Hacker News Reader

Comment by cnnsucks | Hacker News Reader

Ads. YouTube is punctuating every video with ads every few minutes now. It gets tiresome and drives people away.

Ads, but also content / recommendations. I signed up for YouTube Red to finally get rid of ads & support the few channels I subscribe to, but instead it started promoting YouTube Originals that insult my intelligence. (I'm really, really not interested in Scare PewDiePie, or Prank Academy, or Foursome.)

YouTube keeps shoving recommendations on me that I'm just not interested in. I'm more likely to start at Netflix first now (no ads, better quality), or even Vimeo (which has tons of really good conference videos that aren't on YouTube). I do miss watching TechMoan on YT, though.

I'm with you there. I have YouTube Red because it's included with Google music.

The absolute garbage that they have in YouTube Red is so prominently forced on top of everything else. Things that I'm sure they have the data to prove I'm not interested in.

What shocked me the most about it is that it seems that's the kind of content that gets big on YouTube. Which is fine, I don't mind them subsidizing YouTube with that. But it is annoying for them to try to force that and prioritize it over my subscriptions. So much so that it has turned me off some from YouTube. Thing is, they probably don't mind, I don't think I make them any money, I'm not the audience they want.

I also thought these were all pretty dumb, but clicked the X button and haven't even thought about them in several months. I am kind of annoyed by unrelated recommendations though; I watch a video where someone is making tools for his lathe, then the recommendation is "MAN GETS STUNG BY BULLET ANT OH GOD THE PAIN 30 MINUTES OF HIS HAND SWELLING UP AND THEN BEING RUSHED TO THE HOSPITAL AND THEN HE DIES OR SOMETHING MAYBE NOT YOU CAN'T FLAG TITLES FOR BEING MISLEADING SO HAH". Not interested, at all, seriously.

Some of my recommendations I blame on clicking on things that are popular on Reddit. Pushes me back towards the lowest common denominator. (I'm not averse to watching some car crashes.)

I'm not sure how refusing to watch Techmoan because of dismissable recommendations accomplishes anything, though. Bookmark his channel, pick the video you haven't seen, watch, close tab :)

I wondered what you meant about dismissible recommendations and the X button... then I realised that isn't an option in the YouTube smart TV app, at least not that I can see. Much of my YouTube watching (especially while subscribed to YouTube Red) was happening on my TV through the Smart TV interface, not the web browser or phone apps.

I have Youtube Red and regularly watch Youtube videos. But I've never even heard of Scare PewDiePie or Foursome, and have never seen Youtube recommend Prank Academy.

The ads are getting ridiculous.

The worst is when I go to watch a youtube for an ad (a movie trailer) and get ads for that.

These are indeed the worst. What I don't get is the nature of the relationships such that studios don't seem to promote their own trailers.

The only things that show up are those crappy trailer aggregators that, to your point, cause you to watch an ad to see an ad. These days I tend to start with Apple's Trailers app. Brief synopsis and a list of all the trailers in HD--is that too hard for YouTube?

The studios are very strange sometimes. Dumb stuff I've seen them do recently:

* Post to obscure channels

* Have cross-promotional stuff on the trailers

* Region blocked videos

* Take down official trailers after a while

* Give exclusive trailers to sites

* Only post the trailers to yahoo or some other less-popular site and skip youtube.

Thus often the most reliable way to get the trailers is via MovieClips or one of the other channels, who all put their junk and ads on them.

Source: I have a little hobby of finding trailers to post to /r/trailers ( https://www.reddit.com/r/trailers/ ) on Reddit. Would recommend if you are into trailers, the mods there prioritize official sources and weed out most of the dups and bads ones.

You say ads, I say facebook and snapchat.

Previously, more users would embed youtube videos within facebook and obviously those would count as youtube views. Now facebook has pushed their own videos like crazy taking away tons of yt views.

Second, a lot of the young youtube watchers that would stay there for hours are now hooked on snapchat or various other video specific apps to fill that video content demand.

And it's not just frequent ads. I've seen bizarrely long ads recently - 10 minute ad on a 22 minute video.

There are some ads that I just really fucking hate, and it would be good if YT gave me the chance to block obnoxious ads. A recent set of car ads had a startle noise blare in the 5 second forced watch, so I spent a couple of weeks using youtube-dl to avoid ads.

If you make your living from ads you don't want people like me to switch because I'm mostly ad tolerant.

> it would be good if YT gave me the chance to block obnoxious ads

It does, in exchange for $10/month.

> I've seen bizarrely long ads recently - 10 minute ad on a 22 minute video.

YouTube advertisers expect people to skip ads.

You can sort of think of all ad content on a skippable-after-5s ad as a request by the advertiser to "watch as much or as little of this as you want", rather than a request to "watch all of this."

You see in in movie trailers. The trailer will typically have a cold-opening and sometimes a "mini-trailer" before the movie title that last almost exactly 5 seconds. This is to at least expose you to the movie even if you don't watch the rest.

Examples (especially the first)

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BWWWQzTpNU

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVwFM2PukSE

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzXIaTt99U

I laugh at the ads necklace when adblocker is disabled. It's like the worst of tv ads hell explained to you in advance.

Also, 60 seconds commercials for small videos... bad idea

I don't mind the ads but I hate the delay to dismiss. I actually enjoy watching relevant or non traditional ads, seen some great ones lately from other YouTube channels advertising. But my ability to decide if an ad is relevant is way faster than 5 seconds. It wastes everyone's time and money by making me wait longer.

It doesn't waste your time; it uses it to force you to watch that ad. That's worth money!

The ads on YouTube are not there for you.

Bad way to think about it. If there's no possibility of conversion it's a waste for both. Ads should align interests between advertisers and viewers.

Speculation. It would be simple for YT (Alphabet) to figure out if this is true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com