YouTube ads considered harmful A few months ago, YouTube raised the price of its subscription. In a spur-of-the-moment decision, I decided not to pay and instead started watching the ads they get paid to make me watch. For educational purposes, obviously. Here is what I learned: A surprisingly large number of ads leave me completely clueless as to what they are actually trying to sell. I assume this is some advanced form of marketing beyond my comprehension.Ads for actual physical products are targeted spectacularly badly. Easily 95+% of them are a complete waste of marketing money on me. The people paying for these ads are either remarkably bad at marketing or are being sold a targeting capability that does not exist.Advertising video games to me is certainly not completely misguided. Showing me the same game literally hundreds of times, however, cannot possibly be in the advertiser’s interest. At some point, “brand awareness” turns into “deep personal resentment.”Remark: The current trend seems to be showing people playing a “strategy” game while being spectacularly bad at basic logical decision making. Presumably, watching someone fail at a puzzle that could be solved by a moderately gifted hamster is supposed to make me download the game and prove my intellectual superiority.The sheer amount of obvious scam advertising is disgusting. There cannot be even the most cursory inspection of what is being shown to YouTube’s viewers. Apparently, “Does this look remotely legitimate?” would already constitute an unreasonable burden on the world’s fourth-largest company.Google is doing itself a remarkable disservice by allowing one of its flagship products to become such a cesspit. At some point, hosting the scam becomes part of the brand experience.YouTube ads also seem to be a primary dumping ground for AI-generated images and video. I see my fair share of AI slop in YouTube videos themselves, but the ratio skyrockets once the ads begin.Scam ads and video-game ads seem to have the highest share of undisclosed AI-generated content, which is perhaps the least surprising correlation in this entire experiment. After several months of this field research into “involuntary content,” I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone advertise on YouTube. If you have an honest business, you risk tainting your product by association. If you don’t have an honest business, you just won’t get any recommendation from me.