- YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
- Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
- Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
Imagine being on the YouTube ad team…that has to be the most depressing team in tech history. Your whole existence revolves around peddling ads before people can watch the ads they want.
Even better, you work for one of the wealthiest corporations in the world with virtually unlimited resources at your disposal, and you still get your asses handed to you by a handful of people with laptops.
If they didn’t have to support the web, and various legacy platforms, the could lock it all down with drm more easily.
Hence Google’s proposal to DRM the web
At least you can tell your boss “I’m working on it!”, sit on your ass, and every 6 months add one more little UI or formula change which “finally stops adblockers” but is defeated within 3 days.
Yeah I don’t believe they really put their hearts in it. If they truly wanted to force you into watching ads, they’d manage. Their team is just not that interested.
Their team is probably using adBlockers more than the rest of us. They understand the depth of the surveillance baked into those ads.
And because they have to test the ads.
I’m sure they make enough money to not care. Being in the part of the company that brings in the dough is generally a pretty good position to be in as well.
Your whole existence revolves around peddling ads before people can watch the ads they want.
Ah, what. Who wants or likes to watch ads at all?
A lot of creators have just turned into corporate shills. I stopped watching ETA Prime’s channel about tech reviews because it was becoming pretty clear that mostly everything he got was paid for by the company. Also, most creators are putting their own ads into their content.
Welcome to Youtube. It’s ads all the way down. Unless:
Firefox browser, Ublock Origin extension, Sponsorblock extension
Save 40% of your viewing time for actual content and send tips through creator’s Paypal or whatever.
I hope nobody lets them know that Firefox on Linux has never shown ads for any of their content.
Don’t worry. Linux is only 4% of the total computer market. They aren’t bothered with you because Linux isn’t worth it.
YouTube is just on demand TV with extra steps these days. I’ve stopped watching videos, I have an LLM transcribe and summarize for me now. 99% of the content of a 10-15 minute video can be summarized into 1 or 2 pages and read in under 2 minutes.
I have an LLM transcribe and summarize for me now.
Only a matter of time before LLMs start injecting their own ads into these responses.
YouTube has been a dumpster fire for many many years now and it continues its slide down.
Patreon would not exist had anyone over at YT had focus beyond the next two quarters.
Sooner or later an actual real contender will be created, and you’ll see YT’s knee jerk reactions with a surprised Pikachu meme in full effect.
I would love it but I don’t see it.
It costs an enormous amount of money to host video content, doubly so when you need to replicate it across servers. I have never seen another company come close to usurping them.
Patreon and sites like it exist as a hedge against YouTube banning your channel.
I think its more likely that YouTube will shut down and be replaced by nothing. Its existence has never made sense as anything but an act of charity from an organization with tech resources to burn.
Remember that Google bought YouTube only AFTER it was successful for several years. This was also before Google turned evil.
Good.
Youtube is a wonderful thing. It’s a wealth of knowledge and resources unlike anything this world has ever seen.
And it’s ran by one of the worst, most predatory corps on the planet.
it’s ran
it’s run
Perfectly put. The product is great and I love how it democratizes “being on TV” and lets some people make a living doing their own thing.
But I do not like where YouTube’s cut of that ad/sub money goes, and the enshittification pushed into it.
Unfortunately, YouTube is not unique in that regard. It’s a sucky fact of life that just about any complex product you spend money on will benefit a collection of rich sociopaths skimming as much as possible from the incomes of the people actually making the thing. Gotta vote with your wallet where you can, and vote the traditional way for the systemic issues.
I’ll never understand the entitlement of these companies when it comes to ads. You send the content freely to my computer along with BS ads. It’s my computer. I’ll display what I want using programs I want.
If you want me to pay for that content with $ or by watching ads - then put up a hard paywall and stop sending the content for free. You can’t get uppity and complain about ad blockers - it doesn’t make any sense…
The real problem is your content sucks and nobody is willing to pay for it. And that’s your problem - not mine.
