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Notes -
Some thoughts about online political ads:
For the last couple months pretty much all of the ads I get on YouTube have been political. I figure this time of year must be a ripe harvest for Google in terms of ad revenue. Maybe it can buoy them through the recent drop in tech stocks.
Interestingly enough, every single ad I've gotten that mention abortion has been strongly pro-choice. I've strongly pro-life myself, and for most of these ads the effect is that I now know who to vote for (namely, the person they're warning me against). This is a very useful service because all the Republican candidates are keeping their stance on abortion on the down low. It often isn't even listed as an issue on their official campaign website, I have to google around until I can find some interview where they were asked about it in order to learn their stance. The Democrats are definitely making this an abortion centered campaign, and the Republicans are trying to keep their heads down. For someone like myself, who will not vote for a pro-choice candidate, it means I have to do a lot more legwork.
Also interesting is that I saw the same ad more than a dozen times (which is normal) when I suddenly realized that the names in the ad were different every time. Turns out they are cycling through every Republican running for the state legislature, slotting each name in for "If X gets elected, women will have to travel out of state to access reproductive healthcare." It occurred to me that online it can be difficult to tell what district a viewer is in, so I guess you have to have a shotgun approach.
Though for all the abortion focused ads, I did notice none of them actually say the word "abortion": it's always "reproductive rights" or "women's health." The most notable euphemism I heard also happened to be the only time I think I've seen genuine "dog whistle" in the wild: a candidate declared (along a list of other issues) that they would preserve our "constitutional privacy rights". Excellently manufactured so that anyone who cares about the abortion debate will hear "I am pro-choice" while the average voter who doesn't care about abortion doesn't hear it at all. So, ads are big on abortion but mostly wants to talk to the base.
Which is the other odd thing: ads like this are meant for pro-choice voters. It does nothing good for them for a staunch pro-lifer like me to see them. Yet I did see one openly pro-life online ad this election season, and it was on my wife's computer! My wife, who is much more moderate on the issue than I am. Even curiouser, this ad was on a probably-not-quite-legal manga scan-lation site. How and why are pro-life ads ending up on a manga website? Don't manga readers skew female? Doesn't YouTube's audience skew male? I had assumed I was only getting pro-choice ads because most people online lean left, but now I'm not so sure.
I always have to ask... in this day and age, why do people volunatarily still watch ads on YouTube? While it has given you fodder for an interesting post, simply using UBlock, or Brave, or any one of the dozens of other ways to block Youtube ads is a really easy way to upgrade your quality of life to a surprising degree.
Ads are how the Youtubers I like to watch make their money. They're already giving me the content for free, least I can do is deal with ads.
Which is the moral gloss I put on top of the fact that I dislike fiddling with things so much that I can't be bothered to spend five minutes to figure out what adblockers are legit and set them up.
Donating or subbing to YouTuber's Patreons/etc. is probably giving them more money than they make from you having ads on, TBH.
Yeah but then I have to pay them the money. My money grubbing, skinflint heart just won't allow that.
And that will not make the ads go away anyway.
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But you're already paying with your time and at a pretty abysmal rate too. You waste a lot of time to give them a pittance
Spoken quite sensibly by someone who clearly doesn't have what it takes to be a world class miser! Take John Elwes for instance: now there was a miser! A member of Parliament and extremely wealthy, he would go to bed at sundown each day so he wouldn't waste money on candles. He wore ragged clothes everywhere, and was noted for regularly eating spoiled food rather than throwing it out. He would walk in the rain rather than take a coach, and often sat around in wet clothes rather than waste coal or wood starting a fire. Now there was a miser! Skinflints like me can only aspire to be that pointlessly frugal.
Even if I wasn't a so tight with my money, it would be quite a task to donate to every YouTuber I watch. And where does YouTube get it's cut? I feel like YouTube presents me with an excellent deal: it provides free entertainment in effectively unlimited quantities, and I watch ads. Everybody wins. Putting on an ad-blocker and then using YouTube anyway seems like an act of anti-social defection.
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