and then because lots of people use adblockers

It’s an arms race they are fueling. They add more, longer, unskippable ads. Folks respond by learning how to run adblockers. They then add more ads, costing them more views again.

Stop increasing ad frequency/duration and they will see fewer people arming themselves with adblockers and VPN’s. 5 years ago people treated me like a tinfoil hat-wearer for having a VPN on and ublock origin. Now my boomer dad is asking questions for how to better obfuscate his telemetry and how to reduce the number of ads he sees. He uses YT to teach himself piano and had zero issue with it until the last few months. He says he can’t even use it properly as a result. So much waiting around, so many interruptions.