I get they want to work against ad blockers, but as a Premium member I really wish there was an easy way to watch a video without it polluting my history or recommendations. I don't want to watch ads just due to that.
IIRC i stopped using this because it takes way too long to toggle on/off and another crucial mistake they make is that YouTube acts like its chrome incognito where you want full privacy and an anonymous browsing experience, I do not want that, I still want to be able to see my own history like my last few search bar queries, I just dont want NEW entries added when in incognito mode. essentially i want read only mode
I would love something like what Spotify has - private listening. In the meantime, I just go into the YouTube history and remove anything that I don't want to pollute my recommendations. Turning off search history entirely also is good.
If you create a new profile and switch to it it keeps your Premium benefits with its own watch history. I do this for communal watching on the living room TV.
I was wondering when buffering was going to be a thing. I’ve been seeing it on YT and figured it’s the Adblock wars getting heated up.
The next step is to scrape the videos, strip the ads, store them on a torrent magnet and serve that instead. Yes it would have to be from a shady RU or CN or NK or IN site. I’m fine with that.
If copyright laws were reasonable and limited to what was necessary to serve their stated purpose, I would agree with the critique - that it seems like entitled behaviour. But in a world where copyright terms are 150 years, in my opinion any premise that it serves the public is gone.
Consider that it's a monopoly. You can't get 99% of this content anywhere else (not even if it's marked as creative commons¹ or any other free license, publicly funded, etc.) but I don't agree with Google's/Alphabet's practices either. One could:
Option 1: be a hermit and not watch anything on YouTube ever. You can't look up repair guides, fully use a news website that I'm subscribed to that got rid of their self hosted version, watch a subset of public broadcasts that we pay for via taxes, etc. It's not just entertainment / a Netflix replacement
Option 2: give in and enrich this monopolistic tracking company
Option 3: try to pirate the content
I'd feel very different if this were Spotify or an individual artist: I can use three other music services with massively overlapping offerings from different jurisdictions. Or supermarkets, for the same reason. But if it's irreplaceable and gatekept, I can understand both sides here
I find it frustrating that so many people expect some kind of morality from consumers but not companies. It’s cold, hard business logic to use an adblocker when you have the knowhow and are annoyed enough, just as its cold, hard business logic to fight adblockers up to a point.
If they ran less hostile ads, people wouldn't be as hostile to watching their ads. Some of the ads they run are just ridiculous and awful. Ads for scams, soft-core porn ads, just the worst of the worst.
I think that’s a rationalization. Most people just don’t like ads no matter what they are. And I can’t blame them, ads are terrible. But this is a case where they offer a nice subscription that takes them all away, so people ought to buy that instead.
I don't think it's a rationalization. I have two normie friends who were mostly fine seeing ads on the internet, until one night they saw one too many scum ads on YouTube. They asked me to help them install an adblocker. It was specifically the scumminess of these ads that got them to start using adblockers, which by the way the FBI recommends as a matter of course. People should buy YouTube premium for the convenience features it offers, but everyone should be blocking ads for their own safety and sanity. There is no reason to engage in the ad economy. Everyone should be blocking all ads.
Well, I don't particularly enjoy ads on Reddit, Gmail, and, when I used them, Tiktok, Facebook, etc but I wasn't particularly pissed off by them either. On YT it seems just so in your way and in your face and egregious. It's like every couple minutes there's an other ad. You can't even chromecast videos to your tv to play in the background because you have to constantly babysit it or else it will load up an ad that goes on forever or 10 minutes until you come back to skip it.
The YT Premium subscription suffers from being low value imo, forced bundling with YT Music which inflates prices, and little to no synergy with Google One subscriptions in most countries.
They offer a cheaper version that isn't bundled with Youtube Music, but then you get ads on official music uploads since I guess that's how the licensing works out. https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite
I pay for YouTube Premium, but what I am afraid will happen is that once enough users opt to pay for the service, YouTube may pull an Amazon Prime and show ads, and then ask for more money to not see the ads.
Where are you located? I've never seen any of those.
Pretty much all of my YouTube ads are for TV shows, movies, cars, mobile games, consumer products, and various consumer services. Volkswagen, Dove, TurboTax, etc. All incredibly mainstream.
Maybe you're located in a country or region maintain advertisers avoid?
I'm in America. I only see these scummy ads I talk about, and I assume it's because I'm extremely aggressive about preventing myself from being tracked and profiled. My friends made the horrible mistake of looking into cryptocurrency on Google while signed into their account, so they got targeted by scum crypto ads.
It sounds like you've explicitly opted yourself into the lowest common denominator ads. It's understandable that mainstream companies want to maximize their advertising impact by only targeting the viewers where there is data to suggest the viewers will actually be interested in their products.
I'm honestly not really sure why you're complaining. If you don't want to be tracked or profiled, you're going to get the lowest quality ads. Why do you think higher-quality advertisers should be wasting money trying to reach you, when you are going out of your way to avoid any interest in them?
To be clear, I'm not criticizing what you're doing to avoid tracking, or your stance against it. But I'm questioning why you would then complain about the ads you receive.
I'm not complaining that higher-quality advertisers aren't spending money trying to reach me. I'm saying the fact that the lowest common denominator ads are so hostile is reason enough to completely avoid them.
This might be a controversial take, but I don't want to see soft-core porn ads. I don't want to see scam ads. I don't want to see the worst of the worst. It is not a necessary state of affairs that the lowest common denominator ads are ads that are explicitly attempting to prey upon the least informed, most vulnerable members of society.
The fact that the worst ads are the way that they are is indicative of YouTube's willingness to engage in user-hostile activities.
If they were less willing to engage in hostile ads, there would be less hostility towards their ads.
YouTube's solution is extremely simple: vet ads and don't accept money to run hostile ads.
Right, then avoid them. Either don't use YouTube, or else pay for Premium so you don't see them.
You claim people are hostile to watching YouTube's ads because of their quality. But I don't think so -- I think they're mostly seeing normal ads, not scammy ones. Because they're not taking measures against tracking. Your experience would seem to be very much an outlier.
I simply don't see the ads you're talking about, not even a little bit, so I can't really speak to YouTube's acceptable ads policies. But just so you know -- you can also mark checkboxes in your Google profile around which categories of ads you are and aren't interested in. I actually did that, and got less ads for categories I have zero interest in. That may help your ads experience, and make your ad quality complaints go away, if you're philosophically OK with that, since you're providing data freely rather than through tracking.
No, I'm going to continue watching YouTube while also avoiding their ads. If they want to engage in an adversarial relationship then I will as well. Until there's another competitor in the space that provides the same value, I will just take value from the only game in town. They don't owe me their service, but I also don't owe a bad faith monopolist anything. I do pay for premium, and I also block all of their analytics and ads at the network level.
EDIT: also, I think everyone should block ads. We should snub advertisers and surveillers all of the time. If they want to be hostile towards users, users should be hostile towards them.
Capitalists have had it too good for too long. It's time consumers stop caring about how the poor capitalist will make their dime.
Until the capitalists take the time to respect us, the consumers, we don't owe them anything.
It's time for reciprocity. If they're hostile, we reciprocate. If they're cooperative, we reciprocate.
giving them $13/month is not being hostile to them, it’s being a long term customer. they have exactly the relationship they want with you,
minus your adblocking. i too pay for premium, run a pihole and use ubo. i pay for premium because the company sells a quality product at a good price and adfree. sponsor segments is another thing, but solveable. i also use sponsorblock and have a docker setup to autoskip segments on devices connected to my wifi. but out of all streaming services out there, yt actually seems like the least vampiric.
Weird way to blame the victim and not the organization pushing scams on people. I vaguely recall that 20 years ago, Google served things like nonprofit or government PSAs when they didn't know what to serve (or thought you were botting), not financial scams.
Speaking of PSAs, the US federal government issued a PSA a couple years ago recommending use of an ad blocker to avoid becoming a victim of financial scams/fraud (purged now for some reason). Why they don't prosecute the ad companies for being the ones to select and deliver the mark is anyone's guess.
I don’t get soft core porn ads but I do scams all the time. Bullshit supplements, pyramid schemes, “buy my program to make money” type things. Otherwise it’s mostly political ads, more legitimate consumer products like dishwasher detergent, gambling, and mobile games. NE USA for reference
Personally, for my own value system, I consider the gambling ads to be as bad as scam ads. I think we'll soon come to see the social harm of gambling ads to be as bad as tobacco ads. We should strive for a culture where people see an ad for addictive services or substances and feel an instinctive, pre-conscious disgust. They are the dirty, disgusting, bloodsucking bedbugs of society.
I agree and feel it is a reflection on social decline. While I don’t think prohibition it the way forward it is unsettling that we tolerate this as a society. Would we tolerate youtube advertising for heroin or even recreational marijuana? We certainly don’t for tobacco and we probably shouldn’t for alcohol.
I work in mental health and I am seeing more people who spend a substantial amount on “parlays”. Many examples downplay or hide the behavior from their social network and the extreme examples spend a significant amount. The advertising is obviously predatory and goes against what we know about control dynamics in addict behavior but we tend to view that as a personal moral failing rather than exploiting basic biology and as a result allow the dealer to ruin countless lives before any action is taken (see Purdue and Teva lawsuits)
Yeah, I find instagram ads not that annoying, and they actually promote things I would buy (I've bought a couple of things over the years through their ads).
Youtube/google ads? Never bought anything, automatically assume they are a scam.
I don't get such nasty ads, but the ones I get are extremely repetitive. I see the same 3 ads all the time: one for a car, one for a bank, one for clothes.
Even google can't keep malware ads out of their system. If we say have geek squad remove the malware, its $149.99, all because google wanted to show me a $0.0001 value ad. No thanks.
You underestimate your attention's value by two orders of magnitude. A typical YouTube ad impression cost is about half a cent or so, sometimes several cents. We're talking serious business here!
Maybe they just want you to buy Premium and get rid of ads altogether. I think it's really good value now, especially the family plan, if you use YouTube heavily, like my kids do.
.. and that's YT's problem? This is like being angry with Apple, because an app developer created only an iOS app and didnt create an Android. What did Apple do wrong if a developer chose to only create an iOS app?
YouTube is the system, you've not heard of "don't hate the player, hate the game"?
If I "blamed" the creators, you'd be telling me it's not their fault, they're just incentivised by the system, they're just playing the game.
But when I "blame" the system, you're telling me the system is not at fault, that it's individual choice to choose a near-monopoly on video discoverability that is propelled by and heavily benefiting from the same company's actual monopoly of search.
Is it "YT's problem?"? No, it's to YT's massive benefit, it's my problem when I have to suffer through adverts.
Alphabet is the fifth largest company in the world, has earnings higher than most countries' GDP, and is established to have engaged in illegal behavior as a monopolist. It's fair to say they're closer to "the system" than "a player".
Not that this was part of the suit, but the whole practice of giving things away for free and subsidizing them with stalking and ads obviously distorts or completely destroys markets, so yes they can be blamed for doing that. The behavior of these companies is so bad that people in a recent thread were claiming things like chat services (where a single computer can provide service for millions of users) cannot be sustainably run by charging money.
What if Google didn't horde whatever data it could about me from the analytics systems that it has installed on a myriad of websites without my consent?
