SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Rickroll video hits a billion views on YouTube as Internet’s most popular prank:
The Internet’s most popular prank, Rickrolling, has driven the official video for Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up to the prestigious 1 billion views milestone. To celebrate the achievement, singer Astley pinned a comment on the video announcing the moment, thanking fans for the “amazing, crazy, wonderful” milestone.
Never Gonna Give You Up was uploaded by Rick Astley on YouTube in late 2009. The song soon became a popular prank that reached meme status, with Internet users alleging they’d linked to one thing when, in reality, the person who clicked the link would be taken to YouTube’s copy of the music video.
This is a notable achievement and milestone. Take a look, though, at Wikipedia's List of Most-Viewed Videos.
Also at The Verge.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday August 02 2021, @05:27AM (2 children)
I have that problem now on my main box, using SeaMonkey (which I prefer for everyday browsing). YT plays nothing but ads, all are unskippable, and it never does get to the main video. Adblocker did not help. The only way I can watch a YT vid is if it's embedded (or by editing the link to fake being embedded). The ads even follow me to Hooktube and Invidio.us, which used to strip them.
Then it started getting bad on the box now used for video, with Chrome. The final straw was a 30 minute unskippable infomercial when the video I wanted to see was like 5 minutes. And then after a video played, if I left the page up, after a while it would start playing infinite ads. Can you say "disproportionate" ??!
Plus a lot of the ads had become loud and stupid and too obnoxious to put up with. (Which isn't necessary. There's a camera store that made such a good ad, that over a million people followed it back to their own channel and played the ad again! If all ads were like that, who would mind ads?)
Now Chrome has two different YT-specific adblockers (conveniently found on the Chrome store) plus UBlock, and finally I have peace again.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02 2021, @08:28PM (1 child)
One ad at the beginning of a video was alright. Fifteen seconds of annoyance was tolerable.
Two ads at the beginning is obnoxious.
Two ads at the beginning and another at the end of the video is beyond annoying because things keep playing audio when it should just stop. Autoplay is disabled for a reason.
Three ads at the beginning of a 2 minute video? WTF? Closed, did not watch.
One ad in the middle of a video that's less than 10 minutes is annoying.
Three ads in the middle of a 12 minute video is unwatchable. I just close the video if a second ad shows up in less than 10 minutes.
Any combination of the above: unwatchable.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @01:40AM
I generally agree with you. I have no problem with ads, but I've progressed the same as you. I don't know enough of how that all works and how much control the content creators have over the number of ads and their placement. I'm assuming that they control it, not the ads that are shown, but whether there are ads in mid video, or the time interval between them. I'm assuming it is a time interval thing because I've seen videos where you get an ad at the end, come back for 15 seconds of closing, then the finishing ads. The ads at the end are pretty new to me, and they are very annoying. I've dropped a couple of channels because of the mid video ads, when they are showing up every two minutes, but I've so far tolerated the end video ads.