Well, it seems to be official now. Starting April 14, 2025 Google will update its Unfair advantage policy to say it is allowed to show the same ad, from the same company, going to the same page, as long as the ad is in a different ad location. Google was just experimenting with double serving ads earlier and now it is officially going to be allowed.
Sounds like an awesome way to get me to boycott your product for annoying me
…because if I’m not interested in something, I might change my mind after I see it a bunch more times on the same fucking page - what a brilliant idea! Hell, put the ad in 50 different spots and make me click no less than 7 times to close each one - who knows, maybe that will encourage me to buy whatever shit you’re peddling!
Thing is, even after buying whatever it is you still continue to see the same ADs…
frequency does help a lot with a customer actually going through with a purchase, but really this is just another way for advertisers to spend more on the same ad spot, because now your competitors can screw you out of multiple opportunities instead of just one
Seeming that I’m getting increasingly pissed off by Spotify giving 5 or more ads without 30 minute adless times and for every 5th song rather than every 8th or 10th, I’m gonna have even more stress from the doubling of all google ads.
At least ublock origin lite does its job pretty well on YouTube, so I won’t need to worry until google eventually kills that too.
Watched something on YouTube on my TV for the first time last week. Never again. 12 minute video had like 6 or 8 ads, 2-3 were 30 seconds. Fuck. That.
plug in $20 laptop from craigslist and disable internet on your tvs
Or some cheap Raspberry Pi box or those sail the high seas streaming sticks or a Nvidia shield, so many better options than giving the Spyware and adware filled TV OS from getting access to your internet
yea I used to use a raspberry pi but it is way too slow with a massive library. and for youtube even the 4 performance is dwarfed by some random half broken laptop. I haven’t tried the pi 5 but doesn’t really matter
When we replaced our computers years ago we used the old parts to build a low-spec, but functional, computer to hook up to the TV. Paired with a wireless mouse/keyboard we dont really notice a difference in ease of use compared to a streaming device.
SmartTube
I can’t find it on my Roku or AppleTV or TIZEN or WebOS.
Just checked, sounds like that program isn’t working anymore.
plug in $20 laptop from craigslist and disable internet on your tvs
DV is difficult to get working properly on PC, and last time I tried to set up an HTPC I ran into tons of remote control issues and it wasn’t simple enough that I could just hand the remote over to a guest (or my spouse).
2019 Shield has plenty of issues sure, but it still seems like the best option for me, personally.
Agree about disable network on the TV itself.
Not sure when the last time you tried doing this is, but it’s pretty easy these days. KDE connect can pretty much handle most of the HTPC necessities. Alternatively, a debloated Onn box will do the trick quite easily
I love SmartTube. Every time someone comes over and they want to play something via YouTube, they’re like: “holy fuck, no ads? skipping straight to music part? this is divine technology”
Right! Why is an adblocker such a foreign concept to the bulk of humanity.
SmartTube is the best. There was a small period of time recently where it stopped working and it was so bad going back to regular YT that I just stopped watching entirely.
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be designed to work without an account.
I think I remember being able to switch to anonymous user with it.
Yeah, normal YouTube is totally unwatchable. If you have a Roku device, the Playlet app can let you watch without ads. There are probably methods for other devices too.
Sure, after you’ve waded through the swamp of Roku ads, you could get an adfree youtube experience with that
I dunno, all I see on Roku is an image banner on the home screen. I never even look at it.
Holy shit this is the first I’ve heard of Playlet. Giving it a go now and it’s already impressive.
Yeah, it’s not worth it. Maybe sometime I’ll get something like pihole set up so YouTube is usable on my TV, but for now, I just plug in a laptop w/ proper ad block.
I’d totally pay for YT if it was reasonable for my usage. But I honestly watch so little that their monthly sub just isn’t worth it for me.
I have a pihole and the youtube app on a smart TV. Trying to block the ad domains from the TV just bricks the app. Maybe I’m doing something wrong but, I got no luck.
You can’t block youtube ads with DNS blocking; youtube serves ads from the same domains it serves the actual video from.
You need a custom youtube client like Revanced.
