YouTube intensifies fight against ad blockers showing pop-ups, and users are frustrated | Blocking ad-block users::undefined
Fuck YouTube
I agree. YouTube can be very useful, but we really ought to be moving to other platforms at this point. Fuck YouTube.
I’ve been using YouTube far more than any of my paid services for years. However I’m ready for a switch. If the YouTubers who I follow switched platforms I’d go with them in a second.
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Patrion and buying merchandise are the ways I support content creators. I’d rather make sure money goes directly to them and not to some corporation that will seize funds or cut off ad revenue at a whim with no real recourse.
I understand the economics behind hosting videos, I also don’t use Adblock. YouTube has taken ads and unwanted content to a new level in the last year and they are driving away viewers. I refuse to support them with a subscription.
If an ethical alternative pops up that has the creators I want I’d be happy to support it.
While buying merch, doing patreon, and other forms are commendable - we watch them on YouTube. Id get protesting the platform if they were making money hand over fist but we already know they don’t make a profit on the platform. Ads and premium are just methods to staunch the bleeding. I understand the ads are intrusive and are getting worse but they’ve only amped them up to compensate for users who aren’t served ads due to adblockers.
I don’t find it unethical to pay YouTube. They pay creators a fair percentage and overall are taking a loss. It’s not greed, it’s trying to stay afloat. Whether or not I support their policy changes, I’d like creators to survive off their work.
Problem is hosting all the video. You either have one host or many (P2P). Both have issues.
And both cost money, neither can exist if everyone circumvents the methods to make money.
YouTube defended their monopoly by running for free. They murdered the growth of legitimate competitions like Vimeo that had healthier business models… Because they didn’t try to run for free.
And now that they’ve saturated the market and killed off all of the serious competition it’s time to profit
Well, frankly, go fuck yourself.
So long YouTube, and thanks for all the fish. 🐬
Do you know why there are no good competitors to YouTube? It’s fucking expensive.
They have a monopoly but for what? They don’t turn a profit. The losses they take on the platform are public knowledge because shockingly, hosting hundreds of TB of data being uploaded per minute isn’t cheap.
The only sites that even spit in their general direction is like, Pornhub and oh boy don’t try to tell me that ‘ad experience’ is better Lol. Youtube has shit policies and even worse moderator decisions but it is widely a fucking charity and I think they have some right to turn it into a business instead.
That article is outdated. YouTube started to become profitable, but it took more than a decade to get there, so your point still stands.
I look forward to the updated source you have on hand. They weren’t profitable in 2009, weren’t profitable in 2015, and the only things to change since then were Premium subscriptions and more ads. What could they have done to turn a profit?
You literally just proved my point.
It wasn’t profitable. And it was free. It killed competition by losing money.
And now, by your concession, they are turning it into a business.
That’s a fundamental change in the service. Fuck that. Either it was always their intent, in which case they were lying scum the whole time. Or it wasn’t their intent and they’ve just decided spontaneously to prioritize profit, in which case it’s greed and betrayal.
Either way, fuck 'em.
… Yes. The strategy of expanding at a loss in order to recoup it later is a… business strategy. What? It’s not even an underhanded one because it carries substantial risk. They ate losses and are now trying to collect on what users like you and I have been enjoying on their dime. Adblockers was to staunch the bleeding and clearly it’s not working well enough so they’re trying new ways.
You’re confusing greed with typical business practices. The grocery store isn’t greedy, they’re trying to keep the lights on and pay employees. This isn’t “Walmart selling items at a loss until local businesses shut down and ramping them back up afterwards” - the data storage needed for this shit is beyond what most companies can do. Amazon with their AWS infrastructure is the only thing that has a shot in hell. The only reason Youtube can do it is by the sheer fact rich ass Google owns them.
Businesses typically collect this thing called money to keep supplying the service you enjoy. Adblockers remove the very essential part of this exchange in which you pay for the thing you’re using. You’ve been stealing groceries and are mad you’re now being told to pay for them.
My confusion is profound.
For sure! Which video site are you using instead?
Xhamster
Lol don’t search for this site
Dear lord there’s peanuses
Peanuses… it sounds like a slang term for Charles Shultz worst nightmare, Peanuts porn 😂
there are a few but they’re all filled with right wing nutters and i doubt their ability to scale effectively
Nebula isn’t full of right wing nutters as far as I know
However, I am broke
Nebula is a gated community, and they don’t let enough people in. It is far from the definition of “You” Tube.
On the other hand when you pay for a service you’re the customer, not the product. That can be an advantage.
i’m not sure nebula can be considered in the same class as youtube though
You’re right, it’s much much higher
Great case of nut job lefty derailing and politicising every topic possible including video platforms.
Ok have fun on bitchute with the Nazis then
wait what does bitbucket have to do with nazis?
I dunno but it explains a lot about Atlassian’s UX, doesn’t it?
Ah yes, the new blue that’s painful to look at unless you’re a true aryan developer
Lefties have brain deficiency. That’s all.
Nothing, I meant bitchute lmao, my bad
Do you mean BitChute? Because Bitbucket is a Git repository solution from Atlassian.
I did lmao, corrected it now
BitBucket? You mate are an idiot. I mean lefty.
ignore the problem then. it’s the same problem that killed voat
It’s amusing to see how nobody is able to genuinely answer this question.
Because its a monopoly.
There are other sites, but neither viewers nor content creators are seeking them out.
YouTube is a shining example for the network effect.
No I’ve tried all alternatives and they are really bad.
How does that contradict what I said?
So… YouTube then
The reason while they have all the content, is precisely because they can generate revenue for channels. I much prefer payment through subcription and ad views to annoying in video sponsors and product placements
But on YouTube you get both. If I could pay and not get in video sponsorship along with no ads, then I might consider it. But I will not pay to be advertised at.
