YouTube gets more aggressive in pushing adblock warnings with countdown timer
neowin.net
neowin.net
Screw that mentality, not paying them. And I don't mind paying for a service btw - I have a premium Odysee for example.
If something goes wrong, you are just SOL. No recourse, nothing and nobody can really help you.
Availability, universally accepted, free (to the product: you), large storage, easy to use.
There is no serious competition, and I say this as a Hotmail user since well before Larry and Sergey opened their doors.
I have a vanity domain which MX's to Gmail so I can move it to another service _when_ they bumrush me, but I don't want to have that happen so I keep my account in good standimg.
Other than self-hosting or a paid service, do you have a suggestion for an alternative?
I know I'm not the OP, but I'm genuinely interested in this.
Maybe someday I will spin up my mailserver also, but for now this is quite good balance between convenience & price for me.
edit: To make it really clear, Odysee is not the only thing I'm paying for. I'm also paying for example for Apple Family, HBO GO, Spotify, mailhosting etc. I'm also sponsoring SponsorBlock extension. As I said: I don't have a problem with paying for a product or service. I have a big problem when someone deliberately and needlesly cripples a product just so they can sell you a solution to the (unnecessary) problem they artificially created. I mean: Background play behind a paywall? Really? Is that the bar that we think is acceptable these days?
I'm not a big fan of everything YouTube does either, but this stance of yours bothers me, too.
> I have a big problem when someone deliberately and needlesly cripples a product just so they can sell you a solution to the (unnecessary) problem they artificially created
The whole of YouTube is artificially created. It wouldn't be there without the people who run it, and they get to decide how they want to monetize. You can take it or leave it, or say "screw your rules, I'm using this anyway". Just realize that this is not necessarily read as some form of rebellion against the man or whatever, but instead as a neat excuse to help yourself to some free content.
The content on YouTube you're watching also would not exist without the people who create it. It would be nice if you gave back to at least some of them, somehow, in a way that's independent from YouTube. That would be a more interesting and constructive position to take.
(edited spelling)
This is why i prefer to force high-res in the first place, and have it buffer enough to play the entire video without stopping. Unfortunately, google considers this wasted bandwidth, or something...this option is not available unless you use browser mods to do it.
That is another thing, which I don’t mind (if I understand it right). Sometimes internet becomes worse temporarily and that approach is okay.
But in the described case it plays a whole video in this hypothetical “mode”, never trying to go up. My internet is not greatest, but when I switch from “720p (Auto)” to “720p” it takes only a couple of seconds to then play it without any further interruptions. It doesn’t add up. I believe they are simply saving traffic on those who look at the quality setting and either think “well, maybe it’s just shitty bitrate 720/1080p” or have no clue at all.
Am I super happy about paying for YouTube? No. Is it worth ~CAD$30/mo to not worry about ads anywhere, have background playback on mobile, and support the folks I watch? Absolutely.
Google is designing YouTube as a ad distribution platform, not as a media platform and it shows
I’d prefer they were both cheaper. That doesn’t prevent me from seeing the value they provide me.
finally, without something like sponsorblock you still end up with ads uploaded as part of the video.
I can't overstate how much I despise advertising.
Maybe I'd consider $3. Especially since even "ad free" videoes themselves now have lots of ads baked into them by the creators. Not a fan of the double dipping.
If you want to remove those embedded ads, SponsorBlock and DeArrow are great extensions to make YouTube more bearable!
Am I super happy about paying for YouTube?
Even if I believed a for-profit model were appropriate for the largest repository of the world's video content, I wouldn't want AlphaGoogle to be the company implementing that model.
I actually think this is irrational, because reason google is forcing thru anti-consumer features is _because_ they can't get enough revenue out of youtube!
If you're skeptical about how/if massive corporations are able to leverage their market power and monopolization to generate monstrous profits and force through very anti-consumer features, I'd encourage you to read Goliath from Matt Stoller: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/...
Maybe.
YouTube should have to police copyright for the little guys as strongly as they do for the big guys. Instead, YouTube is happy to flat out steal content from little guys while stomping all over fair use when the big guys are involved.
I don't wish to support that. I want YouTube to go under so we can maybe get a video site that doesn't suck.
I'm skeptical they even consider YouTube premium a real option internally or if it's just there for potential regulators.
I also don't like the trend to blame adblock, Google is losing money now because there's an advertising scandal where they lied to customers, that's not adblocks fault.
$20 a month for unlimited, unrestricted access to literally millions of hours of high quality content is a really good deal. I regret having waited so long and wasted so much time waiting to click through ads.
It has YouTube premium and more, e.g. Sponsorblock, it's over all superior. And free.
However, I find the app's UX to be a little off-putting compared to the actual Youtube app.
YouTube takes a 45% cut. So out of that $30, YouTube pays a few cents for bandwidth, and takes $13.50 thanks to its dominant market position. I'd much rather watch with AdBlock and donate via Gumroad or Patreon.
