But of course, they'll presumably do that also.. I just wonder what making the product ad-free would do for increasing the user-base (since ads cost me as a user, and presumably I'm not the only one)
1) (a few months ago) Adblock stopped working. Fine, ads were rare, short, and skipable, didn't bother me enough to try to fix it.
2) (a few weeks ago) The percentage of videos displaying ads increased significantly, and most of them are now unskipable.
I even had one that lasted for maybe two minutes with no sign of ending the other day (it hadn't repeated yet, it was that long! There was no indication of how much longer it would be) which eventually prompted me to reload the page, which clued me in that the "unskipable" ads can be skipped immediately by refreshing the page—it rarely (maybe 5% of the time, tops) plays an ad on the second load.
Whether or not ads are unskippable (and whether or not to show ads at all) is up to the video owner, so it's more likely you've just wandered into a different subset of videos recently.
I almost never see unskippable ads anymore, though it seems like the worst offenders are "official" vevo music videos and (most annoyingly, since the video itself is already an ad) some studios' movie trailers.
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