So I had heard and read articles about this roll out that YouTube was imposing many months ago now, but only until about a week ago I had remained unaffected. But, as you can see, that's no longer the case. They caught up to me.
Been using ad blockers as an extension to my Chrome browser probably for more than a decade now. In fact I just did a very lazy little search of this blog to see if I could see a screen cap from about a decade ago and I found this screencap of an actual YouTube page from 2013 on my browser which doesn't include the part of the status bar that includes extension icons (if Chrome displayed them back then?) but you can clearly see no Banner ad so I must have had Adblock installed.
For many sites that block Adblock users with a pop-up that notifies us that our Adblock is not allowed, it seems to fall into one of two categories. One category says ad blocking is not allowed but it still has an option to click past the pop-up one way or the other, many times with a line that says choose not to support us at this time. Like that's supposed to give me a guilt trip LOL. The other category simply doesn't let you go by at all it's a total paywall. To those sites, which I usually find to be news media sites, I chuckle and just bypass their site all together. They think they're being hard ass but they must forget, especially if they're a news media site, that there's plenty of competition that I can go to for the same article or information or service that won't be such pricks.
But now we're talking YouTube. YouTube suggesting that my Adblock would keep me from their content is a threat that, frankly, for my lifestyle, is real. I spend way too many hours of every single day on YouTube. Unlike the aforementioned websites that have competition that are readily available to greet me if I shun similar sites that block me, YouTube has no competition, really. And unfortunately, you darn well know YouTube knows their power. Especially over me. They track every step I take, every move I make, they are watching me.
These pop-ups on YouTube started a week or two ago and they had an X in the upper right hand corner of the box that allowed you to click past it but it still stalls you in your tracks making your video pause until you deal with this pop up. A minor inconvenience, and certainly faster to click through then an actual ad would be, but it's especially intrusive if you're trying to view a live stream. It means now you have to refresh the page in order to get back the 2 seconds you lost clicking the pop up, otherwise your live stream will be 2 seconds behind the time.
Now though, this pop-up notice has started to put a timer on the X in the upper right hand corner making you wait a few more seconds. The implication is sinisterly clear. In either disabling my ad blockers, or subscribing to premium YouTube, the longer the timer will extend my period of punishment.
I may have mentioned in the past on this blog why I'm so averse to advertising. But here it goes again. My tiny little diatribe about how I, a boomer who swallowed the red pill, have come to hate the Dr Frankenstein that created me.
You see, like many of my generation, who grew up from being a toddler in the sixties, a child of the seventies, a young man in the '80s, and a pioneer internet citizen of the 90s, I can fully see in ultra-sharp clarity how my electronic parents have corrupted humanity's highest achievement in potentially reaching universal open communication.
I call advertising my electronic parents since, like real parents, it was TV commercials and radio ads that instructed me from my earliest memories on what to like, what to get excited for, what to dream about, and how to buy it all. In the '60s and '70s, the buy it all aspect would have to be imposed by my behavior in being able to manipulate my real parents who had the real money. But by the '80s, that money was all mine, and in one of the most naive Concepts ever in modern day Society, I thought my money was all mine to spend on whatever I wanted to. Of course that's not true. It was to spend on what advertisers wanted me to spend it on.
Having grown up with these overlords of the airwaves of the 20th century, I'd been too young to notice how pervasive and intrusive they'd become. It was just the way it was. Kids of my generation didn't think twice about it. But then came the internet.
In the wild west days of the burgeoning internet of the early 1990s, the only advertising you'd
be subjected to were ads in computer magazines, posters and billboards offering various computers, and peripherals, and of course the never-ending parade of floppy disks and then later CD-ROM discs stuffing your mailbox from America Online. Once you've made your "independent choices" regarding your computer and internet service provider of choice, you were free to cruise the information superhighway with nary a digital speed bump to be found.
But then Corporate America took notice of this fledgling thing and decided to jump on board.
Before long by the late 90s glaring, gaudy advertising was all up in your face chewing up ever so valuable bandwidth from your 56K dial-up modem on your pitifully underpowered Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, even going so far as to throw up massive amounts of pop-ups, pop-unders, page rerouters, automatic midi files, etc.
But we the First Citizens of the internet were still in control. We banded together, creating Usenet news groups, FTP site petitions, email awareness campaigns, and HTML forums decrying the sins of these intrusive assaults. And lo and behold we were successful. By the early 2000s, Corporate America had gotten the Network-esque message that "We're mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore!"
...And they dutifully obliged us by relegating the obnoxious ads to history.
Well, actually, that's how I like to remember it but it probably was more the result of the Dot-Com bubble bust which made Corporate America rethink the amount of money they were investing into this new frontier. For now.
But 20 years have gone by now and Corporate America has slowly been reintroducing all their old Slick Willy snake oil salesman tactics. "Step right up Folks!"
But I'm still in the rain, shaking my fist screaming up to the sky, screaming that I'm still mad as hell. Only thing now is it's a new generation in control of things and they, like me, grew up with their electronic parents. For this new crop of sheeple it's not TV or radio, it's the internet. They're not old enough to have seen the sad slide from the Halcyon Days of true free speech and expression into the gates of Hades. It's all they've ever known.
And that my friends is why I use ad blockers.
And so if push comes to shove with the newest impositions of even a site as big and scary as YouTube I'll be clicking the X on these pop-up warnings for as long as I can. If they eventually block me entirely, then I'll cry my little tear, sniffle, find a Kleenex®, a fine Kimberly-Clark Corporation product superior at helping people with "Life's Little Messes"®. That's Kleenex®, buy a box or two now at your favorite retailer...
and just move on.
