I was watching a video on landscape mode on my phone on YouTube. And then when a wild midroll ad appears, the ad thinks it’s a good idea to play a ultrawide-screen video inside a TikTok style vertical phone window, and then puts that in a widescreen video. The whole thing also got smaller to display the CTA at the right.
Which reminds me, I hate how YT ads on mobile try to forcibly cover up the entire screen. It’s like seeing a billboard that suddenly expands to fill most of your vision. They didn’t used to do that, instead they just took over the video portion of the screen, but you could keep browsing comments while the ad plays.
Hosting video content must be insanely expensive so I have some amount of sympathy for YouTube. However, ads earn such a paltry amount that I can hardly fathom how anyone can put up with it.
The total amount of ad revenue between all sites is only like $12 per user per year. So IMO it is a net benefit to block all ads (save your sanity!) and simply pay the creators of content you like.
Even just one $5 Patreon sub is worth more than all ads I’m likely to see so I block everything I can and IMO my conscience is clear