YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers
(www.howtogeek.com)
from AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 20 Aug 2024 17:07
https://programming.dev/post/18367923
from AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 20 Aug 2024 17:07
https://programming.dev/post/18367923
- YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
- Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
- Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
threaded - newest
I’ve been downloading my subscriptions and loading them into Plex. Plenty of room for improvement in that system, but I get a nostalgic hit of YouTube long ago. Man, it’s fallen so far over the years.
Also related, I’ve hit 2.4TB of internet use for the first time last month doubling my previous record.
Literally doubling down lmao
Which downloader do you use?
Not OP but I use the arr family of services (Sonarr and Radar, though there are more) and NZBGet as my downloader.
Lol NZBGet is not typically used for getting free content.
It’s one of the preconfigured downloaders for sonarr and radarr which is really a fancy front page for adding media from usenet? So, I would disagree.
Well… if your idea of “free” content is something you don’t pay for then yes, but if your idea of free content is something that was intended to be distributed for “free” then no.
Is it free if it supported by ads?
People don’t use NZBGet for that reason. It is literally a platform & distribution model primarily intended for pirating content in a way that is much quicker and more reliable than torrents. Usenet would probably have died without NZBs.
There are several out there using yt-dlp. Tube archivist, tube sync, etc. They are fairly straightforward to set up in docker if you use that.
Probably yt-dlp, it's a pretty popular and relatively simple terminal application.
Yeah, that’s a lot. As a comparison: My connected family of 5 hits 1.3TB-1.5TB on a monthly basis. Streaming apps in 4K/Dolby Vision and Atmos, YT, gaming, FaceTiming constantly on 500/500 fiber.
Once upon a time Google used few and non-intrusive ads. The ads were soo well-placed and relevant, that they almost seemed like a service to the user, rather than being forced upon you. Some of us even added exceptions for Google ads in our ad blockers, so we would not miss out.
I miss those days.
That was almost a decade ago or even before. I remember adockers recommending white listing search engines or recommending to disable non-instrusive ads to support websites.
I don’t know of any day where I unblocked ads and felt good cause they were targeted directly at me
There are some ads that I’m fine with, but they have to be clearly an ad, and related to the content on the site, not based on my previous interactions, nor using tricks to disguise ads as part of the content.
On documentation pages: sure just have a thing related to CS courses, on pirating and streaming sites advertise VPNs, on horny sites advertise horny stuff, and casinos and sports advertise gambling and sports betting. But DON’T make the ad look like a section in the documentation, like another download button, like another horny video on the site, like another casino game or segment of the sports analysis. If I want to explore the ad I will, stop trying to trick me else I will try to block and avoid you entirely! If I figure out that are you spending more effort trying to trick me the less interested I will be in the product you offer.
While the intentions behind this are mostly evil nowadays, there’s also the design aspect to be considered.
Imagine a nice, modern and minimal UI, and suddenly some flashy colorful element in the feed. it just hurts a designers feeling.
Meanwhile these days every time I happen to use Youtube without an adblocker I get the same car insurance ads that I’ve gotten for the last 4 years.
Then they killed the competition and there was nobody left to stop them doing to you with ads what the farmer does with geese to make foie gras.
I forgot where I heard this::: If there are fewer, more relevant ads, Google and YouTube should be able to make more money with fewer ads.
The advertisers though want more ads even though they are less affective. As it forces the cost per ad down.
It is totally backwards…. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The ads are so obnoxious and frequent. It just kills it for me.
I know the reply I’m gonna get…
Then google got greedy and ruined it’s own ad service. Imagine google would’ve stopped at this early point. A single, non flashing banner ad would generate as much as 5 multiple second video ads do now. But ads got used more and more inflationary, to the point where we are now.
I unblock ads on AVForums. And honestly, the ads are either really well targeted (because I’m probably going to buy that amplifier eventually), or random ebay stuff.
If they started serving up the generic “reduce belly fat in 2 seconds with this simple trick” with some AI generated picture, I’d re-evaluate very quicly.
Eh, I dunno if I’d say they’re “losing”.
I’ve certainly noticed disruptions on every platform except GrayJay. LibreTube stopped working for several months for me.
Certainly these interruptions could be enough for some users to abandon them.
I agree with you, but you can also think about it as a one sided battle where youtube keeps shooting themselves in the foot
Not really. YouTube provides a lot of tools to make most of their services and content pretty accessible from third party clients. If Google wanted to prevent ad blockers and force you to watch ads, trust me they could. At this point I think some users that only know how to install third party software are going to start claiming they won and ruin a good thing for everyone. You don’t want ads? Then don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
How are they doing that? Users who aren’t watching ads have absolutely zero value to YouTube, and only cause increased use of their computing resources. If they leave, YT has lost absolutely nothing, and gained a decrease in energy use. Most likely these people won’t leave YT altogether but just go back to watching ads or paying for premium, which is exactly the point.
Not saying I give a shit, that’s just reality.
I’d argue they risk losing users who post links to their videos online. It’s likely the same group who tend to use ad blockers are also the ones more likely to link a video online, so YouTube would miss out on all the non-adblock users clicking links and watching the videos that way.
You are grossly overestimating the value of your likes and comments.
Maybe they are, but it’s not “absolutely zero” like you said.
Disagree. You’re forgetting the part about consuming their resources.
thanks. exactly my point
forbes.com/…/cristiano-ronaldo-smashes-records-wi…
you can thank the non-paying youtube members who made post like this possible
NewPipe/PipePipe and Freetube were affected for half a day max, these guys are super fast with the updates.
Imagine being on the YouTube ad team…that has to be the most depressing team in tech history. Your whole existence revolves around peddling ads before people can watch the ads they want.
Even better, you work for one of the wealthiest corporations in the world with virtually unlimited resources at your disposal, and you still get your asses handed to you by a handful of people with laptops.
If they didn’t have to support the web, and various legacy platforms, the could lock it all down with drm more easily.
Hence Google’s proposal to DRM the web
And people’s response has shown its not easy or even working.
in tech*. most people don’t even know or care about it
That’s far less true now that they’re breaking the functionality of tons of adblockers that it was a few years ago.
most normies i know don’t care about it.
i have no idea how they use the internet without them, but here we are.
Yep, most of my non-tech friends just say “Ads? Oh yeah, I don’t even notice them anymore, I got so used to them.” whenever that topic pops up in a conversation.
ive got the “ads are cool so benevolent facebook can keep our beloved skinner box free!” type of answer.
they really did brainwash the normies.
All the eggs in one basket? Computer nerds would never allow that.
Ah, what. Who wants or likes to watch ads at all?
People watch an ad for the privilege of watching a movie/show/game trailer all the time.
I have no problem watching a ad for a video but when I have to watch an ad just to see if I am interested in watching the video is where I draw the line. Forced ads before the video starts is the worst. Give me a min or two before forcing an ad. If I am looking for help for a particular issue I don’t want to watch ads after ad while trying to gauge the video.
I get what you’re saying but I’ve reached a point in my life where I really don’t give a shit and there is absolutely no way I’m watching ads. I’m also not paying google for anything they offer.
Yea…I’m old enough to remember when that was the content that paid for the platform. Putting an ad on top of that is fucking soulless vampic greed.
Welcome to the new Google. It’s rent seeking all the way down.
A lot of creators have just turned into corporate shills. I stopped watching ETA Prime’s channel about tech reviews because it was becoming pretty clear that mostly everything he got was paid for by the company. Also, most creators are putting their own ads into their content.
I know right… Why should content creators be able to make money from content. Am I right?
The same reasons as open source software devs.
Some content creators but not most of them. A lot of open source software advertises too.
You’re joking, but you’re right.
Once the content has been created, the near-zero marginal cost of online distribution makes the concept of charging for copies wholly untenable.
The furry community figured this out years ago, our creators work on commission or paid subscription through Patreon or one of its ilk. They (mostly) don’t care where you freely share their work because they already got paid.
The knives are out for Patreon. Apple is looking to carve a big chunk out of that revenue. Google and Amazon (owner of Twitch) will not be far behind. Believe me, Google and Twitch are very unhappy that creators skip the platform monetization methods and just tell viewers to go to Patreon to bypass the heavy commissions.
Great time for Patreon to expand more into content delivery.
Patreon is jacked to the tits with vc money and enshittifying at a breakneck speeds. Done expect goods innovations from it in the future
Patreon deserves to die, their cut of the subscription income is extortionate for what amounts to a very limited web hosting platform.
Open-source alternatives like Mirlo or Cloud Patron will take its place, it’s only a matter of time.
Or SubscribeStar or any of the other alternatives.
Welcome to Youtube. It’s ads all the way down. Unless:
Firefox browser, Ublock Origin extension, Sponsorblock extension
Save 40% of your viewing time for actual content and send tips through creator’s Paypal or whatever.
YouTube is just on demand TV with extra steps these days. I’ve stopped watching videos, I have an LLM transcribe and summarize for me now. 99% of the content of a 10-15 minute video can be summarized into 1 or 2 pages and read in under 2 minutes.
Only a matter of time before LLMs start injecting their own ads into these responses.
By that point I’m pretty sure we’ll have an effective compact model that can run locally and transcribe downloaded videos on reasonable hardware. Or you can just sic a paid model like chatgpt on the task. The corporate Internet is entirely focused on subscription service models now, unless you run the model yourself on local hardware you’re going to end up paying someone somewhere a service fee.
Edit: y’all need to learn about minified models designed to run on edge hardware, they’re a thing and often work shockingly well.
Nah, local LLMs are easily in the range of transcribe/summarize. I bet you could do that nicely with llama 8B without even needing a gpu.
Cant wait to have these
You already can I think? Ollama is something you can install, and then you can set up a webui like sillytavern for roleplays, or some other more fitting ui for whatever you want. Also, Linux is great for projects like these, on windows it’s fucking a pain to set up, Linux it’s easy.
Local and open source
.
I think I need this, finally a real use for ‘ai’.
The amount of how to videos you have to watch through, when all you want is one little piece of info you should be able to search or scan for has been a problem since before the internet figured out how to increase clicks by making a web page in to slides.
Can you link me a how-to video on how to get startedt and send me a summary from your working setup?
It’s just two steps, first get a transcript from the video somehow (use the whisper API if you’re willing to pay a small amount or just Google “transcribe YouTube video” and look for an ad supported site that’ll do it via Google.) Second: use chatgpt or local llama to summarize the transcript.
I hope nobody lets them know that Firefox on Linux has never shown ads for any of their content.
Don’t worry. Linux is only 4% of the total computer market. They aren’t bothered with you because Linux isn’t worth it.
That’s fine, we’re happy to keep the better choice to ourselves. 😆
Oh well, sucks to be us! /s
SmartTube for Android TV is a must as well
You don’t have to actually watch sponsorships since most of them are paying the creator excluding the ones where they pay by clicks on a custom link
I don’t follow those creators!
The best part of YouTube is the small creators who are just making videos as a hobby. Once they get so big they start shilling products they wouldn’t use themselves I drop them like a hot potato. For the most part that doesn’t happen though because I prefer niche topics and creators that don’t have “sellout” personalities.
To some extent, these types of videos advertise or promote a product, service, or experience.
I’ve clicked in to see a movie trailer, which is basically an ad, and had to watch an ad before I could watch the ad
and it’s potentially an existential threat.
