It seems like we've all lost the plot. We'd probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn't literally jarring. Try browsing for a day on a plain-no-extension browser. If you use other web enhancement tools kill those too. Straight-up internet is cancer, especially on mobile.
It's impossible to read a 250-word article without being interrupted 5-7 times. Two of those interruptions are likely a full page overlay with give me your email, and are you sure you don't want to subscribe, just give me your credit card number.
Then there are auto-play videos on the side, some with audio on by default. I mean I came here to read something, so of course we have things flashing and moving and making noise, it's the most conducive environment for thought, right?
Ad blockers and script blocking are essentially a hazmat suit that allows us to withstand a hostile environment. Remember when we said myspace pages with audio and [marching-ants] borders was a bad UX? At least we didn't have overlays back then.
Go back to basics and consider what makes a good vs bad internet experience. The reality sounds like someone with a minor case of severe brain damage. I think we've just become unashamed of greed as a society. It's clearly all just about money.
Those annoying customers/users generate content and we have to put up with them so we can monetize it. *Sadly, It's unclear if I'm talking about youtube, reddit, or nearly any other site.
Le sigh.
We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring.
Not me, sorry. Fuck ads. I've been ad-free for like a decade, and I'm not interested in regressing.
Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive? I mean, servers and bandwidth cost money. I'm in the same boat as you where I have run ad blockers, adblocker blockers, no script, privacy enhancers, and anti-fingerprinting since forever ago.
I'd rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data. If there was a balance, this is where I'd say it was reasonable. Since not reality, I'm with you, nuke them all, and just take the content.
The definition of "reasonable ads" and "just a few ads" keeps sliding. I'm old enough to remember the early internet, and that this lie has been told many times.
Just a few acceptable ads always becomes many unacceptable ads, because money.
Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive?
I don't need propaganda telling me to want to buy shit that I otherwise wouldn't want to buy, no. I'll go to other consumers (and, more specifically, people I trust) to determine what things are worth, not entities with a conflict of interest in the matter.
The whole marketing/advertising industry is illegitimate and harmful, and I'm "boycotting" the whole thing until we finish the job of destroying capitalism and it's no longer needed anyway.
I’d rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data.
The corporations are going to try to mine and sell your data anyway. Why wouldn't they? You think just because they have a revenue stream through ads that they'll give up another revenue stream from fucking over your privacy? Then I've got this nice bridge to sell you, too....
We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring.
Not really I don't want to view propaganda about how the new 6 wheels family killer wagon is still chill even if you're going through the desert.
I just don't like ads and unnecessary consumerism.
God, this is tangential to your point, but car and housing aesthetics have gotten terrible. Everything is BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER. People need to buy huge fucking hulked out monster trucks now for their suburban ass lives so they can make sure to fit their entire home when they commute an hour to work in soul crushing traffic. And they absolutely NEED their giant ass monstrous mcmansions. How can they survive without the extra dozen rooms that they can fill with more cheap bullshit? And don't get me started on color. Houses are all beige, grey, monotone terrible. Cars are silver, white, grey, black. There's no color anymore. It just feels like what's the point? Why bother trying when this is what success looks like. We have this beautiful planet and this is the shit we fill it with. I'm sorry. /endrant
My truck is white because it’s hot AF outside and it there is a LOAD of difference between dark colors and white in the sun.
I feel you... the world is a sad place today...
I fully agree. Online ads used to be some banners next to the content you came to the site for. I was fine with that. As soon as they put it in front/in between/.. the content, I very quickly got fed up with it.
oh look, another web service who wants to strangle its users for money and ad views :D when's a peertube instance going to get some big creators on it supported by viewers? that'll do it, i bet
Seems unlikely that a creator would jump ship from a platform that pays them to a platform that doesn’t. That being said, lots of creators also constantly complain about demonetization, so maybe they’ll start to get fed up and move to purely in-video sponsorship things. Seems most likely from a creator that’s already on a platform like nebula
Most big youtubers have in-video ads now anyways. I'm not sure what the ratio of their revenue comes from youtube ads vs in-video ads, but youtube seems pretty trigger happy about demonetizing videos. Sometimes entire channels. If someone gets the majority of their revenue from other sources than youtube ads, I could see them migrating to something like peertube.
Even with in-video ads, those must be paid based on historical (or actual?) view counts right? No matter how big you are, there's no way you're going to maintain view counts when switching away from YouTube.
You're allowed to upload the same .mp4 file to multiple websites. There's absolutely no reason why a creator that isn't getting YouTube ad money couldn't upload to YouTube and PeerTube at the same time. Presumably if they are getting YouTube monetization, they have some kind of exclusivity agreement.
Hopefully once the issue of the ridiculous amount of resources needed for such a service is resolved. This is why we don't have any viable youtube alternative yet, especially one that isn't a corporate pile of junk. Once you get to a certain size if you don't rake in the cash you shut down.
So hopefully peer to peer saves the day.
yup, even youtube isn't profitable. Video remains one of the largest sinks of resources. A 4K movie is stored on a disc of about 66GB, so about 30GB per hour of 4k video. Even with peertube it'd take the best hobbyists to run even a modest server for a few streamers. We're talking people with PB level of storage capacities now with fiber lines to their house to truly host peertube alternatives, and if we're talking cloud we're talking thousands per month.
It's not impossible, I don't want to get people down, but that's the major hurdle
Every video maker should host his own peertube instance with only 1 user.
yeah but then we get a youtube esque site of nerds who love hoarding hard drives and setting up selfhosted services. Which is great, I did that, but the vast majority of youtubers don't have the knowledge/don't want to set that up
hopefully 💙 video codecs have gotten pretty good, and maybe they'll get even better to where, like you're saying, we don't have to shovel so many resources into hosting something like a peertube. crossing fingers 🤞
I subscribe to nebula for this reason, directly support creators and it's very reasonably priced.
never heard of nebula, thank you for bringing it up :D
Did they ever get around to implementing playlists and autoplay of some sort? I really wanted to get into that service, but the absence of those two things just killed it for me
How is peertube in terms of hosting costs? I would assume much higher than lemmy or mastodon considering it's all video content.
hosting cost for peertube would probably be astronomical since you're likely hosting the videos yourself :/ unless there is some sort of federation that kind of works like bittorrent. that would be awesome
I'm confused about this take. YouTube clearly has hosting costs and also pays creators. That money has to come from somewhere. They offer two options, ads or subscription. You could argue that the number of ads is too many or the cost of the subscription is too high, but demanding a service be free just because it's technologically possible to block ads seems weird.
Wow the enshittification is at full throttle across silicon valley! Guess those investors gotta get those returns now that interest rates are spiking!
I have to imagine many of these investors also have money in areas whose prices have skyrocketed due to "inflation." They've seen the profits other industries are getting away with and now big tech feels the need to do the same. These companies are supposed to be the future, after all... How will it look if big oil is more profitable than mainstream digital platforms? To investors, it looks bad.
Sadly, when your ability to generate profit relies on using your users (or the developers and mods that run your platform cough Reddit) like cheap labor, rather than providing better product at reasonable prices, digital platforms suffer in usability or features. It's kind of a lose lose for anyone that actually cares, because so far the market hasn't self-corrected.
I imagine folks wouldn't have a problem with this if the ads weren't already so aggressive. Numerous ads before and during the content break it up too much. And if the content is extremely short form, it completely ruins the experience.
The number of ads and their length should be proportional to the length of the video. And any creator doing built-in ads should also not be able to inject a bunch of other ads. Burying content is an easy way to get avoided.
Print media had limits for advertisements, heck, in magazines they were premium real estate for the finest graphic designers to put together incredible imagery to get your attention. This level of care (not necessarily images or what have you) has yet to translate to the web.
Unrelated, online ads seem to go out of their way to insist that there's nothing to be learned from print ad stacks. Which is a shame, because I've personally placed an irregular shape ad in the middle of a broadsheet page and placed stories around it in the manner least like to confuse readers. Guess what the verdict was back then?
Are you saying your threshold for ads and empty foreshadowing hype is somehow under 99%? I sure do love me an ad-blocked, sponsor-blocked video that still somehow manages to waste 10 minutes to learn "no" or "I don't know, either."
That's when the skip to highlight option comes in handy. And if a video doesn't have it I end up contributing so next person can save time.
It makes the servive inconvenient and annoying to use. I just want to watch the video, not watch a 60s ad that us totally irrelevant to me.
That's funny, I'm testing YouTube alternatives.
Suggestions?
My issue is that the content creators i watch probably arnt going to leave... and im sure ad blocks will find a way around it after a month or so
PeerTube seems to be the federated (decentralized) option (similar to this). Content obv is entirely different, but maybe that's actually a good thing. Think of it as a clean slate - a fresh canvas. tbh YouTube's content has really sucked the past few years, and mother of bog do you see the stuff that trends nowadays when you're signed out? It's basically become cable tv. I started using youtube bc I hated cable tv.
Invidious is the most obvious. Its FOSS wrapper but it also lets you watch peertube and other federated content.
They already started to fight the project last week, Google legal contacted the project owners
I saw the reply they had. Interesting point about "We don't use your API so we didn't agree to the TOS of your API. Also there is no 'we', since we don't host invictus; simply develop it as a product"
Nebula. Most of they content creators I watch are there.
@PhatInferno There's Peertube here in the fediverse. But yea, every platform will need creators which will not easily switch. Some even have youtube membership enabled on their channels, which makes it kinda impossible (without being deprived of revenue).
Yep, got selected for this test and I thought my network went down.
Had to do nearly 30 mins of debugging until I realized it was youtube actively withholding JUST the video. Took some effort but managed to get them to send the videos again after resetting a bunch of things.
I refuse to view ads and will go to the ends of the earth to make that happen.
Paying is most certainly an option, but only when that becomes the ONLY option.
I've been using an adblocker since ads starting becoming more intrusive and the internet has progressed so much that it's become generally unusable without one. I remember when a mobile ad popped up on my phone and it straight up startled me.
I'd happily pay for the content on youtube, if the user experience was not as miserable as it is.
Search is basically non functional, sort by oldest is gone, search in channel is only available on desktip not on mobile, filter videos by date range is not possible, video quality is mediocre, everyone and their dog makes titles that leave no clue at all about ehats actually in the video because "they do better for the algorithm", if you want to actually read the comments or video thescription on mobile you'll have to click "shoe more" and "expand" until your finger hurts, video caches only a few seconds ahead, which makes watching on flaky connections miserable, video quality defaults to 480p even on gigabit internet, etc., etc., etc.
If they would actually care about the user experience, I'd pay. Instead they just make the ads as annoying as possible, in the hopes that users pay just to get rid of the annoance, instead of paying for an actually good service.
This is crux of the issue. The whole websites interface is structured around ads. If you pay to get rid of them, it's still structured around ads from its most basic level, so much so that simply getting rid of them doesn't fundamentally change the experience.
I pay for premium and the only reason is because I watch a lot of youtube on my TV. However their app is terrible on cable boxes. I've had 3 different brand boxes and they all have the same issue. If you rewind the video it stutters while playing from the buffer until you get back to live.
And it's so annoying if you have a ton of channels you are subbed to. The algorithm will only show you videos from like the last dozen or so of your subs that you watched videos from. Then show me tons of videos I have absolutely no interest in. Or tons of videos on the same topic that are basically just plagiarized from each other.
I've found youtube has gotten really, really good at recommending me stuff over the past 2 years. I've gone to great lengths not to mess that up once I noticed that. I also like how youtube now shows me 0-10 view videos since I keep clicking on them. Most are trash but very occasionally youtube finds an incredible video. Basically like tiktok but without that annoying short form content interface and I get to choose to view it.
I've got thousands and thousands of subscriptions to channels over the years at this point. It's impossible to manage. I've no joke probably cost them in the thousands at this point.
I don't watch youtube on a TV but I do believe there are ad free solutions if the TV runs some form of android, besides premium.
Wonder how long the ad-free non-premium will last. I predicted in the 2030s like 5 years ago, but with how quickly platforms are cracking down on "leach users", it's probably in the <5 year span at this point. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Hopefully they aren't successful like Twitch was at killing adblockers. I stopped watching twitch after they broke them. The web just wants you to pay for a million subscriptions nowadays. Meanwhile those subscriptions continue to climb in price.
Update: Vaft script for Ublock Origin works for me now from TwitchAdSolutions
I have an adbocker for twitch, it usually works, sometimes twitch can still shove an ad through, but when twitch does show an ad I just close the stream and do something else
my ublock origin works ok for twitch, although i basically only watch replays. maybe its different live
We'll find a way around it, if not go to hell YT. Apart from posters in the real world, I am living a 100% ad-free life and I'm super happy about it.
Okay but I don't understand. Isn't paying to remove ads a fair deal? I don't know, I pay for YouTube Premium and I'm kinda happy about it. The price seems fair; you get no ads, you get to download stuff, enables picture-in-picture and background playback. YouTube has been my main source of entertainment for the last couple of years so it's the only subscription I have alongside Spotify.
The problem isn't so much that there are ads. The problem is also what kind of ads they're playing. YouTube has been known to play inappropriate ads without vetting them - think of those awful mobile game ads with a heavy sexual tone.
This stuff also seems to explicitly target videos that kids might watch.
Yeah until they start showing ads for Premium as well. You know it's going to happen eventually
Absolutely, you are free to make every kind of contract if you like. Personally, I am not very invested in youTube, I don't watch any streamers or youTubers, it's just a video hosting platform for me. I am boycotting Google wherever I can, it is a privacy desaster and dystopia-like enterprise. NewPipe has all the 'features' as well, if it breaks I just let YouTube go..
I could live without youtube for sure, I have more of a Reddit problem than a YouTube problem... but it seems they fixed that for me.
Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal?
