Does anything at all run without JS these days? I swear all I wanted was to read a blog post, and it loaded more megabytes of JS than the text and pictures combined.
I ran Noscript about 10 years ago. At first I didn't notice any difference. Then, over a period of only a year or so, things started to break. I would notice that my friends' web experience seemed remarkably different to mine. Eventually I capitulated and enabled JS again. Seeing it all happen at one rather than at a trickle over time was quite shocking.
I still design web sites without JS first. In fact, I design them without even CSS. It's called progressive enhancement. Many of them have only a sprinkling of convenient but not necessary JS.
Pihole is only intercepting DNS resolve requests. Those only resolve the domain itself. If they don't use a different domain to serve ads, then it can't be blocked that way.
Got a pr about increasing the speed to 16x wonder if it's same person. I only set the ad speed for 10x, since it can access the skip button and do button.click() if there are longer adds.
Only note I have is I didn't get any warning to restart the browser, but it wasn't working I believe until I did. That could cause a few people to think it doesn't work and to uninstall. (I had a few tabs open I didn't want to close which is the only reason I noticed)
I got to say this arm race is interesting to watch.
I wonder if we'll reach a point where YT asks viewers to pass a captcha at the end of an ad to prove that they watched it before getting back to their video.
> I wonder if we'll reach a point where YT asks viewers to pass a captcha at the end of an ad to prove that they watched it before getting back to their video.
I built the industry first version of that product :)
Fun way to screw with Google is to pick the worst answer (haven't seen any of the products, worse impression of the brand, etc).
Advertisers are starting to try to measure advertising effectiveness (did the user actually see our ad and like our product) instead of easily game-able metrics (impressions, time on screen, click through).
However, we found that poor ad experiences would result in poor metrics. Advertisers really don't like it when they spend millions of dollars in advertising to get a report that says "your target demographic is less likely to consider your product now after seeing your ads".
I'm waiting for the end game where AI processes a native instance of the desktop and outputs a modified desktop according to criteria. Ads can be displayed and playing in the background but they get swapped by random gifs to fill time, dark ui patterns get identified and highlighted. Everything gets post processed sanitized on the final disaply layer with no interaction to the outside.
Eventually each ad has an embedded AI that must be run to see the content after the ad. That AI evaluates whether there's a human who looks and behaves like you watching the ad. The endgame requires your AI to do a convincing impression of you to the ad AI, and to hide other signals that would reveal you doing something else, like the sound of a flushing toilet.
When your AI is pushed by more advanced ad AI to be very convincing, it has to start purchasing things occasionally, just like a typical human. It occasionally buys the things in the ads, the way humans are expected to, to avoid revealing it's not you.
This spirals out of control when your AI has to buy more things than a human would, because the ad AIs co-evolve with your AI to expect that. It won't be possible for an ordinary human to watch content unless they run a highly-evolved adblocker AI that buys enough of the things shown by the ad AIs to satisfy the ad company.
You forgot the part where your AI evolves into a reseller of cheap ad-based products, which you order to satisfy the ad AI — bringing the entire AI ecosystem into a large MLM scheme.
Probably the farthest it'll go is YouTube stitching ads into the videos and not serving all the bits in advance, kinda like cable TV. And the answer will be like a VHS or DVR, where you can only skip ads if you're ok waiting.
I suspect that, too. I got two weeks of anti-ad blockers that required refreshing uBlock Origin. Then all anti-adblock messages stopped. Maybe Portugal has low priority. As far as I can see, practically no one will pay for Youtube Premium here.
Google has announced it will shut down Manifest V2 in June 2024 and move on to Manifest V3, the latest version of its Chrome extension specification that has faced criticism for putting limits on ad blockers.
Manifest V2 is the old model. The Chrome Web Store no longer accepts Manifest V2 extensions, but browsers can still use them. For now. Manifest V3 is supported generally in Chrome 88 or later and will be the standard after the transition planned to take place in June 2024.
Most adblocker users are unaffected because it's only had a limited rollout. I've both been affected and unaffected using same software in an inconsistent way.
I find it interesting that people don't tout the same logic to Windows: paying through the nose to get the enterprise version gets rid of of Microsoft's dirty widgets and spam. But somewhat paying Google is OK, paying Microsoft is no-no.
The only times I've put up with ads so far is when casting to my TV.
I don't mind the ad recommendations on home and after a video, but having to watch an extended ad or 2 before a video, and continuosly throughout the video, is enough for me to get off YouTube as an entertainment platform.
Still useful for tutorials, but that much advertising makes the experience completely unenjoyable. Doubly so if the ad has to be "skipped" or else will run for 3 minutes, and I'm in the middle of something with hands occupied (cooking, working out...)
Am in the same place... I consume YouTube on my SmartTv (native app on LG WebOS).
Am contemplating buying a Chromecast with Google TV, and installing SmartTubeNext on it, just so I can escape the ad barrage:
- 2 ads on video start, unskippable
- multiple (at least 2) 2 ad breaks during even a 10 minute video, almost always unskippable.
And the worst thing? It's the same 5-10 ads that you get!... they rotate in and out on a weekly basis, but the sensation is you see the same frickin ones over and over again!
I don't work in marketing, but if I ever get to speak to someone who does, I'll definitely tell them that repeatedly seeing your ad will definitely put me off your client's product, even if it is the best choice on the market.
I already own a Chromecast Ultra, but it sits unused for more than a year now.
I'll never get YouTube Premium. I (maybe) can afford it, but it's too much for what I get in return.
There is a saying in marketing, I forget the specific words, but it can take up to 5 repeated views of the same ad for someone to make their mind up about buying a product.
It can be much worse. The NHL used to play the same ad, many many times throughout a game, often multiple times in a row. They would also play that same ad for the entire season. We used to watch with remote in hand at all times, ready to mute at any moment. I honestly considered it inhumane. Thankfully ESPN handles games now and they are much more "normal" on how they do ads.
you spend so much time on YouTube that you feel the need to hack together an ad skipping solution by plugging stuff into your TV and installing dubious sounding software. Just do a simple math of watch time in hours / per month (youtube provides these metrics), take around 10-15% of that time as ad time, multiply by your calculated income / hour and you'll be surprised by how much value there is in premium.
I was watching my kid use YouTube, and literally every time she's shown an ad on TV, quick as lightning, she goes into the menu that handles complaints about the ad and tells it "never show me this ad again". Which also ends the ad break.
I don't get why people have no problem paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc but are so stubborn about YouTube in particular, when myself and I know many others watch more YouTube than any streaming service.
Even when ad blocking extensions work, it's only for browsers. If you're on Android you can install hacky modified apks, but YouTube breaks them every once in a while and then you're waiting for an update and having to go through some patching process again (I have to do this with YouTube Vanced to watch YouTube on the cheap Kindle Fire I use exclusively for YouTube in bed). If you're watching on a smart TV YouTube app or Apple TV or something... I assume there's options, but you're again gonna be wasting so much time on maintenance and keeping things up to date in the ad-blocking arms race, I'd rather just pay. And I don't know why anyone should expect YouTube to be infinitely ad-free and payment-free forever. All that storage and data transfer ain't free.
Far from it that I'll defend Google, but I don't know what's so special about YouTube where it's the one service people use more than anything else they pay for, but they won't pay for it.
Even with YouTube Premium, many YouTube videos contain sponsorship messages within the video. I know they're there for reasons, but having two types of advertising does make YouTube different than Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ etc.
One of the episodes of Stranger Things took like a one-minute break to do a soda ad. Probably the most jarring and disruptive “produce placement” (but really, it was more of an embedded ad) that I’ve seen.
I don't know who Olivia Coleman is, but I've seen stuff this blatant on Netflix. There was a reality show where they go looking for antiques and hidden gems in old barns. But on the way, they got real hungry and had to stop for a delicious SubWay™ sandwich, featuring this limited time promotional menu item that's amazingly tasty and filling.
I’m with you. I get a lot of value out of YouTube, mostly consume though the TV app. I pay for YouTube premium.
What is really annoying is the mobile app. The mobile app is constantly pushing shorts on me, I have no interest, that’s not why I use YouTube and if I only used the mobile app I don’t think I’d pay and instead use YouTube less. The mobile app Home Screen is junk content for me now where as the TV app brings relevant longer content…although they are sneaking in one or two shorts.
Netflix invests in content creation, as do other streaming platforms. YouTube piggybacks it's business on amateurs, largely paying them with "exposure" and some fractions of a cent per view.
> I don't get why people have no problem paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc but are so stubborn about YouTube in particular, when myself and I know many others watch more YouTube than any streaming service.
I never used any of these platforms, but I can guess the reason: these platforms were always paid, which sets the expectation that one has to pay to get access to them. YouTube, on the other hand, has for a very long time been available as non-paid (and even logging in is optional, with rare exceptions). Furthermore, YouTube has for a very long time worked even when the user has an ad blocker installed and enabled (few people customize their ad blocker; if they installed it because they were annoyed with DoubleClick animated ads, or with DoubleClick tracking their every move across the whole web, they won't care what else the default lists of their ad blocker blocks). People are used to viewing YouTube without having to pay, and if they use ad blockers, without ads (and people who are not used to viewing ads are going to be more annoyed at excessive ads then people who are already used to watching some ads). It's natural to feel some anger at the other party altering the deal, and having to pray they don't alter it any further.
And beyond that, it has always been socially acceptable to ignore and/or reject ads; I might be showing my age with these examples, but things like going to the bathroom during the ads, muting the audio, pausing the recording during an ad break (or fast-forwarding through them during playback), and so on, were always acceptable, and nobody would scream that you MUST watch the ads or you're stealing from the TV station. Why should YouTube be any different (and it even has "Tube" in its name to make the analogy stronger)?
Yeah I think youtube is well worth paying for. That said, there are other websites that immediately throw up anti-adblock gates asking for money before I've even read the site at all. I just instantly leave those sites.
No, I will not endure ads to "sample" your site. If you want to charge for it then great, I applaud you, but you need a way to let have a trial or some way to know if they want to sign up to pay, and also set the price right. Your little niche website is not the same value as youtube or netflix.
I don't want YouTube, I want the content. YouTube has the content it has because it's public.
Netflix et al are simple models: they pay upstream providers like Hollywood studios for works and they charge viewers to access them. It is a private space; it's like showing a film in a cinema. They get to charge access, but they also have to pay for the films.
YouTube doesn't pay upstream providers anything, nor do they produce anything (of worth) themselves. They get their content for free because they are a public space. It's like a town square: they get performances for free, but they don't get to charge access.
Except they do want to charge access. In other words, they want to have their cake and eat it too.
I'm not a compulsive viewer. It's simply not worth it to me to pay a subscription fee for something I use sporadically. That's why I don't pay for Netflix etc. or any other subscription I don't get value from.
A pay by usage model I would be more likely to get behind. In fact, I already do pay some uploaders via Patreon. But I would also expect to be able to download the videos and play them on repeat without incurring extra costs (after all, it's a waste of bandwidth to watch stuff on repeat and I have my own storage space). This way I could also be sure my payment is going towards worthwhile contributions and not the brain rotting garbage they seem to want me to watch.
I don't understand why this is any different than adblock. If this is an effective, client-side means of defeating ads, and Youtube has an effective way of defeating client-side prevention methods, then isn't this just going to be patched in the same way as adblock?
Said differently, this is clearly an arms race. I have more trust in uBlock winning an arms race than any other extension. If it fails then I don't believe any other will succeed.
One endgame is ad-blockers just blank the video and mute the sound in an undetectable way. Given the negative spiral that modern Internet usage often is, a moment of quiet to breathe and maybe break the cycle I would welcome.
Speaking of enshittification, whatever happened to imgur? That image does not load directly despite being a deep link. Plus it’s so low resolution the text is unreadable! I guess they are one step away from just taking down the http server altogether and just forcing everyone into their app which will connect via some proprietary protocol.
