I just tried to look up a specific video of a Nick Swardson stand up bit. All I searched was “Nick Swardson loitering”. There were 5 fucking ads before an actual user posted video, then one real human posted video that barely had anything to do with Nick, then 5 more fucking ads.

I knew they were forcing ads into videos but clogging the entire search feed with ads is unfuckingbelievable.

Is this really what it’s come to? Ads are more important than what I’m actually looking for? Are people really okay with this?

  • @TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
    12•3 months ago

    Short answer: money

    Long answer: As more and more ad sales started rolling in, YT was like: “Yes please! Can I have some more of that sweet sweet ad money?” Advertisers were like: “Yeah, sure why not. That seems to boost sales, so how much money can we dump into this black hole?” Some users were like: “WTF! I’m installing an adblocker.”

    Meanwhile, nobody was like: “Yes please. I want to see more ads. Who cares about the videos as long as there are lots of ads to watch. This is the best thing ever!”

    • @fine_sandy_bottom
      10•3 months ago

      It’s more like… YT realised they would never be profitable selling ads and needed a subscription model. No one wants to pay for a subscription so to improve the perceived value of the subscription they need to make the free offering unbearable.

      • @_pete_@lemmy.world
        4•3 months ago

        This is pretty much it.

        YouTube Premium is only remotely worth it because regular YouTube is an absolute shitshow

        • @Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0•3 months ago

          YouTube premium is worth it because of YouTube Music. I’ve never been impressed with the music recommendation algos of other streaming companies, but YTM has pretty good recommendations (possibly because they kept some decent things from Google Music). I’m kinda surprised the regular YT music recommendations are so bad compared to that of YTM.

          • @_pete_@lemmy.world
            3•3 months ago

            I’ve never been impressed with YouTube Music, the UI feels jank and it doesn’t work on half the devices in my home (compared to Spotify which just works on everything)

            • @Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0•3 months ago

              Interesting, I haven’t had any issues across multiple phones/PCs/browsers for anyone in my family plan, but that’s internet services for you.