YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin
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andadinosaur.com
There was a point in the past where video platforms were competing, and by no means was it clear that YouTube would end up dominating this area to the point of being close to a monopoly.
When YouTube won that race, they won it with a given set of parameters, including the kind and amount of ads they show. Society at large has, at that point in the past, basically decided that YouTube's offering is the best, and given this market domineering position.
YouTube is increasingly moving away from the parameters of this implicit agreement, in minor ways at first, more now. Had they "competed" in the video platform race with current policies, maybe everyone'd be using Vimeo now.
And here's the crux. YouTube can only do this because their old policies allowed them to establish this domineering position, and by doing so are breaking the implicit "deal" that actually allowed them to get into this position.
To me, there's currently no alternative to going onto YouTube. And no, I won't pay for YouTube Premium — because that wasn't part of the deal either. The platform won the race as a free platform. So, until Google can figure out how to serve a reasonable amount of safe ads — adblocker it is.
I do wonder if it could be argued (maybe even in the current monopoly case against google) whether youtube engaged in predatory or below-cost pricing in order to drive out all of its competitors, establish a monopoly, and now use that monopoly in order to "raise prices" i.e. increase the amount of ads on its service in order to maximize its profit margins.
Although this does seem to be the business plan of basically every startup out there. Get VC funding, run at a loss and burn through money but gain a monopoly market share, and once you've done that you can raise your prices and have a profit margin that far exceeds what should be normal.
But this seems to be the play book for all VC funded web apps. Facebook and MySpace did the same. In fact, you can argue that moving towards profitability too soon and too fast is what killed MySpace. But that argument only works if you are willing to see the growth phase as something other than predatory pricing.
I think your comment is a sobering input to the whole startup discussion.
"Venture capital itself is not a hack. The hack is when unprofitable companies use VC funding to ignore the dynamics of the market economy. We don’t want some central planner to decide which businesses should remain operational and which should close down. But this is exactly what happens when venture capital firms become involved. The injection of VC money means that companies don’t need to compete with each other in the traditional manner, or worry about the normal laws of supply and demand. They can do what would normally be crazy things—give away their products, pay extravagant salaries, sustain enormous financial losses, provide a service that actually harms people—because of that external funding source. It’s basically central planning by elite investors, something that would be called communism if the government did it."
It _should_ be illegal, but since it's the current status quo, it won't change anytime soon.
Slightly off topic, but the business plan of most startups seems to be "get VC funding, and exit". What you wrote may be the business plan of VCs.
I don't understand the valuation of many startups these days (even in the hypothetical case where they capture 100% of their potential market one day).
The crypto dynamics have shifted the expectations so far to cheap, quick moment they most VCs, especially the a16z kind are more about “Can I juice this business and it’s metrics enough to sell it to someone to hold the bag”.
Ironically I think the large numbers involved are basically part of that PR game - they act as proof that the business is worth it and attract attention and bagholder interest.
The crypto economy worked like that too - the NFT wash trading, the signal metrics used to sell the idea that there is value where there is none.
Probably something something wework too.
Google, YouTube's owner, isn't a VC. YouTube was its best when it was burning VCs' cash.
I do feel bad for the creators, but I would rather donate to their Patreons than buy YT premium.
I ended up subscribing to both Nebula and Dropout.tv, especially after noticing that a good portion of my favourite YT channels are in fact on Nebula. Sadly, this is primarly larger ones, and I do feel bad about smaller creators being kinda stuck on YT… especially when it's the odd one-time well-made video that really doesn't warrant e.g. Patreon.
But yeah, the real moral quandry is with the creators. They're more or less under the same monopoly pressure; in most cases you just can't ignore the YT audience :(
Where do creators go if not YouTube!? Ideally they could self host videos which could be expensive AND not bring any revenue, neither do they are they discoverable - this is where the internet is broken these days.
And maybe this is where micro transactions would have a proper use case, i.e. if you had a browser extension where you add $5 and then you can dish out 1ct or 10ct for some content...
Youtube is great because of the wide availability of videos, recommendations and (maybe not great because of this) the comments.
I know the comments are not that well liked, but it means the videos are not in a vacuum. They are in a social context. And comments are pretty good, maybe because negative ones are heavily suppressed, that's at least what it looks like.
Nebula feels empty because of those missing parts. It doesn't draw you in to new channels. I don't like half the recommendations youtube gives, but some of them I do.
If you want "free-market" you should deal with its basic premise that consumer pays as little as they can and seller tries to milk the consumer as much as they can. That's quite literally how it's supposed to work.
I'm very much in favor of bringing some morality to the economic system, but it shouldn't be one sided.
I still have uBlock turned off on a few sites, though that list is becoming vanishingly smaller. 4Chan, funnily enough, has the best ads, where it's just old school banner ads on the top of the page and the very bottom of the page. No click hijacking, no embedded ads made to mimic organic content, no fucking audio and flashing lights ads. The only type of targeting those ads have is that the general audience that goes on 4Chan is into anime and Japan, both of which I don't care about. If the internet still had these kind of ads, I think adblockers would be much less of a "problem", but since 99% of them are invasive garbage, whoever is pushing them and whoever argues it's "immoral" to block them can go fuck themselves.
ads aren't inherently bad, irregardless of much data do they track. What really bad is how this ads is targeted and how much ads is delivered. I would LOVE to see relevant to my interested and situation ads. I like fpv drones and often see interested ads on instagram and led to a purchase. The problem after that I can't just edit the vector of my interests for ads targeting and keep bombarded with something not relevant to my situation anymore, and boy so much of it I see.
I really don't know why big ads network didn't move forward with user controlled ads mechanics - because we all humans buy something anyway, it's okay of being aware of the options on the market. It's not okay to mentally torture users with irrelevant, annoying and overwhelming amount of ads.
