Lately on YouTube I’ve been running into commercials (the horror! the horror!) when I try to watch a video. Certain hosts whose channels we watch now do commercials. To me it seems to demean them.
Patty and I have been away from network TV long enough to have grown unaccustomed to commercials. We don’t watch movies that are “free with ads.” We’d rather pay a rental than have to tolerate commercials.
For several years YouTube and other sites were commercial-free. (Way back when, wasn’t cable TV pitched to us as commercial-free?) I begin to see commercials, collectively, as a kind of devil-dog, a Hound of the Baskervilles, that stalks us till it finds us. Then it hits us with the ads.
Are we going to wind up with commercials on every YouTube video? The last time I went to a movie theater, they showed 15 minutes’ worth of commercials before the Coming Attractions came on. Effectively, I was paying to see freakin’ commercials! [Run screaming to the sidewalk.]
This is cultural decay. This is “Everything’s for sale.”
I hope folks appreciate that there are no commercials here.
YouTube has gotten aggressive with commercials. I actually pay them about $14 per month to be commercial-free, and feel that it is worth every cent.
Commercials, at least many of them, are designed to dull your thinking abilities. It’s a subtle form of hypnosis, which works by deliberately making things just a bit “off”, a bit stupid, and this leaves you in a suggestible state.
When I quit watching broadcast TV, I quickly noticed that when I was exposed to TV at someone else’s home, it had an unsettling effect. Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that most of that unsettling effect reduced to the subtle coercion of advertising. Having ads interspersed between segments of content distracts our attention, and leaves the viewer off guard. Hypnotists use distraction and pacing as tools to make their subjects more suggestible, and TV programming is a study in distraction and pacing.
Some years ago, I was asked to a meeting, held at a local casino. I’m not much of a gambler, which is to say that my last wager was placed sometime around 1970, so casinos are terra incognito, for me. That business lunch at a casino was a learning experience, because I had that same unsettling feeling. The casino was filled with distracting sights and sounds, flashing lights on various machines and random noises, as vacant machines vied for the attention of passers by. It was an environment I was happy to leave, A.S.A.P.
For a price YouTube will eliminate all the commercials.
We have to install an ad blocker. It’s hugely annoying!