What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
> What if Google didn't horde whatever data it could about me from the analytics systems that it has installed on a myriad of websites without my consent?
Arent you voluntarily using their website? Nobody is forcing you to open your browser, and type y-o-u-t-u-b-e-dot-c-o-m.
> What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
MKBHD, LTT and others are willingly uploading videos to YouTube. YT doesnt have an exclusive deal with any of those. Infact, those folks are free to upload the same video to Vimeo, Twitch and others. What is YT doing wrong here?
> What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
Arent websites voluntarily embedding Google Analytics? They can decide today, if they wanna switch to Plausible, or any of the other analytics providers right?
I still fail to understand how this is a fault of a company? Would you blame Apple if everyone bought iPhones? What should Apple do? Ask people not to buy their phones?
If airtags were used almost solely to nonconsensually and surreptitiously stalk people (i.e. not to track the belongings of the people buying them), yes I think it would be fair to blame Apple. Especially if that were the advertised purpose, as it is with GA.
Google Analytics is a tool that websites use to track users, similar to how a store might use a pen & paper to keep track of phone numbers or names. The store made the decision to buy the pen to track users. Why are you angry with the pen company?
Google Analytics is not going around tracking users. They provide a service that the website you decided to go to (cnn.com, bbc.com) is using. If you have to be angry, be angry with cnn or bbc.
Pens have a purpose other than surveillance, and aren't as capable as machines. A better analogy would be Bluetooth trackers and cameras with machine vision to identify and watch people's movements and eye gaze as they move around the store. And yes, that is creepy and the manufacturers should be criticized for creating it.
Also, client side scripts do not run on the website's property. They are taking advantage of the wide-open security model of web clients (the model they coincidentally get to define because they dump massive amounts of money into giving away a free browser, making competition in the space nearly impossible) to use people's computers for unauthorized purposes. It's a malware payload just like a crypto miner. They should be treated the same way (or more severely) that they would be if they published miners and told web developers to add them to get free money (taking their own cut of course). The operator and the tool creator should both be blamed for shady behavior when the tool is designed and advertised for shady purposes.
> manufacturers should be criticized for creating it.
Manufacturers make things when there's a market. If Google didnt build Google Analytics, someone else would (Maybe Microsoft, or Apple) because the demand exists.
Other people steal, run scams, etc. Doesn't mean I have to. Google doesn't have to create surveillance software even if they suppose someone else will.
Why haven't they created crypto miners for even more profit? It would be more ethical and less wasteful than the surveillance/ads combo. Obviously others will and have done it.
Sure, there's a need for a product like GA, and in a vacuum someone else would create a similar product but whatever value it provides to the market and the users does not justify socially malignant behaviour from a convicted monopolist
If GA didn't exist there's no guarantee that the alternatives would create the same negative externalities that damage privacy of strangers while delivering value to the users of the software.
Google Analytics ultimately operates the way it does not because it's necessarily the best way to provide value to the sites that use it, but because it serves Google's monopolistic and unscrupulous interests.
It's the fault of the company because they leverage their illegal monopoly position to do this.
You're operating under this unrealistic assumption that Google is an innocent entity that has not broken the law to get to the position that they are in.
This is false. Google does not play by the rules and as such your assertion that people should in turn play by the rules when interacting with Google is unreasonable.
I dont follow your logic. The website you visit (cnn, bbc) has made the decision to use Google Analytics. They can very well stop using the GA, and nothing would happen.
Imagine all the restaurants in the world used IKEA for their tables & chairs. Can you say OMG IKEA has a monopoly? No sir, IKEA didnt go into the stores and install the tables & chairs, the restuarants did. Will you be angry with IKEA?
I would imagine that those sites use GA because it's the best tool for their needs. It's probably the best tool for their needs because it is both a very well developed tool with superior integration with other parts of their platforms and has a large developer base that is familiar with it. These advantages come from Google's monopolistic practices and the money and resources that it provides them.
I can certainly imagine such a thing but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the situation as IKEA has as far as I'm aware never been ruled to be a monopoly while Google has.[0]
Ultimately my position on this subject comes down to this: Google does things that are hostile to me. They do things that are hostile to you. They do things that are hostile to society writ large. They break the law and violate the social contract. My morals necessitate responding to such an entity with disregard for whatever they're legally entitled to.
I don't like the way that I'm surveilled by Google and I don't like the way that they abuse their monopoly position and lobby the government to make it impossible for me to evade that surveillance.
To bring the conversation back to where it started: I already pay them with my privacy, I pay for the economic harm their monopolistic practices have on society, and I pay for the corrosive effects their lobbying has on the political structure.
I'm not going to be paying them for an ad free Youtube experience.
I've always paid for cable without complaining, but the adtech surveillance reality that was innovated by the tech industry makes me less willing to support them.
I have to wonder whether they are tracking changes in consumer confidence. Subjectively, I have noticed a significant drop in confidence from my peers. I do not know whether my experience generalizes, but if it does, they are playing with fire.
I'm surprised they don't just inject the ads directly into the video stream, I think that would solve their issue overnight (not that I want any ads personally). You could also rate-limit it to the playback speed to prevent pre-downloading the stream easily. But now that everything uses HLS/DASH, it's easy to inject different content right in the middle of the stream without re-encoding anything.
I've also wondered about this for a long time. It seems like there must be something difficult about it, but I can't even guess. Otherwise it seems like they would be, no?
The creators themselves will include sponsor segments in their videos, but some users go a step further and use sponsorblock to automatically skip through.
That's how some podcast houses do it. Sometimes they'll be mid sentence and the ad will come in.
I pay for a subscription to The Athletic, who used to offer ad free podcasts in their app. Last month they signed an exclusive deal with Acast, and now I cannot possibly listen to their podcasts without ads.
How does Twitch do it? They're super aggressive and even using third party clients that do a good job and not displaying ads, you still get an occasional "commercial break" screen where they're not serving you the content, or the ad, just a "let's all go to the lobby" screen.
Those clients could be doing a better job - when twitch starts playing an ad on the main stream, they also provide a secondary stream that shows the actual content.
Maybe; I don't know anything about it. I will note that that belief could easily develop, true or not, if twitch streams start out in low resolution and increase as you buffer them.
A third-party client has room to make a dramatic improvement on the twitch experience by not dropping audio while you make the switch from the ad stream to the content stream.
Twitch puts the ads directly in the HLS stream, but as seperate segments from the content (a HLS stream is made of many small video files, on twitch they're about 2s long). They're trivial to recognize and filter out (they're actually explicitly tagged as ad segments) but it still won't serve you the actual stream you were trying to watch - the ad segments override it. The best you can do is just block until the first non-ad segment arrives.
There exists crowdsourced adblocking based on timestamps (SponsorBlock, Tubular). Soon we will have realtime on-device content-aware AI adblocking. They will ever win.
In the future, everything will be like that vapid chicken wing podcast (the one where they bring on an interesting, talented person and then waste half an hour interviewing her about sriracha)
So Ira Glass will be narrating This American Life while simultaneously reviewing different varieties of Doritos, etc.
...or the producers of The Rest is History will add the Planters Peanut Man as a third host
...or Marques Brownlee will review every product in relation to how well it works with Bose headphones
My favorite relentless one is Tracker (Amazon Prime), who spend approximately 30% of screen time dedicated to showing off a GMC pickup and Airstream, but the most egregious was one dialog line:
> As Colter enters and gives them hugs, Velma remembers that they got a gift for him. Reenie hands him the gift - very conspicuously packaged in an Amazon box with its trademark logo and blue tape - and says, "I've gotta say, next-day delivery is pretty sweet. Thank you, Amazon Prime!"
that is not what they do on hot ones. sean is an intelligent interviewer and their team goes above and beyond to find interesting lore in people’s past to showcase. guests are routinely impressed.
Even though I hate advertising I think Hot Ones is one of the few efforts to do a good job with this.
1. Interviewing a guest while they are eating insanely spicy food is an extremely novel idea and the guest's reactions and answers end up being really interesting and unexpected as a result. It humanizes famous people in a way I've never seen before because you can't just bluff your way through it.
2. The hot sauce vendors are often small companies or indie makers (at least they used to be). This is way different than reviewing 11 bags of Superman Transformers 3D Doritos Walmart Product Placement for the next blockbuster.
3. Hot sauce is interesting! Nearly every culture on every continent has hot sauce. They are made from a huge variety of interesting and unusual ingredients but are also simple and can be made at home. Hot sauce hasn't been explored in this way in popular culture.
I use content aware ad blocking to remove inserted and native ads from podcasts. The next level adblocking will be rewriting content that is overly commercial.
I imagine you can do it by AI-transcribing the podcast while preserving timestamp metadata for each symbol. Use LLM to identify undesirable segments (ask it to output json or something) and then cut them out from the audio with ffmpeg.
Then you would need to set up a server that would do all this and serve as a 'mirror' to your podcasts without the ads.
If you've gone through that much effort, you might as well turn it into a subscription service. It would be resource intensive, but some people would gladly pay through their nose to rid their podcasts of ads.
I'd definitely like to make it easier to use and spread it more widely, but I can't directly distribute the edited (copyrighted) podcast files. Might share transcript markers of the text right before and after ad segments, which is like a slightly more complicated version of what SponsorBlock does.
What's your prompt for Gemini like, does it include examples of ads? Assume you're using Flash for cost?
I also have a setup like this, I transcribe with Whisper and send it to OpenAI 4o-mini to detect ads then clip those segments with pydub, but my prompt must be lacking because the success rate on detecting ads is maybe 60%
My Gemini Flash 2.0 prompt:
"Below is the transcript of a podcast preceded by a line number. Reply with the line numbers that are likely to be from advertisements, promotions, commercials, sponsorships, or ending credits."
I think it's better than 60%, but I should definitely set up some evals.
I split the text by sentence, but was considering having the LLM try and put into paragraph (that might conceptually chunk commercial sentences together), but what I've got has been good enough for me.
I wanted to switch to Flash 2.5, but it looks like they increased the price a lot.
I think I could do a fair bit of ad identification just with text heuristics: "This podcast is sponsored/supported by...", etc.
It’s already a race to the bottom, blocking tech improves and so does marketing. The latter will pump out as much as you’re scientifically proven to accept before switching off.
All I ask is that I can pay the creator directly for content without any middle-man. Anything less will be routed around.
It's not like sneaking into a concert. It's like attending a free concert at a mall and wearing a mask so the cameras can't read your lips. Or covering your phone screen with your hand when you show a friend a private photo of a special moment.
Who pays for the electricity, upkeep, security and airconditioning of the mall? Who pays for the sound stage, the technicians, the lighting of the mall?
The band decided to perform at the mall, because they like the facilities there. They always had a choice to perform at their house ("own website"), but they chose the mall ("YouTube") and as long as YouTube is hosting their videos, YouTube deserves to be compensated.
They don't want to boil the frog too quickly. Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream. As the post mentions:
To be clear this isn’t server-side ad insertion; the ad and content streams are still separate (YouTube is doing a server-side ad insertion experiment, but that’s separate from fake buffering)
Yep. It's been pretty funny actually both here but especially on r/youtube.
