YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers
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.
Imagine being on the YouTube ad team...that has to be the most depressing team in tech history. Your whole existence revolves around peddling ads before people can watch the ads they want.
Even better, you work for one of the wealthiest corporations in the world with virtually unlimited resources at your disposal, and you still get your asses handed to you by a handful of people with laptops.
If they didn’t have to support the web, and various legacy platforms, the could lock it all down with drm more easily.
Hence Google's proposal to DRM the web
And people's response has shown its not easy or even working.
in tech*. most people don't even know or care about it
That’s far less true now that they’re breaking the functionality of tons of adblockers that it was a few years ago.
most normies i know don't care about it.
i have no idea how they use the internet without them, but here we are.
At least you can tell your boss "I'm working on it!", sit on your ass, and every 6 months add one more little UI or formula change which "finally stops adblockers" but is defeated within 3 days.
Yeah I don't believe they really put their hearts in it. If they truly wanted to force you into watching ads, they'd manage. Their team is just not that interested.
Their team is probably using adBlockers more than the rest of us. They understand the depth of the surveillance baked into those ads.
And because they have to test the ads.
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.
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.
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?
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. 😆
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.
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
I'm sure they make enough money to not care. Being in the part of the company that brings in the dough is generally a pretty good position to be in as well.
It’s the only consumer product they haven’t canceled.
All corporate IT jobs are depressing, because working in a corporation isn’t something that a thinking person is equipped to do.
The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I'd rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.
legit, if youtube ever beats ublock origin, i'll just stop watching youtube
Its an all out assault on half your senses without an adblocker. Literal torture.
The entire web is like that without an ad blocker these days.
I miss those cheeky gif banners from the 2000s
[With hindsight] The commercial use of the internet should never have been allowed.
I want the internet to be a network of digital libraries...communication, public events and sharing space...personal pages...services...the commercial motive starts from there and eventually consumes the rest :/
I reckon without the rule changes in 1993-94 allowing commercial use that the internet would have turned into a significantly more useful utility with higher quality innovation than the advert laden train wreck that we have now.
Yt-dlp download script + text file with fav channel urls + jellyfin.
No bullshit, saves bandwidth.
Also look into invidious.
And peertube, some content creators also post there, e.g., The Linux Experiment.
They were serving videos with ads spliced in, basically DAI in podcasting industry. I’m not sure how that experiment went, but if that’s how they’d serve the videos, downloaders will have ads embedded as well.
Yt-dlp supports sponsorblock, i am not worried.
I also dont even need tools for this as my usual style of watching is with my fingers on the arrow keys to skip back and forth
I actually don’t know if/how the ad block people worked around it or if YouTube pulled back. The problem with DAI on podcast and in stream ads is that the ads aren’t always 1:05~1:35, the ad could be longer or shorter, then the next ad won’t necessarily start at the same time, and most definitely won’t end at the same time. So sponsor block won’t know precisely where the ads are, thereby making it much harder for a crowd sourced solution to accurately skip embedded ads. Hopefully they figured out a way, but as mentioned earlier, I don’t know what happened to that experiment.
Put it on a VHS, then use one of those VCRs that removes the ads for you.
I've had YouTube Premium since the days when it was called YouTube Red, so like a decade. I've grown used to not seeing any ads from Google and anytime I watch a video not using my account it's torture.
Same here. FreeTube for desktop and NewPipe are all you need though if you don't want to pay and/or have access to music.
Tubular is newpipe + sponsorblock BTW
I use pipepipe but it's less stable
You‘re part of the problem then. It only got so shitty in the first place so they could trap people in the Premium subscription that will get increasingly more expensive and less useful.
That‘s where Youtube Premium comes into play for many fools who don‘t really know about adblockers. Google‘s goal isn‘t to destroy the website, but to turn it into a much more profitable Netflix subscription based on user generated content. Sadly the enshittification of the biggest video platform will continue because enough people are willing to pay a lot for it. The site will not improve until there are mainstream alternatives that actually take revenue off Youtube.
It’s so bad that I 1) refuse to pay for premium so I don’t enable the behavior and 2) ended up sideloading an alt YouTube app on iOS that just doesn’t display the ads. YouTube hasn’t been able to block that one yet as it spoofs as the original YouTube app. Totally unsanctioned and a pain in the ass to keep the certificate alive but worth it. YouTube is actually enjoyable again. All that because the ads interruptions were constant. If it was every 15 min or so I wouldn’t care, but every 5!? Get the hell out of here!
Same.
I came across someone who uploaded a 90 minute video as an ad as well.
I remember watching some video, falling asleep for a few hours, then waking up to a livestream of an ad. One of those "skip after 5s" but it was a livestream, so it just kept playing. I couldn't believe it!
Once upon a time Google used few and non-intrusive ads. The ads were soo well-placed and relevant, that they almost seemed like a service to the user, rather than being forced upon you. Some of us even added exceptions for Google ads in our ad blockers, so we would not miss out.
I miss those days.
That was almost a decade ago or even before. I remember adockers recommending white listing search engines or recommending to disable non-instrusive ads to support websites.
There are some ads that I'm fine with, but they have to be clearly an ad, and related to the content on the site, not based on my previous interactions, nor using tricks to disguise ads as part of the content.
On documentation pages: sure just have a thing related to CS courses, on pirating and streaming sites advertise VPNs, on horny sites advertise horny stuff, and casinos and sports advertise gambling and sports betting. But DON'T make the ad look like a section in the documentation, like another download button, like another horny video on the site, like another casino game or segment of the sports analysis. If I want to explore the ad I will, stop trying to trick me else I will try to block and avoid you entirely! If I figure out that are you spending more effort trying to trick me the less interested I will be in the product you offer.
