YouTube's crackdown on ad blockers intensifies
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I've not looked into exactly how adblockers work, but I presume they just don't allow advert content through to be rendered by the browser - they block the html/css/js from loading in the page - and that's how places like Youtube and other sites can detect one is using an adblocker.
If I were going to write an adblocker, I'd make it such that it pretends to load and play/display the adverts, meanwhile allowing the video which the user intends to watch through. The adblocker basically says somehow that "yup! I'm the browser and your advert was definitely rendered. Honest, guv'nor!"
Something like that. (I fully recognize that I may be talking out of my ass if my assumptions above are incorrect.)
Until, of course, we get the modal of death: "For best and safest experience, must view on officially certified Google Chrome (tm) (r) (diaf)."
> Until, of course, we get the modal of death: "For best and safest experience, must view on officially certified Google Chrome (tm) (r) (diaf)."
Which will probably happen super fast (unless antitrust regulators get involved) since Firefox's market share is in the toilet and continuing to drop.
Firefox also can't push too hard, since (IIRC) pretty much all their funding comes from Google.
But I would also consider Waterfox: https://www.waterfox.net/
They're WebKit-based and for MacOS/iOS/iPadOS only, so they don't get max points for browser diversity, and I can't run it on my Linuxes. As far as I understand, they plan to target more operating systems, and to target the most popular add-ons for other browsers.
I'm not satisfied until it supports an OS-agnostic (non-sucky, no thank you 1Password) password sync and works on Linux.
I hope they'll grow into a worthy alternative to Firefox, because Firefox is going down.
One review of alternatives here scores Waterfox at the highest, but I think I prefer if a company is behind it:
If the fetched data doesn't match what the page says it should be, it won't work. Another pro-security feature that DNGAF about user agency.
The countermeasure would be to ask you to take a quiz on the ad contents before showing you the payload video. I'd like to think they would realize this is a non-starter, but the stupidity and venality of advertisers are pretty much unbounded. Plus, modern AI will very soon be able to pass such a quiz with flying colors.
In fact this is my favorite use case for [client-resident!] AI: "Surf the web for me, deal appropriately with all the faff, and distill the relevant bits you think I'll probably want to see."
It will happen.
Please Drink Verification Can
How would you pretend to show the adverts in way that's undetectable? Even if you had complete control of the browser through your ad blocking extension (you don't). Youtube could trivially get around this by not sending the actual video content down to the browser until after the expected length of an the ad.
For video content an alternative would be to replace ads with a clip from the next video on your playlist/suggestions as a short "coming up next" preview.
They could delay serving the post-ad part of the video by the length of the ad. Your ad blocker could stop the ad from actually playing so you don't actually see it but your viewing would still be disrupted.
My guess is that for most people it is that disruption that annoys them more than actually seeing ads, and so this would still be effective as an inducement to subscribe.
On broadcast TV the content creators usually know when the ad breaks will occur, and they work that into their scripts. They structure their stories so that the ad breaks occur between the acts in the script. Most people are used to that and have no trouble picking up a book or magazine (in the old days) or their phone or tablet (nowadays) to pass the time during the ad.
On YouTube the ads often come right in the middle of something interesting going on in the video, which forced an abrupt context switch. So even if you don't see the ad itself the damage is done.
If it was a bit cheaper I would may be consider it, but for my specific use case (just watch random videos and some channels) at this price is just not worth it and I will just stop using the platform.
Had the realization recently at a family reunion that, aside from Succession, I haven't watched a full season/series of a TV/streaming show in the last few years. I actually don't know what the shows of the moment are. I almost exclusively watch YouTube in the evenings, if I'm watching anything at all.
I've been sub'd to YouTube Premium since it was called YouTube Red. Anytime I have to watch it withs ads I'm horrified. I wish I could give yearly subs out as gifts.
It's on you for not seeking out better content.
There are plenty of ways to search the youtube index for the good stuff while avoiding most of the BS you mention.
I'm in this bucket. I think for YouTube my no-brainer price would be around 4.99 or so. Even if it just gave me like 20* hours ad free or something.
I do pay for Twitch Turbo (£11.99) however, I've almost always got a stream open. At least YouTube ads don't run over the top of content, haha.
* Number completely out of thin air, not thought about it at all. Insert fair number here.
Uhg. I hope paying for hours of """premium""" streaming service isn't where the industry goes.
Fair comment though, I do get what you mean but I'd be ok with it if it meant things were more affordable. Each to their own and that.
