Ad-free experience: Hey what's up child-rearing nation! I hope you're having a wonderful day! Today we're gonna be about saving your child from choking! I know right, my kid is choking, your kid is choking, it just keeps happening! They're blue in the face and gagging and you don't know what to do! *laughs* But before we get to that, I need to tell you about our sponsor, ridge wallet, fuck, skip ahead alright, that was great, now the first step is to locate your kid, if they're choking they may not be making a lot of noise so you need to look carefully. Then you need to make sure they're actually choking, are they breathing or what, maybe just holding their breaths. Then to fix the problem, well I'm gonna tell you about that but first let me give a shout out to NordVPN, you wouldn't want someone to download your IP address while you're out looking for dying kid tutorials *skip ahead* alright and what you do next is you call 911, and they'll maybe know what to do. Alright, that's it for today, don't forget to slap that like and subscribe button and next time we'll talk about what to do when your frying oil's caught fire [ominous cut to running faucet]
and qualify for additional pay if you work onsite and are prepared to be listed as a first on scene (while the professionals are in transit) responder.
YouTube premium family is best value for money for all streaming services. Just don’t waste time on adblocking, as it works reliably only on desktop.
I used ublock and it was more or less cuccessfully fighting ads on desktop, but they still were present on phone (new pipe just sucks, and I moved to iPhone anyways), iPad, Xbox and tv.
Premium removed all of them. Also gave downloads for offline viewing.
I still use sponsorblock on desktop though. And miss it a lot everywhere else.
Mandatory disclaimer. I’m Google employee but do not work for YouTube and I’m paying for premium with my own money.
I never watch youtube on my phone, always desktop and like you sponsorblock has become essential.
I can't bring myself to give YT money when I can address my use case for free. YT's hostile user approach also rubs me the wrong way, I can't reward that behavior
Aggressively pushing shorts, opaque/biased moderation, lack of appeals, removing power user features such as sorting creator videos, disabled the like button, totally ruined comment hierarchy when G+ was pushed aggressively, etc.
I used to have those "downloads" on Youtube. There are not a real downloads because I do not have an access to the file. Also the feature tends to be misworking - from time to time one of "downloads" just stucks with eating 100% of 1 CPU core and the recipe is to remove all the "downloads". This was one of the stupidiest features I ever had, because if I need a video for offline wieving but do not want to get a file, I can just watch 100% of video (of course with adblock because YT advertisements use to destroy cache) and do not close the tab, then suspend my PC and unsuspend it in the place I want to watch.
Downloads are working and very useful on mobile - they give you offline version on a device that you can later watch.
I click download on videos that I'm interested in morning and have something to listen to during commute without worrying about spotty connections and mobile traffic consumptions. So yes, file is downloaded to the device.
If I want to download something to have it forever, I use yt-dlp on pc.
The downloads feature works pretty good when you are going to be on a plane or train without an internet connection. Predownload a bunch of educational content and then you'll have it for your trip.
Newpipe has to use workarounds to the limitations put in place by youtube; I find it expected that downloads will be slower, since they won't be using secret shibboleth done by youtube on the backend and on the app but standard web access.
It has been crashing for me as well but since it's so stateless it has never been an issue: playback continues, playlists remain, ads ana tracking stay nonexistent.
Money from advertisers doesn’t decrease long-term without uBO/yt-dlp users (since they don’t watch ads and pay for them). So less operating costs for Youtube, and more money for creators (in theory, if YT doesn’t keep the costs savings). That should help the platform, not kill it.
And 1080p quality is somehow a "premium" feature now. Could YouTube be the next platform to ditch after reddit died? At least the official clients, NewPipe is quite nice.
Thank you, I will definitely use it for short sentences. But my typical scenario is to throw a whole webpage from HN if I am too tired to read it in English. I do not see how deepl can translate a whole webpage, all I see is 1500 symbols with no registration.
Not really. You need a separate payment profile in the country you intend to subscribe to it. My Play Store profile is USA-based, but I'm in Thailand and I subscribe for the 1-year plan for $44.99. A new payment profile is created for YouTube billing, though I deleted it as it's quite a hassle to manage different profile; I'll create a new one if needed.
Thinking it's wrong to advocate fraudulently billing in a poor country to avoid a small charge, does not preclude thinking it's wrong for corporations or billionaires to commit fraud.
It is not just about thinking that corporations/billionaires are doing something wrong, it is also about them getting away with it, governments doing nothing about it and being powerless yourself to do something about it. If this world rewards the rich cheating for example by using tax havens, why not cheat themselves out of some dollars a month by using a 'cheap haven' yourself? Seems fair to me.
While probably unintended, this still benefits them because this normalizes paying for premium either way. And a few years later when they decide to pull the plug, your chance of paying full price will be greater as a result.
I love this idea because finally there is some force which can make me less watching youtube and I certainly am not going to deepen my profile with a bank credentials (but I would pay for premium with crypto if it will be possible)
I use Bitcoin + several wallet.dat each of those is bond to a different VPN. It means that I absolutely do not care about on-chain tracking on each wallet.dat because I am sure that nobody can tie my different addresses to a single person.
This seems quite unnecessary and over-complicated. Trust me, Google will have you tracked one way or the other, so it might be better to just grab a prepaid visa gift card for your Youtube Premium subscription and save yourself the trouble. Any grocery or convenience store can sell those to you with untraceable cash with ease.
There is a workaround to this that is quite simple. Get a prepaid visa gift card. You can make up whatever nonsense info you want on those and pair that with the subscription. Then once the balance runs out, get another card and repeat the process. Problem solved.
Nice, then google decides to block your account one day for an unspecified reason and they are asking you for a drivers licence with those credentials to let you back in.
I get that people hate companies but $7 a month for unlimited video on any device with 500 hours uploaded every minute. That's a decent deal. The only drawback is that you don't get Sponsorblock on smart devices. People seem to overestimate how much the average person care about online outrage. Netflix, Reddit, Twitter.. They all seem fine despite being declared dead numerous times.
I remember people saying years ago that reddit's redesign is not a problem because it has API access and you can use third party clients...
The $7 is the current price, it does not reflect future changes. If the pool of potential customers is dry, they will try other means of increasing revenue, including increases of that price.
They might also turn the $7 into a requirement to watch YouTube at all, and show ads anyways.
> They might also turn the $7 into a requirement to watch YouTube at all, and show ads anyways.
Yep. All cable channels started out ad-free. When cable was introduced, the cost was $35/mo for all channels (there were no movie channels initially), justified by not having ads.
I'm not entirely convinced that youtube is actually worth $7 a month. Ofc, I'm also far away from saying it is worth nothing, but not gonna pay 7USD unless I'm getting something extra (I mean content, maybe movies???) than just no ads. Otherwise once blocked will switch to other platforms, eg. https://d.tube/, vimeo, etc...
>$7 a month for unlimited video on any device with 500 hours uploaded every minute.
This is irrelevant. 99.9% of content is garbage and / or not relevant to me. Also, I really don't watch that much so why should I be paying ~8 EUR a month to watch a few videos without ads? Moreover, I don't earn that much, so even that amount is a noticeable loss.
it kind of boils down to a question of who is the actual customer? me or advertisers? if i'm paying a subscription to youtube, then i don't want post-adpocalypse censorship & sanitization.
I think I would pay for a respectful video service which also pays the people who make the videos.
Giving money to Google though, would hurt so much!
I'll consider it the day they stop the dark patterns company wide and commit to stop being ad-supported. Making the users pay for the service is a step in the right direction but I don't see them stop the ads company wide and I don't want to feed this.
YouTube is actually regarded quite high in terms of revenue sharing and Linus has praised them numerous times. It's for example partly (26% in 2020) why LTT have around 100 employees. YouTube do have a ton of other issues (spam, lack of support, content moderation, etc) but I don't believe revenue sharing is a big one.
It's not their content though. Most people upload stuff without any intent to monetize or otherwise control it. YT, like other large sites, was built through mass-scale theft of what was supposed to be public domain works.
