YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers
androidpolice.com
androidpolice.com
It's because they've become increasingly obnoxious. Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter or maybe an animated GIF banner with 3 frames. No, adblockers became popular because ads kept getting more loud (both visually and audibly), in your face, and resource hungry (remember those flash ads that'd keep your CPU pegged?). The web became unusable if you didn't have a blocker installed.
Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.
No amount of content justifies subjecting ourselves to this brain washing. And I’m not even talking about malware in ads (not on YouTube, but since you mention Adblock…)
Is the comment wrong? Or is it right?
Amusingly, when I first started reading this I thought you were referring to all the comments justifying using ad blockers for the various reasons.
Funny that things like this go both ways...
Now I watch without ads, so sue me. I’d grant them the moral high ground the day they stop tracking me across the internet and put a reasonable amount of ads time before their videos (interrupting a video is a deal breaker, I cannot believe that so many years after TiVo some companies still think it’s a good idea). They want to play whack-a-mole, that’s their right. But then it is my right to control what’s running on my computer. In the end, if they persist to treat me as a nuisance even though I used to be a model consumer before their hostile behaviour put me off, then they’ll lose me for good and I’ll just send some money Nebula’s way. At least they seem to respect their users.
Don't forget YouTube used to let you skip all ads, it wasn't even that long ago.
None of this is the result of blockers. It's the result of Alphabet needing to earn more money and becoming increasingly desperate to snatch up every little bit left on the table.
On the plus side, this is only making it easier to compete with them. They're increasingly turning YouTube into what broadcast television has become; a raging dumpster fire of advertising and propaganda.
The worst that happens is Google drives away a chunk of its user base, opening the door for competition.
Partially because those sponsored articles (native ads) pay a lot of money to be there.
Partially because they'd have to build and support a whole other version of the newspaper without ads, and if the subscriber count is low, that engineering/infrastructure cost isn't spread as much.
Those Google display ads do pretty much pay garbage though.
When we ran the numbers, it'd have to be a 3-5x increase in subscription cost to replace advertising completely. None of those newspapers think anyone would be willing to pay those costs.
The only thing that I recall that was ever advertised as free from ads with a subscription was premium cable like HBO. Even magazines were full of ads. Hell, certain magazines were bought more for the ads than the content (thinking fashion mags).
Today, it'd be quite simple, as most ad blockers prove every day. I'd argue that today, many small newspaper websites are virtually unreadable without an ad blocker. 2-3 videos playing all at once, plus regular banner ads, while trying to make close buttons invisible. The same number of ads appear in a mobile browser too, leaading to basically no space to read any of the actual content.
You seem to only be coming from the expense of layout which is just not true. The world has increased in size from only paying attention to the local news with maybe a few specialty sources. Now, you can have access to news from any country at any time. Expecting people to pay for subscriptions to that is not realistic either. So since people are not paying for subscriptions, each company is depending on income for other places which has always been ads. The key difference today for me is that ads can now be malicious beyond their original purpose. Seeing an ad in print or tv or hearing one on the radio was never able to drain you of resources whether that be compute power or something much more nefarious. Because they cannot (or will not) control that, they have lost all sympathy from me about ads.
So by subscribing Hulu makes less money off of you.
The main reason is video ads pay the most, which doesn't apply to papers, but does apply to websites. So what's their excuse now?
*Their "ad-free" tier has ads.
I was a subscriber more than 10 years ago but gave up when they started to have pushy, navigation blocking ads. It was like being unable to turn page before some time passed on the ad. How hostile is that?! Very! Analogy: you see an ad in the street and you are not allowed to walk on for some period of time, forced to stay at the ad. I requested ad free subscription for elevated price or promising cancellation, it became a cancellation.
I still buy the paper format occasionally, I love their articles - it is also easy jumping over ads in the physical format -, but I will not subscribe for paper version due to the amount of paper used and my trust in their electronic version is gone. I did not try their app since (and my tablet use sinked too, I might need much more push now to give a second try).
I listen to the audio edition nowadays, that has no ads. Also, I haven't found any good alternatives to it. The weekly issues and the regional columns are a very convenient format for me to consume the news.
Does your computer have an Intel Inside sticker on it? An Apple maybe? Perhaps it's emblazoned with Lenovo.
How about the car you drive? Does it not proudly display the manufacturer's logo? Did you ask the dealer to remove their stickers and plate surround?
As I look around my house, all I see are ads! For things I paid for!
Yeah but it's not against their TOS to buy the clothes and cut the logo out.
> Does your computer have an Intel Inside sticker on it?
Yeah but it's not against their TOS buy an Intel processor and take the sticker off.
> An Apple maybe?
Yeah but it's not against their TOS to buy an Apple laptop and put a sticker with a 4 pane window on top of the Apple sticker.
> Perhaps it's emblazoned with Lenovo.
Perhaps it is, but it's not against their TOS to put an IBM sticker over the Lenovo sticker.
> How about the car you drive? Does it not proudly display the manufacturer's logo? Did you ask the dealer to remove their stickers and plate surround?
Yeah but it's not against the TOS to..
Hopefully the point is clear.
https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014893428
I didn't check the others.
We're discussing more than if the WSJ, FT, and NYT allows ad blockers or not. We're discussing how stupid it is that a service shows ads in the first place for premium service people pay for. WSJ and NYT are only two examples.
We're discussing how there's precedent to pay for a service and still see ads and how it wouldn't be a shock if Google pulled the same stunt.
We're discussing concepts and ideas, not specific companies and their policies.
Furthermore, the link you provided has a section "4. PROHIBITED USE OF THE SERVICES" which is an overly broad section that reads exactly like Google's TOS and could be interpreted as banning ad blockers if NYT wanted to say that's its purpose.
I don’t understand how everyone else seems to be okay with this norm. I dyed the advertisement on my rain jacket black to make it invisible. I disassembled my phone dock and ripped out the glowing advertisement. I sought out a foil-backed sticker to fully block the illuminated advertisement on the lid of my laptop. I ordered custom printed stickers to cover the advertisement on the frame of my bicycle. I ripped out the advertisements embroidered onto my shoes.
As I look around my house, I see sanctuary from our dystopia.
Anyway rlly enjoy your comment you’ve given me some great inspiration
Is at least my quick assessment. Interested in your thoughts
I buy things with the least amount of logos and adverts as possible.
Unless I explicitly choose something with a logo, it's gonna be plain, or even a pretend logo, advertising nothing
High interest loans, fast foods, cable channels (with more advertising), sports gambling, et cetra.
I still cannot understand why I paid to get a specific streaming service (Sportsnet) and had to sit through Wayne Gretzsky ruining his legacy by selling sports gambling to my 3 children.
Why did they do it?
Money.
They wanted more money and you wouldn't stop watching your sport.
It's not a surprise. If given the option, people will actively shop to get the best bang for their buck. Given two options, they will opt for the one that gets them the most of what they value.
Why did you do it?
Because you valued your viewing habits over other things.
It's all really simple.
I assume making a decent return off a large number of people is of less importance than fleecing true fans.
I used to think the Japanese baseball league was insanely commercial due to it using corporate sponsor names instead of the city name (Hanshin Tigers, Yomiuri Giants, etc..) but in retrospect, the commercialization was only skin deep while the NHL is completely and unapologetically corrupted.
Lesser leagues are more fun anyways
The transphobic fiasco with bud light made it pretty clear that boycotts WORK, if only we had the balls to do them, and maybe endure minuscule """suffering""" to continue them.
Your point stands in general.
I assume because the ads are in language and region Google don't care as much, there's less priority or resource to filter them out. Maybe they should ask Meta how to do it since FB and Insta ads are way more "reasonable".
Sure, if everyone is smart, well-educated, rational, and has access to affordable licensed doctors, there isn't much harm in such garbage advertising. However, the problem is that these advertisements are being displayed to people who live in the real world.
Re: web ads, they were bad, but then Google came in and showed that they can be non-disruptive as well, their plain text ads took over the online ad market. For a while anyway.
Apparently one offline technique was checking for black frames inserted by local stations.
Some more information here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayTV
I mean, just watching a show on whatever streaming source...a "30 minute" show is typically more like 21:30 to 22:30 long. That means 7:30 to 8:30 of the time is ads. At least 25% of the time.
6 minutes of content, 2 minutes of ads. It's awful, and it feels so much worse when watching a movie. Movies are all about building tension for an hour or more, and that feeling of build-up is just destroyed by ad breaks.
How anybody can stand that is beyond me.
And then the ads are designed to be seen one time, so when they get repetitive you start noticing things that you wouldn't care about after one showing but will drive you insane after you see it for the 50th time in a row. An actor flubbed their line and they didn't fix it, a laugh sounds a little awkward, a sound is out of place, all sorts of things that pique your subconscious and you can't tune out.
How many of you can sing an advertising jingle from your childhood decades later? That is clearly a crime against humanity.
I own a VW. I like my VW. I will not be buying their EV product. Ever.
After moving out I never subscribed to cable or satellite and don't watch terrestrial broadcasts either, partially because of the advertising. If I were to subscribe now it'd probably be contingent on my ability to use a modern TiVo-like DVR for the same reasons.
- Just how many ads there are. And it's not even that there are a bunch of different ads, it's the same 3-4 ads played in a loop.
- The absurd number of drug commercials. The last time I was I was at a friends place to watch a football game we played a drinking came called "ask your doctor". Anytime a drug ad said "ask your doctor is X is right for you", you take a shot. We were all drunk by the end of the game.
And since we're on the topic...soccer also needs to adopt rugby's rule that only the team captain can talk to the ref and question calls, and respect is required. But, you know...baby steps.
The MLS can do alot to become more popular but it won't ever be what soccer in the rest of the world is because to do that they would have to dethrone American Football which is just never happening.
I have no idea what you did when TV was still relevant, but when ads came on my family used to either change channel or mute the tv and talk about stuff until the show came back on. You got very good at feeling out how long ad blocks were and switching back at the right time.
Regardless though, there were strict laws on the ads that you could put on TV, the claims you could make, how you could master them (ie sound volume), and in what timeslots.
Based on the scams you endlessly see in YouTube ads, I'm pretty sure they don't bother with any of that.
VCR & fast forward.
> In my country that worked, because ads were neat 5 minute blocks every 15 odd minutes, but in the US it seems every few minutes there's an ad interrupting - but they're too short to tune out / do something else.
The US television ads switched to that format to make them more obnoxious and harder to fast forward over.
This battle between attention spam and users thinking that's obnoxious has been going on for decades.
Too bad the FCC's CALM act can't be applied to the internet as well: "The CALM Act applies only to commercials aired on television—it does not apply to radio commercials or commercials aired on the internet or via streaming services."
https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/areas/sound-volume-commercia...
You can't block access to their most profitable raw material and expect them to just sit and take it.
I'm far from convinced this isn't relevant to YouTube history with controversial content. I think somebody is paying to do that, covertly or overtly. Sort of payola? I think there are ways to pay off YouTube to promote your content.
The publishers are also in the business of selling ads, not aiding creators.
We - wife, me, and some I know - cancels providers as they are not serving the consumer, and we feel that. Let them sell their service to ad companies then, when less and less consumers go to their site, good luck with that in the long run. They lost one customer for sure, and looking at the mood here there may be more, or will be more if they carry on like this.
However, more importantly, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Ads enable content creators to get paid. Frankly, youtube barely eeks out a profit. When you block ads instead of paying to remove them, you’re making it harder for Youtube to justify its existence.
Personally, I think it’s fine to block ads if you’re actually quite poor or if it makes the web unusable. But if you’re just doing it because “web advertisers deserve it” or some other kind of hare brained rationalization, then you should reconsider your position. It’s not rebellious or brave to use an adblocker when there are affordable paid ad free experiences, it’s simply theft.
However, I have had a dual 30sec ad before starting a video that repeated every 2min on something I actually wanted to watch, but quickly stopped, because it was "unwatchable". I consider that level to be at about 10% of watch time (regular TV is about 25% 8/30 min in larger blocks).
Me watching a video of a creator I don't like 50 times without ads so he loses money with every view, that's how it works right?
When did this become ok? Telling them to get off my lawn hasn't worked.
You guys will know what I'm talking about - random words in text, underlined twice, which if you hover over, will get an obnoxious ad.
Google bought them not long after:
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick....
Ads have been obnoxious for at least 15 years already.
Once they lose you, once you get so pissed off that you go to the trouble to install and configure an adblocker, they NEVER get you back.
They do not understand this, and so they'll simply push more people to adblockers. Maybe Chrome's manifest v3 won't suffice, so people will move to Firefox or Brave to do it. Either way, Google loses.
But the fucking Internet ad world there doesn't seem any upper limit to how much of someone's time you can waste.
If there was a company with clear community intentions and sound morals, yeah I would consider paying for it and support the creators. But YT that treats me like trash with their dark patterns and algorithms showing me stuff to hijack my brain instead of stuff I am looking for? No way in hell.
1) tracking me across in serval ways, only making me more fanatical about it by selling my information and activity to who know whom. 2) malware/virus injections … it still happens way too often. 3) garbage ads; for garbage products, products/services I just purchased, or the infamous scam ads to defraud people.
I guarantee that if all ads were just a little couple kb image banner then the majority of the anti-ad people would decide that this was unacceptable to them for some new reason — or they’d rely on their stance that all advertising is immoral (see elsewhere in these comments for many examples of this).
I think there's a distinction between that and the tragedy of the commons. Advertisers face a game theory scenario where they can increase the obnoxiousness of their individual ad, which will enrich themselves, but it hurts the industry as a whole because users are marginally more likely to figure out a way to block ads altogether after seeing an obnoxious ad.
But it is only fitting since advertising is an arms race regardless of the nature of online advertising or the ability to be obnoxious. All companies would be better off if they collectively decreased their marketing budgets, but that would require coordination and a way to guarantee no one defects.
This isn't always true as there are a few giants that do embedded ads too, but most of the sponsor reads I see on YouTube are from smaller or more niche channels.
1. They're produced much more mindfully in context of the video your watching. At their most basic, they're a small ad read at the beginning of a video, at their best, they're a much more likely to be relevant to me (the consumer) ad that doesn't cause me to lose focus on the video's original context. When a YouTube ad plays on my iPad while I'm listening to something during my daily shower, I don't really fear that a sponsor read is going to cause me to lose focus on the topic, largely because the automated ad inserter isn't going to accidentally cut out a second or two before a natural break, or even worse, in the middle of a sentence.
2. I know the proceeds of the ad are going directly to the creator, instead of to a machine that does ads in a way that myself, and a slough of psychologists, believe is damaging to a human.
I would much rather pay for YT Premium, or other services for ad free content viewing, however a lack of job security has lead me to sock away that and other funds that would go to paying for content like this to my rainy day fund. If it were a binary choice of pay for YT or not right now, I wouldn't, and I'd miss out on some fun, informative, and entertaining content, but in a way, I wish that was the case. It'd come with some awful consequences for an entire ecosystem of content creators, but ultimately that's the consequences of pedaling tech drugs, and that's a whole different conversation.
What are terrible are the tone-deaf pre-packed injected ads that blare out of your speakers into your skull.
TWiT uses pre-recorded ads pretty often, and has admitted to trying AI-read ads which mimic the host. I prefer either to the meandering before and after banter that bookends the off-the-cuff ad reads. Thankfully it appears their paid Club TWiT excludes both ads and annoying wind up / wind down around them.
(Full disclosure, I work for a company that facilitates ad-free podcast offerings)
It's a classic case of tragedy of the commons.
Your gutter ads don't convert as well and they are blocked just as readily as the loud ones.
Because other services have done that model change too.
Another possibility is google could kill gmail accounts from youtube ad blockers someday, who is going to stop them?
It is mainly that the internets have become 'real life' instead of some hidden away tech thing for us. We can't be deprived alone anymore without society falling down in pieces around us ...
On mainstream sites ads are almost always not that obnoxious imo. Pop-up ads used to be the standard.
I'm subscribed as well, but it's becoming less valuable as more and more content creators run sponsored ads in their videos and these play regardless of your subscription status.
No, I block ads because they are fucking malicious and dangerous. As far as I'm concerned, an ad in this day and age is literally malware. I am not going to even try and tolerate that bullshit. Adblockers are an anti-virus measure.
Ads are malvertisements and deserve to be blocked with the fury of a thousand suns.
I can’t pay google to stop profiling me, so there’s no way I’m paying for youtube premium.
[edit: honestly, the new three strikes for ad blockers policy looks like a usability improvement to me. It makes sure I don’t watch more than three videos without clearing cookies]
As many services like Hulu, cable TV or even just premium hardware have shown, paying for a service doesn't mean a company will never succumb to the perceived revenue opportunity of showing ads to paying subscribers too. I also pay for premium, but it's very much a case of "Doesn't affect me.. yet"
Besides the sensory assault "ads" are also running arbitrary code in your browser and trying to track you individually across websites. I find it absurd when an ad block detector says something like "please support us". It's really "please support us...by letting AdTech track everything you do without informed consent and resell all of that information to innumerable downstream buyers also without consent by the way watch this blaring ad for something entirely unrelated to the topic of this webpage".
To make things even worse AdTech networks have ended up to be major malware vectors because they do effectively zero filtering or curation of uploaded content.
In principal I don't mind advertisements. Someone has a thing for sale they want to show me is for sale. It's not a big deal. I never really had issues with print advertisements, even a full page ad wasn't intrusive on my life and I could just turn the page if I was uninterested. But modern web "advertising" is just the worst fucking thing. The only sane option is to block it because it is so invasive and intrusive.
There were programs way back then that acted as a proxy server that would remove image tags that matched the size used by banner ads. See WebWasher or Proxomitron.
I haven't heard that name in a long time. Is that how it worked, by image size? I thought it was URL pattern matching.
Music pirating happened because it was simply impossible to get a lot of music you wanted to. Then when you could find it, you'd pay a large amount. Maybe not even knowing if you liked the work. Napster and Limewire come in because they let you get whatever and even one song at a time. Music industry comes in with DRM and makes it harder to rip CDs, but the mouse always wins. Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify killed a lot of music pirating because they offered most of the advantages that pirating had: access and portability. It made things easy.
Or look at movies. The "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad started in 2004, when a ticket cost under $10 (I think I paid around $6-$8). Now that same ticket is $18-$20, which is $11-$13 in 2004. Not to mention the crazy prices for refreshments. People didn't stop liking going to the movie theaters, they were priced out (along with the studios migrating towards international audiences and diverging from our cultural standards to theirs). Home streaming didn't fix that because they charged the same price or more for a ticket. Netflix killed a lot because people would rather wait (and especially after they started making their own content). Then more streaming services popped up and pirating is back because it re-simplified things. PopcornTime was incredibly popular for a bit and was simple enough for my grandma to use.
This is all really due to incredibly short sighted thinking. Chasing one marker to the next not realizing that they're veering away from the actual goal. I know this link isn't exactly the same thing, but we should be able to see the parallels here because it is the exact same game going on[0], just with profit maximization rather than policy making (we can formulate markets as a social choice theory problem).
Similarly, what gives the newspaper more money, the unpersonalized ad respecting your privacy or the personalized ad that first loads a fingerprinting framework to track you across the web and then show you more targeted ads?
But they do not take my second inch, let alone a mile. I simply avoid places with agressive ads, like youtube (and the products advertised), and TV in general long long ago. I stopped to care about the content, not least because the content thinned up with plethora of ad hungry nothing, uninteresting, deceiving, ad optimised nothing. Content pushed on me based on ad strategy and not my interest, navigating to something truely similar or favoured is obscured (just like in movie streaming services wich pushes trends and obfuscates navigation). Not to mention the shameless tracking. No point going to such places, there is plenty of life elsewhere.
