YouTube blames ad blockers for slow load times, not the browser
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The fact that they are going above and beyond is what makes people angry. YouTube may be the property of Google but they got so successful due to all of society and most people have the intuitive sense that Google is taking more than their fair share from society now.
The problem is not technical, and as long as Google continues to make their profits soar beyond what they deserve, people will continue to use adblockers.
However, we should also note that ads have gotten worse, more insidious, and personalized with tracking and that's rather creepy.
"We now return to your regularly-scheduled commercial."
"Oh good, I didn't miss a moment of this week's episode of Product Unboxing."
"This week's episode of Product Unboxing features the limited edition Thneed Premium but first I gotta give a shout out to my sponsor..."
It's wild to see a lot of parenting in contrast. Kids come home from school, instantly sit down on phone or tablet, will complain incessantly or throw a tantrum if it's taken away for any amount of time, and eat whatever they want whenever they want and also tantrum if they can't. Usually involves a lot of yelling by parent with zero effect on child.
I've explained the purpose of ads and how nefarious they can be and they now hate seeing ads. At all.
When they play a game on their phones, when an ad appears, they put the phone down and look away or do something else.
How about a 30s ad before a 10s video?
This is like changing the TV channel during an ad break only to have them restart from the beginning once you switch back to it; wait, it's worse than that. Absolutely nuts.
Demand your money back for such horrible service you are receiving…
Ah, ok. Just let YouTube know how many ads they are allowed to run and we can clear up this whole issue.
The product is worth 0 ads.
I really doubt the acceptable number of ads on a really well-crafted video player and search engine sitting on top of a nearly infinite amount of content is zero.
Google essentially holds creators hostage in this arrangement. Creators provide content the consumers want, but they only get paid well if the consumers don't skip the ads. So creators have to pander to what Youtube as a platform "seems to want" (thumbnails with :O face are so hot right now) in hopes that the algorithm will deliver videos to consumers who want them AND they are shown ads they don't immediately hate and skip. If any of those things fails to happen, they don't get paid as much as they should and it's not even their fault.
So if we can let broadcast TV know, why not YouTube?
You seemed to be mocking the entire idea of "too many ads". I think this kind of law is a pretty strong argument that it's a reasonable idea and not mock-worthy. But you don't seem to think that argument matters, so please, explain yourself more.
I supply a counter example, where a nation has collectively decided on a reasonable amount of ads.
And now you're handwaving that away?
Your two comments don't seem to be consistent with one another.
But that's not even the issue. For instance the entire Steam platform is built around advertising computer games to me that I might be interested in, and I have zero issue with that. I discovered lots of interesting games by following Steam's recommendations which I then bought and enjoyed.
I also accept "sponsor ads" that are directly integrated into YouTube content creator videos, absolutely nothing wrong with that.
What's entirely pointless is YouTube showing me some fancy lifestyle ad that's entirely unrelated to my "lifestyle" and also unrelated to the video that I actually wanted to watch instead.
But you don't just buy more videos on YouTube. The videos are mostly free. So they have to advertise other stuff at you.
In case of YouTube it should be guiding me towards interesting content creator videos about things I might buy (like video games I'm interested in). YouTube just needs to find a way to get a chunk of my purchase money from Valve if I end up buying a game on Steam after watching a Let's Play video for that game on YouTube.
But that's something for YouTube to figure out, not me ;)
Youtube rarely knows what ads to show me. I don't make enough money to visit Saudi Arabia or buy a luxury EV, and I don't have Crohn's Disease, but those are the ads I get shown. If the ads were relevant it might be a different story, and that's supposed to be the entire point of targeted/personalized ads, but it routinely fails to deliver.
zero.
People say dumb stuff like "I whitelist my favorite sites and would be happy to watch a few short ads"
But the fact of that matter is that virtually no-one in the ad blocking crowd actually does this.
I suspect that is the same for the vast majority of people. Just like with music back in the day: people accept a minor nuisance (either ads or a small monetary cost) if they feel they get a good deal (a smooth experience and reliable content).
I did. I installed a blocker once they added unskippable adds and I was fed up with 2 ads in a row before a 10 minutes video. They did not seem to get the message as every time I try to disable the blocker it seems to be getting worse.
