YouTube is now actively hostile to users without a premium subscription or an Ad blocker.
Yesterday I put on a YouTube video to listen to under the shower.
In the 10 minutes it took, there were 6 advert segments, each containing 2 ads, some couldn’t be skipped, some of which wouldn’t have ended unless I did skip and 1 creator advert within the video itself.
The actual content was less than 3 minutes.
30% content, 70% Ads.
I think it’s fair to call this hostile to users.
Some might say this is working as designed and YouTube of course needs to pay the bills (and make a bit of profit too) but if this is not currently happening, they should be communicating reasons to their users and encouraging them to make an informed choice.
My guess is that YouTube is in fact already making money and that being hostile to users is a choice. A choice that makes their product actively worse to make number go up.
#Tech #Anecdote