Collecting Advertisements
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I’ve had a love/hate relationship with online advertisements, especially those that promotes mobile games. First, I should set things straight:
Me of today says: you should totally get an ad-blocker
Like, really. I believe everyone should get at least 1 method of blocking ads set up on any device they have, be it Pi-hole, AdGuard DNS, or uBlock Origin.
(the content of the rant was originally meant to be here but since I wrote a little bit too much I’ve move it into another blarb. This one here will just be about the fascinating things I found with mobile game ads, like:)
Collecting ads was my hobby
During the early days of COVID-19, I’ve found myself into an unusual hobby of collecting online advertisements for a lack of a better thing to do. Now in the year 2025 as of when I was writing this, it served as a time capsule on how things in 2019~2020 used to be like, and when I finally get myself to music-making, sample them to make a goofy song perhaps (?)
Using a VM to collect ads
The first thing I discovered is that ad services like Unity Ads save a copy of the ads on a cache folder (conveniently named UnityAdsCache) which means I can move them somewhere else, like the hard drive of my computer.
With that in mind, I set up an Android VM in order to let the ads play and load in the background. The ads are then moved and “collected” to my computer. Want to see how ads in 2020 looks like? Here you go:
Yeah, it was your standard pull-the-pin-puzzle ads, from Evony out of all things.
I also used a VPN in order to get ads in other places that I couldn’t have seen otherwise, especially those from Japan that I found the most interesting. I was able to save gems like this:
(I also saved a YouTube link to the 30-second version of this thing which is much more hilarious but they privatized it and I couldn’t find a copy of the video online. Oh well, by the way, speaking about YouTube)
Saving YouTube ads into a playlist
I also found a way to extract the YouTube links of ads on my YouTube phone client which I can then save into a YouTube playlist. Basically, the process goes like this (for me, YouTube probably do things a little bit differently for you since they love A/B testing):
- Enable stats for nerds (go to “You” tab → press the cogwheel on the top right → go to “General” → scroll to the bottom and turn “Stats for nerds” on)
- When an ad appears, turn the stats for nerds panel on (by clicking the 3 dots at the top and check “Stats for nerds”) and copy or screenshot the video ID
- On my computer, go to the playlist URL, click the plus next to the “Play all” button, type in “https://youtu.be/” + the video ID that I extracted, and add the video that appears
With this method, I was able to add any video ad I see into a playlist of my choosing. Here’s the link to the playlist itself, but I must warn that you should not watch it in public (I try to save every ad that I saw, and you’ve probably heard people complain about YouTube ads being a bit too suggestive on the unofficial subreddit)
YouTube embed (you've been warned)
Why?
Simply say, because I can!
…And also, maybe, in the rare event of me getting banned on platforms like YouTube because of the ad playlist, I could point to it as proof that the advertising scene has gotten so bad the platforms themselves doesn’t even like the videos they got paid to promote.