The average ad on YouTube is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of creativity, cinematography and appeal to people in general. I’m talking about the average ad with personalization off — the mobile game “mafia boss”, slightly pervy, and really weird shock value ads, or the get rich quick schemes, or even straight up crypto fraud. If some better advertisers are targeting you - consider yourself very lucky.
I do enjoy a good ad every now and then. Something creative and well executed. But that’s not what YouTube is serving. And you might hate all ads — it’s ok, everyone is different. Though I think some people would be ok with ads that are respectful of their time as I am one of them.
It depends. Podcast syndication services like PocketCast and Apple Podcasts now programmatically splice in ads into the audio files. You could be listening to some podcast from years ago and it would have ads for [present-day-thing]. Sometimes even in the middle of a sentence, because these dynamic ads can't event detect silent segments.
Last night, 1 minute of preroll ads in front of a 4 minute video..
In fact when I went back just to check the video length, I switched off ad block:
It wanted to play 2 ads, first one being 1:37 ...
I think I'll go back to the to blanket adblock and see if I can spread a little of the loose change I have among those channels I truely get some worth out of.
Not disagreeing/agreeing with you but just want to point out that Alphabet Inc only publicizes Youtube's revenue and not the profit in their financial reports. So we as outsiders really can't say with 100% certainty whether Youtube is still losing money, or break-even, or profitable.
And if they are profitable this year (or recent years), does it make up for all the accumulated losses over multiple years since they acquired it in 2006? We don't have the raw internal numbers to calculate that.
The best number I could find is that over 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. That’s 720,000 hours of video uploaded per day or 263 million hours per year.
At a modest estimate of around 1.5GB/hour for 1080p video (I think this is a very low estimate, since YouTube has much higher quality available now, and also stores different versions of each video), this works out to 376PB per year!
Other factors to consider:
* Transcoding. YouTube servers are constantly transcoding video into many different formats, given a single input file.
* Serving. YouTube isn’t served from one central data centre. They operate a huge CDN in order to serve users at the edge of the network. This means some percentage of that 376PB figure must be duplicated many times across many different data centres.
I feel like the obvious starting point is to sort videos by whether they meet a view count threshold like 1000, and I would expect that to preserve internet history quite well.
I would love to see a breakdown of how many hours of video youtube is storing, sorted by how many digits the view count has.
And Alphabet's 2022 net income works out to $59 billion. Let's not pretend that YT is some struggling startup that could be bankrupted by cloud costs at any moment.
Back before the acquisition, YouTube was losing hundreds of millions of dollars. They were burning so much runway the company was essentially an all-in moonshot to get acquired by one of the big players (Google being the most likely buyer).
Since then, their costs have only grown and rather dramatically at that. They are far larger in terms of users and the videos far higher quality than they were back then.
So why do people continue expecting Google to subsidize YouTube and run it at a loss?
A nickel per minute / month if they want to get greedy about it.
What we see today can only be described as greed.
How do we as a society decide whether these profits are "deserved"?
I absolutely love the YouTube ads discourse.
Sure, you will support all of the creators independently, but you're too cheap to pay for no ads for a great product (which shares fees with creators and provides them with tools, by the way, plus other features) to "stick it to the corporations". Meanwhile, you likely subscribe to at least one of Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music etc.
This is the perfect example of "if you like the product, pay for it." There's a ton of value YouTube Premium, both on the creator and consumer sides.
The end of this cycle is DRM and ads becoming part of the content. YouTube can do that because your refusal to stop using their service only cements their market share.
My point is simply that continuing to use YouTube helps maintain their market share. If you don’t like them, you have to stop helping them.
Ad blocker users pay 0%.
It’s not a great product. The player is absolutely terrible and goes out of its way to remove features that the OS player provides. The company is just another rent-seeking monopolist. It’s a product that I have to use, because it’s basically the only game in town after their bait and switch, having driven all competition to the ground when YouTube was free. I am glad to pay for Nebula and a couple of Patreons, but I cannot support Google willingly in this case.
They are not trying to win me over. They are trying to bully me into accepting the new deal they are forcing on us. I won’t comply.
