this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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YouTube is also aggravating customers who use their official apps by increasing the frequency and length of the ads. In just 4-5 months, I've seen YouTube ad lengths on Roku go from 10-15 seconds to 30 seconds, to a minute.
They're trying to recoup lost ad revenue by pissing off the one demographc most likely to sit in front of the TV the longest.
On rare occasions YouTube will play exceptionally long videos as ads. When YouTube Red came out I got multiple entire hours long shows as ads (as a "free preview!") I'm pretty sure Ive gotten one of the movies they put up for free viewing as an ad before.
Obviously you can skip after 5 seconds or whatever but they hope to catch someone playing stuff in the background. Probably to increase their crappy view count for those features to sell actual ads later.
I've noticed this on my TV's YouTube app as well. It went from 15 second I shippable ads, to 2 ads where I need to watch at least one and only then can I skip, to sometimes at least 30 seconds before I can skip. It's worse on the longer video essays that I like watching, where they say "Fewer ad breaks for this long video", but in reality they have the same amount of ads that you need to watch more of to skip. I absolutely fucking hate it :D
I think they should have included "ad free YouTube" as a perk for their YouTube TV service, which I had for a short while. Instead they wanted you to pay an extra subscription cost for YouTube Premium to get rid of ads.
The dark pattern game they play with the "skip" options and the increasing amount and random placement of ads is really offputting.