At least you can tell your boss “I’m working on it!”, sit on your ass, and every 6 months add one more little UI or formula change which “finally stops adblockers” but is defeated within 3 days.
Yeah I don’t believe they really put their hearts in it. If they truly wanted to force you into watching ads, they’d manage. Their team is just not that interested.
Their team is probably using adBlockers more than the rest of us. They understand the depth of the surveillance baked into those ads.
And because they have to test the ads.
Thank god for that.
So tell the content creators you like that you don’t like YouTube. While YouTube Premium is the same price as like two coffees a month… Maybe your content creator will help you if you can’t afford it.
Well, to begin with, both the watcher and the creator are clients of the platform. Both sides feel bound to it, even if both dislike it.
Then, YouTube premium is literally 20 machine coffees a month in my first world country. 15 if they’re done by someone. You seem to be speaking “privileged minority”.
I’m sorry… I didn’t realize the reason that there are so many Starbucks in America, like literally caddy corner from one another is because their customer base is the “privileged minority.” I’ll have to remember that line.
In all seriousness, you could argue that ads prey on poor vulnerable people unable to afford YouTube Premium that just want to use it to learn, and that would be a semi-coherent argument.
What you are trying to point is that in the United States of America (and maybe Canada) you people have coffee that’s so expensive that two of them pay for YT premium. You’re only missing out on most of the internet (eg. Not the US).
Starbucks is notoriously expensive and nobody refers to it as coffee round here. Starbucks in my first world country is considered something for hipster digital nomads. You can’t find them outside areas with tourists as everyone else is happy with “regular” coffee that’s literally 10 times cheaper.
Saying that two coffees equate to YouTube premium while using Starbucks as a metric is like saying that a car only costs a watch or two while using a Rolex as the reference watch. If you consider a Rolex to be your reference watch, cool, you’re a privileged minority.
I’m sure they make enough money to not care. Being in the part of the company that brings in the dough is generally a pretty good position to be in as well.
It’s the only consumer product they haven’t canceled.
Gmail would like a word
All corporate IT jobs are depressing, because working in a corporation isn’t something that a thinking person is equipped to do.
Drying tears with dollar bills .gif
The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I’d rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.
legit, if youtube ever beats ublock origin, i’ll just stop watching youtube
Its an all out assault on half your senses without an adblocker. Literal torture.
The entire web is like that without an ad blocker these days.
I miss those cheeky gif banners from the 2000s
[With hindsight] The commercial use of the internet should never have been allowed.
I want the internet to be a network of digital libraries…communication, public events and sharing space…personal pages…services…the commercial motive starts from there and eventually consumes the rest :/
I reckon without the rule changes in 1993-94 allowing commercial use that the internet would have turned into a significantly more useful utility with higher quality innovation than the advert laden train wreck that we have now.
Ok, apparently it wasn’t as gradual as I thought, there was a determining moment in 93-94 with Netscape and HTTPS that made secure transactions possible for e-commerce.
For this to happen, everyone using the internet should know HTML or there has to be a easy to use, MS Word-like web designer. And there should also be easy to use, free web hosting providers (neocities exists).
Owning a website as a non-techie should be normalized and be portrayed as “cool”
Hey, neocities is pretty good, I think I’ll try to use chatgpt to get some boilerplate site running and then keep adding to it :)
These sites make me happy melonking.net/melon?z=%2Funiverse%2F 😂
Do online multiplayer video games count as a commercial use? I kind of like those
Yt-dlp download script + text file with fav channel urls + jellyfin.
No bullshit, saves bandwidth.
Also look into invidious.
They were serving videos with ads spliced in, basically DAI in podcasting industry. I’m not sure how that experiment went, but if that’s how they’d serve the videos, downloaders will have ads embedded as well.
Yt-dlp supports sponsorblock, i am not worried.
I also dont even need tools for this as my usual style of watching is with my fingers on the arrow keys to skip back and forth
I actually don’t know if/how the ad block people worked around it or if YouTube pulled back. The problem with DAI on podcast and in stream ads is that the ads aren’t always 1:05~1:35, the ad could be longer or shorter, then the next ad won’t necessarily start at the same time, and most definitely won’t end at the same time. So sponsor block won’t know precisely where the ads are, thereby making it much harder for a crowd sourced solution to accurately skip embedded ads. Hopefully they figured out a way, but as mentioned earlier, I don’t know what happened to that experiment.
Put it on a VHS, then use one of those VCRs that removes the ads for you.
And peertube, some content creators also post there, e.g., The Linux Experiment.
YouTube had beaten ublock origin for a while so I resolved to using invidious.
I’ve had YouTube Premium since the days when it was called YouTube Red, so like a decade. I’ve grown used to not seeing any ads from Google and anytime I watch a video not using my account it’s torture.
Same here. FreeTube for desktop and NewPipe are all you need though if you don’t want to pay and/or have access to music.
Tubular is newpipe + sponsorblock BTW
I use pipepipe but it’s less stable
I haven’t tried that yet. I think Libretube also does SponsorBlock too & have seen it on F-Droid.
Ya I think you’re right.
I use pipepipe over tubular because it let’s you change the ugly red YouTube banner to black (enable eye protection)
As a recent YT premium-tryer, it’s amazing how many ads they put in that aren’t obviously adverts - comparing between non-premium and premium browsing.
Not sure I’ll keep YT premium beyond the free trial, until I find more decent content producers. Even then, it’s skipping those video’s paid promotion segments.
So it’s like paying for a streaming platform to not get ads… But still getting ads
I agree… however, that is an issue with the content creators relying on using content promotions. I have noticed when skipping ahead in videos that it usually indicates in the progress bar where the promotion ends. If the content producers utilized other ways to contribute and I liked them enough, then I’d do that. YouTube now has a subscriber only feature that should help with this. There are also extensions that are supposed to block sponsors too. I don’t think YouTube has implemented any functions to make blocking sponsored ads more difficult, especially for paying users… who knows though.
You‘re part of the problem then. It only got so shitty in the first place so they could trap people in the Premium subscription that will get increasingly more expensive and less useful.
You could pay for YouTube Premium
Is that what they are trying to do? Push crap ads and try to kill adblock to get a little extra user share to pay for yet another subscription?
PS: let me add that I also watch TV and the balance between quality of content and ads and their placement is much better (yes, some countries are worse than others with this). I don’t know what they are doing in youtube ads, but it’s anti-human (not just the ads, but the design too: super slow loading, tricks you into clicking the wrong content). Like they don’t want you to “pay” by watching ads, they want to torture you until you subscribe, go away or get adblock.
I don’t care if you block ads… but to act like Google owes you and that you deserve free content is called entitled.
Google certainly acts like it owes me nothing indeed, that’s why it will never be good enough to pay to watch.
I’m just glad someone is thinking of the shareholders
I forgot… where can I get my free data center with petabytes of storage & 300TB/s fiber interconnects?
Wait, are we acting like YouTube isn’t profitable now? If I’m going to spend money on videos it’ll be a content creator owner platform like Nebula
I get what you are saying, but the balance is off.
YT premium costs (edit) more than a streaming service per month.
There are no industry leading movies or series released exclusively on YouTube.
YouTubes benefits of premium is “not being delivered ‘skip after 5 seconds’ live streams” as an ad that will play indefinitely (or at least for hours).
Also, streaming services provide much better series discovery. Ie, find a show you like and easily discover the start of that series, then binge watch the entire series in order.
YT premium is basically a “play next” queue, 1080p, and no ads.
It doesn’t (AFAIK) support creators any more. It’s literally just a fee to not-be-inconvenienced, and it’s not great at that
Yep… i actually looked at Subscribing. But… It’s basically mostly amateur hour and the subscription costs a huge amount.
Even worse, I don’t believe creators even get revenue until they exceed sufficient subscribers. So most people are actually paying youtube to put benefit from other people’s video’s which they have no involvement in.
When did this change? AIUI creators got a larger cut of YouTube premium views compared to ad share.
Not sure if its subscribers or views… But, I tried to monitize one or two of my videos, and it wouldn’t let me because I don’t think I had enough views or something.
It’s only a matter of time until the premium users get ads. Just like Netflix, and cable TV before that. You will inevitably wind up paying to be advertised to.
Netflix has ads now? I thought that was only for their lower tier service? I had to cancel Netflix cause they haven’t came out with two more seasons of Stranger Things yet.
yes for lower paid tiers.
Google makes enough money evading taxes already. Not gonna help them make more.
I don’t care if you use ad blockers. I get annoyed when people publish articles like… “Google is losing the adblockers war” cause then advertisers are going to start pushing harder for Google to actually prevent adblockers entirely, which they could have done already. Thus far Google, despite issues, does quite a lot of good things… Android is the only open source OS out of Apple & Windows. Android lets you install third party app stores. Chrome (Chromium) is open source… etc.
These users writing this content don’t even develop the apps to block YouTube ads. If you’ve ever explored the APIs by YouTube, then you’d know that Google despite pushing ads for users without blockers, is still rather friendly to third party apps.
Advertisers couldn’t care less about adblockers. Advertisers don’t pay if the ad is blocked.
Fuck that though
I’d pay for YouTube Premium Lite if it didn’t state “Note: Ads will still show on music content and outside of videos.” and if that’d make them stop harvesting all my data.
Pro tip, LLMs do an excellent job summarizing YouTube videos now. I’ve never liked YouTube content, the incentives for creators are perverse and discourage conveying accurate information simply in favor of drawing out every video to maximize ad opportunities. About 95% of the content I might have been interested in could have been better conveyed in a 1-2 page blog post and read in 2 minutes instead of stretched out into a 15 minute video. Having a robot summarize that content is so much less irritating.
What do you use for that, fetch the transcript and just feed it to the LLM of your choice? Or are you talking of the actual LLM watching and summarizing?
I’ve always just used chatgpt for both tasks. I’ll ask my SO, she does more of this and she might have better tools to suggest.
Same.
I came across someone who uploaded a 90 minute video as an ad as well.
I remember watching some video, falling asleep for a few hours, then waking up to a livestream of an ad. One of those “skip after 5s” but it was a livestream, so it just kept playing. I couldn’t believe it!
It’s so bad that I 1) refuse to pay for premium so I don’t enable the behavior and 2) ended up sideloading an alt YouTube app on iOS that just doesn’t display the ads. YouTube hasn’t been able to block that one yet as it spoofs as the original YouTube app. Totally unsanctioned and a pain in the ass to keep the certificate alive but worth it. YouTube is actually enjoyable again. All that because the ads interruptions were constant. If it was every 15 min or so I wouldn’t care, but every 5!? Get the hell out of here!
That‘s where Youtube Premium comes into play for many fools who don‘t really know about adblockers. Google‘s goal isn‘t to destroy the website, but to turn it into a much more profitable Netflix subscription based on user generated content. Sadly the enshittification of the biggest video platform will continue because enough people are willing to pay a lot for it. The site will not improve until there are mainstream alternatives that actually take revenue off Youtube.
What’s YouTube?
<img alt="" src="https://media2.giphy.com/media/J8FZIm9VoBU6Q/giphy.gif">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/832b221b-26a7-4b7b-8918-af71b6aaa89c.webp">
I’ll never understand the entitlement of these companies when it comes to ads. You send the content freely to my computer along with BS ads. It’s my computer. I’ll display what I want using programs I want.
