YouTube ad lottery

I don’t know if this is a recent change or if I just don’t use YouTube enough, but recently whenever I try to watch something on YouTube I have to endure not one, but two ads. It’s annoying, though I’m too cheap to pay for whatever the premium version of YouTube is. I guess I’ll be seeing more Airbnb ads.

As I was watching a video on YouTube recently I wondered what might happen if ads got consolidated and served to one unlucky person. This “ad lottery” would give everyone but the “winner” an ad-free experience. If you lose, you receive a fixed amount of ads you can’t skip. This would be an interesting social experiment, and you could give users a backdoor to invite friends to help them work through their ad catalog.

While this is an insane feature, I think if the odds were good enough some people would jump at the opportunity to live life on the edge and enjoy a world without ads. The bigger problem with this idea is that advertisers pay for reach and impressions. I doubt Airbnb would want one person to watch the same ad 15,000 times. You never know though.

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