YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
bleepingcomputer.com
bleepingcomputer.com
I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting. I could count the times that I have found an internet ad interesting in my lifetime using half the fingers of one hand. Personalised or not, the vast majority is useless, badly made, that just takes processing time both for the computer and my brain.
I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads. If a website says that I have to disable the adblocker to view it, and I cannot go around it, 99% of the times I do not visit it, I do not care. I pay the people I want to support directly and that's it. I use bandcamp to buy the music I like directly. I subscribe to patreon to the ones that I feel they bring value to my life. But for the occasional or ephemeral video or entertainment, I will just as easily live without, as the disruption ads cause is worse than not viewing that content.
I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites). If a website blocks this, I am not going to sacrifise my experience and I am not interested in browsing it.
- I start the video, an ad is shown within 30 secs.
- I fast forward a few minutes, the SAME ad is shown again.
- I jump to anywhere on the timeline, the SAME ad is shown again.
At least show me something that is relevant, like facebook does. The ads there reflect what I usually look for. On YT, none of the ads are relevant to me, ever.
It's just ridiculous.
Never have I seen self-entitled people so furious as when YT requests they buy premium in order to remove ads. What, should YT be hosted for free without ads and without a subscription?
I get that ads suck and companies suck, but self-entitled people suck too; most of us here are devs and we get paid because our company has to make money _somehow_.
YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription. They refuse either option and instead are furious that YT doesn't offer itself completely for free.
This is the main point IMO. When you have a printed newspaper or magazine you are not annoyed by the ads.
If we had ads that (1) do not move, (2) are not modal/do not pop up, (3) do not track you outside the website, (4) do not take MB's of data I would be willing to tolerate them and they could even be helpful.
Youtube has become unwatchable without ad blockers. It used to be better than TV, now it is worse and you cannot skip them.
Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads.
Being able to manipulate my own machine and what I want to view is entirely up to me. This can't be infringed.
There is always the option today to block from the client side, but I can see this changing if there's enough money involved.
not saying this applies to you but might it be that ads are distracting enough that they would be an actual accessibility problem affecting people with ADHD - if so is not allowing people to block ads likely to run into legal issues?
Some websites just keep throwing an enormous number of ads into your face to the the extent you start losing consciousness why you came here in the first place.
On computer, you still able to use an AdBlock but on mobile, I suffer terribly, not only because I could not disable ads but because on some sites while you are reading an article a random ad video that took about half of the screen keeps playing and scrolling down with you, even clicking the X doesn’t work most of the time but generally triggers an external link. At the bottom of the page, you start reading “best job offers in XYZ” where this XYZ is your city name deduced from your IP address, the thumbnail, as you might expect, is a “s_x_” girl lying on a bed :(
I know, free content should be supported by ads but I believe this is not the way to do it.
Okay, but how do you square that with the fact that hosting content costs money? Are the people and companies which provide the content you look at not allowed to earn money to keep the servers running and the sysadmins fed?
When you browse a website with no ads, you are the public. Content is provided for your use, and that's all.
When you visit an ad supported website, you are only the means to achieve an end, which is to have you in the site as much as possible, clicking on as much ads as possible. That usually had the effect of making the website content bloated.
Not all sites begin like that, but they all end like that. And ad blocking hides that ugly truth under a layer of normalcy.
About 2 weeks ago, I heard Black Player (App), which already works in a very unexpectedly and illogically difficult and frustrating manner, started injecting ads into my normal music library. I may just need to charge up my old iPod from now on, it doesn't ever need weekly software updates for some strange reason like everything else.
Internet? I think you mean everything. The whole everything is bloated with ads right now. Look around you, I bet you can see at least a dozen brand names without even leaving your chair.
People who work in marketing and ads should quit their jobs if they care at all about society, but of course they don't or they wouldn't be in marketing and advertising. Alternatively, we should just stop putting up with their bullshit because they have a long history of abusing every inch they are given.
This works out great because my brain doesn't get so distracted by ads, even physical billboard ads. But at the same time I use an ad-blocker to avoid wasted screen real estate.
Thus it stores all the places you have been and with ML and AI create some sort of personal file, with all kinds of attributes. (the more the better)
uBlock and others block these cameras from seeing your face.
It is YouTube's right to prevent me from using their site if I use an ad-blocker just as much as it is my right to stop using their service altogether if they prevent me from using it with an ad-blocker.
Yes some people give voluntarily through donations or Patreon, but it's a tiny amount of the actual number of people who derive satisfaction from the content.
The best solution for someone who hates ads is a subscription model. The thing that bothers me is that publishers still collect massive amounts of data and sell it, and some continue to have advertising or product placement. Give me ads or give me a completely untracked experience for a fee. Don't do something in between and claim that it's ad-free.
To the bean counters who seem to have overwhelmed Google, losing a few users might seem like a dog losing some fleas. They are out of ideas for growth. Once blitz scaling has reached the limits of user acquisition the only play left to juice the numbers seems to be “boil the frog”, going to war with their Oort cloud of free users, pay up or else. Are the c-suite types at Google aware that this is exactly the mindset that will make their decline into irrelevance inevitable?
Elon Musk inadvertently turned Twitter into a howling wasteland in a few short months, which shows what happens when you boil the user frog too quickly. Imagine how Twitter would look today if Elon instead doubled down on making Twitter the best user experience, offering users tools to make Twitter more relevant, making it an unmissable service for users, and in turn unmissable for advertisers? But instead he pulled the lever all the way from utopia to hellscape, attempting to shake down users to restore some functionality to a clearly degraded product. Enshitifying (thanks Cory Doctorow) the user experience is not a compelling reason to subscribe.
Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product.
