I tried not to block ads, I would let the preroll go and usually not skip it.
I started skipping ads when they started getting long. I recall some were several minutes long at times.
I started leaving videos part way through when there were mid-roll ads, and those got long enough that I'd often forget what I was even watching.
I started blocking the ads outright when I would be watching a relaxing video, and a very loud mid-roll ad would blow out my goddamn eardrums.
Fuck you YouTube. You abused your users, you chased off good content creators, and now you're offering people no carrot and all stick. How about you offer to match the volume of the ads to the videos, limit the length of ads to something reasonable, and nicely tell viewers that you are making ads less annoying and that unblocking the ads helps pay the content creators.
I used to make animations for YouTube, which weren't monetized because I hate ads, and one day they copyright struck me for some very provably public domain music, but the way they did it was to insert ads into my video without my consent so they could monetize them to send the money to the scammer who flagged me. So I just deleted my entire account, fuck them.
That didn't stop you from making cartoons, did it?
No I just went to Vimeo lol
if they're anything like cable ads, they actually make the ads louder than the regular programming on purpose to try to make sure you hear it if you tune out or just walk away. no relaxed, unfocused watching for you!
Lmao "you purposely made your stuff shit. Now, if you offered a basic service without all the shit, I might pay for that."
Bruh, you don't pay for something because it's not shit, you pay for something because it's good. By paying for a basic service simply because it's not shit, you are incentivising them to enshittify their service and offer a premium "not shit" version, instead of actually improving their service.
It's just like the people who buy the new iPhone because it actually has a headphone jack this time.
If you’re using uBlock Origin. Go to “Filter Lists” and Purge All Caches. That may help.
I imagine they'll eventually find a way to prevent us from blocking ads. Twitch TV for example has found some ways to make adblock useless.
It's a shame, and it's really just a side effect of google racing to the bottom of the adspace game. If ads weren't as cheap as they are today, they wouldn't be trying to maximize the amount of users who are forced to see advertisements.
I suspect ad blocking will always be an arms race. The server can only ask the client to play the ad, and then rely on the client to truthfully report whether it did so.
I'm sure they'll try to implement some type of DRM BS into the web that allows them. It's one of the good things about projects like Gemini. I used to think it was only good for the novelty of having a web alternative protocol.
No doubt Big Tech would lobby for Microsoft to use Windows to flag Gemini browsers as malicious and then run FUD campaigns against the Gemini protocol
I’m sure they’ll try to implement some type of DRM BS into the web
Y'all remember when back in the day, Google's motto was "don't be evil." And then at some point somebody told them how much money there was in being evil and then they just pivoted to being a functional parody of a giant evil megacorporation from a cyberpunk novel? Cuz I remember that.
But then you'll get prompts for "What product did you just watch an ad for?"
"Drink verification can."
They already do this on the YouTube TV app
It's amazing how many times someone in this thread has joked about Google doing something absurd sounding only for it to already be true.
You have to be careful with that sort of thing - some percentage of people who do watch the ads will close the tab rather than read the prompt and answer it.
It’s only a matter of time before they start embedding them into the video like podcasts do and you won’t be able tell the difference between ad and video with software.
Timestamps can still be voluntarily marked for an auto-skip feature to jump throughthe ads.
Not if YouTube interjects the ad after uploading and the location is randomized.
That's why there pushing Web Environment Integrity (essentially just DRM for the entire internet)
They'll start banning Google accounts, that'll stop quite alot of people just because of how many users use gmail or drive.
I don't think they'll resort to that because that would mean getting rid of their own source of income. YouTube may not be getting ad revenue, but they still collect data and that's where the real value is.
You can block ads on Twitch... I use S0undTV on my firesticks and never see ads.
I just did the zap element thing on that warning. So far so good, except you can't scroll down.
I see this as an absolute win, since that means you don't have to read YouTube comments.
When you do that sometimes there's another invisible element covering the page that when deleted lets you scroll down again.
Also, try the element dropper/picker icon beside the element zapper, it does the same thing, except it sticks it into a list to do it automatically every time the page loads, also great for uncluttering needless crap on websites permanently.
They're on one of the tabs for your lists if you need to undo one
to people saying YouTube is a moneysink for google:
yes it is, if you just look at direct expenses of running it. but you're overlooking the fact that it has enabled google to amass so much data(we're taking about 500 hours worth of videos being uploaded per minute) that they can train anything with it.
it's a service that's too big to fail. even whole governments, courts, and other institutions depend on it. so, I refuse to believe that YouTube will be non-existant because a sliver of users refuse to be profiled by invasive advertisements.
it's a service that's too big to fail.
I used to believe that.
Then Elon Musk showed us that nothing is too big to fail.
Too big to fail is a lie told by bankers who don't want to pay their losses.
A new charity that takes your failing social media company off your hands (and your ledger!) and donates it to the United States Postal Service to administer and, after government streamlining, channel all profits into funding summer camp and spring break for our underprivilaged senators, congresspeople, and justices of federal rank or higher.
This is where I am a bit curious. In a world where we didn't have user tracking and just did ads the old fashioned way like television via over the air signals and used content as proxy for viewer interest, would folks still use ad blockers or accept having ads as part of the viewing experience? Is there a happy medium where users are willing to watch some ads, and advertisers don't track everything but still get some measurement that there shit is being viewed by real people and not bots. IDK. Is there a minutes per hour of ads per content that makes sense for video?
We just muted the TV during the ads and did something else until the show came back on. Ad breaks for regular shows like dramas were a predictable length of time, so you could time your bathroom or fridge run pretty well.
I don't mind ads if they're solely keyword-based, and one per 30 mins or so. but I do mind the tracking by ad companies(most notably google and meta).
but nowadays I'm so deep into privacy hole that I steer clear of anything that's not FOSS, unless it's absolutely necessary(e.g.: degoogled android). So naturally, ublock origin stays on all the time.
for sure. I listen to a number of podcasts that instead of having dynamically inserted ads, still have the hosts do an ad read. I don't mind that at all
to people saying YouTube is a moneysink for google:
Who says that today? This was true about YouTube many years ago, before Google took it over, I doubt that's still true.
it’s a service that’s too big to fail.
No it's not, most content of value will have back ups and can be uploaded to other services.
Google have been saying that for ages, that their YouTube advertising revenue does not cover YouTube's running costs.
Source please.
I tried a search "youtube still running at a deficit"
Lots of talk about revenue, but nothing on profit/loss, except they had had losses up until 2014.
Mate 2015 was only yesterday.
Fair play though lol I hadn't quite realised how long it had been.
Also I wouldn't take the losses up until 2014 to mean anything except that the 2015 financials hadn't been published at that time the WSJ article (which both links source) had been written.
I am much, much more likely to be willing to pay for Ublock than I am YouTube.
That's interesting to me as someone who has paid for both lol.
Just curious, why would you not want to pay for YouTube knowing that some of that money makes it to the creators at least? Is that not enough? Is it a principal thing because they try to block the ad blockers now? Or do you think all video content should be free somehow with the creators making a living some other way?
I have been going through things I subscribe to lately and realized that the content on YouTube is probably the thing I watch the most. I genuinely like some of the people I watch videos of there and want them to do well. I like that some of them started their own streaming sites now so that's nice but I also don't want more streaming sites.
Well there are a few things to say about your comment. First, YouTube DOES pay content providers. However, most earn money from multiple sources like YouTube, Patreon, sponsors and merchandise sales. Out of those sources youtube is probably the most fickle. Their rules about canceling a channel or removing monetization are arbitrarily enforced and difficult or impossible to appeal.
The same can be said for the way viewers are treated. YouTube is a "free" service. They decided to operate this way, not us. Instead of, for instance, offering the streaming service as a paid subscription, they chose to essentially destroy the product and then ask for payment to fix it ( the so called poison pill). And don't forget the notion that if you are not paying for the product, you ARE the product. I'm pretty sure that YouTube is collecting our information and profiting from it. And if they aren't the parent company absolutely is. When you couple this with the thought that "suggested" content is designed to profit youtube, its easy to make the argument that it wasn't actually free to begin with.
So bottom line is, I think people are fed up with relentless marketing and the form of marketing YouTube has chosen is the worst possible kind of marketing. This leaves those who have been users for a while and want to continue, with the choice of fighting this invasive advertising with ad blockers or paying for the service. The latter of which feels a lot like a reward for reprehensible behavior on the part of youtube.