Sponsorblock is an extention which can help. It doesn’t detract from the money the creator makes and you don’t see ads for shit you dont want or can’t afford. If you don’t have premium and block ads though, you’re definitely hurting the creator and platform as a whole.
Most creators that have in-video sponsors also have Patreons with sponsor-free feeds.
They have pissed 4channers. You do not piss 4channers. The last time that happened, Trump got elected.
Lol
Also they literally go on killing sprees.
I was using newpipe x Sponsorblock on Android exclusively, and now on desktop I’ve moved to freetube. Never did get the pop up telling me to remove Adblock but decided to make the jump early.
still using Firefox and ublock and all seems fine to me
Same. I’m wondering if it’s limited to certain markets for the time being.
For me it’s a “soft” popup - a simple banner with a close button telling me not to block ads. And it doesn’t appear very often, I think I’ve seen it twice.
You will get the timer one in due course.
I first got the ‘soft’ banner, then it went to timer one (and this timer comes after watching 3 videos with ‘soft’ one.)
However, uBlock still removes the banner, but you have to click on the video after a few seconds to start it. Alternately you can hit F to fullscreen the video, and the banner just goes away and the video starts (without uBlock).
Many people have either not up-to-date filters, or are using some other addons/features that interfere with uBlock/trigger the adblock detection.
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I got the AdBlock screen only every 2nd or 3rd video…
I am using unlock and Firefox and getting hit by the anti-adblock
I have never gotten a adblock popup using Firefox and ublock origin while my friend has gotten several on Chrome. I wonder if I’m just lucky that I’m not in the adblock block rollout on YouTube or if Firefox+ublock is working
Probably just lucky. They didn’t roll it out to all Firefox users at once. I got it several days after other Firefox users started reporting getting the popup. I followed the instructions to update my quick fix list in uBlock and it’s gone again. However, the first time I did it it came back after a day, so it may just be a never ending game of whack a mole.
Same Firefox and unlock setup (also sponsorblock) but I got a pop-up about ad blockers the other day and I just closed it and the rest of the site works fine.
Who asked? This comment thread is clearly about alt front ends yet here you are telling us still Firefox works for you. Okay, and???
Freetube adopter as well. The experience is actually an improvement over using the yt site. I wish I had done it earlier.
Also this seems to be the safest way as your account not linked to freetube. Yt looses all data like age, likes and comments. Only the number of views gives them any feedback. This will bring down yt. All we need is time to work out alternatives. Yt censorship and demonetizing rules are killing the platform anyway.
I don’t think anything is killing the platform as the longstanding ones seem pretty durable. Reddit did just fine throughout the API exodus and Twitter has somehow managed to survive Musk’s repeated and constant attempts to kill it. There will be enough viewers on youtube that will take whatever Google decides to throw at them. Don’t ask me why but a large portion of the viewers( redditors and tweeters, etc) just don’t care enough to make a change.
what is reddit? and what is twitter? my memory is bad.
The only issue I have with freetube is that I sometimes like to click on the recommended videos on YouTube’s front page. If I switch to freetube entirely, I’ll lose that. But if uBlock doesn’t continue to work I will make the switch and the YouTubers I wouldn’t normally see just won’t get my views any longer.
I never thought of that aspect as I’ve never used them. My subscription list is so long, I don’t have the time to watch the videos I’m subbed to, much less any bonus content. I wonder how many people use that feature.
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Using ReVanced and having a fantastic time. If they find a way to block a locally patched client that is only a few versions behind, I will be impressed.
Why are so many of you alergic to paying creators to make videos? I get doing it on most sites, but buy premium of the sites like nexus mods or YouTube where people make content so they aren’t making shit you enjoy for free.
The insinuation that website users somehow have a responsibility to watch ads so that the website’s 3rd party content creators can make money reads like a case of Stockholm Syndrome. YouTube are the ones paying the creators, not me, and can change the terms by which they calculate creator payments at any time. If YT decides that now, ads viewed during the hours of 7pm to 10pm result in higher creator payments, where is my role in that? Am I now obligated to prefer viewing ads during that time?
Plenty of content is uploaded to YT by people who don’t and never will get creator payments. Do I have to watch those ads?
My contract with YT is that I control what data is downloaded by and presented on my PC, not them. That Silicon Valley has decided that everything is free, but with ads, is unfortunate. If they’re unable to fund their business or their content if I use an ad blocker, then it seems to me like they’re pretty fucking bad at business.
Are you new to the internet? Every website, every single one of them, costs money to maintain and keep running. If you don’t pay to keep it online, someone else has to. Ads are a way for everyone to contribute a super small amount to keep the thing you’re on, online. When one or two people block them, it’s not a big issue. When most people do, it becomes one.
How do you pay to keep the servers up when most users are free booting? What do you do about high traffic when most of it isn’t paying for the servers you need to keep it running smoothly?
It’s the fucking apex of entitlement to think you should be able to slink through every website without paying a cent either through your data, your attention, or your wallet. You’re on lemmy, you should have a basic understanding of how this shit works and it baffles me you don’t. The instance you’re using is up because of volunteers, paying the electric bill and for the hardware so you can type shit this stupid. Maybe we’re just finally getting normies with how big the site is growing. Maybe this is a good thing. I take it back, welcome to the internet.
Ads are a way for everyone to contribute a super small amount to keep the thing you’re on, online.
In 2022 Google grossed around $280 billion, and only around 10% of that from Youtube. Before tax they profited around $73 billion, and after tax around $60 billion. They’re doing fine selling ads.
And we paid all of that $280 billion, even those of us with adblockers, because companies charge us more to cover their marketing costs. I pay for google every time I pull out my credit card.