That's interesting. It loads directly for me and the quality seems fine. I have experienced the issue you're describing when attempting to direct link to Reddit images lately, though. I wonder why we're experiencing differences?
I dunno.. I open the link I posted in a private Chrome browser instance as well as Edge and in both cases it opens directly to it without showing the imgur branding around it
There's a bunch of hypothetical takes on this, but currently youtube already has ads that won't get away without interaction.
In particular, ads can get stacked if the user doesn't skip, and they get two or three ads where they would only have gotten one if they skipped the first. Then some of the ads will stop at the last frame (I think I saw that on mobile game ads that have a store button ? didn't pay attention so might be mistaken though) until the skip button is pressed.
I think the only question for Google is how much advertiser will pay to annoy their users and when will a user just give up and do something else (I'm with you on the moment of quiet: having ads show up is a good sign to close youtube and go do something else)
I think I'm just biased because I built an extension a decade ago that made YouTube a better music player. It flew under the radar for a couple of years, then got popular, then I got C&D'ed and lawyered into the dirt [1][2].
It makes me sad watching people get excited about releasing their totally new, innovative YouTube extensions as if this is a welcoming space.
These extensions don't exist because they get destroyed not because it's a space ripe for innovation.
probably more effective than trusting ublock is to find an obscure method. ublock is too much of an easy target for google. on the flipside, something obscure is possibly harder to trust
The ad blocker arms race is still a victory for the companies. The average user is going to get tired of fighting the constantly changing strategies and debugging why their latest combination of extensions isn’t working today despite working yesterday. Even if they can figure it out half the time, that still means they’re watching 50% of the ads instead of 0%.
I also see many people capitulating, especially among my peers who realize that spending potentially hours every month keeping up with the latest adblocker tricks is not a good use of their time relative to the trivial amount of money they’re saving on YT premium.
The die hards will always fight this battle and don’t seem to care how much effort it takes. Some people derive a sense of satisfaction from gaming the system or “winning” against corporations. They all have their justifications, but it doesn’t matter much.
As long as it’s sufficiently annoying to deal with, the number of people fighting it and succeeding will be negligible small. The problem was when as blockers were so easy that they jumped from a small number of techie users and started catching on among the general public. Once an ad-supported company starts seeing a significant number of users evading the ads and also refusing to pay, they have to do something.
Definitely. The next phase is an AI agent "watching" (through the "analog hole") if necessary and applying computer vision systems to detect and remove ads.
YouTube Premium is a top 5, maybe top 3 subscription service that I pay for. Others in that tier would be Amazon Prime, Apple One+, NYT Crosswords, and 1Password.
Watching on every device without praying that this week’s ridiculous workaround continues to function for only like $15/month feels like a bargain.
Remember folks... when running away from a bear you don't have to outrun everyone, just the slowest person
And similarly, to get people or organizations to pay, you just have to make it much more expensive for them at every moment to hack or fork your service than just pay you. It gets harder the bigger the organization is, but works like a charm on the long tail!
If you've got an open source platform, it's a major consideration because a competitor can just fork your service and start offering it. So you have to have enough of a network effect and lock-in (e.g. ethereum nodes only taking ethereum gas as payment) that the fork is not as accepted for years, despite being faster and better (e.g. polygon). You can centralize trust (Amazon), Liquidity (exchanges) and ease-of-use through vertical integration (Apple).
Same. I figure that since I watch this much YouTube, it’s probably worth paying for. At the moment, the rev share seems to be _okay_ compared to other creator platforms, so I take that bit of solace as well.
Is it too expensive today? If not, sign up and then cancel when it gets too expensive. Plus at work, I get a raise every x months nowadays, too. Gotta spend it on something.
I wouldn't be able to enjoy my usage of it. I have a strong moral objection to ads, so to me paying to get rid of ads is akin to paying off the bully so they will stop beating you up. Next week they might decide you haven't paid enough, or that it doesn't even matter that you paid up -- they're bored and want to beat someone up.
I'd rather give the bully a whack in balls instead.
Asking people to provide compensation for a service isn't bullying. They even give you a choice on how you pay. You hate ads, they give you an option to avoid them and now you hate paying to avoid them. You're trying to makes yourself sound self righteous and you just sound like you believe you are entitled to others resources.
I'm not trying to be righteous, my moral compass is mine.
I'd be fine with YouTube being a purely paid service. Either pay, or the server returns a 500. I might even be willing to pay for it then, knowing that the only ads i might encounter are sponsor segments in the video themselves (that i can also skip right on by.)
Yes because they are inconsistent with the actions of a moral position you claim and entirely consistent with the actions of someone doing something for financial reasons.
Except it's not a service that costs much money to run, so much as it is a giant silo exploiting the fact that lots of video is uploaded there. Don't you remember YouTube in 2005 before Google's purchase? It made ends meet all by itself, apparently.
OK, video quality is higher now but, but they could make the lower-quality video freely accessible -- and so could lots of other possible video-upload sites without charging $15. The value-add is not why you're paying $15.
No it didn't make ends meet it raised something like $35m from vc and was running at a loss of around $1m a month which is why they were so quick to sell to Google despite the growth.
They also started ads in 2006 before Google bought them
> Don't you remember YouTube in 2005 before Google's purchase? It made ends meet all by itself, apparently.
They were burning VC funding the whole time. Youtube didn't become profitable until a few years ago even with Google ads being there it took that much scale and added ads for them to start breaking even on it.
Bullshit. They're the ones who think themselves entitled to our attention.
No one "asks" people to see ads. They're the ones who show ads to people in the most underhanded, intentionally attention grabbing manner possible. When you are charged a price, it's obvious and they are up front about it. Meanwhile in advertising land they make it a point to hide the ads in prose so you don't even know you're being manipulated, the videos cut into the ad abruptly so you can't react and it's not like links have big signs in them warning you about ads inside.
Charge people money up front. If you send us ads, we'll delete them. Our attention is not currency to pay for services with.
You're being entitled to their services. They give you a way to avoid ads and still compensate them. If you don't want to do that it has nothing to do with ads you are just a leech.
Leech? That's funny. You wanna take a peek at the numerous accounts under my name?
Maybe stop offering some bullshit "free" tier before expecting people to pay you. Because that's what ad-supported YouTube is: free. It's absolutely free for everyone. They just happen to send you noise alongside the signal. Easily filtered out.
Not to mention the fact Google's still extracting value out of you via surveillance capitalism. Better pay for the creator's patreon instead, that's a perfectly ethical way to make money.
Yes a leech. They give you the option of paying with money or attention. If you choose neither but still use their service you are a leech.
It's not free, they've made that clear, just because you are able to take something without paying doesnt make it free. You can justify being a leech all you want it doesn't impact me because i neither work for YouTube nor produce content for it but it also doesn't change what you are.
Okay, paypig. I don't have to "justify" anything. I'm not obligated to watch ads, it's that simple. If they don't like that, they better have their server return 402 Payment Required instead of a free video. Otherwise I'm gonna be right here making full use of those servers as much as I want. And if they send me ads I'm deleting them. And if they block my ad deleter, I will delete their blocker. And I won't lose a second of sleep over it.
You complain about them feeling entitled to use your computer how they want while trying to justify doing the same thing to them. You are a cheap hypocrite trying to build up your actions into some kind of noble cause when the reality is you just want something for free. You want to leech. You call me a paypig but I just believe in supporting the people providing me value because i understand that someone has to or the services go away and people like you exist harming the common.
As the parent pointed out, there's a simple way for Youtube to deal with me "feeling entitled to use their computer" -- either don't make your computers publicly available via a standard web api, or return the appropriate response via that standard web api, which would be an HTTP error code.
When the server returns a 200 and the video to my request of 'video for free please', that is them choosing to accept my request for the video. Just as the common refrain goes that 'if you don't like ads, you can just not use Youtube', the argument that 'if Youtube doesn't like me blocking ads on my computer, they can just not serve me the videos' applies equally.
You are proposing making the internet worse to try and justify your leeching. They give you a way to use there service with out ads and magically you have an excuse not to do that to. You are a drain, if you're happy making the world worse that is on you mate but stop trying to make it into some holy noble cause. You're just being cheap and selfish.
I appreciate seeing your argument devolve down to just a personal attack instead of actually addressing the points I raised. I feel much more intelligent after this conversation with you.
You raised no points. You said you don't like ads. It was pointed out you can pay to not see ads and you said that was just as bad(because reasons? You're morally opposed to ad based systems but you aren't opposed enough to stop propping YouTube up with traffic. Your morals stop exactly where they would start to inconvenience you, they are pretend). And that if they really want you to compensate them for taking their resources they should make the internet worse by making it impossible for anyone to choose viewing ads over paying. You're selfish and trying to find a way to justify it that doesn't boil down to selfish and cheap and you won't find it because that is literally your only justification.
> I feel much more intelligent after this conversation with you
You're welcome. Hopefully you'll feel like being less of a leech too.
They are in that paid traffic is essential for them but I don't directly receive income from ads for any of them. At least not in a way that an ad blocker would negatively impact my income.
First I'm a leech, now I'm a literal cracker who hacked his way into the trillion dollar monopolist corporation's servers and forced them to serve me videos at their expense. Even mined some Monero on their data centers while I was at it.
Are you for real my man? I'm not even gonna read the rest of your comment.
Sure thing, paypig. Pay them some more, maybe the trillion dollar corporation will finially notice that you exist. When they put ads in the paid service tier.
I've been reading HN since around that time, and it's hasn't made me sympathetic toward VC. If anything it's hardened my views against consumption, greed and advertising.
"I gave my product away for free, bundled it with some garbage no one cares about because they paid me to do it and am now angry because people are throwing the garbage in the trash where it belongs and the garbage men don't want to pay me anymore."
Even more so. You gave me a product, and I took parts of it and threw it away. Once you gave it to me, your right to define what I do with it ended in my mind -- or to put it more concretely for Youtube, you sent me the bytes, I ignored some of them. That is my right and prerogative as the owner of the computer. Don't want me to ignore any of the bytes, don't send me any of them.
Exactly. We own the machine, in its realm we are gods. We dictate what it does or doesn't do. If it is our will that ads not be displayed on our screens, then by god it's not going to happen.
It's actually offensive that these corporations even think they have any say at all about what goes on in our machines. The nerve.
I'm more offended at the people that support said corporations -- I can understand the profit motive for the corporation, but not prostrating yourself to them. To think that it should be okay to be forced to pay a month sub to a megacorp to control what I do with my computer, my hardware...is unappealing.
Refined these over years here by discussing the subject with like-minded people. I always post smaller versions of it when people start trying to shame us for not tolerating ads.
> Always nice to find like-minded people on this site.
There might even be more than two of us! HN unfortunately due to it's inherent bias (vis-a-vis their origin/benefactors/audience) will tend to skew a little more against this train of thought.
> You might enjoy this mantra I like to recite in every ad blocking thread:
I agree with the vast majority, but some of the phrasing I think betrays a certain militantness on the issue that might turn people off. Specifically, your point about it being mind rape. I agree with the point you try to make with that, but that can conflate it with some other unsavoury topics that make it easier to try to attack your argument. The way I see it, it's not quite mind rape, but it is assault and battery on the dignity of the human mind.
I'm happy to pay for it, but I don't always want to be logged in and gave an echo chamber created for me. When I'm not logged in, I don't want to watch ads
I don’t mind giving money in exchange for useful services. I pay for YouTube because I recognize they need money through some channel, and I’d rather I just be up front and pay them for their service. Likewise I pay for Kagi, protonmail, Disney+, arstechnica, and a small variety of other service and media providers that provide value to my life. In fact, I would always rather pay up front than have them figure out some way to exploit me to fund their operations.