If you want me to pay for that content with $ or by watching ads - then put up a hard paywall and stop sending the content for free. You can’t get uppity and complain about ad blockers - it doesn’t make any sense…
The real problem is your content sucks and nobody is willing to pay for it. And that’s your problem - not mine.
Here’s some free apples. There’s a newspaper ad stuffed in there as well. Oh you ate the apples without reading the newspaper? Foul ball! /facepalm
Edit: never mind the fact that many ads have been served that are downright malicious code…
“Your content sucks… And I can’t stop watching it. I also got herpes by watching too much brain rot”
I was paying for Google music until they took it away from me and told me it was Youtube Premium and then raised the price twice.
Not exactly what I’d call a great value proposition.
That’s a weird way to look at it, obviously you’re watching the content.
I’d rather see it like this:
Free tier with ads
Subscription without ads (and better quality)
You are currently on the free tier. Yes, you can block ads (just like you can pirate movies), but that’s not the deal you were offered. I’m using an ad blocker myself, but I can understand the corporate side too.
They absolutely could add a hard paywall, but why should they if there are plenty of users who want to watch for free by paying with ads?
No, I’m on the “you’re freely posting content to the internet - some of which I want to consume(videos), others not so much (ads)” plan. I never asked them to post anything, never entered a contract, etc.
If they lock the content up, and stop freely posting it, then fine, I’ll stop consuming and go elsewhere. If I can’t live without the content, then I can decide to pay up. It’s their content - they can do whatever they want with it. But they can’t get mad at ad blockers if they put their stuff out there for free.
Totally fine by me! But by your logic you can’t get mad at them if they block you from watching due to using an ad blocker. Which brings us back to square one?
Agree 100%. IF they figure it out - which they won’t for more than a day or two. They know the only real solution is to lock their content up and protect it, but they don’t, and then they get bent out of shape. The companies get weird about it - not the users.
I still hold the opinion that they could absolutely block you out. I use uBlock Origin and there was actually a time where I got blocked/warnings every day. Even with upgrading my plugin / refreshing all block lists.
At some point I finally gave in and grabbed YouTube Premium, not because of the ads (I’d rather stop watching than watch with ads), but because I needed their music service (Used Amazon Music before, the app sucked. Music quality was the highest out there though. Also cancelled Prime for a double whammy).
For example the moment an ad gets triggered they could just refuse to send you video data. And if the ad is an unskipable 15 seconds, block playback for 15 seconds. Done. Even if you block this, you get 15 seconds of nothing and will soon be pissed off enough to either start watching ads, buy Premium or leave (no longer costing them bandwidth).
You may be right, but I can’t imagine how they’d actually pull it off. The internet as a medium just doesn’t work that way - there’s always going to be a flag or a call for me to go pull ad data from somewhere else, and someone somewhere will write code that ignores that command.
Great for them if they figure it out, but the medium doesn’t work in their favor. They want the frog to be an elephant, and when it proves to be a poor elephant they cry to the govt. to fix it with laws and dmca takedowns and whatnot. That’s just a waste of taxpayer money, and annoys people on the medium.
Just the way I described, I’m a software developer, it would be easy as hell.
Your browser requests the video, YouTube decides you have to watch an ad. The ad has 15 seconds unskipable. So the easiest thing they could do is not send you video data for 14 seconds (add a spare second for buffering to not piss off users who do watch ads).
Doesn’t matter if you call some endpoint, load the ad data, whatever. You’re not receiving any video for a while, which would piss people off enough to leave.
But you’re describing something like a hard paywall. I have to do a thing BEFORE they publish the video. Fair game. Weird that they don’t do that, but then bitch about me using an ad blocker.
I think we’ve reached the point of “violently agreeing”. :)
Good chat.
I think if companies put effort into reasonable amounts of ads, and tried hard at keeping the malware in check - people would be more willing to let the ads through and let them make money. If they make money, I get content - win win.
They make more money via ads than they ever will with a hard pay wall. The innumerable advertisers paying google/youtube will always pay more than individuals paying for a subscription for no ads.
That’s why people who paid for no ads will eventually end up with ads again, despite paying. They don’t care if we pay or not. They want that sweet sweet ad revenue.
The sad fact of the matter is that we live in an ad based economy. Advertising is more profitable than selling an actual product. Having a platform to sell infinite ad space is a money making machine, plus people making free content for them to lure in more people to watch said ads. It’s super fucked up on youtubes part.
YouTube now exists as a billboard first, content second or third.
They definitely couldn’t add a hard paywall. It would collapse the system overnight.
Collapse what exactly? It would actually reduce strain on their servers and provide a better experience for paying users. Obviously they won’t do it because there’s a ton of users who watch ads (think of the average guy who plays YouTube on their phone or TV, with zero adblocking).
Just the revenue of paid subscribers will not pay the bills of any content creator that actually has employees or spends money creating content.
They won’t do it because all of their content would have no alternative but to disappear.
It would be a huge gamble, but it could pay off. Seriously, how many people are watching YouTube every day? Hours of their favorite content creators.
Imagine a rug pull, YouTube is now a pay only service. No ads, but everyone has to pay $5 a month to access. I’d bet with you that a surprising amount of people would just pay that to continue using it.
How many? Nobody knows, but it would certainly be 30% or higher. Now imagine 30% of users paying just $5 a month how much money that would be.
It can be done, YouTube just doesn’t do it right now as they still earn plenty with ads. If suddenly everyone started to use an ad blocker then things would change very quickly.
This is an insane pipe dream.
You underestimate how addicted people are to YouTube. There is no alternative to it.
Twitch is streaming focused, the vods absolutely suck. Kick? Same.
What else is there? TikTok? Instagram? Neither of which provide long high quality videos.
After all we are talking about YouTube literally blocking everyone and putting up a banner: $5 a month or you’re out of luck. If someone already happily pays $18 a month for Netflix, what is 5 bucks?
30% conversion rate of people already not paying to paid subscriptions is astronomical.
Expecting 10% would be delusionally optimistic.
Amazon has around 310 million active users. Amazon has 230 million Prime subscribers, even though it costs up to $15 a month. Yes, those include cheaper student subscriptions of course, but still.
Of course 30% is optimistic, but the average people I know happily watch those fucking ads. And don’t even complain about unskipable double ads. They don’t like them, they’re still too lazy to install an ad blocker as long as they get their content. Each one of them would absolutely shell out 5 bucks to continue watching (it’s less than a single beer when you go out).
The comparison would be Amazon just removing non-prime purchases. It’s not possible they’d convert 8 million of those 80, let alone 24mil. The people who aren’t members have already decided Prime isn’t worth buying.
30% isn’t optimistic. It’s impossible. 10% is “optimistic”. They’d be more likely to net a drop in subscriptions when some creators announced that they were going to be forced to stop making content than they would to somehow convert 30% of people who aren’t willing to pay for YouTube.
Amazon includes a bunch of services with that price, I don’t see Google matching that
It already reduced the services severely. The included Amazon Music sucks if you don’t pay extra. The included Amazon Video has ads now. And Prime gaming has reduced the offers.
While YouTube premium gives you full access to YouTube music and 1080p Enhanced Bitrate video quality. I only got it for the music, no ads on TVs is a bonus (Already had an adblocker for phone/PC).
And in all tiers: make an additional profit by selling your information without your consent (it has been decided in many courts that burying subtext deeply in forced terms of service isn’t consent)
We are already paying them by letting them harvest our data, ads or not.
Then they double or triple dip with the scenarios you describe. I am still paying them by being on their site with an ad blocker as they harvest my data and sell it to the highest bidder. Not to mention quadruple dipping with using our info and content without consent to train AI to sell.
They use the argument “your data/art/photos/videos are freely posted on the internet, so we can use them how we please”. If they publish content openly on the internet, then we are free to do with it as we please.
They can’t use the argument but say “no no no, it doesn’t apply to things WE put out”
They are either pirating our content and data constantly or ad-blocking is not pirating.
Sounds like users are trying to end up in the find out phase.
YouTube… “We provide these APIs and make our apps and privacy policies more accessible than most, but we still can’t give everything away for free.”
Users… “Haha scum of the earth we think we’re beating you and that you have no way to stop us from circumventing your ads without paying.”
My dude, white knighting a company that had almost $60 billion in profit in 2022 and $73 billion profit in 2023 isn’t a good look.
Source.
My dude… There are 100s of legitimate things about Google to complain about, but you pick the weakest argument and then say I’m white knighting them. YouTube doesn’t owe you cause they made profit… you’ve been able to still bypass their ads for this long, and so now users are complaining that they were able to circumvent something easier in the past?
But you’re not. You’ve made several comments on this post criticizing the people who 1. want control over their own devices and 2. are sick of ads being forced into every aspect of their lives.
And I happen to think that a company throwing such an entitled fit over money, when they are making an immoral amount of profit that is increasing YoY, is super relevant when discussing the profitability of one of their services.
Pretty sure I didn’t say they did.
People always complain when their convenience is removed from them. Welcome to the human condition.
They have control over their devices. You’re not making sense and can’t even articulate how they don’t have control. If they want even more control, they can install GrapheneOS or a plethora of third party ROMs that removes all Google services. Apple users can’t even do that. No one is making them use YouTube either. Google allows third party apps that blocks ads. It isn’t like a… “Ha, Google you’re idiots we are smarter than you cause you are too stupid to block ads.” Seriously, what kind of dumb person takes this attitude?
Dumb users are the ones throwing an entitled fit. Why is making profit immoral? If you want to say, “I’m anti-capitalist and don’t think the world should be about money…” then just say that. It is a much stronger argument and one that should be discussed more, but singling out Google is dumb. In terms of ethics, they are still way better than most companies, including Apple & Microsoft… In what realitydoes it make sense to attack the more ethical companies before going after the least ethical?
Read your previous comment.
Not always. If I go to a coffee shop and they give me a free one out of convenience… I don’t go back and demand they keep giving them to me for free cause they did it once.
Please rewrite this to make sense and we’ll get back to you in 3-5 working days.
Meh, paywalling some videos behind Google+ (or whatever the current iteration is) would’ve been the honest option. But they chose ads and tracking for everything (makes more money), i can understand why people circumvent them.
I can understand why people circumvent them too. I can’t understand why they’d claim… “Hey Google, you suck at blocking ads. You can’t stop us from doing it.”
Seriously, fuck people that do this. Google knows people use third party apps that block ads. They might as well say… we’re not happy not having ads. We want Google to block it entirely so we can be even more pissed off.
My brother in Christ you really think we’re using APIs?
Please consult the image:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/416bf304-cc66-471e-b049-e39beb08e3eb.webp">
Then why have they positioned youtube to be a public worldwide service freely accessible all these years?
It is the usual tactic of operating at a loss for years, building an unsustainable service and supporting it with revenue from other places. Google was officially declared a monopoly, and youtube is not profitable, so it’s easy to connect the dots and say youtube grew to it’s current dominance unfairly through that monopoly money.
Now they want to enforce their TOS on you, pay up or watch a million ads or leave. Well fuck their TOS, I avoid anything google like the plague, but their unfair position on video sharing makes it hard to avoid youtube particularly. I respond unfairly in turn, by proxying youtube through invidious.
