YouTube is now blocking ad blockers so I make ads run faster
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I intend this as a second line of defence against ads, where the first line would be a conventional ad blocker.
After work I’m going to investigate the same technique for speeding up paid sponsor portions of the video.
My background is a web dev, but I make extensions in my spare time :) I recommend making some yourself they are a fun little project. This one only took about 4 hours so I’m laughing at the interest :)
If you want to see a way more awesome extension I’ve created check this out - https://mobileview.io/
And also Invidious.
And also their combination.
User of both, I'm unaffected by the recent adblocking issues on YouTube and I can still subscribe to channels, reliably. Without any Google account. (by the way, a simple regular RSS feed reader would do, since YouTube provides RSS feeds for each channel, but Invidious is a really convenient, specialized UI for this, without the notification / algorithm issues that seem to plague YouTube wrt this, but I digress)
All these issues are already solved by these projects. I guess one could consider contributing to them (financially or with code for instance). The official YouTube frontend actually don't need no love, others already achieve what we want.
Piped, NewPipe and FreeTube are also projects to look into (I loved NewPipe when I had a smartphone, Piped looks very good too and FreeTube looks interesting but I know less about them).
So I don't love ads but mostly because of the privacy invasion they represent, but sponsorships I have a lot less of a problem with. Oftentimes sponsorships will have at least marginal connection with what in watch (most of the time looking at you NordVPN and Raid Shadow Legends) but to me sponsorships are the happy middle ground that allows creators to get some recompense for their labors without turning everything into an adscape dystopia.
Really I don't have a problem with ads on websites back in the day as long as they were somewhat tasteful, which they often were because the creator worked to integrate them into their work, but the constant user surveillance and spamming random nonsensical ads are what bugged me.
I mean some channels that I frequent have even turned the sponsorships into additional entertaining content (check out Ryan George's the Adstronaut or Viva La Dirt League).
We’ve played a few rounds of this game, we’re dumber, sadder, and more politically polarized for it.
I just cannot go back to Android after years of dealing with garbage(I owned all the Nexus phones and gave up after Nexus 5) so my options have been to limit phone usage in favor of Desktop + start working on as many homemade/ open source versions of iPhone apps that I use as possible. Luckily most apps i'd be likely to have installed are just some downloaded data(text, audio, video) and some buttons. How hard can it be to scrape and rip the content and make my own container to serve that data?
For other apps like Youtube alternatives I am in search of an app.
I'm missing some features like being able to select a play next video easily, so I may look into writing an Invidious-based client of some sort for this, but they are so many things to do for a strongly limited time.
Maybe Piped has the features I'd like to have, I should check it out.
When they actually force me, I'm perfectly happy to mute my TV during ads and do something else, which is the exact same moral area as blocking ads.
Google did this to themselves and they are the one imposing everybody to play by their rules. Nobody asked them to kill their competitors. Besides, I'm not really concerned for them. It's not like they are struggling.
Yes, but these things are far from essential. Most of YouTube is entertainment, which is as fungible as it gets, and what isn't (for example repair tutorials) can usually be solved by buying repair guides or hiring professionals. There are alternatives. You might not like them, but they exist.
> Google did this to themselves and they are the one imposing everybody to play by their rules.
This is really peak absurdity. "Google made me use their service for free".
> Nobody asked them to kill their competitors.
YouTube has competition in all of its areas. They might be the leader, but they are not the singular source.
This is like saying Microsoft didn't have a monopoly on the PC market in the 90s because Apple had 5% of the market. They only feel comfortable designing serious limitations in MV3 because chrome owns 90% of the browser landscape.
> This is really peak absurdity. "Google made me use their service for free".
This is not absurd, they got to where they wanted through massive investor led subsidies and buying out their admittedly better competitor (remember google video?) What they performed on the on-demand video market was a form of predatory dumping, and when all the competition was gone they used that position as well as other positions to extract "value" and cash out.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/
On top of that, YouTube is only one choice of many for user created videos. Sites like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit are all top 20 sites that host user created videos. A number of YouTube creators mirror their content to Nebula and other creator platforms. Twitch is yet another alternative and is likely more popular than YouTube’s live feature.
We also have to count every streaming video service from the legacy media companies and Netflix/Amazon/Apple as competition as well.
In the 90s you couldn’t complete basic computing tasks without Internet Explorer and Office. Even while fully admitting to YouTube’s relative dominance of its niche, the situation is not the same.
