- 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.
i consider unblockable ads to be direct attack on my psyche, trying to worm in and make me think in a way they want. I will never tolerate them and would rather see anything relying on them burn. My mind is my own and no one else has any business influencing me without my permission.
There’s a large war going on behind my uBlock plugin.
Make your platform so bad in the interest of shareholders so no one wants to use your platform anymore. It’s a story as old as capitalism.
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.
I’m starting to think our entire economy is built upon ads.
Edit: Word missing
Wheres the data to back up this claim? That article is purely opinion
On the one hand I understand they aren’t serving billions of hours of video for their own health. Not sure how one can justify the expenditure as a “loss leader”. But at the same time, the ad experience is horrendous.
In the last month I have consumed YT on desktop browser, mobile, and regular TV. Guess which is by far the worst experience?
On desktop, you can use an alternate browser or do a reg edit to re-enable manifest v2 plugins (for now) in Chrome, and continue blocking (for now). On mobile you can use alternate apps and frontends.
TV viewing of YT is the worst experience, as there are no native alternative apps and DNS ad blocking doesn’t block YT ads. The native YouTube app (on Samsung and LG TVs at least) is horrendous. You get midroll ads sometimes mid-sentence as the content presenter is speaking. Sometimes you get pre-roll ads, disruptive mid roll ads, and then wash it down with a POST-roll ad at the end of the video. Depending on how the content is structured it is disorienting as to whether the video has ended or not.
Say for example its a 30 minute video. I would rather they show 5-7 minutes of predictable ads at the beginning of content, so I can at least have the same experience as broadcast TV, and make an informed decision to get up and use the restroom and feed the pets while the ads roll. Then once the content starts, don’t randomly interrupt it.
Imagine the YT model applied to broadcast television. The quarterback drops back to throw a deep pass towards the endzone, and suddenly you find yourself watching an undskippable ad for diarrhea medication, while the football is in the air.
And we wonder why people have ADD.
deleted by creator
Linus
Let’s hope he doesn’t have access to any critical email account related to that service.
I’m out of the loop. What’s that referencing?
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Torvalds?
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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.
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.
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 think I need this, finally a real use for ‘ai’.
The amount of how to videos you have to watch through, when all you want is one little piece of info you should be able to search or scan for has been a problem since before the internet figured out how to increase clicks by making a web page in to slides.
Can you link me a how-to video on how to get startedt and send me a summary from your working setup?
It’s just two steps, first get a transcript from the video somehow (use the whisper API if you’re willing to pay a small amount or just Google “transcribe YouTube video” and look for an ad supported site that’ll do it via Google.) Second: use chatgpt or local llama to summarize the transcript.
I know right… Why should content creators be able to make money from content. Am I right?
The same reasons as open source software devs.
Some content creators but not most of them. A lot of open source software advertises too.
Even better, you work for one of the wealthiest corporations in the world with virtually unlimited resources at your disposal, and you still get your asses handed to you by a handful of people with laptops.
If they didn’t have to support the web, and various legacy platforms, the could lock it all down with drm more easily.
Hence Google’s proposal to DRM the web
And people’s response has shown its not easy or even working.
in tech*. most people don’t even know or care about it
That’s far less true now that they’re breaking the functionality of tons of adblockers that it was a few years ago.
most normies i know don’t care about it.
i have no idea how they use the internet without them, but here we are.
So tell the content creators you like that you don’t like YouTube. While YouTube Premium is the same price as like two coffees a month… Maybe your content creator will help you if you can’t afford it.
Well, to begin with, both the watcher and the creator are clients of the platform. Both sides feel bound to it, even if both dislike it.
Then, YouTube premium is literally 20 machine coffees a month in my first world country. 15 if they’re done by someone. You seem to be speaking “privileged minority”.
I’m sorry… I didn’t realize the reason that there are so many Starbucks in America, like literally caddy corner from one another is because their customer base is the “privileged minority.” I’ll have to remember that line.
In all seriousness, you could argue that ads prey on poor vulnerable people unable to afford YouTube Premium that just want to use it to learn, and that would be a semi-coherent argument.
Despite all of their machinations my strategy of simply ignoring literally everything they say and continuing doing the same old same old appears to be flummoxing them.
I’ve literally not done anything and have never experienced any inconvenience. Are we sure they’re doing anything at all?
Same, I think they must be AB testing and I don’t get assigned into the shitty group
I definitely got really awful, unplayably spotty playback that seemed linked to adblock usage. Then I saw an article about it and confirmed I wasn’t going crazy, and that day it stopped happening, so it felt like I was going crazy all over again. It’s like the moment they realised it was going to become a problem and they weren’t as sneaky as they thought, they turned it off. I haven’t had an issue since then.
The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.
Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.
That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.
WTF were they thinking?
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.
I don’t know of any day where I unblocked ads and felt good cause they were targeted directly at me
I’ve been downloading my subscriptions and loading them into Plex. Plenty of room for improvement in that system, but I get a nostalgic hit of YouTube long ago. Man, it’s fallen so far over the years.
Also related, I’ve hit 2.4TB of internet use for the first time last month doubling my previous record.
Which downloader do you use?
Not OP but I use the arr family of services (Sonarr and Radar, though there are more) and NZBGet as my downloader.
Lol NZBGet is not typically used for getting free content.
It’s one of the preconfigured downloaders for sonarr and radarr which is really a fancy front page for adding media from usenet? So, I would disagree.
Well… if your idea of “free” content is something you don’t pay for then yes, but if your idea of free content is something that was intended to be distributed for “free” then no.
Is it free if it supported by ads?
People don’t use NZBGet for that reason. It is literally a platform & distribution model primarily intended for pirating content in a way that is much quicker and more reliable than torrents. Usenet would probably have died without NZBs.
The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I’d rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.
I’ve had YouTube Premium since the days when it was called YouTube Red, so like a decade. I’ve grown used to not seeing any ads from Google and anytime I watch a video not using my account it’s torture.
Same here. FreeTube for desktop and NewPipe are all you need though if you don’t want to pay and/or have access to music.
As a recent YT premium-tryer, it’s amazing how many ads they put in that aren’t obviously adverts - comparing between non-premium and premium browsing.
Not sure I’ll keep YT premium beyond the free trial, until I find more decent content producers. Even then, it’s skipping those video’s paid promotion segments.
So it’s like paying for a streaming platform to not get ads… But still getting adsI agree… however, that is an issue with the content creators relying on using content promotions. I have noticed when skipping ahead in videos that it usually indicates in the progress bar where the promotion ends. If the content producers utilized other ways to contribute and I liked them enough, then I’d do that. YouTube now has a subscriber only feature that should help with this. There are also extensions that are supposed to block sponsors too. I don’t think YouTube has implemented any functions to make blocking sponsored ads more difficult, especially for paying users… who knows though.
Tubular is newpipe + sponsorblock BTW
I use pipepipe but it’s less stable
I haven’t tried that yet. I think Libretube also does SponsorBlock too & have seen it on F-Droid.
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.
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.
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?
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 want the statistic on how many Google employees use ad blockers now. It’s basically a necessity.
I’m sure Google employees get Premium for free
It’s pretty sad how not having the money for it makes it unbearable, while all of them don’t need to experience it, disconnecting them from their practices.
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…
“Your content sucks… And I can’t stop watching it. I also got herpes by watching too much brain rot”