I'm not against advertising per se, I’m against being shaken down to regain a user experience that should be the default. Here are two examples of successful advertising models:
1. Lex Friedman does an ad read at the beginning of his podcast. It’s intentionally skippable, I skip it 90% of the time. But when I'm busy with bread dough on my hands or whatever, I'm still hearing the ads, which are mostly repeat offerings anyway. Advertising is not always appropriate, eg at a kids birthday party or showing a video in a lecture. The lesson: MAKE IT SKIPPABLE!
2. Inserts into shows / product placement, like on VFX Artists React. These seem harder for a behemoth to monetise but I like these because I know that the actual creators are getting paid. Youtube doesn't want to deal with creators with anything closer than a dashboard. This is not the end users fault, it’s not the content creators fault, it’s a symptom of absentee capitalism. Youtube should invest in creators and form true partnerships. The lesson: INVEST IN DEALING FAIRLY WITH HUMANS!
I’m not going to pay, I will continue to avoid ads but watch them occasionally. I’m going to keep playing the game of whack-a-mole finding software / hardware solutions. And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship.
So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops).
Youtube Premium costs $12/month [1]. Ads average something like $2 per 1000 views to the creators (in some of the most common categories) [2]. Youtube takes a ~45% cut, so Youtube makes ~$4 per 1000 views from ads. So, to reach $12/month, you would need to average 3000 views per month. At a average of 30 days per month, you would need to consume on average 100(!) videos a day for Youtube to come out behind.
Wikipedia says Youtube made ~$28.8B in 2021 and had ~2.5B MAU as of the beginning of 2022. So, the average MAU only brings in ~$10/year. You need to average over 10x the number of views as the average MAU for Youtube Premium to come out behind for Youtube.
The actual alternative is that you charge a comparable price to the advertising revenue instead of complaining that it does not work because your consumers are not dumb enough to pay a 1000% markup.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/premium
When a website designed to sell ads fails to sell content, that's not evidence that selling content doesn't work, it's evidence that selling content designed to sell ads doesn't work.
There's also a factor of quality and trust. I don't trust YouTube Premium enough to even try it. This is mostly colored by their constant, invasive disruption of my YouTube experience (particularly apparent on mobile) with YT Premium ads. Yes, I know it exist. No, I don't want it - the more you try to trick me into activating the trial, the less I want it.
> So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops).
Proper ad blocker on the desktop. yt-dlp for archiving/off-line playing. NewPipe or some other alternative YouTube players for mobile.
Yes, I know you meant a non-free-riding alternative, but hey - I have no problem paying for services, even for premium tiers when free tier is available. But I'm not getting bullied into subscribing.
The amount of my life I save by using adblock + sponsorblock when watching YouTube is such a huge amount of time. Maybe I am just cheap, but I also feel it's a bit on the expensive side of things for what you get.
I do however still like to support creators that I watch a lot, so I'll use things like Patron, or in the case of Linus Tech Tips, Floatplane. I feel like directly supporting the creators I spend a lot more time watching makes more of an impact on supporting the content I enjoy. Creators don't seem to get much out of YouTube Premium viewers.
People don't want to pay for subscriptions because everything has become a bait and switch with infinite tiers!
Whether it's the local newspaper, or a mega-tech company's corporate offerings.
I tried subscribing (online) to my hometown newspaper within the last year. And a major national news publication.
You know how people say (or used to) that the garbage on the internet is the fault of the public for not being willing to pay for good journalism.
Well, guess what? You pay, you're just a sucker, probably senile and out of touch, so every third thing you click on is still behind a pay wall in the hopes you'll upgrade.
And, you know, it's being done to big dumb corporations with all the software-as-a-service offerings, and they're sucking up your tax dollars from government the same way. I don't want to name names, but the entire game seems to be slicing up features randomly and making up excuses to charge more for almost every one.
I'm happy subscribing to creators' patreons or Kofi or whatever because almost all of my money goes to them.
Whereas on YouTube, most of my money or ad-generated money goes to Google. YouTube pays creators very little and treats them very poorly. There's a new adpocalypse every few months where YouTube will randomly change the rules, retroactively demonetize and delist videos, while offering no chance to appeal or even have videos reviewed by a person.
Without even considering Google's generally evil and monopolistic behavior, why would I ever willingly give them money?
YouTube's shitty treatment of creators is why every video now has a sponsored segment in the middle. They aren't paying enough and creators need additional income sources. YouTube can decide at any moment without notice to nuke your entire business and give you no option to recover. They keep shittifying the website with shorts and aggressive ads and dark patterns to drive up ad exposure, but this doesn't translate to higher pay for creators. In no circumstance is giving google more money going to fix any of the problems.
All a YouTube plus subscription gets you is YouTube will turn off the ads and dark patterns designed to force you to pay for the subscription. As well, I have exactly zero faith that YouTube won't also start showing subscribed users ads in a year or two.
Ads are immoral and should not be a valid business model to begin with. What YouTube is doing is exactly what should be done: pay us, or we won't actually send you the video. The network is the boundary: I'm not gonna try to hack into their servers to get a video they don't want to send me. If they send me the video for free though, that's their decision. They can send me ads too hoping I'll look at then but I make no such promise. They don't get to complain at all if I block them just like magazines don't get to complain if I rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash.
Many channels are successfully backed by patrons via patreon. That seems to be the most ethical way in my understanding.
People don't want to pay for half-baked products:
- Workspace accounts don't work
- Even with standard accounts, it won't work on many devices (eg. TV apps), so you still get ads even as you paid
- As Google regularly kills people's account, it also means most of us have multiple Youtube accounts that we check in different contexts, and paying for premium on all of them is way more of a commitment that you make it sound like.
* Content is prioritized and screwed with too often. Videos that have no business anywhere near front-page or that are overall not well received are promoted because of shady backdoor deals with media companies. This is why late night talk show content is on the front page. I do not want to pay to support this.