Sure it's their servers, but then it's their fault they don't allow redistribution via third party channels.
As someone who has no "special love" for YouTube, I feel like the equation for YouTube is different for me that what they have in mind. YouTube chose to host a public mode of displaying videos that someone in a third world country made or Linus Sebastian made. As long as they don't put everything behind Netflix style login, I will fight tooth and nail with UBO. I don't care about "ethics" of ad blockers. If its public, I will do what I darn want. Want to stop me, well put it behind a paywall.
That does two things.
I don't use Netflix so any content there is of 0 interest to me.
You don't get to stay public and expect ad dollars. It doesn't work like that on the internet.
Same for NYT. I don't pay for it and have no use for content there. If if were an ad supported one, then I could use an ad blocker.
Think of it this way. If you screen your movie in a cinema hall, I will watch it if I pay for a ticket. Fair and square. If it is played on a public roadshow, I will skip all ads or skip it altogether.
The org has to decide. Either make content pay per use or free. No middle ground.
> If its public, I will do what I darn want. Want to stop me, well put it behind a paywall.
The ethics are pretty clear I think: if I navigate with my browser to YouTube, or any site with ads, I'm able to see the content, plus annoying ads. I don't have to watch the ads: I can use an ad-blocker to tell my browser to not render those ads. The site has every right to serve me HTML/JS/video however they wish, but they have no right to tell me what to do with that data. If I want to ignore part of it, that's my right, and if I use automated means to ignore selected parts, that's also my right. If they want to spend massive resources trying to figure out ways to get around my automated means, or to detect my ad-blocker and refuse to send me data, they can do that too, but at what cost?
But if they want to avoid this arms race of ad-blocking, they can just do what Netflix does: require payment and an account to get in.
As for paywalls, those are really the same thing as ads usually: they load the article, then use JS to block it. You can block the JS and read the article.
Yes, in fact the "ethics" is written clearly in web standards principles:
> 2.12 People should be able to render web content as they want
> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts or auto-played videos. We will build features and write specifications that respect peoples' agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.
Exactly. Inundating information with intrusive ads works directly against this goat, so blocking those ads isn't just your right, it's a moral imperative.
I pay for twitch turbo, I even had youtube tv during football season. So I'm not that cost sensitive, and don't oppose giving youtube money for a service.
But logging in on every browser and device I watch youtube on? Fuck, I'd rather not. Also, I never login to my personal google account at work.
Before google bought youtube, my account there was called something like "duntwantacct".
>> Before the reliance on ad blockers, people turned to YouTube Vanced to enjoy a Premium-like experience for free. However, the service was shuttered in March last year due to legal pressure from Google. With ad blockers now seemingly on the way out, it looks like free users may only be left with the option of sitting through ads
That is simply not true. There are numerous alternatives to YouTube Vanced, including NewPipe, LibreTube or SkyTube. Only to name a couple. And then there still is invidious. So no, you don't have to sit through ads.
I wonder if we're gonna see an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker kinda race going on here. As long as the code runs in the users' browser, there should be a way around it.
Makes me wonder if they'll ever move to WASM... though I assume there's gonna be ways to block ads regardless.
im assuming there's gonna be ways to bypass y0utub3 and go straight to the videos. in the meantime g00gle continues to footgun, provide motivation and traction for exodus and competition, and a peertube-like non-exclusive for the masses.
I'll just stop using YouTube if they make ads unblockable. The quality of content on the site has decreased dramatically as the result of of their pushing corporate media/youtube "creators" to the top of search results. It's literally not worth it to me to pay for a subscription that _might_ reduce the number of ads I see.
This. I recently re-setup my HTPC and forgot to add the usual plugins and suddenly instead of actually being able to watch youtube stuff, there was a BS ad every few minutes. It was essentially unwatchable. But I would never pay premium for that. Sure I care about some of that content, but it's not a lot and if I had to pay for it, I'd rather pay the author directly via say Patreon than to give it to Google and the author may or may not get some of that and they constantly have to try and "be nice to the algorithm" in order to get their share of the money. I really don't care if the algorithm thinks they're worthy of being listed in people's feeds. I like their content, period.
Honestly the algorithm they use to pick and choose which ads they show me is as annoying as video feed algorithm.
I didn't mind the 5-second ads. Two to three of them before a video? I'd deliberately sit through those. Seemed a fair deal. That's now largely gone away (in my experience) and now it wants to show me longer, un-skippable ads. Not only at the beginning but randomly in the middle of videos regardless of what's going on in the video. At least on Television has natural commercial breaks "baked in" to the format.
Oh. And stop showing me the same four cookie-cutter ads every few minutes. It's annoying at best, condescending at worst. If you must advertise to me at least give me some variety.
I'm honestly surprised that Google hasn't directly injected the ads into the video itself, so it can't be skipped beyond some kind of AI looking for drastic scene changes.
SponsorBlock crowdsources the location to skip to. If YouTube spliced ads in the video that would no longer work, as timestamps would be different for each person/region/however they target ads.
They definitely have had the idea for a long time. It is almost certainly a technical limitation stopping them. I'd guess that decoding, splicing, and then re-encoding is too compute intensive for it to be worth it.
No need to re-encode the video. Just split the video at a keyframe and inject an ad at that point, no re-encoding required. Most video files have keyframes every few seconds or so. The proper term is I-frames, though they're commonly known as keyframes as well.
Right now they force you to watch for a number of seconds before you can skip ahead. If the ad were in the video, you could skip immediately. Perhaps not to the exact moment it ends, but you can scrub or jump in 10 second increments until there’s no ad. You check with your eyes, no AI necessary. It’s basically what we did decades ago with VCRs.
That's exactly what's been going on with Twitch for the past several months, and frankly Twitch is winning.
All of the ad blockers are now pretty jank. Sometimes they don't work at all, sometimes you need to refresh a couple times to get the stream to play. I think Alternate Player somehow still works despite being unmaintained, but its stream is always 5+ seconds behind no matter how you tweak the buffer settings.
The easiest way to win this war is if an adblocker is detected just make your site unreliable outright claiming an error is risky (see the infamous AARD code[0]) so better let the user come to the realisation.
Strange move, people use adblockers for a reason, 2-3 unskipable bs ads. Instead better limit quality to 480/720p. This way they'll save money for traffic. No adblocker?, Can go up to 1080p. Yt premium?, Welkome to 4k. Yt premium+?, Welcome to >8k
Its not worth it. You don't watch YouTube videos for the fancy graphics, you listen to it for the commentary with some visual guides. 480p is more than enough for most
I watch a lot of gaming videos or instructional videos that benefit from better resolution when viewing on my iPad. It is beyond aggravating I can't set them to at least 1024 by default.
You might not, but there’s a ton of great content where the quality is very noticeable – anything related to nature, astronomy, sports, the tons of niche genres which involve looking at real world things in detail like rail fans, building/architecture fans, bird watchers, etc. is really unpleasant to watch at 480p. That’s the size of an iPad icon!
Stuff like conference talks, of course, really don’t matter but there’s so much material that no generalization won’t be inaccurate for millions of watchers.
imo it's woth it not for the sake of user conversion, but for the sake of minimizing the cost for network load. Technically they'll have the same revenue, but profit will increase due to optimizing the delivery and since most yt users dont have premium I believe this can be a big chunk of money
> “In cases when viewers feel they have been falsely flagged as using an ad blocker, they can share this feedback by clicking on the link in the prompt.”
At this point, such a statement almost feels as though it is explicitly stating that the "feedback" will be ignored. It probably won't be in aggregate but why should I expect that my individual report will be acted upon?
This is a rather disturbing move to me, as I am a YouTube addict and adblocker user. I use NextDNS, a DNS-based service that's like your own PiHole in the cloud.