Pretty much since YouTube started cracking down on adblockers, r/youtube top post Every. Single. Day. is usually someone complaining that they just got hit with "adblock detected" and comments split between "Yeah it sucks, hit me last month" and "Huh, uBlock Origin works fine for me. I must be super smart. YouTube can't defeat me"
> Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream
We've all seen what they're doing with AI-generated video, and we know their market and political power. Eventually they'll be remaking the video so the person or animal or rock or tree on the screen is giving AI-generated product testimonials.
It has to be a cost thing. HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.
I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.
It would break all the time stamps as well, unless you had fixed length ads. Sponsorblock already skips ads embedded in videos, so I don't think this would make ads much harder to block.
Agree, it has to do with cost, considering the sheer number of videos they have. Plus, oftentimes the ad won't be relevant after a week or two, in which case they can't re-encode again.
One could splice ads out of the video on the client just as easily as they splice them in, assuming you can detect them (which could be done via crowdsourced databases a la sponsorblock).
Sure, and I can use "technology" to identify those splices, and fix them in various ways that work for me because I control the client (unlike Chrome users) and that gives me the power to make the web behave how I want it to, if I'm willing to put in the effort (or someone else does it for me.)
YouTube is currently running an A/B test for server-side insertion according to what some other people have posted. I'm not getting SSAI ads so I can't really know much about them though.
They are working on it. Web YT player no longer fetches separate video and audio streams from the server, it requests them pre bundled and receives a single server side muxed stream.
Injecting the ads directly would make them skippable. Unskippable ads are inherently detectable (because the unskippability has to be communicated to the client-side player controls), so there’s no easy way out.
Twitch seems to have won the war against adblockers by injecting directly into the video stream. It’s been months now and I still see ads. I assume it isn’t as easy as you say to skip them otherwise uBlock would have done it already.
The core difference is that when Twitch plays an ad, they'll never send you that part of the video. [1] So buffering doesn't help. If YouTube would do this, you could have a custom player that preloads enough of the video so that all ads could be automatically skipped and as a viewer you wouldn't notice their existence. However, on Twitch, even if you're willing to give up the live factor and would buffer, you still would have missing parts of the video where an ad was placed. So you would lose content. [2]
--
[1] They do send a super low resolution stream with no audio, but not the actual quality you are watching in.
[2] Right now Twitch does not stop sending content in markets where they don't have ad inventory. So there are actually browser extensions already that will use a custom foreign market server to proxy the video during ad breaks, so that you can still have an 100% effective ad blocker.
The server can't completely ignore the player, as it would have to adjust the embedded timestamps to be consistent with the skip operations, or otherwise the player won't show the video. In other words, the server would have to act as if the ad is embedded wherever you skip to in the video. Not only would it mean that users lose their position in the video when they try to skip, since after the ad it would continue in a different place, but it would also mean that timestamps don't uniquely identify positions in the non-ad parts of the video anymore, which is a nonstarter in many ways.
JS on the client (which is already required) can be instructed by the server to manipulate the timeline. You could zero it out completely (or stop it from moving at all) while an ad is playing and then return it to the right spot after, this is not rocket science.
For JS on the client side to be able to behave in the way you describe, it has to be informed by the server about the unskippable parts. Thus browser extensions are informed as well, and can take action correspondingly. In the worst case, they’ll behave as YouTube’s new hold screen does now.
Anything that JS on the client can do is also under control of browser extensions. We are talking about YouTube’s options under that constraint.
I don't think there's any reason the JS would have to know ahead of time, and the server still controls what video fragments are served when, so I don't think JS can be reliably used to skip ads that are embedded in the video stream, especially if the download speed is limited to somewhere close to the playback speed.
When the player performs a skip, it waits for stream packages whose timestamps match the new position after the skip. It’s the client who requests a different segment of the video, and waits until it receives the respective segment, as identified by the embedded timestamps. Skipping isn’t a purely server-side operation in that sense, the client side has to cooperate. The server has no control over which timestamps the client wants to play.
The only other alternative is to make the video a live stream of indefinite length where the user can’t skip forward beyond the farthest point they already played.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, or how it invalidates anything I said already. Not trying to be rude, I just don't understand where you're going with this.
I have no respect for Youtube/google developers, like they have apps where you need to pay to use them with the screen turned off, so they screw your battery (reducing your device live) and wasting energy so their boss gets a bigger yacht (cecause it seems ads are not enough)
I don't necessarily disagree but it's not a Google problem. It's a human problem.
For example: What value does your comment provide the world? Enough value to offset the carbon emissions from transmission/storage/retrieval/display? Personally, I'd answer no. Thus your comment itself is a waste of energy.
> Reframing a problem with anything as a human problem is a tautology
I respectfully disagree.
> don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say
They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy. I shared my "tautology" to illustrate while OP's point may be largely correct, greed is not unique to Google.
>They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy.
More then that, sure they show you ads, GREAT
but they screw your device and environment, this makes them no money , a small fraction of users might buy premium but the rest of the users will waste energy and bdevice life, the developers contribute to killing devices and wasting energy.
That is the user's choice. If a user comes to a bookshop wherein they are allowed to read the books for free but only in the store, they have little right to argue that they should be allowed to take the books home like paying customers because the store's lighting is not to their liking and they want to read in 6000K. They are free to picket outside and claim that the store is ruining people's eyesight, but no one sane will take them seriously.
Furthermore, the appropriate solution to this "problem" would be to stop letting people read anything for free.
So if Samsung makes a TV that will use 10x more energy if you decide not to buy the Premium Subscription you will comment that is actually a Good thing, free markets and so on, fuck that environment and fuck the "Don't be evil promise" .
Today Big Tech moto should be "Be as evil as you are able if it makes money".
Hopefully some civilized countries can add laws about wasting energy and killing devices for no good reason.
EDIT: The Google/Samsung exampel is affecting the entire planet not only the individual that "choose" that he really wants his device to be screwed and his energy bill to increase. So the individual "freedom" is screwing the entire planet for no fucking good reason , at least if you waste the battery to show ads I can understand it.
Can you guess how much is my comment energy usage compares versus all the devices that run YouTube with the screen on?
What about those electronic devices that will end their life sooner because of that?
My hope is that other people will read my comment, add their own support or feedback and maybe at least one single person will think mroe and had the morals to refuse implementing anti environment and anti user features.
it’s funny that you bring up contractual obligations while google ignores the iOS app store rule (contractual obligation) about locking features like PiP behind paywalls.
>How else would you propose they make money (and satisfy contract obligations)? Because nobody else has figured out a better solution.
Do they make money from those millions of devices that run with the screen on? How ? Is some devil paying them for the damage caused to the environment?
For ads it makes sense but not for this shit policy, if they hate the users that they use youtube for free and ads are not enough for them then either put more ads, or find some other methods that do not screw then environment (maybe use the sound of crying babies each 30 seconds if you are not a premium )
Yeah, I will unabashedly shill for YouTube Premium. It’s cheap, it pays video creators more than ads do, and it includes YouTube Music so you can ditch Spotify.
Paying 13 bucks per month, which is a non trivial amount for a lot of people if it competes with other subcription services, merely to block ads on a website that doesn't even produce its own content is in my opinion one of the worst deals on the internet.
That's equivalent to a Netflix subscription, which puts what, 20 billion into original content each year?
I assume with the same amount of magic as they do at all the other streaming platforms, but they still manage to serve up original content. Hence, as a consumer, this seems like a shoddy deal. You're basically paying for ad-free slop, which by the way like Amazon these days you have to crawl through an entire mountain of because the site barely has any content management features either
We're comparing two different companies here. Netflix et al, are in the business of producing original content (good for them), while YouTube et al are in the business of serving user-generated content.
That's not a bug, but a feature. Its the same difference as a high end restaurant, and a hole in the wall restaurant. Both are serving food, yes, but they are doing business in different categories. You cant go to the second restaurant and be like, the food you served didn't come with a smile like this other restaurant here. They seem to have figured it out, why cant you.
Or similarly, you cant go to the high end restaurant and be like - you charge for water now? Why cant you be like this other hole-in-the-wall restaurant.
the entire point is that in this analogy youtube is quite literally the mega chain self serving restaurant on the most decrepit corner, somehow charging you premium prices despite you having to refill your own water.
They're curating nothing, there's garbage everywhere and you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
Netflix costs around double of Youtube Premium for the technical equivalent experience (No ads, UHD playback). It's not like they're charging the same amount for some much better service.
It's interesting to see such different experiences.
To me, YouTube is the gateway to those wonderful hole-in-the-wall places where you get real food made from scratch by people who care. Yeah, there's also a ton of shit. You have to actually make choices, not just take whatever it puts at the top of your recommendations. But the good stuff is there, and it's really good. A gigantic corporation may be intermediating, but the content is real stuff from real people.
Services like Netflix are the soulless mega-chain restaurants serving committee-designed meals that have been focus-grouped and cost-optimized to death.
there are an absurd amount of different takes on it, its pretty crazy. I probably focus too much on the bad content, meant to grab attention. For that reason i have a distaste for youtube because it sorta pushes that type of stuff to the top, which in my mind makes more people make similar cash grab type content.
meanwhile youtube is actively attempting to keep user's viewing as long as possible... netflix probably doesnt really care if you watch for 2 hours a week vs 10 hours a day, they just want the monthly payment.
> you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
Then dont go to the restaurant if the "hygiene" is not upto your standards? Why do you insist on eating food from that resturant, and insist that it needs to be free?
People make videos because there is a platform which makes it incredibly easy to share that video all across the planet without cost to them. And in turn that platform has an enormous base of viewers for that content. To suggest that a world without YouTube (or a similar service) would look the same is ludicrous.
I don’t care what they pay to create content. I care about how much stuff they have that I want to watch. YouTube knocks this out of the park. Netflix fails. I actually have Netflix for free (with some ads) through my cell phone plan and I haven’t used it in a year. I use YouTube daily and the subscription fee is well worth it to remove the ads.
A family plan says it's $23/month. That's well over the cost of a 3 lb tin from Costco ($18.69 by me), which is several weeks if not a month of cold brew.
We're kind of getting off track here, but a 3-lb tin of preground coffee is not going to taste very good by the time you finish it, if it ever tastes good at all. It's pretty likely to be low-quality and stale before you even pull it off the shelf.
I've been getting these buffer loading times recently, and ironically, I don't mind them all that much. The annoyance of ads isn't primarily in the time it takes up, but in having the audio play and a video feed run that isn't the video I clicked on.
If an actual ad played, I'd be irritated beyond belief. But when there's a 12 second buffer, I have enough patience training for slow load times that I instinctively just quickly check my email or spend a brief moment lost in thought. Especially when it's every video. If it was one in every 5 videos, I'd notice it and be bothered. When it's every video, it's part of the experience and my brain just cuts it out automatically.
It certainly has to be better than getting an ad that fills no need of mine. I can't say I noticed any slow loading times on youtube though that might be because the last clip I watched was probably a month ago. Only search for diy fixes on problems I have, rest online attention goes to fediverse nowadays.
The extension is stealing from them. I get stealing a zero marginal cost good is minor but the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video. Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?
> Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?
I've held the position that, if YT wants to, they can block me from their platform for using an adblocker, and I would have no moral ground to stand on.