I think that browser market share is just one facet of the power Chrome holds over the web. Open source development, w3c membership and committee assignments, leadership in the direction the web takes, should also be considered alongside how much Chrome is being used directly.
> On top of that, YouTube is only one choice of many for user created videos. Sites like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit are all top 20 sites that host user created videos.
These are primarily social media products, it's not easy or intended to use these services in the same way as you would use Youtube. Video is a "Feature".
> In the 90s you couldn’t complete basic computing tasks without Internet Explorer and Office. Even while fully admitting to YouTube’s relative dominance of its niche, the situation is not the same.
I think it's the spectre of this past that people recognize as being the inevitable conclusion of the enshittification process, which is why the alarm bells are sounding now.
While I feel like your arguments are absolutely sound in isolation, I personally don't know "how much dominance is too much dominance?" considering the stakes, and I would certainly rather be cautious. That said, what sort of act do you think is a "bridge too far" for Google to implement?
Some of us control our computers, instead of letting every third party do it.
Your consent was given by the fact that you directed your browser to interact with the service continually, if that’s something that you did.
You can’t say you didn’t consent to be searched if you walked into an airport. You can’t say you didn’t consent to be splashed with water if you got on the log flume ride. Your own ignorance or disagreement with the fact that you can get searched at an airport or wet on a lot flume ride isn’t really an excuse.
https://superuser.com/questions/30940/is-an-eula-enforceable...
Comparison to real world situations when the trigger is physical presence are not a good example exactly because they require physical presence, something unachievable in the virtual world of software and internet.
You kill competitors and now want to dictate the price (including attention) everyone pays to see user-generated content? Yeah no.
Got zero sympathy. None. You do not command my attention - a resource I am less and less willing to pay with these days.
If that results in YouTube becoming unsustainable and collapsing and something more sustainable emerging charging a price consumers are willing to pay? Well then that sounds acceptable.
In such a situation where one part pays for the other parts benefits, you should expect the part that just loses out to try to end the trade. And that is what we see happening here, youtube tries to block you since youtube doesn't want you as a user, since you lose them money.
What they do is incredibly immoral and despicable. There is no opt-out (even if I pay them money). Even if I never use their services they still try to vacuum up all my data.
Me watching a few YouTube videos a week is a better deal for them than it is for me.
If you block all their ads. They get your data since they intend to display ads to you. I said that in the first post, did you miss that?
Since you pay them you have an account and is logged in. They do use the data they have collected about you to serve you targeted videos even if they don't serve you targeted ads, they say that in their privacy policy document. Targeted videos are for your convenience.
If you don't want it to target videos to you you can disable all that data collection here, at least I can (Not sure if you can outside of EU):
https://myaccount.google.com/yourdata/youtube
So go and disable all that if you feel their video targeting isn't worth collecting your data, but there is no way for them to target videos without having any data about you.
Their tracking is all encompassing and invasive, even without a Google account. They are a menace to the world and it should be an obligation to block their ads. If Google disappeared tomorrow the world would be better off.
Though I don't just hate Google but really all big tech. I even work in it but my salary doesn't buy my loyalty, just my time. Loyalty requires respect.
A trade can't be fair when only one part benefits. If you feel their services are worth nothing then stop using them.
Anyway, the value they receive is incidental: if I like content, I'll tell my friends about it. Not all of my friends dislike ads. I "market" the content via word of mouth. The content markets the subscriptions. Or the ads. Either one.
If I stop watching the content entirely (due to it becoming harder to discover) then fewer of my friends know about it. So it's not quite as black and white as you want it to be. The "grifting" population helps content to spread to the paying population.
OpenStreetMaps is considerably more customizable, has much better hiking trail data, and doesn't hide train stations and street names when you zoom/pan. Google Maps has become awful in the last few years.
What does happen, is I make a request, and Google sends some bits to me over the Internet for free, and then those bits are sitting on my PC, and my PC is my property. I have the right to do whatever I want with my property and the bits on it. If I want to transform the bits in some way, render video from some of them and not from others, all on my PC in my own home, then I can. With a few exceptions, courts have upheld that general right. Ad blocking isn't illegal, circumventing their anti-ad blocking isn't illegal, and it doesn't interfere with a "trade" because there wasn't one, Google just sends some bits for free to anyone who asks the right way.