I don’t mind they offer alternative ways of monetizing than a subscription. A lot of folks can’t afford to pay like I can. But I deeply value the option to pay.
I’m not a fan of ad blocking on services you use that offer a pay option. I am fine with blocking in general, but if they offer the chance to just give them your money and you can afford it, you should. Every service should offer a chance to just give them your money instead of data harvesting and ad spamming as the only option.
I’m a huge supporter of open source and free software for over 35 years now, but people who make a living off their software, media, art, music, etc, should be supported as well. There’s nothing wrong with making a living doing what you love, but there’s something wrong with expecting people to give you their labors and services for free.
> Where is the eula that spells out in simple language the details of the devil’s bargain that these data thieves offer?
GDPR means all tracking is overt. I have a page where I can see all the things Google tracks about me and what they are used for and I can disable different categories such as location or watch history or search history or browsing history etc.
I mean, there are not workarounds every week. Since Google announced their war on adblockers, I've had to update the 'quick fixes' filter in uBlock Origin exactly once. That's it.
I just wish I could convince Google that I will never buy certain products that they force feed me ads on continuously. No, I will never buy a Chromebook, so please stop putting that ad everywhere. No, I am not going to switch to an Android phone either.
I bought my current car only because I was able to block the car maker being stupid and force me to watch their ads on Youtube. I didn't use ad-blocker before but interruptive video ads were the last straw for me.
We need to kick this up a notch, with automated recognition of the advertiser and either complaint letters generated to their sales team email addresses, a media regulator, or for those with physical stores, geofenced notifications on your device to remind you how intrusive the brand has been/directions to the nearest competitor's store at the tap of a button.
You can absolutely advertise on an intrusive platform, but as consumers, we can aggressively boycott/make your marketing work against you.
But there are oodles of other things that I would consider buying! They'd do better with random ideas for Christmas gifts for family members, which would be nice given that it is the season...
Why don’t people just not use YouTube if they don’t like the ads? Simple.
Peertube is there for those folks. People keep whining about the monopoly but won’t go to another service to help grow it.
People also whine about sponsor ads, as if you have to watch those videos or those channels. Don’t consume their content if you don’t like it.
At the end of the day, if you don’t want to be tracked, hate ads and hate Google the solution is simple: stop using YouTube.
The anti Facebook people understand this, which is why we don’t see incessant posts about facebooks anti-Adblock on HN. The kind of people on HN who hate Facebook probably just don’t visit the site at all. Same with Reddit vs mastodon. Twitter vs threads. Quora vs ChatGPT.
Anti YouTubers seem unique in their constant whining yet reluctance to stop using what they hate.
>Why don’t people just not use YouTube if they don’t like the ads?
Simple: the videos they want to watch don't exist elsewhere. PeerTube doesn't help you if nobody you watch publishes to it.
I use PeerTube, I run my own instance. PeerTube really sucks compared to YouTube. Even with all of the enshittification and google crippling the service, the quantity, quality, and discoverability of videos on YouTube has no comparison at all anywhere.
People use YouTube for the reason they use anything: there simply is no viable alterative.
Whining at people to use PeerTube doesn't help. You have to convince people to publish there before anyone can use it.
Because these websites create expectation. If everyone is using YouTube, won't you be missing something by not going? If you started using the service when you felt it was great and it deteriorated since, would it really be unfair to feel a sort of betrayal?
You should go tell drug addict to just stop, not that hard. Maybe also to everybody complaining about house pricing, after all our ancestors build theirs with log and dirt why would you need something else.
And surely it's self evident that if everyone blocked ads, the service would stop functioning?
So all this is about being the "Special Few" who can get away with it, despite often positioning themselves as the Moral Choice because the adverts are bad.
I’m oddly OK for now with the pop up. Still would rather it to an ad. Makes me reflect on if I really want to have surfed to where I am. And I find myself moving on or seeking elsewhere.
This may all change. But the friction\value trade offs are a bit ‘shrug’ for me. Maybe instant video is still novelty and waiting a few seconds to see it, isn’t so different.
I think it's odd that YouTube hasn't simply proxied the ads into the same stream to make them indistinguishable from the video. Technically the browser is pulling chunks of video from their servers, and the ad content is pulled from different servers which ad blockers restrict. If the ad chunks weren't identifiable, there would be no practical way of blocking them. It'd be like removing commercials - or those in-video sponsorship segments - from a live broadcast.
It seems YouTube is creating an arms race with ad blockers and alienating users by threatening bans than simply changing the way the ads are served. Yes, there's a whole industry around bidding for, dynamically serving and tracking ads using VAST and all that, but I'm positive Google has the market power to change that.
One small reason is they use ads as "payment" for things. Scrubbing through a video looking for a certain spot will require you to watch an ad almost every time you stop scrubbing. They also make you watch an ad if you pause the video for too long. When you unpause it, it immediately jumps into an ad. That's on top of the mid ad breaks the video already has.
The hardest part would be to redesign the video play UI to ensure timestamp references still works and the progress bar is user friendly. Live video streaming is a harder problem to solve than injecting ads in a video and they already do that, so the technical parts aren't hard for them to do at all.
There is an entire ecosystem built up around youtube timecodes as bookmarks.
If you simply bake an add in I'm guessing it would massively messup those bookmarks.
> I think it's odd that YouTube hasn't simply proxied the ads into the same stream to make them indistinguishable from the video.
I would assume they do this for caching and personalization. Presumably, YouTube can make more from personalized ads. However, if they embedded these ads in the main video stream caching would be more challenging.
I don't think he's referring to actually baking in the ads into the video stream, but rather just having video URLs transparently redirect to ad content.
So for instance, if normally the first 100 bytes of the video (as fetched via yt-dl) are like "googlevideo.com/gibberish-id?signature&rage=0-100", then you could transparently insert an ad into the next 100 bytes by making "googlevideo.com/gibberish-id?signature&rage=100-200" return the ad. Of course this makes the serving logic much more complicated, so it's probably why they don't do it. You'd also have to appropriately cut on a keyframe, muck around with muxing so things splice properly, and so on.
Another possibility to enforce that ads are seen (or at least things are appropriately delayed) is to simply only return video URLs if there was a "pingback" that an ad was seen. So if you serve a 10 sec ad, but the user requests a video URL before the 10 seconds are up, just reject it. This requires a bit more logic on the serving end to track state, but is easier than the previous proposal.
YouTube premium is one of the best value purchases I’ve made. If you subscribe to Netflix you’re probably better off canceling that and replacing it with YouTube premium. Also, you can get the family plan for not much more and share with your parents and siblings (or in-laws!)— they will be very appreciative if they watch YouTube and don’t already have premium. It’s not just for skipping ads, it also lets you download videos locally on your phone and the audio continues in the background when you switch to another phone app.
Really? No ads baked-in into videos by the creators? I.e. those skipped by another add-on, sponsorblock?
> and I support creators.
Are you sure about that? Why do they need to put their own ads into videos then?
By paying Netflix, Amazon Prime, or other streaming service, you surely would: Netflix and Amazon have to pay for the content. But Youtube? They get it for free.
> my conscience is clean,
But your privacy-awareness should be on alert. For YouTube premium, you have to be logged in. You can bet, that Google profiles you based on what you watch. They just don't show you the ads right on the YouTube, but surely they do elsewhere on their network.
Think of it like browser equivalent of the smart tv connected to net.
> Really? No ads baked-in into videos by the creators? I.e. those skipped by another add-on, sponsorblock?
Sponsorblock, yes.
> Are you sure about that? Why do they need to put their own ads into videos then?
For the people who use ad-blockers. Not me specifically and youtube doesn't provide a functionality to skip certain parts on paid views.
> But your privacy-awareness should be on alert. For YouTube premium, you have to be logged in. You can bet, that Google profiles you based on what you watch. They just don't show you the ads right on the YouTube, but surely they do elsewhere on their network.
I use kagi (paid), and ad-blockers for everything else.
I can live with google having access to my [poor] music taste and view history.
Same here. No hassle whatsoever. I cannot remember seeing an ad for years now, honestly, I do not get the discussion about blockers when you have everything via Premium. I use YT a lot, more often than Apple Music for example.
This is disingenuous and inaccurate. YouTube had no ads in 2005 or 2006. Further, YouTube ads in 2007, 2011 and today are not really even in the same category.
I follow a bunch of developers and engineering channels on it and I learn a lot of stuff on YouTube in general.
A couple of years ago, after running AdguardHome on my network, I’ve noticed that YouTube ads became more and more aggressive and that was hard to unnotice since I mostly consume YouTube on mobile devices that don’t have adblockers. I just gave up and convinced myself that YouTube, of all the services, is the one that probably deserves my money, so here I am, paying for the student plan which is 6.99€ a month. Now, after almost a year of premium, it’s probably the only plan I could not give up along with Spotify’s. I’m not used to ads anymore, I listen to a lot of stuff in background mode and I love it more than before.
Only thing that got on my nerves is that they now decided that if you don’t activate watch history you’re not going to get a Home feed, which is crazy if you ask me.
How will you feel when YouTube introduces quick ads for premium users and longer ads for free users?
There's absolutely nothing stopping the arms race from continuing past the point which you are currently satisified.
Just look at Hulu, for example.
Also, it's ridiculous that YouTube was able to convince people it's acceptable to have audio pause when in the background. If YouTube on Desktop paused audio when the tab was not the active tab it would be fundamentally unusable.
How will you feel eating a potato chip tonight, knowing that next year they'll probably make the bag smaller and increase the price?
You're not locked into subscribing to YouTube until you die. This is a misunderstanding I see frequently among hackers. They also seem to think that changing the default web browser is equal in severity to building a battleship...
It doesn't mean I'm going to try and get everyone onboard with shrinkflation though. I'm not telling everyone "aye it's a part of life, accept receiving less so that stocks can trend upward."
It's good to have a healthy tension between consumer wants and corporate financials. If everyone stops using ad block today then Google reports one quarter of increased profits. Afterward, investors are normalized to that expectation, the fact everyone is watching ads is meaningless, and Google pursues whatever their next step is for squeezing blood from stone.
I want to live in a world where products are as good for me as possible without corporations going under. I do not want to live in a world where products are as poor as I'll tolerate just for profit maximization.
When prices kept rising on cigarettes it was easier to quit them for good. It's been many years now. I was and still am thankful for that pricing regime.
Lately I find I waste a lot of time "relaxing" on YouTube, but I've noticed it's become TV for me; a habit like smoking was. Sure, there's thought-provoking stuff on there, but that's not what seems to show up in my feed. It looks like cable TV. I suppose I have terrible viewing preferences. This is just my experience, of course.
So, I'm ready to kick the YouTube habit and to do more "pulling" of information. Having experienced what cable TV did (eventually throwing a huge amount ads into an expensive subscription) the new fee structure makes kicking the habit an easier, healthier, and more prudent choice. I think I know where they're heading.
I'm thankful for it, frankly. It's wind at my back to pull away from too much screen time. It'll be much easier to break the habit. I've paid enough by providing my viewing preferences anyhow. And when already-profitable monopolistic non-essential services start squeezing tighter, it's surprisingly refreshing to search for new pastures.
If/when Reddit kills "old" reddit, that'll be good too.
Absolutely infuriating that Youtube used to have background play as a feature for free and then decided to hide it away behind a paywall because they had to monetize it somehow.
They also decided to get rid of Google Play Music, one of the best music streaming platforms ever created, and replace it with Youtube Music - which is absolutely god-awful. I want to play music, not watch music videos, not be limited to what's on Youtube and upload my own music to stream...
Purely for removing background play alone, they don't deserve 15 dollars a month (or whatever they're charging right now)
I don't subscribe to netflix, though. I'm not a compulsive viewer. I just look up the occasional thing. It's not worth it to me, but I still don't want ads.