I’m getting Playback failed from time to time on reVanced. Maybe after 5mins of every 3rd video. I just go to my watch history, open the video again and it continues. Mildly annoying, but good trade-off for not having ads.
I have not encountered any issues in revanced. Maybe check and make sure it’s updated?
Updated yesterday. Maybe it is something connected with me running Adguard Home as my private DNS.
Just got a one-minute unskippable ad for the first time yesterday (no way to use adbockers on a PS5). I’d rather not watch at all.
MMW: Google plans to make Chrome a locked down browser for a proprietary web. But this is only the intermediate step before all web services will be accessed via an app. The commercial web and the public web will hard fork and the kids will never know what a “browser” is.
And Sponsorblock. Can’t imagine going back.
The ads have reached a breaking point.
If I can’t block them, I’m just not watching the YouTube. I’ll never pay.
It used to be funny to link a relevant YouTube clip, but it’s not funny if you have to sit through half a minute of ads just to see something silly.
It’s also not really a long time streaming service like TV channels or netflix etc., because the homemade content sucks in comparison to an actual documentary that I can also watch without ads on other services.
It’s like Google completely misunderstood the point of the service they initially made. Also following a decade of users attempting to “monitize” their fucking crap, you can be sure that there’s nothing worth watching on YouTube that couldn’t have been better presented in a gif or in text.
Then the player is also fucking up lately. Usually if I go there, I’ll check the written description while the ads play, just to see if the content is worth the wait, but nooo… you can’t even do that anymore, because the app will start reloading between the multiple ads and the screen scrolls around and minimizes the description and comments. They’re literally hiding any information on the clip except the title until you’ve watched the ads.
It’s fucking garbage. Enshittified to death.
Repeating: Google, if you’re listening: I’ll never pay for YouTube, no matter how intrusive you make the ads. Enshittification is not encouraging me to pay.
Can’t even rickroll people properly now
Jesus christ i didnt think it was THIS bad. Google really needs that ad revenue lol
I already pay tons yearly for extra storage. YouTube without ads should be included. Also I was a paying customer for ad free back when Google Music was alive. They killed the best service for the shitty YouTube Music. Bring back Google Music and I will subscribe again.
Same boat dude. That’s how I got YouTube premium. I uploaded like 500 GB of music for Google Music to host it and I could stream my own collection. Now I use Navidrome and my own server.
Remember when videos had to be at least 10 minutes long, so more ads could be added to the play time? Now they don’t give a fuck.
Now you get a 10 minute ad for a 2 minute video
You don’t even need an account to use YouTube lol
What always got me about accounts like Mr. Beast is how they never made the jump to a direct subscription service for their content. Some of the more popular Patreon accounts rarely if ever bubble up to the top of the YouTube algorithm. Yet they are clearly popular enough to bring in millions as independent artists. Meanwhile, the folks that dominate the YouTube charts are inevitably the ones that the algorithm force-feeds you in every “Recommended” feed.
It’s almost as though YouTube needs quality content providers more than the quality providers need the ads. Almost as though the real beneficiaries of the YouTube ad-supported model are generating endless largely unappealing filler content.
What account?
I used to just watch YouTube at default, taking the ads as they felt like.
Now, no thanks. If I have to watch as many ads for as long as they mandate, I’ll just watch other things.
.
They successfully broke almost every Piped instance.
Who could have foreseen this? s/
This battle was lost before it started. Sad thing is, if they weren’t so goddamn obnoxious with the ads it wouldn’t even need to be a battle. As it stands, YouTube without ad blocker is damn near unwatchable.
.
I remember when google search had one text-based ad. Bearable.
The guy who decided to start the battle increased ad revenue for a week so he got his bonus, that’s all that matters.
“I’ll glady tank YouTube’s revenue tomorrow for an extra dollar today.”
That’s just executives in general. And on the wayout they’ll leech a golden parachute.
Dangit. Now I want a burger…
Absolutely! Everything on YouTube is somehow predicated to getting you exposed to some kind of advertising. Absolutely everything!
They’ve min maxed it so hard that without the various plugins that I use in Firefox YouTube would be almost completely unusable.
Good.
Pro tip: open YouTube in Chrome, signed into your YouTube account. Allow the algorithm and your subs to continue recommending videos. Find one you wanna see. Copy link address. Paste it into Firefox with adblock, not signed into Google/YouTube. Prosper.
Just watched a YouTube video on my PS5 earlier today while cooking a food and saw for the first time that they will shoot an ad with a “next” button that skips to another ad, and then there’s a “skip” button countdown. Ridiculous. I wouldn’t bother with adblock if the ads were reasonable.
Here’s a free idea, YouTube: build in the ability to add videos to a simple temporary queue and then only put ads in at the very start or very end of videos so they aren’t intrusive.
That free idea reduces (potential) ad watch time which reduces money, so there's no chance they'll implement it.
If they thought they could get away with serving an ad every 15 seconds, they'd do it.
what I do is open a containerized tab on firefox so that youtube has no history enabled and doesnt fill the page with obnoxious content then I search for what I went there for then I close the tab so everything is purged. for my subscriptions I use a container on my server that downloads their videos and ads them to my plex server so I can watch them there when I have time to watch stuff its all in one place
Watch time affects your recommendations, so this isn’t a great solution
After watching, click do not recommend and say that it’s because you’ve already watched it. Problem solved.
And now YouTube thinks you hate that video, so your recommendations are less relevant unless you’re willing to do the survey every time.
It’s barely more work than just clicking “Not interested.” though. Just click “tell us why” and “I’ve already watched this video” and it knows that you didn’t dislike it. Trust me, I’ve been doing this for a while now and it still properly recommends videos. It just cleans up your recommended queue because it knows that you’ve already watched those ones in particular. I’ve watched a lot of music deep dive content this way because the ads stupidly will interrupt at the worst moments and ruin the flow, but that kind of content still shows up on my feed all the time.
SmartTube on the shield. Prosper.
You can have that by paying for youtube premium, they want you to sign up.
I’m not tempted to sign up for something if I don’t even know what the features are. Maybe some of their dumbass ads should be for their own fucking product lol. I assumed that it was free from ads, and I think you can download videos and play with your screen off on your phone? Idk, Vanced has been great for me on my phone. And I wouldn’t have bothered to get that set up in the first place if the ads and lack of features weren’t so disruptively intrusive. If they find a way to shut down every way of getting around their overreaching bullshit, I’ll opt to fund a few respectable creators directly rather than pay for the platform.
And I wouldn’t want to bother building a queue in the first place unless it were in order to manage ad breaks. Putting that behind a paywall defeats the purpose of what I’m proposing. You can already build playlists all day long.
The best feature is that it auto-downloads recommended videos, but I hate how finnicky it is, and I hate how it’s capped at 1080p.
Presumably the algorithm feed will stagnate or even deteriorate if it sees you ain’t watching what it’s suggesting.
If you have Plasma Integration (KDE), you can create a task for sending the link directly to Firefox without copying and pasting. Plasma Integration shows as a context menu item inside chrome, if you use KDE.
Until they start properly filtering ads they accept they get auto disabled in my side. No weird crypto or porn ads for me, thanks.
Even the shitty mobile ads of “someone watching prerecorded gameplay and commenting it”.
How obvious can you be?! “Oh wow, these 2 different people playing EXACTLY the same and saying almost the same thing”.
That’s not an ad.
Never mind that the gameplay in the ad is an extremely minor part of the game. The rest is some sort of city-builder with mtx shortcuts.
It’s just whaling
.
Patreon and sites like it exist as a hedge against YouTube banning your channel.
I would love it but I don’t see it.
It costs an enormous amount of money to host video content, doubly so when you need to replicate it across servers. I have never seen another company come close to usurping them.
I agree. We don’t get a new YouTube, we get whatever comes after YouTube—some new modality.
Yeah, The problem is, the price on YouTube is so incredibly expensive because we have to pay for a million script kiddies worth of useless videos to be uploaded and permanently stored everyday.
If someone made a competing system where you had to pay a small amount to host a video and then it turned around and paid you once you’ve got enough eyeballs that would be a far more sustainable model and cause people to police their old underperforming content.
I think its more likely that YouTube will shut down and be replaced by nothing. Its existence has never made sense as anything but an act of charity from an organization with tech resources to burn.
Remember that Google bought YouTube only AFTER it was successful for several years. This was also before Google turned evil.
There are a lot of unprofitable startups that get purchased speculatively based on other factors like their user count. The idea being the buyer thinks they can monetize.
This was more like a merger with Google being the larger company. YouTube was already very successful.
What account?
But to be serious, this might be at actual risk to those who are logged in. They were locking out users of their whole google accounts for less, including their emails and the uploaded files to drive.
Sadly they killed Piped, and a lot Discord Bots in the Process…
Free tube still works, android app is kinda buggy though.
Piped should be able to work if they implement invidious’s workaround. Unfortunately devs don’t seem to be active anymore :/
What features aren’t working in Piped?
I have a selfhosted Piped instance and use it daily without issue in Firefox and LibreTube on Android.
A lot of instances have been getting these “Sign in to confirm your not a not” messages, if to many people use them at the same time. It works after a while again, but only being able to watch Videos sometimes, when the right stars align properly, is to unreliable for most user, me included.
Ah. Yeah I’m the only one using my instance. Haven’t had that issue.
Once piped stops working for me YouTube is dead to me. I had to load up a video at work the other day using the YouTube website and holy crap is it naaty looking these days. Can’t use any browser extensions at work so ads and crap everywhere.
I pay for YouTube Family. I consume a lot of YouTube and I want to support the creators I watch. At its current price point, YouTube Family is reasonable. Several households in my family get ad-free YouTube for what is a reasonably low price point for each household.
If the price goes up much (eg if I were paying the single price of $11 per household), the creators I really enjoy continue to get pushed out or change content because of shitty ad rules, or they pull the whole “must be in the same household” bullshit I would drop it in a heartbeat just like I’ve dropped most streaming providers. Streaming has become cable and YouTube has been shooting itself in the foot by forcibly changing content for advertisers. I come to the platform for content, not advertisers.
Unfortunately that fee won’t stop google’s endless thirst for data mining and it’s manipulation through “personalized recommendations”, and through ads on any other website and mobile apps.
If you care about that you don’t use YouTube at all or support creators that do. Even using 3rd party apps or services feeds into that. This feels like a serious non sequitur on any thread about any Google product.
Unfortunately that’s not an option. Youtube has not only host “fun” videos, but repair videos, learning materials and even university course learning materials, none of them to be found elsewhere.
There is literally no way to opt out of Google’s data collection if you are going to use their products. Using another frontend shifts the data profile but it still exists and provides value to them. It’s reasonable to say it’s a bad thing. It’s unreasonable to say there are no other ways. I grew up in a public library and I can still get most of the information I need from a public library without Google products (things I can’t get usually come through inter-library loan or direct connections with subject matter experts at, say, a maker space). This seems to be less of “I’m against invasive corporations” and more of a “I don’t like the solutions available to avoid invasive corporations.”
I wouldn’t care if they would only keep aggregate statistics, not stats about individual users, and when watching through a public frontend my usage blends in with that of many other people.
That’s not how that works.
I’m interested, how that works?
Good.
Youtube is a wonderful thing. It’s a wealth of knowledge and resources unlike anything this world has ever seen.
