YouTube’s anti-ad blocking test gets even pushier with a new timer

fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 751 points –
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I’d pay for YouTube premium if t wasn’t more expensive than HBO. It’s ridiculous. Especially considering YouTube has no production costs. It’s all user-generated content.

the users do get paid though, although i'm sure it's a fraction of what youtube makes.

Hmmm. $20 a month for the big budget action of Westworld, or $20 a month for a cooking show filmed in someone’s basement. Decisions, decisions.

To be fair, YouTube has far more variety and far more content overall. Personally, I have seen pretty much anything worth watching on the major streaming services. My wife and I can just ignore any top 200 list of shows or movies because we have already seen it all and anything we haven't seen doesn't look interesting to us. We just have to wait for new shows to come out.

YouTube though. It's functionally unlimited considering the length of a human lifespan.

For some insight, a quick Google search says that Netflix has about 4 years of content if you sat down and watched everything they have to offer. Meanwhile, YouTube has about 18,000 years of content.

Are they including all those 10-hour long loop videos I uploaded?

I'd take 10h shreksophone over 3 of those 4 years worth of netflix content any day of the week!

I've never been one to really get into the loop of watching YouTube endlessly. It's felt like my use has been more like a search engine.

For me it's not really been a great source of entertainment. At best background noise. Quantity of hours is a useless metric for me when most of it is stuff that feels like unnecessary content. I think it's most telling that what makes YouTube watchable for me is sponsorblock with one of my most used functions skip to highlight, and blocktube to block the popular channels that dominate search results. And lately youtubetranscript to just save myself time watching and overly long 10+ minute long segment in favor of quickly skimming over the words.

I feel the algorithm promoting long videos has ruined the quality with now more videos trying to fit that minimum length.

The irony of this comment is you can find the cooking show but not Westworld on HBO lol

honestly i will watch westworld once, but i never use my netflix account but i watch stuff like physics lectures and chemistry videos all the time. i just find it fascinating, in a way scripted TV isn't for me.

I'd pay more for YouTube rather than HBO/Netflix. There's much more content that interests me on YouTube.

I sleep to lectures on youtube so I probably clock up a lot of hours a day and ads would ruin that forever - so I pay

but i do enjoy a lot of creator channels too, so it's worth it for that as well. plus i really fucking hate ads.

part of me also thinks - it must cost a bomb to deliver that much data and storage, plus the bandwidth for 4k video at any time, plus paying the people who make content. some of them are millionaires, youtuber is kind of a career and it's not all in-video endorsements.

at some point, someone has to pay, and it's the advertisers paying to access me, or it's me paying. i'd rather pay. i'd prefer it if it was free but i kind of get that it's not. I couldn't pay to host youtube and develop the platform and have everyone watch free.

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We actually don't know what percentage they're making. They can tell you how much they're paid, but no one but Google can tell you how much of the subscription cost goes to them versus Google.

This was maybe 5 or so years ago, but I remember Game Grumps did mention something along the lines of how they get more from someone watching their video on YouTube premium vs someone who watches their videos with ads playing.

It's still not a ton of info, and I'm not sure if it's still true. Or maybe it's different for every channel or something.

It's such a low number most people would be disgusted.

We're talking a few bucks for a million views.

the big guys get sponsors to fund them, not ad revenue

That's a symptom of a broken system. It's literally users creating their own ads because the platform's ads aren't getting them paid.

On a related note, you can skip those ads with a plugin, or the right app on Android and Android TV.

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You can get Premium cheaper through other countries. It’s super simple. I only pay about 1€ / month and that feels about right to me unlike the 15€ or something I’d have to pay otherwise.

Isn't there a risk of getting your Google account banned for doing this?

It's definitely a TOS violation (as is using any kind of VPN to access their content apparently) but I never heard of anyone having trouble with it. Either way, I moved off of other Google services completely, so it would not be a huge loss for me at least.

That's not a bad idea. I could consider making an extra Google account just for that so that way if for some reason it went screwy it doesn't affect being able to log into other services.

Man, I hate Google.