It is sometimes tricky for me to disable adblocking! There are a couple of approaches. Resetting my DNS servers to defaults is disruptive and error-prone; it's a non-starter. I find it peculiar that there is no knob on NextDNS that says "disable blocking features and act like normal DNS" even though they themselves enable such a feature if you run out of free monthly queries. You can disable a bunch of features one-by-one, but of course that affects all sites, not just the one. You can whitelist any domain you want, but that involves a cycle of testing and guessing which ones are emanating from the site you want to use.
In short, there's no straightforward way of just telling NextDNS "don't block ads while I'm on YouTube.com" and it's for that reason that I sort of miss uBlock Origin. However, YouTube does use native domains for all its ad serving, and I see them all now anyway, so I don't believe that this new policy will adversely affect my usage profile.
I did this. I was skeptical at first but it's such a big qol improvement. I got a family plan so now that's what I bring to the streaming service exchange with the family and they love me for it
I was kind of against it since it seemed like a waste to pay for spotify and youtube music, but its honestly worth it just for ad free youtube alone. Only video streaming service I pay for.
If I had to pay for all of the web platforms I use (on top of paying for internet access to begin with) on a daily basis I would have no disposable income. And I'm not ready to live in a world with even more micro micro-transactions. I don't think the world is economically capable of supporting the web the way big tech companies wish to be supported if they couldn't continue just selling our harvested data alone.
I suppose the point is that if someone is a self described addict of a particular service, it's not entirely unreasonable to expect them to pay for that service (directly via premium, or indirectly via ads).
How does it work? Youtube for a long time now has been serving video ads from the same domain names as videos so you can not block video ads on DNS level.
As far as I know, the only way to block ads is by using ad blocker in a browser, or modified or 3rd party Youtube app.
Could you, in theory, stream a “video” of a website to the user and handle only the input (mouse, keybord) from the user?
The user would then not interact with a website but with a “video” where everything is rendered server side thus making it impossible to block any ads.
Here's hoping someone writes a youtube-dl extractor for that site soon. Haven't gotten around to doing it myself, despite manually downloading a bunch of videos using Firefox's network tab.
How are people who don’t pay for what they use customers? They cost YouTube money but if they’re not watching ads they’re not bringing in revenue and it’s highly unlikely that they’re bringing enough promotional value to defray that.
I could see some push for ethical ads or security but at some point you need to pay for what you like, either by subscribing to premium or watching ads.
Until this very moment google has considered the wisest move to be trying to keep all potential users on their platform, and it's arguably part of why they have maintained such dominance. It has always depended on network effects and the nearly uncompensated efforts of creators.
They have been getting greedier and greedier under the relentless quarter over quarter pressure to grow. Now we have mandatory ads on all videos, including non-monetized ones, and creaters who made the mistake of trusting youtube are systemtically defrauded through arbitrary demonetization.
I certainly feel no obligation to pay tithes to google.
Paying for what you use isn’t tithing. It’s straight up capitalism – if you don’t like it, don’t take the deal. It’s completely optional and you’ll probably be better off for it given how many people describe their YouTube usage as an addiction.
That’s what’s happening: YouTube offers things people want which cost money to produce and host, while users pay for those costs either directly (Premium) or by selling their attention and activity data to a middleman (Google).
Understanding that is key to understanding why ad blocker users complaining about being blocked is unreasonable. If you don’t like the terms of a deal, you can ethically walk away from it but not decide you don’t want to pay. If you prefer to mooch, sure, it’s not a huge crime but you don’t have any standing to complain, either.
Here’s another line of thought: YT could have straddled P2P tech and hosting directly (premium 4K offerings etc.). But Google wants all the content and all the control. The world’s video library is controlled by one corporation. They could farm the cost to peer tech but they won’t. So fuck them, I’ll circumnavigate my way into the library to watch some guy in his shed work on his hobby who isn’t begging for likes and subs.
And if I did pay? Google will still be logging my data. So fuck them once again.
Sure, nobody says you have to like them any more than you have to like every restaurant in town. The solution in both cases is not to give them your business – not complain when they refuse to give you freebies.
It's not even capitalism. Socialism definitely involves paying for services rendered. Exchanging something for something else is a basic building block of human society.
It's important to remember that piracy and theft are also capitalist practices. Companies routinely break the law and do unethical things, and consider it a sucess as long as money was made overall. Yet there is somehow this sense that individual consumers MUST play by the unfair rules often set up by these monopolies themselves. The incredible asymmetry in how copyright law is abused is an example. These companies deserve the same level of contempt they show their users.
The definition of "customers" has shifted in the ad-supported tech world. There's nothing inherently wrong with that model when it's unobtrusive and useful ads; It's when they get overly aggressive with the advertising that it drives people to block, IMO.
Also there's a pattern in the industry of introducing ads (or "promotions" to get around legalese) to "ad-free" subscriptions once they have sufficient lock-in.
My point is simply that Google is providing something which costs money to produce. They offer two ways to pay for it but someone who rejects both of them has no reason to expect Google to subsidize their activity – it’s like whining that the concert hall closed the window you used to camp out at for free music.
Customer is generally whoever is giving you money. With YouTube ads it's advertiser with the viewer being a second customer as the viewer gives YouTube the attention/click through. That falls apart if the user refuses to engage in that transaction
I'm pretty sure that the ethics of interacting with the likes of Youtube or Google are a fair bit more complex than you're giving it credit for, but I'm also pretty sure that this isn't the platform for that debate. Suffice it to say that as others have pointed out the definition of "customer" in the world of data brokers and advertising has become a lot less meaningful.
It’s not complicated unless you’re trying to avoid honoring the terms of the deal. YouTube is a completely optional service – you can use it with ads or pay not to have ads, that’s it. If you don’t like it, don’t use the service – and that goes a thousand times over for privacy concerns since there’s no way to avoid giving Google your activity data unless you don’t use their service.
When someone wants to sell me apples, I can pay for them or choose not to buy them. That's capitalism.
But if someone hands me apples for free, they really can't force me to study the ads on the wrapping paper, can they? I have never signed anywhere that I agree to this 'deal'. That's not how capitalism works as far as I understand it.
And their terms aren't legally enforceable.
Where I live adblockers are legal. When I access YT with Firefox and uBlock Origin it's legal for me to filter YTs datastream how I want to.
If this was a capitalistic transaction of goods, I would have to login to use their service. I would have to agree to some kind of legally binding contract. I would first have to pay, and could then use their product or service. But all that isn't necessary to watch videos on YT.
There is no legally binding 'deal' between YT and me.
YouTube never handed you apples, you went there and asked for them because you didn’t want to pay for apples directly and they had a sign up saying “apples are free for ad watchers”.
> There is no legally binding 'deal' between YT and me.
It’s at the bottom of every page. Your continued use of their service is subject to their terms of service, and they are free to block you if you don’t follow the deal you accepted.
At a fundamental level the HTTP protocol is a negotiation, where the client asks (on behalf of the user) for a file from a server, and the server decides (on behalf of the site owner) if it sends the file. HTTP provides plenty of error codes to deny that request. 403 or 451 come to mind. The server sending the file implies that it is OK with my use of the file.
If the server sends a file that's on the server. A license agreement hosted on a server that needs to be accessed in order to read it doesn't change that. Reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide:
>“But the plans were on display…”
>“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
>“That’s the display department.”
>“With a flashlight.”
>“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
>“So had the stairs.”
>“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
>“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
I suggest reading more carefully - I like Douglas Adams too but that’s irrelevant to the situation here. People are whining about Google’s servers not returning the content they want when they’re detected as using an ad blocker.
Googles customers are the advertisers. The viewers are the product. It's amazing google has tolerated bad product (Ad-block users) as long as they have.
Presumably Google (you know, the people who run Ad Sense) find the sheer amount of viewing data valuable on its own, given the marginal cost of "bad product" as you put it. How many advertisers would pay to have that sort of marketing data pipeline?
It’s no coincidence that this is happening against a background of budget cuts. I suspect Google is seeing less demand for ads right now while simultaneously dealing with expectations that their profits not go down correspondingly.
