I HATE, HATE, *HATE* GOOGLE!

[Blue Mountain]

So tonight I wanted to watch a series of videos on YouTube related to Manitoba Hydro's generating stations. Just as the second video started, a white balloon appeared on top of the video saying "Make money on YouTube." It did not have an X to close it ... I had to click on the damned thing to make it go away, and it replaced the balloon with an ad!

Okay, I get that YouTube wants to make money by selling ads. But to PUT THEM ON TOP OF A VIDEO I'M WATCHING?? And I REALLY HATE the fact that YouTube is for all intents and purposes a monopoly on this sort of content, so they can abuse their captive audience with crap like this, and do it with impunity. And like the nice little psychopaths they are, Google simply doesn't care. Not about me, not about their abuse of power ... it's all about money.

I'm SO pissed off right now. No way in hell am I going to sign up for a paid account with Google to get rid of the ads. That's practically a protection racket. Give money that THAT outfit? It feels like I'd be paying someone to rape me.

 

[marplots]

I'm SO pissed off right now. No way in hell am I going to sign up for a paid account with Google to get rid of the ads. That's practically a protection racket. Give money that THAT outfit? It feels like I'd be paying someone to rape me.

Grab the moment! Make a video about it.

 

[Blue Mountain]

Grab the moment! Make a video about it.

Do you think I'd make any money off it?

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Aside from taking issue with most of your hyperbole, you do realise that YouTube still isn't profitable?

 

[Blue Mountain]

Aside from taking issue with most of your hyperbole, you do realise that YouTube still isn't profitable?

Ouch! So I can look forward to even more of this crap?

So now I'm thinking of ways YouTube can impose its ads even more than they do now. How about--

• Interrupting the video at random intervals to bring you a message from a "sponsor" (probably more like an ad from some random company that had nothing whatsoever to do with the video)
• Suddenly dulling the video at an unpredictable time to make their pop-ups even more visible
• Overlaying the audio with advertisements, so you have to re-wind and replay the video in order to hear what was said
• Clicking "Play" on a video switches your current browser to full screen screen mode and plays an ad
• Playing videos gives you a continuous ad stream to the left or right of the video you're watching.
• Going full screen gives 2/3 of the screen to the video and the remaining 1/3 of the real estate--top/bottom, left/right--to separate advertising streams
• During playback, suddenly shrinking the video in size (at random intervals, of course) to display flashy and irritating text ads in the space that was formerly occupied by the video
• Perhaps every third or fourth video you play would simply dispense with the video altogether and play an ad instead

It would be interesting to see just how much they could pull off before people actually abandon the service altogether. I'm horrified at the crap advertisers shove at people these days without getting sufficient blow-back to stop particular practises. (And with YouTube it's practically impossible to interact with them anyway, which makes them rather immune from blow-back.)



My primary source of entertainment and learning when I was young was books, sometimes mockingly referred to as a "dead tree medium." But I've never had a book suddenly replace its text on a random page with an ad, never had a book that forced me to read a thirty second commercial for some crap that I wasn't interested in (and quite possibly wasn't even available in my locality) before I could start the next chapter, never had a book decide to start playing annoying music on a random page, and never had a book try to gather up my demographics and send it back to its publisher.

One sure-fire way to get me royally upset is to rudely and audaciously get between me and the information I'm seeking with some crap that I'm not interested in and more than likely have no use for. I'm not necessarily anti-consumer (I bought this computer, after all) but I seriously and intensely dislike the shallow and fake world presented by consumer advertising.

 

[Aepervius]

Are you sure it was from youtube and not from the video author ? Those annotation you can close are usually from the video author itself, not from youtube...

 

[a_unique_person]

You can pay for Youtube now. Gets rid of the ads.

 

[Axiom_Blade]

Get an ad blocker. I use uBlock Origin. I haven't seen an ad on YouTube (or anywhere else) since installing it.

 

[Donn]

You can pay for Youtube now. Gets rid of the ads.

If my basic Internet connection (ISP) did not cost so much, I'd have some money left over for YouTube, at least.

I watch YouTube, being often ill abed, and I confess to blocking ads.

I find it ironic that the money I set aside for the net all goes to my ISP, and thence to a monopoly government company — a foul coil of steaming corruption called Telkom.

If I had money left over, I could become a better netizen.

What to do?

If I allow ads, my time is wasted because:
1. It takes longer to get to the content, so I am waiting for the ad to finish.
2. It chews my limited bandwidth and so constrains my use.
3. I have no money.

Point 3 is the important one. I have no money for the products in the ads. I am not a target market. I will not click on your ad. It simply will not happen. Therefore — in what way do you benefit from showing me that ad?

 

[Belz...]

Like the other guy said: get adblock. Works great, although _sometimes_ an add will manage to go through. If that happens, hit F5 on the keyboard and odds are, it'll go away.

Stay zen.

 

[SezMe]

Get an ad blocker. I use uBlock Origin. I haven't seen an ad on YouTube (or anywhere else) since installing it.

I use Ad Block and the post that mentioned ads was the first time I was aware that YouTube ads were a thing. Just get an ad blocker and enjoy life.

 

[theprestige]

My primary source of entertainment and learning when I was young was books, sometimes mockingly referred to as a "dead tree medium." But I've never had a book suddenly replace its text on a random page with an ad, never had a book that forced me to read a thirty second commercial for some crap that I wasn't interested in (and quite possibly wasn't even available in my locality) before I could start the next chapter, never had a book decide to start playing annoying music on a random page, and never had a book try to gather up my demographics and send it back to its publisher.