I don’t feel like watching ads to convince even more companies to pay google to advertise to me and buy my data. They’re all making enough money already, and every year they spend less of it on wages or tax for society to function. Their money goes to stock buybacks, payouts to their major shareholders, executive bonuses, and think tanks to push policies and social trends that hurt all of us.
They profited $73 billion
Revenue is not profit. Profit is what you have after expenses. So let’s do a quick logic exercise. $13 billion after taxes, minus bandwidth costs worldwide, minus hundreds of server centers worldwide, minus tens of thousands of TB storage per server, minus redundant storage just in case a server blows, minus what they pay creators, minus what they pay employees.
Boy howdy, not so sure about this one. Especially when we know in 2015 they lost 470 million from operating the platform. They took losses from keeping Youtube alive. Hmmm. Seems like a narrow fuckin margin if that’s possible. Haven’t heard of Netflix losing money from a year of keeping their platform up.
“I don’t feel like watching ads” so buy premium. “I pay for google every time I pull out my credit card” that… what? “They’re making enough money” 470 million in losses. “They own the entire fucking planet” They aren’t even one of the five companies that own everything. You’re thinking Blackrock. “Every year they pay lower wages” That’s every corporation. Yes, eat the rich. This is not eating the rich. We do not get higher wages from you using adblocker.
Also, when I said “they own the entire fucking planet” in my original unedited comment — which I edited for tone before I saw your near-immediate response — I was referring both google and the companies that advertise through google, which is why I said “they all make enough money already.” All is plural. Google sells enough ads, and their client companies buy enough ads.
Also, Blackrock is an asset management company that handles other people’s money. Google earns 16 times more revenue than them.
I gave you both revenue and profit.
Of Google, not YouTube. I said YouTube took losses and actually costs Google money, which it does. Yes, YouTube is part of Google just as Google is part of Alphabet but what I’m explaining is that YouTube, isolated on its own, does not make money. Hence the ads, premium subscription, etc.
Advertising costs money.
Y… Yes. So does shipping the product to retail stores and depending on the product, the continued research into said product or the manufacturing of it. All expenses are calculated and a price is set above that to create a margin but what I don’t understand is your point. The only difference is that as a creator on YouTube, you get a cut of that advertisement budget from companies you might not personally buy from and put it towards products you do. What baffles me is that I’m having to break down economic concepts that I assumed were pretty transparent.
Google sells enough ads
Not gonna lie, I’ve missed the advertisements of Google since I was pretty sure everyone was aware of them. They’re synonymous with searching something on the internet. They kinda won on the advertisement front, like band-aid and kleenex. They make their money on pushing ads but if everyone blocks ads, they don’t get paid. Hence why they made it harder to do on Chrome and why they’re cracking down on it on YouTube. Their entire business model (or large majority of it) is ads. Adblocker is a direct obstacle to their existence. What is your proposed alternative for them to make money if not ads?
Blackrock is an asset management company
They’re an investment company that have purchased trillions of dollars in shares of some of the most massive companies you or I are aware of. Google, Amazon, Telsa, all of them. The more shares they own, the more direct legal power they have over the company. So just like Alphabet owns Google, a company like Blackrock can own Alphabet by direct investments. They have over 52 million shares of Telsa valued at $220 each or about 5% of the company. These are the kind people conspiracy theories are made about and are the ones we should be taxing into oblivion for those bigger wages. Not YouTube.
I gave you both revenue and profit. Their revenue was $280 billion, not $73 billion. $73 billion was their profit before tax, and $60 billion was profit after tax. $13 billion, the difference, was their income tax.
they took $470 million in losses
According to the Credit Suisse report, which also massively contradicted Google’s own earnings reports, lowballing YouTube’s revenue by a factor of ten iirc.
that…what?
Advertising costs money. To cover that cost, companies charge us more for their goods and services. I don’t know what is baffling to you about this.
Come on man, I’ve been on the internet since the beginning. Back in the day I paid $10 to join the Something Awful forums. We used to host our own game servers, back when games would let you. We rented our own Ventrilo server for over a decade.
There are ways to pay for things besides making the user experience godawful.
Then you’ve been there. You’ve seen what I’ve seen. The banner ads, the pop-ups, the sound-on ads that you can’t find because your browser won’t tell you what tab it’s on. The user experience of just ten years ago was so abhorrent that today, even having the ability to go fully dark on ads is a heaven we take for granted. It comes at a cost to companies that need that revenue.
I’m not throating Youtube for the sake of it, but what are their options? What advertisement company is going to pay decent for a streamlined ad you can ignore? When you ‘skip ad’ I believe it doesn’t even count as a ‘served ad’ so they pay nothing on those. I’m genuinely asking - what ways are there to pay for the behemoth Youtube has become beyond the methods available?
I’m okay with paying for YouTube but I don’t want a Google account. If Google ever reinstates having separate YT accounts then I will consider paying.
In the EU they are doing exactly that! You will be able to have individual accounts.
I mean I can respect that choice to an extent but I personally don’t find too much of an issue with the account itself. I’m comfortable with it having the data it collects as it’s mostly nonpersonal but I refuse to use their search engine.
Some of us pay for premium but still use Revanced and Freetube because they are simply better youtube clients. Sponsorblock, OLED themes, customizable UI, better performance, etc. The adblocking is just icing on the cake
Wasn’t aware any of them had baked in Sponsorblock or OLED themes. I might look into those platforms if that’s the case. But yes, Youtube does need to keep up on features instead of paygating the ones that already exist (like queue).
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For as many hours of YouTube I watch 4+ daily at least. I don’t mind paying for Premium to avoid the hassle. Plus I get music with it.
Edit: haters can ligma. Down vote all you want!