> There's a ton of value YouTube Premium, both on the creator and consumer sides.
I’d be happy to if they were not trying to force their rubbish YouTube music thing as well. Again, they are not acting in good faith. Again, I do support Nebula, I am not against the concept of paying for videos itself.
So presumably none of this affects you because you don't use it?
What this means, however, is that I do what I can to de-enshitify what can be (and the less ethical the company, the fewer qualms I have about doing this, meaning I have zero issues with blocking Google and Meta trackers and analytics, and I have no respect for companies who don’t respect me and try to shove ads down my throat), and I jump ship the second there is an alternative.
Youtube has allowed its algorithm to prioritize recommending radicalizing conservative content to people that have watched nothing but videos that have to do with videogames. That's not a model I want to support. That also makes me less willing to shell out.
I also (irrationally) still hold a grudge from when they took away the ability to play videos on the youtube app in the background in order to promote premium, which added back the functionality. This makes me less willing to shell out.
Content creators have for years been talking about how easy it is to get demonetized, how the payments get lower, how it's harder and harder to sustain a channel, how without clickbait and icon bait it's harder to get videos noticed, etc etc. This makes me incredibly unwilling to shell out.
So, to sum it up: If YouTube does a better job of policing their ad-content and makes them less overtly obnoxious, takes any steps at all to moderate the gaming-content to alt-right content pipeline, and restores their app's ability to play in the background without the premium version, and, probably most importantly of all, starts treating smaller content creators better and improving discovery of high quality, creative videos (over lowest-common-denominator clickbait bs) I'll consider paying them a monthly fee.
What I hate when I'm watching YouTube on a device without an adblocker is that they show ads in the middle of a video. Thats a bad user experience IMO.
I could be more passive in my stance if they simply had all the ads in the beginning and showed some at the end before transitioning to another video or something, but I do not enjoy having my time interrupted during the video, that is the most annoying thing ever
I've had this happen during fitness videos, which is quite ridiculous indeed. If they'd at least slot them into a break between exercises...
I love it when I'm winding down from work, in the middle of nice chilled out relaxing music, and suddenly some roided-up asshole comes in at 10X volume SHOUTING at me "You want to get ripped in the gym?!?! Follow my workout method and crush it!!!!"
Thank you, YouTube, for destroying the entire last 20 minutes of relaxation I just enjoyed.
No, this is not the reason. People hate ads, generally.
Go ahead and block ads. I use a PiHole myself (but also subscribe to YouTube Premium, so..). But stop complaining when companies try to do something about it, or acting like there's some optimal amount of ads.
Just as it's your right to block ads, it's their right to block ad-blockers. This is the game, it's been played for 20+ years.
Why are you dismissing offhand the idea that there is an appropriate level of ads that users will feel is a fair trade for the content they're getting? You're just completely rejecting the idea that there's any middle ground at all. Why would it not be the case that some reasonable limits on ad volume, content, maliciousness, and total percent of time covered by ads, could restore some goodwill toward ads? People hate ads because ads are unbelievably fucking terribly awful. Ads are as awful as they could possibly be, and nobody seems to be making any effort to sit down and say "what if our ads weren't fucking awful tooth-pulling assaults on human reason and consciousness? What if we actually changed that?" Nobody is saying that, and people like you are simply dismissing the idea that it even matters.
Why are companies trying so hard to do something that their customers hate? We all know the answer, we know we aren't "the customer", it's this perversion of incentive that people are complaining and should complain about
Before anyone asks, I don’t care about the moral or ethical concerns of adblocking. Nor do I ever plan to pay Google for YouTube Premium. If Google wins the adblocking war I’ll begrudgingly find another platform.
I see the corporation as a collection of humans that want to receive a pay cheque to pay their bills.
The hell it is, I don't have to look at billboards while driving down the highway, I sure as shit don't have to look at ads while surfing the internet.
It's one of the biggest marketing scams ever.
Only strong DRM actually gives Google full control over the video playback environment, and that comes with huge (but different) downsides too.
Part of the point being missed by those who think it's a moral issue is that these companies _also_ have alternatives but those alternatives have downsides.
We can disagree about how much is too much, or how careful or careless any given system is. Yet I'm thankful the model exists and has democratized video, despite it's downsides.
