Google got in trouble recently for running ads on these videos. Advertisers would pay for a YouTube ad and it would only run on these random videos in the corner of the screen on click bait websites.
And "news" sites that intentionally delay the relevant images/videos to load after their ads and related stories, so users scrolling around for the only relevant content in the entire "article" see all the ads first.
I'm getting to the point where I just want to read ... once I get onto a site, I skip the ads and just read (most of the time I get limited ads because I have ad blocker) ... but if the ads, images, display is making it hard to read, I turn on read mode and get rid of all the clutter ... if the site was purposefully designed to not allow me to use read mode ... turn off the tab and move along to the next link.
If the site has somehow bypassed ad block and now shows ads, floating images, floating videos, banners or other elements ... if I can't get to the content I came to see, I turn off the tab and move on to the next site. I'm no wasting my time on these dumb sites.
add to that that google turned to crap nowadays and just pushes meaningless bot generated content in the top pages... it's getting almost impossible to use it to find stuff. not sure about other engines because I only started recently being search-engine-curious, so no idea how they were like before
absolutely. Since the advent of the YouTube gameplay guide, I have done my best to not touch multimedia guides and forcibly put it into text. You can even extract YouTube closed captions for accessibility reasons via hidden APIs. Give me plaintext.
