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I pay for a YouTube premium family plan. It’s probably a rip off but my kids enjoy content on YouTube more than any other platform but YouTube is not safe for children with ads enabled (and YouTube kids is a joke)
Soggy cereal made a video about how YouTube ads are unsafe a few weeks ago and that was exactly my experience before I started paying for yt premium, look that up if you are curious
It's not just ads on Youtube. It's also all the sponsor crap and filler content to get to 10 minute videos.
I use it with an adblocker and sponsorblock but it's still shit.
For sure. YouTube creators shilling for honey while Honey stole their affiliation money shows how little time they spend vetting their sponsors. The stuff they peddle is usually a few ticks away from scam, pretty much always overpriced. The day sponsorblock stops working, is the day I stop paying for YouTube premium and using youtube. It's a pity, because there is a lot of good content on there.
Tinfoil hat time:
YouTube allows/endorses/pushes ads not suitable for kids because they know parents, of all people, have no time to curate their kids' ad experience and will just fork over the cash.
I'll just share with you my experience:
I was also paying for a YouTube Premium family plan, but still got ads. What made me cancel was the fact that they're still using trackers, so they were making money off me three times (subscription, ads, and selling my data)!
Coupled with the fact that "content creators" don't really make content for the love of making it. It's all created "for the algorithm", especially the "watch to the end", clickbait titles and thumbnails, "like and subscribe" begging, "only 15% of you are subscribers", sponsored content disguised as education, etc... Videos today are nothing like they were 15 years ago, because it became solely about making money.
Google is one of the pioneers of the enshittification movement!
Ads didn’t make 10 billion, Google charged advertisers 10 billion. IMO ads have gone so pervasive they’ve hit a point of diminishing returns. They’re everywhere, we hate them, and those 10 billion spent would have to bring many more billions in sales to be an attractive service.
I can’t wait for the ad bubble to burst, as advertisers understand they’re just giving money away to megaadvertisers for paltry conversions.
I'm an admin in Google Ad Manager for a few hundred sites. Saying that to say I've read a lot of their documentation. They have a great graph showing this very concept. Less ads, less money, happy users. More ads, more money, unhappy users. They're aware. They aren't pouring the poison. They're designing the pitcher and selling different size cups.
Companies wouldn't buy the ads if they didn't work.
Those poor suckers. I don't think I've seen an advertisement on YouTube in something like five years.
Edit: And I sure as hell ain't paying Google either.
I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock. I never see any ads on youtube.
