YouTube Will ‘Frustrate’ Some Users with Ads So They Pay for Music | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Will ‘Frustrate’ Some Users with Ads So They Pay for Music

bloomberg.com

145 pointsdrewg123165 comments

This is why I still maintain a digital music library -- backed by a physical media collection that sits in my real live analog house -- that I sync to an SD card in my phone.

In 2018, Bandcamp seems to have solved the digital music sales problem that the iTunes music store never could (DRM-free album downloads in lossless formats for less than the retail price of the CD or LP). Everything that isn't there can usually be found on Amazon music in a lossy format for a decent price w/ no DRM (sometimes free if you have Prime). If I have to rent music, I'm doing it from Spotify.

Another half-baked Google service that they'll give up on in six months plus an obnoxious marketing campaign fronted by an old Warner executive? They might want to consider paying people to use it.

After several months of Apple Music and disappearing tracks this is what I’m doing now.

I’m not renting anything any more.

May I ask, why not both? I‘m pretty sure you will not buy 20mio songs, rather a couple thousand. With Match you get your own collection online and available everywhere, and augment it with the Music subscription. I’ve done it like this but only rarely need the Match fallback now, because most of my library is available on Music or Spotify.

Two reasons: cost and that I like things in one place and format.

Ugh this was also what got me to stop my Apple Music and then Spotify subscriptions. Songs or entire albums can disappear simply because the licencing changed.

I do this too. Not only do you save money by not subscribing to streaming services each month; chances are that you can downgrade your data plan as well. The money I save I spend on CDs.

Yeah, I use about a gig of data a month. All of my music is stored on my car.

Frankly, I'm moving back to vinyl. I'm aware that most albums have finally been properly remastered to be in a digital format, eliminating the disparity in sound quality, but I feel like something purely analog with zero possibility of any DRM is more permanent, crazy as that may sound.

Plus, Bandcamp is nice. Artists I've discovered through there frequently have a vinyl pressing available, which entitles me to download the lossless digital version as well.

> I feel like something purely analog with zero possibility of any DRM is more permanent, crazy as that may sound.

Yeah that's crazy. CD (when appropriately mastered) is as good as it gets (unless you're looking to make remixes or something): perfect sound reproduction as far as human ears are concerned, and losslessly copyable. Vinyl you wear away slightly every time you play it.

Wrong. Many good Lables release 24 bit mastering quality flac releases, better as CD. But, to hear a difference, you really need highest quality equipment and even then, depends on the sound.

I hear the different of flac vs mp3 on my Shure SRH 940 and some other high quality headphones. On medium quality speakers I don't.

> Many good Lables release 24 bit mastering quality flac releases, better as CD. But, to hear a difference, you really need highest quality equipment and even then, depends on the sound.

A properly mastered CD can represent the whole audible range; to properly represent the very quietest sounds (mosquito-in-an-empty-room level) requires doing dithering as part of the mastering process, but any competent masterer should be able to do that. AFAIK no properly blinded (ABX) listening test has ever shown a human-detectable difference between 24-bit and correctly mastered 16-bit.

> I hear the different of flac vs mp3 on my Shure SRH 940 and some other high quality headphones. On medium quality speakers I don't.

mp3 is a long long way below CD quality.

Unfortunately my A&H Xone:K2 does not have a 24 bit DAC so I can't really test with equipment and songs I know.

I think people who like vinyl more the CD just like the noise floor on top of the music and not that vinyl actually has higher quality. Everything before the pressing is digital anyway these days, just with higher resolution. And that's what I meant, your sound can't get better then the 24 bit releases used for mastering. You may like the sound more, but the quality is necessarily worse then the digital original.

> your sound can't get better then the 24 bit releases used for mastering. You may like the sound more, but the quality is necessarily worse then the digital original.

My point is that a correctly mastered CD will be perceptually indistinguishable from that digital original.

Have you ever found vinyl sounding different from its CD equivalent due to the equipment you play it on?

The few vinyl rips I have seem to have issues like a high noise floor (hearing the amplified sound of the needle pushing the vinyl during supposed silence, as well as random pops).

I am curious to know if that's seen as a feature and not a bug.

That sounds like vinyl crackle. It's such a sought after thing that people make entire sample libraries of it.