One thing I’m sure the mess over at Twitter has done is getting companies to reconsider the value of their ads in general, too. That’s always hard to measure which means it looks like an east spot to cut, and I believe there’ve been multiple companies claiming that cutting to zero didn’t affect sales so I’d be surprised if Google wasn’t looking at a soft market where cost cutting looks like a more reliable path to improve their profitability.
>I suspect Google is seeing less demand for ads right now while simultaneously dealing with expectations that their profits not go down correspondingly.
This seems like the root of the problem right here. Why shouldn't corporate profits go down when the economy falters? This should be expected. If you just keep running the company the same way and not pissing off the users/customers, things will improve when the economic situation improves. Rocking the boat just increases risk.
We do have that, to an extent: capital-gains taxes are higher for securities held for less than 1 year. Maybe this needs to be extended or improved somehow.
I purchased a year of YouTube premium while I was on holiday in Turkey and it didn’t cost much. I mostly did it for YouTube music but the no ads thing is pretty great too.
>“YouTube’s ad-supported model supports a diverse ecosystem of creators, and provides billions of people globally access to content for free with ads,” the company’s statement says.
Let's at least be 100% honest with everyone and stop with the disingenuous garbage:
1. Ad-blocker usage is roughly 25-30% of US users.
2. The average YouTube content creator makes less than 0.02 per ad view and thus why many of the large ones choose to use sponsors instead. Most YouTube content creators aren't making ANY money, let alone enough for them to care all that much. For those that are, they're doing just fine w/ad-blockers being used.
3. Google made nearly $70 billion in Q1; they're not hurting at all, especially their executives.
4. The on-going rise in the use of ad-block technologies is simply because platforms, sites, etc, are all absolutely inundating viewers with so much trash in an effort to make more money that it's almost a requirement to use them without having a shitty experience.
>3. Google made nearly $70 billion in Q1; they're not hurting at all, especially their executives.
This is disgusting. Google's executives do an incredible amount of valuable work, easily thousands of times more than other employees, and deserve rich compensation packages. People need to be willing to pay a lot for Premium, or watch more ads, so that these executives can afford bigger yachts.
Not me, I fully support billionaires in yachts. I think they should all have yachts and spend lots of time with the exuberant aquatic wildlife off the Iberian coast.
Which is so strange, to have a government agency recommend violating terms of service. I suppose they can't advocate for better legislation or regulation of ads themselves.
Don't forget that YouTube will actively "demonetize" videos of small/medium creators, and take whatever ad rev. was made on it for themselves and kill the reach of a video.
Curiously the same content from bigger brands gets a pass.
You touch on what is effectively the biggest problem I see with ads: how aggressive they are.
Interrupting my watching experience so you can show me 15 seconds of some chips bouncing around on the screen only serves to frustrate me and cause me to despise whatever you're selling. It's reminiscent of the "butt in chair" managerial mindset, and does not convey a solid understanding of how an intelligent person makes purchase decisions or meaningfully interacts with whatever you're peddling.
The most effective advertisements are the ones you don't even realize are advertisements. If you've ever searched reddit for product recommendations, you've likely read covert marketing campaigns disguised as casual suggestions. I'm not saying those are better, they're actually just as bad if not worse, because they are fundamentally dishonest.
In my opinion, a tolerable ad is one that does not aggravate me. Non aggressive, non intrusive, quick, to the point, and at least somewhat relevant without having to spy on me. Showing me ads for travel or hotel bookings during a video about videogames or hobby model making isn't useful to me (or anybody I presume).
It's like spam having obvious misspellings as a bandpass filter for lowered reasoning faculties. YouTube ads are made to appeal to the type of person who doesn't use adblocking. They don't care if they're intolerable to you - they already know you're not going to engage.
The question is, if ads are forced on the rest of us and we can't walk into the proverbial other room while they're on, how might we allow ads, make them useless for capturing real data about us, but have them appear valuable?
Spam is unsolicited, and will keep coming no matter what you do.
Web ads are implicitly solicited. You go to websites knowing that they will serve ads. If you don't like it, you can stop going to said websites and no more ads.
Email spam is implicitly solicited. You open your email knowing people are sending you spam. If you don't like it, you can stop opening your email and no more spam.
>>“YouTube’s ad-supported model supports a diverse ecosystem of creators, and provides billions of people globally access to content for free with ads,” the company’s statement says.
Before I switched to using adblocking on my phone for youtube (like I did for my desktop), I made sure I will never ever buy whatever crap was presented in YT ads.
I believe I am not the only one for which ads have a contrary effect to the desired effect.
So, some companies payd Youtube money and end up actually losing money from sales.
When I was younger, and more energetic, I would actually seek out an owner's website after seeing an advertisement. There would be a big splash ad for a movie on IGN or something, and I'd find the site for the movie, find the email address, and write some internet-crazy rant about how I'd never watch the movie, and tell everyone I knew that the movie sucked, all because I was shown an advertisement for the movie. It was pretty immature of me, but I felt so strongly about it at the time.
I get very suspicious of things I see advertised too much. It either implies that the company has way too much money and is blowing it on ads, implying some predatory monetisation, or that it's spending money it doesn't have on ads, which means it's going to either implode in a few months or have to jack up prices.
Remember: "Ad-supported content" isn't really ad-supported, it's supported by the customers of whoever's buying the ads.
I am looking to build a house, and a few days ago I was driving on the highway and saw a billboard for a custom house builder. I made a mental note never to contact that company. If your ad is on the highway, you are not building my house :)
Always wondered how anyone picks an attorney from a billboard, as it seems that would be a negative signal but it must work because there are so many of them.
I think you're being completely disingenuous here. Using an ad-blocker is free-riding and nothing less. We consume a service provided by Google through server capacity, monetization enginea, and improved discovery and by the creators through sweat and tears in creating video content without paying for it. You can consume the content without being exposed to ads while paying Google and the creators their share by buying Youtube Premium but you choose to instead steal it by both consuming it and not paying for it.
It's completely fair to argue that Google makes more than enough money to not have to rely on your ad revenue but after all you're still free-riding.
Ya people want their cake and eat it too. Or we want a free and open internet and that means ads or we really don’t want ads and that means to the app/platform/creator/website to go private and with a paywall. It will never be sustainable to have something free out there without ads and quality. Quality in anything won’t just come out of nowhere when it require investment, sweat and tears.
Alternative take, Google introduced the "customer as the product model", at least they did that at scale. Then honestly, we became dependent on their services as the web became Google, so I don't think it' totally fair to take that view.
No, I think most people are fine with paying for a service, it's just that most people in this thread are completely right.
1.) Google drove up ad coverage in front of videos to the point where I have to watch 2, sometimes 3 ads before I can watch a video. This is insane. I'd rather go back watching TV instead.
2.) Simultaneously, they have made it impossible for creators to support themselves by using ad payouts - indicated by how many creators chose to go with third party sponsorships. So even when I'm using adblock, I'm watching ads, only this time I'm usually okay with it, because I can skip them and even if not, it supports the creators I'm watching (although I'm sure advertisers will slowly figure this out as well and creep over to surreptitious advertising).
> that means to the app/platform/creator/website to go private and with a paywall
You pretend like this isn't already happening. Google is so detached from their customer-base, that Linus Tech Tips is currently starting his own streaming service, that does exactly this. Using their YouTube platform as a way to advertise it.
Larger content creators will just build their own platforms, as Linus proves.
> No, I think most people are fine with paying for a service
> I have to watch 2, sometimes 3 ads before I can watch a video. This is insane. I'd rather go back watching TV instead.
Your 2 statements contradict themselves. If you and others are fine to pay for a service and hate to watch 2-3 ads then why not take YouTube Premium? Now you just said you will prefer not to pay and go watch TV.
> they have made it impossible for creators to support themselves
You can literally pay a subscription to a channel you want to directly support now. How is that not helping to support content creators.
> You pretend like this isn't already happening.
I think you start to reading way too deeper here because I was literally pointing that it is happening and has to happen if people want quality. Or you go free with ads or you go private with a paywall.