Maybe do a cloud-style pricing? x/hour, capped at £12.99/mo. Same thing if you're already paying for premium but allows for affordability.
It is that way by design
If Musk had simply cranked up the ads to increase revenue, it would have worked / probably wouldn't have hurt the platform like all his other changes. The problem at Twitter (from a short term profit perspective) is that his changes - or rather, what he wanted to do - were not all so simple.
From a business perspective, it's completely logical.
Youngest generation will be the perfect customers in the nearest future, it seems. That kind about which corporations dream about now; they won't complain about privacy or ads because they're being programmed right now to consume whatever they see. And that scares me tbh.
At the same time, the reality check is that ads continue to be the way to monetize the masses as no other model works at this scale of users.
So do expect it to get worse. By means of IP, the Web Integrity API, whether you've opted-in to this new "Ad topics" thing in Chrome...the future direction is to discriminate clients. You will see the ad or not see the service.
The only resistance is to just watch less or not at all.
I'd love to know how many people end up subscribing vs allowing ads vs reducing views drastically vs just never using YouTube again.
I assume this will bite me soon, and I think I'll be in the "reducing views drastically" because there's very little I watch on YouTube that I'd want to sit through any ads for.
It's just the market pressure to generate even more every quarter.
There are ways around this and ways to still generate profits.
It's not like nobody was watching ads. It's not ever ENOUGH people to watch ads because you have to deliver more for the shareholder horde.
You know you fail when you gimp your free service and allow users to ungimp it for cash, while someone else ungimps it better for free.
Big corps never understood this, with Valve being the only counterexample I can think of.
Blocked by: SponsorBlock
Next?: YouTube making it harder to skip around video
Blocked by?: Zoomers just alternating between videos, cutting in and out while the ads “play” silently, because they can never get enough dopamine
Even the concept of "changing the channel" is something to eventually lock down in this way; don't let the users change tabs or modify the window or display state at all until trusted ad content has verifiably finished.
The saving grace is that you'll probably be able to just get up and walk away until it's done, at least for some time.
There has to be a reason why they haven't done that already. Perhaps they haven't worked out a reliable way to track ad impressions in the continuous stream. Perhaps they got it working but it's too resource intensive at scale.
Given the magnitude of revenue at stake, the other shoe should have dropped by now.
Especially since they can/do also target any of your secondary accounts, and can also hit family members depending on various backend circumstances that users can't really know about.
Regardless of the fact that you can find some sort of replacement for any of those things individually, it would be a major stumbling block and disruption for most users to suddenly no longer have access to their email/history.
The average person does not have forwarding or mirroring of all that stuff set up. I posit that that disruption is enough of a deterrent to get users to stop using ad blocking on Google services once the consequences start being applied.
Though that reminds me, I don't quite know what happens to your chrome bookmarks and settings if Google obliterates your profile's account. I assume that merely syncing will stop working, but perhaps more might be disrupted.
My guess is they're going to quickly back down on that...
I tried the iphone for a year before going back to android and I just stopped using youtube there, you quickly realize how unnecessary you find it, because there is no way in hell any same person is going to endure a 30 second ad for the garbage content you find there now.
And that's silly, and I claim it would be even with perfectly good intentions. It's just wasting huge amounts of energy on something that is worse, and cannot ever be good (that is, the whole algorithms second guessing people stuff). Give me "dumb" search that returns things that contain the terms in the title or description, or that are linked in the descriptions of videos that contain them. Or even find an open way (i.e. not restricted to Google, and not "the way Google likes it", but decent and simple and clean) to show videos on web pages that contain them. Page rank is not perfect and can be gamed, but it's actually feasible to make that good -- it used to be stellar compared to what we have now, now imagine what we could do with all that was learned and invented in the meantime.
Crafting searches to make pinpoint landings on what you are looking for, if it exists, is a delightful art. Remember http://www.fravia.net/ ? It's like remembering having and being able to use a screwdriver, instead of there being this fairy that you can ask for help, which sometimes shows up instantly and fastens the screw, and sometimes shows up pretending to not know what a screw is while reaching in your pocket... which is at best as good as having and being able to use a screw driver, and potentially infinitely worse. So on average, it's infinitely worse. Logic :D
And when it comes to clicking "not interested", I know that in the long run my wishes aren't respected anyway, and I've gotten so cynical about this stuff that I basically just view it as a further signal to a bad actor (if not abuser) that yes, I saw this thing, didn't just scroll by it, noticed it enough to strongly dislike it, and am now offering a futile plea to please not show me that again. I'd rather close the tab altogether.