If a trail has been setup and maintained for the public good, new owners cannot remove the public access. They are _legally required_ to maintain them.
Just as they are legally required to maintain the sidewalks in front of their property.
Just don’t use YouTube if you don’t want to pay or see ads. It is not complicated.
and yet, many places have actually banned them, with good reason.
Think of ad blockers as banning ads.
The fact that they're spending money on resources is on them and has nothing to do with me. Them spending money on servers does not obviate or override my ownership of devices I paid for.
As long as the content is 100% free, users like me will continue to take it for free while blocking any content we don’t want to see aka ads.
It is quite simple.
Those ads don't stop you from driving for half a minute per billboard.
https://movia.media/moving-billboard-blog/why-are-billboards...
> In 1997, the Legislature made an exception for tourism advertising billboards in Alaska which surprised many. However, the following year, 72 percent of Alaskan residents voted on the ballot measure to reverse the exception.
There's an old book called "The Little Red Book of Selling" and one of its points it that people love to buy but they don't want to be sold to.
I may or may not partake in whatever it is you're advertising, but I sure as shit do not want to see it while driving down the road or trying to watch a video.
The other key problem is the stalking & tracking of activity and linking it to other personal data. If adverts were not as intimately linked with this as they are, I'd be far less inclined to block ads.
I don't block sponsor segments with the tools that are easily available to do that – they can't stalk the way other types of ads do. I skip them, just as I used to fast-forward adverts on VHS or go make a drink during ads on TV, when after a few seconds it is obvious I've heard that one before (often many times) or it is otherwise irrelevant to me, but I don't outright block them.
I don't want to be advertised to and I have no moral obligation to give you my time.
It's like walking into a grocery store and someone wants to give you a sample of some sausage or cheese or whatnot.
I can continue to partake of that store while refusing to partake of the advertisement. Those options are to stop making it publicly available, but they won't do that because that threatens their dominance.
ad blockers is the cost of doing business using that model.
Not exactly true anymore, because ad revenue direct from Youtube sucks, creators were forced to start taking sponsorship deals and advertise directly in the videos. Raid Shadow Legends being the meme sponsor points to how prevalent this practice is now.
My individual contributions, Premium or not, are tiny in the grand scheme of things. Similar to me buying an EV and feeling better about myself "solving climate change", giving Google money so they will feed that poor, starving content creator an extra morsel of revenue misses the mark entirely.
Google is asking creators to rely on them to get their bills paid. Google doesn't pay them enough so they have to get revenue some other way. This is also similar to Walmart not paying workers enough but spinning it as a good thing because then they can qualify for food stamps.
Your choice is paying or not paying the people who make what you like. If you continue to use YouTube but don’t watch ads or pay for premium, you’re choosing the latter option even if you don’t like to acknowledge what you’re doing.
So I'm expected to sell them my data and accept them using that data against me before I am allowed to watch a video, and while I watch a video, and after I watch a video, and anytime I go anywhere on the internet...Google might want Youtube to pay for itself, but Google is already being paid via my data. And has been for years.
As mentioned before, this idea that we owe our time and money to someone giving away something for free is a scam on the same level as diamonds being a girls best friend.
I don't really care what you think about my behavior, I'm going to continue consuming youtube ad-free and I'll do so with no other justification than because I can and I can because they give it away for free.
This framing is all wrong, it's not my responsibility to ensure someone elses business model is viable.
100% agree. There is a building in my town that has had multiple restaurants come and go. I don't eat out much so when I see a local business closing down, I feel bad that they went out of business but I certainly don't feel like it was my fault. Content creators are not my dependents and it's my opinion Google should be making it worth their while to upload videos so they don't have to get annoying sponsored segments.
If anything it's immoral to pretend that you must watch ads to support the creator or they might starve, which is the corner Youtube is trying to back people into.
So how are web site owners supposed to pay their bills?
Don't want watch ads, but still get content? Create a paid account and login.
If you don't want to watch the ads that are posted, that's your right. But someone has to fork over cash for hosting and bandwidth (and paying staff, so they can pay their bills), and I'm guessing you're not that person.
Someone elses business model is not my problem.