Truth is you are already kinda answering what is happening right now:
> So even when I'm using adblock, I'm watching ads, only this time I'm usually okay with it, because I can skip them and even if not, it supports the creators I'm watching (although I'm sure advertisers will slowly figure this out as well and creep over to surreptitious advertising)
During Covid the internet ad market exploded but the price also went way down. If it’s ads on Facebook Google or even YouTube. A lot of people are more on the web with lock downs. They shop even more on Amazon and e-commerce shops. But this influx of new (regular) users made also cost of the ads per user crash because of the influx itself and because of the financial situation.
Coming back on YouTube that’s when and why YouTube started to show a lot more ads before it was 1-2 it went to 2-3 or so. And usually not skipable.
Add to this like you said in your comment people that want to support a channel and do watch ads but never click, advertisers will “figured it out”. Well they already did figured it on out. And they is them and Google Facebook etc. The market already corrected itself at the beginning of Covid. That’s why now you have to see more ads on YouTube because the cost per click is way down.
We can’t just zoom in and avoid all the economic situation. Forget how we got here. And avoid to see what YouTube offers to support content creators and yell that they don’t do a thing when really everything is already there. The question is are people defending this narrative going to fight to always things free with no (little) ads or are they going to put their money where their mouth is?
Still not free-riding when you consider the data they are collecting from viewers even with ad-blockers. People still have accounts to save channels/videos, lots of people or households have Android phones that makes it stupidly easy to link to people, places and purchases. There is significantly more value they still gain from it even if youtube itself operates at a loss.
Maybe if they weren't allowed to collect so much information, or had to pay back the users they are collecting data on could I see the point that ad-blocking is free-riding.
Users are also part of the content-generation algorithm. Youtube uses my view history in their recommendation algorithm to others. YT uses my interactions the same way, whether it's engaging with the creator in the comments or providing feedback for other viewers or just simply giving it a like.
Yes, I'm consuming the service, but I'm also contributing to it. Less users = less engagement, and maybe that's good for YT's bottom line but it's harmful to the ecosystem.
Using words like 'theft' to describe visiting an openly-accessible webpage with a browser extension that modifies the presentation of that webpage is a bit extreme.
Calling it free-riding is somewhat absurd in this framing, though. Is it free-riding of google to literally play music in my house? They don't pay for it, after all. Consider, you could easily frame this such that they are free riding on my trust to let them sell access to other companies. That they can't deliver on that purchased transfer of trust is their problem, not mine.
Did Google ever unfairly dominate competition? Did Google ever use their power tyrannically? Did Google ever release a product or design that caused untold social damage? Does Google deserve stellar treatment because they treat us stellar? Even if you view their ads or buy their product, is the product still not free of exploiting you? Why is it not the correct moralism that we have a right and a duty to take everything from them until they are no more?
If these sites were truly concerned, why not just put youtube behind a paid username and password like netflix or hbo go or any other streaming content service today? Its because there is massive value in having your content be open to the world and not gatekept behind a subscription. The financials of this business don’t suggest its lacking a means to cover its costs, so why should I pay out my attention for a rate far below I quote anyone else in the market for it?
Very disingenuous argument. That's their revenue, not their profit, and that includes their entire business, not just YouTube. Or is your point just that Google is big, therefore even if YouTube is operating at a loss (I don't know if it is or not) they should maintain that indefinitely just because they can?
No one is forcing YouTube to operate, at a loss or otherwise. They can stop any time they want.
If YouTube disappeared tomorrow it would arguably the best thing that happened to internet video since its inception. You can only imagine the variety of services that would spring up, maybe a standard way of finding and viewing videos would emerge.
People don't realise how damaging (essential) monopolies are, abusive or not.
By your standards, Google is acting even more juvenile. It will not defeat or reduce adblocking and will likely alienante paying customers. It's less than pointless.
>3. Google made nearly $70 billion in Q1; they're not hurting at all, especially their executives.
The CEO of YouTube is probably sweating as their performance is tied to YouTube net profit. YouTube is one of many revenue streams that Alphabet will be tightening over the years. I expect the Android division to also start bringing in revenue that is not connected to Google Play.
1. Youtube creators move to sponsors where Youtube isn't getting a cut, which means youtube has to keep the lights on with only ad revenue.
2. Many users want to keep blocking/avoiding ads & don't want to pay. So they want to use the service for literally free. What other monitization method do you propose?
3. Their parent company's revenue doesn't matter. Is Google expected to run a free service that is very expensive and serves billions of users?
4. Youtube demonitizes people to keep advertisers on the platform. Users blocking ads & not paying ("freeloaders") only exacerbate the issue by being a drain on resources and further incentivizes Youtube to keep striving to preserve revenue by demonetization.
> The average YouTube content creator makes less than 0.02 per ad view
The number I see tends to fluctuate between $1 to $1.50 per 1,000 views, or about $0.001 to $0.0015 per view. (YouTube makes around twice that in direct gross revenue, and splits it up 55% to 45% between the creator and the platform, respectively.)
This obviously fluctuates substantially: if you produce videos that are viewed by prime demographics advertisers are more interested in, you tend to make more. YouTube also has better individual deals signed with their topmost creators, giving them a better revenue split or a different advertiser pool that’s willing to pay more for the most popular YouTubers. Shorts and livestreams also work a bit differently, but that’s too complicated to get into here.
Sponsors, meanwhile, typically offer massively better rates. Estimates very a lot more, and it depends on your individual track record as a creator, but I’ve seen numbers thrown around ranging from $2.50 to $10 per 1,000 views at the lower end. The biggest creators are apparently being quoted $50 or more per 1,000 views, and that number goes up exponentially as your channel grows.
That’s why seemingly every YouTuber is taking those deals, they’re unbelievably lucrative compared to the integrated YouTube ads. Combine that with a healthy Patreon and it’s no wonder why YouTubers are still able to do so well despite Google infamously difficult behavior.
The primary reason I use an adblocker is to prevent malware / viruses.
I would be more accepting of ads in general if:
1 - they were all served from the primary websites server - eg yahoo blaming third party ad servers for injecting virus scripts and taking no responsibility is not okay with me.
2 - I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level, not just browser level.
3 - no flashing animated ads on static text pages. I am amazed at some pages I see trying to read 6 sentences and instead I get three at a time with 3 moving ads taking up most of the space.
Obviously it'd be fine to have moving ads during a 'commercial break' in a video.. but overlay a banner over it or next to it and having it moving is just wrong imho.
I didn't use youtube much at all for a long time, but have recently trained the thing to give me interesting videos about CSS, new tools like framer io, clickup, AI, 'productizing' and other helpful content is now available to me easier now..
So if I could not block ads on youtube now, I would have to pay the $12 for premium if that's what it costs.. I would suggest having a checkbox to add in a $5 bucket for tips to content creators and give a way to tip multiple of 10 cents or something - as I would like to support some of the folks adding value to the platform, and I'm guessing going 12 premium wouldn't help them much if at all.
A few days ago I brought up some lists of 'YT watch history' - it's a decent amount for me the past few months
- if 2 minutes of time was added to each one, and I had an employer, that company would be burning a fair amount of money for me to wait for ads each week at this point.
I also worry that ads at beginning of videos can be unfair when it seems a good percentage of videos I click then skip into a bit and find that they are not what I was expecting / hoping for and the click itself, 3 second buffering, and 2 second seek - were a huge waste of time, I can't imagine getting hit with added ads in those equations.
Yeah, I really want one of those ethical ad programs to go somewhere – limit the JavaScript substantially and serve everything first party, use Cloudflare/Apple’s PAT scheme to assert real user presence vs. spoofing, etc. The problem is that advertisers really want cross domain tracking so we really need tracking protection to become popular enough that they’re willing to give up that dream, and that’s not going to happen with Chrome.
