EDIT: Since a lot of sibling comments are talking about the price of Youtube Premium. My $0.02, I was paying £16/month for Spotify Duo for me and my girlfriend. Dropped Spotify after 15 years of paying, for £18/month Youtube Premium family which includes Youtube Music in addition to ad free Youtube. Total win.
Whenever I see my (9-year-old) nephew watching YouTube on their TV at home, I get a little horrified at some of the ads he's exposed to. But this has been normalized throughout his childhood, so it seems unremarkable to him, and his parents seem to be desensitized to it as well. I suppose some of this is bias on my part: I aggressively avoid exposing myself to advertising, using in-browser ad blocking, network-level ad-blocking, and OS-level DNS VPN-based ad-blocking on my phone. Whenever offered, I always pay for the service tier (like YouTube Premium) that removes ads. I get that this could get expensive real fast for a lot of people, and isn't feasible. (But I know a lot of people who don't even install browser ad-blockers, which is just baffling to me.)
But that's the big problem... people are being forced to choose between an uncomfortable level of financial expense, and paying for things with their attention, where that attention is being exploited with deeper and deeper psychological manipulation that has been fine-tuned over the span of decades. On the occasion I do see an ad (especially a video ad), my reaction to it is so viscerally negative that I mute audio and look away, even sometimes shutting it down entirely.
$14/mo is a lot just for brainrot so you can listen to your kid shout "skibidi Ohio sigma rizz" all the time
> $14/mo is a lot just for brainrot so you can listen to your kid shout "skibidi Ohio sigma rizz" all the time
They'll get that from school, most of them aren't watching a YouTube vid and inventing culture, they're just picking it up. Like every other generation
This just demonstrates how much money is in those ads and how much Youtube needs to charge to compensate for that. And advertisers wouldn't pay that much if it wasn't at least somewhat worth it, i.e., the psychological manupulation is worth at least that much w.r.t. their bottom line. The average person therefore "pays" with $14 worth of brainwashing.
You could obviously argue that $14 is just a ripoff and they don't make that much money off you. Sure you are not average and perhaps less influenced than others, but fun fact, a large majority of people believe that about themselves.
By the way, Youtube Premium still collects your data and uses it. Without that, it would need to be even more expensive.
But oh boy have the ads really slid far down the hill of enshittification in the past several months. They've gone from one ad break every ~15-20 minutes to one every ~7-10 minutes. With that, you also get an increased chance of a mid-sentence ad break (especially noticeable on older videos, where ad points have clearly been automatically retrofitted). In the past, you'd usually expect at least one of the ads to be skippable, and now, many of them seem to be fully unskippable.
To be fair, the sheer repetitiveness of the ads and their poor targeting isn't new, but it is a lot more aggravating to be shown the same completely useless ad that you saw 10 minutes ago.
(Not to mention the other enshittifications of recommendations getting even worse or the number of videos per row in search going down from 6 to 3.)
And the enshittification isn't tempting me to pay Google for a better experience; instead, it's tempting me to spend time (and perhaps coin) to other people to avoid the YouTube ads. Good job, Google.
Um what? How much they get is based on views and subscriptions, not on whether an ad was filtered or not. It also doesn't depend on whether you click skip or not.