YouTube isn’t gonna give you brownie points for shilling for them
This is very possibly a Google employee, every big company in the world now has rooms full of people constantly astroturfing this shit and it works very well. It works so well that this comment will be downvoted to oblivion. It’s also virtually guaranteed that it will be responded to with a condescending, paternalistic post about how “lol bruh everybody who thinks different than you do must be a shill” or something similar - also not unlikely to be paid for.
Edit: Predictable, but not entirely unexpected. For anyone reading this, use LibRedirect browser extension to point all your YouTube links to a different front end.
Oh no! Someone is going against the anti YouTube circlejerk by saying that it’s personally worth it for them to pay for the service. Obviously a paid actor. No one who isn’t paid by google would ever dare to express that kind of sentiment on a relevant discussion thread, of course. Lmao.
Edit: Lol I love how you added your prediction that you’d be downvoted after being downvoted, and after I left my comment. For those who didn’t see, he edited the comment to add everything after the first sentence after being met with resistance making it seem like he predicted the downvotes and my response. I wish I was being paid to clown on this moron haha. What a sad pathetic fucking loser lol.
This is a controversial viewpoint on here. You have to be pirating everything and using Linux otherwise you are corporate shill and will be downvoted for having a different viewpoint. Talk about an echo chamber.
I have used YouTube premium for years and years now, it is the best value subscription service I use. I haven’t seen an ad in years, I don’t have to find loopholes and I get to support the creators that produce great content. Also music.
I used to have premium for $9.99/mo until I got an email about them raising their rates come December. No thank you.
Use a VPN and set your location to turkey. It’s ~$15-20 for the year. You never have to use the VPN again once you’ve purchased the subscription
Just tried and it said I needed a payment method from the country.
Just move to Turkey. Start a new job. Find the love of your life. Get married. Have kids. Grow old together, and support your children as they age in to adulthood. Spend your golden years relaxing. Maybe visit some beaches.
Oh yeah, and I guess use your Turkish payment method at some point in there too. I’m guessing at some point in there you got like a credit card or something
You could probably use Wise, but why bother.
Huh, it worked fine for me, but this was maybe ~3 months ago.
India is even cheaper. I pay 1$ a month.
I don’t, but I’m fine with paying for premium. I hate that a lot of content has sponsored content that your premium subscription doesn’t remove. Even if I paid for premium I’d still need to have SponsorBlock to make it watchable.
I pay for premium but I ended up installing revanced on my phone so I could disable shorts and it also skips in-video ads which is really nice. I didn’t disable YouTube’s ad blocking though because I don’t need to.
I’m wondering,.can you use sponsorblock with premium YT?
Like install the extension on top of the subscription? Yes
Shit, dude, I was in your corner until the edit. It’s supposed to be about choice. Those that wanna pay, pay. Those that can put up with ads, put up with them. Those that wanna say fuck YouTube, well, arr matey.
So, you rock on with your choice. You didn’t, as far as I can see, bitch at anyone else’s choice, so keep on rocking.
But ffs, never, ever whine about votes. Doesn’t matter if they’re up or down, they’re just part of the forum. You say your peace, you get the votes you get (and if you check my user history, you’ll see plenty of shit I’ve said where I did exactly that, so this isn’t from someone that’s all pristine or shit), and that’s the way it is.
I mean the free choice argument falls apart a bit when you consider that YouTube is essentially a monopoly.
Same here. It’s nice to have high quality niche content from individual content creators and with premium I believe they get better revenue than ad supported users.
Although YouTube music kind of sucks I’m using Apple Music for that so I kind of have redundant service
I think the best way to support them is through donations.
Most have links to them.
Ads are out of hand, that is why many left cable and subscription based platforms are the next thing.
Piracy is growing and that is good, it forces these greedy companies to inovate or to do better.
can’t donate to all of the different creators I watch
You are right, most could not.
I wuld say that any way to support them works, not just with money…
what other ways would help them?
Word of mouth, when possible.
It depends on the goal of the people, I follow some that mention what helps them.
it seems to me like what is probably more helpful is getting paid. With my YT premium sub all of the creators get paid some amount for my watch time (better than ad payment) and I don’t see ads. It simply seems like the best solution
If you use premium they get a bigger cut based on your viewing. It lets you support them more.
Exactly, that’s what I do. I think that’s really the best option. Support the creators and support the platform while avoiding ads. Video hosting is absurdly expensive
That’s a big "hell no"from me
It is worth it for some.
That’s just only for you. :(
It’s not
From the article
even if some users stop using YouTube, there won’t be a loss of revenue because those users weren’t watching ads anyway.
Guys, YouTube doesn’t give a flying fuck that you aren’t going to consume their content without paying. That’s the point. They’re only rolling this out slowly to be sure they aren’t impacting their actual customers.
Lemmy felt like classic reddit for about a week, actual content that I wanted to see, discussions at an adult level. The amount of bandwagoning and “me too”, “fuck corporations” comments has me signing on less and less.
I wish people didn’t care about downvotes. Always hated the edits on reddit reacting to being downvoted. Would downvote comments I agreed with too if they whined about votes.
Downvoting this guy complaining about complaining about downvoting.
Its not relevant to this particular commenter, but ive made downvote edits when i get to -5 or -10 but have no replies. Especially when i felt like i had a reasonable take. My edit is usually asking for responses from those who disagree, rather than just a “edit: fuck you haters”.
I used to care for about 2 minutes, it’s just strange to worry about fake Internet points, but I guess humans like the endorphins or rewards for the brain.
social media got a lot of their ideas from the gambling sector
Yep, same here. Premium is worth it for me too. I don’t understand the entitlement on lemmy with YouTube, it’s worse than reddit.
Agreed. I’m currently paying for streaming services that I get less value from than what I get from YouTube.
