About YouTube and ad-blockers:
YouTube is owned by Alphabet, aka Google's umbrella corporation. Google in turn was devoured by DoubleClick, the largest advertising company to come out of the 1990s web.
When you use Google, you are feeding the attention monster that is the advertising industry.
We should aim to criminalize behavioural advertising and break up the Google monopoly, not tolerate their shit and work around it by using adblockers.
@cstross Also spread awareness that targeted ads DO NOT WORK, literally nobody except the middleman trying to cream rent off the top of the system benefits from them. Advertisers lose, we all hate them, and frankly screw googbook completely.
If your product is good, I WILL find it and blaze a trail to your door, but if you try to cram ads about it in front of me I will actively seek out your competitors to spite you.
@kcarruthers @maxthyme @cstross
If targeted ads worked, they wouldn't:
show me ads for new vacuum cleaners a month after I bought one
show me ads for tampons (wrong biology)
show me ads for Microsoft products or things that only work with Microsoft OS (none of those in this house)
If targeted ads worked, I would never turn on an adblocker because a large proportion of the ads would be relevant and interesting.
qed.
@dashdsrdash @kcarruthers @maxthyme @cstross Right? I can still remember ads from the 70s and 80s because they were *good* (yes, Sturgeon's Law, but still). What were the last ads everyone talked about? For me, it was, "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" from Old Spice, and that New Zealand porn education PSA.
But both of those were partly notable because they were so entertaining and funny, and so many ads today are barely memorable.
Charlie Stross
Max™
kcarruthers
-dsr- (not a dog)
eyrea 🇨🇦