> they were all served from the primary websites server -
- If your website is YooToo dot com, then serve the ads from your server - not a subdomain (easy to offload to other server), - I've seen many instances where malware was injected by web sites that pull their ads from third party servers.. sometimes it's a third party ad network, sometimes it's a bad actor that makes a deal with a desperate site to host ads server from their server,
(I'd see a fair amount of offers from lesser known entities offering to place flash ads on sites for a few hundred a month back in the day, I'm sure it's still a thing using javascript and similar these days, I've seen things flagged from sites that host video files lately)
There's been malware ads served from yahoo dot com - that were injected by a third party server - I think the details show they fake the ad for X city where XY company is located and server the viruses to other cities.. this is also sketchy for data tracking (outside jurisdictions?) and other issues.
> I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level -
I don't think it's right to serve ads for alcohol to people that do not want them, same with gambling and similar - think about it this way, the technology exists to push weight loss, abilify, and other drugs to people who have been flagged as depressed, we should be able to prevent ads in the same way.
I've seen opt-out of ad networks by going to a site and checking off tracking / targeted marketing / remarketing from a, b - z networks - but these I believe add a cookie to the browser you are using - so you opt out of targeted ads in that one browser on that one device
- I think people should be able to sign a document online and opt out of gambling, drugs, sugar, alcohol, and many other types of ads if they want to block them, and it should be via ip address - so it's blocked on phones, chromecasts, vizio tvs, playstations, laptops, tablets - all the things that connect... the big ad networks should be able to handle this with minor code changes.
Two things spring to mind: My experience with a YouTube premium trial ended immediately upon being told that I couldn't play music in a second place at the same time. And ad-blocking is part of my security posture.
I have plenty of local storage. Moving forward, maybe good videos won't just go into a playlist with the assumption that YouTube will continue to be available.
1,690 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadYouTube search: how to stop a baby from choking
> Two 30 second ads about how important vitamins are for me to get pregnant
Meanwhile baby is dead.
Install adblocker so I can save my next eligible heir quickly.
> Next baby is choking.
Quickly open YouTube.
YouTube: you are blocked.
Now I have two dead babies but thank god I know how to get pregnant again because of those Vitamins.
If i do everything the corporations think is good for me, life will be so great :)
I am just underhanded and thats why we don't deserve good things :(
Try this (or equivilant):
https://stjohnwa.com.au/first-aid-training
and qualify for additional pay if you work onsite and are prepared to be listed as a first on scene (while the professionals are in transit) responder.
I used ublock and it was more or less cuccessfully fighting ads on desktop, but they still were present on phone (new pipe just sucks, and I moved to iPhone anyways), iPad, Xbox and tv.
Premium removed all of them. Also gave downloads for offline viewing.
I still use sponsorblock on desktop though. And miss it a lot everywhere else.
Mandatory disclaimer. I’m Google employee but do not work for YouTube and I’m paying for premium with my own money.
I can't bring myself to give YT money when I can address my use case for free. YT's hostile user approach also rubs me the wrong way, I can't reward that behavior
https://github.com/yattee/yattee
I used to have those "downloads" on Youtube. There are not a real downloads because I do not have an access to the file. Also the feature tends to be misworking - from time to time one of "downloads" just stucks with eating 100% of 1 CPU core and the recipe is to remove all the "downloads". This was one of the stupidiest features I ever had, because if I need a video for offline wieving but do not want to get a file, I can just watch 100% of video (of course with adblock because YT advertisements use to destroy cache) and do not close the tab, then suspend my PC and unsuspend it in the place I want to watch.
I click download on videos that I'm interested in morning and have something to listen to during commute without worrying about spotty connections and mobile traffic consumptions. So yes, file is downloaded to the device.
If I want to download something to have it forever, I use yt-dlp on pc.
What's wrong with newpipe ?
It has been crashing for me as well but since it's so stateless it has never been an issue: playback continues, playlists remain, ads ana tracking stay nonexistent.
Never give a SV tech company money.
Bull fucking shit. There are services like Privacy.com which allow you to pay without deepening your profile.
Nor do I. Banks themselves in the EU and India offer virtual cards. There's also Wise with much wider availability.
I won't pay for YouTube because they don't accept magic jellybeans is a bullshit excuse and you know it.
source: I work on card payments
I don’t want to pay$7/month so when I do get a link I don’t get annoyed by YouTube’s UX.
The $7 is the current price, it does not reflect future changes. If the pool of potential customers is dry, they will try other means of increasing revenue, including increases of that price.
They might also turn the $7 into a requirement to watch YouTube at all, and show ads anyways.
Yep. All cable channels started out ad-free. When cable was introduced, the cost was $35/mo for all channels (there were no movie channels initially), justified by not having ads.
This is irrelevant. 99.9% of content is garbage and / or not relevant to me. Also, I really don't watch that much so why should I be paying ~8 EUR a month to watch a few videos without ads? Moreover, I don't earn that much, so even that amount is a noticeable loss.
Then don't use it ? That's like saying you only like one show on netflix so they should give it to you for free
Giving money to Google though, would hurt so much!
I'll consider it the day they stop the dark patterns company wide and commit to stop being ad-supported. Making the users pay for the service is a step in the right direction but I don't see them stop the ads company wide and I don't want to feed this.
https://twitter.com/BobDuckNWeave/status/1613846589482598403
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/100fmgx/linu...
Sure it's their servers, but then it's their fault they don't allow redistribution via third party channels.
That does two things.
I don't use Netflix so any content there is of 0 interest to me.
You don't get to stay public and expect ad dollars. It doesn't work like that on the internet.
Same for NYT. I don't pay for it and have no use for content there. If if were an ad supported one, then I could use an ad blocker.
Think of it this way. If you screen your movie in a cinema hall, I will watch it if I pay for a ticket. Fair and square. If it is played on a public roadshow, I will skip all ads or skip it altogether.
The org has to decide. Either make content pay per use or free. No middle ground.
The ethics are pretty clear I think: if I navigate with my browser to YouTube, or any site with ads, I'm able to see the content, plus annoying ads. I don't have to watch the ads: I can use an ad-blocker to tell my browser to not render those ads. The site has every right to serve me HTML/JS/video however they wish, but they have no right to tell me what to do with that data. If I want to ignore part of it, that's my right, and if I use automated means to ignore selected parts, that's also my right. If they want to spend massive resources trying to figure out ways to get around my automated means, or to detect my ad-blocker and refuse to send me data, they can do that too, but at what cost?
But if they want to avoid this arms race of ad-blocking, they can just do what Netflix does: require payment and an account to get in.
As for paywalls, those are really the same thing as ads usually: they load the article, then use JS to block it. You can block the JS and read the article.
> 2.12 People should be able to render web content as they want
> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts or auto-played videos. We will build features and write specifications that respect peoples' agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.
https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#render
---
And guess who is one of the members of World Wide Web Consortium: https://www.w3.org/membership/list/?initial=g&ecosystem=
> Google's mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1688025600&dateRange=custom&...
But logging in on every browser and device I watch youtube on? Fuck, I'd rather not. Also, I never login to my personal google account at work.
Before google bought youtube, my account there was called something like "duntwantacct".
That is simply not true. There are numerous alternatives to YouTube Vanced, including NewPipe, LibreTube or SkyTube. Only to name a couple. And then there still is invidious. So no, you don't have to sit through ads.
Makes me wonder if they'll ever move to WASM... though I assume there's gonna be ways to block ads regardless.
I didn't mind the 5-second ads. Two to three of them before a video? I'd deliberately sit through those. Seemed a fair deal. That's now largely gone away (in my experience) and now it wants to show me longer, un-skippable ads. Not only at the beginning but randomly in the middle of videos regardless of what's going on in the video. At least on Television has natural commercial breaks "baked in" to the format.
Oh. And stop showing me the same four cookie-cutter ads every few minutes. It's annoying at best, condescending at worst. If you must advertise to me at least give me some variety.
I could see Google trying and eventually giving up after blocking the the most obvious workarounds just like everything else they do
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_type...