I’m with you, but I’ve found that any post here on Lemmy about YouTube, Spotify, or any other streaming service ends up the same: artists have enough money already, artists are paid better through merchandise and performances (no citation provided and the author acknowledges they don’t actually do this), these services don’t pay enough anyway, non-paying users are entitled to a better experience; all this is to excuse themselves of stealing content from creators they love by bootlegging it illegally.
For as many hours of YouTube that I watch, maybe 1 hour daily, I don’t mind setting my VPN to turkey and paying $15 for the year. I mostly use it for music anyway… I certainly wouldn’t pay the full price for it though.
To your point, I watch YouTube more than Netflix or Disney plus. The only reason I’m not paying for YouTube is because I have it for free now.
The ads are so annoying that I might subscribe for an add free experience if I didn’t have other means to block it.
This guy gets it
Go back to Reddit
can you use sponsorblock with premium?
Yes
and I do!
Use Firefox, update the uBlockOrigin extension, update the filters, remove any other adblocking extension in case you have it. Should work just fine then.
I use Firefox with uBlockOrigin and haven’t had to do any manual updates or anything. I still seem to be unaffected by the changes everyone is talking about. Is it a slow rollout or does uBO just silently keep up with it?
It could be simply luck because it is a slow rollout, or it could also be that you got the filter updates on the background. In any case, you know what to do if you ever run into it.
not working for me anymore, I have firefox + ublock and updated the filter, they are blocking now after 3 videos
Same here. That’s not 3 videos per day, but total before it stops playing.
I wonder what tech and it creators say about this change. They will probably see a dip in views, engagement and number of clicks they promised their sponsors.
Are you signed in?
I was in the same boat, but cleaning out my cookies helped.
For now. If YT really wants to end it, they can
How exactly “can” they? They’ve been trying pretty hard for quite a long while now and nothing has ever worked. It’s also pretty logical why they can’t: they don’t control your device, you can do anything with it. Whatever they implement, you can always fake being a normal user. Which is exactly why no one using Firefox + uBlock sees anything of what’s mentioned in this article (as long as no other addons/settings trigger the adblock detection).
Only the environment they do control is affected, which is essentially like “controlling your device”: Chrome.
Delaying the video stream for the ad length would do most of the work. Since they manage that server side there is no way to request the video sooner. Blocking technically works, but you would have to stare at a blank screen for the ad duration.
Twitch started embedding ads into the stream video feed. So if you blocked the ad you also blocked the stream.
It’s been really effective at getting me to watch less twitch. I’d love to see statistics on how many people click away immediately after an ad starts.
A streamer I was watching was playing PUBG, made it to a 1v1, and then an ad played.
A good 99% of the chat was just ‘WHAT HAPPENED?!’ and we came back to an empty chair, with the streamer in the background.
I haven’t watched since.
(The streamer won with an insane pan-throw over a small hill, so it wasn’t even a lame win)
I open a stream, get a 45 second ad, close the stream, and go do something else. Congrats, you just killed any enthusiasm I had about your platform.
Preroll ads never made any sense… those first few seconds are when you’re deciding whether to watch that streamer or go elsewhere. An ad makes me go elsewhere without the streamer even getting a say.
Some streamers never use ads, but I think the bigger ones are contracted to do so.
Yeah they definitely have an X amount of minutes of ads per hour in their contract.
100% of the time I do the same thing. I subscribe to 1 streamer max per month and get ad free there, and pretty much don’t use the platform outside of it
Staring at a blank screen is better than watching an ad IMO.
To be honest, I’d take that over ads. I’d use YouTube a lot less, but there’s some content from creators I like that’s not available elsewhere.
My pessimistic opinion is that they’ll lobby ths shit out of governments to get laws written which make it illegal to circumvent this stuff somehow. I’m not sure that’s even possible, but it’s my irrational fear.
If it does happen, I’ll convince myself that I don’t care about any of the content on YT. Let’s face it - 99% of the shit on there is emotionless-face-with-open-mouth-and-red-arrow/circle hot garbage. Sifting through that sewage is so exhausting.
A surprising number is videos don’t even need the video component. Just go for a walk, and leave your phone in your pocket while you’re listening to whatever you would normally watch. Try that out and you’ll realize that there’s hardly any reason to see what’s on the screen.
Netflix is able to only serve paying customers.
Sure, granting view credits for ads is a little more complicated, but definitely within googles scope.
So they can block everyone, unless you either pay or watch ads. Unpopular, sure. But they have a huge library and a constant stream of new content, so enough people would put up with it. They can also start soflty, and only tighten the screws later. Lets start with one ad per day.
Sure, granting view credits for ads is a little more complicated, but definitely within googles scope.
How exactly? What stops someone from creating a program that behaves like a normal user earning view credits for ads, but never showing that to the actual user, only letting Google think the user is legitimate? Afaik nothing.
Yes, turning it pay-only like Netflix would technically work, but YouTube itself only works because it’s “free”, so yeah.
There are audits that try to determine if the view credits are legitimate. They’ll cross reference a selection of data (what segments did they fetch, what was the timing like, did each ad checkpoint get crossed, etc) because companies don’t like paying for ads that arent watched.
That can all be faked, just grab all the segments at a timing that would match playing it. This is why Google wants to do that trusted client thing, because there’s no way to guarantee that a user is watching something on their own device unless the software and hardware on that device prevent it and the server makes the user prove they are running that software and hardware and nothing else.
They can easily embed ads into the main stream, so ad blockers will have nothing to block. Not sure why they haven’t done so already.
Because those can also be skipped. They are required by law to label sections of ads. This labeling can be read to figure out how long the ads are and thus be skipped. That’s how twitch ads are blocked.
The label can be a part of the stream as well. There are no issues to stream everything and make it non-blockable.