I also very rarely shop wal-mart and the primary reason is your stop-loss prevention issues are not my problem, you feeling the need to treat me as a potential thief is.
theft is a cost of doing business, ad blockers are a cost of doing business. These companies have alternatives that don't involve treating their users like shit, but the alternatives aren't as profitable.
If you were to tell me youtube would go out of business if I continue to use an adblocker then they would go out of business. Someone else will figure out how to make it work or it was never going to work.
Some things are more important than youtubes preferred business model working.
So I assume you pay for YouTube Premium?
Is you following the law and acting ethicaly by using a company's services as outlined by their terms of service important?
* https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14129599
* https://www.youtube.com/t/terms#c3e2907ca8
The ToS says that if you want to watch vides (without paying for Premium) you have to not block ads. Why can't you just either (a) follow the ToS, or (b) stop using the service?
I just don't understand why you feel entitled to cheat the system.
Am I cheating the system if I go to Oktoberfest and listen to music I didn't pay to listen to?
Am I cheating the system if I watch an ad and then don't purchase the item being advertised?
am I cheating the system if I choose not to pull off the highway and gas up at the gas station that was advertised on the sign right before the off-ramp?
All of these things are equivalent, yet big tech has convinced you one is not like the others.
That's also not my problem. They put their content in a public space, so I'm free to consume it as I will. If they would like control over that interaction, they're free to take their content to a private space where they can enforce whatever rules they would like. That private space probably isn't nearly as profitable, but their business plan is also not my problem.
I don't feel any obligation to let them reap the rewards of being publicly accessible, while negating any drawbacks via social convention. They have a solution if they want to force people to watch ads, I'd encourage them to take it if this is so important. I'm not going to change behavior to support their business plan.
Shopping malls put in parking lots and bathrooms. The goal is for shoppers to use them, but we all accept that people who aren't buying anything use them. This is the same thing. Being publicly accessible comes with costs, and the business can either decide being public is worth it and pay them, or decide they aren't and shut off public access.
Ads are the same thing. I don't feel bad about using ad blockers any more than I feel bad about walking around the mall for exercise or using their bathroom and deciding not to buy anything.
The terms of service for a mall are different than the terms of service for Youtube.
* https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14129599
* https://www.youtube.com/t/terms#c3e2907ca8
A little while ago someone was charged in Canada for theft because he did a gas-and-dash at a petrol station, and his defence was that the pump was in a publicly available space. The judge was having none of it. My front yard is publicly available, but that doesn't mean someone can pitch a tent and have a campout. Just because Youtube's web page isn't completely behind a login doesn't mean what's on it is ripe for the taking in any way you see fit.
If you don't want to watch ads on Youtube, why don't you simply stop watching Youtube (or pay for Youtube Premium)?
I think much of why people are so excited about using LLMs for discovery and writing basic code is because nobody has yet found a way to jam ads in the top three results and SEO listicles for next two dozen organic. "Aha, finally I can write a query and receive seemingly relevant content with no extra effort!"
I am already finding garbage listicles written by computers in all my searches now. One funny and obvious example: trying to query about a miter slot on a powertool had an article about types of slots but accidentally included casino slot machines in the list.
Agreed. It's the Uberization play. Get everybody hyped up on below-cost service and no tipping, subsidized by VC money. Then go public, jack the prices up and add in a tip screen at the end of every ride.
It's coming.
Translation:
"I will begrudgingly find another platform that provides free bandwidth and hosting and takes nothing from me in return"
YouTube sticks a rod into its wheel spoke while moving.
YouTube blames Ad Blockers.
Youtube is riding a bicycle.
Youtube gets sick of the sticks getting caught up in its wheels.
Youtube removes the sticks.
If you adblock youtube, you just cost them money. Dead weight. How can people be so confused about how youtube works? It's a platform to sell ad-space to advertisers. If you are not viewing ads (or paying premium) you are just a stick in the wheels of the platform.
Its like sneaking into the backdoor of a buffet, eating for free, then telling the place they are going to fail when they lock the door. Even worse, you didn't even know you were using the backdoor, you thought it was the front.
