Ads

I do at times watch YouTube videos. I know there is a lot of rubbish, but there are clips that are entertaining or educational. I don’t create any myself, and that’s just laziness on my part, so you may say I should not complain, but I’m going to.

There are some things that bug me about YouTube, increasingly bug me.

I hate advertising in all cases, whether it’s posters on a bus, product placement on a film, interruptions to tv shows (I record the shows and skip the ads), spam e-mail, whatever it is. I don’t want your product, whether it’s female sanitary products or vpn services or web building wizards, or anything.

And to be honest, if I did, I’d avoid those companies who advertise incessantly, out of principle.

I left Facebook because the advertising was annoying. I stopped using Messenger – reporting the ads took too much time.

Plugs

I used to travel to Rochester NY quite a lot. On the sides of their buses they had a sign that said “Does advertising work? It just did”.

This used to annoy me a lot, as you can probably imagine, at least in part because I was never quite sure what the sign was advertising? Advertising space, on the side of a bus? This kind of thing:

So, advertising.

I don’t know. Do you find it as annoying as me? Everything seems to carry advertising these days. Look at sport. On cricket, the batsmen, umpires, bats, stumps, scoreboards, well, everything except the ball, even the grass carry the stuff. Virtually every part of a formula one car, and driver, and mechanics is covered in the stuff. If you use an app on your tablet or phone, the advertising covers the screen. I play a little Words With Friends (aka Scrabble clone). You can’t see the scores as there is a banner headline advert that covers it. After every move you are taken to an advert, usually for a fruit based game. Often you can go back and skip it, but then your device locks up for ten seconds as a punishment.

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