Our Attention Is Not Free
There was a time when I could open YouTube, choose a video, sit back and actually watch it. Imagine that. 😭 You clicked on a documentary, a music video, an interview, a random two-hour movie uploaded by someone with questionable copyright decisions, and you knew there might be an advertisement somewhere along the way. Fair enough. Businesses have to make money, creators have to make money, and apparently we all have to be reminded that SHEIN has another sale.
But these days? The advertisements have become part of the main event.
And I genuinely want to know: when did we decide this was normal?
I'm not talking about one advertisement before a video. That's been around forever. I'm talking about watching something on YouTube and getting interrupted again and again. You're 15 minutes into a documentary, completely invested in whatever story you're watching, and suddenly somebody wants to sell you something. You continue watching, get comfortable again, and there it is—another advertisement.
Now you're not watching a documentary. You're watching a documentary with regular commercial breaks that you didn't ask for.
And before anyone says, “Well, just pay for Premium,” that's exactly what makes this whole thing feel strange. Because YouTube already earns money from the enormous amount of attention people give it. We spend hours there. We watch, search, like, comment, subscribe and share. We use our Wi-Fi and our mobile data to do it. Our attention is valuable, our behaviour is valuable and advertising is built around that value.
So sometimes it feels like we're being told: “Thank you for giving us your attention. Now would you like to pay us extra so we interrupt you less?”
😂
And yes, I understand that creators can have some control over where advertisements appear in their videos, including manually placing mid-roll ad slots, while YouTube can also automatically place them. So it's not as simple as blaming the person who uploaded the video. The whole system has become much bigger than that.
Then there is Facebook.
You're currently watching a video, actually enjoying it, following the story, and then—BOOM. Advertisement.
Fine. You either get the little “Skip” button, or you have to sit there and wait for the whole thing to finish. Eventually, your video comes back and you continue watching. A few minutes pass. Maybe 30 seconds. Maybe one minute. And then—ANOTHER AD.
At this point, I'm looking at my screen like, “Who did I offend?” 😭
You skip it if you can. If you can't, you sit there and wait again. Then the video comes back. You continue. And if the video is long enough, guess what?
Another advertisement.
Two or three interruptions in ONE video? Sometimes even more? That's not a video anymore. That's an advertisement with a little bit of entertainment in between.
And the sickening part is that I get angry every single time. I despise it. I complain to myself, I roll my eyes, I threaten to leave Facebook forever...
And then I go back.
Why?
Because I'm a procrastinator. 😭
Apparently, my hatred for advertisements is not stronger than my desire to avoid whatever I was supposed to be doing in the first place.
Then there's TikTok. Sometimes you're scrolling, an ad appears, and you think, Okay, let me just swipe past this.
Except suddenly your innocent little swipe has launched you into the advertiser's app.
No.
I was trying to leave.
I did not suddenly wake up and decide I needed SHEIN.
I didn't ask to be transported to a catalogue containing approximately 74,000 dresses, phone cases, shoes and things I never knew existed. 😭
And I know I can close the app. I know I can swipe. I know I can pay for certain services. That's not the point.
The point is that advertising is becoming increasingly difficult to escape. And I'm starting to wonder what the end goal is. How much is enough? How many advertisements can you put in front of a person before the experience itself becomes unbearable?
Because there has to be a balance.
I don't think advertisements should disappear. They support businesses, creators, websites and free services. But perhaps there should be some reasonable limits on how frequently they can interrupt certain types of content. Maybe users deserve more control over how aggressively they're advertised to. Because we are already giving these platforms something incredibly valuable: our time. And time is something you can't refund.
You can give me back R10. You can give me back R100. But you can't give me back the hour I spent watching advertisements instead of the thing I actually came there to watch. That is what bothers me most.
The internet was supposed to give us more choices, more access and more freedom. Instead, I'm beginning to feel like I need a negotiation strategy just to watch a video without being interrupted. And perhaps I'm being dramatic.
Maybe.🤷🏿
But I'm definitely not the only person who has thought, “Oh, COME ON!” when an advertisement appears for the fourth time during something I'm watching.
So here's my question for The Dreamer's Pause this Monday:
At what point does advertising stop being advertising and start becoming an invasion of our attention? Because our data already has value. Our clicks have value. Our views have value. Our engagement has value. Our time has value. Surely we deserve some respect for what we're already giving these platforms.
Otherwise, what's next?
An advertisement when we unlock our phones?
“Welcome back! Before you can check your messages, please watch this 30-second promotion for laundry detergent.”
😭
Please. Let's not give them ideas.
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