However, that isn't what they do. They try to circumvent it. They try to make it technically impossible. They try to mislead users into thinking their extensions are malicious.
> the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video
I never made that agreement. And if some software on my computer somehow gets YouTube to deliver me the content anyway, that's not my fault. In my view, it's a cat and mouse game, they can do whatever they want to try to stop me, and vice versa. If they win, I won't complain; but if I do, so be it.
By clicking on the video you did. It is in their terms of service.
How is you purposefully trying to block ads not your fault? Whose fault is it that you installed an Adblock? If you went to a grocery store and told the clerk you already paid and they let you leave would that not be your fault either?
It is legally binding. By accepting ToS, or using service with ToS, you are entering a legal contract. And as long as ToS isn't breaking laws (like Digital Services Act in EU, or Online Safety Act in the UK) it can be fully enforced.
> By accepting ToS, or using service with ToS, you are entering a legal contract
Half right. Only if I accept them affirmatively with a clickwrap, like your article mentions. Implicitly accepted ones do not count. I’m not signed into youtube.com, so there is no acceptance of ToS.
Even browse-wrap is legally binding, if visible enough (and it is visible just under the confirmation button on that massive Cookie Acceptance modal dialog when you come to YouTube).
There's zero agreement happening when you visit a website.
Assuming you didn't do something actually illegal while using their service, without a contract the most they can do is ban you from the service, or try to.
It is legally binding. By accepting ToS, or using service with ToS, you are entering a legal contract. And as long as ToS isn't breaking laws (like Digital Services Act in EU, or Online Safety Act in the UK) it can be fully enforced.
How are you making an agreement? You can’t say “I’ll watch this video in exchange for X minutes of ads” because YouTube will never tell you how many minutes they’re going to show you, and because they have zero interest in committing to some number of minutes of ads. It’s constantly getting worse, and this process will continue until it kills the service.
The agreement is you watch the ads YouTube serves you. Why would that agreement have to include the amount of ads served? If you are unhappy with their business model you can always pay for premium or stop using it. Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
That’s not an agreement, that’s just YouTube doing whatever they want. Which they can—but then—I can just do whatever I want, too. You don’t need to imagine some sort of covenant being involved.
> Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
I don’t even do that, I just watch it as-is. I just don’t need to imagine that YouTube and I have agreed to anything.
There is no agreement. TOS is a notice not a contract. It's not stealing because it's public content, publicly accessible to anyone with the technology to do so.
If Google wants to make YouTube a service with actually binding contracts and not TOS notices no one reads or respects, it can put the whole thing behind a login and end un-authed public web traffic. They're free to do that but they won't because they know that would kill the site dead, and quickly so.
It won't kill the service. The media executives who run YouTube are well aware of how advertising volume affects viewership so they'll titrate up or down as needed to maximize profit.
But don't worry, something else will eventually kill YouTube. Most likely they'll miss some sort of disruptive innovation. Like maybe in 30 years everyone will have content beamed directly into their neutral implants and only a few old people will still watch online videos.
The time line for these sorts of things seems to be: they’ll slowly make YouTube worse and worse, but just not bad enough to kill it. And then something else will come along, and people will be so dissatisfied with the quality of YouTube that people dump it en masse.
Couldn't they fix at 1:1 ad:content ratio and codify it into the charter so that they couldn't give a better or worse deal to the parties even if they wanted?
I've never said they should, they are free to implement any anti-ad-block for all I care. I just pointed out their lack of honesty about the source of the problem, they should say they are actively blocking the extension rather than the extension is malfunctioning.
I’m happy to make the agreement I need to so I can access the thing I like, then turn around and violate those terms when it benefits me. Why should I feel a sense of personal obligation towards google?
You're not even making an agreement. You're reading a notice, if that. In most cases it's entirely moot legally and only really useful as a policy tool for the provider to hang its "we're blocking you" authority on.
Having said that, I 100% agree. If Google allows for non-logged in users, it's a public website and we can consume it however we like, until Google decides to try to block us. That's what it's doing now, trying to block users from consuming the content however they like, a core feature of the public web. Fortunately, blocking us is very very hard for sites not behind a login. If they want not-logged in use, they either go to war with my tech, favored by platform, or they let it slide.
Now, Google owns Chrome, so they can also go to war in the browser and standards bodies as well. But for now, the web is open and accessible and that means, wiht the right technology (Firefox plus uBlock Origin for me) you can watch all those video ad-free and there's nothing Google can do to stop you.
TOS is not an agreement, it's a notice, an assertion from the provider that mandates absolutely nothing from you.
TOS is like me putting a sign up at the end of my driveway saying if you approach my home, you owe me $10. If you pull up to my house, I demand the $10, and you don't pay me, I cannot forcibly take $10 from you, nor can I call the cops or sue over the $10.
You never agreed to anything and certainly not in any legally binding format.
Notices are not contracts and TOS notices are notices.
Taking something without paying for it is theft. You can get into whatever legalize you want but that doesn’t change the fact that you are doing what the vast majority of people recognize as the common definition of theft. Is it illegal? No idea frankly but it’s certainly a decent reason for YouTube to stop serving you videos. Getting mad at YouTube for not serving you when you are not playing by their rules makes absolutely no sense to me and really just seems overwhelmingly entitled.
> Taking something without paying for it is theft.
You keep using the word "theft". Let's grab the definition of "theft" from a legal dictionary:
> Theft is the taking of another person's personal property with the intent of depriving that person of the use of their property. Also referred to as larceny.
The intent of depriving another of their property is a key element of theft. When one receives a copy of data, no one is deprived of their property. It's substantially similar to how I can not steal your car by taking a photo of it.
Not only that, but the typical intellectual property industry nonsense of referring to unauthorized copying as "theft" does not apply. Google, who have acquired a right to distribute this data, are serving it to you.
> You can get into whatever legalize [sic] you want but that doesn’t change the fact that you are doing what the vast majority of people recognize as the common definition of theft.
The legalese matters because it's the best way we've come up with to consistently reason about topics like this regardless of shared values.
There is no theft happening in the case of blocking ads.
Your claim about "the vast majority of people" is patently absurd -- because you have not provided and almost certainly do not possess any evidence to substantiate it -- and lacks a basis in fact. Regardless, we do not reason about these things based on the fluctuating opinion of the masses. There is no case in which blocking ads meets "the common definition of theft".
Are they really trying? They have vast resources and engineering talent. I doubt they are sincerely trying and failing to implement something that radio and broadcast television have managed to do for the better part of a century.
Funny, until now I assumed the "buffering" was just something shoddy with the google infrastructure. Youtube has a reputation for pushing buggy/undesirable changes and already has slow javascript widgets on it so at this point I expect it and "just deal with it". It didn't even occur to me they were trying to poison the well with regards to adblockers.
while ad blocking has grown in prevalence over the years, for something like youtube I'd figured it was more than counteracted by the shift to mobile / TV (where ad blocking is more complicated)
whatever the merits, this (and google's neutering of extensions in chrome) signals a fundamental attitude shift from ~10 years ago; they're more interested in squeezing margins out of their dominant platforms instead of growth
Yeah, it's true. iOS 9 Safari actually had the ability to play YouTube in the background without paying for that, and in iOS 10 they went out of their way to prevent it. And Apple signaled willingness to go along with WEI back when that was on the table.
Safari + Vinegar is my favorite way to watch youtube on any platform. One minor bug I sometimes notice is that the PiP option stops working between videos until you actually hit refresh.
Agreed about Orion, I keep it around and update it and try it out every now and again but I don’t think the experience is there yet.
It's too bad, the stock Safari in iOS 9 did both those things. Nowadays the rare times I want to watch YT on Safari, I just refresh the page once or maybe twice, which somehow makes it not show an ad.
Having to pay for something so that's "less annoying" is the worst business model. YouTube Premium is very expensive. I had it for a while when I got a Pixel smartphone with a few months of YouTube Premium included. It was great. I also understand that streaming on this scale must entail incredibly high operating costs; the money has to come from somewhere. It's simply a dilemma. But there has to be a better way. Any ideas?
They’re attempting that now with “memberships.” I’m not a heavy patreon user, but the current implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I expect they’ll be able to iterate on it.
An unfortunate aspect is that I’m frequently recommended videos which I would have to pay to watch. As a youtube premium subscriber, feeling like I’m constantly being upsold has begun to grate on me. I’d really appreciate a feature to hide these videos as a premium subscriber, which I have little faith in them implementing. On my laptop it’s easy enough to hide these thumbnails (as I already do with shorts) using ublock origin. However this is making me reconsider my subscription. Why should I have to use a third party tool to best use this service which I’m paying a fairly significant fee for? I’ve similarly used ublock origin to work around recent change where only three videos were shown on each row
I would pay that 130€ / year if I was alone. I have to be responsible with the money I earn as I have to feed 3 kids and my wife is not working. We also use other different streaming services like netflix, spotify family... adding youtube premium seems not reasonable for me at the moment.
Commenting to share my experience: I ran into and ended up with youtube because it bundles youtube music as well, allowing me to consolidate. I was able to invite my household to the same account.
I also wanted to ensure my views resulted in the creators being paid, it goes without saying that the royalties for streaming are abysmal and is a separate conversation, but it was a contributing factor for me.
In the USA I subscribe to Youtube Premium family. The rate is just $3.00 a month more than Spotify family. For that price you get both the Spotify-equivalent Google-owned service (confusingly called YouTube Music) AND you get ad-free Youtube as a bundle. Basically just $3/month for no ads on Youtube is worth it and much easier to justify for a household on a tight budget.
It might be worth looking into if the pricing differential is similarly minimal where you live.
In 2025 it's actually not that expensive. CDNs aggressively drive down the cost of streaming video.
A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates.
You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure.
Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,000 bill from your ISP because your content went viral but nowadays their value proposition is more about network effects plus built-in revshare scheme.
Youtube is $14/month. netflix is $17/month. That is VERY expensive, considering that most of Netflix's cost is production. Youtube has almost no production costs. Their users create content.
Maybe if they paid their users more, so they didn't also have to add 'sponsor segments' inside their video's it would make more sense. The bundling music for the same price is the same crap cable and phone companies have been doing for decades, that most people hate. Let me buy just youtube without ads, and keep spotify.
But as it sits right now, $14/month for video's without youtube ads, but still with ads added by the creators themselves (or paid promotion, I guess) is pretty expensive, compared to $17/month for actual movies with no ads at all.
YouTube gives, I think, 55% of revenue (not just profits) to creators, which could be considered similar to production costs making up a majority of expenses.
I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music a couple of years ago because of Spotify showing disruptive ads/promotions on the premium plan. YT Premium for Music + Videos is worth it for me, being about 2.5USD more expensive per month than Spotify where I live. But I agree that one should just be able to subscribe to them separately.
You're not wrong, but the amount of content on YouTube (that they need to index, store, and stream) is several orders of magnitude more than what's on Netflix.
And for that matter, the number of active viewers is also significantly higher since there's no paywall. AND they also support live streaming.
Premium is a good deal if you would have already had Music, and Music is pretty great while also being a good deal. They also have a cheaper 'Premium Lite' these days, though apparently some content still has ads if you use it.
