Google started a big fight against ad blocker use on YouTube a few years ago, which was perfectly understandable. YouTube is free for people who don’t want to pay for a Premium subscription because ad revenue pays is how the service is supported. A part of that money goes to Google, of course, and part goes to creators.
While YouTube makes billions of dollars, Google is also very greedy since it has shareholders to satisfy. 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 YouTube ad blockers 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 across the web or serving all sorts of annoying ads on YouTube and elsewhere, Google helped create the need for ad blockers. Internet users got 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 hour-long unskippable ads on YouTube. No, seriously… an hour. I wouldn’t blame anyone if they resorted to ad blockers after dealing with that sort of nightmare.
I can’t recall encountering 60-minute ads on YouTube, though I did see longer commercials pop up before some videos. The longer ads were always skippable, though.
Conversely, if you see unskippable hourlong ads in your YouTube experience, you should just reload the page, which will hopefully fix the problem.
As you can see in the photo above, a Redditor was served one of these super-annoying hour-long unskippable ads. It’s probably a mistake from Google that we’re witnessing here. Ads like that should always be skippable. Why annoy the user when you’re going to serve other ads along the way?
But it’s the kind of mistake that shouldn’t happen. Google should have better control over what advertisers can do inside YouTube and elsewhere. It should also have the user’s best interest at heart. Watching hour-long ads is absolutely not in anyone’s interest, not even the advertiser’s. If that happened to me, I would go out of my way to ensure that the advertiser in question never gets a single penny from me.
If you’re not using ad blockers, nobody would blame you if you tried 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 might find yourself unable to play new clips until you disable the ad blocker on YouTube.
Ad-blocker use aside, the experience in the photo above is, hopefully, a rare bug that Google will fix soon.