Here’s some free apples. There’s a newspaper ad stuffed in there as well. Oh you ate the apples without reading the newspaper? Foul ball! /facepalm
Edit: never mind the fact that many ads have been served that are downright malicious code…
I was paying for Google music until they took it away from me and told me it was Youtube Premium and then raised the price twice.
Not exactly what I’d call a great value proposition.
“Should we moderate our ads and get rid of 2 hour long ads, disinformation, porn,scams and fake products?”
“No, no. Thats to much effort. Lets spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to force people to watch our 2 hour long ads, disinformation, porn, scams and fake products. Thats clearly the way forward.”
This decision process brought to you by Prager U proceeds into 30 minutes about how slavery was good for the black man and he should be grateful for it
Once upon a time Google used few and non-intrusive ads. The ads were soo well-placed and relevant, that they almost seemed like a service to the user, rather than being forced upon you. Some of us even added exceptions for Google ads in our ad blockers, so we would not miss out.
I miss those days.
That was almost a decade ago or even before. I remember adockers recommending white listing search engines or recommending to disable non-instrusive ads to support websites.
I pay for Nebula and try to watch as much as I can there. The content is more “pleasant department store” and less “Mexican public market”.
I do watch YouTube regularly when channel-surfing, but if I ever see an ad (which happens only on mobile devices), I close it immediately and do something else. It’s not that I don’t think I should be able to watch everything for $0, but YouTube ads are so jarring, random, irrelevant and just make me sick. They literally ruin whatever I was watching and make me sad to exist.
It can be exhausting to wade through the absolute meat market of click bait titles and thumbnails to find something that not only looks interesting but won’t abuse me with infomercial-form audio/visuals.
YouTube enables and promotes the “content creators” who abuse human psychology to accumulate views, likes, subscriptions, etc. The best thing that could happen is they continue to be exposed as the drug dealer they are.
It’s always laughable to me that these companies are able to have the meta data on our entire lives and yet show ads for shit we don’t even want.
I’m a lesbian, Google has enough data on me to know I’m a lesbian, I live with women, don’t really hang out with men at all. I use a bunch of Google services so I know Google knows this about my living situation.
SO MANY FUCKING ADS FOR MANSCAPED, WHHHYYYYY. I am not the target market for this Google.
I’ve taken to blocking the ads, still more Manscaped. Is it cause blocking = engagement? “Oh wow, she interacted with this ad to block it but ignored the others, what a good ad placement!”
what, women don’t shave their coochs? (coochiii? what is the multiple of cooch?)
by analogy with goose,
ceech
Despite all of their machinations my strategy of simply ignoring literally everything they say and continuing doing the same old same old appears to be flummoxing them.
I’ve literally not done anything and have never experienced any inconvenience. Are we sure they’re doing anything at all?
One time they told me I had 3 days left to enjoy YouTube with my ad blocker, and then I would have to buy premium, or they would just lock me out of the site. I was like “welp, it had a good run, I guess that’s it for ol’ YouTube.”
But then the 3 days went buy and nothing ever came of it.
That tactic probably did get them some preemptive subscriptions though, unfortunately.
The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I’d rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.
That‘s where Youtube Premium comes into play for many fools who don‘t really know about adblockers. Google‘s goal isn‘t to destroy the website, but to turn it into a much more profitable Netflix subscription based on user generated content. Sadly the enshittification of the biggest video platform will continue because enough people are willing to pay a lot for it. The site will not improve until there are mainstream alternatives that actually take revenue off Youtube.
It’s so bad that I 1) refuse to pay for premium so I don’t enable the behavior and 2) ended up sideloading an alt YouTube app on iOS that just doesn’t display the ads. YouTube hasn’t been able to block that one yet as it spoofs as the original YouTube app. Totally unsanctioned and a pain in the ass to keep the certificate alive but worth it. YouTube is actually enjoyable again. All that because the ads interruptions were constant. If it was every 15 min or so I wouldn’t care, but every 5!? Get the hell out of here!
I’ve had YouTube Premium since the days when it was called YouTube Red, so like a decade. I’ve grown used to not seeing any ads from Google and anytime I watch a video not using my account it’s torture.
