I was watching a video on landscape mode on my phone on YouTube. And then when a wild midroll ad appears, the ad thinks it’s a good idea to play a ultrawide-screen video inside a TikTok style vertical phone window, and then puts that in a widescreen video. The whole thing also got smaller to display the CTA at the right.
Which reminds me, I hate how YT ads on mobile try to forcibly cover up the entire screen. It’s like seeing a billboard that suddenly expands to fill most of your vision. They didn’t used to do that, instead they just took over the video portion of the screen, but you could keep browsing comments while the ad plays.
The solution for YouTube is right in your comment: it used to be the case that only tech savvy people would install AdBlock.
With more ads though, the incentive to install an ad blocker is suddenly there for more, even not so tech savvy people.
YouTube‘s reaction is already visible as they are now trying to block ad blockers: Try to make it more difficult to get an ad blocker at all, so not as tech savvy people won’t get one and continue to watch ads as they used to.