Yeah I figured they went the Twitch approach. Desktop YouTube I still have ublock for, but there’s no hope for the TV.
I’d totally pay for YT…But I honestly watch so little that their monthly sub just isn’t worth it for me.
I’d pay for it if their first-party experience wasn’t so horrific and gave me any control over my feed.
I pay for it so the TV and web experience is ad free. I use PipePipe on my phone because the native client won’t stop pushing shorts at you.
I pay for it so the TV and web experience is ad free.
Yeah, I mean, you don’t need to pay for it to get that.
Adtech is a scam
Recent report showed all these verification companies missed obvious bot traffic and weren’t doing anything prebid even though they were charging for it lol
Multiple sources said that, based on the report, verification platforms appear to be blocking domains based on historical, post-bid assessments of the site’s bot traffic, rather than doing real-time, pre-bid bot blocking on an impression-by-impression basis.
No advertising platform has any incentive to prevent bot traffic; they actively profit from ‘failing’ to prevent it.
That’s not true
Ad companies are often payed on “impressions” which bots that click on a link can count as. Or they are payed upfront for a ad campaign in both of those cases the incentive is to make it seem like as many people are clicking the link as possible.
I know how it works but thanks. Impressions are cpm vs cpc like you described. The incentive is to have the cleanest traffic in order to get bigger budgets from agencies. Yes, there are shady networks that will look the other way but the original comment stated everyone in the space is bot friendly.
Edit: I could have worded that better. Eh
Yay, now the world’s worst profiling service can show the same completely irrelevant add twice!
If you’re a business and using Google to serve targeted ads, think twice. Their targeting is absolutely horse-shit mumbojumbo. They’re wasting your money, their money, and my time by consistently serving the least-relevant, no-fucking-chance-I’d-click-on-that ads.
You’d be better off paying local pigeons for investing advice.
Do you think Google is proud of this work, do you think the people working on double serving ads feel pride in their ‘experimentations’. In their personal time and at the end of their lives will they be happy they took things people liked and made them worse, even unusable for their money. That their only contribution was to scrawl their mess over that of others. Do they cling to the idea that it makes delivery free at the point of use as they make far more from their low practices than they would from honest subscriptions. Are they glad that their living makes the world more mundane. Happy to mar the endeavours of humanity, and as we push into space and maybe meet other intelligences ours will be the only ships with ads for toilet rolls on the outside. And throughout all of this shame the kicker is we would buy toilet rolls anyway.
You do not see the scope of the way advertising ruins our society.
We have
- a world-wide surveillance and profiling network collecting data about everyone for advertising purposes that is beyond the wildest dreams of authoritarian regimes
- ruining our planet’s climate through advertising efforts by the fossil fuel and automotive industries among others
- ruining our health through advertising efforts by the tobacco, alcohol, sugar and similar industries
- destroying our systems of government through advertising efforts for political causes and for populist candidates
- keeping our population divided by using advertising methods to spread wedge issues
- destroying genuine grass-roots causes and spreading astroturfing to hinder popular movements, unions,…
Essentially everything you think of as propaganda is just applying advertising methods and societal structures for political purposes.
destroying genuine grass-roots causes and spreading astroturfing to hinder popular movements, unions,…In my city there is a public vote planned for an ad free cityscape and all of a sudden i see adverts claiming that only adverts keep stuff like Soup kitchens or other charities in the publics focus and how good ads are in public space. It’s a goddamn disease
Oh yeah, completely forgot to list the destruction of aesthetically pleasing views with public advertising boards and the waste of lifetime spent on watching ads in my list.
Edit: also loss of life from depression and inferiority complexes caused by unrealistic life and body image goals in advertising
Don’t forget light pollution that wrecks peoples and animals biorythms
Light pollution makes me so sad. You have to get so far away from cities to not have the all encompassing glow of the cities to not affect your view of the sky.
I’ve been contemplating the effects of a constitutional amendment to ban all forms of paid advertisements for physical and digital and Im only able to think of YouTube being shut down but that’s alright by me
That’s parasitic behaviour in the nut shell.