I forgot where I heard this::: If there are fewer, more relevant ads, Google and YouTube should be able to make more money with fewer ads.
The advertisers though want more ads even though they are less affective. As it forces the cost per ad down.
It is totally backwards…. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Then google got greedy and ruined it's own ad service. Imagine google would've stopped at this early point. A single, non flashing banner ad would generate as much as 5 multiple second video ads do now. But ads got used more and more inflationary, to the point where we are now.
Meanwhile these days every time I happen to use Youtube without an adblocker I get the same car insurance ads that I've gotten for the last 4 years.
The ads are so obnoxious and frequent. It just kills it for me.
I know the reply I'm gonna get...
I’ll never understand the entitlement of these companies when it comes to ads. You send the content freely to my computer along with BS ads. It’s my computer. I’ll display what I want using programs I want.
If you want me to pay for that content with $ or by watching ads - then put up a hard paywall and stop sending the content for free. You can’t get uppity and complain about ad blockers - it doesn’t make any sense…
The real problem is your content sucks and nobody is willing to pay for it. And that’s your problem - not mine.
Here’s some free apples. There’s a newspaper ad stuffed in there as well. Oh you ate the apples without reading the newspaper? Foul ball! /facepalm
Edit: never mind the fact that many ads have been served that are downright malicious code…
I was paying for Google music until they took it away from me and told me it was Youtube Premium and then raised the price twice.
Not exactly what I'd call a great value proposition.
Good.
Youtube is a wonderful thing. It's a wealth of knowledge and resources unlike anything this world has ever seen.
And it's ran by one of the worst, most predatory corps on the planet.
Perfectly put. The product is great and I love how it democratizes “being on TV” and lets some people make a living doing their own thing.
But I do not like where YouTube’s cut of that ad/sub money goes, and the enshittification pushed into it.
Unfortunately, YouTube is not unique in that regard. It’s a sucky fact of life that just about any complex product you spend money on will benefit a collection of rich sociopaths skimming as much as possible from the incomes of the people actually making the thing. Gotta vote with your wallet where you can, and vote the traditional way for the systemic issues.
it's run
it's ren
Ron*
i consider unblockable ads to be direct attack on my psyche, trying to worm in and make me think in a way they want. I will never tolerate them and would rather see anything relying on them burn. My mind is my own and no one else has any business influencing me without my permission.
Agreed. It's a form of cyber terrorism and needs to have an end put to it.
I agree with that... somewhat. Except they are providing a service.
The content is not produced by YouTube, but it is made available by YouTube. There's a cost to provide that service and value to the consumer for having videos available to watch.
I doubt you want to pay for the service, so how is it supposed to work? What pays YouTube's costs so we can all keep watching videos for months and years to come?
I get that this comes across as someone simping for YouTube. I'm not trying to do that though. I'm just intrigued by this worldview and would like to understand if there is more to it or if you believe YouTube should not be compensated some other way.
Is it a "Fuck you. I got mine." mentality where people watching ads and paying premium cover the cost for you to use the service for free? Or is there some nuance I've missed?
Nationalize youtube and turn it into a public utility financed by the UN. Create a kind of patreon system that distributes funds to creators similar to how it's done for music collection agencies.
There are always alternatives, but not until people demand an alternative to constant brainwashing. Right now it's unthinkable because people insist that there cannot be an alternative and therefor the status quo mustn't be endangered.
At this stage burning it all down would be preferable although that would never happen until we're seen widespread system collapse.
Not our problem. They can go the twitch.tv'ish way and add subscription models for people to subscribe and support their favorite content producers and Youtube can take a cut.
Just because they can't think of a profitable business model other than annoying and exploiting the internet's userbase while deplatforming, demonetizing and having their own myriad of problems doesn't mean that's on us.
Doesn't mean you're simping. You have a valid point, but when's enough enough when they're squeezing everything out of us for ad revenue and finding new ways to fuck with our psyche/psychological things like Facebook does with its highest paid employee(s) to rake in attention for cost-per-click and cost-per-view? We're more than just 'metrics' and KPIS. We're humans, we deserve joy. If youtube dies, there's decentralized solutions out there that can become more mainstream. People can self-host and host their own content.
yup and I've always felt just like this even as a kid, fuck ads
They can keep going, it just makes want to leave these platforms for good
Despite all of their machinations my strategy of simply ignoring literally everything they say and continuing doing the same old same old appears to be flummoxing them.
I've literally not done anything and have never experienced any inconvenience. Are we sure they're doing anything at all?
Same, I think they must be AB testing and I don't get assigned into the shitty group
I definitely got really awful, unplayably spotty playback that seemed linked to adblock usage. Then I saw an article about it and confirmed I wasn't going crazy, and that day it stopped happening, so it felt like I was going crazy all over again. It's like the moment they realised it was going to become a problem and they weren't as sneaky as they thought, they turned it off. I haven't had an issue since then.
I had the same experience with shitty playback buffering every few seconds on popular videos that should be cached on a nearby cdn, and then saw lots of articles about it and then boom a week later everything was back to normal
That would be quite a funny strategy that they could definitely implement. Creepy as hell but clever.
They know everything you do and look at, so they know if you're the sort of person that would look up a fix for this or just take it on the nose. If they realize you're looking at articles about the problem they just turn the function off.
They are definitely AB testing things like rejecting ad blockers.
One time they told me I had 3 days left to enjoy YouTube with my ad blocker, and then I would have to buy premium, or they would just lock me out of the site. I was like "welp, it had a good run, I guess that's it for ol' YouTube."
But then the 3 days went buy and nothing ever came of it.
That tactic probably did get them some preemptive subscriptions though, unfortunately.
MBAs are taught they can shape human behavior with decades disproven assumptions.
