What about youtube ads, do you consider them pretty bad too?
Personally I think they are the most tolerable. There isn't that many of them displayed for me (maybe one ad per 3-4 10-15min videos). One can skip it after 5s and around half the time those ads are fairly well matched.
Contrast this with web page ads that obscure the entire content until you find a tiny x in the corner to close them or worse require you to click some stupid button to disappear. With websites that display the content, but then obscure it within a split second I realised a pretty quick way to get rid of them is to right click on the ad/element-> Inspect in Chrome then hit delete removing DOM elements that obscure the main content until you can see the content.
For me personally, I find Youtube ads tied with peak annoyance. Ads which jarringly interrupt my audio, like Youtube ads inevitably do, are the worst.
Usually, audio ads are an ignore-able abomination, fortunately my audio is muted most of the time. However, if I'm watching a Youtube video, then my audio is almost certainly NOT muted, hence the terribleness of the ads.
Often an ad interrupting whatever content I'm watching on Youtube is enough to make me reconsider whether it's worth bothering finishing the actual video.
YouTube could have good ads but their interface is horrible.
The ad interrupts the video, and I don't just mean it cuts in the middle of something. The problem is two timelines, the video and the ad. The ads make jumping around difficult because you switch between these timelines. Sometimes you always trigger an ad at around the same point. And you can't forward over the ads so if you're jumping forward and backward in the video, looking for something, the whole experience is choppy.
Obviously, the video creator could be asked to set N points in the video where ads would fit more naturally. Maybe they already do this, I don't know, but definitely a lot or most of video creators don't use that feature.
YouTube ads might be all right if they were just part of the video timeline, just like a tv episode with ads recorded on VHS.
I might not bother to j/l and left/right over short ads but watch them instead. And if I were seeking back and forth looking for interesting bits of the video I would spend time seeking back and forth over the ads as well which would be a point of contact to make me stop for a while and finish watching the ad too, if it seemed good.
Magazine ads don't force me to watch them for 5 seconds either, and they're worth paying money for. YouTube could very well do the same and I'd welcome a more streamlined, linear watching experience instead.
YouTube are the worst. With TV they find a break to pause for messages - it might be a cliff hanger, to ensure I don't go away, but at least it is a pause. YouTube breaks in right in randomly in the middle of a sentence which means it is difficult to follow the thought across the ad break. (YouTube breaks in at deterministic times, but they have no relation to the program so it counts as random)
> There isn't that many of them displayed for me (maybe one ad per 3-4 10-15min videos). One can skip it after 5s and around half the time those ads are fairly well matched.
How many ads you see highly varies by person. Recalling Tom Scot's explanation that I fail to find, imagine when you play a video an auction is going where advertisers bid to buy your time from Google and winner shows you an ad, but Google also sets a minimum bid, so you don't see ads if nobody bids that minimum.
Personally I think they are the most tolerable. There isn't that many of them displayed for me (maybe one ad per 3-4 10-15min videos). One can skip it after 5s and around half the time those ads are fairly well matched.
Contrast this with web page ads that obscure the entire content until you find a tiny x in the corner to close them or worse require you to click some stupid button to disappear. With websites that display the content, but then obscure it within a split second I realised a pretty quick way to get rid of them is to right click on the ad/element-> Inspect in Chrome then hit delete removing DOM elements that obscure the main content until you can see the content.