The videos are crazy high quality hand-construction porn and would never exist without the monetization aspect. Oh, and I had no prior and no current interest in boat building.
Most of the channels I follow (via RSS, rather than YT itself) are like this, and YT generally does an excellent job at putting new channels in front of me from time to time that marry my interests (even one's I didn't know I had) with phenomenally great story telling via video.
But people like linus tech tips, marcus brownlee etc, they have really gone over the edge of commercialisation. I don't bother watching them anymore.
Youtube can take a hike, I’m not giving that company a dime and hope it fails. After some changes in my personal life as well, it’s good that I am not spending too much time on that awful website
I currently pay for Apple Music though ha
I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.
I recall that even logging into Youtube with your Google account could have that danger: if for some reason Google decided that your name isn't your real name, under its "real names" policy your whole account could get banned, even from other services like Gmail and Google Talk. It's for that reason that I've been very careful to never log into Youtube with my Gmail account, even though that account always used my real name, and even though Google+'s deep integration with YouTube is AFAIK no longer relevant.
Ad blocking is already free and was free for two decades, why would I want to start paying for it now? It's not like I am breaking ToS (despite their pop-ups stating otherwise) and even if I did it is my computer and it is entirely up to me what kind of content it is and isn't going to display.
Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile.
Everyone wins aside from me, the end user. I am paying for something that is already free to do, I get nothing out of it (I still have to run stuff like Sponsorblock to get the content I actually want) and I participate in the upkeep of a business model that not only doesn't have my interests in mind but also has no issues with tricking me (there is no content moderation for YouTube ads and there are plenty of cases in which users are served scam ads).
Then stop watching youtube. You're just free-riding on the backs of whatever mechanisms exist to motivate the people who make videos to keep doing so. Plenty of other things to do in life other than watch videos you think are worth precisely zero <currency-units>.
Why would I, since I can watch it for free without ads ?
> Plenty of other things to do in life other than watch videos you think are worth precisely zero <currency-units>.
Oh they definitely are worth something. But I also definitely do not want to give Google money.
I say this number so people know how to think economically about this. Anyone who is complaining about this is annoyed, but not $14/month level annoyed on net. Otherwise they'd just get the subscription, or stop watching YouTube.
Bane: For you
I dislike them because they're loud, flashy, annoying, and (most of all) because YT saturates them. It even tries to put them in the middle of songs when it detects a transitional pause. And they are served so often. It's literally worse than broadcast TV, which is an incredibly low bar to step over.
Platforms should not allow advertisers free speech. They should limit the content to static imagery/shots, dissolves, and spoken narration, ie the form rather than the content. Don't tell it can't work, this was how adwords worked on Google Search for years and everyone made handsome profits. Advertising is cancer if allowed to go full spectrum. The people who work at Youtube should be deeply ashamed of what they have allowed it to become and the trash monetization incentives they've established.
Not only are they largely irrelevant, but they are frequently in the wrong language. If I want to immerse myself in the local language, I will go outside and interact in that language. If I am listening to a podcast in English, typically around Anglophone cultural or political topics, why would they invade my space with non-English content?
I don't want to hear local music or K-Pop when I am listening to classical music.
In many cases, the language isn't even local to the country which I reside in. If I cannot have an English-only space on my own computer, I won't be using the site. There's a time and a place for immersion into other cultures. My personal computer in my home office isn't the place.
First pay with your identity (carrier phone number required for a Google account). Then double pay through Premium in the illusion you won't end up seeing ads anyway.
Youtube is offering access to entertainment in exchange for 30s ads, that's a valuable proposition to many.
If you’re Coca Cola and you spend £1,000,000,000 on a Christmas TV ad of a bear drinking cola, does that increase your sales? No. It does nothing. But every year they’ll do it.
The only marketing that works is at the point of sale, and free samples. Anything which is just random and in public will not result in anything.
But the genius of the scam is, it’s not measurable. You bill £1,000,000,000 a year for marketing, and they can’t measure if it worked. How do you know if a TV ad worked? But they can’t withdraw the funding, because you’ll tell them their competitors will win. So the scam keeps going.
Well this is one of them too, unfortunately.
Ads work extremely well. Often they are the single most important aspect of product. Google and Meta are two of the largest corporations on Earth entirely because thin brains click their ads all day. Your hate for ads isn't misguided, but you are hitting the wrong mark.
