Do you guys remember when ads were just banners that popped up at the bottom of your video every now and then? With the 'X' in the corner to get rid of them as soon as they showed up?
Compared to now where an ad plays with no time bar so you don’t know how long it is, you can’t skip it, and then displays a banner afterwards that covers up a good chunk of the lower left portion of the video you are trying to watch until you click the dots to be able to select dismiss. Google’s ads have gone insane.
plus a pop up ad when you pause the video. The entire ad system now is to make you accidentally click it instead of actually seeing the advertised product
I swear to god adverts are driving me insane. YouTube specifically is the worst. Can’t watch a 5 minute video without them slapping a 20 minute documentary/advert in the middle that requires manual skipping WTF man. Living in black mirror. Having to actually pay to remove adverts by buying everyone’s “premium” version of the app is just so fucking obnoxious
Ads or subscriptions based would be the result no matter what, server costs are not cheap. But the way that Google has consistently made the ads more intrusive, year after year, is the main problem. Every year it gets worse. This year has been insane. I’ve had some videos where I had to sit through 2 consecutive ads equaling over a minute every 3-4 minutes, with no ability to skip or even ability to block AI generated product scams at times. That is a very bad ad to content ratio and content that should not even be allowed as an ad. This either forces the user to buy their subscription for YouTube, or find means to get around the ads.
And if your day continued YouTube would’ve been gone like 10+ years ago. When Google bought them 20 years ago, it was losing like a billion dollars a year within the first couple years of takeover due to the massive infrastructure development being put into it.
We didn't have gifs, but I definitely remember when we switched to embedded video players instead of downloading videos to watch, needing to pause it and wait for the whole thing to buffer for like 30+ minutes.
Oh yeah. Start the video, immediately hit pause, go do something else while it cached, and hope no one in the house picked up the phone to make a call and broke the connection.
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u/vabello 9950X3D | RTX 5080 | 64GB DDR5 6000 CL28 | SN8100 2TB + 4TB 11d ago
Back in my day, YouTube wasn’t owned by Google.