* Content I have opted into seeing is suppressed, censored, etc. Creators that I enjoy have to modify how they make videos because of obscure and virtually unexplained reasons that YouTube mostly hand waves away as "the AI does a thing". They do not properly staff any kind of human review. The only way creators get their accounts back after the system goes completely haywire is by complaining on Twitter or other platforms and those without a megaphone get lost to the broken system. I am not interested in paying to support this.
* Basic features like comments have serious problems with them. The community has to attempt to hodge-podge together solutions while a multi-billion dollar company fails to do anything or provide the tools to stop rampant scams of a few basic types from ruining the comment section. I do not want to pay to support this.
* Features are randomly removed or subject to strange choices like the dislike button because a few people at YouTube think they know what the massive billions of people on the platform is best for them. I don't want to pay to support this.
Give me the option to pay and be free from these terrible choices YouTube makes and you can have my entire wallet.
Peer to peer streaming of the PeerTube type seems to work reasonably well. Unlike Mastodon, etc., you don't have to sign up to receive content. You just click on a URL and it works. What it doesn't offer is discovery. Nobody will find your stuff on PeerTube. They might follow links there.
I put metaverse tech demos on PeerTube.[1] Works fine, few views. No ads.
1) Don't want Youtube to connect me to my real identity. I browse incognito, or using alt IDs.
2) Many creators I follow are demonetized.
Why should I reward Youtube ?
If I want to pay, I would rather pay them directly. It's their content that I watch.
3) I have seen a Ton of financial scams for targeting poor people using the names of Credible Top Brands in the country . The fact that Youtube approves such shady Ads doesn't feel right to me.
What's the alternative ? Instagram Reels and TikTok already rule short form videos.
If they can introduce a better Search Experience and a Long Form Video product, there will be a credible competitor to Youtube.
Unlikely to happen, so I will keep ad-blocking or eventually stop watching if they make ad-blocking too difficult (happened with Twitch for me)
They made "free" the norm on the internet as it increased the barriers for their competitors. Then started to show ads as nothing can be free for ever. And we users accepted that as a reasonable compromise with the belief that the ads will be limited. What happened? Bait and switch - from one to two to three banners in a page, from text ads to display ads to video ads, there was suddenly more ads than content on a web page. And the ads used more bandwidth than the content. Next came the assurance that our privacy wouldn't be compromised. Google pledged to "Do No Evil". What happened? Bait and switch - suddenly Google (or other BigTech) claimed that they just can't survive without personalised ads that need to be very privacy invasive. Now we are the products.
The bait and switch in Youtube (or any other streaming platform) is quite obvious - get us to pay for "ads free" video, and then suddenly introduce ads in the paid tier. Then offer another "ad free" tier for a higher price. No thanks, Google. We are not going to be fooled. Go ahead and introduce the anti-ad blockers - there is no way you are going to get me to pay to watch videos full of ads. Google's greed also needs limit. Especially when the user experience of most Google products have become worse.
Want free peer to peer streaming? Hard to build a content ecosystem on that.
Fucking with adblockers there wouldn't exactly encourage me to keep the main subscription…
And
https://peering.google.com/#/learn-more/faq
And specifically the section on: "What content can Google serve from an edge node?"
If this is true, and I have long believed it is, then the following, from the article, is a lie:
"It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide," the message adds.
If YouTube does not "stay free" then it shrinks to a small fraction of its current size.
So-called "tech" companies know users will not pay. This is not surprising since so much of the "content", none of which the "tech" company produces, is garbage. The stuff that goes "viral", that generates the most ad revenue, is not stuff people are going to pay for.
Either the "tech" company's website/app is free and a Trojan Horse by which its users can be spied on, or the "tech" business model isn't worth much of anything. Like someone said, "You are the product." Not the stuff uploaded by so-called "creators", YouTube's unpaid workforce.
"Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide."
YouTube has to be free or it won't be able to continue operation. It's wonderful experiment, all this uploaded video, if we ignore all the surveillance Google is conducting and all propaganda and worse videos Google is forcibly putting in front of people, but this is not something many people with pay for. YouTube cannot convert "billions of users wordlwide" into paying subscribers.
Why blame the users for YouTube failure?
* No attachment to Google
* Enough network effect / traction to be interesting
* No predatory data collection and recommendation algorithms
YouTube premium isn't that. So for now I use Newpipe and ad blockers. If they lock it down, hopefully there will be enough traction somewhere else to pick up where they left off.
If you want to skip ads your option is to block ads, not to buy premium
Paying youtube for an infinite catalogue of shit? No thanks. And the rare gems that do interest me are invariably... overly expanded and filled with sponsor bullshit, so, ads.
Paying for YT premium to give Google their pound of flesh, only to be stuck in same horrorshow of well-meaning content creators having to whore themselves out to their sponsors... To me that means that the only winning move is not to play.
Never believe “I’ll pay if …” if you’re running a business.
Maybe the ad model doesn't work, and people are not clear on what they are actually paying for, since it's effortless to get the same service for free.
Edit: And I'm suprised few people are mentionning how much information youtube gets about you from using the site, and using youtube premium makes being anonymous impossible. Having a way to remaing somewhat anonymous would make me consider premium, but it's a not go for me at this time
So I can’t see how you expect me to trust the company that has tried to game me, and never disclosed that I was the product.
Why should I pay now ?
- Make the TV app be useful and not utter trash
- Allow me to globally disable/remove 'shorts'
- Stop promoting the front-page trash that is 'trending'
- Allow me to permanently filter music by genre or remove sports entirely
- Fix the recommendations engine to actually work
- Allow grouping/filtering subscriptions
Unless it does all of the above, there's no way I'm paying. Ads are an annoyance (and as others have said, most videos now run their own sponsorships/ads inside the video as well), but not having a well functioning 'application' in the first place means there's nothing worth paying for.