Then how hard would it be to use some pattern-based image recognition to detect this label? Not very hard, I have a friend that does something similar at work.
Lol, good luck with that!
If they did that then they’d have to re-encode videos for each veiwer (which would require an insane amount of processing power), or give up on tracking and have contextual only ads.
Their only real option is to have ads as separate files and then use the magic JavaScript to tell your computer to play one file then the next, which is where adblock comes in like “naw, let’s not do that”.
Not really. That’s not how modern streaming works. No one sends plain files like it’s 2000.
I didn’t mean like they just strait up embed video.mp4 on page for the video, but as far as I understand on their backend they still have actually video files of various resolutions and such that they serve to you.
Even if the page isn’t giving you a copy of a strait up file in the way it might in 2000, the player is still pulling a copy of a pre processed video file stored on YT’s servers, and in order to have the ads as part of that same file in order to make adblock very hard to implement they’d need to re-process it any time they want to show an ad that hadn’t been already inserted into the video.
I could be completely wrong tho, I don’t work at YouTube and haven’t built a video sharing site before.
That’s not how it works. I don’t know exactly what YouTube is doing, but it’s not serving files at all. There are several options available today, perhaps the easiest one to look at is HLS.
In short, the streaming server splits video files into small chunks. Then instead of sending you one huge file, it sends you a HLS playlist. Your browser reads the playlist and starts playing small video chunks one by one. If you want to navigate somewhere inside the video, you don’t wait for the whole file to be downloaded, instead the browser will simply skip lots of chunks in the middle until it lands on the one you want to watch. That’s also how changing video resolution works - the browser doesn’t re-download 4K video after downloading 1080p video, it just stops at current chunk and switches to a higher res one for the next portion of the video.
So, few important things:
- There’s no big video file.
- There’s no real-time video processing.
- Chunks can be of varied time.
- You can create any playlist and insert whatever chunks you want from your existing chunk library.
This means that YouTube can create a new HLS playlist on the fly, send you 10 chunks of the your video, then send 3 chunks of the ad video, then 42 chunks of your video and 5 more ad video chunks. There’s no need to decode/encode anything. And you will never know what the next chunk holds. They can also add ad chunks at random moments, so you won’t be able to auto-skip them like you do with sponsor segments.
The real question is why Google is not doing it already.
Yes, they can, it will probably become a cat and mouse situation. The main idea is to put pressure on people that will not take the time to keep looking for alternatives or new solutions and will simply pay up or watch the ads.
Fuck it. I’ll just say this instead. It’s time to break up the tech monopolies. Google, Microsoft, etc.
TRUST BUSTING: 21st CENTURY EDITION! FUCK YEAHHHH
Yeah, good luck hosting a high quality video streaming service for free and eating up millions of dollars in losses.
then don’t do something for the benefit of humanity if you can’t handle not having infinite line-go-up. Numbers aren’t easily found but it looks like they generated north of a billion in profit, not revenue, profit.
If a billion, after all bills are paid, is not enough. Give it to someone to whom a billion is enough.
Wut?
companies enshittify themselves not to make money but to make more money than they did 3 months ago, repeat indefinitely.
If you didn’t have to meet that metric, and were happy with generating a billion dollars a year and didn’t have to make it 1.3B by next year, and 1.6B by the following, then you wouldn’t have to shittify your product to do so.
So when people are like “oh but poor YouTube won’t make any money if they make their product user friendly” don’t mean they will make no money, it’s that they will fall short of making 30% more money than last year and “only” make 10% more than last year.
(all numbers made up for illustrative purposes only)
all numbers made up for illustrative purposes only
That’s your problem here. YouTube’s revenue growth is less than 2% YoY. That’s below inflation. Meaning they effectively lose money.
Where did you get that number from?
And Inflationary costs are taken into account before profit, so no, they aren’t losing money.
YouTube is a public company, all numbers are publicly available.
Youtube was doing it for years before Google acquired them.
YouTube only existed for about 20 months before Google acquired them
It didn’t exist that long. And it didn’t allow you to watch 4K or even Full HD videos.
Breaking up big tech doesn’t mean that we all have to host our own YouTube.
It doesn’t. But you need to have a replacement. So, go ahead, and create a free video hosting!
They don’t have to be dicks about it. Neither do you.
Of course most everyone here would agree, but the likelyhood of that ever happening is incredibly low.
Well of course. Now what ?
87.7% of the users watch on mobile, they are this mad about 12.3% possibly having access to an adblock.
Do you mean 87.7% use the YouTube iOS/Android App or 87.7% use their smartphone to watch YouTube? Because in the latter case you also can use ReVanced, Firefox + Adblock, Invidious, etc.
Invidious (and other front ends) wouldn’t be effected by this
This is web and official app
I watch on mobile and have all ads blocked. There are multiple options a ton of people use
Insert smug “I run YouTube with Firefox with adblock installed” comment here. I’ve not seen any of the anti block stuff yet
[Laughs nervously in NewPipe]
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I was fine with ads a couple years ago, but the number, length and frequency of them keeps ramping up. This wouldn’t need to be such a struggle if they just were reasonable about it.
Me : clicks a helpful tutorial of 5 minutes. YT: here have an unskippable ad 5 seconds. Me: annoying but the creators have to make money somehow I guess. YT: and now here’s your skippable ad. Me: I just want this to be over with. YT content creator: Hello guys this video is sponsored by Raycons. 10 seconds blabbering on the product, skip skip Me: closes video.
Sponsorblock might be helpful for you on some of that at least.
Sponsor lock is a godsend
Use Revanced on phone. Works like a charm.