That buffet frustratingly does not just accept payment per meal – you get a choice between either paying for a monthly subscription that also includes access to a fancy gym and is accordingly quite expensive (and you might already have another gym subscription you like!), or you can eat for free, but the waiters force you to watch several videos of their pets and children between each course.
YouTube is running a bicycle track.
YouTube keeps throwing sticks in people's wheels.
People put stick shields on their wheels.
YouTube makes heavy magnets that pull people's stick shields and blames stick shields for people's bikes being slower.
If you're serving content on the internet, and I download some of that content, it is completely up to me what I do with it on my machine. Google may screech "nooo you can't play downloaded videos if you don't play downloaded ads first", but that's complete bullcrap since Google can't tell me what I can and cannot do with my computer.
If Google doesn't like what I do with the content I download from their YouTube servers, Google can choose to make YouTube subscription-only. Yet they never did. Go figure. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
Is that a question? As long as my screen is not connected to Google's servers through a 100 mile long HDMI cable, the videos have to be downloaded to my machine before they can be played on my screen.
> They are not your videos...
Google made them available to me through a publicly accessible website.
...but your computer is in fact connected to google's servers through a 100 mile long cable. Maybe not an HDMI cable, but maybe that is key to your argument somehow?
>Google made them available to me through a publicly accessible website.
Cafes are also publicly accessible, that doesn't mean the coffee is free. If a cafe gives out coffee for watching an ad, you still have to watch the ad to get the coffee. Just because you found a way to skip the ad watch, doesn't mean you are entitled to the coffee at the "publicly accessible" cafe...
Yes, because the file has to be downloaded on my computer. Once it's on my computer, it's no longer Google's business what I do with it. What's your issue with this argument, exactly?
> Cafes are also publicly accessible, that doesn't mean the coffee is free.
Not a good analogy, downloading content from a publicly accessible server is free, while getting coffee is not free.
A better one would be that a cafe is giving away free coffee with the condition that you also take their advertisement pamphlet. Once the coffee and pamphlet is in my possesion, it is no longer cafe's business what I do with it - I have complete freedom to throw the pamphlet away and enjoy the coffee.
Please, you cannot be this dense.
Google could just say "no" and not send me any content at all. I'm not "taking" anything though.
No, Google has a system in place to serve the video with ads. Google does not, and cannot, control what I do on my computer. Google could control what I can download, e.g. through authorization mechanisms for enforcing subscription, but they don't. They run a web server which serves content for free, and they would like me to play ads on my computer before playing the content. But what they would like is completely irrelevant to the discussion - their wishes aren't moral laws.
> Please, you cannot be this dense.
Right back at you.
This may be their intention, but, no, they don't gate files with ad views. They allow you to start downlaoding the ad and the file at the same time. I am not circumventing a "system to gate files with ad views" because that is not the system that they have.
It seems like YouTube is attempting to FORCE people to adhere to its desired business model. If ad-supported video playback is not economically viable, then maybe it's time for a new model to be born? There is no obligation for me to pick up the stick and hit myself with it because Google says I should. I downloaded a bunch of bits that Google sent to my computer, and then I read the bits I cared about. That's how every webpage has worked in my experience.
I could opt to close my eyes and ears for every ad they send instead and it would have the same effect at the cost of my personal time. Ad blockers are just time shifting Tivos in disguise. Google has no say in how I spend my time interacting with the bits they already sent to my computer.
Ad blockers drive those odds to zero, so the advertisers won’t pay.
Personally, I like paying people who make things I enjoy, but if you feel you’re entitled to their work without paying for it, just be honest about it and be you.
- Overzealous Content ID and lack of punishment for false claims. I understand it's more lightweight than DMCA and easier for YouTube, but when you're such a cultural hub the standards should be higher.
- Rewarding longer videos and causing even the most straightforward 30-second content to balloon to 12+ minutes.
- Hiding all content on Home until you enable "watch history" (hey, why not give me suggestions based on my carefully curated list of subscriptions?).
- Promoting absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel Shorts content.
- Favoring provocative content, creating the alt-right pipeline[1].
For 15 years, YT has been providing an old-school "TV-like" experience, with 16:9 video, 10 minute-plus "episodes". That model is dead, especially with how YT does ads, which annoy users.
