YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos.

  • Ads are an anti-pattern for me. If I have to sit through your bullshit I am NOT buying your product. It’s in your best interests for me to run an ad blocker. I also run Sponsorblock to skip the product-shilling parts, similar reasons. I buy things on merit after researching, not because I saw it on a video.

    Still, by watching the video, it will be recommended to other people because it’s popular. Being a little tounge-in-cheek here but I like to think that by watching it, I am crowdsourcing the ad revenue aspect to other viewers who will sit through the ads.

    • Yup. If I see an ad for a thing, it means they spent more money trying to trick me into buying the thing than just making the thing better in the first place. An ad for a thing means the thing is shit!

    • Same. Seeing an ad, especially an obnoxious one, is more likely to make me avoid a product or brand. Also listening to a WAN show a few months when Luke & Linus started talking about how Linus can’t “see” ads kinda blew my mind because I’ve always been that way too. I imagine a lot of people of a certain age reflexively developed the ability to read pages full of ads and still manage to extract info from them.