Showing content costs them money, showing ads makes them money. Simple as
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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Net neutrality. Something that was trampled over in the wake of fascism and never given a second thought.
I'm in a country with net neutrality, this still happens, granted, I can up the resoultion myself.
its probably the video codec, ads also tend to be very short and are capable of fully buffering, unlike videos, so they can often manage to send properly, compared to a video.
Really efficient video codecs tend to be a real bitch on lower end hardware.
I’ve seen a couple mentions of YouTube in this thread. Not sure if this is source inspiration of your meme, but in case…
The Roku TV YT app has been heavily enshitified in the last 6-8 months. Keep in mind, ads on this format (CTV) typically run $12-35 per 1,000 views.
They are bit rate throttling content and it most commonly occurs on content one year or older. YT has a dismissible call to action to upgrade to premium to remove this experience.
When you pause, the app shows a display ad sidebar to the paused video.
When the TV goes into initial sleep mode after a longer pause the YT app will lose the current video and land you back on the home page.
My experience is with using the YT app on Roku TV unauthenticated.
If you're on the Internet and you're seeing ads, you're doing something wrong. Use a decent browser that supports Ublock Origin or use a PiHole instead.
Advertisement networks are a legitimate security threat because they don't vet their shit or even properly secure their own damn infrastructure consistently.
Or both. Both is good.
Both is very good. And PiHole will actually speed up slow internet as depicted in the meme, because the ads never even download in first place. Those that do get downloaded get squashed by your standard Ublock Origin.
Yep, PiHole can also block a lot of ads on mobile apps that uBlock can't be used for.
Websites try to aggressively optimize your content for lower bandwidth, so they compress it using lossy algorithms.
Ad networks want to represent the ad content clearly so they are not as aggressive about it.
The irony is sites who care that much about performance kill their own performance by adding these slow ad networks. It’s wild how much ads ruin your load times.
It’s wild how much ads ruin your load times.
And burn through your data cap if you're poor and/or on a mobile device.
I always use VPN connected to my home network on my mobile device. This allows me to enjoy my PiHole even when not home. Though IPSet adds overhead for the network traffic, I like thinking that this setup uses less data in total due to not loading ads.
They don't care about performance, they care about cost.
There are two different customers here. The site wants to serve the absolute minimum required resolution they can get away with before the user goes somewhere else. This saves money on bandwidth and storage. The ad networks customers are the advertisers and they want their ad to be high quality and presented quickly so it's harder for the network to trim the fat.
There’s only one customer (and you’re not it).
Eh you can pay for YouTube or Netflix. They'll still try to serve you shit quality and ads If they can get away it. It might be 4k but it's probably at the lowest bit rate they can get away with while your device which is " powered by AI" makes up some shit to fill in the blanks.
Everyone wins!
Ads are also heavily localized, so their servers are usually close to you.
The real reason is boring: CDN logistics.
This will be a grossly oversimplified explanation. Streaming platforms mirror their files across dozens - sometimes hundreds - of server farms. However, it's not efficient to mirror everything in every location. For instance, if a YouTube channel has a viewer base that is 99% located in the UK, it wouldn't make sense to waste the bandwidth to transfer those files and the storage to keep them on servers in the US, in the off-chance an American clicks on that channel's video. So when you try to play a video that isn't already cached on your regional server, you have to fetch it from a farther-away server, which results in degraded stream quality as you're literally accessing a file from a physically farther location. But a larger channel with a more widespread audience is more likely to have viewers in farther regions, so those files are more likely to get mirrored to other server locations.
Ads, however, are smaller files, and are generally going to be locale-specific, so it makes sense to keep those cached in all the local servers. So you never have to reach far to pull an ad, but you may have to reach far to pull the content you actually want to see.
When it comes to YouTube, specifically, what's going on is that it isn't using your quality settings. So often I see the image quality is shit, I look to see what resolution it's running at and instead of being on auto or whatever the highest is, it's literally on the lowest. I have confirmed my settings to be set to always use highest availabile res and it still does this shit.
It's mostly been explained.
Basically it's content delivery networks. Caching. That ad, from start to finish, has been queued up and loaded and played for thousands of people near you. This is less frequently the case with some show that you're streaming.
It's the same reason that if you were to go watch trending YouTube videos, they will load up a lot faster than if you find some niche YouTube video from 12 years ago that no one's watched in a decade.
I wonder if youtube buffers the ad in the background as you're watching a video. That could explain why your actual video buffers but the ad plays just fine.