YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos.
YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos.
Yes, the annoyance of the ads is the bigger problem. Give short, non-annoying ads (the solar ones are some of the worst) and I won’t work to stop them.
Or at the very least, show me a healthy variety of ads, instead of spamming the same ad over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and–
their ad algo sucks. You search diets, and suddenly your inbox is spammed for months with weightloss adds. or they determine you’re a stay at home mom because you let your SiL on your network one time… and now you get shit loads of bra adds. (okay, maybe they just determined I have really nice boobs. Which is kinda why I was looking for the diet… manboobs aren’t really all that attractive.)
Lmao this reminds me of one time when I opened up Amazon, and my homepage was suddenly filled with My Little Pony products, various stuffed animals, and lube. Idk why that happened, I’m not a brony or a furry or anything like that, and the products disappeared after about a day. Maybe it was because I clicked something brony/furry related on reddit? or it might’ve been a joke from a bored Amazon employee or something.
It was funny at the time, but it also made me realize how problematic targeted advertising can be. What if someone that doesn’t know me that well sees it and thinks I’m a weirdo, and decides to not hire me or give me a loan or accept my college application, or whatever. Or what if I want to secretly look up divorce lawyers, and then every site/video I open starts spamming me with loud obnoxious ads for divorce lawyers? How many intimate personal details about a person can be deduced from the ads they’re seeing?!
So yeah, ad blockers and tracking protection for me all day every day. I refuse to give Youtube my money as that’s the only choice I have as a consumer to fight back against business models I disagree with. If they want to block people like me, they’re free to do so at any time.