If the price were reasonable, community practices especially regarding monetization and moderation were acceptable, telemetry-tracking javascript minimal, etc. then sure.
But... we're not there.
The comments in here are interesting to me. Ads and Premium are a way for your favorite content creators to get paid for the content that they produce. I've listened to a number of creators talk about the YouTube revenue sharing model and most of them (LTT and Hank Green) says that YouTube is actually really fair with how they share ad revenue and how Premium is actually a good alternative that meets the needs of the platform, users, and creators. And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can't get to you.
I also hate ads, like a lot, and I do whatever I can to get them off of my screen because I think they are intrusive and we have proof of how they enable tracking across the internet at large. However, for those platforms that I find extreme value in (YouTube being the example here) I see how and why ads/Premium pump value into their system. If your favorite content creator isn't getting paid for their content, they won't be able to sustain it long term.
One last thought about video streaming and the content we all love that is hosted by YouTube: if we were to say that we would rather our money go directly to our favorite content creators, we would end up with a very fragmented ecosystem akin to the Streaming Service MESS we are in with TV/Movies. I would LOVE to pay LTT directly through Floatplane, but then where would I be with being able to watch other content creators?
Remember when ads were short and easy to skip?
They're just getting more annoying now.
I could bear them back then, but now I can tell immediately if I accidentally use the mobile app on my phone vs my phone's web browser.
This is the thing about ads. It's never, ever enough. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and it doesn't matter. We still get more ads.
Basically I think we are going to have to find more and more alternatives to the web. It's ruined and it's not coming back.
I know many people who are back on piracy now. It's just impossible to take all the ads.
I have heard that the ads are getting worse and longer/unskipable. I do wonder how YouTube determines what the 'balance' should be. You know they have the usage and engagement statistics to back up the increase. It did get to a point where I said there was no way I could continue to use YouTube as it was; but it was also around the time that I pretty much switched to YouTube for content over Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/TV so Preimum was a no brainer as I could drop 3 or 4 streaming services for YouTube.
Once, I played the first YouTube of the day on the Roku, and instantly got 2 minutes of unskipable ads (4, 30 second segments) with (what I would categorize as) unnecessarily sexual content on a children's playdough video. That was when I installed and configured PiHole for the Roku. That was the last straw. My 2-yo niece should not have seen a dude's butt. A 5-second video-age-appropriate ad, ok. An age-appropriate banner on the bottom, ok. 2 minutes of unskipable adult ads on a kid's video, no. I started blocking, when they started intruding.
I understand your argument, but I think the issue is more complex. I would wish that it was just advertisers paying money to YouTube and YouTube taking its cut and giving the rest to the content creator. It used to be like that in the beginning, but it isn't anymore.
I do not pay for a YouTube subscription, because I don't want YouTube to track my videos and create a profile of me. Especially when I often have to sift through multiple videos just to find an answer to very specific question and YouTube takes that as me being super interested in that whole topic.
Watching ads on the other hand is also just a large tracking apparatus that tries to squeeze money out of my pockets. My preferences over the whole Internet is being tracked to serve me "the most relevant and personalised content". Basically, they try to figure out what I want, before I do and then try to sell me that.
If there is a way to directly support content creators (donations, subscriptions, etc), I usually do that. But I don't want to support shady business with my data behind my back.
Very much this. If I visit the grocery store, I am not walking through other businesses just to get to each isle.
I am perfectly happy with going back to amateur YouTube somewhere else. If it was a real community of individuals I would probably post content again myself. The whole idea of YT as career content creators only is not very interesting to me any more.
I do not use an ad blocker. I use a whitelist firewall. I only visit the websites I request. If anyone wants to show me content, it must be on the servers I wish to visit. As far as I am concerned, if I invite you into my home, you head to the bathroom, open the window and let a dozen people into my home, you're never going to get invited to visit again. This is how ads work.
If YT can't trust these people to host their content directly, that is not my problem.
If they would let me just specifically pay for ad-free YouTube at a reasonable price, instead of lumping it in with a bunch of shit I don't use and am not interested in, I would happily pay.
And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can’t get to you.
I disagree. YouTube is owned by Google as we all know very well. They don't need to show you ads technically. I get why they would want to, because obviously its a company and they want to make more and more money. But I (and many more like me), as users we feel that it gets to a point where I'm not watching a video with ads sprinkled in, but ads with a video sprinkled in. So I as a consumer will find ways to circumvent that, and avoid watching ads. There comes a point where they're getting far too greedy and I can no longer tolerate the extent to which their "more and more money" practices get to. As another commenter mentioned, the ads arms race will simply continue turning. As for creators, there are other ways for them to make money, as was the case when YouTube was still a younger thing. Now there's even more options such as Patreon. Also, bigger brands such as LTT inevitably branch out and create separate revenue streams (think LTT store). Obviously, not every creator might want to do that simply to get paid, but when did we shift to this idea that its a job. Even though I'm young(er), I still remember the beginning of YouTube, though barely. It seems like it was more people back then that wanted to do this as a passion, not that they felt "I need to release a video every week at a set day and time or I get less money" as it seems to be now.
I wouldn't even mind that much if the ads didn't interfere with the primary function of the site, which one would think is to serve content (the product) to me (the consumer). Such as ads which are not part of the video but are loaded on the side for example. However, this is not the case. Primarily I think because we have reached a point in the internet's timeline where people using it are not the customers anymore, but the product. And we're being sold to ad companies.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk xD
YSK that Premium pays considerably less to creators than any other form of monetization.
So, if you want to support your favorite creator, literally send them a dollar.
One dollar is more than what that creator will ever make from a single viewer on YouTube.
They didn't repeat the same 3 ads every few minutes on high ad videos (No It, I will not take it >:c)
Moderated and removed obvious scam ads
Remove ads that are disgusting or clearly inappropriate (I have seen some stuff that could be categorized as porn in YouTube ads and no I do not allow them to feed me ads based on my interests)
If ads were still not being actively used to spread malware/viruses (not sure if this happens on YouTube at all but I would rather be safe then sorry)
[EDIT] Removed a redundant word
The largest issue for me is that I've never watched an ad and thought "I need that". It's just a huge waste of time that I find disrespectful and distasteful.
That being said I haven't watched and ad in years. A bit less then a decade now, actually.
Advertising clearly does work on the whole or who would companies spend so much gold on it? Advertising shits in your head. It subtly influences consumers and advertisers have become quite sophisticated about it. There is a glut of advertising space available now so we see awful and ineffective ads but be assured a lot of the bigger players know what they are doing. This is why I block all ads. Well for that reason plus they are annoying as hell.
To be fair the aim of ads generally isn’t to make you go ‘oh now I’ll go and buy that’, it’s more about unconsciously planting the idea that $product exists so when you actually do want to buy something you buy that brand. It’s why ‘show me as many as you like, ads don’t work on me’ is complete rubbish and the only real solution is blocking them entirely on a personal level and on a social level laws that restrict where and when they may be shown.
A particularly egregious example of psychologically manipulative advertising would be ‘Joe Camel’ who was nominally just a fun mascot but in reality existed to advertise cigarettes to children so they’d buy Camels when they were old enough. Given the prevalence of really awful advertising in the present day Big Tech really does deserve the increasing comparisons with Big Tobacco I think.
@Mewio@talos This, and
- do not show me ads for praegeru / hey you're queer, you should stop being queer
which was absolutely a thing that was happening to me before I was blocking ads on yt
And it would be nice if ads would not be played with an insane volume. Every time one sneaks by my uBlock it blasts my ears out.
I was late to the vanced game because I was very willing to put up with the ads for a long while. But yeah, the number of commercial breaks in a 10 minute video became insane.
This, and this is why few years ago I didn't care about yt ads on my TV. I had like 3-4 ads, 15 sec each for an hour of content, ads only between videos, not in the middle.
However, suddenly there was 3-4 ads before each video, and many times the ads started to be longer than videos.It feels like they are trying to push me into subscribing to paid YouTube by making the free version unusable without an adblock. And now they are even trying to make me disable my adblock?
I would rather not watch Youtube again then be exposed to terrible ads. I accidentally went on Youtube on Chrome and one of the ads was a straight up scam. $7.54 Switch! Like maybe if they had humans vet ads like you used to do maybe I would have less of a problem with it.
Lol I know exactly the company you’re talking about. I like their ads for $1 Lenovo headphones
I just stood up a selfhosted Invidious instance the other day, and I replaced YouTube ReVanced with Clipious (an Invidious client for Android) on my phone. No ads, SponsorBlock built-in, no need for a YouTube/Google account to create subscriptions, playlists, etc. And it's highly performant since I run it behind a reverse proxy with some custom caching configuration for things like thumbnail images, static assets, etc.
Clipious can also be installed on an Android TV (has an actual Android TV interface). I'm going to end up installing it on mine, but I'm also using SmartTubeNext at the moment, which does require a YouTube/Google account for subscriptions, playlists, etc, but does have no ads, built-in SponsorBlock, and a slew of other great features. I'll be keeping both around, since I do sometimes like to cast to my TV, and SmartTubeNext allows for that (Clipious does not, at least at this time).
Unless YouTube somehow starts dynamically splicing in ads as part of the actual video stream, there's always going to be a way to block ads, unless they do something pretty elaborate. But that's probably not worth the effort on their end to go that far, since the vast, vast majority of people won't know what to do to get around that, nor will they probably care enough to try. But I think it's clear that DNS blocking using services such as AdGuard Home, PiHole, etc, are going to become less effective over time.
I hadn't heard of Clipious before! What are some of its advantages over SmartTubeNext and ReVanced??
I do understand that if companies running ad-supported models, they need to make sure users are actually watching those ads. Seems logically to me - no ads mean no money, and no money means no sustainable business model.
On the other side, as a user, I just can't browse the internet without an ad-blocker any more. They just got so annoying and sometimes even break the actual website.
But to be honest, I don't see an alternative to ad-supported models except paying money directly via subscriptions plans etc. But this also will not work in the long term. I just can't pay afford to pay a subscription for each website I visit during the day.
The biggest issue, I guess, is the amount and obnoxiousness of the ads. I could live quite well with seeing one ad banner per page-worth of scrolling, if it's for example off to the side in a specific "your ad here" place.
Or if the ads would be thematically related to the topic at hand. I don't want to be reminded of how much our devices listen in on us by seeing ads for diapers on a website for posting news about the Ukraine War, just because I happened to talk with my gf about how my step mom has another child now. But seeing ads for a website to buy camping tools, on a website for hiking backpacks, is fine by me.
Unfortunately those types of non-intrusive ads probably aren't what's raking in the most money.
I'll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?
I use it every day and I'm a human who likes boosting the things that I enjoy
I think YouTube's content recommendations are a genuine value-add and not easily replaced
A cut of my subscription fee goes directly back to the video creators that I watch
The "premium" encoding levels are actually a substantial improvement to video bitrates
Important: the premium bitrate is higher than anything previously offered and probably would not have been otherwise practical to serve for free
So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly winning is a drag though, so I think I'll continue to enjoy getting swindled.
I don't think there is anything wrong with paying for what you consider to be value. I pay for Nebula for similar reasons. Similarly, I don't have a problem with free services including modest ads to cover their costs and even make a profit.
I do have a problem with ads that have gotten so aggressive that the free experience becomes unusable. For many providers, I feel like they have lured in content creators by promising free access and then changed the bargain after the fact by making the free tier intolerable.
rather than paying for youtube premium you should use an adblocker, or download all the videos you watch, then donate the money to creators you watch. if everyone who paid for youtube premium just decided to split the cost of the subscription between the creators they watch, creators would make a lot more money and as a bonus you hurt Alphabet, one of the worst companies in the world. It's a win win
Alright, let's say I do that. I'll take my $12 and split it equally between every unique channel I've watched in the last 30 days. Eyeballing my watch history shows... about 100 different channels.
Let's ignore for the sake of argument the incredible overhead I'd have to take upon myself in order to facilitate and account for 100+ recurring micro-donations. How much more money do you think these creators would get from my direct donations rather than going through greedy Alphabet? Let's do math together:
Subscription: $12.48 (the extra $0.48 is applied at checkout for the 4% VAT)
Ok. That's ~$0.06 instead of the $0.12 each creator would have gotten had I simply hand-delivered two pennies and a dime to every single individual. Now, I don't know about you... but I'm kind of too busy watching YouTube to go outside right now, so let's go ahead and factor in what would happen if I managed to donate using a platform like Patreon instead:
Not-Subscription: $12.48
Rounded up: $13.00 (the donation has to be evenly divisible by 100)
In other words: I'd be paying $0.52 more to donate a grand total of: no money. If we ignore the "no money" problem, there's also the issue of it being literally impossible to donate such a tiny sum in the first place. Of course, we've also conveniently ignored the issue of individually navigating numerous currency conversions...
Let's be honest and come clean with each other now: you weren't being completely serious with me when you claimed that your suggestion was about helping ✨the creators✨. Even if you were serious, I'm certain that you don't actually follow your own advice because it's quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.
I subscribed to a paid version of YouTube Music many years ago, and at some point, due to some changes by YouTube, this automatically converted into a Premium YouTube membership, and I've been somehow locked in at $9.99/mo since then. Thankfully, my wife doesn't care about watching ads, so we don't need the family plan. That being said, even if I had to pay full price, and even if my other family members wanted Premium, I'd still pay for it. It's 100% worth it from my perspective, for all of the reasons you mentioned.
I didn't know that you also get higher bitrate with premium. That might change things for me. Most of the time I watch YouTube on a desktop where I can use uBlock but when I watch on my iPad the ads get really annoying and I have already thought about getting premium just to get rid of the ads while watching videos during breakfast. Having higher bitrate would be a nice bonus.
