https://www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/sep/05/advertiser-exodus-x-survey-2025-elon-musk
Annual survey highlights growing concern about platform content and trust in information disseminated
Advertising and advertisers are the reverse midas touch of the internet. Everything they touch turns to shit.
Case in point, just look at reddit.
YouTube is terrible without an ad blocker. The current business model is: bait users with free entertaining content, insert reasonable level of ads, stockholders get mad there isn't exponential growth, really annoy users until they subscribe. I get that companies need to make money, but this cycle seems to be faster than ever now.
The rule is ghat they need to make more money than the year before. A company that need to make money and does would not be an issue. But a company that needs to make more and more each year is the disease.
This whole idea of infinite growth is so fucking stupid because it's just not possible.
Nothing grows infinitely. It's a complete denial of reality, and because businesses refuse to accept the idea they cannot infinitely grow, we end with no plans for periods of no growth, which ends up in layoffs and the poorest getting fucked while the morons demanding infinite growth take all the money and try and do it again somewhere else.
YouTube is a great experience with a paid subscription. It’s the streaming service I use the most and I find the monthly cost to be worth the content I watch there. It’s also an even more effective way to fight the disruptive influence advertising has on our online communities and helps fund the creators on the platform that I enjoy.
Everyone should make their own choices, I’m just highlighting one of those choices that works well for me.
Thanks for contributing! What is the difference between your experience and mine (with an ad blocker)?
For me, it was about being able to watch yt on my tv and mobile devices which are not able to block ads as easily as a desktop browser. I have a pihole on my home network, but it hasn't been able to block yt ads for a few years.
I've been using this to automatically skip ads on my Chromecasts (youtube ads and in video segments) for the past year.
https://github.com/gabe565/CastSponsorSkip
It's literally sponsor block but for all of my Chromecasts
Not the person you replied to, but I use the queue feature a lot, the ability to just queue up 10 videos at night and fall asleep without having to worry about making a playlist is nice. I also use their experiments a lot, like for example they currently have an AI experiment active that let's you ask questions that it will answer based off the video. someone post a video that looks super boring or bland or too long, but you wanna know what happens? just ask for a summery, you get something that looks like this.
honestly if the download offline functioned better that would be an amazing feature too, it's just glitchy for me.
Currently the price is steep though, I've told myself if it raises again I'm jumping ship myself
I would use those but, I can't go without my recommendations, like thats a hard deal breaker to me, and revance doesn't like to allow for recommendations easily without also risking account ban, as it relies on the microg suite. I should just seperate my youtube to another account but like, I have so many years of recommendations on this one its hard to part with it
It’s a shame that advertisers are still planning to cut spending. I, for one, plan to maintain my current level of spending with X. I have no future plans to cut or boost my spending with X.
I completely agree with you. An interesting aspect to this is that when it was still Twitter, Apple was one of the biggest marketers on the site. This was because all of the other online ad venders were direct competitors (google with phones, and Facebook with virtual reality). So having a place that isn't google/meta to pump ad dollars makes sense to some businesses, or at least it did before the percentage of Nazi content rose so much.
If they're still on track to do 1.92B this year, that is far more than people had been saying and far, far too much.
Is it 26% from the amount when Elon originally took over X, or is it 26% updated to the total advertisers left on the platform?
Because those are two very different numbers.