YouTube to stop 30-second unskippable ads
campaignlive.co.uk
campaignlive.co.uk
This is why people cry no tears when ad companies complain. If you want to stick crap in my way, the experience had better be flawless.
Not saying it's right, but it's just the status quo of the moment.
Sometimes I have to wait 5 minutes to get through a 30 second commercial.
uBlock Origin will continue to serve me well.
Don't be an asshole.
HOWEVER the real assholes are whoever is serving bloat and ads that will do anything to get malware onto your machine and track your every breath. This is really why we're blocking.
I will feel no remorse for adblocking until advertisers go back to static, single-request, non-tracking, non-targetting ads.
Huh, that's about right. It feels like it was released after that.
Having to block ads in the first place makes the ad creators and deliverers assholes, but not the user, as explained in other comments.
You're right, and I already paid for it with my ISP. I only get a set amount of data each month, so you can be sure I'm going to block 100% of the ads I can to stop them from wasting my limited bandwidth.
No, you paid for bandwidth from your ISP to you. Your ISP doesn't pay anyone else for traffic. YouTube also has to pay your ISP and that cost is made up from ads.
But even that is beside the point. I believe it's fine for me to access whatever information that people release. I see no moral problem here, and I will choose what the bandwidth I pay for is spent on.
It's not your responsibility to make YouTube profitable but if you enjoy the content, it's in your best interest to contribute to it, whether it be through watching ads or subscribing. The service needs some amount of money just to cover bandwidth and maintenance but more importantly, most of the money from those ads/subscriptions goes to the people who make the content you watch, many of whom can't do so without that money. Those people also can't choose to block adblockers.
> If they didn't want me to consume the content, they would have a model in which you can't view the content without subscribing for a fee.
They do. It's called ads. You can't watch the video until you watch the ads.
> And yet Google knows about adblockers and continues this model, suggesting that they are fine with people skipping the ads.
Or they don't want to get into an arms race just yet.
> I assume you do not download things you do not want, so I am merely doing the same thing.
The download of the thing you don't want here is the payment, not the product. Most of us do pay for things we want.
> I believe it's fine for me to access whatever information that people release.
What's your profession? I believe it's okay for me to promise you payment in exchange for your work then take it without payment.
And make ads unsuitable for the most egregious attacks on privacy, simple plain tracking or even as distribution channel for malware. Curiously, this nuclear option will make things better than the current situation.
Ads embedded in the video stream (i.e. "burnt" as one with subtitles) can't be blocked but also can't deliver any active content (JS, Flash, etc) used for tracking or infecting users.
If giving out free videos isn't a sustainable business model, change your business model.
No amount of shame will ever be effective in getting me to turn off my adblocker. Sorry if this offends you.
Are they giving out free videos? The content creator gets to choose how to monetize, right? The platform does allow for free, and the creator chose to get paid.
If hosting content online for free isn't working for you, maybe that's not a commercial space worth occupying. Not everything deserves to be paid for, "selfish" or not. Users, aka "the market," will decide if your product is usable despite the income generating parts.
Marginally related, if your business isn't profitable enough to pay your employees a livable wage, then maybe your business isn't actually profitable enough to, well, be "in business."
We haven't even reached the real arms race yet, and people are already talking like adblockers won.
Let's pick this convo back up at least when ad networks like Adsense let you proxy through your server, ending an entire class of adblocking at once. And that's not the end of the low-hanging fruit.
Perhaps I don't do it personally because I'm a Communist.
Clearly your time isn't valuable, as you spend it watching content you value at $0.
If the content you watched and hence the time you spent watching it actually held value to you, you would be happy to pay the meagre $10/mo subscription fee.
Also, as it was pointed out in this thread, less than 10% of the world population has access to those subscriptions.
Water is a commodity, it doesn't require you to contribute for it to be available, it's ubiquitous and cheap. I pay less than I value it at, yes, as a price has been set and there's no method or reason to pay more for it.
YouTube content however is not a commodity and the amount of money that goes into it affects the quality and quantity of content available. Throw $10m at water, you get nothing meaningfully better. Throw $10m at YouTube creators, you get a new major original series or a few small ones.
> Also, as it was pointed out in this thread, less than 10% of the world population has access to those subscriptions.
And they can pay for it with ads.
The price for the content has been set. You can choose to pay for it or you can choose to essentially steal it.
So Google and other companies that largely depend on online ads just have to accept the fact that some people are going to disable them. They have complete ability to do so and simply no way it can be stopped. It's inevitable.
If ad blocking becomes so rampant that businesses start to collapse, we'll likely see the internet really ramp up subscription models.
For the user too, do you think people have unlimited data plans? I'm not paying to see ads.
> Don't be an asshole.
Because insults are going to rally people to your cause?
So that's a weird excuse.
My phone has unlimited data (only plan advertised by T-Mobile) but it's possible for my home internet not to be (restriction removed on the gigabit plan, which I have).
So if the company only cares about the US then...
"Hahaha yyolo rigt?!1!" - some exec
If you want to run adblockers on random news sites, whatever, I'm not going to argue, but there's really no excuse on youtube except "I'm a cheap shit"
or perhaps the slightly more valid excuse of "i don't live in australia, mexico, korea, new zealand, or the united states"
ymmv
Seriously though, this is a good thing. Everybody needs to know about and install one. It should be considered a part of basic internet literacy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/5ua042/youtub...
Considering the strides Amazon and Netflix have made with original content, I think Youtube should be viewed as having missed the boat in a pretty big way. All of the promising platform innovations that seemed worth waiting for now seem to have been put on hold in favor of prioritizing Google's ad revenue maximization.
