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Comment by puranjay | Hacker News Reader

20 second unskippable ads about cat food (I don't have a cat) to watch a 1 minute video.

No thanks YouTube!

It's worse when you have no idea if you're even _interested_ in the video you're going to sit through two unskippable ads to watch. It degrades the experience considerably.

I used to use the YouTube app on my firestick to stream music while working around the house. One of my favorite bands - who I personally know and who don't put any ads on their videos - releases entire albums in a single 30-40 minute long video.

YouTube now throws 4-6 ads in the middle of the videos, often right in the middle of the songs.

It's worse when you are trying to put a soothing music to put your baby to sleep and it starts with a loud ad which wakes her up. Or now that she is a toddler, her nursery rhyme videos have political campaign ads in the middle of the song.

Of course, many of those nursery rhymes were political ads originally.

Little Donny Trumpet went out on a junket, swatting his golf balls away...

One of the best things about the ads on youtube was that if they sucked or weren't relevant you could skip them, sending a signal that the ads should not be shown.

I suspect that the platforms have started to realize that personalized ads aren't better than content relevant ads, because I have several times seen ads on Facebook that were just targeted to people who live in my country and are over the age of 18, ie not targeted at all. Yet Facebook presumably showed me those ads because that is what they thought would make them the most money.

Watch the ads, start the video, pause the video for a few minutes, come back and get shown fresh ads.

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