Have you noticed youtube is slowly ramping up the ads?

[Halcyon]

Yes! I thought it was just me, but I have definitely seen a significant increase in the amount of ads at the start of almost all videos.

I only subscribe to a small handful of channels; EEVblog, bigclivedotcom, techmoan, 8-bit guy, ashens... and I fully understand they get some (or the majority) of their income through YouTube advertising. However shoving unwanted advertising in my face will only make me find a way to ignore the product/service they are promoting entirely and block it. I have never clicked on an ad and overt advertising does not have a positive effect on me.

Thankfully, Ghostery and Adblock Plus do a pretty damn good job of removing all advertising from my web surfing experience.

Also, why should Google and other advertisers profit from the hard work of those who contribute content either entirely funded out of their own private income or by those (such as Dave) who make an honest living out of it? I prefer to put my money where my mouth is and donate either hardware to the channels I love, so in turn they increase their audience or contribute cash directly to the content creators via Patreon, Paypal etc... so I know exactly where all of my money is going.

EDIT:

I will add, that my methods don't work for everyone and I don't think there is one "right answer". If I may use our roads as an analogy: In Sydney, we have toll roads and non-toll roads. If everyone took the toll roads, they would be congested and no longer worth the cost. If everyone wanted to avoid the toll and use the back roads, they would be congested and no longer worth the saving. I think there is a balance (although realistically, in Sydney, you're stuffed either way). Bringing it back to my point: While User A's contribution be nothing more than watching an ad, User B might contribute in another meaningful way and User C might do nothing more but introduce Users D & E as regular subscribers to the channel.

[Halcyon]

Also, why should Google and other advertisers profit from the hard work of those who contribute content either entirely funded out of their own private income or by those (such as Dave) who make an honest living out of it? I prefer to put my money where my mouth is and donate either hardware to the channels I love, so in turn they increase their audience or contribute cash directly to the content creators via Patreon, Paypal etc... so I know exactly where all of my money is going.

Why indeed! Why should Google profit from Dave's hard work? It's a damned outrage. Dave should set up his own video streaming infrastructure and stop paying Google for using Youtube. Bloody leeches.

Calm down. I think you are smart enough to read between the lines and know exactly what I meant. Besides, anyone fluent in "internet" will know, on social media, YOU are the product, not the consumer. Do you think Dave became famous because of Google? Of course not! He did so because of hard work. Did Google's stock go up because of Dave (and others like him)? You bet! There is someone higher up the food chain profiting off your hard work (not to say that's wrong, but I think Google could afford not to show me pointless ads every time a video changes. They might even save a cent or two by not wasting their bandwidth).

In fact, I'll go one step further, if we can calculate how much Dave makes, per ad view (say 2 per day) x 365 days a year, I'll double quadruple it and contribute that in cash form directly to him from now on, on top of everything else.

EDIT: And just to prove that I'm not just full of hot air, attached is a transfer I made to bigclivedotcom less than 2 weeks ago. As I said, I contribute regularly to the few channels I follow. In Dave's case I've made both monetary donations and have sent in hardware on two occasions.

[P90]

bigclive kicks ass!  I find him very entertaining...

[Halcyon]

bigclive kicks ass!  I find him very entertaining...

Top bloke and I know he watches EEVblog as well. He made a comment in one of his more recent videos that he wanted to send something to Dave's mailbag except the postage was exceptionally expensive from Isle of Man to Australia.

[P90]

bigclive kicks ass!  I find him very entertaining...

Top bloke and I know he watches EEVblog as well. He made a comment in one of his more recent videos that he wanted to send something to Dave's mailbag except the postage was exceptionally expensive from Isle of Man to Australia.

"but the postage was astronomical..."



bigclive for president...  LOL

[rdl]

I recently set up a new computer with Linux. To test that things were working well I went to youtube and started to watch a video - probably EEVblog, but I don't remember for sure. This was on Firefox before I had any addons installed.

The first thing I got was not the video, but an advertisement for a popular internet retailer that caters to the "maker" crowd. It was over TWO MINUTES LONG. Seriously? That's more like a documentary. Instead of making me want to support that company, it's more than likely I will will avoid them in the future.

[debininja]

I'm surprised nobody in these 3 pages of posts so far have mentioned hosts file based blocking of ads. If you have a router that supports aftermarket firmware, like OpenWRT (open source, my favorite, and recommended firmware) or DD-WRT (I don't recommend because of their GPL violations), or Tomato, you can load up a hosts file and it'll block all the advertising networks contained within that file. You no longer have to download and install adblockers for each and every new device you acquire.

[nctnico]

Installing an ad blocker is easier. I used to use a hosts file to block advertisement but you have to keep that current.