And it’s ran by one of the worst, most predatory corps on the planet.
it’s run
it’s ren
Ron*
<img alt="" src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/04/34/4d/04344d273334cdabf87b5f52129f555a.gif">
Danke. Mein Reichsleiter.
*Reichsleiter
Ty. I knew it looked wrong.
Ballsy to use a 2nd language as a sarcastic reply to someone correcting grammar.
Perfectly put. The product is great and I love how it democratizes “being on TV” and lets some people make a living doing their own thing.
But I do not like where YouTube’s cut of that ad/sub money goes, and the enshittification pushed into it.
Unfortunately, YouTube is not unique in that regard. It’s a sucky fact of life that just about any complex product you spend money on will benefit a collection of rich sociopaths skimming as much as possible from the incomes of the people actually making the thing. Gotta vote with your wallet where you can, and vote the traditional way for the systemic issues.
Very noice
I was looking at the comment section from the article and the following comment made me laugh loudly, thinking on how bizarre our current world is:
<img alt="" src="https://thelemmy.club/pictrs/image/237792b6-21c1-4b52-bbe7-722927c1127f.png">
So a platform that is blocking adblockers is delivering an ad piece advertising an adblocker. Ha! That’s an ad I’d love to watch 😂
.
You need to deactivate your ad blocker for that 😆
.
Every video ad needs to have the video uploaded to YouTube afaik. So it’s possible to find it, although I’m not sure if it also works for private videos.
Gotta love when the article saying adblock-blocking doesn’t work is itself preceded by a notice to disable your adblocker
They don't even believe themselves.
Honestly it makes me appreciate Lemmy more. Like we’re all on here enjoying an ad free experience… it’s clearly feasible to do
there are several orders of magnitude difference between text-forums with almost all multimedia content hosted externally, and hosting/streaming video.
a big Lemmy instance is a manageable cost for a few well-paid people to run out of their own disposable income.
anything even vaguely approaching YouTube is not.
I’d rather not watch YouTube videos at all than videos with ads.
Smarttube stopped working some weeks ago for a day. I tried watching YouTube with ads, the experience was so fucking insane to me. Like multiple, non skipable ads before the video starts + more ads during the video. It just was unwatchable. Its just unusable.
Try grayjay
Newpipe still works (Google may break it, but the app is usually updated in a couple days and it works again)
It just didn’t work for a day. They are really fast in patching. But good to know that newpipe is working also an androidTV.
Here’s my current lineup.
Newpipe Freetube Greyjay Tubular Brave
They get through all those, I’m just going to surf peertube or odysee
I don’t mind one or two of their old 5 second ads, but anything beyond that is unacceptable especially on a 2 min vid.
Despite all of their machinations my strategy of simply ignoring literally everything they say and continuing doing the same old same old appears to be flummoxing them.
I’ve literally not done anything and have never experienced any inconvenience. Are we sure they’re doing anything at all?
Same, I think they must be AB testing and I don’t get assigned into the shitty group
They are definitely AB testing things like rejecting ad blockers.
I definitely got really awful, unplayably spotty playback that seemed linked to adblock usage. Then I saw an article about it and confirmed I wasn’t going crazy, and that day it stopped happening, so it felt like I was going crazy all over again. It’s like the moment they realised it was going to become a problem and they weren’t as sneaky as they thought, they turned it off. I haven’t had an issue since then.
I had the same experience with shitty playback buffering every few seconds on popular videos that should be cached on a nearby cdn, and then saw lots of articles about it and then boom a week later everything was back to normal
That would be quite a funny strategy that they could definitely implement. Creepy as hell but clever.
They know everything you do and look at, so they know if you’re the sort of person that would look up a fix for this or just take it on the nose. If they realize you’re looking at articles about the problem they just turn the function off.
I guess that’s possible, and a very creepy thought, but more likely they saw the level of general attention on the issue and backed off globally.
The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.
Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.
That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.
WTF were they thinking?
Honestly it sounds like someone was paid to do something about adblocking and just like… did something. Like if you were tasked with reducing adblocking, and your first and most obvious idea of “reduce the obnoxious ads” was disallowed because enshittification is mandated, you could say no, which most workers won’t do, or you could just do whatever random bullshit feels like it might work because it’s punitive. Or at least it’s a gesture that shows your boss you’re trying.
Authoritarian systems like capitalist corporations are inherently low-information for exactly this reason. People on the low rungs doing the real work who understand what needs to be done will typically not report problems to their superiors. And when they do, those superiors tend not to listen, because the idea that lower workers know something they don’t threatens their leadership status.
Also our society’s legal system trains us to believe punitive measures must do something even though they don’t.
Also I guess another reason they might wind up at this strategy is that straight up telling users that the problem is their adblock is the fastest way to get adblockers to block your countermeasure, so they think they have to be sneaky.
I thought I was getting that blank screen long pause before videos, turns out my phone cable was damaged, fixed it and YouTube’s back to normal.
Wait, how would a phone cable cause a symptom like that…?
I’m guessing some of the wires being broken caused congestion or sonething, I dont know why it did it, I just know once I fixed the cable it was fine.
Was the video signal going through it? Otherwise, sounds more like a coincidence.
100% coincidence
Maybe they’re using the phone line for their Internet ? Vsdl etc…
Your phone could have been switching power profiles incorrectly due to your phone rapidly switching between charging and not charging (and perhaps with a low power state depending on battery level).
@ripcord@lemmy.world Just my guess.
And this phone cable damage only impacted youtube lol
No, it potentially impacts cpu power profile (if it’s toggling between AC and DC because of a loose connection)
This would adjust throttling of the cpu, which could impact playback in certain cases, so it’s possible. Likely other apps would be affected but OP was probably most often watching videos while plugged so noticed mostly there 🤷
MBAs are taught they can shape human behavior with decades disproven assumptions.
It’s fallout like this that shows their hand.
“Oh, the customers don’t like it? Fine we do it twice as hard” is fucking Pavlovian training and the executives behind the initiative should be sealed in an underground vault knee deep in hungry roaches.
One time they told me I had 3 days left to enjoy YouTube with my ad blocker, and then I would have to buy premium, or they would just lock me out of the site. I was like “welp, it had a good run, I guess that’s it for ol’ YouTube.”
But then the 3 days went buy and nothing ever came of it.
That tactic probably did get them some preemptive subscriptions though, unfortunately.
Floatplane is Linus’ smartest decision he’s made. It’s going to be needed.
Platforms like Floatplane, Nebula, Patreon etc make it so easy to support creators outside of YouTube, while also giving creators a larger share of income compared to Adsense.
There’s YouTube Premium… but I don’t think I’m alone in not wanting to give Google a single cent of my hard earned cash
I already have Pixel phones, they can already spy on me. No f’ing way I pay to remove enshitification. Also, they’ll increase the price regularly anyway. If they want ppl to pay, they could just paywall the whole thing, well see who’s left after that lol.
I’ve actually looked at these platforms as someone who has taken YouTube semi seriously in the past, and there are two major issues with them.
The first is, they don’t allow just anyone to upload video, you must already be an established creator. Second, there is no free access for viewers, meaning someone isn’t likely to share a link to your video with friends.
YouTube really does have a monopoly.
The problem with things like Patreon is that nobody with an average income can afford to pay “only 5 dollars per month, 10 for premium membership” for each channel and podcaster they have subscribed to. It makes more sense to rather pay a flat fee for one or two streaming services (in my case Nebula and YT Premium) than 30 Patreon memberships.
Let’s hope he doesn’t have access to any critical email account related to that service.
I’m out of the loop. What’s that referencing?
Linus got phished out of his twitter account recently.
Respect where it’s due. He owned it and was transparent so everyone can learn. Apparently he was at a pool party and just about to throw the burgers on the grill when he got an email that said his account was logged into from Turkey or Russia or someplace.
He panicked a bit, because of the last time his YouTube account was hacked he felt like acting quickly was the only thing that help it not be worse. I think he clicked the link in the email and “logged in” and boom. Got em.
Caught him at the right time and place and it all aligned to burn him.
That sucks. Thanks for the info.
Did he end up getting his account back?
Torvalds?
Sebatianalds
Van Pelt.
No. Of LTT
That is the best part of it! A very welcome change! Basically the first step of becoming an independent creator, and to being able to abandon youtube for any of them.
They kept trying to ruin my experience so I’ve switched to Invidious and Odysee.
Invidious only for the content creators that don’t crosspost to Odysee yet.
Worse part of the problem is knowing what part of the ad profit YouTube uses to pay MrBeast and his stupid content.
There isn’t a big streamer that doesn’t strike me as a creepy tryhard.
<img alt="The sickos “haha yes” meme" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/5941b08d-e6d1-4e1e-b8ed-3c508bfaf2d3.jpeg">
I pay for Nebula and try to watch as much as I can there. The content is more “pleasant department store” and less “Mexican public market”.
I do watch YouTube regularly when channel-surfing, but if I ever see an ad (which happens only on mobile devices), I close it immediately and do something else. It’s not that I don’t think I should be able to watch everything for $0, but YouTube ads are so jarring, random, irrelevant and just make me sick. They literally ruin whatever I was watching and make me sad to exist.
It can be exhausting to wade through the absolute meat market of click bait titles and thumbnails to find something that not only looks interesting but won’t abuse me with infomercial-form audio/visuals.
YouTube enables and promotes the “content creators” who abuse human psychology to accumulate views, likes, subscriptions, etc. The best thing that could happen is they continue to be exposed as the drug dealer they are.
So I paid for nebula, but it seems totally vacant. I’m not mad, I’m happy to spend the money supporting small creators/any independent endeavour, but am I missing something??
OP did say that “the content is more “pleasant department store””. Have you been to a department store lately? They’re pretty vacant lol
I’d check out the podcasts - I like It’s Probably Not Aliens
The app isn’t exactly optimised for finding content. There’s a lot on there, but it always takes me a while to figure out which submenu gives me the goodies.
I’ll be honest, one of the parts I really like about the show Jet Lag is when they reccomend channels to watch at the end of the episode.
It’s relatively new and has a small userbase. I doubt it will ever get as active as youtube but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
It’s always laughable to me that these companies are able to have the meta data on our entire lives and yet show ads for shit we don’t even want.
Not to mention 50 different variants of the same annoying loud video ad, so that even when you block it, you have to do it 49 more times to actually stop seeing it.
And the problem with the same irrelevant and animated ad repeated 5 times on the same webpage
Look at it this way, Google stopped caring about their viewers as anything more than wallets to empty years ago. Now they’re going through the same cycle with advertisers. They don’t care if the ads land, or the targeting works, just that they can convince them to keep buying ad space.
Eventually the ROI will show as not worth it to the advertisers, but by then Pichai and the rest of the C-suite will be pulling the same scam at another company whose investors are more greedy and stupid than saavy.
Because the horrible truth of America now, is that CEOs and their ilk have stopped caring about creating value, or building a sustainable business model with long term revenue. Now they just look at witless investors as wallets to be emptied too.
Shit you don’t want yet. That’s the idea of ads, trying to sell you shit you don’t want or need. Why advertise the stuff that you’re already buying?
Because an animated 5 second ad telling me to buy more dice and horde them like the goblin I am would work on me!
Advertisements are for a large part about brand recognization. Even if you’re not going to buy the product, the fact that you remember the brand means the ad has worked.
There are tons of products I’d impulse buy, old lego sets, spice and hot sauce samplers, custom gaming dice.
