Long Passage

Grammarly Ads on YouTube really get my goat, and I wanted to figure out how to stop seeing them. After a bunch of searching for “how to stop grammarly ads on YouTube” yielded nothing, I sat down at my stand up desk and thought about it.

I figured it out. And there’s only one sure-fire way.

Why Do I Notice Grammarly Ads So Much on YouTube?

Tired of seeing this over and over and over and over again?

I probably wouldn’t have noticed them any other day, but yesterday I had a bit of a YouTube binge. Sometimes when I’m sad, I watch men fighting on YouTube – it’s like a mis-placed aggression being acted out on a canvas surface. It only really hurts myself.

Now there’s no reason to expect young men to donate their brain cells to sport without being paid. So YouTube has two modes – ad supported and a subscription model.

Grammarly wants to tout their product and pays for the privilege.

YouTube gets some money, the person providing the content gets some money.

(though I suspect it’s really content aggregators who provide montages of other people’s content who really get paid – “Top 10 apocalypses that ended worlds” probably doesn’t feed too much money back to the original four horsemen that started them and their patient videographers – I believe the fifth horseman is now called Social Media and gets the lion’s share of funding, but then again is probably doing more to cause depression and anxiety in the modern world. And as we know from dirty warfare, you don’t win by killing people cleanly, you weaken the opposition by wounding them severely and forcing them to care for the wounded. Ergo Social Media’s unwitting side-effects are probably doing more to hamstring civilization than smallpox)

So Grammarly is paying a bundle to get their product out there. On one hand you might see their grammar and spelling correction as helpful. On the other, you might see that sending every single thing you type to a third party (over and above Google et al.) might be a great opportunity to lose every single secret you ever wanted to keep and to give yet another platform the knowledge to advertise the heck out of your interactions.

The Only Way To Stop Grammarly Ads

The answer is pretty simple I’m afraid.

It’s that simple. Click like there’s no tomorrow

You click on their ads as often as possible.

The company has a marketing department. It has a budget. It is measured on its ability to put ads on a network, get people to click on them, and then ultimately sign up for Grammarly – either the free version where you just give them every jot of your typed data, or the paid version where you pay about $30 per month for the same privilege.

So every time you see an ad, click on it. You’ll see a link from YouTube like this:

https://www.grammarly.com/?q=writing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=youtube&utm_phase=other&utm_content=testimonials1m&gclid=CjwKCAiAiarfBRASEiwAw1tYv4mH6pUJiqFuoqD6sMAxycawV000irVwhIr75w9ZDblaSunGmi2ZNRoC_gAQAvD_BwE

So What Happens When I Click on a Grammarly Ad on YouTube

If you break down the URL above, you’ll see standard tracking parts – things beginning with utm_ (utm_medium, utm_source etc.) allow the marketeers to say what generated the click to their site, and also present different data quite easily to the user.

You can build your own utm_ URLs ideal for google analytics at the Google campaign URL builder.  ( Random fact: UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Modules – Urchin being a company Google bought in 2005 to help them get Analytics up and running)

The useful part in this for us people frustrated by the sheer frequency of Grammarly advertisements is the utm_medium=cpc part. CPC stands for cost per click.

So every time we click on it, the campaign budget is used up. The more we click, the less money they have to pay for ads. The less conversions – people signing up from YouTube clicks they have – the less they’ll be inclined to flood YouTube with their visual canticles.

Everyone Needs To Contribute to Stop YouTube Grammarly Ads

I can’t do this all by myself. We need everyone to click the living bejesus out of those ads consistently for a week. Click the damn thing every time you see it. Get your friends to click it. Get your enemies to click it twice. Click it til the insipid campaign is all done. Spent and spent. Exhausted crashing on the walls of user indifference. Click it til it’s dead. If I can place a banner here for Grammarly I will.

Does Grammarly Work?

