Pulaski

Do you get absolutely blitzed with the same or very similar ads on YouTube day after day, sometimes for weeks on end?

Last year, for a couple of months, I was seeing numerous Ryan Reynolds ads every day on YouTube for a gaming app called Toon Blast, but at least the ads were amusing. And of course I see a steady stream of Geico ads. But this thread is more about the WTF ads - specifically why am I seeing ads this week for a colon cancer detection drug 10 times a frickin' day? …. And no I have not been using my phone or PC, or anything else for that matter, to research colon cancer or colonoscopies.

MidAtlantic

Not noticed it on my admittedly infrequent visits to YouTube.

Maybe they know something you don't?

Hotscot

I download lots of music videos.
About 80% of the time they are preceded with an ad for 'Grammarly' a writing checking thing.
I've never watched a full Grammarly ad as you can skip after 5 seconds.

Some ads you can't skip though.

The whole monetization beast...

Anian

You've been classified as an "old person" in their demographics based on whatever other sites you have visited. The all-seeing-eye of Google knows so much about you and whoever uses your devices purely by what other sites you visit, I doubt search history plays much role at all compared to 5-10 years ago. Then the ad guys say they want to blanket people over 55 and/or the videos watched mainly by people over 55, and you get those ads coming up over and over. My kids use my account for Youtube for watching gaming videos while I watch mostly science and history shows, so we get lots of insurance and travel ads regardless of what we watch. I let them play through if they are for channels I like, gives the maker more revenue.

Hotscot

I look for Ariana Grande, Bebe Rexha, Ann Marie, Jess Glynne..

Pulaski

I wonder if that is why they blitzed me with ads for Caroline Jones last summer, all summer, long, and well into the autumn! That was my wife's theory, that her management thought that "middle-aged, conservative, white guy in The South" was a target demographic for her! I can only assume that "zero interest in country music" also factored in somewhere.

civilservant

Ad blocker. Problem solved.

tom169

Grandfathered into the cheaper YouTube red pricing. For the amount of videos I watch on there was worth the $10 a month to get rid of ads.

caretaker

If the ads are on the video itself then ad blockers don't touch them. As noted, most can be dismissed after 5 seconds and I think the ones that have to play through are usually only about 20 seconds. If you don't want Google targeting you for advertisers do your searching with duckduckgo - they don't track your search history.

Pulaski

Thank you, I thought that would be the case. The ads can be pretty much any length, and I fairly regularly get full length music videos as the pre-video ad, so they can be 3-5 minutes, and about 10% of the Caroline Jones ads were "full song" ads, others were snippets of studio interviews, or part of a song.

I have also been shown a Fender P-Bass ad three or four times over the past year that is more of a documentary about the musical journey of discovery of two guys who got into rapping, sampling, and mixing, and then discovered the joy of making the source music themselves, using drums and a P-Bass.... and then sampling it! Anyway, that ad runs over 22 minutes!

ETA. A video I just now entry to watch on astronomy, the scientific subject, not the song, was preceded by a 3:50 "song" by Kendrick Lamar, which was less appealing to me than country music and also lacked the visual appeal of Caroline Jones videos.

caretaker

I haven't encountered anything like that.

Dorothy

Me either. The worst I get is the Grammerly ad and the odd 30 second one that I can skip after 5 seconds. I really only watch cake decorating videos on YouTube, so maybe I'm too boring for Kendrick Lamar or bass advertising.

Hotscot

Thanks for the Caroline Jones tip...nice..

Anian

I get a 10-minute ad every now and then, although it is usually a travelogue style thing so it ends up being quite interesting. The second time it comes up I will skip it. Sometimes it is a long trailer for a movie I want to see.

I think the super long ads are because they think you only have it on in the background while doing something else, so they can show you the longer stuff without expecting you to skip it quickly. If they didn't insist on re-enabling autoplay then it wouldn't be so easy to get into that situation. The worst ads are the ones that interrupt the video in a dumb place. The Youtubers have been complaining a lot about this lately, they have to manually go in and remove the breaks that Youtube automatically inserted without permission. I'd expect ads in hour long videos, but they do it to 8 minute ones.

Pulaski

Agreed, the P-Bass ad was quite interesting, in fact I have watched it twice, despite not currently being in the market for a bass guitar. Also agreed, like the one I saw a few days ago inserted 30s before the end of a 5 minute video!