Back in 2020 I had a post asking What happened to Amazon? What inspired it was my observation that the behemoth online retailer’s prices had gone up, way up, during the pandemic, while their search function had gotten so overgrown with sponsored links that it was nearly useless. Their ability to deliver packages quickly and efficiently was (and still is) impressive, but the shopping experience has gone to the dogs.

A couple of years after this Cory Doctorow came up with the label of “enshittification” to describe the death spiral of platforms: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

I don’t know enough about the operation of the big platforms to judge how close to death they are, but from a user’s point of view I can certainly testify to how shitty they’ve become. As I said in my earlier post, Amazon took a steep dive into the shit at the time of the pandemic (a time when it was also raking in the cash). More recently, however, I’ve been noticing a similar trajectory being followed by YouTube.

I like YouTube. I watch a lot of stuff on it, from shorts to half-hour lectures and podcasts, to full-length documentaries. I’m often impressed at the production values of a lot of the videos I see, if not always as impressed at the content. But there are lots of things to click on and have playing in the background while I get something to eat.

But there are ads. There have always been ads. These cut in, unannounced, sometimes at really annoying moments that can’t be predicted (I’m sure on purpose). If it’s handy I just click to skip these when they start up, but since a lot of them are short (5 to 15 seconds has long been a standard) I often let them play.

What I’ve noticed happening just in the past month though is that not only do there seem to be more ads, but the ads themselves are getting longer. Much longer. Much, much longer. Ads that run for a minute and a half are now not uncommon. But I’ve also seen them run 4 and 5 minutes, and (this was the record) one a couple of days ago that was 8 minutes and 30 seconds! That’s not an ad, it’s a full infomercial. This goes beyond being annoying, to the point where it actually has had the effect of driving me away.

It’s no secret why they’re doing this. They want you to pay for a premium service where you don’t have to see ads. Or so they say. I don’t know how true that is (sponsored ads, I assume, are still included), or how long it’s likely to last. I can remember when cable TV became a big thing and it was known as Pay-TV and the deal was you paid a subscription and you got to watch everything with no ads. That’s not cable TV today.

Still, I’m scratching my head at advertising that’s so deliberately alienating. Who wants to watch an eight-and-a-half-minute ad? Absolutely no one. That isn’t an irritant, it’s a nuclear bomb being dropped on the platform. It’s a message to everyone that if you’re not paying for a subscription they don’t want you there at all. That seems self-defeating to me. But Amazon is still going strong despite its enshittification and I suspect YouTube will still be in business even after it’s become so overwhelmed with advertising it’s barely functional. There’s a lot of room for things to get shittier yet.