This rant wasn't directed at you or your suggestion, not at all! But I just had to get it out, I hope you understand. I'm so over the whole web as a worse version of TV, where the middlemen get the vast majority of profits plus information on how to better poison you, and you get the poison.
Teach people digital literacy instead of giving them "free" assistants that very well might one day become their captors or worse, to the degree they aren't already.
Am I hiding all videos from Mr Beast himself?
Am I hiding all videos with Mr Beast style thumbnails?
Am I hiding all videos with charity drive messages from popular influencers?
Am I hiding all video who take sponsor breaks at the 2-3 minute mark?
Am I hiding all videos who don't provide my typical type of content when compared to all my other subscriptions?
Am I hiding all videos which were liked by 13-21 year olds?
And multiplied in every possible dimension across every possible video category....
I'm not too surprised it took this long -- the % of viewers who are on a PC, not a phone, and technically savvy enough to install an ad blocker is relatively small, so it wasn't worth the effort.
But now, with the death of ZIRP and the demand that these tech companies which were experiencing infinite growth somehow continue to grow infinitely, they're very much in "squeeze blood from a stone" mode.
Its looks is very much like OG Youtube and it is unusually fast: no overdone JS. You can also sync it up to Clipious on the phone and get a clean, bloat free Youtube experience without ads or slow page loads.
I think their argument that they do this to "ensure that its content creators are compensated for their work" is not genuine given their practice to de-monetize the same content creators with no explanation or, apparently, for their political views. For example, California Insider youtube channel was demonitized and I suspect that this is because Google was unhappy with the narrative.
It's a non-starter.
They might finally cure my addictions
My rule: it's not worth using YT, TikTok, or any other corporate behemoth with your attention as their product. So if a form of media runs ads, I'm out.
There's nothing particularly defensible about YT's readily commodifiable service and indefensible business model except the power law distribution of a monopoly. YT's closest competitor/alternative was once Vimeo. The problem was their founders made a critical error of taking venture funding and, later, going public, leading to poor decisions driven by the board that gradually wrecked it.
YT is allowed by the market to be shitty because there is no viable competitor in their space. The biggest touted contenders aren't much of a threat: TikTok started as a copy of Vine, so it's unsuitable for substantive, long-form content. Instagram is TikTok plus pictures. Twitch is pigeonholed for specific uses: gamers and ear-licking models. Reddit Live isn't for persistent, on-demand content hosting. There isn't much else except tiny startups, some of which may well be better for both viewers and creators.
To be a YT competitor I'd want to use: Charge content creators and viewers a modest subscription fee so they don't have to have ads AND have engagement and monetization tools for the creators. Don't spam me with ads for viral cat videos.
I didn't always block ads on YouTube, but they pushed me to it. And apparently enough people for them to do this. There still isn't enough on there to make it worth subscribing for me. ~$170/year is not a small amount of money.
What I did was move to my own domain. Its hosted with Apple, but that is not important, I can always move it.
I changed most places to use my domain, for the rest I set up a forward from Gmail to my own domain. Then I did a Google Checkout so I have all my mail locally.
I moved from Google search to Duck Duck go and now partially to Kagi and AI.
Gmail is very sticky, but the hardest Google services to leave was a) Android and b) Youtube. Android meant buying an iPhone and I still haven't found anything that competes with Youtube.
Truly anonymous unpersonalized YouTube under the old algorithm from the early 2000s.
No tracking, no censorship, no manipulation, no boosted videos…
Truly anonymous payment options.
Google-free viewing.
But you make most of your money by tracking all that, and keeping me from finding the videos I actually want to watch, so who am I kidding.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/media/23adco.htm...
But here - you can pay. And if you think it's too much and doesn't reflect value it brings - well that's your choice, but its not a charity and they can (and should IMO) fight with ad blocking.
Disclaimer - I pay for YT family plan that I share with my wife and it's most useful subscription we have - YT is our main source of media consumption.
Good things don’t have to be cheap. Even more - very often they aren’t.
well now you have lol
You say you are paying for youtube because it's your main source of media consumption. While I think youtube is merely (ab)using its position as a main source of media consumption to generate wealth.
For one Youtube is currently the default way to include video somewhere, even in situations where it would be inappropriate to redirect people to a paid service. Also since youtube is the main way people find content it is hard for free and open alternatives (e.g. peertube) to become popular enough to replace it.
I'm not going to help them entrench any further though.
No amount of reporting by me and even reporting on by mainstream media seems to make a difference.