It's fallout like this that shows their hand.
"Oh, the customers don't like it? Fine we do it twice as hard" is fucking Pavlovian training and the executives behind the initiative should be sealed in an underground vault knee deep in hungry roaches.
I thought I was getting that blank screen long pause before videos, turns out my phone cable was damaged, fixed it and YouTube's back to normal.
Wait, how would a phone cable cause a symptom like that...?
Maybe they're using the phone line for their Internet ? Vsdl etc...
Your phone could have been switching power profiles incorrectly due to your phone rapidly switching between charging and not charging (and perhaps with a low power state depending on battery level).
@ripcord@lemmy.world Just my guess.
YouTube has been a dumpster fire for many many years now and it continues its slide down.
Patreon would not exist had anyone over at YT had focus beyond the next two quarters.
Sooner or later an actual real contender will be created, and you'll see YT's knee jerk reactions with a surprised Pikachu meme in full effect.
Patreon and sites like it exist as a hedge against YouTube banning your channel.
I would love it but I don't see it.
It costs an enormous amount of money to host video content, doubly so when you need to replicate it across servers. I have never seen another company come close to usurping them.
Yeah, The problem is, the price on YouTube is so incredibly expensive because we have to pay for a million script kiddies worth of useless videos to be uploaded and permanently stored everyday.
If someone made a competing system where you had to pay a small amount to host a video and then it turned around and paid you once you've got enough eyeballs that would be a far more sustainable model and cause people to police their old underperforming content.
I agree. We don’t get a new YouTube, we get whatever comes after YouTube—some new modality.
I think its more likely that YouTube will shut down and be replaced by nothing. Its existence has never made sense as anything but an act of charity from an organization with tech resources to burn.
Remember that Google bought YouTube only AFTER it was successful for several years. This was also before Google turned evil.
There are a lot of unprofitable startups that get purchased speculatively based on other factors like their user count. The idea being the buyer thinks they can monetize.
This was more like a merger with Google being the larger company. YouTube was already very successful.
"Should we moderate our ads and get rid of 2 hour long ads, disinformation, porn,scams and fake products?"
"No, no. Thats to much effort. Lets spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to force people to watch our 2 hour long ads, disinformation, porn, scams and fake products. Thats clearly the way forward."
This decision process brought to you by Prager U proceeds into 30 minutes about how slavery was good for the black man and he should be grateful for it
I'd rather not watch YouTube videos at all than videos with ads.
Smarttube stopped working some weeks ago for a day. I tried watching YouTube with ads, the experience was so fucking insane to me. Like multiple, non skipable ads before the video starts + more ads during the video. It just was unwatchable. Its just unusable.
Newpipe still works (Google may break it, but the app is usually updated in a couple days and it works again)
Try grayjay
Here's my current lineup.
Newpipe Freetube Greyjay Tubular Brave
They get through all those, I'm just going to surf peertube or odysee
I don't mind one or two of their old 5 second ads, but anything beyond that is unacceptable especially on a 2 min vid.
Good fucking riddance.
The sooner they realize the enshittification isn't working, and is only increasing the amount of people participating in the largest global consumer boycott ever, the sooner they'll actually try to improve the platform, or die resisting.
YouTube has continuously made the experience worse, adding more and more ads to users not using ad blockers, to compensate for those using them. Guess what, genius? People block ads because they suck. Adding more won't stop people from using ad blockers!
And they have the audacity to try selling YouTube Premium for a whopping $14/mo (nowhere near the actual revenue generated from a user watching ads,) then don't even provide any real benefit past ad blocking, after they deliberately killed YouTube Originals because it didn't instantaneously bring in immense profits.
And the content creators I personally know have shown me the amount of money they get from Premium users, and it's sometimes less than the value of an ad-supported user, even though the Premium user generates more revenue than an ad-supported one.
I would pay for YouTube Premium if it was a reasonable rate, and actually came with exclusive content, similar to Nebula, but it doesn't.
Instead, YouTube has continued to make the interface more and more bloated, slow, and inefficient, and increased the incentives for low-quality, mass-produced content, all while not paying creators enough to support themselves on YouTube's own platform.
YouTube can't see itself as being the cause of its own issues, because it's blinded by bad ad-driven fiscal policy that has only been a proven failure.
Those surfshark maps... ugh. No, I'm not searching for ublock origin. Why would I it's been installed since time immemorial. You have to measure install base, not search interest. Leave search interest for celebrity gossip.
Can you expand on this? I don't follow what you mean here
i read it as - the Premium money is mostly going to YouTube HQ, instead of to video makers.
Every creator I've seen talk about it said they get more from Premium viewers, so that's why I'm confused
YouTube is also aggravating customers who use their official apps by increasing the frequency and length of the ads. In just 4-5 months, I've seen YouTube ad lengths on Roku go from 10-15 seconds to 30 seconds, to a minute.
They're trying to recoup lost ad revenue by pissing off the one demographc most likely to sit in front of the TV the longest.
On rare occasions YouTube will play exceptionally long videos as ads. When YouTube Red came out I got multiple entire hours long shows as ads (as a "free preview!") I'm pretty sure Ive gotten one of the movies they put up for free viewing as an ad before.
Obviously you can skip after 5 seconds or whatever but they hope to catch someone playing stuff in the background. Probably to increase their crappy view count for those features to sell actual ads later.
Gotta love when the article saying adblock-blocking doesn't work is itself preceded by a notice to disable your adblocker
They don't even believe themselves.
Honestly it makes me appreciate Lemmy more. Like we're all on here enjoying an ad free experience.. it's clearly feasible to do
there are several orders of magnitude difference between text-forums with almost all multimedia content hosted externally, and hosting/streaming video.
a big Lemmy instance is a manageable cost for a few well-paid people to run out of their own disposable income.
anything even vaguely approaching YouTube is not.