There's also the ridiculous fact it is literally impossible to pay to remove the ads without also getting the horrible Youtube Music service.
Sounds anticompetitive as hell, and a government that actually cares about functioning markets should eviscerate them for it.
Internet speeds are maturing, and maybe it is time to try again a self-hosted or distributed model. The hard part is to put ads in it, because ad-supported is traditionally the best medium for videos. However most video creators are already having sponsorship deals
I came across whole episodes of British TV on there this very week that were uploaded 12 years ago. I know they have a strict "no humans involved, ever" system going, but the programme name was in the title and the video was one of those ones inset into a fake background and the audio was original. I find it amazing that no one (or rather nothing) with a ban button has noticed that for so long.
If they actually cared even a microgram and they couldn't even get an intern to do a days' work searching for TV show titles, there'd be enough failed Reddit moderators out there who they could recruit who would gleefully do the job for free. Not that I would want them to - it's bad enough when only bring reactive to often-spurious complaints - but it's such a completely perfect lack of interest that it must be very deliberate.
General principle of the internet seems to be people can host what they like till someone who has legal ownership of it tells them to take it down at that point they're expected to take it down and keep it off their service unless added by the owner.
That's what google is sticking to because frankly any other method would be a nightmare.
The old tv episodes might have muddy/unclear ownership and so things continue to coast along until someone exercises their right of ownership.
Distributed, maybe.
Self-hosted? Not a chance. Sure, if you just want to share a video with some friends and family, that's fine. But if I reached the popularity of even a moderately successful YouTube channel (Say, 100K subscribers?), even the lucky few with gigabit internet at home could not handle the load.
What about a distributed model, but with a distributed ad network which pays people and/or the project?
Would it be enough to cover internet service provider costs of average folks?
My biggest issue with running a service like this would be the possibility that I'm all of a sudden serving CP from my house because the distributed model doesn't have a good moderation scheme.
Moderation tends to be the bottleneck with distributed services right now. The infrastructure is there.
Creators have the final decision on the ads shown. I have a YouTube channel, and I always disable monetization on all my videos, so no ads are ever shown on my channel.
If you see an ad, it's because the creator decided to include one. YouTube is simply the platform that enables this choice.
They will be improving ads on the platform by removing the creator's control over them.
> optimizing creator revenue and taking the guesswork out of which ad formats to use by removing individual ad controls for pre-roll, post-roll, skippable, and non-skippable ads on newly uploaded videos.
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/233723152/simplify...
Anyway, at present it's possible to disable them if you have reached the monetization requirements on the channel, like 1000 subscribers and some amount of hours viewed.
But after the channel satisfy such requirements, like 1000 subscribers, the creator gets control of the monetization and they can choose.
For any major channel you watch, it's the creator decision that you see ads or not.
One of the videos was hit with an automated DMCA takedown, one was hit with a "mature content" takedown, and the remaining 3 have ads on them now.
This applies to videos with no copyrighted content. If you use any excerpts or music that someone else claims, anything might happen to your video regarding ads.
We (through a convoluted, but in the end democratic process that is supposed to represent the will of the people) decided that piracy is illegal not because there is some divine right of authors to get compensated, but because we believe that by making piracy too common we would kill the incentive for the future authors to create.
Similary, we will need to decide on the laws around ad blocking. If we decide to keep it accessable, then the downside is that both the infrastructure work done by Google (or its competitors) and the creative work done by authors will become less profitable and thus the quality will decline. If we don't envision this happening, we should definetly get ad blockers without a second thought.
No, it does not. There is no discussion to be had.
Unless they qualify their definition with something like “you may still see in-video sponsored content”, ad-free should 100% ad-free, and it is irritating that that (perhaps) through some nuanced definition of “ads” that they allow this. IMO this needs to be investigated by the FCC.
If you look at the advertising literature for Premium, it simply says “Enjoy ad-free videos…” with no asterisk or fine print that has any exclusions. Perhaps there is something deeply buried in one of the “terms and conditions” documents that allows for this, but I haven’t taken the time to look. My point is, YT and the content creators benefit from these ads on a supposed no-ad plan. Imagine if other streaming services like Netflix started doing this.
This happens because Youtube doesn't pay content makers a flat rate, unless they're a whale.
Also: part of the problem is the quality of the ads. Could you actually get "better quality" ads for a competitor video platform? Do such ads even exist in sufficient number at this point? (I vaguely remember a significant portion of larger companies reducing their internet ad budgets because they simply weren't seeing good returns…)
It's the largest video platform in China[0]. However, it keeps losing money since forever, including in last year, and is expected to keep losing more in 2023.
[0]: Youtube is blocked in China and you need a VPN to access it there.
If Youtube wants to control their content and users - they should create their own protocols or at least closed network using web protocols, write their own client software and distribute it.
The Roman Empire is moving away from the parameters of their implicit win, including the kind and amount of victories they score. Had they "competed" in world domination with the current policies, maybe everybody would speak Persian by now.
No, I won't be subject to the Byzantine Empire - because that was not part of the deal either. The empire was build on Rome. So until the Byzantines can figure out how to win _reasonable_ amount of _military victories_ - I won't pay taxes.
Do you realize how shallow your argument sounds ? :)) Of course Youtube is turning the screws now that they have the lock-in. Ethics have nothing to do with it. And they will turn the screws until you either pay up or stop going there all together.
Don't forget the flipside, the "morality" of interfering with a user's freedom to selectively ignore certain content.
Give a dollar(unprofitable and unsustainable service) for a pennies by burning the money of the investors to capture a market then switch to high profit margin business practices and milk out the captured market thereafter.
Sure, it can be framed as spend money when developing a product then make profit of it when released but the winners are determined by keeping alive the developed product longer than everyone else ane when everyone else is gone, then monetise.