Eh, I'm not here to hawk product. The higher bitrate is nice to have, but the impact of bitrate on video quality is perhaps a bit overblown. In a lot of situations, you'd have to pixel-peep to spot the improvement -- youtubers are pretty good at making videos look nice under the core quality settings.
On the other hand, ads suck. I'd have never watched enough YouTube to buy premium without years of heavy adblocking (shoutout to ReVanced Manager). Getting an ad-free experience out-of-box is very convenient and could possibly be worth the value of the subscription depending on your usage & means.
What I find most annoying is that it's still not possible to get Premium Lite (Premium without music, offline and background play) because I already have Spotify and don't really need background and offline play. 12 EUR/month is a steep price for just removing ads.
Fair enough, you need to look out for you. If the money would be missed, don't pay the bridge troll. Block ads and be free.
FWIW: YouTube Red was basically what you're asking for and it cost the equivalent of 9 EUR/month. Red wasn't available in Europe so this is a moot point, but that's the rate that YouTube previously valued itself at as a standalone product if you're curious.
They had a pilot project in benelux and nordic countries called Premium Lite for 6,99 EUR/month
Oh! I'd never heard of Premium Lite so I thought you were speaking hypothetically. TIL.
Yeah, that is a lot lower. If they offered that option I'd definitely use it over the $12 one... but I suppose that explains why the pilot never took off, eh?
Probably, such a shame really
If you watch YouTube videos on a small smartphone screen, sure, the bitrate does not matter that much. But whenever I watch it on my 55" 4k TV I cringe every time the image gets a bit busy and suddenly there are blocking artifacts everywhere
I’m also a YouTube premium user. I realize there are other ways to get around the ads, but I prefer supporting the services I enjoy using.
I second this. Probably the best $15 I spend for my family every month. No ads for kids watching YT on their own is nice peace of mind for me and my wife.
And because I already pay for it, we've slowly all migrated over from Spotify to YT Music and been surprisingly happy with it.
The family plan was the best $15 I spent for many years but when they raised the rates this past year I took a look at all my streaming subscriptions and YouTube didn't make the cut any longer. There's a small chance I'll resub as an individual down the road but for now it's ad blockers for me.
If you serve me Ads that lead to scams and malicious websites, you don't reserve my ad revenue.
Honestly, others do have point when they say we are basically leeching off of the platform. I honestly don't think I'd mind paying for youtube, I currently don't because it kind of just got ingrained in me that youtube was "free". I think the ad supported model is fundamentally flawed though.
Platforms will always want to make it worth it for advertisers to work for them. With the huge trove of user data that sites like Youtube, Twitter, Facebook etc. have they will use that to leverage personalized ads that will feed your brain with garbage all day and coax you into buying shit you don't need or sometimes even falling for scams.
I'd honestly like it better if these sites just straight up charged you right out of the gate. Maybe on top of that we could have sites be interoperable, like the fediverse, so it's not necessarily what the site offers but how they offer it to you. Making you want to pay for an experience that you truly can't get anywhere else.
For folks considering paying for YT, note that you get YT Music Premium bundled in with it. The music premium alone is only $2/mo cheaper than the bundle.
I got it when I bailed on Spotify, and gotta say, the app is a little less polished, but I don’t miss Spotify a bit. Just putting it out there if you were looking for a push to get yourself off Spotify or a push to get YT ad-free, there ya go. It works out to $10/mo if you get the annual plan, so same as Spotify Premium, plus yanno, the YouTube benefits. It’s a pretty decent deal tbh.
Yep. I've had Google play music since it came out so I've never seen YouTube ads except when at a friend's house. Each time I do, I'm reminded how worth it YT premium/YT music is. I wish more platforms would allow me to simply pay a small fee to enjoy an ad-free experience.
Personally, I think YouTube will be the hardest thing to replicate in a federated way.
and I'm testing Youtube Revanced on my phone for unlimited ad-free background play for nothing!
This will lead to an increase of ad-blocker-blocker-blocker development.
yo dawg I heard you like blockers
The adblocking arms race escalates further!
It'll happen. I just hope that it will just become semi-diffucult to do it, so that non-technical people give in so Google is happy, then the 0.1% of us can enjoy our adblocked youtube.
They already exist and are quite effective, I wonder whether YouTube is able to detect those too
So you're saying we need an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker.
At least with my subscriptions I've been noticing an increase in sponsored segments. And you know what? I don't mind. It's much less jarring when the "host" is also doing the ad and pretty much just works it into the video. People have to make money, and this old-school approach works for me. Reminds me of ads in old TV/radio shows. And it doesn't suddenly change the scene and quadruple the volume along with seizure-inducing backgrounds.
If you did want to skip sponsored content within videos, try using SponsorBlock. It's an extension that skips ads, transitions, and other annoying segments within videos based on user submitted timestamps. Pretty much every YouTuber I've found with over 100K subscribers has already got segment timestamps on most of their videos. It really makes watching videos more enjoyable
This. Not that I pay for YouTube Premium, but I'd be annoyed if I got ads on top of that (regardless of whether it's from YouTube or the creator).
We've been watching an old TV series called "One Step Beyond." I actually like the Alcoa ad that runs ahead of the program. It's written specifically for the program and runs as an introduction. They use "One Step Beyond" as a phrase highlighting their ability to innovate and in contrast to the "One Step Beyond" our normal existence as portrayed by the upcoming episode.
I know I'll tire of it eventually, but for now I'm enjoying it much the same way I enjoy listening to a piece of music multiple times or rereading a good book.
This should go quite well for YouTube. popcorn gif
The ad blocking arms race churns ever onward
If they really block adblockers, I will subscribe. To Nebula. It's got everything I want, adfree (including sponsored segments), extra content and is cheaper. And the content creators get a bigger share of the money.
There is nothing stopping you from subscribing to nebula right now. Since I haven't gotten any ads on YouTube in many years and even use sponsorblock to skip those annoying video segments I started thinking about how I am basically leeching off of most content creators. Subscribing to nebula was a no-brainer. It's about $4.16 per month on the yearly plan and lets me support all content creators I watch on there at once rather than subscribing to each and every one of them on patreon and I still don't see any ads
I'm not familiar with Nebula. Are known Youtubers on that platform?
Yeah I think I initially signed up for a free month because I wanted to watch some nebula exclusive content and was pleasantly surprised by how many creators I was already subscribed to release their stuff there. It made it a no brainer to subscribe to nebula.
YouTube is going to have a lot of trouble enforcing this. Lots and lots of people out there are going to be immediately at work finding ways around this limitation.
We'll make some plugin that downloads the ad and tells Google it was "totally watched and stuff".
"Say the product name into the mic to continue viewing the video"
There will be some cat-and-mouse games with blockers and anti-blockers, but the "Nash equilibrium" end result of online ads is that they will be spliced with the content into a single video stream before being sent to you. It's not done now because it's less work for youtube servers not to re-encode, but it can and will be done if youtube clients/browsers with addons keep ignoring downloading the ad video files, or download them but lie about playing them. We'll come full circle back to television yet!
You'll need a DVR for your YouTube. Ironically, when DVRs were a thing for TV, the most reliable method for automatically skipping commercial breaks was cutting out segments with increased sound volume profile XD
The other alternative is total DRM and a war against general computing. We already have HDMI with HDCP encryption in place, next YouTube will demand that only trusted code (that guarantees ads are played) authenticated via a TPM on authorized devices can access their video streams. Netflix and Amazon are already doing it. I can't play either because my devices are too "free" for them.
Translation: YT tests randomly pissing off users until they get fed up and leave for another site.
if a site tells me I can't partake of their content with my adblocker engaged, I simply find my fix elsewhere.
I use YouTube a lot, both on my phone via ReVanced and my smart TV via SmartTubeNext, completely ad free. If Youtube manage to block videos unless the users deactivate their adblockers, even if I enjoy Youtube a lot, I'll just stop watching videos. The quantity of ad per video is just insane. No way I can stand watching all those ads.
While I don’t disagree, YouTube won’t care. Currently folk like you and I who evade their ads are freeloading. We get all the content and YouTube gets nothing in return. Having those who block ads abandon watching doesn’t lose YouTube anything, and maybe saves them a little bandwidth bill I guess?
Unpopular opinion around these parts, I imagine, but I bought a family sub.
Me and 5? 6? other people get ad-free viewing, the creators get a little more for our views, and no worries about finding ad-blocking youtube viewers for my in law's smart-tvs or my idevices.
Especially given just how intrusive they are; they completely interfere with technical explanations or comedic timing.
Although not nice for people that can't afford or don't want YouTube premium, this makes a lot of sense. Hosting videos costs a lot of money, and I doubt the YouTube Premium subscribers pay even nearly enough to pay for the hosting of all these videos. Personally I just have YouTube Premium as this also gives more money to the creators that make these videos.
I think an Open Source alternative would also have a lot of trouble with receiving enough funding to stay up. It would require a lot more donation compared to hosting mostly text based sites like Lemmy.
Peertube I think helps offload that by having every video be a torrent so each additional viewer increases the max bandwidth. But still not free to start
God the ads are awful. If they start blocking apps like Vanced and Browsers like brave, i will make a PiHole. And they can never block it.
Unfortunately this is a question that comes up very often in the Pi-Hole community where the answer is always: no, a Pi-Hole cannot block YouTube ads.
This is because a pihole blocks at the DNS level and YouTube serves their ads from the YouTube.com domain. Block that and you lose full access to the site.
They recommend running either uBlock Origin alongside it and/or use apps such as newpipe for android and freetube for desktop.
That said, I will always recommend setting up a Pi-Hole if you're able to as the benefits of blocking trackers and ads from the entire network (which includes your cellphones, smart TVs, printers, IP cameras, etcetera) is definitely a good thing. Once set up it is 99% a "set it and forget it" kind of setup.
I think a pi hole dosen't work for youtube ads.
Piholes rely on blocking DNS requests to ad servers, but on youtube the servers that host the videos and the servers that host the ads are the same thing.
While a Pi-hole would work in theory, Ads are just wrapped youtube videos as they come from the same servers. It would be a need of pinpointing each video individually.
My take is that we need uBlock to have a functionality to send data to people's Pi-Hole on a page by page basis.
I've got most of the channels I sub to tracked by yt-dl so it all gets pulled to my nas. If Youtube starts forcing ads I'll just put some effort into getting things categorized properly into Plex and ditch their site.
I know it isn't the best thing a rando on lemmy should be asking but can you zerotier me access?
I pay for Prenium. But that's only because I also use YouTube Music. Otherwise, I wouldn't pay for it and I would do everything that I can to get rid of the ads. YouTube with ads is just hell now. There are so many of them now, it's ridiculous.
Don't get me wrong, I recognise the value that YouTube provides. Most things I watch and listen to are on YouTube. It's the website I use the most and I'll be glad to pay for it. I understand that it costs money to run and I want to support the creators that I watch.
HOWEVER.
I refuse to be strong armed into paying for it. Music brings me the value that I want and comparing with other prices, such as Spotify and so on, the actual "YouTube" part of the package just cost me 1€ per month which is one hell of a deal if you ask me.
But if you don't care for YouTube Music, 11€ a month (worst in the US apparently), just to get rid of ads is... ridiculous. I'd happily pay 5€ a month. It's not much and for the thing that I use the most? Yeah, I'm willing to! And I know that there is YouTube Prenium Lite. However, it's not available everywhere and it comes with a giant "fuck you" to the costumer.
You see, YouTube Prenium Lite is YouTube without ads. And that's it. So, no Background Play (which I use ALL THE TIME), no downloading of videos, none of that. You want that, well, you have to pay full price. Even though these are basic features.
Paying for getting rid of ads is one thing, and maybe accessing special features is one thing. But paying for artificial limitations that are put into place? Absolutely not. And I know the line between what's a prenium feature and what's an artifical limit is blurry. But for me it's basically this: If I can do something for free on desktop, but can't on mobile without paying. Such as background play.
I am convinced YouTube Prenium would be way more appealing if YouTube weren't being such dicks about it.
It's simple:
Get your prices back to normal (I hear that in the US, prices have been going up for... no reason).
Roll out YouTube Prenium Lite to everyone and rename it YouTube Prenium. So it has all the features of current Prenium except YouTube Music (put ads and disable background play only on music videos?).
Make it at like 5 bucks a month.
Make a variety of plans based around that. So a Prenium Family and also, a Prenium Duo, just like Spotify, for just two people. Reasonably priced.
And you make a YouTube Prenium Music plan, which includes YouTube Music as well. So on top of all of that, for 11 bucks a month, you now have a really compelling offer because you can go, Hey, for just 5 more bucks a month, you get all of the features of YouTube Prenium AND you get a complete music streaming services.
Bam. All of the sudden you have compelling options. Some people will say: "Uuuh, jUsT uSe an AdbLocKeR!" and whatever. Those people are not the majority, so many people watch YouTube from their phones and their TVs now, they will be much more inclined to buy it...
...I think.
That last part is important. I recognise I'm just playing armchair business developper here and that I don't know shit, but still. I'm convinced this could work. The real issue comes down to YouTube being a monopoly and thinking that they can do whatever the hell they want, which... they likely can, due to the position they're in. It's an issue but this comment is already long enough and that is another discussion entirely, but basically: Monopolies sucks.
I'm using NewPipe, which gives me music in background and no Ads
that's enough for me
out of interest, what other advantages does a premium account have?
Fuck youtube anyway. Absolute sesspit of influencers, ads and stolen content.
to be honest YouTube has great content because of the video length allowed. You can find all sorts of tutorials on pretty much anything. Instagram and TikTok, on the other hand, fit your description much better.
That entirely depends on who your subscribed to. Personally all my stuff channels like Numberphile/computerphile, or SmarterEveryDay, and plenty of Blender3d tutorial channels, animators, and a whole bunch of other informative channels.