At least on TV I occasionally catch randomly interesting ads... sometimes. On YT, I'm stuck with the same obnoxious commercial from a company whose service I strongly dislike, playing on loop ever since they associated me to some related product category. They think pestering me with more interruptions will win me over, but their analytics are working in reverse. I can't understand why they're so clueless.
its creating a problem and selling the solution to that problem. im surprised there isnt more of a distaste for youtube out there for just their overall product... ads aside. One of the better things ive done for myself this past year is remove the right sidebar as well as almost all of the homepage.
my youtube homepage is just that left sidebar, which has dots if a new video for one of the channels i care about uploads. It totally frees me from clickbait thumbnails, and "youtube rabbit holes".
youtube has just been getting slaughtered with horrible trends of mindless content, low effort documentary stuff, all sorts of low effort garbage with high effort thumbnails/titles. it is so nice to just rid myself of all of it.
Is it actually expensive though? Or does it just feel that way? A movie costs $15, or roughly 13 cents per minute of watch time.
The average daily YouTube watch time is north of 40 minutes per day for adults in the US. That's a penny per minute for YouTube... 11x cheaper than a movie.
It’s a psychological problem. Going from $0 to $1 is a mountain.
Starting a product or service at $30 / month sets expectations up front (no ad supported free tier)
This is an incompatible strategy with venture backed “get all the market share possible by offering services for free to crush competitors so we can have a monopoly to exploit later” mindset
I'd be happy to pay for premium if it actually removed all ads from the platform. I wish they forced creators to declare which segments of a video are ads for their sponsors and then removed or skipped them for premium users. Basically built-in Sponsorblock except not crowd-sourced.
Alternatively, many creators already upload ad-free versions to their Patreon or other paywalled platforms, they could upload those to YouTube as well to be shown to premium users if YT allowed for it and forced them to.
Alas I'm not willing to pay 13€ a month for just slightly fewer ads.
I don't think YouTube should get further into the dangerous spiral of chaperoning the content of videos. If there are too many sponsored segments in a video, take it up with the creator or stop watching that channel.
yeah I think the free market can figure ad load out. creators who go overboard on sponsored segments will get less views, less engagement. there's a natural equilibrium.
In many countries ad sections have to be clearly marked for another reason the "free market" hasn't solved: disguised advertising. I wish the US got with the times.
I'd love an option to be able to filter out all videos from my feed that have sponsored segments. For me, I find the best content is the underground stuff made by folks who don't have a clear profit motive.
I have recently started seeing this on the website, too. It also shows up after you use the temp 2x speed mode by holding left mouse button on the video/tap-holding the video on the app.
So you buy premium - now you don't have ads from YouTube anymore. But now YouTubers such as LinusTechTips and who else not want monthly payments for their exclusive content. Yea, that's not going to work. Now your watchers don't watch your content.
It’s crazy to ram as they did a revenue breakdown recently and the sponser segments was way tinier than I expected - like 10% or in that range. I was annoyed just knowing they shit on their videos just for that tiny profit boost.
I run Brave on multiple devices and there's now a "glitch" a few seconds after what wouod be the ads, starts. I put up with this because the alternative is to put up with ads that treat viewers like morons with one hand in the mouse and other in the wallet.
I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too) and am happy with the lack of ads, even though many creators still mix paid sponsors into their videos. It seems the creators are motivated to keep things minimal or they will lose engagement.
What I am not happy with is a lack of control over the homepage and recommendations. I would really like to be able to easily block channels from ever showing up, but you can only sort of do this if you click "don't recommend this channel anymore" from the homepage. But you can't do this if a video shows up recommended from another video. And overall, it just feels like they are spending so much effort trying to get me to watch the next video instead of enjoy the one I am trying to watch.
For my kids, I came up with an ad hoc policy where they can watch from the homepage / recs on weekends but during the week have to stick to a personal playlist they can only add videos to on the weekends. This removes the algorithmically driven addictive nature of YouTube and unsurprisingly they end up moderating their use of Youtube within their alotted screen time much better. It distinguishes between, "I want to watch this" and "I want to pull the slot machine lever." But I would be a lot happier if I could better curate access to content for my kids too. Youtube Kids sucks, it ends up filtering out a bunch of interesting stuff like carpentry and nature content that hasn't been marked "for kids" in favor of videos of kids shopping for toys and stuff.
The "don't show this channel" feature also feels like there is some kind of expiry because I've blocked a few channels multiple times now via that method.
Totally a theory but sometimes YouTube has a button that says roughly "show me something new". I think that may be the source of those channels returning.
Agreed. I've told YT about a thousand times I have zero friggin interest in YouTube Shorts and lo and behold a few weeks later they guiltily try to sneak back into the home page.
> I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too)
I'm curious about a buyer's perspective: would you say this is "tying"? (Seems like an ambiguous word for it but I can see no other translation for koppelverkoop)
To me it seems like trying to undermine the market for music streaming (which is currently somewhat healthy with a handful of competing services worldwide where you can get access to most artists' work) by abusing the monopoly on videos that people often want a subscription on. The parent corp has so much cash to spare, giving away music for nearly free is worth it to make it extremely difficult to compete in this other market. From an individual's point of view, you're a thief of your own wallet if you don't get this two in one deal (assuming you want both). I'm not sure how to feel about people who buy this
I've come to rely on a robust method of adblocking YouTube which I believe to be perfectly reliable and impossible for YouTube to circumvent: avoid watching YouTube. Incidentally this method also reliably prevents false buffering.
Absurd but true in a similar way: I get a tiny spark of nostalgia on those occasions where a bit of sponsored promotion pops into part of some podcast i'm listening to as a YT video while I do chores. (Ublock running, so no third party ads at least)
The thing about those idiotic third party ads on YouTube, which is so grotesquely annoying is that, unlike TV ads of old, some of then can literally run for dozens of minutes at auto-increased volume unless you go to your device and skip them at some point. That is some particularly shitty nonsense right there.
When was that? I'm genuinely asking, since I remember the breakdown from when I was recording TV to my computer and editing out the commercials, as 10 minutes of commercials and 20 minutes of TV show.
Are you mostly watching short videos? I mostly watch videos that are 10+ minutes and I've never had YouTube come anywhere near either the number or total length of ads that I saw on cable or that I see on broadcast TV.
No they do not have that right. They do not have the right to try to circumvent what I'm telling my browser to do. If they don't like what it's doing, they can block me from the platform.
! Stop sites from prompting to sign into Google account
||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p
! Stop annoying reels from littering friend feeds
www.facebook.com##[aria-label="reel"]:upward(2)
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element-show
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
! Don't use the obnoxious new bold font for titles, use the old font instead
www.youtube.com###title h1 yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;)
www.youtube.com##h3.ytd-playlist-panel-renderer .title .yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;)
! Remove branding bugs in the bottom corner
www.youtube.com##div.iv-branding
www.youtube.com##.annotation.annotation-type-custom.iv-branding
! Disable live video previews on hover
www.youtube.com##+js(aeld, /^(?:mousemove|pointermove|pointerenter)$/, buttons)
! Remove "Scroll for details"
www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-fullerscreen-edu-button
! Remove "This video contains paid content" warning
www.youtube.com##.ytp-paid-content-overlay
! Remove badges
www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.badges
www.youtube.com##ytd-badge-supported-renderer.ytd-video-primary-info-renderer
! Remove badges in lists, expand video title to fill that space again
www.youtube.com##.ytd-badge-supported-renderer.style-scope.badge-style-type-verified.badge
www.youtube.com###menu > .ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.metadata:style(padding-right:0!important)
! Remove chat
www.youtube.com###chat
! Remove sidebar
www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer.ytd-app.style-scope
www.youtube.com##ytd-app[mini-guide-visible] ytd-page-manager.ytd-app:style(margin-left:0px!important)
! Remove the shadow over the top of videos
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-top
www.youtube.com##.ytp-chrome-top
! Reduce opacity of the shadow over the bottom of videos
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-bottom:style(opacity: 55% !important)
! Reduce opacity of video length labels
www.youtube.com##ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer.ytd-thumbnail.style-scope:style(opacity:75% !important)
! Remove Next button. I only ever hit this accidentally, losing my place
! and my playback buffer >:-[
www.youtube.com##.ytp-left-controls > .ytp-button.ytp-next-button
! Remove Miniplayer button
www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-miniplayer-button
! Force YouTube to display the complete copyright information in the description
www.youtube.com###expanded-metadata:style(display:block !important)
! Don't load the preview image before the video loads (saves some bandwidth)
||i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/*/maxresdefault.webp
||i.ytimg.com/vi/*/maxresdefault.jpg
! Remove interactions (eg if you never login to YouTube)
www.youtube.com###like-button
www.youtube.com###dislike-button
www.youtube.com###sponsor-button
www.youtube.com###hover-overlays
www.youtube.com###subscribe-button
www.youtube.com###flexible-item-buttons
www.youtube.com###button-shape
www.youtube.com###reply-button-end
! Remove sidebar items that are only applicable to logged-in users
www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1)
www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)
! Remove "Watch Later" and "Add to Queue"
www.youtube.com###h...
Not sure if it's the same one, but I managed to consistently click the "includes paid promotion" banner on video thumbnails so I open a tab with the help page explaining what sponsorships are instead of the video.
If YouTube's ads were like the TV ads of olden days, they might even be marginally tolerable. They're not however.
In my experience, they not only deliberately increase volume to pretty much screech whatever insipid bullshit is being offered at you, but they also can sometimes run for dozens of minutes unless you manually go to your device and press "skip". TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.
I even wonder how anything so fucking hostile and annoying to a YT free user can possibly be effective? Who's actively paying for all this garbage ad placement with such scummy little playback mechanics?
It was around that time that I stopped watching cable television altogether.
If you want to back down memory lane, search on YouTube for old recordings of network TV ad breaks from the late 90s and early 2000s- they’re just obnoxious.
Yeah, I was reading this and thinking wut, TV sucks. Like half the time watching a show (most likely a rerun) is ads, even if it's a paid cable channel. And even after that 2010 law, pretty sure the ads are louder than the shows. And the ads are even worse nowadays because the ads exclusively target old people, so 90% are drugs or gold-buying scams. Somehow the cable STBs are super laggy nowadays too, like they rewrote the video decoder in Javascript or something, cause it used to be fine.
The only thing I miss at all is being able to leave a TV on and have it keep playing something reasonable, not convince itself that watching a car review means I want to watch a screaming kid trolling in Minecraft followed by the Syrian Civil War.
Oh the gold buying ads come by mail, you only sell your gold on TV. I heard they pay even higher than market rate if you order some orbexlitol with it.
If adblock stopped working I would leave, which is interesting to me as I wonder what I'd do with my new time.
Funny I make YT videos too trying to build an audience, I'd like to not put ads on it but not my choice
I don't understand how people can just accept ads it drives me insane when some random shit starts playing
I already lost money with YT, I bought so many UHD movies on their platform ($20 ea) and they won't stream it in HD unless you're on a supported device or ad-ridden tv
edit: alright, aftrer seeing it's $13 I will get it, I have been converted
You pay to make the content. You would have to "pay" to make the content no matter where you hosted it. You don't pay YouTube to host it. That's a silly argument.
