Because Google or YouTube think we are ready.
Have you ever heard of the boiling frog ?
If you try to throw a frog into hot water, it jumps right out. Might hurt the skin a little, but it walks out alive.
If you throw the frog into cold water and very slowly heat it up, it will stay there, get comfortable, and possibly won’t realize the environment is getting hazardous until it’s already too late.
As a metaphor in this case, it describes how easy it is for us to neglect minor inconvenience in life because we would slowly learn to accept them, even if they pile up against each other.
That’s right, but to an outside observer who remembers what step A was, both P and Q are awful, with Q being a bit worse. This scenario perfectly illustrates that humans can be manipulated into staying in absolutely horrible conditions as long as things started out okay and only worsen slow enough. Due to the human nature that we don’t tend to quit something for minor reasons even if we can sense them, we gradually forget why we agreed to stay in the first place and learn to adapt to challenges presented.
The original idea of YouTube was to be a sharing platform for candid, home-made videos. The site would allow them to be shared beyond friends and family circles and reach people with similar interests.
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At that stage, the most important thing for YouTube was traffic. Views and clicks, all that good stuff. There were no ads on the videos.
As YouTube received massive adoptions everywhere, it grew into an internet media powerhouse and ads started being implemented.
The first ones were the skippable ads.
Then there were un-skippable ads that were shorter than the other skippable ads, around 5 seconds in length.
Then there were skippable ads that were no longer 30 seconds long. They could go for minutes, basically getting to lengths that you can no longer let them run casually without wasting much of your time.
Then there were un-skippable ads that could be up to 20 seconds long. I guess those were the guys who paid the big bucks.
Another year or more has passed and YouTube has not gone down one bit in popularity. There have been many other video services that spawned from the trend through the years and yet none can shake the kingdom that YouTube has built.
guess that was the indication YouTube needed that we are ready to silently accept and adapt to another worse integration.