Effing YouTube ads

You know the ones. You get to YouTube and as soon as you do the damn commercial ads on the sidebar all start playing AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME. Far above and beyond annoying. Is there a way to disable all this happy horseshit?

I've never encountered youtube ads before. I didn't even know there was such a thing to be honest. Maybe it's because I'm running NoScript and AdBlock on Firebox?

adblock should be enough, because i'm not using noscript and i'm free of yt ads as well. i have to wonder how the big companies would react to everyone using adblock-type programs?

Mechadon said:

I've never encountered youtube ads before. I didn't even know there was such a thing to be honest. Maybe it's because I'm running NoScript and AdBlock Plus on Firefox?

Adblock Plus, very likely. NoScript, probably not.

I don't have AdBlock, but I do have NoScript and I have no idea what ads you're talking about.

The ads that annoy me are the little ones that pop in front of vids just in time to obscure subtitles. Damn them and damn people who plaster notification boxes all over their vids.

dew said:

i have to wonder how the big companies would react to everyone using adblock-type programs?

They'll embed advertising in the stuff you want to see, I've already seen that done with flash videos.

Adblock for Chrome Beta works for Youtube AFAIK..

I'm sure there's nothing you can do about those ads without adblock/noscript/whatever. Youtube's braindead decisions have been nothing but to cater for the partners. They don't give a damn about the regular users it seems.

Mechadon said:

I've never encountered youtube ads before. I didn't even know there was such a thing to be honest. Maybe it's because I'm running NoScript and AdBlock on Firebox?

Do AdBlock users get paid to be smug? I wouldn't mind getting some of that swag, even if I did have to reply to EVERY thread on the internet about ads.

I hate pretty much ALL YouTube Ads. Back in the old YouTube, we had NO Ads at all. But then a few years later, we got YouTube Ads!

Also, most of the new features on YouTube suck ass.

Ads pay for many of the YouTube contributes. I'll gladly be agitated for a second to support someone actually making money from their original content.

Well, as original as many of them are...

Bucket said:

Do AdBlock users get paid to be smug? I wouldn't mind getting some of that swag, even if I did have to reply to EVERY thread on the internet about ads.

I'm not sure what you mean. I seriously had no idea Youtube videos even had ads. I was only guessing as to why I never saw them :P

Eh, I agree with Technician. Usually ads don't annoy me and it helps support the people I enjoy watching so I'm cool with it.

GreyGhost said:

They'll embed advertising in the stuff you want to see, I've already seen that done with flash videos.

Or block you from viewing the content if you're using ad blockers. At least that's what a few Finnish TV channels do with their online streams.

Ads are fine as long as they're not pop-ups, fake download buttons, or motherfucking auto-play videos with sound. I like to imagine there's a special Hell where the creators of the lattermost item will go, along with child molesters and people who talk at the theater.

[EDIT] Seems that someone on the admin staff agrees with my last point. "auto-play" without the hyphen gets censored. :P

I like the semitransparent ads that appear on the video window because they're often the mark of a popular and worthy video. I can get rid of them by clicking the X button. But what the OP is using seems more like Internet Explorer?

To be honest the creepiness of ads now really bother me. For a FF user for a long time with Ad-blocking extensions, I never really knew how bad it had gotten until I had ot use IE recently.

the Internet has gotten bad when it comes to ads. Covering up entire text sections is one of the meanest things I've seen yet. seeing a video ad to read text (ABC News is the worst at this) really pisses me off and makes me click the nice X button to make the awful commercials go away.

Back in the bad old days when I was on a $2.50 an hour dial-up plan, I begrudged advertisers the time and bandwidth they stole to promote products or services I'm usually not the slightest bit interested in. Now that I'm on uncapped ADSL the animated gifs have been replaced by multi-megabyte Flash videos, which are an assault on the ears as well as the eyes - so my attitude hasn't changed.

I actually like ads. They help make the internet services and software free.

Free stuff like GAIN/Gator? Took me the best part of a day to purge an office network of their spyware and ad servers.

