This. I recently re-setup my HTPC and forgot to add the usual plugins and suddenly instead of actually being able to watch youtube stuff, there was a BS ad every few minutes. It was essentially unwatchable. But I would never pay premium for that. Sure I care about some of that content, but it's not a lot and if I had to pay for it, I'd rather pay the author directly via say Patreon than to give it to Google and the author may or may not get some of that and they constantly have to try and "be nice to the algorithm" in order to get their share of the money. I really don't care if the algorithm thinks they're worthy of being listed in people's feeds. I like their content, period.
Honestly the algorithm they use to pick and choose which ads they show me is as annoying as video feed algorithm.
I didn't mind the 5-second ads. Two to three of them before a video? I'd deliberately sit through those. Seemed a fair deal. That's now largely gone away (in my experience) and now it wants to show me longer, un-skippable ads. Not only at the beginning but randomly in the middle of videos regardless of what's going on in the video. At least on Television has natural commercial breaks "baked in" to the format.
Oh. And stop showing me the same four cookie-cutter ads every few minutes. It's annoying at best, condescending at worst. If you must advertise to me at least give me some variety.