In short, I think the chief complaint here is HOW youtube has gone about this. Anyway, that's the way I see it. I use a lot of "free" services and youtube is by far the worst type of cost. Pandora, plays ads I have to listen to as the cost for that service but they aren't nearly as bad about it and they never do it in the middle of a song, for instance. I use Wikipedia and they don't market at all, just ask for a donation every now and then. I gave up and just paid for youtube premium. But I have to say it feels a bit like I was extorted, because I feel like I have seen enough ads for one lifetime. If at any point youtube starts showing ads with their paid service I will absolutely drop them like a hot potato, which would be a shame since, like you, I enjoy a lot of the content.
If youtube didnt consistently fuck over creators, and didnt have draconian and immutable copyright takedown and ad stealing policies, maybe Id consider it
But theyre too hostile to feel good giving money to. They dont work with creators or viewers, they try and undermine them. So Im not interested in doing as they ask.
why would you not want to pay for YouTube knowing that some of that money makes it to the creators at least?
do the math to find out what percentage of user subscription ends up in a creator they watch. Also do the math to find out how much is earning google vs how much money goes to the creator. Creators end up getting pennies. If you want to support your favourite creators do it differently. By believing that "least some money makes it to the creators" is what youtube has managed to make people believe so that they rationalize paying for a subscription.
I haven’t watched live tv in almost 20 years because I refuse to sit through ads, and I definitely won’t sit through them on YouTube. If it was a banner or some thing on the page or the side of video that would be more acceptable, but sitting through ads to watch a YouTube video….there’s just no way.
If you really want to support the creators without getting your data exploited, this ist the place to go: https://nebula.tv/
Yep. Nebula rules, I wish more creators were in there.
Hopefully it's a positive feedback loop situation here. More nebula subscribers-> more revenue -> more creators -> more subscribers. It's good that it's owned and ran by some creators so hopefully they stay true to their cause here.
Exactly. Premium is basically twice what I'm willing to pay. I've considered going premium multiple times, and have multiple times suffered sticker shock and backed away.
Family plan split 6 ways among friends and family roughly comes out to $5/month
Pfft you think JCDenton has 6 friends and family to split the cost with?
It's an end of an era. I've been on reddit for over a decade, and on youtube for even longer. Crazy to think I might be giving up both of those services within a few months of each other. Feels like the internet is dying. Oh well. Maybe I'll go back to reading a shitload.
The worst part about reddit was they made ads and legit posts look as similar as possible
Other way around for me, 14+ years on reddit, youtube maybe 8 or so. Watched videos occasionally, but wasn't really hooked on something. I feel that started when reddit got more mainstream and I wanted to consume media without the constant comment wars and downvote tirades. I'm sure that happens on youtube as well, but I just deactivated comments and done.
I'm not getting any ads and intrusions just yet with my blocker setup, but it really feels like the internet is changing. It grew up from being a rebellious teen to a mainstream adult, and that doesn't sit right with me. Guess current generations will in time alienate the generation older than the internet to the point where we won't feel at home anymore.
That's a good analogy. The internet's kind of like a gen-Xer, super into anti-establishment punk and grunge music, wearing nothing but Nirvana t-shirts well into its twenties, who woke up one day to find itself a NIMBY-esque middle-manager who votes every election for either corporate democrats or your mildly less homophobic Republican candidates and who cares about no issue beyond getting his taxes lowered. And the sad thing is, that's the internet people wanted. We/they wanted it banal, tame, sanitized, and, ultimately, lifeless. All the porn is sequestered into its own little corner of things, where it used to just be everywhere (you couldn't go to the front page of reddit without just seeing a ton of T and A) and all the media is hyper-sanitized because corporate sponsors want everything family friendly so they can feed the same advertising to kids that they do adults. And instead of interesting, new websites cropping up every other week that you find with Stumbleupon, it's just screenshots of comments from 4 social media websites reposted ad-nauseam on each other and the same mundane youtube videos you've been watching on repeat the past 6 years. And now corporations like Google and Reddit are starting to go the extra mile and box people out of even quietly bypassing the web of bullshit they've put around the content they host, dictating not just what kind of content is available, but how you interact with it.
It kind of reminds me of this passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson is talking about the sixties. You can read it here. He talks about strange memories, about this feeling like you were a part of an important time that meant something. The internet of the early 2010s was a special place. Alive and vibrant and strange and perfect for weirdo loners who couldn't figure out how to interact with people in real life. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully quantify or describe how much of that time shaped me into who I am, or about what ideas and thoughts and beliefs that live within me that all those moments, aimlessly frittered away in some little corner of cyberspace gave rise to. Maybe I would have been better off if I never was an "internet person." I know the changing of the time and the end of this era would hurt less. I know I wouldn't feel so old seeing the internet, which was once something that felt like a good friend, dying of cancer-like greed and the pathological centralization of all its myriad services.
Perhaps this is the story of all history: of how new frontiers, like the "Wild West," always become settled, and how we remember the best parts of what we experienced and try to forget all the bad parts of it, or forgive those flaws because they didn't really affect us. I know the new internet is certainly kinder to women, LGBT persons, and people of color today than it was back then. And that's good. And I know that the myths of history, of the Wild West, or the Gold Rush, or the early internet, or any other period of rapid settlement and development is never as neat and clean or as kind or even as "real" as we care to remember. And for the people who come afterwards, the way things are now will be all they know. They'll never even think to wish the internet was different or better, because they weren't there and they didn't experience the internet with all its raw potential before it became a digital stripmall. And for all our lamenting, nothing will really change. There might be holdout places, small corners where nostalgia lives on. Virtual retirement homes for the internet's senior citizens. And maybe that's fine. Because nothing lasts forever. Things, people, places, ideas, they all die, and you just have to appreciate the time you had with them. And even the internet as it is now will die and give way to something new, even if it takes decades or centuries to happen.
But even with all that said, you just can't help but wish the thing it became, in this moment, held more of the dreams of the people who actually helped make it.
That was easily the best-written, deepest-resonating diatribe that I've read on the Internet since the OG web. Thank you for giving voice to the pain I've been enduring.
Perhaps the whispered decentralized web 3.0 will take off, and I can meet you someday in the virtual tavern at the top of a hill, and we can toast to an exciting new frontier...
I was reading Bruce Sterling's book the hacker crackdown and it describes the same sense of cultural freedom and possibility, but for phones/computers in the 80s and 90s and of how the open/freewheeling hacker culture got eaten by people turning to moneymaking (crime) and by subsequent government crackdowns. He even explicitly mentions how the same thing happened to the bohemian drug underground of the 60s
So I suspect this cultural pattern is kind of a regular thing, maybe mirroring our economic boom/bust cycles. Iirc both the oughts and the 60s were "on" decades while the 70s and teens had big economic crises.
For me personally the saddest instance of this is the proliferation of cultural and social experimentation in the early Soviet Union followed by well, the rest of soviet history
I've been reading a lot more lately, and dear god, for your own sake, please do. I've been so much happier and less anxious reading books vs random internet garbage. Highly recommend.
Clearly you're reading actual books, don't drop down the webnovel rabbit hole. All those damn stories are designed to scratch an itch you never knew you had until you're subbed to a dozen patreon's paying way more than if you'd waited for a book release.
Yeah I could care less about people saying they'd watch ads of they were less intrusive. I'm not, I don't give a fuck about YouTube's sustainability who happened to still have major growth while I ran an AdBlock this entire time.
Maybe I'd consider paying if YouTube was the actual product I was paying for. Instead I get privacy invasive spying and my data being harvested, while am paying to do so. The product I'd want to pay for would have zero privacy invasive stuff involved. Which that isn't going to exist, so I'm never going to pay.
I couldn't* care less.
If you say "I could care less," then it means you're still caring.
I don't really know how people can even use YouTube without ad blockers. Sitting through minutes of advertisement is not going to make me want to buy your product if I start mentally associating your product with frustration and annoyance. If these video ads are going to be repetitive and annoying, at least make them funny.
It seems like there is nowhere on the Internet to get away from ads currently, even here, where you thought you are safe, you are now reading an ad for my newest movie (you know the one), now also available on streaming!
I would like to imagine a world where site advertising was reasonable. Ad blockers don’t exist, sites advertise 1 or 2 banners at $3-5 CPM and everyone gets paid and consumes content in synchrony.
It won’t happen. Advertising is setup for ad blocking audiences and iOS cookieless environments. Everyone else subsidizes by viewing the myriad of placements splattered all over the page.
Sitting through minutes of advertisement is not going to make me want to buy your product if I start mentally associating your product with frustration and annoyance.
Thing is, it’s actually very easy to quantify whether or not these ads produce enough sales to justify their spend.
They piss of people, but they also work and drive sales that more than make up for the ad spend.
I'll be watching a documentary about a horrible accident or murder and then grammarly pops up in the middle all cheery. Nice ad campaign there guys.
