Apparently Ad Blockers are not allowed on YouTube. Is this a new thing?
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I don't know of any data that backs this up but my perception is advertising on YouTube has gotten way heavier in the last 12 months. Used to be short ads, usually 1, that you could skip after a few seconds. Now it seems there are multiple ads on each video, some unskippable, even the longer ones.
I don't expect YouTube to be completely free, and of course it's their platform they can do what they like, but at what point are they just getting greedy and should perhaps realize the result of that is going to be more people using ad blockers. I mean, their 2019 revenue was 15bn, it was almost 30bn in 2022. They hardly struggling to monetize. Will be interesting to see where this goes. Perhaps it's an attempt to push people to premium.
If I pause the video to do something, another couple of ads will play after restarting.
I wouldn't be surprised if they ramped up the ads the more you used it, new users would get less ads to make it more attractive. After you build up some hours, have some subscribers they might reckon they could squeeze more in there as you're more invested in the platform.
Let’s be real, at this point YouTube is too big to fail. Without Google’s capital it would be impossible to do this at scale. Also I would much rather support Google and independent creators rather than Netflix and the entertainment industry.
Of the independent creators I know about, not a single one is satisfied with YouTube and their draconian rules. They all have their own sponsors in the videos and Patreon accounts. Google, like other major tech companies, has proven time and again they care about their bottom line above all. Let’s not pretend they are good guys standing up for the little guy.
> rather than Netflix and the entertainment industry.
Wasn’t Netflix specifically a big supporter of independent creators, giving a lot of them a chance they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise? There was even a running joke that anyone could get a show on Netflix. Perhaps I’m mistaken or that has changed but it seems like any other of the big streaming services would be a better target for that comment.
Ask yourself this: "If youtube stopped existing tomorrow, what would I do?"
Chances are your first thought was something along the lines of "Hm, well I'd probably just...", as opposed to simple abject despair.
And I bet same goes for content creators. They'd find a way. And it might even be better.
In fact, the more prudent ones already have more than one basket for their eggs already, such that if and when youtube does "that thing", their patrons will know exactly where to find them next, with minimal friction.
I think it’s a function of preferring longer content to show more ads so what was once a 4 minute read blog post is now a 15 minute video that meanders around and around killing time.
People watch it, very much, so it’s not YouTube’s fault entirely. But I wish they would incentivize valuable content over chaff. I think there’s a lot of bloat wastage that exists only because YouTube pays more and encourages it.
And as the creation of the Universe was, so to was the web becoming the next advertising frontier widely considered a bad move. So get off my web, and go set up your monetized fiefdom elsewhere. This place was not meant for your ilk. Leave us, and take your shitty rip-off content syndication farms with you. Leave and sully our search indexes no more! Go and find your own damn playground.
Oh, wait, what's that? Don't want to move somewhere or build a network that requires opt-in to your shitty monetization schemes because you'd miss out on all the eyeballs that won't follow you?
Well... Now you know why we complain. Because your arse feels entitled to pollute the shit out of our indexes and poison our wells.
Who defined what web was meant to?
And you can read other parts as they were designed and added.
The problem with ads is that the ad-pushers basically forced people to use adblockers. In the early days, people put up with a few ads here and there as the cost of seeing stuff for free, plus ad-blockers didn't exist yet. But then the ad-pushers kept making the experience worse and worse, and the ads more and more intrusive and obnoxious. People invented ad-blockers, and as the ads got even worse (and even dangerous: many were laden with viruses), more and more people turned to ad-blockers, even if before they were ambivalent or even wanted to support the advertising model.
This story is as old as the WWW. It's the same thing now. YouTube ads weren't that bad before, but as several comments here have noted, they're getting worse and worse. So before, only die-hard ad-haters would employ ad-blockers, but now the advertisers are pushing more people to use them.
Collectively, those two things make the ads on YouTube infuriating. It's then made worse by the ramp up in the volume of ads. Either work with content creators on when ads are displayed to make the content and ad experience better (a la tv) or come up with a different method. And for the love go god, git rid of those stupid ads that pop over the content.
This is part of the problem with YouTube. I watch a shitload of ads and the creators still cannot pay their bills.
What would replace YouTube if it didn't exist? Well, PeerTube gives an example of one possible direction, Discord (or IRC) another. YouTube's continued existence prevents any better alternatives from developing. It's squatting on the conceptual space for "where I go to watch short videos" and acting as a middle-man between me and creators, then using its monopoly over that connection to shaft us both.
- Regularly see static ads for fake Mario Android games that are an OBVIOUS violation of Nintendo copyright.
- Regularly see snakeoil ads. Complete garbage that Google used to be too good for. Now they'll take anyone's money.
- Regularly get an entire page of ads when I search for something on mobile. Not a single actual result until I scroll below 3 rows of ads.
- Ad breaks have seemingly doubled.
- Unskippable ads were 5, then 7, now up to 15 seconds.
Secondly, the yt experience without adblocking is so poor that I cringe any time I have to watch something on a device (eg my phone) that I don't have adblocking set up on. For whatever reason at the moment I get bombarded with get-rich-quick scams promising to teach me trading (thanks but I used to work in the city - I don't need your bs "advice") and deepfake scams saying Elon Musk is giving away his money.
When it comes to corporations like Google I don't really mind watching ads but I don't want to help them with their revenue.
However this still doesn't mean there's a reliable channel to detect whether the ad was actually displayed, and as far as I understand there might be some architectural limits as to what data can be collected by a given server (for example, the CDN).
Now, I don't think advertisers 'd be very happy if Google counted simply downloading the ad as an impression :)
That's how it's been done for years, and verified with tracking pixel from a third-party to correlate numbers. I used to work at a startup in the ad space ages ago and most third-parties were on block lists, we weren't. So we couldn't get paid for real impressions because the numbers didn't add up.
How would a site confidently verify that a video was actually played as opposed to simply downloaded? The path of least resistance is good enough, and Google is Google, advertisers do what they say. If they're unhappy is there even a way to let them know?
A simple check that the rest of the video is requested at least $now >= ($ad_request_time + $min_skip_or_view_time) will catch most adblockers while degrading none of the regular users. All done server-side, no need to complicate things. Sure the adblocker could play some elevator tunes and display a spinner while waiting, but what's even the point. Next step they require a hash of the ad in the next request as proof and on it goes.
See facebooks markup for the "Sponsored" string for a similar example in the wild. Last I checked ublock origin gave up.
Back to the technical argument, I was refering to the fact that a DB read to check if an ad should be served (done on the player page) as well as the DB write to check if the video was downloaded earlier (on the CDN, we have signatures there and expiry date passed as a parameter) might be infeasible from the architectural/performance point of view, but I gotta admit I actually don't have any relevant knowledge here so I'm just speculating because this seems interesting.