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YouTube is starting to get annoying, though, with their constant pre-roll ads and the ads in the middle of videos that don’t appear at natural breaks. Now I find mysel focused on the Skip Ad button while tracking the countdown to its clickability.

I broke down and started paying for YouTube. Another 12 bucks :) On the laptop, I block ads, but on the tablet, I like to use the official app.

Yep, they sell a product of use/interest to their community. They make even more if they own the product they sell.

This does take away from them making content, but it currently is the only path towards salary replacement monetization.

How useful are such ads to the companies? Are there forum members who discover products through them that they wouldn't otherwise? Old school stuff was genuinely useful, because we didn't have Internet to do product research before buying, but now...