The ads have reached a breaking point.
If I can't block them, I'm just not watching the YouTube. I'll never pay.
It used to be funny to link a relevant YouTube clip, but it's not funny if you have to sit through half a minute of ads just to see something silly.
It's also not really a long time streaming service like TV channels or netflix etc., because the homemade content sucks in comparison to an actual documentary that I can also watch without ads on other services.
It's like Google completely misunderstood the point of the service they initially made. Also following a decade of users attempting to "monitize" their fucking crap, you can be sure that there's nothing worth watching on YouTube that couldn't have been better presented in a gif or in text.
Then the player is also fucking up lately. Usually if I go there, I'll check the written description while the ads play, just to see if the content is worth the wait, but nooo.... you can't even do that anymore, because the app will start reloading between the multiple ads and the screen scrolls around and minimizes the description and comments. They're literally hiding any information on the clip except the title until you've watched the ads.
It's fucking garbage. Enshittified to death.
Repeating: Google, if you're listening: I'll never pay for YouTube, no matter how intrusive you make the ads. Enshittification is not encouraging me to pay.
Who could have foreseen this? s/
This battle was lost before it started. Sad thing is, if they weren't so goddamn obnoxious with the ads it wouldn't even need to be a battle. As it stands, YouTube without ad blocker is damn near unwatchable.
The guy who decided to start the battle increased ad revenue for a week so he got his bonus, that's all that matters.
"I'll glady tank YouTube's revenue tomorrow for an extra dollar today."
That's just executives in general. And on the wayout they'll leech a golden parachute.
Dangit. Now I want a burger...
I remember when google search had one text-based ad. Bearable.
Just like the rest of the internet .....
Absolutely! Everything on YouTube is somehow predicated to getting you exposed to some kind of advertising. Absolutely everything!
They've min maxed it so hard that without the various plugins that I use in Firefox YouTube would be almost completely unusable.
I'll stop using YouTube altogether before I disable my ad blocker. My time is simply more valuable than whatever video I'm watching.
The reason I left Twitch was because the fucking ads were unbearable. I've even taken a screenshot to show people that I wasn't lying when I said I saw that Twitch expected me to sit there and listen to and watch 8 fucking ads. Ads to shit I don't care about other than think of violent thoughts in what I'd love to do to marketers and find a way to advertise that so they get a god damn clue.
In a perfect world, maybe A ad wouldn't be so bad. But this has gotten out of hand and out of control. We shouldn't ever have to sit and watch a string of ads, all varying from 20 seconds to an entire minute and even longer.
And good, I hope YouTube is stupid as fuck enough to be aggressive. Drive more creators out, even hit the successes of the YouTube whores who've long lived on the platform. Because all that they're going to do is affect everyone at the end of the day, all for the sake of profiting for marketers.
I'd have left Twitch if I didn't find it more entertaining than current YouTube. No one should be surprised they're at pre-covid profit levels again because they tried to shovel way too many ads down people's throats.
Imagine tuning into a random stream and getting greeted by 3 ads before you can understand if you want to stay or check a different one. I've been frustrated enough that I just turn to something else altogether for entertainment.
There are some decent adblockers like TTV.LOL, which is a simple proxy to a country that doesn't allow ads. But sometimes those solutions don't work either. Ironically I just use Turbo while not paying for YouTube premium, but just as people don't pay for YouTube Premium, I understand not wanting to support Twitch for a variety of reasons.
Not that you should return to Twitch but if you ever need to there's this TTV LOL PRO add-on for Firefox/Chromium or you can just use a client such as Streamlink (with GUI and ttv lol support) for desktop or Xtra/Twire for Android with a custom proxy
There is a twitch ad blocker it works really well
In a perfect world we wouldn't have ads.
Wheres the data to back up this claim? That article is purely opinion
The backup is I havn't seen a single fucking ad for years on Youtube. Using it daily on both desktop and android
I've been using Youtube basically since it exists. There were no ads in the beginning. I've also always been using adblockers. I was surprised when I heard people say they have to wait for ads on youtube. I was like "What? Youtube has ads!?".
I dont want to offend you, but you're a drop in the ocean when compared to the grand total of Youtube users.
Pretty much everyone I know outside of tech who has ever "showed me a cool video on Youtube real quick" has waited to load ads before showing me their phone.
If you get outside, touch grass and meet real non tech people pretty much all of them need educating on ad avoidance.
That's true, would be great to have more evidence.
But I really wish this to be True 🤞
Fuck em, they're just greedy fucks that'll blame us for everything.
If they kept the ads to 10-15 seconds at the start of a video and didn't interrupt my videos for them, I would never use an adblock on Youtube (i'll even give them an allowance for one 10 second ad interruption for every hour in the case of super long videos). But for as long as they keep trying to squeeze every goddamn penny out of me that they can, I will fight back and do everything in my power to prevent them from being allowed even a single ad impression off me.
I'm not unreasonable, but I refuse to accept unreasonable offers.
that mentality is probably what most ppl started with. however, youtube burnt quite a lot of bridges. i would assume, that many ppl, just like me, wont do the 3 clicks to disable adblock for youtube.
Fair and I agree. I should have stated it in the past tense because what I really meant is exactly what you stated - that I wouldn't have brought the adblock to Youtube had they not gone nuclear assault in their ad approach and made the choice unreasonable, now I am unwilling to engage with them honestly without ENORMOUS, HERUCLEAN efforts towards rehabilitation on their part.
Cheers.
Do they give the creators any control over where the ad breaks are? Seems like they just get thrown in all willy-nilly, too often and in the middle of sentences.