I've been doing it for four years and never had a problem with it. There are so many people from India that live and travel in my country so how would they know that I'm not one of them?

I'm guessing via a VPN, but which country do you connect to for the low prices?

Argentina or (in my case) Turkey seem to be popular options. You only need to use a VPN when setting up the first payment. Your credit card can be from your home country, no checks at all. After that it'll just work and you won't need a VPN anymore.

I'm from India and it's about ₹120 ~ $1.4.

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More video is uploaded every minute than anyone can ever watch in a lifetime. It costs money to store and serve all that.

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Isn't their issue more hosting costs and not production costs? Unless they start telling people they can't upload videos (exception being copyright of course) Youtube greatly outpaces the storage costs of other social media sites.

They probably still store more than other video-hosting sites too.

their problem is probably paying $2 billion a year or some crazy number for nfl football.

It should be a crime the way they make you subscribe to YouTube Music to get YouTube Premium.

The pricing feels like it only makes sense if you want to use YouTube Music (and thus also don't use one of the many streaming music competitors). Paying a couple of bucks extra for ad free YouTube is fine and that's why I pay it personally. But if I wasn't a YTM user already, I don't think I would.

And most people don't want to switch streaming music services. I did that years ago and it sucked. Music is the kinda thing where you really benefit from the service knowing your tastes. I only did it because back then, Spotify was missing some of my favourite artists while Google Play Music had them. I don't even know if that applies today.

Idk if the price is that ridiculous, the family plan costs me 16 bucks and I have YT premium for my household+. I also have YouTube music from that as well, I find it better than spotify for my use and I dont have to put up additional cost for music streaming elsewhere. There was also youtube premium content (Youtube Red?) if that is still a thing, I remember the Vsauce series being available because of this.

Youtube having no costs is a hot take if ive ever seen one, but I dont think I can say anything about this that hasnt been said.

Only a kid used to having mommy and daddy pay for everything would claim youtube has no costs. It is amazing how many people on social media think everything should be free. The real issue here it is the lack of competition.

That's a bit disingenuous, IMO. Of course they don't pay to produce content, but they definitely pay quite a lot to store all of the video that millions of people are uploading daily for free.

A part of your YT Premium payment goes directly to creators that you watch based on your watch time. That is their content expenses just like HBO for making new shows.

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Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube

  • ad blockers are not "on youtube", they are on my devices

  • allowed by whom?

  • fuck you

Just click the "not using an adblocker" button. If everyone does that it'll probably whitelist the blockers, we can hope.

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Dear Youtube: Bring back the downvote count, allow me to disable shorts, allow me to disable your bullshit annoying ass startup music, then half the price and then we'll talk about paying for your "service".

Youtube has startup music???

Yep, on Smart TV devices there's a startup tune.

Eww. I installed SmartTubeNext the day I got my first smart TV and never launched the official app.

Being able did disable content you don't want aside from ads with a paid membership would be a huge boon.

Killing shorts would be fantastic, and they shouldn't care if I'm not using a feature as long as I'm paying.

That got me, the "you can only upvote stuff" bull. I should also have the option to block channels and videos.

Why would they ever do that when they can make the website more intrusive and annoying to use?

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ublock origin users:

KEKW

Sponsorblock and Return YT Dislikes FTW as well.

On desktop blocktube has improved things so much too. It has made search results so much better, since YouTube suppresses smaller channels in favor of the same large youtubers depending on the subject. Really wish it could be integrated into mobile YouTube options, but until then my hope is waiting until mobile firefox getting desktop extension support.

Glad you brought that up, never heard of it. Thanks!

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I'm confused, if ublock origin and sponsor block and all those are bypassing this, then who is it actually targeting?

have you ever searched "ad blocker" on your browser of choice's extension store and scrolled down? or had a cheap/free VPN that advertised ad blocking functionality?

those. for some reason people install those. and they never get updates.

(some of them are actual malware too)

Not sure what you're on about, Google is absolutely capable of detecting if you're using Ublock Origin, Piped, ReVanced, whatever. The question isn't if they CAN break those things, it's just if they WILL.

