There are a lot of parallels between advertising and copyright. Buy wholeheartedly in to either, and you end up sort of failing to accept the reality of their flaws.

Advertisers think they have a big problem whenever someone circumvents their ads. They panicked when VCRs came around and allowed people to record shows and fast-forward through ads. They panicked when DVRs came out and let people digitally skip through ads. And they are panicking now, with more and more people getting fed up and putting ad-blocking software on their computers or devices.

Copyright holders think they have a big problem when someone tries to circumvent their system, too. They worried about libraries giving people free access to books; but at least a physical book is pretty much limited to one person at a time. They freaked out about cassette tapes being easily copied with a dual cassette deck. They freaked out about people sharing MP3 music over the internet. They freaked out when DVDs came out with CSS protection which was circumvented almost immediately. They continue to freak out by pushing for ever more and more drastic DRM schemes, that are generally circumvented quite rapidly.

The general theme in both advertising and copyright is escalation; a sort of arms race. The problem is that that solution doesn't actually improve things for anyone, in either case. Ads get more and more offensive and annoying, more and more people block/skip them. Copyright gets more and more locked-down, more and more people circumvent it. In both cases, as the "legitimate" side squeezes harder, it ends up making the user experience better for those who circumvent it "illegitimately". See, for example, this good old comic from The Oatmeal:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

The web with adblock software is a massively better experience than the web without it. A pirated 1080p movie or TV show lets you skip the previews/commercials that are often unskippable on a DVD. And on and on.

This arms race doesn't have a good future. Creators and distributors must start wracking their brains to come up with whole new ideas, or at least variants of the old ones, that break that cycle and ensure that "illegitimate" users/viewers don't have a better experience than legitimate ones. I'm sure not holding my breath though.

Has anyone else noticed a sudden spike in unskippable minute long ads on YouTube recently?

I seem to be getting the same ad on everything I watch these days.

Nope, I once had to look up what those little yellow marks on the timeline were when I viewed stuff on YouTube. Firefox + Adblock Plus + NoScript = a much better and safer browsing experience. Although sometimes YouTube does change things up a bit and Adblock has to play catch up, otherwise my YouTube videos are just black screens.

I unblocked ads on YouTube for a while. It didn't last long. The annoying and insulting and unskippable ads finally forced me to block ads again. If there is a long, unskippable ad you used to be able to refresh until you got a shorter or skippable ad or no ad at all.

I didn't mind letting an ad play out for a creator I watched regularly if it was a "good" ad (see below). Long ads, especially if the it played at the end of the video, I would just mute the volume and switch to another tab until it was finished (although I have read that they have a way of knowing if the window/tab is in focus and don't pay if that happens). There was one that I used to get all the time. The "ad" part was 10 seconds long, then it was literally 7 more minutes of a guy eating a sandwich. Apparently advertisers tried to game the system because Google wouldn't count the ad as viewed unless a certain percentage was watched, but they put a stop to that eventually.

Sorry in advance, I just had to rant about ads while they were on my mind.

I don't mind ads, if it's a good ad. Keep it simple and short, like: This is our product, this is what it does, here are some uses you could have for it, thank you for your time. I hate ads that try to be catchy, clever, or seem targeted at idiots. They basically follow the opposite formula for what I consider a good ad above. They start off by telling you that you have a problem, why you have the problem (your an idiot) and then tell you that have to buy their product to fix your problem, and usually go on way too long.

There are too few good ads, so I just don't watch ads anymore, anywhere. Advertisers have brought this on themselves. I don't watch much TV anymore, but for the few things I do still watch, I record on my DVR and skip ads. I use an ad blocker on my browser, but I will white list sites that I regularly visit if the ads are reasonable.

I don't mind paying a reasonable fee for ad-free content. I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon video (but fucking Amazon is now putting ads in for their own shit). I have a one-disk subscription with my Netflix account, but I'm only watching about one movie a month. I used to watch the trailers once so I could see if there are any up-coming movies I might want to see, but movie trailers are becoming too damn long now. And fuck you if you make your ads unskipable on the disk, I won't watch them out of principle. I've gotten to the point now where I just put the disk in 10 minutes or so before I'm ready to watch it, leave the sound muted and when I come back with my popcorn and beer the movie is ready to watch.

Just for the record, I do run ad block plus on chrome.

@00Scud00, I used to run noscript, but it pretty much made the web unusable, or I spent so much time enabling js on certain sites it wasn't worth it.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

It's THE problem of content on the Internet and it hasn't been figured out yet. As you can rightly guess - VideoSift has a hand in this too - as advertising pays the server bills.

I don't know what the answer will be. Nobody likes ads really. The experience of watching TV commercial free, or Netflix spoils you for ever watching standard broadcast or cable TV.

I don't know what the answer is - I suspect it will be some kind of tightly integrated weaving of content and advertising, like product placement.

I agree that NoScript tends to make it a hassle to get basic functionality out of the vast majority of the web. You have to play around with allowing scripts from some domains and not others, on pretty much every page you visit.

...Which is pretty scary, if you think about it. Are all of those cross-site scripts beneficial or even necessary from a user standpoint? Hell no. Users stand to gain nothing from all that crap running. From our perspective, they just increase load times and data usage, often compounded with auto-reloading. We should have control over that stuff in all circumstances, but it becomes absolutely critical in mobile internet where we generally don't have as much processing power AND the vast majority of people have data usage caps.

Basically what I'm saying is, the admitted fact that NoScript tends to make the web unusable is a symptom of a deeper problem with how the web is constructed these days.

If you like the idea of NoScript, but generally find it too high-maintenance, you might want to try Privacy Badger. It requires somewhat less user input with regards to which trackers/scripts get blocked, instead going with defaults based on "trustworthiness" as measured by algorithms from the EFF. Those defaults can be tweaked if you desire, also.

I usually run a Firefox (or Pale Moon) client that is extremely locked down. UBlock Origin, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Self-Destructing Cookies, sometimes Ghostery, etc. I use that as my default browser, and take the time to fine-tune the controls in NoScript, element hiding in uBlock, etc. for sites that I visit regularly.

But frequently, I'll find a link to some article that I want to read and notice that the page content won't load at all since it requires some nonsensical script. In those cases, if I don't want to take the time to fiddle with NoScript etc. permissions, I copy the URL and fire up Chrome in incognito mode, with only uBlock Origin.

Probably not worth the hassle for most people, but I guess I'm kicking and screaming my way into this brave new world.

I disagree. That functionality is what makes the web useful.

As much as I despise Javascript as a programming tool, we just wouldn't have the web we know without it.

I do run ghostery though. One of my favourite extensions.

Sure, Javascript can do some great and beneficial things. But along with that comes a massive amount of grey-area stuff like tracking, loading content from "CDNs", etc. And then there's plenty of utterly indefensible crap like XSS attacks, intrusive advertising and malware, etc.

To me, the bad apples spoil the bunch. At least to the extent that I want to be careful to the point of paranoia about what I allow in -- I'm rigorously inspecting every goddamn apple. Admittedly, if you stay on legit and mainstream sites, the chances of stumbling on one of the bad apples are very low. But you're still subject to a hell of a lot more of the grey-area stuff that way.

To me, my scorched-earth approach is worth it both for preventing really nasty stuff AND the grey-area stuff that is getting more invasive all the time.

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