YouTube's ban leads to a record number of users uninstalling their ad-blockers
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Frankly, in the past years, nothing makes me more sick that the pure greed of tech companies doing things just because they can, and Google and its employees are at the top of that list of those who make me wretch.
The "contract" with YouTube being: don't pay us in $$$, give us your privacy — by attempting to use without revealing our privacy gold we're somewhat free loading, being greedy. It would be better to reject the "contract" and find different ways to access the content without relying on Google's "free" distribution infrastructure. There are alternatives (like https://peertube.tv/)
It's a sad content distribution and discoverability (especially video) has become so centralized.
It would be a site that is like YouTube but only allows 1080P video (to save on hosting). It would take a few minutes, maybe 5 to load a video, to save on bandwidth. It would have a limit on video length as well maybe,
It would also not have any analytics or recommendation algorithm, and it would have a modest paid tier (2$ a month for some additional features). It might have a Patreon-like feature from which I would take a modest percentage, just to pay for hosting.
Instead of a recommendation algorithm, it would have some basic categories and new videos would just appear in the categories that you subscribe to, but only sorted by date.
It would be a slower, simpler site for genuine video sharing, but with some limitations to keep things realistic. I am being 100% serious: I do think a slower, more modest site with less features would be quite nice, sort of like Medium but for video.
The "infrastructure" to the bigger audience is about
* being available ubiquitously and recognized as a brand
* discoverability, search, recommendations, filling you free time with cat videos, memes
* being a platform for wannabee influencers with real advertisers money in the form of pennies offered to creatives
Especially the latter two need to continuously monitor every little move happening in the "attention market".
The worst example possible.
But having that AND getting ad money is more valuable, of course, so they do it.
And who would actually pay on what people watch? Would that really be sustainable model?
in the aggregate, at the population level? very valuable. especially changes over time.
While I agree with the greedy part, what do you specifically suggest they do? If they do nothing then the people without an adblocker are effectively subsidizing those who don't see the ads, resulting in them seeing more ads.
If you don't want ads there's YouTube Premium ( even if it sucks that you need to get YouTube Music at the same time ). The worst part of that deal is that I'm pretty confident that Google is still collecting everything that can about me and uses it everywhere else.
(1) You can opt out of any analytics and tracking
(2) They would turn off ads for your OWN channel. So for example, if I have a channel and I pay for premium, then I should be able to TURN OFF ads so that OTHERS who view my channel don't see ads.
If Google had these features, I would buy premium in a heartbeat.
Just let us pay your ad revenue and don't be exploitative.
1. Meta earns about 40/year from EU citizens while their ad-free service will cost 120/year
2. The ad-free reddit experience costs 50/year while for an average user they only earn about 30 cents every year.
But it’s a bit worse than that, since users willing to pay for adblocking are disproportionately rich users, making them more valuable.
(2) This makes no business sense for Youtube. If you are a serious channel you might bring in tens of thousands of dollars per video easily. If you are a mega channel that might be hundreds or millions of dollars. You want to offset that with a single $10/month subscription?
Maybe Youtube could become actual hosting platform and allow creators and companies to pay some fee per minute of streaming at each resolution.
How are they supposed to have a thriving business with no ads?
Why would anyone pay for YouTube if not to remove the ads?
The videos that get the most views only exist because YouTube shares ad revenue with creators. That content largely wouldn't exist without ad money to fund it.
The cost to run YouTube is enormous.
They will setup DRM, or render the full site in canvas, or with wasm, or something, or requires a TPM trusted signatured in an approved web browser or some shit.
The new generation will accept a limited client, because they know mostly locked down phones. So only a few will not accept it, and they will not have to care about it a single bit.
They'll win over the masses, which is what they really care about. But they won't ever defeat the die-hards.
Previously Google was not a monopoly in so many areas. Now the Internet goes through Google. It caters to investors, not to users. It controls search engine, and a browser, and phones. It can decide what is happening on client side, and on search server side.
The wild west of the Internet has ended. We have the corporate Internet now, that is surveilled and scanned, and they became quite efficient with that.
Previously you could find pirate links through Google, this has ended. You could run pirate software, but software more and more ask OS for approval to be executed. Android will scan sideloaded apps for example.
While environment becomes safer, it also becomes more controlled by corporations. Piracy eventually will be very hard to do. All blockades can be broken, but there more and more of them.
And TPM checks are really hard to bypass.
All that to watch a few videos without a 20 second ads?
Not sure it's event worth it.
Long before I had an adblocker, I developed "banner blindness", the real benefit my adblocker gives me is less info leaking out to the platforms. (and since ublock/umatrix is so great, also more security and better loading times, but these are cherries)
If that counts as a "practical purpose" is up to you.
https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/25/streaming-video-piracy/#:~:te...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/digital-cont...
https://torrentfreak.com/online-piracy-continues-to-rise-wit...
https://torrentfreak.com/sharp-rise-in-piracy-rates-across-s...
Not really.
Netflix may have dampened torrents at some point, but boy are those making a comeback with the splintered enshittifcation prone streaming world we live in.