I won’t normally go out to shop for them but if they show up as an ad I may click and buy.
But they NEVER advertise anything to me that I like or am interested in. It’s always bullshit
Exactly. Show me ads for guitar parts, pen inks, and 80’s kid stuff. I would impulse buy the shit out of that. Instead it’s “Want this loot box filled with bullshit that a hipster is trying to sell”. No thanks.
the thought is “not what you want, what THEY want you to want”.
If your favorite brands and IPs aren’t as profitable as Mypillow and Regressive Fake University ads (well not mypillow anymore thankfully)
That’s the key difference and why nearly every idle auto-play leads to the alt-right within a few hundred views.
I’m a lesbian, Google has enough data on me to know I’m a lesbian, I live with women, don’t really hang out with men at all. I use a bunch of Google services so I know Google knows this about my living situation.
SO MANY FUCKING ADS FOR MANSCAPED, WHHHYYYYY. I am not the target market for this Google.
I’ve taken to blocking the ads, still more Manscaped. Is it cause blocking = engagement? “Oh wow, she interacted with this ad to block it but ignored the others, what a good ad placement!”
what, women don’t shave their coochs? (coochiii? what is the multiple of cooch?)
by analogy with goose,
ceech
But multiple women living, eating and sleeping together means they are just good friends. ~historians
lol no they arent.
I’m begging google to just bring back YouTube Premium Lite and expand it
I find the whole thing so ugly even as a youtube plus subscriber. How much possibly you could gain here? isn’t youtube already profitable and being run by one of the world’s richest corporations? just let people watch and educate themselves and whatnot.
The worst of all issues to me was any interruption working to help feed people or the destitute immediately has a 5 second skip, while all else has 59, 30, 20, 14 skip. There was no benefit for good externalities, just cost and profit. I was even ok with ads around 5 seconds and that they can even show up before watching a video. Adding the countdown was a nice touch too. It’s when it gets in the way of UI/UX, how you have to suffer through the same commercial over and over, interrupting a video at critical moments, and ending videos with an ad so that you don’t know if the video is ended that it gets awful to use. I would hope someone gets to making it 5 second ads that don’t take away from the experience.
Start 2x30 second ads
During video here’s an ad för my sponsor “braid narrow legends”
Buy my merch on www.mymerch.dog
Outro youtube ads
Good fucking riddance.
The sooner they realize the enshittification isn’t working, and is only increasing the amount of people participating in the largest global consumer boycott ever, the sooner they’ll actually try to improve the platform, or die resisting.
YouTube has continuously made the experience worse, adding more and more ads to users not using ad blockers, to compensate for those using them. Guess what, genius? People block ads because they suck. Adding more won’t stop people from using ad blockers!
And they have the audacity to try selling YouTube Premium for a whopping $14/mo (nowhere near the actual revenue generated from a user watching ads,) then don’t even provide any real benefit past ad blocking, after they deliberately killed YouTube Originals because it didn’t instantaneously bring in immense profits.
And the content creators I personally know have shown me the amount of money they get from Premium users, and it’s sometimes less than the value of an ad-supported user, even though the Premium user generates more revenue than an ad-supported one.
I would pay for YouTube Premium if it was a reasonable rate, and actually came with exclusive content, similar to Nebula, but it doesn’t.
Instead, YouTube has continued to make the interface more and more bloated, slow, and inefficient, and increased the incentives for low-quality, mass-produced content, all while not paying creators enough to support themselves on YouTube’s own platform.
YouTube can’t see itself as being the cause of its own issues, because it’s blinded by bad ad-driven fiscal policy that has only been a proven failure.
Those surfshark maps… ugh. No, I’m not searching for ublock origin. Why would I it’s been installed since time immemorial. You have to measure install base, not search interest. Leave search interest for celebrity gossip.
Can you expand on this? I don’t follow what you mean here
i read it as - the Premium money is mostly going to YouTube HQ, instead of to video makers.
Every creator I’ve seen talk about it said they get more from Premium viewers, so that’s why I’m confused
I’m not entirely sure myself, but the people I’m talking to have much smaller channels than the ones I often see talking about their Premium earnings, so that may have something to do with it.
I’m not sure if this has an impact as well, but I do know there has also been a lot of users spoofing their locations to regions where the cost of Premium is cheaper (and thus generates less revenue for everyone involved) the vast majority of their viewer numbers are from the US though, so that doesn’t seem to make much sense.
I do believe it can simply vary in terms of revenue-per-view depending on the creator, though.
Regardless, I think that, overall, YouTube and YouTubers would make more money if YouTube didn’t price Premium so high, and actually invested a portion of their profits into original content for subscribers. I have a hard time believing that YouTube is generating anywhere near $168/yr from ad supported users, compared to the monthly Premium subscriber cost.
YouTube’s share of Google’s global revenue is around 10%, but it would need to account for nearly half of Google’s yearly revenue to be earning the same rate as Premium costs, and that’s already including current higher-paying Premium subscribers.
Obviously, not every user is going to be buying Premium if it becomes cheaper, but YouTube isn’t incentivizing Premium users past just “please don’t use an adblocker, pay us instead.” which I think will inevitably lead to them just not converting enough new subscribers.
Enshittification actually does work, but only up to a point. Unfortunately, all the corporations have all the subtlety of a Sherman tank, so they always go all in on it.
Wheres the data to back up this claim? That article is purely opinion
That’s true, would be great to have more evidence.
But I really wish this to be True 🤞
The backup is I havn’t seen a single fucking ad for years on Youtube. Using it daily on both desktop and android
I’ve been using Youtube basically since it exists. There were no ads in the beginning. I’ve also always been using adblockers. I was surprised when I heard people say they have to wait for ads on youtube. I was like “What? Youtube has ads!?”.
I dont want to offend you, but you’re a drop in the ocean when compared to the grand total of Youtube users.
Pretty much everyone I know outside of tech who has ever “showed me a cool video on Youtube real quick” has waited to load ads before showing me their phone.
If you get outside, touch grass and meet real non tech people pretty much all of them need educating on ad avoidance.
But it’s not with them youtube is at war. They always had the vanilla app and always will. Youtube is at war with us
There is no data. That article is useless and the title is sensationalized as absolute fuck.
Youtube is waging a war against their customers. If they win, they lose; and if they lose they win.
if i ever get banned from youtube for using ublock origin am prob switching to odysee
If I’m getting banned I’ll probably circumvent the ban
My NewPipe app stopped working for a week and it wasn’t difficult at all living without YouTube. There’s tons of content in the world that can be consumed in its place.
true
true
I use NewPipe only despite having a current YouTube Premium subscription because the official app is bonkers. It’s hilariously stuffed with useless features that can’t be toggled off(games, shorts), half baked stuff like specific video quality can’t be chosen for all videos by default( has to be on a per video basis). Oh, and every other time I visit some channel, asking me to join the YouTube’s channel for additional perks. You just took money from the user to give them a sub par experience.
The surface level entitlement in these threads are always off the charts.
Everyone is on this bandwagon that Google hates adblockers on youtube. It certainly does but it hasn’t been this agressive as of late.
You know why?
The issue google has is with server farms guzzling up the entirety of their video database for training their AI. They’re using open source tools/frontends to do these downloads. That takes up lot of resource and bandwidth unlike ignoring the minority of plebs using youtube without ads.
They want to rule the AI trend not fuel the COMPETITION. They will do whatever to keep their competition from getting ahead.
And it isn’t cheap to keep up with server farms unlike letting miniscule numbers of terminally online mouth breathing basement dwellers who think too high of themselves block ads.
But whatever floats your boat.
So, where does entitlement fit into all of this?
If this is the problem spending a lot of effort to also serve ads along with the real video seems like it’d increase costs.
What you’re talking about is a real problem for Google but it’s not the only cause of the new behaviour since Neal took over
It sounds like a projection. Many times someone makes an angry, hasty comment but all their inside problematic thinking patterns flow out for all to see.
I’m surprised that Vimeo hasn’t decided to take advantage of the enshittifcation of YouTube. They have been a social video platform for years, and are probably the best placed platform to come close to overtaking YouTube - should they choose to move away from the professional space and embrace the social aspects of video.
Honestly, Pornhub has the infrastructure to take on Youtube, if they wanted. If they just cloned the site, sans content, and called it Videohub, there would immediately be a real contender in the marketplace.
Pornhub ads don’t bother me. They are annoying, and too loud but 4 seconds is like the magic number. And you only watch it once i think.
Oh god, imagine midroll ads on Pornhub… “Oh yeah baby, lick that wet- [Overly loud and obnoxious Adam & Eve ad starts playing]”
Ads suck, but the type of ad is what is sucking the most. All I’m getting are ads for get rich quick schemes. You never see big name brands advertise on youtube anymore.
I’m mostly getting product ads on YouTube, but they’re so poorly planned and low-effort that they annoy the everloving spit out of me… In all regards, streaming services have officially become at least as bad as cable tv used to be…
They are worse. Unless you’re using an adblocker.
Last time I disabled an ad blocker to try it on desktop, I was getting scammy looking product ads. On my phone if I browse Shorts (revanced doesn’t stop those ads) it’s all straight-up financial/health benefits scams.
But the other night I accidentally opened the 1st party YouTube app on my TV instead of Smart Tube Next and the ads were for big brands. So there’s probably a different level of desirability based on content type and device type at play.
Part of me once wished for a utopia of only getting ads for things I have a reasonable interest in - working to inform me about options to spend my money on a service or product I need. It was based on Steam, which shows ads for games I like. No repeating ads to harass a particular message, no convincing people they need Brand X.
I don’t imagine we’ll ever get close to that.
We do but you have to agree to give up your data and browsing traffic to do so
I hope one day we will find a method to finance websites operating costs without ads. Meanwhile I will be using blockers and hope someone else’s does the ad clicking.
It’s my little internet piracy you could say, if I am already doing it with every movie and tv show and most games it would be out of character. I am obsessed about saving money and so if I can get away with it I will do almost anything.
Same with the health insurance I have 1/5 of the real cost for full package because of various gray area tax optimisations. Then double dipping on real estate rent+appreciation. Most efficient used car purchase. 25 year old fridge and washing machine because new ones break down too fast and can’t be repaired. Manual renovation between tenants to save on labour cost. Lack of addictions. Relatively cheap hobbies. 4 milion in assets, zero debt.
Never. People don’t want to donate, people don’t want to pay a subscription fee, people don’t want to watch ads. People want everything on the internet for free.
.
Give the people doing good stuff and social proofed a livable wage. Just print fucking money, don’t even tax, do I have to kill every economist with my bare hands ?
I’d argue part of this is true because of minimum wage and wealth disparity.
When you have a healthy disposable income, it feels more reasonable to give out some donations for good online content. But that’s not the case for a lot of people now.
It sucks because monetization models definitely influence the types of content we get. For instance, freemium video game models with cash shops are better for our current wealth gap, while a large set of consumers having extra cash through the year is much better for expensive, well-produced singleplayer games.
We have a solution but….
you’re not going to like it
cryptocurrency (especially 3rd generation cryptocurrencies like Cardano which uses proof of stake) could easily fund website operating costs without ads.