So I switched to Floatplane (3 subscriptions) and Spotify. I have no problem paying for content. I have a HUGE problem paying Google.
https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en
https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/7658599?hl=en
I'll just keep up with the inevitable cat and mouse game with adblockers.
I'd argue exactly the opposite, since over 25 million people pay for YouTube Premium.
When Youtube arrived first, I had an account with some playlists, then Google decided to merge account and asked me to switch a google account in order to keep my youtube account, that was the time I decided not to have an account on Youtube and subscribtion requires an account.
Also for subscriptions generally, thing are getting wild. There are several paid video / streaming services. Just to be able to watch 3 or 4 shows requires almost being subscribed to all streaming services, which is both expensive (at least for some part of the world) and ridicilous.
I pay for YouTube premium and for me it's worth it to remove the ads with the family plan. But paying for extra stuff you don't want sucks.
On one of my google accounts, and only if I am logged in.
For about 80% of my youtube watching experience this works.
But there are times I am logged in with my work account as (at the least) the primary account and I dont bother switching.
Or a random tutorial video I am looking at from a new laptop or untrusted device.
The pain of logging in outweighs looking at a couple of ads in the moment. So dont think that premium is a failed model based on usage. I certain I am not alone in engaging with youtube in a non-premium capacity despite having a subscription.
That would be a lot more tempting.
I'm not sure if it's possible to build P2P network with zero trust that could work like that.
One issue could be that participating person might technically be involved with distribution of forbidden content like child porn or disney cartoon. So even if they didn't know that and everything was encrypted, they might still be accountable for it, especially because they made money doing it.
We just need this country/world to collectively remember what a library is.
We don't REALLY know that. If adblockers are effectively blocked, we might see an increase in people paying. The big value add of Premium was something people here were taking for granted because that "feature" was available for free.
Anecdotal but I knew a few people who are paying for it because of Apple TVs and iPhones where it's less trivial to block the ads on the apps.
This idea that uploading is free artificially created by big data and somehow we think that's the way it should be. But really it's just their strategy, get as much data in then tax those who want to access it, even forgetting about the whole ML angle it's very simple to understand.
Absolutly wrong. I pay for spotify to not have ads, I pay for netflix despite the fact I can download torrents because of the benefit of the service. Hell, I pay for Telegram premium and chatgpt, both of which have very good free offer without ads!
But GAFAMS have exhausted our trust, so they don't get the same treatment.
I will never pay for a Google service, because that would mean having a google account tie to a payment system. And Google spies, collect data, close accounts and services on a whim and has terrible support.
It doesn't respect their customers, and so they lost our will to give them money.
Plus, even if you pay, you have no way to know if they are going to respect their own contract anymore because they don't care and have no consequence for messing up.
You pay for an amazon product? Can be a scam and amazon will not prevent that. You pay for twitter blue to see less ads? We just learned this month tweeter blue users say exactly as many ads as regular users.
> So what is the alternative?
We don't want an alternative. Those companies made billions with their short term abusing policies, now they finally pay some price.
Good.
For once the market is behaving as a regulating force as it should, which is not often nowadays.
The problem is legal not technical.
The point being, it's hard to want to pay for the no-ads experience when you rarely if ever get to experience it and/or your YT usage is not that often.
Id argue a large amount of YouTube’s traffic is cacheable.
I understand that they are in a bind. Not my problem, however.
I like Nebula and I like its creators and their values. I loath Google and I can't stand by much of the content.
How much would they save if "free" users only got 480p videos?
I'd be fine with 480p resolution.
Why can't Google do this? They already have presence at ISPs
Ain't nothing wrong with this, once it went free, it is hard to go back.
YouTube Premium Family is worth every penny.
Most of the people and channels I follow are on Rumble. And no, most of them are not "right-wing" and fairly apolitical.
If doing something as simple as asking you to hold up your end of the deal of using their website (letting ads load for the ad-supported content) is too much to ask but paying for the website is also too much to ask, you have to be honest that you just want a free experience.
I don’t buy the argument that you were going to pay them in the future but you decided against it because they wouldn’t let you have it for free.
I don't like the spying that will go along with paying, given that it is Alphabet/Google. If they offered a plan to pay without the spying I would have signed up years ago.
I didn't try so I could be wrong but my guess is your payment will be tied directly to your login and so you need to have that login on the browser at all times to view the videos (without ads) and given all the decline of "do no evil" I don't trust them at all.
I also don't trust they wouldn't mess things up. I travel a lot. I paid for YouTube TV and the ludicrous junk they do to try and verify you are able to view things was a huge pain and failed quite a lot until it failed nearly always I and dropped it.
I imagine if they push me I will pay and then have to copy and paste every YouTube url into a sanitized browser instance only used for YouTube. But I don't trust Alphabet/Google to not constantly be attempting to use that subscription to improve and deepen their spying which annoys me quite a bit. I just trust them a tiny bit more than Microsoft (and I ditched using anything by Microsoft decades ago - other than my use of LinkedIn continuing after they bought it and very occasional uses of Bing to check on it).
If you are not going to pay for THAT, you aren't going to pay for ANYTHING. Just admit you want free stuff. Stop deluding yourself into thinking that Youtube is somehow responsible for hosting all these for free.
What I don't understand is why you feel entitled to benefit from this resource without supporting it in any way.
i know some other folks are complaining about still getting tracked or whatever, but i think the simple truth is that youtube without ads is a vastly superior experience.
Pay for it or don't, but what is this nonsense about being poised (for a while) to maybe someday possibly consider thinking about purchasing the service?
It's $13. (In inflation-adjusted terms that's $7.12 the year I graduated high school.) What in the world are we talking about here? Buy it or don't. What is there to think about?
