I watched a Warframe (game) YouTube video on the Steam integrated browser, without beeing connected to my account and Holly s* it was horrible.
In a 14 minutes video, I got 5 ads. 1 (or more skippable once) at the beginning, 1 during the first half of the video, 2 during the second half, and 1 at the end.
All were skippable after 5 sec.
2 were close together at about 1 min interval during the second half of the video.
But that is not the only issue. 4 of those ads (not the last one at the end), were Israeli hate/war anti-hamas propaganda.
I consider these ads horrible and they should not be allowed in my opinion.
YouTube Ads: “You are a MAN with a GUN and you will MURDER EVERYONE if it means you can PROTECT your FAMILY”
I don’t even know, or care, wtf they are selling but they missed the target audience with that one. That’s the cringiest fetishism I’ve ever seen in my life.
So many ads seems like Powerthrist turned down to 70% but lacking the irony.
Google must be scraping the bottom of the barrel of crazy that’s also stupid enough to pay for ads, I think it’s common knowledge now that Google games analytics to artificially inflate the appearance of ad impact.
Honestly, I don’t really think they could be any more impactful with ads than they actually are, though. Might have to side with them against the advertisers on that front. YouTube Sponsors should know by now exactly how effective Google is. If Google attempts to be even more pushy, like with the banner that disables video player, the only thing they get is massively reduced user engagement as people either log out or leave the site.
A much bigger issue is that Google has either Monopoly or strong Oligopoly on serving online ads, and they set their rates accordingly.
I don’t think they need to be pushy, just the quality of product decisions has been going down as time goes on. Monopoly a bigger issue for sure, If not for the massive decline in value to both users and advertisers, we wouldn’t mind the monopoly so much.