All of the ad blockers are now pretty jank. Sometimes they don't work at all, sometimes you need to refresh a couple times to get the stream to play. I think Alternate Player somehow still works despite being unmaintained, but its stream is always 5+ seconds behind no matter how you tweak the buffer settings.
I am using Firefox with uBlock origin and don't have those issues on Twitch.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
Stuff like conference talks, of course, really don’t matter but there’s so much material that no generalization won’t be inaccurate for millions of watchers.
If people leave because of this that cuts their costs to zero. What's their incentive not to do this ?
At this point, such a statement almost feels as though it is explicitly stating that the "feedback" will be ignored. It probably won't be in aggregate but why should I expect that my individual report will be acted upon?
Narrator: ...it wasn't for life.
It is sometimes tricky for me to disable adblocking! There are a couple of approaches. Resetting my DNS servers to defaults is disruptive and error-prone; it's a non-starter. I find it peculiar that there is no knob on NextDNS that says "disable blocking features and act like normal DNS" even though they themselves enable such a feature if you run out of free monthly queries. You can disable a bunch of features one-by-one, but of course that affects all sites, not just the one. You can whitelist any domain you want, but that involves a cycle of testing and guessing which ones are emanating from the site you want to use.
In short, there's no straightforward way of just telling NextDNS "don't block ads while I'm on YouTube.com" and it's for that reason that I sort of miss uBlock Origin. However, YouTube does use native domains for all its ad serving, and I see them all now anyway, so I don't believe that this new policy will adversely affect my usage profile.
Where did I say that I do not pay for it?
I could see some push for ethical ads or security but at some point you need to pay for what you like, either by subscribing to premium or watching ads.
They have been getting greedier and greedier under the relentless quarter over quarter pressure to grow. Now we have mandatory ads on all videos, including non-monetized ones, and creaters who made the mistake of trusting youtube are systemtically defrauded through arbitrary demonetization.
I certainly feel no obligation to pay tithes to google.
Understanding that is key to understanding why ad blocker users complaining about being blocked is unreasonable. If you don’t like the terms of a deal, you can ethically walk away from it but not decide you don’t want to pay. If you prefer to mooch, sure, it’s not a huge crime but you don’t have any standing to complain, either.
And if I did pay? Google will still be logging my data. So fuck them once again.
What I mean is people often tout the merits of capitalism while ignoring that the merits aren't actually happening.
Also there's a pattern in the industry of introducing ads (or "promotions" to get around legalese) to "ad-free" subscriptions once they have sufficient lock-in.
But if someone hands me apples for free, they really can't force me to study the ads on the wrapping paper, can they? I have never signed anywhere that I agree to this 'deal'. That's not how capitalism works as far as I understand it.
And their terms aren't legally enforceable.
Where I live adblockers are legal. When I access YT with Firefox and uBlock Origin it's legal for me to filter YTs datastream how I want to.
If this was a capitalistic transaction of goods, I would have to login to use their service. I would have to agree to some kind of legally binding contract. I would first have to pay, and could then use their product or service. But all that isn't necessary to watch videos on YT.
There is no legally binding 'deal' between YT and me.
> There is no legally binding 'deal' between YT and me.
It’s at the bottom of every page. Your continued use of their service is subject to their terms of service, and they are free to block you if you don’t follow the deal you accepted.
If the server sends a file that's on the server. A license agreement hosted on a server that needs to be accessed in order to read it doesn't change that. Reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide:
>“But the plans were on display…”
>“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
>“That’s the display department.”
>“With a flashlight.”
>“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
>“So had the stairs.”
>“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
>“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
One thing I’m sure the mess over at Twitter has done is getting companies to reconsider the value of their ads in general, too. That’s always hard to measure which means it looks like an east spot to cut, and I believe there’ve been multiple companies claiming that cutting to zero didn’t affect sales so I’d be surprised if Google wasn’t looking at a soft market where cost cutting looks like a more reliable path to improve their profitability.
This seems like the root of the problem right here. Why shouldn't corporate profits go down when the economy falters? This should be expected. If you just keep running the company the same way and not pissing off the users/customers, things will improve when the economic situation improves. Rocking the boat just increases risk.
We should have some kind of model that incentivises long-term investment not this kind of short term profit extraction.
YouTube isn't a public service. You can either pay the $12/mo for Premium for no ads and other perks or watch ads to subsidize the site.
>“YouTube’s ad-supported model supports a diverse ecosystem of creators, and provides billions of people globally access to content for free with ads,” the company’s statement says.
Let's at least be 100% honest with everyone and stop with the disingenuous garbage:
1. Ad-blocker usage is roughly 25-30% of US users.
2. The average YouTube content creator makes less than 0.02 per ad view and thus why many of the large ones choose to use sponsors instead. Most YouTube content creators aren't making ANY money, let alone enough for them to care all that much. For those that are, they're doing just fine w/ad-blockers being used.
3. Google made nearly $70 billion in Q1; they're not hurting at all, especially their executives.
4. The on-going rise in the use of ad-block technologies is simply because platforms, sites, etc, are all absolutely inundating viewers with so much trash in an effort to make more money that it's almost a requirement to use them without having a shitty experience.
This is disgusting. Google's executives do an incredible amount of valuable work, easily thousands of times more than other employees, and deserve rich compensation packages. People need to be willing to pay a lot for Premium, or watch more ads, so that these executives can afford bigger yachts.
Why do you hate rich people so much?
/s
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...
Curiously the same content from bigger brands gets a pass.
Interrupting my watching experience so you can show me 15 seconds of some chips bouncing around on the screen only serves to frustrate me and cause me to despise whatever you're selling. It's reminiscent of the "butt in chair" managerial mindset, and does not convey a solid understanding of how an intelligent person makes purchase decisions or meaningfully interacts with whatever you're peddling.
The most effective advertisements are the ones you don't even realize are advertisements. If you've ever searched reddit for product recommendations, you've likely read covert marketing campaigns disguised as casual suggestions. I'm not saying those are better, they're actually just as bad if not worse, because they are fundamentally dishonest.
In my opinion, a tolerable ad is one that does not aggravate me. Non aggressive, non intrusive, quick, to the point, and at least somewhat relevant without having to spy on me. Showing me ads for travel or hotel bookings during a video about videogames or hobby model making isn't useful to me (or anybody I presume).
It's like spam having obvious misspellings as a bandpass filter for lowered reasoning faculties. YouTube ads are made to appeal to the type of person who doesn't use adblocking. They don't care if they're intolerable to you - they already know you're not going to engage.
The question is, if ads are forced on the rest of us and we can't walk into the proverbial other room while they're on, how might we allow ads, make them useless for capturing real data about us, but have them appear valuable?
Web ads are implicitly solicited. You go to websites knowing that they will serve ads. If you don't like it, you can stop going to said websites and no more ads.
Before I switched to using adblocking on my phone for youtube (like I did for my desktop), I made sure I will never ever buy whatever crap was presented in YT ads.
I believe I am not the only one for which ads have a contrary effect to the desired effect.
So, some companies payd Youtube money and end up actually losing money from sales.
Remember: "Ad-supported content" isn't really ad-supported, it's supported by the customers of whoever's buying the ads.
Always wondered how anyone picks an attorney from a billboard, as it seems that would be a negative signal but it must work because there are so many of them.
Mobile experience with ads is the most user hostile experience in tech.
E: keeping the misspelling.
It's completely fair to argue that Google makes more than enough money to not have to rely on your ad revenue but after all you're still free-riding.
1.) Google drove up ad coverage in front of videos to the point where I have to watch 2, sometimes 3 ads before I can watch a video. This is insane. I'd rather go back watching TV instead.
2.) Simultaneously, they have made it impossible for creators to support themselves by using ad payouts - indicated by how many creators chose to go with third party sponsorships. So even when I'm using adblock, I'm watching ads, only this time I'm usually okay with it, because I can skip them and even if not, it supports the creators I'm watching (although I'm sure advertisers will slowly figure this out as well and creep over to surreptitious advertising).
