I was watching a video on landscape mode on my phone on YouTube. And then when a wild midroll ad appears, the ad thinks it’s a good idea to play a ultrawide-screen video inside a TikTok style vertical phone window, and then puts that in a widescreen video. The whole thing also got smaller to display the CTA at the right.
Which reminds me, I hate how YT ads on mobile try to forcibly cover up the entire screen. It’s like seeing a billboard that suddenly expands to fill most of your vision. They didn’t used to do that, instead they just took over the video portion of the screen, but you could keep browsing comments while the ad plays.
This is basically YouTube’s fault. I was one of those who initially did not block the ads to “support” creators I watched, and just used the app. Now they’ve made that completely insufferable and think my alternative is going to be to pay the subscription. Idiots.
First they started kicking you out of incognito and then add whatever you were watching to your account. It used to be that the video you were watching would also close.
Then if you don’t skip the first ad, they play a 5 minute ad after with the most obnoxious shit hoping you’re not there to click.
Then they tripled the amount of ads you have to skip, and making part of them 15-30 seconds unskippable ones. Now ads are about 1/4 of my watch time which is on par with the old cable model.
The straw that broke the camel’s back is now when you open the app, IT AUTO PLAYS SHORTS FULLSCREEN! At least if it was the creators I normally see in my shorts, but now it’s some garbage trending youtuber I don’t know. AND NOW THAT IVE WATCHED 1 SECOND OF IT THEY ARE NOW RECOMMENDED IN MY CONTENT.
I used to juggle accounts to focus the algorithm of certain type of videos for certain accounts, and youtube has completely ruined that too. Fuck that, went with the webapps and skipped the ads entirely. Fuck you youtube, you spat on those who gave you the least trouble. Never going back to the app.
I’m really wondering: is this working?
Like, does this approach yt is taking really increase viewership, revenue, watchtime, whatever the metric is?
I seriously can’t imagine, that it works. If you’re savvy enough, you’ll use AdBlock of some kind and for the less techy people it gets insufferable. That can’t be good for yt.
The thing is, YT is a de facto monopoly. Yes, there are alternatives, but most people don’t know about or use them. I’m not talking about short TikTok-style videos, I’m talking about longer-form video content. Sure, there is stuff and other sites. I go to Vimeo and DailyMotion sometimes to watch things, but YouTube is where the vast majority of the content is. They don’t need to worry about losing viewers right now, because they know viewers have nowhere else to go. So they can do whatever the hell they want. I wish I knew a good solution.
The solution for YouTube is right in your comment: it used to be the case that only tech savvy people would install AdBlock.
With more ads though, the incentive to install an ad blocker is suddenly there for more, even not so tech savvy people.
YouTube‘s reaction is already visible as they are now trying to block ad blockers: Try to make it more difficult to get an ad blocker at all, so not as tech savvy people won’t get one and continue to watch ads as they used to.
I imagine us taking the high seas is “inconsequential”. Until it isn’t at least, all that matter is quarterly earnings, the rest “is next quarter”.
I suspect it’s like video games, they don’t give a shit if pay to win mechanics drive away interest for the game, they make more than enough off those who do pay. In the long run it will worsen the platform until eventually there will be a crisis (similar to some banana looking motherfucker on reddit), and the CEO of google Sundae Pichu is going to start cutting on pencils and printers at YouTube, while asking government for subsidies lest they slack off a chunk of their workforce and buyback they stock.
The fucking world we live in
I don’t understand why people use apps. Just like, in general. If there’s a browser version, it’s almost always waaaaaay better.
@Aesthesiaphilia @SuperSpruce @Kalkaline @RedditWanderer I generally use apps (specifically on my tablet/phone) because:
* They visibly separate those activities from random web sites that I viewed as one-offs
* They look and feel lighter-weight
* Features not in the app are generally more obscure things that I wasn’t gonna do anyway
There’s plenty of apps out there that improve on the web experience, like the eleventy billion Lemmy apps.