If you visit content on the internet that the Google Ad network thinks suggest you might be interested in purchasing new tyres, then showing you ads for companies that sells tyres is, unfortunately, relevant no matter what your doing now, because you're more likely to click them, or remember the company/brand when choosing a purchase.
Also a large proportion of ads aren't designed to affect immediate purchase - cars, movies, coca-cola, and other brands are hoping to get into your (sub) consciousness so you'll remember when you buy days, weeks or months later.
However it seems impossible to last for our society with all the tracking, product placement and astroturfing.
> billboards [...] countryside
I think people simply find this to be an ugly thing. They object to the ugliness of it. They're in the countryside -- i.e. not the town/city -- and they find themselves unable to escape (even here!) from this seedy miasma. Putting disgust into words is not a simple thing, perhaps this is the reason for the inconsistent reasoning you've noticed.
All advertising is ugly, it's an ugly business -- money grubbing manipulation. It's inherently weird to be subjected to the endless torrent of uncanny twisted art that is advertising every day for your entire life. The ads on Youtube are normalised by the same force that normalises all the other advertising -- the ads in one context normalise the ads in another. The ads on the side of the bus, on the LCD panels on the train, on the same screen that shows the timetable at the station, before the movie starts, by the seemingly sensible ads in Costco. One hand washes the other.
Shit I rather willingly give info about myself so irrelevant ads can be filtered out and I dont have to waste time on them and the advertiser doesnt waste money on me
Most advertising is seeking the less intelligent consumer. Or the young and still naive consumer.
They outnumber you 1 million to 1.
It's why female musicians make more money putting their name to a makeup brand then their music.
It's why Elon will make some promise that is unrealistic.
It's why Apple put low paid everyday tech support staff in their stores and called them Geniuses.
You have to put yourself in the shoes of the mainstream buyer. They see a headline and believe it.
But lots of companies are now allowing people to pay to not see ads.
Not the naive young ones. Who are also the prime target for radicalisation.
Also wouldn't we farm & sell our ad-free accounts
PS: maybe they could just show us Coke ads, whichever ubiquitous brands necessarily advertise to stay in our consciousness etc.
I always thought the geniuses were the second-level (or higher) Apple support that you escalate to when your problem isn't readily solved by the first level?
I absolutely hate advertisements in stores specifically because of their releavance. If I go there to buy cereal, I expect to go to the cereal shelf, look at the options, evaluate them and pick the optimal one for my set of criteria.
What I absolutely do not want is for one cereal brand to be placed right as I come in, exploiting my psychological quirks to get me to either buy it on the spot without going to evaluate other options or just occupy a slightly larger part of my attention to skew my evaluation process when I get to the shelf.
Advertising is just another money multiplier. If you have a ton of money to throw at ads, you'll make more money than those that don't. And to make up the ad investment, you'll necessarily have to be a worse deal for consumers.
The product which is easiest to reach - for an adult on cereal shelves and a child in the toy section - pays a premium to be there. The smaller unknown brands are pushed to the bottom and on top where you have to stretch.
It's no different to a large Kellogg's cereal advert in your face as you walk in the shop.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the whole thing. There is nothing good about ads, ever. If I want information about a product, I'll go looking for it, and I won't go to an advertiser. If I'm looking to watch a YouTube video, there is absolutely no condition under which I want to hear about a product unless that's explicitly what I went to that video to hear about.
All ads are lies. There is never an ad that tells you about the flaws in a product or compares it honestly to competing product. I'm simply not interested in being lied to.
Well, obviously. If the message was relevant or a good offer for the customer, they wouldn't need to pay to advertise it. Advertisement is for products which have low enough cost/benefit for the customer to not sell themselves.
Your eyes are the supply. The demand (customer) is people wanting your eyes. Relevance in ads is if your eyes are a candidate to at some point buy their orid8.
What your taking about at costco is essentially house ads or really signage.
Remember unless you are a brand you are not the customer for ads.
Your eyes are the supply. The demand (customer) is people wanting your eyes. Relevance in ads is if your eyes are a candidate to at some point buy their product.
What your taking about at costco is essentially house ads or really signage.
Remember unless you are a brand you are not the customer for ads.
But the real customer, the brand, cares if the ad is relevant to you because they are either paying for impressions or traffic. Either way, if the ad is not relevant the analytics tools will show that campaigns in Google perform worse than campaigns bought in, say, Meta or TikTok.