Earlier this week I got served a 1.5 HOUR long ad by YouTube for a bank here in Hong Kong.
If publishers don’t like it they can put their content behind a subscription.
If I trick the user into clicking on something that looks organic but it's not, I will be paid money.
Showing an ad full screen on youtube, forced, won't guarantee that is has any effect on the viewer, but the advertiser has to pay and on top of that, the user experience is ruined.
So based on lies, we ruin experience.
Isn't there a way to get incentives aligned?
The only ads that seem to work on me are Steam, because I open the platform on purpose to find new games. The other is costco giving free food. I'm hungry, I grab something from them and if it's tasty, I'll buy a bag to test if it's something we would like to buy on a recurring basis.
Everything else seems to just be annoyances
Then there is the fact that we consumers struggle to maintain and communicate a blocklist of bad actors.
And even good actors can sell out or slide into mediocrity.
Oh how the turntables... shorts everywhere and ads longer than usable content.
It does. Premium doesn't skip ads inside videos added by creator, SponsorBlock addon (that probably will be banned) does.
I agree. And for me they're also two (!) good examples of tragedy of the commons.
From the side of the advertisers, your ads are only competitive if they're slightly more obnoxious than your competitors, but as you make your ads more obnoxious you're degrading a common resource - the willingness of the public to put up with your crap. Eventually the public says "this is too obnoxious, I'm going to block it".
And, from the side of the sites showing ads, you'll want (or need) the additional money brought by one more ad. But once you do it, you're creating yet another ad space - making the market value of ad spaces a tiny bit cheaper. And as everyone is doing this, the price of ad spaces drops down to the bottom, so you need to include more and more ads on your platform to stay competitive (or even to stay online).
I would expect governments to intervene in those situations. At the end of the day, a government should, among other things, prevent its citizens from making things worse for everyone, when seeking their own interests. Sadly governments aren't big fans of contradicting megacorps like the Ad Sense (from Alphabet) mafia.
I am willing to give Youtube money just to get rid of the ads once and for all, especially on my TV ... But I can't because Premium isn't available in my country.
You said that you subscribe to premium. Quick Google search says about 120 USD per year. What do you get for 10 USD per month?
Not true. People are blocking ads whenever they have the chance. Even when they are just a lousy picture on the side, in the text or a banner at the top, they were always annoyed from all of them and found ways to remove them. And it makes sense, because Ads need to have a certain level of "in your face"ness to work, that's unavoidable.
There are two things that pop into my mind here.
One is that to pay more for an ad the advertiser wants to know which user explicitly interacted with it or saw it. So non-intrusive ads on the sides of a UI are by far lower in value during sales.
The other is that the one way to increase interaction and value is to prove that the ad is the only thing the user was exposed to, ie. eliminate everything else.
So what we get today is an entire aesthetic and de-cluttered look. Even when you pay for premium the design is still made so that the machine can read into what your eyeballs are up to.
I have kids that sometimes get to watch something on YT. I can control what they watch but there were way too many bad surprises of gross or scary content in the ads (often by proxy, e.g. the ad of a cable TV company would showcase their explicit or horror offerings..). Using YT kids made no difference, really.
I have YT premium now, at least for the time being.
And i won't be turning off my adblocker ever. no matter how nicely someone asks. If you block me from your site, I'll find the content i want somewhere else. The risk is too high, and frankly - it's my device, and i can pick what software i want to run on it(for now).
side note about hostile sites: if you mess up with the scrolling in any way I'm immediately leaving the site.
Leave angry comments on the videos you watch and tell the creators your pissed at them for how many ads they place. This is one area YT gives almost full autonomy to the creator. They can choose everything except which ads get played.
But keep in mind it would kill YT business model. Youtubers disabling ads means fewer ad views and clicks, so less profit for YT. Less reach also means advertisers agree to pay less, so even less profit. And finally there is no reason to sub to premium, so even less profit.
YT doesn't want to be just a free hosting because transcoding and serving petabytes is expensive I guess, and it does not want to be a paid hosting because it would make YT a commodity and no one wants to be a commodity.
https://www.makeuseof.com/youtube-ads-without-paying-creator...
I do agree with your general point. Creators can choose to show less ads, and we should prefer channels that choose to monetize less.
EDIT: I'm no longer sure whether YouTube is displaying ads when you do this. The wording I found in their help pages is ambiguous. I think they reserve the right to display video ads if monetization is off, but they are not displaying ads (currently).
Edit: Also, when I click on the help icon next to the monetization bubble, the entire Google help article[0] talks about turning on ads. Which seems to imply they're off by default, but they don't mention turning off ads, so who knows if that's just "clever" writing to indicate there's no way to turn ads off.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/18/youtube...
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2475463?hl=en-GB
That said, I checked the parent's video, watching it all the way though... and I also didn't see any ad (and I even watched it on my Chromecast, which usually triggers a lot more ads on Youtube, which is a reason why I never use it for Youtube, but only for Netflix, Disney+, etc.)
I assume that ads might be shown, but only rarely. Probably Youtube wants to run them, to have the flexibility to recoup on some of the infra costs for videos which wouldn't otherwise earn revenue (i.e. they aim net zero for non monetized videos... but this is my speculation)
Which I think is fair -- after all, I think they're already doing non-monetized creators a favor by footing the entire bandwidth bill, they don't owe them free promotion!
But it obviously puts a limit on what a creator can do about ads if they are actually trying to make money (even if they don't want any Adsense money and only want to do their own in-video sponsors, or heck, even if they're just looking for "exposure"). If they turn off monetization, they'll drop off the face of the Earth, essentially.
Hence why creators care so much about a single demonetized video, basically it means the video goes into a black hole and earns them basically no views. It exists, but it may as well not.
I'm on desktop, adblocking the entire internet to the best of my ability. I daresay if YouTube got pushy with me as a video watcher, I would watch less and would be the better for it. Go ahead, make my day ;)
Sounds like grounds for an investigation that could develop into a lawsuit.
I don't know why it would be illegal for YouTube to use its recommendation algorithm to favor videos with ads.
It's a for-profit business after all.
If you're not allowed to block ads, you sure as hell don't have a right to be promoted while refusing to RUN ads. I've assumed the worst for years now.
The FTC has brought lawsuits against deceptive practices, like tricking people into signing up for something they didn't mean to -- that might be what you're referring to?
But I don't see any deceptive practice here. YouTube favoring more profitable videos is no different from grocery stores putting candy next to you while you wait to check out. Companies are trying to manipulate you into selecting the most profitable thing all the time, that's the norm. But you still get to choose which video to click on, the same as it's your choice whether or not to buy the candy at checkout.
Of course youtube wouldn't want that, because they don't get any money out of that deal. And judging by how things are going at Twitch, the platform trying to get a cut by forcing sponsorship deals to happen via their platform just gets people up in arms.
This will get your account shadowbanned, i.e. you'll be able to see your comments and votes but nobody else will be.
>“YouTube’s ad-supported model supports a diverse ecosystem of creators, and provides billions of people globally access to content for free with ads,” the company’s statement says.
Let's at least be 100% honest with everyone and stop with the disingenuous garbage:
1. Ad-blocker usage is roughly 25-30% of US users.
2. The average YouTube content creator makes less than 0.02 per ad view and thus why many of the large ones choose to use sponsors instead. Most YouTube content creators aren't making ANY money, let alone enough for them to care all that much. For those that are, they're doing just fine w/ad-blockers being used.
3. Google made nearly $70 billion in Q1; they're not hurting at all, especially their executives.
4. The on-going rise in the use of ad-block technologies is simply because platforms, sites, etc, are all absolutely inundating viewers with so much trash in an effort to make more money that it's almost a requirement to use them without having a shitty experience.
This is disgusting. Google's executives do an incredible amount of valuable work, easily thousands of times more than other employees, and deserve rich compensation packages. People need to be willing to pay a lot for Premium, or watch more ads, so that these executives can afford bigger yachts.
Why do you hate rich people so much?
/s
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...
Curiously the same content from bigger brands gets a pass.
Interrupting my watching experience so you can show me 15 seconds of some chips bouncing around on the screen only serves to frustrate me and cause me to despise whatever you're selling. It's reminiscent of the "butt in chair" managerial mindset, and does not convey a solid understanding of how an intelligent person makes purchase decisions or meaningfully interacts with whatever you're peddling.
The most effective advertisements are the ones you don't even realize are advertisements. If you've ever searched reddit for product recommendations, you've likely read covert marketing campaigns disguised as casual suggestions. I'm not saying those are better, they're actually just as bad if not worse, because they are fundamentally dishonest.
In my opinion, a tolerable ad is one that does not aggravate me. Non aggressive, non intrusive, quick, to the point, and at least somewhat relevant without having to spy on me. Showing me ads for travel or hotel bookings during a video about videogames or hobby model making isn't useful to me (or anybody I presume).
It's like spam having obvious misspellings as a bandpass filter for lowered reasoning faculties. YouTube ads are made to appeal to the type of person who doesn't use adblocking. They don't care if they're intolerable to you - they already know you're not going to engage.
The question is, if ads are forced on the rest of us and we can't walk into the proverbial other room while they're on, how might we allow ads, make them useless for capturing real data about us, but have them appear valuable?
Web ads are implicitly solicited. You go to websites knowing that they will serve ads. If you don't like it, you can stop going to said websites and no more ads.
Before I switched to using adblocking on my phone for youtube (like I did for my desktop), I made sure I will never ever buy whatever crap was presented in YT ads.
I believe I am not the only one for which ads have a contrary effect to the desired effect.
So, some companies payd Youtube money and end up actually losing money from sales.
Remember: "Ad-supported content" isn't really ad-supported, it's supported by the customers of whoever's buying the ads.
Always wondered how anyone picks an attorney from a billboard, as it seems that would be a negative signal but it must work because there are so many of them.
Mobile experience with ads is the most user hostile experience in tech.
E: keeping the misspelling.
It's completely fair to argue that Google makes more than enough money to not have to rely on your ad revenue but after all you're still free-riding.
1.) Google drove up ad coverage in front of videos to the point where I have to watch 2, sometimes 3 ads before I can watch a video. This is insane. I'd rather go back watching TV instead.
2.) Simultaneously, they have made it impossible for creators to support themselves by using ad payouts - indicated by how many creators chose to go with third party sponsorships. So even when I'm using adblock, I'm watching ads, only this time I'm usually okay with it, because I can skip them and even if not, it supports the creators I'm watching (although I'm sure advertisers will slowly figure this out as well and creep over to surreptitious advertising).
> that means to the app/platform/creator/website to go private and with a paywall
You pretend like this isn't already happening. Google is so detached from their customer-base, that Linus Tech Tips is currently starting his own streaming service, that does exactly this. Using their YouTube platform as a way to advertise it.
Larger content creators will just build their own platforms, as Linus proves.
> I have to watch 2, sometimes 3 ads before I can watch a video. This is insane. I'd rather go back watching TV instead.
Your 2 statements contradict themselves. If you and others are fine to pay for a service and hate to watch 2-3 ads then why not take YouTube Premium? Now you just said you will prefer not to pay and go watch TV.
> they have made it impossible for creators to support themselves
You can literally pay a subscription to a channel you want to directly support now. How is that not helping to support content creators.
> You pretend like this isn't already happening.
I think you start to reading way too deeper here because I was literally pointing that it is happening and has to happen if people want quality. Or you go free with ads or you go private with a paywall.
Truth is you are already kinda answering what is happening right now:
> So even when I'm using adblock, I'm watching ads, only this time I'm usually okay with it, because I can skip them and even if not, it supports the creators I'm watching (although I'm sure advertisers will slowly figure this out as well and creep over to surreptitious advertising)
During Covid the internet ad market exploded but the price also went way down. If it’s ads on Facebook Google or even YouTube. A lot of people are more on the web with lock downs. They shop even more on Amazon and e-commerce shops. But this influx of new (regular) users made also cost of the ads per user crash because of the influx itself and because of the financial situation.
Coming back on YouTube that’s when and why YouTube started to show a lot more ads before it was 1-2 it went to 2-3 or so. And usually not skipable.
Add to this like you said in your comment people that want to support a channel and do watch ads but never click, advertisers will “figured it out”. Well they already did figured it on out. And they is them and Google Facebook etc. The market already corrected itself at the beginning of Covid. That’s why now you have to see more ads on YouTube because the cost per click is way down.
We can’t just zoom in and avoid all the economic situation. Forget how we got here. And avoid to see what YouTube offers to support content creators and yell that they don’t do a thing when really everything is already there. The question is are people defending this narrative going to fight to always things free with no (little) ads or are they going to put their money where their mouth is?
Maybe if they weren't allowed to collect so much information, or had to pay back the users they are collecting data on could I see the point that ad-blocking is free-riding.
Yes, I'm consuming the service, but I'm also contributing to it. Less users = less engagement, and maybe that's good for YT's bottom line but it's harmful to the ecosystem.
Using words like 'theft' to describe visiting an openly-accessible webpage with a browser extension that modifies the presentation of that webpage is a bit extreme.
Add up all their users and that's many billions of dollars of networking they're getting for free, paid for by those users.
Very disingenuous argument. That's their revenue, not their profit, and that includes their entire business, not just YouTube. Or is your point just that Google is big, therefore even if YouTube is operating at a loss (I don't know if it is or not) they should maintain that indefinitely just because they can?
If YouTube disappeared tomorrow it would arguably the best thing that happened to internet video since its inception. You can only imagine the variety of services that would spring up, maybe a standard way of finding and viewing videos would emerge.
People don't realise how damaging (essential) monopolies are, abusive or not.
And everyone here is behaving like pissy 6 year olds in response
By your standards, Google is acting even more juvenile. It will not defeat or reduce adblocking and will likely alienante paying customers. It's less than pointless.
The CEO of YouTube is probably sweating as their performance is tied to YouTube net profit. YouTube is one of many revenue streams that Alphabet will be tightening over the years. I expect the Android division to also start bringing in revenue that is not connected to Google Play.
2. Many users want to keep blocking/avoiding ads & don't want to pay. So they want to use the service for literally free. What other monitization method do you propose?
3. Their parent company's revenue doesn't matter. Is Google expected to run a free service that is very expensive and serves billions of users?
4. Youtube demonitizes people to keep advertisers on the platform. Users blocking ads & not paying ("freeloaders") only exacerbate the issue by being a drain on resources and further incentivizes Youtube to keep striving to preserve revenue by demonetization.
The number I see tends to fluctuate between $1 to $1.50 per 1,000 views, or about $0.001 to $0.0015 per view. (YouTube makes around twice that in direct gross revenue, and splits it up 55% to 45% between the creator and the platform, respectively.)
This obviously fluctuates substantially: if you produce videos that are viewed by prime demographics advertisers are more interested in, you tend to make more. YouTube also has better individual deals signed with their topmost creators, giving them a better revenue split or a different advertiser pool that’s willing to pay more for the most popular YouTubers. Shorts and livestreams also work a bit differently, but that’s too complicated to get into here.
CGP Grey has a great video on how YouTube ads work: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KW0eUrUiyxo
Sponsors, meanwhile, typically offer massively better rates. Estimates very a lot more, and it depends on your individual track record as a creator, but I’ve seen numbers thrown around ranging from $2.50 to $10 per 1,000 views at the lower end. The biggest creators are apparently being quoted $50 or more per 1,000 views, and that number goes up exponentially as your channel grows.
That’s why seemingly every YouTuber is taking those deals, they’re unbelievably lucrative compared to the integrated YouTube ads. Combine that with a healthy Patreon and it’s no wonder why YouTubers are still able to do so well despite Google infamously difficult behavior.
The way they get around App Store restrictions is by claiming that they aren't a Youtube app. They're technically a video-watching app which is supposed to be used with your own personal server. The server API they require, however, is supported by Invidious[2], an open-source, privacy-preserving Youtube front end. If you configure an Invidious instance in settings[3] (you don't have to host your own, there are plenty of them out there), you effectively get access to the entirety of Youtube.
It's not a replacement for the official app by any means, it doesn't have a recommendation feed, it doesn't let you log in with a Google account, so it doesn't sync watch history with your other devices, it doesn't let you cast to Youtube-enabled devices, post comments, scroll through shorts etc, but if you have a playlist or a specific, longer video in mind, it's quite good. It also supports Invidious accounts, which let you manage channel subscriptions.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629 [2] https://invidious.io/ [3] https://gonzoknows.com/posts/yattee/
And there's a native Mac app! And tvOS!
Maybe I'm just getting old, but as I was reading through the list of features this doesn't have, I just got more and more excited. My watch pattern is pretty much watching videos to solve problems or research some particular thing, and I feel like I find most of them through Google or YouTube search. The recommendations can be pretty good, but there's always those clickbaity, completely unrelated ones mixed in, trying to pull me into a totally separate rabbit hole.
It blocks all YouTube ads, allows background playback and picture-in-picture, etc.
You also get all of your regular YouTube features, like recommendations, etc.
I haven't used the official YouTube app since.
Plus I paid for the lifetime subscription there so … no subscription for me.
At some point I will probably cancel my subscription and use an unofficial app with sponsor block. And that aldo hopefully blocks shorts ad well
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/musi-simple-music-streaming/id...
Missing most of the features mentioned (recommendations, watch history, google account, shorts) are all pros instead of cons to me. Just an app for intentionally watching content in a no-frills private environment, it's refreshing.
I have two modes of watching YouTube:
1. When I want to learn about something. Then I use a search engine to find the video, and your setup would be fine
2. When I want to relax and watch generally interesting informative videos. Or sometimes comedy or animation.
I subscribe to a range of channels and use the YT recommendations for the second mode (which sucks but is barely usable).
How do people watching YT with no account handle this second mode of watching?
I actually have tried to use TikTok a few times. However I live in a country where I'm not a native speaker and there is no way to set the TikTok region to anywhere except your geographic location. Even when using a VPN, reinstalling the app, and creating an entirely new account, it still knows exactly what country I'm in. That's scary enough to make me not use it much.
But I was bored so I figured, the algorithm is supposed to be good right? It should learn I want English videos pretty quickly.
Nope, I spent about an hour searching exclusively for videos in English, and 99% of all the recommendations were still in Vietnamese. I guess I should be grateful that one privacy invading timewaster is unavailable to me!
And we're just a short hop from ads being "Attention required" with eyeballs tracked. I wonder if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance.
Ads are truly a cancer on human culture, I hope society decides to wage a war on them soon.
More and more platforms will try the « paid subscription with ads » in the coming years.
When a free experience can do better than the premium experience, your product have a problem.
I’m not even sorry about SponsorBlock, creators still get their money, I don’t have to watch the sponsored segment, and advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it. So it’s zero impact on the creator, big impact on my sanity.
Actually per-segment viewership gets tracked by YouTube and displayed in the YouTube creator tools. I wouldn't be surprised if those statistics get used when negotiating deals with sponsors.
So YouTube has no idea that the content was skipped by SponsorBlock? I find that hard to believe.
Ads targeting children would be an international crime if our world was just.
In late 90s and early 2000s, before all Youtube, Facebook and Instagram crap, some passionate people produced content wich was available for free on their web pages.
I don't feel the need for need mass culture and mass entertainment crap, but if I would feel such a need, I would install cable TV and/or pay for it.