While YouTube, or any service, has bad users/channels, there are also many great users/channels for people with varying interests to enjoy. You can ignore the channels you don’t like, and get to watch some of the best content from regular people you’ve never heard of, who aren’t major television studios or corporations with an agenda. All they want to do is make videos of things they are passionate about.
This. Can't really understand YouTube addiction. I'm not exaggerating if I say that I watch, maybe, 2 entire videos per year.
There's always the Revanced Project on Android. Honestly though, I've cut way back on YouTube after their algorithm started shoveling crap at me. Now it's hard to find genuinely informative videos. It's all "This guy got PERMANENT ORGASM FACE DISORDER Tears of the Kingdom" type videos, instead of ones on science, technology, and news.
Ever tried looking at youtube while in incognito mode? What's popular is a hellscape of lowbrow garbage that makes reality tv look downright erudite. I still like the site when it shows me all the channels I've curated, but otherwise, goddamn...
I've been thinking of switching to Invidious or something and using youtube primarily via subscriptions. I'm kind of getting sick of the whole 'recommended' frontpage thing.
Unpopular opinion: I like paying for YouTube Premium to get rid of ads and still make it possible for creators and YouTube to get paid and survive an keep offering me entertainment.
In addition you also get YouTube Music so no need to pay for Spotify. It might not have as good features but I listen to music specifically so I only search for what I want to listen to and don't want any algorithms anyway.
This is very much their propaganda tactic, that by not watching ads you're stealing from the poor content creators, when in reality they're just chucking a few pennies to the people who actually made the videos. If you want to actually support the creators then donate to their patreon or whatever, but don't pretend that watching ads or paying for premium is doing anything more than lining the pockets of investors.
My counterpoint to yours: YouTube Premium is not available in all countries.
Beyond that, I personally used YouTube Red for years until they killed Google Play Music. I was an avid user of GPM, had several playlists and radios tuned there, and when they announced the move to YT Music, I was hesitant but gave them until literally the last minute to add the features from GPM that didn't exist on YTM, but they never did.
I cancelled my YouTube Red subscription the day that the GPM app on my phone said it wouldn't work again, and on that day I swore I'd never pay YT another penny directly.
Yeah I think it's a good option for a lot of people.
As a counterpoint, I recommend watching Louis Rossman's take on why he recommends people pirate instead of paying for YouTube Premium.
His general philosophy on things is that you should pay for things unless you're getting an inferior service to the pirates.
In this case of YouTube Premium, he considers it restrictive enough (won't let him watch videos offline) that he cancelled his subscription and now recommends piracy.
But YouTube Premium lets you download and watch offline...
Call me lumberjack cause I wish a nigga wood pay for YouTube premium. With how many times YT tells me I’m not connected to the internet while my phone has a 3 bars of 5G (for whatever that’s worth) connection, hell naw I’m not paying for youtube premium. They move the goalpost way too often for what counts as “monetizable content” to the point that it’s neutering my favorite content creators to keep the lights on. TBH I’d rather pay Nebula
Honestly, I pay for YouTube Premium because I find value in it. The price is reasonable for where I live, and it's my main source of entertainment. I don't like watching movies/TV shows that much so YouTube is my jam. So the convenience of being able to download videos, ad-free viewing, picture-in-picture, background playback etc. is totally worth it for me. I know if I dig hard enough and use an Android phone/tablet I can get those features without having to pay, but I don't like Android and again, the features are worth the small price.
For me, YouTube Premium and Spotify broke piracy because they're more convenient than pirating.
Also a premium subscriber, and I it's definitely worth it to me (especially since it comes with music and I've got the grandfathered price)
The biggest problem I have with it isn't even a problem with premium. It's that it doesn't deal with sponsor spots in videos.
Same for me. Premium is worth it for the ease of use (especially because I watch a lot of YT on my AppleTV). I don’t want to have to worry about making sure all these ad blockers are set up right, and I also am ok with paying since I believe creators get something from that, right?
When I visit a friend and they pull up YT only for it to have three ads or whatever, I die inside. How do those people live?
Right! I'm enjoying all these FOSS alternatives lately. I really hope they're here to stay.
Is there a YouTube alternative that isn't an alt-right cesspit?
PeerTube is one of them, but usually you will find it under any other name like TILVids and Kraut.Zone, as the developers dont have an open instance.
But be aware that since its much more resource intensive to host a video platform, there may be fewer of them, and also the content format seems to work out less in this world for now.
Honestly if I worked at YouTube and they asked me to implement this I'd quit.
The big issue for me is the content to ad ratio is completely out of whack.
I took the L and started paying for YT Premium since you can't really get rid of ads on LG TV otherwise
Did it with a bit of malicious compliance and opted for Family plan using argentinian VPN, totaling at less than $3 a month (and constantly dropping) for 5 people.
Same here, been using YT Premium via Argentina for 2 years or so by now. It's nice, cause the few bucks you pay for that are fine, considering you get all videos ad-free and even YT music which isn't great but a nice bonus!
just a shame you by now need a Mastercard for it cause Visas have to be from Argentina, as I've heard.
I'd be happy to pay for video content/video hosting, but I'm not happy with any of my money going to youtube or google. Peertube is the future. 😎
I like the idea of peertube and hopefully it'll be the future with more and more bandwith being available but the risk of ending in jail right now is too high in my country.
If you get fined for downloading a movie it would be a relatively small amount of money I'd say not more than 200 € but if you torrented a movie you are now fined as a distributor and the 200 € will get multiplied by the amount of people you potentially shared the movie with and that's a shitload of money.
I could be wrong in some details because torrenting died about a decade ago in my country but in the end the risk of getting sued for xx,xxx € is not worth it. And if I understood the peertube system right, I would be torrenting every video I watched and couldn't know if I am violation the law
Knowing what I know about the costs of streaming video, I really want to know what the alternative is for a platform that can't just throw money down the drain. To my mind, there are only two options here - people watch ads (within reason, but 2 hour ads aren't resonable), or people pay YouTube (a la Premium).
If you want things for free, the only way to make that happen sustainably is ads right now. Donations simply will not work, especially for something with the costs that video incurs - to say nothing about being able to compensate creators for their time and effort.
If I wanted to watch 15 minutes of ads in a 45 minute video, I'd just get cable. I'm happy to watch 1 or 2 ads before a video. That's it. So I use an app that can even remove promotions.
I wonder if this would affect things like Newpipe (android YouTube client replacement with no ads) or even just playing streams via MPV. I assume that stuff is relatively safe since it's grabbing the actual video streams, but I'm sure there is still a way they could block them.
they'll probably start embedding the ads in the video stream like Twitch does
For folks considering paying for YT, note that you get YT Music Premium bundled in with it. The music premium alone is only $2/mo cheaper than the bundle.
I got it when I bailed on Spotify, and gotta say, the app is a little less polished, but I don't miss Spotify a bit. Just putting it out there if you were looking for a push to get yourself off Spotify or a push to get YT ad-free, there ya go. It works out to $10/mo if you get the annual plan, so same as Spotify Premium, plus yanno, the YouTube benefits. It's a pretty decent deal tbh.
I'm in the camp that says you should really pay for premium. It's so worth the money. For every premium user that watches a video the creator gets a pretty good cut. Something like 55%. Blocking ads doesn't really hurt the creator too much. Your mainly just sticking it to Google. But if your someone who watches alot of YouTube consider premium, to help your favorite creators more. Especially you get Music included.
Man, everything is a premium subscription these days. I'm just so done with modern monetization schemes thst nickel and dime. Everything from heated seats in cars to content in games that we've already paid for.
That’s my problem, actually. I very much do not want music bundled with ad-free YouTube. I’d pay a reasonable price for an unbundled version, but the Premium family plan is more than the top-tier Netflix or Max subscription.
I would consider it if YouTube had built in sponsorblock since I find YouTube videos unwatchable without it that I don't bother casting videos to the TV, and go through other methods to retain sponsorblock functionality.
SmartTube on my TV and NewPipe on my phone make me realise when I watch something on my Xbox just how bad regular viewing can be
Yeah, my kids have always watched on NewPipe, SmartTube, uBkock, pirate Spotify, torrents, pirate streams, etc. It's to the point that they're actually excited to see ads since they literally never see them.
I pay for Premium (bc I watch mostly from the TV using a console or AppleTV) but this sucks. Especially because how annoying and long a bunch of these ads are now.
For AppleTV, have a look at Yattee. It’s a YouTube front-end with no tracking and no ads. Downside is obviously no algorithm, so you need to make some effort to find your own stuff. Maybe that’s an upside anyway.
Yeah please do, I will just stop using YouTube and that would be a good thing.
Youtube ads are such garbage. Everyone talks about how google is 'the most advanced advertiser' - well google, you really can't figure out that playing the same ad for me 4 times in a 30 minute period is just going to make me hate both you and the advertiser?
If any state banned advertising entirely, I'd strongly consider moving there.
Not to mention the scams. I have tinnitus, and google knows that, so I get snake oil tinnitus ads all the time.
Seriously, if someone cures that, they won’t need to be advertising on YouTube.
I'd be much happier to pay if I could ensure I don't get personalized recommendations and I could use it with yt-dlp. I can probably opt out of personalized recommendations, but I haven't checked yet because I don't use youtube through its main interface much.
What really irritates me is that I pay for YouTube TV because it's the cheapest option out of all "cable-like" plans, and yet I am not allowed any benefits on actual YouTube. It's ridiculous that I am already paying well over the premium amount so why do I have to watch more ads?
I have a private piped instance running in oracle cloud free, works nicely for me.
didn't know about piped, thanks for the recommendation!
anything to know about before setting it up?
like some pitfalls or hiccups?
Honestly, I've always been surprised as to why YouTube even tolerates adblockers. It's basically a no-brainer for them to bake ads into the stream and disable skipping
Well, this certainly explains my difficulty with YouTube over the last few days. Ironically, the piped instances still seem to be fine...
This might just be enough to push me primarily over to Rumble. There are fewer and fewer reasons to use YouTube and more and more reasons not to.
Hadn‘t heard of Rumble. At first glance, it looks like its run by Elon Musk. Andrew Tate on the frontpage, far-right political channels and crypto bros. I think I‘ll pass.
Same, a lot of YT alternatives seem ripe with alt-right garbage. I'm a leftist myself, but I can stand liberal content, however platforms like Rumble and Odysee's feeds look awful right now
My odysee feed looks good. No right wing stuff there. I'm only missing a few channels that haven't moved over.
I prefer watching on my tablet, and still got no luck with any ad blocker.
Somehow I like the default YT app, so switching to something else would be hard for me…
I use NewPipe. Never seen a single add in 5+ years.
Then again I don't use a google account on YouTube.
First trying to kill off invidious, and then this? What a world.
So PeerTube is seeing uptake soon :D ?
I never thought YouTube's business model was very sustainable. As the world economy goes down, so does the value of ads. Creators or consumers need to pay up for all the bandwidth and storage. The question is about what is a reasonable price. Are low tiers for $3/mo. possible along with premium 4k options or does everything need to be at more than that?
Tough choice. I feel like if you’re a creator who uses YouTube as your sole source of income, a few bucks a month, even like $100 could be worth while. Tragically would lock out people just starting, but maybe they can get some kind of free trial? On the consumer side tho I imagine people would be much less likely to pay, but maybe some people could be convinced if it was real cheap.
I watch youtube, I mean, who doesn't? But there is nothing on there, no creater, no content, that would stop me from going cold turkey with the site if they are actually able to pull it off.
I'm certainly not an expert in this, but surely there are ways to get around this right? Pihole? Could ad blockers fake ads being played?
Yes. I give it like a week before the FOSS community figures out how to bypass again. LOL.
At least for me, and as far as I know, Pihole doesn't block YouTube ads. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong because I'd love a network-level solution. Currently just have uBlock Origin for blocking YT ads.
uBlock Origin does a good job for me. On occasion, I will try watching YouTube on a platform where I don't have it and I'm amazed how unwatchable it is. This reminds me to try to find alternate platforms for watching the creators I care about. Nebula is a good option for a lot of them, although it probably will never have the variety YouTube has. I haven't tried PeerTube yet...I suspect I will run into the same issue.
Pihole will not block YouTube ads. I think it’s incapable of doing so without blocking YouTube.
I can confirm this - the content comes from the same DNS name as the ads, this means pihole cannot distinguish between them
The solution then falls on something like ublock origin - sadly layers of ad blocking is needed in this day and age
It seems like we've all lost the plot. We'd probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn't literally jarring. Try browsing for a day on a plain-no-extension browser. If you use other web enhancement tools kill those too. Straight-up internet is cancer, especially on mobile.
It's impossible to read a 250-word article without being interrupted 5-7 times. Two of those interruptions are likely a full page overlay with give me your email, and are you sure you don't want to subscribe, just give me your credit card number.
Then there are auto-play videos on the side, some with audio on by default. I mean I came here to read something, so of course we have things flashing and moving and making noise, it's the most conducive environment for thought, right?
Ad blockers and script blocking are essentially a hazmat suit that allows us to withstand a hostile environment. Remember when we said myspace pages with audio and [marching-ants] borders was a bad UX? At least we didn't have overlays back then.
Go back to basics and consider what makes a good vs bad internet experience. The reality sounds like someone with a minor case of severe brain damage. I think we've just become unashamed of greed as a society. It's clearly all just about money.
Those annoying customers/users generate content and we have to put up with them so we can monetize it. *Sadly, It's unclear if I'm talking about youtube, reddit, or nearly any other site.
Le sigh.
Not me, sorry. Fuck ads. I've been ad-free for like a decade, and I'm not interested in regressing.
Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive? I mean, servers and bandwidth cost money. I'm in the same boat as you where I have run ad blockers, adblocker blockers, no script, privacy enhancers, and anti-fingerprinting since forever ago.