Just pay the $15 for the ad free version? The entitlement people feel for a free service that takes hundreds of millions of dollars in compute and human hours to run boggles me.
Don’t like ads? Don’t like subscription fees? Don’t like large tech companies? Great! Go to the library and check out a book.
They are entitled, but just like any commercial service this will just bloat to "ad lite" and then "full ads but you can still pay for it" - cable did the exact same thing.
It's already there, except the ads are baked into most content as "sponsored videos". They make it easy to skip over the ads (seriously, just fast forward 20-60 seconds depending on the video).
For better or worse, the vast majority of my media consumption is youtube these days and of all the subs I pay for, it's the one I get the most value out of. I don't get the cynicism.
For me personally it’s the way they’re bullying me to pay it. For years I wanted YouTube and Twitter to introduce a paid plan with less ads. And then they did, and immediately started harassing everyone who didn’t purchase it right away with ads every few seconds. It’s just rude and I don’t like being bullied into doing something.
What's the alternative here? Just offer the service with minimal ads and just hope people decide to sign up for the ad-free version - a value proposition that makes little sense since the ads are minimal?
They aren't bullying anyone. They are trying to make a business model work as efficiently as possible. Anything that relies on ad revenue is going to be predatory like this.
> And then they did, and immediately started harassing everyone who didn’t purchase it right away with ads every few seconds
Youtube premium has been a thing for 8 years now, you have had a really long time to start paying for ad-free youtube. You just didn't bother to even check if it existed until they started to push for it harder recently.
So you are a perfect example why they gave up and started becoming more aggressive now, its because it didn't work to just do it the way you think is "fair".
> Youtube premium has been a thing for 8 years now
Tell me you're from the US without telling me you're from the US.
> So you are a perfect example why they gave up and started becoming more aggressive now
They started rolling out aggressive ads before YouTube Red was available in my country to purchase. And by the way, I gave in and do pay for YouTube Premium currently.
But I still stand by my statement, because I see how bad it is on my second account. For decades, YouTube managed to show me a few ads before and after the video just fine. And suddenly it's literally every minute? I'm sure Google is struggling to make ends meet.
You could've started paying almost a decade ago. I've had Premium for as long as it's existed, even when ads were "tolerable." (It was never tolerable enough for me to be able to keep a few bucks.)
I think it's ridiculous that people are only now coming out of the woodwork saying things like "I would pay if they weren't forcing me into it" or "I would pay if it wasn't so expensive now" or "I just want to pay for ad-free and not YT Music".
It's been out for years, and it was cheap before; they even had Premium Lite for a while.
I’m fine with paying for this type of service,but the last thing I want to do is give money to YouTube so it can become an even bigger defacto monopoly.
You can do that through patronage, if you have the means. Advertising never leads to that. Every sector that depends on large numbers of people contributing a small fraction (like cinema or music) ends up turning into a race to the bottom, as appealing to the lowest common denominator is the most efficient way to succeed. The advertising internet model the epitome of that.
That is only true for the largest of brands. There are hundreds of thousands of niche youtube channels that makes their creators enough money to live on so that can now work full time creating niche content for their audiences, that wouldn't be possible without youtube ads.
So at least from we see on youtube the ads leads to more niche content, not less. There aren't enough payers to sustain that many niche channels.
Maybe. From what I've seen niche channels tend to have a Patreon or similar, so neither monetization model exists in a vacuum. It's true those niche channels exist thanks to YouTube, but if they were forced to rely uniquely on ads I don't think they would be able to survive without succumbing to trend-chasing, drama and formulaic routine videos, which is what big channels seem to do for the most part.
No. They're making my pay for the bundle of YouTube Music plus ad free YouTube. I'm happy with Spotify, I refuse to pay extra for a service I won't use.
If it was $10+$5 for YouTube+music, this thread would be full of people complaining that Google is nickel and diming them because there's already music on YouTube.com
I 100% guarantee you that eventually the $15 tier will have “limited” ads and then the upcoming $25 tier is ad free, rinse and repeat. It’s happened with cable, it’s happened with streaming, it’ll happen with YouTube.
Doubt it. Most streaming sites are still ad free and their prices only increased with inflation. Both YouTube and creators already get way more revenue from premium subscribers than ad watchers so I doubt that'll change this decade
US dollar inflation was 32.1% over the last decade.
Netflix increased their prices from $10/mo to $16/mo in 2011 and faced massive backlash with tech journalists praising Blockbuster and saying "Up until today, we loved Netflix":
Today Netflix charges $15.50/mo. The price rises and falls every 2 years and we get the same whining every 2 years: https://flixed.io/netflix-price-hikes
Why not pay people to watch the ads by a similar logic?
BTW, curious has anyone ever anywhere in the world, any media, tried creating a channel/stream which just shows ads and pays people if they watch? Wondering if that’ll work.
Also, I rarely watch YT, so for me personally $15 or whatever the price is, is too high.
Another thing, ad blockers also help in privacy. $15 may result in no ads being shown in YT, but does that also mean that Google is not collecting data? I’ll consider paying to Google for a no-data-collected mode.
I’ll pay for the ad free version when youtube stewards a responsible and accountable platform - both in moderating content and in proving transparent appeals instead of giving an open path for copyright trolls to harass and cause monetary harm to creators.
If you use YouTube at all then you're not at all concerned with "a responsible and accountable platform" you're just trying to justify leeching. If you were actually concerned about those things you'd avoid using them entirety. You talk about being concerned about YouTube causing monetary harm to creators but your own actions are causing them monetary harm by denying them any payment for their value provided to you. It's hypocritical.
I don't want to financially support every person that I happen to watch. Sometimes I am curious what propaganda scumbag right wing trolls are putting out. Viewing content I disagree with is the cost of staying informed. Doesn't mean I want those creators getting a cent. YouTube isn't getting any revenue from me (from advertising or subscription) until I can allocate exactly where my money goes.
So your statement is that "You cannot possibly be concerned about, and want something to be better, if you continue to use it."? Am I understanding that correctly?
My statement is that if you're really concerned about a service being a bad actor you would avoid it entirely to avoid propping it up at all unless it's an essential service.
I am concerned about the new management of Twitter so I deleted my account and stopped using the service. It's very empty to claim you won't pay for a service because you are morally opposed to their service while continuing to use said service.
How are you using the word “entitlement” here? A very small number of people are looking for technological solutions to block ads, presumably motivated more by the enjoyment of the intellectual pursuit than by the disdain of ads.
I don’t see any statements or actions even remotely hinting at feeling entitled to an ad-free viewing experience. They’re simply trying to figure out how to achieve an ad-free experience.
If someone locally modifies a website’s visuals to implement dark mode, would you lambast them for feeling entitled to dark mode?
I'm absolutely entitled to decide what content plays on mwy computer. They're also absolutely entitled to send me ads along with their content. What they're not entitled to is forcing me to see those ads.
The service has been free so far only because it allowed YouTube to get almost 3 billions of users and build a de facto monopoly. Now that they are the video platform, the enshittification starts. I don't see any downside in speeding up their ads: I'm not interested in rewarding their enshittification practices and I find it healthy to affirm, once again, that on my computer I play only the content I decide to play. If this hurts the business model of YouTube, good. Maybe it will help competition.
Can ad publishers filter out ad blocking users as not being their target audience? Forcing someone to watch your ad most likely triggers negative connotations about your brand.
I know there's lots of empirical studies and literature on this
I believe the rationale is even if say 90% of the viewers who wouldn't buy the product anyway are now less likely to buy the product, That's considered a zero.
However if you're positively influencing the purchasing decisions on that remaining 10%, then it might be money well spent.
Thus the advertising may not affect specifically you but because this is a broadcast style exposure, that doesn't matter
I think the logic is flawed in thinking this way too. Most products have an overwhelming amount of choice. If you are not in the market for that category of product then the advertisement is not aimed at you. Even if you were annoyed by the the advertisement at that particular moment in time, if you are ever in the market for that category of product then the product will have brand recognition over its competitors and that is what is so huge and valuable.
IMO it is quite like the classic example of the heuristic that there is no such thing as bad press.
I never bought an advertised product in my life. If any of the brands I buy starts advertising Im going to look for something else. I look for things, it’s not the other way around.
Some of the most life-changing products I own were shown to me in an ad. Might not have bought that exact item, but the knowledge of that type of product even existing?!
I suppose they're being a little hyperbolic but honestly plenty of folks just buy off brand generic products at ALDI. Pretty easy to avoid advertised stuff if you just shop at discounters. Popular here in Germany even among people who are well off.
Cudos for you. I try something similar, I do not buy a product if I believe I saw its ads. It is a light version of your strategy (I'm not going to watch ads to know what is advertised and what isn't), but even it doesn't work in all cases. For example, my cat eats advertized food now. Not all of it though, but dry food is advertized.
Yes but barely. I consider myself a person on whom advertising doesn't work. But then I would prefer international brands in an unfamiliar city simply because I'm getting exactly the experience or the product I already know. But IMO that's not because they advertise out of literally everything, it's because they're international, the consistency is one of the primary benefits of that. (although US McDonald's did disappoint me)
People just like to tell themselves it doesn't work on them because it makes them sound more intelligent. I've yet to actually meet a single person in my life that advertising didn't work on. You just have to talk them through how they decided on the things they own and before long they start to realise the truth.
If advertising gives people a negative association with a particular brand, I highly doubt it would increase the odds of those people making a purchase.
Otherwise, Firestone should have seen an increase in tire sales after all the free advertising they got on the news. Instead, though, Firestone tire sales fell off a cliff.
I recently threw away a coupon for a product specifically because I saw a few too many extremely annoying online ads for this product, and now I can't stand the brand. They poisoned my image of them.
Some ML likely doing this: they track your interests, for example you searched adblockers in the past, it goes as a feature to ML model, and model predicts that it is unlikely you will click and make purchase, and they will bid on you much lower, as result you will see lots of cheap junk Ads..
While reading your comment, I thought abouts ads for ad blockers like "hey, we noticed you searched for ad blockers so here are the top 10 best!". That's not a good idea though.
I wonder why you say that. At least an ad for a specific ad blocker sounds like a great idea.
- Ideally, you don't send ads to users of your product
- Users of inferior products will see your ad, and it might be super effective (if you used MY adblocker, you wouldn't be seeing this ad)
- Everything else is a user that doesn't have an ad blocker, and it's probably an easy sell to say "would you like to never see ads like this?"
This is one argument I've used in my head for ad blockers - you're removing hostile viewers so it might be a net win. It's like dropping flyers in a "no junk mail" box. I wonder if anyone studied it.
Advertisers would love to skip uninterested viewers, the problem is that someone else, in this case youtube, wants that money from the advertiser for your eye balls. I normally don’t mind the model of ads for free service but it’s a sewer of interminable garbage that is also dangerous to be exposed to (bad scripts and stuff).
> interminable garbage that is also dangerous to be exposed to (bad scripts and stuff).
Not really an issue with YT video ads though right? They're just annoying and too frequent but they're not really hazardous (beyond some cognitohazard of random crank stuff).
Ads drive consumerism which comes with a rather large pollution problem, making the only planet we can live on that we know of more and more uninhabitable.
Ads are only meant for certain groups of the population. That's why you never see ads for good products that you would actually want to buy – because people who buy those kind of products make informed purchases by comparing price, features and quality.
We could dream of an internet where companies would advertise their products on relevant videos and be done with that, but they probably won't increase sales that way. Because the audience would buy their product anyway if it fit their needs.
In 2023 there are two methods of marketing:
Method 1 is competing on price, features and quality. Customers will buy your product if it fits their wants and their budget.
Method 2 is advertising, where the product itself has little to no influence on sales. Certain groups of people will buy your product because you've made them feel they should.
