My Lovely Bride™ and I watch a lot of YouTube, or at least we have until recently. I don’t know if you have noticed, but lately YT has ramped up the number of pre-roll and mid-roll advertisements, many of which are unskippable. This isn’t a huge problem while watching on our computers, thanks to ad blockers (because f*ck YT), but we mostly have watched on our Roku device… which doesn’t have that functionality.
So, yeah. Not only have I decided to not return to YT, because it’s too much work for absolutely no return, but now we have to basically stop watching YT entirely.
Look, I get it. YouTube is a business, and they need to make money. This means they need to advertise, and I understand that. But there is a difference between having a pre-roll ad on a ten minute video (the average length of recent content on YT), and what we see now.
Routinely, I have to deal with two pre-roll ads, plus another 4-6 ads throughout a 10 minute ad, then sometime even another set at the end! Seriously, it is absolutely ridiculous, and wholly unacceptable!
Many people fled from network television, because of the ads were just too much to deal with there. Well, with the current policies on YT, they actually have more ads on their videos than you see on broadcast or cable television, over the same space of time. It has come to the point where, once I have passed the mid-roll of a video, I will pause a YT video I am about to watch, and count how many yellow marks are scattered along the timeline for that content. If there is more than one yellow mark (denoting where a mid-roll ad is), I simply close the video and watch something else.
If it has more than two, I give it a Dislike, before I leave.
To be honest, I hate that I have to do this. I know it hurts the content creators here, but frankly, they have brought it on themselves. Many people think that YT is responsible for putting those mid-rolls on these videos, but it is the content creator themselves who decide if they will show mid-roll ads, and how many they will allow. That’s why so many videos stretch their content, so that their videos are at least 10 minutes long. You can’t qualify for mid-rolls, unless your content is that long, at a minimum.
So those videos that are just over 10 minutes long, and have three or more mid-roll breaks scattered over that timeline, are entirely, 100% the result of the content creator trying to line their pockets. It is just that simple, and while YT does share some blame in this situation, they only facilitated it.
The greedy content creators are the ones pushing those ads on us, and I won’t have it anymore.
What I have started doing is sticking with content creators who eschew YT ads as much as possible. Many have their own Patreon accounts, others take sponsorships, and so forth. But they go out of their way to not run YT ads on their content, at least not as mid-roll ads.
Honestly, I have no problem with pre-roll ads, I think those are just fine. I am just sick to death with these mid-roll ads breaking up videos, and making it impossible to enjoy the platform anymore! I know people complained about something similar happening with Twitch, but those don’t happen nearly as frequently as they do on YouTube anymore.
It’s ridiculous, and it has to stop.
