this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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They do, and they don't care. The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they'll get to play you more ads and cash out more. When/if they implement pause ads advertisers will have an even bigger case against against yt inflating ad watch time to make more money. Facebook has this issue as well.
You might be misremembering / misinterpreting a little there. This behavior is not intentional, it's just a side effect of how the algorithm currently works. Showing you longer videos doesn't equate to showing you more ads. On the contrary, if you get loads of short videos you'll have way more opportunities to see pre-roll ads, but with longer videos, you're just to just the mid-roll spots in that video. So YouTube doesn't really have an incentive to make it work like that, it's just accidental.
Here's the spiffing Brit video on this, which I think you might have gotten this idea from: https://youtu.be/8iOjeb5DTZI
Edit: to be clear, I fully agree that YouTube will do anything to shove ads down our throats no matter how effective they actually are. I'm just saying that this example you've brought is not really that.
Huh yea you've actually got a great point there. Also one of the YouTubers I watch is quite open about his knowledge on content creation and the algorithm and he once claimed yt knows when and to whom showing ads is beneficial, if you don't mind sitting thru ads your supposedly more prone to get them, which is the reason why every time I'm using the official YouTube client for whatever reason I make sure to close and reopen the video as many times as it takes until I get it to start playing with no ads 😂 If that is true they'd def use that as an opportunity to roll out more ads cus no ones there to skip em