And if they're beta testing this system right now, I'd say it's just a matter of time.

I wouldn't be absolutely sure about this. In the end, everything on the web still boils down to (mostly) simple HTTP GET requests. If you open a webpage, then you are served the file you requested (usually HTML with CSS for styling and JavaScript for special actions) and your browser handles the display of them and the execution of their scripts. This means that you can program a browser to detect and remove ads directly from the code and also eradicate malicious detection scripts potentially employed by Google that are meant to find out whether the ads are displaying correctly. If Google would want to circumvent this, they would either have to make YouTube available solely over their own app or block such behaviour on the client's end, for example by manipulating the browser's code to block ad-blocking functionality. Google is actually pursuing the latter with their Chromium browser, which is also the foundation for some others, including Microsoft Edge. This is why it's important that people start to move away and use Firefox for browsing, THE free/libre software non-profit web solution since decades. Because then Google is essentially powerless, if they don't want to take YouTube off the web.

Making YouTube available solely in their app sounds entirely possible and not unlikely here. They already sorta do that with age-restricted videos and videos that have voluntarily disabled embedding.

Watching all this from the sidelines, I'm very pleased that I took the time to de-Google my critical daily services, already.

Yeah, I'm glad I already have a cheap annual subscription to Curiosity Stream + Nebula. I'll have to look for some other decent video platforms if they're going to start being dicks about YouTube.

Yep, they are ramping up to disable all of the scripts and extensions.

Lately, I've been getting 403 errors in Newpipe after a video has been playing for about a minute. I think they're starting.

They are capable of detecting it because they aren't putting much effort into being undetectable. If there was a need, uBlock Origin itself could be made entirely undetectable.

Of course the YouTube script running in your browser will be able to detect changes made to the page and request blocking. However, the said script can be modified by a different extension to either receive incorrect data about blocked requests and page information, or to send a fabricated result back to the server. Google can react to it by modifying the script, and the extension would need to adapt accordingly. It's a game of cat and mouse.

If there was a need, we could have YouTube running in an entirely clean headless browser with no adblockers, while the real browser we use pulls data from it and strips out the ads.

Ultimately, currently we have the last word on what happens on our end. Unfortunately, Google's webDRM, pushed by traitors to humanity Ben Wiser, Borbala Benko, Philipp Pfeiffenberge and Sergey Kataev, is trying to change that.

I mean, you could do all sorts of wild shit but at a certain point it's impractical for most people. You think Google has actually put effort into this so far? You haven't seen effort yet, they're just beta testing.

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It drives me mad when I use PCs of friends and relatives and I see AdBlock Plus installed, but they still get ads and they never seem to stop and wonder why this "ad blocker" is not working! I do however enjoy their facial expressions when I install uBlock Origin for them and start refreshing pages.

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They want to frame it so that internet ID is the solution. That way you as a person can be banned, not just the account or ip. Good luck buying and selling when everything becomes digital and you get banned.

The reason people are talking about this new change is that it will bypass the extensions.

I understand that, but look at who I am responding to - they seem to think that they're immune from it.

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I am paying for YouTube Premium, and yet I still have to skip over US-exclusive sponsor sections which almost every Youtuber has nowadays…

That's why I still use Vanced. Sponsorblock is something I can't live without even though I have YouTube premium.

Yeah, almost exclusively either Us-centric and not even available where I live, or so gosh darn expensive that I just will never use the stuff advertised (looking at you, magic spoon)

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If you’re not already using it, this is gold: https://sponsor.ajay.app/

It's funny how we need uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and maybe even DeArrow (same dev as SB) to make Youtube tolerable.

I'd love DeArrow to be merged into SmartTubeNext.

Watching quite some youtube on my TV, and the clickbait suuuuuuucks.

Yeah, those are frustrating. Some channels I watch have a ton of annoying YouTube ads, where premium becomes a must for sanity. But some others have baked in sponsors that can't be skipped (but no native YouTube ads). I wish they'd reconcile the two. It doesn't make sense that you can pay to only block some ads, and depending on what videos you watch, that could be either the majority of ads or none at all!

