I've had YouTube Premium since its inception. Whenever I'm around someone else who puts on a free-tier version of YouTube its rather shocking how frequent and intrusive the commercial ads are.
Some ads still sneak into my world though. My current peeve is when going to a restaurant and they have "the game" on full blast. I'm perfectly fine with people watching/listening to the game - and half the time the restaurant is considered a "sports bar", so I get it. But what ends up happening is that those major games are mostly ads. And the ads are twice as loud as the game. So here I am, paying to eat at a place and I'm listening to ads. I've been tempted to ask the server if we'll be receiving a discount for listening to each ad like a mobile game!
I wish more of these places would have CC on. Especially if multiple programs are on, you can't have the audio. There's a solution right there, built right in, just waiting.... page in the conversation about how accessibility can be useful to more than just the immediately disabled.
Unless the volume is turned up annoyingly loud, I find the visuals to be the annoyingly loud part: The subdued hues of the painted walls, tile floors, and wood trim reflecting back to my eyes from the ambient lighting are invisible compared to the 500 nits of flourescent colors jump cutting back and forth.
Turning on CC but leaving the visual assault in place doesn't help my eyes much. I would feel less abused if they'd turn the screen off but leave the game audio over the radio.
If I'm just there to eat, one TV is no big deal to me, but the TV Wall is definitely a distraction.
But at least don't try to have the audio on. As technically nifty as some of the restaurants are that try to have per-table speakers or a streaming option are, CC is still less obtrusive to me.
But of course everyone's mileage will vary.
Get a TV-B-Gone.
But I guess there is no law that says that patrons should be shielded from ads. And I don’t think they would listen if I gave them a complaint (why would they give up a source of revenue?). So I don’t know what can be done about it short of a concerted effort by many members. And they (and myself) would probably not be motivated enough to go to that level of effort just to get rid of some irksome ads.
For those reasons adblock is a must, and paying for YouTube Premium is not an option (I’m not going to voluntarily give a single penny of my money to Google)
Sure, I’ve got CuriosityStream and Nebula subs, but not all content creators use those platforms.
It is what it is.
0: https://nebula.app/faq#:~:text=How%20do%20the%20creators%20g...
1: https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/youtube-partner-progra....
2: https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=2... and https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...
My fear is I would pay the fee for no ads, but Google would still collect data on what I view and monetize that by selling me ads somewhere else.
By not loading the ads at all, it may stymie non-Google ad networks attempts to profile you.
If youtube was 90% premium members, it would likely be an unrecognizably better platform, since users instead of advertisers would be the core profit center.
Netflix has the same MBAs and bean counters, but their product has no ads and orders of magnitude less clickbait. Its clear they make content geared for their users, not for their advertisers. Youtube is very heavy with advertiser friendly content, and both creators and users pay heavily for that (but its *quote* Free! *unquote*)
Just install that and uBlock Origin and you're set: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublock-origin...
Also, when I accidentally open a video in a private browsing window where I'm not logged in. DAMN IT WHY IS ALL THESE ADS.
Although, I have to say that the ads on YouTube were some of the most targeted of any site, and I would often sit through them.
So you'll get whatever's in the B-list of ads and that may be just two.
I hate when they do this. I just leave and go somewhere else. I'm not submitting to Voight-Kampff just to see a LinkedIn profile.
Note: I tried a few google search to find accurate data, but it goes all over the place; is there an accurate estimation somewhere?
(anti ad blocker leads to anti anti ad blocker)
Most of the time it's journaldemontreal.com (and other Quebecor-related websites) that prevents me from reading their articles with my adblocker. Which is a blessing in a way, because it's basically a glorified tabloid with a lot of articles of dubious quality.
I'm on Firefox with both AdBlockPlus and uBlock Origin.
0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...
Of course this isn't 1:1 parity in reality, but the ultimate manifestation of ad blocking is that.
Google had a good system a few years ago that I was probably the only sucker who paid them for it (and probably why they stopped it). You could pay a chosen amount monthly, and they would not show you ads as a result. It wasn't perfected, but the concept was good for those who understand the problem and want to work towards a solution.
