this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
1179 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59042 readers
3020 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
YouTube is also aggravating customers who use their official apps by increasing the frequency and length of the ads. In just 4-5 months, I've seen YouTube ad lengths on Roku go from 10-15 seconds to 30 seconds, to a minute.
They're trying to recoup lost ad revenue by pissing off the one demographc most likely to sit in front of the TV the longest.
On rare occasions YouTube will play exceptionally long videos as ads. When YouTube Red came out I got multiple entire hours long shows as ads (as a "free preview!") I'm pretty sure Ive gotten one of the movies they put up for free viewing as an ad before.
Obviously you can skip after 5 seconds or whatever but they hope to catch someone playing stuff in the background. Probably to increase their crappy view count for those features to sell actual ads later.
I've noticed this on my TV's YouTube app as well. It went from 15 second I shippable ads, to 2 ads where I need to watch at least one and only then can I skip, to sometimes at least 30 seconds before I can skip. It's worse on the longer video essays that I like watching, where they say "Fewer ad breaks for this long video", but in reality they have the same amount of ads that you need to watch more of to skip. I absolutely fucking hate it :D
I think they should have included "ad free YouTube" as a perk for their YouTube TV service, which I had for a short while. Instead they wanted you to pay an extra subscription cost for YouTube Premium to get rid of ads.
The dark pattern game they play with the "skip" options and the increasing amount and random placement of ads is really offputting.