State of the YouTube Ads

While my site currently doesn’t contain ads, it did contain them before. And I still do a sponsored post or two on occassion. Primary reason why I removed ads from these pages was because they were becoming vehicle for a snake-oil salesman. I was ok with ads that try to sell real stuff. I was not ok with ads that sell perpetuum mobile of any kind. Google ads didn’t allow me to remove later category so I simply disabled them all.

But that doesn’t mean I removed ads from my life. While amount of ads online is increasing, one site is becoming more and more unusable due to them - YouTube. Pretty much all ads I get these days from YouTube are ads for either scammers or republicans. But I repeat myself.

And length of the ads has been increasing substantially. For example, I got ad for Ben Shapiro show. Curious on how long it would go, I left it running. Darn thing ran for more than 1 hour (don’t worry, I muted him after a minute or two in order to preserve my sanity). The whole freaking show was the “ad”. Total duration of the “ad” was 1:07:41. Duration of the video this ad was playing on was 46:33. So, ad was more than 20 minutes longer that the content. WTF?

And this is just one ad that made me write this. I cannot even count how many ads for the revolutionary new device that “the government wants to destroy” I saw. Be it a flashlight, binoculars, night-vision, or some magic bean, YouTube will give it an audience.

This is not a normal thing. It never was, and it should never be considered normal. While ads on TV were never perfect and there was an occasional scammy ad or two, you had some standards. For one, I never saw and ad that was longer than the content. And I never saw as many political garbage on TV (admittedly, I didn’t grow up in the USA).

I guess we all bought into an argument that it’s “too difficult to check all the ads”. I guess multibillion company just cannot afford it.

That said, I don’t believe solution is in more rules. Solution, as it often happens would be in more competition. I doubt that YouTube would allow for crappy ads if they had any proper competition. But it might be that ship has sailed.