People who spent billions of dollars to run YouTube at loss for years were not philanthropists, they rightfully expect to make that money back and make much more on top of it.
Vimeo, Rumble, DailyMotion, Facebook Video and self-hosting all still exist you know. There are plenty of alternatives.
Because I say so with my AdBlock. This is the reason why small guy should have power.
> It’s one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It’s quite another to deal with a wave of angry users.
> And then one of the moderators actually deleted their Reddit account. “The ID in the post wasn’t updated because my mother was hospitalized,” they said. It’s sad to see them leave because of some drive-by comments — new users who sign up for Reddit, leave their comments,
I have seen this becoming more and more common on open source projects and totally free services, where people act as if they are entitled to something as if it is their god given right. The people doing public services like uBlock origin can only take so much from the mob.
This disgusting review was sitting at the top of the review page for Search by Image on the Chrome Web Store: https://i.imgur.com/P1QU176.png
This person has edited their review a couple of times in the past year which pushed it to the top, and also emailed me with a similar demeaning message. I've reported it to Google staff, and they thought that the review did not break their content policy, so they did not remove it.
So yeah, it hurts when you're offering so much of your free time for so little benefits, or none at all, and a couple of entitled jerks still manage to poison the well for everyone.
With each abusive message the thought of no longer offering up your time and the results of your work for free grows stronger and stronger. It's no surprise that people either quit, sell their open source projects, or stop offering it for free.
I like to take a moment to publicly thank them whenever the opportunity to do so arises. Thank you so much!
Do you count YouTube as a "free service" (with ads) in this case?
I wonder if there is an overlap with people that expect free stuff and people that use uBO on YouTube. YT does offer most users YT premium, which gives users an ad free experience.
Disclosure: I worked at YT in the past, but still pay for premium because I don't want the ads.
Most of them I even delete outright, but I still have requests that were sent to me in 00s that I'm keeping just in case one day "I'm in the mood".
And yes, people request (demand!) crazy things, and have done so for decades. There are even "If you don't do it, then $threat" guys. And my area of software is generally industrial/professional....
Why are these big tech monopolists so entitled?
So it can scarcely be surprising that the sorts of people blocking youtube abs because they want the content for free, are the same sorts of people that feel entitled to uBlock Origin's services for free.
If you want youtube's content without ads, then pay for it. If you despise ads, but refuse to pay, then don't watch youtube.
Google made a mistake in offering free drive, gmail, Google docs, etc etc. Imagine telling someone in the 90s all the shit we get for free with a couple ads/our data being sold.
People have free will, they should use it, and stop using these services if they don't like ads or want their data sold.
Pay for email instead of your Gmail. Everyone refuses to do this, they'd rather shake hands with a devil and then cry when their soul is taken.
Only donators should be allowed to review the service and complain then.
Why in the world are there only two? That's your problem right there.
How many competent devs are right here in the comment section? Why is it so difficult to get their help?
"Entitled" came up a lot, but I would have to disagree. Au contraire, YouTube is the one that feels "Entitled" to show me advertisements, even when that feature potentially exposes me to the risk of Malware.
I adblock everything but I am sympathetic to the idea that video hosting costs money. But I watch, on average, less than 1 hour of Youtube videos a month, so paying for Youtube makes no sense. Plus I have issues with privacy (part of the reason I've never created a Youtube account). The videos I do watch on Youtube are short ones for a specific need: e.g., a company showing me how to install their product in an easy way (I'd prefer a write up, but sometimes those are so bad you need to rely on a video), or a simple how-to on changing the battery in X model of car. So when I do need to go to Youtube for something, often its because the video is nowhere else. People don't even think of hosting it elsewhere. I don't watch any long form stuff there, don't listen to music there, etc., so paying for premium makes no sense.
I wish there was a free and open video platform that had a funding model like Wikipedia, where people could upload things that they had no intention of "monetizing".
What's your issue with having to watch ads if you watch less than 1 hour of video content a month?
> I wish there was a free and open video platform that had a funding model like Wikipedia, where people could upload things that they had no intention of "monetizing"
There's a lot of content on YouTube that people upload that they have no intention of monetizing.
> I wish there was a free and open video platform that had a funding model like Wikipedia
Why don't you or someone else try starting one?
Google ad for a scam site made to look like a legitimate Australian Bank: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-21/scammers-using-text-m...
Youtube's home page seems to always have, at the top, some kind of get-rich-quick video advertisement when I (rarely these days) visit it. Far from trying to improve on this, it feels as if Google/YT are actively trying to normalise scam advertising. I just cannot support that, at all, ever.
If Google has no mechanism to prevent their platform from being used by scammers, I feel it's my responsibility that their platform doesn't reach my screen, lest I, or my family members fall for a scam - which can be psychologically damaging beyond the potential financial damage.
I've mentioned before that this isn't a problem Google are inspired to solve, since their current advertising scheme successfully scales to the size of the Web. However, appropriately policing advertising to ensure scams don't get through would seriously affect the ability to scale. And it's the scaling that makes the billions.
Regulate Internet advertising the same way television advertising is regulated.
Colour me unsympathetic at my most forgiving.
you don't get free access to my time, there will never be a point where I'm willing to spend time watching an advertisement or sifting through advertisements looking for real content.
I haven't watched television regularly since the mid-90's specifically due to the commercials, I'll be damned if I'm going to do it online.
And I don't give a shit if you think I'm entitled or not, it's my time not yours.
They show you advertisements in exchange for the free content they provide.
You can just as easily not visit the website if you don't feel like the service they provide is worth the risk of being shown the ads they serve.
YouTube is where people go to post and upload videos. YouTube has a dominant place in the market and in people's minds.
Does it cost money to run? Yes. Does Google deserve to have those costs covered? Yes. Should Google be entitled to abuse their dominant position? Certainly not.
I do feel bad for who high-quality creators are not able to make ends meet, but I have zero sympathy for a business the size of Google.
