this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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Well, it seems to be official now. Starting April 14, 2025 Google will update its Unfair advantage policy to say it is allowed to show the same ad, from the same company, going to the same page, as long as the ad is in a different ad location. Google was just experimenting with double serving ads earlier and now it is officially going to be allowed.

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Sounds like an awesome way to get me to boycott your product for annoying me

[–] biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works 8 points 21 hours ago

Seeming that I'm getting increasingly pissed off by Spotify giving 5 or more ads without 30 minute adless times and for every 5th song rather than every 8th or 10th, I'm gonna have even more stress from the doubling of all google ads.

At least ublock origin lite does its job pretty well on YouTube, so I won't need to worry until google eventually kills that too.

[–] doctortofu@reddthat.com 41 points 1 day ago (2 children)

...because if I'm not interested in something, I might change my mind after I see it a bunch more times on the same fucking page - what a brilliant idea! Hell, put the ad in 50 different spots and make me click no less than 7 times to close each one - who knows, maybe that will encourage me to buy whatever shit you're peddling!

[–] tonywu@lemmy.world 4 points 8 hours ago

Thing is, even after buying whatever it is you still continue to see the same ADs…

frequency does help a lot with a customer actually going through with a purchase, but really this is just another way for advertisers to spend more on the same ad spot, because now your competitors can screw you out of multiple opportunities instead of just one

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 105 points 1 day ago (10 children)

Watched something on YouTube on my TV for the first time last week. Never again. 12 minute video had like 6 or 8 ads, 2-3 were 30 seconds. Fuck. That.

[–] rice@lemmy.org 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

plug in $20 laptop from craigslist and disable internet on your tvs

[–] BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 6 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Or some cheap Raspberry Pi box or those sail the high seas streaming sticks or a Nvidia shield, so many better options than giving the Spyware and adware filled TV OS from getting access to your internet

[–] rice@lemmy.org 1 points 8 hours ago

yea I used to use a raspberry pi but it is way too slow with a massive library. and for youtube even the 4 performance is dwarfed by some random half broken laptop. I haven't tried the pi 5 but doesn't really matter

[–] Sprinks@lemmy.world 8 points 21 hours ago

When we replaced our computers years ago we used the old parts to build a low-spec, but functional, computer to hook up to the TV. Paired with a wireless mouse/keyboard we dont really notice a difference in ease of use compared to a streaming device.

[–] Dempf@lemmy.zip 41 points 1 day ago (7 children)
[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago

I can’t find it on my Roku or AppleTV or TIZEN or WebOS.

[–] Bristingr@lemm.ee 3 points 20 hours ago

Just checked, sounds like that program isn't working anymore.

[–] rice@lemmy.org 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

plug in $20 laptop from craigslist and disable internet on your tvs

[–] Dempf@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

DV is difficult to get working properly on PC, and last time I tried to set up an HTPC I ran into tons of remote control issues and it wasn't simple enough that I could just hand the remote over to a guest (or my spouse).

2019 Shield has plenty of issues sure, but it still seems like the best option for me, personally.

Agree about disable network on the TV itself.

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

Not sure when the last time you tried doing this is, but it's pretty easy these days. KDE connect can pretty much handle most of the HTPC necessities. Alternatively, a debloated Onn box will do the trick quite easily

[–] RandomPrivacyGuy@lemm.ee 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I love SmartTube. Every time someone comes over and they want to play something via YouTube, they're like: "holy fuck, no ads? skipping straight to music part? this is divine technology"

[–] BroBot9000@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

Right! Why is an adblocker such a foreign concept to the bulk of humanity.

[–] NotSteve_@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 day ago

SmartTube is the best. There was a small period of time recently where it stopped working and it was so bad going back to regular YT that I just stopped watching entirely.

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[–] Zarxrax@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yeah, normal YouTube is totally unwatchable. If you have a Roku device, the Playlet app can let you watch without ads. There are probably methods for other devices too.

[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Sure, after you've waded through the swamp of Roku ads, you could get an adfree youtube experience with that

[–] Zarxrax@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago

I dunno, all I see on Roku is an image banner on the home screen. I never even look at it.

Holy shit this is the first I've heard of Playlet. Giving it a go now and it's already impressive.

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[–] sittinonatoilet@sopuli.xyz 52 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Adtech is a scam

Recent report showed all these verification companies missed obvious bot traffic and weren’t doing anything prebid even though they were charging for it lol

https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/adalytics-the-ad-industrys-bot-problem-is-worse-than-we-thought/

Multiple sources said that, based on the report, verification platforms appear to be blocking domains based on historical, post-bid assessments of the site’s bot traffic, rather than doing real-time, pre-bid bot blocking on an impression-by-impression basis.