They want to move mobile users to the TikTok model ASAP, which allows them to throw in many more ads in a natural way compared to what they currently have.
yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove allHere's a link to the other options that yt-dlp allows
YouTube showed them the beginning of an IDF ad with dead bodies. On a small children’s blippi episode. Not signed in but unbelievable still.
I had seen this specific ad and stopped it before we got to the dead bodies.
My kids won’t touch another google product until they make their own decisions. (13 or so). It also made me question the motives of someone paying to play ads with dead bodies on children’s shows.
I recently went through this. I disabled targeted ads on my Google account so then Google deigned that every video (child-friendly content or not) needed to have the nastiest ads available. They are absolutely twisting your arm into giving them your personalization so they don't show your kids "inappropriate ads". It was then that I swore to never pay for Premium because it's like paying the mafia protection money so they don't cut my gas line under the stove and blow up the entire place.
I’m not for the government getting in the middle of online content but what in the hell are YouTube thinking with this?
www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), 5000, 0.001)
My favorite joke in this vein is "You can't spell slaughter without laughter!"
They left out a period
Ask yourself, which came first in Android?
I use both Firefox and Chrome with uBlock. But I only get the slow loading UI on Firefox. If I change the User Agent in Firefox to Chrome, then it loads as fast as in Chrome.
This is deliberately set in place to be slow on Firefox.
At one point the video playback started to slow down, the audio was playing but the video was freezing and stuttering. I paused the video and checked the UBO tooltip - 930 ads (elements) blocked.
And they want to tell me it's UBO causing slowness???
IMO, the content and software industry has a pricing problem. From $80/yr (or nothing!) for a weekly blog subscription to software subscription licensing for products that might be feature-complete-ish after the first year.
Maybe the economics/market research doesn't support people who are fine supporting at a lower price but not the requested price. Or, maybe the recent zeitgeist of "fewer people paying more" works out well for creators.
This makes me not buy the idea that Youtube cannot survive without ads. I bet there are startups out there that would kill to be in Youtubes position sans the ads.
"That's surely unsustainable" one might think. But I believe Youtube already markets the rankings of videos and how high up they are displayed in your feed and search result.
I ran my own subjective experiments on Youtube, trying to determine the effects of the "not interested" and "don't recommend" buttons on channels I have never clicked but seemed to be promoted. The result was that there are seemingly promoted channels that transcend any such functions. Nothing political as the most significant example was a popular youtuber. Of course one can put that down to the normal workings of the youtube algorithm, but that's kind of the problem: those two cannot be discerned, which means Youtube can make money this way if they chose to.
Other realistic sources of income: The US government stepping in and subsidizing, because of the cultural relevance and impact.
Or the continuation of the current economic model: long term stock investments, raising the value of a google account ownership and acquisition of customers for other google products.
Facebook tried with Facebook Watch and wasn’t really successful. So I’m doubtful TikTok will be able to
Didn't Facebook also inflate viewer numbers and force video uploads to Facebook (no more sharing a Youtube link)? I remember back in the day the Glove and Boots channel started uploading their content on both Youtube and Facebook, which cut the viewership numbers to plummet on both platforms. They had to take a hiatus for a while to figure out how to fix the issue so their business wasn't destroyed.
If I am remembering correctly, then Facebook "tried" but they really didn't do a great job to actually make it work.
Have you used Tiktok because it's kinda bizarre to try and compare those two companies let alone hold Facebooks failure up as a reason why the most popular platform for generation Z wont be able to take out an incumbent that's lost it's way.
Not to mention YouTube has severely limited it's algorithm in response to the radicalization scare while Tiktok has a scarily accurate and fast different type of algorithm entirely.
The beginning of the first sentence is what we might call "framing". It's hilariously deceptive. Let's remove it.
"We've launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience. Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
Readers can deduce YouTube's motivations.
Seems like a no-brainer I'd rather deal with 5 seconds extra added to my load times.
A video here and there is whatever. But it's hypocritical to watch many videos per month and expect to not pay for it - unless you also expect to not get paid for your work or services.
Is is theft is you eat dozens of unlimited breadsticks?