It's one thing if Google were demanding I watch their ads to get the free video in exchange, but it is not an honest broker, because it doesn't vet the people it allows to advertise with it thoroughly enough to prevent scams and everything else from slipping through.
And frankly i'm taking a moral stand as well by blocking their ads, I refuse to allow Google to profit off of scammers in my or my families name.
ackphtttt with those typos. btw. fixed.
When I shout on a public street "sing me the Francoise Hardy version of I'll Be Seeing You," no one has to reply. If they do reply, but they decide to sing a 2 minute ad for a pyramid scheme first, I am free to cover my ears till the song comes on.
Google's servers have a public internet IP. I can "shout" a request to them. The data they send back to me, is mine to do with as I please. I am free on My computer, from the memory buffer on a RAM stick I own, to ignore some of the bytes, in My RAM change some of the bytes, or save some of the bytes to a file on my HDD. They are free to ignore any request I shout at them, but they have zero say in what I do on equipment they do not own.
I keep adblock on for most sites because ads are so intrusive and often malware vectors. If advertisers want my eyes they need to not be obnoxious.
I started blocking YouTube ads in particular because it kept serving me ads that were brazenly homophobic ("how gross and smelly is gay sex? Find out!")
I feel no moral problem with this, if you do then your priorities are bad, IMO.
Edit: as a counter example, ubo doesn't seem to work on Twitch but I have never attempted to find a different solution as it has never run ads worse than the usual "lying about how good a product is" you always get with marketing. Further, I don't see them very often because the channels I watch the most I buy subscriptions.
Particularly appauling in my view is the propaganda: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/clive-palmer-spends-...
We saw similar things with The Voice referendum recently.
When someone has paid to manipulate society en masse, and there are no more targeted controls to stop the content being forced on you available, why is anyone surprised people choose to filter that?
P.S. I use Clive Palmer's advertising as a useful data point for what not to support, so it's not a total waste.
https://twitter.com/baroquespiral/status/1716488758030118931
They run at different volumes than streamers. They run over streamer's content. They run pre-roll ads so you can't "flip channels". If I accidentally reload the page or the Twitch video player crashes, pre-roll ad. The ads aren't related to the steamers and streamers don't get to tell Twitch to not play a certain ad during their stream. I can pay $10 a month for Twitch Turbo but that just promotes ad revenue over subbing.
I bought 4 six month subscriptions to some of my favorite streamers in September for about $80. My internet costs $69.99 so that's kind of a bargain.
If we were to work off of morals, commerce and morals don't go hand in hand.
So going back to topic, is it moral to block the ad and stop the revenue to a content creator? The content creator should not be getting revenue from alcohol companies or companies that profit off of intoxication. But everything else? No restrictions.
I wrote a "tutorial" of sorts: https://lemmy.world/post/5452725
YouTube I'm not sure but there are blatant crypto scams so you could lose your money
Sidebar, and I assume the ad wasn’t that way, but that does actually sound like a sarcastic pro-homosexual-sex ad ;)
I was at a friend's house yesterday and they showed me a video on YouTube. I couldn't believe how many ads there were. It was unwatchable. Not sure how people don't pay for premium or block ads. What a miserable experience.
Would love to see more newbie guides (perhaps videos hehe) on how to set this up.
> couldn't believe how many ads there were. It was unwatchable.
I'd go further, a single ad makes it unwatchable for me. That includes on work computers where I'm not (and can't) logged into my google account to access paid youtube without ads.
And then never login. If you have uBlock Origin you won't see ads
I don't watch YouTube enough that Premium is anywhere close to worth the money. So I happily block ads and will drop YouTube in a second if they block me for using an ad blocker.
They'd be better off limiting the quality of streams to ad blockers. By blocking those users YouTubers lose paid placement online advertising.
I had to disable public GitHub issues on the app repo [1] because people seemed to fuel each other with spiteful comments and “why can’t you just!!” sentences.
The contact form still attracts many such “entitled” people and it hurts to wake up to such messages, but at least I can choose to ignore those if I can’t bring anything to the discussion. There’s no peer pressure.
These people are expecting too much from a handful of developers who are sharing a lot of free work and time that could have been spent better than hunting new IDs in URLs and updating regular expressions.
Paraphrasing most if not all of the open source licences, the software is provided with no guarantee, not even with a promise that it will be fit for any purpose. Most users don't even think of the possibility that, given how the source code is offered, private contractors can be hired to make whichever modifications are deemed useful by anyone. I like to remind that to people who get too insistent.
That's basically a less lazy reply form of "just fork it", but it tends to draw the line pretty well. Just quote the license, folks. Otherwise, people usually don't bother to read it.
So really, thank you!
Ads vs Ad Blockers seem to be in that space, but on the cost of customer good will. Can YouTube squeeze more money from ads by doing this? Sure. Is it worth the customer anger? Maybe?
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
Thanks, I just skimmed this post. It seems to me that "optimal" is substituting for "cost effective". The optimal amount of fraud is always zero, it's just not cost effective given the existence of people willing to go to lengths to commit fraud.
> Can YouTube squeeze more money from ads by doing this?
The third option is that this would incentivize a portion of the viewership to purchase Youtube Premium. Netflix seems to be benefiting with the same strategy.
Or that fraud is an evolutionarily stable strategy within the environment.
Reddit is not and should not be considered a tech support site.
Github issues is probably the best place, but when its abused, there's just no more appropriate place to go.
Do you have better suggestions if not Reddit?
I understand ads are annoying - I block as many as I can! - but I’ve never seen someone put together a coherent defense of the practice.
I don't have a right to ad-free youtube, but I do have every right to try and control what things get sent to and viewed on my computer. If I (and people like me) are abundant enough and succesful enough, then youtube and other services will be forced to abandon an ad-supported model. I'm personally ok with that.