Steam takes a 30% cut or something when I buy video games. I’m not about to start pirating games and mailing cheques to the developer.
I don’t assume that my YT Premium is paying for lavish meals for my favourite channels. But I watch lots of different channels, not all of which I’m going to sponsor on Patreon. They at least get something.
It's fantastic value for that price, but I would definitely think twice at 30 CAD/month.
1. I don’t trust Google at all and am very reluctant about giving them any personal information.
2. Even if I pay, I still get all the promotional crap that the content creators put in their videos.
Part of that could be the bundled music subscription, which has zero value for me when I use and prefer Spotify, but it just seems like a very expensive niche product here which makes me surprised they’re pushing it so hard. They have a straight ad-free offering in some markets that seems much closer to something I’d actually pay for.
Lose the music stuff and charge A$9.99 a month and you’d have me.
Edit: I realised I was looking at the Apple subscription price at $19.99 for an individual rather than the online sign-up one. $14.99 still seems too high when my entire Amazon subscription with a video service and free-delivery is still roughly $10/mo.
There is no way youtube can win this battle using "brute force". The only way they can win this is by offering a new better service, not deteriorating existing ones. What could that new service be? How about recommendations that don't suck? I used to watch a lot of youtube on my TV from the main page. These days I only use a list of my subscribed channels and a search feature.
Also, if youtube gets really aggressive people will go elsewhere.
1. they own the browser (Chrome is the dominant browser) and with their "Web Integrity API" proposal they can do whatever they want. Also v3 doesn't help adblockers.
2. they own youtube and all the content. I've seen many youtube creators speak against adblocking, because no ads = no income for them. Most people can't create content at consistently high level without getting paid for their time or their team time. So Google and content producers both are better off without ad-blockers.
The web in 5 years sadly will lose most of the freedoms we take for granted, because nothing is "free" if it requires human time and resources. May be with crypto some pockets would emerge but large scale monopolies like Youtube with strong network effects wouldn't bulge.
It seems like you're saying that people are mainly using adblockers because the recommendations aren't good enough, and if the recommendations were improved they'd respond by turning off the adblock? That doesn't sound realistic. People use ad blockers because they don't like to watch ads, and since the adblockers let them avoid ads with no effort or cost. The site offering "better service" doesn't change that equation.
> Also, if youtube gets really aggressive people will go elsewhere.
Oh, no! The people who are not willing to pay for the service and who are blocking ads are going elsewhere! How can the platform and the creators possibly survive without that $0 in revenue?
The reality is that Google depends too much on its ads business and can't afford to spin their business model.
I can see how what I said could be understood this way, but that's not what I meant. Yes people use adblockers to block ads, but if there was a better recommendation mechanism one could pay for and that paid service also blocked ads people like myself might pay for it.
>Oh, no! The people who are not willing to pay for the service and who are blocking ads are going elsewhere! How can the platform and the creators possibly survive without that $0 in revenue?
The value of a person's attention is not zero, even if that person blocks ads. First if people use your service for free, they aren't using the competition. You aren't making much money, but at the same time you're taking away potential revenue from the competition.
Imagine all these people that use ad block would get up and go somewhere else? More people that watch ads would follow in short order.
Then there are other things these people do. Patron payments, even just popularising certain creators has value to these creators, finally simple engagement like comments etc have value that they create data that can be used to improve the service and so on.
Fair enough, sorry for misunderstanding!
The problem I see with that idea is that whenever YouTube tries to differentiate Premium via features (e.g. background play, downloads, better video quality) people complain about that too. You can see an example of this as the top voted comments of this submission, about "[making] the original product so awful deliberately only so they can shove subscription down your throat".
> The value of a person's attention is not zero, even if that person blocks ads. First if people use your service for free, they aren't using the competition. You aren't making much money, but at the same time you're taking away potential revenue from the competition.
They're people who aren't willing to pay or watch ads: they'd generate no revenue for another service either. There's a limit to how much "data to improve services" one can use before running into diminishing returns.
Network effects are of course a possibility, but I don't know that viewers would follow other viewers to a new platform that directly. This is a two-sided marketplace so in principle you'd expect a feedback cycle: viewers go where the creators are, the creators go where the viewers are. Except here it's not the case that all viewers are equal. Some of them won't be generating any revenue for the creators. Why would the creators chase that audience?
I'd put the under/over at about 5 years from now.
I too mute my TV and pick up my phone when obnoxious ads start playing. Who wants to listen to this crap? Can you imagine TV companies pushing for technology that disables the mute, change channel and even on/off buttons while ads start playing? Magazines setting themselves on fire if you rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash?
If it seems like people are accepting of ads, it's really because they think it can't be helped. They think there's nothing they can do to prevent the unending flurry of corporate spam from grabbing their attention. If you show them a better world, I guarantee they'll like it.