On the other hand, it's also good to demonstrate to children that advertising is not some utterly inevitable and inescapable phenomenon, and that an experience without ads can possibly exist (and is more pleasant to boot). Don't just teach your kids to ignore ads; teach them to explicitly recognize their mentally-manipulative properties and outright oppose ads.
> teach them to explicitly recognize their mentally-manipulative properties
The most effective way to teach them that is to let them spend their own hard-saved money on stuff-they-really-want-that's-actually-garbage. To do that they need to be exposed to the minor league con artists behind so many ads. Anything short of that will be mere theoretical knowledge, inconsistently applied.
I don't think that's enough, because not all advertisements seek an immediate purchase. Furthermore, learning the explicit levers in your brain that marketing execs seek to pull can then be usefully applied to becoming more cognizant of implicit manipulation elsewhere, such as in the case of political propaganda. Theoretical knowledge should be applied in addition to first-hand experience; there's no need for people to reinvent all this from scratch solely for the sake of experiential learning. Even without ads on children's content on YouTube, I'm not at all concerned about a child's ability to thoroughly experience advertising in their formative years.
