Written by Timothy Johnson
Follow me on Twitter @Timothy_OwlFeed

It is no doubt that YouTube has grown a lot ever since its launch in February 2005. With over a million videos available at your fingertips uploaded by many popular and well known people including PewDiePie and Markiplier among many others, people across the nation enjoy getting online and watching their favorite videos in their pastime. Virtually every topic is available for people to watch, including gaming, music videos, how-to videos, film or TV reviews, and more. YouTube is only increasing in popularity as the years go on, and the most famous YouTubers are actually making money for their videos.

However, recently YouTube has gotten a bit annoying to watch, with a couple problems I have started to notice. I’m not going to talk about any technical issues, just problems with the actual website. By far, the two most irritating aspects of YouTube include its ads, and the amount of clickbait content that has exploded in the past few months.

Let’s start by talking about YouTube’s ads. When the website was first created, people praised it for being different than normal television, which has around four minutes of commercial breaks after typically fifteen minutes of the currently airing show. YouTube was not like that, and instead started off with no ads, so people could watch what they wanted without having to wait.

Now, notice how you get an ad almost every time you open a video? You probably sigh, then wait about three second before you happily tap “Skip ad” and continue with your business. But, there are the ads that are 30 seconds to even a minute long and you get the message that says “video will play after ad”, which aggravates you more. Ads in general are annoying to see, but having to sit through one before nearly every YouTube video might be where you draw the line.

Why does YouTube show many ads now? Well, to quote Lickboot from Tom and Jerry: The Movie, “we got to have … money!” That’s right, the company itself and the big channels make a ton of money from the ads that are shown, so no doubt they are going to want to have more. A lot of companies are getting greedy with money, aren’t they? YouTube isn’t an exception. Not to mention some longer videos have ads in-between the video, which can be easily frustrating.

Now this is only a small issue, and there are of course ways to get out of having to watch an ad, such as exiting out of the video and going into it again or refreshing the page until the actual video finally commences. If you watch YouTube a lot on a computer, you might be familiar with the ads that pop up at the bottom of the video where you have to click the X to make it go away… those appear a lot too. Jeez..

           Once you get past the ads, there is another, more complicated problem that people have easily noticed. And this is all of the clickbait channels out there. I’m not going to say any names here, but how many times do you hear things among the lines of this?: “Smash that like button guys! Subscribe and comment to win a free PS4 or Xbox One!!” Not to mention those videos where people supposedly got a new unreleased game (such as Grand Theft Auto VI), and then show “gameplay”, but ends up being a heavily modded version of the current game?

This is a good example of clickbait, which is when people try to get your attention and then lie and purposely continue talking and talking until they hit the 10 minute mark (which is how they make that money they are hungry for, after you have liked their videos and subscribed to their channel). Younger kids are of course probably going to fall for this content, but when you get older you can see right through the You-Tuber’s lies.

Clickbait is most common with video game videos, but there are other forms of it as well. Everybody’s heard of those “3 AM challenge” videos, right? People are doing certain activities in 3:00 AM, then something weird happens every time, which is clearly staged. There are also those videos where You-Tubers call a fictional character and they supposedly answer, then they engage in a weird, super fake conversation.  

The list goes on with clickbait channels, and the easiest thing to do is ignore them and do not fall for their tricks.

And that is it, those are my two major problems with the website. I see how these aren’t extreme, and they should not affect anybody’s experience with the website. I still watch my favorite videos every day regardless. Anyway, is there any issues that I might have missed talking about? In fact, there could be one more.. those cringe-inducing kids videos that your little siblings may watch. One word: No. Just no. That’s a whole different story..

On that note, happy You-tubing, everybody! (Wow that was bad)