That gives you an annual individual plan for $15usd p.a.
I'm definitely not signing up for youtube premium.
It also pays the content creators I watch more money. So imho it’s a win win. No ads for me more money for the peoples content I enjoy
Clearly, the solution is for me to create another google account to use for these services and only use my workspace account for one thing. But then why am I paying Google to host my workspace account? Should I pay them _MORE_ for my wife and children to also be on my workspace, as well as paying for Youtube? (don't worry, I'm working on migrating off workspaces too).
(and fwiw, I paid for youtube premium for years, and watch hours of youtube content a day)
But yes, the solution is definitely having a separate private gmail for those services.
As a bonus, it is super fast because it doesn't have to justify the salaries of dozens (hundreds?) of frontend developers and can get away with server-side-rendered HTML and minimal amounts of Javascript.
"Oh, it appears with the new Chrome extension API it is impossible to write an adblocker that bypasses this. How could that have happened? Google told us they only have our best interests in mind, so this must've been by accident."
Broadcast TV generally syncs the ads with act breaks in the show. YouTube generally doesn’t seem to do any syncing with the content, so ads can suddenly happen in the middle of someone speaking. That’s way more disruptive.
I agree the number of ads is absolutely shocking, which I'm reminded every time I see someone else play youtube, as I've had a subscription for about as many years as it's been available. My time is absolutely worth more than whatever I'm paying to skip these ads.
Just buy the subscription. You get the free trial for a month. Nothing changes, the money is not missed, but you actually pay for something you use a lot.
The biggest benefit is not being subjected to ads anymore just by being next to family members who don't use ad blockers. It comes with four slots for family members.
I might watch one or two a month, that's it. I will always prefer written content over video. The only time I go for video is when I can't find a written source.
With that little use it will not be worthwhile.
But they won't, and I won't stop blocking their trackers either.
I shouldn't be stalked 24/7 to sell ads.
If YT Music great? Well, no but it's fine. It has my music, podcasts and decent recommendation algorithm. Paired that with commerical free YT and it's a stellar offer.
That would be a good deal. Now we are sandwiched between ads both inside videos and between them, and they act surprised people use ad-blockers.
i watch a couple 5-minute YT videos each day: sure, i’d happily pay 10x whatever they make from me in ads, but there’s no way they could implement that in a way which doesn’t worsen my experience overall. not to mention the whole angle of providing Google with my undeniable legal name.
Until they have reached a critical mass of subscribed users, and they start serving ads to paid users too (à la Netflix)
Some shit site gets the idea to "block adblock". Detects a few common ones. But disabling javascript almost always works. But annoying.
So http://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/#filterlist is created. And it "anti-block adblock" is here. And works well.
By the time the chumps make "anti-anti-block adblock", we'll neuter that as well.
The endgame is something terrible like a WebAssembly that does forced downloads to get the content you want all in a VM like thing. That's what Widevine is already doing, kind of. Im just surprised that more for-profit news/media companies aren't doing exactly that, since now you have to pop off the payload in a container and try to detect what an ad is and isnt.
As an aside: If you're running Firefox, download Sponsorblock. It skips over the shit in-video adverts on Youtube with "a message from our sponsor". Oh, and you dont get this even IF you pay youtube.
This is a slippery slope that I definitely do not want to be going down. At that rate, "drink verification can" is not far off.
When I used to watch the actual TV I changed the channel, muted, or left the room during ads. My eyes, my ears, my brain. I will not be forced to consume.
I was never able to get into YouTube Music, though, so I don't actually use it to stream my music. The fact that my playlists are shared between YouTube and YouTube Music is enough for me to drop it from serious consideration as a music streaming service on its own. That, plus the lack of lossless streaming, inconsistent, clunky UI, and lack of any positive features that distinguish it from Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, is why I never used it for anything other than sharing songs with people who didn't use Tidal.
That they apparently also include ads in the albums I transferred from Google Play Music - albums that I paid for - is just added insult.
The main way I justified paying the subscription was that other people in my household got access to ad-free music streaming (and they actually used it, unlike me), Youtubers get comped more from me watching their videos, and I didn't have to worry about whole-home adblockers to remove ads from the app. But after a 50% price hike that takes it above the prices for Tidal Family ($15), Apple Music Family ($17), and Spotify Family ($16), it's not something I can justify anymore.
(Youtube Music Family is $15, FWIW, but it doesn't include Youtube itself.)
It feels deeply icky
Companies: Here's a ad-free version. Subscribe
HN/Reddit: Why are you asking me to subscribe? I hate this
I've done a lot of digital curtailing in my life, but Youtube has been hard to avoid. It's both good and bad, as they have some of the most amazing content in the whole world, but also some of the most addictive trash that I can't stop watching. Because the service is so addicting, I'm not sure I could justify paying for it, even though the value it brings is incredible.
Getting an adblocker denied message on youtube to determine exactly how much YT can annoy you in the service of stuffing more ads into your videos is both actively user-hostile and very definitely evil.
In most medical research, there are all types of consents that are required before you get subjected to this.
This is not good news, and it's probably not going to be a lesson in humility for the company.
If a site decides to go so far as to actively prevent you from using it without an adblocker, I consider that to be a pretty bad sign.
Fortunately almost no one does that.
Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly), they're getting much worse.
I assume this is the result of companies just accepting ££ for anything rather than having more quality control?
I get it that they are not a charity and can monetize or paywall their platforms as seen fit, but there's something just sad about the model where you build a customer-friendly and open platform, then progressively crapify it once you capture a niche and eliminate most alternatives, and then start penalizing users for trying to work around that.
I cannot think of any subscription that offers literally no upside beside what a free browser extension that you install in 1 click already provides.
