I have to wonder if they never have due to fear that people will stop using the platform. I honestly will stop using it. I don't mind ads, but they always come on YouTube at the worst time, if you're watching something informative, they cut your brain off from that into some obscure that has no relevancy to your life.
I’d like to say that I don’t mind YouTube ads but I actually do much of the time because they try to sell me on an investment scam, some tactical doomsday merch, or fundamentalist religion depending on the theme of the video.
Many YouTube ads truly feel adversarial and it is hard to not mind that.
I got one that straight up told me my penis was too small to please my partner. I have to say that you'd think the supposed best and brightest that FAANG companies hire could come up with a bit more of a sophisticated pitch than "your peepee is too small".
Amazon Prime Video is not much better. We recently got an ad for an all black dating site. I’d expect them to guess our ethnicity a bit better (and the content was as 1950’s cracker white as can be), but ignoring that, they were literally selling us diapers a while back, and the kids have their own video profile. Based on our purchases, it’s not physiologically plausible that only one adult lives in the house.
Given how bad the output of ad targeting infrastructure is, I wonder who the “real customer” of it is.
It's funny that we used to laugh about pirate websites having those kinds of ads, but the difference now is just that it's "ok" videos instead of banners drawn using MSPaint.
I turned off personalization a while ago. I get ads for Mint Mobile, a local spa, an Internet fast fashion men's T-shirt company, dog food, and similar anodyne topics. It feels a little like watching 90s daytime TV.
I'm actually loving this whole debacle, because I managed to cut down my Youtube time from 1h/2h a day to almost zero, after I had a week of my Ad Blocker not being able to block ads.
