YouTube wants me to watch a 4m30s ad for middle-aged men who want to stay healthy. I won’t watch it. Hence, it never goes away.

I suppose this makes sense… I won’t play almost any video that has an ad that doesn’t have a 5s timeout button. I even skip those, most of the time.

I download videos using Downie, youtube-dl, or yt-dlp, and I watch them offline. So, the result is that I never complete the super long ad that YouTube wants me to watch, hence, it never stops being offered. I think that’s what’s going on here.

I just wanted to run a sanity-check to see if others agree that this is why this extreme garbage is being served. It can’t be that YouTube is serving ~5m ads to lots of people on a regular basis and people let them play, right? I think people would be outraged if this was common. But I’m not sure.

Background (unnecessary info to provide context):

I live in a nearly ad-free world because I deliberately cut them out with software. Thus I don’t really have a good sense of what average people tolerate. I haven’t tolerated ads for over 20 years. That’s when I cut the cord on television and switched to pirating content, later buying from iTunes, then streaming when that became available.

I live in a bubble and was offended at the idiocy of TV ads when I’d visit family for the holidays back when the iPod was on every single ad-break (and I’m an Apple / Mac user). I been un-desensitized for so long that TV ads have seemed alien and offensive for a long time.

It has to be that I keep getting this ad because I won’t complete YouTube’s stupid challenge-quest of “watch a super long ad one time,” right? I won’t complete the challenge to confirm that it goes away, so I need others to tell me if they think I’m right that this is why I keep seeing it. If I let it play, do you think they’d serve short ads again and it would be rare for such a long ad to be served? I’m not going to do so either way. Fuck YouTube and fuck ads.

Aside: when I can no longer download videos to avoid ads, I’ll stop watching YouTube videos. Spare me your lectures on them needing monetization to pay for servers. We won’t agree for reasons beyond the scope of this question.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

  • LWD@lemm.ee
    11·
    7 months ago

    You’ve got two options:

    • Fight back with ad blockers. Tubular or ReVanced on Android, uBlock Origin on PCs.
    • Pay up. (This is the unethical option.)
      • LWD@lemm.ee
        3·
        7 months ago

        To paraphrase Louis Rossman, he doesn’t need the fraction of a penny he’d get from you wasting your time, and if YouTube wants your money then they should earn it.

        • VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          7 months ago

          Sure but he also monetizes videos rather than turn it off, let’s say every browser by default blocks adverts and skips sponsored segments is he still going to support it?

          The argument that a behavior is acceptable because only a small amount of people do it is a bad argument, if he doesn’t like adverts he has the actual option to turn them off and not to accept sponsorship. His income comes from the fact most people watch the adverts so he supports and agrees with the advertising model.

          Sure you can argue it’s not worth the effort to stop 5% of users freebooting but when is it worth the effort? If creators can’t afford to create because there’s no money in it then the platform dies, so where is the line?