What ads? I don't see any ads. ;)

GreyGhost said:

Free stuff like GAIN/Gator? Took me the best part of a day to purge an office network of their spyware and ad servers.

I'm not talking about spyware, I'm talking about websites having normal ads.

printz said:

I like the semitransparent ads that appear on the video window because they're often the mark of a popular and worthy video. I can get rid of them by clicking the X button. But what the OP is using seems more like Internet Explorer?

Actually I'm using Google Chrome. And the ads I'm referring to are just like the commercials you see on TV all the time. I'll be watching a video and not one, not two, not three but five of the damn things will all start playing at the same time.

My solution is both Adblock Plus and to block third-party cookies. People say ad-blocking is unethical, but it has gotten to the point where I can't do research/read an article without some flash ad starting playing in the background. The advertisers have pushed me over the edge, so I install ABP on all machines I use.

Consider going to Youtube to learn about a product like an upcoming tablet. Without ABP, you end up having to watch a commercial to watch a two-minute video about the tablet you were interested in. (You have to watch an advertisement to watch an advertisement!) lol

Also, ABP protects me from those link/pop-up minefields. You know the web sites where if you mouse over double-underline text, an ad jumps out? This is terrible for folks who use the mouse to read, e.g. with a screen magnifier.

On the other hand, you have sites like DoomWorld and Anandtech which have very reasonable advertising. It isn't intrusive or annoying at all.

Csonicgo said:

To be honest the creepiness of ads now really bother me. For a FF user for a long time with Ad-blocking extensions, I never really knew how bad it had gotten until I had ot use IE recently.

the Internet has gotten bad when it comes to ads. Covering up entire text sections is one of the meanest things I've seen yet. seeing a video ad to read text (ABC News is the worst at this) really pisses me off and makes me click the nice X button to make the awful commercials go away.

Yeah, I experienced this too, both when I first decided to give Chrome a try (long before it had extensions) and using Steam's overlay browser. I never realized how bad it had gotten, and I think it's really telling that advertisers feel the need to be so intrusive. No one wants the crap they're offering, so they get in your way and try to force you to click on their ads accidentally.

On the other hand, I know of a handful of sites that only use ads relevant to the site. You go on a gaming site and you get ads for games and computer hardware, for example. Makes perfect sense, and you're actually inclined to check them out. It's baffling to me that those sites are the exception and not the rule.

Adblock plus and noscript for me too. I have never seen these ads at home. Work is a different matter. IE only there.

The video ads that come up on some sites before the one I want to watch are the ones that really piss me off. My internet connection is so slow that watching a 3 minute YouTube video usually takes about 10 minutes if you take buffering time in to consideration. You can imagine how frustrating it can be to sit for a few minutes waiting for a video to buffer only to find out that all I have loaded is some ad for a product I'll never buy available in a country that I don't live in and the actual video that I want to see hasn't even started buffering.

Video ads piss me off if I'm watching a series of the same thing, seeing the same ad 5x will grind on me.

The existence of advertising in general is an interesting topic for me. At least ninety-nine percent of all human creative work - television, music, writing, etc. - exists not for its own sake, but merely to gather and redirect eyes and ears onto marketing materials. At the same time, a colossal amount of human effort is spent creating said marketing materials, as everyone viciously defends their own piece of the pie, yet the net result would be more-or-less the same for everyone if nobody advertised at all. Imagine a world where the money we save by not buying stupid shit we hear about on TV was simply paid directly to content creators, and everyone currently employed in marketing actually contributed to society.

thelostsoul83 said:

On the other hand, you have sites like DoomWorld and Anandtech which have very reasonable advertising. It isn't intrusive or annoying at all.

I haven't browsed without an ad-blocker in several years now, but I do vaguely remember some incredibly obnoxious pop-up ads on this site.

Last time I browsed Doomworld without an ad-blocker, they had those Trojan Magnum ads everywhere. I'm really amazed anyone who's remotely tech-savvy still browses the internet without one. It literally takes 30 seconds to install.

I'm using Opera and the only ads I see on Doomworld are the plain-text kind advertising about SVN. Hah!