You seem to ignore that you would probably have no audience - or have a significantly smaller audience - were it not for YouTube hosting your content. They are providing you a service, but you seem to think that nobody - not you, not your viewers - should have to trade anything for that service, despite the hosting and streaming of video being one of the most expensive possible tech services in the world (bar perhaps running genAI models.)
I dunno it's just very annoying how a lot of people have memed themselves into this train of thought where the big tech companies aren't actually providing them anything of value, when if they decided to suddenly stop providing their services they would be up a creek without a paddle.
YouTube Premium has existed for years now... You're absolutely able to pay for an ad-free experience, and it provides more financial support to creators than ads do
YT Premium revenue goes to the same creators you watch otherwise but they get compensated more for your views than they do for any other person's views.
e.g. Linus Tech Tips posted up their share of revenue from AdSense in 2024; YT Premium made up 37% of their revenue despite being 29% of their views.
That's different though. Paying through Patreon is directly giving the creators a larger share, but neither party (you or the creator) pays for video hosting service in this transaction.
Your argument only makes sense if you watch the creator's videos exclusively on Patreon (paid by the cut they take from your transaction) or on a platform like Vimeo (paid directly by the creator for hosting). In which case, what Youtube does isn't relevant to you.
The existence of premium is not the same as parent poster’s, “make us pay for it” idea, aka a paywall.
If YouTube and its content actually has value, then presumably a paywall would have no effect of revenues of YouTube or creators. On the other hand if the content is actually nearly worthless, the vast majority of people would find something better to do with their time.
the OP said "make us pay" not "give us the option to pay"
Until they make us pay, put the entire site behind a paywall or similar, I'll keep enjoying their public web content using my clients of choice, some of which modify the content in various ways for various reasons, entirely of my choosing.
Ransomware doesn't have to be illegal in North Korea to convict a North Korean who did it, either in absence or with extradition, in the country where the damage was done
With Alphabet being from a country with extreme capitalism, the comment you're replying to seems applicable no matter where the viewers are (regardless of whether I agree with their viewpoint/outlook). YouTube's owners can choose to block or prosecute whoever doesn't comply with their terms. Not saying that's likely, just that: this isn't a matter of needing to be on the American continent
Edit: perhaps interesting to realise that, conversely, laws in North Korea might make it illegal for Alphabet to have certain terms if they want to serve consumers in their market. (A better example here would be EU with copyright legislation that makes it illegal to sign away your moral rights, for instance.) It works both ways and both could legally prosecute the other at the same time and both win in their area! But with YouTube being able to gatekeep the content here, one has more power than the other..
I mean most adblocking software is open source and easily acquired, a lot like torrenting software it’d be near impossible to actually enforce anything.
Yep, they need viewers to click the like/subscribe button. They need that so content creators keep on providing content to Google for free in exchange for popularity metrics. Which they need to close sponsorship deals (because Google isn't paying them a whole lot).
So, Google is merely optimizing the ad clicks and impressions here. If they succeed in becoming too obnoxious with their ads, viewers might leave for other platforms, and then content creators would follow. So, fighting ad blocking has diminishing returns and can actually have a negative impact on them. Which is why ad blocking is still effective in 2025 and why Youtube has thrived by being not too effective with their anti ad blocking measures. This is more about selling the notion to advertisers that they are a really good advertising platform than it is about fighting the minority of users who block their ads no matter what. It won't work. But it won't matter as long as advertisers keep on paying for advertising on Youtube.
The irony of their latest efforts is that it is driving away users from Chrome to more effective alternatives (Firefox, Brave, etc.) and it's driving content creators to depend on sponsor ship deals instead of advertising money from Google. The only reason Chrome exists is actually ads. So, more effective counter measures against ad blocking in Chrome could end up hurting their ad revenue. And Google's behavior is actually causing for increasingly stronger calls to break up Google. None of that is good for Google and their advertising revenue.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 408 ms ] threadA) sincerely, trustfully, optimistically, etc.
...or...
B) critically, skeptically, experimentally, observationally, etc.
The next step is to scrape the videos, strip the ads, store them on a torrent magnet and serve that instead. Yes it would have to be from a shady RU or CN or NK or IN site. I’m fine with that.
Option 1: be a hermit and not watch anything on YouTube ever. You can't look up repair guides, fully use a news website that I'm subscribed to that got rid of their self hosted version, watch a subset of public broadcasts that we pay for via taxes, etc. It's not just entertainment / a Netflix replacement
Option 2: give in and enrich this monopolistic tracking company
Option 3: try to pirate the content
I'd feel very different if this were Spotify or an individual artist: I can use three other music services with massively overlapping offerings from different jurisdictions. Or supermarkets, for the same reason. But if it's irreplaceable and gatekept, I can understand both sides here
¹ https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en
> Ads however may appear on music content, Shorts, and when you search or browse.
- https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/15968883?hl=en
Pretty much all of my YouTube ads are for TV shows, movies, cars, mobile games, consumer products, and various consumer services. Volkswagen, Dove, TurboTax, etc. All incredibly mainstream.
Maybe you're located in a country or region maintain advertisers avoid?
I'm honestly not really sure why you're complaining. If you don't want to be tracked or profiled, you're going to get the lowest quality ads. Why do you think higher-quality advertisers should be wasting money trying to reach you, when you are going out of your way to avoid any interest in them?
To be clear, I'm not criticizing what you're doing to avoid tracking, or your stance against it. But I'm questioning why you would then complain about the ads you receive.
This might be a controversial take, but I don't want to see soft-core porn ads. I don't want to see scam ads. I don't want to see the worst of the worst. It is not a necessary state of affairs that the lowest common denominator ads are ads that are explicitly attempting to prey upon the least informed, most vulnerable members of society.
The fact that the worst ads are the way that they are is indicative of YouTube's willingness to engage in user-hostile activities.
If they were less willing to engage in hostile ads, there would be less hostility towards their ads.
YouTube's solution is extremely simple: vet ads and don't accept money to run hostile ads.
Right, then avoid them. Either don't use YouTube, or else pay for Premium so you don't see them.
You claim people are hostile to watching YouTube's ads because of their quality. But I don't think so -- I think they're mostly seeing normal ads, not scammy ones. Because they're not taking measures against tracking. Your experience would seem to be very much an outlier.
I simply don't see the ads you're talking about, not even a little bit, so I can't really speak to YouTube's acceptable ads policies. But just so you know -- you can also mark checkboxes in your Google profile around which categories of ads you are and aren't interested in. I actually did that, and got less ads for categories I have zero interest in. That may help your ads experience, and make your ad quality complaints go away, if you're philosophically OK with that, since you're providing data freely rather than through tracking.
EDIT: also, I think everyone should block ads. We should snub advertisers and surveillers all of the time. If they want to be hostile towards users, users should be hostile towards them.
Capitalists have had it too good for too long. It's time consumers stop caring about how the poor capitalist will make their dime.
Until the capitalists take the time to respect us, the consumers, we don't owe them anything.
It's time for reciprocity. If they're hostile, we reciprocate. If they're cooperative, we reciprocate.
You pay for Premium?
Then why are you complaining about ads when you don't even see them?
And why are you talking about being hostile to a company when you pay them every month?
I'm even more confused than before.
Speaking of PSAs, the US federal government issued a PSA a couple years ago recommending use of an ad blocker to avoid becoming a victim of financial scams/fraud (purged now for some reason). Why they don't prosecute the ad companies for being the ones to select and deliver the mark is anyone's guess.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221221123349/https://www.ic3.g...
I work in mental health and I am seeing more people who spend a substantial amount on “parlays”. Many examples downplay or hide the behavior from their social network and the extreme examples spend a significant amount. The advertising is obviously predatory and goes against what we know about control dynamics in addict behavior but we tend to view that as a personal moral failing rather than exploiting basic biology and as a result allow the dealer to ruin countless lives before any action is taken (see Purdue and Teva lawsuits)
Youtube/google ads? Never bought anything, automatically assume they are a scam.
If people hosted video elsewhere, I would gladly never visit youtube again.
Creators are not going to start paying for uploads when they can push their costs to the viewers.
If I "blamed" the creators, you'd be telling me it's not their fault, they're just incentivised by the system, they're just playing the game.
But when I "blame" the system, you're telling me the system is not at fault, that it's individual choice to choose a near-monopoly on video discoverability that is propelled by and heavily benefiting from the same company's actual monopoly of search.
Is it "YT's problem?"? No, it's to YT's massive benefit, it's my problem when I have to suffer through adverts.
But isnt YouTube a mere player in the game as well?
I can't think of an adjective less suitable for Alphabet/Google/YouTube than "mere".
Not that this was part of the suit, but the whole practice of giving things away for free and subsidizing them with stalking and ads obviously distorts or completely destroys markets, so yes they can be blamed for doing that. The behavior of these companies is so bad that people in a recent thread were claiming things like chat services (where a single computer can provide service for millions of users) cannot be sustainably run by charging money.
So of course they're never going to pay. That's the problem advertising solves -- infrequent users can be monetized.
YouTube already has an option to pay to avoid ads, for frequent users. And lots of people subscribe to it.
What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
Arent you voluntarily using their website? Nobody is forcing you to open your browser, and type y-o-u-t-u-b-e-dot-c-o-m.
> What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
MKBHD, LTT and others are willingly uploading videos to YouTube. YT doesnt have an exclusive deal with any of those. Infact, those folks are free to upload the same video to Vimeo, Twitch and others. What is YT doing wrong here?
> What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
Such as?
I still fail to understand how this is a fault of a company? Would you blame Apple if everyone bought iPhones? What should Apple do? Ask people not to buy their phones?
Google Analytics is not going around tracking users. They provide a service that the website you decided to go to (cnn.com, bbc.com) is using. If you have to be angry, be angry with cnn or bbc.
Also, client side scripts do not run on the website's property. They are taking advantage of the wide-open security model of web clients (the model they coincidentally get to define because they dump massive amounts of money into giving away a free browser, making competition in the space nearly impossible) to use people's computers for unauthorized purposes. It's a malware payload just like a crypto miner. They should be treated the same way (or more severely) that they would be if they published miners and told web developers to add them to get free money (taking their own cut of course). The operator and the tool creator should both be blamed for shady behavior when the tool is designed and advertised for shady purposes.
Manufacturers make things when there's a market. If Google didnt build Google Analytics, someone else would (Maybe Microsoft, or Apple) because the demand exists.
Why haven't they created crypto miners for even more profit? It would be more ethical and less wasteful than the surveillance/ads combo. Obviously others will and have done it.
If GA didn't exist there's no guarantee that the alternatives would create the same negative externalities that damage privacy of strangers while delivering value to the users of the software.
Google Analytics ultimately operates the way it does not because it's necessarily the best way to provide value to the sites that use it, but because it serves Google's monopolistic and unscrupulous interests.
You're operating under this unrealistic assumption that Google is an innocent entity that has not broken the law to get to the position that they are in.
This is false. Google does not play by the rules and as such your assertion that people should in turn play by the rules when interacting with Google is unreasonable.
Imagine all the restaurants in the world used IKEA for their tables & chairs. Can you say OMG IKEA has a monopoly? No sir, IKEA didnt go into the stores and install the tables & chairs, the restuarants did. Will you be angry with IKEA?