[james_s]

Ad blockers are more versatile too. You see an ad, a video, even an annoying animated avatar or signature and you can just right-click and select Block. No messing around with editing files.

[TheSteve]

My router handles host based ad blocking automatically. I generally also use an adblocker in my browser.

[james_s]

I block some of the more well known culprits at the router but for normal day to day adblocking I use a browser plugin.

[JPortici]

a link to the newest kasabian album on youtube:

notice how they put an ad inbetween every fucking song
i wanted to have another listen to it last night on my phone and i noticed that.

fuck this, this is an example of why we have adblock and we MUST use them. annoying to the most

[P90]

a link to the newest kasabian album on youtube:

notice how they put an ad inbetween every fucking song
i wanted to have another listen to it last night on my phone and i noticed that.

fuck this, this is an example of why we have adblock and we MUST use them. annoying to the most

Are you trying to impersonate Louis Rossmann?

[Kilrah]

Or you could, like, buy the album?

[MarkS]

Yeah, YouTube has gotten pretty bad lately. I whitelist the site to support the many channels that I subscribe to, but I'm reaching my breaking point. It used to be that the majority of videos started without ads. Now I'd guess 95% of them have an ad at the start. A close percentage have one or multiple ads in the middle. That used to not be much of a problem as those ads were banner ads that can be closed. Not any longer. Now they are all video ads.

What's really getting on my nerves are the alcohol ads. These are not coming up due to my search history and I do not touch alcohol. Not for religious reasons, but religiously none the less. I have no interest in seeing beer commercials and they are getting much more frequent and longer.

[P90]

It's annoying... you can skip this ad in 10 seconds... now I'm never buying that product, that's for certain! 

[KE5FX]

Yeah, YouTube has gotten pretty bad lately. I whitelist the site to support the many channels that I subscribe to, but I'm reaching my breaking point. It used to be that the majority of videos started without ads. Now I'd guess 95% of them have an ad at the start. A close percentage have one or multiple ads in the middle. That used to not be much of a problem as those ads were banner ads that can be closed. Not any longer. Now they are all video ads.

What's really getting on my nerves are the alcohol ads. These are not coming up due to my search history and I do not touch alcohol. Not for religious reasons, but religiously none the less. I have no interest in seeing beer commercials and they are getting much more frequent and longer.

Just subscribe to Red and be done with it.  Your blood pressure is worth $10/month.

Failing that, is it possible to change your birth date on Google?  If they still show you ads for alcohol when they know you're underage, they're probably breaking quite a few laws.

[JPortici]

Or you could, like, buy the album?

Yeah, too bad i didn't have it saved on my phone yet.
 FYI i always stream albums from youtube* during work, it's not that i have my music collection on a trolley to carry around at all times, nor i can play music from the phones, in case i have to answer skype calls and whatnot.

*i don't like spotify and other streaming services

Point was, i'm going to put up an ad but not something like this. I also don't watch television. I use streaming services, like netflix, because i pay and get the content

[Cyberdragon]

Yeah, YouTube has gotten pretty bad lately. I whitelist the site to support the many channels that I subscribe to, but I'm reaching my breaking point. It used to be that the majority of videos started without ads. Now I'd guess 95% of them have an ad at the start. A close percentage have one or multiple ads in the middle. That used to not be much of a problem as those ads were banner ads that can be closed. Not any longer. Now they are all video ads.

What's really getting on my nerves are the alcohol ads. These are not coming up due to my search history and I do not touch alcohol. Not for religious reasons, but religiously none the less. I have no interest in seeing beer commercials and they are getting much more frequent and longer.

Just subscribe to Red and be done with it.  Your blood pressure is worth $10/month.

Failing that, is it possible to change your birth date on Google?  If they still show you ads for alcohol when they know you're underage, they're probably breaking quite a few laws.

STOP...STOP...STOP IT! Don't pay them! That's exactly what they want! Stop supporting and promoting !

I have adblock on my pc, but it's in for repairs. The most annoying ads are the ones that repeat tons of times over a week before showing different ones. I hate Discover Card's stupid credit check now. I also hate the weird/aweful ones. I once got an ad for birth control pills for whores (the women in the commercial mentioned "clients").

[KE5FX]

STOP...STOP...STOP IT! Don't pay them! That's exactly what they want! Stop supporting and promoting !

(Shrug) Bandwidth isn't free, and neither is good content.

[rdl]

If Google wants to show commercials on its main page, that's fine with me (just no sound please). The same goes for the Youtube page, anywhere is fine there except the beginning of or during a video. I will not sit through a 2 minute 45 second documentary length advertisement. And whoever produced that spam will never get any of my business. Advertising is fine until it becomes obnoxious, but it seems like that's what happens over and over and they just never seem to learn.