For several years now, the problem with ads on the internet has gone way too far. The sites which still have non-agressive ads which don't interfere with navigation are very scarce, and some places don't even care for the number of ads they put in place, what their content is or anything.

Youtube has been on the forefront of all of this. I'm the first one to understand they need to make some money both for them and to share with the content creators, but as time has passed by the ads have become more and more aggressive, as well as interfering more and more with the user experience. All of this pushes more and more people into using adblock or anything similar to do away with the interferences because they've overdone it, yet that people is seen as the bad ones for hampering the monetary gains of the site independently of how the site is actually treating them.

A few years ago, Youtube showed at which points an ad would pop out during a video. At this time, ads weren't that troublesome and you could anticipate when your video would be cut, so we could withstand it. Yes, it was a bit of a drag, but like I said it's a way for them to get earnings and as such we coped with it. However, in the past four years, the ad policy of Youtube has changed drastically.

First, they stopped showing when would ads pop out. Understandable because some people would deliberately skip that specific part if they could, which I honestly consider displeasant but whatever. Then, we had the ability to report ads we considered annoying, but there was a trick: you couldn't report the marque, and a single ad of a specific marque could be shown dozens of times (different duration, sponsored by a third-party...), so in the end the same ad kept pursuing you even in your dreams (in the not so distant future, this could be literal).

As of late, the ability to report ads is gone. You can now block them, which is good, but some times blocking them doesn't mean the ad stops playing. Also, the option is not always there, and completely disappears under certain circumstances (static ads when navigating, for example, and sometimes whether or not you have custom ads enabled in your account) meaning you have no way of making that ad disappear, let alone denounce it. The static ads can be denounced but with a lengthy process that many people don't even bother. Not even Google bothers, I've seen ads under tags that are absolutely false or opposite to what the ads are, yet we have no way of reporting such false information. Nice.

Youtube has a policy that, when a video is long enough, they make less ad pauses, though in reality they show the same amount of ads but less often: instead of stopping the video every 6 minutes, they stop it every 12 minutes for example and each pause is longer to make up for the viewed time. This could be understandable if it wasn't because it is inconsistent: the same video one day stops as usual and the day after stops as a long video, or even the first pause is normal and the second one shows the "Less pauses for this long video". This goes on to say they have ZERO control over how ads are handled, yet we're forced to accept it and swallow all ads they want to show us, to the point not even paying a subscription frees you from seeing ads because they don't make enough money with it.

I started using adblock because of the aforementioned reasons, whitelisting the sites I knew weren't aggressive with ads. However, the last few days I saw a message saying "¿The video lags? Click here for more information" which essentially says using an adblock can cause malfunctions. Investigating further, it looks like Youtube has started prohibiting access to it if you're using adblock, though only in some places. Once again, Youtube is doing nothing wrong here as they're only striving to survive and the evil guys are the consumers who don't want them to survive. In reality, Youtube wants to make more money every year and as such they've been doing this many changes just in this decade alone, and we either accept it WITHOUT QUESTION or we move away. So basically, we're being pushed into piracy because of this aggressive behavior and they seem perfectly fine with having less consumers (and in the end, not meeting the monetary results they expected because of this drop).

Things took a turn to the worse just today, when directly I couldn't play any videos. No warning appeared, simply the video wouldn't load. You want me to pay in order to see some ads or rather none when you treat me like this and have no control over your ad system? Hell, no. That's why I stopped watching Youtube on my TV, and now I'm switching towards Brave. I've already tested it in my PC and it works perfectly well, so any site I see with troublesome ads will now belong to Brave and the rest will remain with Chrome, without any adblock extensions.

This is my way of rebelling towards the aggressive policies of some sites. Today, I became another one who has badly affected Youtube's earnings, and sincerely I don't care. I'm willing to allow ads to a certain degree, but I won't allow such an aggressive behavior. We do have a word to say, and companies should be willing to hear us and respect a bit the ones who are actually making them rich. Instead, Youtube and other companies disrespect consumers and blame us for not spending more money on them or being more flexible with the ads they want to show.

I was also an AdBlock user and had the same experience. And also mainly used it because the ads on YouTube are oppressive at times.

Also, too lazy to look it up, but as someone that solely uses Firefox, YouTube has a habit of failing to work properly, aka lagging and failing to load videos, and it literally happens with no other video/streaming site.

i'd also love to see all the ai narration stuff gone but we cant have it all.

I noticed the issue more than a year ago but I also had Ublock on in the background and they didn't notice. I use UBlock Origin Lite now (because regular UBlock was being decommissioned or something)

I've been using an Adblocker for over 15 years now, and I'm honestly proud of it after seeing some of the ads, especially the evony marketing campaign of 2009.

Plus, combined with some of the ads being highly explicit and being played on sites or webpages where children tend to go to, AND a recent study that links to ads being bad for mental health, I'll never relent in even the slightest. I'll keep using Adblockers in everything that needs to have one, from browsers to tablet browsers to even the computer monitor and printer if needed.

RavusRat: As someone that used solely Chrome, I can confirm the bad habit of Youtube you mention. I'm using Brave now and I have zero issues with how the website works, so we can definitely see a clear cause.

The ai narration stuff would be a very good riddance indeed, but it has helped (part of) us realize the true value of human touch and how we're different and not programmed to do things, as well as the need for some emotion in speeches to actually convey a message.

classgame : UBlock is from the Chrome store, if my information hasn't failed me. Call me pessimistic, but I don't see that one standing the passing of time considering how Google wants to ultramonetize everything.

TouchMaster97 : I can't agree more with you. The ads currently are horrible in quality, quantity and content, and it's getting out of hands. It still amazes me how I'm being shown ads when opening the file manager of my cellphone, like they even need to make profit of how often I use my phone's preinstalled apps which need no internet to fully function.

I once tried a DNS server which worked wonders in eliminating ads, maybe I'll go back to it. The thing is I haven't yet found a way to protect my Smart TV, and it's an absolute pain because even there we have way too many unwanted ads. But the lack of results won't stop me from eventually finding a solution to this cancer.

The note about the printer sounded funny at first, but now it sounds painfully plausible xD