After disabling my adblock for YT I noticed the video player has gotten much worse. I always saw preroll ads still but now all of them are completely jarring. My previous player seemed to play them inline whereas now they load separately, jump abruptly, much more annoying.

i can almost nod my head in acceptance for a :30 ad before a new piece of content. at :45, i'm starting to get annoyed. at :60, i'm wondering if this is really worth it. then, youtube steps up to the plate, points to the fences, and serves up a 2minute30second (i've seen longer) short film on some clearly fake as fuck scam type of 4am paid programming type of crap. on top of serving some mind bendingly annoying long ad break, they don't even attempt to prevent serving clearly malicious ads. if you're going to be heartless and force ads, don't be soulless and at least vet the ads from obvious scams.

There's a channel I like to watch "Mini Air Crash Investigation" who does 5-15 minute long summaries of airplane crashes and the results of the ensuing investigations.

I once got an ad on one of their videos for a 45 minute long video of an air crash investigation from a copycat channel narrated by someone with a very similar voice. I got about 10 minutes in before thinking "wow, this is a pretty weak episode from this channel" before noticing what was going on.

(I don't mean to imply all air crash investigation style channels are copying this one. But that video was a straight copy of their style, narrative order, and even voice and speaking style).

Like Already__Taken says, if you go a while without skipping ads, youtube seems to intentionally show you longer and longer ads.

I have premium now, and while I enjoy it, I really feel like I got bullied into subscribing. If all the ads breaks were 60 seconds total or less I would have been fine staying a free user. But they punish me for not diligently having my finger ready to press "skip".

I left a playlist on while working, so an anonymous account. A full on hour self-help seminar was playing as an ad. if you don't skip the ads you get to some weird places.

Its weird too because the ad-player doesn't like you scrub the timeline or go forward-back. So even if it was an interesting ad you can't go back or interact at all. Its so similar to a late-night infomercial and unlike a YT video its uncanny.

Yeh there's no way humans are watching those, almost technically so. Whoever is buying the ad time is being scammed hard or money laundering somehow.

Vinegar for iOS and macOS uses the native player. Along with adblocking I rarely see the FOPRA (flash of pre-roll ads). Whenever I use a native app (FireTV, Apple TV) I’m annoyed by the now ≥10s unskippable ads.