Now Google can of course choose to refuse service to me for any reason they want. They can make their anti-ad blocking more sophisticated. That's fine, I'll use a competitor in that case, and we need to make sure the government enforces the antitrust laws on the books so that there's more competition against Google anyway. Whether YouTube is a criminal monopoly or not is currently up for debate, probably the answer is yes.
At any rate your understanding of the relationship is legally and morally flawed. You claim there is a trade between me and a probably criminal organization, where in fact there is none. On the other hand my right to control my property is one of the most fundamental rights out there. You better believe Google feels that way about their property and spends billions to protect/expand their own property rights!
So I am confused as to why you want Google to have property rights, but not the rest of us.
But hey, "You will own nothing and be happy," right? We're all really just renting our hardware I guess? It's 2023 and the concept of us little peons owning and controlling anything is obsolete, just do what Master says right?
BTW, FWIW my property rights are inalienable. I possess these rights because I was born a human, yes they are also upheld in the US Constitution, UN Declaration on Human rights etc. While government has mostly upheld them they don't come from government, they come from us being born human, so even if a government said what I was doing was illegal, it would be moral to ignore that government, resist and do it anyway. What's crazy to me is that people seem to be OK with handwaving away a basic human right just so that a corporation can make more profit off of entertainment content.
That is false. You might think that you should have that right, but you don't.
Your incredibly reductionist take does not consider the fact that you exist in an ecosystem of relationships and economics.
The flaw in your thinking comes from not knowing that one can acknowledge property rights without the notion that anything can be done with their property. A baseball bat may be mine but it doesn’t mean I have the right to hit someone else’s property with it. I can, however, paint, carve, or otherwise destroy my bat without serious consequence.
Property laws are just as relevant to computer systems as they are to anything else.
Obviously not. They give a pittance of what they make with a single ad while continuing to use the data they acquire for as long as they want without you having any say in the matter. They simply steal this "useless" data and make billions year over year.
For the record I do pay for premium, but that's because I want to support creators directly. I do that a lot actually; Patreon is great. But I block ads anyway, everywhere I go. There is no moral argument you can make that will convince me to actually watch ads. If companies want to stop making stuff available for free because advertising is not a sustainable business model, good! Cut the marketing out. Let it die.
Of course you don't. But neither does Google have the obligation to serve you if you don't pay and don't watch ads.
Given that advertising platforms are one of the primary vectors of scam content these days, it's almost negligent to not block advertising.
So if you tell them the ad has been displayed so you get the video, but no ad was displayed for you, then that is a form of fraud. I don't think that would hold in court since it is such a petty crime, but it is still fraud. You lie to their server so that you can see the video without ads, that is fraud.
How about if I download the ad but don't watch it?
Since when is watching an advertisement a moral imperative?
Since you got paid for it. Youtube pays you by serving you content for those ads.
Note that I also block ads. However, unlike you I don't try to tell myself that I am morally right when I do so, I know that it isn't a nice thing to do and that the content I consume when doing it is paid for by all the users who doesn't block ads.
I am not sure why you try to argue that you are morally good when you block ads. Does that really matter to you? That is the most interesting part of this discussion to me, all the people who want to see themselves as good people even though they leech off others.
Edit:
I kind of consider it disgusting that watching a video is considered by anybody to be "payment", or that anybody legitimately believes it's somebody's duty to watch an advertisement. The worship of abusive corporations in our culture has gotten insane.
You already aren't understanding us when you come in believing that we're convincing ourselves of anything. We actually do have an ethical and moral map that is consistent with blocking ads, and we don't consider not watching a commercial to be the same thing as theft, or even to be morally questionable.
Yes. And I'm willing to pay for it in taxes, or directly to creators and hosts, but I'm not going to pay Google after the massive amounts of abuse and anti-competitive behaviors. I will never pay Google.
> Ads are the price.
I don't accept that. Ads as "funding" for "free" content is a myth.
The specific act of not watching the ad is morally neutral, you can render content sent to your computer however you want or not at all.
This would eliminate most free flows of information. I really doubt that is the "better evil" compared to watching the occasional ad.
Is that technically true though? Legally it certainly wouldn’t be, there is no explicit agreement between you and Google. Even if some people feel that they have some ‘moral’ obligation to watch those ads..
Equally annoying, I'd block those too if I could.