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
[1]: https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l40...
This makes sense in my head, if there's an incredibly small cost to watching someone (which would add up if that someone thousands of views) and the experience doesn't revolve constantly around trying making me constantly want to consume something else.
It's easy to forget that in reality it's almost never a case where we "can't find alternatives", it's that they are incompatible with profit seeking.
It's refreshing to see how people are starting to revolt on platforms like Reddit and Twitch. People are done with this stuff. Even if it is only a small percentage of the total amount of users, it allows for new platforms to thrive and grow, while the old platforms slowly decay. I hope this day will come for Youtube as well.
They're doing another promotion for cosmetics too. And it's not even per sandwich, it's per purchase. So to get them all, you have to have 4 separate transactions.
There is an option.
YouTube premium is still full of ads.
If uBlock doesn’t work anymore, either I’ll use YouTube-flow/yt-dlp, or I’ll stop using YouTube altogether.
I’m ok to pay for services, but paying and still getting ads is my hard limit.
If you're right, then I'm not that far off from cancelling my subscription. But I think you're wrong.
There are a few big subreddits like r/interestingasfuck that are still closed, but these are more like meme channels than communities. People can just get the same dozen gifs a day from r/damnthatsinteresting, r/whoadude, etc.
If, as is widely (self) reported, many mods and power users interact with reddit via 3rd party apps; we won't see the true impact of the API changes until they're active.
If what the mods say about their tools is in fact true, then:
Next, you're going to see a lot more spam as mods tools are gone and most of America is on a long weekend with a family holiday at the end.
Next, the spammers are going to quickly figure out the mods are asleep/gone and up the crap game even more.
Next, the creeps are going to post more less-than-kosher material, with reporting of it essentially going into unread inboxes by overworked mods.
Next, r/all is going to be, well, boring and gross. All the spam will make you go, huh, that's not very interesting. All the less-than-kosher stuff is going to make you go yuck.
Then, you're going to say to yourself, we'll see how long this lasts. And if it lasts until ~July 8th or so, you'll have found your next reddit fix.
Again, all predicated on what the mods are saying is true.
If anything can hurt Reddit, it's that kind of material. Advertisers really, really don't like controversial content, and are the first to pull out of any service that even smells of controversy or political incorrectness, see what happened to Twitter revenues after the Musk takeover. The Reddit protests would have been far more effective if people started posting (and/or moderators stopped removing) gore, porn and Swastikas everywhere, maybe with a sprinkling of racism and homophobia on top.
Even more important: Alternative platforms had a huge surge in usercount. They don't reach the number of Reddit of course, but rheu don't need to. They are their own thing and many do now have enough users to replace Reddit for most usecases of many users.
I've been having a blast on the Ferdiverse for the last few weeks. I'm also trying out tildes.net and squabbles.io. It's all very refreshing and reminds me of early reddit and old forums.
I'm actually somewhat glad this all happend. I'd have never dicovered all these platforms otherwise. And I'm not alone in that perspective
https://www.youtube.com/premium
> Enjoy watching YouTube uninterrupted by ads whenever you sign in - on your mobile device, desktop, or enabled TV.
Sadly, very unlikely. I recommend AdBlockers and YouTube app alternatives without ads to basically everyone and the vast majority of people would rather watch ads than deal with installing something even if it'll take a few seconds.
There's enough of us (adblock users) for Google to want to take profit from but not enough to make a dent in YouTube's monopoly even if we all moved to something else.
Yes, I'm sure everyone is fighting for an audience who refuse to pay and block all ads. And of course the audience who do sit through ads or pay are therefore not going to switch and stick with YouTube.
So unless you want to burn money, I really don't see a viable business model there. Unless you think you can take the initial hit to grow a big enough audience and then force ads and paid subscriptions on everyone to make that money back.
So, on the one hand you have people who use ad blockers. The first retort that comes to mind here is: Well, we'll take our business elsewhere. Which is odd because without ads they aren't paying and them leaving is the goal.
Of course on the other hand ... when I read the title my thoughts weren't that I would be okay because I don't ad block youtube. My thought wasn't that I should buy youtube premium to avoid ads. My thought WAS that if I ever get falsely flagged, then I'll just buy a nebula subscription (or whatever) and never use youtube again.
In fact I went over to nebula to check it out.
Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable. But youtube got big via offering a free service and now if feels like they're trying to pull up the ladder behind themselves.
Even Uber is becoming an ads company...
Yeah, with youtube it kind of makes sense that the ads would be there. Uber (TIL), Windows 11, and non-media experiences/services/goods in general looking for ways to sell ads makes my skin crawl.
Just wait until doorbells play you an ad when you press the button.
If given a single magical wish, I wonder how much havoc I could wreck by wishing that immediately before someone intends to purchase ad time or join an ad network or whatever they mystically gain an understanding of exactly what the ROI is going to be for them. My conceit is that 99% of entities that purchase ad time have a significantly negative ROI because at the end of the day the only thing that an advertiser has to be good at selling to exist is their own services.
Platforms which require network effects to function like YouTube, Twitter, Email (deliverability), etc have a different dynamic. They're very difficult to abandon once you've come to rely on them.
Until the government comes in and mandates you need such and such light switch/thermostat/doorbell because of some regulation and conveniently all of the ones on the market which meet that spec are adware-infested nightmares.
You can get your own doorbell, but if everyone else has a doorbell with ads on it, then you kind of still have to deal with it.
"It's okay, I'll just text them instead of going to their front door." Oh they'll consider that too. The free monthly subscription is only valid when you end up with at least 10 ad plays during that month. You don't even have to push the button, the doorbell sees you and plays the ad. And your friends have an incentive to take just a few extra seconds to get to the front door even though they texted back that the door was unlocked and they're right there.
I saw a brand new machine for measuring blood pressure at the store and sat down because why not. It had unskippable screens demanding my personal info then it says “gathering your data” for a full THIRTY seconds after measuring my blood pressure which was conveniently just the amount of time to show me a commercial. It made me want to throw up.
I’m sure Walmart threw out all the old blood pressure machines that worked for 30 years and put these abominations in. It just makes my skin crawl how dystopian that machine was.
I feel like due to the VC-enabled delayed monetization that tends to happen with startups, we have all (me included) become convinced that it's sustainable to expect a bunch of ad-free, subscription-free content that just creates itself and teleports onto our computer, forever and ever. TANSTAAFL though.
There were 4 "commercial breaks" of 2, unskippable 30 second ads. So, 4 minutes extra.
That's an extra 40% of the original video length (10 minutes). That's 30% of the total length (14 minutes).
It's almost exactly the same as broadcast tv, maybe slightly high? TV averages 12-20 minutes per 60 of tv being ads.
Not really sure what to do with that. It feels like I should be upset, but really, it's proportionate to what already exists and I'm only upset because it's worse than it was 10 years ago.
We're PAYING for our kids to become desensitized to attention-vampiricity and we're unsure if it is ok to be upset? Yes!
Your argument is a different thing. Valid as well, but completely different.
There's far too many people in "business" today who think they provide anything of any real, determinable value to me rather then a passing fancy which will be easily replaced or discarded.
And this doesn't just apply to the content hosters: it also applies to their advertisers. There is nothing of value being advertised these days. It's all misrepresented junk, when it's not outright scams. It isn't worth ever exposing yourself to.
My first thought upon hearing this was "oh, I guess my time lost to youtube-dl + mpv of those few channels I have bookmarked will finally be reclaimed!" (assuming this breaks it)
This move makes zero sense on their part. Cutting off your addicts is a horrible approach to being a drug dealer. You always keep them hooked to your supply, if you wholly interrupt it they'll quickly seek replacement. That's literally what created the illicit opioid crisis - folks lost their prescription opioids and immediately pivoted to street dealers.
Surely youtube has better options than outright blocking users of adblockers... Why wouldn't you first just restrict the quality of videos they can access to extremely low-res. It lessens the bandwidth burden on you, and may be enough to keep them under your spell and away from the competitors supply.
For me, it was, in order:
- "Three strikes" and... what? Red alert! Let me drop everything and read the damn article right now, because it could be "three strikes and you lose your Google account", which is kinda big fucking deal.
- [Couple paragraphs later] oh, only disabling playback. Whew, cancel red alert.
- My kids will not be happy though the first time it hits. Neither will we, because YouTube + AdBlock is the easiest way to play our 4yo and 2yo music, without exposing them to the brain poison of modern advertising at this early age.
- (The next easiest one is NewPipe or yt-dlp, + some manual fixup, + an old phone working as an off-line music player.)
- (Also no joke on brain poison. The way kids react to an ad that occasionally slips by us is a perfect measure of how fucked up advertising is.)
- Oh well, let's hope NewPipe keeps working.
- ... also, what took them so long? I expected this so many years ago that I actually forgot this could happen.
BTW. is it only me, or is 2023 the year of "enshittification" of SaaS shifting into high gear? Like the layoff wave earlier, this also feels like suddenly happening everywhere at the same time.
This is an interesting point. Like, they're not doing it today, but ... yeah, I might checkout the alternative streaming services again when I get a moment. Because you know if this initiative doesn't make a chart start to go upwards, then sooner or later somebody in a board room is going to suggest it. Better to just get off of youtube now.
> (Also no joke on brain poison. The way kids react to an ad that occasionally slips by us is a perfect measure of how fucked up advertising is.)
My kids absolutely freak out whenever they see an ad. "What's happening? Is the TV broken?" I feel like their reaction is proof that I've done at least one thing right as a parent.
No affiliation with them, just very happy I made the switch.
The words likely to sum up this decade.
The era of free money may be over, but that doesn't mean we're required to present our gaping maws willingly as receptacles for the enshittifiers' effluent.
What's supposed to be bad about it. I'm still using Netflix and never even shared my password the first time. I like it.
- Charitable view: a very broad selection of productions aimed at smaller, niche audiences, so that everyone can find something unique they like.
- Cynical view: B-rate shit, going for quantity over quality, and hoping something sticks.
Either way, at this point, many Netflix users have long ago watched everything remotely worth watching on the site, and keep the subscription out of habit (or to keep access to something they like to rewatch). It doesn't take much to lose those subscribers.
Sometimes there really are good old days.
Google accounts are fragile like people; they can suddenly cease operation, for no known reason.
I keep everything Google isolated. It's all in it's own browser or container. As for youtube, it ~only gets watched on a dedicated device attached to a TV.
How is this easier than paying a subscription? You get ad-free YouTube and YouTube music.
I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements. We paid a few dollars more for a family plan and now my father and grandfather no longer watch ads either.
If most people choose to do this, your premium subscription will start to have a few premium, curated ads, and you'll have to buy the next tier up to get ad-free again. Four years later, you'll have to by the next tier up just to get the premium, curated ads back.
I absolutely hate this.
This has never happened to me even once with any service that I pay for. Hulu is the closest, but they replaced a free tier with a cheap-with-ads tier. Their expensive tier at least once had "some ads that were contractually required" but i never saw them.
And I think if "most people" paid for YTP they'd be drowning in revenue so I doubt that they'd be desperate to screw that up by repositioning YTP as something other than "ad-free."
I might get flamed for this, but while I see the reason to hate and adblock mainstream sites that have awful ads and have no paid ad-free option (see most newspapers and TV stations, especially local ones, everything that has those idiotic bottom-feeding ads at the bottom of an article, Yahoo, AOL, Newsweek, Gizmodo etc.) ... in contrast, YTP is there, it's twelve bucks a month, I don't see why anyone wouldn't pay for it instead of trying to cheat. Not saying it's a crime or even immoral, but they don't owe you video content and trying to subvert the conditions they place on access seems like basically cheating. Kind of like not paying your water bill (when you could afford it) and just using the public restroom next door 10 times a day. Not illegal, but... seems like a bad plan.
First of all, isn't YouTube Music dead? Didn't it die twice already? Secondly, I don't know. I didn't look into YouTube Premium precisely because they're pushing it way too hard. I don't trust Google, I don't trust them handling ads and child-related content on YouTube right, after various YouTube Kids fiascoes. I don't trust people who are pushing their products/services this hard - so far, I was never wrong. Whatever curiosity I had about YouTube Premium, they burned it by the third time in a day I got interrupted by a full-screen "activate a trial" ad, optimized to have distracted people subscribe by mistake.
Not to mention, the way YouTube Premium story evolves, this really feels like extortion. It technically isn't, and they're in their rights, but perception matters - and because of that, I'm willing to spend a lot of effort, and even a lot of money with someone else, just to not have to deal with YouTube Premium, YouTube ads and other YouTube bullshit, while retaining easy access on the relatively infrequent occasion I want to play something from their catalogue.
Nope. Never died. I've been using it for at least a year.
I think the West is escalating its war on user control of anything networkable, and content blocking is a security hole. Western governments prefer that everyone be using the same few monitorable, censorable, and compliant communication mediums in the same way, and is ignoring or supporting massive private media/tech businesses when needed in order to reach that goal.
1. Make everyone pay
2. Make everyone either watch ads or pay, user's choice
3. Eliminate all ads. Since there would be little reason to sign up for YTP once ads are eliminated, they're going to have to have "Pledge drives" where they try to beg you to pay just out of generosity, to support a public service for all. Somehow this seems like it'll never not lose huge amounts of money.
4. (sort of the status quo up till now) Nerds get to block ads, and are subsidized by Premium subscribers and suckers.
Admittedly option 3 sounds stupid, I just can't think of any other options for YouTube where it doesn't cease to exist.
This is, in fact, a point raised by many commenters in the thread - it's very likely that Premium will stop being ad-free once it gains a large enough user base. See also: cable TV, or any other paid-for medium whose initial value proposition was... "we charge you for it, but there are no ads!".
Option 3. - nah, can't imagine it either.
Option 4. - that would be going back to the "good years". I don't think it's possible for YouTube - they'd have to somehow undo or reverse the pressures that got them to the situation today. See also: image hosting service cycle - they start bullshit-free, then they get progressively worse, but it's only when they go past the "nerds block ads, whales pay, suckers get ads" stage - when they disturb that balance - that they die.
I mean... then you stop paying and download an ad blocker. Why not enjoy the utopia of paid commercial free video content while it lasts. It's not like you're locked in somehow.
I use an ad blocker. If I can no longer block ads on YouTube, yes I will just stop using YouTube, or use an Invidious/Piped instance. I think your mistake is believing everyone who uses ad-block also believes ad-free YouTube is worth paying for. I do not.
Further, if Invidious, Piped, NewPipe, and yt-dlp stop working as well, I will simply just watch drastically less YouTube, which is what Google wants.
> Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable.
I don't care. Would I care if YouTube was run by a small company that didn't employ dark patterns or fuel unhealthy addiction of innappropriate content in kids? Probably, but YouTube is run by megacorp, so no, I don't care about their server costs.
No, they are saying that they will not "lose your business" because there was no business in the first place, which is true.
Maybe the mistake of these conglomerates is getting people accustomed to a certain level of service for free.
The advertised rates are currently $5/month or $50/year.
Social media does it (Reddit, Twitter). Video games do it (COD, yearly releases, DLC). eCommerce does it (Walmart, Amazon). IaaS does it (Heroku).
Don't give them the benefit that it's a 'mistake', it's very intentional. CAC is a metric used by all tech companies and is calculated to build network effects and large user-bases. I find it unethical and borderline fraudulent to build these community pillars and then defile them for profit. We'll be left with absolutely nothing free in life, no town squares and no transfer of information without fees.
Whether you or someone else can afford $10/mo is completely irrelevant.
For example, YouTube could increase the price of advertising on their platform to make up for the fact that a certain fraction of users never see the ads, thus keeping everyone who matters happy.
2. That's just making the experience worse for the people who do watch ads. Imagine it's a restaurant and you're raising the price so half the people can eat for free (this way everybody stays happy).
When I used to watch broadcast television I used to do the utmost to avoid the ads by muting during ad break. However, on the occasions that an ad would actively interfere with my watching experience, such as an animation on the channel logo, or a sudden ad break with an ad premeditatedly designed to catch you by surprise (often by "sponsors") I made an explicit decision to boycott said product if I had an opportunity. There are brands that I stopped buying because of these things.
People who react with antipathy to ads have been removed, increasing the value of the brand messaging by negating brand damage in large-scale ad campaigns.
And why are you assuming that YouTube should make money at all? It is YouTube'job to find a business model that works without coercing users. If users don't want to pay (money or attention) then YouTube is not offering anything worth paying. And it's their fault, not the users'
Both outcomes of "pay and we'll give you access" and "I won't pay and I won't get access" are reasonable outcomes in a free society.
I imagine most things that people pay money for they'd prefer to get for free, but that's not an actual option on the table.
YouTube provides a service you can either pay for with money or attention, and sure if people don't think it's a worth while expenditure of either then by all means they shouldn't watch it.
Why are you assuming YouTube should provide their service for no compensation?
That's for you to decide, and if you (and the other tens of people that think the same) end up leaving the platform that would reduce YouTube's costs, which makes sense for them.
Your argument is basically the same people use for piracy. If you don't want to pay for Photoshop, don't use it. If you don't want to pay for YouTube, don't.
Not really sure how you expect content creators to be paid at all for what they produce, then.
What makes you think I watch content creators who are into this for the money?
Both sides of this argument are laden with assumptions. It’s a more opinion-based discussion than most. It’s a philosophical wormhole with no clear answer.
(Not saying I agree with this.) It’s a perfectly reasonable conclusion that using an ad blocker is morally wrong.
This philosophy stack exchange does a good job of breaking down the argument in the context of music: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/1597/is-it-im...
> How else should Youtube make money from those users? They must literally lose money on those users.
Cry me a river.
It’s expensive, but I’ve done it, but it also includes YouTube music which I like.
YouTube music is definitely not as good as Apple Music (or Spotify) but it’s acceptable for the combined cost.
With Premium you also get to minimize the YouTube app on the phone. It's nice for talks and discussions that are not uploaded as podcasts.
Back in the day I even used this to ‘white-wash’ low quality mp3 files to 256kbps acc files instead.
I think it is actually user-hostile to force users to pay for YouTube Music when you want access to ad free YouTube videos, probably why in Europe YouTube Premium Lite exists (without Music), because tie-in purchases (translated term) are generally not allowed here.
Which was the thing that finally made me upgrade, as I already have a preferred music streaming service, I refused the premium bundle out of principle for a long time.
As a principle, I think each product and service should stand by itself and bundling things up just makes the experience worse for the end user (Teams etc). But that's a bit different discussion.
It also makes no sense that you need a family account for more than one profile with a single paid account. At least price wise it is a tough sell against actual streaming services with actual (developed or licensed) content that do offer multiple profiles per account.
ReVanced is the only option I know so far.
FreeTube for PC
I don't see in-video ads, but I don't watch "content creators" with sponsors.
Finding Vanced (and now ReVanced) with adblocking, SponsorBlock, and the ability to set the speed higher than 2x made it so that I actually use YouTube more regularly. (Despite the name, SponsorBlock can skip over a lot more than just sponsor segments - intros, outros, recaps, jokes, etc.)
Any time I see YouTube on someone else's device I'm shocked by how awful it's become in it's default state. If I can't watch YouTube without adblock/sponsorblock/etc, I'll probably just go back to not watching YouTube.
The one point where YT has improved over the years is the comment section. Aside from the occasional scammer impersonating the creator and trying to get me to send them money off-platform, the comments don't seem nearly as awful as I remember from 5-10 years ago.
