I have the free YouTube service, and the ads are designed not only to promote whatever they’re promoting, but also to drive viewers to the point of such annoyance and frustration that they finally spring for the premium, ad-free version of YouTube.

Not me, not yet, although I find the ads incredibly annoying.

For some reason, for about a year I’ve been getting an ad for some sort of face makeup (I turn it off after the usual five seconds, so I don’t even know what it’s advertising, even after all this time), featuring a woman with the most droning grating annoying voice ever. But those ads are nowhere near as infuriating as what I’ve come to call the counter-message ads. At present, they seem to solely involve Israel and Jews – or rather, with countering the message of videos made by pro-Israel or pro-Jewish sources.

For example, if I happen to watch a video by some Jewish or Israeli organization which offers news of the Gaza War or the Iran War from Israel’s point of view, the ads invariably are pro-Gaza and pro-Hamas. If I happen to watch a video that has to do with Jewish thought or religion, invariably it is accompanied by ad after ad from proselytizing Christian organizations explicitly dedicated to converting Jews to Christianity.

These counter-ads are presently solely on Israeli or Jewish videos, but it hasn’t always been that way. I distinctly recall, during the 2024 election campaign, that nearly every pro-Trump video or podcast I would watch (or really anything on the right) would be paired with an ad for Kamala Harris. The opposite may have been true (pro-Kamala podcasts paired with Trump ads), but I wasn’t watching a whole lot of podcasts on the left, so I don’t know.

So, who makes these ad-placement decisions? It certainly doesn’t seem to be the people making the videos. Is it YouTube? Is it the advertisers? Do advertisers pay extra for counter-placement of their ads?