I don't buy this theory, because in my job we get a lot of new customers every year, and we don't advertise. Other forms of marketing are just so much more effective. Putting your product out there is not the same as advertising, people can find your product by search engine or other means, and then if you compete on price, quality and features, the product is marketed by word of mouth.
Do products show up on your store shelves because the company did a ton of advertising and customers were begging the store manager to sell it? Usually not. Instead these are negotiations between businesses. How often do you see ads for new products, compared to products that have been around for decades?
The only situation were advertising is wise is when you have a product that is not different from your competitors product and you have a customer base that is ignorant, so that you have a lot of margin for advertising to get your stuff moved. Ignorant in this situation can mean just ignorant on the product category.
Running a website to get traffic from a search engine is advertising, it's just not directly paid advertising.
Products often show up on store shelves for two reasons. The product does independent advertising so the store knows it will sell or they advertise to store buyers.
If you think that is the only time advertising makes sense I'm going to assume your employer is very slow growing. Advertising pretty much always makes sense one you have protect market fit. I can't think of a single business that has that which would be worse off with advertising.
If we go down that path, then everything is advertising and the word means nothing. Your label is on your product? Guess that's advertising. But what purpose does word-wrapping have except shutting down conversation?
If advertising was a sure thing as long as you claim, then how come none of the ad sellers can guarantee sales? Until they offer a guaranteed increase in sales or your money back, I have a hard time believing the praise.
I think businesses severely underestimate word of mouth, and overestimate how effective their advertising was. That's understandable, since they don't want to feel like fools for having spent money on worthless advertising.
>Products often show up on store shelves for two reasons. The product does independent advertising so the store knows it will sell or they advertise to store buyers.
From what I know, products show up on shelves because the suppliers let the retailers know about their new products. It's not the store manager deciding to start selling the new Snickers flavour because he saw an ad on a bus stop.
Advertising is anything you do to try and increase the visibility of something.
No single ad is guaranteed and i never made that claim.
Word of mouth is great but an extremely slow way to grow a business and tends to geographically limit you and requires advertising first to get the initial clients.
> From what I know, products show up on shelves because the suppliers let the retailers know about their new products
I cover this scenario with the advertising to store buyers line.
Even if you make the perfect product, you may well have to spend a lot on advertising.
In Fintech, it feels like the first $5 of advertising per customer just goes to persuading them that you're not a scam.
Charities, travel services and perfumes have value propositions often hard to express. Perhaps a perfect communicator could get it across in a short essay, but most rely expensive ads.
There are some domains where customers are well educated & motivated to seek out better products, like consumer electronics & cars, but those are the minority.
I can't disagree with you on charities, since their business is literally begging for money. They're never going to have a "customer" recommending them to friends and family.
Travel and Fintech are products that are for everyone, so there will always be people interested in your stuff and then recommend to their friends if your product is good. Especially for travel, people are always seeking out new "products".
I think it's interesting that you brought up cars. In the past 20 years I've only seen two types of car ads: One is the stylish young woman going on a date, the second type is with young urban adults doing street dance and then the car flashes quickly in the end of the ad. Because advertising is only directed at certain groups. To normal people, these car ads communicate "We hate you" from the car company to the consumer, and would be a net negative for the brand. But since normal people are going to compare price, gas economy and features when buying a car anyway, this brand negativity doesn't mean much.
An interesting feature of car marketing is that - in general - it only targets new car buyers. These people are a relatively small segment of the driving population.
I wonder whether those groups you describe disproportionately purchase mass market new cars.
Those groups can mostly amount to less than 10% of prospective new car buyers, if I'm allowed to speculate. I think that almost everybody who is in the market for a new car will know several persons to give them recommendations and advice. So the ads will only be targeting some people who have a lot of disposable money and few real friends to help them choose a car, and no understanding to compare cars themselves. Maybe the children of rich careerists?
Or it could be that the advertisement and media industry have their heads too far up their own asses to care what they're doing. It certainly seems like this sometimes, when huge brands can destroy themselves permanently in a matter of days with out of touch advertising.
They probably don't. Forced ad viewing is fundamentally dishonest: they can force the user to watch the ad, but they can't force him to pony up for what is being advertised.
I would say Facebook ads have sold me on a few things. But they are not full page, I can easily identify them and move past should I chose and at times were actually relevant to what I want. How come YouTube ads try and push the dumbest shit on me when they have all my data and know all my searches yet I’m getting ads for stuff I would never buy. So I propose google cut back on some of the video ads, force the video being watched to slim up a bit while no video ads of relevance pop on on the side.
> Forcing someone to watch your ad most likely triggers negative connotations about your brand.
I will give up driving before ever purchasing anything from Liberty Mutual and I caution everyone who will listen that they are a shitty company who will grift you for your last cent precisely because of this. As if watching the same stupid ad for the millionth + 1 time will suddenly make me realize that I WAS WRONG and I CAN'T LIVE without their product.
This instantly loses the main selling point: Massive audience. If they manage to get 20% of people to pay (which would be huge) they'd lose hundreds of millions of viewers still.
There are so many people currently employed at Google whose livelihood (think mortgage payments, food, gasoline) depend on having a problem that they can work on but never solve.
If only regulatory bodies were as motivated in combating advertising’s huge data privacy issues inherent in RTB as Google are in beating down people trying to not have their data sent to hundreds of third parties without consent.
You're never going to capture the "will never watch ads" group.
What is being destroyed by YouTube's current policy that led to this anti adblock attempt, is pushing too far with the ads.
Crap quality and overstuffed.
A 5 second ad on a 4 minute video? Fine.
1:30 ad, one of TWO... on same video?
Fuck. That. Noise.
It's the same segmentation issue as piracy, y'all get hyperfocused on the group that will NEVER play ball, and ruin the experience so much for those that would, that they "swap teams".
That pretty much sums up my opinion, too. I'm happy to pay for my time and for convenience. If you violate either, that's on you. And let's be honest, losing access to most of YouTube is a rather miniscule loss.
If the USPS was never a public service America would literally look differently. Maybe social media(including YouTube) is the modern day USPS, the primary way Americans interact/communicate with each other.
I’m ready to pay about a $2 per month for YT as a paid service. Personally, paying more than $2 for a software makes me want to avoid using it completely.
If you use YouTube a lot, paying for no ads is a no brainer. I pay for YT premium, Apple News+, NYT, Kagi, etc. If you watch just a few videos a month, the price is just not worth it and there is no per-block pricing. Same goes for paid articles - I would have liked to read a few articles from TheInformation about OpenAI but there is no way I’d buy a subscription.
The library (and the books inside it) are paid for by taxes. The movies you watch at your friend’s house was paid for by your friend. How are you paying for YouTube?
The amount of effort people spend on these sophist explanations of why they don’t have to pay for the services they use is just amazing.
What's your stance on muting TV commercials, zapping to another channel when TV commercials start, using TiVo, using TV commercials for bathroom pauses?
> What is the stance of the people who work against the revenue generation of the services they consume?
Those services are fooling themselves.
Consider television. Is it immoral to mute the TV during a commercial? No. Is it immoral to go get up and get a snack or go to the bathroom during a commercial? No. TV advertisers have absolutely no expectation that TV viewers will watch their ads. So why's it that when it comes to internet advertising all the advertisers suddenly wring their hands and whine and moan about their poor business model? Ads are nonsense, I won't watch them, stop wasting my time with them, and if you want to cover costs for your service, charge me for the privilege to access it. In the meantime, if you're foolishly giving away something for free, I'm going to consume it without remorse.
The entire ad business model is nonsense, and it's not our responsibility as consumers to prop up the companies that have based their fragile fortunes on it.
'If I can consume the same service with no ads I will' is my stance I think.
I'm way more likely to donate to a channel I like than I am to put up with loud annoying obnoxious ads for things I'm never going to buy anyway if I don't have to.
There's one I like, or at least used to, King's Fine Woodworking, that.. I don't know he clearly has some setting enabled that others don't, that means his channel is plastered in text link ads that just make it look crap, and you have to scroll way down to get to 'Uploads' (vs playlists of old videos you've seen before). Ads cheapen every channel they touch, the more there are the worse it is. 'Creators' are better off focussing on direct monetisation imo. Or sponsored unbiased content, product reviews etc. where it is actually related to the channel. Not like VPNs or backup battery systems are everywhere.
You're not answering the question. Do you think Youtube should just be streaming to everybody for free? Do you think that's a sustainable business model?
No I don't, I just mean if the model is ads that's fine, but if it's possible for me to block them I will, because I don't want to see them and it's not illegal.
I do understand that means maybe they have to show more to people not blocking them, or start charging, or something. I'm not saying it should be provided free and adless, I'm just saying that doesn't matter, it's not the point, if it's free and can be adless then it will be. It's not my job to make sure it's sustainable by sitting through ads.
Yes. They were loss leader for more than a decade and killed all competition because nobody had coffers deep enough to fight Google.
Now because of their dominant position it’s impossible to migrate from it, because of network effect.
So f** them, not my problem. I’m willing to pay for stuff that I enjoy (old videos from 10+ years ago), I’m not going to pay for modern cancer (just open YouTube in incognito tab to understand what I mean).
I don't feel bad for blocking YouTube ads. Other sites tried a more sustainable subscription-based model and Google crushed them by running YouTube at a loss for years. They seem like very smart people that don't need my help to turn a profit.
> What is the stance of the people who work against the revenue generation of the services they consume?
Would the advertisers really want to pay for their ads to be shown to people who aren't interested in their products? Every ad view costs them money. (I know, there are also the advertisers who just want to spread their message and aren't selling any products..)
If the ads are actually useful to people, would they still jump through all these hoops to block them?
The ad supported model is only sustainable for the ad company if it is a win for both advertisers AND end users.
"You are not paying for the (premium) service, so we will degrade your service and force you to watch ads so we can pay our bills" is usually a sign that youtube is chasing after short term profits at the detriment of it's own advertisers / end users imo.
I know this is a little too simplistic and I don't have any real answers... but this is how i'm looking at this whole debacle.
First, there is the glaring ethical violation of writing software that deliberately works against the user's interest. In this case the Youtube player is not just playing the requested video, but also displaying ads, backhauling surveillance telemetry, and trying to lure users into the world of conspiracy tripe. It's unfortunate that software development has very little in the way of professional ethics and essentially relies on punk volunteers to counter the surveillance industry's continual aggression, but here we are.
Second, Youtube gained outsized winner-take-all popularity by the anticompetitive dumping of hosting and development effort at below the apparent cost. This created a simulation of the early Internet's liberating spirit while killing any competitors that could have been based around sustainable economics (ideally some combination of publisher hosting plus p2p). Blocking ads is continuing the relationship as Youtube created it.
Third, just fuck ads in general. The original post is a fun piece of art, but even seeing those three quick blips in the demo video was still an unneeded mental attack. The less I have to suffer and mentally repel corporate attempts at faking social proof, especially interruptive video/audio ones, the better my life is. If I could get AR glasses that blocked billboards, I would.
My only concern of Youtube somehow going out of business would be losing the back catalog, which I think is better served by independent archiving rather than framing business revenue as some kind of collective responsibility.
My stance is that ads don't work on me, so either YouTube or the advertiser is losing money on me, and they know it. Would rather choose the option that doesn't waste my time too.
I pay for plenty of things, but I'm not going to pay an advertising giant for anything. Google is an abusive, greedy company, and I'm forced to pay too many of those in the course of daily life as it is.
When I'm given the choice, I only pay companies that I respect. If they successfully block ad blockers, I'll mute the ads and do something else while they're playing.
I'm fine paying for YouTube as soon as it's not in Google's hands. Until then, I'd consider it an ethical wrong for me to pay for it.
722 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadI hate it when YouTube / Google needs to exploit everyone's data and privacy in order to make money.