One sure-fire way to get me royally upset is to rudely and audaciously get between me and the information I'm seeking with some crap that I'm not interested in and more than likely have no use for. I'm not necessarily anti-consumer (I bought this computer, after all) but I seriously and intensely dislike the shallow and fake world presented by consumer advertising.

How much money have you paid youtube, for the entertainment they've been providing you? If it's anything less than the full cost (the books of your youth are an instructive comparison), then I'd say the sense of entitlement and anger are entirely appropriate to YouTube. And from the content of your posts, I'd say they've done a very effective job of expressing their feelings towards you.

It seems like maybe you're the villain of this tale.

 

[Pup]

I remember books. I always paid extra to get the ad-free versions, and so did everybody I knew, but it wasn't cheap. There was the library though, that rented the ad-free books for free, supported by mandatory taxes. Not sure how I feel about that as a forced use of taxes.

Newspapers and magazines on paper were the real ripoff, though. The free versions were so full of ads they were useless, so I'd always pay the minimum to get the premium ones with reduced ads, but it still always seemed like there were a lot of ads.

Sometimes I handle TV like books, and pay the premium for the ad-free version, and sometimes I'm cheap and just watch the ads in the free version. The free version of TV is like Youtube.

Edited to add: The dumbest business model and the biggest ripoff is in my semi-professional work, where I subscribe to a couple of databases of newspapers. You pay to have access to the database, but the newspapers are still full of ads. Annoying. But the ads aren't even targeted toward people like me. I don't need the latest fruit from the West Indians brought by steam, or the newest style of carriage, or I don't know where their runaway slave went.

 

[Blue Mountain]

Are you sure it was from youtube and not from the video author ? Those annotation you can close are usually from the video author itself, not from youtube...

Absolutely not. The video was posted years ago by Manitoba Hydro as part of the Manitoba Hydro channel. The ad was from YOUTUBE.

 

[Blue Mountain]

You can pay for Youtube now. Gets rid of the ads.

Did you even read the OP? For me, paying for Google is like paying someone to rape me.Google makes its money by vaccuuming up vast amounts of data about me and my browsing habits and selling them to third parties. I have no control whatsoeever over this activity. And now you're askimg me to PAY them for this privilege?

 

[Blue Mountain]

Get an ad blocker. I use uBlock Origin. I haven't seen an ad on YouTube (or anywhere else) since installing it.

Like the other guy said: get adblock. Works great, although _sometimes_ an add will manage to go through. If that happens, hit F5 on the keyboard and odds are, it'll go away.

Stay zen.

I use Ad Block and the post that mentioned ads was the first time I was aware that YouTube ads were a thing. Just get an ad blocker and enjoy life.

I run AdBlock Origin, NoScript, and the MVPS HOSTS file. But I still got the god-damned ads because YouTube overlayed them directly on to the video stream.

 

[Blue Mountain]

How much money have you paid youtube, for the entertainment they've been providing you? If it's anything less than the full cost (the books of your youth are an instructive comparison), then I'd say the sense of entitlement and anger are entirely appropriate to YouTube. And from the content of your posts, I'd say they've done a very effective job of expressing their feelings towards you.

It seems like maybe you're the villain of this tale.

Do you even know how Google works? You and I have paid YouTube's master Google very very handsomely over the years by letting them hoard vast amounts of data about my internet activities, interests, and demographics, storing them in unregulated databases that would make the East German Stazi green with envy, and selling the data to whoever wants it. I may not have given them cash, but I've given them lots of the currency of the Internet: information. And they say "Thank You" by shoving even more ads in my face.

 

[Stout]

I run AdBlock Origin, NoScript, and the MVPS HOSTS file. But I still got the god-damned ads because YouTube overlayed them directly on to the video stream.

Your browser maybe? I"m running Firefox with uBlock Origin and Manitoba Hydro's channels has been playing in an open tab for the past half hour and I haven't seen any ads. My kid, who has YouTube running at least 3 hours a day ( watching game videos ) says he hasn't been bothered by ads save the ones put in by the individual YouTube users.

Bonus....I now know what ice rolling is

 

[willim]

I use Ad Block and the post that mentioned ads was the first time I was aware that YouTube ads were a thing. Just get an ad blocker and enjoy life.

I like to listen to audiobooks on Youtube, but they were becoming virtually un-listenable due to the excessive commercial interruptions every 4-5 minutes or so. It was getting to the point where you got 4 minutes of content followed by 6 minutes of commercials.

Like you, I got Ad Block, and it works so seamlessly that I forget I have it.

 

[marplots]

Do you even know how Google works? You and I have paid YouTube's master Google very very handsomely over the years by letting them hoard vast amounts of data about my internet activities, interests, and demographics, storing them in unregulated databases that would make the East German Stazi green with envy, and selling the data to whoever wants it. I may not have given them cash, but I've given them lots of the currency of the Internet: information. And they say "Thank You" by shoving even more ads in my face.

The thing to do is to use the Internet against them. Recruit a zillion of your fellow offendees to help.

When you see an ad, contact the commercial interest and tell them their ad interrupted your Youtube experience and now you HATE, HATE, HATE their product, a product you once thought highly of.