I routinely see >1hr skippable ads, whenever I make the mistake of attempting to watch on my iPhone instead of my PC (Where Adblock works). They are definitely intentional ads. I don’t know why. The products vary wildly, but are all scams or scam-adjacent at the very least.

Most of my experience with them is that if I ever fall asleep watching a YouTube video, I wake up halfway through an ad about how I can “improve my life with this one simple trick” or how “Jesus can help me if I donate now”

But they have gotten much more aggressive lately. I tried to watch a 30 minute podcast on YouTube from my phone, and gave up 15 minutes in after the fourth hour-long (skippable) ad. They don’t show the duration until you interact with the screen now, so if I’m doing something else and not able to touch my phone right away I get a good few minutes in before I think “is this ad going to end?”

Right and Google likely doesn’t want to be responsible for using one of their customers ads as an antiadblocker attack. That could result in reputational damage for the brand.