Youtube Premium is literally the worst value for money that I can think of, because I can get effortlessly the same for 0 cost.
Asking me to pay for the ability to have background play to me is akin to opening a restaurant and serving unsalted food and asking 2% extra for salt in the food.
I already pay for a few other google services (google one, google cloud etc) and their customer service (that I have needed on the rare occasion) is ..... almost non existent as well.
Will most probably use alternate frontends or a pihole or whatever other alternative there is for as long as I can.
1. YT doesn't decide how many ads to show. The creator of the video gets to choose exactly how many ads are shown and when and where they are shown.
If you see too many ads on your videos, get pissed off at the creators you're watching, not YT.
2. Ad revenue is a very large portion of income for most creators. It's definitely not as large as sponsorship deals, but it's nothing to sneeze at. You people who are entitled to your free content aren't sticking it to the man by refusing to watch ads. Instead you're directly hurting the creators you enjoy watching by specifically depriving them of any ad revenue they may otherwise have gained from you. Shut up and sit down and watch the 30 second ad or stop watching YT altogether. The creators don't give a crap either way because you clearly don't give a crap about financially supporting them in the simplest way possible.
3. If anything, I believe YT will stop showing ads if they're too prevalent. There's a feature where creators can play ads at the beginning/ending of their videos. These ads don't play all the time, and I think that's because the YT algorithm is making sure that if you're doing something like playing music it doesn't play an ad at the beginning of every single song even if the video creator tries to make that happen.
Honestly, these comments read as if cable didn't exist just a few years ago (and still does today!) where they literally play 2 minutes of ads for every 5ish minutes of content. Even with DVR, skipping through the ads would take around 30 seconds (and then you have to adjust to make sure you didn't skip too far and everything) which is the length of typical YT ads. Buck up and pay up to support the "amazing" content that you selfishly indulge in and refuse to pay for out of a warped sense of entitlement.
Contrary to popular belief, most content creators are not putting their content out for free. They're putting it out knowing the majority of viewers will at least watch the ads and help them make money.
Maybe we're moving past the societal stage where being a content creator is a real job.
Maybe people aren't meant to make a living from putting videos on the internet.
I am not worried about Google going forth with this. I see others asking what happens when users won't pay for a subscription and at the same time won't view ads? I believe the answer is pretty clear.
YouTube will either decide to suck up that they won't see ad revenue from a portion of the audience (ad blockers are and will always be a niche thing, there is no reality in which YouTube buckles because too many people block ads, especially since YouTube is predominantly viewed on devices where ad blocking is not as easy as in the desktop browser) or they will close up shop.
The fact is that YouTube currently occupies a spot in the online sphere which will always be occupied by someone: being the top service for hosting videos for free and showing them to audiences for free. There is a line of businesses which would jump on the opportunity of filling YouTube's "woeful" position of being the top dog in online video.
YouTube's collapse would be devastating considering the amount of culture and history stored on there. But new video content will always find a home and reach online. And Google knows this which is why they will IMO never give up on YouTube even if it were operating with loss again. Storage is only getting cheaper and their moat with YouTube is the user-generated content. Gate it too heavily and creators will find a place where they can post content more freely and users will fine a place where they can view content more freely.
I don't expect this to be anything other than YouTube pulling a Netflix with their password sharing crackdown complete with the back-paddling that ensued once they realized how replaceable they really are to a sizeable portion of their viewers loosing which would be more expensive than keeping it.
AV content is pretty important to humanity. I want my government to tax me and spend the money on a public video repository.
When some garbage for-profit outfit like Alphabet is in charge of the world's video, I expect ads and garbage content.
Let’s say worst case scenario google embeds ads into the video itself, and refuses to stream the actual video packets until the length of the ad has elapsed. The repetitive nature of advertising makes if trivial to detect when the served video is an ad and when it’s content. You might be able to make me wait for a video file, but you can’t make me watch an ad. My Firefox extension is gonna replace those advertising frames with a black loading screen and there’s nothing google can do to stop that.
I believe this has been successful for Twitch, growing revenue despite decrease in concurrent viewers. So the real impact seems obvious to me, even if I would personally avoid it.
Peertube of course has the peer system, but I don't think my client has ever uploaded more than 100kb from any peers, it's all from the server. There's also no way that I know of to "donate" some network/storage BitTorrent style to servers I wish to support, which again means the costs are all centralized and extremely high.
You can use third party media players like MPC-BE or MPC-HC that leverage yt-dlp to stream the video into a media player without any ads of course.
Yes, sometimes it makes sense to download if you want to keep the video, but to just watch just stream it via yt-dlp to a media player.
It is just offensive that they want me to pay for something that is my phones feature not theirs.
Sadly I expect this to get blocked just the same
Nebula is great. It feels like they are actually just trying to allow me to watch videos, no nonsense. I have found a few bugs and the support team is nice and responsive. I can't imagine what else I would want.
I would love to see a BitTorrent-style solution to video hosting. If your video is popular, there's more seeders, but also you can just seed it yourself. Then you can have an ecosystem where there's different indexers with different recommendation algorithms but the content is the same.
Long story: We are Chinese family living in US. We listen to both Chinese and English songs. We have both Apple Music and Spotify memberships, but due to copyright, many Chinese songs are not available (sometime this is true for other languages or even English songs, that’s why we have both subscriptions). Since a few years ago, I just found that YouTube has all the songs we love, some are high quality live stage recordings that are even better to listen (kinda surprising since YouTube is blocked in China mainland). So nowadays my family are listening music on YouTube more frequently: we have our own playlists, use YouTube on iPhone Safari with AdGuard so no noisy ads. The problem is we have to keep safari open and can’t use other apps when listening to music. Also jumping in the playlist is painful especially when driving.
