• Hexanimo@kbin.earth
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    16 hours ago

    I switched over to NewPipe a couple weeks back after consciously tolerating ads on the official mobile apps for years. This is what pushed me over the edge:

    I was watching a 30 minute video a friend had shared and a (skippable) 4 minute ad played probably a little before the 10 minute mark. It was a variant of an ad I had seen before, but I’ve been interested in the product, so I let the ad play all the way through. But now for the rest of the video, all the ads I was getting were several minutes long and all were unskippable. The interval of actual video content became shorter as well, so I was effectively watching more ads than the content I was trying to view. I decided to finish the video just to experience how ridiculous it was. Immediately installed NewPipe afterwards.

    I have a hard time thinking it wasn’t a coincidence that the ads became unskippable partway through the video after watching one ad all the way through. Obviously, I can’t say that for sure. But I sure as hell am not tolerating that ratio of ads to content. I feel guilty for not sending ad view pennies to the creators I enjoy, but this YouTube “experiment” made the platform unusable for me.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Wow, that sounds pretty ridiculous. I rarely have seen it for years with ads but every time I have, it’s been pretty disgusting. I have also had the feeling I was watching more ads than content, which is very far overboard.

    • CentipedeFarrier@piefed.social
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      15 hours ago

      They probably do that when one plays all the way through because people let shit continue to play without being there, and they can count that as an impression and get paid for it if they just inject a bunch of them to an active but unmonitored stream. The fact that you actually sat through it is completely irrelevant to them. Most people would have closed it out or went back in the video to whenever they left, which would likely reset the ad serving instruction.

      Speculation, of course, but the sort of fuckery every big company is doing these days.

      Also, creators don’t really get money from ads. Don’t feel bad for skipping them. Sponsorships and direct donations are basically the only ways creators make anything worth making on YouTube. Many creators will tell you as much themselves.