I payed $5/mo and they would roll over unused funds. It worked pretty well, except that it would still show where the banners were, just blank whitespace instead of an ad.
Some things about our brain we just can't change: we like things we've seen before. Both brands and people. Recognition makes a big difference, for example in arbitrary choices when shopping.
This is a completely unsubstantiated claim, and also false if you think about it.
[1] https://swizec.com/blog/pirates-downfall-causes-global-warmi...
>Ad-blockers took off once they started throwing animated banners at us
which is still not true. When they took off the ads were still minimal.
The advertising industry was really aggressive even then. Some publishers put as many popups and banner ads as they could. I'm not saying all publishers would do this, but I have to admit the worst actors are the ones I strongly remember.
Only difference now is that there's a lot more tracking and ads are more insidious where they blend in with content now.
Although every now and then an ad happens to pre-load before the video starts but I just refresh the video page and the ad goes away.
This has been a hot topic lately[2,3], but at what point is you watching YouTube for years without ads, without paying for Premium, ethically stealing or "piracy"? YouTube was buying petabytes of Hard Drive storage a day in 2012 to keep up with the demand[4], i'm sure it's nearly an Exabyte a day or more right now, so it doesn't cost $0 for YouTube to run the service, they just happen to have enough people on Mobile watching and clicking ads to make a profit[5] and subsidize the rest of us.
0: https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...
1: https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=2...
2: https://youtu.be/-znPFc-0VS8?t=149
3: https://youtu.be/6jUxOnoWsFU
4: https://sumanrs.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/youtube-yearly-cost...
5: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
Here's my take. It's not "piracy" or "ethical piracy" (what the fuck?). The content creators put it out on YT with the expectation that it will get viewed. The little money they receive now is simply a bonus. It's only piracy if the content creator put it out on a platform for some dollar amount (ie, direct to consumer model) and then it is later re-uploaded for free by another channel or via other means..
In other words, you can't claim piracy when the "price" is $0 up front.
As for YT, I don't really care. They are subsidized by the data that is fed to them (ie, viewing history) and resold to advertisers. They get their nut.
If anything, this should really push the forefront on innovation for a decentralized video streaming platform. One organization or group should not have this much power over who gets the "top views" via a proprietary algorithm.
Piracy in general is just 'unauthorized use'[0]. YouTube requires you watch ads to use their website, so not doing that is piracy. The only reason there's no consequences for adblock are because (A) it'd be bad optics and bad PR to sue regular viewers, and (B) YouTube sees the value of subsidizing those who block ads as a plus, since it means they can keep their tight grip on where 'everyone' goes to watch videos and thus where creators are required to upload if they want people to see their stuff. If they blocked ~37% [1] of viewers with adblock, different services more lenient to ad blockers (at first) would be able to actually attract viewers and perhaps get the content creators to start dual-uploading their content.
Piracy is another word for copyright infringement. Blocking ads on YouTube is not piracy because you are not violating copyright law (in any country that I'm aware of) by viewing only a portion of the content that is delivered to you. DVRs do the same thing as ad blockers for TVs, but in the U.S., the courts have ruled that DVR services do not infringe the copyrights of media companies.[1]
YouTube and other Google services don't forbid ad blocking in their terms of service.[2] If they did, there would be an uproar because Google itself includes an ad blocker in Chrome, which of course does not block any YouTube or Google ads.[3]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business-us-cablevision-cour...
I've seen it block Google ads a few times on this one website which cycles through them every minute. It says the ad 'used too many resources and Chrome has killed it'.
Taking advantage of you, by manipulating your mind is one of the basic premises of ads.
In some ideal 'fair' world ads would just present information for you to make rational choices - but nope, the reality is the ads industry is based on emotional/psychological manipulation. If you seek to understand you can research about the evolution of the industry since the time of Freud where they co-opted psychological techniques to sell things by exacerbating people's psychoses.
Put another way, your arguments would only make sense if the advertisers played fair but they are abusive and try to trick you. You can't make a fair deal with conniving.
The reality of this is so bad that it is destroying our society - at what point is allowing massive scale psychological manipulation/abuse for profit destroying society?
My post here is a bit ranty but I get upset at the lack of fair context in the presuppositions of your argument.