Also, as an aside, I pay for Nebula, and out-of-the-box, Nebula is a far superior experience to YouTube. But, I still think ReVanced has a leg up on Nebula thanks to skipping intros and the like. However, the biggest problem with Nebula is that it just doesn't have as much content that I'm interested in as YT does. It does seem to be improving, though.
I would be more accepting of ads in general if:
1 - they were all served from the primary websites server - eg yahoo blaming third party ad servers for injecting virus scripts and taking no responsibility is not okay with me.
2 - I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level, not just browser level.
3 - no flashing animated ads on static text pages. I am amazed at some pages I see trying to read 6 sentences and instead I get three at a time with 3 moving ads taking up most of the space.
Obviously it'd be fine to have moving ads during a 'commercial break' in a video.. but overlay a banner over it or next to it and having it moving is just wrong imho.
I didn't use youtube much at all for a long time, but have recently trained the thing to give me interesting videos about CSS, new tools like framer io, clickup, AI, 'productizing' and other helpful content is now available to me easier now..
So if I could not block ads on youtube now, I would have to pay the $12 for premium if that's what it costs.. I would suggest having a checkbox to add in a $5 bucket for tips to content creators and give a way to tip multiple of 10 cents or something - as I would like to support some of the folks adding value to the platform, and I'm guessing going 12 premium wouldn't help them much if at all.
A few days ago I brought up some lists of 'YT watch history' - it's a decent amount for me the past few months - if 2 minutes of time was added to each one, and I had an employer, that company would be burning a fair amount of money for me to wait for ads each week at this point.
I also worry that ads at beginning of videos can be unfair when it seems a good percentage of videos I click then skip into a bit and find that they are not what I was expecting / hoping for and the click itself, 3 second buffering, and 2 second seek - were a huge waste of time, I can't imagine getting hit with added ads in those equations.
> I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level
???
(I'd see a fair amount of offers from lesser known entities offering to place flash ads on sites for a few hundred a month back in the day, I'm sure it's still a thing using javascript and similar these days, I've seen things flagged from sites that host video files lately)
There's been malware ads served from yahoo dot com - that were injected by a third party server - I think the details show they fake the ad for X city where XY company is located and server the viruses to other cities.. this is also sketchy for data tracking (outside jurisdictions?) and other issues.
> I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level -
I don't think it's right to serve ads for alcohol to people that do not want them, same with gambling and similar - think about it this way, the technology exists to push weight loss, abilify, and other drugs to people who have been flagged as depressed, we should be able to prevent ads in the same way.
I've seen opt-out of ad networks by going to a site and checking off tracking / targeted marketing / remarketing from a, b - z networks - but these I believe add a cookie to the browser you are using - so you opt out of targeted ads in that one browser on that one device
- I think people should be able to sign a document online and opt out of gambling, drugs, sugar, alcohol, and many other types of ads if they want to block them, and it should be via ip address - so it's blocked on phones, chromecasts, vizio tvs, playstations, laptops, tablets - all the things that connect... the big ad networks should be able to handle this with minor code changes.
It's not even about just the ads. I use it because it let's me remove all the crap I don't want force fed to me while all I want it watch my subscribed channels (shorts, news etc). Smartyoutubetv let's me disable all of it. "
Also, it is technically impossible to ensure users watch these ads. The more elaborate detection they use, the more elaborate emulation of these ads being watched will be made.
Additionally, I used to have mixed feelings about using an ad blocker so I'd give the normal youtube client a chance now and then. Interestingly on the very first video watched I'd get pretty reasonable ads (maybe 2x5s of unskippable ad, the rest can be skipped in a 10min video), or one 30s unskippable ad in an hour long video. But continue watching and the number of ads (by ~5th video) will continue raising to obscene amounts. So no, I have no bad feelings for using the ad blocker.
Good consumer is good.
Stuff like conference talks, of course, really don’t matter but there’s so much material that no generalization won’t be inaccurate for millions of watchers.
If people leave because of this that cuts their costs to zero. What's their incentive not to do this ?
EDIT: I do wonder if the price point of youtube premium is too high to capture an audience that simply doesn't want ads but doesn't care about any other features. $6/mo feels higher than the typical per-user ad revenue.
EDIT2: While I don't know youtube's average revenue per user, both Facebook and Google's ARPU for the NA segment is ~$100-$200/y, which would put $6/mo quite close to the replacement cost of lost ads revenue.
The trouble is apparently that Ads are worth more to these companies than ad-free subscribers.
Then they added postroll ads. Then preroll ads. Then midroll ads. With these ads I find YouTube unusable for any period of time.
It's this plus the fact that I get virtually no value-add with YouTube. I have to fight with its algorithmic recommendations more than I would ever want to if I were paying any money for the service. I also don't want YouTube Music and would like it completely removed from my YouTube experience altogether. My music listening is done through a separate universe using my own collection.
I would happily pay money for a service that could provide the videos I watch regularly with a reasonable recommendation system that worked for me. And it needs to be priced for basically what it is: network egress.
$100/12 = $8.33
$200/12 = $16.66
Or Vimeo, or Facebook, or TikTok, or ...
It's just a big stupid farce when technology is used to bluntly cudgel users. Even if the user intents arent what corporations want.
I’m quite satisfied with the platform since all the enshitification is removed on the premium version which provides pretty good value for money.
Come to think of it, the only people I've newly subscribed to on YouTube in the past year I've discovered through TikTok.
It's a shame YouTube prioritizes ads so far above user experience - they have everything needed to build the best video recommendations platform besides the will to prioritize that above ad revenue.
Youtube can be used in a very unhealthy way. TikTok cannot be used in a healthy way.
If you're gonna spend a few minutes scrolling through your phone because you have an awkward amount of time then TT is to me the cream of the crop. Reddit/News/Twitter just makes me angry and feel bad, Pinterest/Tumblr are stale, Facebook is for old people.
Further, youtube's algorithm rewards creators that waste their viewers' time, while tiktok punishes it.
Companies that are not profitable should very soon be profitable. Companies that are profitable yet are stagnating need to show their next growth. And that's why you have this intensity in amping up monetization across several companies.
You can be absolutely sure that tech leaders are keenly watching the effects of bold moves at Twitter, Reddit, the like. Companies testing the waters to see how far they can go.
We had it coming and probably shouldn't complain that much. As the dutch saying goes: when shaven, sit still. Your expectations are based on party mode, but the party stopped.
Narrator: ...it wasn't for life.
It's really come to the stage where I actually "hope" the search helps me find what I'm looking for, the sea of bullshit on YT is vast and difficult to navigate now.
For a time, I would say I was quite addicted to YouTube, but now I'm so turned off by it and I find that it is mostly full of really low grade content. I hardly even think to look the front page it unless I'm looking for something very specific. I treat it like a bank job now, race in, get what I need then straight back to the get away.
Personally, I feel similar to you, if they force me off it with Ads, good. I had though about paying but the smut they suggest I watch is just a turn off.
This is not all that different than my experience with even Google Search these days. Half the time I search for something on Google the top 10 are all ads/SEO spam sites.
There are certain things that I search that still give the best results out of all search engines (usually very specific queries), but more and more I want to be able to pay Google to leave out the shit.
Did someone say top 10!?? Top 10 ad platforms 2023! Our top picks for adblockers this year! Top 10 ways to add numbers 2023! Best notepAD trusted reviews! Best adblue products on amazon in 2023!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-%F...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blocktube/bbeaicap...
Thanks for some of those. What a relief.
I don’t want to pay$7/month so when I do get a link I don’t get annoyed by YouTube’s UX.
The $7 is the current price, it does not reflect future changes. If the pool of potential customers is dry, they will try other means of increasing revenue, including increases of that price.
They might also turn the $7 into a requirement to watch YouTube at all, and show ads anyways.
Yep. All cable channels started out ad-free. When cable was introduced, the cost was $35/mo for all channels (there were no movie channels initially), justified by not having ads.
This is irrelevant. 99.9% of content is garbage and / or not relevant to me. Also, I really don't watch that much so why should I be paying ~8 EUR a month to watch a few videos without ads? Moreover, I don't earn that much, so even that amount is a noticeable loss.
Then don't use it ? That's like saying you only like one show on netflix so they should give it to you for free
Giving money to Google though, would hurt so much!
I'll consider it the day they stop the dark patterns company wide and commit to stop being ad-supported. Making the users pay for the service is a step in the right direction but I don't see them stop the ads company wide and I don't want to feed this.
https://twitter.com/BobDuckNWeave/status/1613846589482598403
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/100fmgx/linu...
Sure it's their servers, but then it's their fault they don't allow redistribution via third party channels.
I have plenty of local storage. Moving forward, maybe good videos won't just go into a playlist with the assumption that YouTube will continue to be available.
But yeah, the incognito mode is bollocks.
Some of my recommendations are based on my subscriptions (but only directly), others are just random things based on my location and language.
But even self-curated history and other tips I’ve got here still produce an echo chamber. Even “New to you” tab which appears once a month for few minutes becomes too narrow. I gave up recently and removed youtube from my bookmarks bar, to suffer less often. I find the idea of paying for it pretty… strange?
Browse in Incognito mode.
Better: access through an Invidious or Piped instance.
________________________________
Notes:
1. And never log back in again.
Remember when you paid for cable so there weren't ads (yeah, I'm old)?
The best was a retrospective (20th or 25th) on CNN one NewYears in the early 2000s, which had old footage of CNN. In one of them, the anchors were bragging about how they didn't have ads that biased their coverage of events... Then it broke to an ad. I had to laugh, because the (unpaid?) intern who put that together had to know how it was going to look when actually viewed by the public.
So I'll gladly pay for that freedom.
Freedom is very important to me, not just that it's open source, or that I have power over ads, but also freedom of time and leisure. Ads take away freedom from me, it's a powerless feeling when an ad comes on. Real 1stworldproblem here but since we're on the topic...
I'm happy with uBlock Origin :D
But please, I plead people to not abuse it. It only forces developers to bump up prices and make games and digital goods inaccessible. [1]. There was already a x10 price bump last year with Steam Turkish localization exchange rate update and rumors say another x2 is coming soon.
I understand people like cheap stuff but please don't pull the ladder on us. I apologize for not being born in the "correct" country but getting out isn't as easy and we deserve to have some minor entertainment meanwhile. There is already an economical crisis going on.
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/588650/view/33467576...
My dentist's office doesn't pay for this service, so I have to hear advertisements while under the drill... which is frustrating. I've even offered to pay for Doc's subscription!
I honestly don't know if this exists now or has ever existed, but I would love to directly support content creators without the total garbage game theory equilibrium we seem to have settled into of every expert hocking their nutritional supplements.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_...
You put money in your account and basically bid against the ads that would be shown on websites you visited. I think you could even pick the images you'd see instead of ads.
I've already got the crypto, and am more than willing to pay to read articles WITHOUT HAVING TO LOG IN TO ANYTHING.
The model failed however (cannot recall the details but there are plenty of writeups [1]) and they switched to a new model which is all you can eat for 10 euro a month. However the selection is trimmed down massively.
I kinda miss it, although typically now I just 12ft or web archive anything I really like to read.
[0] https://blendle.com/getpremium
[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pio...
Are they not advertisements for products? Or ads only count, if they're auctioned words from Google? What's the new definition.
- torrents and other piracy
- rapidly evolving ad-blockers
- undetectable ad-blockers sitting in a new page layer invisible to page scripts
- visual ML ad-blockers detecting ads no matter how they are loaded
- new ad-free P2P video sharing websites
- influential users discouraging everyone from using YT
- popular content creators moving off YT and advertising other hosting options
NewPipe is another option which works since it's a full client, though it doesn't handle logging in and youtube without an account and personalized recommended is like swimming in a river of garbage.
If your still interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/yhkmze/updated...
How long until Google / Meta / whomever just starts having faster response times and higher resolution content for people who have clicked on an add in the past N minutes?
People who don't click on ads either (1) self-select away from the platform (or at least reduce their time on the platform), (2) begin to engage in quasi click-fraud, or else (3) consume fewer of the service's resources.
It seems like a pretty simple way to improve the ratio of consumed resources to ad revenue.
I could see some push for ethical ads or security but at some point you need to pay for what you like, either by subscribing to premium or watching ads.
They have been getting greedier and greedier under the relentless quarter over quarter pressure to grow. Now we have mandatory ads on all videos, including non-monetized ones, and creaters who made the mistake of trusting youtube are systemtically defrauded through arbitrary demonetization.
I certainly feel no obligation to pay tithes to google.
Understanding that is key to understanding why ad blocker users complaining about being blocked is unreasonable. If you don’t like the terms of a deal, you can ethically walk away from it but not decide you don’t want to pay. If you prefer to mooch, sure, it’s not a huge crime but you don’t have any standing to complain, either.
And if I did pay? Google will still be logging my data. So fuck them once again.
What I mean is people often tout the merits of capitalism while ignoring that the merits aren't actually happening.
Also there's a pattern in the industry of introducing ads (or "promotions" to get around legalese) to "ad-free" subscriptions once they have sufficient lock-in.
But if someone hands me apples for free, they really can't force me to study the ads on the wrapping paper, can they? I have never signed anywhere that I agree to this 'deal'. That's not how capitalism works as far as I understand it.
And their terms aren't legally enforceable.
Where I live adblockers are legal. When I access YT with Firefox and uBlock Origin it's legal for me to filter YTs datastream how I want to.
If this was a capitalistic transaction of goods, I would have to login to use their service. I would have to agree to some kind of legally binding contract. I would first have to pay, and could then use their product or service. But all that isn't necessary to watch videos on YT.
There is no legally binding 'deal' between YT and me.
> There is no legally binding 'deal' between YT and me.
It’s at the bottom of every page. Your continued use of their service is subject to their terms of service, and they are free to block you if you don’t follow the deal you accepted.
If the server sends a file that's on the server. A license agreement hosted on a server that needs to be accessed in order to read it doesn't change that. Reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide:
>“But the plans were on display…”
>“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
>“That’s the display department.”
>“With a flashlight.”
>“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
>“So had the stairs.”
>“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
>“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
One thing I’m sure the mess over at Twitter has done is getting companies to reconsider the value of their ads in general, too. That’s always hard to measure which means it looks like an east spot to cut, and I believe there’ve been multiple companies claiming that cutting to zero didn’t affect sales so I’d be surprised if Google wasn’t looking at a soft market where cost cutting looks like a more reliable path to improve their profitability.
This seems like the root of the problem right here. Why shouldn't corporate profits go down when the economy falters? This should be expected. If you just keep running the company the same way and not pissing off the users/customers, things will improve when the economic situation improves. Rocking the boat just increases risk.
We should have some kind of model that incentivises long-term investment not this kind of short term profit extraction.
Youtube have great catalogue of the lectures and other educational material, so it is still kinda irreplaceable
Not an optimal solution, as it still uses more data, but nothing is, if we cannot solve the base problem that we have an ad financed internet.
YouTube search: how to stop a baby from choking
> Two 30 second ads about how important vitamins are for me to get pregnant
Meanwhile baby is dead.
Install adblocker so I can save my next eligible heir quickly.
> Next baby is choking.
Quickly open YouTube.
YouTube: you are blocked.
Now I have two dead babies but thank god I know how to get pregnant again because of those Vitamins.
If i do everything the corporations think is good for me, life will be so great :)
I am just underhanded and thats why we don't deserve good things :(
Try this (or equivilant):
https://stjohnwa.com.au/first-aid-training
and qualify for additional pay if you work onsite and are prepared to be listed as a first on scene (while the professionals are in transit) responder.
Makes me wonder if they'll ever move to WASM... though I assume there's gonna be ways to block ads regardless.
I didn't mind the 5-second ads. Two to three of them before a video? I'd deliberately sit through those. Seemed a fair deal. That's now largely gone away (in my experience) and now it wants to show me longer, un-skippable ads. Not only at the beginning but randomly in the middle of videos regardless of what's going on in the video. At least on Television has natural commercial breaks "baked in" to the format.
Oh. And stop showing me the same four cookie-cutter ads every few minutes. It's annoying at best, condescending at worst. If you must advertise to me at least give me some variety.
I could see Google trying and eventually giving up after blocking the the most obvious workarounds just like everything else they do
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_type...
All of the ad blockers are now pretty jank. Sometimes they don't work at all, sometimes you need to refresh a couple times to get the stream to play. I think Alternate Player somehow still works despite being unmaintained, but its stream is always 5+ seconds behind no matter how you tweak the buffer settings.
I am using Firefox with uBlock origin and don't have those issues on Twitch.
Collectively, these 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.
Let me introduce you to Paying for the services you use™
(If you enjoyed this comment, please like and subscribe. It really helps me create more great content like this.)
Just think about the ad strategies of, say, Coca-cola and Pepsi. They don't tell you about a new product. They don't inform you about any benefits of their product, or advantages relative to the competition. They purely exist to keep the brand names in your head, and associate the brand names with images of people having fun. And the saddest part is, it works! We desperately need regulation to prevent companies from hacking consumer's brains into zombies who grab products on the shelf based on how many times they've heard the name spewed out of their television in the last 24 hours.
On the flip side, I would be happy to allow purely informative, contextual, non-tracking ads in my browser. Objective statements about new products I'm actually interested in? Sure! Privacy invading, mind manipulating mental malware? No thanks.
Recently, this has been reminding me of all the hand wringing about "prompt injection vulnerabilities" - like e.g. when you have an LLM summarizing articles for you, or going over your inbox, and a malicious actor sneaks in a well-crafted bit of text that makes that LLM return you false information, or forward all your e-mails to attacker's address, etc.
Well guess what, ads are exactly such prompt injection attacks, but on humans.
Edit: Let me them turn on the screws, I says.
But I dream.
edit: I just thought about a little more. How would that work with UDM. Would they be able to detect that?
edit 2: to the downvoters, tell me how I am wrong. Argue your point. Don't simply assume status quo is the desired state.
I am simply not that kind of consumer. That's not the way I learn about products I'll buy later. In fact, I've never ever bought something I saw in a youtube commercial. IMHO, the current model of advertisement is broken.
I used ublock and it was more or less cuccessfully fighting ads on desktop, but they still were present on phone (new pipe just sucks, and I moved to iPhone anyways), iPad, Xbox and tv.
Premium removed all of them. Also gave downloads for offline viewing.
I still use sponsorblock on desktop though. And miss it a lot everywhere else.
Mandatory disclaimer. I’m Google employee but do not work for YouTube and I’m paying for premium with my own money.
I can't bring myself to give YT money when I can address my use case for free. YT's hostile user approach also rubs me the wrong way, I can't reward that behavior
I used to have those "downloads" on Youtube. There are not a real downloads because I do not have an access to the file. Also the feature tends to be misworking - from time to time one of "downloads" just stucks with eating 100% of 1 CPU core and the recipe is to remove all the "downloads". This was one of the stupidiest features I ever had, because if I need a video for offline wieving but do not want to get a file, I can just watch 100% of video (of course with adblock because YT advertisements use to destroy cache) and do not close the tab, then suspend my PC and unsuspend it in the place I want to watch.
I click download on videos that I'm interested in morning and have something to listen to during commute without worrying about spotty connections and mobile traffic consumptions. So yes, file is downloaded to the device.
If I want to download something to have it forever, I use yt-dlp on pc.
What's wrong with newpipe ?
It has been crashing for me as well but since it's so stateless it has never been an issue: playback continues, playlists remain, ads ana tracking stay nonexistent.
Use of blocker has been on the rise because YT has been failing in modulating amount of ads vs annoyance.
