[[[ Solved - Using FreeTube for now ]]]
It seems youtube is breaking into the middle of long-form video much more often. And most of the ads are for snake oil - Fear mongering “Tinnitus will KILL your brain in three years” baloney.
Is there a Fediverse equivalent to YouTube? Can the Fediverse be applied to this? Will it solve the above complaint?
I have been to Odysee but with very few exceptions none of the content I want is there (They have Veritasium, and minute Physics, but not Vsause, Technology Connections, or Stand Up Maths)
I read yesterday (I forget where, I can try to find the article if you want) that a YouTube video only has to be 8-10 minutes long before they put an ad in the middle, and they reward creators for making videos that length. The vast majority of creators on YouTube make almost no money, but even a tiny financial incentive affects people’s behavior.
Personally, I just pay for ad-free YouTube, since there are a lot of small channels I like, including some that serve as useful background noise for me, so I find it worth the investment. I use it enough that I think the company would get more money by serving me ads than they do from my subscription, and if it ever stops meeting my needs, I’ll stop paying. It certainly wouldn’t meet my needs if they served me an ad every 4-5 minutes.
I don’t have the spare cash to pay for a thing like that. I am retired on a fixed income. I also will not turn off my U-block origin, I was surprised to find it was off. Those ads and all “Fill the hole” ads are a vector for malware. A website says we have a place for an ad here give us $$ for it. Ad broker sells that space. Anyone can buy that space and fill it with any HTML and PHP they like. Anyone, Anything.
That’s fair, I might not if I had to pay the current price. I got grandfathered in on a lower price. I block ads through a VPN on most sites, but YouTube ads are hard to block on mobile without more technical skills than I personally have.