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 day ago (3 children)

No advertising platform has any incentive to prevent bot traffic; they actively profit from 'failing' to prevent it.

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[–] SouthFresh@lemmy.world 30 points 1 day ago

Yay, now the world’s worst profiling service can show the same completely irrelevant add twice!

If you’re a business and using Google to serve targeted ads, think twice. Their targeting is absolutely horse-shit mumbojumbo. They’re wasting your money, their money, and my time by consistently serving the least-relevant, no-fucking-chance-I’d-click-on-that ads.

You’d be better off paying local pigeons for investing advice.

[–] seven_phone@lemmy.world 32 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Do you think Google is proud of this work, do you think the people working on double serving ads feel pride in their 'experimentations'. In their personal time and at the end of their lives will they be happy they took things people liked and made them worse, even unusable for their money. That their only contribution was to scrawl their mess over that of others. Do they cling to the idea that it makes delivery free at the point of use as they make far more from their low practices than they would from honest subscriptions. Are they glad that their living makes the world more mundane. Happy to mar the endeavours of humanity, and as we push into space and maybe meet other intelligences ours will be the only ships with ads for toilet rolls on the outside. And throughout all of this shame the kicker is we would buy toilet rolls anyway.

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 32 points 1 day ago (3 children)

You do not see the scope of the way advertising ruins our society.

We have

  • a world-wide surveillance and profiling network collecting data about everyone for advertising purposes that is beyond the wildest dreams of authoritarian regimes
  • ruining our planet's climate through advertising efforts by the fossil fuel and automotive industries among others
  • ruining our health through advertising efforts by the tobacco, alcohol, sugar and similar industries
  • destroying our systems of government through advertising efforts for political causes and for populist candidates
  • keeping our population divided by using advertising methods to spread wedge issues
  • destroying genuine grass-roots causes and spreading astroturfing to hinder popular movements, unions,...

Essentially everything you think of as propaganda is just applying advertising methods and societal structures for political purposes.

[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)
destroying genuine grass-roots causes and spreading astroturfing to hinder popular movements, unions,…

In my city there is a public vote planned for an ad free cityscape and all of a sudden i see adverts claiming that only adverts keep stuff like Soup kitchens or other charities in the publics focus and how good ads are in public space. It's a goddamn disease

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 6 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Oh yeah, completely forgot to list the destruction of aesthetically pleasing views with public advertising boards and the waste of lifetime spent on watching ads in my list.

Edit: also loss of life from depression and inferiority complexes caused by unrealistic life and body image goals in advertising

[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 7 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

Don't forget light pollution that wrecks peoples and animals biorythms

[–] monarch@lemm.ee 4 points 12 hours ago

Light pollution makes me so sad. You have to get so far away from cities to not have the all encompassing glow of the cities to not affect your view of the sky.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Are people concerned with WHICH ads they see?

Do people see ads? I'm on Firefox with an adblocker I haven't seen an ad in ages, anywhere. Except perhaps for that brief interval where Youtube nominally tried to stop adblocking, it worked for like two weeks and it made me go check out FreeTube until they gave up.

[–] kazerniel@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yeah, with Firefox + uBlock Origin I'm always surprised when I come across an ad. It's like getting a spam email in my Gmail inbox in 2025, a novelty :)

Whatever ads slip through are still quite annoying though (especially autoplaying videos when I disabled it in the browser settings) - I either hide them with reading mode, or Stylus if it's a site I visit repeatedly, or if neither works I just go to another site 🤷‍♂️

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[–] vane@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (3 children)
[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 3 points 22 hours ago (5 children)

Have a look at Qualityland, it has (satirical) ads in it. The whole thing is a comment on consumerism

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[–] tmcgh@lemm.ee 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Every 100th page, there will be a small, "unobtrusive" ad near the bottom of the page. Just to cover rising publishing/paper costs. Then it will be every 50th page, 25th page. Then the ad will get bigger, little by little, until a full page advert is shown every few pages.

Just reinvented a magazine, I know but I could see it happening. The fact that we now have ads showing up in cars at red lights...

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[–] oakey66@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Enshittification continues.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 10 points 1 day ago

It's a naturally emergent property of capitalism.

[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 11 points 1 day ago (9 children)

The real group getting screwed here are advertisers who used to get free protection against their campaigns running with excessive frequency.

This change lets Google burns their customers ad budgets of a bunch of junk duplicate impressions.

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[–] Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 8 points 1 day ago

Yo, I heard you like ads so we put ads in your ads.

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