The weird thing about the whole advertising economy is the assumption that you are somehow denying them money by not watching their ads. It is as if they were thinking "Well, if you do watch the ads enough eventually you'll cave in and spend $ on the product/service so by not watching our ads you are stealing from us." No, I have no desire, and never will, to buy your product/service. It reminds me of the copyright proponents who think that if you copy something that is a lost sale. Well, if the price is unreasonable to me, or if I only have it because it is free, it was never a lost sale because I never would've bought it in the first place so you haven't lost a cent.
Don't get me on the sites that repeat the same ad on the same page a dozen times. Yah, the first 6 times didn't get me but the next 6 have me sold!
They want you to remember their products. For example, you know that Grammarly is a text correction service. If the ads didnt exist you wouldn't know that, so now if you want a service like this, instead of searching "top autocorrect tools" or something else, you would search "grammarly download".
Youtube is getting on cable tv levels of bad. On a regular ~10min video you will first deal with a few preroll ads and at least one is unskippable, then the creator will have a 2+ minute sponsor segment (I don't mind those since they are usually well presented). There will also be multiple midroll ad spots.
Depending on video length, it's gonna soon be literally more ad than video. They are still stealing and selling your data though, and also making the web worse for everyone with DRM shit.
Fuck. Google.
I had already migrated to Invidious since last year because I degoogled everything. Seems like now its time to look for real youtube alternatives.
Youtube is getting on cable tv levels of bad. On a regular ~10min video you will first deal with a few preroll ads and at least one is unskippable, then the creator will have a 2+ minute sponsor segment (I don’t mind those since they are usually well presented). There will also be multiple midroll ad spots.
That would only be accurate if Google quintupled the price of YouTube Premium and forced these ads upon actual paying customers.
I really don't like it when pro-piracy advocates whine about being served ads or not having everything on a single unified service costing just $9.99 a month, or a fraction of how much Cable used to cost.
Now this may be a bitter pill for the Lemmy World community to swallow, but ads being annoying doesn't grant you a God given right to freeload off of other people's products and services, and this rings especially true for YouTube. The only reason I don't compare ad-blockers to piracy is due to their downright necessity in tackling malvertising, which is unfortunately all-too-common.
YouTube is the only big player in the video sharing market for a reason, and that's because hosting videos is prohibitively expensive unless you have the resources of Alphabet Inc and the existing following that YouTube already has. Many competitors have come and gone. Heck, the only competitors in this space are Dailymotion (a French platform that has been enshittified Digg v4 style) and Rumble (an extreme pro-free speech platform that's being bankrolled by alt-righters.)
You forget that many simply don't care, like me. I stopped using anything google for a reason. Their services are usually lower quality than alternatives, might get shut down tomorrow, paying them doesn't stop your data from being milked, and they continually look for ways to make the internet worse. You're supporting the biggest ads company here...
I pay for 3+ streaming services, and all of them offer me a better deal than yt. It's not about paying for me. It's simply not worth it for my low use of the platform. I only ever look at my 20 subscriptions and my watch later playlist. Until that goes away I will block ads.
I'm just waiting for the next platform to pop up, it's gonna happen sooner or later and hopefully isn't cancer...
And forget about the absolute goldmine YouTube is for Google. It's is among the most important information repositories in history and profits massively from it. There is a reason they run it at a loss. Google uses that data to categorize everything thing about you and uses it to exploit your psychology to sell whatever bullshit their advertisers are peddling this week. It then double dips by selling off that data. And I'm supposed to pay for this? Nah. Fuck Google. I'd rather see YouTube get shit canned than pay a single dime to Google.
I almost got it until I saw it cost 15 a month and they need to fix their copyright troll problem.
Does anyone else remember back in the days of VCR, the networks wanted to push a technology that disallows you from fast-forwarding through ad breaks on the stuff you recorded?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Does that last sentence make this comment an advertisement?
I guess, technically yes. Does that mean I have to specify that I am in no way endorsed by or representing Pepperidge Farms and that I cannot attest the quality of their products because they are not offered in my country (or at least I haven't seen them)? Is that The Way It's Meant To Be Played?
It worked for me but minutes later it started appearing again
The UBO guys have recommended turning off other plugins (obviously, start by turning off everything, then turn stuff on slowly until you find what is conflicting).
Oh, and make sure you're on Firefox, not any chromium based browser (Edge, Chrome, Opera, Brave etc).
I've also seen suggestions that you should try removing any custom filters (can't remember if that's direct from the UBO guys or not)
I haven't turned off ad-blocking in 20 years. That's because I "don't allow" companies to use my home and my computer as their place of business.
i actually blindly accepted Google ads in early 2k because they were text only and an imitation of ads in newspapers. whenever they made animated banners i lost my shit and never allowed it again
How did manipulation to make you buy specific shit become so accepted?
What was their last big success? Google maps? Pretty much everything they do lately is some combination of shitty or prematurely killed.
Google more than just kind of sucks. Like you said they haven’t done shit in a long time outside of making the internet more hostile with shit like this and their planned chrome-based anti adblock (a LOT of browsers run on chromium which would bring the same shit, Mozilla4lyfe)
Also, the google graveyard is just pathetic at this point. They truly can’t do shit outside of anti-user bullshit
UP FIREYFOX!
Android? Google Photo? Google Pixel? Google Pay? Google Apps? Chrome? Chromebook? Google Drive? Chromecast? Android Auto?
They launched a ton of successful stuff since Maps came out in 2005
Unpopular opinion: They should've just started charging big creators, kind of like Vimeo. Mofos be having youtube ads, sponsorships, built-in ads, courses, merch stores and patreon, and then they whine when youtube wants them to comply with advertiser's demands.
YT Creators get paid a share of ad revenue and that is what funds their channel. Charging them would just kill a lot of channels.
That's ignoring the first part of his comment though. He said the ones that have merch stores and patreon pages. Not just getting YT money.
That's not accurate, they didn't say "charge creators who have their own sponsorships and merch stores" he said it as two separate statements "Charge creators" and "They have sponsorships and merch stores."
While we're on the topic, YT does already penalize people for videos that contain advertisements and have in the past put strikes videos that link to crowdfunding pages. Monetary fines for the larger pages might make sense, but idk how profitable it would be, especially if it gets contested in courts and adds legal fees.
Charging the people to create the content you sell is downright dumb.
Works well enough that it's still one of the major video hosting platforms.
The part you miss is "you sell" part. Unlike youtube, where it solves both monetization and content delivery for you, Vimeo, AFAIK, doesn't do any monetization and focuses enterely on content delivery. You pay for the service, and how you monetize the content is entirely up to you. May be the ad deal with NORD SHADOW MANSCAPED, may be donations. Or, the video may be promoting your own business, which seems to be the most common use case - as a business you don't want a competitor's ad on a video which purpose is to promote your own.
Idk if that would be a good business decision. They would want it to be free and easy to start a channel still, so it would mean once your channel gets to a certain popularity google makes the deal progressively worse. This would create a big incentive for competition if all your biggest content creators are suddenly paying over cost to subsidize smaller channels.
Not that this would be a bad thing, but I don’t see why google would ever want to risk it.
ublock origin is so good at blocking YouTube it almost makes me think the developer is affiliated somehow. Their other extension, umatrix (which has more or less the same functionality just laid out differently), never really worked for me, but as soon as I add ublock origin it works perfectly.
Are any of the blocklists actually made by gorhill?
Adblockers are eventually just going to become undetectable because of this. Adblockers are about to get so much better!
I would argue that next step YouTube is going to pull is just in time video mixing where they will overlay add on top of your video. This would make adblockers unable to block since it's indistinguishable from regular video. However efforts like SponsorBlock would become dominant way of blocking ads. At which point YouTube will probably resort to preventing skipping video while ads are playing.
At not poing will it occur to them all of that is a waste of time and that there are smarter ways to earn money without gouging people's eyes out. At the moment this is not happening because it's too CPU intensive.
Usually most of my YouTube ads are for bullshit training programs (and I do mean bullshit, like pseudosciencey shit) or gambling.
Both are just at the edge of legality (I am pretty sure some cross it).
Except since last month, because now almost all are for that Scorsese movie. I mean, I don't mind being advertised that, but I've seen these ads so much that all they managed to do is make me hate it despite barely knowing anything about it.
Also, unskippable ads keep being longer. Now it's reached two 20-second ads interrupting even short-ish videos every 5 minutes or so.
So yeah, people, that's what YouTube looks like without an ad blocker now. Gee, I wonder why so many block them.
I get the piano fraud guy shouting about how only he can teach you mastery of the piano in three days, or something like that. It's a scam but I can't get rid of his obnoxious ads.