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Why's everything going to shit? The world is already shitty enough, lemme enjoy some escapism ffs.

Eshitification is a result of end stage capitalism. People are trying to extract their last bit of value before society goes tits up due to climate change.

well they better be investing in bunkers and 100 years worth of canned beans.

They're also betting on Aquaponics, sea-steading, and flying to Mars.

Let's hope they also make close friends with their bunker guards, else the millionaire residents will be the first to get slaughtered.

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You meant lemmy enjoy?

lemmy lemme lemmon same thing. What even is a word but words that someone worded, if you reword a word enough times the word doesn't even sound like a word anymore. Word?

The markets tanked which meant the cheap VC money dried up. Tech companies are rushing to implement the monetisation and cost-saving strategies they withheld before because it ruined the user growth now to ensure they are maintaining as much revenue as possible.

For close to 2 decades we had near 0 interest rates. VC daddies used that as an excuse to throw loads of money at every itiots pet project because hey, why not? They were able to absolutely roll in money and take out loans at criminally low rates.

But now rates are getting back to actually sane levels again, and suddenly the vc daddies are all sad because the infinite money pit has dried up and they actually have to be responsible with their money again. So now they're turning to all of the companies that they gave money to and are saying "hey remember when I gave you money? Pay me back now. I don't care if it means you have to fundamentally change the service that's making you money, get me my money or I'll bring you down with it."

And since our economy is structured such that the money of wealthy people is more important than literally anything or anyone else in our society, the companies have no choice but to comply. So they all raise their prices and shore up the holes that weren't letting them milk every cent out of their users.

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Ah YouTube, the site where I watch a video that tells me in ten minutes what I could read in one. And only 5 advertisements!

Oops, six. I forgot the ad the creator slipped in between minute 1 and 2.

You might want to follow other people, my friend

No, they have a point. Because you earn money by views, people now make videos about everything instead of writing something somewhere that can be found by search engine. Video has its uses but it's far overused nowadays and it sucks.

That's why I use YouTubetranscript now to read through the video to see if it is even worth watching, since so much stuff is unnecessarily long due to how algorithms push those videos to the top.

Ctrl+F'ing my way through the transcript of a 38min crafting video to see when they're ever actually going to do the thing they made the video about, if they ever get around to it at all.

Somehow, more than once, the answer was no.

I would like to use this opportunity to make more people aware of YouTubetranscript.

Sites been a huge time saver just reading through the video instead of sitting through 10 minute long videos that turn out to be a waste of time that could have been said in a couple minutes.

Recommend hitting '4' (40%) straight away on how to videos, its usually the start of showing you how to do the thing.

I used SponsorBlock for a while and it worked pretty well. It crowdsources where the ads are in a video and you can choose to skip them automatically.

How can you possibly forget the mid-video ad read that is actually a part of the video, thus unblockable?

I mean, if it is an ad that actually directly gets the video creator paid, I’m not even mad about those, especially when it’s quality content. Not a fan of those who just take common searches for questions online and create a long video to explain the answer when it should have just stayed as a stackoverflow question and answer or something.

+1 to InternetHistorian's ads, the only channel where I purposely don't skip over the ads even if I know I'm never gonna actually get said product

It's like how they expect you to pay for things at a store now too! Like "I just wanted some milk dude!"

If my grocery store required me to either buy an unwanted, overpriced store-specific subscription or stand there listening to multiple minutes worth of sales pitches for shit that I also don't want and could never afford, and this kicked in every time I took an item from the shelf, regardless of whether I decided I was even interested in said item, then yes, shockingly, I am going to do anything except what they're demanding. At that point, especially if they don't like me doing it.

"Try not to make your customers' experience repeatedly miserable or you will lose them" has fallen out of the playbook for no particular reason.

So I'm sure u wont have a problem avoiding it therefore this doesnt concern you

There is something fundamentally wrong with a service that shows more ads than content.

fuck YouTube premium. why would I pay £19.99 a month when literally the only defining feature for me is no ads. all this will do is allow for more complex ad blockers to be made to bypass this

The creators also get a good chunk of the money from premium as far as I’ve been able to verify (by asking some I follow directly).

