[Archelaos]

Could that have started a downward spiral? I noticed that when I am casually browsing Youtube that the increased amount and length of ads let me stop browsing Youtube quite often. Especially when a second ad starts at the beginning of a video or if a video is interrupted too frequently or at the "wrong" point, I close Youtube altogether at that point and do something else. And while the short occasional ads before the videos did not bother me much in the past, now I stop browsing Youtube earlier because it is no fun to watch the same stupid clip a dozen times. Thus, the increase in advertising on YouTube has probably led to my seeing less advertising there overall than I used to.

[adamsb6]

Yes.

At a previous gig we had alarms that would fire when we were making too much money, because it probably meant something had gone wrong and we were over-serving ads, which was bad for long term user engagement.

[travisjungroth]

Long… term…? Do you mean setting OKRs every half instead of every quarter?

[VHRanger]

Silly you

With annual bonuses, you set everything to max KPIs and leave when the house burns down next fiscal year.

It's the Dick Fuld method(tm)

[buscoquadnary]

Honestly this is what the canary in the coal mine was for me.

As soon as it happened I said to myself "This is juicing of short term metrics at the expense of long term success and goodwill, the final triumph of management over engineering."

It was obviously such a user hostile obnoxious move that I will never understand why no one ever pointed it out.

Googles hey day is past it may stick around for a long time but it has become the new MS, while MS is the new IBM.

It's funny I always assumed Amazon would become MS before Google.

[bushbaba]

Amazon is the new Google. Google the new IBM. MS seems to be doing fine. What is Google's next cash-cow? Google's Cloud pitch sure reminds me of IBM's "Big Data" push.

[DesiLurker]

My biggest pain point is the ads at the end of the video (on TV). they are completely unexpected and hold the 'related videos' hostage until you finished watching so you cannot jump to next. sure you could hit back but then YT takes you to home screen and you've lost all history. overall a poorly designed navigation but agree that basically its not fun to watch on TV anymore. its too bad because YT's main selling point was casual viewing.

[chaosbolt]

Of course, when I switched to the 13 pro max last year because my wife bought it for me I just didn't install the Youtube app at all, I understand that's how the creators make money etc. etc. but I just chose to not use it and it's ok...

Then switched to the Samsung z fold 4 last month and installed Vanced, first thing I did to be honest, got the apk from the wayback machine, then realized they offer 4 months of free premium if you bought a z fold or z flip so I subscribed and will cancel it 3 days before it ends.

Just put a cheap audio only plan without subscription, say pay 2$ for 1 month of audio without ads, and if video then 1 short ad at the start maybe, people don't want to subscribe, it's a commitment, and audio is cheap to stream, and people would pay for background play.

[spaceman_2020]

I use ad blocker on my computers so never have to see any ads. But on my TV, without ad blocker, YouTube is completely unusable. I have to sit through 2 unskippable ads just to watch a 2 minute movie trailer.

The alternative is to get YouTube premium, but that’s priced higher than Disney+Hotstar here (which has live sports along with Disney and HBO shows) and I just don’t see the value.

[TeeMassive]

Get µBlock Origin on Firefox, also works on android.

[propogandist]

Brave browser does good ad blocking by default on iOS and desktop.

uBlock and uMatrix are unable to block ads on Chrome/Chromium, it only seems to work on FF. I can't imagine how much worse things will get once manifest v3 limitations kick-in.

[1270018080]

The ads lately have been painfully excessive. I installed Brave on iOS just a few weeks ago to avoid the spam. I used the Youtube app for years and didn't have an issue giving them their ad revenue. Now I am gone forever.

[etrautmann]

Definitely. It's so much harder to watch now - seems like many companies have made myopic choices about monetization in the last year, making a plethora of services less useable.

[wildrhythms]

I just assume the people who demand ad density increases don't even use Youtube, much less experience the ads. Out of touch upper management: a tale as old as time.

[paganel]

What you describe it's sort of a Laffer curve for our time/attention, and I totally believe that it has an effect.