The temu and tiktok ads that seem to be intentionally engineered to provoke extreme negative emotions such as discomfort and irritation, that force your attention on the screen by overloading your ears with so much noise that you feel compelled to take in some amount of visual information to ease the shock, and then tacking on hashtag slogans at the end; like "oddly satisfying" after a video of a fucking butcher knife cutting through colorful play sand or "shop like a billionaire" after yelling at me about cheap Chinese goods, both of which only serving as reminders of the current state of society at large and pushing me ever so closer to a state of blind rage; are what finally pushed me to install vanced on my android.
It's psychological torture and it should be against international human rights law.
Advertisement is brainwashing and should be against human rights.
not totally true, targeted spammed ads are brainwashing, suggesting a thing isn't. it's always the dose
People choose products that seem or sound familiar. It is a psychological effect that advertisers abuse. Often times you see the same ad multiple times and this establishes that familiarity.
Unpopular Opinion: I don’t like ads as much as anyone, I’d rather YouTube monetises 1440p and 4k content instead of forcing people to watch ads. YouTube is an extremely expensive business to run, so it being free forever is completely unsustainable.
Google doesn't pay taxes. They save something like 3-4 billion a year not paying taxes.
It's entirely sustainable.
What did they charge the government for selling out to the surveilance agencies?
Google recently announced that it's podcast service is shutting down and moving to YouTube music, I don't want or need YouTube music so I've already moved to Podcast Republic, it has a few ads but they can be removed with a small one off payment. Google just wants to shove all it's users into YouTube and YouTube music for maximum ads and data harvesting.
Heads up as more and more people seem to not know this lately: the overwhelming majority of podcasts are officially and legally available without having to pay for them. Traditionally a podcast was just an mp3 or video file someone posted up on their blog that could be subscribed to via a basic RSS feed.
Anyway, on Android Antenna Pod is a great free and open source app for managong podcasts and youe subscriptions to them. Can get it off F-Droid.
The way I see it, if a podcast isn't available through RSS it ain't a podcast.
Spotify exclusives: Not podcasts.
Audible exclusives: Not podcasts.
If I can't listen to it on my phone with Overcast, then I won't listen to it. The only exception for me is stuff on BBC Sounds, but much of that isn't offered as podcast anyway.
AntennaPod user for years and years here too. I've tried other ones but always come back. It's in the regular play store as well if that's easier for folks.
Even if I have to sit through 30 seconds of silence, is there a way to redirect the ad to a ghost browser so I don't have to listen to something like grubhubs stupid video?
Cannot get this to work for the life of me. Worked for a bit, then it stopped working again and no amount of repatching fixes it
I ran into the same problem. Uninstalling and trying again without touching any of the options for setup worked instead of going in and messing with the toggles. I hope it helps. I would suggest you look for a Lemmy uhh... What do we call them? Subreddit? I mean they are on the other site too and perhaps you can get assistance there if you're still having issues
R🤮ddit has subr🤮ddits, while Lemmy has communities and instances.
2025: Search removed. Spend a decade crippling the function, then claim the usage data support getting rid of it!
2027: Expiring updates. Juice those watch numbers with a new artificial scarcity measure. Marvel Bullshit 49 Theatrical Trailer, available for seven days only! Featuring AI Robin Williams and a Mr B_ast guest ad!
2028: Web Environment Integrity inserted. Hand warmer sales crater as mobile viewers relish their new handset functionality.
Eh, don't need YouTube that badly. I think we'll collectively figure out video distribution without em just fine.
And we can call it something like... I don't know... PeerTube?
Reset Ublock orgin and update the filter and Ublock extension.
Disable other adblock extension if you have one.
Still you would be getting the popup once a while.
Yeah. This is becoming a problem with Google. Whatever they have created they just want to make it shit. Like everybody can't just pay and the amount of ads just makes it unwatchable.
On my firefox this rarely shows up though.
I use the privacy extensions uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes.
A good ad blocker would be one that will still load the page as intended but not display the ads. There would be no way for the site to know you can't see them. Blocking their activation just signals the site that you are using an adblocker.
Edit: I was thinking more of a VM sandbox like another comment said
Sandbox the ads. Trick them into thinking the playback is finished. If there is a timer that prevents skipping, modify timing calls to shorten the duration. Or execute faster than real-time.
If there is some kind of timer callback to server, it would even be preferable to have ad "running" invisibly with a progress bar and no ad.
Honestly, I'd tolerate an adless grey timer, you don't even have to trick it that time has passed.
Just open in another tab, wait for skip option, skip (but probably not in a perfectly timed robotic way), then pause. Grey and silent midroll would be annoying but still tolerable.
People who know programming and how far it can go seem to sometimes trap themselves in very difficult problems that would be great to solve, but undervalue a version without that complicated luxury.
I'm all for trying to solve it, but a tool that doesn't is still good. I just don't want to be aware of what the companies want to make me aware of.
Someone please make an extension so it automatically redirects to piped.video or something else.
you can use extension made by creator of piped Piped Redirects (it's only on firefox)
I recommend LibRedirect instead. It can redirect to both invidious and piped, as well as working for other services. e.g., Twitter → Nitter, Reddit → teddit, and many more
I will happily either find an alternative frontend, or just stop watching youtube all together. It's done nothing good to my life either way
For a while, I've been quietly preparing for the day when YT becomes unusable. I've been using Odysee and Peertube to see if they are viable options. To some limited extent they already are, but there are still lots of room for improvement. Just like Mastodon feels like the early days of Twitter, Lemmy feels like the early days of Reddit, Odysee is a bit like YT once was a very long time ago.
in recent years, YT has been working hard to kick out certain types of channels, so nowadays you can find that sort of content in some of the other platforms. It depends on what you're looking for, so the experience can be anything between awful and great.
Originally there was an X. Now I have to wait a few seconds before I can click the X.
This pause gives me time to think if I really need to watch this video, which more and more often is turning into a "not really".
I have yet to see anything like this with my adblocker.
Is this fake? I thought the term is whitelisted not allowlisted
In recent years there's been a shift from "white/black list" to "allow/block list" in an effort to avoid the stereotypes associated with those terms. I wouldn't say it's the new norm yet, but it's slowly becoming more popular.
Yeah. This is becoming a problem with Google. Whatever they have created they just want to make it shit. Like everybody can't just pay and the amount of ads just makes it unwatchable.
On my firefox this rarely shows up though.
I use the privacy extensions uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes.
Okay, I don't ever see this problem. Using Brave and uBlock origin in Firefox. Maybe just update your filters once in a while?
Dear YouTube, if anyone there ever reads this.
I tried not to block ads, I would let the preroll go and usually not skip it.
I started skipping ads when they started getting long. I recall some were several minutes long at times.
I started leaving videos part way through when there were mid-roll ads, and those got long enough that I'd often forget what I was even watching.
I started blocking the ads outright when I would be watching a relaxing video, and a very loud mid-roll ad would blow out my goddamn eardrums.
Fuck you YouTube. You abused your users, you chased off good content creators, and now you're offering people no carrot and all stick. How about you offer to match the volume of the ads to the videos, limit the length of ads to something reasonable, and nicely tell viewers that you are making ads less annoying and that unblocking the ads helps pay the content creators.
I used to make animations for YouTube, which weren't monetized because I hate ads, and one day they copyright struck me for some very provably public domain music, but the way they did it was to insert ads into my video without my consent so they could monetize them to send the money to the scammer who flagged me. So I just deleted my entire account, fuck them.
That didn't stop you from making cartoons, did it?
No I just went to Vimeo lol
if they're anything like cable ads, they actually make the ads louder than the regular programming on purpose to try to make sure you hear it if you tune out or just walk away. no relaxed, unfocused watching for you!
x2
Lmao "you purposely made your stuff shit. Now, if you offered a basic service without all the shit, I might pay for that."
Bruh, you don't pay for something because it's not shit, you pay for something because it's good. By paying for a basic service simply because it's not shit, you are incentivising them to enshittify their service and offer a premium "not shit" version, instead of actually improving their service.
It's just like the people who buy the new iPhone because it actually has a headphone jack this time.
If you’re using uBlock Origin. Go to “Filter Lists” and Purge All Caches. That may help.
I imagine they'll eventually find a way to prevent us from blocking ads. Twitch TV for example has found some ways to make adblock useless.
It's a shame, and it's really just a side effect of google racing to the bottom of the adspace game. If ads weren't as cheap as they are today, they wouldn't be trying to maximize the amount of users who are forced to see advertisements.
I suspect ad blocking will always be an arms race. The server can only ask the client to play the ad, and then rely on the client to truthfully report whether it did so.