I don’t think that true. Users have no have signed no contract and/or have any obligations to watch those ads.
Of course it would still be fraud if ad buyers were paying for ads which were never displaying it, except Google would be committing it. In most cases on a significant scale to warrant legal action.
My user agent works for me.
I definitely avoid watching ads, except the non-national spots on local TV where I kinda like the local city flavor of the ads. Is that grifting? I dunno. The ads are still there in aggregate, I just won't give them my brain space. Give me a way to pay without being tracked and having my content streams tied to a single account, and I'm all over it instead of adblock.
Videos don't need to be hosted on a server, they can be shared through peer to peer networks, which cost nothing.
> nothing
Except huge amounts of drive space and upload bandwidth. Considering most (to an overwhelming degree) people consume videos on phones, tablets or laptops with relatively tiny drives it’s not realistic.
Maybe some decentralized system with content providers hosting themselves might work.
However all that is irrelevant even if it were technically feasible because it doesn’t align with the incentives many/most content creators have (they actually want to be paid either through ads or subscriptions..)
It’s not really worth it for me to block fashion sponsors who tell me what is popular, when I would otherwise have to go research to find the same information.
My experience is that most sponsors are overpriced, largely garbage products, that they must pay YouTube to promote in order to sell.
All in all, if I was looking for an employee, seeing this page would put that person at the top of the list for me because it gives off all the right vibes - team player, interested in helping others, well rounded, etc.
This comment seemed to generate 1k visits to my site, from and 2 called booked for Tuesday.
Most of my calls are 30m coffee chats (I'd say close to 90%).
Rants are quite rare and people tend to cancel those last minute. My theory is behind this is that the decision to book a call is more likely to be driven by emotions.
Rants rarely end up being rants. For instance, the first one I had ended up being a 2 hour discussion about life, privacy, cryptography, tech + a century-long and hemisphere-wide family history in English and Ukrainian.
If you have any questions about this -- please let me know as I'm compiling an article for untested.sonnet.io
Also, you can call me for a quick 3 minute rant if a longer call feels like a commitment. In fact, I just finished my first rant today!
https://github.com/paprikka/butter/blob/main/src/watcher/det...
The irony would be incredible if you happened to use Bard.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...
Ads for McDonalds replaced with obesity stats. Ads for goods rephrased to make the actors say, "you don't need it."
Why not just remove it entirely? The only people that would use it are the same people that already know those stats.
It probably works.
I never bother watching LTT anyway. It represents everything that's wrong with YouTube.
When it comes to creators I actually respect I'd think of Dave Jones (EEVBlog), Naomi Wu, Louis Rossman...
I suspect techlinked troll HN for news content, but I watch that for the humour rather than news.
They put out a "crazy engineering" video maybe once every 6 months while putting out 5+ videos every single week. The majority of the videos being uploaded are them faking enthusiasm for version i+1 of whatever product giant tech company put out this week or them trashing some silly or sometimes misunderstood idea.
Each time I stumbled upon a video of LTT, it ranged from "great" to "really ok".
There are way better channels but LTT is far from being the worst.
But I’m like you, I’m pretty sad about it because sometimes this pushes me back very hard and I avoided some otherwise very great quality channels for months or years because of that.
My most remarkable example of this is KURZGESAGT : YouTube algorithm was always suggesting it and my brain was always thinking that this looked like cheap animated videos with colors everywhere to catch my eyes, probably with synthetic narration. I ignored it for months until I watched one by accident. And boy did I discovered it was in fact a brilliant channel with probably one of the most impressive animation and music on YouTube, an incredible narrator, one of the rare YouTube channels which provides links to studies for anything sentence they say and all of this full of poetry. Also a very non intrusive business model with pertinents sponsorships at the end of the videos and their own merchandise marketplace with actually nice items and artwork to buy.
The even sadder thing is that their thumbnails are in fact pretty good but they mostly suffered from the fact that my brain is now programmed to avoid anything catchy.
There was only one of their video I felt awkward was their video about the fact we will tackle climate change, I felt like they were I little too techno optimistic. But given that they have a good history in this subject, I just felt their goal was to provide optimism.
Also, I’m sorry if I’m overly paranoid but I feel strange that you created an account just to make this comment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjHMoNGqQTI
The optimism you mention in your comment is key. Conditioning the public to perceive and blindly accept the ideas and procedures commonly discussed in many of their videos as something net-positive seems to be the primary goal.