But as long as they are attempting to pursue ad revenue, I'm going to try and avoid those ads, for a host of reasons.
This is effectively a monopoly. It probably doesn't fit any legal definition of a monopoly but it has all the hallmarks of an abusive relationship between a service and a customer base. And therefore you shouldn't feel any guilt of depriving Google of their ad-revenue or their mining of your personal data.
Google's not some poor little startup that bit off more than it could chew and accidentally ended up serving videos to the entire world, they have strategically maneuvered themselves into this position for the money and influence they stand to gain by putting themselves in a position where they have information and control over how information is exchanged between people online.
Best case scenario, frustrated ex-adblock-users will ignore my ads by muting them or looking away, so I'm paying the same price for less value, sometimes as low as zero. Worst case scenario, these users will actively despise my brand and avoid it altogether because they will associate it to their disdain for YouTube ads, so I'm paying for negative value.
Let me give it a try then.
As part of part of our cognitive functions, our attention is inalienable. It is ours. It's not theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. It's not currency to pay for services with. They do not get to insert brands and taglines into our minds without our consent. Advertising is mind rape and ad blocking is justified self-defense. I literally don't care how many billions they lose, I will block ads, I will help others block ads and I won't lose even one second of sleep over it. They are not entitled to our attention. Their choices are to charge money up front or to deal with it. If they send us ads, we'll delete them.
On Youtube, it's convenience and unwillingness to either pay or stop using the service. I don't have a problem being unethical to Google, but I will probably end up paying once my adblocker no longer works on Youtube.
Many people have literally grown up with Youtube, and a large section of them have used ad blockers for most of their lives. They see the adblockblock on Youtube as an attempt to take away a service that's supposed to be (ad) free, because to them, it always has been free. When you see Youtube as the free, unlimited repository of videos that the internet provides you with, forcing minute long ads on Youtube would feel like putting billboards in a national park.
The same is true for many other services. Everyone is mad that Netflix wants its customers to pay. The best stretch I've found is that Netflix tweeted "sharing is caring" once, but sharing accounts within a household has always been allowed.
In their attempts to undercut the competition by shedding money to provide services for free or for cheap, large corporations have cultivated a large audience that expects everything for free with no contribution from their end. Fifteen years of free, almost ad-less service, is a long time, and it changed the culture of the internet.
Regarding reciprocation, a lot of platforms offer a free tier and then offer additional features for paid subscribers. There's the principle of reciprocation at play: they give me something for free and that then makes me more likely to pay for additional features. But I'm only willing to pay for features, not to have an annoyance, like ads, removed. The conditions I'd have to agree to feel coerced ... like making an agreement with Darth Vader: "pray YouTube doesn't alter the deal further by now only blocking 50% of ads for a paid subscriber." What do I, as an end user, get out of this other than feeling hostile towards YouTube?
It's my computational device and my internet connection. I think there's a very complex argument to be made but this isn't the forum for it.
I never used youtube without adblock and won't ever use it. I hope they block adblocks so it become so annoying that better options start to appear again.
YouTube is not the creator/owner of the content. There are even channels that are actively against the advertising business model and that rely on off-platform subscriptions and donations. I.e. the creator still gets value even if no ads show on their videos.
YouTube still shows ads on those channels though. And the more eyeballs and YT subscriptions these channels get, the more YT makes money off them.
Now what percentage of viewers use ad blockers? 5%? 10%?... YT still makes money off the rest. It's not like those are a worrying cost center to YT. Why then go to those extremes to shave the last penny of the last person who really strongly does not want to see the ads (which potentially undermines the advertiser's purpose of making you like their product)?
They might lose significant Chrome market share.
Chrome is also a "free" product. I could reverse your logic and ask why they shouldn't inject their ads into the HTML you downloaded from somewhere, from first principles?
I can see a privacy argument being made by folks who don't want their viewing history associated with one account but also don't want ads. I'm not an expert, but I'm not sure what monetization strategy would appease those folks. Proof of work on crypto mining for each video you want to watch, with any found coins going to Google?
First of all, I absolutely will not have ads in my own home. Ads are bad enough in public, but they will not be in my home. This is completely non-negotiable.
So then, what are my choices? Well there are paid-for services like Netflix, for example. This is a straightforward choice for me: I either pay for it or I don't. Simple.
Then there's the web. The web is essentially a public place. It thrives because it's free at the point of access. Unlike netflix, YouTube put itself on the web. It would not have become anywhere near what it is if it were like Netflix and behind a paywall. They used their "free" and "public" image to make themselves the only place on the internet for videos.
What they want is to have their cake and eat it too: they want to be the dominant public platform, but they want guaranteed revenue like Netflix too.
What I want is just to pay for my bandwidth fairly. If I pay for YouTube (which I must because remember ads are non-negotiable) then I'm not going to pay for any other platform. So YouTube grows as a monopoly. This is not the web.
So you might say, well just stop using YouTube then, but why should I? I don't want to use YouTube. I'm not there because of anything they deliver, I don't care about 4K quality or whatever. I'm there because I want to learn how to put up a shelf. A lot of that videos are posted by people thinking they are doing a public service and sharing knowledge. If YouTube were behind a paywall then they'd post them somewhere else.
So they just need to make up their mind. You want money? Then don't be public. Watch other platforms grow overnight. Watch P2P video sharing grow (which is how it should be). You want to be public and be the only video platform? Then I'll be blocking the ads when I try to access video in the only practical way I can.
Also, if this is about the cost then why not get the uploaders to pay for it? After all, it's their content that's being stored. Again, because if they did that then YouTube would not be the Borg of video content that it is.
What does "going thermonuclear" look like in this context?
Why shouldnt users go thermonuclear if Google tracks you everywhere. Why was Google allowed to buy Double Click and become a giant in ad space?