Rooster coming home to roost. And not for users, but for YT. They should tread carefully.
while the public perception with popular channel is that they're making bank (in general), many professional channels are using in-video ads to make the most money. so it is very naive to use that card. not to forget that probably 90+ percent videos don't belong to people receiving the ad revenue through the program.
there was a point about people taking "free" content on the internet for granted. in the current web ecosystem where tracking has carried the platforms for so long, it is not like paying for youtube will get rid of all that. pretty funny how they want it both ways with monetization.
on mobile, youtube has already been twitch-level obnoxious with countering adblock efforts, with large banner ads right below the video and sometimes 20 seconds unskippable ads for a short 40 seconds video.
in terms of running costs, etc, they've already been reducing video quality despite having a fast connection. the culmulation of the above points pushes me away from paying them a single penny out of principle.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1688025600&dateRange=custom&...
Bull fucking shit. There are services like Privacy.com which allow you to pay without deepening your profile.
Nor do I. Banks themselves in the EU and India offer virtual cards. There's also Wise with much wider availability.
I won't pay for YouTube because they don't accept magic jellybeans is a bullshit excuse and you know it.
source: I work on card payments
Most jobs I've seen (even outside of tech ) require familiarity with Windows and Office, ie. basic skills linked to one platform.
Google is used enough and thus influential enough, it should be classified a public utility and forced to comply with strict utility laws ( which requires government approval to modify prices ).
IANAL, but I'm sure there are layers that could contrive the social penalties of not using Google service.
People make this logical leap in their brains without recognizing it when they use a service for years and rely on it for their daily information, then turn on the high paid exec's who are trying to squeeze a dollar from every user. Red Hat, Reddit, Google, Microsoft, Comcast, all need reigning in because of their necessarily high required utility in civilization.
I mean, in exchange for giving them so much money that its gravitational field warps all of democracy, can we not get a little customer service when needed?
I would pay a lot for a service that gives me the most useful answers instead of what is most likely to make me watch for longer, I know that is their business model to maximize view time to sell more adds but I wish they would sell me a subscription that allows me to customize the UI to show only a search bar, show only educational content when I use the search function and when I'm watching a video don't show me any recommendation or try to pull any tricks on me to spent more time in the platform, nothing more, I would gladly pay 50$ a month for this type of service on Youtube, until then uBlock origin to the rescue, my attention span and productivity is worth more than all the crap the Youtube team tries to pull.
YouTube isn't a public service. You can either pay the $12/mo for Premium for no ads and other perks or watch ads to subsidize the site.
I hope this move will strengthen alternatives.
The browser's user agent string doesn't change based on plugins installed, or at all--unless end user changes it purposefully.
The ad-block detection is likely and usually a separate script that runs an interval check on the existence/visibility of ad-related DOM elements (which would be false when hidden/removed by a plugin or even the developer tools)
In the modern world there are so many people that are citizens some place, but work or revel often in other places. These kind of restrictions are a nuisance.
It is sometimes tricky for me to disable adblocking! There are a couple of approaches. Resetting my DNS servers to defaults is disruptive and error-prone; it's a non-starter. I find it peculiar that there is no knob on NextDNS that says "disable blocking features and act like normal DNS" even though they themselves enable such a feature if you run out of free monthly queries. You can disable a bunch of features one-by-one, but of course that affects all sites, not just the one. You can whitelist any domain you want, but that involves a cycle of testing and guessing which ones are emanating from the site you want to use.
In short, there's no straightforward way of just telling NextDNS "don't block ads while I'm on YouTube.com" and it's for that reason that I sort of miss uBlock Origin. However, YouTube does use native domains for all its ad serving, and I see them all now anyway, so I don't believe that this new policy will adversely affect my usage profile.
Where did I say that I do not pay for it?
Or the current rubbish "Shop like a billionaire ... buy Nike trainers for 55 cents" crap-verts ...
When Youtube stop serving me the above bullshit, perhaps I'll take their advertising efforts more seriously ...
Internet is burning. The sources of information are getting scarce, it's almost unbelivable.
Unfortunately, the other reason non-surreptitiously-paid-for services are currently not viable is that most people, including the vast majority of HN seem to be, uhm, not very sophisticated about reasoning about costs (to most people the k-gadzillions that google makes apparently materialize out of thin air, instead of really coming out of large_overhead_factor*k gadzillions they personally proportionally pay for). This seems hard to overcome.
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I assume the only reason this isn't done is dynamic insertion, but at some point the CPU horsepower necessary to do that on-demand will be available.
When watching a sitcom or drama the script writers plan in the commercial breaks where you would have the different acts in a play. They are natural stopping points to take a short break.
Youtube ads are just random interruptions.
The problem is that YouTube has on several occasions actually gone in and added huge numbers of additional automatic ad breaks, showing at random places in the video, and has stated that the “opt-out” is YouTubers manually going in and deleting those new ad breaks for every single video.[1] Most YouTubers don’t care enough to spend the time to manually fix it for every video, or just accept the excuse of “oh, but you get more revenue this way” and don’t bother. So then baking in smooth ad transitions becomes retroactively useless since YouTube is just running ads at random points in the video anyway.
[1]: https://twitter.com/redlettermedia/status/111398430485249228...
Which comment found or suggested, the best way to circumvent,avoid or get around youtube approach without paying subscription?
A: None.
I suggest we start doing, cause they're ahead of us..... before is too late.
https://gizmodo.com/spotify-may-suspend-your-account-if-it-c...
that'll take what, 5 minutes to be added to the ad blocker extension
(short of requiring a login to watch videos)
This is downright trivial for a google engineer, and I bet you could and would do it too if your company’s finances (aka your salary/livelihood) depended on it.
this is all extremely gameable if you have a CGNAT ip (like say, if you own a mobile phone)
> If the probability exceeds some threshold (derived from expected potential ad revenue vs cost of service, perhaps), they won’t be served video.
that's not what they've described in the article though is it
> This is downright trivial for a google engineer
I dunno, seems like they hire anyone these days
That is simply not true. There are numerous alternatives to YouTube Vanced, including NewPipe, LibreTube or SkyTube. Only to name a couple. And then there still is invidious. So no, you don't have to sit through ads.
If the copy said "Looks like you're blocking trackers and content from properties we don't own" instead of "Looks like you may be using an ad blocker" it would be more truthful. Maybe somebody should go after them for deceptive advertising.
And seeing a 1 hour ad for some guy telling me to stop eating what I'm eating to have no-wipe bowel movements isn't going to make me buy the stuff.
There have been studies done about plumbers. The ones that pay money to get on top in the White Pages have worse reviews than the ones that work by word of mouth. I go by the same thing. If you feel that your product needs an ad, it's probably overpriced and / or doesn't do what it says it does.
User Choice Ads: no (platform decides) Offers: yes (user decides = opt-in)
Privacy Ads: no privacy (your data belongs to them) Offers: total privacy (no info collected)
Rewards Ads: no reward (platform keeps all value) Offers: cash rewards (paid by seller)
Participants Ads: seller -> ad platform -> buyer Offers: seller < - > buyer
Disclosure: founder of sellff.com. We created Offers to facilitate a more effective and honest way for buyers to connect with sellers.
Wait, you consider ad-blocking to be stealing, and sneaking into a paid concert, for which you could face legal consequences to be not stealing? That seems very weird.
Anyway that analogy is not at all what YouTube is doing though. The valid analogy would be more like there’s a free concert in the park and people accuse you of stealing if you don’t buy their optional T-shirts, or I dunno watch an optional real-estate presentation beforehand or something.
YouTube is not free. It's ad/subscription supported. Just because they didn't fight ad blocking in the past doesn't make it free.
Hahaha you need to tell YouTube that, not me. Lol why are accusations of bad faith always made in bad faith? I guess you just don’t want to address your own inconsistency? You didn’t answer the question of why you consider sneaking into a paid concert to be not stealing yet claim you must pay for YouTube somehow. That makes no sense. You could be fined or jailed for sneaking into a concert because it’s illegal, it’s stealing by definition. You cannot be fined for not watching YouTube ads.
What, exactly, is your definition of free? Does YouTube agree with your definition, do they say it’s not free? Where? Can you link to language that outlines the non-premium YouTube payment procedure? Can you demonstrate that failure to pay could result in legal consequences?
YouTube is in fact free in the sense that it does not cost the viewer money to watch. And unlike concert tickets or any other paid product, there is no legal obligation or expectation to “pay” for YT with time or attention, and there is no tracking or record of any such payment. Just because they want you to watch ads while not asking for money does not make YouTube not free.
In the past there used to be well written blog posts and you were able to read them in 15 minutes and better understand the matter. Now we have to waste 15 mins more of our life to get the same point.
So fuck you Barilla pasta for shitting your disgraceful ad right in the middle.
C'è casa? C'è merda.
How the hell people do yoga and other calming things with youtube with ads is way beyond what i can understand.
At least, i tried, although i got burned. Never going back - and if yt manages to defeat me, fuck them too. I'm not against ads per se, but please...try and be tasteful!
javascript:(function() {window.location=window.location.toString().replace(/^https:\/\/www.youtube\./,'http://fixyt.');})()
I think YouTube should just drop the creators who demanded the greater subscription revenue that must've precipitated this change; go sell your own content.
FWIW, ad-free Khan Academy videos are subsidized by Alphabet/Google/YouTube.
It's not blocking an ad or two, but a full spam marathon, sometimes longer than a movie itself. Of course, it's not possible to see which movies are worth to watch, as dislikes are not visible, so more video opens, more disappointment, but also... more ads.
Never give a SV tech company money.
If I can't watch it with ublock, I will search for some alternative measures that will still allow me to watch without seeing ads. If no such measures will exist, then I'll quit watching youtube. Maybe I'll go for Vimeo or DailyMotion.
But logging in on every browser and device I watch youtube on? Fuck, I'd rather not. Also, I never login to my personal google account at work.
Before google bought youtube, my account there was called something like "duntwantacct".
It is immoral to fund an ostensibly free service that you cannot afford to host for free by forcing users to do something they don't want to do.
Granted, Google abandoned "don't be evil" a long time ago
False dichotomy.
Free users will continue to either block their ad practices, stop watching in YouTube, download the videos, etc.
It's my computer/devices. I don't simply consume because YouTube decides to operate at a loss to gain market Monopoly and targets competitors in anti competitive ways.
Of course, no ads are better than any ad, but I can't ignore the fact that ad-enabled Youtube is free.
But you also know why all the talk about advertising supported models on the web is just talk, and why it is that in the end, all of those models are fated not to work. Because in digital media, when you give people knowledge, you can’t force them to take advertising, because digital media are filterable – that’s the beauty of them.”
— Eben Moglen, Free and Open Software: Paradigm for a New Intellectual Commons, 2009-03-13, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8#t=31m51s>
I am able to play audio however using yt-dlp.
Once the ad volume readily affects page load times, or disrupts casting flow (e.g. if my attempt to listen to Brian Eno & Jon Hassell's ambient works is intruded on every 10 minutes with an earbleed level ad for Papa John's Pizza), I just download the content locally and cast it via Emby.
I hardly use YT but yesterday, I searched something which turned out on YT. So I clicked it then I was served two ads before I can actually play it. And in just around 5 minutes or so, another ad popped out again. Thus I don't really see why not try blocking ads.
Youtube has excellent content form people who put a lot of effort into it, but do not have a lot of subscribers, don't earn a lot and don't produce a lot of traffic.
Then there are millions of low effort videos that produce millions of clicks.
Youtube should have a model that adapts to this.
it’s an arms race. it’s the same flaw as DRM. Google wants to control how your device interacts with the bits it’s already downloaded. as long as the device is in your hands, they can make the bits more difficult for you to use in a manner they don’t approve of, but they can never make it impossible.
Today I tried to watch a long video and there adverts every five minutes. Closed again.
After Youtube removed dislikes and started pushing "shorts" – it became noticeably worse.
I exclusively watch Youtube through the browser on desktop.
It's bad enough the spam of shorts I struggle to block. And now I'm getting alerts for shorts.
It's long overdue for a decent alternative to YouTube.
Wouldnt it convince more people to pay? And Google can try to entice users later to upgrade to the full Premium. Would t that make sense?
We let them get too big. Nowadays they just buy the competition in the cradle, even if just to drive nascent products into the ground.
There is a always a chance that the next generation gets hooked on to a different platform. That phase where an emerging competition is eating the incumbent's lunch is the best time to be there.
You do what you gotta do, and I'll do what I gotta do.
Cheers!
If you dislike the ads, pay for YouTube Premium. Otherwise, you pay with your time.
This might be a privileged take, but I wish the entire Internet was like this.
I really hate having to use an ad-blocker for everything, but I also hate that the only way some (many?) companies make money is by shoving as many bandwidth- and resource-stealing ads and tracking scripts into my face as possible.
At this point, such a statement almost feels as though it is explicitly stating that the "feedback" will be ignored. It probably won't be in aggregate but why should I expect that my individual report will be acted upon?
Not good, Youtube.
That does two things.
I don't use Netflix so any content there is of 0 interest to me.
You don't get to stay public and expect ad dollars. It doesn't work like that on the internet.
Same for NYT. I don't pay for it and have no use for content there. If if were an ad supported one, then I could use an ad blocker.
Think of it this way. If you screen your movie in a cinema hall, I will watch it if I pay for a ticket. Fair and square. If it is played on a public roadshow, I will skip all ads or skip it altogether.
The org has to decide. Either make content pay per use or free. No middle ground.
The ethics are pretty clear I think: if I navigate with my browser to YouTube, or any site with ads, I'm able to see the content, plus annoying ads. I don't have to watch the ads: I can use an ad-blocker to tell my browser to not render those ads. The site has every right to serve me HTML/JS/video however they wish, but they have no right to tell me what to do with that data. If I want to ignore part of it, that's my right, and if I use automated means to ignore selected parts, that's also my right. If they want to spend massive resources trying to figure out ways to get around my automated means, or to detect my ad-blocker and refuse to send me data, they can do that too, but at what cost?
But if they want to avoid this arms race of ad-blocking, they can just do what Netflix does: require payment and an account to get in.
As for paywalls, those are really the same thing as ads usually: they load the article, then use JS to block it. You can block the JS and read the article.
> 2.12 People should be able to render web content as they want
> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts or auto-played videos. We will build features and write specifications that respect peoples' agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.
https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#render
---
And guess who is one of the members of World Wide Web Consortium: https://www.w3.org/membership/list/?initial=g&ecosystem=
> Google's mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
It's like living next door to a black hole. It's a bad neighbor.
Advertisers have no morals, they're completely depraved. They'll eagerly exploit a teenager's self-conscious body issues to sell useless beauty products. They sell sugar water to fat people and at every turn promote the rampant consumerist culture that is destroying our planet. They're lower than pond scum and I never want to see a single ad from them ever.
I don't let Ads tell me what I 'might' need. I already know what I need (I might 'want' something but that is a different topic).
Ads try to convince me that I 'need' whatever it is they are 'selling'.
How did it we accomplish it for the earlier 99.99% of human history?
This system doesn't make sense... the incentives for producers don't line up with reality. Producers are incentivized to find ways to break your rules and advertise as if they do it alone, they will profit massively.
I don't think ads are what changed this.
Just this morning, I was on the toilet, about to finish up a shit. I reached instinctively to my left to grab... wait, the little roller is empty!
But...what used to be there? What was I about to grab? This is crazy, my mind is completely blank!
If only there were some kind of an unskippable 30 second movie with dancing animated bears that could remind me what product I might use adjacent to a toilet bowl to complete my biological morning ritual!
What I find more helpful is authentic experience from other consumers of that product. The authentic part is getting harder and harder to validate, of course.
I didn’t mind skippable YouTube preroll adverts. Now they are unskippable, multiple ones, and appear mid video.
Howver I don’t watch YouTube enough to justify paying more than Netflix and Disney combined just to skip adverts (but not skip the burnt in sponsor adverts)
Imagine if it were your business for a second, you’ve created a new website or a new physical product and you want to get more customers or users, what do you do? It’s not going to sell itself if nobody knows it exists no matter how good it is.
I didn’t need an ad to tell me to buy a camera. I didn’t see any ads at all! Rather, I decided “I wish I had something to take pictures with”, so I started researching how I could accomplish that thing.
And ads would not have helped me find the best camera option at all, in fact it’s probably a slightly negative signal — they must have big profits to spend lots of money on ads, compared to a company that just makes the best product and has their customers promote it for them.
Same thing with any other product. I see my coworkers using a terminal app I’ve never seen. It looks better than the normal one, so I ask them about it.
It’s very simple and not even nuanced I’m just unsure why many seem to gloss over that. Perhaps I’m more jaded than most
Or, alternatively, I noticed you recently purchased an instant pot. Would you like to subscribe to purchase instant pots monthly?
Plus ads are fundamentally inefficient sources of information. Billboard lawyers like to flood the interstates with their "Accident? call me" signage, on the off chance someone without a lawyer has an accident and looks up and sees Jacob Emrani smiling on them. Big payoff for the lawyer if they do get a job from this ad, but for the vast majority of the millions of commuters a day who pass such an ad its probably a useless waste of thought to even catch one in your periphery.
You already know you need toilet paper. There are only so many brands to choose from. Every month, you have to make a decision about one of them based on whatever factors are important to you at that time. (For me, it's usually cost, ply count, and how likely it is that someone in the house is going to flush a massive wad of it and clog the pipe.)
The point of print/radio/television ads are to groom you into associating some positive feeling with a specific choice, whether or not it's new or you know about it. So the next time you're looking at the wall of toilet paper, you recognize the bear, the colors, the jingle, the florid language about its delicate softness upon your tender starfish, and get you to feel something positive enough to get you to gravitate toward it despite its higher price. Joy, lust, anger, and vanity are easy to appeal to.
They're not trying to inform you of anything or make you a die-hard fan. They're buttering you up to tilt your next purchasing decision in their favor. That's why advertising never stops; it's an endless loop of a handful of charlatans competing with each other to coerce you into buying their version instead of the other guy's.
That doesn't mean ads are necessary though, frankly any system which depends on spending more than your competitors will never produce the best recommendations. Instead I learned to first build a list of companies in a space, then research those companies. I use things like Wirecutter, Reddit, and Productchart to help decide as well.
What I need aren't ads; I need good, user-centric, recommendation and discovery products. Sadly we fell into the local-minimum of ads instead. That said sometimes I do choose to let a company advertise to me in a specific channel (separate email or social media account) so I can keep up with their products and potential deals. That seems like a good middle ground for me.
I this is one of the reasons why Reddit became so popular
I'm not a proponent of advertising in the modern sense, but it's probably the least dishonest way that companies pay to promote their product. Professional reviewers are a good medium but it takes time to find those in a new space where you're not sure if their standards and preferences match yours
If I'm missing out on some product that I might like but I've never heard of because I block ads, that doesn't matter to me. If I don't know that I would want it, then I don't want for it. But generally, people talk about things worth talking about and I'd rather hear about new products from real people who don't have a commercial stake in promoting the thing.
P.S.: I have had any number of marketing types push back (vehemently) when I expressed my distaste for oppressive ad overload with "well you tell me what the alternative is...how else am I supposed to reach customers". And I have stopped even trying to be nice about it: Figuring that out is your goddam job. My job would be vastly easier if I could just say "all that stuff about ethics, regulation, legislation and simple common decency...that's really inconvenient and I'm going to ignore it". But I don't get to ignore any of that; I still successfully do my job. So why should marketing be somehow different.
