I have ad targeting turned off on my google account. As a result, probably >90% of the ads I see on YouTube are scams, almost-nsfw content, deepfakes, more scams, illegal products, and more scams. I’ve been tempted to take notes and keep track of how many are scams. It’s awful. I cannot remember the last legitimate product I saw an ad for on YouTube.

Yesterday I saw an ad on YouTube that was literally just porn. Very NSFW, not “almost” NSFW like a lot of the ads are. After reporting it, I tried to pull up the ad transparency page for the company running the ad. I was hoping I could somehow report the company itself, in addition to the ad. I had to be logged in to do this. Because when logged out, you can’t see “age restricted” ad campaigns. This completely blew my mind. I didn’t think they allowed nsfw ads, but if they knew enough to age-restrict the ad campaign, maybe they do?

From what I understand, if I turn on targeted ads, I can opt out of ad categories, and maybe google will stop showing me the scams. Instead, I simply use Adblock, and avoid YouTube on iOS as much as possible. The experience is completely unusable with the advertising.

I’m not going to pay for premium to avoid ads that are blatantly violating YouTube’s TOS anyway. At least, I hope they are violating it. “Report” never does anything so they might just allow anything in ads.