Ads, paywalls, and all other forms of access-control are a way of obscuring the relationship between programming and programmed, inverting it to me about me wanting to access them instead of them wanting to access me. It’s like that Cartmanland episode of South Park where telling people they can’t come to the park makes everyone want to come to the park.
This is not unique to YouTube or other streaming services, just the newest and most effective in the long line of newspapers, Hollywood, radio, TV, etc, and why all of those previous forms of media are as well-aligned with the US Government as is “““Big Tech”””. Ever gone for a Cultural Victory in Civ?
If youtube blocks off access completely, people will stop considering it a reliable video host and another "default" website will take its place.
The easiest way to prevent an adblocker from blocking is to make ads and real content indistinguishable in frontend code and network requests. Tie ads and real content together in a way that if you block ads, the video also doesn’t load.
Or in the case of video ads, you could stream the ad as part of the video itself instead of a separate pre roll.
If I had a billion dollars of revenue on the line, I’m pretty sure I’d be able to make the YouTube player serve ads in a way that evades adblockers. The fact that they haven’t been able to do this makes me think I’m underestimating the difficulty of the problem.
Back when people watched an actual "tube", ads were indeed like that. Yet VCRs could easily detect and skip over them when recording. Remember that this was before AI too, so the technology exists to counter it already.
I suspect YouTube keeps the ads separate from the content because the sort of "splicing" that would be required is not trivial to do at the scale YouTube handles video. Also, perhaps they'd rather users who are adblocking not waste their bandwidth downloading ad videos which are going to be ignored anyway.
I will tell my computer to automatically skip video that was originally marked as unskippable.
If things really escalate, I will tell my computer to blank the screen and mute the audio when an ad is playing. I will do this with a keybinding, or maybe with an AI. This will be undetectable to the server.
Ads that the creators themselves put in their videos are exactly what you're suggesting. Yet there exist fairly-effective (if not perfect) ad blockers for those, too.
It would raise the server-side costs by an order of magnitude, because instead of just serving prerecorded content from storage, you would need to do non-trivial GPU-intensive stream processing.
There is no such thing as "unblockable" ads. Advent of AI makes it even harder, as AI get better and better at discerning Ads from actual content.
Ads providers just need to accept that being forced to watch ads will become a thing of the past soon.
The only issue would be discovery, but at this point most of what I watch is either from people I already follow or from their "network".
> I am happy to pay it's competition for service
You can just pay for YouTube.... How many times did you need customer service on YouTube that it's your main argument for not paying
It boggles my mind that engineers and managers that have kids and are working on the YouTube team think this is okay and this is what the future of the platform should look like.
It's the beginning of the end of an era, and I'm immensely sad to see what the internet has become and where it is heading.
It's also kind of interesting to see people acting like it's entitled for people to be mad that the service that drove most other early competitors out by showing unsustainably low ads is now bait and switching by showing increasingly more ads. There's a reason there are more smaller competitors starting to pop up as YouTube has burned through leftover goodwill.
I use YouTube to search for videos on subjects I want to watch, but it seems that Google want YouTube to be like a TV channel where you just turn it on and watch what they show you.
Don't forget that Google also owns Chrome, which by its dominance over the market can be used to effectuate DRM (such as widevine, or web integrity). They also own the Chrome Web Store, and they can ban any extensions that bypass Youtube ads (they already ban extensions with the ability to download Youtube videos, strangely they allow downloaders for any other site).
Google has a lot of money, and a lot of fingers in critically important pies, to make their wishes a reality should they deem to do so.
* don't waste infrastructure on freeloaders
* convince advertisers audience is seeing the ads they pay for
The content is free in the sense Google pays (close to) nothing and in the sense that creators can go to a different platform (as long as viewers come too).
Cost centers are data centers, bandwidth and labour maintaining the platform. Wrt. the latter, I would estimate the anti ad blocker stuff has significant costs, but isn't eating into the dev cycle in an existential way yet.
At some point they might be in trouble. Anyone have an idea when?
Brave Browser has been great so far...
It's gotten to the point where I've seen a couple creators give up on the Youtube monetization and go "I don't care, use Adblock, I make my money on sponsorships anyway". There's also been a rise in popularity of creator-owned platforms like Floatplane and Nebula.
People do not remember the ads when they go shopping. Instead our brain goes "I've seen this brand before". (Obviously a positive emotion works better)
This insidiousness.and manipulation is a good reason to block them as much as possible.
And maybe the recognition of manipulation might strengthen our mental resistance and increase consideration when shopping for things. Almost all people including myself don't bother!
That, or it's broken on purpose.
The proof of this may be that ads on YT are actually completely unrelated to the content I subscribe to and watch on YT. Even if Google has zero web tracking information on me, they know what are my interests through what I watch on their own platform.
Yet, I have never seen an ad for something related to the topics I follow.
This makes me think that Google is not interested in being too good at targetting ads, they wouldn't have much to sell otherwise.
It was exactly what you want, a much lower priced subscription which just removed ads, and didn't include any other premium features. I happily paid for it.
It was discontinued this month.
I still think there's some shady monetization going regarding their recomedation system as well, where the "algorithm" will recommend shit that has nothing to do with the content you watch
I absolutely love this extension and every time I come across a browser without it, I am horrified what the normal web is like today. Thanks a lot for providing everyone with a very good chance to experience a much better web.
Google gets paid by advertisers to go fishing. They bait the hooks. I don't think it is reasonable to complain that the fish eat the bait and not the hooks.
Maybe it's not good for their business model, but I don't understand why the fish has any duty to the fisherman. You want me to pay for this content? Great, let's settle on a price that doesn't involve your dominant market position first. What do you think you could charge everyone without losing your moat? That seems like a price I'm much more willing to pay.
* Who paid for the computer displaying the content?
* Who paid for the electricity powering that computer?
