this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Another executive-driven decision by people who clearly don't use their own product (kinda impressive really when it's YT).
I can't help wonder if they saw an uptick in adblocking as a result of their absurd increases in ad-time recently and somehow thought this was a reasonable solution.
8-10 unskippable ads before a video? Holy shit. That's ludicrous.
It really is hard to fathom how that got through any internal discussion.
Its not that hard to fathom when you have worked with these types of people.
All it was was a numbers meeting, no User Experience folks in the room. They said how much revenue they would increase quarter over quarter, and how much engagement it would drive. Everyone claps, the meeting ends they move forward with the next terrible design decision. Companies no longer take focus group testing seriously for anything.
Focus groups and qualitative data are so last season. It's all Business "Intelligence" -driven bullshit nominally based on poorly defined and even more poorly understood metrics (excuse me, "KPIs")
I rarely use YouTube, but my nephew (he's two) was over the other day and we put on some cartoons for him that were in YouTube since my wife and I don't have Disney plus. I couldn't BELIEVE how many ads it showed. One five-minute merry melodies cartoon had FOUR SEPARATE ad breaks, the third and fourth of which were both 3+ minutes long if you weren't paying attention to skip.
Wtf?! Not even shit ass normal broadcast television has that many commercials.
Feels like every year corporations rely on the naivety of youth in an attempt to push more and more egregious shit.
Exactly right they're normalizing ads in everything. They're indoctrinating the youth, who don't know any better or differently, into just accepting/expecting that all content in all forms comes with ads, and you can't watch any of it without signing in so they can track you and sell your data.
Executives don't have to watch ads! They're rich! I wouldn't be surprised if they all had YT Premium or whatever it is.