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Comment by colefichter | Hacker News Reader

You don't think advertisers want to market to children? I hope this was sarcasm and I'm just missing the joke.

Have you walked down the cereal aisle in a grocery store?

Have you seen YouTube advertisements? Half the time the ad has nothing to do with the video. I've seen ads for cement mix in front of video game videos.

If I want to advertise my stand mixer, I don't want to have to pay when my ad is seen by a 5 year old just because a video about gummy bears was tagged "culinary."

I understand advertisers want to "get 'em while they're young" and want children to pester their parents to buy things, but 2 million views from children is not the same thing as 2 million views from the 18-35 bracket.

I think Youtube advertisements are very targeted toward you, and not necessarily relevant to the video. Google uses the information it has on you and plays the products that have paid the most for your demographic from what I understand.

My 3-year-old illiterate child keeps saying "skip" and pounding the skip button until it becomes available, every time he sees an YouTube add.

Hypothesis: maybe they're all like that?

(I do limit and monitor his YouTube use)

Considering just how susceptible children are to advertising brainwashing, you might shed the guilt of skirting video ads on YouTube by installing an ad blocker (ex: uBlock Origin). Morality of blocking ads aside, I wouldn't want my children watching the number of pre-roll ads that YouTube pushes out. As a side effect, your child won't spend an hour a week clicking a skip button, or sitting though the ads that aren't even skippable.

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