[soared]

Youtube ads have been on an impressively consistent path of aggression. Chromecasting went from no ads as recently as a couple years ago to 30+ second unskippable ads to. The revenue firehose I’m sure is incredible though. I run some online video campaigns for work (~$300k/mo) that compete with YouTube for budget and they have incredible performance stats… as indicated by GA4.

[bastawhiz]

Chromecast got ads in ~2015. I was keenly aware of this because paying for YouTube premium didn't get rid of ads on Chromecast (yet).

[soared]

Must have been some hardware combination or something unique where I never got them until recently, and it was quite jarring.

[bastawhiz]

That's very unusual. Maybe you had been paying for Premium as part of something else (like Google One or Fi)? I'm not sure if a pihole or other hardware device can block YouTube ads, but if it can maybe that's a possibility?