The art-style I think plays a very well-defined role in that: yes it's bland, but it's the most unlikely one to offend any one average viewer, irrespective of nationality or culture. It's just cute 2D flat birds after all.
There is one good way to solve climate issues: consume less. Instead, kurzg says "we could consume, but someone will solve our issues with new great tech, like carbon capture".
Still, people like it, because it "sounds good".
Sadly... Ok ok, so it is basically science video channel with sponsored content where they don't say it is sponsored content. Better description?
No, kurzgesagt says that given that people won't be willing to consume less to the required degree novel tech will also have to play a role. It's disingenuous to run around and say that 'consume less' is the solution knowing that people won't do it. At least not if they aren't forced to. Do you want to argue for forcing people? Then say it. Don't hide behind "oh, just consume less, it's the only thing that works".
That's why I wrote that if you want to force people you should argue for it and not that you do want to. Please, don't accuse me of things I didn't write.
Personally, I don't think carbon capture will work very well either, but I don't see why my position should be more valid than kurzgesagts. Or why mine isn't propaganda, but theirs is.
I wonder if this effect could be completely virtualized as an audio driver, where you choose this middleware as the default output device in the OS, and it messes with the audio clock speed: essentially overclocking the upstream (OS) side whenever an ad is detected, and dropping samples (basically a rudimentary sample rate conversion) proportionately so the downstream (hardware) side never skips a beat. I don't know how an extension/userscript would be able to communicate with said middleware, but maybe there's a way.
Aside: I wonder what would happen with live streams. Probably just periodic buffering, not from congestion but from the analog to digital conversion consuming the stream faster than it's being created. Theoretically a very miniscule version of this problem always occurs if the DAC on the production side is running slightly lower clock speed (say, 47999 Hz) than the ADC on the consumer side (say, 48001 Hz) and the player knows how to gracefully compensate to avoid occasional buffering (or buffering does occur but it's too brief for anyone to notice). Hmm.
As an aside, what audio interface was this? Sounds fascinating (as an amateur audio-interested person).
Not because I don't think you should be payed for your hard work, but because the extension being free allows me to recommend to any of my students - some of which are very poor.
Thanks!
Got a pr about increasing the speed to 16x wonder if it's same person. I only set the ad speed for 10x, since it can access the skip button and do button.click() if there are longer adds.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ad-accelerator/gpbo...
I was also surprised most of the downloads are from Japan
Only note I have is I didn't get any warning to restart the browser, but it wasn't working I believe until I did. That could cause a few people to think it doesn't work and to uninstall. (I had a few tabs open I didn't want to close which is the only reason I noticed)
Thanks for sharing the issue around installing, I haven't seen that one before but I'll see if I can reproduce & fix
I believe the rationale is even if say 90% of the viewers who wouldn't buy the product anyway are now less likely to buy the product, That's considered a zero.
However if you're positively influencing the purchasing decisions on that remaining 10%, then it might be money well spent.
Thus the advertising may not affect specifically you but because this is a broadcast style exposure, that doesn't matter
IMO it is quite like the classic example of the heuristic that there is no such thing as bad press.
Some of the most life-changing products I own were shown to me in an ad. Might not have bought that exact item, but the knowledge of that type of product even existing?!
Mindblowing.
Otherwise, Firestone should have seen an increase in tire sales after all the free advertising they got on the news. Instead, though, Firestone tire sales fell off a cliff.
I recently threw away a coupon for a product specifically because I saw a few too many extremely annoying online ads for this product, and now I can't stand the brand. They poisoned my image of them.
I wonder why you say that. At least an ad for a specific ad blocker sounds like a great idea.
- Ideally, you don't send ads to users of your product - Users of inferior products will see your ad, and it might be super effective (if you used MY adblocker, you wouldn't be seeing this ad) - Everything else is a user that doesn't have an ad blocker, and it's probably an easy sell to say "would you like to never see ads like this?"
Show ads for ad-blockers. Deliver an ad-blocker with spyware or other forms of malware.
The anti-malware industry used to be dominated by tools that ended up being malware (I’m sure that hasn’t changed much TBH).
Not really an issue with YT video ads though right? They're just annoying and too frequent but they're not really hazardous (beyond some cognitohazard of random crank stuff).
We could dream of an internet where companies would advertise their products on relevant videos and be done with that, but they probably won't increase sales that way. Because the audience would buy their product anyway if it fit their needs.
