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YouTube Ads

Lately I've been very stressed, and find myself spending a lot of time watching YouTube. I know, I shouldn't for a variety of reasons, but it helps silence the noise in my head... Occasionally I learn something useful.

Today I want to talk about the ads on YouTube on Roku and similar streaming apps.

The advertising system on YouTube is more generous than most. You can often skip ads after watching a few seconds, and you can always terminate an ad by backing out of your selection back to the main screen! And there is a random algorithm which places one or two ads of various length into the queue - and occasionally, no ads at all. Backing out and repeating the selection gives you another chance for a shorter ad sequence, or possibly a way to bypass ads altogether. So here are my observations and preferred workflow for minimizing ads:

• No ad. Your selection starts, and this is the ideal outcome.

• Countdown, usually from 5 or 7 seconds. You can skip ads then; this is often the fastest choice.

• Anything else means that you have one or more ad; these may run 15 seconds; back out and try again.

Sometimes you have to back out several times, but in the end you will almost always be in your show sooner than one or more 15-second ads.

Occasionally, my app goes to a black screen during rapid back-and-forth action; I just back out and try again.

And that is my wisdom for dealing with YouTube ads. Enjoy the stupidity.

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