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Comment by 18973424 | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Red is the stupidest thing ever. It advertises as "youtube without ads", but the majority of ad content is embedded into the videos by the creators in the form of often undisclosed product placement.

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That certainly exists, but that just means you need to change what you're watching. Channels like 3 Blue 1 Brown will openly disclose their ads, usually at the start or end of the video. And others simply have no content related to things you can buy and are supported via the YouTube ads in and around the video instead.

> 3 Blue 1 Brown

Their refresher series on linear algebra is seriously amazing as is other content. :)

Good point. I wonder if Google will start banning that to make YouTube Red/Premium more attractive.

If they do this, their content creators will leave for another platform.

What other platform?

A bunch left for twitch after the demonetization scandal. A few use exclusively Patreon, but there's no discoverability there.

I will agree there's not a lot of options, though.

How do you ban something like that? If I make a video in which I happen to be drinking a Mr. Pibb, how do you tell the difference between it being undisclosed product placement vs. me being thirsty?

As far as I know they do keep track of videos that have undisclosed product placement, I'm fairly sure I've read that videos that do that are getting demonetised.

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