In 2023 there are two methods of marketing:
Method 1 is competing on price, features and quality. Customers will buy your product if it fits their wants and their budget.
Method 2 is advertising, where the product itself has little to no influence on sales. Certain groups of people will buy your product because you've made them feel they should.
How do you or the people doing the comparisons you read know the product exists without advertising?
Do products show up on your store shelves because the company did a ton of advertising and customers were begging the store manager to sell it? Usually not. Instead these are negotiations between businesses. How often do you see ads for new products, compared to products that have been around for decades?
The only situation were advertising is wise is when you have a product that is not different from your competitors product and you have a customer base that is ignorant, so that you have a lot of margin for advertising to get your stuff moved. Ignorant in this situation can mean just ignorant on the product category.
Products often show up on store shelves for two reasons. The product does independent advertising so the store knows it will sell or they advertise to store buyers.
If you think that is the only time advertising makes sense I'm going to assume your employer is very slow growing. Advertising pretty much always makes sense one you have protect market fit. I can't think of a single business that has that which would be worse off with advertising.
If advertising was a sure thing as long as you claim, then how come none of the ad sellers can guarantee sales? Until they offer a guaranteed increase in sales or your money back, I have a hard time believing the praise.
I think businesses severely underestimate word of mouth, and overestimate how effective their advertising was. That's understandable, since they don't want to feel like fools for having spent money on worthless advertising.
>Products often show up on store shelves for two reasons. The product does independent advertising so the store knows it will sell or they advertise to store buyers.
From what I know, products show up on shelves because the suppliers let the retailers know about their new products. It's not the store manager deciding to start selling the new Snickers flavour because he saw an ad on a bus stop.
No single ad is guaranteed and i never made that claim.
Word of mouth is great but an extremely slow way to grow a business and tends to geographically limit you and requires advertising first to get the initial clients.
> From what I know, products show up on shelves because the suppliers let the retailers know about their new products
I cover this scenario with the advertising to store buyers line.
In Fintech, it feels like the first $5 of advertising per customer just goes to persuading them that you're not a scam.
Charities, travel services and perfumes have value propositions often hard to express. Perhaps a perfect communicator could get it across in a short essay, but most rely expensive ads.
There are some domains where customers are well educated & motivated to seek out better products, like consumer electronics & cars, but those are the minority.
Travel and Fintech are products that are for everyone, so there will always be people interested in your stuff and then recommend to their friends if your product is good. Especially for travel, people are always seeking out new "products".
I think it's interesting that you brought up cars. In the past 20 years I've only seen two types of car ads: One is the stylish young woman going on a date, the second type is with young urban adults doing street dance and then the car flashes quickly in the end of the ad. Because advertising is only directed at certain groups. To normal people, these car ads communicate "We hate you" from the car company to the consumer, and would be a net negative for the brand. But since normal people are going to compare price, gas economy and features when buying a car anyway, this brand negativity doesn't mean much.
I wonder whether those groups you describe disproportionately purchase mass market new cars.
Or it could be that the advertisement and media industry have their heads too far up their own asses to care what they're doing. It certainly seems like this sometimes, when huge brands can destroy themselves permanently in a matter of days with out of touch advertising.
I will give up driving before ever purchasing anything from Liberty Mutual and I caution everyone who will listen that they are a shitty company who will grift you for your last cent precisely because of this. As if watching the same stupid ad for the millionth + 1 time will suddenly make me realize that I WAS WRONG and I CAN'T LIVE without their product.
For a lot of advertisement that is simply not a problem.
Remember those horrible ads for dishwashing detergents or sanitary pads on TV? You probably do and you probably hated them and that was the point.
It seems YouTube is creating an arms race with ad blockers and alienating users by threatening bans than simply changing the way the ads are served. Yes, there's a whole industry around bidding for, dynamically serving and tracking ads using VAST and all that, but I'm positive Google has the market power to change that.
Yeah, same -- cable TV has been doing that since god knows how long. There must be some internal engineering reason(s) behind it.
- Fetch the video multiple times
- Cut out the non-overlapping segments from the video shown to the user.
This assumes that a different ad is shown every time. Crowd-sourcing like with Sponsor Block could come in handy here.
I would assume they do this for caching and personalization. Presumably, YouTube can make more from personalized ads. However, if they embedded these ads in the main video stream caching would be more challenging.
