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Comment by afandian | Hacker News Reader

I use Firefox on iOS (which as we all know is mostly not Firefox). I don't have a google account. Nothing else exotic.

YouTube serves me an ad every 3 minutes or so (I've not timed it). If I ever seek in a video, again, an ad. Even if it didn't play any video yet.

I can't figure out why they think is is a good idea. I've seen the same iPhone ad so many times.

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Because advertisers pay for the eyeballs anyway.

I started paying for YouTube a couple of years ago and decided it’s worth the money. I watch YouTube a lot more than, say, Netflix and they’re priced around the same.

It's to make you a paying user. Ad dollars aren't worth what they used to be.

From the beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves school of marketing. No thanks.

(And I wonder if advertisers know how their ads are being played? That ad is worth a lot less to Apple on the 5th play, and negative on the 10th).

When I owned an Apple table I saw this beer ad about 20 times in a row, while watching a conference video. It had an annoying song. And I made a solemn oath to myself I will never buy a beer with that brand again in my life.

I wish your response was more generalized and people would punish brands for intrusive/abusive or advertising in bad taste. In Europe and perhaps other parts of the world advertising is a bit more bearable as compared to what’s the norm in the US.

The sad thing here is I doubt the beer company is intending this to occur. They just offer Google $X spending, and they are ensuring they get every one of those $s.

A similar thing happens in a lot of the streaming platforms. The same ads are shown relentlessly. Advertisers aren't stupid, and they are aware of ad fatigue. I can't imagine they are possibly happy about the situation. OR...I have no clue what I'm talking about and they are quite tickled about the situation and this is why it continues

Advertisers can pay a premium to frequency cap their ads. Usually they get a sweet heart deal on remnant inventory, which sounds like what you’re watching.

But how effective is it for sales? Watchere could get alienated from abusine ads and in turn avoid the brand, does’t anyone really care? It’s all dumb meaningless metrics all the way down?

Exactly, it has negative value. You will hate it forever and tell your friends. I'm not sure how making something bad cheap makes it better.

I'll slam a door on your foot once for a $, or 100 times for only 10 cents!

I don't think I could afford to refuse such a deal.

Interesting. Do you have any sources for this? I wasn't aware the price of ads had gone down; in fact, I assumed the market was doing very well.

I think you are right I spoke too soon. Much like the yield curve un-inverting. Way too soon.

I think brave browser on iOS blocks YouTube ads.

At least you can still block them by installing a separate app (forgot the name. not an apple user).

AdGuard on iOS. Brave everywhere else.

Mind you, Brave will then fill your notifications with text ads for sketchy crypto products.

Still better than YouTube ads, I guess, but I hope we can do better.

Brave only sends you advertising notifications if you activate their rewards feature, which is disabled by default.

No, it activated itself a few months ago on mine. There was never any prompt. The setting is way down in a submenu and had two separate switches enabled; no chance I could have hit it by accident.

It's nice to know that it can be toggled back off, though. The ads themselves certainly gave no indication.

Everything gets pushed to its breaking point in the cycle of improvement and then enshittification, and YouTube is the perfect example.

Loads of people were happy with the ads early on. One ad, immediately skippable but occasionally it would grab your attention and you'd stick through it, and then you got to the content.

Now it's multiple ads, many unskippable, and then randomly inserted ad breaks with zero respect for the content (you would think that Google would have the AI chops to find appropriate "intermission" points), all so you can watch the content where the creator is pushing snake-oil supplements, pillows and VPN products. It has reached the point of absurdity. For a content system where a tiny fraction of creators are yielding all of the rewards.

And while Premium seems like the solution, at least for the former problem, we all surely realize that once Google has captured enough of the market in Premium, "trials" of Premium, "curated" ads will begin. Something something support creators.

As a total aside about ads, I'm surprised the ad industry has made zero headway into ad customization or even variations. There's some gambling ad that plays over and over again during NFL games here in Canada (and probably all other sports) that has a guy talking about his "system" for gambling responsibly or some such whitewashing of a garbage industry. The other guy then reveals his system and it's a cat pawing at some balloons. I've seen this ad literally thousands of times. I don't even know what fungible, evil gambling company runs the ads because it's tuned out so much. But couldn't they have dozens of variations of the guy revealing his system? How is that not a thing? 100s of variations. Thousands. It would probably capture my attention instead of always the same cat balloons thing.

> But couldn't they have dozens of variations of the guy revealing his system?

Interesting thought. There is a big cost to this on the ad creator side. I also wonder about how they would make a customizable standardization for this?

In email we can use fields like your name and job title, for example with targeted LinkedIn recruiters.

I can foresee video ads which utilize AI calling your name.. I guess this is Minority Report..

But underlying this modern web ads already give us granular targeting though interests. So most of the benefit is already there.

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