They get some control but it depends on the content how exactly it works. I think for normal videos they get a say right from the start where the breaks are. But I know one guy who does YT and he live streams and has to clean up every VOD because they just randomly pepper ads all throughout.
What account?
But to be serious, this might be at actual risk to those who are logged in. They were locking out users of their whole google accounts for less, including their emails and the uploaded files to drive.
I pay for Nebula and try to watch as much as I can there. The content is more "pleasant department store" and less "Mexican public market".
I do watch YouTube regularly when channel-surfing, but if I ever see an ad (which happens only on mobile devices), I close it immediately and do something else. It's not that I don't think I should be able to watch everything for $0, but YouTube ads are so jarring, random, irrelevant and just make me sick. They literally ruin whatever I was watching and make me sad to exist.
It can be exhausting to wade through the absolute meat market of click bait titles and thumbnails to find something that not only looks interesting but won't abuse me with infomercial-form audio/visuals.
YouTube enables and promotes the "content creators" who abuse human psychology to accumulate views, likes, subscriptions, etc. The best thing that could happen is they continue to be exposed as the drug dealer they are.
It’s always laughable to me that these companies are able to have the meta data on our entire lives and yet show ads for shit we don’t even want.
I'm a lesbian, Google has enough data on me to know I'm a lesbian, I live with women, don't really hang out with men at all. I use a bunch of Google services so I know Google knows this about my living situation.
SO MANY FUCKING ADS FOR MANSCAPED, WHHHYYYYY. I am not the target market for this Google.
I've taken to blocking the ads, still more Manscaped. Is it cause blocking = engagement? "Oh wow, she interacted with this ad to block it but ignored the others, what a good ad placement!"
the thought is "not what you want, what THEY want you to want".
If your favorite brands and IPs aren't as profitable as Mypillow and Regressive Fake University ads (well not mypillow anymore thankfully)
That's the key difference and why nearly every idle auto-play leads to the alt-right within a few hundred views.
Shit you don't want yet. That's the idea of ads, trying to sell you shit you don't want or need. Why advertise the stuff that you're already buying?
Advertisements are for a large part about brand recognization. Even if you're not going to buy the product, the fact that you remember the brand means the ad has worked.
Not to mention 50 different variants of the same annoying loud video ad, so that even when you block it, you have to do it 49 more times to actually stop seeing it.
And the problem with the same irrelevant and animated ad repeated 5 times on the same webpage
Look at it this way, Google stopped caring about their viewers as anything more than wallets to empty years ago. Now they're going through the same cycle with advertisers. They don't care if the ads land, or the targeting works, just that they can convince them to keep buying ad space.
Eventually the ROI will show as not worth it to the advertisers, but by then Pichai and the rest of the C-suite will be pulling the same scam at another company whose investors are more greedy and stupid than saavy.
Because the horrible truth of America now, is that CEOs and their ilk have stopped caring about creating value, or building a sustainable business model with long term revenue. Now they just look at witless investors as wallets to be emptied too.
So I paid for nebula, but it seems totally vacant. I'm not mad, I'm happy to spend the money supporting small creators/any independent endeavour, but am I missing something??
The app isn’t exactly optimised for finding content. There’s a lot on there, but it always takes me a while to figure out which submenu gives me the goodies.
OP did say that "the content is more “pleasant department store”". Have you been to a department store lately? They're pretty vacant lol
It's relatively new and has a small userbase. I doubt it will ever get as active as youtube but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I want the statistic on how many Google employees use ad blockers now. It's basically a necessity.
I'm sure Google employees get Premium for free
They still probably use ad blockers for other sites though. It's essential on the Internet these days.
The number of malware or otherwise malicious ads is too damn high. There are articles that are so filler they literally have less content than ads, it's an embarrassment.
Premium doesn't have downvote count and sponsor skip.
The pirated version of youtube is better than the paid one.
Google should spend time improving their service instead of being assholes.
I've been downloading my subscriptions and loading them into Plex. Plenty of room for improvement in that system, but I get a nostalgic hit of YouTube long ago. Man, it's fallen so far over the years.
Also related, I've hit 2.4TB of internet use for the first time last month doubling my previous record.
Literally doubling down lmao
Which downloader do you use?
Probably yt-dlp, it's a pretty popular and relatively simple terminal application.
There are several out there using yt-dlp. Tube archivist, tube sync, etc. They are fairly straightforward to set up in docker if you use that.
Not OP but I use the arr family of services (Sonarr and Radar, though there are more) and NZBGet as my downloader.
I'm starting to think our entire economy is built upon ads.
Edit: Word missing
Partially. Our economy is built in selling you stuff you don't need, and ads are a crucial part of making that happen.
Sorta. Ads are just part of the much larger beast of selling things, marketing.
Starting?
Ads suck, but the type of ad is what is sucking the most. All I'm getting are ads for get rich quick schemes. You never see big name brands advertise on youtube anymore.
Last time I disabled an ad blocker to try it on desktop, I was getting scammy looking product ads. On my phone if I browse Shorts (revanced doesn't stop those ads) it's all straight-up financial/health benefits scams.
But the other night I accidentally opened the 1st party YouTube app on my TV instead of Smart Tube Next and the ads were for big brands. So there's probably a different level of desirability based on content type and device type at play.
I'm mostly getting product ads on YouTube, but they're so poorly planned and low-effort that they annoy the everloving spit out of me... In all regards, streaming services have officially become at least as bad as cable tv used to be...
Part of me once wished for a utopia of only getting ads for things I have a reasonable interest in - working to inform me about options to spend my money on a service or product I need. It was based on Steam, which shows ads for games I like. No repeating ads to harass a particular message, no convincing people they need Brand X.
I don’t imagine we’ll ever get close to that.
