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Comment by Sosh101 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much money Grammarly have spent with youtube.

I read somewhere they are among their top 10 advertisers. So this is not a good look for YouTube.

Hope someone from Google chimes in because this is a PR disaster in the making

I don't think that I have ever seen a single ad for Grammarly on Youtube. Well, Google proably knows that I don't live in an English speaking country.

I do see Grammarly ads if I search things like "practice or practise" because I write English every work day.

Well, I use Firefox account containers and auto cookie delete everywhere. So Youtube knows little about me writing English.

Many people outside the English-speaking world will never see those adds. Your search bubble is not others.

Despite that, even in the search bubbles containing Grammarly I doubt closing an account with 3 videos will do any significant PR damage to anyone.

So what where the videos about? Grammarly storing everything the user writes??? Selling it to others???

"Many people outside the English-speaking world will never see those adds. Your search bubble is not others."

I am a Czech and I see them all the damn time. Maybe because I consume a lot of English content.

I generally don't use Youtube a lot and because I never log in they have no profile for me. So they show me random household ads based on location. Very poorly targeted, 90% completely uninteresting stuff. They even don't know my mother tongue :)

> because I never log in they have no profile for me

Oh I wish this was true

What I find funny is that YouTube knows who I am and where I live (English-speaking Canada), but every now and then I go through a short time period (a few days) where most of the ads are in French (for Canada).

I think the importance of this is being grossly overstated.

What do you mean a PR disaster, something people get upset about on Twitter for 3 days and then forget?

Unless Google deletes the articles about the incident from its index (and hey, it's possible), then the internet doesn't forget. Instead it just slowly builds personal and political opposition against them.

Or are you saying we just should be quite and let them do what they want?

How many "PR disasters" have Google had? If you google "google scandal", how many pop up? Have people stopped using Google because of those scandals? What makes this particular scandal stand up amongst those?

That would be irrelevant in this case. Grammarly has no issues with the videos, as the company stated in the official responses on HackerOne.

Grammarly's plagiarism self-check is to help its users avoid accidental or unintentional plagiarism by highlighting text that may need citations. If a user is using countermeasures to mask plagiarism, it's not accidental or unintentional, so Grammarly stays out of it. Grammarly is NOT a plagiarism policy enforcement tool.

We continued our discussion in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29933516#29947146

Them and that...insurance company. They absolutely bombaaaarded me with ads and I literally never thought of them when I went shopping for car insurance a year back. Money well spent, you annoying turds!

Geniune question. Why don't you use Ad-blocker ? my life on the internet turned around when I started using it around 5-6 years ago.

I do, but YouTube constantly finds a way around it. I've been running Adblock Plus and Ghostery Lite, but YouTube ads have poked their way through again.

I use UBlock Origin and I have NEVER watched an advert ever as far as I can remember.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

I don't use Chrome anymore, just Safari. I agree that uBlock Origin is best!

And I wonder that Grammarly didn't pay me even a penny for this issue I published in their Bug Bounty channel on the HackerOne.

I also wonder how many users they have.

In what sense? Ridiculously few or overwhelmingly many?

Honest question of someone using mostly local free software (as not in the cloud, as in free speech, not beer) and not living in an English-speaking country.

What do you mean? How can a number be ridiculous/overwhelming when you don't know it yet?

I also wonder how many paid users they have.

Seems like the starting price is USD $12/mo, which IIRC, costs more than my Office 365 Personal subscription.

I believe most of their users are academicians - students writing their thesis. And I don't think a lot of them pay for its license themselves. It's their institute which purchases the license.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com