I get 50% AI generated tai chi promising strength gain, weight loss and enlightenment, the other 50% israel sponsored ads assuring me people in gaza are not starving at all and completely healthy
There were many other similar ones, especially on the smaller digital ad spaces that were basically just TVs on the side of roads. And those ones were more specifically calling for empathy for the deaths occurring to Israeli people during the war on Palestine
I pay for YouTube so all I get is paid creator promotions for VPNs and Squarespace unless it's someone being sent a free thing in exchange for a review
Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention to the highest bidder.
Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention to the highest bidder.
But you just admitted that you pay for YouTube and it shows you creator promotions. You are literally paying to see ads, then telling people not to do the same.
Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I haven't been on YouTube in at least a decade. I see no difference between a blogger pushing a VPN and Google showing an ad for a VPN.
The big draw for cable TV was that you could watch TV without ads. Then ads started appearing on cable and people said it's OK, because the content is higher quality and not available elsewhere. Then that changed, and now there is no difference between broadcast, cable/satellite, and streaming services. Except that you don't have to pay for broadcast. (Yet. It's coming.)
> Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I haven't been on YouTube in at least a decade.
Youtube Premium is fighting back against the sponsor segments with this "commonly skipped segment" feature. You hit a fast forward button and it automatically skips ahead to the place most people jumped to.
A year or two ago somebody asked Adam Ragusea about whether this type of skipping causes problems for creators - and what he said was basically that if viewers see the brand name / call to action at the end of the ad, that's mostly what matters to sponsors.
No idea if that's been borne out in practice, though.
If you don't like youtubers with sponsors, don't watch those videos. Not all do.
Personally I pay for youtube and I don't mind the sponsor sections. They're easy to fast forward through and income goes directly to the creator. Youtube doesn't take a cut. These are the only kinds of ads that work on me - in the rare case that the product is something I'm interested in, I go out of my way to make sure I use the creator's link.
The long story short is that there are creators I like and I want them to devote all their time to making more content. I'm glad some of them get sponsors. For many I just straight up give them money on Patreon.
I've gotten rid of 90% of the ads by paying for YouTube, the rest of the ads I skip by jumping forward in the video which is annoying but only a little OR by being legitimately interested in what the person has to say if they're reviewing a product which has been in some way paid for. I'm also just fine with someone promoting their own merch or patreon which I am sometimes actually interested in.
The subtlety I don't get why you're missing is I now have very much reduced ad exposure and the rest I do have is entirely controllable.
I choose to not watch YouTube. I was born in the 80s, am a software engineer, and I’ve watched maybe 10 total hours of YouTube, all 100% of those hours were car-repair related.
None of those scams were intermixed with popular legitimate content. If Facebook had a tab at the top called "Scams and Other Nonsense" and you clicked on that and it had a bunch of scammy content, that would be an equivalent to late night infomercials. But Meta doesn't do that. It mixes the scams in with all of its popular and non-scam content so you cannot easily tell it's scammy. Worse, it targets people vulnerable to those scams by tapping directly into their interests and sentiments in a way TV never could.
You are making a silly argument here. There's no equivalence at all.
Mostly, I'm getting things like German ads for my local German supermarket (that I would've gone to anyway without the ad) dubbed badly into English with an AI that can't tell how to pronounce the "." in a price, plus a Berlin-specific "pay less rent" company that I couldn't use even if I wanted to because I don't rent.
But when I get 30 seconds of ads a minute into a video that had 30 seconds of ads before I could start watching… I don't care what the rest of the video was going to be about, I don't want to waste my life with a 30:60:30:… pattern of adverts and "content" whose sole real purpose is now to keep me engaged with the adverts. (This is also half of why I don't bother going to Facebook, every third post is an ad, although those ads can't even tell if I'm a boy or a girl, which language I speak, nor what my nationality is, and the first-party suggested groups are just as bad but grosser as they recently suggested I join groups for granny dating, zit popping, and Elon Musk).