> that means to the app/platform/creator/website to go private and with a paywall
You pretend like this isn't already happening. Google is so detached from their customer-base, that Linus Tech Tips is currently starting his own streaming service, that does exactly this. Using their YouTube platform as a way to advertise it.
Larger content creators will just build their own platforms, as Linus proves.
> I have to watch 2, sometimes 3 ads before I can watch a video. This is insane. I'd rather go back watching TV instead.
Your 2 statements contradict themselves. If you and others are fine to pay for a service and hate to watch 2-3 ads then why not take YouTube Premium? Now you just said you will prefer not to pay and go watch TV.
> they have made it impossible for creators to support themselves
You can literally pay a subscription to a channel you want to directly support now. How is that not helping to support content creators.
> You pretend like this isn't already happening.
I think you start to reading way too deeper here because I was literally pointing that it is happening and has to happen if people want quality. Or you go free with ads or you go private with a paywall.
Truth is you are already kinda answering what is happening right now:
> So even when I'm using adblock, I'm watching ads, only this time I'm usually okay with it, because I can skip them and even if not, it supports the creators I'm watching (although I'm sure advertisers will slowly figure this out as well and creep over to surreptitious advertising)
During Covid the internet ad market exploded but the price also went way down. If it’s ads on Facebook Google or even YouTube. A lot of people are more on the web with lock downs. They shop even more on Amazon and e-commerce shops. But this influx of new (regular) users made also cost of the ads per user crash because of the influx itself and because of the financial situation.
Coming back on YouTube that’s when and why YouTube started to show a lot more ads before it was 1-2 it went to 2-3 or so. And usually not skipable.
Add to this like you said in your comment people that want to support a channel and do watch ads but never click, advertisers will “figured it out”. Well they already did figured it on out. And they is them and Google Facebook etc. The market already corrected itself at the beginning of Covid. That’s why now you have to see more ads on YouTube because the cost per click is way down.
We can’t just zoom in and avoid all the economic situation. Forget how we got here. And avoid to see what YouTube offers to support content creators and yell that they don’t do a thing when really everything is already there. The question is are people defending this narrative going to fight to always things free with no (little) ads or are they going to put their money where their mouth is?
Maybe if they weren't allowed to collect so much information, or had to pay back the users they are collecting data on could I see the point that ad-blocking is free-riding.
Yes, I'm consuming the service, but I'm also contributing to it. Less users = less engagement, and maybe that's good for YT's bottom line but it's harmful to the ecosystem.
Using words like 'theft' to describe visiting an openly-accessible webpage with a browser extension that modifies the presentation of that webpage is a bit extreme.
Add up all their users and that's many billions of dollars of networking they're getting for free, paid for by those users.
Very disingenuous argument. That's their revenue, not their profit, and that includes their entire business, not just YouTube. Or is your point just that Google is big, therefore even if YouTube is operating at a loss (I don't know if it is or not) they should maintain that indefinitely just because they can?
If YouTube disappeared tomorrow it would arguably the best thing that happened to internet video since its inception. You can only imagine the variety of services that would spring up, maybe a standard way of finding and viewing videos would emerge.
People don't realise how damaging (essential) monopolies are, abusive or not.
And everyone here is behaving like pissy 6 year olds in response
By your standards, Google is acting even more juvenile. It will not defeat or reduce adblocking and will likely alienante paying customers. It's less than pointless.
The CEO of YouTube is probably sweating as their performance is tied to YouTube net profit. YouTube is one of many revenue streams that Alphabet will be tightening over the years. I expect the Android division to also start bringing in revenue that is not connected to Google Play.
2. Many users want to keep blocking/avoiding ads & don't want to pay. So they want to use the service for literally free. What other monitization method do you propose?
3. Their parent company's revenue doesn't matter. Is Google expected to run a free service that is very expensive and serves billions of users?
4. Youtube demonitizes people to keep advertisers on the platform. Users blocking ads & not paying ("freeloaders") only exacerbate the issue by being a drain on resources and further incentivizes Youtube to keep striving to preserve revenue by demonetization.
The number I see tends to fluctuate between $1 to $1.50 per 1,000 views, or about $0.001 to $0.0015 per view. (YouTube makes around twice that in direct gross revenue, and splits it up 55% to 45% between the creator and the platform, respectively.)
This obviously fluctuates substantially: if you produce videos that are viewed by prime demographics advertisers are more interested in, you tend to make more. YouTube also has better individual deals signed with their topmost creators, giving them a better revenue split or a different advertiser pool that’s willing to pay more for the most popular YouTubers. Shorts and livestreams also work a bit differently, but that’s too complicated to get into here.
CGP Grey has a great video on how YouTube ads work: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KW0eUrUiyxo
Sponsors, meanwhile, typically offer massively better rates. Estimates very a lot more, and it depends on your individual track record as a creator, but I’ve seen numbers thrown around ranging from $2.50 to $10 per 1,000 views at the lower end. The biggest creators are apparently being quoted $50 or more per 1,000 views, and that number goes up exponentially as your channel grows.
That’s why seemingly every YouTuber is taking those deals, they’re unbelievably lucrative compared to the integrated YouTube ads. Combine that with a healthy Patreon and it’s no wonder why YouTubers are still able to do so well despite Google infamously difficult behavior.
I would be more accepting of ads in general if:
1 - they were all served from the primary websites server - eg yahoo blaming third party ad servers for injecting virus scripts and taking no responsibility is not okay with me.
2 - I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level, not just browser level.
3 - no flashing animated ads on static text pages. I am amazed at some pages I see trying to read 6 sentences and instead I get three at a time with 3 moving ads taking up most of the space.
Obviously it'd be fine to have moving ads during a 'commercial break' in a video.. but overlay a banner over it or next to it and having it moving is just wrong imho.
I didn't use youtube much at all for a long time, but have recently trained the thing to give me interesting videos about CSS, new tools like framer io, clickup, AI, 'productizing' and other helpful content is now available to me easier now..
So if I could not block ads on youtube now, I would have to pay the $12 for premium if that's what it costs.. I would suggest having a checkbox to add in a $5 bucket for tips to content creators and give a way to tip multiple of 10 cents or something - as I would like to support some of the folks adding value to the platform, and I'm guessing going 12 premium wouldn't help them much if at all.
A few days ago I brought up some lists of 'YT watch history' - it's a decent amount for me the past few months - if 2 minutes of time was added to each one, and I had an employer, that company would be burning a fair amount of money for me to wait for ads each week at this point.
I also worry that ads at beginning of videos can be unfair when it seems a good percentage of videos I click then skip into a bit and find that they are not what I was expecting / hoping for and the click itself, 3 second buffering, and 2 second seek - were a huge waste of time, I can't imagine getting hit with added ads in those equations.
> I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level
???
(I'd see a fair amount of offers from lesser known entities offering to place flash ads on sites for a few hundred a month back in the day, I'm sure it's still a thing using javascript and similar these days, I've seen things flagged from sites that host video files lately)
There's been malware ads served from yahoo dot com - that were injected by a third party server - I think the details show they fake the ad for X city where XY company is located and server the viruses to other cities.. this is also sketchy for data tracking (outside jurisdictions?) and other issues.
> I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level -
I don't think it's right to serve ads for alcohol to people that do not want them, same with gambling and similar - think about it this way, the technology exists to push weight loss, abilify, and other drugs to people who have been flagged as depressed, we should be able to prevent ads in the same way.
I've seen opt-out of ad networks by going to a site and checking off tracking / targeted marketing / remarketing from a, b - z networks - but these I believe add a cookie to the browser you are using - so you opt out of targeted ads in that one browser on that one device
- I think people should be able to sign a document online and opt out of gambling, drugs, sugar, alcohol, and many other types of ads if they want to block them, and it should be via ip address - so it's blocked on phones, chromecasts, vizio tvs, playstations, laptops, tablets - all the things that connect... the big ad networks should be able to handle this with minor code changes.
I have plenty of local storage. Moving forward, maybe good videos won't just go into a playlist with the assumption that YouTube will continue to be available.