I am not some reactionary or a luddist, IF the tool works it’s all fair game in my book
If they kept the ads to 10-15 seconds at the start of a video and didn’t interrupt my videos for them, I would never use an adblock on Youtube (i’ll even give them an allowance for one 10 second ad interruption for every hour in the case of super long videos). But for as long as they keep trying to squeeze every goddamn penny out of me that they can, I will fight back and do everything in my power to prevent them from being allowed even a single ad impression off me.
I’m not unreasonable, but I refuse to accept unreasonable offers.
Do they give the creators any control over where the ad breaks are? Seems like they just get thrown in all willy-nilly, too often and in the middle of sentences.
Hopefully somebody who actually makes monetized Youtube videos will join the conversation to answer that one, as I’m not certain. I’m a pretty active Youtube watcher and fairly savvy on the culture, so from what I’ve gleaned I believe there is some control given to creators but I believe it is somewhat limited. For example if you watch the Sorted channel (a UK-based food channel) with ads on, they seem to pretty consistently happen at small scene transitions, which leads me to believe the Sorted team is doing their part to strategically place them.
They get some control but it depends on the content how exactly it works. I think for normal videos they get a say right from the start where the breaks are. But I know one guy who does YT and he live streams and has to clean up every VOD because they just randomly pepper ads all throughout.
that mentality is probably what most ppl started with. however, youtube burnt quite a lot of bridges. i would assume, that many ppl, just like me, wont do the 3 clicks to disable adblock for youtube.
Fair and I agree. I should have stated it in the past tense because what I really meant is exactly what you stated - that I wouldn’t have brought the adblock to Youtube had they not gone nuclear assault in their ad approach and made the choice unreasonable, now I am unwilling to engage with them honestly without ENORMOUS, HERUCLEAN efforts towards rehabilitation on their part.
Cheers.
“Should we moderate our ads and get rid of 2 hour long ads, disinformation, porn,scams and fake products?”
“No, no. Thats to much effort. Lets spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to force people to watch our 2 hour long ads, disinformation, porn, scams and fake products. Thats clearly the way forward.”
This decision process brought to you by Prager U proceeds into 30 minutes about how slavery was good for the black man and he should be grateful for it
Woah, youtube ads in the US are so much more interesting. Don’t get me wrong, fuck pro slavery propaganda, it’s just completely exotic to someone who only saw bank loan and lame product ads (when visiting parents who use official app on their tv)
Its real funny when you see a video get demonitized because they said a no no naughty word in the first like fe wminutes, but the first advertising you see is literally almost completely nude art of women bouncing around screen for the latest scam mobile game.
Like, Saying Fuck to early in a video is no no bad for the kiddies. but cartoon tiddies 96% uncovered in a 3 minute ads is perfectly okay for the kiddies.
Sounds really healthy
ha ha!! take that!
The ads have become too long. Some of them are 40 seconds long, for a 3 minute video. That’s unacceptable. I have thought about it, and I think the best would have been a single 8 second ad, unskippable. But never more than that. That, I could take. But multiple ads (even if they’re just 5 secs each but you have to be vigilant to press “skip”), or long ads, or interrupting ads, are just too much to accept.
Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn’t play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.
I mean this genuinely: I would rather YouTube die than be subject to their overlong and hyper targeted ads.
If the ads were untargeted I’d feel less adamant, but as it is now I would sooner give up YouTube entirely.
That’s how I feel too. If it were to die, it gives more room for things like peertube to grow from its ashes.
I don’t mind if they used either data I entered or general trends of my watch history to serve me Degree For Men rather than Secret ads. “Data indicates this viewer is a male in his mid-30’s, serving this viewer a tampon ad is unlikely to generate sales.” I get that.
It’s when I got the same exact ad for a Mission Impossible movie that had that annoying “Ready or not, here I come” song thing in front of every single video for three weeks straight that I downloaded uBlock Origin, stopped using the official app in favor of the website in the browser.
It’s gotten to the point that I associate advertisements with bad products. I’ve had good functional search engines for most of my life, I’ve been able to find the products I want and need. The more you feel the need to pay to have your brand shouted at me the shittier I think your product is. Case in point: I’ve never seen a commercial for Sennheiser headphones but holy SHIT I’ve seen ads for Raycons.
I wish more marketers understood this. In fact, keeping on topic with Youtube in general, any product I see Youtubers doing sponsored ad reads for is for me is an instant and automatic hard pass for whatever it is. I just automatically assume that product is either crap or a scam. Or both. When I was shopping for headphones, the #1 brand I refused to consider for any price was Raycon. If I’m looking for a new game to pick up, I can guarantee you it will never be Raid: Shadow Legends or War Thunder, no matter how bored I am. If I need a new razor, it absolutely will not be from Manscaped. Etc., etc.
If I am bombarded incessantly with really insipid ads for a particular product, the only thing it makes automatically come to my mind when shopping for a product in that category is that the one I definitely don’t want is that one with the fucking annoying ads. This is obviously completely counterproductive from the advertiser’s standpoint, and I have to imagine I’m not the only person in the world who rolls this way.
The only possibilities I can think of are that advertisers really are dumb enough to oversaturate people’s attention to the point that they get turned off from the product entirely but keep soldiering on anyway because it earns a paycheck. Or worse, that it doesn’t matter because for every one viewer who gets pissed off and vows to never buy your product, they are outnumbered and offset by a horde of other viewers who are stupid enough to conflate repetition with truth and actually will be enticed to buy whatever it is, insipidity be damned. And the marketers probably know it.
The most recent ad that actually got my attention was on Reddit, so this was at least a year ago now. It was an ad for caffeinated chocolate candies. I don’t remember the brand name but they had an owl motif, because caffeine = awake. I saw that ad in passing ONCE. Just enough for me to learn the product existed.
In the case of that Mission: Impossible movie, if it had played the long form of the trailer at me once or twice in an entire week, and then the shorter version of the trailer once or twice the next week, I might have gone “You know that looks like a cool movie I might go see it.” But I got served that ad and only that ad several times an hour for weeks on end, and I have now resolved to never watch another Mission Impossible movie, a movie starring Tom Cruise, or any film distributed by Paramount Pictures ever again. When it comes to boycotts I do my brain surgery with a backhoe.
Gonna blast another ad I hated: A scarecrow dancing around on a GE coal-fired powerplant to the tune of “If I only had a brain” from the Wizard of Oz. Apparently the show I was watching was sponsored by General Electric’s heavy industry division, which okay fine, but…what decision was the average SyFy channel viewer supposed to make based on the contents of that commercial? “Gee Tina, we should run out and buy a 1.5GW steam turbine generator.” Why’d they feel the need to bother me about it?
Yeah, repeat ads are the worst. One of the best targeting thing that could be done is simply prevent seeing the same ad more than once in a 24h period. It would do so much to make the hellscape a little more bearable.
Especially with something like a movie trailer. Do they really get asses in theater seats via stockholm syndrome?
My ads aren’t targeted, at least I don’t think they are… I honestly don’t notice what they are for most of the time, so that’s a failure right there, they’re not memorable - but when I do notice, they’re for either trump or sports betting, two things which I have negative interest in…
If you put up any guards at all against data tracking, they get pretty bad pretty quick. They get skewed toward the one or two datapoints that you didn’t shore up, so they think “huh, this user must really like phone games because they played doodlejump in 2016 and still has it installed on their phone”. Or at least I think. My wife gets ads that are far more on-the-nose than I do, but she doesn’t lock down her tracking data at all.
But I don’t even like them trying to match me to ads, I don’t want to incentivize their data collection practices.
Are they? The app I use to view YouTube without ads got taken down and so did the other ones
uBlock Origin and similar ad blockers stop YouTube ads. Occasionally YouTube changes something and ads sneak through until someone updates the filters.
Now that Chrome has essentially neutered its ad blockers, the only option for many people is Firefox on desktop and mobile, which still has a working version of uBO.
It’s odd I have unlock and my YouTube still has ads. But mostly I’m looking for a mobile app to use YouTube without ads
Tubular works nicely, and Smart Tube Next on android tv.
YouTube ReVanced still works. Also, ad blockers on desktop.
I had new pipe and another I forget, for my phone but they stopped working a while back
There’s no winning a perpetual game of whack-a-mole, especially when having no moles (=viewers) left also means that you lose.
Ads overall take up a good amount of time now. I would rather not use Youtube at all if I have to watch long ads.
The day adblockers don’t work anymore, is the day i will never use youtube again. I have no idea how people do it. I have a friend who uses youtube to listen to music at home. Every time there is a commercial she drops everything and runs to her laptop. It’s insane. Sometimes i accidentally click a link and the youtube app opens and i’m reminded that there have to be people who wait to click away these ads, every single time. It would drive me mad.
I just pay for premium. I’d rather pay the $25 a month to never have to see an ad.
Yeah. Same here. It’s amazing how many people feel entitled to things for free.
Personally I prefer subscription model over ad-based data tracking model. When you get something for free, you are the product being sold. For example Facebook or Reddit. Your content (comments, media) is used to populate the site and your data is sold to advertisers.
When you pay a subscription, you are the customer. There’s more incentive to create a proper service with the actual users in mind when it’s a subscription model.
When advertisers are the primary customer, they will always be a priority in determining policy. So for example YouTube- longer ads and more of them.
Of course, I think Google is guilty of double dipping. We pay for premium but I’m certain they still sell our data to advertisers. For example you watch a lot of carpentry videos, they will sell a list with your name that says “likely tool buyer” or something along those lines.
But generally speaking, I never mind paying a subscription for a service. It’s more honest, more clear what’s going on.
Fuck em, they’re just greedy fucks that’ll blame us for everything.
I’ll stop using YouTube altogether before I disable my ad blocker. My time is simply more valuable than whatever video I’m watching.
YouTube is also aggravating customers who use their official apps by increasing the frequency and length of the ads. In just 4-5 months, I’ve seen YouTube ad lengths on Roku go from 10-15 seconds to 30 seconds, to a minute.
They’re trying to recoup lost ad revenue by pissing off the one demographc most likely to sit in front of the TV the longest.
On rare occasions YouTube will play exceptionally long videos as ads. When YouTube Red came out I got multiple entire hours long shows as ads (as a “free preview!”) I’m pretty sure Ive gotten one of the movies they put up for free viewing as an ad before.
Obviously you can skip after 5 seconds or whatever but they hope to catch someone playing stuff in the background. Probably to increase their crappy view count for those features to sell actual ads later.
I’ve noticed this on my TV’s YouTube app as well. It went from 15 second I shippable ads, to 2 ads where I need to watch at least one and only then can I skip, to sometimes at least 30 seconds before I can skip. It’s worse on the longer video essays that I like watching, where they say “Fewer ad breaks for this long video”, but in reality they have the same amount of ads that you need to watch more of to skip. I absolutely fucking hate it :D
I think they should have included “ad free YouTube” as a perk for their YouTube TV service, which I had for a short while. Instead they wanted you to pay an extra subscription cost for YouTube Premium to get rid of ads.
The dark pattern game they play with the “skip” options and the increasing amount and random placement of ads is really offputting.
I’d be willing to pay for their service if it didn’t entail creating an account and letting me get tracked even further.
I don’t know what the solution is, but ads isn’t, a Google account isn’t, but piracy isn’t either.
I want the statistic on how many Google employees use ad blockers now. It’s basically a necessity.
I’m sure Google employees get Premium for free
They still probably use ad blockers for other sites though. It’s essential on the Internet these days.