"Have you ever found vinyl sounding different from its CD equivalent due to the equipment you play it on?"

Many CD are remastered if not remixed, so they aren't perfect equivalents of the original vinyl; they usually also add compression to raise the perceived average volume (sometimes beyond clipping!), which kills the original dynamics and quality of the media. Some early CDs may have been direct conversion of the master into digital form, but if we take an old record and the equivalent CD issued recently, they're not the same thing anymore.

"The few vinyl rips I have seem to have issues like a high noise floor"

That's because of the needle friction and other interference by motor and other mechanical parts etc. all noise which is getting amplified. They've made miracles with pickups, RIAA preamps and other stuff, but we can't make a mechanical device that doesn't generate friction otherwise we would have invented perpetual motion. So yes, records are more noisy and have a much smaller dynamic range, although most modern overcompressed music would falsely suggest the opposite. A search for "loudness war" can bring some interesting information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

You know that vinyls get a mixdown from a tape (open-reel) or DAT master also, right?

Vinyl, like CD, has format limitations that need to be overcome. Most notably with vinyl, bass has to be converted to mono and high frequency content needs to be heavily EQ'd.

Vinyl isn't the "original" sound, and you should never mixdown a CD from a vinyl source (since in most cases you have the original master or a tape copy of it) unless you have absolutely no other choice.

Of course I know about limitations, I stopped using vinyl over 20 years ago. The OP was wondering why vinyl and CD sound different and besides the obvious media limitations I added that even a perfectly new record that doesn't crackle will produce noise because of friction. I also pointed out that today CDs don't come from the same master (1) used for vinyl. Sometimes they're also remixed (2) then compressed and limited (sigh). This may suggest that modern CD sound worse than vinyl while it should be the other way around, but greedy producers force their engineers to ruin the sound to make music louder. FWIW, I am one of hose Rush fans who stopped buying their CDs when Vapor Trails came out. I don't even have the mp3s of that awful sounding crap:(

1. stereo master tape, not the record press 2. from the same multitrack tape (often transferred onto digital) and sometimes with other audio added.

Well you have to master differently for a vinyl. At least you have to take it into consideration when mastering for digital and vinyl.

So it is possible to sound differently to the digital signal. The phono amplifier has to do some filtering, so this influences the sound too.

All in all records are a pretty bad medium for conserving music nowadays.. but for many people the experience is the most important thing.

>purely analog with zero possibility of any DRM is more permanent,

I wonder could a make an needle that only works with specific records now..

Doing a search on Bandcamp for songs that I like.. I was able to find none of them. I'd argue if they only solved the problem, then they solved the subset of the problem which excludes the songs that I would be after.

There's nothing to solve. Bandcamp is for finding music you'd probably never hear on radio or streaming.

Here's what you can do:

1: Find one album you like.

2: Click through the profiles of people who bought it (those icons under the album cover).

3: See what else they like.

You can also check out Bandcamp's blog and click through the tags on posts for genres you like: https://daily.bandcamp.com/

Yeah, they've solved the problem brilliantly for people who either don't want record company involvement (and I don't blame them) or would never get a record deal (me). But it will only ever be a supplier of niche(ish) content.

I only buy music on bandcamp these days. Usually 200-300 Euros a month, because I know the artists get most of the share. I really really really must be needy for some song that I go to beatport or some other service. I find it unbearable to pay extra for flac - seriously, bandwidth and storage is so cheap these days, 1.5 Euro extra for flac - absurd.

Secondly, I'm a DJ and even if I would not be able to hear the difference, there are people with certain hear impairments in which the psychoanalytic model does not fit. It's my job to bring the best possible sound quality.

But I hardly buy physical media anymore, it's just using up space of something I don't use and with the saved buck I just buy more music :)

My backup is done through git annex and my library is duplicated over many PCs and harddrives - it works quite well and I'm able to carry only a part of the library but still see everything. A simple "git annex get ..." will get the requested files. My girlfriend has my library as well and when I add new files, a quick "git annex sync [...]" will update her copy as well.

> In 2018, Bandcamp seems to have solved the digital music sales problem that the iTunes music store never could (DRM-free album downloads in lossless formats for less than the retail price of the CD or LP).

Until it’s inevitably integrated into YouTube Red (they bought Bandcamp)

You're thinking of BandPAGE - Bandcamp is still privately owned.

