A Dormant YouTube Habit

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For months now I have had Pihole running, and other ad blocking solutions working. I said, at the time that I don’t feel bad about using ad blockers because they’re so invasive, especially with YouTube, among other platforms.

I also find that when I play games on Android ad blockers work. Ads fail to load so I get blocked. With iOS when you have an ad it plays despite Pihole. Apple have a way to ignore Pihole.

The key thing I notice, at the moment, is that I stopped watching YouTube content completely for several weeks or months. I used to binge watch contennt and now the opposite is true. It’s hard to find compelling content. That’s why YoUtube Premium is not worth paying for, and why ad blocking is not the issue.

We migrated from live television to PVRs because ads are always the same five ads, hour after hour, three or four times per hour long program. This means that we have seen the ad, so if we skip it program makers and broadcasters don’t lose any revenue. We don’t need to see an ad twenty times. Once is enough.

When I don’t use YouTube at all, for several days content creators go without my views, and without my views their in-stream promotions don’t get seen, and then YouTube, advertisers and content creators lose out.

If content was easier to find and ‘discover’ then I would spend more time on YouTube, but for now I prefer Netflix.