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Comment by ylhert | Hacker News Reader

It's wild to me how much Youtube TV costs and yet they still serve you tons of ads. Coming from youtube premium where occasionally I have to skip through a preroll ad, I forget how much you are bombarded with ads while watching traditional TV. The fact that you have to pay the princely sum of $73/month on top of that boggles my mind. I canceled when they raised the price from $35/month and I'll never go back at these prices...

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Just because lots of people seem to be getting confused, "pre-roll ad" isn't the right term for this. Pre-roll is one of those ads YouTube forces you to watch 5-30 seconds of before you can skip it, and when they play before the video starts. Mid-roll ads are the same thing, but interrupting the middle of the video. And Post-roll are ones that play after the video is over.

What you're referring to are usually called sponsored segments. They're ads, but they're just a part of the video file you're being served. They're not dynamically targeted or cycled out. So if a LTT video is sponsored by ASUS, every viewer will see the same sponsored bit about ASUS because as far as youtube knows, it's a genuine part of your video, not a slot for an ad bid.

They're still annoying, but it's not a pre-roll ad. You don't get those with Premium.

Thanks for clarifying. I was worried that the parent was actually seeing real pre-roll ads with the subscription that would eventually get rolled out to everyone.

Doesn’t matter how the pre-roll ad is served or who is serving it. The customer wants to pay for no ads, and that includes removing ads otherwise embedded into the video. The fact that ads people see this as out-of-scope demonstrates how little ads people want to make a product that users want. It’s all about burning the dumb money of advertisers and abusing the users along the way.

If you had just said ad, I would agree with you. But a pre-roll ad is a specific type of youtube that many people are familiar with but don't know the proper name of. That's my point. The OP comment does not get pre-roll ads with premium. But they still get sponsor segment ads.

Hopefully OP understands this, but I can confirm folks like my parents do not distinguish the difference. It's mind boggling

That's an implementation detail leak: for the end user it's just an advertisement. Call it as you want, but when I pay premium and you write "no ads" I want no ads. That's it.

I don't care that the content provider found a way to show ads. I have a contract with you - you have to figure it out.

Ah right, I forgot: they don't want to do content moderation, because then they become gatekeepers etc.

They just want our money. Twice.

Youtube doesn't get any money from sponsored segments. It's a direct deal between the channel owner and the sponsor.

The only way it gets YouTube additional money is because it lets those channels put out more frequent or higher budget videos, which usually leads to more views.

When I said "they" I meant: content providers, service providers and so on.

I frankly don't care at all, I will never buy Youtube TV. However, justifying this behavior is ludicrous, even if YouTube doesn't monetize on such content.

It's just unfair - you pay for no ads, and ...well you do get them because "the file..."

Yeah, but life has never been that simple

I am more of the opinion that things were actually simpler before, even with analog TV. You knew what to expect. Now you pay 70$ per month, but hey, the file (?) you are streaming (?) contains an advertisement. Who cares?

I just want to watch a show. Without ads, because I paid to have no ads.

But hey we're a young generation, so we understand that it's not Youtube's fault... (?). Sorry, but no way! You are the service provider - you choose what goes through your platform. When I pay, you can't treat me like "you're (still) the product, sorry". That's for me unacceptable.

So if you pay for premium you're blocked from watching movie trailers?

Movie trailers are a bit different than coca cola ads, come on...

Plus, offer the chance to choose: with the amount of metadata flying through our networks, they are even able to guess what I ate for lunch, ... can't they really offer a checkbox like "show/don't show movie trailers"?

They are Youtube, not random startup run by a guy working on it over the weekends...

Where it gets really confusing is podcast networks (like Spotify exclusives, but also others) offer the ability to cycle out the sponsored segment. So you may be listening to a Conan O'Briend podcast episode from 2016 and hear an ad break of Conan recommending you check out some tv show airing this Saturday, October 16 2023.

But YouTube doesn't let video makes swap out parts of a video without re-uploading the whole thing and losing your viewcount. From what I've heard they have let some very big channels swap out things without it being considered a new video. But that's for the sake of avoiding copyright or fixing a dangerous error. Not for sponsorships.

You can use SponsorBlock to skip those.

Will get more and more difficult. This morning Youtube kicked me out because I was using adblock origin. And update fixed it, but if they start putting DRM...

That and you can also see certain youtubers chopping off sponsored ads block into multiple parts and integrating it with their video

SponsorBlock helps with this also, even when it's incorporated into the video (via muting the audio).

FWIW https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y... is a crowdsourced way to skip past promos (by timestamp).

Or some creators have moved to Nebula, which seems to have less of that crap but IMO a worse UI than YouTube.

I really appreciate creators who add chapters to their YouTube videos, especially their sponsorship advertisements, since you can easily skip over them.

I enjoy this with the Youtube ReVanced app. It's an amazing feature on top of regular ad blocking. I can never go back to regular YouTube.

I wish there was AI + crowdsourced extension as such.

While I like Nebula on premise, it seems creators on it are getting 'lazier' and some of the people on the site are downright questionable ("TL;DR News" and "Therapist Reacts" being the biggest offenders for me)

Like, why am I paying Nebula for this garbage? https://i.imgur.com/itiLYbK.png

I think Little Joel is a treasure, personally

He still does long-form well-researched videos if you're into that, too

Yeah don't be dunking on little joel. He's

Is that really Nebula's fault? YouTube, TikTok, etc. are full of garbage too.

