> I've gone to great lengths to avoid ads - but it's a war I am losing. Content is now interleaved with ads at the creative stage...

In the end you'll win this war, maybe not in the way you envisioned but win it you will by avoiding 'content' altogether. There is more than enough to read, listen to, see and do that you don't need 'content' to keep you satisfied. Drop it like the lukewarm turd it is and you'll be better off while they can hide their ads where the sun don't shine.

Source: living ad- and 'content'-free for decades

Just in case you don't know the SponsorBlock extension can skip past Youtube interleaved ads, promotional items other time wasters. You can pick and choose what you want to skip and in the Youtube Interface you can also press a button to automatically go past a skipped item you wanted to see. [1]:https://sponsor.ajay.app/

Also hate clickbait title cards? Theres now an extension to remove those as well: https://dearrow.ajay.app/

This SponsorBlock extension also integrates with yt-dlp so downloaded videos can have ads stripped in the final video. That way you don't even have to ever go to youtube itself. The war isn't over yet and people must keep fighting back.

Yeah, I pay for youtube so I don't have to watch ads, but then youtube creators at some point all decided to jump on the bandwagon of interleaving ads into their content. Many are kind enough to make it easy to jump ahead to when the ad is over, but man, I would much prefer they set up a patreon or just let me pay them through youtube's own UI. Incredibly annoying.

The only winning move is not to play.

Only old school media is holding themselves to a standard. No AI, no sponsored content. And thank god we still have a public broadcaster.

The future is unfortunately propaganda and brain rot.

What is keeping you hooked to that type of content?

There’s an easy solution that I’ve taken: just stop watching stuff. Choose not to participate in the bullshit.