Regarding things like breadsticks or chips: you have to pay for either them or the meal itself, they have never been "free". There's not really a thing such as "unlimited", because there are always practical limits. Walking out without paying is also theft.
Buying Youtube Premium is like installing an "official" ad blocking, you are just chucking money into the general Google money pit. You aren't paying for the content, because Google doesn't create it.
Same thing with Spotify, you are just financing Taylor Swift or Joe Rogan.
On youtube or spotify, you are paying in either subscriptions or watching ads to access the content, of which a % goes to the creators. That's the deal the hosts provide in exchange for hosting content & making other content easily discoverable, etc. That's what's violated by adblockers. It is taking something without paying, which is theft.
I am not making a moral judgement on those who use adblockers. But I am tired of the semantic games and pedantry that people pull out to justify theft. Just acknowledge that it's theft and move on!
Youtube is go-to platform for video publishing because it started as free platform. When they captured this segment of web, they have overloaded it with ads.
I do not expect anyone serving me for free. But it is not bearable when everything and everyone expects you to use these walled gardens.
YouTube is not losing money, it's a significant contributor to Alphabet's overall revenue.
They are not struggling to maintain it, they're trying to milk the cash cow...
There's no contradiction between those two ideas. Something that loses a lot of money is more likely to be a significant contributor to revenue, because you can't lose a lot of money without seeing a lot of use.
But why would anyone care about revenue? Is it a significant contributor to profit? Last I heard, Alphabet doesn't even provide a breakdown of how much of its money comes from YouTube.
Many sites that are not behind the wall are providing part of their content through embedded Youtube videos. In order to see that content you need to agree with tracking. Those sites use Youtube just because it is often considered as standard.
If you think there can be a free platform (truly free) I highly encourage you to look up the fate of youtubes biggest competitive threat of the last decade: Vid.me, an actually whole hearted VC funded attempt to dethrone youtube. And it worked great for a bit..
I mean they aren't paying for the content — that's on the backs of the content creators, most of which I suspect see no positive cash-flow for their time and effort.
I'd also like to see 70% of the subscriber money go to the content creators (which appears to be the new standard royalty cut) and do away with the ads, ad revenue.
Wanting both ad revenue and subscriber money is a bit like the bait-and-switch we saw from cable television when it debuted.
Edit: Just saw this post "In June 2024, ad blockers such as uBlock Origin will be disabled in Chrome 127". So there's an incentive either way.
The late comer executives to Google seem content with burning it all to the ground and pursuing "be evil" at all cost. I think Google is too big at this point to ever disappear, but it seems like it's ripe for a reset for their business model. They do have products that are actually good, but there's a disease in the company that if it doesn't help ads it's a problem. It would be nice if all this anti ad blocker bull shit ends up with another IE moment with people switching back to Firefox to bring Chrome in line.
I'm not super hopeful because there are so many shitty boot camp JS devs now that would rather advocate for blocking non Chromium browsers over adhering to standards and figuring out why their bad code isn't working, but one can hope.
I'm not surprised most gapps work like crap under firefox, and I can't even leave reviews for things there as it hasn't worked under FF in like 10 years. It's like the old IE6 days all over, but now Google is the new Microsoft.
I actually still think that there is a decent change that this wasn't fully intentional (as in the task wasn't to user-agent detect non-Chrome and slow it down) but the explanation doesn't cover why this delay depends on the user agent?
And if you only watch YT occasionally, meaning the subscription isn’t worth it, then I think watching a couple ads for the 1-2 videos you watch a month is a great compromise! I watch YT all the time, and the ads are not excessive compared to cable, or heck, even popular streaming nowadays! The new streaming platforms make you pay a subscription, give you reduced video quality, and have the gall to slap you with a ton of ads!
One final note (that I’ve mentioned on HN before): the channels on YT have full control over whether or not ads play, and where and when the ads play. Of course the channel owners won’t publicly announce this, because it’s much easier to let YT take the PR hit for the ads. And because I know it will be asked why I’m any sort of authority on this, I have a channel with 50K subscribers and have experimented with turning ads off on particular videos to see if YT respects that decision, and they do.
2. uBlock Origin or NewPipe provide better YouTube viewing experiences than YouTube Premium. And they are free and open-source.