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Google started a big fight against using YouTube ad blocker a few years ago, which was perfectly understandable. to YouTube it’s free for people who don’t want to pay for a Premium subscription because ad revenue is paid for is how the service is supported. A portion of that money goes to Googleof course, and a part belongs to the creators.
While YouTube makes billions of dollars, Google is also very greedy since there are shareholders to please. Ad blockers cost Google money, so it makes sense that the company would want to fight them.
But when I defended Google’s stance on ad blockers on YouTube in the past, I also reminded the company that ad blockers are a side effect of Google’s own practices. Whether it’s tracking users around the web or serving all kinds of annoying ads on YouTube and elsewhere, Google helped create the need for ad blockers. Internet users grew tired of the invasive ads that Google popularized.
Now that Google is largely winning the war against ad blockers, it’s time to remind the company that it’s messing up again in the most annoying way possible. Some users are seeing unskippable ads for an hour on YouTube. No, seriously… an hour. I wouldn’t blame anyone if they turned to ad blockers after facing that kind of nightmare.
I don’t recall coming across 60-minute ads on YouTube, although I did see longer ads appearing before some videos. However, the longer ads were always skippable.
Conversely, if you see unskippable ads for an hour in your YouTube experience, simply reload the page, which will hopefully fix the problem.
As you can see in the picture above, a Redditor was served one of these super annoying insurmountable ads for an hour. Maybe it’s a bug from Google that we’re seeing here. Such ads should always be skipped. Why bother the user when you will serve other ads along the way?
But it’s the kind of mistake that shouldn’t happen. Google needs to have better control over what advertisers can do within YouTube and elsewhere. It should also have the user’s best interest at heart. Watching hour long commercials is in absolutely no one’s interest, not even the advertiser’s. If this were to happen to me, I would do everything in my power to ensure that the advertiser in question never received a penny from me.
If you’re not using an ad blocker, no one would blame you for trying one in response to these practices. However, Google is always going back and forth with ad blockers on YouTube, so many of them don’t even work anymore. You may find yourself unable to play new clips until you disable YouTube’s ad blocker.
Ad blocker usage aside, the experience pictured above is hopefully a rare bug that Google will fix soon.
