I'm glad I'm not the only person who thought "I forgot YouTube has ads!" I have a feeling a lot of Hacker News readership has -- at least -- ad-blocking installed on their computers that hides the problem from them.

Unlike the rest of my family, I generally don't watch YouTube, but when I do, it's almost always from something other than a smart TV[0] and I rarely watch videos on my phone[1] (though on my device, I think I'm ad-free there, too).

In a way, it's a lot more of the same. Internet advertising has been a cesspool ... I'm old enough to remember scantily clad women holding X10 devices[2] (usually cameras) in pop-under ads, along with "cyber cash", online casinos and the like. I used to selectively unblock sites that I didn't want to starve of advertising revenue but that stopped when ads became a popular way to deliver malware. Once that became a thing, the gauntlet went down -- I stopped feeling even the slightest bit of guilt about filtering.

I can't say it's (at all) surprising. The scammers have a system where they can produce a large volume of trash at a low cost and make a profit on a few (often naive/elderly/other) poor souls. There's the usual "policing content is orders of magnitude harder than producing it", "lack of sufficient penalty on those producing the ads" combined with lack of sufficient pressure/penalty on those displaying the ads to police them well enough[3]. It's so bad now that you could do exactly what you said -- Google could, literally, run a script to capture the ads from 10 minutes of incognito play, ban them all and would catch, maybe one?, that isn't a law/terms of service violation. Some of these ads make the offers appearing in my spam folder look about as trustworthy.

Add into that "I'm the problem, too" in that rather than "making a lot of noise about this issue", I simply implement ever-more complex ways of eliminating advertising from my life wherever it exists. Due to filtering, I rarely see advertisements that aren't of the "product placement" or physically unavoidable variety (billboards/physical advertising in public spaces, though I'm sure mixed reality will let me wipe those out one day, too[4]).

My kids, however, watch YouTube and similar services far more than they watch traditional streaming/TV and they do so on devices that I haven't taken the time to censor. Much worse, however, is the advertisements included in "the dumb game of the week" installed to one of their devices. It got so bad that I put a blanket family rule of "do not install anything on your device without asking me, first." As I have teenagers, now, about the only way I've been able to enforce that rule is "your device gets malware, it gets a factory reset and I provide no help getting the thing restored." About twice a year they get that hard reminder. It doesn't help much.

[0] Hell, for that matter, I don't watch TikTok or other social media videos at all

[1] A story worthy of another post but modern smart phones seem to do something to the audio that when anything is played out of the speaker that isn't "a ring-tone", it has an aspect to it that sounds like "fingernails on a chalkboard." It bothers me so much that if I'm dealing with a Migraine headache the sound coming out of the speaker results in my symptoms amplifying about as badly as if I looked directly at a bright light source -- it's caused me to spontaneously run to the bathroom to vomit before.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_Wireless_Technology

[3] Which, were the penalties big enough would also -- due to "policing content is orders of magnitude harder ..." -- would make it impossible for anyone other than the FAANGs of the world to police.

[4] The idea of walking around with goggles on to avoid advertising is pretty silly ... and the cost of physical advertising is prohibitive enough, today, to make it less attractive to scammers ... however, more than half of the billboards down the interstate are for pot dispensaries extolling the virtues of "the high life", casinos touting the "cool car you can win" and liquor brands "enjoyed by the successful/cool people of the world".