Does anyone else kinda miss when youtube was more informal, random, less edited, and more janky? Nowadays everybody has a title card, and a two minute intro greeting, high-end camera setup, and tightly rehearsed script. It’s like they all decided to just recreate the unnecessary bloat and ceremony from classical television, for the sake of “appearing professional” or something?
For example, a tutorial doesn’t need to begin with a “Hey guys, it’s your pal ASDFGHJKL. Have you ever got your foreskin trapped in a whatever and yada yada yada? Well today I’m gonna show you how to blah blah blah. Now let’s get into the video. But first a word from our sponsor Lockheed Martin…”
What’s with the “today”? I’m always watching it “today” by definition. And I wouldn’t have clicked it if I wasn’t in that particular predicament. Why not just immediately start showing the solution?
There is no being reasonable in a capitalist society. The only thing that matters is profit potential
It was never reasonable. Not ever.
If you’re old enough to remember the original need for pop-up blockers you would know that. Just 30 screens pop-up in a cascading order filling your screen with crap. Auto play video, auto-installing toolbars (Thanks
ObamaMicrosoft).I definitely remember those days, a lot of sites were just unusable, and I hear some places like the Fandom wiki are returning to that level.
I believe there is a small amount of ads it’s acceptable to live with, I do accept that content needs to be paid for somehow, but corporations can’t seem to ever accept a limit for themselves. Even though YouTube is already perfectly profitable and has been for years, it continues to escalate. Not to mention the rampant data-tracking that there is all over the place that people just accept because it’s invisible. Or that Google is working to weaken ad blocking and enhance tracking at a browser level.
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It doesn’t matter if you made 1,5 billion dollars last year. If you are not making 2 this year, you are a bad business and should declare bankruptcy.
They would never not ramp up the ads, even if youtube was the most profitable thing ever.
There is something fundamentally wrong with Capitalism. Watching the unhinged ways corporations behave pushes me further to the left every day.
corporations can’t seem to ever accept a limit for themselves.
This is the result of competition. When success is measured relative to others, it’s forever a moving target. Under this definition of success, self improvement is equally effective as sabotaging another. And as we can see, it’s not just businesses sabotaging one another. If a business can get away with sabotaging its own consumers, as it can in the case of a monopoly, a cartel, or regulatory capture, it will.
I kinda get your point, but is there even any competition when it comes to YouTube? Everybody pretty much accepts it’s the only viable publicly available online video publishing platform. Who are they even competing with? Twitch and TikTok work in a completely different ways that don’t really supplant it. Vimeo and Dailymotion are so small they might as well not exist. Seems like they are still keeping at it even bereft of competition.
And injected in the most halfassed points of the video. Surely they have the technology to figure out a better way to time the ads.
They definitely do and they did do that for a while, but apparently it changed.
Oh really how does it work now?
Unfortunately there’s too many people that just roll over and take it at much higher levels than is reasonable. They’ll stop when the normies start to walk away, and from what I can see that sits at about the Idiocracy TV scene level.
I’m just closing the window when that happens. Same as I did when ads first came to the web. There was a long gap in between where I somewhat tolerated them but mostly annhialated them with ad-blockers. The few that got through were allowed because pick your battles.
But if you’re gonna get in my face and block content, I’m just gonna walk away. Get fucked. Find another way to make money. If that means no more free content, I’ll pay. But I won’t suffer abuse.
Lol look at me change to piped
Cough invidious cough
Took me all of 30mins to spin up a local invidious instance. Worth every second
I’ll look forward to reading this yet again next week, alongside all the entitlement in the comments section that seem to think running YouTube is free and recommending trash alternatives which have less than 1% of YouTube’s content and don’t even work.
See you next week!
Google is a multi trillion dollar company. They can afford to run youtube at a loss for decades, if not centuries to come.
They don’t want to because they are greedy and “need” to grow their profits yearly.
Get the fuck out of here with your bullshit ass shilling for a corporate entity that would kill you if it was profitable enough.
Why would google run YouTube if it’s making negative profit? Seriously. Why would anyone do that?
Am I greedy too because I expect my work to pay more than it costs me to live?
Because of the insane amount of advertising they can do on the massive majority of people who don’t use adblock?
Because they hold THE monopoly on video upload?
There are many reasons why a company exists with no profit incentive.
Why do you think they do advertising? It’s for profit lol.
… did I argue otherwise?
So let the peasants who don’t know how to block ads cover the costs for the rest of us freeriders?
What a good faith argument! I will surely waste my time arguing with you!
Because they’re a monopoly and should get nationalized to ensure they align with the citizens rather than with the greedy shareholders.
I don’t like the idea that my YouTube premium money just goes into a big pool that’s divided among all creators whether I watched them or not. I block ads and subscribe to patreons of YouTubers I watch the most, I would probably pay a few dollars for YouTube premium.
Premium only goes to the creators you watch though and not everyone? Unless I misunderstood things or you have a source for it?
Yeah I’d much rather prefer a system when portion of the money goes to google to cover their costs, but the majority of it would be divided between the creators whose videos I’ve been watching during that month.
So YouTube premium then?
Not to mention they were fine without ads and forcing content creators to spew the whole “like and subscribe or else the algorithm will hunt me down” bullshit. This is all because of corporate greed, it’s so disgusting. They just want to get on the subscription gravy train because it lets them have their cake and eat it too, meanwhile content creators are left out in the cold even though they’re the only reason people still use YT at this point.
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Fuck YouTube and fuck shills/simps
YouTube has a monopoly that is nearly impossible to challenge because of the network effect.
Sure there are costs but it would be better if as many people as possible would be ready to jump ship to create an alternative
Competitors would be great but there isn’t another service that comes close to what youtube provides. You’d need it to be worth it for creators to jump ship or at least upload to multiple sites. There hasn’t been any real competition in the space because youtube is so far ahead of everyone else.
creators to jump ship
that’s why I said it’s impossible - it the same kind of monopoly Steam has in that it’s impossible for the creators to NOT be on that platform because of the size it has but unlike Steam Youtube has started acting anti-consumer now instead of just anti-creator as in the past
Some alternatives are just front-ends to YouTube. Thanks to those, I haven’t used YouTube the site or the app in three years.