I can certainly imagine such a thing but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the situation as IKEA has as far as I'm aware never been ruled to be a monopoly while Google has.[0]
Ultimately my position on this subject comes down to this: Google does things that are hostile to me. They do things that are hostile to you. They do things that are hostile to society writ large. They break the law and violate the social contract. My morals necessitate responding to such an entity with disregard for whatever they're legally entitled to.
I don't like the way that I'm surveilled by Google and I don't like the way that they abuse their monopoly position and lobby the government to make it impossible for me to evade that surveillance.
To bring the conversation back to where it started: I already pay them with my privacy, I pay for the economic harm their monopolistic practices have on society, and I pay for the corrosive effects their lobbying has on the political structure.
I'm not going to be paying them for an ad free Youtube experience.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/05/business/google-loses-antitru...
I pay for a subscription to The Athletic, who used to offer ad free podcasts in their app. Last month they signed an exclusive deal with Acast, and now I cannot possibly listen to their podcasts without ads.
A third-party client has room to make a dramatic improvement on the twitch experience by not dropping audio while you make the switch from the ad stream to the content stream.
In the future, everything will be like that vapid chicken wing podcast (the one where they bring on an interesting, talented person and then waste half an hour interviewing her about sriracha)
So Ira Glass will be narrating This American Life while simultaneously reviewing different varieties of Doritos, etc.
...or the producers of The Rest is History will add the Planters Peanut Man as a third host
...or Marques Brownlee will review every product in relation to how well it works with Bose headphones
...it powers through tough grease and grime
...with no harsh smells!
The future is Fantastik®.
My favorite relentless one is Tracker (Amazon Prime), who spend approximately 30% of screen time dedicated to showing off a GMC pickup and Airstream, but the most egregious was one dialog line:
> As Colter enters and gives them hugs, Velma remembers that they got a gift for him. Reenie hands him the gift - very conspicuously packaged in an Amazon box with its trademark logo and blue tape - and says, "I've gotta say, next-day delivery is pretty sweet. Thank you, Amazon Prime!"
1. Interviewing a guest while they are eating insanely spicy food is an extremely novel idea and the guest's reactions and answers end up being really interesting and unexpected as a result. It humanizes famous people in a way I've never seen before because you can't just bluff your way through it.
2. The hot sauce vendors are often small companies or indie makers (at least they used to be). This is way different than reviewing 11 bags of Superman Transformers 3D Doritos Walmart Product Placement for the next blockbuster.
3. Hot sauce is interesting! Nearly every culture on every continent has hot sauce. They are made from a huge variety of interesting and unusual ingredients but are also simple and can be made at home. Hot sauce hasn't been explored in this way in popular culture.
Then you would need to set up a server that would do all this and serve as a 'mirror' to your podcasts without the ads.
https://github.com/jdrbc/podly_pure_podcasts
I also have a setup like this, I transcribe with Whisper and send it to OpenAI 4o-mini to detect ads then clip those segments with pydub, but my prompt must be lacking because the success rate on detecting ads is maybe 60%
I think it's better than 60%, but I should definitely set up some evals.
I split the text by sentence, but was considering having the LLM try and put into paragraph (that might conceptually chunk commercial sentences together), but what I've got has been good enough for me.
I wanted to switch to Flash 2.5, but it looks like they increased the price a lot.
I think I could do a fair bit of ad identification just with text heuristics: "This podcast is sponsored/supported by...", etc.
This is like saying I was able to sneak into a concert. Sure, but at some point the restrictions are gonna come down hard.
It's not like sneaking into a concert. It's like attending a free concert at a mall and wearing a mask so the cameras can't read your lips. Or covering your phone screen with your hand when you show a friend a private photo of a special moment.
Who pays for the electricity, upkeep, security and airconditioning of the mall? Who pays for the sound stage, the technicians, the lighting of the mall?
The band decided to perform at the mall, because they like the facilities there. They always had a choice to perform at their house ("own website"), but they chose the mall ("YouTube") and as long as YouTube is hosting their videos, YouTube deserves to be compensated.
Pretty much since YouTube started cracking down on adblockers, r/youtube top post Every. Single. Day. is usually someone complaining that they just got hit with "adblock detected" and comments split between "Yeah it sucks, hit me last month" and "Huh, uBlock Origin works fine for me. I must be super smart. YouTube can't defeat me"
We've all seen what they're doing with AI-generated video, and we know their market and political power. Eventually they'll be remaking the video so the person or animal or rock or tree on the screen is giving AI-generated product testimonials.
I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.
Not really. They'll just need to recode for you that one minute with the ad. The rest of the video can stay the same.
If they're doing it smartly, they can even avoid full recompression and just splice in the ad.
They own the hosting website, if they want to show their user ads, they will find a way, even if it takes a few year.
--
[1] They do send a super low resolution stream with no audio, but not the actual quality you are watching in.
[2] Right now Twitch does not stop sending content in markets where they don't have ad inventory. So there are actually browser extensions already that will use a custom foreign market server to proxy the video during ad breaks, so that you can still have an 100% effective ad blocker.
Anything that JS on the client can do is also under control of browser extensions. We are talking about YouTube’s options under that constraint.
The only other alternative is to make the video a live stream of indefinite length where the user can’t skip forward beyond the farthest point they already played.
For example: What value does your comment provide the world? Enough value to offset the carbon emissions from transmission/storage/retrieval/display? Personally, I'd answer no. Thus your comment itself is a waste of energy.
Only pointing it out because of the irony given the content of your post
Otherwise yeah, don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say
I respectfully disagree.
> don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say
They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy. I shared my "tautology" to illustrate while OP's point may be largely correct, greed is not unique to Google.
More then that, sure they show you ads, GREAT but they screw your device and environment, this makes them no money , a small fraction of users might buy premium but the rest of the users will waste energy and bdevice life, the developers contribute to killing devices and wasting energy.
Furthermore, the appropriate solution to this "problem" would be to stop letting people read anything for free.
Today Big Tech moto should be "Be as evil as you are able if it makes money".
Hopefully some civilized countries can add laws about wasting energy and killing devices for no good reason.
EDIT: The Google/Samsung exampel is affecting the entire planet not only the individual that "choose" that he really wants his device to be screwed and his energy bill to increase. So the individual "freedom" is screwing the entire planet for no fucking good reason , at least if you waste the battery to show ads I can understand it.
What about those electronic devices that will end their life sooner because of that?
My hope is that other people will read my comment, add their own support or feedback and maybe at least one single person will think mroe and had the morals to refuse implementing anti environment and anti user features.
Do they make money from those millions of devices that run with the screen on? How ? Is some devil paying them for the damage caused to the environment?
For ads it makes sense but not for this shit policy, if they hate the users that they use youtube for free and ads are not enough for them then either put more ads, or find some other methods that do not screw then environment (maybe use the sound of crying babies each 30 seconds if you are not a premium )
That's equivalent to a Netflix subscription, which puts what, 20 billion into original content each year?
How do you think those video bits get streamed all around the world? Magic?
That's not a bug, but a feature. Its the same difference as a high end restaurant, and a hole in the wall restaurant. Both are serving food, yes, but they are doing business in different categories. You cant go to the second restaurant and be like, the food you served didn't come with a smile like this other restaurant here. They seem to have figured it out, why cant you.
Or similarly, you cant go to the high end restaurant and be like - you charge for water now? Why cant you be like this other hole-in-the-wall restaurant.
They're curating nothing, there's garbage everywhere and you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
To me, YouTube is the gateway to those wonderful hole-in-the-wall places where you get real food made from scratch by people who care. Yeah, there's also a ton of shit. You have to actually make choices, not just take whatever it puts at the top of your recommendations. But the good stuff is there, and it's really good. A gigantic corporation may be intermediating, but the content is real stuff from real people.
Services like Netflix are the soulless mega-chain restaurants serving committee-designed meals that have been focus-grouped and cost-optimized to death.
meanwhile youtube is actively attempting to keep user's viewing as long as possible... netflix probably doesnt really care if you watch for 2 hours a week vs 10 hours a day, they just want the monthly payment.
Then dont go to the restaurant if the "hygiene" is not upto your standards? Why do you insist on eating food from that resturant, and insist that it needs to be free?
It could be ludicrous, if that argument were being made.
If an actual ad played, I'd be irritated beyond belief. But when there's a 12 second buffer, I have enough patience training for slow load times that I instinctively just quickly check my email or spend a brief moment lost in thought. Especially when it's every video. If it was one in every 5 videos, I'd notice it and be bothered. When it's every video, it's part of the experience and my brain just cuts it out automatically.
I've held the position that, if YT wants to, they can block me from their platform for using an adblocker, and I would have no moral ground to stand on.
However, that isn't what they do. They try to circumvent it. They try to make it technically impossible. They try to mislead users into thinking their extensions are malicious.
I never made that agreement. And if some software on my computer somehow gets YouTube to deliver me the content anyway, that's not my fault. In my view, it's a cat and mouse game, they can do whatever they want to try to stop me, and vice versa. If they win, I won't complain; but if I do, so be it.
By clicking on the video you did. It is in their terms of service.
How is you purposefully trying to block ads not your fault? Whose fault is it that you installed an Adblock? If you went to a grocery store and told the clerk you already paid and they let you leave would that not be your fault either?
Here is an example of ToS being enforced: https://kennedyslaw.com/en/thought-leadership/article/2023/n...
Half right. Only if I accept them affirmatively with a clickwrap, like your article mentions. Implicitly accepted ones do not count. I’m not signed into youtube.com, so there is no acceptance of ToS.
TOS is a NOTICE, not a contract.
There's zero agreement happening when you visit a website.
Assuming you didn't do something actually illegal while using their service, without a contract the most they can do is ban you from the service, or try to.
Here is an example of ToS being enforced: https://kennedyslaw.com/en/thought-leadership/article/2023/n...
Another example https://www.internetlibrary.com/cases/lib_case392.cfm
> Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
I don’t even do that, I just watch it as-is. I just don’t need to imagine that YouTube and I have agreed to anything.
If Google wants to make YouTube a service with actually binding contracts and not TOS notices no one reads or respects, it can put the whole thing behind a login and end un-authed public web traffic. They're free to do that but they won't because they know that would kill the site dead, and quickly so.
But don't worry, something else will eventually kill YouTube. Most likely they'll miss some sort of disruptive innovation. Like maybe in 30 years everyone will have content beamed directly into their neutral implants and only a few old people will still watch online videos.
Having said that, I 100% agree. If Google allows for non-logged in users, it's a public website and we can consume it however we like, until Google decides to try to block us. That's what it's doing now, trying to block users from consuming the content however they like, a core feature of the public web. Fortunately, blocking us is very very hard for sites not behind a login. If they want not-logged in use, they either go to war with my tech, favored by platform, or they let it slide.
Now, Google owns Chrome, so they can also go to war in the browser and standards bodies as well. But for now, the web is open and accessible and that means, wiht the right technology (Firefox plus uBlock Origin for me) you can watch all those video ad-free and there's nothing Google can do to stop you.
TOS is like me putting a sign up at the end of my driveway saying if you approach my home, you owe me $10. If you pull up to my house, I demand the $10, and you don't pay me, I cannot forcibly take $10 from you, nor can I call the cops or sue over the $10.