Whoops, you are correct!

I have been paying for YouTube Red since 2015. I really like the YouTube Music app and how I can save songs for offline use, and how it's kept up-to-date with songs I like on YouTube (as well as recommended suggestions) whenever my phone goes on WiFi, so my playlist never gets old. You also get other perks like keeping a YouTube video playing in the background on your phone.

I prefer using YouTube for music as opposed to other services because I listen to a lot of underground/developing artists who aren't as easily signed up to go on the larger platforms like Spotify. For that reason I also like Soundcloud, but I feel I find more relevance on YouTube.

Since I pay for YouTube Red, I don't get ads. I think the cost justifies it. So, if you have so much of a problem with ads, you should really consider just paying for it. It's a great service. Shouldn't you be paying for services you appreciate?

There's a huge difference between a product that's being funded by ads, and you can pay to switch the funding source, and a product that they're actively making the ad-funded experience worse specifically to push you to subscribe. One is just trying to keep a business afloat, the other is a company intentionally trying to irritate you.

or, or, hear me out...

I could use adblock, a free and crowd-sourced adblocker, to... block the ads.

YouTube already makes copious amounts of money outside of advertising and Red exclusivity. don't force that kind of an annoyance on people if you expect them to A) use your service or B) not subvert the crap you put in front of them.

there is no argument for ads anymore.

Youtube could make their ads unblockable by putting them in the content's video stream or just serving them from the same domain. I feel like they don't do that just as a way to be nice to adblockers, but I don't know why.

I'm pretty sure it would also be more expensive in terms of CPU and potentially disk.

The cost of concatenating two mp4† files is essentially zero. IIRC you can even `cat foo.mp4 bar.mp4 > baz.mp4` and it's supposed to still be valid mp4 (there may be same-codec restrictions, but even resolution can change).

The output of cat isn't valid MP4. The CPU cost of concatenating is small though, it can be done on the fly. Even easier for MP4 streaming (DASH).

The cost is not in the CPU, or the processing or the resources. The cost is in the people who leave.

They've a/b tested inserting ads into the video stream before. If most people acted like I did, then YouTube would have seen them come back once every week or two and leaving as soon as one of those ads came up.

Right now it seems like most content providers are actually experiencing competition as it's extremely easy to jump to the provider with the least onerous ads, while torrents create a floor in terms of how annoying your ads/drm can be before people pirate

They are doing it already, if I block googlevideo.com, the videos don't play.

Wanting to do targeting for the specific user makes that really hard. They would have to do real-time transcoding of the ad into the video. Makes more sense to transcode the video once at upload then dynamically insert just the ad.

Youtube controls the client, so they could switch to a format (a brand-new format if necessary) that makes it computationally cheap to catenate videos.

> YouTube already makes copious amounts of money outside of advertising and Red exclusivity.

What? Unless something drastically changed in the last two years Youtube still breaks about even [1]

I'm willing to bet that they are the largest hoster and streamer of video content in the world, and storage, servers and bandwidth ain't exactly free.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-goo...

What other revenue sources does Youtube have other than ads and Red subscription?

I would assume there is a fair amount of data collection that goes on with YouTube as well.

How does this contribute to revenue for youtube though? Certainly they will be using it to drive increase ad revenue, but the data collection of itself does not pay the bills.

I get YT Red for free with Play Music. Two things an adblocker can't help with are mobile and Chromecast, so I'm sticking with it for that.

uBlock works just fine on Firefox for Android...

It certainly doesn't for me....could you possibly share your uBlock config on pastebin?

Sorry, I use the default.

Does it work for the YouTube app?

No, for the site.

I agree. For $15/month family plan, my wife and I enjoy the music and we get no ads on YouTube. For $180/year it is a great entertainment value. That is two months of cable TV, which provides much less value.

Annoyingly, the family plan is unavailable to G Suite users.

Do you run G-Suite for your family? That would be the only reason I can think of to not be using a personal account for this purpose.

For a while you could get a free google apps account for up to 10 users. A free google account + your own domain name which costs you less than 8 bucks a year.

If they were smarter maybe they would just offer this as a paid feature on top of gmail. Its not like it costs them more money to deliver email to a different domain.