Why not pay creators directly through Patreon PayPal or equivalent instead of Google as well?

Well, for one thing it scales more efficiently. If you watch 50 creators, giving Google a 45% cut is more efficient than paying processing fees on $20 split 50 ways. If you want to be truly fair, the logistics become basically impossible without massively increasing your budget. That's why, when most people opt to give directly, they're effectively choosing to reward only their most favorite channels while giving nothing to everyone else.

I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with that, but it's not objectively superior to Premium, which does fairly distribute the creator's cut. Google is able to endlessly split your $11 creator's cut into micro-contributions based on exact watch-time in a way that individuals cannot replicate. Every creator you watch gets their share. Not as much as a direct donation, true, but nobody gets left out and it's considerably more than they'd get from an ad-watching viewer.

Finally a good argument, thank you.

I agree that premium splits the percentage of my cash equally and easily but only 55% bugs me. That's an arbitrary number based off of some black box calculation.

I do not trust YouTube to have my or the creators best interest in mind.

If this number was 90% for creators I would consider it fair. The majority of the work comes from creators and is the reason YouTube has any people at its doorstep.

In the meantime, I can still far less effectively make use of my money the way I want to until a better alternative comes around.

I'll just have the sweat it and try harder to be a better consumer, I guess.

That’s an arbitrary number based off of some black box calculation.

It's not arbitrary. It's the same 55/45 split that creators have gotten from ad-revenue as part of the YouTube Partner Program. I can't seem to find a source to prove it, but IIRC the split percentage has remained completely untouched for a very long time, maybe even since YPP was originally introduced in 2007.

I should also stress that this is a revenue split, not a profit split. Youtube pays all of their operating expenses after creators take their 55% share. It means that the final balance sheet for Youtube works out to something like (fudging): 55% creators, 25% expenses, 20% profit. I won't shill for the shareholders -- the deal could be better, but it's not exactly highway robbery, either.

Thank you for the information. I needed some brushing up on all of it.

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If no one pays for YouTube how can they keep supporting their insanely costly infrastructure? Hosting all those videos is not free. Far from it.

I'm perfectly fine paying for YouTube if that means I can continue to have access to awesome creators under a easy to use platform. It would be a very sad day if Google decided to shut down YouTube due to not being able to cover it's costs.

The only other company that could potentially take over would be meta. Which would probably be even worse. At least YouTube provides an option to pay to disable ads.

Good. Let them close it.

They won't, because it's still making money hand over fist. This is all because tech profits are down a smidge now we're all getting back to normal after COVID, so they're all cranking up the enshittification dial to compensate.

None of these companies are "losing" money. They're just making very slightly less than they were before. Fuck 'em.

I would be fine if YouTube crumbled and was put into second place by a better platform or two.

Yes it's the best option currently which is why they can do such ridiculous practices.

But once they have actual competition, I expect them to bend over backwards for my attention. Because if they don't change the current trajectory, they'll go the way of the other digital giants of the past.

Do not worry about having a viable platform in a future without YouTube. I am 100% sure there will be one.

I just wish they kept the ads at the start and end. There is something off putting about watching some documentary about some horrible event only to have it pause for some perky Grammarly ad in the middle of it.

This is an extremely unlikely hypothetical. Google is one of the most profitable companies in the world and there is no sign of that changing, even considering all the people who block ads right now. There is no reason to squeeze everyone like this.

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There's a lite version that's only for the ads.

It's cheaper than the full 19.99.

While that might still be too much, I just wanted to point out that if you don't want ads, it doesn't cost the full 20quid.

This was news to me so I went looking and couldn't find it on youtube. Reading articles seems to indicate it is only available in certain regions and at certain times. I finally found the link to the page (https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite) and confirmed it's not available for me in the US at least.

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I just got my first 30 second UNSKIPPABLE ad on my TV the other day...I closed youtube, as watching a 1min video is NOT worth 30 seconds of ads

I recommend you to sideload SmartTube on your TV, *if it has an Android-based OS. It works better than the official app in my opinion, and includes SponsorBlock.

