I switched over to NewPipe a couple weeks back after consciously tolerating ads on the official mobile apps for years. This is what pushed me over the edge:
I was watching a 30 minute video a friend had shared and a (skippable) 4 minute ad played probably a little before the 10 minute mark. It was a variant of an ad I had seen before, but I’ve been interested in the product, so I let the ad play all the way through. But now for the rest of the video, all the ads I was getting were several minutes long and all were unskippable. The interval of actual video content became shorter as well, so I was effectively watching more ads than the content I was trying to view. I decided to finish the video just to experience how ridiculous it was. Immediately installed NewPipe afterwards.
I have a hard time thinking it wasn’t a coincidence that the ads became unskippable partway through the video after watching one ad all the way through. Obviously, I can’t say that for sure. But I sure as hell am not tolerating that ratio of ads to content. I feel guilty for not sending ad view pennies to the creators I enjoy, but this YouTube “experiment” made the platform unusable for me.




Man, the Red-lipped Batfish is weird. It looks like someone made it in the Spore Creature Creator.
The Tonkin Snub Nosed Monkey is cute. It’s sad they’re critically endangered.
It’s been years since I watched a nature documentary and it’s nice learning about animals I was unaware of before today.