I don't really know their arrangement with creators (one would hope creators get a bigger cut there, otherwise why leave YouTube?), but my favorite creators* have the same videos on both, just a little earlier on Nebula usually.

*Just engineering channels though, which is probably why they're not as spammy/shock-reaction-y.

https://nebula.tv/practical-engineering

https://nebula.tv/realengineering

https://nebula.tv/the-efficient-engineer

are all excellent

Never used them.

The way they're marketing themselves I didn't think I would have to curate their content myself. How much do I need do I need to pay to not have to sift through brain-numbing clickbait diarrhea?

At that point you might as well just kill your time on YouTube. Plenty of good channels there too - if you can stand the stench of the heap of trash they're buried under.

Oh, I never thought of Nebula as a curation service, just a hosting service that the creators I like seem to prefer (who knows why, maybe they get paid more there or have some promotion with them?). But I eventually moved back to YouTube too, for unrelated reasons (auto captions etc.)

I don't think any video site these days can be easily "browsed" if you want to avoid the garbage :( It's all about picking and choosing specific channels/creators to follow and ignoring the crap... sadly.

I don’t pay Nebula for that “garbage” (although that creator has a very different, and possibly unique, style of videos).

What you are paying for is all the other stuff that isn’t garbage.

The “garbage” adds negligible costs to the Nebula experience.

Are you unfamiliar with Little Joel? Big Joel has actual deep analysis if you like, but Little Joel is just a silly side channel of his. You're paying for this, plus also multi-hour-long analysis of, say, media analysis contrasting with the role of Jewish people who were coerced to cooperate with the Nazis in concentration camps.

Nebula is meant to serve a variety of videos. I'd probably feel the same of "I have to watch ads for this crap?" for YouTube, y'know?

You may be paying Nebula, but like all UGC platforms, it can't show you what it doesn't have. Social media video is heavy on lazy "TLDR", and light on substance.

What is questionable about TLDR News?

> youtube premium where occasionally I have to skip through a preroll ad

I thought YouTube Premium was ad-free?

It's free of ads from YouTube. Plenty of videos have baked in ads from the content creators themselves.

If you dislike them, check out the SponsorBlock extension, which will skip in-video ads. While you're at it, also get DeArrow, which chooses a random frame as the thumbnail and allows community written titles that accurately describe the videos.

Too bad sponsorblock will not work on tv((

But at that point why not block all ads without paying? (That's what I do.)

I think you and the comment you replied to are talking about different things. The comment you replied to IS talking about skipping these inline ads without paying (SponsorBlock). If you aren't using it and are watching the same videos, you're also seeing these ads.

xdennis is asking why bother paying for premium if you still need to use sponsorblock. Why not just use sponsorblock + (uBlock Origin, or yt-dl, or etc) to remove both forms of ads for free.

Pretty much every streaming service with a "no ads" tier does this. I agree it's infuriating.

I bought an licensed VHS of Mission Impossible in '96, and had to FFW through trailers for other movies made by that studio.

It goes deeper too. Original programming (film / tv) seems to contain paid product placement with no disclosure.

that's why https://sponsor.ajay.app/ exists

I don’t actually mind those, because at least you can skip past them manually; if they stop allowing THAT, though, THEN…

Check out SponsorBlock.

Parent comment was comparing YouTube TV to YouTube Premium.

Two different products. YouTube Premium removes the YouTube-inserted ads.

YouTube TV is a different product. It tries to compete with cable and satellite TV (which also serve ads despite hefty monthly fees)

Yup, cable TV is ridiculous.

Streaming, however, is doing just fine catching up with costs and playing with "ad supported" pricing levels which is only expected to spread.

We're in the "eternal September" of streaming, it's only going to get worse from here.

Compare it with a cable subscription, not YouTube Premium.

I was a Google Music All Access member since day 1 or whatever, they grandfathered me into YouTube Premium ('Red' at the time) and I was okay with that. Then my card expired, they cancelled my Music All Access, and when I re-enabled it, I no longer had YouTube Premium, I had to all of a sudden go out of my way to pay an extra $9 a month for it. I went with Apple Music as soon as I went iPhone and have not bothered to pay Google anymore. All Music Access was amazing, forcing me to YouTube is a poor choice that had they not gone that route I would still be on All Music Access. Apple One is superior in many ways anyway. I rather not be with a company that re-brands existing services then axes them when there's zero need to do so.

My significant other watches sports, so the comparison to YT Premium doesn't count for us. It was either be subjected to ads and pay a lot of money or be subjected to ads and pay a medium-small amount of money.

But as someone who has never paid for cable TV before, I agree that it's jarring. Our trick is to only watch things we've marked to be recorded, which allows ad skipping. (On demand and live don't allow skipping. Starting a sportsball game an hour late gives plenty of buffer.)

Plus they always seem to be taking away channels too. Here in NY, they removed SNY. It’s like ok if you’re raising prices, make sure you aren’t taking things away!

install yourself an adblocker and see no ads :)

You won't have to go back, youtube premium will bring the enshitification to your door over the coming decade or so.

You still endured ads with YT Premium!? That's shocking if true.

He just means promos by creators, not YT ads.

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