I'm sure they'll try to implement some type of DRM BS into the web that allows them. It's one of the good things about projects like Gemini. I used to think it was only good for the novelty of having a web alternative protocol.
No doubt Big Tech would lobby for Microsoft to use Windows to flag Gemini browsers as malicious and then run FUD campaigns against the Gemini protocol
Funny you say that:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/02/googles-plan-to-drm-the-web-goes-against-everything-google-once-stood-for/
Google is already testing it I think.
Y'all remember when back in the day, Google's motto was "don't be evil." And then at some point somebody told them how much money there was in being evil and then they just pivoted to being a functional parody of a giant evil megacorporation from a cyberpunk novel? Cuz I remember that.
But then you'll get prompts for "What product did you just watch an ad for?"
"Drink verification can."
They already do this on the YouTube TV app
It's amazing how many times someone in this thread has joked about Google doing something absurd sounding only for it to already be true.
You have to be careful with that sort of thing - some percentage of people who do watch the ads will close the tab rather than read the prompt and answer it.
It’s only a matter of time before they start embedding them into the video like podcasts do and you won’t be able tell the difference between ad and video with software.
Timestamps can still be voluntarily marked for an auto-skip feature to jump throughthe ads.
Not if YouTube interjects the ad after uploading and the location is randomized.
That's why there pushing Web Environment Integrity (essentially just DRM for the entire internet)
Someone will create an extension to mute the ad and overlay it with suitably timed bite sized cat videos.
You can block twitch ads. I literally never see them. Use https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions/blob/master/vaft/vaft.user.js with Tampermonkey.
Also, checkout S0undTV if you use android TV.
Will to be fair, Google is an ad company. We should have seen this coming.
Worst case scenario I think I'd just resort to downloading the videos to watch. Live videos is the challenge, but luckily I don't watch live streams.
They'll start banning Google accounts, that'll stop quite alot of people just because of how many users use gmail or drive.
I don't think they'll resort to that because that would mean getting rid of their own source of income. YouTube may not be getting ad revenue, but they still collect data and that's where the real value is.
You can block ads on Twitch... I use S0undTV on my firesticks and never see ads.
I just did the zap element thing on that warning. So far so good, except you can't scroll down.
I see this as an absolute win, since that means you don't have to read YouTube comments.
When you do that sometimes there's another invisible element covering the page that when deleted lets you scroll down again.
Also, try the element dropper/picker icon beside the element zapper, it does the same thing, except it sticks it into a list to do it automatically every time the page loads, also great for uncluttering needless crap on websites permanently.
They're on one of the tabs for your lists if you need to undo one
I occasionally see ads on Youtube. I'm not sure if this is related.
Can we pin this?
to people saying YouTube is a moneysink for google:
yes it is, if you just look at direct expenses of running it. but you're overlooking the fact that it has enabled google to amass so much data(we're taking about 500 hours worth of videos being uploaded per minute) that they can train anything with it.
it's a service that's too big to fail. even whole governments, courts, and other institutions depend on it. so, I refuse to believe that YouTube will be non-existant because a sliver of users refuse to be profiled by invasive advertisements.
I used to believe that.
Then Elon Musk showed us that nothing is too big to fail.
Too big to fail is a lie told by bankers who don't want to pay their losses.
fair point. but twitter isn't as big as YouTube. YouTube is the second largest search engine.
So, YouTube going down would be a much bigger deal than twitter. I suppose governments won't even allow YouTube to get acquired by some musk.
Digg was the front page of the Internet. Anyone remember MySpace? Posted any Vines lately?
Was.
If youtube is such a burden, donate it to
Cash-4-Clunker_Companies.com
A new charity that takes your failing social media company off your hands (and your ledger!) and donates it to the United States Postal Service to administer and, after government streamlining, channel all profits into funding summer camp and spring break for our underprivilaged senators, congresspeople, and justices of federal rank or higher.
This is where I am a bit curious. In a world where we didn't have user tracking and just did ads the old fashioned way like television via over the air signals and used content as proxy for viewer interest, would folks still use ad blockers or accept having ads as part of the viewing experience? Is there a happy medium where users are willing to watch some ads, and advertisers don't track everything but still get some measurement that there shit is being viewed by real people and not bots. IDK. Is there a minutes per hour of ads per content that makes sense for video?
We just muted the TV during the ads and did something else until the show came back on. Ad breaks for regular shows like dramas were a predictable length of time, so you could time your bathroom or fridge run pretty well.
I don't mind ads if they're solely keyword-based, and one per 30 mins or so. but I do mind the tracking by ad companies(most notably google and meta).
but nowadays I'm so deep into privacy hole that I steer clear of anything that's not FOSS, unless it's absolutely necessary(e.g.: degoogled android). So naturally, ublock origin stays on all the time.
for sure. I listen to a number of podcasts that instead of having dynamically inserted ads, still have the hosts do an ad read. I don't mind that at all
Who says that today? This was true about YouTube many years ago, before Google took it over, I doubt that's still true.
No it's not, most content of value will have back ups and can be uploaded to other services.
Google have been saying that for ages, that their YouTube advertising revenue does not cover YouTube's running costs.
Source please.
I tried a search "youtube still running at a deficit"
The ONLY relevant result I got was this 7 year old post on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/593tgc/reminder_google_runs_youtube_at_a_loss/
I made the search on Google, and found this: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
Lots of talk about revenue, but nothing on profit/loss, except they had had losses up until 2014.
Mate 2015 was only yesterday.
Fair play though lol I hadn't quite realised how long it had been.
Also I wouldn't take the losses up until 2014 to mean anything except that the 2015 financials hadn't been published at that time the WSJ article (which both links source) had been written.
I am much, much more likely to be willing to pay for Ublock than I am YouTube.
That's interesting to me as someone who has paid for both lol.
Just curious, why would you not want to pay for YouTube knowing that some of that money makes it to the creators at least? Is that not enough? Is it a principal thing because they try to block the ad blockers now? Or do you think all video content should be free somehow with the creators making a living some other way?
I have been going through things I subscribe to lately and realized that the content on YouTube is probably the thing I watch the most. I genuinely like some of the people I watch videos of there and want them to do well. I like that some of them started their own streaming sites now so that's nice but I also don't want more streaming sites.
Well there are a few things to say about your comment. First, YouTube DOES pay content providers. However, most earn money from multiple sources like YouTube, Patreon, sponsors and merchandise sales. Out of those sources youtube is probably the most fickle. Their rules about canceling a channel or removing monetization are arbitrarily enforced and difficult or impossible to appeal.
The same can be said for the way viewers are treated. YouTube is a "free" service. They decided to operate this way, not us. Instead of, for instance, offering the streaming service as a paid subscription, they chose to essentially destroy the product and then ask for payment to fix it ( the so called poison pill). And don't forget the notion that if you are not paying for the product, you ARE the product. I'm pretty sure that YouTube is collecting our information and profiting from it. And if they aren't the parent company absolutely is. When you couple this with the thought that "suggested" content is designed to profit youtube, its easy to make the argument that it wasn't actually free to begin with.
So bottom line is, I think people are fed up with relentless marketing and the form of marketing YouTube has chosen is the worst possible kind of marketing. This leaves those who have been users for a while and want to continue, with the choice of fighting this invasive advertising with ad blockers or paying for the service. The latter of which feels a lot like a reward for reprehensible behavior on the part of youtube.
In short, I think the chief complaint here is HOW youtube has gone about this. Anyway, that's the way I see it. I use a lot of "free" services and youtube is by far the worst type of cost. Pandora, plays ads I have to listen to as the cost for that service but they aren't nearly as bad about it and they never do it in the middle of a song, for instance. I use Wikipedia and they don't market at all, just ask for a donation every now and then. I gave up and just paid for youtube premium. But I have to say it feels a bit like I was extorted, because I feel like I have seen enough ads for one lifetime. If at any point youtube starts showing ads with their paid service I will absolutely drop them like a hot potato, which would be a shame since, like you, I enjoy a lot of the content.
If youtube didnt consistently fuck over creators, and didnt have draconian and immutable copyright takedown and ad stealing policies, maybe Id consider it
But theyre too hostile to feel good giving money to. They dont work with creators or viewers, they try and undermine them. So Im not interested in doing as they ask.
do the math to find out what percentage of user subscription ends up in a creator they watch. Also do the math to find out how much is earning google vs how much money goes to the creator. Creators end up getting pennies. If you want to support your favourite creators do it differently. By believing that "least some money makes it to the creators" is what youtube has managed to make people believe so that they rationalize paying for a subscription.