Deny the parasitic trash engagement and profit.
The number goes up if you know what I mean.
Are people concerned with WHICH ads they see?
Do people see ads? I’m on Firefox with an adblocker I haven’t seen an ad in ages, anywhere. Except perhaps for that brief interval where Youtube nominally tried to stop adblocking, it worked for like two weeks and it made me go check out FreeTube until they gave up.
Yeah, with Firefox + uBlock Origin I’m always surprised when I come across an ad. It’s like getting a spam email in my Gmail inbox in 2025, a novelty :)
Whatever ads slip through are still quite annoying though (especially autoplaying videos when I disabled it in the browser settings) - I either hide them with reading mode, or Stylus if it’s a site I visit repeatedly, or if neither works I just go to another site 🤷♂️
Honestly, at this point the dealbreaking enshittification stuff I bump into is mostly subscription requests and paywalls from the sites themselves. Which, fair enough, people need to get paid and I don’t have a particularly good answer to give them about how. I am not watching ads on purpose as a support gesture, though.
Protip: you can also block a lot of those by enabling some “annoyances” blocklists in uBlocks settings.
And while you’re there, take a look at all the other blocklists they don’t enable by default. You might find something useful to you.
Books don’t have ads.
Have a look at Qualityland, it has (satirical) ads in it. The whole thing is a comment on consumerism
Sorry I don’t watch ads, can be funniest joke on planet if there is brand name in it I don’t listen, my immune system don’t allow me to do that.
They are fictional
Well, advertisement is form of expression. I don’t accept that kind of expression in general just like some people have food intolerance.
Is it really an ad if it’s not actually trying to sell something though?
Is advertising art ?
Every 100th page, there will be a small, “unobtrusive” ad near the bottom of the page. Just to cover rising publishing/paper costs. Then it will be every 50th page, 25th page. Then the ad will get bigger, little by little, until a full page advert is shown every few pages.
Just reinvented a magazine, I know but I could see it happening. The fact that we now have ads showing up in cars at red lights…
You need to burn old books first. Also old CD, DVD, BlueRay movies don’t have ads. There are so many movies produced you won’t be able to see all of them if you start right after born and keep tv on 24/7 for the rest of your days. Don’t get me started about old books and old music. People could literally stop buying those things and they will be fine.
Most of us are just adicted to marketing, news and more things that literally don’t matter because you have no power to change those things. We’re just animals after all, we eat meat so we’re predators, we like to follow the lead.
Amazon says “hold my beer”
Enshittification continues.
It’s a naturally emergent property of capitalism.
The real group getting screwed here are advertisers who used to get free protection against their campaigns running with excessive frequency.
This change lets Google burns their customers ad budgets of a bunch of junk duplicate impressions.
The real group getting screwed here are advertisers
On no the parasite funding this whole circus getting screwed over by a mega corp…
Fuk 'em, they deserve each other.
Deny the Parasite profit 🐸
The people paying for content are the parasites?
I thought it was the monopolist in the middle engaging in rent-seeking behavior like this.
People attempting to inject their shit corporate propaganda into my daily life is in fact a parasite… That I deny engagement daily!
Dude I hate ads too but I recognize that people like you and me who view content but block the way to pay for it, we’re actual parasites on the creatives. Google is just a bigger parasite and exploits both creatives and advertisers.
Who owns teevee shows and movies?
Who owns the music?
Who owns the shit posting on here?
Are these “Creatives” in the room with us right now dear?
Just because you don’t know any artists doesn’t make you cool for ripping them off.
I am not following which artists I am ripping off.
Vast majority of “content” is owned by mega corporations
How am I “hurting” the “artist”?
They already got paid and mega corp owns the IP. You are not making sense here from property law perspective.
If anyone is getting hurt it is the content owner ie perosn who hold the title to property. I am literally do my thing to ensure that corpo never gets paid for this content.
Yo, I heard you like ads so we put ads in your ads.
Wasn’t Google in the middle of an antitrust investigation?
Wasn’t that with the old administration?
degoogling and demicroshit defaceberg over last decade is really printing now