* Who paid for the internet service the computer is connected to?
* Who paid for the housing the computer is in?
The answer to all of those is ME. That seals it personally, I am not seeing ads in my own home when I'm paying for all that.
I'm not denying Google has costs to keep YT running. I'm just stating that from my perspective, I've already paid plenty - both upfront and monthly.
It would be different if it was a computer in a public library where I paid for nothing, and the ad revenue went to support that library. But that isn't the situation.
I have multiple problems with YouTube ads and online ads in general. It seems, to me, that there are severe flaws in online advertisement regulations or it's just extremely hard to enforce.
One can compare the regulations and what responsibilities advertisers have for ads in other media vs. online ads.
Here are some of the reasons why I have problems with YouTube ads:
1. Online ads are often scummy, marketing some pyramid scheme, plainly lying with fake videos/screenshots, breaking my country's laws (probably, hard to verify) or, in the case of some web ads, contain malware.
2. YouTube takes no responsibility for what is shown to me or on which videos (for example, showing political propaganda from "ultra right" as ads).
3. The amount of online ads per minute of video is often obscene, even if you can skip some of them.
4. Ads volume is through the roof - this is intentional.
5. (off-topic) Zero protection from YouTube against abuse of copyright strikes.
6. (off-topic) YouTube takes no responsibility for their recommendation algorithms and yet wants to make money on all videos, regardless of the topic. I think such behaviour is irresponsible for such a big corporation as Alphabet.
Edit: To summarize: please treat me with respect and I'll watch your ads.
However, I hate how they price YTP. Why is everyone so allergic to options/add-ons with subscriptions? Ideally, I just want to pay for two seat license to YTP+Music, so my wife and I can consolidate our Spotify duo plan with YTP. Failing that, I would love to pay for just YTP without Youtube music and keep Spotify. Under the current model I would have to either pay for two separate full price subscriptions for $28, or for less money, get the family plan and have 3 extra licenses I don't need. I could sublet them to friends or other family, but I don't want to mix our accounts together, and I shouldn't have to be a mini-landlord because Google won't do $14/m + $2.5/m per seat.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-...
If you watch 100 videos that’s $2 if there’s 1 ad per video. But these days it’s more like 2-3 ads per video (or dozens for long videos)
- Select "Watch ads later" a few times, until required, so time sensitive situations aren't bothered
- Choose "Watch 1 long ad, then no more today" and pay the piper all at once with a couple minutes of ads.
- Only relevant ads! When I worked at [video game news co], video game content got video game ads. The now defunct Grooveshark's ads were bands showcasing their music and upcoming shows.
And doesn't this Youtube ads issue seem like Google is getting desperate for ad revenue? Like they have a lever and they're pulling it to 100% now.
- People will simply clear their cookies when it becomes required, and this will be automated via extensions.
> Like they have a lever and they're pulling it to 100% now.
They are not pulling it to 100%, I think yt-dlp and similar stuff is still working. If they want to do it at some point, they will have to do it before adblocking usage is more than 50% of the population, at which point the uproar will be even higher and the change impossible to make.
People would walk away and do something else.
YouTube will win because they are financially incentivised to so so. UBO and other free blockers will fail because there is so much downside, and no upside.
Wars are always won by those with the most resources, whether it is money or people or both.
I say this not to gloat (I'm no fan of google) but rather because it can be useful to understand both the goals, and where the goals are leading to.
I know HN doesn't appreciate some truths being spoken, and I imagine I'll be down-voted, but YouTube is paid for by advertisers. Content creators are paid by adverts (and embedded sponsors.)
Yes we all want our entertainment for free. Yes we done want ads. Yes we dont want to pay for our content (or our software.) I get that, I really do.
But content creators need to eat. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth. Since I'm not chipping in, I appreciate advertisers doing so.
Personally, and this is not a recommendation, or a judgement, I don't use an ad blocker. I'd there are too many ads I stop visiting a site. For the rest, including YT, I understand what I get and I understand what I give. I get this is not the popular HN position. Each sees this his own way.
This has been the situation for the ad-blocking war since it started. If the pro-ads side is destined to win, they're sure taking their sweet time about it.
North Vietnam and the Taliban would probably beg to differ. Sometimes wars are won by the side that wants it the most.
Youtube's early success was in large part due to enabling mass music piracy. That war was won, principally, by youtube and pirates, when rightsholders agreed to youtune them distribute music for only meagre advertising revenue. Besides youtube, torrenting music continues basically unchecked today, despite the massive resources available to combat it, and the strong financial incentive to do so.
Along those lines, a general solution to youtube (or other) adblocking looks like: person 1 records their screen with a high def camera while a video plays, removes the ads, and creates a torrent of it. A simple browser extension detects a link to a youtube video, and redirects to a web torrent of the same video. An approach like this has no possible response from youtube, though hosting might be expensive, and availability might therefore be poor.
An instance of a similar solution to paywalling of content on various sites like patreon involves scraping the content and rehosting it elsewhere. Websites hosting such content are frequently very popular. One would imagine that patreon would be well resourced in this domain, but apparently they have been ineffectual.
I don't understand why Youtube is doing this, wouldn't it make their numbers look better if the people that won't click ads never have them delivered to them (5% of users clicked on ads vs 1% of users clicked on ads)
I guess it's because they want to sell "video inventory" to their advertisers. But why really? They own both the demand and the supply of advertising and they can 'convince' advertisers to use banners instead of videos. Why not be a good monopoly ?
My guess is because the non-modal video ads are the only things that a human can not ignore easily. Banner blindness is a thing and I'm pretty sure we are great at "blocking" everything around the video (that we actually want to look at).
So the only option is to withhold what we want (the content) until we consumed what we don't want (the ad).
This is not a domain I am knowledgeable about but : if Youtube detects (somehow) when an ad is blocked , why don't adblockers become "adfastworwarders" ?