I could see an ad for the exact thing I need and I still wouldn't click it. Either it's a scam, or it's technically not a scam because offering 90% off in the first month of a 12 month contract is legal, or it's the worst product on the market and the only way it can get users is blowing VC cash on ads, or there's something else that will surely disappoint me.
One of the blogs I used to read was The Last Psychiatrist. The author had a saying: "if you're seeing it, it's for you". In other words, if someone goes to the effort of putting something in front of you, they did it for a reason. Usually that reason is not "my company is growing via word of mouth and organic PR efforts because our product is so good, but I just want to grow faster."
I'd argue that even in a supermarket they're mostly useless and manipulative. I came in to buy bananas, you don't need to tell me doritos are buy 9, get 3 free.
Fuck ads.
They also are a distraction, which seems pretty ironic when billvoarda are used to remind drivers to not drive distracted.
This is because tracking data is google's moat.
They don't want people to offer content-based ads. Why? Because they will find out that they work pretty well while preserving privacy. And will start using them. But then Google has a problem, because to offer those you don't need a global pervasive tracking network to do it. Anyone with a few million can set up an ad network and compete with Google.
So, they try to double down on their tracking driven approach because it's something only they and a few other big ones can do. Content-driven ads they discourage with propaganda that they don't work, just not offering or making them difficult to use.
> I don't complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they're irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.
They're normalized because we've been conditioned over many decades to accept them.
We were psychologically manipulated to associate brands with specific feelings engineered by advertising firms. Cigarettes were "torches of freedom". The Marlboro Man was a symbol of masculinity and confidence. Coca-Cola was the happy Christmas drink. Ads with catchphrases became cultural phenomena: "Just do it", "Whasssuuuuup", and so on.
We watched ads on cable TV even though we were paid subscribers. We watched 30 minutes of ads before a movie in the cinema. We read ads in newspapers and magazines even though we paid for them, and then when we could get them for "free", we liked even more paying with our attention than our money. We consumed TV and radio shows where "brought to you by" was just part of the content. We accepted ~20 minutes of ads for every hour of TV we watched.
So it was natural for advertising to also take over the internet. With the technology built for them by very smart people who got rich in the process, they're able to create campaigns that target potential buyers much more accurately. They can build profiles of people in various invasive, shady and inventive ways, and their profits have never been higher because of it.
Never mind the fact that the same technology is used to manipulate people into thinking and acting in certain ways unrelated to their purchasing behavior, and that this is largely responsible for corrupting democratic processes, toppling governments, and the sociopolitical instability of the past decade. Several birds, one stone.
Where they’re also “irrelevant”.
But the relevancy to our current activities isn’t tied to their effectiveness.
I know that they’re effective, because I had impressionable teens tell me they wanted me to pick up Prime drinks at the store, all because they were convinced drinking Prime was cool.
But let me be clear — I hate ads, too. I hate them on TV, radio, YouTube, billboards, in my mailbox, in my email inbox, and when they cover up 50% of real estate on websites. Pretty much everywhere they show up.
But the purpose of ads aren’t for me to like them, or to be tied to where I’m at a place I can purchase something.
The purpose is to leave a lasting impression.
And, like it or not, they’re effective enough, for some people and for some products, that they’re going to keep doing them, regardless of the fact that nearly everyone hates them.
The mailbox ads can actually be quite useful. Since I started looking at them instead of just tossing them straight into the recycling bin I've discovered they often contain coupons for good deals at restaurants that I semi-regularly already go to. Those coupons have saved me noticeable amount of money on those visits.
Similarly on groceries. In the grocery case it is not coupons but advertisements of sales. 97% of the time I shop at the large supermarket nearest my home, which usually has the best prices. But occasionally there is a very good deal on something expensive like meat somewhere else and it is their mailbox flyers that let me know about it.
Moreover, it's now also a matter of fending off GenAI content (AKA slop) for the sake of sanity.
So, I'm clearly not the audience. Which raises the question, what is YT in the business of selling, they are trying to enforce? Lifetime?