I haven’t watched live tv in almost 20 years because I refuse to sit through ads, and I definitely won’t sit through them on YouTube. If it was a banner or some thing on the page or the side of video that would be more acceptable, but sitting through ads to watch a YouTube video….there’s just no way.
If YouTube premium was $4.99 a month it'd be worth a consideration. But then again adblocking is free and privacy respecting
I'm not gonna pay for a service that harvest and sell my data
So you pay for 0 services then?
Arr!
Well, we all know it's the free services that don't harvest data.
If you really want to support the creators without getting your data exploited, this ist the place to go: https://nebula.tv/
Yep. Nebula rules, I wish more creators were in there.
Hopefully it's a positive feedback loop situation here. More nebula subscribers-> more revenue -> more creators -> more subscribers. It's good that it's owned and ran by some creators so hopefully they stay true to their cause here.
Exactly. Premium is basically twice what I'm willing to pay. I've considered going premium multiple times, and have multiple times suffered sticker shock and backed away.
Family plan split 6 ways among friends and family roughly comes out to $5/month
Pfft you think JCDenton has 6 friends and family to split the cost with?
It's an end of an era. I've been on reddit for over a decade, and on youtube for even longer. Crazy to think I might be giving up both of those services within a few months of each other. Feels like the internet is dying. Oh well. Maybe I'll go back to reading a shitload.
The worst part about reddit was they made ads and legit posts look as similar as possible
Other way around for me, 14+ years on reddit, youtube maybe 8 or so. Watched videos occasionally, but wasn't really hooked on something. I feel that started when reddit got more mainstream and I wanted to consume media without the constant comment wars and downvote tirades. I'm sure that happens on youtube as well, but I just deactivated comments and done.
I'm not getting any ads and intrusions just yet with my blocker setup, but it really feels like the internet is changing. It grew up from being a rebellious teen to a mainstream adult, and that doesn't sit right with me. Guess current generations will in time alienate the generation older than the internet to the point where we won't feel at home anymore.
That's a good analogy. The internet's kind of like a gen-Xer, super into anti-establishment punk and grunge music, wearing nothing but Nirvana t-shirts well into its twenties, who woke up one day to find itself a NIMBY-esque middle-manager who votes every election for either corporate democrats or your mildly less homophobic Republican candidates and who cares about no issue beyond getting his taxes lowered. And the sad thing is, that's the internet people wanted. We/they wanted it banal, tame, sanitized, and, ultimately, lifeless. All the porn is sequestered into its own little corner of things, where it used to just be everywhere (you couldn't go to the front page of reddit without just seeing a ton of T and A) and all the media is hyper-sanitized because corporate sponsors want everything family friendly so they can feed the same advertising to kids that they do adults. And instead of interesting, new websites cropping up every other week that you find with Stumbleupon, it's just screenshots of comments from 4 social media websites reposted ad-nauseam on each other and the same mundane youtube videos you've been watching on repeat the past 6 years. And now corporations like Google and Reddit are starting to go the extra mile and box people out of even quietly bypassing the web of bullshit they've put around the content they host, dictating not just what kind of content is available, but how you interact with it.
It kind of reminds me of this passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson is talking about the sixties. You can read it here. He talks about strange memories, about this feeling like you were a part of an important time that meant something. The internet of the early 2010s was a special place. Alive and vibrant and strange and perfect for weirdo loners who couldn't figure out how to interact with people in real life. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully quantify or describe how much of that time shaped me into who I am, or about what ideas and thoughts and beliefs that live within me that all those moments, aimlessly frittered away in some little corner of cyberspace gave rise to. Maybe I would have been better off if I never was an "internet person." I know the changing of the time and the end of this era would hurt less. I know I wouldn't feel so old seeing the internet, which was once something that felt like a good friend, dying of cancer-like greed and the pathological centralization of all its myriad services.
Perhaps this is the story of all history: of how new frontiers, like the "Wild West," always become settled, and how we remember the best parts of what we experienced and try to forget all the bad parts of it, or forgive those flaws because they didn't really affect us. I know the new internet is certainly kinder to women, LGBT persons, and people of color today than it was back then. And that's good. And I know that the myths of history, of the Wild West, or the Gold Rush, or the early internet, or any other period of rapid settlement and development is never as neat and clean or as kind or even as "real" as we care to remember. And for the people who come afterwards, the way things are now will be all they know. They'll never even think to wish the internet was different or better, because they weren't there and they didn't experience the internet with all its raw potential before it became a digital stripmall. And for all our lamenting, nothing will really change. There might be holdout places, small corners where nostalgia lives on. Virtual retirement homes for the internet's senior citizens. And maybe that's fine. Because nothing lasts forever. Things, people, places, ideas, they all die, and you just have to appreciate the time you had with them. And even the internet as it is now will die and give way to something new, even if it takes decades or centuries to happen.
But even with all that said, you just can't help but wish the thing it became, in this moment, held more of the dreams of the people who actually helped make it.
That was easily the best-written, deepest-resonating diatribe that I've read on the Internet since the OG web. Thank you for giving voice to the pain I've been enduring.
Perhaps the whispered decentralized web 3.0 will take off, and I can meet you someday in the virtual tavern at the top of a hill, and we can toast to an exciting new frontier...
I was reading Bruce Sterling's book the hacker crackdown and it describes the same sense of cultural freedom and possibility, but for phones/computers in the 80s and 90s and of how the open/freewheeling hacker culture got eaten by people turning to moneymaking (crime) and by subsequent government crackdowns. He even explicitly mentions how the same thing happened to the bohemian drug underground of the 60s
So I suspect this cultural pattern is kind of a regular thing, maybe mirroring our economic boom/bust cycles. Iirc both the oughts and the 60s were "on" decades while the 70s and teens had big economic crises.
For me personally the saddest instance of this is the proliferation of cultural and social experimentation in the early Soviet Union followed by well, the rest of soviet history
I've been reading a lot more lately, and dear god, for your own sake, please do. I've been so much happier and less anxious reading books vs random internet garbage. Highly recommend.
Clearly you're reading actual books, don't drop down the webnovel rabbit hole. All those damn stories are designed to scratch an itch you never knew you had until you're subbed to a dozen patreon's paying way more than if you'd waited for a book release.
not dying, evolving
Yeah I could care less about people saying they'd watch ads of they were less intrusive. I'm not, I don't give a fuck about YouTube's sustainability who happened to still have major growth while I ran an AdBlock this entire time.
Maybe I'd consider paying if YouTube was the actual product I was paying for. Instead I get privacy invasive spying and my data being harvested, while am paying to do so. The product I'd want to pay for would have zero privacy invasive stuff involved. Which that isn't going to exist, so I'm never going to pay.
I couldn't* care less.
If you say "I could care less," then it means you're still caring.
Premium is priced so uncompetitively my family can subscribe to all of Netflix, AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime Video for less than a YouTube subscription.
I have YouTube premium family and it costs about $20/month for 5 family members. Are you sure those streaming services cost less than that?
Maybe youtubeTV
I don't really know how people can even use YouTube without ad blockers. Sitting through minutes of advertisement is not going to make me want to buy your product if I start mentally associating your product with frustration and annoyance. If these video ads are going to be repetitive and annoying, at least make them funny.
It seems like there is nowhere on the Internet to get away from ads currently, even here, where you thought you are safe, you are now reading an ad for my newest movie (you know the one), now also available on streaming!
I would like to imagine a world where site advertising was reasonable. Ad blockers don’t exist, sites advertise 1 or 2 banners at $3-5 CPM and everyone gets paid and consumes content in synchrony. It won’t happen. Advertising is setup for ad blocking audiences and iOS cookieless environments. Everyone else subsidizes by viewing the myriad of placements splattered all over the page.
Thing is, it’s actually very easy to quantify whether or not these ads produce enough sales to justify their spend.
They piss of people, but they also work and drive sales that more than make up for the ad spend.
I'll be watching a documentary about a horrible accident or murder and then grammarly pops up in the middle all cheery. Nice ad campaign there guys.
The weird thing about the whole advertising economy is the assumption that you are somehow denying them money by not watching their ads. It is as if they were thinking "Well, if you do watch the ads enough eventually you'll cave in and spend $ on the product/service so by not watching our ads you are stealing from us." No, I have no desire, and never will, to buy your product/service. It reminds me of the copyright proponents who think that if you copy something that is a lost sale. Well, if the price is unreasonable to me, or if I only have it because it is free, it was never a lost sale because I never would've bought it in the first place so you haven't lost a cent.
Don't get me on the sites that repeat the same ad on the same page a dozen times. Yah, the first 6 times didn't get me but the next 6 have me sold!