The number of malware or otherwise malicious ads is too damn high. There are articles that are so filler they literally have less content than ads, it’s an embarrassment.
Premium doesn’t have downvote count and sponsor skip.
The pirated version of youtube is better than the paid one.
Google should spend time improving their service instead of being assholes.
Dislikes is why I left anyway! XD
I even left ads on for nearly a year until a particularly metally hazardous on pushed me to turn them off, and I haven’t gone back since. On the occasion I use YT outside my ecosystem, it suddenly feels so much worse.
It’s pretty sad how not having the money for it makes it unbearable, while all of them don’t need to experience it, disconnecting them from their practices.
The reason I left Twitch was because the fucking ads were unbearable. I've even taken a screenshot to show people that I wasn't lying when I said I saw that Twitch expected me to sit there and listen to and watch 8 fucking ads. Ads to shit I don't care about other than think of violent thoughts in what I'd love to do to marketers and find a way to advertise that so they get a god damn clue.
In a perfect world, maybe A ad wouldn't be so bad. But this has gotten out of hand and out of control. We shouldn't ever have to sit and watch a string of ads, all varying from 20 seconds to an entire minute and even longer.
And good, I hope YouTube is stupid as fuck enough to be aggressive. Drive more creators out, even hit the successes of the YouTube whores who've long lived on the platform. Because all that they're going to do is affect everyone at the end of the day, all for the sake of profiting for marketers.
There is a twitch ad blocker it works really well
which one?
I’d have left Twitch if I didn’t find it more entertaining than current YouTube. No one should be surprised they’re at pre-covid profit levels again because they tried to shovel way too many ads down people’s throats.
Imagine tuning into a random stream and getting greeted by 3 ads before you can understand if you want to stay or check a different one. I’ve been frustrated enough that I just turn to something else altogether for entertainment.
There are some decent adblockers like TTV.LOL, which is a simple proxy to a country that doesn’t allow ads. But sometimes those solutions don’t work either. Ironically I just use Turbo while not paying for YouTube premium, but just as people don’t pay for YouTube Premium, I understand not wanting to support Twitch for a variety of reasons.
The streamers on twitch control how many ads you see. If it’s a huge amount, they opted into that. They get a small cut of the ad revenue
This isn’t true for all streamers, just those with partner contracts from Twitch. They are the ones that are required to run ads a certain amount, I think below that they have the option to run ads but aren’t required to but also if you don’t run any ads Twitch will just start putting in ads on its own. And theres no control from the streamers over ads that show when joining a stream, those are always there and in my opinion are more annoying cause it makes it more annoying to switch between streams.
Not that you should return to Twitch but if you ever need to there’s this TTV LOL PRO add-on for Firefox/Chromium or you can just use a client such as Streamlink (with GUI and ttv lol support) for desktop or Xtra/Twire for Android with a custom proxy
In a perfect world we wouldn’t have ads.
I’m starting to think our entire economy is built upon ads.
Edit: Word missing
Starting?
Partially. Our economy is built in selling you stuff you don’t need, and ads are a crucial part of making that happen.
Sorta. Ads are just part of the much larger beast of selling things, marketing.
i consider unblockable ads to be direct attack on my psyche, trying to worm in and make me think in a way they want. I will never tolerate them and would rather see anything relying on them burn. My mind is my own and no one else has any business influencing me without my permission.
yup and I’ve always felt just like this even as a kid, fuck ads
I agree with that… somewhat. Except they are providing a service.
The content is not produced by YouTube, but it is made available by YouTube. There’s a cost to provide that service and value to the consumer for having videos available to watch.
I doubt you want to pay for the service, so how is it supposed to work? What pays YouTube’s costs so we can all keep watching videos for months and years to come?
I get that this comes across as someone simping for YouTube. I’m not trying to do that though. I’m just intrigued by this worldview and would like to understand if there is more to it or if you believe YouTube should not be compensated some other way.
Is it a “Fuck you. I got mine.” mentality where people watching ads and paying premium cover the cost for you to use the service for free? Or is there some nuance I’ve missed?
Nationalize youtube and turn it into a public utility financed by the UN. Create a kind of patreon system that distributes funds to creators similar to how it’s done for music collection agencies.
There are always alternatives, but not until people demand an alternative to constant brainwashing. Right now it’s unthinkable because people insist that there cannot be an alternative and therefor the status quo mustn’t be endangered.
At this stage burning it all down would be preferable although that would never happen until we’re seen widespread system collapse.
There is nebula.tv which works like that, but it lacks content. I am a subscriber, but I’m running out of interesting content to watch there.
OBviously there is network effect in play here. If Youtube switched to subs-only model tomorrow, they would have much wider content offer from the get-go.
Yeah, but the issues there are any musicians that aren’t Taylor Swift don’t make enough on their music alone. They have to either continue working, or go to other extreme lengths with frequent touring, extensive merch offerings, etc. They have to work the equivalent of 3 full time jobs (somehow) to make the money worth it.
If they were to nationalize YT in the same way, there would be 0 content creators. There is already so much effort that goes into that work, lowering the amount people earn even more would kill that as a career path.
Just my speculation of course, but I don’t think the answer is always “make the governments pay for it”. That will come back around in taxes, and the everyone is paying for YouTube Premium.
Well even if you’d keep advertising if you turn YT into a public utility or non-profit, MUCH more of that money would go to creators. And/or much less advertising. Or less annoying or more discerning ads. And of course no demonetization because you talk about problematic issues.
Without advertising you’d need some kind of revenue. I imagine something like e.g. a EU wide “universal content subscription” or something like that. So if you create good content the various distribution channels simply track what you watch, anonymize it (firefox has this new system that got them in hot waters) and distribute the money from the giant pool to the creators.
Maybe start with a universal newspaper subscription so we’d have a free press again, new newspapers or channels that produce independent news with only the viewer as a customer, without ads.
For music in the EU / Germany there are collection agencies that already do this sort of thing. So it’s not even without precedent.
Obviously there are tons of issues to work out, but the biggest is simply that the elite do everything to gain and maintain power or wealth and this would go contrary to that.
Not our problem. They can go the twitch.tv’ish way and add subscription models for people to subscribe and support their favorite content producers and Youtube can take a cut.
Just because they can’t think of a profitable business model other than annoying and exploiting the internet’s userbase while deplatforming, demonetizing and having their own myriad of problems doesn’t mean that’s on us.
Doesn’t mean you’re simping. You have a valid point, but when’s enough enough when they’re squeezing everything out of us for ad revenue and finding new ways to fuck with our psyche/psychological things like Facebook does with its highest paid employee(s) to rake in attention for cost-per-click and cost-per-view? We’re more than just ‘metrics’ and KPIS. We’re humans, we deserve joy. If youtube dies, there’s decentralized solutions out there that can become more mainstream. People can self-host and host their own content.
Agreed. It’s a form of cyber terrorism and needs to have an end put to it.
They can keep going, it just makes want to leave these platforms for good
No, this can’t be. They took all of our personal information so they could use AI to tailor ads to exactly what we wanted at any given moment.
/s
If they want to fight hard, they just add the ads into the stream.
Like Twitch you mean? I think that has been blocked as well. And other addblockers can even skip adds within yt videos
What do you use to block twitch ads?
Meanwhile Odysee goes ads free…
Who is paying for it so?
users for premium i guess
They also take a cut from content purchases and tips to content creators.
help.odysee.tv/payments-chart/
YouTube takes 30% from channel memberships, whereas Odysee takes 5%
Fuck these greedy bastards at Google
On the one hand I understand they aren’t serving billions of hours of video for their own health. Not sure how one can justify the expenditure as a “loss leader”. But at the same time, the ad experience is horrendous.
In the last month I have consumed YT on desktop browser, mobile, and regular TV. Guess which is by far the worst experience?
On desktop, you can use an alternate browser or do a reg edit to re-enable manifest v2 plugins (for now) in Chrome, and continue blocking (for now). On mobile you can use alternate apps and frontends.
TV viewing of YT is the worst experience, as there are no native alternative apps and DNS ad blocking doesn’t block YT ads. The native YouTube app (on Samsung and LG TVs at least) is horrendous. You get midroll ads sometimes mid-sentence as the content presenter is speaking. Sometimes you get pre-roll ads, disruptive mid roll ads, and then wash it down with a POST-roll ad at the end of the video. Depending on how the content is structured it is disorienting as to whether the video has ended or not.
Say for example its a 30 minute video. I would rather they show 5-7 minutes of predictable ads at the beginning of content, so I can at least have the same experience as broadcast TV, and make an informed decision to get up and use the restroom and feed the pets while the ads roll. Then once the content starts, don’t randomly interrupt it.
Imagine the YT model applied to broadcast television. The quarterback drops back to throw a deep pass towards the endzone, and suddenly you find yourself watching an undskippable ad for diarrhea medication, while the football is in the air.
And we wonder why people have ADD.
I watch long videos on my TV (45 min - 1 hr) and YouTube has the audacity to shove minute+ long ad reels in my face every 15 minuets, claiming “fewer ads for this long video.” Bullshit. I have learned however that if you go to give feedback on the ad and flag it as inappropriate, it skips all the ads in that reel and sends you right back to the video! I can get past unskippable ads in a few seconds this way.
Fundamentally what YouTube is doing is an unprofitable model. Google bought them when they were in their “we can solve internet unprofitability with scale and more efficient data centres!” phase, but that has never really gone as planned for YouTube.
For a while I was very hopeful that YouTube Premium would solve that, but as they started removing features and making it an overall worse experience it became no longer worth the money. I don’t have an answer to this. If I did I could probably make a lot of money on that answer. What I do know, however, is that Google’s answer isn’t the right one.
Any one else watch the Linux tech tips video (degooglefying) where he tried to claim blocking ads was Piracy.
That pissed me off because blocking ads is honestly just protecting yourself against viruses which appear even on ads on Google etc.
Also who am I depriving of their property by blocking ads, F you linus.
I mean… It probably is. It’s accessing the copyrighted content outside of the terms of the license provided by the copyright owner.
But that shows more how broken the copyright system is than anything when piracy has such a low bar.
.
Why can it not be both? It is piracy because you access content that should be payed with your time (ads) instead of money, by bypassing the front door/line of ads and going in through the backdoor.
You do guard yourself from virus and some data hording and it can also be true that you don’t find it worth it of your time and only want to consume without interruptions.
I also use an ad blocker. It is the first thing I install on a browser. The internet is impossible to navigate in without it and I try to only use sites without ads if possible… But I do believe it is piracy to block it, and it is my choice.
I only pay for nebula and Spotify so all the creators who is on there at least get something from me. But I don’t know if that is even close to enough.
Linus is not one of them and will never be haha (I rarely like any of their video formats)
🤔
Not sure why you feel the need to defend your actions by drawing analogies with real piracy - it’s their attitude towards you as a content consumer that you should note in this situation, and that’s just appaling. Your actions may well be piracy but frankly that’s just a word they use to guilt you out of choosing convenience and safety. Be a pirate and be proud, goddammit!
.
Make your platform so bad in the interest of shareholders so no one wants to use your platform anymore. It’s a story as old as capitalism.
Oh, you’re losing the war? I HOPE SO!
There’s a large war going on behind my uBlock plugin.
if only there was a simple easy solution