I was looking at the comment section from the article and the following comment made me laugh loudly, thinking on how bizarre our current world is:
So a platform that is blocking adblockers is delivering an ad piece advertising an adblocker. Ha! That's an ad I'd love to watch 😂
I wanna see that ad
You need to deactivate your ad blocker for that 😆
Every video ad needs to have the video uploaded to YouTube afaik. So it's possible to find it, although I'm not sure if it also works for private videos.
They'd have to pay me
Ads overall take up a good amount of time now. I would rather not use Youtube at all if I have to watch long ads.
The day adblockers don't work anymore, is the day i will never use youtube again. I have no idea how people do it. I have a friend who uses youtube to listen to music at home. Every time there is a commercial she drops everything and runs to her laptop. It's insane. Sometimes i accidentally click a link and the youtube app opens and i'm reminded that there have to be people who wait to click away these ads, every single time. It would drive me mad.
The ads have become too long. Some of them are 40 seconds long, for a 3 minute video. That's unacceptable. I have thought about it, and I think the best would have been a single 8 second ad, unskippable. But never more than that. That, I could take. But multiple ads (even if they're just 5 secs each but you have to be vigilant to press "skip"), or long ads, or interrupting ads, are just too much to accept.
Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn't play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.
I'm surprised that Vimeo hasn't decided to take advantage of the enshittifcation of YouTube. They have been a social video platform for years, and are probably the best placed platform to come close to overtaking YouTube - should they choose to move away from the professional space and embrace the social aspects of video.
Honestly, Pornhub has the infrastructure to take on Youtube, if they wanted. If they just cloned the site, sans content, and called it Videohub, there would immediately be a real contender in the marketplace.
Pornhub ads don't bother me. They are annoying, and too loud but 4 seconds is like the magic number. And you only watch it once i think.
Oh god, imagine midroll ads on Pornhub..... "Oh yeah baby, lick that wet- [Overly loud and obnoxious Adam & Eve ad starts playing]"
Make your platform so bad in the interest of shareholders so no one wants to use your platform anymore. It's a story as old as capitalism.
You don't even need an account to use YouTube lol
I mean this genuinely: I would rather YouTube die than be subject to their overlong and hyper targeted ads.
If the ads were untargeted I'd feel less adamant, but as it is now I would sooner give up YouTube entirely.
I don't mind if they used either data I entered or general trends of my watch history to serve me Degree For Men rather than Secret ads. "Data indicates this viewer is a male in his mid-30's, serving this viewer a tampon ad is unlikely to generate sales." I get that.
It's when I got the same exact ad for a Mission Impossible movie that had that annoying "Ready or not, here I come" song thing in front of every single video for three weeks straight that I downloaded uBlock Origin, stopped using the official app in favor of the website in the browser.
It's gotten to the point that I associate advertisements with bad products. I've had good functional search engines for most of my life, I've been able to find the products I want and need. The more you feel the need to pay to have your brand shouted at me the shittier I think your product is. Case in point: I've never seen a commercial for Sennheiser headphones but holy SHIT I've seen ads for Raycons.
I wish more marketers understood this. In fact, keeping on topic with Youtube in general, any product I see Youtubers doing sponsored ad reads for is for me is an instant and automatic hard pass for whatever it is. I just automatically assume that product is either crap or a scam. Or both. When I was shopping for headphones, the #1 brand I refused to consider for any price was Raycon. If I'm looking for a new game to pick up, I can guarantee you it will never be Raid: Shadow Legends or War Thunder, no matter how bored I am. If I need a new razor, it absolutely will not be from Manscaped. Etc., etc.
If I am bombarded incessantly with really insipid ads for a particular product, the only thing it makes automatically come to my mind when shopping for a product in that category is that the one I definitely don't want is that one with the fucking annoying ads. This is obviously completely counterproductive from the advertiser's standpoint, and I have to imagine I'm not the only person in the world who rolls this way.
The only possibilities I can think of are that advertisers really are dumb enough to oversaturate people's attention to the point that they get turned off from the product entirely but keep soldiering on anyway because it earns a paycheck. Or worse, that it doesn't matter because for every one viewer who gets pissed off and vows to never buy your product, they are outnumbered and offset by a horde of other viewers who are stupid enough to conflate repetition with truth and actually will be enticed to buy whatever it is, insipidity be damned. And the marketers probably know it.
That's how I feel too. If it were to die, it gives more room for things like peertube to grow from its ashes.
That is the best part of it! A very welcome change! Basically the first step of becoming an independent creator, and to being able to abandon youtube for any of them.
The worst of all issues to me was any interruption working to help feed people or the destitute immediately has a 5 second skip, while all else has 59, 30, 20, 14 skip. There was no benefit for good externalities, just cost and profit. I was even ok with ads around 5 seconds and that they can even show up before watching a video. Adding the countdown was a nice touch too. It's when it gets in the way of UI/UX, how you have to suffer through the same commercial over and over, interrupting a video at critical moments, and ending videos with an ad so that you don't know if the video is ended that it gets awful to use. I would hope someone gets to making it 5 second ads that don't take away from the experience.
Start 2x30 second ads
During video here's an ad för my sponsor "braid narrow legends"
Buy my merch on www.mymerch.dog
Outro youtube ads
Worse part of the problem is knowing what part of the ad profit YouTube uses to pay MrBeast and his stupid content.
There isn't a big streamer that doesn't strike me as a creepy tryhard.
Eh, I dunno if I'd say they're "losing".
I've certainly noticed disruptions on every platform except GrayJay. LibreTube stopped working for several months for me.
Certainly these interruptions could be enough for some users to abandon them.
I agree with you, but you can also think about it as a one sided battle where youtube keeps shooting themselves in the foot
NewPipe/PipePipe and Freetube were affected for half a day max, these guys are super fast with the updates.