They makes it a design point that Kagi should work even without javascript enabled.
I still design web sites without JS first. In fact, I design them without even CSS. It's called progressive enhancement. Many of them have only a sprinkling of convenient but not necessary JS.
They serve the ads from the same domain, as the site itself.
For twitter.com a filter option here on HN would be nice but a domain blocker might do.
Got a pr about increasing the speed to 16x wonder if it's same person. I only set the ad speed for 10x, since it can access the skip button and do button.click() if there are longer adds.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ad-accelerator/gpbo...
I was also surprised most of the downloads are from Japan
Only note I have is I didn't get any warning to restart the browser, but it wasn't working I believe until I did. That could cause a few people to think it doesn't work and to uninstall. (I had a few tabs open I didn't want to close which is the only reason I noticed)
Thanks for sharing the issue around installing, I haven't seen that one before but I'll see if I can reproduce & fix
I wonder if we'll reach a point where YT asks viewers to pass a captcha at the end of an ad to prove that they watched it before getting back to their video.
A: Louis Vuitton
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en
GPT-4 has entered the chat
Fun way to screw with Google is to pick the worst answer (haven't seen any of the products, worse impression of the brand, etc).
Advertisers are starting to try to measure advertising effectiveness (did the user actually see our ad and like our product) instead of easily game-able metrics (impressions, time on screen, click through).
However, we found that poor ad experiences would result in poor metrics. Advertisers really don't like it when they spend millions of dollars in advertising to get a report that says "your target demographic is less likely to consider your product now after seeing your ads".
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en
Eventually each ad has an embedded AI that must be run to see the content after the ad. That AI evaluates whether there's a human who looks and behaves like you watching the ad. The endgame requires your AI to do a convincing impression of you to the ad AI, and to hide other signals that would reveal you doing something else, like the sound of a flushing toilet.
When your AI is pushed by more advanced ad AI to be very convincing, it has to start purchasing things occasionally, just like a typical human. It occasionally buys the things in the ads, the way humans are expected to, to avoid revealing it's not you.
This spirals out of control when your AI has to buy more things than a human would, because the ad AIs co-evolve with your AI to expect that. It won't be possible for an ordinary human to watch content unless they run a highly-evolved adblocker AI that buys enough of the things shown by the ad AIs to satisfy the ad company.
Unless WEI becomes a thing.
Could this be a country-specific thing?
https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/
Firefox said it will adopt Manifest V3 in the interest of cross-browser compatibility.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes...
Manifest V2 is the old model. The Chrome Web Store no longer accepts Manifest V2 extensions, but browsers can still use them. For now. Manifest V3 is supported generally in Chrome 88 or later and will be the standard after the transition planned to take place in June 2024.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/decla...
I don't mind the ad recommendations on home and after a video, but having to watch an extended ad or 2 before a video, and continuosly throughout the video, is enough for me to get off YouTube as an entertainment platform.
Still useful for tutorials, but that much advertising makes the experience completely unenjoyable. Doubly so if the ad has to be "skipped" or else will run for 3 minutes, and I'm in the middle of something with hands occupied (cooking, working out...)
https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/
Am contemplating buying a Chromecast with Google TV, and installing SmartTubeNext on it, just so I can escape the ad barrage: - 2 ads on video start, unskippable - multiple (at least 2) 2 ad breaks during even a 10 minute video, almost always unskippable.
And the worst thing? It's the same 5-10 ads that you get!... they rotate in and out on a weekly basis, but the sensation is you see the same frickin ones over and over again! I don't work in marketing, but if I ever get to speak to someone who does, I'll definitely tell them that repeatedly seeing your ad will definitely put me off your client's product, even if it is the best choice on the market.
I already own a Chromecast Ultra, but it sits unused for more than a year now.
I'll never get YouTube Premium. I (maybe) can afford it, but it's too much for what I get in return.
You don't want to make inconveniencing you profitable for others.
Even when ad blocking extensions work, it's only for browsers. If you're on Android you can install hacky modified apks, but YouTube breaks them every once in a while and then you're waiting for an update and having to go through some patching process again (I have to do this with YouTube Vanced to watch YouTube on the cheap Kindle Fire I use exclusively for YouTube in bed). If you're watching on a smart TV YouTube app or Apple TV or something... I assume there's options, but you're again gonna be wasting so much time on maintenance and keeping things up to date in the ad-blocking arms race, I'd rather just pay. And I don't know why anyone should expect YouTube to be infinitely ad-free and payment-free forever. All that storage and data transfer ain't free.
Far from it that I'll defend Google, but I don't know what's so special about YouTube where it's the one service people use more than anything else they pay for, but they won't pay for it.
You can just tap right on your keyboard a few times to get past those anyway.
What is really annoying is the mobile app. The mobile app is constantly pushing shorts on me, I have no interest, that’s not why I use YouTube and if I only used the mobile app I don’t think I’d pay and instead use YouTube less. The mobile app Home Screen is junk content for me now where as the TV app brings relevant longer content…although they are sneaking in one or two shorts.
I never used any of these platforms, but I can guess the reason: these platforms were always paid, which sets the expectation that one has to pay to get access to them. YouTube, on the other hand, has for a very long time been available as non-paid (and even logging in is optional, with rare exceptions). Furthermore, YouTube has for a very long time worked even when the user has an ad blocker installed and enabled (few people customize their ad blocker; if they installed it because they were annoyed with DoubleClick animated ads, or with DoubleClick tracking their every move across the whole web, they won't care what else the default lists of their ad blocker blocks). People are used to viewing YouTube without having to pay, and if they use ad blockers, without ads (and people who are not used to viewing ads are going to be more annoyed at excessive ads then people who are already used to watching some ads). It's natural to feel some anger at the other party altering the deal, and having to pray they don't alter it any further.
And beyond that, it has always been socially acceptable to ignore and/or reject ads; I might be showing my age with these examples, but things like going to the bathroom during the ads, muting the audio, pausing the recording during an ad break (or fast-forwarding through them during playback), and so on, were always acceptable, and nobody would scream that you MUST watch the ads or you're stealing from the TV station. Why should YouTube be any different (and it even has "Tube" in its name to make the analogy stronger)?
No, I will not endure ads to "sample" your site. If you want to charge for it then great, I applaud you, but you need a way to let have a trial or some way to know if they want to sign up to pay, and also set the price right. Your little niche website is not the same value as youtube or netflix.
Netflix et al are simple models: they pay upstream providers like Hollywood studios for works and they charge viewers to access them. It is a private space; it's like showing a film in a cinema. They get to charge access, but they also have to pay for the films.
YouTube doesn't pay upstream providers anything, nor do they produce anything (of worth) themselves. They get their content for free because they are a public space. It's like a town square: they get performances for free, but they don't get to charge access.
Except they do want to charge access. In other words, they want to have their cake and eat it too.
I'm not a compulsive viewer. It's simply not worth it to me to pay a subscription fee for something I use sporadically. That's why I don't pay for Netflix etc. or any other subscription I don't get value from.
A pay by usage model I would be more likely to get behind. In fact, I already do pay some uploaders via Patreon. But I would also expect to be able to download the videos and play them on repeat without incurring extra costs (after all, it's a waste of bandwidth to watch stuff on repeat and I have my own storage space). This way I could also be sure my payment is going towards worthwhile contributions and not the brain rotting garbage they seem to want me to watch.
Said differently, this is clearly an arms race. I have more trust in uBlock winning an arms race than any other extension. If it fails then I don't believe any other will succeed.
Relevant green text: https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png
In particular, ads can get stacked if the user doesn't skip, and they get two or three ads where they would only have gotten one if they skipped the first. Then some of the ads will stop at the last frame (I think I saw that on mobile game ads that have a store button ? didn't pay attention so might be mistaken though) until the skip button is pressed.
I think the only question for Google is how much advertiser will pay to annoy their users and when will a user just give up and do something else (I'm with you on the moment of quiet: having ads show up is a good sign to close youtube and go do something else)
But the it ignores the fact that it may be able to work just because it's small.
It makes me sad watching people get excited about releasing their totally new, innovative YouTube extensions as if this is a welcoming space.
These extensions don't exist because they get destroyed not because it's a space ripe for innovation.
[1]https://thenextweb.com/news/how-youtube-killed-an-extension-... [2]https://imgur.com/15gaOf6
I also see many people capitulating, especially among my peers who realize that spending potentially hours every month keeping up with the latest adblocker tricks is not a good use of their time relative to the trivial amount of money they’re saving on YT premium.
The die hards will always fight this battle and don’t seem to care how much effort it takes. Some people derive a sense of satisfaction from gaming the system or “winning” against corporations. They all have their justifications, but it doesn’t matter much.
As long as it’s sufficiently annoying to deal with, the number of people fighting it and succeeding will be negligible small. The problem was when as blockers were so easy that they jumped from a small number of techie users and started catching on among the general public. Once an ad-supported company starts seeing a significant number of users evading the ads and also refusing to pay, they have to do something.
Definitely. The next phase is an AI agent "watching" (through the "analog hole") if necessary and applying computer vision systems to detect and remove ads.
Plugging directly into the computer as a separate device that emulates monitor, mouse and keyboard.
Watching on every device without praying that this week’s ridiculous workaround continues to function for only like $15/month feels like a bargain.
Remember folks... when running away from a bear you don't have to outrun everyone, just the slowest person
And similarly, to get people or organizations to pay, you just have to make it much more expensive for them at every moment to hack or fork your service than just pay you. It gets harder the bigger the organization is, but works like a charm on the long tail!
If you've got an open source platform, it's a major consideration because a competitor can just fork your service and start offering it. So you have to have enough of a network effect and lock-in (e.g. ethereum nodes only taking ethereum gas as payment) that the fork is not as accepted for years, despite being faster and better (e.g. polygon). You can centralize trust (Amazon), Liquidity (exchanges) and ease-of-use through vertical integration (Apple).
I'd rather give the bully a whack in balls instead.
I'd be fine with YouTube being a purely paid service. Either pay, or the server returns a 500. I might even be willing to pay for it then, knowing that the only ads i might encounter are sponsor segments in the video themselves (that i can also skip right on by.)
Luckily for me, the only one that knows what to ascribe my actions to is..me.
OK, video quality is higher now but, but they could make the lower-quality video freely accessible -- and so could lots of other possible video-upload sites without charging $15. The value-add is not why you're paying $15.
They also started ads in 2006 before Google bought them
They were burning VC funding the whole time. Youtube didn't become profitable until a few years ago even with Google ads being there it took that much scale and added ads for them to start breaking even on it.
No one "asks" people to see ads. They're the ones who show ads to people in the most underhanded, intentionally attention grabbing manner possible. When you are charged a price, it's obvious and they are up front about it. Meanwhile in advertising land they make it a point to hide the ads in prose so you don't even know you're being manipulated, the videos cut into the ad abruptly so you can't react and it's not like links have big signs in them warning you about ads inside.
Charge people money up front. If you send us ads, we'll delete them. Our attention is not currency to pay for services with.
Maybe stop offering some bullshit "free" tier before expecting people to pay you. Because that's what ad-supported YouTube is: free. It's absolutely free for everyone. They just happen to send you noise alongside the signal. Easily filtered out.
Not to mention the fact Google's still extracting value out of you via surveillance capitalism. Better pay for the creator's patreon instead, that's a perfectly ethical way to make money.
It's not free, they've made that clear, just because you are able to take something without paying doesnt make it free. You can justify being a leech all you want it doesn't impact me because i neither work for YouTube nor produce content for it but it also doesn't change what you are.
When the server returns a 200 and the video to my request of 'video for free please', that is them choosing to accept my request for the video. Just as the common refrain goes that 'if you don't like ads, you can just not use Youtube', the argument that 'if Youtube doesn't like me blocking ads on my computer, they can just not serve me the videos' applies equally.
