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.
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.
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....
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.