Until they start properly filtering ads they accept they get auto disabled in my side. No weird crypto or porn ads for me, thanks.
Even the shitty mobile ads of "someone watching prerecorded gameplay and commenting it".
How obvious can you be?! "Oh wow, these 2 different people playing EXACTLY the same and saying almost the same thing".
That's not an ad.
Never mind that the gameplay in the ad is an extremely minor part of the game. The rest is some sort of city-builder with mtx shortcuts.
It's just whaling
Pro tip: open YouTube in Chrome, signed into your YouTube account. Allow the algorithm and your subs to continue recommending videos. Find one you wanna see. Copy link address. Paste it into Firefox with adblock, not signed into Google/YouTube. Prosper.
Just watched a YouTube video on my PS5 earlier today while cooking a food and saw for the first time that they will shoot an ad with a "next" button that skips to another ad, and then there's a "skip" button countdown. Ridiculous. I wouldn't bother with adblock if the ads were reasonable.
Here's a free idea, YouTube: build in the ability to add videos to a simple temporary queue and then only put ads in at the very start or very end of videos so they aren't intrusive.
That free idea reduces (potential) ad watch time which reduces money, so there's no chance they'll implement it.
If they thought they could get away with serving an ad every 15 seconds, they'd do it.
Presumably the algorithm feed will stagnate or even deteriorate if it sees you ain't watching what it's suggesting.
what I do is open a containerized tab on firefox so that youtube has no history enabled and doesnt fill the page with obnoxious content then I search for what I went there for then I close the tab so everything is purged. for my subscriptions I use a container on my server that downloads their videos and ads them to my plex server so I can watch them there when I have time to watch stuff its all in one place
If you have Plasma Integration (KDE), you can create a task for sending the link directly to Firefox without copying and pasting. Plasma Integration shows as a context menu item inside chrome, if you use KDE.
if i ever get banned from youtube for using ublock origin am prob switching to odysee
If I'm getting banned I'll probably circumvent the ban
My NewPipe app stopped working for a week and it wasn't difficult at all living without YouTube. There's tons of content in the world that can be consumed in its place.
I use NewPipe only despite having a current YouTube Premium subscription because the official app is bonkers. It's hilariously stuffed with useless features that can't be toggled off(games, shorts), half baked stuff like specific video quality can't be chosen for all videos by default( has to be on a per video basis). Oh, and every other time I visit some channel, asking me to join the YouTube's channel for additional perks. You just took money from the user to give them a sub par experience.
On the one hand I understand they aren't serving billions of hours of video for their own health. Not sure how one can justify the expenditure as a "loss leader". But at the same time, the ad experience is horrendous.
In the last month I have consumed YT on desktop browser, mobile, and regular TV. Guess which is by far the worst experience?
On desktop, you can use an alternate browser or do a reg edit to re-enable manifest v2 plugins (for now) in Chrome, and continue blocking (for now). On mobile you can use alternate apps and frontends.
TV viewing of YT is the worst experience, as there are no native alternative apps and DNS ad blocking doesn't block YT ads. The native YouTube app (on Samsung and LG TVs at least) is horrendous. You get midroll ads sometimes mid-sentence as the content presenter is speaking. Sometimes you get pre-roll ads, disruptive mid roll ads, and then wash it down with a POST-roll ad at the end of the video. Depending on how the content is structured it is disorienting as to whether the video has ended or not.
Say for example its a 30 minute video. I would rather they show 5-7 minutes of predictable ads at the beginning of content, so I can at least have the same experience as broadcast TV, and make an informed decision to get up and use the restroom and feed the pets while the ads roll. Then once the content starts, don't randomly interrupt it.
Imagine the YT model applied to broadcast television. The quarterback drops back to throw a deep pass towards the endzone, and suddenly you find yourself watching an undskippable ad for diarrhea medication, while the football is in the air.
And we wonder why people have ADD.
I watch long videos on my TV (45 min - 1 hr) and YouTube has the audacity to shove minute+ long ad reels in my face every 15 minuets, claiming “fewer ads for this long video.” Bullshit. I have learned however that if you go to give feedback on the ad and flag it as inappropriate, it skips all the ads in that reel and sends you right back to the video! I can get past unskippable ads in a few seconds this way.
Fundamentally what YouTube is doing is an unprofitable model. Google bought them when they were in their "we can solve internet unprofitability with scale and more efficient data centres!" phase, but that has never really gone as planned for YouTube.
For a while I was very hopeful that YouTube Premium would solve that, but as they started removing features and making it an overall worse experience it became no longer worth the money. I don't have an answer to this. If I did I could probably make a lot of money on that answer. What I do know, however, is that Google's answer isn't the right one.
Youtube is waging a war against their customers. If they win, they lose; and if they lose they win.
Just got a one-minute unskippable ad for the first time yesterday (no way to use adbockers on a PS5). I'd rather not watch at all.
MMW: Google plans to make Chrome a locked down browser for a proprietary web. But this is only the intermediate step before all web services will be accessed via an app. The commercial web and the public web will hard fork and the kids will never know what a "browser" is.
I already pay tons yearly for extra storage. YouTube without ads should be included. Also I was a paying customer for ad free back when Google Music was alive. They killed the best service for the shitty YouTube Music. Bring back Google Music and I will subscribe again.
Remember when videos had to be at least 10 minutes long, so more ads could be added to the play time? Now they don't give a fuck.
Now you get a 10 minute ad for a 2 minute video
And Sponsorblock. Can't imagine going back.
Any one else watch the Linux tech tips video (degooglefying) where he tried to claim blocking ads was Piracy.
That pissed me off because blocking ads is honestly just protecting yourself against viruses which appear even on ads on Google etc.