I am not blind to commercial imperatives, but expecting people to ever feel anything more positive than low-level irritation with advertising is unrealistic. People do not like feeling that others matter more than them, particularly where money is involved. Spaces without adverts in them, whether physical or virtual, are simply more mentally enjoyable to people than those with them. Imagine one of the worlds wonders, natural or otherwise. Imagine the Acropolis, the Coliseum, the Buddha of Leshan - or Lake Annecy, or the Great Barrier Reef, or the Amazon. Now try and imagine a single advert which is so wonderful that it would improve any of them, contextual or otherwise. You can't, and you won't. They're pollution that we tolerate.
If there really was a way to magically make all adverts relevant then yes - users would like them!
But that's a totally impossible ask. Not only do websites mostly have no idea what's relevant to me (even with all the tracking) but they obviously have huge financial pressure to show me crap that I wouldn't ever want.
So, yes. Relevant advertising is good, but also basically impossible.
"Adverts" are a pretty incoherent category here. There are a lot of things that are technically advertising — placement of a product, or informational content about that product, paid for by some company's marketing department — that most people would never think to call "an ad."
For example, the end-caps in a grocery store? Ad space, auctioned off by the retailer each month!
But you're already shopping, looking for things you need, comparing brands; and these end-caps are effectively just putting things you might have been looking for anyway, where you'll find them sooner. So people don't tend to think of these as ads.
(They are ads, insofar as they succeed in getting many people to never go to the regular place in the store where that thing is, and therefore never doing a fair compare-and-contrast of the product to its alternatives, being swayed by alternatives that might be running sales, etc.)
But do they steal your time? No, in fact the opposite; if you pay attention to products on store end-caps at all, and ever buy anything from them, then they mostly will end up saving you a tiny bit of time. So consumers don't tend to perceive these as ads.
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Now take this one little bit further: sponsored search results. These sometimes feel like ads and sometimes don't.
If you think about it, sponsored search results are a lot like store end-caps... except that their existence makes the regular "store shelves" of the SERP page take longer to get to.
If they end up showing you the thing you were actually looking for (as they might if you're searching for a specific brand, and that brand has paid-for placement for their own name — perhaps to defend against others placing for their name; or perhaps they're bad at SEO and their website ranks badly in the organic SERPs for their own name) then these sponsored SERPs feel like they performed a genuine service for you.
Likewise, if they end up showing you something better than what you were looking for (as they might if the organic listings, ranked by SEO-ness, end up ordered askew to actual product value or popularity; while the sponsored listings, ranked by auction, end up ordered by, essentially, the paying company's stock price, and thereby by how much consumers already interact with them), then you also might come away pleased with the existence of these "ads."
But the other maybe 90% of the time, they look and feel and act like ads — things less-relevant than the organic SERPs, that you want to just get out of the way of the search — and so are perceived as ads.
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And now, consider, say, the catalog of other products available for purchase, that used to come in-box with products from some manufacturers. You'd buy e.g. a LEGO set, or a couch from Sears, and end up with a glorified flyer telling you about all their other products — often in much greater detail than you'd get by viewing the products in a retail store. (This has been mostly superseded by the existence of online stores and product unboxing+review videos — but it's still a good object lesson.)
Were these catalogs, ads? Maybe. Probably the majority of people who received such a catalog never ordered anything from it, and had their time wasted having to dispose of it. But because these catalogs were being sent to people who the manufacturer knew already had shown willingness to purchase from them, it's likely that a much larger percentage of people were "called to action" by these catalogs than by what you'd normally think of as an advertisement.
And, in fact people sometimes would just read this type of "ad" for fun: fantasizing about things they might one day own! (I recall doing this myself, as a child, with certain toy-brand catalogs)
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One more turn of the screw: is a movie or TV show that stands on its own as a work of entertainment, but which was made at least in part with the motivation of getting people interested in purchasing things from the franchise licensor's universe of branded products... an ad?
Certainly, back in the 80s, when advertising laws were more lax, and there were kids' cartoons running untrammeled with "integrated" advertising: embedding ads for the merchandise itself; showing the equivalent merch in the show; etc — there was every reason to call those shows "ads."
But is Hello Kitty and Friends (2020) an ad?
Now, if you said yes to that, try again with: is a Marvel movie an ad?
If you said yes + no: what's the difference? Prestige?
You raise some interesting points, and I'm probably pretty unusual in finding most of those things even low-grade annoying (I am genuinely slightly irked by producers having influence over store merchandising because I'd rather be free to try and choose products which genuinely suit my needs rather than having my attention nudged by certain products being shoved into my eye line).