Youtube doesn’t run for free, but they can save more money by firing a few executives than go after the minority adblock users. It’s not the creators that really matter (but they’re the group of people who are visible and who we can relate to) but you would not be saying the same thing if they were totally honest and say they’re raising money so the executives can keep on “executing” and that investors can keep their short term profits.
The problem I have is paying for a service that harvest my data to make money, I wouldnt mind paying if they keept all that shit in the free version, so now instead I will focus my energy on circumventing the anti-adblocker
It’s not even that.
YouTube can do whatever the fuck it wants since it essentially holds a monopoly on video hosting thanks to the network effect.
I installed a userscript today that plays ads in muted embeds hidden behind the actual player so that it effectively and quite literally blocks them while still leaving actual ublock disabled on the site. works pretty well.
EDIT: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/477464-beta-youtube-no-preroll-ads-undetectable
If I wanted to learn how to do that what should I search for?
not on my computer at the moment so I don’t have a copy of mine to send you but this one looks like a similar premise.
Do you mind updating with what you use when you get the chance? I think this solution is great, currently im using firefox with ad blocker but I do feel a bit quilty as some creators I enjoy dont get the ad revenue they deserve but it seems this way they still would get paid.
Sure thing. I’ll update my comment at around 2:30pm pacific time.
Revanced still going strong on mobile, which is where I watch YouTube 99% of the time.
Users complain but 99% of the 0,01% that actually use adblockers will just continue, just like how internet “boycotts” always end, by going back to the dystopian status quo
https://www.statista.com/statistics/351862/adblocking-usage/
similar stats to elsewhere.
you should probably not pull numbers out of your arse
not only is this a seemingly random site that needs you to use an account to access part of the information, all you need to do is not look at a random site that pulls stats out of their arse like you say, they dont explain where the data comes from, they dont explain anything.
I dont need to pull random ass data from that sketch site, this small amount of legwork is far more than necessary nor what you deserve for being a dick about it: (lets not forget you just say “elsewhere” without showing us, well, anything)
firefox addon site users:
ublock origin: 6.713.504 adblocker ultimate: 2.286.976 adguard adblocker: 991.481 block site: 518.605 adblock plus: 4.236.338 ghostery: 1.104.375 adblock for firefox: 1.166.799
everything else is too small and inconsequential to mention, same with github, thats a total of 17.018.078, firefox usercount FROM firefox, about 188 million
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
since webstore doesnt use proper numbers we can only assume but:
adblock best adblocker: 10million+ adblock plus: 10million+ adaway: 2million+ ublock origin: 10million+
thats again, only super roughly but 32 million users compared to chromes rough 3.3 BILLION users
both of these may nto be exactly 0.01 % sure, but we are all inconsequential and mean nothing compared to the total count of uers, who barely know what a browser is, let alone what an adblocker is.
Google is not going to all this effort for a rounding error
“All this effort” is not a big investment for Google, and that rounding error is worth several millions. I’m sure the small team they put together is worth it even if ad blockers are very small.
Companies want to pursue growth, and every million is worth grabbing.
Here is another article on the study for north American stats. WSJ might be a capitalist shit rag but they rarely publish nonsense data
http://deloitte.wsj.com/cmo/are-consumers-adlergic-a-look-at-ad-blocking-habits-1522728141
That’s where the approx 30% for NA comes from.
Idk how accurate those addon numbers are, they’re probably not capturing stats for global numbers but user accounts are.
Or maybe this is a proof of concept for completely blocking adblock across the web. YouTube is just a demo.
That can’t really be done to people who don’t use chrome. People who use chrome are morons though and might not realise they can just switch software.
YouTube itself has 2.7 billion monthly active users. Even if everyone rolling an adblocker is using YouTube, that’s still less than 2% of users. Of course, people who use YT more often are also probably more likely to be blocking ads, so going by the 122 million daily active users, 49 million could potentially be a hefty chunk of users. The real percentage of views getting adblocked is going to be somewhere in-between. It’s also worth noting that the numbers you pulled are likely inflated due to extensions being installed on multiple devices.
If I had to pull a number out of my ass, I’d guess it’s around 15%. Not a lot, not negligible.
When I read something like that, I don’t think “hey those are actual stats, wow!”. I actually think “hey those are actual stats, whoa!”. Kidding.
You’re being pedantic for no reason
It’s a generalization and their point was not the numbers. It was that in the past people complain about this kind of atuff, Google ignores it and people move on. Google probably even still continues to grow.
However, I think things have been shifting and that may not even end up being the case. Look at Unity.
Yes. Remember when everyone would leave reddit because of the API tax? 😂 reddit, front page of hypocrisy.
I left after over a decade. Haven’t been back and won’t.
We’re here, aren’t we?
I did fucking leave.
Plenty of people actually did leave reddit, myself included. It wasn’t the API tax though, that was just the beginning…
Firefox and UBO still block all ads for me on YT and I’m not being blocked.
Same. YouTube started detecting UBO for me, but a quick UBO cache refresh and it was good as new.
I suspect it’ll be as it usually is, where they only really go after the lowest hanging fruit.
…what? This headline makes no sense.
They could have fixed it with 1 word: “YouTube intensifies fight against ad-blockers BY showing pop-ups and users are frustrated.”
For some reason headlines don’t like to use prepositions.
anti-lgbtq headlines smh
Hahaha, had to reread the headline to understand what you said.
Yah, I still don’t get it.
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