To be serious, nobody would use that platform even there hadn’t been any ads, because competing with YouTube is not an easy fit.

I should probably be happy that Rutube and VK Video gain popularity as the regional alternatives to the monopolist which gets more aggressive each day… if not that popularity has just been inflated by bought-out bloggers and comics from Putin’s oligarch owned channels like TNT being directed to cease their YouTube presence, just so the government could have their own “YouTube without team Navalny”.

but yeah, being more shitty than YouTube at delivering ads is not an easy fit, too!

A Russian video hosting Rutube (which was totally dead until the govt decided to detract Russians from using YouTube, which made the platform semi-dead) actually tried to do that, having a quiz after each ad break, asking questions such as “what TV channel has been advertised in this ad?” and repeating the ad video if answered wrong

Should be more than baby grapes!

Not sure about other countries, but the Russian branch of Burger King had some uniquely bad sense of humor when it came to their ads. The most known as was a wordplay between “Don’t get too spicy” and “Don’t shit yourself”, but there was another ad of chicken nuggets with a little chick in the corner saying something like “6 nuggets for 99 rubles!”. I found it hilarious to see a chick advertising their mom.

I am not sure how to proceed, to be honest.

I had a small community, !jrpg@vlemmy.net (see lemmy.world cache). It had its issues, like low # of posts and comments made by anyone but me, but I could see people starting engaging bit by bit and if I was to write more, the community would be able to compete with its kbin counterpart. Aaaand bam.

Now I’m thinking of where I could move to. !jrpg@lemmy.world is semi-dead and is run by a person who I believe to be a squatter who had occupied a lot of communities and called them “placeholders until the reddit mods evacuate”. If I am correct, then I’m not sure if I really like the idea of participating in a community run by a squatter.

Probably I should settle somewhere else.