YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers

AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 1170 points –
howtogeek.com
  • YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
  • Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
  • Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
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Your whole existence revolves around peddling ads before people can watch the ads they want.

Ah, what. Who wants or likes to watch ads at all?

A lot of creators have just turned into corporate shills. I stopped watching ETA Prime's channel about tech reviews because it was becoming pretty clear that mostly everything he got was paid for by the company. Also, most creators are putting their own ads into their content.

Welcome to Youtube. It's ads all the way down. Unless:

Firefox browser, Ublock Origin extension, Sponsorblock extension

Save 40% of your viewing time for actual content and send tips through creator's Paypal or whatever.

YouTube is just on demand TV with extra steps these days. I've stopped watching videos, I have an LLM transcribe and summarize for me now. 99% of the content of a 10-15 minute video can be summarized into 1 or 2 pages and read in under 2 minutes.

I have an LLM transcribe and summarize for me now.

Only a matter of time before LLMs start injecting their own ads into these responses.

Nah, local LLMs are easily in the range of transcribe/summarize. I bet you could do that nicely with llama 8B without even needing a gpu.

Cant wait to have these

You already can I think? Ollama is something you can install, and then you can set up a webui like sillytavern for roleplays, or some other more fitting ui for whatever you want. Also, Linux is great for projects like these, on windows it's fucking a pain to set up, Linux it's easy.

By that point I'm pretty sure we'll have an effective compact model that can run locally and transcribe downloaded videos on reasonable hardware. Or you can just sic a paid model like chatgpt on the task. The corporate Internet is entirely focused on subscription service models now, unless you run the model yourself on local hardware you're going to end up paying someone somewhere a service fee.

Edit: y'all need to learn about minified models designed to run on edge hardware, they're a thing and often work shockingly well.

I think I need this, finally a real use for 'ai'.

The amount of how to videos you have to watch through, when all you want is one little piece of info you should be able to search or scan for has been a problem since before the internet figured out how to increase clicks by making a web page in to slides.

Can you link me a how-to video on how to get startedt and send me a summary from your working setup?

It's just two steps, first get a transcript from the video somehow (use the whisper API if you're willing to pay a small amount or just Google "transcribe YouTube video" and look for an ad supported site that'll do it via Google.) Second: use chatgpt or local llama to summarize the transcript.

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I hope nobody lets them know that Firefox on Linux has never shown ads for any of their content.

Don't worry. Linux is only 4% of the total computer market. They aren't bothered with you because Linux isn't worth it.

That's fine, we're happy to keep the better choice to ourselves. 😆

You don't have to actually watch sponsorships since most of them are paying the creator excluding the ones where they pay by clicks on a custom link

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I don’t follow those creators!

The best part of YouTube is the small creators who are just making videos as a hobby. Once they get so big they start shilling products they wouldn’t use themselves I drop them like a hot potato. For the most part that doesn’t happen though because I prefer niche topics and creators that don’t have “sellout” personalities.

I know right... Why should content creators be able to make money from content. Am I right?

You're joking, but you're right.

Once the content has been created, the near-zero marginal cost of online distribution makes the concept of charging for copies wholly untenable.

The furry community figured this out years ago, our creators work on commission or paid subscription through Patreon or one of its ilk. They (mostly) don't care where you freely share their work because they already got paid.

The knives are out for Patreon. Apple is looking to carve a big chunk out of that revenue. Google and Amazon (owner of Twitch) will not be far behind. Believe me, Google and Twitch are very unhappy that creators skip the platform monetization methods and just tell viewers to go to Patreon to bypass the heavy commissions.

Patreon deserves to die, their cut of the subscription income is extortionate for what amounts to a very limited web hosting platform.

Open-source alternatives like Mirlo or Cloud Patron will take its place, it's only a matter of time.

Great time for Patreon to expand more into content delivery.

Patreon is jacked to the tits with vc money and enshittifying at a breakneck speeds. Done expect goods innovations from it in the future

The same reasons as open source software devs.

Some content creators but not most of them. A lot of open source software advertises too.

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  • Reviews
  • Trailers
  • Reactions
  • Travel vlogs
  • Beginner tutorials

To some extent, these types of videos advertise or promote a product, service, or experience.

I've clicked in to see a movie trailer, which is basically an ad, and had to watch an ad before I could watch the ad

People watch an ad for the privilege of watching a movie/show/game trailer all the time.

I have no problem watching a ad for a video but when I have to watch an ad just to see if I am interested in watching the video is where I draw the line. Forced ads before the video starts is the worst. Give me a min or two before forcing an ad. If I am looking for help for a particular issue I don't want to watch ads after ad while trying to gauge the video.

I get what you're saying but I've reached a point in my life where I really don't give a shit and there is absolutely no way I'm watching ads. I'm also not paying google for anything they offer.

Yea...I'm old enough to remember when that was the content that paid for the platform. Putting an ad on top of that is fucking soulless vampic greed.

Welcome to the new Google. It's rent seeking all the way down.

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