Is This Going To Be The Death of YouTube?
YouTube has been getting rather greedy with these ads/commercials. They announced that in late 2023, they were experimenting with instead of showing short ads interspersed throughout a video, YouTube is trying out longer chunks of ads for non-Premium subscribers that appear in the middle of the content.
YouTube has several different ad formats:
Skippable Video Ad
These are skippable video ads that allow viewers to skip ads after 5 seconds. These appear on computers, mobile devices, TVs, and game consoles.
Non-skippable video ads
These are Non-skippable video ads that must be watched before a video can be viewed. These appear on computers, mobile devices, TVs and game consoles.
Bumper Ads
These are short, non-skippable video ads of up to 6 seconds that must be watched before a video can be viewed. Bumper ads are turned on when skippable or non-skippable ads are turned on. These appear on computers, mobile devices, TVs and game consoles.
During my testing, I see that I got two or three 15-30 second commercials (some are significantly longer, but you can skip the video after a prescribed time), at the start of the video, another pair of ads 3-5 minutes into the video and another pair of ads 9-11 minutes into the video. So a 15-minute video has 6 or more ads that are anywhere between 15-60 seconds each, plus the ad that most of the influencers inject into their videos from their sponsor, which are several minutes in length. According to YouTube, the ad frequency is every 5-8 minutes. However, this can vary depending on the length of the video and the type of ad.
And now, you can no longer use a blocking extension like uBlock Origin, which is used to stop all the ads, except the one from the influencer’s sponsor.
And what makes it much worse, is that currently, an overwhelming majority of the ads are politically based.
If you try to use an extension to block the ads, you will get the following warning from YouTube, which simply states, that the video player will be blocked after 3 videos, and then encourages you to use their Premium subscription, which is $13.99 a month and you get to skip all the ads that YouTube injects into the videos.
Why are there so many ads on YouTube 2023?
To your question about why are there so many ads on YouTube, there are six reasons; reasons are Monetization for creators, Revenue for YouTube, Advertiser demand, Content Hosting Cost, and Target advertising.
Is There A Way Around All Of This?
I’m not endorsing or recommending this Chrome extension, but you should really take a quick look at this video as it appears that this guy found a way around the ads.
