Youtube is a platform that lives by and for users. And the hours those users are watching videos. Unless you have the premium version of Youtube without ads, you’ll be tired of seeing Youtube ads coming out before, during, and after a video. Many of those ads are totally irrelevant, misleading, scams, sellers of supposedly free courses, etc.
In this article I share the ways to avoid watching those heavy videos that are useless, except for you to lose a few seconds between video and video you see on Youtube.
Reasons why you’re shown certain ads
Ads are based on the personal information you’ve used in your Google Account, data from advertisers associated with Google, and user interests. The ads we see on Youtube or other websites that use Google ads are based on 3 factors:
- Your data: Information from your Google Account, such as age range and gender or location.
- Your activity: What you’re looking for right now, your previous search activity, your activity signed into your Google Account, your previous interactions with ads, types of websites you visit, etc.
- Other information: Such as the time of day, information you have provided to an advertiser, etc.
Videos from people that sell smoke
Due to some Youtubers that I follow usually upload videos about scams or frauds, it is very common for me to appear ads precisely from the people to whom those videos are dedicated. The algorithm is likely to recognize patterns, and if there is a keyword in a video such as marketing, digital entrepreneurship, sales funnels, etc., it offers you ads framed in that pattern.
To see google’s ads settings you have to go to this Google ads address. We sell them, people or companies that sell you something at a price of gold being a content copied from the internet and with zero, they usually buy ads on Google and you are the target of them.
By default, Google does not block any interest. It is you who little by little is shaping your own profile to choose the ads that you do want to see. There are factors, Google calls them that, that you can deactivate and therefore you will not see ads of those factors. It is important to note that they are deactivated, because at any time you can activate them again or you may do some action that activates them.
Not filtered by domain
In Youtube ads you still can’t filter by domain. That is, if a company launches an ad about its new system so that you learn English in 9 weeks and mark it so that it is not seen, it is very common for another video of the same company to appear. The video you marked does not appear, but another from the same company. So what’s the point of me marking it as irrelevant or inappropriate? As an example I put in Fig. 1 ads that I have blocked, some several times. It is a veritable museum of the horrors of people that sell smoke.
Block Youtube ads
There is another more drastic way which is to prevent those ads from being shown to you. There are several ways, one of them is Adblock. With AdBlock, you can block YouTube ads and control your YouTube experience.
Block Youtube ads from your Adsense account
If you’re a YouTube partner or have a website that shows Google ads, you can filter the AdSense ads that appear next to your videos and on your channel. Also, if you block those ads you will not see them in other videos of other creators that you see on Youtube.
Here are the steps you need to take to filter ads for general or specific categories, or those that come from specific AdSense advertiser domains pulled from Google help:
- Sign in to your AdSense account.
- In the top left, click Menu.
- Click Hosting Block Controls on YouTube.
- To block URLs for specific advertisers: Click the Advertiser URLs tab in the horizontal bar at the top of the page. Enter the URLs in the appropriate text box, and then click Block URL.
- To block ads from general or sensitive categories, click the corresponding tab in the horizontal bar at the top of the page. Use the controls on your page to allow or block categories.
Changes are automatically saved as soon as they are selected and should be reflected on your channel in less than 24 hours.
Summary
Youtube ads are a serious problem. Many of those ads violate Youtube policies as I already mentioned in the article Youtube algorithm recommends videos that violate its policies. When you can’t control everything you have to automate tasks and the ads are displayed based on multiple variables that determine what you are going to see. There is no one person who chooses for you the ads you want to see.
There are some tools that allow you to disable ads that bother you or that are irrelevant to you, so that you do not see them again. However, today it is still not possible to filter by domain and you still see several times videos that you had already marked as irrelevant s or not appropriates previously.
References
- https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/2662856?hl=es&visit_id=637981643129640795-2706545733&p=adssettings_activity&rd=1
- https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=es
- https://www.youtube.com/intl/ALL_es/howyoutubeworks/user-settings/ad-settings/
- https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/172795?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1634057?hl=es&visit_id=637988223255961654-3072577404&p=adssettings_gapnac&rd=1
- https://research.google/
- https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/172795?hl=es
