Shard

Anyone watch YouTube? I know I sure do. It really seems to have figured out the topics that interest me. They now seems intent on monetising it with commercials and or a paid app. Not quite ready to shell out, but with added functionality, who knows.

scrubbedexpat091

I watch some videos, usually short ones on aquariums, airplanes and random things. I don't pay for any of the extra stuff, just use the free version. Ad blocker on chrome seems to block most ads, but sometimes one slips through.

BristolUK

Mostly music stuff there for me. And the odd champions league draw

Shard

Is that all? I watch everything on YT: music, news, debates, how-to's, psychology, science, languages, travel, recipes, and (yes, JS) planes !!

They are launching a premium version with no ads (the more you watch YT the more frequent ads become). I don't think the ad blockers will work, because YT is owned by Google (which provides Chrome).

I think it's a great platform. Lots of people producing interesting content. Lots of dross too, but it's easy to move on.

BristolUK

The odd how-to for something computer related. One or two movies. Comedy sketches. But really not much that's not music. There are other sources for the other stuff.
Ads? Never seen any. When you say the more you watch, do you mean in a session or over a period? I can spend a couple of hours on it when I get the bit between my teeth.

Sometimes it can be a bit like changing channels on TV. Suddenly an hour has gone by and you watched nothing.

Shard

Usually after the first few videos, new ones are preceded by a "you can skip this in 5/15/30 seconds" type and, and some videos have ads that pop at regular intervals (even marked in the timeline).

Definitely a time vacuum. On the Android app version there's a info section where you can view how many hours you have spent on it that day/week, and even set reminders to stop. Just discovered that feature and haven't really used it.

BritInParis

Having the YouTube app on the TV is a real game changer. Watch it a lot more than live TV now.

scrubbedexpat091

I must luck out then with ads, I haven't seen an ad on youtube in like a year, but then I only watch maybe 15-20 videos a week tops so maybe google doesn't have enough on me to select ads of relevance.

BristolUK

Never had anything like that.

I just watched a BBC interview with Spike Lee that someone sent me the link for.

Danny B

I use this blocker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin and it removes all the annoying sidebar ads, inc this website.

caretaker

Adblock plus.... I see nothing!

BristolUK

I use both. uBlock comes in particularly handy for footie/movie streams.

Shard

I agree. And some of the 4K videos (usually drone shots over cities) look amazing, whereas on an iPad the same video has low impact.

And to some extent the content is pre-edited. You can see the best bits/interviews from talk shows rather than having to sit through the whole show. Ditto the news.

Shard

The ads are embedded in the YouTube panel. I don't see how they are going to be blocked if Google decides they want to launch a premium ad-free product. It's like Spotify, you either put up with ads or you pay for premium. I'm not referring to sidebar ads or annoying pop-ups, I'm referring to ads integrated in to YouTube. On the TV app, there were even blank 5/10 second segments (with a YouTube logo) that are placeholders for future ads.

BristolUK

So there's a big downside to it then and one not experienced on standard youtube.