Now this HN title just reminds me of YouTube premium that has no ads, supports background playing, and better playlist control. Then I really don’t see a reason to keep Apple Music and Spotify subscriptions which together cost more but still lack of songs we love.
Disclaimer: I work for Google and this represents my personal opinion.
If you select a video from this interface you will be served with ads. Sometimes with an additional banner to sign in and enjoy Premium.
I would gladly ignore this interface, but my daughter likes to select things out of it. I would just prefer to have it like it was before (just a static image until you play something) instead of this thing screaming at me.
That sometimes makes me want to cancel the Premium.
- They removed the useless "shorts"
- They removed the "mix" things that keep coming back like a bad smell
- They let me remove youtube music
- Their suggestions were less terrible. Like seriously they run the biggest data centers in the world, have some of the best ML researchers and know what I actually watch. How do they manage to be so consistently bad at this?
- Their search was less terrible. They figured out search of the whole internet 20 years ago, how is search in YT worse than searching YT from duckduckgo?
If you care enough that you install ad-blockers you will not click on any ads anyway. If they block ad-block then their click-per-view metrics will go down which looks bad to advertisers and makes ad spots sell for less
Of course that is a very simple view of a very complex problem, but there is definitely some merit to it. For example ad-block these days has been normalised enough that too many people do it, even people that would click some ads. Also, specifically for youtube, by allowing ad-block you reduce the value of youtube premium (which is not true for google search for example, there is no google search premium)
But that's tied to my personal account. Sometimes I want to watch a video on my work laptop, or just in incognito mode. I would find it incredibly irritating if that were blocked because I use an adblocker. In this case I've paid for no ads, I just don't want this particular video linked to my personal account.
This will save them whatever it costs to serve me videos, and I will spend my life more productively. Win - Win.
If I had known there was a LITE option I would have subbed probably years ago - but it seems like they do their damndest best to try not to tell you about it.
Twitch does the same. They have some kind of site-wite subscription ("twitch turbo"). Although I think it is a tad expensive for what it is. And they do their damndest best for you not to know about it.
They will pry my ad-block from my cold, dead hands. I will sooner stop using YT altogether than give in on this.
https://andadinosaur.com/launch-vinegar
If YT would now block me completely, I would simply have one less reason to use them at all. PeerTube is my go-to first stop anyways.
- Google used to have Google Music, which I loved and paid for willingly as it was a good service, the recommendation algorithm was _not bad_, the UI was _okay_, and you could upload your own music and have it integrate with their system.
- Google used to by default allow you to play Youtube in the background and let you use the picture in picture mode for free - they removed that feature and put it behind a paywall.
- You can't volume control ads. I have Youtube playing in the background on my bedside table at night and having consistent volume is key. I don't want blaring audio telling me to buy X product or use Y service, waking me up when I'm trying to sleep. Yet another way for them to convince you to get Youtube premium.
- I hate all forms of advertisements. Don't shove advertisements in my face. If I want a product, I'll look for it and do my own research. I don't want algorithms and AI deciding what I want to purchase. When I've had advertising slip through, it's usually for things that I've already bought recently (mattress, clothing, etc.)
I will continue to willingly eat away at Google's profits for as long as they run YouTube.
I've been looking into some kind of open source solution that automatically grabs my Youtube history playlist and downloads and automatically catalogs these videos on a network share somewhere locally. (If someone can recommend a solution, please feel free!)
Too many times I've had videos that I've added to a playlist be removed for some inane reason (copyright violation, DMCA requests, etc. etc.)
I don't understand how a giant company like Google hasn't figured out global availability of a service like this. Especially given that videos can be geo locked if needed.
I'm curious how does yt share profit with creators for views from paying subscribers.
I have found a lot of good content on YT, but lately, the suggestions are just terrible and the "hunt" is taking longer and getting frustrating - sort of like Netflix, which I cancelled. I'm guessing they keep suggesting videos that make the most money for Google, even if I don't want to watch it. If the content suggestions on YT were better, I might consider subscribing to it, but with the way it is now, ads will definitely push me to leave.
This move will hurt badly those content creators who appeal to a more knowledgeable user base, but I will not watch YouTube without an AD blocker.
I am probably in the vast minority, I understand it, both my father and my nephews don't know that there was a version of the internet without ads and that you could block them.
I guess YouTube made their calculations.
Also I'm more and more convinced that YouTube listens on my microphone for running water.
Years ago I bought a Chromecast for a family member but ended up sending it back because it was subpar. The return process was so frustrating (not to mention the difficulty in deleting the mandatory Google Wallet account) that I vowed to never trust Google with any money again. I feel I’d rather stop watching YouTube entirely.
I’m interested in experiences, good and bad, of cancelling as YouTube Premium.
I don't need YT, the content they host is not worth paying and I wouldn't have a problem to live without it.
Personally I don’t mind a few ads, but the volume of them was just getting completely out of control for a while there on YouTube. It’s what prompted me to finally install an ad blocker!!
Wonder what the economics of this is for Google? Would they rather have everyone pay $12 a month and nix ads altogether?
I suspect they still would want most people watching ads, considering how central their ads business is to their business model.
Faced with blocked videos I would either figure out a way around or do something else with my time. No way I'm disabling my ad blocker.
It’s generally not a great sign for a business when the focus of your innovations turns into increasingly aggressive ways to force folks to consume something they obviously don’t want.
It can also optionally stream through mirror services like invidious that also strip all ads.
In short, you can -always- access content provided to the anonymous internet without ads without the provider being able to tell.
The creators even get paid for ads you never watched.
If everyone does this advertisers will stop paying, and we can move on from this failed experiment and build better microtransaction systems.
Never ever watch or listen to ads or give data to adtech companies. This is always doing more harm to society than alternatives like piracy or violating terms of service.