I'd rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data. If there was a balance, this is where I'd say it was reasonable. Since not reality, I'm with you, nuke them all, and just take the content.
The definition of "reasonable ads" and "just a few ads" keeps sliding. I'm old enough to remember the early internet, and that this lie has been told many times.
Just a few acceptable ads always becomes many unacceptable ads, because money.
I'm willing to pay for site and services I consider valuable. Not with my data, not with my attention.
I don't need propaganda telling me to want to buy shit that I otherwise wouldn't want to buy, no. I'll go to other consumers (and, more specifically, people I trust) to determine what things are worth, not entities with a conflict of interest in the matter.
The whole marketing/advertising industry is illegitimate and harmful, and I'm "boycotting" the whole thing until we finish the job of destroying capitalism and it's no longer needed anyway.
The corporations are going to try to mine and sell your data anyway. Why wouldn't they? You think just because they have a revenue stream through ads that they'll give up another revenue stream from fucking over your privacy? Then I've got this nice bridge to sell you, too....
Not really I don't want to view propaganda about how the new 6 wheels family killer wagon is still chill even if you're going through the desert.
I just don't like ads and unnecessary consumerism.
God, this is tangential to your point, but car and housing aesthetics have gotten terrible. Everything is BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER. People need to buy huge fucking hulked out monster trucks now for their suburban ass lives so they can make sure to fit their entire home when they commute an hour to work in soul crushing traffic. And they absolutely NEED their giant ass monstrous mcmansions. How can they survive without the extra dozen rooms that they can fill with more cheap bullshit? And don't get me started on color. Houses are all beige, grey, monotone terrible. Cars are silver, white, grey, black. There's no color anymore. It just feels like what's the point? Why bother trying when this is what success looks like. We have this beautiful planet and this is the shit we fill it with. I'm sorry. /endrant
My truck is white because it’s hot AF outside and it there is a LOAD of difference between dark colors and white in the sun.
I feel you... the world is a sad place today...
I fully agree. Online ads used to be some banners next to the content you came to the site for. I was fine with that. As soon as they put it in front/in between/.. the content, I very quickly got fed up with it.
oh look, another web service who wants to strangle its users for money and ad views :D when's a peertube instance going to get some big creators on it supported by viewers? that'll do it, i bet
Seems unlikely that a creator would jump ship from a platform that pays them to a platform that doesn’t. That being said, lots of creators also constantly complain about demonetization, so maybe they’ll start to get fed up and move to purely in-video sponsorship things. Seems most likely from a creator that’s already on a platform like nebula
Most big youtubers have in-video ads now anyways. I'm not sure what the ratio of their revenue comes from youtube ads vs in-video ads, but youtube seems pretty trigger happy about demonetizing videos. Sometimes entire channels. If someone gets the majority of their revenue from other sources than youtube ads, I could see them migrating to something like peertube.
Even with in-video ads, those must be paid based on historical (or actual?) view counts right? No matter how big you are, there's no way you're going to maintain view counts when switching away from YouTube.
You're allowed to upload the same .mp4 file to multiple websites. There's absolutely no reason why a creator that isn't getting YouTube ad money couldn't upload to YouTube and PeerTube at the same time. Presumably if they are getting YouTube monetization, they have some kind of exclusivity agreement.
Hopefully once the issue of the ridiculous amount of resources needed for such a service is resolved. This is why we don't have any viable youtube alternative yet, especially one that isn't a corporate pile of junk. Once you get to a certain size if you don't rake in the cash you shut down. So hopefully peer to peer saves the day.
yup, even youtube isn't profitable. Video remains one of the largest sinks of resources. A 4K movie is stored on a disc of about 66GB, so about 30GB per hour of 4k video. Even with peertube it'd take the best hobbyists to run even a modest server for a few streamers. We're talking people with PB level of storage capacities now with fiber lines to their house to truly host peertube alternatives, and if we're talking cloud we're talking thousands per month.
It's not impossible, I don't want to get people down, but that's the major hurdle
Every video maker should host his own peertube instance with only 1 user.
yeah but then we get a youtube esque site of nerds who love hoarding hard drives and setting up selfhosted services. Which is great, I did that, but the vast majority of youtubers don't have the knowledge/don't want to set that up
hopefully 💙 video codecs have gotten pretty good, and maybe they'll get even better to where, like you're saying, we don't have to shovel so many resources into hosting something like a peertube. crossing fingers 🤞
I subscribe to nebula for this reason, directly support creators and it's very reasonably priced.
never heard of nebula, thank you for bringing it up :D
Did they ever get around to implementing playlists and autoplay of some sort? I really wanted to get into that service, but the absence of those two things just killed it for me
Unfortunately most people post to YouTube. They might not know about Peertube. So Peertube just doesn't have the content.
Here's to hoping as lemmy, mastodon, etc. get name recognition peertube gets their time of day too.
Peertube will unfortunately never be an answer because of the lack of way for creators to get paid for watchtime
How is peertube in terms of hosting costs? I would assume much higher than lemmy or mastodon considering it's all video content.
hosting cost for peertube would probably be astronomical since you're likely hosting the videos yourself :/ unless there is some sort of federation that kind of works like bittorrent. that would be awesome
I'm confused about this take. YouTube clearly has hosting costs and also pays creators. That money has to come from somewhere. They offer two options, ads or subscription. You could argue that the number of ads is too many or the cost of the subscription is too high, but demanding a service be free just because it's technologically possible to block ads seems weird.
Wow the enshittification is at full throttle across silicon valley! Guess those investors gotta get those returns now that interest rates are spiking!
I have to imagine many of these investors also have money in areas whose prices have skyrocketed due to "inflation." They've seen the profits other industries are getting away with and now big tech feels the need to do the same. These companies are supposed to be the future, after all... How will it look if big oil is more profitable than mainstream digital platforms? To investors, it looks bad.
Sadly, when your ability to generate profit relies on using your users (or the developers and mods that run your platform cough Reddit) like cheap labor, rather than providing better product at reasonable prices, digital platforms suffer in usability or features. It's kind of a lose lose for anyone that actually cares, because so far the market hasn't self-corrected.
I imagine folks wouldn't have a problem with this if the ads weren't already so aggressive. Numerous ads before and during the content break it up too much. And if the content is extremely short form, it completely ruins the experience.
The number of ads and their length should be proportional to the length of the video. And any creator doing built-in ads should also not be able to inject a bunch of other ads. Burying content is an easy way to get avoided.
Print media had limits for advertisements, heck, in magazines they were premium real estate for the finest graphic designers to put together incredible imagery to get your attention. This level of care (not necessarily images or what have you) has yet to translate to the web.
Unrelated, online ads seem to go out of their way to insist that there's nothing to be learned from print ad stacks. Which is a shame, because I've personally placed an irregular shape ad in the middle of a broadsheet page and placed stories around it in the manner least like to confuse readers. Guess what the verdict was back then?
Are you saying your threshold for ads and empty foreshadowing hype is somehow under 99%? I sure do love me an ad-blocked, sponsor-blocked video that still somehow manages to waste 10 minutes to learn "no" or "I don't know, either."
That's when the skip to highlight option comes in handy. And if a video doesn't have it I end up contributing so next person can save time.
It makes the servive inconvenient and annoying to use. I just want to watch the video, not watch a 60s ad that us totally irrelevant to me.
That's funny, I'm testing YouTube alternatives.
Suggestions?
My issue is that the content creators i watch probably arnt going to leave... and im sure ad blocks will find a way around it after a month or so
PeerTube seems to be the federated (decentralized) option (similar to this). Content obv is entirely different, but maybe that's actually a good thing. Think of it as a clean slate - a fresh canvas. tbh YouTube's content has really sucked the past few years, and mother of bog do you see the stuff that trends nowadays when you're signed out? It's basically become cable tv. I started using youtube bc I hated cable tv.
Invidious is the most obvious. Its FOSS wrapper but it also lets you watch peertube and other federated content.
They already started to fight the project last week, Google legal contacted the project owners
I saw the reply they had. Interesting point about "We don't use your API so we didn't agree to the TOS of your API. Also there is no 'we', since we don't host invictus; simply develop it as a product"
Nebula. Most of they content creators I watch are there.
@PhatInferno There's Peertube here in the fediverse. But yea, every platform will need creators which will not easily switch. Some even have youtube membership enabled on their channels, which makes it kinda impossible (without being deprived of revenue).
@kool_newt
Yep, got selected for this test and I thought my network went down.
Had to do nearly 30 mins of debugging until I realized it was youtube actively withholding JUST the video. Took some effort but managed to get them to send the videos again after resetting a bunch of things.
I refuse to view ads and will go to the ends of the earth to make that happen.
Paying is most certainly an option, but only when that becomes the ONLY option.
I've been using an adblocker since ads starting becoming more intrusive and the internet has progressed so much that it's become generally unusable without one. I remember when a mobile ad popped up on my phone and it straight up startled me.
I'd happily pay for the content on youtube, if the user experience was not as miserable as it is.
Search is basically non functional, sort by oldest is gone, search in channel is only available on desktip not on mobile, filter videos by date range is not possible, video quality is mediocre, everyone and their dog makes titles that leave no clue at all about ehats actually in the video because "they do better for the algorithm", if you want to actually read the comments or video thescription on mobile you'll have to click "shoe more" and "expand" until your finger hurts, video caches only a few seconds ahead, which makes watching on flaky connections miserable, video quality defaults to 480p even on gigabit internet, etc., etc., etc.
If they would actually care about the user experience, I'd pay. Instead they just make the ads as annoying as possible, in the hopes that users pay just to get rid of the annoance, instead of paying for an actually good service.
This is crux of the issue. The whole websites interface is structured around ads. If you pay to get rid of them, it's still structured around ads from its most basic level, so much so that simply getting rid of them doesn't fundamentally change the experience.
I pay for premium and the only reason is because I watch a lot of youtube on my TV. However their app is terrible on cable boxes. I've had 3 different brand boxes and they all have the same issue. If you rewind the video it stutters while playing from the buffer until you get back to live.
And it's so annoying if you have a ton of channels you are subbed to. The algorithm will only show you videos from like the last dozen or so of your subs that you watched videos from. Then show me tons of videos I have absolutely no interest in. Or tons of videos on the same topic that are basically just plagiarized from each other.
I've found youtube has gotten really, really good at recommending me stuff over the past 2 years. I've gone to great lengths not to mess that up once I noticed that. I also like how youtube now shows me 0-10 view videos since I keep clicking on them. Most are trash but very occasionally youtube finds an incredible video. Basically like tiktok but without that annoying short form content interface and I get to choose to view it.
I've got thousands and thousands of subscriptions to channels over the years at this point. It's impossible to manage. I've no joke probably cost them in the thousands at this point.
I don't watch youtube on a TV but I do believe there are ad free solutions if the TV runs some form of android, besides premium.
Wonder how long the ad-free non-premium will last. I predicted in the 2030s like 5 years ago, but with how quickly platforms are cracking down on "leach users", it's probably in the <5 year span at this point. Enjoy it while it lasts.
My problem is that the money given to Youtube only very marginally gets to the creators...
I have had this in my ublock origin filters for quite some time. Seems to do the trick:
Hopefully they aren't successful like Twitch was at killing adblockers. I stopped watching twitch after they broke them. The web just wants you to pay for a million subscriptions nowadays. Meanwhile those subscriptions continue to climb in price.
Update: Vaft script for Ublock Origin works for me now from TwitchAdSolutions
I have an adbocker for twitch, it usually works, sometimes twitch can still shove an ad through, but when twitch does show an ad I just close the stream and do something else
Alternate Player for Twitch still doesn't let any ads through https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/twitch_5/
my ublock origin works ok for twitch, although i basically only watch replays. maybe its different live
We'll find a way around it, if not go to hell YT. Apart from posters in the real world, I am living a 100% ad-free life and I'm super happy about it.
Okay but I don't understand. Isn't paying to remove ads a fair deal? I don't know, I pay for YouTube Premium and I'm kinda happy about it. The price seems fair; you get no ads, you get to download stuff, enables picture-in-picture and background playback. YouTube has been my main source of entertainment for the last couple of years so it's the only subscription I have alongside Spotify.
The problem isn't so much that there are ads. The problem is also what kind of ads they're playing. YouTube has been known to play inappropriate ads without vetting them - think of those awful mobile game ads with a heavy sexual tone.
This stuff also seems to explicitly target videos that kids might watch.
Yeah until they start showing ads for Premium as well. You know it's going to happen eventually
Absolutely, you are free to make every kind of contract if you like. Personally, I am not very invested in youTube, I don't watch any streamers or youTubers, it's just a video hosting platform for me. I am boycotting Google wherever I can, it is a privacy desaster and dystopia-like enterprise. NewPipe has all the 'features' as well, if it breaks I just let YouTube go..
I could live without youtube for sure, I have more of a Reddit problem than a YouTube problem... but it seems they fixed that for me.
If the price were reasonable, community practices especially regarding monetization and moderation were acceptable, telemetry-tracking javascript minimal, etc. then sure.
But... we're not there.
The comments in here are interesting to me. Ads and Premium are a way for your favorite content creators to get paid for the content that they produce. I've listened to a number of creators talk about the YouTube revenue sharing model and most of them (LTT and Hank Green) says that YouTube is actually really fair with how they share ad revenue and how Premium is actually a good alternative that meets the needs of the platform, users, and creators. And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can't get to you.
I also hate ads, like a lot, and I do whatever I can to get them off of my screen because I think they are intrusive and we have proof of how they enable tracking across the internet at large. However, for those platforms that I find extreme value in (YouTube being the example here) I see how and why ads/Premium pump value into their system. If your favorite content creator isn't getting paid for their content, they won't be able to sustain it long term.