I am using a bookmarklet to play Youtube videos faster & I noticed the videos are also played at the same speed. Couldn't "adfastworwarders" detect the start of an ad & like play it at x10 or x20? It would still create a tiny "cut" in the watching experience but perhaps a way to skip ads ?
Any reason this cannot be a path for adblockers?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fadblock-friendly-...
There's plenty of content o Youtube that's simply stolen from the original creators (home video fail compilations, newsreader bloopers). Yet YT can take a cut of the ad revenue from the tens of millions of view those videos get.
Everyone bitches about this sort of stuff and then refuses to boycott.
Look at the fucking shitshow Twitter has become under ol Musky...and have people left? Yeah, some for sure, but not very many at all.
The problem isn't just these companies, we can't act like the problem isn't us as well.
Pay for their services, or stop using them. If enough people did this simple thing, they'd have to react to it. Twitter would already be dead if everyone had _actually_ left.
To be fair uBlock origin users feel entitled to use YouTube, an extremely expensive operation to run, without giving anything in return.
I say this as someone who uses Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin. Websites are nigh unusable without ad block. But as far as ads go YouTube is far and away one of the least offensive imho.
If you don’t like ads you could choose to pay for YouTube Premium or simply not use the service. Demanding to use the service for free is rather entitled.
I think YouTube’s current system is a fair deal. You either watch the content and pay by watching ads, or you pay by purchasing YouTube premium. If you don’t want to pay, and you don’t want to watch ads: leave.
Fixed that for you.
Related article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538123
>As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation.
Why not just use fadblock?
https://github.com/0x48piraj/fadblock
It doesn't need to be updated in this cat and mouse game. it just skips the ads in milliseconds and you don't even notice them.
The part about people failing to follow instructions but then taking the time to complain about the instructions not working hits home for me. My limited experience being on the front lines of a much less popular project was marked by similar experiences: Many of the people who took the time to make accounts and participate in online forums seemingly had all the time in the world to complain about us, but couldn’t be bothered to read basic instructions. In many cases people would write pages of complaints about us and rant on social media about how awful we were before they’d even try contacting support.
Not everyone is awful like this. It’s actually only a small number of people. However, it doesn’t take many people to make forums and social media into completely toxic places for a subject. The first impression for anyone coming to Reddit or other places for support might be that it’s a dumpster fire, even though it could be as few as 20 in a vocal, toxic minority setting the tone.
The internet is a weird place. The demographic of users who complain that the volunteer support staff for their free ad blocker which lets them avoid watching ads on their free website being toxic is not at all surprising to me.
I suppose if I was rolling in money I'd just pay for premium - though I'm sure all that data would also be fed into their user-marketing-optimization database and sold on to whoever, which I also dislike.
Set up and use podsync. It uses your free API credits to monitor YouTube content and downloads them for you. Then just use any simple web server to share the static files and import the “channel” using your favorite Podcast player.
End result, you have YouTube ad-free in your podcast app, with notifications (per channel) for new episodes and likely some offline caching.
While this is my top favorite way to watch YT, I also support my channels directly through Patreon.
It's hard to know if in the long run they will start requiring subscriptions, develop better anti-blocker tech, or just give up and eat the loss. But somehow I wouldn't bet on #3.
I will always use an ad blocker otherwise, because the main thing I'm protecting against is tracking. Similarly, I don't mind the old school static ads some blogs and websites still use but I will go out of my way to block all dynamic ads for the same reason (tracking).
The uBO had similar issues with Facebook's anti-adblock. IMO the anti-adblock worked. The maintainers probably all muted the thread, and now 99% of the time, ads show up in the feed.
but that could be because i am using vinegar[0] to replace youtube's player with a <video> tag
If I am not mistaken one also needs to have Javascript enabled.
"And... if you're not logged in, you're safe."
Any reason why this hasn't been done so far?
I just wish people with free time could gather together and build a completely distributed Google (YouTube, Search etc.) * On top of Freenet 2023 * As performant as Google * Funding the project by ads. Yes, you need it.
Edit: Look if you’re going to downvote, at least provide a coherent rebuttal. K8sToGo already failed in that regard with this gem: “Well since you are not cheap you can just buy premium for all of us. Thanks in advance.”
If youtube ever manages to actually block adblockers I'll simply stop using youtube.
My computer, my home, my rules. Google has their policies, I have mine. It’s none of Google’s business whether I watched the ads or not.
I'm pretty sure there's a middle ground agreement. Such as serving 480/720p videos for free users, 1080p+ for ad watchers and 4k+ for subscribers. YouTube already makes a good amount of money only from monetizing watching habits and selling that data. We're giving away our tastes and deepest interests to a company at a daily basis for multiple decades. Why should we show them pity ? They don't have any for us.
Even after disabling my only adblocker, Youtube seems to partally load, then break for long periods. I don't even have any extra privacy plugins installed, but I do use Brave browser, that does have some privacy settings built in. If I try to open in private mode, the video loads fine.
Which state rights does YouTube violate?
Let Youtube "win" and further sink into garbage heap and become more irrelevant. The more ads Youtube shows, the less useful and relevant it becomes.
Sure, I mean, maybe Youtube always exists and always makes money, but its origins are practically lost at this point.
I want YouTube to be free! I want my YouTube ad free! I want my adblocker free! I want support and devs for my free adblocker to be on top of everything and to make sure I never have to watch an ad and never pay a dime on the Internet!
Hopefully this brings more creators over to Rumble, Bitchute, and/or Odysee though -- it's about time YouTube gets ditched en masse, and not just for the fringe content.
I'd even be willing to watch a blank screen for the length of the ads if I didn't have to see this trash.
⌘+[ and ⌘+]
I do wonder what the right term for those videos are, but it ain't "ads".