It seems to vary a great deal, but it is too much on some videos. Its partly encouragement to sign up for YouTube premium.

That doesn't surprise me in the slightest. It's all about money money money when it comes to their company. If you're not making enough money for them than they bin you. If you're willing to pay for adverts than they don't give a monkeys about the viewers user experience.

if the service is free, you are the product.

Indirectly related, but at some news sites, often, you have several minutes of ads before the video itself. And, it's not rare that the ads are longer than the video.

Some of those news websites are so packed with adverts that it makes it #*$! difficult reading the page. I simply don't understand why they do it, you're much better off with just a few strategically placed ads rather than packing the page with them, all it does is make the user angry and they leave earlier than they probably would have done if the page was easier to read.

ESPN has you sit through a 30sec ad to watch a 15sec highlight : /

Needless to say, I rarely make it to the end of the advert.

This is because of these sites, that people started to massively use ad blockers. And I am talking about famous and "reputed" sites. If you look at it, this is the biggest sites which are the more abusive with ads, and this is "us" the smallest, who face the consequences. The worse is that, this is the same sites, that people are more likely to whitelist in their ad blocker, to be able to access them :)

Thought that Chrome was supposed to block abusive ads ...

Sorry, kiddies. I never see any of these ads ... Works a treat!

(NoScript, JS off, Ad Blocker+)

Did I say, "works a treat?"

The rising number of users world wide taking the same option (which also happens to affect ordinary webmasters, too) is nothing to sneeze at. The fact that major browsers are considering adding the same (don't expect CHROME to be there, that's their bread and butter via the "corporation", but will take out all advertising NOT THEIRS) ...

We live in interesting times, as the old adage goes.

Tough love merely indicates: "Deal with it."

Users are getting fed up. We will see a "new normal" over the next six months to a year and no one is going to like it (if they are webmasters who continue to play the old games). Not doom and gloom, merely a call to action that the times are a'changin' and those who are there first will benefit the best.