One last thought about video streaming and the content we all love that is hosted by YouTube: if we were to say that we would rather our money go directly to our favorite content creators, we would end up with a very fragmented ecosystem akin to the Streaming Service MESS we are in with TV/Movies. I would LOVE to pay LTT directly through Floatplane, but then where would I be with being able to watch other content creators?
Remember when ads were short and easy to skip? They're just getting more annoying now.
I could bear them back then, but now I can tell immediately if I accidentally use the mobile app on my phone vs my phone's web browser.
This is the thing about ads. It's never, ever enough. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and it doesn't matter. We still get more ads.
Basically I think we are going to have to find more and more alternatives to the web. It's ruined and it's not coming back.
I know many people who are back on piracy now. It's just impossible to take all the ads.
I have heard that the ads are getting worse and longer/unskipable. I do wonder how YouTube determines what the 'balance' should be. You know they have the usage and engagement statistics to back up the increase. It did get to a point where I said there was no way I could continue to use YouTube as it was; but it was also around the time that I pretty much switched to YouTube for content over Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/TV so Preimum was a no brainer as I could drop 3 or 4 streaming services for YouTube.
Once, I played the first YouTube of the day on the Roku, and instantly got 2 minutes of unskipable ads (4, 30 second segments) with (what I would categorize as) unnecessarily sexual content on a children's playdough video. That was when I installed and configured PiHole for the Roku. That was the last straw. My 2-yo niece should not have seen a dude's butt. A 5-second video-age-appropriate ad, ok. An age-appropriate banner on the bottom, ok. 2 minutes of unskipable adult ads on a kid's video, no. I started blocking, when they started intruding.
I understand your argument, but I think the issue is more complex. I would wish that it was just advertisers paying money to YouTube and YouTube taking its cut and giving the rest to the content creator. It used to be like that in the beginning, but it isn't anymore. I do not pay for a YouTube subscription, because I don't want YouTube to track my videos and create a profile of me. Especially when I often have to sift through multiple videos just to find an answer to very specific question and YouTube takes that as me being super interested in that whole topic. Watching ads on the other hand is also just a large tracking apparatus that tries to squeeze money out of my pockets. My preferences over the whole Internet is being tracked to serve me "the most relevant and personalised content". Basically, they try to figure out what I want, before I do and then try to sell me that. If there is a way to directly support content creators (donations, subscriptions, etc), I usually do that. But I don't want to support shady business with my data behind my back.
Very much this. If I visit the grocery store, I am not walking through other businesses just to get to each isle.
I am perfectly happy with going back to amateur YouTube somewhere else. If it was a real community of individuals I would probably post content again myself. The whole idea of YT as career content creators only is not very interesting to me any more.
I do not use an ad blocker. I use a whitelist firewall. I only visit the websites I request. If anyone wants to show me content, it must be on the servers I wish to visit. As far as I am concerned, if I invite you into my home, you head to the bathroom, open the window and let a dozen people into my home, you're never going to get invited to visit again. This is how ads work.
If YT can't trust these people to host their content directly, that is not my problem.
If they would let me just specifically pay for ad-free YouTube at a reasonable price, instead of lumping it in with a bunch of shit I don't use and am not interested in, I would happily pay.
I disagree. YouTube is owned by Google as we all know very well. They don't need to show you ads technically. I get why they would want to, because obviously its a company and they want to make more and more money. But I (and many more like me), as users we feel that it gets to a point where I'm not watching a video with ads sprinkled in, but ads with a video sprinkled in. So I as a consumer will find ways to circumvent that, and avoid watching ads. There comes a point where they're getting far too greedy and I can no longer tolerate the extent to which their "more and more money" practices get to. As another commenter mentioned, the ads arms race will simply continue turning. As for creators, there are other ways for them to make money, as was the case when YouTube was still a younger thing. Now there's even more options such as Patreon. Also, bigger brands such as LTT inevitably branch out and create separate revenue streams (think LTT store). Obviously, not every creator might want to do that simply to get paid, but when did we shift to this idea that its a job. Even though I'm young(er), I still remember the beginning of YouTube, though barely. It seems like it was more people back then that wanted to do this as a passion, not that they felt "I need to release a video every week at a set day and time or I get less money" as it seems to be now.
I wouldn't even mind that much if the ads didn't interfere with the primary function of the site, which one would think is to serve content (the product) to me (the consumer). Such as ads which are not part of the video but are loaded on the side for example. However, this is not the case. Primarily I think because we have reached a point in the internet's timeline where people using it are not the customers anymore, but the product. And we're being sold to ad companies.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk xD
YSK that Premium pays considerably less to creators than any other form of monetization.
So, if you want to support your favorite creator, literally send them a dollar.
One dollar is more than what that creator will ever make from a single viewer on YouTube.
I wouldn't mind ads if,
[EDIT] Removed a redundant word
The largest issue for me is that I've never watched an ad and thought "I need that". It's just a huge waste of time that I find disrespectful and distasteful.
That being said I haven't watched and ad in years. A bit less then a decade now, actually.
Advertising clearly does work on the whole or who would companies spend so much gold on it? Advertising shits in your head. It subtly influences consumers and advertisers have become quite sophisticated about it. There is a glut of advertising space available now so we see awful and ineffective ads but be assured a lot of the bigger players know what they are doing. This is why I block all ads. Well for that reason plus they are annoying as hell.
To be fair the aim of ads generally isn’t to make you go ‘oh now I’ll go and buy that’, it’s more about unconsciously planting the idea that $product exists so when you actually do want to buy something you buy that brand. It’s why ‘show me as many as you like, ads don’t work on me’ is complete rubbish and the only real solution is blocking them entirely on a personal level and on a social level laws that restrict where and when they may be shown.
A particularly egregious example of psychologically manipulative advertising would be ‘Joe Camel’ who was nominally just a fun mascot but in reality existed to advertise cigarettes to children so they’d buy Camels when they were old enough. Given the prevalence of really awful advertising in the present day Big Tech really does deserve the increasing comparisons with Big Tobacco I think.
@Mewio @talos This, and
- do not show me ads for praegeru / hey you're queer, you should stop being queer
which was absolutely a thing that was happening to me before I was blocking ads on yt
And it would be nice if ads would not be played with an insane volume. Every time one sneaks by my uBlock it blasts my ears out.
I was late to the vanced game because I was very willing to put up with the ads for a long while. But yeah, the number of commercial breaks in a 10 minute video became insane.
This, and this is why few years ago I didn't care about yt ads on my TV. I had like 3-4 ads, 15 sec each for an hour of content, ads only between videos, not in the middle.
However, suddenly there was 3-4 ads before each video, and many times the ads started to be longer than videos.It feels like they are trying to push me into subscribing to paid YouTube by making the free version unusable without an adblock. And now they are even trying to make me disable my adblock?
I would rather not watch Youtube again then be exposed to terrible ads. I accidentally went on Youtube on Chrome and one of the ads was a straight up scam. $7.54 Switch! Like maybe if they had humans vet ads like you used to do maybe I would have less of a problem with it.
Lol I know exactly the company you’re talking about. I like their ads for $1 Lenovo headphones
I just stood up a selfhosted Invidious instance the other day, and I replaced YouTube ReVanced with Clipious (an Invidious client for Android) on my phone. No ads, SponsorBlock built-in, no need for a YouTube/Google account to create subscriptions, playlists, etc. And it's highly performant since I run it behind a reverse proxy with some custom caching configuration for things like thumbnail images, static assets, etc.
Clipious can also be installed on an Android TV (has an actual Android TV interface). I'm going to end up installing it on mine, but I'm also using SmartTubeNext at the moment, which does require a YouTube/Google account for subscriptions, playlists, etc, but does have no ads, built-in SponsorBlock, and a slew of other great features. I'll be keeping both around, since I do sometimes like to cast to my TV, and SmartTubeNext allows for that (Clipious does not, at least at this time).
Unless YouTube somehow starts dynamically splicing in ads as part of the actual video stream, there's always going to be a way to block ads, unless they do something pretty elaborate. But that's probably not worth the effort on their end to go that far, since the vast, vast majority of people won't know what to do to get around that, nor will they probably care enough to try. But I think it's clear that DNS blocking using services such as AdGuard Home, PiHole, etc, are going to become less effective over time.
I hadn't heard of Clipious before! What are some of its advantages over SmartTubeNext and ReVanced??
I do understand that if companies running ad-supported models, they need to make sure users are actually watching those ads. Seems logically to me - no ads mean no money, and no money means no sustainable business model.
On the other side, as a user, I just can't browse the internet without an ad-blocker any more. They just got so annoying and sometimes even break the actual website.
But to be honest, I don't see an alternative to ad-supported models except paying money directly via subscriptions plans etc. But this also will not work in the long term. I just can't pay afford to pay a subscription for each website I visit during the day.
The biggest issue, I guess, is the amount and obnoxiousness of the ads. I could live quite well with seeing one ad banner per page-worth of scrolling, if it's for example off to the side in a specific "your ad here" place.
Or if the ads would be thematically related to the topic at hand. I don't want to be reminded of how much our devices listen in on us by seeing ads for diapers on a website for posting news about the Ukraine War, just because I happened to talk with my gf about how my step mom has another child now. But seeing ads for a website to buy camping tools, on a website for hiking backpacks, is fine by me.
Unfortunately those types of non-intrusive ads probably aren't what's raking in the most money.
I'll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?
So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly winning is a drag though, so I think I'll continue to enjoy getting swindled.
I don't think there is anything wrong with paying for what you consider to be value. I pay for Nebula for similar reasons. Similarly, I don't have a problem with free services including modest ads to cover their costs and even make a profit.
I do have a problem with ads that have gotten so aggressive that the free experience becomes unusable. For many providers, I feel like they have lured in content creators by promising free access and then changed the bargain after the fact by making the free tier intolerable.
rather than paying for youtube premium you should use an adblocker, or download all the videos you watch, then donate the money to creators you watch. if everyone who paid for youtube premium just decided to split the cost of the subscription between the creators they watch, creators would make a lot more money and as a bonus you hurt Alphabet, one of the worst companies in the world. It's a win win
Alright, let's say I do that. I'll take my $12 and split it equally between every unique channel I've watched in the last 30 days. Eyeballing my watch history shows... about 100 different channels.
Let's ignore for the sake of argument the incredible overhead I'd have to take upon myself in order to facilitate and account for 100+ recurring micro-donations. How much more money do you think these creators would get from my direct donations rather than going through greedy Alphabet? Let's do math together:
Ok. That's ~$0.06 instead of the $0.12 each creator would have gotten had I simply hand-delivered two pennies and a dime to every single individual. Now, I don't know about you... but I'm kind of too busy watching YouTube to go outside right now, so let's go ahead and factor in what would happen if I managed to donate using a platform like Patreon instead:
In other words: I'd be paying $0.52 more to donate a grand total of: no money. If we ignore the "no money" problem, there's also the issue of it being literally impossible to donate such a tiny sum in the first place. Of course, we've also conveniently ignored the issue of individually navigating numerous currency conversions...
Let's be honest and come clean with each other now: you weren't being completely serious with me when you claimed that your suggestion was about helping ✨the creators✨. Even if you were serious, I'm certain that you don't actually follow your own advice because it's quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.
I subscribed to a paid version of YouTube Music many years ago, and at some point, due to some changes by YouTube, this automatically converted into a Premium YouTube membership, and I've been somehow locked in at $9.99/mo since then. Thankfully, my wife doesn't care about watching ads, so we don't need the family plan. That being said, even if I had to pay full price, and even if my other family members wanted Premium, I'd still pay for it. It's 100% worth it from my perspective, for all of the reasons you mentioned.
I didn't know that you also get higher bitrate with premium. That might change things for me. Most of the time I watch YouTube on a desktop where I can use uBlock but when I watch on my iPad the ads get really annoying and I have already thought about getting premium just to get rid of the ads while watching videos during breakfast. Having higher bitrate would be a nice bonus.
Eh, I'm not here to hawk product. The higher bitrate is nice to have, but the impact of bitrate on video quality is perhaps a bit overblown. In a lot of situations, you'd have to pixel-peep to spot the improvement -- youtubers are pretty good at making videos look nice under the core quality settings.
On the other hand, ads suck. I'd have never watched enough YouTube to buy premium without years of heavy adblocking (shoutout to ReVanced Manager). Getting an ad-free experience out-of-box is very convenient and could possibly be worth the value of the subscription depending on your usage & means.
What I find most annoying is that it's still not possible to get Premium Lite (Premium without music, offline and background play) because I already have Spotify and don't really need background and offline play. 12 EUR/month is a steep price for just removing ads.
Fair enough, you need to look out for you. If the money would be missed, don't pay the bridge troll. Block ads and be free.
FWIW: YouTube Red was basically what you're asking for and it cost the equivalent of 9 EUR/month. Red wasn't available in Europe so this is a moot point, but that's the rate that YouTube previously valued itself at as a standalone product if you're curious.
They had a pilot project in benelux and nordic countries called Premium Lite for 6,99 EUR/month
Oh! I'd never heard of Premium Lite so I thought you were speaking hypothetically. TIL.
Yeah, that is a lot lower. If they offered that option I'd definitely use it over the $12 one... but I suppose that explains why the pilot never took off, eh?
Probably, such a shame really
If you watch YouTube videos on a small smartphone screen, sure, the bitrate does not matter that much. But whenever I watch it on my 55" 4k TV I cringe every time the image gets a bit busy and suddenly there are blocking artifacts everywhere
I’m also a YouTube premium user. I realize there are other ways to get around the ads, but I prefer supporting the services I enjoy using.
I second this. Probably the best $15 I spend for my family every month. No ads for kids watching YT on their own is nice peace of mind for me and my wife.
And because I already pay for it, we've slowly all migrated over from Spotify to YT Music and been surprisingly happy with it.