Anyone in marketing who says "You tell me how to do my job without crapping on people" is lazy and incompetent.
Typically the content I'm trying to watch (even if unsponsored) is a far superior advert. I didn't know I wanted a powered/active cooler box (and definitely don't need one) until I saw an AvE video of one last night. Now I'd quite like Makita's, and in fact now I come to think of it I did even share the link with someone who is in the market for one. But the malgorithms did their best to make me learn about and want to buy shitty VPNs and maltesers instead. If I'm watching tool/DIY videos give me the tool ads? I might actually be interested? I might warm to the brand, associating it with my favourite channels?
Not that I want to be manipulated like that, it just seems bafflingly poorly targeted whenever I do see them that it's irritating and I'm glad I block them everywhere else.
Other than paid subscriptions, which is only a partial solution.
The need comes first. If I have a need, I (re)search for solutions. The ad does not create the need.
Ads still work. They can generate a want, but if I never see the ad, I'll live happily on in blissful ignorance.
Building awareness is important for new products. Heck, I might like them. Not complaining about ads in general, just the ones that try to get between me and what I really want my to do. The ones that try to make my attention non-optional. Those must die a fiery death.
Well said. While I recognize the right of people to put out messaging, advertisers seem to put out some of the most disgusting messaging ever.
The recent pushing of incredibly obese people as all healthy and normal is a very dangerous phenom. Many of us could afford to lose a few pounds, but the idea that BMIs > 40 are healthy is going to get people killed for certain.
So it's interesting to see how much focus gets shifted onto obesity specifically while ignoring all else. It's all disgusting messaging, that young model selling you a perfume who hasn't eaten anything but an almond all day, that shredded guy telling you to buy compression shorts, those obese people telling you these pants stretch.
Given the context that:
- Dieting, on a population level, has proven to be an ineffective means of curbing obesity (the only statistically effective method is bariatric surgery)
- The message that has, throughout the obesity epidemic, been pushed is that those that suffer from obesity are to blame for their own condition, and that they are essentially less valuable human beings for it in more than a few ways
- Obesity appears to be, according to the best research currently available, a disorder of the brain
Most of the fat acceptance people are merely trying to counteract the less valuable-part of how obese people are viewed in society. It's not a single-messaged group, and some of the things that some of them say is probably not a force for the better, but the message that obese people should not be scolded, chastised or in any other way treated negatively for their condition is actually a good message which any empathetic adult should follow.
If sites want to send me useful content and additional annoying content, I’ll just render the useful bit.
If sites decide they aren’t willing to send the useful bit unless enter some other sort of arrangement with them, that’s fair on their part, I’ll evaluate their other options.
I don’t feel any obligation to render ads or make their business model viable, of course it is no problem if they decide they don’t want me around as a result!
Of course, business models might change. In that case my preferences probably will too, but I don’t think my reasoning will.
Just circling back a bit, what IS advertising? I work at a relatively unknown company - it's not in anyone's daily vocabulary. It exists, but barely. It will actually die if it's not marketed, advertised.
Now I can just go, fuck it, I don't want to work for any company that advertises. Great. Where should I work?
It’s a sad problem that we can’t expect to solve if we continue to limit our discussion around the symptoms of the diseased advertisement industry rather than the root causes of this cancer that ruins it for everyone like your company and most other small and medium sized players.
A company website that tells me what the elevator pitch is, is advertising arguably, but is not in the same category as putting a message in something I want to consume. The difference is push vs pull. If I have to seek out your message, if I ask you a question, then it's perfectly acceptable to answer.
The second you answer a question I've never asked, you are morally repugnant and harming society as a whole. It's an inevitable slippery slope to literal mental manipulation at that point. There is no "push" advertising that can NOT go that route, as it is inherently a hostile relationship, with independent competitors.
I try to quickly check if I’m agreeing to a cookie consent thing, or if it is a full TOS. But sites have so much garbage when you first show up nowadays. I’ll have to be more careful there.
if youtube wanted to make the ads unblockable, they could embed them in the primary video stream. They won't do that because then they would have to expend the computational effort of muxing the content instead of offloading it onto your computer. They want their code (javascript) to manage the ads to run on your computer and they want to be able to treat your computer as their slave.
If the site needs me to view content in a specific sequence, then they need to deliver it as such. Otherwise, I'll ignore (technically block) any content other than that in which I'm interested.
So basically, you won't pay for premium because Google makes money by serving ads, but you also use an Adblocker (assumption)?
Remember that you are not just paying with ad eyeballs, but also with your data. When what where how much you watch. That's nobodies business. I'd pay for not having this be in somebodys DB, ready to be exploited (and/or leaked).
They're essentially charging 80% surplus to tack on a poor man's version of Spotify. I also don't get any other improvements to the service.
If they'd just give me a feature that gives continuity of play between devices I'd pay the full monthly price without blinking.
So many small QoL improvements that would make a huge difference but instead they're too busy removing voting buttons and testing obnoxious autoplay thumbnail ads.
Source: I just tried it on my phone right now. platform - iOS (don't know about others). Also, possibly not possible for all songs or countries in the world.
Maybe the force feeding of obnoxious podcast hosts actually attracted some users?
Although I did subscribe to Google Play Music, and it was great, until they killed it. And that was it for me and Google.
(Although John Zorn's catalogue remains an elusive beast)
I use LMS for my small, curated personal music library, which is great: https://github.com/epoupon/lms
I tried YouTube music for a few months and it felt much more spaghetti-at-the-wall than Spotify.
My opinion is that this is because of the way that Spotify applies algorithm and curation in a highly unified way.
Spotify Radio, Release Radar and Discovery playlist are just wonderful. Right down to the ordering of the lists it accounts for broad tastes, current personal trends, building accessible gateways to new genres and so on.
YouTube Music felt a bit like the video algorithm. "You watched a Minecraft video? Prepare for the avalanche of tenuously related but quite obnoxious Minecraft content"
I am however left to assume, based on Spotify's broad success and appeal, that it hits a bit more frequently than it misses.
I have had the "continue playing from another device" feature for a good couple months at least, and it is clearly labeled as a "Premium" benefit.
Whenever I pause a video on one device, and open Youtube on another (Confirmed web desktop -> mobile app or mobile app -> web desktop, but I don't have a TV to test), the video that was playing on the other device shows up paused, as the given platform's miniplayer. Below you can see a desktop screenshot.
https://i.imgur.com/Leq2cJs.png
You could view this cynically as paying to be a lab rat, or you can also take it at face value.
Good A/B testing only works if you're measuring for the right things. When you get into the realms of "engagement is down but revenue generated is at $X" and X meets a goal, you're doing it in bad faith.
Given that a big fat ad thumbnail is a pre-selected item that fills half the screen on the YT TV client, we are left to assume that engagement resigned from Google a while ago.
>Whenever I pause a video on one device, and open Youtube on another (Confirmed web desktop -> mobile app or mobile app -> web desktop, but I don't have a TV to test), the video that was playing on the other device shows up paused, as the given platform's miniplayer. Below you can see a desktop screenshot.
This doesn't work at all for me TV -> TV. TV -> mobile device also does not work. I'd be interested to know, if you do try this with TV, whether you can get it to work.
> Good A/B testing only works if you're measuring for the right things. When you get into the realms of "engagement is down but revenue generated is at $X" and X meets a goal, you're doing it in bad faith.
Sure, and that doesn't stop people from doing it anyway. Pointless mass-gaslighting, but it makes you look busy.
> If they'd just give me a feature that gives continuity of play between devices I'd pay the full monthly price without blinking.
Probably you wouldn't. Then it would be some other feature needed to open the wallet.
To restate what I already said: will I pay to remove ads? Yes. Will I pay the price they're asking when I compare to the value and quality of service / UX other services I pay for? No.
> Probably you wouldn't. Then it would be some other feature needed to open the wallet.
You're wrong, but I don't need to justify it, I stated why in the original post. There's no need to be stubborn about it.
My question is why do you compare? Just because both things are on a computer or telephone screen? I've never heard people compare with other things they purchase. Why would I pay for this cup of coffee when I get 15 minutes of use from it, when there is so much free content online? Why would I pay for this restaurant meal when I get several months of entertainment on Netflix for the same price?
People will agonize for weeks over a $5 or $10 subscription, but outside of the digital they won't think about spending the same amount on parking, a pint of beer, etc.
Since we have the idea that everything on the computer should be free, we get upset over the slightest annoyance and cancel/decide not to continue the service. But is that rational? Like people are itching for the slightest excuse to not pay.
YouTube has an enormous amount of entertainment and also educational content, like videos on how to fix things that have personally saved me at least hundreds of dollars. It's a great value IMO.
Having it hidden three menus away is archaic and not the 'continuity' I'm looking for. It's a small thing but it's a) painfully simple to implement and b) one of many of these kinds of small usability gripes that make it a lesser experience.
What specifically are you looking for? e.g. was watching a video on my computer, powered that off, opened youtube on my phone and the video I was watching was most recent thing in youtube history there with my position in the video tracked. Similarly I can use my phone or laptop to control Youtube on my TV. Seems like what you're looking for is already mostly here.
(I've been a Youtube Premium subscriber for the last year or so thus far).
'Continuity' for me means a seamless experience. For example, Netflix used to be one click and is now two or three clicks which I find to be a worse experience.
The _perfect_ version of this for me would be a "Send to device" function to send from TV to TV in different rooms. Even being able to do a quick switch via my phone as I'm in transit (like I do with Spotify) would be a worthy middleground.
Preach it. Blocking ads is tantamount to washing your hands or wearing a condom. It's simply good mental hygiene.
when click rates go down, advertisers always choose to make the ad more noticeable by making it more obnoxious. at first it was a very small movement every few seconds. then two. then more movement more frequently until there were full games in the space of an ad. sounds and video came. interstitial ads came, and full page ads which covered what you were reading as you scrolled.
so, ad blockers were developed. at first they blocked simple URL patterns and that was enough to completely block ads from those who serve them. advertisers caught on and changed how they serve ads. rapidly. adblockers had to advance to keep up.
where does it end? it can't end, because one side or the other will win and there are enough people who don't want that outcome so they keep fighting for their own side.
things that are bad often follow this pattern, it seems. if you are in an arms race of any kind you are either someone or something who wants money or authority more than anything else, or you are fighting against that force. both sides feel 100% justified in their actions. everyone nearby suffers.
— G.K. Chesterton, The New Jersusalem
I also think that advertising is often a crutch for incompetence. Build a good product and it can take off all on its own. People advertise for you. Or build crap and hire an industry to manipulate people into wanting your crap. Advertising is manipulation. Watch any ad and ask, “what emotion are they trying to con me into feeling?”
Advertisement is sometimes just to inform and build awareness, sometimes to build brand, but often to persuade, and sometimes it exploits unethical persuasion techniques. The gap between ethics allowed by society and your own personal ethics are very variable from place to place and person to person. For example in a lot of places it's illegal for doctors and pharma to advertise; some might consider it a good thing not to exploit hypochondriacs, but is it ethical if it results in patients not knowing about an actual cure for their condition? These things are endlessly debatable, they're very far from a black and white situation.
I don't have an answer to this question, it's purely hypothetical. And even if it is true that in this hypothetical world, good products would spread, we're still left with a prisoner's dilemma to resolve in the real world.
So I would answer you with, given the extremes defined above, that indeed advertising is a necessity since good products would otherwise rot inside the inventor's home. It being illegal (say, for example) to have ads would mean that it is illegal to even tell anyone that you invented a product.
I think there's got to be some kind of give from the anti-ad side if we want to have _things_ in the world that do stuff - because if I can't even say "I made a better product that does x,y,z" then how the heck is anyone ever gonna find out about it? Where does the word-of-mouth kick off even?
You gotta _tell_ people you made something - but that's an ad.
On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products. It is just much easier to sell something useful with sneaky advertising than selling advertising in a vacuum. People not knowing about their options is one of the bigger problems in modern life. There are a lot of things I'd spend money on to change and I'm just not sure how to do it. As far as I can tell that is normal.
"I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services" - when I see people doing that I'll believe it is an option. Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.
How? Take the examples from above about selling beauty products to teenagers, where is the ad saying "you're perfect as you are, no need to drop hundreds of dollars on any of this bullshit"? All the ads in existence will try to extract money from them by playing up body image issues, so the noise WILL NOT cancel out on their own.
> Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.
To think that you know what's better for people than they know for themselves... Tell me, are you an advertising professional? Because your thought process is just as obnoxious.
Easy mistake, I suppose. But if you read closely, you'll notice that isn't what I said or implied.
People often know what is in their own best interests, they just don't act on it. Consider, for example, how hard it is for most people to get to the gym even after taking out gym membership. I had a running buddy once solely because the gentleman knew he wouldn't go running unless he had someone else to remind him.
People usually need a little push before they do the sensible thing. That is one of the things advertisers tap in to and why they are so valuable to a business.
The gym advertising its memberships would rather you never set foot on their premises.
Beauty products want you to feel good about yourself, but only while you're wearing their products.
McDonalds and Coca Cola do not want you to eat healthier, or enjoy their products only occasionally.
It's actually shocking to see someone frame advertisers as pushing people towards making good decisions for themselves, when we've had to explicitly ban tobacco companies from advertising how sexy and popular smoking would make you.
Name three.
There are a lot of medical devices that help people with relatively minor or uncommon issues. Even doctors don’t always know about them. The companies that make them can’t usually afford to advertise on larger platforms, but they target ads to try and reach those affected.
Local consumer-facing businesses in general need local advertising to survive. This works better for some industries than others, but keeping a competitive space healthy requires some assistance getting a newer/smaller competitor’s message out.
AWS advertising generally has been a major contributor to the success of at least two companies I worked at.
I get reminded from time to time that I could saved quite a bit on my retirement fund if I switched to one with lower fees. One day an ad will probably hit me at the right moment and I'll actually do it.
That, in general sense, violates second law of thermodynamics. More specifically, it also feels like going against some physical law with Shannon's signature on it, though its formulation escapes me.
Point being: even in cases where this "cancelling out" happens, it's not a free process. It uses energy, it uses natural resources, it uses victims' attention, it generates entropy. The more advertisers scale it, the more waste it creates.
As for "made based on the quality and usefulness of the products", that's actually the first victim of advertising - all real information gets lost in the sea of lies, while victims' attention is saturated, so they have very little headspace to evaluate competing offers.
Sorry, what? This sounds like wishful thinking not grounded in reality or data…
I spent a number of years doing market research for advertising, and I couldn't agree more. Data analysis is primarily focused on increasing "top of mind" and "unaided" awareness and linking positively-perceived properties and emotions to the product being flogged.
I got out before "social media" convinced everyone to share everything about their lives with advertisers and their enablers, but back in the day, ad agencies and the marketing departments of large consumer product companies each spend millions every year (cf. BSB Global Scan[0] as an example) collecting a tiny subset of that data.
Given the enormous amount of data available today, I imagine that the levels of manipulation have increased exponentially. And more's the pity.
[0] https://www.proquest.com/openview/46f87cae3614d373064294a43b...
However, it’s expensive. It has been a really tough uphill climb to connect to our audience and convince them the money is worth it here. In a market with marked up shitty quality products it has been a journey to position ourselves, especially since our budgets are maybe 1/10th of that of aforementioned shitty producers who outmarket us.
I honestly feel the work I am doing is near to a community service. Although still advertising our ads are honest of what the products can do.
I think that the rest of your discussion hinges on this assumption, and I completely disagree with it.
What you need actually is for people to know that your product exist.
People have needs & problem beyond the fake ones created by advertising.
People can _ask_ for what options exist to solve their problem. And that to me is fundamentally different.
Having a way for consumers to go out and pull information in about what options exist is fundamentally different from having advertising shoved down their throat.
Where do you propose people ask? Who would fulfill those queries? What formats would you allow the information to be expressed in? Would you filter out any non-objective characterization (“best car in the world”)? Would you constrain packaging (eg color, creativity, etc.) so that it isn’t attention-grabbing? Etc.
Remove the ads and make people pay to use them beyond some number of queries a month. This alone gets rid of the problem of the platform intentionally shoving ads down your throat.
Find a shitty website that SEO’d it’s way to the top and got through the cat and mouse game? Then allow people to blacklist websites so they stop appearing in results. Then as the provider investigate and downrank sites that people downrank and block often.
Maybe also preferentially treat companies that don’t load their own sites with other people’s ads and tracking scripts. Oh and tell the user how many of those trackers exist on the site.
This obviously don’t solve the problem of companies pushing ads onto you. But it:
1. Sets up your information provider to not be the biggest and worse ad pusher of them all.
2. It gives people the tools to start penalizing bad content and ads and to outright block them from their results.
This alone, I strongly believe, would be a great improvement.
Maybe they still do all that, but I'm not convinced. I see so many transparently SEO-ified sites at the top of search results that I regularly think "I wouldn't have seen that in 2008".
They recently rolled out a leaderboard where you can see the top sites people block, downrank, uprank, and pin to the top. Extremely useful.
Regardless of current issues with Reddit's business model, it does seem to have been particularly successful as a US/English repository of product knowledge, despite not having any specific strategies to deal with the problems you mention above.
The proposal that I responded to wanted a system where a consumer can express their desire for a product or service given the problem and that you get back results that don't have the smell of advertising. Put differently, these aspects I enumerated ARE attributes of advertising that the proposal seeks to eliminate.
This is opposed to the current system where they are constantly trying to barge into your life.
It’s about pulling in information when you want it versus having it pushed onto you. See my reply to your other comment.
[1] https://eucyclos.wixsite.com/eucyclos/post/making-advertisin...
This is an example of how businesses and customers can be perfectly happy without any advertising. It's not the only example, just the first that came to mind.
Put up a non-intrusive entry in a directory that people would use to reach out to you. Let them come to you.
Stop hounding people to be the repeatedly ground in impression by repetition. So much time is wasted today... When I think of all the broadcasting/transmission medium throughput that's eaten up by carrying unsolicited advertisements to people that could either A) be left unused, or used to provide better performance for everyone, or B) utilized for, heaven forbid, the public calling out for proposals from service providers!
- no qualitative adjectives
That is, you can say "Foo Corp. makes high speed Gizblams that can help you and your family deal with the challenges of flamming" without it being an ad.
BUt if you say "Foo Corp. makes the best anti-flam devices", it's an ad.
I mean sure, it's sort of bullshit, but there's some sort of idea buried in there somewhere.
“We make Foo. Foo helps you Bar the Baz. Check us out at foobarbaz.com”
Vs.
“Look at this scary Baz. Feel emotions about it. We want you feeling anxious and ill-equipped. Okay now here’s Foo. We want you feeling better. Nicer music. Smiles. Good emotions from you. What a relief. If you’re tired of being a dumb idiot who suffers from Baz all the time, we can fix you with Foo.”
"Foo Corp. makes Gizblams." Whether or not they're high speed depends on the other Gizblam manufacturers, whether or not it can help me or my family depends on if I like it or not.
"PEPSI - When they don't have Coke."
Thanks for sharing that
It is even more complex than that. As it already happens, word of mouth can also be hijacked by advertising resulting MLM pyramid schemes.
To bring about such a world we need more than just banning advertising, we need to make it a socially repulsive behaviour.
What a strange example. Other than Apple products, I'm not sure if most people could tell you what computer they are using, or can recall seeing an ad for any of them. "PCs" are a generic, interchangeable object to most people.
I still found a computer to buy.
How?