You‘re part of the problem then. It only got so shitty in the first place so they could trap people in the Premium subscription that will get increasingly more expensive and less useful.
legit, if youtube ever beats ublock origin, i’ll just stop watching youtube
Its an all out assault on half your senses without an adblocker. Literal torture.
The entire web is like that without an ad blocker these days.
You could pay for YouTube Premium
It’s only a matter of time until the premium users get ads. Just like Netflix, and cable TV before that. You will inevitably wind up paying to be advertised to.
Netflix has ads now? I thought that was only for their lower tier service? I had to cancel Netflix cause they haven’t came out with two more seasons of Stranger Things yet.
yes for lower paid tiers.
I’m just glad someone is thinking of the shareholders
I forgot… where can I get my free data center with petabytes of storage & 300TB/s fiber interconnects?
I get what you are saying, but the balance is off.
YT premium costs (edit) more than a streaming service per month.
There are no industry leading movies or series released exclusively on YouTube.
YouTubes benefits of premium is “not being delivered ‘skip after 5 seconds’ live streams” as an ad that will play indefinitely (or at least for hours).
Also, streaming services provide much better series discovery. Ie, find a show you like and easily discover the start of that series, then binge watch the entire series in order.
YT premium is basically a “play next” queue, 1080p, and no ads.
It doesn’t (AFAIK) support creators any more. It’s literally just a fee to not-be-inconvenienced, and it’s not great at thatYep… i actually looked at Subscribing. But… It’s basically mostly amateur hour and the subscription costs a huge amount.
Even worse, I don’t believe creators even get revenue until they exceed sufficient subscribers. So most people are actually paying youtube to put benefit from other people’s video’s which they have no involvement in.
When did this change? AIUI creators got a larger cut of YouTube premium views compared to ad share.
Not sure if its subscribers or views… But, I tried to monitize one or two of my videos, and it wouldn’t let me because I don’t think I had enough views or something.
Google makes enough money evading taxes already. Not gonna help them make more.
I don’t care if you use ad blockers. I get annoyed when people publish articles like… “Google is losing the adblockers war” cause then advertisers are going to start pushing harder for Google to actually prevent adblockers entirely, which they could have done already. Thus far Google, despite issues, does quite a lot of good things… Android is the only open source OS out of Apple & Windows. Android lets you install third party app stores. Chrome (Chromium) is open source… etc.
These users writing this content don’t even develop the apps to block YouTube ads. If you’ve ever explored the APIs by YouTube, then you’d know that Google despite pushing ads for users without blockers, is still rather friendly to third party apps.
Advertisers couldn’t care less about adblockers. Advertisers don’t pay if the ad is blocked.
Is that what they are trying to do? Push crap ads and try to kill adblock to get a little extra user share to pay for yet another subscription?
PS: let me add that I also watch TV and the balance between quality of content and ads and their placement is much better (yes, some countries are worse than others with this). I don’t know what they are doing in youtube ads, but it’s anti-human (not just the ads, but the design too: super slow loading, tricks you into clicking the wrong content). Like they don’t want you to “pay” by watching ads, they want to torture you until you subscribe, go away or get adblock.
I don’t care if you block ads… but to act like Google owes you and that you deserve free content is called entitled.
I hope one day we will find a method to finance websites operating costs without ads. Meanwhile I will be using blockers and hope someone else’s does the ad clicking.
It’s my little internet piracy you could say, if I am already doing it with every movie and tv show and most games it would be out of character. I am obsessed about saving money and so if I can get away with it I will do almost anything.
Same with the health insurance I have 1/5 of the real cost for full package because of various gray area tax optimisations. Then double dipping on real estate rent+appreciation. Most efficient used car purchase. 25 year old fridge and washing machine because new ones break down too fast and can’t be repaired. Manual renovation between tenants to save on labour cost. Lack of addictions. Relatively cheap hobbies. 4 milion in assets, zero debt.We have a solution but….
you’re not going to like it
cryptocurrency (especially 3rd generation cryptocurrencies like Cardano which uses proof of stake) could easily fund website operating costs without ads.