*Edit

I wish this was available on WebOS. I use it on my Shield and it's been flawless.

Are Android smart TVs that popular nowadays? I mean few years ago I wouldn't assume Android TV when hearing about smart TVs

Good point. I must confess that I haven't actualized my knowledge of smart TVs in a long time, so, specifying that the recommendation concerns only TVs with an Android based OS would be a good idea.

Up next: An AI-enabled Web Browser extension which

  • mutes the YouTube ads and overlays it with cute cat videos
  • clicks the "skip" button for you

And then* YouTube adds captcha to the skip button.

And then the AI script retaliates by identifying and switching to matching videos on PeerTube, whilst also learning your viewing habits. A premium version offers a subscription which pays third world workers to complete the captcha on your behalf.

Then Google users WEI to kill the extension.

Then someone releases a VPS which runs Chrome and supplies the whole thing by Remote Desktop, with a client side app that integrates the behaviour...

(just thinking of how it could go.)

Just mirror every YouTube video ever created and we won't get any ads. /s

I know you jest, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility for some peer to peer system to exist, similar to bittorrent, which could distribute the load across viewers. Most people have half decent internet these days. This imaginary extension could recognise the YouTube video URL, check it's DHT to see if anyone else has it, and if not it could capture the YouTube video and redistribute it to the next person who looked up the same URL. Stale videos could be deleted after a time.

So, basically torrenting but for YT videos. Pretty interesting on the technology side on how you'd handle unstable seeders, because after all it's streamed content, which is different from your regular content you'd get.

Now I realized YT videos buffer anyway.

One could even dedicated a set amount of disk space for sole use of downloading videos automatically that server says they should, which could be algorithmically decided whether it's needed due to high demand (need more seeds) or sort of archiving.

Could be an interesting project, a decentralized youtube "archive".

"While the duration of this timer isn't revealed, we expect it to be somewhere around 30 to 60 seconds."

Peak journalism.

We suspect it may or may not be somewhere in the ballpark on five seconds to seven days.

The really annoying part is YouTube gets all their content for free, while every other subscription video service pays for content.

They do, but the costs to store all of that high resolution video is enormous. Especially since it must be replicated to local repository for quicker access as popularity raises and removed when popularity falls on videos. The amount of content stored and served is significantly more than Netflix houses. That being said, ads are getting way too intrusive.

other streaming services dont let pretty much anyone upload gigabytes of video

Me gesturing at gazillions of porn sites that lets anyone upload any videos...

If YouTube implodes, pornhub will immediately launch an sfw version to grab the fleeing content creators.

Honestly I'm surprised they haven't done so already, they already have the tech to do it, probably need to scale it a bit.

Now I wonder if there aren't SFW videos in pornhub from people that want to upload videos but don't want to use YouTube. Or NSFW video that aren't really porn, like a random guy reviewing videogames naked for some reason. I'm not checking either.

I remember people from certain subreddits used to upload full movies to pornhub and share them for shit and giggles.

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Creators no longer get ad revenue? What did I miss?

The ad revenue is a portion of what the advertisers paid.

YouTube DOES get its content for free. They pay YouTubers per view, essentially a portion of profit, whereas something like Netflix pays for the creation of content and then also a portion of profit made.

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I believe he is referring to the fact that YouTube don't have to pay upfront for new content, they even get new content without hunting for it, and many smaller channels don't have partnership and so on.

Sure they have a platform, backend and so on. But Netflix needs to have all that too plus buy things to show to their customers.

That's what I thought, and it's kind of a silly point to make. You're just moving around the order of the steps. They still pay for it.

I believe he is referring to the fact that YouTube don't have to pay upfront for new content, they even get new content without hunting for it, and many smaller channels don't have partnership and so on.

Well, sure, but on the other hand, those smaller creators couldn't attract any attention or grow their audience without a platform to do it on. And, like it or not, youtube has that and doesn't charge those new creators anything to use the platform (unlike platforms like Vimeo, as one example).