The biggest of these are "autoplay" and the silly way that it chooses content to play next.
There seems to be some notion that consumers want to sit in front of youtube and gaze at it while it plays some bizarre mix of low quality user generated content and videos that consumers have watched before, while interspersing annoying ads that encourage the user to tap/click to dismiss the ad.
It's hard to imagine an experience that creates more annoyance. It's as if a fly is released into the room at the start of each video that lands on your ear, and you must either put up with it or exert effort to get rid of it.
Regular TV commercials should be viewed simply as a result a near monopoly for years, with viewers having no choice but to suffer through ads, and advertisers having no choice but to overpay for them.
I actively avoid watching youtube for these reasons, and consider it (as a product) a lot like SourceForge -- someone just trying to milk every ad dollar possible with no concern for the quality of the experience.
I hope this article means that there has been an inflection point and YouTube cannot continue to increase revenue by emulating the dated paradigm of broadacast TV.
Facebook, it seems, has already eaten Google's lunch on live video.
I would sign up for youtube red but alas, tis not available to hostile foreign countries such as Canada
I wonder if they are doing this because youtube red is killing it....can't beat netflix in terms of contents but if they gave you access to entire Play movies and tv shows then that would be a game changer...I don't even watch Amazon Prime shows apart from The Grand Tour and Man. I'm quite fond of Netflix's UX and UI.
but why would you?
tldr: whats better, one person donating $1 a month, or 100 people suffering thru 3 minutes of mindless ads? Do you really value your time at $0.2c/hour?
Advertising is the sole reason I stopped watching television. It's unbelievably distracting when I enter someone else's house and they have their TV playing all the time. How do you not get sucked in? I guess I was desensitized to it earlier in life, but now I'll gladly pay subscription fees to distance myself from that racket.
This is the first time I've seen the service mentioned on HN, which seems surprising in itself.
FTFY!
Not long after, I installed uBlock Origin and haven't looked back.
EDIT: Mobile Benefits for YouTube Red
- Playback with the screen turned off
- Download videos
- YouTube Music No Ads
-YouTube Gaming
"“I can now clearly determine how much Red views are worth vs normal views. If I did my math correctly, since Red started, a Red view is on average worth 20x that of a normal ad view. This calculation is based on taking the total revenue the channel has generated via Red and dividing it by the total number of Red views since Red was first launched, then multiplying that number by 1000 to find the effective CPM of Red.”
http://lipanitechnologies.com/2017/01/03/youtube-red-helping...
There's actually a service that allows you to move your playlists: https://freeyourmusic.com/
It's hard to imagine how Google or TV will convince the world to accept let alone want their ads for much longer when a generation is growing up with ad blocking and Netflix.
IIRC it has been for years.
http://www.investors.com/news/technology/youtube-valuation-s...
> But is YouTube profitable? Google has never said. Nor does it disclose viewership data or other financial metrics beyond a few broad statements.
> “There’s substantial uncertainty, particularly over the profit levels at YouTube, whether it’s break-even or if they're doing modest operating margins," RBC Capital analyst Mark Mahaney told IBD. “They have a lot of content royalty costs, massive bandwidth costs, storage costs, processing costs.
The only one competitor I could think of here would something like a Twitch.tv spinoff by Amazon with a focus on sharing videos, but since they decided to focus on live streaming, that ship probably sailed.
They probably still have the scale to do it, though, with AWS being what it is.
Do you have any insight as to how Vimeo hosts and serves their videos and what their scale is?
If you're going to force me to watch the same ad over and over, at least make it an ad that doesn't make me want to claw my eyeballs out with a rusty razor blade.
I think a good place for ads would be at the end of the video. I know many people will say that then many ads would never be seen. But I think you should consider the emotion associated with your product when your ad is at the beginning:
If I click on a funny 1-minute cat video, a front-loaded ad first of all makes Youtube act like it's broken. I clicked a link to play a certain video, and it didn't play. Instead something else played. For a brief moment, there is a feeling of brokenness. Then there is a feeling of frustration: you tried to accomplish something, and you were blocked (though temporarily).
The second reason it is so irritating is that it seldom has something to do with you: it's advertising something you don't want. It's like someone who strikes up a conversation with you about something that they find interesting, but they didn't bother to consider whether it interests you. (Google's AdSense doesn't seem to work well in Youtube.)
The third reason it is so irritating is a sense of proportion. An hour-long documentary could do with a 30-second commercial. A 30-second Youtube video seems overburdeded with even a 5-second ad.
If you put your ad at the end, I am in a good mood, because I just finished my cat video. Also, I'm thinking of what to watch next. So an ad playing in the background doesn't bother me as much. Maybe it's even subliminal, since I'm not really concentrating on it. That's just what the advertisers want! ;)
I think ads at the end would also be more in the same spirit as the text-only ads on Google Search, that it would be better to have an ad go unnoticed than have an ad that is interfering. Actually I think the genius is that text-only ads fit in better with text-only search results. The user is already in careful-reading mode. So in fact I think they are more likely to run across the text-only ad than some flashing image, which they would have quickly learned to ignore.
I finally signed up for Youtube Red, despite my pennypinchingness. I think I'll stick with it. It includes also all the free music I want, on Google Play. Through that I found a new album by an obscure band that I always liked. It's only $10 a month, and if you can buy a family plan for $15.
Edit: Just figured it out. Blocking this with an adbock rule fixes it at as a logged-in user, in the US, using Chrome.
https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info*