Today I’m going to complain about YouTube Advertisements. Not that they exist (I’m sure plenty of people have already tackled that subject), I understand that they are a chunk of how they fund the platform. Nor will I complain about the fact that they seem uncomfortably well-targeted occasionally. That’s just a part of the capitalist hellscape we exist in now. I have two very specific issues with them these days. But first, some backstory.
When my partner and I need to turn our brains off for a few minutes, or just want some background noise while we either relax or wake up, we watch YouTube videos. These can be occasionally dumb (Good Mythical Morning/Safiya Nygaard/The Try Guys), vaguely useless trivia (Today I Found Out), or a lighter take on the day’s news (The Late Show with Stephen Colbert/The Daily Show/Last Week Tonight with John Oliver).
These videos tend to range anywhere from less than a minute up to around the half-hour mark. Which brings us to issue one. Most of the ads are 5-15 seconds, even with the option to skip after the 5-second mark. Fine. Works well. I’m probably too lazy to find the remote and skip rather than just wait an additional ten seconds while I’m eating my bagel. I imagine YouTube counts on that fact.
But a couple of years ago I was listening to a playlist on YouTube while I did some work around the house, and realized that I’d been listening to “Not Music” for some time. YouTube had started playing an “ad” that was actually just a video from a cooking channel masquerading as an advertisement. But it was a full ten minutes long. Twice the length of any song I was listening to. More recently, what I thought was an advert started up and seemed intriguing. It was 4 minutes long, for the 3-minute video I was waiting to watch, and it eventually dawned on me what I was watching was just the music video for a song I had heard on the radio. Finally, my partner sat down to watch a video recently and was presented with an “ad” that was, in fact, an entire 1-hour episode of a show she had never watched, but complete with the small “skip ad” option.
YouTube. I have two simple requests here: 1) If you’re presenting me with an ad, have it be an actual ad, not just a video you think I should be watching instead. Recommend videos, fine, but don’t just put them up in front of me when I’ve clicked on something else. 2) Keep these things shorter. Ads should be able to get me interested in less time than this, and they certainly shouldn’t be longer than the actual video I chose to watch.
Issue number 2: I mentioned that we watch these to wind down, relax, turn off our brains. We choose fun silly videos. So I’d like to have a single button added to my settings. One which allows me to turn off one type of ad that ruins that cozy, comfortable feeling. I’ll watch all the other ones. I’ll let the whole 15 seconds play out, just for you (but not the hour, sorry). But when I start a video that promises to show me two grown men eating something they shouldn’t, please. Please. Don’t show me horror movie trailers with creepy nuns and children complete with gratuitous jump scares. Some of us are trying to sleep.