The family plan was the best $15 I spent for many years but when they raised the rates this past year I took a look at all my streaming subscriptions and YouTube didn't make the cut any longer. There's a small chance I'll resub as an individual down the road but for now it's ad blockers for me.
If you serve me Ads that lead to scams and malicious websites, you don't reserve my ad revenue.
Honestly, others do have point when they say we are basically leeching off of the platform. I honestly don't think I'd mind paying for youtube, I currently don't because it kind of just got ingrained in me that youtube was "free". I think the ad supported model is fundamentally flawed though.
Platforms will always want to make it worth it for advertisers to work for them. With the huge trove of user data that sites like Youtube, Twitter, Facebook etc. have they will use that to leverage personalized ads that will feed your brain with garbage all day and coax you into buying shit you don't need or sometimes even falling for scams.
I'd honestly like it better if these sites just straight up charged you right out of the gate. Maybe on top of that we could have sites be interoperable, like the fediverse, so it's not necessarily what the site offers but how they offer it to you. Making you want to pay for an experience that you truly can't get anywhere else.
For folks considering paying for YT, note that you get YT Music Premium bundled in with it. The music premium alone is only $2/mo cheaper than the bundle.
I got it when I bailed on Spotify, and gotta say, the app is a little less polished, but I don’t miss Spotify a bit. Just putting it out there if you were looking for a push to get yourself off Spotify or a push to get YT ad-free, there ya go. It works out to $10/mo if you get the annual plan, so same as Spotify Premium, plus yanno, the YouTube benefits. It’s a pretty decent deal tbh.
Yep. I've had Google play music since it came out so I've never seen YouTube ads except when at a friend's house. Each time I do, I'm reminded how worth it YT premium/YT music is. I wish more platforms would allow me to simply pay a small fee to enjoy an ad-free experience.
Personally, I think YouTube will be the hardest thing to replicate in a federated way.
and I'm testing Youtube Revanced on my phone for unlimited ad-free background play for nothing!
This will lead to an increase of ad-blocker-blocker-blocker development.
yo dawg I heard you like blockers
The adblocking arms race escalates further!
It'll happen. I just hope that it will just become semi-diffucult to do it, so that non-technical people give in so Google is happy, then the 0.1% of us can enjoy our adblocked youtube.
They already exist and are quite effective, I wonder whether YouTube is able to detect those too
So you're saying we need an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker.
Alternate headline: Users test using only YouTube ReVanced to bypass this new system
Newpipe for me!
Newpipe x Sponsorblock fork is my go to.
Wait newpipe has a sponsorblock fork? literally the only reason I use revanced
Yep, here's the github https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe
It's on izzyondroid too so I've been using the Neo Store in favor of F-droid to update it.
YouTube Revanced is a savior
Hey, where do I find this? UBlock blocks the top links on DDG as "Badware risk"
Unfortunetly google is stupid and shows fake websites as the top result, with the official one beeing way down the search results.
The official website is revanced.app or the github.
Also note that the revanced team dosen't distribite pre-patched APKs for copyright reasons. Instead you have to patch a stock APK yourself.
ReVanced in all its forms are a blessing.
At least with my subscriptions I've been noticing an increase in sponsored segments. And you know what? I don't mind. It's much less jarring when the "host" is also doing the ad and pretty much just works it into the video. People have to make money, and this old-school approach works for me. Reminds me of ads in old TV/radio shows. And it doesn't suddenly change the scene and quadruple the volume along with seizure-inducing backgrounds.
If you did want to skip sponsored content within videos, try using SponsorBlock. It's an extension that skips ads, transitions, and other annoying segments within videos based on user submitted timestamps. Pretty much every YouTuber I've found with over 100K subscribers has already got segment timestamps on most of their videos. It really makes watching videos more enjoyable
This. Not that I pay for YouTube Premium, but I'd be annoyed if I got ads on top of that (regardless of whether it's from YouTube or the creator).
We've been watching an old TV series called "One Step Beyond." I actually like the Alcoa ad that runs ahead of the program. It's written specifically for the program and runs as an introduction. They use "One Step Beyond" as a phrase highlighting their ability to innovate and in contrast to the "One Step Beyond" our normal existence as portrayed by the upcoming episode.
I know I'll tire of it eventually, but for now I'm enjoying it much the same way I enjoy listening to a piece of music multiple times or rereading a good book.
This should go quite well for YouTube. popcorn gif
The ad blocking arms race churns ever onward
If they really block adblockers, I will subscribe. To Nebula. It's got everything I want, adfree (including sponsored segments), extra content and is cheaper. And the content creators get a bigger share of the money.
There is nothing stopping you from subscribing to nebula right now. Since I haven't gotten any ads on YouTube in many years and even use sponsorblock to skip those annoying video segments I started thinking about how I am basically leeching off of most content creators. Subscribing to nebula was a no-brainer. It's about $4.16 per month on the yearly plan and lets me support all content creators I watch on there at once rather than subscribing to each and every one of them on patreon and I still don't see any ads
I'm not familiar with Nebula. Are known Youtubers on that platform?
Here is a list and you can see if you recognise someone
Thanks! That list is much longer than I expected!
Yeah I think I initially signed up for a free month because I wanted to watch some nebula exclusive content and was pleasantly surprised by how many creators I was already subscribed to release their stuff there. It made it a no brainer to subscribe to nebula.
YouTube is going to have a lot of trouble enforcing this. Lots and lots of people out there are going to be immediately at work finding ways around this limitation.
We'll make some plugin that downloads the ad and tells Google it was "totally watched and stuff".
"Say the product name into the mic to continue viewing the video"
There will be some cat-and-mouse games with blockers and anti-blockers, but the "Nash equilibrium" end result of online ads is that they will be spliced with the content into a single video stream before being sent to you. It's not done now because it's less work for youtube servers not to re-encode, but it can and will be done if youtube clients/browsers with addons keep ignoring downloading the ad video files, or download them but lie about playing them. We'll come full circle back to television yet!
You'll need a DVR for your YouTube. Ironically, when DVRs were a thing for TV, the most reliable method for automatically skipping commercial breaks was cutting out segments with increased sound volume profile XD
The other alternative is total DRM and a war against general computing. We already have HDMI with HDCP encryption in place, next YouTube will demand that only trusted code (that guarantees ads are played) authenticated via a TPM on authorized devices can access their video streams. Netflix and Amazon are already doing it. I can't play either because my devices are too "free" for them.
Translation: YT tests randomly pissing off users until they get fed up and leave for another site. if a site tells me I can't partake of their content with my adblocker engaged, I simply find my fix elsewhere.
I use YouTube a lot, both on my phone via ReVanced and my smart TV via SmartTubeNext, completely ad free. If Youtube manage to block videos unless the users deactivate their adblockers, even if I enjoy Youtube a lot, I'll just stop watching videos. The quantity of ad per video is just insane. No way I can stand watching all those ads.
While I don’t disagree, YouTube won’t care. Currently folk like you and I who evade their ads are freeloading. We get all the content and YouTube gets nothing in return. Having those who block ads abandon watching doesn’t lose YouTube anything, and maybe saves them a little bandwidth bill I guess?
Unpopular opinion around these parts, I imagine, but I bought a family sub.
Me and 5? 6? other people get ad-free viewing, the creators get a little more for our views, and no worries about finding ad-blocking youtube viewers for my in law's smart-tvs or my idevices.
Especially given just how intrusive they are; they completely interfere with technical explanations or comedic timing.
Just get an adblocker-blocker-blocker. Easy
Although not nice for people that can't afford or don't want YouTube premium, this makes a lot of sense. Hosting videos costs a lot of money, and I doubt the YouTube Premium subscribers pay even nearly enough to pay for the hosting of all these videos. Personally I just have YouTube Premium as this also gives more money to the creators that make these videos.
I think an Open Source alternative would also have a lot of trouble with receiving enough funding to stay up. It would require a lot more donation compared to hosting mostly text based sites like Lemmy.
Peertube I think helps offload that by having every video be a torrent so each additional viewer increases the max bandwidth. But still not free to start
God the ads are awful. If they start blocking apps like Vanced and Browsers like brave, i will make a PiHole. And they can never block it.
Unfortunately this is a question that comes up very often in the Pi-Hole community where the answer is always: no, a Pi-Hole cannot block YouTube ads.
This is because a pihole blocks at the DNS level and YouTube serves their ads from the YouTube.com domain. Block that and you lose full access to the site.
They recommend running either uBlock Origin alongside it and/or use apps such as newpipe for android and freetube for desktop.
That said, I will always recommend setting up a Pi-Hole if you're able to as the benefits of blocking trackers and ads from the entire network (which includes your cellphones, smart TVs, printers, IP cameras, etcetera) is definitely a good thing. Once set up it is 99% a "set it and forget it" kind of setup.
I think a pi hole dosen't work for youtube ads.
Piholes rely on blocking DNS requests to ad servers, but on youtube the servers that host the videos and the servers that host the ads are the same thing.
While a Pi-hole would work in theory, Ads are just wrapped youtube videos as they come from the same servers. It would be a need of pinpointing each video individually.
My take is that we need uBlock to have a functionality to send data to people's Pi-Hole on a page by page basis.
I've got most of the channels I sub to tracked by yt-dl so it all gets pulled to my nas. If Youtube starts forcing ads I'll just put some effort into getting things categorized properly into Plex and ditch their site.
I know it isn't the best thing a rando on lemmy should be asking but can you zerotier me access?
Haha, that’s bold
https://github.com/meeb/tubesync
"hey its me ur brother"
I pay for Prenium. But that's only because I also use YouTube Music. Otherwise, I wouldn't pay for it and I would do everything that I can to get rid of the ads. YouTube with ads is just hell now. There are so many of them now, it's ridiculous.
Don't get me wrong, I recognise the value that YouTube provides. Most things I watch and listen to are on YouTube. It's the website I use the most and I'll be glad to pay for it. I understand that it costs money to run and I want to support the creators that I watch.
HOWEVER.
I refuse to be strong armed into paying for it. Music brings me the value that I want and comparing with other prices, such as Spotify and so on, the actual "YouTube" part of the package just cost me 1€ per month which is one hell of a deal if you ask me.
But if you don't care for YouTube Music, 11€ a month (worst in the US apparently), just to get rid of ads is... ridiculous. I'd happily pay 5€ a month. It's not much and for the thing that I use the most? Yeah, I'm willing to! And I know that there is YouTube Prenium Lite. However, it's not available everywhere and it comes with a giant "fuck you" to the costumer.
You see, YouTube Prenium Lite is YouTube without ads. And that's it. So, no Background Play (which I use ALL THE TIME), no downloading of videos, none of that. You want that, well, you have to pay full price. Even though these are basic features.
Paying for getting rid of ads is one thing, and maybe accessing special features is one thing. But paying for artificial limitations that are put into place? Absolutely not. And I know the line between what's a prenium feature and what's an artifical limit is blurry. But for me it's basically this: If I can do something for free on desktop, but can't on mobile without paying. Such as background play.
I am convinced YouTube Prenium would be way more appealing if YouTube weren't being such dicks about it.
It's simple:
Bam. All of the sudden you have compelling options. Some people will say: "Uuuh, jUsT uSe an AdbLocKeR!" and whatever. Those people are not the majority, so many people watch YouTube from their phones and their TVs now, they will be much more inclined to buy it...
...I think.
That last part is important. I recognise I'm just playing armchair business developper here and that I don't know shit, but still. I'm convinced this could work. The real issue comes down to YouTube being a monopoly and thinking that they can do whatever the hell they want, which... they likely can, due to the position they're in. It's an issue but this comment is already long enough and that is another discussion entirely, but basically: Monopolies sucks.
I'm using NewPipe, which gives me music in background and no Ads
that's enough for me
out of interest, what other advantages does a premium account have?
I'm sorry, I know this isn't a constructive comment, but I had a real good chuckle seeing your autocorrect (?) writing Prenium every single time 😂
Fuck youtube anyway. Absolute sesspit of influencers, ads and stolen content.
to be honest YouTube has great content because of the video length allowed. You can find all sorts of tutorials on pretty much anything. Instagram and TikTok, on the other hand, fit your description much better.
That entirely depends on who your subscribed to. Personally all my stuff channels like Numberphile/computerphile, or SmarterEveryDay, and plenty of Blender3d tutorial channels, animators, and a whole bunch of other informative channels.
While YouTube, or any service, has bad users/channels, there are also many great users/channels for people with varying interests to enjoy. You can ignore the channels you don’t like, and get to watch some of the best content from regular people you’ve never heard of, who aren’t major television studios or corporations with an agenda. All they want to do is make videos of things they are passionate about.
This. Can't really understand YouTube addiction. I'm not exaggerating if I say that I watch, maybe, 2 entire videos per year.
There's always the Revanced Project on Android. Honestly though, I've cut way back on YouTube after their algorithm started shoveling crap at me. Now it's hard to find genuinely informative videos. It's all "This guy got PERMANENT ORGASM FACE DISORDER Tears of the Kingdom" type videos, instead of ones on science, technology, and news.
Ever tried looking at youtube while in incognito mode? What's popular is a hellscape of lowbrow garbage that makes reality tv look downright erudite. I still like the site when it shows me all the channels I've curated, but otherwise, goddamn...
I've been thinking of switching to Invidious or something and using youtube primarily via subscriptions. I'm kind of getting sick of the whole 'recommended' frontpage thing.
Unpopular opinion: I like paying for YouTube Premium to get rid of ads and still make it possible for creators and YouTube to get paid and survive an keep offering me entertainment.
In addition you also get YouTube Music so no need to pay for Spotify. It might not have as good features but I listen to music specifically so I only search for what I want to listen to and don't want any algorithms anyway.