The direct reason for this is the existence of advertisement. In a ideal (also pretty much only theoretical) world where there are no ads, only honest reviewers and comparison sites, bad products would fall pretty quickly, planned obsolesce would be suicide etc etc.
If I make a website tomorrow that details the best innovation in programming language technology, how is it ever going to find an audience unless I advertise somehow? At some point I have to go around and tell people about it either in person or via ads, either way I am advertising.
Ads on the other hand often lie by omission when it comes to the limits of a technology being advertised. They exist to get you on their product simply because the business is leveraged in it, not because its a good product, much less to share findings with potential colleagues about what you’ve discovered that might even tarnish said products initial expectations.
Advertising and marketing executives spend all their time thinking up ways to say things that are technically true if construed in the most torturous way possible while implying something else. That is a pure intent to confuse and bewilder and is the lifeblood of the industry.
We can fix this by requiring advertising to inform. Any implication that overstates your product should be false advertising. The test is simple, if your lawyer says: “Well technically…” you lose. You must be truthful, clear, and spend all of your time thinking about how a customer might misinterpret what you say over-positively and nip that in the bud. Obviously, this depends on the target demographic, and the expected viewers who might act on the ad, but the details seem solvable once you approach it from the stated concept.
Advertising should inform, anything else should be the crime of false advertising.
Advertising is a 0 sum game. Everyone doing it and no one doing it has roughly the same result. If your competitors do it and you don’t you lose.
As for advertising driving consumerism, that’s undeniable but it’s unclear to me that consumerism is a net positive. We certainly can see all the negative things it creates in society. It also distorts the market in a way that funds are directed to things that may not be as important but has better advertising.
No amount of drug advertisements will change that. Solve the root cause and the problem generally goes away, but keep putting lipstick on a pig and you just get more problems.
Advertising should be heavily taxed so companies have an incentive to innovate and make better products. All the money that goes to advertising is money that don't go to R&D and salaries.
The internet business model is an exception because there ads actually fund useful services. It's anomally, a clever hack but should really be independant public services whose goal is to expand freedom of associtaion and peer to peer discovery and exchanges and could be funded with taxes.
> The internet business model is an exception because there ads actually fund useful services.
?? Most public information services, including newspapers, radio, and television, are funded in large part by advertising.
TBH, I can't recall the last time I saw an ad for a Dell product.
Computers are actually pretty bad example of this here on HN, folks here do (or at least should) understand pretty damn well what they are buying and ads should never interfere with this process.
Patients shouldn't be researching cures for themselves, they should be given choices by professional doctors. If this process is broken fix that, and not justify amoral for-profit advertising instead.
I literally can't agree with a single sentence you wrote, it all sounds like from person way too deep in PR business justifying their jobs.
As a counterpoint, I chose my last three laptops (Thinkpads, by Lenovo) because I was fed up with the advertisement, in particular grassroots advertisement, by Apple. Lenovo did advertise to people like me, but I was already on the market for a powerful laptop and the last thing I would buy was an Apple laptop, because of all the advertisement as I said. I went with the first thing that was shoved in my face and that looked good enough for my needs.
Honestly I have no idea whose game I'm playing here. When I find the time I'll make a laptop of my own. Only of course it will end up as big as a desktop :)
Isn't this the survivorship bias? If aggressively advertising companies outcompete companies not advertising or advertising less - then if advertising wasn't an option, or if the society was more negative towards ads - then perhaps the latter category of companies would be more thrive.
It's about establishing a duopoly, tell to consumers "here is your choice" and overshadow all the other alternatives.
See Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism, dating from 1909:
<https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft>
And I do mean see it. Read the damned thing, or at least the first dozen pages or so. It's a highly-readable, information-dense, and exceedingly insightful look at the development of commercial publishing in the US at the time, and its author is a magazine publisher himself.
> No wonder that the man who realizes the significance of all these figures and the trend disclosed by them is coming to look upon the editorial department of the newspaper as merely a necessary means of giving a literary tone to the publication, thus helping business men get their wares before the proper people.
> Thus you see advertising has made possible the great complex papers and magazines of the day with their corps of trained editors, reporters, and advertising writers, in numbers and intellectual calibre comparable with the faculty of a good-sized university. Advertising makes it possible to issue a paper far below the cost of manufacturing — all to the benefit of the consumer. So far as I know there is not an important daily, weekly, or monthly in America that can be manufactured at the selling price. But, on the other hand, with the growth of advertising a department had to be created in every paper for its handling. As advertising still further increased, rival papers competed for it and the professional solicitor became a necessary adjunct of every paper, until now the advertising department is the most important branch of the publication business, for it is the real source of the profits. Because the solicitor seeks the advertiser, and, therefore, is in the position of one asking for favors, he puts himself under obligations to the advertiser, and so in his keenness to bring in revenue for his paper, he is often tempted to ask the aid of the editor in appeasing the advertiser. Thus the advertiser tends to control the policy of the paper.
> And this is the explanation of the condition that confronts most publications to-day. By throwing the preponderating weight of commercialism into the scales of production, advertising is at the present moment by far the greatest menace to the disinterested practice of a profession upon which the diffusion of intelligence most largely depends. If journalism is no longer a profession, but a commercial enterprise, it is due to the growth of advertising, and nothing else.
- Growth especially of large-city dailies and some consolidation of markets effectively gave newspapers some market leverage over most advertisers. There were still some somewhat-untouchable entities, but for the most part, a reasonably-strong editorial independence was achieved.
- It was also possible to go muckraking in another district --- outlying suburbs or cities elsewhere in a state or country, which didn't contribute advertising to that particular institution.
- Increased reliance on classified advertising and legal notices. Each of these were huge contributors to newspapers' revenues, whilst at the same time giving relatively little risk of an advertising boycott. The dawn of Internet classifieds (Craigslist gets a lot of blame, but it was pretty much inevitable, someone would enter that niche) was absolutely devastating in that regard.
There's another bit of media history that I think pairs excellently with the Holt book. It's a 1970s interview with I.F. ("Izzy") Stone, on the PBS programme "Day at Night". That's on YouTube, which is ... somewhat less accessible to me with its current shenanigans, but might be available here:
<https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g>
<https://youtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g>
In particular, Stone calls out the distinction between major city dailies, which had strong editorial independence over local businesses and politicians in the 1970s, versus small-town and rural newspapers, which were far less independent. Keep in mind that this interview occurred in the shadow of the Watergate scandal, in which two reporters literally brought down the President of the United States --- it was a high-water mark for journalistic independence and power.
I return to both these references often.
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are ‘The Advertisers’ and they are laughing at you.
> You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
> Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
> You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs. - Banksy
It doesn't give me a lot of hope we'll be able to reclaim our public spaces from being littered with ads anytime soon.
Best statement against 1) advertising, and 2) copyright, that I can imagine.
Does this guy really not understand the difference between someone asking for money in exchange for nothing as opposed to asking for money in exchange for something of value? If Coca-Cola was advertising a Venmo address to send them money in exchange for nothing it would be much more annoying than what they currently do.
but besides that, people actually enjoy drinking soda. I certainly do from time to time, and I don't find the price unfair.
> CocaCola revenue for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $43.493B
> CocaCola net income for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $9.868B
> CocaCola net profit margin as of March 31, 2023 is 22.69%.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KO/cocacola/revenu...
(note I also specifically argue that soda is nearly free to produce, not nearly free to store, or transport, or market, etc.)
Which means that it costs them $1 to produce every $1.23 of soda that you purchase. This is a long-shot from being "nearly free" as you claimed earlier, and materially different from "asking for money in exchange for nothing".
That's not a cost to produce their product, or even ship it, or store it. That's strictly just "buying more customers", which has no bearing on my initial claim - that soda is extremely cheap to produce.
Again, materially different from asking for money in exchange for nothing.
That's not correct. The $1.23 you pay at the store includes wholeseller/distributor and retailer margins. The wholesale price of that soda is maybe a quarter of the retail price. So for Coca Cola the bottle the production cost and shipment to a distributor was less than 20% of the retail price.
tangent: I've been to some restaurants that charge $5+ for a fountain drink, presumably to mitigate the lost profit on alcohol. it would be interesting to know why the business model is that way, instead of just pricing a moderate profit into both food and drink.
That's only compounded by the tendency for drinks and sides to be impulse-purchases - easy up-sells that no one walked in intending to consume. And, if choosing the $5 burger has maybe embedded the idea that your place is "cheap", then so much the better, as that makes them likely to spend a little more than they would have at the other place: "I saved $2 on the burger, so I can afford an extra side!"
Tl;dr: Commodity restaurants are trapped in an equilibrium where food has to be a loss-leader for sales of drinks and fries.
Any little thing to extract just a tiny bit more money from people I guess.
> It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages."
— Adam Smith
Not multinational conglomerate monopolist meat-packing, alcohol, and shelf-stable baked goods manufacturers.
As individuals, Smith's artisans would have faced ample competition both within a community and from others nearby if they attempted to strong-arm customers or degrade products (though there was plenty of both going on, as attested by food-quality and food-purity laws dating back to Hammurabi). They lacked any appreciable ability to lock in more than a very localised monopoly absent armed force or coercion, though those too were abundantly evident (see: America's Colonies and the British East India Company, both of which Smith also writes of).
As Smith himself notes:
What are the common wages of labor, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties [(masters and workmen)], whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. ... The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of Parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it.
<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...>
The proto-labour organisations were probably the guilds, which existed in Smith's time, and in fact he helped find alternative employment for one guy who had been blackisted by the local Hammermen's Guild (the blacksmith's union, as it were), goes by the name of James Watt. Had him set up at the University of Edinburgh, and worked on one of the fire engines there. What we'd now call a steam engine.
(And for all that, Smith utterly failed to realise what the import of that particular invention on the economic development of Britain during the 19th century would be....)
The first general unions in the UK date to the 1820s and 1830s, roughly three to four decades after Smith, who died in 1790:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union#National_general_u...>
I'd compiled a set of quotes from Karl Marx and Adam Smith a ways back and encouraged people to tell which came from whom:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127620>
The "butcher, brewer, and baker" quote is most often seen in a form that ties it together with another passage hundreds of pages from it within Wealth. That construction was created in the early 20th century, more than 100 years after Smith wrote his work, by Jacob Viner, at the monopolist-defending University of Chicago. My understanding is that this was initially an exercise to show how much one could twist Smith's meaning by selectively editing his work. It's since come to be taken as a flat statement by Smith, as originally intended, when it is in fact no such thing.
In fact, the chapter in which the vastly over-exaggerated and greatly misconstrued phrase "invisible hand" occurs, begins with a discussion of restraint of trade by monopoly interests, including of the previously-mentioned butchers:
BY RESTRAINING, either by high duties, or by absolute prohibitions, the importation of such goods from foreign countries as can be produced at home, the monopoly of the home market is more or less secured to the domestic industry employed in producing them. Thus the prohibition of importing either live cattle or salt provisions from foreign countries secures to the graziers of Great Britain the monopoly of the home market for butcher's meat. The high duties upon the importation of corn, which in times of moderate plenty amount to a prohibition, give a like advantage to the growers of that commodity. The prohibition of the importation of foreign woollens is equally favorable to the woollen manufactures. The silk manufacture, though altogether employed upon foreign materials, has lately obtained the same advantage. The linen manufacture has not yet obtained it, but is making great strides toward it. Many other sorts of manufactures have, in the same manner, obtained in Great Britain, either altogether, or very nearly a monopoly against their countrymen. The variety of goods of which the importation into Great Britain is prohibited, either absolutely, or under certain circumstances, greatly exceeds what can easily be suspected by those who are not well acquainted with the laws of the customs.
<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_IV...>
The late Gavin Kennedy's blog, "Adam Smith's Lost Legacy" covers this misrepresentation in depth:
<https://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/>
(I'd need to hunt through that to find specific posts of note, though I'd encourage anyone reding this to go through it on your own.)
There's a book of the same title:
<https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230511194>
Kennedy's hardly the only person to point this out. John Kenneth Galbraith made much of how Smith was misrepresented during his lifetime, and Steve Keen is amongst present-day economists doing similarly, if memory serves.
Smith does best where he comments on that which he can observe directly. He's weak on ancient history and what we'd now call archeology and anthropology (Graeber's own specialisation), as well as on contemporary conditions he'd not directly witnessed --- the American Colonies, again, or China, come to mind.
But in observing and commenting on actual trade, commerce, and politics of his own time and place, there's a great deal of wisdom. His commentary on prices suggests to me a number of classes of goods & services (commodities, assets, rents, wages, skilled / privileged work, public goods, capital stock) with distinct pricing tendencies, some of which behave poorly in open markets. His commentary on the components of wages is excellent (I've mentioned this numerous times over the years on HN). His commentary on the practices of privately chartered companies operating as empires and armies abroad are telling (and little commented on by the usual vociferous "champions" of Smith).
It's useful to keep in mind that all authors and authorities have their strengths and weaknesses. The one shouldn't blind us to the other, either way.
(Graeber also has his ... excessive enthusiasms, I'll put it. But he's also intelligent, a keen observer, and doesn't fall slave to orthodoxies and convention.)
In other words, the average person isn't advertising; at least, not in an intrusive way.
Indeed, the best at any particular job probably are not advertising, because the effort they spent on advertising is effort that was not spent on the job. After buying expensive medication in the United States, I come home and the TV is showing a 90 second commercial from a pharmaceutical company with a catchy song and is overall very well made--guess I know why my medication was expensive. Do we even need advertisements for prescription medication?
Actually, one of the main innovations of the past 20 years is that advertising has become easily accessible to those who are not rich. Small businesses and individuals can easily become advertisers on FB, Google, Etc. This has helped, many, many people earn a living. Myself included. I'm certainly not a millionaire.
Is YouTube a town?
Not OP, but I block ads for similar reasons. I do pay for ad-free experiences, but
1) often I'm shown ads anyway, and 2) there's typically no privacy-preserving way to pay. So in practice paying often implies a significant loss of control over managing your privacy
So my personal take is that we're not there yet in terms of having robust viable alternatives to the ad-block experience.
This is exactly my problem. I log into as few services as possible and clear my cookies on browser exit. Of course this is supplemented by ad-blocking and blocking most 3rd-party scripts and cookies to avoid cross-site tracking. I have no way to pay for a service while maintaining that level of privacy.
Lol, then there are ads like the Liberty Mutual ads. All I know is I will never, ever purchase car insurance from that shithole from having been made to watch their obnoxious ads on loop.
I agree with the other commenter that ads have become so obtrusive that it's being dealt with in the same vein as malware. It's just malware from the techno oligarchy.
(And uh, yes, adware, but that's usually the programs themselves. A website with intrusive ads is adware, but the ads are spywares)
Fits the definition of spyware.
The larger problem is that this behaviour has been normalised to such a degree that "the world wide web" as a whole could be described as spyware.
I pay for a few subscription services and get my entertainment _mostly_ ad free. Unfortunately there’s no similar subscription I can buy to escape advertising as I walk down the street.
>The alignment was apparent in everything they did, in their words as well as their actions. They spoke of "package grab level" and "container flash time" -- of "puff limit" and "acceptance threshold." It was an "in" language of militarylike maneuvering and combat. They knew which height on a shelf was most apt to make a customer grab an item. They knew the "flash time" -- the shelf width needed for certain containers. They knew how much empty air could be "puffed" into a package to make it appear a greater bargain. they knew how much price and package manipulation the customer would accept without jarring him into a "rejection pattern."
>And we're their spies, Dasein thought. the psychiatrists and psychologists - all the "social scientists" we're the espionage arm.
The Santaroga Barrier,
Frank Herbert, 1968
I see them as environmental pollution that affects the mind instead of the body (this also includes offline ads btw, I actually wish there were adblockers for the real world).
Pollution is something that occurs because it's too costly to prevent, or the people producing the pollution simply don't care.
The effect advertising has one you isn't some externality that the advertisers couldn't be bothered fixing, the effect is the whole point.
"If anyone here is in advertising or marketing ... kill yourself" (:
Some people use the excuse of 'scale', and "can't monitor everything", but it's not like Google and Facebook don't have the resources to solve it, it's just that they have no motivation to solve it because it's not costing them anything to be a platform for malware and scams.
While that's true, it glosses over the fact that not only is it "not costing them money," it's bringing in revenue -- those malware/scams are paid-for ads after all, aren't they?
This also ignores the in-video sponsorships and ads that creators will often include.
I also run an ad blocker, with extra rules to ban content I don't want to see, such as the terrible "shorts" mind-ebola, as well as a bunch of regexes for clickbait titles and a big ban list of channels that is updated often.
SponsorBlock to remove baked-in advertisements and other misfeatures like interaction reminders.
Now I am also using the beta DeArrow extension to disarm the thumbnails/titles a little bit by replacing them with random frames from the video.
I think the hip way to say it is "I'm between jobs" currently, but when I had a stable income source I would do eventual donations to channels of my interest, which according to some creators even a single USD is way more than the average lifetime return of a single viewer due to ads/YTP.
The only reason I haven't subscribed to Nebula / CuriosityStream instead, which seems to be a much healthier platform, is precisely because they advertise it so much. Also because I do appreciate more entertainment-y videos sometimes, not just edutainment.
! Nuke high contrast elements
www.youtube.com##ytd-feed-filter-chip-bar-renderer
www.youtube.com##yt-chip-cloud-renderer
! Nuke news sections and other "engagement boosting" sections of the homepage
! This breaks the channel page, I temporary disable the filter rules when I need to go in there. Selector can probably be refined
www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer
! Nuke Shorts
www.youtube.com##[is-slim-media]
Can you please share which ad blocker you use and how we might use regexes to do this? Sounds fascinating and I want to do that myself
It's basically CSS selectors, but with some very powerful ones added in too.
Check the docs for details https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...
The particular filters I use include things like:
! Kills "You won't believe something useless! Some subtitle"
youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:has-text(/you won'?t .*!( .*)?/i)
! Kills "100 idiotic life hacks that are definite safety hazards!"
youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:has-text(/(\d+) (.+)s/i)
Also look at the sibling comment about other distraction-removals like shorts and engagement callout taming.
The only people who make meaningful advertising money from youtube are the ones in the extreme high value advertising niches, like Swell Entertainment when she does a tech related video (though she still makes way more money from sponsorships) or all the Logan pauls making clickbait screaming content for literal children to mindlessly consume all day because their parents can't afford baby sitters because all the money goes to advertising behemoths instead of the workers.
I actually WANT youtube to be a great, pro-creator platform, where I have to pay to see people who feel that youtube gives them support and good tools to do their damn job. But that's not an option. The only option available is for me to pay youtube to remove their horrifically overbearing advertising, often from advertisers that are fraudulent, so I can watch videos from creators who genuinely hate youtube for making their lives hell.
I will not give youtube a dime until they stop viewing creators as replaceable cogs in a machine designed to grind them to dust for every second of content they can produce and then cast them aside.
I mean fuck, does youtube even send content creators documents to help them prepare their taxes? These people are all technically self employed, couldn't a behemoth like google help them get a pooled health care scheme that was affordable to middle size creators?
I don't mind compensating the creators. I do mind compensating the middleman leech in between.
Advertising is just a disgusting tax on capitalism by a few cartels.
Get a billboard ban passed in your state. It's absolutely wonderful.
Have you also cut everything out of your life that's financed through ads? So I'm expecting you to not use any Facebook, Google, Twitter, Youtube or other modern web content.