You never agreed to anything and certainly not in any legally binding format.
Notices are not contracts and TOS notices are notices.
You keep using the word "theft". Let's grab the definition of "theft" from a legal dictionary:
> Theft is the taking of another person's personal property with the intent of depriving that person of the use of their property. Also referred to as larceny.
The intent of depriving another of their property is a key element of theft. When one receives a copy of data, no one is deprived of their property. It's substantially similar to how I can not steal your car by taking a photo of it.
Not only that, but the typical intellectual property industry nonsense of referring to unauthorized copying as "theft" does not apply. Google, who have acquired a right to distribute this data, are serving it to you.
> You can get into whatever legalize [sic] you want but that doesn’t change the fact that you are doing what the vast majority of people recognize as the common definition of theft.
The legalese matters because it's the best way we've come up with to consistently reason about topics like this regardless of shared values.
There is no theft happening in the case of blocking ads.
Your claim about "the vast majority of people" is patently absurd -- because you have not provided and almost certainly do not possess any evidence to substantiate it -- and lacks a basis in fact. Regardless, we do not reason about these things based on the fluctuating opinion of the masses. There is no case in which blocking ads meets "the common definition of theft".
That’s what they are actually trying to do lol.
whatever the merits, this (and google's neutering of extensions in chrome) signals a fundamental attitude shift from ~10 years ago; they're more interested in squeezing margins out of their dominant platforms instead of growth
I just use Vinegar [0] and watch YT on Safari. It also allows me to listen to the videos with the phone locked.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...
Agreed about Orion, I keep it around and update it and try it out every now and again but I don’t think the experience is there yet.
This is obnoxious.
An unfortunate aspect is that I’m frequently recommended videos which I would have to pay to watch. As a youtube premium subscriber, feeling like I’m constantly being upsold has begun to grate on me. I’d really appreciate a feature to hide these videos as a premium subscriber, which I have little faith in them implementing. On my laptop it’s easy enough to hide these thumbnails (as I already do with shorts) using ublock origin. However this is making me reconsider my subscription. Why should I have to use a third party tool to best use this service which I’m paying a fairly significant fee for? I’ve similarly used ublock origin to work around recent change where only three videos were shown on each row
That's older than the "membership" concept. They licensed a bunch of television and movies and made them pay-per-view.
I also wanted to ensure my views resulted in the creators being paid, it goes without saying that the royalties for streaming are abysmal and is a separate conversation, but it was a contributing factor for me.
It might be worth looking into if the pricing differential is similarly minimal where you live.
A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates.
You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure.
Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,000 bill from your ISP because your content went viral but nowadays their value proposition is more about network effects plus built-in revshare scheme.
Maybe if they paid their users more, so they didn't also have to add 'sponsor segments' inside their video's it would make more sense. The bundling music for the same price is the same crap cable and phone companies have been doing for decades, that most people hate. Let me buy just youtube without ads, and keep spotify.
But as it sits right now, $14/month for video's without youtube ads, but still with ads added by the creators themselves (or paid promotion, I guess) is pretty expensive, compared to $17/month for actual movies with no ads at all.
And for that matter, the number of active viewers is also significantly higher since there's no paywall. AND they also support live streaming.
It's for content that use music. As you said of you want ad free music you need the full one.
my youtube homepage is just that left sidebar, which has dots if a new video for one of the channels i care about uploads. It totally frees me from clickbait thumbnails, and "youtube rabbit holes".
youtube has just been getting slaughtered with horrible trends of mindless content, low effort documentary stuff, all sorts of low effort garbage with high effort thumbnails/titles. it is so nice to just rid myself of all of it.
like a forest preserve deciding theyd like billboards in the middle of their paths after a few years.
The average daily YouTube watch time is north of 40 minutes per day for adults in the US. That's a penny per minute for YouTube... 11x cheaper than a movie.
Starting a product or service at $30 / month sets expectations up front (no ad supported free tier)
This is an incompatible strategy with venture backed “get all the market share possible by offering services for free to crush competitors so we can have a monopoly to exploit later” mindset
Alternatively, many creators already upload ad-free versions to their Patreon or other paywalled platforms, they could upload those to YouTube as well to be shown to premium users if YT allowed for it and forced them to.
Alas I'm not willing to pay 13€ a month for just slightly fewer ads.
.. or a competitor (who's a competitor to LTT? GamerNexus? MKBHD?) would take their place.
LTT does have some interesting videos, but yeah, most of their output is full of ads.
I run Brave on multiple devices and there's now a "glitch" a few seconds after what wouod be the ads, starts. I put up with this because the alternative is to put up with ads that treat viewers like morons with one hand in the mouse and other in the wallet.
What I am not happy with is a lack of control over the homepage and recommendations. I would really like to be able to easily block channels from ever showing up, but you can only sort of do this if you click "don't recommend this channel anymore" from the homepage. But you can't do this if a video shows up recommended from another video. And overall, it just feels like they are spending so much effort trying to get me to watch the next video instead of enjoy the one I am trying to watch.
For my kids, I came up with an ad hoc policy where they can watch from the homepage / recs on weekends but during the week have to stick to a personal playlist they can only add videos to on the weekends. This removes the algorithmically driven addictive nature of YouTube and unsurprisingly they end up moderating their use of Youtube within their alotted screen time much better. It distinguishes between, "I want to watch this" and "I want to pull the slot machine lever." But I would be a lot happier if I could better curate access to content for my kids too. Youtube Kids sucks, it ends up filtering out a bunch of interesting stuff like carpentry and nature content that hasn't been marked "for kids" in favor of videos of kids shopping for toys and stuff.
Totally a theory but sometimes YouTube has a button that says roughly "show me something new". I think that may be the source of those channels returning.
I'm curious about a buyer's perspective: would you say this is "tying"? (Seems like an ambiguous word for it but I can see no other translation for koppelverkoop)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
To me it seems like trying to undermine the market for music streaming (which is currently somewhat healthy with a handful of competing services worldwide where you can get access to most artists' work) by abusing the monopoly on videos that people often want a subscription on. The parent corp has so much cash to spare, giving away music for nearly free is worth it to make it extremely difficult to compete in this other market. From an individual's point of view, you're a thief of your own wallet if you don't get this two in one deal (assuming you want both). I'm not sure how to feel about people who buy this
Google is intentionally throttling YouTube, slowing down users with ad blockers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304293
The thing about those idiotic third party ads on YouTube, which is so grotesquely annoying is that, unlike TV ads of old, some of then can literally run for dozens of minutes at auto-increased volume unless you go to your device and skip them at some point. That is some particularly shitty nonsense right there.
Why?
I didn't write the filter, hence, "Mostly stolen from elsewhere."
In my experience, they not only deliberately increase volume to pretty much screech whatever insipid bullshit is being offered at you, but they also can sometimes run for dozens of minutes unless you manually go to your device and press "skip". TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.
I even wonder how anything so fucking hostile and annoying to a YT free user can possibly be effective? Who's actively paying for all this garbage ad placement with such scummy little playback mechanics?
Until the CALM Act was passed in 2010, networks actually did increase the volume on advertisements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...
If you want to back down memory lane, search on YouTube for old recordings of network TV ad breaks from the late 90s and early 2000s- they’re just obnoxious.
The only thing I miss at all is being able to leave a TV on and have it keep playing something reasonable, not convince itself that watching a car review means I want to watch a screaming kid trolling in Minecraft followed by the Syrian Civil War.
Haha, so then what if i'm young but want some shady gold investments while I look into trying Ambien?
Funny I make YT videos too trying to build an audience, I'd like to not put ads on it but not my choice
I don't understand how people can just accept ads it drives me insane when some random shit starts playing
I already lost money with YT, I bought so many UHD movies on their platform ($20 ea) and they won't stream it in HD unless you're on a supported device or ad-ridden tv
edit: alright, aftrer seeing it's $13 I will get it, I have been converted
I do pay for it, the time to make the content
Sucks how everything is like that nowadays, IG, Reddit
(have to join a platform to be seen)
You seem to ignore that you would probably have no audience - or have a significantly smaller audience - were it not for YouTube hosting your content. They are providing you a service, but you seem to think that nobody - not you, not your viewers - should have to trade anything for that service, despite the hosting and streaming of video being one of the most expensive possible tech services in the world (bar perhaps running genAI models.)
I dunno it's just very annoying how a lot of people have memed themselves into this train of thought where the big tech companies aren't actually providing them anything of value, when if they decided to suddenly stop providing their services they would be up a creek without a paddle.
I pay for YouTube and Nebula.
I'll compromise, I'll get premium but still have my adblock
Source: I have Premium and have adblock disabled on YouTube - no ads.
e.g. Linus Tech Tips posted up their share of revenue from AdSense in 2024; YT Premium made up 37% of their revenue despite being 29% of their views.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeCP-0nuziE
Whether that makes a given creator more money versus Patreon depends on how much you watch them, frankly.
Your argument only makes sense if you watch the creator's videos exclusively on Patreon (paid by the cut they take from your transaction) or on a platform like Vimeo (paid directly by the creator for hosting). In which case, what Youtube does isn't relevant to you.
If YouTube and its content actually has value, then presumably a paywall would have no effect of revenues of YouTube or creators. On the other hand if the content is actually nearly worthless, the vast majority of people would find something better to do with their time.
I know which outcome I’d be betting on!
Until they make us pay, put the entire site behind a paywall or similar, I'll keep enjoying their public web content using my clients of choice, some of which modify the content in various ways for various reasons, entirely of my choosing.
Capitalism always wins
Not everyone is American.
With Alphabet being from a country with extreme capitalism, the comment you're replying to seems applicable no matter where the viewers are (regardless of whether I agree with their viewpoint/outlook). YouTube's owners can choose to block or prosecute whoever doesn't comply with their terms. Not saying that's likely, just that: this isn't a matter of needing to be on the American continent
Edit: perhaps interesting to realise that, conversely, laws in North Korea might make it illegal for Alphabet to have certain terms if they want to serve consumers in their market. (A better example here would be EU with copyright legislation that makes it illegal to sign away your moral rights, for instance.) It works both ways and both could legally prosecute the other at the same time and both win in their area! But with YouTube being able to gatekeep the content here, one has more power than the other..
So, Google is merely optimizing the ad clicks and impressions here. If they succeed in becoming too obnoxious with their ads, viewers might leave for other platforms, and then content creators would follow. So, fighting ad blocking has diminishing returns and can actually have a negative impact on them. Which is why ad blocking is still effective in 2025 and why Youtube has thrived by being not too effective with their anti ad blocking measures. This is more about selling the notion to advertisers that they are a really good advertising platform than it is about fighting the minority of users who block their ads no matter what. It won't work. But it won't matter as long as advertisers keep on paying for advertising on Youtube.
The irony of their latest efforts is that it is driving away users from Chrome to more effective alternatives (Firefox, Brave, etc.) and it's driving content creators to depend on sponsor ship deals instead of advertising money from Google. The only reason Chrome exists is actually ads. So, more effective counter measures against ad blocking in Chrome could end up hurting their ad revenue. And Google's behavior is actually causing for increasingly stronger calls to break up Google. None of that is good for Google and their advertising revenue.