This is very much their propaganda tactic, that by not watching ads you're stealing from the poor content creators, when in reality they're just chucking a few pennies to the people who actually made the videos. If you want to actually support the creators then donate to their patreon or whatever, but don't pretend that watching ads or paying for premium is doing anything more than lining the pockets of investors.
I pay for nebula, which is significantly cheaper and has a lot of creators that I am interested in supporting, plus extra content from them.
My counterpoint to yours: YouTube Premium is not available in all countries.
Beyond that, I personally used YouTube Red for years until they killed Google Play Music. I was an avid user of GPM, had several playlists and radios tuned there, and when they announced the move to YT Music, I was hesitant but gave them until literally the last minute to add the features from GPM that didn't exist on YTM, but they never did.
I cancelled my YouTube Red subscription the day that the GPM app on my phone said it wouldn't work again, and on that day I swore I'd never pay YT another penny directly.
Yeah I think it's a good option for a lot of people.
As a counterpoint, I recommend watching Louis Rossman's take on why he recommends people pirate instead of paying for YouTube Premium. His general philosophy on things is that you should pay for things unless you're getting an inferior service to the pirates. In this case of YouTube Premium, he considers it restrictive enough (won't let him watch videos offline) that he cancelled his subscription and now recommends piracy.
But YouTube Premium lets you download and watch offline...
Perhaps I should add that I hate ads with a passion and that I'm really thankful to YouTube that they offer opt out of ads.
While we are saying "fuck reddit", let's say "fuck you too YT". Fucking malware machine.
Fuck youtube and fuck their ads, this shit is getting out of hand
Oh, cool; more reason to use Piped and Invidious lmao
Invidious received a lawyer letter from youtube...
Which they promptly ignored...
Yeah, that was fun as they said they were using the API illegally and as they are not :D
But I mean, google KNOWS about Invidious. They will try to f**k them as hard as possible by every mean, that's for sure.
Call me lumberjack cause I wish a nigga wood pay for YouTube premium. With how many times YT tells me I’m not connected to the internet while my phone has a 3 bars of 5G (for whatever that’s worth) connection, hell naw I’m not paying for youtube premium. They move the goalpost way too often for what counts as “monetizable content” to the point that it’s neutering my favorite content creators to keep the lights on. TBH I’d rather pay Nebula
Honestly, I pay for YouTube Premium because I find value in it. The price is reasonable for where I live, and it's my main source of entertainment. I don't like watching movies/TV shows that much so YouTube is my jam. So the convenience of being able to download videos, ad-free viewing, picture-in-picture, background playback etc. is totally worth it for me. I know if I dig hard enough and use an Android phone/tablet I can get those features without having to pay, but I don't like Android and again, the features are worth the small price.
For me, YouTube Premium and Spotify broke piracy because they're more convenient than pirating.
Also a premium subscriber, and I it's definitely worth it to me (especially since it comes with music and I've got the grandfathered price)
The biggest problem I have with it isn't even a problem with premium. It's that it doesn't deal with sponsor spots in videos.
Same for me. Premium is worth it for the ease of use (especially because I watch a lot of YT on my AppleTV). I don’t want to have to worry about making sure all these ad blockers are set up right, and I also am ok with paying since I believe creators get something from that, right?
When I visit a friend and they pull up YT only for it to have three ads or whatever, I die inside. How do those people live?
Yet another platform to boycott? Excellent!
Right! I'm enjoying all these FOSS alternatives lately. I really hope they're here to stay.
Is there a YouTube alternative that isn't an alt-right cesspit?
PeerTube is one of them, but usually you will find it under any other name like TILVids and Kraut.Zone, as the developers dont have an open instance. But be aware that since its much more resource intensive to host a video platform, there may be fewer of them, and also the content format seems to work out less in this world for now.
Honestly if I worked at YouTube and they asked me to implement this I'd quit.
The big issue for me is the content to ad ratio is completely out of whack.
I took the L and started paying for YT Premium since you can't really get rid of ads on LG TV otherwise
Did it with a bit of malicious compliance and opted for Family plan using argentinian VPN, totaling at less than $3 a month (and constantly dropping) for 5 people.
If you can sideload Android apps SmartTubeNext is a great option https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext
Same here, been using YT Premium via Argentina for 2 years or so by now. It's nice, cause the few bucks you pay for that are fine, considering you get all videos ad-free and even YT music which isn't great but a nice bonus! just a shame you by now need a Mastercard for it cause Visas have to be from Argentina, as I've heard.
I'd be happy to pay for video content/video hosting, but I'm not happy with any of my money going to youtube or google. Peertube is the future. 😎
I like the idea of peertube and hopefully it'll be the future with more and more bandwith being available but the risk of ending in jail right now is too high in my country.
If you get fined for downloading a movie it would be a relatively small amount of money I'd say not more than 200 € but if you torrented a movie you are now fined as a distributor and the 200 € will get multiplied by the amount of people you potentially shared the movie with and that's a shitload of money.
I could be wrong in some details because torrenting died about a decade ago in my country but in the end the risk of getting sued for xx,xxx € is not worth it. And if I understood the peertube system right, I would be torrenting every video I watched and couldn't know if I am violation the law
I use ytdl-sub to downloadt the newest videos from the channels I like and import into Jellyfin. No ads, nothing, just videos. Even thumbnails.
So soon we will need an adblocker blocker blocker to use YouTube?
Lol, well it's not like a lot of us aren't already using adblock detector blockers.
It will probably come down to using a third party program/script to watch videos.
Do you have recommendations? Never heard of adblocker detector blockers.
Unfortunately not at the moment. I was using https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-Extra before it went defunct and I haven't replaced it.
Knowing what I know about the costs of streaming video, I really want to know what the alternative is for a platform that can't just throw money down the drain. To my mind, there are only two options here - people watch ads (within reason, but 2 hour ads aren't resonable), or people pay YouTube (a la Premium).
If you want things for free, the only way to make that happen sustainably is ads right now. Donations simply will not work, especially for something with the costs that video incurs - to say nothing about being able to compensate creators for their time and effort.
If I wanted to watch 15 minutes of ads in a 45 minute video, I'd just get cable. I'm happy to watch 1 or 2 ads before a video. That's it. So I use an app that can even remove promotions.
I wonder if this would affect things like Newpipe (android YouTube client replacement with no ads) or even just playing streams via MPV. I assume that stuff is relatively safe since it's grabbing the actual video streams, but I'm sure there is still a way they could block them.
they'll probably start embedding the ads in the video stream like Twitch does
For folks considering paying for YT, note that you get YT Music Premium bundled in with it. The music premium alone is only $2/mo cheaper than the bundle.
I got it when I bailed on Spotify, and gotta say, the app is a little less polished, but I don't miss Spotify a bit. Just putting it out there if you were looking for a push to get yourself off Spotify or a push to get YT ad-free, there ya go. It works out to $10/mo if you get the annual plan, so same as Spotify Premium, plus yanno, the YouTube benefits. It's a pretty decent deal tbh.
I'm in the camp that says you should really pay for premium. It's so worth the money. For every premium user that watches a video the creator gets a pretty good cut. Something like 55%. Blocking ads doesn't really hurt the creator too much. Your mainly just sticking it to Google. But if your someone who watches alot of YouTube consider premium, to help your favorite creators more. Especially you get Music included.
Man, everything is a premium subscription these days. I'm just so done with modern monetization schemes thst nickel and dime. Everything from heated seats in cars to content in games that we've already paid for.
That’s my problem, actually. I very much do not want music bundled with ad-free YouTube. I’d pay a reasonable price for an unbundled version, but the Premium family plan is more than the top-tier Netflix or Max subscription.
I would consider it if YouTube had built in sponsorblock since I find YouTube videos unwatchable without it that I don't bother casting videos to the TV, and go through other methods to retain sponsorblock functionality.
Try YT subscription from Argentina...😎
laughs in SmartTube
SmartTube on my TV and NewPipe on my phone make me realise when I watch something on my Xbox just how bad regular viewing can be
Yeah, my kids have always watched on NewPipe, SmartTube, uBkock, pirate Spotify, torrents, pirate streams, etc. It's to the point that they're actually excited to see ads since they literally never see them.
Very different from my cable TV childhood.
I pay for Premium (bc I watch mostly from the TV using a console or AppleTV) but this sucks. Especially because how annoying and long a bunch of these ads are now.
For AppleTV, have a look at Yattee. It’s a YouTube front-end with no tracking and no ads. Downside is obviously no algorithm, so you need to make some effort to find your own stuff. Maybe that’s an upside anyway.
Yeah please do, I will just stop using YouTube and that would be a good thing.
Youtube ads are such garbage. Everyone talks about how google is 'the most advanced advertiser' - well google, you really can't figure out that playing the same ad for me 4 times in a 30 minute period is just going to make me hate both you and the advertiser?
If any state banned advertising entirely, I'd strongly consider moving there.
Not to mention the scams. I have tinnitus, and google knows that, so I get snake oil tinnitus ads all the time.
Seriously, if someone cures that, they won’t need to be advertising on YouTube.
I'd be much happier to pay if I could ensure I don't get personalized recommendations and I could use it with yt-dlp. I can probably opt out of personalized recommendations, but I haven't checked yet because I don't use youtube through its main interface much.
What really irritates me is that I pay for YouTube TV because it's the cheapest option out of all "cable-like" plans, and yet I am not allowed any benefits on actual YouTube. It's ridiculous that I am already paying well over the premium amount so why do I have to watch more ads?
I have a private piped instance running in oracle cloud free, works nicely for me.
didn't know about piped, thanks for the recommendation!
anything to know about before setting it up?
like some pitfalls or hiccups?
Honestly, I've always been surprised as to why YouTube even tolerates adblockers. It's basically a no-brainer for them to bake ads into the stream and disable skipping
Sponsorblock: allow us to introduce ourselves
If YouTube wanted to, they could disable that.
Well, this certainly explains my difficulty with YouTube over the last few days. Ironically, the piped instances still seem to be fine...
This might just be enough to push me primarily over to Rumble. There are fewer and fewer reasons to use YouTube and more and more reasons not to.
Hadn‘t heard of Rumble. At first glance, it looks like its run by Elon Musk. Andrew Tate on the frontpage, far-right political channels and crypto bros. I think I‘ll pass.
Same, a lot of YT alternatives seem ripe with alt-right garbage. I'm a leftist myself, but I can stand liberal content, however platforms like Rumble and Odysee's feeds look awful right now
My odysee feed looks good. No right wing stuff there. I'm only missing a few channels that haven't moved over.
Whats the percentage of YT users who use Adblock tools? i think it's a tiny number, mainly the power users.
There are people out there using YT without an ad-blocker?
well, The majority of YT users doesn't even know what is an adblocker.
edit: typo
That makes me kind of sad.
I prefer watching on my tablet, and still got no luck with any ad blocker. Somehow I like the default YT app, so switching to something else would be hard for me…
I use NewPipe. Never seen a single add in 5+ years.
Then again I don't use a google account on YouTube.
They can choke
First trying to kill off invidious, and then this? What a world.
So PeerTube is seeing uptake soon :D ?
I never thought YouTube's business model was very sustainable. As the world economy goes down, so does the value of ads. Creators or consumers need to pay up for all the bandwidth and storage. The question is about what is a reasonable price. Are low tiers for $3/mo. possible along with premium 4k options or does everything need to be at more than that?
Tough choice. I feel like if you’re a creator who uses YouTube as your sole source of income, a few bucks a month, even like $100 could be worth while. Tragically would lock out people just starting, but maybe they can get some kind of free trial? On the consumer side tho I imagine people would be much less likely to pay, but maybe some people could be convinced if it was real cheap.
I watch youtube, I mean, who doesn't? But there is nothing on there, no creater, no content, that would stop me from going cold turkey with the site if they are actually able to pull it off.
I'm certainly not an expert in this, but surely there are ways to get around this right? Pihole? Could ad blockers fake ads being played?
Yes. I give it like a week before the FOSS community figures out how to bypass again. LOL.
At least for me, and as far as I know, Pihole doesn't block YouTube ads. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong because I'd love a network-level solution. Currently just have uBlock Origin for blocking YT ads.
uBlock Origin does a good job for me. On occasion, I will try watching YouTube on a platform where I don't have it and I'm amazed how unwatchable it is. This reminds me to try to find alternate platforms for watching the creators I care about. Nebula is a good option for a lot of them, although it probably will never have the variety YouTube has. I haven't tried PeerTube yet...I suspect I will run into the same issue.
Pihole will not block YouTube ads. I think it’s incapable of doing so without blocking YouTube.
I can confirm this - the content comes from the same DNS name as the ads, this means pihole cannot distinguish between them
The solution then falls on something like ublock origin - sadly layers of ad blocking is needed in this day and age
Just set up a pi hole. Fuck ‘em
Pihole explicitly doesn't block Youtube ads as they can't differentiate them from content at that level, it needs to be done at browser/app level
This.
The ads and content are delivered via the same way, so blocking one blocks the others.
Now we need a new video platform.
Seems fair enough, I've personally been freeloading for a while. Youtube is irreplacable, so there's not much we can do.
I've started using Mastodon after the Twitter changes, Lemmy after the Reddit changes, I don't think any website is irreplaceable
Haave you met revanced.app, and invidious.io?
I understand why they're doing this, but if you make a service that was once free, paid (whether with your time, or money), it's not a good look.
Oh gosh, that's unfortunate.
Good thing I've been using NewPipe! I'm reading the post for other alternatives, but feel free to suggest some to me directly, if you'd like.
I have used freetube on windows. I assume adblock is in browser context here, so freetube should skip the browser completely.
Let's do the Peertube migration.
I test not using YouTube.
I wonder if this will affect Invidious
They already sent a legal warning to them but apparently didn’t realize that Invidious doesn’t use their API and never agreed to any terms of service.