Also who am I depriving of their property by blocking ads, F you linus.
I mean... It probably is. It's accessing the copyrighted content outside of the terms of the license provided by the copyright owner.
But that shows more how broken the copyright system is than anything when piracy has such a low bar.
Why can it not be both? It is piracy because you access content that should be payed with your time (ads) instead of money, by bypassing the front door/line of ads and going in through the backdoor.
You do guard yourself from virus and some data hording and it can also be true that you don't find it worth it of your time and only want to consume without interruptions.
I also use an ad blocker. It is the first thing I install on a browser. The internet is impossible to navigate in without it and I try to only use sites without ads if possible... But I do believe it is piracy to block it, and it is my choice.
I only pay for nebula and Spotify so all the creators who is on there at least get something from me. But I don't know if that is even close to enough.
Linus is not one of them and will never be haha (I rarely like any of their video formats)
What account?
What always got me about accounts like Mr. Beast is how they never made the jump to a direct subscription service for their content. Some of the more popular Patreon accounts rarely if ever bubble up to the top of the YouTube algorithm. Yet they are clearly popular enough to bring in millions as independent artists. Meanwhile, the folks that dominate the YouTube charts are inevitably the ones that the algorithm force-feeds you in every "Recommended" feed.
It's almost as though YouTube needs quality content providers more than the quality providers need the ads. Almost as though the real beneficiaries of the YouTube ad-supported model are generating endless largely unappealing filler content.
I used to just watch YouTube at default, taking the ads as they felt like.
Now, no thanks. If I have to watch as many ads for as long as they mandate, I'll just watch other things.
Sadly they killed Piped, and a lot Discord Bots in the Process...
Free tube still works, android app is kinda buggy though.
I find the whole thing so ugly even as a youtube plus subscriber. How much possibly you could gain here? isn't youtube already profitable and being run by one of the world's richest corporations? just let people watch and educate themselves and whatnot.
There's a large war going on behind my uBlock plugin.
They successfully broke almost every Piped instance.
Floatplane is Linus' smartest decision he's made. It's going to be needed.
Platforms like Floatplane, Nebula, Patreon etc make it so easy to support creators outside of YouTube, while also giving creators a larger share of income compared to Adsense.
There's YouTube Premium... but I don't think I'm alone in not wanting to give Google a single cent of my hard earned cash
I already have Pixel phones, they can already spy on me. No f'ing way I pay to remove enshitification. Also, they'll increase the price regularly anyway. If they want ppl to pay, they could just paywall the whole thing, well see who's left after that lol.
I've actually looked at these platforms as someone who has taken YouTube semi seriously in the past, and there are two major issues with them.
The first is, they don't allow just anyone to upload video, you must already be an established creator. Second, there is no free access for viewers, meaning someone isn't likely to share a link to your video with friends.
YouTube really does have a monopoly.
Let's hope he doesn't have access to any critical email account related to that service.
I'm out of the loop. What's that referencing?
Linus got phished out of his twitter account recently.
Respect where it's due. He owned it and was transparent so everyone can learn. Apparently he was at a pool party and just about to throw the burgers on the grill when he got an email that said his account was logged into from Turkey or Russia or someplace.
He panicked a bit, because of the last time his YouTube account was hacked he felt like acting quickly was the only thing that help it not be worse. I think he clicked the link in the email and "logged in" and boom. Got em.
Caught him at the right time and place and it all aligned to burn him.
That sucks. Thanks for the info.
Did he end up getting his account back?
Torvalds?
I pay for YouTube Family. I consume a lot of YouTube and I want to support the creators I watch. At its current price point, YouTube Family is reasonable. Several households in my family get ad-free YouTube for what is a reasonably low price point for each household.
If the price goes up much (eg if I were paying the single price of $11 per household), the creators I really enjoy continue to get pushed out or change content because of shitty ad rules, or they pull the whole “must be in the same household” bullshit I would drop it in a heartbeat just like I’ve dropped most streaming providers. Streaming has become cable and YouTube has been shooting itself in the foot by forcibly changing content for advertisers. I come to the platform for content, not advertisers.
Unfortunately that fee won't stop google's endless thirst for data mining and it's manipulation through "personalized recommendations", and through ads on any other website and mobile apps.
Good.
I'm getting Playback failed from time to time on reVanced. Maybe after 5mins of every 3rd video. I just go to my watch history, open the video again and it continues. Mildly annoying, but good trade-off for not having ads.
There's no winning a perpetual game of whack-a-mole, especially when having no moles (=viewers) left also means that you lose.
Meanwhile Odysee goes ads free...
They kept trying to ruin my experience so I've switched to Invidious and Odysee.
Invidious only for the content creators that don't crosspost to Odysee yet.
No, this can’t be. They took all of our personal information so they could use AI to tailor ads to exactly what we wanted at any given moment.
/s
I hope one day we will find a method to finance websites operating costs without ads. Meanwhile I will be using blockers and hope someone else’s does the ad clicking.
It’s my little internet piracy you could say, if I am already doing it with every movie and tv show and most games it would be out of character. I am obsessed about saving money and so if I can get away with it I will do almost anything.
Same with the health insurance I have 1/5 of the real cost for full package because of various gray area tax optimisations. Then double dipping on real estate rent+appreciation. Most efficient used car purchase. 25 year old fridge and washing machine because new ones break down too fast and can’t be repaired. Manual renovation between tenants to save on labour cost. Lack of addictions. Relatively cheap hobbies. 4 milion in assets, zero debt.
We have a solution but….
::: spoiler you’re not going to like it cryptocurrency (especially 3rd generation cryptocurrencies like Cardano which uses proof of stake) could easily fund website operating costs without ads. :::
Very noice