I _think_ (not entirely certain as the docs are pretty bad) that the very-recently-accounced Google Cloud Identity free tier does almost that for free; but it's just the identity service, and doesn't include any apps like GMail. Not sure if it has mail routing settings, or if that's just standard DNS.

Because of these issues I abandoned moving my family to G-Suite I had setup and instead use it for forwarding to our free Gmail. Not sure if we're missing out on anything much we would've had from the free tier of G-Suite.

I pay for red, but the real annoying thing is you can only have 1 youtube video playing at once.

So if i'm listing to music on my tv and open a link to youtube on my desktop, it stops the music on my tv.

At one point they had it so if you were listening to a song on Google Music on one device and then opened a YouTube video on another, it would stop the song on Google Music.

That would be rewarding bad behavior. If Google wants money they can ask. If Google wants to play games to pressure me into giving them money, they can go perform anatomically improbable acts on themselves.

I have Play Music, and Red comes with it. I like the current YouTube Red experience. It actually encourages me to watch more videos.

I have to say that since I've been paying for music, I've always had the one complaint: Why does the industry insist that each music portal have a fragmented, incomplete catalogue.

In a world where everyone pays for music, I suppose this makes sense, since to have access to the complete catalog one would need to subscribe to each and every service out there. The one exception was grooveshark, which had everything.

I think google may have succeeded where grooveshark failed, in strong-arming the industry to provide access to their complete catalogue. Originally I subscribed to youtube-red because I couldn't stand adverts popping up during video lectures. I suppose they succeeded in frustrating me.

But $10/month is the correct price point for an unrestricted music catalogue, and now ad-free streaming of other media is just a bonus.

My one complaint: I have to use the various companies’ shitty players to access the music. Spotify’s discovery is just about making me not hate their “value-add” too much, but the consumer is going to win big when startups can one-stop license all the music for $10/m and start doing interesting things with it

The music industry isn’t a monolith, there is an array of companies and rights holders that control over a century’s worth of recorded music. The only single party that could step in and simplify the legal morass is the government.

This doesn't prevent the industry from getting together to make their product more accessible. It didn't stop them from banding together to make it less accessible (RIAA/MPAA).

The government has also already shown they can force licensing as they did for radio.

Yes, the music industry is extraordinarily complex. There are many layers of legal complexity that apply differently (consent decrees) across the industry. There are archaic rules about the source of the music.

And generally, the fact that distribution of original music is effectively a two-sided market business model (media) means music isn't worth as much until it is popular, so one method has been to give it away for free to get to that point (think demo CDs).

Spotify deserves a lot of credit for handling the mainstream content to an international user base. The business rules of serving which version of a song (two users who play the same song can be served different content because of licensing rules), accounting for the royalties to different publishers, etc... are hard enough to figure out.

uBlock and youtube-dl is the poor mans alternative. But I suppose it will not work so well on a phone.

uBlock works on a phone on Firefox (on Android). There's also NewPipe: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/

Newpipe added the ability to subscribe to channels a few months ago. I'm still occasionally finding videos it fails to play but overall a fantastic app.

Unfortunately videos now stop playing when you turn off the screen with Firefox for Android, so you drain battery faster if you just want to listen.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...

I agree, I wish I could get YouTube Red, I have been trying for a few years now, but is still only available in very few countries. I love playing all kinds of music videos on my AV system. I’m happy to pay for ad free high quality video and audio and suround sound. In the UK Sky’s music channels are awful (i dropped Sky last year mainly because of this) terrible poor quality sound, no HD video and long adverts literally every 10 minutes, adverts are particularly annoying on a music channel. Apple Music has a pathetic choice for selectable Video and no Video channel. I don’t understand why the market is not serving my needs, I’m sure there are plenty of others who want the same as me.

Unfortunately this is only in the US as many other google programs. I have google music and if I were living in the US I'd have Red included. But it isn't, Red isn't even available.

So I make my own red, i.e. see videos with ad-block or youtube-dl.

Google really needs to make their stuff global, right now it's extremely US centric.

"extremely US centric" All content services are like this. Even Netflix hides some content from non-Americans.

The common excuse is licensing and copyright. Yet none of these services are actively trying to fix it. They just do not care about non-Americans.

