This is something that gets me angrier than it probably should.
I went onto 4oD to watch yesterday's Black Mirror, and it asked me to disable my ad blocker. I though "find, just this once". At the first ad break, it asked me to PICK WHICH AD I WANTED TO WATCH FOR SOME FUCKING CHOCOLATE DRINK. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?
I can just hear some sneering corporate exec. "Go on, you little consumer whore, pick your advert." Is this training for that other Black Mirror episode where we'll have to keep our eyes on the screen lest we hear a piercing tone?
I didn't click anything but there was a countdown timer that said "an ad will be selected for you in...".
I don't even know what I'm really ranting about, here. I just find it abhorrent that we're expected to enjoy ads so much we want to interact with them. I'm probably sounding like an edgy teenlad, I guess, but I hate advertising, and make every effort I can to scrub it from my life.
Oh no, in addition to watching an ad, you had to move your mouse. That's just like the Black Mirror advert-or-torture scene.
Come on. It's easy enough to take a sip of water or clean your fingernails or check your mobile's battery level or something during the thirty second ad that isn't watching it.
>>17468 My main problem isn't watching it, I understand that. I mute and check Facebook for a few minutes. It's when it asks you to pick which one you want to watch.
Horrid, isn't it? That's why I just stopped using 4od, the presumption that I'd actually want to watch an ad was too much. Fortunately there's so little worthwhile content coming out of Channel 4 that it's rarely an issue.
Better is when you're watching a program with half a dozen ad breaks (Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares USA for example) and have to go through the whole thing with the same damn advert, over and over. By the end of it you're swearing blind you will never buy a bottle of that Burberry perfume as long as you live.
4OD's entire ad setup is bad and they should feel bad.
I do search engine evaluation so I have to do all kinds of searches I wouldn't normally do and some of the targetted advertising I end up getting is pretty funny. Before I started using adblock, youtube made me watch the Toys R Us advert dozens of times until the jingle would randomly start playing in my head.
>>17474 I use adblock, but recently I started leaving it disabled on youtube, due to a laughable sense of duty towards some channels I subscribe to who are some decent lads posting interesting stuff and scraping a living off it.
Although whenever an ad comes on with skipping disabled I just mute it and switch to another page for a few seconds while it plays.
The worst ads though are the motogd ads on games like TF2, they can't be stopped, they can't be muted, and the way my sound is set up they come on about 5 times as loud as the game itself.
>>17477 Disable HTML MOTDs. Some servers might beg you to them back on, but fuck them.
Most respectable servers now don't even have them any more; since people wouldn't play on them.
>>17477 I don't have any evidence but would assume youtube pays channel owners on the strength of the number of views they get, not how many adverts are watched.
I use ABP, I disable it for the first ad, re-enable when the first one is playing and Bob's your uncle: no more ads. Dave on Demand is the worst and this technique does not work there.
You know what?
I can tolerate shit ads.
I can tolerate being asked to actively participate in choosing an ad (i never do, mind)
I can tolerate being subjected to the same poorly-targeted turd of an advertisement every 15 minutes,
but what I cannot stand, is when I'm forced to WAIT while something i don't want to see and couldn't give a fuck about takes longer to buffer than the bloody program i'm watching. If you're going to force me to endure your overloud, gaudy, shite-hawking pap, at least have the decency to deliver it from a capable server.
I wouldn't even be surprised if there was some godawful "pschological" research that says it's more effective for advertisers to make their victims wait.