They want you to remember their products. For example, you know that Grammarly is a text correction service. If the ads didnt exist you wouldn't know that, so now if you want a service like this, instead of searching "top autocorrect tools" or something else, you would search "grammarly download".
Youtube is getting on cable tv levels of bad. On a regular ~10min video you will first deal with a few preroll ads and at least one is unskippable, then the creator will have a 2+ minute sponsor segment (I don't mind those since they are usually well presented). There will also be multiple midroll ad spots.
Depending on video length, it's gonna soon be literally more ad than video. They are still stealing and selling your data though, and also making the web worse for everyone with DRM shit.
Fuck. Google.
I had already migrated to Invidious since last year because I degoogled everything. Seems like now its time to look for real youtube alternatives.
That would only be accurate if Google quintupled the price of YouTube Premium and forced these ads upon actual paying customers.
I really don't like it when pro-piracy advocates whine about being served ads or not having everything on a single unified service costing just $9.99 a month, or a fraction of how much Cable used to cost.
Now this may be a bitter pill for the Lemmy World community to swallow, but ads being annoying doesn't grant you a God given right to freeload off of other people's products and services, and this rings especially true for YouTube. The only reason I don't compare ad-blockers to piracy is due to their downright necessity in tackling malvertising, which is unfortunately all-too-common.
YouTube is the only big player in the video sharing market for a reason, and that's because hosting videos is prohibitively expensive unless you have the resources of Alphabet Inc and the existing following that YouTube already has. Many competitors have come and gone. Heck, the only competitors in this space are Dailymotion (a French platform that has been enshittified Digg v4 style) and Rumble (an extreme pro-free speech platform that's being bankrolled by alt-righters.)
You forget that many simply don't care, like me. I stopped using anything google for a reason. Their services are usually lower quality than alternatives, might get shut down tomorrow, paying them doesn't stop your data from being milked, and they continually look for ways to make the internet worse. You're supporting the biggest ads company here...
I pay for 3+ streaming services, and all of them offer me a better deal than yt. It's not about paying for me. It's simply not worth it for my low use of the platform. I only ever look at my 20 subscriptions and my watch later playlist. Until that goes away I will block ads.
I'm just waiting for the next platform to pop up, it's gonna happen sooner or later and hopefully isn't cancer...
And forget about the absolute goldmine YouTube is for Google. It's is among the most important information repositories in history and profits massively from it. There is a reason they run it at a loss. Google uses that data to categorize everything thing about you and uses it to exploit your psychology to sell whatever bullshit their advertisers are peddling this week. It then double dips by selling off that data. And I'm supposed to pay for this? Nah. Fuck Google. I'd rather see YouTube get shit canned than pay a single dime to Google.
I almost got it until I saw it cost 15 a month and they need to fix their copyright troll problem.
Invidious is having trouble to work these days. I fear google will also pull the plug on third party front ends once they get popular enough.
Does anyone else remember back in the days of VCR, the networks wanted to push a technology that disallows you from fast-forwarding through ad breaks on the stuff you recorded?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Does that last sentence make this comment an advertisement?
I guess, technically yes. Does that mean I have to specify that I am in no way endorsed by or representing Pepperidge Farms and that I cannot attest the quality of their products because they are not offered in my country (or at least I haven't seen them)? Is that The Way It's Meant To Be Played?
Holy crap
Piped is about to get another user
Why wouldn't they block Piped?
For the past few months, they have been rather aggressive with IP bans for Piped instances, yeah.
Oof
If you're using UBlock Origin do the following:
Go to settings. Go to Filter Lists. Click purge all caches. Click update now.
That's it, this message should disappear entirely.
What youtube is trying to achieve is technically impossible, unless they merge the advertisements into the videos.
don't give them ideas
What you're saying is already very possible. Twitch is at the forefront of fighting adblockers and they're constantly adding new ways to serve ads.
Realistically speaking I think YouTube has been only tolerating ad blockers and will start rolling out new methods next year.
It worked for me but minutes later it started appearing again
The UBO guys have recommended turning off other plugins (obviously, start by turning off everything, then turn stuff on slowly until you find what is conflicting).
Oh, and make sure you're on Firefox, not any chromium based browser (Edge, Chrome, Opera, Brave etc).
I've also seen suggestions that you should try removing any custom filters (can't remember if that's direct from the UBO guys or not)
I haven't turned off ad-blocking in 20 years. That's because I "don't allow" companies to use my home and my computer as their place of business.
i actually blindly accepted Google ads in early 2k because they were text only and an imitation of ads in newspapers. whenever they made animated banners i lost my shit and never allowed it again
How did manipulation to make you buy specific shit become so accepted?
Because that's the goal of capitalism
That's deep.
Google kind of sucks.
What was their last big success? Google maps? Pretty much everything they do lately is some combination of shitty or prematurely killed.
Google more than just kind of sucks. Like you said they haven’t done shit in a long time outside of making the internet more hostile with shit like this and their planned chrome-based anti adblock (a LOT of browsers run on chromium which would bring the same shit, Mozilla4lyfe)
Also, the google graveyard is just pathetic at this point. They truly can’t do shit outside of anti-user bullshit
UP FIREYFOX!
Android? Google Photo? Google Pixel? Google Pay? Google Apps? Chrome? Chromebook? Google Drive? Chromecast? Android Auto?
They launched a ton of successful stuff since Maps came out in 2005
Google photo sucks
What do you prefer using?
Unpopular opinion: They should've just started charging big creators, kind of like Vimeo. Mofos be having youtube ads, sponsorships, built-in ads, courses, merch stores and patreon, and then they whine when youtube wants them to comply with advertiser's demands.
YT Creators get paid a share of ad revenue and that is what funds their channel. Charging them would just kill a lot of channels.
That's ignoring the first part of his comment though. He said the ones that have merch stores and patreon pages. Not just getting YT money.
That's not accurate, they didn't say "charge creators who have their own sponsorships and merch stores" he said it as two separate statements "Charge creators" and "They have sponsorships and merch stores."
While we're on the topic, YT does already penalize people for videos that contain advertisements and have in the past put strikes videos that link to crowdfunding pages. Monetary fines for the larger pages might make sense, but idk how profitable it would be, especially if it gets contested in courts and adds legal fees.
How well did that work out for Vimeo?
Charging the people to create the content you sell is downright dumb.
Works well enough that it's still one of the major video hosting platforms.
The part you miss is "you sell" part. Unlike youtube, where it solves both monetization and content delivery for you, Vimeo, AFAIK, doesn't do any monetization and focuses enterely on content delivery. You pay for the service, and how you monetize the content is entirely up to you. May be the ad deal with NORD SHADOW MANSCAPED, may be donations. Or, the video may be promoting your own business, which seems to be the most common use case - as a business you don't want a competitor's ad on a video which purpose is to promote your own.
Idk if that would be a good business decision. They would want it to be free and easy to start a channel still, so it would mean once your channel gets to a certain popularity google makes the deal progressively worse. This would create a big incentive for competition if all your biggest content creators are suddenly paying over cost to subsidize smaller channels.
Not that this would be a bad thing, but I don’t see why google would ever want to risk it.
ublock origin still blocking everything.
ublock origin is so good at blocking YouTube it almost makes me think the developer is affiliated somehow. Their other extension, umatrix (which has more or less the same functionality just laid out differently), never really worked for me, but as soon as I add ublock origin it works perfectly.
Are any of the blocklists actually made by gorhill?
not the current version. YT just updated their id.
YouTube ReVanced is still around?
Adblockers are eventually just going to become undetectable because of this. Adblockers are about to get so much better!
I would argue that next step YouTube is going to pull is just in time video mixing where they will overlay add on top of your video. This would make adblockers unable to block since it's indistinguishable from regular video. However efforts like SponsorBlock would become dominant way of blocking ads. At which point YouTube will probably resort to preventing skipping video while ads are playing.
At not poing will it occur to them all of that is a waste of time and that there are smarter ways to earn money without gouging people's eyes out. At the moment this is not happening because it's too CPU intensive.
if only ads arent annoying and loud, i have no problems unblocking them. but damn, they're unbearable atleast in my region.
Getting so many NSFW dating/straight up p##n ads. I shit you not they have even had CP ads I have seen. Disgusting and completely illegal.
The amount of ads that I get on mobile YouTube about meeting Ukrainian women is alarming to say the least
I got russian ones. Jesus christ they are running a fucking massive trafficking ring at the least.
Usually most of my YouTube ads are for bullshit training programs (and I do mean bullshit, like pseudosciencey shit) or gambling.
Both are just at the edge of legality (I am pretty sure some cross it).
Except since last month, because now almost all are for that Scorsese movie. I mean, I don't mind being advertised that, but I've seen these ads so much that all they managed to do is make me hate it despite barely knowing anything about it.
