[settyness]

This is what I thought was the case since the "Adpolcalypse". I made the point to my colleagues that what YouTube wanted was slightly predatory in nature. Kids have no spending power, why are we catering to them on that platform? Why can't an adult, who has spending power, watch edgy content if they want to? Kids are exploited while adults are being treated like children.

Then there was the instance, a sort of another soft "Adpocalypse" where all these videos featuring children had creepy comments. This caused a culling of comments on certain videos, but it was ultimately a situation YouTube had fostered.

[FussyZeus]

This is a fundamental flaw of advertising. As advertising has increased over my lifetime, I've become so inured to it that I literally no longer register things as advertisements. I just see straight through them. They're everywhere now; ads are shown on McDonalds' menus. Ads are on gas pumps while I'm filling. Ads are placed on seemingly every electronic or physical surface in a desperate arms race for my attention and the more they try, the more my brain just blocks the shit out.

It's just a never ending deluge of spam and bullshit in my brain and it's been there for so long and has increased to such a ludicrous degree as I actually now LAUGH when I see an ad shoved into a new place.

Like, I do not understand why anybody is spending money on advertising. You could be advertising the most amazing product in the history of the world and you would be simply drowned in spam, and no one would ever see it or care.

And to bring this rant back to topic, of course kids are the only ones left. They haven't had their minds assaulted with predatory conniving language for decades yet. They're the only ones who still look at ads as anything other than spam email but in whatever format it's in. But don't worry; at the breakneck pace advertisers are set into now, they'll be getting used to it even sooner, and it will be even LESS effective, until the only people still watching ads are infants crapping their pants. Maybe we can monetize little holograms in diapers and then sell the diapers for 5 cents cheaper. Let's just get to the bottom of this barrel!

[EForEndeavour]

> As advertising has increased over my lifetime, I've become so inured to it that I literally no longer register things as advertisements. I just see straight through them.

Not only are you very likely affected on a subconscious level by the nonstop avalanche of ads that surround us all, but worse, you have a false sense of security that you're immune to them.

[product50]

Obviously you are wrong since literally 100s of billions of $$ are being spent on digital advertising and they are driving downstream conversions. Don't generalize your experience.

Advertisers (especially Direct Response) are some of the more analytical folks you'll meet. They won't spend a cent on a channel if they are not making it back in downstream conversions.

[FussyZeus]

I think there’s a lot of people making a lot of money pretending it’s 1955. That’s my theory.

B2B advertising and directed, targeted campaigns probably have good results. The spam shit I’m talking about? The crap you see on YouTube especially? I doubt it.

[adrianN]

Children tell their parents what they want to have. They have spending power, it's just that they don't buy things by themselves.

[ionforce]

> Kids have no spending power

This fact means nothing for as long as one can accumulate ad dollars based on views generated by children.

[cwyers]

Which lasts until the advertisers figure out that the views are going to toddlers watching creepy videos featuring unlicensed Disney IP and bad Peppa Pig creepypastas, and the party ends.

[Slartie]

Nope. In that case YouTube is just forced to adjust their targeting - they're simply showing the wrong ads!

As another comment already correctly stated: kids do have indirect spending power by being able to manipulate the spending of their parents. This works particularly well with the kind of parent that uses YouTube as an easy and reliable pacifier - this kind of parent will most likely also take the easy way out of the situation of an obnoxious kid screaming and blaring about it's dire need for product X (as seen on YouTube), which means buying the product so the goddamn kid shuts up.

[cwyers]

Advertising is not immune from market corrections. The whole "pivot to video" trend was a market corrections to ad rates, _and_ has died off in a response to another market correction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video

[gpm]

For companies that can take a long term perspective, I bet having kids grow up with your product is very valuable.

[settyness]

Of course it's a naive statement on its own. I mean only to enforce the fact that YouTube's advertising stance is predatory and has been since day one.