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.
The thing is, YT is a de facto monopoly. Yes, there are alternatives, but most people don’t know about or use them. I’m not talking about short TikTok-style videos, I’m talking about longer-form video content. Sure, there is stuff and other sites. I go to Vimeo and DailyMotion sometimes to watch things, but YouTube is where the vast majority of the content is. They don’t need to worry about losing viewers right now, because they know viewers have nowhere else to go. So they can do whatever the hell they want. I wish I knew a good solution.