Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large. 

No free marketing

You ever walk by rows of parked cars and noticed that plenty of them still have the dealership license plate frame affixed? That cannot be me! There is no way I am giving out free advertising space like that, no matter how excellent the deal was the selling dealership gave me. The positive Yelp review should be a good enough return gesture.

If I can safely de-badge my car - without leaving exposed holes in the sheetmetal, I totally would. Volkswagen should be paying me to advertise that the vehicles they make are worth buying.

A similar befuddlement happens when I see car enthusiasts put stickers of aftermarket part manufacturers onto their cars. Again, you would have to be paying me to have your company logo displayed and driven all over town. Unless of course I got that car part for free, then the gratis marketing is an appropriate quid pro quo.

I’m just saying: don’t give away something for free so easily! Think of the Uber drivers that run advertising boards on top of their cars: you think it’s for charity?

On the same principle, my mother has steadfastly refused to buy any clothing with logos on it. I’ve seen her seamstress hands painstakingly take logos off thread-by-thread, because the underlying shirt was bought on sale. It wasn’t a want of anonymity, but a purely business decision. If the world is run on advertising - see Google, Meta, etc, then us peasants should not give away marketing space for free.

If I ever start a YouTube channel, I’m taping up/blurring all branding, unless otherwise sponsored. Sorry, MacBook Pro: your signature Apple logo will have to go under the gaffer tape.

Brick by brick.

Can't touch me

Word on the street is that YouTube is cracking down heavily on ad blockers. Videos absolutely will not play if you don’t disable/whitelist. I intensely abhor watching YouTube with ads, especially when videos are less than five minutes. If I had to watch a 30-second commercial before a three-minute music video, I would just skip both entirely. More than any other streaming service, YouTube is where I spend most of my viewing time. A smooth experience with zero ad interruptions is kind of important (first world problems).

Over the years, browser ad-blocking extensions have done well to keep the YouTube ad machine in check. However, even before this latest crackdown, YouTube has been doing whack-a-mole on the extensions for a long time. It would work fine one day, then the next you’re suddenly seeing ads on videos, wondering why your ad blocker isn’t doing its magic. The solution is to switch to another one, and if that also gets whacked, then to another. Perhaps you’ll end up back to the ad blocker you started with, because it's received an update to combat the YouTube shenanigans.

Frustrated by this, I picked the obvious solution to the problem: pay for YouTube Premium. I bet that’s what YouTube hopes to achieve with its latest crusade against ad blockers: get more folks to pay up. At a not cheap $14 per month, I get the full YouTube experience completely ad-free. Best of all, I can watch videos on my Apple TV’s built-in YouTube app, also without ads. It’s not possible to run an ad-blocker on TV apps, so prior to subscribing, I avoided watching YouTube on my much larger (than a laptop screen) LG TV. These days, a majority of my YouTube time is on the TV.

Crack down on ad blockers all you want, Google. I am chilling over here. The people complaining about it are sitting in the cheap(skate) seats.

A San Francisco classic.