Many other American companies make excuses too. Apparently non-American money is no good. Heck, Microsoft have differing support services. They even actively try and hide the contact information. When you find you figure out quickly they ignore your contact requests. Unless you mention bomb, gun or addresses of their employees families. Oh the creepy things you have to do to get them to do their job. It is vile nasty work indeed.

> The common excuse is licensing and copyright. Yet none of these services are actively trying to fix it. They just do not care about non-Americans.

What do you think initiatives like Netflix Originals are for?

Content owners are trying very hard to squeeze as much as they can without losing all their agreements.

Netflix is ubiquitous so clearly they can be charged more and more until they drop the agreement and a show falls off.

Do you really think Netflix wants anything less than to offer every TV show and movie ever created? That'd be a huge advantage for them.

But every step they take toward that makes it harder to negotiate for more. So they've started making their own content that costs upfront but with no recurring fees.

FYI YT Red is about to launch in 100 countries in the upcoming months. AFAIK the launched has been delayed a few years because right owners used the occasion to renegociate the contract they had with Google Play Music.

I actually don't want to pay for services from google though, nice if vimeo had something similar.

> Since I pay for YouTube Red, I don't get ads. I think the cost justifies it. Since I have started using ad blockers I don't get ads neither.

> Shouldn't you be paying for services you appreciate? Sure, but if 'lacks advertisement' is the selling point then it sounds like a bad joke that I don't get.

You are using Adblockers to circumvent the primary means of making money on YouTube while enjoying the services for free. Sooner or later, they will block you from using the application.

"Lacks Advertisement" is not the main point. It's one of the points. Ability to play music in the background is one big advantage.

I am waiting for YouTube Red to come to my country. It's one more subscription to add to my already big list of subscriptions. But for now, I can see the value in it.

> You are using Adblockers to circumvent the primary means of making money [...]

I'm using adblockers to control the way I interact with the content, on my device.

I should perhaps clarify, I don't use YT Android app, only Firefox.

> [...] "Lacks Advertisement" is not the main point. It's one of the points. Ability to play music in the background is one big advantage.

This is precisely why I don't use YT app on Android. Firefox allowed this by default, now you just need an addon to re-enable the "big feature".

Could you share how you are successfully blocking ads on YouTube (without sitting through a blank screen while the ad plays in the background)?

afaik, uBlock Origin no longer is capable of it.

Does anyone know of a way to combine youtube-dl + Plex or something like that to simulate YouTube's subscription list? That is my primary means of media consumption rather than TV, and I would gladly pay for TY Red, but they don't offer it in my country.

Possibly a bug on your end. Win 10 w/ firefox, uBlock filters all youtube ads, and it's pretty much a stock install of uBlock.

You're right, so much for following guides on the internet to optimize things.

> Cohen, who joined YouTube in 2016 after about 30 years in the record business, including stints as a road manager for Run-DMC and a senior executive at Warner Music Group.

I'm not sure he understands yet the culture of the organization he's in, and the way most internet companies work. The fact that Youtube is king of the hill does not mean he's sitting on a monopoly he can milk for revenue. On the Internet, if you crap on your users you become history in 6 months time.

Not if you're the actual monopoly because of network effects.

See youtube, facebook, google, microsoft.

Google search is a monopoly only in a regulatory/market leadership sense; they have what's called the incumbent's advantage, they were the first to provide a satisfactory solution and people don't have significant reason to switch to copy cats. Similar for Gmail.

When we are moving to platforms like Android or Windows, yes, that's a strong technical monopoly entrenched by network effects, but it's no longer an internet product.

Facebook is somewhat of a mixed bag, as they are recently finding out they have widely overestimated their "crap on the users" margin.

Not if you're the actual monopoly because of network effects.

I'd have thought network effects are exactly why companies on the internet can't mess around with their users. If a few people start using another site and share it with their friends, the rest could all follow very quickly.

Youtube does have a big advantage of video being too large to move around quickly. It would take quite some time to bootstrap a new video service with even a remotely comparable catalog.

> It would take quite some time to bootstrap a new video service with even a remotely comparable catalog.

That's true, but it's a question of adoption - it has nothing to do with file size.

Vimeo are a rival streaming service, and they're very good, but they don't offer YouTube-style monetization.