> I feel much more intelligent after this conversation with you
You're welcome. Hopefully you'll feel like being less of a leech too.
We're proposing they stop pretending the service is free when it's not. If they keep giving us free stuff, who are we to refuse?
First I'm a leech, now I'm a literal cracker who hacked his way into the trillion dollar monopolist corporation's servers and forced them to serve me videos at their expense. Even mined some Monero on their data centers while I was at it.
Are you for real my man? I'm not even gonna read the rest of your comment.
Seems like it’s more accurate to say that you have a moral objection to either ads you don’t like or things you have to pay for?
So perhaps my moral objections are to obnoxious, in your face, unavoidable advertisements.
This is the reason advertising works. Because people think it doesn’t work on them lol.
“I want what you have and I’m going to take it from you in any way I desire regardless of your thoughts on the matter”
It's actually offensive that these corporations even think they have any say at all about what goes on in our machines. The nerve.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38329083
Refined these over years here by discussing the subject with like-minded people. I always post smaller versions of it when people start trying to shame us for not tolerating ads.
There might even be more than two of us! HN unfortunately due to it's inherent bias (vis-a-vis their origin/benefactors/audience) will tend to skew a little more against this train of thought.
> You might enjoy this mantra I like to recite in every ad blocking thread:
I agree with the vast majority, but some of the phrasing I think betrays a certain militantness on the issue that might turn people off. Specifically, your point about it being mind rape. I agree with the point you try to make with that, but that can conflate it with some other unsavoury topics that make it easier to try to attack your argument. The way I see it, it's not quite mind rape, but it is assault and battery on the dignity of the human mind.
There are many. Someone here once told a tale of a hero who picked up a paintball gun and drove around the city blasting billboards.
A brazilian city banned billboards:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
I want to propose a similar law for my own city. The advertising is obnoxious.
> assault and battery on the dignity of the human mind
Agreed.
I don’t mind they offer alternative ways of monetizing than a subscription. A lot of folks can’t afford to pay like I can. But I deeply value the option to pay.
I’m not a fan of ad blocking on services you use that offer a pay option. I am fine with blocking in general, but if they offer the chance to just give them your money and you can afford it, you should. Every service should offer a chance to just give them your money instead of data harvesting and ad spamming as the only option.
I’m a huge supporter of open source and free software for over 35 years now, but people who make a living off their software, media, art, music, etc, should be supported as well. There’s nothing wrong with making a living doing what you love, but there’s something wrong with expecting people to give you their labors and services for free.
Where is the eula that spells out in simple language the details of the devil’s bargain that these data thieves offer?
They are selling trinkets to the natives that have no idea what they are giving up.
https://www.eff.org/fr/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interop...
GDPR means all tracking is overt. I have a page where I can see all the things Google tracks about me and what they are used for and I can disable different categories such as location or watch history or search history or browsing history etc.
And on top of it I don't get forcefully logged in to it anymore (I never wanted that in the first place).
You can absolutely advertise on an intrusive platform, but as consumers, we can aggressively boycott/make your marketing work against you.
Peertube is there for those folks. People keep whining about the monopoly but won’t go to another service to help grow it.
People also whine about sponsor ads, as if you have to watch those videos or those channels. Don’t consume their content if you don’t like it.
At the end of the day, if you don’t want to be tracked, hate ads and hate Google the solution is simple: stop using YouTube.
The anti Facebook people understand this, which is why we don’t see incessant posts about facebooks anti-Adblock on HN. The kind of people on HN who hate Facebook probably just don’t visit the site at all. Same with Reddit vs mastodon. Twitter vs threads. Quora vs ChatGPT.
Anti YouTubers seem unique in their constant whining yet reluctance to stop using what they hate.
Simple: the videos they want to watch don't exist elsewhere. PeerTube doesn't help you if nobody you watch publishes to it.
I use PeerTube, I run my own instance. PeerTube really sucks compared to YouTube. Even with all of the enshittification and google crippling the service, the quantity, quality, and discoverability of videos on YouTube has no comparison at all anywhere.
People use YouTube for the reason they use anything: there simply is no viable alterative.
Whining at people to use PeerTube doesn't help. You have to convince people to publish there before anyone can use it.
You should go tell drug addict to just stop, not that hard. Maybe also to everybody complaining about house pricing, after all our ancestors build theirs with log and dirt why would you need something else.
So all this is about being the "Special Few" who can get away with it, despite often positioning themselves as the Moral Choice because the adverts are bad.
This may all change. But the friction\value trade offs are a bit ‘shrug’ for me. Maybe instant video is still novelty and waiting a few seconds to see it, isn’t so different.
It seems YouTube is creating an arms race with ad blockers and alienating users by threatening bans than simply changing the way the ads are served. Yes, there's a whole industry around bidding for, dynamically serving and tracking ads using VAST and all that, but I'm positive Google has the market power to change that.
Yeah, same -- cable TV has been doing that since god knows how long. There must be some internal engineering reason(s) behind it.
- Fetch the video multiple times
- Cut out the non-overlapping segments from the video shown to the user.
This assumes that a different ad is shown every time. Crowd-sourcing like with Sponsor Block could come in handy here.
I would assume they do this for caching and personalization. Presumably, YouTube can make more from personalized ads. However, if they embedded these ads in the main video stream caching would be more challenging.
So for instance, if normally the first 100 bytes of the video (as fetched via yt-dl) are like "googlevideo.com/gibberish-id?signature&rage=0-100", then you could transparently insert an ad into the next 100 bytes by making "googlevideo.com/gibberish-id?signature&rage=100-200" return the ad. Of course this makes the serving logic much more complicated, so it's probably why they don't do it. You'd also have to appropriately cut on a keyframe, muck around with muxing so things splice properly, and so on.
Another possibility to enforce that ads are seen (or at least things are appropriately delayed) is to simply only return video URLs if there was a "pingback" that an ad was seen. So if you serve a 10 sec ad, but the user requests a video URL before the 10 seconds are up, just reject it. This requires a bit more logic on the serving end to track state, but is easier than the previous proposal.
Really? No ads baked-in into videos by the creators? I.e. those skipped by another add-on, sponsorblock?
> and I support creators.
Are you sure about that? Why do they need to put their own ads into videos then?
By paying Netflix, Amazon Prime, or other streaming service, you surely would: Netflix and Amazon have to pay for the content. But Youtube? They get it for free.
> my conscience is clean,
But your privacy-awareness should be on alert. For YouTube premium, you have to be logged in. You can bet, that Google profiles you based on what you watch. They just don't show you the ads right on the YouTube, but surely they do elsewhere on their network.
Think of it like browser equivalent of the smart tv connected to net.
Sponsorblock, yes.
> Are you sure about that? Why do they need to put their own ads into videos then?
For the people who use ad-blockers. Not me specifically and youtube doesn't provide a functionality to skip certain parts on paid views.
> But your privacy-awareness should be on alert. For YouTube premium, you have to be logged in. You can bet, that Google profiles you based on what you watch. They just don't show you the ads right on the YouTube, but surely they do elsewhere on their network.
I use kagi (paid), and ad-blockers for everything else.
I can live with google having access to my [poor] music taste and view history.
YT cut off my favorite channels' monetization all the time. They'll never get a dime out of me.
>download videos locally on your phone
>the audio continues in the background when you switch to another phone app
Y... you mean like NewPipe already does?
I follow a bunch of developers and engineering channels on it and I learn a lot of stuff on YouTube in general.
A couple of years ago, after running AdguardHome on my network, I’ve noticed that YouTube ads became more and more aggressive and that was hard to unnotice since I mostly consume YouTube on mobile devices that don’t have adblockers. I just gave up and convinced myself that YouTube, of all the services, is the one that probably deserves my money, so here I am, paying for the student plan which is 6.99€ a month. Now, after almost a year of premium, it’s probably the only plan I could not give up along with Spotify’s. I’m not used to ads anymore, I listen to a lot of stuff in background mode and I love it more than before.
Only thing that got on my nerves is that they now decided that if you don’t activate watch history you’re not going to get a Home feed, which is crazy if you ask me.
There's absolutely nothing stopping the arms race from continuing past the point which you are currently satisified.
Just look at Hulu, for example.
Also, it's ridiculous that YouTube was able to convince people it's acceptable to have audio pause when in the background. If YouTube on Desktop paused audio when the tab was not the active tab it would be fundamentally unusable.
Soon there’ll be a premium premium with no ads at a premium cost, $30 a month.
You're not locked into subscribing to YouTube until you die. This is a misunderstanding I see frequently among hackers. They also seem to think that changing the default web browser is equal in severity to building a battleship...
It's good to have a healthy tension between consumer wants and corporate financials. If everyone stops using ad block today then Google reports one quarter of increased profits. Afterward, investors are normalized to that expectation, the fact everyone is watching ads is meaningless, and Google pursues whatever their next step is for squeezing blood from stone.
I want to live in a world where products are as good for me as possible without corporations going under. I do not want to live in a world where products are as poor as I'll tolerate just for profit maximization.
Lately I find I waste a lot of time "relaxing" on YouTube, but I've noticed it's become TV for me; a habit like smoking was. Sure, there's thought-provoking stuff on there, but that's not what seems to show up in my feed. It looks like cable TV. I suppose I have terrible viewing preferences. This is just my experience, of course.
So, I'm ready to kick the YouTube habit and to do more "pulling" of information. Having experienced what cable TV did (eventually throwing a huge amount ads into an expensive subscription) the new fee structure makes kicking the habit an easier, healthier, and more prudent choice. I think I know where they're heading.
I'm thankful for it, frankly. It's wind at my back to pull away from too much screen time. It'll be much easier to break the habit. I've paid enough by providing my viewing preferences anyhow. And when already-profitable monopolistic non-essential services start squeezing tighter, it's surprisingly refreshing to search for new pastures.
If/when Reddit kills "old" reddit, that'll be good too.
They also decided to get rid of Google Play Music, one of the best music streaming platforms ever created, and replace it with Youtube Music - which is absolutely god-awful. I want to play music, not watch music videos, not be limited to what's on Youtube and upload my own music to stream...
Purely for removing background play alone, they don't deserve 15 dollars a month (or whatever they're charging right now)
Don’t like ads? Don’t like subscription fees? Don’t like large tech companies? Great! Go to the library and check out a book.
For better or worse, the vast majority of my media consumption is youtube these days and of all the subs I pay for, it's the one I get the most value out of. I don't get the cynicism.
They aren't bullying anyone. They are trying to make a business model work as efficiently as possible. Anything that relies on ad revenue is going to be predatory like this.
Youtube premium has been a thing for 8 years now, you have had a really long time to start paying for ad-free youtube. You just didn't bother to even check if it existed until they started to push for it harder recently.
So you are a perfect example why they gave up and started becoming more aggressive now, its because it didn't work to just do it the way you think is "fair".
Tell me you're from the US without telling me you're from the US.
> So you are a perfect example why they gave up and started becoming more aggressive now
They started rolling out aggressive ads before YouTube Red was available in my country to purchase. And by the way, I gave in and do pay for YouTube Premium currently.
But I still stand by my statement, because I see how bad it is on my second account. For decades, YouTube managed to show me a few ads before and after the video just fine. And suddenly it's literally every minute? I'm sure Google is struggling to make ends meet.
I think it's ridiculous that people are only now coming out of the woodwork saying things like "I would pay if they weren't forcing me into it" or "I would pay if it wasn't so expensive now" or "I just want to pay for ad-free and not YT Music".
It's been out for years, and it was cheap before; they even had Premium Lite for a while.
They’re breaking the implied contract, not us.
Now they want all our data, AND for us to pay to skip their ads? I'm not for it.
Encourage what you want to see in the world.
