Feel free to watch the video by clicking here.
4:17 It would only make financial sense if YouTube actually cared about making sure that their advertisers get a value for their money, i.e., more potential leads, but this so-called war on ad blockers is proof that YouTube cares more about draining their advertisers’ ad budget as quickly as possible¹. For me, one of the main reasons I stopped watching TV 18 years ago was commercial breaks. Thing is, I have a very good memory, and one of the disadvantages is that I remember a lot of ads that I don’t care remotely about, and even though I’m not officially diagnosed with ADHD or anything of the sort, getting interrupted in the middle of watching something entertaining or thought-provoking is like mentally getting hit by a train.
¹ I’ve had first-hand experience with both Google Ads (it was called Google Adwords back in the day) and Facebook Business ad campaigns where, you target a very specific audience, and yet you get no meaningful interactions whatsoever, let alone leads. I once stopped halfway through setting up a Google ad campaign, note that I didn’t even enter my credit card information, and yet somehow I got 10K viewers from Mexico on one of my then-YT videos, and suddenly, Google was saying that I owed them 50 bucks out of nowhere, then my Adwords account got disabled. The whole thing was so random. And as with Facebook Business, I lost 30 bucks, and I didn’t get a single like or comment, much less a lead; it was just one guy living in some country in Africa asking me to help him with a green card, note that I’m from Morocco, and I’ve never been anywhere outside Morocco except Ceuta, Spain a few times, so you can imagine how disappointed I was. Some would blame my ‘lack of skills’ as a marketer, but seriously? Trying to sell 4th-of-July decorations on the 4th of July should at least get me a random comment from someone saying, “Yeah, no, thanks. I’d rather buy this Uncle Sam hat from Amazon.” Also, Facebook is obnoxiously sneaky with how they charge you $2 incrementally, so there was no way I could open 15 disputes on PayPal to get my 30 dollars back, so I basically gambled that money away. It’s no wonder I hate ads, and anything related to marketing with a passion, and I’m just too conscientious to even delude myself into thinking that marketing is a actually a skill or something worth pursuing, because for me, marketing is essentially snake oil; that obviously does not apply to companies that don’t even need to spend a crazy amount of money on marketing for people to buy their products, and yet somehow they still do, which I think is more about “expenses bloat” kind of like having overpaid employees followed by massive layoffs when things don’t work out, but I digress.
Stuff like marketing and SEO reminds me of a story, and here’s the summary of it: “Joha, a clever trickster, is brought before the sultan for some wrongdoing. To save himself, Joha promises the sultan that he can teach his donkey to speak within 50 years. When asked how he could possibly do this, Joha replies, “In 50 years, either the sultan will die, the donkey will die, or I will die.” The point of the story is that Joha cleverly buys himself time, knowing that the promise will likely never have to be fulfilled.”
Just like I hate using cheat codes in games, I hate misleading people, and selling them empty promises or pretend to make a fake effort, and rationalize getting paid for it, because I simply don’t ever want to be a miserable overpaid service provider who does not provide any service at all while pretending that I’m doing something good for the world at the same time; that’s just not me. I’d rather make less money doing something I really enjoy, because then every buck I make feels like free money, which is simply the result of mastering my skills as an IT guy.
Addendum:
What’s awesome about uBlock Origin (and other similar extensions) is that you can use it to block elements on a webpage manually, which is why I highly doubt uBlock Origin is going anywhere no matter how hard YouTube tries to give its users a hard time.