Also, unskippable ads keep being longer. Now it's reached two 20-second ads interrupting even short-ish videos every 5 minutes or so.
So yeah, people, that's what YouTube looks like without an ad blocker now. Gee, I wonder why so many block them.
I get the piano fraud guy shouting about how only he can teach you mastery of the piano in three days, or something like that. It's a scam but I can't get rid of his obnoxious ads.
The temu and tiktok ads that seem to be intentionally engineered to provoke extreme negative emotions such as discomfort and irritation, that force your attention on the screen by overloading your ears with so much noise that you feel compelled to take in some amount of visual information to ease the shock, and then tacking on hashtag slogans at the end; like "oddly satisfying" after a video of a fucking butcher knife cutting through colorful play sand or "shop like a billionaire" after yelling at me about cheap Chinese goods, both of which only serving as reminders of the current state of society at large and pushing me ever so closer to a state of blind rage; are what finally pushed me to install vanced on my android.
It's psychological torture and it should be against international human rights law.
Advertisement is brainwashing and should be against human rights.
not totally true, targeted spammed ads are brainwashing, suggesting a thing isn't. it's always the dose
People choose products that seem or sound familiar. It is a psychological effect that advertisers abuse. Often times you see the same ad multiple times and this establishes that familiarity.
YouTube is the cable tv of 2023
Unpopular Opinion: I don’t like ads as much as anyone, I’d rather YouTube monetises 1440p and 4k content instead of forcing people to watch ads. YouTube is an extremely expensive business to run, so it being free forever is completely unsustainable.
Google doesn't pay taxes. They save something like 3-4 billion a year not paying taxes.
It's entirely sustainable.
What did they charge the government for selling out to the surveilance agencies?
Suck my balls Google
Present them
Okay Google, show me your balls
They might, but you'll have to watch ads while they do it.
Next tactic to stop adblocking: we will come to your house and break your fucking legs if you even THINK about installing ublock
Then a few days later ublock removes it
Imagining uBlock releasing the notes for that one.
"Created emergency response team to break the kneecaps of Google's kneecap breaking squad."
https://github.com/gilbsgilbs/NewPipeSponsorBlock
https://invidious.io/
Spread the word for non IT folks too! Fck up google! Google is evil!
See also, another attack from google: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
Google recently announced that it's podcast service is shutting down and moving to YouTube music, I don't want or need YouTube music so I've already moved to Podcast Republic, it has a few ads but they can be removed with a small one off payment. Google just wants to shove all it's users into YouTube and YouTube music for maximum ads and data harvesting.
Heads up as more and more people seem to not know this lately: the overwhelming majority of podcasts are officially and legally available without having to pay for them. Traditionally a podcast was just an mp3 or video file someone posted up on their blog that could be subscribed to via a basic RSS feed.
Anyway, on Android Antenna Pod is a great free and open source app for managong podcasts and youe subscriptions to them. Can get it off F-Droid.
The way I see it, if a podcast isn't available through RSS it ain't a podcast.
Spotify exclusives: Not podcasts. Audible exclusives: Not podcasts.
If I can't listen to it on my phone with Overcast, then I won't listen to it. The only exception for me is stuff on BBC Sounds, but much of that isn't offered as podcast anyway.
AntennaPod user for years and years here too. I've tried other ones but always come back. It's in the regular play store as well if that's easier for folks.
Pocketcasts. You’re welcome.
AntennaPod is available on F-Droid.
Even if I have to sit through 30 seconds of silence, is there a way to redirect the ad to a ghost browser so I don't have to listen to something like grubhubs stupid video?
Not exactly what you have described but better https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
Stop using YouTube, go for new pipe/piped/invidious instead. Same content without the fucking bullshit.
Example: http://yt.whateveritworks.org
Freetube is another valid option
Or ReVanced
Cannot get this to work for the life of me. Worked for a bit, then it stopped working again and no amount of repatching fixes it
I ran into the same problem. Uninstalling and trying again without touching any of the options for setup worked instead of going in and messing with the toggles. I hope it helps. I would suggest you look for a Lemmy uhh... What do we call them? Subreddit? I mean they are on the other site too and perhaps you can get assistance there if you're still having issues
R🤮ddit has subr🤮ddits, while Lemmy has communities and instances.
Eh, don't need YouTube that badly. I think we'll collectively figure out video distribution without em just fine.
And we can call it something like... I don't know... PeerTube?
Hold the line uBlock Origin. If YT becomes unusable, I'll find somewhere to binge-watch true crime videos at 3am.
Fuck youtube
Reset Ublock orgin and update the filter and Ublock extension. Disable other adblock extension if you have one. Still you would be getting the popup once a while.
Yeah. This is becoming a problem with Google. Whatever they have created they just want to make it shit. Like everybody can't just pay and the amount of ads just makes it unwatchable.
On my firefox this rarely shows up though. I use the privacy extensions uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes.
"allowlisted" topkek
Lmao, time for anti anti-adblock! 🤣 https://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/
A good ad blocker would be one that will still load the page as intended but not display the ads. There would be no way for the site to know you can't see them. Blocking their activation just signals the site that you are using an adblocker.
Edit: I was thinking more of a VM sandbox like another comment said
Sandbox the ads. Trick them into thinking the playback is finished. If there is a timer that prevents skipping, modify timing calls to shorten the duration. Or execute faster than real-time.
If there is some kind of timer callback to server, it would even be preferable to have ad "running" invisibly with a progress bar and no ad.
Honestly, I'd tolerate an adless grey timer, you don't even have to trick it that time has passed.
Just open in another tab, wait for skip option, skip (but probably not in a perfectly timed robotic way), then pause. Grey and silent midroll would be annoying but still tolerable.
People who know programming and how far it can go seem to sometimes trap themselves in very difficult problems that would be great to solve, but undervalue a version without that complicated luxury.
I'm all for trying to solve it, but a tool that doesn't is still good. I just don't want to be aware of what the companies want to make me aware of.
#BoycottGoogle
Everyone go back to Yahoo and Ask Jeeves!
More PeerTube please!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
Been getting that lately after successfully avoiding it for a bit. Just not gonna use it directly anymore.
Do we really need a new post about this, with the same screenshot, every time it happens to someone for the first time?
Someone please make an extension so it automatically redirects to piped.video or something else.
you can use extension made by creator of piped Piped Redirects (it's only on firefox)
I recommend LibRedirect instead. It can redirect to both invidious and piped, as well as working for other services. e.g., Twitter → Nitter, Reddit → teddit, and many more
I use Redirector for that.
I will happily either find an alternative frontend, or just stop watching youtube all together. It's done nothing good to my life either way
For a while, I've been quietly preparing for the day when YT becomes unusable. I've been using Odysee and Peertube to see if they are viable options. To some limited extent they already are, but there are still lots of room for improvement. Just like Mastodon feels like the early days of Twitter, Lemmy feels like the early days of Reddit, Odysee is a bit like YT once was a very long time ago.
in recent years, YT has been working hard to kick out certain types of channels, so nowadays you can find that sort of content in some of the other platforms. It depends on what you're looking for, so the experience can be anything between awful and great.
For me the solution is to just log out and only login to comment or watch shorts.
I LOVE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES
Drink verification can.
Originally there was an X. Now I have to wait a few seconds before I can click the X. This pause gives me time to think if I really need to watch this video, which more and more often is turning into a "not really".
I have yet to see anything like this with my adblocker.
Is this fake? I thought the term is whitelisted not allowlisted
In recent years there's been a shift from "white/black list" to "allow/block list" in an effort to avoid the stereotypes associated with those terms. I wouldn't say it's the new norm yet, but it's slowly becoming more popular.
This is why we use Frontends... NewPipe, FreeTube, Invidious, Piped, etc c: Otherwise the nuclear option; "mpv https://youtu.be/url"
Fortunately I haven't gotten any warnings but my dad did last night. I cleared ublock's cache and updated the lists. Hopefully it works.
[Edit] Nope my dad is still getting warnings about ublock origin.
Google is updating their code every few hours to adjust to ublock code. Just keep updating it daily.
Yeah. This is becoming a problem with Google. Whatever they have created they just want to make it shit. Like everybody can't just pay and the amount of ads just makes it unwatchable.
On my firefox this rarely shows up though. I use the privacy extensions uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes.
Okay, I don't ever see this problem. Using Brave and uBlock origin in Firefox. Maybe just update your filters once in a while?
Remember when the hopper was going to be the end of free TV?
This is only the 3764th post this week..
And I will gladly read 3,764 posts more.
To be the man who read 7,528 posts to fall down at your door
Streisand effect