YouTube Gripes

What's one of the most annoying things about television? Advertising. Radio? Advertising. Hulu.com? Advertising. And now YouTube? That's right... Advertising. It's everywhere, and it makes me want to /wrists.

SOME advertising on the Internet (although very little) is actually done tastefully. In fact, I'm not sure I have a problem with unintrusive advertising. Take GMail, for example, or the Google search engine. Small text ads that don't interfere with the content I'm trying to view.  Admittedly, I think they have little effect on me, as I mostly ignore them and hardly ever remember seeing them.  But they're there, so the advertisers are happy and the websites posting them are happy.

But YouTube has for some time put ads at the bottom of videos.  DIE YOUTUBE!!  It's really dumb, because they cover the bottom portion of the video, and to get rid of it I have to click something.  I hate it enough to consider not using YouTube, but so far it hasn't gotten to that point (yet).  I'm wondering when we'll get to the point where the bandwidth consumed by ads exceeds the bandwidth consumed by spam e-mail.  I know we have a long way to go for that, but it wouldn't surprise me if spam actually had a rival in the future...