- YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
- Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
- Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
The most recent ad that actually got my attention was on Reddit, so this was at least a year ago now. It was an ad for caffeinated chocolate candies. I don’t remember the brand name but they had an owl motif, because caffeine = awake. I saw that ad in passing ONCE. Just enough for me to learn the product existed.
In the case of that Mission: Impossible movie, if it had played the long form of the trailer at me once or twice in an entire week, and then the shorter version of the trailer once or twice the next week, I might have gone “You know that looks like a cool movie I might go see it.” But I got served that ad and only that ad several times an hour for weeks on end, and I have now resolved to never watch another Mission Impossible movie, a movie starring Tom Cruise, or any film distributed by Paramount Pictures ever again. When it comes to boycotts I do my brain surgery with a backhoe.
Gonna blast another ad I hated: A scarecrow dancing around on a GE coal-fired powerplant to the tune of “If I only had a brain” from the Wizard of Oz. Apparently the show I was watching was sponsored by General Electric’s heavy industry division, which okay fine, but…what decision was the average SyFy channel viewer supposed to make based on the contents of that commercial? “Gee Tina, we should run out and buy a 1.5GW steam turbine generator.” Why’d they feel the need to bother me about it?
Yeah, repeat ads are the worst. One of the best targeting thing that could be done is simply prevent seeing the same ad more than once in a 24h period. It would do so much to make the hellscape a little more bearable.
Especially with something like a movie trailer. Do they really get asses in theater seats via stockholm syndrome?