Gotta love when the article saying adblock-blocking doesn’t work is itself preceded by a notice to disable your adblocker
Honestly it makes me appreciate Lemmy more. Like we’re all on here enjoying an ad free experience… it’s clearly feasible to do
there are several orders of magnitude difference between text-forums with almost all multimedia content hosted externally, and hosting/streaming video.
a big Lemmy instance is a manageable cost for a few well-paid people to run out of their own disposable income.
anything even vaguely approaching YouTube is not.
MMW: Google plans to make Chrome a locked down browser for a proprietary web. But this is only the intermediate step before all web services will be accessed via an app. The commercial web and the public web will hard fork and the kids will never know what a “browser” is.
Ads overall take up a good amount of time now. I would rather not use Youtube at all if I have to watch long ads.
Sounds like users are trying to end up in the find out phase.
YouTube… “We provide these APIs and make our apps and privacy policies more accessible than most, but we still can’t give everything away for free.”
Users… “Haha scum of the earth we think we’re beating you and that you have no way to stop us from circumventing your ads without paying.”
Meh, paywalling some videos behind Google+ (or whatever the current iteration is) would’ve been the honest option. But they chose ads and tracking for everything (makes more money), i can understand why people circumvent them.
I can understand why people circumvent them too. I can’t understand why they’d claim… “Hey Google, you suck at blocking ads. You can’t stop us from doing it.”
Seriously, fuck people that do this. Google knows people use third party apps that block ads. They might as well say… we’re not happy not having ads. We want Google to block it entirely so we can be even more pissed off.
"but we still can’t give everything away for free.”
Then why have they positioned youtube to be a public worldwide service freely accessible all these years?
It is the usual tactic of operating at a loss for years, building an unsustainable service and supporting it with revenue from other places. Google was officially declared a monopoly, and youtube is not profitable, so it’s easy to connect the dots and say youtube grew to it’s current dominance unfairly through that monopoly money.
Now they want to enforce their TOS on you, pay up or watch a million ads or leave. Well fuck their TOS, I avoid anything google like the plague, but their unfair position on video sharing makes it hard to avoid youtube particularly. I respond unfairly in turn, by proxying youtube through invidious.
My dude, white knighting a company that had almost $60 billion in profit in 2022 and $73 billion profit in 2023 isn’t a good look.
My dude… There are 100s of legitimate things about Google to complain about, but you pick the weakest argument and then say I’m white knighting them. YouTube doesn’t owe you cause they made profit… you’ve been able to still bypass their ads for this long, and so now users are complaining that they were able to circumvent something easier in the past?
There are 100s of legitimate things about Google to complain about
But you’re not. You’ve made several comments on this post criticizing the people who 1. want control over their own devices and 2. are sick of ads being forced into every aspect of their lives.
you pick the weakest argument
And I happen to think that a company throwing such an entitled fit over money, when they are making an immoral amount of profit that is increasing YoY, is super relevant when discussing the profitability of one of their services.
YouTube doesn’t owe you cause they made profit
Pretty sure I didn’t say they did.
you’ve been able to still bypass their ads for this long, and so now users are complaining that they were able to circumvent something easier in the past?
People always complain when their convenience is removed from them. Welcome to the human condition.
The surface level entitlement in these threads are always off the charts.
Everyone is on this bandwagon that Google hates adblockers on youtube. It certainly does but it hasn’t been this agressive as of late.
You know why?
The issue google has is with server farms guzzling up the entirety of their video database for training their AI. They’re using open source tools/frontends to do these downloads. That takes up lot of resource and bandwidth unlike ignoring the minority of plebs using youtube without ads.
They want to rule the AI trend not fuel the COMPETITION. They will do whatever to keep their competition from getting ahead.
And it isn’t cheap to keep up with server farms unlike letting miniscule numbers of terminally online mouth breathing basement dwellers who think too high of themselves block ads.
But whatever floats your boat.
So, where does entitlement fit into all of this?