Not to mention 10 years worth of archived videos that will be lost (and are currently lost due to censoring and de-ranking). Youtube at this point is like the Library of Alexandria, but they just decided to burn down half the books and replace the index with a list of their favorite ones. You can read books for free, but they inject advertisements between paragraphs.

No, network effects are the barrier preventing you from moving elsewhere. The stronger they are, the more of your friends have to simultaneously move elsewhere for you to move as well. In other words, the stronger the network effects are, the more a company can mess around with their users.

> If a few people start using another site

But they don't, because they can't. YouTube recommendations are only ever internal links to other YouTube videos. Where would they go, anyway? Self-hosting and ads? They'd miss out on YouTube's monetization.

Some YouTube personalities are quite vocal in how much they dislike YouTube, but they can't really leave. Perhaps if Vimeo looked into advertising monetisation there'd at least be a rival platform.

Hi 5, Altavista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, ....

Wang, DEC, Olivetti, Commodore, Atari, Compaq, ....

This seems like one of those things corporations obviously do, but you'd be hard pressed to believe someone would be dumb enough to openly state they do. Now when you wonder if YouTube is actively trying to irritate you, you can know that yes, that's exactly what they're trying to do.

The YouTube team's behavior is getting a lot more annoying of late. The other thing I can't get rid of is the popup suggesting I get YouTube Red every like 48-72 hours of my life.

There's an associated set of ads on the Play Music app as well.

Every couple of days there'll be an interstital/overlay/message about the paid subscription option, it's incredibly annoying because it doesn't let you dismiss it forever.

I've previously paid for Spotify and for Google Play Music, I've gone back to buying my music (hooray Bandcamp) and don't stream any on my phone but get subjected to all the ads anyway.

I came across iYTBP - injected YouTube Background Playback. It allows one to

1. view 2k 60 fps videos in app

2. background playback

3. download for forever

4. dark mode

5. no advertisement ever

6. VP9 codec

7. loop playback

8. pip mode

and much more without rooting your phone.

https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-iytb...

This app is also available by Youtube Vanced name in XDA app store for free.

Alternatively, just make the public playlist of videos you like to watch and use youtube-dl cmd tool to download all those videos inside Android using Termux app. I prefer this method over the earlier one.

Sooner or later, Google is going to come after this guy. The ProTube app on iOS did most of this stuff, and they made him shut it down.

Don't think the same thing will work on android.

NewPipe also supports most, if not all, of these features, and it's open source. https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

Newspipe is my yt client of choice on android. Otherwise mps-youtube.

I am all the more disposed to tolerate a little more advertising on the youtube site since youtube kindly tolerates download with youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxx

you can also

  youtube-dl -o- URL | mpv -

You know what frustrates me? I can't get YouTube Red because I am in Canada. And then the coalation called Fairplay Canada have the audacity to ask the government to censor the internet in order to stop piracy. No way in hell. We will stop this.

It's totally reasonable to push people towards their music service and there's nothing inherently wrong about doing it this way. However, it feels a little strange to see a company weaponizing advertisements in their marketing strategy.

> will “frustrate and seduce” users of YouTube’s free service

Oh look at Google once again thinking of alienating their users once more

I use YouTube for background music while I program, but fortunately my wide variety of instrumental music choices are not inundated with ads.

To me this indicates they are putting their muscle behind a certain flavor of content representative of specific demographics inclined to spend money. If YouTube tried to muscle me in this way I would just use Amazon Music instead. I detest ads enough that I would alter my preferences, behavior, and content choices to remain ad free.

To those of you who are subscribing to YouTube or watching copious amounts of ads thank you for indirectly funding my entertainment.

You may find this interesting, if you haven't heard of it before: http://musicforprogramming.net/

Has anyone else encountered the 25 minute ads? Mine was a full episode of some home-improvement show sponsored by Lowes.

I got one ad that was 10 minutes and couldn't be skipped. I said, yeah screw that noise, copy/paste youtube-dl url

Why don't you install an adblocker, which will block the ads for you?

Some people are labouring under the misapprehension that adblockers are immoral.

I think a 25' ad for a 5' video is a lot more immoral...

I have one, not everything gets blocked.

Ah, ok. Try AdGuard, it works great for YT ads.

uBlock has youtube specific rules, check my setup https://i.imgur.com/S9pCwIc.png

Well, one or the other. I don't think it makes a difference.

