The ads sometimes being loud on YouTube usually doesn't bother me (except recently when it was an extra loud woman shouting something like "My husband fucked me all night last night" and proceeded to extol the virtues of the product that I am supposed to believe allowed for that bedroom performance--that was so annoying and it was so different from the ads they normally show me it earned YouTube a week with the ad blocker on [1]).

What I find most bothersome is the timing. On linear TV the ad breaks are planned to fit with the show. On YouTube they can happen at pretty much any time and often step on a dramatic moment or compelling scene and totally break the mood.

With their ability to automatically make transcripts of video, and their AI models, surely they could make something that could look at the transcript ahead of time and figure out places where ads could go that would avoid this problem, couldn't they?

[1] For several months I've started the day with ad blocking off on YouTube. If they annoy me too much it goes on for the rest of the day. I follow these rules. (1) Ads that are relevant to me do not change my annoyance level, or maybe even lower it. (2) If the ad that interrupts what I'm watching is skippable in 5 second or it is non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and is not followed by another ad it does not change my annoyance level. (3) If there is a second ad and it is skippable in 5 seconds or non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and not followed by a third, it will raise my annoyance level, but they can get away with this a small number of times. (4) A 15 second non-skippable ad will raise my annoyance level enough that as soon as I get back to what I was watching I note the time, turn on the ad blocked, hit refresh, and seek back to where I left off if the refresh loses my place. (5) Too many ad breaks will also raise my annoyance level enough to turn the blocker on.

For the first few months this worked great. It was is if their algorithm had figured out what I was doing and adapted. I'd always get 5 second skippable ads, and they would be spread out far enough apart that most days I wouldn't turn ad blocking on. But lately, over the last few weeks, they are doing a lot more non-skippable 6 second ads following by skippable ads or a second 6 second non-skippable ad, and they are more likely to insert way more ad breaks than they used to. They now almost always are in the ad blocker by the middle of the day.

I don’t think YouTube normalizes the audio on their videos. I have no idea why, but that could easily become a quiet video that leads into a -16 LUFS ad that blows your ears out.

I have experienced this while listening to classical concertos and to meditation videos.

You don't need to pay YouTube protection money. Get a different browser.

YouTube is a completely different experience once you pay to turn off the automated ads