YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That’s not to say whether or not the advertisement is for a product or service for which the viewer is interested in purchasing but how it relates to the context in which it is viewed.

People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may be about how the billboards block a scenic view but that also seems like another way of complaining about the irrelevance. Similarly, if I am watching a Youtube video, I am never thinking that a disruptive message from a commercial business is relevant to my current activities (uh, passivities?). No advertisement is relevant, not even in-video direct sponsorships, hence SponsorBlock.

If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them. I might need tires and realize I can get that taken care of while I’m at Costco. Nearly every advertisement I see at Costco is relevant because it’s selling something I can buy in the same building, indeed usually something juxtaposed close to the advertisement.

I don’t complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they’re irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.

> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

That's not true. We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.

The YouTube ads are hated because that's the whole point. YouTube has something we want (the video), and they're keeping it from us until they we do something we don't want to do (watch an ad). We dislike these ads almost by definition. If we liked them, we'd seek them out, and we'd call them something else, like "movie trailers" or "Super Bowl ads."

> If the billboards were all about driving-related products

Well, I don't complain about road signs.

The road signs are also unwelcome eye sores. However, they provide a lot of value by achieving safer road traffic so we tolerate them.

That value still needs to be compared and evaluated for delivering information vs delivering annoyance. If information were delivered by giant, flashing, multicolored road signs every 50 meters the answer would be different. My 2c.

Precisely. Thank you.

Road signs are relevant so we dont complain about them despite being an ugly eyesore.

We don’t complain not because road signs, in addition to being an eye sore, are relevant to our current activity, but because they provide significant value.

While relevance has some correlation to value, that correlation is pretty weak; it is easy to find examples of high relevance and very negative value. We should not conflate those.

Your opponent (with whom I agree) argued that the problem with most YT ads and billboards is negative value. Which will stay even if google makes them relevant. My 2c.