I'm a little surprised Google doesn't bake all the ads directly into the stream at this point, making it extremely difficult to separate them.
Adding a bit technical context (for readers) to your comment on inserting ads at "random places": many codecs use the concept of an initial frame [1] which would place technical restrictions on where the ad could be inserted. If Youtube believes that ad timing is too important, they might not accept technical restrictions on the timing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_type...
Other than ads, which is the business model and keeps the content flowing... does YouTube not care about UX? I generally find the UX pretty good. I can always watch a video near-instantly, on nearly every device I own, search is astonishingly good even when my Apple TV mis-hears my searches, and it's one of the biggest video streaming sites in the world.
As a user I think the UX overall is pretty great. Sure there are things I'd tweak, but I can see reasons for them.
Randomly rewarding the latest 'feature' so you get a load of shorts of videos you've already seen, random votes for things, etc.
Zooming out there's typically an ecosystem benefit, because otherwise why would they do it. That ecosystem benefit isn't always about money, if no one watched videos there would be no business. In fact a business that is often much better than a business with no users that isn't, so user happiness and experience tends to be prioritised highly in products/companies like this.
A video with 1000 upvotes and 2000 downvotes tells me something.
A video with 1000 upvotes doesn't tell me anything.
I can still downvote, I just don't get told the downvote total.
If they decided the system was broken and decided to replace it, I could understand. But they haven't changed the system, they've just removed the utility it did have.
You think it's "pretty good" when a video is interrupted at some random point in time (usually while someone is mid-word) to play some annoying video at a much, much louder volume than the video? That is not what I consider a "good user experience" at all.
If you make the generic ads worse than personalized ads (show more, show them more frequently, or just get the most annoying ads) you'll actually get people opting into personalized ads as the lesser of 2 evils.
You still can block ads but you must wait if you see a black window or an ad stream.
I would honestly be perfectly happy with a black screen for 30 seconds as a compromise to ads. I only leave the twitch webpage because the visuals bother me almost just as much as hearing the stupid sales pitch or the goofy "lol we're so cheeky and random" jokes made non-stop by insurance company ads.
This is separate from YouTube itself tracking who watches the video, and for how long (and if they skip any), and if they watch any ads, and then giving a bit of money to the creator for the ad views.
Why do I need the app for anyway?
Most people don't do this.
See audienceWatchRatio under https://developers.google.com/youtube/analytics/metrics
Example: "A one-minute video is watched 100 times. Half of the viewers stop watching after 15 seconds and the rest watch the entire video. None of the viewers watch any parts of the video more than once. In this case, this metric's value would be 1 for time buckets in the first quarter of the video, and its value would be 0.50 for the remainder of the video."
So someone could ask for ratios before, after, and during the ad segment to see if it's worth sponsoring them again. On average they can tell how many people skip the segment, how many stop watching entirely, etc. You can also see this on the UI where it shows peaks above the timeline with other users clicking past sponsored content.
> Basically you want people creating videos for free?
Noone "wants" anything here. It's just more convenient.
Like, YouTube would only work in a browser environment which has been approved by Google? and which has promised not to be running in headless mode? And which promises to have validated that there is at least one authentic retina looking at the screen?
What is a reasonable end game situation to be working on countermeasures for, and what is tinfoil haberdashery?
All code being executed on the device, from the bootloader all the way to the browser or youtube app, must be approved by the manufacturer, with an opaque black box security chip inside the device verifying that this is true and providing a signed message as proof that has to be sent to Youtube servers before videos are served. This completely eliminates the issue of both adblockers and third-party frontends.
https://www.techradar.com/news/sony-patent-would-have-you-ye...