If you want to know more about Grammarly, you might give their product a whirl. I know I did a few years back and thought it was quite a useful way to learn more about grammar. I’ve written a little update, and will use lots of funny parameters in the link to that Grammarly update to show how they work (although in practice, you wouldn’t need to do that with links from your own site.)

I love the BBC’s comment on Grammarly when it raised $110m in funding in 2017:

Its own website contains the sentence: “Enhance your sentences with Grammarly’s context-optimized word choice suggestions to instantly improve the readability of your document.”

Clearly split infinitives are safe from the software’s forensic gaze.

Grammarly is a free service which checks your spelling and grammar as you type via a Google Chrome plugin. There are other ways to use Grammarly – Word plugins and so forth – and also a paid version with a desktop app.

You people – yes you – seem to like the Chrome plugin – over 10 million of you downloaded it, and it’s got a lot of stars for the reviews. Silicon Valley likes the notion too – $110 million was put forward by eager venture capitalists in 2017 to help the company grow.

So Do I Use Grammarly?

I did. For a bit.

I learnt grammar four decades ago. I’d like to say I’ve forgotten more about grammar than you’ve ever known, but that’s so blatantly untrue – I can’t even remember learning any grammar in the first place. I have pretty shoddy grammar most of the time, but don’t realise it. The odd time I do a writing course, people very gently tell me about “dangling modifiers”.

My brain thrives on the ambiguity of most English sentences. When I say thrive, I really mean, gets easily and frequently confused by.

So in theory, having a writing assistant and editor constantly helping might seem like a good thing. I could be clear of word and meaning. My sentences could be very highly graded by readers and google alike. ( google the great false god to which we worship, hoping to get more reads, likes, shares, subscribes or whatever to gain some external validation for our meaningless lives).

And I liked it for a bit. Who doesn’t love red pen on your exercise jotter – at least it means someone is reading your heartfelt missives right? (Oh that’s right, no snowflakes like red pens. Even less people like red pens than like cheery paperclips  – thanks uncyclopedia for the  reminder image of word processors of nightmares gone by.)

Do I Use Grammarly Now?

That would be a no.

Why Did I Like Grammarly?

• I felt my writing was being read and critiqued
• It seemed I was learning some grammar rules, even though it was at a glacial pace. Very hard to steer glaciers from the downhill.
• I liked arguing with it when I thought my sentence was better (though perhaps less technically correct)
• I passed it along to my former boss and former assistant, as I arrogantly thought their written communication was much worse than mine – it felt like I’d discovered a silver bullet for poor writing.

Why Don’t I Use Grammarly?

• I’m sick of plugins. They each have a lifespan of a few weeks before I boot them out of the pram.
• I don’t like sending everything I type to someone if it’s not going to be public.
• It’s like when I use a satnav – it takes me 10 times as long to learn a route to somewhere if I’m using the satnav (GPS for you American people) to navigate. (Yes grammarly would have whooped my ass for the last sentence and my full stops are all wrong).
• I’m sick of freemium upsells and have no intention of spending $30 monthly on anything that doesn’t at least give me a foot massage.
• Gmail already reads most of what I write – it also suggests what I might type to people and does that thing that really annoys my family when I do it – finish the sentence. At some point, my half-bot gmail will be conversing with someone else’s half-bot gmail while I play video games in a bath of nutrients in a waking dream, but I’m not sure if I want to dilute my half with Grammarly.

Would I Use Grammarly Again?

Possibly. I might install it for a while during the great book writing push. (Yes, I’m aware that every person has a book inside them, and that’s perhaps where it should stay.) For now though, I’ll just keep splitting my infinitives, making my antecedents vague and occasionally see what grammar and punctuation errors the masses are making and steer clear of them as much as my human brain can manage.

Should You Use Grammarly?

It only takes 90 seconds to sign up, but that doesn’t make it okay. I’d give it a whirl so that at least you can have an opinion at last year’s dinner party when it was still interesting to talk about it.

Why Am I Writing About Grammarly in 2018?

About 90% of the ads I see on YouTube are for Grammarly, so I thought I’d check in to see what it’s about.