I had YouTube Premium to avoid ads. Since the adpocalypse, more creators are adding sponsored content to their videos. So now I've got ads even though I'm paying.
You can often catch some pretty severe cases of dead eyes.
Some websites have also taken to add their own ads on top of the youtube player, which is equally infuriating.
It's so bad that occasionally I'll ask myself if the overt and relatively easily defeated ads exist in part to obfuscate the more subtle advertising most content has become rife with.
I stumbled on a video yesterday about how Tesla was so far ahead of its competition .. and I could not help to wonder how much this youtuber has been paid to say that.
Even if the review was absolutely genuine, and this was a reviewer espousing love for an otherwise universally-ignored game, I couldn't help but feel I was just watching an advertisement and promptly closed it.
I don't blame anybody for this, but this is seriously ruining my ability to enjoy YouTube content.
With video you have the advantage that someone has to watch the video in wall clock time so you can run a bid/re-edit/display process in seconds instead of having to choose an ad to show in milliseconds.
You could even use the identity information that Google has to run all of this server side to create a targeted ad fully in a first-party way.