If they want to sell premium so badly, maybe they should actually let me buy it.
But why in the world would I want to pay to support YouTube’s toxic incentives, abusive copyright takedowns, and overall rubbish treatment of small content creators?
The day Adblock stops working is the day I stop watching YouTube.
At this point it is an arms race. I don't think out right refusing to serve the video will fly for long, the next target is to make the noise(the ad) undecidable from the signal. They already sort of tried this, which made it hard for umatrix to filter out the ads. but they will get better at it.
I love youtube, but If I can't watch it without being pestered by ads and without giving all my information to google, I will simply do something else.
I would be ok paying for youtube premium if Google were actually not abusing their customers at any chance they get. But since they will spy on you, delete your accounts, cancel services, encourage take down abuses, I really don't want to put my whole life in their hand.
and on the other hand, i adblock anything that looks at me the wrong way. i'm not sure where to go on this.
i've seen some creator-based ads that i would be willing to look into purchasing, but that doesn't actually benefit youtube as a company, is it simply up to me to rely on people who have never heard of adblock as these folk steadily decline out over the next couple decades? i guess premium it is. i don't mind supporting the platform.
I could also see them splitting Premium into "Basic Premium", "Grand Premium", and "Ultimate Premium" where one shows some ads and the other shows "minimal" ads.
Having to do this for an un-skippable 20 second ad for one minute video, however, makes me press the back button.
That said, the new plays-even-if-you-can't-see-them ad-block-proof ads on desktop are annoying to the point I'm considering just giving up on the website, possibly going to the other places like Nebula and old-fashioned podcasts instead.
At this point the amount of advertising has become so pervasive that I’ve lost all care. This “monetization” game as far as I’m concerned is blackmail to creators as their content is heavily regulated by the platform and god forbid you say the wrong thing and then all the money you would get per view goes away but the ads will continue playing because someone else is going to get that money.
What a scam.
Maybe Brave works like that, IDK, I don't use it, but I would like to see something like that in Firefox.
All I see happening here is more adds overall.
Other than that I see that the algorithm has some value in showing you things you wouldn't otherwise...but I'm not sure that's actually wanted or needed.
How impossible would it be to have an internet without centralized video hosting?
For PC i have sponsor block which allows me to skip ads in videos
For TV i am using smarttube, an unofficial client which imo better and more customisable than the official one. Plus it also supports sponsor block
Also, if it's not individually personalized, and uncensored. You know; How YouTube used to be in the early 2000s.
Give me what I want, don't collect my stuff, don't try to mess with me, and allow me to remain anonymous, and I would be willing to pay for it –anonymously, of course.
They sure do like that word https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/104325801/testing-...
But somehow everything that I have to do through Google makes me cringe the amount of friction I'll have to go through. Unclear whether this perception is justified, as I never even tried to sign up to YouTube Premium (though intended often).
Hmm, if google starts banning accounts they would deactivate it in a heartbeat. This is what I’m mostly afraid of when using adblockers. I don’t want to wake up to a banned account.
YT and Alphabet may seem too-big-to-fail, but in truth there are endless reams of content and services out there vying for people's attention.
What's the conclusion to this? Should Netflix start a Youtube competitor?
Cutting off users access unless they do something is not "urging."
For years I've had an ad-blocker installed and that's the only way I can stand YouTube, in which I spend WAY too much hours on.
It would be nice of them to help me overcome my addiction and make me quit.
I don't care that it's cheaper than a Starbucks coffee. It's ... not worth it at this price.
I won’t pay them and I won’t watch their ads.
I'm only half joking.
Don't remember who said it.
The games industry is a good example, they tune many games so that they're less fun and then try to upsell you some way to circumvent the less fun parts.
I feel the same is true for youtube, twitch etc.
I used to watch both without adblock, the amount of ads were generally okay. I didn't mind them much.
Now i feel they've become unbearable in number and style. Especially on youtube, where they often need interaction or they will run for 2+ minutes.
So watching it on TV is like some clicker exercise with the remote every 3 minutes. Many ads are also unskippable now and much louder than the content watched, they come at bad timings and interrupt the flow.
Have they tuned this to oblivion so their product sucks on purpose without subscribing?
What's in it for me with YouTube? Nothing! - YouTube could create several levels of subscriptions. - Create your own sponsor block. If a video has embedded ads, skip them and show your own. Or in the settings, give the author a choice: either he earns only from integrated advertising or YouTube advertising. - All the other functions provided by plugins (and this is on the client side, there are no costs on the server side). - warnings about deletion or skimming of videos in my playlist (I have 40% of videos in my music playlist for 5 years, and I don't know which videos were deleted to find the originals). - YouTube can reduce its costs by banning uploads, or by strictly moderating stupid videos of 10 hours, which are looped 10-second snippets and the like, videos for cats, dogs, snails and fantasy animals that will never buy anything from ads. - For podcasters, making it possible to download audio and previews is already a savings, because there is no need to store a meaningless "video". And also big problems with YouTube: - terrible search and filter. - It takes a lot of computer resources. - You complain about the channels not being shown to me, but they are shown anyway. - videos/channels are blocked automatically for unknown reasons and complaints from the left heel of some offended mama's son - the same thing is shown in shorts
If YouTube closes the api and pushes through a manifesto so that adblockers don't work, or work terribly. Then I will use YouTube as a regular site that I will visit once or twice a month, that is, it will definitely not be a premium subscription, and there will be a meager viewing of ads. AMD has also introduced a new streaming board, and more of them will appear, and separate blogger communities will be formed that are independent of YouTube, and YouTube will have an outflow. Among my friends and acquaintances, almost no one uses YouTube anymore because it's not convenient. More of them are on social networks, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. That is, most of them will not even notice the death of YouTube, because it is almost dead for them, and they go there only when necessary.