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Marie Mosca
Opinion Editor

A week or so ago I was pulling an all-nighter and trying to get as much work done as I could while listening to music and some podcasts on YouTube. To my dismay, an ad popped up before my video and scared the living bajeebus out of me. It was for some horror movie. Normally I would have been fine with this, but it caught me off guard. I am an extremely visually oriented person, and when I see something horrifying it tends to stick in my head and start appearing around every corner, hide behind my closet door and under my bed for weeks. I usually like to be ready for that sort of self-torture.
Being an artist and a small business owner my, I understand the importance of having YouTube ads to make some money, but I do believe there should be options to turn them off, or at least filter the kind you get before videos. I may be over the age of 18, but that does not mean I want to be seeing stuff like that at 4 a.m. on a Sunday night when I have an 8 a.m. class the next day. To make things worse, every video I tried to watch after that had the same darn ad. It made me jump every time even if I sort of knew it was coming. I blame it on the double espresso shots in my coffee, but seriously? I had to resort to immediately muting all my videos and switching tabs to avoid them.
In reality, the movie itself is probably not scary at all, but I still did not need to be freaked out that late at night (early in the morning?) I would like to see some options presented by YouTube to be able to filter my ads to avoid this. Heck, I would even pay for it. A lot of other websites offer a “Premium” or similar membership that blocks all advertisements throughout the site itself. It would be extremely useful for videos and podcasts when you get hit with three or four ads throughout the entire video because it is so long. I bet a lot of people would pay for something like that if it was reasonably priced!