Most of those large profitable channels wouldn't have been able to grow totbhwir current size without a free to use platform to spread their content to a wider audience.

There's give and take on both sides.

  ;

Of course, the payment share on ads and memberships is fair and equitable is a separate discussion...

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The worst part of YouTube ads is super long ads (sometimes even multiple hours long). It has happened to me multiple times. And coincidentally it always happens when I'm feeling sleepy.

Here is a screenshot.

Seems like a way to check for attention. Not clicking the skip indicates you're not actually watching. The benefit to them is probably more ad revenue.

In other words, taking advantage of their own users!

And advertising customers. Great company all around.

I think back in 2015, there was the Tai Lopez ads that were also very long.

I don't have a screenshot nor do I remember what ad was it, but I have seen an ad that was more than 2 hours long.

Man, all these companies just pushing me away from using their services. I don't need it.

For real. I'm mostly excited for the possibility of getting a viable alternative to Google's obvious disregard for human decency. Bring on the crowd funded video streaming apps!

This is one of these problem with multiple unsolvable issues:

  • people are used to ad block and won't change
  • the price is too high for part of the population (-> ad block for part of them)
  • $1/month, $10/year would attract new paid account but not that much
  • people can't afford/don't want a subscription everything
  • users don't see any value in it
  • a fraction of the paid will go ad block with the price increase
  • people will circumvent the ad block block
  • capitalism
  • ...

They already solved it. Premium was way cheaper before they started bundling it with Music which is just utter garbage. I’d pay like 5€ / month for YouTube Premium without Music IF the experience was actually good and they didn’t shove shorts in my face everywhere like that non-dismissable panel that breaks up my subscriptions now.

I think a lot of people would subscribe if they had a lower price tier where they have a reduced amount of ads (like an ad every few videos). Without ad blockers, youtube is unwatchable, you get more ads than you would on TV (where in many places ads are legally capped at around 15mins/hour).

I think they are likely to pull a Netflix and create a lower premium tier with ad support and missing other premium features like picture in picture

I actually don't have a problem paying for online services. I host my own email, I pay for Kagi search and I do monthly donations to Mozilla and Wikipedia. What I have an issue with is services that start out as advertisement based and then introduce paid plans, because now you still have all these shitty mechanics just for driving up engagement which results in unhealthy incentives for content creators and rabbit holes. I want a service that is for YouTube what Kagi is to Google Search. But perhaps that model is too difficult to monetize, I don't know.

This sounds a lot like Nebula to me.

Nebula is absolutely amazing, but it's a very specific niche. I don't think that kind of model could ever work outside of that genre of educational, super high production value content.

Honestly like the idea of nebula but most of the content from my favorite creators is like an hour long meanwhile I only watch something on YouTube if it's less that 20 minutes

I disagree. I am on the fence about joining nebula, but that's partially because I know I will binge through my favorite stuff then back on YouTube watching small time content.

I would be more likely to pay a couple bucks a month or like $20 a year to a service specifically for small time creators trying to build up an audience. Or even some 15 year old that wanted to earn some candy or dirt bike money from their claymation videos or whatever.

I spend a lot of time lying in bed thinking about all of the great art, poetry, songs, books, videos, plays, etc. That will never come to be because it's stuck in someone's mind and they don't have the outlet and or incentive to put pencil to paper, turn on that cam, or finally record themselves when they set bow to string and start playing the work they had been creating for the last year.

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NewPipe, and YouTube Revanced are great apps you can use on mobile. They aren't attached to any Google account so you can just use them and skip adds all day without getting any account theoretically banned.

For those who continue to use YouTube and adblockers on PC, simply just make a new throwaway Google account. In the case that they aren't actually bluffing (they are) then at least your temp account will be banned.