Movies are about the only one of those areas where I'd be hesitant, but that's mainly because I'd say yes, Hello Kitty is basically an ad, and Marvel Movies... I'm not sure. I'd say the movies themselves would be worth making financially without the merchandising spinoffs, and so they can be considered a product in themselves (and perhaps also because I've never bought a single item of Marvel merch despite having seen many of the films). But you're right to point out that in many cases the line is blurry. That said, for things like YouTube - it isn't blurry in the slightest, in most cases!
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the system that disputes my indisputable right to ignore them. If I paid someone to cut the adverts out of my newspaper before I read it, would I be stealing from the publisher?
Silicon valley has spent the last 30 years getting the internet to run on lies, and depends upon the charity of people willing to be lied to. Now that trillions of dollars depend upon this system, they can no longer afford to leave it up to charity, and believe that they must go to war. This is a war that they will lose.
Ban advertising, formally enshrine the right of adblockers to operate, and use the new regulation to work out a new business model, or perish in the arms race that you are absolutely destined to lose.
If you were alive before ad tech ate the world, you'd have a very different take on this whole thing.
We hate advertisements because they unsolicited manipulations to get our money.
Disagreeable to whom, exactly?
Personally, I would rather the adverts were irrelevant if it meant I didn't have my every move tracked on the web.
The main problems I have with ads are, in order from most problematic to least:
* the lengths that ad networks go to to track me, * the very real possibility of getting malware, * the lengths advertisers go to to ensure their ads are seen. (We have popup blockers in pretty much every browser nowadays for a reason.)
Take away those, and you could convince me to disable my ad blocker. Until then? Not a chance in hell.
The more relevant ads are, the worse they are. Relevant ads are more distracting and more likely to hijack the user's attention and focus against their will.
Calling it like it is.
I view advertising as something brought to my attention that I wouldn't otherwise buy. Being made aware of special offers is more to tweak the moment of buying stuff I was going to buy anyway but waiting for a decent price.
If I go to MediaMarkt and there's a signpost at the phone area saying "Samsung S25 100 euro discount" then I don't think this is advertising. After all the S25's are lying on the shelf right there whether the offer is there or not. I am there to at least consider buying one and I am there already looking for one before I saw the sign, it's just a notification that the price is low.
But then YouTube started PERMANENTLY interrupting what I was watching with never-ending commercials or full-on infomercials... forcing me to manually use the Skip button to stop the commercial onslaught and return to the show I was watching. And they forced me to herd the show along like this every few minutes.
I put stuff on to watch while I'm cooking or doing something; I can't run to wash my hands so I can mash the control on the remote, over and over and over.
So that's when I installed a third-party YouTube client that skips ads. Google took someone who was willing to watch ads, and turned him into someone who never sees one. So Google cost itself and the content creators, through its asshole behavior.
Then they had the gall to WHINE about the uptick in ad-blocking. It's right out of the Trump/Putin playbook: attack someone, and then feign outrage and whine when they fight back.
I disagree but not for the reasons I was seeing in the existing replies here. I believe that advertising is manipulative, and I don't want advertising companies to use the fact that most of my data is in their hands to pull the right strings and push the right buttons to try to get me to buy a product I wouldn't have otherwise.
Whilst you're correct about Costco, advertisers don't care where you are to show you an ad. The data shows that if you are laying on the couch watching YouTube and an ad appears relevant to you, that it sells. I don't think advertisers are sitting there scratching their heads as to why people don't like them. No advertiser looks at a billboard in the countryside and thinks people enjoy looking at them, its a profit making opportunity, even if that means hijacking your YouTube video on tech reviews for an Audi commercial.
The difference with Costco in your example is that the ads don't impeded on your ability to continue shopping around Costco. If you were walking around Costco and had to stop to listen to someone market to you about clothing when you were simply there to buy some bread and milk you'd get annoyed.
People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may be about how the billboards block a scenic view but that also seems like another way of complaining about the irrelevance. Similarly, if I am watching a Youtube video, I am never thinking that a disruptive message from a commercial business is relevant to my current activities (uh, passivities?). No advertisement is relevant, not even in-video direct sponsorships, hence SponsorBlock.
If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them. I might need tires and realize I can get that taken care of while I’m at Costco. Nearly every advertisement I see at Costco is relevant because it’s selling something I can buy in the same building, indeed usually something juxtaposed close to the advertisement.
I don’t complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they’re irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.