I agree that ads are manipulative. That's their very essence. But they exist for a reason. Not to enrich people, but the uphold one side of a bargin. You can't expect everything to be for free.
All of the examples exist there to enrich those running the platform, and not for the benefit of those producing content. Those companies are worth what they’re worth now because they only pass on a pittance of the advertising money they draw in.
But the platform itself needs to be paid for as well. You think Youtube should provide video hosting for free? Facebook should provide their .. social network stuff for free? Twitter should serve tweets for free? No? Then either pay or watch ads.
B) Many of these companies have such large content hosting fees because of the very nature they chose to set up under. For example: YouTube chose to centralize and host all of the videos itself, and it chose to continue pursuing that route rather than experiment with technologies that could distribute that load and make their server costs significantly decrease. Why? Because it gives them a choke point with which they can extract money and leverage over everyone else.
Further, just like I don’t have a right to tell Facebook how their computers should run, they don’t have a right to tell me what my computer has to display.
If an economically more viable alternative exists then you are welcome to create a competitor. The fact that there is no such thing is strong evidence that they've already hit the economical sweet spot.
> Further, just like I don’t have a right to tell Facebook how their computers should run, they don’t have a right to tell me what my computer has to display.
Correct. Nor do you have a right to tell them not to try to prevent you from avoiding that ads are being displayed on your computer.
It would only be evidence for that if there were multiple strong competitors to youtube that use similar methods. The dearth of competition suggests that other forces are the cause.
Consumers just don't want to pay for things they've gotten used to getting for free. You may not like it (I don't), but that's reality. Being angry at "big tech" for this is relieving the general population of their responsibility.
Vimeo wants hosting fees for significant use, there's a few decentralized platforms without ads, nebula charges and doesn't have ads. Dailymotion fits the mold but this ranking site says they get 0.4% as many visits and each visit is 1/4 as long.
I'm not saying that things should all be free, I'm saying that youtube's "economical sweet spot" is one that is basically competition-free and because of that we can't learn much about what other viable forms the market could take.
This is a simplistic take. First of all, even if it’s true now it does not make it true for all time. Blockbuster hit a real sweet spot for video rental until the tech landscape changed under their feet.
Secondly, and more importantly. Economical optimal for what end? For extracting profits and creating a system where it’s difficult for either side of the network to go elsewhere? Cause it’s not optimized for providing most of the revenue to the people creating the content.
Further I’m willing to bet that most of these services would be significantly technically easier to run if all of the advertising and tracking aspects were stripped out. Which in turn means that it may be possible to architect them differently since you now have different requirements and constraints.
> Nor do you have a right to tell them not to try to prevent you from avoiding that ads are being displayed on your computer.
Correct. I never argued to the contrary.
The thing to keep in mind is that they need us more than we need them. The world existed and functioned before all of these companies and will continue to do so after they’re all gone.
True. I'd love to see a competitor someday whom I can just pay and then have a Facebook-equivalent and Youtube-equivalent that doesn't spam me with ads and does not collect my behavioural data to profile me.
I think people would just be shocked how much they would need to pay for their FB account if that would be an alternative offering. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: 2022 FB had a revenue of about $116bn. With about 3bn users. Let's say half of those are actually dead accounts that people almost never log into. (And that's very generous, this number is probably much higher.) That leaves 1.5bn users. To generate $116bn you'd need $77 from each of them. I know very few people who would pay that much money every year to see their aunts cooking results and their uncles Trump posts.
> Secondly, and more importantly. Economical optimal for what end? For extracting profits
Yes. That's what our market-based economies are optimizing for. Other economic models have not proven to be viable.
First of all, that’s revenue, not profit. Looking at revenue is meaningless since it’s easy to take in lots of money and still be in the red.
Secondly, a competitor to Facebook does not need to have facebook’s profitability in order for it to be a viable business model.
By your analysis we can look Twitter and gry get the amount of money that people would have to pay to Mastadon in order for Mastadon to be a competitor. Except that the analogy breaks down because because the underlying technology is different. I won’t be paying server fees to “Mastadon” I’d be paying to an instance.
Likewise, wow google drive for sending large files to people needs a lot of servers. Or, we set something up torrent style and then there is no separate server.
Yes, I'm sure google will be very happy to show videos on my platform rather than on their own first in the search results.
edit: My browser, my rules. Don't like 'em? Feel free to go out of business.
Not GP, but that would be nice. What would be even nicer is if each and every location that one of those organizations, as well as everyone who works for them or chooses to invest in them should be destroyed/die slowly and painfully.
If that were to happen, the world would be a better place.
Is that a fine enough point, or shall I elaborate further?
Edit: Fixed typo.
It's easy to think that people won't pay for such an experience. I think that's naive. There are plenty of examples of people being willing to pay for a premium experience when free/cheap options are available, like these:
- Apple convinced a LOT of non-audiophiles to pay $249 and $550 for Bluetooth earbuds and headphones (respectively).
- OpenAI is convincing millions to pay $20/month for ChatGPT+.
- Krisp makes a bunch of money over something that has a free alternative (software noise cancelling) because it's just THAT good.
- Tesla convinced a LOT of people to buy a Model 3 or Model Y over the Camry or Accord they were originally going to get.
I would LOVE to use Facebook or something like that but am not willing to have a non-governmental entity surveil my every move online in exchange, nor am I willing to be subjected to an experience that is constantly trying to get me addicted to using it.
The 'infinite growth at all costs' model has rarely been seriously challenged, and as a result its become blase to think of a smaller scale but more stable and consistently successful business, and instead everything needs to lead towards monopolized or cartel-like "Big Tech".
It's a farce.
That's true but their number will be extremely miniscule compared to freeloaders who love to consume a freely available resource!
In terms of "revenue/cost per user" metrics (which is more commonly used in IT industry), the ad model thus topples down the subscription model in the eyes of decision makers?
I don’t have ads on YouTube in my country, but my feed is still being manipulated (it’s eery to see how they want my attention). I travel or use a VPN and the experience goes straight down the drain. I could pay, but would they stop manipulating the feed or collecting my data? I’ll be using YouTube as long as they keeping it free. If it becomes paid, I will if the terms are worth it.
I do run an ad blocker, because the web has spent too long spreading viruses and malware through ads to be safe _not_ running one. But I don't mind ads conceptually; they just need to be safe, not obnoxious, and not take up more of my time than the placement is worth (ie, a 20s ad pre-roll on a 15 second video).
But every time I turn adblock off accidentally or on purpose, it’s the same generic shit unrelated to my obvious interests. Nasal sprays, supplements, car dealerships, be-a-programmer courses. I have a non-zero, negative interest in these.
There's a difficult problem of maladaptation and misleading that, to me, is coming from the meaning resulting from the repeated and well-known answer to, "who gets the money in the end", these days. I believe society would benefit from discussing value-propositions of adtech and the attention economy. I wish that we would take more seriously the social impact of our businesses, the richness or depravity which our business activity imputes.
More musing:
I used to work in adtech, not by choice, was transferred to that dept. Worked in in-app purchase tech throughout my 6-years at that co.
A trend in technology, now, seems to me to include: the crisis of Generative AI devaluing humans own ability (and effort) to recreate prior art, the dissatisfying Reddit value-exchange of creators feeling disrespected by site-operators, and the dissatisfying politics of left and right pursuits towards winning instead of promoting healthy human interdependence resulting in disaffected populace.
So in short, I think pop technology has overshot the goal.
Adtech is the simplest way to make money off provided-experiences, I believe. Subscriptions require too much buy-in, by comparison. Adtech is "just there".
This view (of the reality of content creation) imposes, I believe, an expectation upon all of us (who want to create or consume content) that there is nothing better - no better approach to celebrating human experiences than +1'ing to share one's individual influence/record-of-attention...and to me it conflates the point of life as being something to do with short-term financial success.
When it overlooks more true base human goals / pursuits of having babies, that happiness and comfort in safety, and the joy of growth.
I'd like for emoji-reactions, +1's, impression counts to be segregated more formally by businesses, so the boards of managing companies and stockholders could see also see the social impact of businesses.
I’m an ideal world there would be no ads, but we don’t live in one.
If you have such disdain for ads you should probably pay the premium or not use YouTube.
Roger that. Always turning over a full-page ad to verify that no content text would be lost.
And then there's the magazines that put the ads on right-hand pages and the content on left-hand pages.
I hate ads as much as the next guy. But that's the economic model most of the web is built on. Anybody without a youtube premium subscription who rants about youtube ads is just hypocritical. How should this be financed? Either you give your money or your eyeballs. Nobody is going to work for free so you can watch cat videos.
Please don't come with morals here. Expecting things for free is just as morally problematic.
It bothers me far less to have ads at the start of a video, between videos, or even at transition points between coherently separate segments within a video than what YouTube is now doing. That's not hypocritical.
(Tangent: I do have a YouTube Premium subscription, but for irrelevant reasons we usually watch using my wife's account and she does not have one. So I see the ads anyway. Maybe that's the reverse kind of hypocrisy to the one you mean, where I'm wasting my money instead of being stingy?)
Apparently most people don't care though. So, whom are you criticizing? Youtube for providing a service that's populare despite their way of financing which you personally don't like, but others don't have a problem with? Or the other viewers for not joining your boycott?
I'm quite ok with markets and capitalism. Should be regulated, but if you get your wish then there will be 300+ Americans who also want a wish. I rather have people pay for their wishes.
They made people to expect stuff for free. It was their market strategy to offer basically free service to get people locked in. It is their fault they should pay for it.
It is called bait and switch which is a blatant fraud. Only that they stretched it into long years.
Now they switch by introducing pains option and making free one unusable by shoving ads every minute.
Sorry, this is just not true. If you let yourself get baited, then it's your responsibility. Don't lift the responsibility from the general populace of mostly mature adults. If they like to see ads then it's their problem.
Voting for whoever shouts louder.
Don’t overestimate being mature. I’m 35 and look at my aunts and uncles turning 65 and 70 it is so much different view from when I was 15 to 25… it is just people.
Is that why you're using a throwaway, or new account, because you know defending adtech is dubious?
It's this kind of lack of integrity people are unhappy with.
I also don't see how turning this discussion into ad hominem against myself is meaningful. Attacking that I'm using a throwaway? Seriously?
Yes, my comments may be dark. It's because my view on society is dark. It just does not help to blame big tech for the laziness of people to not want to pay and watch ads instead.
could one make an argument of it not being morally justified? maybe.
does youtube, in the way google/alphabet wants to run it suck? most definitely. Is it possible to easily work around some of the biggest stuff here? yes.
well this is what a great many people choose to do, and youtube had better accept reality and deal with it. If they make it impossible to block ads, that is probably within their rights (assuming they implement some technical solution themselves), but that will come with some consequences
As a consumer, I do not care. If I can get a thing for free AND ignore your suggested content, I will do it 10 times out of 10.
If you don't want to offer a thing for free, then don't offer a thing for free.
If your business model is to offer a thing for free and then to somehow profit from that, well then it is your problem. When you give away a thing for free, expect people to take it for free.
It's the exact same logic as stealing from a roadside honesty box (or a corner shop who can't easily detect petty theft) and then saying "tough! Their business model isn't my problem! I could take it for free so clearly I should be allowed to" when morally called out for it
If I choose to view free content and not render ads, no one has lost anything. While yes, the site owner does not get the profit from "selling the ad", it is not theft in the same way if I were to walk into a store, look around, and not buy anything is not theft.
Your comment gave me one of those funny moments where you realise something that should have been obvious but you never saw it being done, or heard about it being done, and simply never thought of it...
You can just rip the adverts out of magazines. I shall be indulging in this on the rare occasions that I end up reading something of that sort when I'm out and about. Cheers.
Ultimately, this is the thing that matters. Back when I was a kid, I muted the TV or changed the channel during the ads break. Imagine if the technology had existed back then to prevent me from muting the sound or changing channels!
Imagine... just imagine if ads were broadcast directly to your brain like in Minority Report. Would people here also defend the advertisers, "you can't have stuff for free!".
Ultimately, I don't want to see ads. I'm sorry that so much of the current "freemium" web wants me to see ads, because I don't.
I pay for YouTube Premium because of several reasons, but before it I used an adblocker. I adblock the web.
When broadcast-ads-to-your-brain tech becomes real, I sure hope I'll be able to block it too.
https://www.techdirt.com/2016/01/11/forbes-site-after-beggin...
Amen. I see advertising as a personal affront to my dignity. I try to remove or deface as much advertising as I can in my life without getting into legally black areas.
The world is run by scummy, greedy and straight up evil people and they have created a global public consciousness where that fact in itself is almost impossible to spread.
The expectation by others that you are as dumb as a gorilla takes you away from what you could become.
So in that way it's evil. It divides you from what you could be.
Email, TV, various websites, etc use ad money in part to pay for and provide content.
Usually seems like a decent trade off. Not always but most of the time.
E.g. I recently talked to an acquaintance about cooking and told them there's a kitchen utensil that would solve a problem they were describing.
Ads should be performed by 3rd parties (a mix of reviews and match-making?) that get paid by both the customer and the company whenever they facilitate a useful transaction. And pay the customer when they took up their time with useless information (thus incentivizing getting out of there way when they're not doing their job).
"See the USA in your [??] ..."
"You'll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with [??] ..."
Carpenter's They Live was great pointing out how many 'OBEY's are buried in adverts. 30 years before, Vance Packard The Hidden Persuaders was published. 2010, Eldon Taylor's Mind Programming.
Worse yet: TV tearing a great movie up into shreds punctuated with adverts (imagine doing that to famous paintings). I eventually dropped cable as a result.
"Lower than pond-scum" = all the disciples of Freud's nephew Ed Bernays.
Every shop in my town is shouting at you to come in a buy crap with flashy signs and displays. Then recently I was in Münster (Germany) where they have some old-school facades for most shops that includes standardised lettering and zero advertisements. Its so much nicer.
5 years ago I would have said ads are a necessary evil, but there's a lot of substance to your argument.
Today, I almost completely agree. Fuck ads.
More and more I end up using other platforms like Rumble or Rutube
And I'm totally amazed that execs at YouTube/Google haven't figured out that maybe a cheaper tier premium service for just no ads, might be a viable enough solution, versus thinking they are going to bully and intimate their customers. At least give it a try, and give users more options. Make a new basic tier for maybe $15 dollars a year, where there are no ads. There are just too many programmers in the world, to think "aggressive intimidation" is really going to work.
I occasionally use this for convenience, even though I pay for YT Premium.
There's basically an agreement that in return for watching some video for free, you have to 'pay' by watching an ad. On YouTube a significant amount of this money even goes to the creator.
Not really sure how you can defend your entitlement to free content with no ads, refusing to support the creator and provider, when the ad free version is reasonably priced, and even includes music.
To me it sounds like thinking a restaurant is too expensive so you just dine and dash.
Yea, and I find it hard to understand why YouTube doesn't deserve the money either.
The rest of your strawman has nothing to do with what I said.
Sure, YouTube deserves the money. They should find a more reliable way than third party advertisements to get the money.
Advertisers pay content creators money directly to feature sponsored ad-reads on their video, knowing full well that a lot of people will skip straight through them. If I skip an ad-read, I'm not stealing from the advertiser, even though the advertiser is expecting to get money from me. The advertiser has paid the money to deliver this ad-read to me, but I'm not paying them back.
Similarly, YouTube keeps on hosting "free" video content with third party ads, knowing full well that a lot of people will block them. If I block ads, YouTube has paid for the content to be delivered to me, but I'm not paying them back.
Both are investments that don't always see return on the individual level. If everyone stops buying sponsored products that appear in ad-reads, advertisers will stop paying for ad-reads. If everyone starts blocking ads, YouTube will find other ways to get compensation for the storage and bandwidth.
The strawman, I never said anything about this. In case you didn't know, as long as the ad plays, the creator and YouTube gets paid.
Older tech: LGR, Cathode Ray Dude, Techmoan
Video games: Cinemassacre, Masahiro Sakurai, Jeremy Parish, Cybershell, Basement Brothers, Retro Game Mechanics Explained, Brian David Gilbert, GTV Japan, Displaced Gamers
Synthesizers/music theory: Red Means Recording, Alex Ball, Andrew Huang, Rob Scallon, Rachel K Collier, David Bruce
Hardware/engineering: Element14, Technology Connections, Applied Science
Guitar: Justin Johnson, Rhett Shull, Guitar Salon International, Andertons, Brandon Acker, Philip McKnight, Alamo Music Center
I'd add a few different guitarists in here though. Paul David's genuinely seems like a great dude. Stewmac has fun stuff though it is generally driven around selling their stuff, but I think they're still highly educational most of the time. Emerald City Guitar's has some really cool videos now and again, and I dig their videos on some of the vintage gear they have and find inspiration in that. Gracie Terzian has great music theory videos, she's the one that helped me fully understand the circle of fifths. I also really enjoy Eric Haugen, he has a few courses on TrueFire now as well.
I also dig Alamo Music Center, watching Cooper shred an acoustic is always a good way to spend 10-15 minutes. Dude can play.
1: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/vid...
https://www.youtube.com/@smartereveryday
A super solid recommendation is the series on nuclear submarines, I also really enjoyed the one about how carburetors work (he makes a clear plastic one to use as a demo, it's... wildly cool). In general this channel is just _full_ to the brim of really great stuff.
A fellow Michigander Alexis Dahl has really cool videos about a bunch of unique places in Michigan and the state's history:
https://www.youtube.com/@AlexisDahl
Diana, aka Physics Girl, who is currently still suffering greatly from long COVID hasn't posted in awhile but her back catalog is amazing:
https://www.youtube.com/@physicsgirl
A good recommendation that I really enjoyed was the video on Rodney Mullen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFRPhi0jhGc
There's some really great stuff on YouTube, I'm sad that it's only offered on YouTube and wish some would move to something else simultaneously, like Floatplane or something where I could just pay a small monthly fee to get the videos at the same time.
I’ll definitely check out the Rodney Mullen video.
I think both floatplane and Nebula are promising. There are some pretty solid creators or Nebula (though they also tend to be some of the bigger more recommended YouTube channels)
https://www.youtube.com/@BenEater (electronics, computers)
https://www.youtube.com/@Tantacrul (music software ui)
https://www.youtube.com/@LinusBoman (graphic design)
https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections (tech)
https://www.youtube.com/@Astrobiscuit (astrophotography)
https://www.youtube.com/@CityBeautiful (city planning)
https://www.youtube.com/@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER (synthesizers)
https://www.youtube.com/@Wintergatan (engineering, building musical marble machines)
I watched a 23-episode Yale class on the History of Ukraine, by prof. Tim Snyder. In fact I binged it. Then I went out and bought Bloodlands and On Tyranny. On Tyranny is a thin book, I read it in a couple of hours. But Bloodlands is fat; I read it in two days.
Snyder is a very engaging lecturer. I wish even one of my uni lecturers had been half so engaging.
In the first lecture, he asked his students to report back on whether any other universisty was offering classes on Ukrainian history; several students researched it, and came back in lecture 2 to tell him his class was unique in the USA. Which in the light of contemporary events seems pretty sad.
I won't be dropping my UBlock pants for Youtube. I watch about an hour every two weeks, on average; I certainly don't rely on it, and I certainly won't pay for Premium.
I remember seeing him earlier in the conflict, when a Ukrainian soldier was pictured reading his book and later met him: https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/121j5f1/sometime_a...
I’ll definitely check the channel out, and probably the book too
So here's a random one in that category: this guy decided to try and build a mass spectrometer from scratch