The Zynga one is the worst IMO, advertising online casinos of any kind should be illegal
55 complaints for red rooster because they have a skateboarder stealing some chicken. Fuck me.
Anyway, as someone who watches a lot of YouTube in our household, fucking Sportsbet. Nearly every YouTube ad is for Sportsbet and they clearly think they’re clever because half the time they make little mini movies with a narrative and everything.
Fuck gambling, and fuck advertising.
I report every single ad I see in Facebook, usually it is more entertaining than the ad and if screws up Metas algorithm.
There is no point complaining about free-to-air TV ads.
I very very briefly worked as a mathematician for a company that assessed and then recommended slot machines for regulatory approval.
It is completely incomprehensible how anyone can work in that industry when all the regulations are to make sure companies are stealing the right amount of money from people. All I ever did there was mathematically prove that it was impossible to ever win. Gambling is obviously predatory on the face of it, but being involved directly in ensuring that process goes smoothly is about as in your face as it gets, and everyone there was just like “yeah this is cool and normal.”
Needless to say, I got out the instant I could. I only ever approved two actual machines and I’ll never stop feeling guilty about it. I don’t know how anyone who works in sports betting can live with themselves…
If you do a bad enough job, it’s a very ethical thing to do. You’re much more likely to take them down from the inside.
If only that were possible, all my work was double checked by a senior and we had to validate all the theoretical stuff with a few million runs of simulated games, and then validated again by the testing team who tests the physical machines. It was painfully rigorous, which is why I only ever did the two machines…
There’s ads on YouTube?
/s but also…
Orion browser + uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock on iOS ReVanced on Android SmartTube on Android TV There are other options on each platform but these are just one set of examples.
Also, yes ads in general are the worst so Pi-Hole on your local network for the win.
I don’t know of anyway to block them on Apple TV 4K. I know some people who tried it with a pi hole but couldn’t get it to work.
I know I’m being advertised to everywhere still but the small amount I’m able to block by not watching commercial free-to-air and having ublock-origin installed everywhere along with using newpipe already seems to make a huge difference.
I didn’t realise how bad the ads were until I used a browser other than Safari. I kept on being told I had Adblockers enabled on every website I went to, and they refused to show me the content.
I then disabled the privacy protection features of Safari and realised that most of the websites had so many ads that they were completely unusable. It was easier to get the content using Safari Reader Mode than the unblocked website with ads visible.
The new “hide distracting items” feature does make a lot of pages readable to the point where you can realise that the published content is all shit.
It’s so jarring when you have to interact with a platform full of advertisements after running that sort of setup too.
I occasionally open a link or two on my work phone that doesn’t have all the blocks, and it’s mind boggling how bad web pages and YouTube has become. Anyone who suffers through that would be brought to mental illness.
It’s worth noting that Ad Standards is the industry self-regulatory body. They don’t do anything pro-actively, and nothing they do is legally enforceable. They don’t have the power to issue fines or enforce takedowns and all their recommendations are just that – recommendations. Member organisations tend to abide by the industry rules, but they themselves had a hand in writing those rules. All that really amounts to is the occasional withdrawal of an ad -after- it’s been running long enough to have complaints received and reviewed. In the meantime, the damage is frequently already done. More frequently it’s a case of “we have investigated ourselves and found we’ve done nothing wrong” (note the number of “no breach” decisions in the article). Non-members, OTOH, are under no obligation to do anything at all (the Gotham City ad in the article is still running AFAIK, despite being declared a breach – Gotham City are not a member of Ad Standards). All it really does is acts as a way for people to feel like their complaints are being heard while fundamentally changing nothing.