Revanced is great because it lets you watch without ads WITH Google account. I know that if you're focused on privacy the last thing you want is Google account but for me the benefit of YouTube algorithm suggesting me exactly what I want to watch is enough the reason to not use any platform/app that doesn't support login. Of course they need to try more before I'll pay for premium. For now if that dialog ever shows up to me I'm setting my UA to Android and see if that happens on mobile YouTube as well. Since they don't care too much about that version of YouTube it's possible that dialog will not show up. If that's blocked too I'm installing waydroid and revanced on it. Also I hope that development of VueTube will speed up because currently it's so slow I'm not sure if it will ever be finished and it would be great to have alternatives to revanced.

Or just don’t use an account. I’ve been doing that since Google force merged YouTube and Google accounts in like 2011.

Dear YouTube,

Go fuck yourselves.

Sincerely, the 1% of people who actually use adblockers happily.

clicks on link

It looks like you are using an ad-blocker

Getting banned from YouTube might be the best thing google has ever done for me

Post a how to guide please?

At least in the past, you couldn't get banned from YouTube: They would instead lock your entire Google account and I personally would not be able to deal with that.

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But what happens when the timer is done? Just a scare tactic?

No one likes timers. They are scary

They force ads and steal money from the content creators, and people still flock to use their services. How fucking braindead can you be?

Just stop using YouTube. That will fix their problems real quick.

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i was a YT premium subscriber when google play music didn't suck.... they lost me when they switched it to youtube music

What changed after the switch? I kept subscribing since the music + YouTube video was well worth the value for me, and haven’t noticed a change.

They kept trying to push videos into my feed. I want a music service period

Also it was sometimes hard to tell if i'm listening to official content from the band, or some bootleg copy uploaded by user "SomeGuy83771"

There were a bunch of other annoyances that i cant really remember off the top of my head right now.... Its beeb many years since i left

No more gapless playback for one. Listening to albums by e.g. Pink Floyd can be really annoying without it...

Is the photo for this article two naked chicks smoking at a bar for anyone else?

On Artemis, yes. On kbin.social, no. Was kinda wondering why no one else was talking about it.

I have the same image, also on Artemis/ camp

@hariette

I think there might be something glitchy with Artemis.camp’s federation of this article. Lemmy.world and kbin.social is showing this as a generic YouTube thumb, but Artemis.camp, both in and out of the app, is showing two nude women smoking in a bar.

It's with Kbin, in general, I think. Kbin.social is having similar issues with caching the wrong thumbnails lately. Been happening for a few days.

Fellow camper here. The two topless chicks were quite a shock.

Go home CTdummy. You’re drunk. /s

I don’t see any photos other than youtube logo.

Memmy for lemmy on iOS.

So what are my options on windows? I just know about patched clients on Android

Probably wait until the adblockers update their filters to block YouTube's attempt to block the adblockers. Twitch tried to do the same thing, and now there's add-ons specifically designed to block that purple banner.

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Use Firefox, and all the same adblockers as always.

uBlock Origin to be more specific.

anything owned by eyeo (which now includes non-Origin uBlock alongside AdBlock and AdBlock Plus) will probably consider these "acceptable ads" after not at all getting bribed by google, and the rest are quite literally malware (except a small handful)

Paste link to VLC, mpv, other media player. Also Freetube and the sort work.

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I just went to yt's front page, which I haven't done in a long while (usually use NewPipe or use a direct link). There is a LOT of garbage on there. I mean, holy crap! It's not the creators' fault, I know. The Algorithm decides, and they must appease The Algorithm. Still, though. And, now, this timer bs for the 2% who use adblockers?

How do the 3rd party clients for youtube work? Can they still circumvent the adblock-blockers or where are the "positioned" inside youtube's code? Sorry for the weird terminology, I'm no programmer.

Re vanced mods the normal app with a premium override.

I had to patch mine as the blocking mentioned in the article was kicking in after about 20 seconds. The video would just stop and sit loading.

Revanced works on Android devices, and Doesn't need root. Follow the guide to do it.

YouTube ReVanced still works. They patch the app to not play the ads.

The way it works is you install the normal YouTube app, install the ReVanced patcher and it patches and reinstalls the app.

most of them go through proxy services like invidious. google is fighting them atm.

I couldn't read this article because AndroidPolice wanted me to disable my adblocker.