Make sure you have these rules enabled https://i.imgur.com/S9pCwIc.png

This blocks all twitter/facebook/google/botnet widgets, other tracking elements, all ads, even those on youtube. Highly increases your privacy and browsing experience. I use these rules for so long I even forgot youtube has ads.

Sometimes I just pull up the youtube app on my iPad no ad blockers work on there. And if I'm making food, I honestly don't worry as much about the ad.

But a 10 minute ad for a 2 minute video? Even then i'll download the video just to spite the entire ad platform, thats insane.

I use the latest uBlock Origin with the latest stable Google Chrome on Linux. I have the block lists above (https://i.imgur.com/S9pCwIc.png) enabled, and I'm still getting lots of ads on YouTube. Ads started appearing in 2018, it was fine before.

Any advice how I can get rid of ads on YouTube?

I've encountered one 25 minute ad on YouTube, I don't recall what it was for though. I laughed and reloaded the page, and off to the races.

I've also encountered a number that range in the 5-10 minute range. I don't use YouTube very often, so I'm not sure how regularly these occur.

I've had a few.

It's annoying. I don't use a blocker. I don't skip the ads. Yet youtube shows me some really tedious 25 minute ad (for obscure builing material; for some online god knows what; for some money scam).

I thought it must be some experiment to see how bad ads could get before people like me hit reload or start blocking, because it makes no sense otherwise.

Pretty sure 90 minutes the longest I've seen.

Having to wade through at least 5 seconds of ads per video has made me reluctant to use Youtube anymore.

The other day I forgot to re-enable my ad blocker after testing a site, and I'm amazed that anyone can even use YouTube without blocking the ads (let alone enjoy it).

I literally have no idea why anyone would go through that to watch a 5-minute video.

I use youtube for music in the car on the way to work and during work hours (which I have an adblocker for).

Two experiences I'd like to relate, In the car, music being interrupted more often with annoying ads. Even more so in the last 3 months. Some ads even asking me to take a survey in the youtube app. This annoys me and makes me hate using youtube. Often will make me switch to using bandcamp (which I purchase music on that I really like) or soundcloud.

Experience 2, when youtube brought out a new algo to pick the next song to play. After stringing together ~10 bangers in a row, some that I haven't heard recently / before, I actually looked into youtube red. Can't remember why I didn't start a subscription.

I'm not opposed to paying for a service, I've had Spotify, Apple and Tidal before. I know the Spotify annoying ads worked well for them. I'm not sure how well it will work for youtube.

Depends how you define "worked for them". Spotify is still not working profitable to this day.

Since the music industry sets arbitary rates for Spotify, it cannot be profitable for any significant period of time - the rates will rise to make it break-even again.

I hope this only happens for people in countries where paying for Youtube Red is actually allowed.

It's fine on my computer thanks to adblocking, but using Youtube on iOS devices and Chromecast is so damn annoying. It's absurd that they ban me from paying to skip the ads.

Is a business model built on people's ignorance of ad-blockers really reliable?

Do ad-blockers now also block video-ads in youtube?

Yeah, they've done that for a long time.

Why does youtube not detect/fight this? I mean they can easily delay serving the real video until after the ad is shown.

I'd imagine a significant portion of their traffic comes from iOS/Android users, and it's not as easy to block video ads on those.

I listen to Youtube fairly extensively while working, but don't get any ads because I have an ad blocker.

I don't even get "you have an ad-blocker installed" warnings...

I get around the ads by muting the sound. It neuters the ad and I just look away for 30 seconds or however long the ad is. Consider it a temporary state of zen.

Oh that's amusing to me, since I use uBlock and Disconnect and download things with youtube-dl. I wonder how they'd work on 'frustrating' me. All I'd do is add a userscript into Greasemonkey or uBlock to get past their nonsense and be on my way again.

And Google probably knows every last thing about you so they can gauge your willingness to pay (based on say your willingness to pay for other Google services, the number of impulse purchases you make on Amazon, etc).

Can confirm. Was running a playlist on a Windows machine with Edge as a cheap substitute for burn-in/stability testing. No dice: it would stop after every song with a ad dialog that required clicking (for YT Red, or for Chrome). Horrible experience generally - it wasn't clear if this torture was reserved for Edge users or I was special that day. I switched to Vevo and it provided the necessary hardware testing that I was seeking.