You can do that through patronage, if you have the means. Advertising never leads to that. Every sector that depends on large numbers of people contributing a small fraction (like cinema or music) ends up turning into a race to the bottom, as appealing to the lowest common denominator is the most efficient way to succeed. The advertising internet model the epitome of that.
So at least from we see on youtube the ads leads to more niche content, not less. There aren't enough payers to sustain that many niche channels.
Netflix increased their prices from $10/mo to $16/mo in 2011 and faced massive backlash with tech journalists praising Blockbuster and saying "Up until today, we loved Netflix":
https://www.wired.com/2011/07/netflix-price-hike-anger/
https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/hey-netflix-wtf-6368309
Today Netflix charges $15.50/mo. The price rises and falls every 2 years and we get the same whining every 2 years: https://flixed.io/netflix-price-hikes
Why not pay people to watch the ads by a similar logic?
BTW, curious has anyone ever anywhere in the world, any media, tried creating a channel/stream which just shows ads and pays people if they watch? Wondering if that’ll work.
Also, I rarely watch YT, so for me personally $15 or whatever the price is, is too high.
Another thing, ad blockers also help in privacy. $15 may result in no ads being shown in YT, but does that also mean that Google is not collecting data? I’ll consider paying to Google for a no-data-collected mode.
Until then, they get no money and I watch no ads.
I am concerned about the new management of Twitter so I deleted my account and stopped using the service. It's very empty to claim you won't pay for a service because you are morally opposed to their service while continuing to use said service.
I don’t see any statements or actions even remotely hinting at feeling entitled to an ad-free viewing experience. They’re simply trying to figure out how to achieve an ad-free experience.
If someone locally modifies a website’s visuals to implement dark mode, would you lambast them for feeling entitled to dark mode?
I believe the rationale is even if say 90% of the viewers who wouldn't buy the product anyway are now less likely to buy the product, That's considered a zero.
However if you're positively influencing the purchasing decisions on that remaining 10%, then it might be money well spent.
Thus the advertising may not affect specifically you but because this is a broadcast style exposure, that doesn't matter
IMO it is quite like the classic example of the heuristic that there is no such thing as bad press.
Some of the most life-changing products I own were shown to me in an ad. Might not have bought that exact item, but the knowledge of that type of product even existing?!
Mindblowing.
Otherwise, Firestone should have seen an increase in tire sales after all the free advertising they got on the news. Instead, though, Firestone tire sales fell off a cliff.
I recently threw away a coupon for a product specifically because I saw a few too many extremely annoying online ads for this product, and now I can't stand the brand. They poisoned my image of them.
I wonder why you say that. At least an ad for a specific ad blocker sounds like a great idea.
- Ideally, you don't send ads to users of your product - Users of inferior products will see your ad, and it might be super effective (if you used MY adblocker, you wouldn't be seeing this ad) - Everything else is a user that doesn't have an ad blocker, and it's probably an easy sell to say "would you like to never see ads like this?"
Show ads for ad-blockers. Deliver an ad-blocker with spyware or other forms of malware.
The anti-malware industry used to be dominated by tools that ended up being malware (I’m sure that hasn’t changed much TBH).
Not really an issue with YT video ads though right? They're just annoying and too frequent but they're not really hazardous (beyond some cognitohazard of random crank stuff).
We could dream of an internet where companies would advertise their products on relevant videos and be done with that, but they probably won't increase sales that way. Because the audience would buy their product anyway if it fit their needs.
In 2023 there are two methods of marketing:
Method 1 is competing on price, features and quality. Customers will buy your product if it fits their wants and their budget.
Method 2 is advertising, where the product itself has little to no influence on sales. Certain groups of people will buy your product because you've made them feel they should.
How do you or the people doing the comparisons you read know the product exists without advertising?
Do products show up on your store shelves because the company did a ton of advertising and customers were begging the store manager to sell it? Usually not. Instead these are negotiations between businesses. How often do you see ads for new products, compared to products that have been around for decades?
The only situation were advertising is wise is when you have a product that is not different from your competitors product and you have a customer base that is ignorant, so that you have a lot of margin for advertising to get your stuff moved. Ignorant in this situation can mean just ignorant on the product category.
Products often show up on store shelves for two reasons. The product does independent advertising so the store knows it will sell or they advertise to store buyers.
If you think that is the only time advertising makes sense I'm going to assume your employer is very slow growing. Advertising pretty much always makes sense one you have protect market fit. I can't think of a single business that has that which would be worse off with advertising.
If advertising was a sure thing as long as you claim, then how come none of the ad sellers can guarantee sales? Until they offer a guaranteed increase in sales or your money back, I have a hard time believing the praise.
I think businesses severely underestimate word of mouth, and overestimate how effective their advertising was. That's understandable, since they don't want to feel like fools for having spent money on worthless advertising.
>Products often show up on store shelves for two reasons. The product does independent advertising so the store knows it will sell or they advertise to store buyers.
From what I know, products show up on shelves because the suppliers let the retailers know about their new products. It's not the store manager deciding to start selling the new Snickers flavour because he saw an ad on a bus stop.
No single ad is guaranteed and i never made that claim.
Word of mouth is great but an extremely slow way to grow a business and tends to geographically limit you and requires advertising first to get the initial clients.
> From what I know, products show up on shelves because the suppliers let the retailers know about their new products
I cover this scenario with the advertising to store buyers line.
In Fintech, it feels like the first $5 of advertising per customer just goes to persuading them that you're not a scam.
Charities, travel services and perfumes have value propositions often hard to express. Perhaps a perfect communicator could get it across in a short essay, but most rely expensive ads.
There are some domains where customers are well educated & motivated to seek out better products, like consumer electronics & cars, but those are the minority.
Travel and Fintech are products that are for everyone, so there will always be people interested in your stuff and then recommend to their friends if your product is good. Especially for travel, people are always seeking out new "products".
I think it's interesting that you brought up cars. In the past 20 years I've only seen two types of car ads: One is the stylish young woman going on a date, the second type is with young urban adults doing street dance and then the car flashes quickly in the end of the ad. Because advertising is only directed at certain groups. To normal people, these car ads communicate "We hate you" from the car company to the consumer, and would be a net negative for the brand. But since normal people are going to compare price, gas economy and features when buying a car anyway, this brand negativity doesn't mean much.
I wonder whether those groups you describe disproportionately purchase mass market new cars.
Or it could be that the advertisement and media industry have their heads too far up their own asses to care what they're doing. It certainly seems like this sometimes, when huge brands can destroy themselves permanently in a matter of days with out of touch advertising.
I will give up driving before ever purchasing anything from Liberty Mutual and I caution everyone who will listen that they are a shitty company who will grift you for your last cent precisely because of this. As if watching the same stupid ad for the millionth + 1 time will suddenly make me realize that I WAS WRONG and I CAN'T LIVE without their product.
For a lot of advertisement that is simply not a problem.
Remember those horrible ads for dishwashing detergents or sanitary pads on TV? You probably do and you probably hated them and that was the point.
Should YouTube be a free service or what?
It's only a semi-ironic question. Perhaps someone has a vision for how it all works out.
Full disclosure: I work on programmatic advertising technologies.
What is being destroyed by YouTube's current policy that led to this anti adblock attempt, is pushing too far with the ads.
Crap quality and overstuffed.
A 5 second ad on a 4 minute video? Fine.
1:30 ad, one of TWO... on same video?
Fuck. That. Noise.
It's the same segmentation issue as piracy, y'all get hyperfocused on the group that will NEVER play ball, and ruin the experience so much for those that would, that they "swap teams".
If users blocking ads is enough to make the service unprofitable, the service should switch to a paid model or shut down.
It's an adversarial relationship. The service is within their rights to shove ads down your throat, and you're within your rights to fight back.
(I pay for YouTube Premium)
The amount of effort people spend on these sophist explanations of why they don’t have to pay for the services they use is just amazing.
Those services are fooling themselves.
Consider television. Is it immoral to mute the TV during a commercial? No. Is it immoral to go get up and get a snack or go to the bathroom during a commercial? No. TV advertisers have absolutely no expectation that TV viewers will watch their ads. So why's it that when it comes to internet advertising all the advertisers suddenly wring their hands and whine and moan about their poor business model? Ads are nonsense, I won't watch them, stop wasting my time with them, and if you want to cover costs for your service, charge me for the privilege to access it. In the meantime, if you're foolishly giving away something for free, I'm going to consume it without remorse.
The entire ad business model is nonsense, and it's not our responsibility as consumers to prop up the companies that have based their fragile fortunes on it.
I believe consumers are in their right, moral or not, to block ads, and Youtube/Google is in their right to disable ad blockers.
I am wondering if someone has a solution because I would really be interested in hearing it.
I'm way more likely to donate to a channel I like than I am to put up with loud annoying obnoxious ads for things I'm never going to buy anyway if I don't have to.
There's one I like, or at least used to, King's Fine Woodworking, that.. I don't know he clearly has some setting enabled that others don't, that means his channel is plastered in text link ads that just make it look crap, and you have to scroll way down to get to 'Uploads' (vs playlists of old videos you've seen before). Ads cheapen every channel they touch, the more there are the worse it is. 'Creators' are better off focussing on direct monetisation imo. Or sponsored unbiased content, product reviews etc. where it is actually related to the channel. Not like VPNs or backup battery systems are everywhere.
I do understand that means maybe they have to show more to people not blocking them, or start charging, or something. I'm not saying it should be provided free and adless, I'm just saying that doesn't matter, it's not the point, if it's free and can be adless then it will be. It's not my job to make sure it's sustainable by sitting through ads.
Yes. They were loss leader for more than a decade and killed all competition because nobody had coffers deep enough to fight Google. Now because of their dominant position it’s impossible to migrate from it, because of network effect.
So f** them, not my problem. I’m willing to pay for stuff that I enjoy (old videos from 10+ years ago), I’m not going to pay for modern cancer (just open YouTube in incognito tab to understand what I mean).
Google did destroy the competition on the space forcing a monopoly.
So if there was a similar competing service with the same content quality and revenue models, would you subscribe/watch the ads?
Don’t misunderstand me, I do watch YouTube ads on my TV, but I’m pissed that nobody can challenge them anymore.
Would the advertisers really want to pay for their ads to be shown to people who aren't interested in their products? Every ad view costs them money. (I know, there are also the advertisers who just want to spread their message and aren't selling any products..)
If the ads are actually useful to people, would they still jump through all these hoops to block them?
The ad supported model is only sustainable for the ad company if it is a win for both advertisers AND end users.
"You are not paying for the (premium) service, so we will degrade your service and force you to watch ads so we can pay our bills" is usually a sign that youtube is chasing after short term profits at the detriment of it's own advertisers / end users imo.
I know this is a little too simplistic and I don't have any real answers... but this is how i'm looking at this whole debacle.
Second, Youtube gained outsized winner-take-all popularity by the anticompetitive dumping of hosting and development effort at below the apparent cost. This created a simulation of the early Internet's liberating spirit while killing any competitors that could have been based around sustainable economics (ideally some combination of publisher hosting plus p2p). Blocking ads is continuing the relationship as Youtube created it.
Third, just fuck ads in general. The original post is a fun piece of art, but even seeing those three quick blips in the demo video was still an unneeded mental attack. The less I have to suffer and mentally repel corporate attempts at faking social proof, especially interruptive video/audio ones, the better my life is. If I could get AR glasses that blocked billboards, I would.
My only concern of Youtube somehow going out of business would be losing the back catalog, which I think is better served by independent archiving rather than framing business revenue as some kind of collective responsibility.
When I'm given the choice, I only pay companies that I respect. If they successfully block ad blockers, I'll mute the ads and do something else while they're playing.
I'm fine paying for YouTube as soon as it's not in Google's hands. Until then, I'd consider it an ethical wrong for me to pay for it.