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.