Why not Spotify?

I should have considered it but I am not someone who streams live content so just a static playlist of music videos was all I was looking for.

Spotify is not live content. You have albums or playlists like YT, but it's made for that and the experience is much better.

Also, you avoid doenloading video content when all you need is audio.

Actually, I was looking for video content. The idea was to take this machine and stress its bits for a bit to see if it was stable.

I would love to be able to pay and just block ads on YouTube forever. Unfortunately a lot of the music i like listening to, just isn't available anywhere aside from YouTube.

Even more frustrating is lately i am getting pop ups every 2-3 songs asking if i am still watching. The solution to prevent this is to get YouTube red. Unfortunately it isn't available where i live.

I must be running just the right combination of adblockers because I swear I've never once seen an advertisement on Youtube.

It is harder to avoid with smart TVs and other hardware with YT apps.

Isn't that the reason to avoid hardware you have no control over, though? AFAIK, this isn't a problem if you're using a HTPC, or not using the app on mobile. This isn't any different than complaining that you can't leave the walled garden in iOS, it is the product working as intended. Which does have some benefits (i.e. better security for iOS vs. android sideloaded apps), but drawbacks as well.

Couldn't one have said the same about those annoying self-plugging Spotify ads on Spotify advertising Spotify premium? I haven't heard them lately, but they were like 30 seconds of a recorded cricket chirping. It seems like a common tactic. Youtube wants to lock in MRR.

Maybe I'm one of those users? I've been getting two ads before almost every YouTube video for weeks now.

Even more annoyingly, the first ad still says, falsely, "your video will start in .. seconds" or "you can skip in .. seconds".

YouTube/Google probably have so-detailed user profile (or maybe I should say "dossier") that they probably know with a very high accuracy who is likely to pay and who isn't.

This feels like 'racketeering' no ?

YouTube Red is solid as everyone uses Youtube to listen to music. THus it knows and creates the best mix playlist especially if you listen to many, many genres of music. Apple Music like Siri is stupid .. the playlist it creates aren't based on all genres I listen to but only one.

Also Red integrates well with Google Home as you can tell home to wake you up to whatever song and play whatever song.

No commercials is a bonus to all previous mentioned.

YouTube Red is not available in all countries Apple Music is.

And Apple Music is not available on all devices YouTube Red is.

hooktube.com

(provides youtube content without the youtube crap)

This isn't new, is it?

free is dying

If true, would it be different than the NPR pledge drives, really ?

I think the 'P' in NPR is the biggest difference.

In all honesty, I don't see why npr being public changes the story. You neither have to pay for YouTube or npr.

I understand the emotional asentiment that because npr is non-profit, it's somehow more worthy to endure hours of pledges.

Fwiw, I'm near the point where I stop using YouTube as ads get more and more agressive and less relevant. But I have no problems with YouTube trying to maximize their profits.

Yeah, it's a lot different.

NPR used to be publicly funded, much like the BBC in the UK. The idea was to offer objective journalism for the strength of democracy. It has helped a lot in the UK may have helped prevent the current disaster we now experience in the US. When that public funding started being removed, NPR had to start acting more like a private company, satisfying target demographics and seeking seeking donor support.

So, NPR pledge drives are in large part them trying to maintain an objective perspective. A feeble attempt, sure, but they are trying. Youtube is merely maximizing profit.

I'm no fan of YouTube, but to be fair to them, it's probably not so much about maximizing profit as it is an effort to avoid the wrath of the RIAA.

Not to be pedantic, but even if that's true, the RIAA is advocating for the profit seeking motives of the labels it represents.

Yeah, uh Brexit is held up as the second-most-terrible thing driven by the same provincialism as Trump-election. BBC is indeed great, and the NPR comparison to YouTube is nonsense. But UK didn't quite avoid disasters (caused largely by Facebook, just as here).

Donating to NPR doesn't reduce the number of NPR pledge drive announcements you hear.

It can. They sometimes have drives with a goal and actually stop pushing the fundraising as hard as soon as the goal is met.

It's fundamentally different because NPR is actually non-profit. It's also different in that donating to NPR doesn't stop the NPR ads (which are growing, all the sponsorship announcements…) for you, as NPR isn't personalized. There are some economic similarities though.

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