That was going to be WEI [1] but they shelved it for now. I expect they will be more subtle with the next project release after it gets renamed.
[1] - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-s...
https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/
(it just checks the YT anti-AB script ID against the UB anti-anti-AB script ID to see if it has been updated).
I don't get the popup, but the video is just black and the play button does nothing.
Sometimes ublock doesn't work for me. I just open the video in a temporary container it works without any issues.
Have you tried this approach?
If you want to avoid the YT messages, you can turn off the blocker for YT. If you're uninstalling then you're likely upgrading to a blocker that actually works. The article might be more convincing if they included stats from reliable YT blockers like uBlock Origin.
The types of ads run on YouTube have more in common with TV and aren't primarily for direct action.
Unless you think everyone who installs ad blockers is going to plug their ears and look away from the screen for 5 seconds when ads come on - advertisers will be happy to advertise to them.
Obviously this is not universally true (for example DNS based blocking stops the request for the ad content going through at all so if the counting is done at that point a blocked ad won't be counted) but a lot of in-browser blocks might see the blocked impression still counted.
And this counter-argument falls flat because YouTube must be able to detect which users are blocking ads in order to show them a message to disable ad blocking. If YouTube is detecting that situation and still counting blocked ads as delivered then they're cheating their customers. There are only three possibilities:
1. YouTube can't tell if user A is blocking ads, so the customer gets billed for an impression that didn't happen, but the user also can't be stopped from blocking the ad.
2. YouTube can tell when user A blocks ads, and must shoulder the cost of delivering a video without a corresponding ad impression. The argument I brought up addresses this.
3. YouTube can tell when user A blocks ads, and changes the customer anyway. In this case YT would have no incentive to stop people from blocking ads.
They must be able to detect some blockers in order to show some users a message to disable ad blocking. They certainly aren't detecting mine, or are for some reason choosing not to show me the message.
> If YouTube is detecting that situation and still counting blocked ads as delivered then they're cheating their customers.
I'm sure they aren't cheating their customers in any way said customers can prove…
In order for their customers to have any confidence that they are getting better value from allowing blocking, as the previous assertion, YouTube would have to convincingly prove that they can detect a large majority of blocking and therefore account for it in how they charge for impressions.
If they can't detect your blocking then you would fall under case #1 above. If they can detect it but choose to allow it for whatever reason then it's not part of this discussion.
>In order for their customers to have any confidence that they are getting better value from allowing blocking, as the previous assertion, YouTube would have to convincingly prove that they can detect a large majority of blocking and therefore account for it in how they charge for impressions.
No, my assertion was that a site that doesn't forbid ad blockers should have a better conversion ratio than one that does, all else being equal, not a better ratio than another arbitrary one. Under the assumption that total_impressions = non_blocking_users * k:
total_impressions / non_blocking_users > total_impressions / (non_blocking_users + blocking_users)
This is true regardless of how large blocking_users is, both in absolute terms and compared to non_blocking users. Whether you can accurately measure blocking_users also doesn't matter.
https://blog.google/products/adsense/evolving-how-publishers...
Lots of news last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128765
It's downright shitty from a highly profitable company whose content volume is entirely created by other users themselves who in any case regularly get demonetized from the ads in their own content for all sorts of arbitrary X and Y bullshit reasons, to the point that those running most of my favorite channels don't even make anything from the very same ads that youtube crams down everyone elses throats.
That's how I normally watch YouTube. It's fine? The ads are mostly skippable after a few seconds.
If I was more into YouTube I'd probably pay to remove ads, but I probably average 15min a day.
They give me service, I give them money, sounds fair.
Even content creators themselves barely benefit from these ads, because an incredible percentage of them are constantly demonetized for endless arbitrary algorithmic reasons.
So there's a level of greed at YouTube as there certainly could be fewer ads, and lower margins. I also don't think it's unreasonable to question if there is a "quality" ad market large enough to support YouTube at it's current profit level. They show a lot of ads, and they are pretty terrible, they also can't be worth much.
For $23 you get YouTube Music and YouTube Premium, for six people. The largest chunk of that money is actually for YouTube Music (I believe it's $11 for Music and $4 for Premium, for a single person). I'd be surprised if YouTube isn't making money on both the single and family plan. YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips have pointed out publicly that YouTube Premium contributes a fair chunk of money in their revenue, so not all of the cost of the subscription goes to YouTube. That means that either the ads are subsidizing Premium or the ads bring in just a few dollars per month per user.
While I have no insights and I'm just speculating, it's currently my belief that online video ads are close to worthless, meaning that they are also cheap enough that the shittiest companies can afford to buy them. So you need to show more and more, and accept increasingly intrusive ads to generate the same profit as earlier.
I wouldn't use Youtube to listen to music any more than I'd use my toaster to cook bacon. It could do it, but I have better tools for purpose.
I'm trying out alternatives fadblock seems to work well enough so far, but this is enshitification.
If it comes to it I'll migrate over to using yt-dlp or disregard YT entirely and find somewhere else. I believe others feel similarly. Ads are not acceptable to me.