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Comment by ianbicking | Hacker News Reader

Totally off topic, but what is happening with YouTube ads? I'm getting 30 to 90 second unskippable videos before every video. This time it gave me two in a row. If I go to another tab it starts over, often with a longer ad.

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Search for the video in DuckDuckGo, flip to video, and watch it in there. No commercials.

I had started to think YT ads were getting worse recently but had convinced myself it was a frequency illusion. Interesting that others seem to be thinking that same thing though...

They came out and said they are making them worse, its not an illusion.

addressed somewhat to HN commenters in general and not just to you: it's okay to trust your first hand observations and real life experience from time to time instead of constantly reaching for increasingly complicated explanations for why you must be wrong when your experience doesn't match the data you've been fed

Do you also notice Google results getting even worse very recently? I noticed now besides retailers, I get news sites. Maybe it’s because of the election. It’s either product or news sites exclusively. Election or not, those two sites have the highest amount of ads.

No, they are getting worse. But it has changed progressively so there is not really a point in time when it went significantly worse rapidly (except if you’re collateral damage in the cat-and-mouse game with ad blockers).

But comparing across several years it is hard to ignore.

I feel like they started to get really bad when YouTube started offering the monthly subscription.

That was October 2015.

My adblocker still works fine. Occasionally have to reload the page for video to play.

What are you using for an adblocker? I'm using uBlock (I thought it was uBlock Origin but apparently not now that I'm looking), and it also stopped blocking YouTube ads. (When it did block ads I'd have a 15-30 second black screen that I had to wait through.)

Only use ublock origin

ublock origin is what you want to be using. ublock was the original project and the maintainer gave up maintenance to someone else. It didn't work out, so he came back and forked it as ublock origin. If you are having problems with ublock origin, read the troubleshooting section of the docs (or whatever they call it)

Same here, using Brave. I don't even remember what an ad looks like.

Use an Albanian VPN and you’ll get no YT ads on your phone. Toggle VPN only when you’re watching YouTube. Apparently Albania has banned ads on YT so you don’t get any.

Progressive enshittification.

I’ve noticed similar and assumed that they are taking a Starbucks-esque approach of adding more and more ad time until they start to see an overall drop in earning.

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