Television's chased off the discerning / discriminating viewers.
I'm well beyond the "I haven't owned one" territory to "I haven't watched in years".
Because of cross-contamination of practices and techniques between commercial and public broadcasting, that includes public broadcasting.
I'll watch an occasional segment on YouTube (with adblocking), but even then, I prefer simply listening to audio (mpv / command-line).
The abuse isn't cost-free, and more attractive demographics will leave. This also means, of course, that the poor or mentally susceptible are left with a far-worse product and more predatory advertising as well.
I’ll go one further. In addition to not watching, My kids have never in their life watched regular tv except visiting someone’s house who does. Those few times they just want to turn it off because it’s “broken and spamy.” “Why does the spam get louder.” “Do they think we care about [thing in ad]” etc.
I was worried they would be more susceptible to ads. Ut it’s the opposite.
It’s kinda my point though. I’m sure TV didn’t have 5 minutes of ads every 5 minutes or whatever the ratio is. It slowly built up to that because that’s what people were willing to put up with.
Over time it’s going to be the same with YouTube. People will accept multi-minute ads eventually, so eventually YouTube will run them. It’s only a matter of time.
The only thing that could stop it is if people immediately leave the site when you feel the ads are too long. If that happens enough, it will force YouTube to back off. Naive to think that would happen, but I’m doing my part.
My naive belief is that if enough people leave, they’ll back off.