So for instance, if normally the first 100 bytes of the video (as fetched via yt-dl) are like "googlevideo.com/gibberish-id?signature&rage=0-100", then you could transparently insert an ad into the next 100 bytes by making "googlevideo.com/gibberish-id?signature&rage=100-200" return the ad. Of course this makes the serving logic much more complicated, so it's probably why they don't do it. You'd also have to appropriately cut on a keyframe, muck around with muxing so things splice properly, and so on.
Another possibility to enforce that ads are seen (or at least things are appropriately delayed) is to simply only return video URLs if there was a "pingback" that an ad was seen. So if you serve a 10 sec ad, but the user requests a video URL before the 10 seconds are up, just reject it. This requires a bit more logic on the serving end to track state, but is easier than the previous proposal.
[1] https://blog.nektra.com/2012/06/13/controlling-the-speed-of-...
I wonder if we'll reach a point where YT asks viewers to pass a captcha at the end of an ad to prove that they watched it before getting back to their video.
A: Louis Vuitton
GPT-4 has entered the chat
Fun way to screw with Google is to pick the worst answer (haven't seen any of the products, worse impression of the brand, etc).
Advertisers are starting to try to measure advertising effectiveness (did the user actually see our ad and like our product) instead of easily game-able metrics (impressions, time on screen, click through).
However, we found that poor ad experiences would result in poor metrics. Advertisers really don't like it when they spend millions of dollars in advertising to get a report that says "your target demographic is less likely to consider your product now after seeing your ads".
Eventually each ad has an embedded AI that must be run to see the content after the ad. That AI evaluates whether there's a human who looks and behaves like you watching the ad. The endgame requires your AI to do a convincing impression of you to the ad AI, and to hide other signals that would reveal you doing something else, like the sound of a flushing toilet.
When your AI is pushed by more advanced ad AI to be very convincing, it has to start purchasing things occasionally, just like a typical human. It occasionally buys the things in the ads, the way humans are expected to, to avoid revealing it's not you.
This spirals out of control when your AI has to buy more things than a human would, because the ad AIs co-evolve with your AI to expect that. It won't be possible for an ordinary human to watch content unless they run a highly-evolved adblocker AI that buys enough of the things shown by the ad AIs to satisfy the ad company.
Unless WEI becomes a thing.
https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed
It has served me well for years and works on YT ads as well as other sites with similar players
Watching on every device without praying that this week’s ridiculous workaround continues to function for only like $15/month feels like a bargain.
Remember folks... when running away from a bear you don't have to outrun everyone, just the slowest person
And similarly, to get people or organizations to pay, you just have to make it much more expensive for them at every moment to hack or fork your service than just pay you. It gets harder the bigger the organization is, but works like a charm on the long tail!
If you've got an open source platform, it's a major consideration because a competitor can just fork your service and start offering it. So you have to have enough of a network effect and lock-in (e.g. ethereum nodes only taking ethereum gas as payment) that the fork is not as accepted for years, despite being faster and better (e.g. polygon). You can centralize trust (Amazon), Liquidity (exchanges) and ease-of-use through vertical integration (Apple).
I'd rather give the bully a whack in balls instead.
I'd be fine with YouTube being a purely paid service. Either pay, or the server returns a 500. I might even be willing to pay for it then, knowing that the only ads i might encounter are sponsor segments in the video themselves (that i can also skip right on by.)
Luckily for me, the only one that knows what to ascribe my actions to is..me.
OK, video quality is higher now but, but they could make the lower-quality video freely accessible -- and so could lots of other possible video-upload sites without charging $15. The value-add is not why you're paying $15.
They also started ads in 2006 before Google bought them
They were burning VC funding the whole time. Youtube didn't become profitable until a few years ago even with Google ads being there it took that much scale and added ads for them to start breaking even on it.
No one "asks" people to see ads. They're the ones who show ads to people in the most underhanded, intentionally attention grabbing manner possible. When you are charged a price, it's obvious and they are up front about it. Meanwhile in advertising land they make it a point to hide the ads in prose so you don't even know you're being manipulated, the videos cut into the ad abruptly so you can't react and it's not like links have big signs in them warning you about ads inside.
Charge people money up front. If you send us ads, we'll delete them. Our attention is not currency to pay for services with.
Maybe stop offering some bullshit "free" tier before expecting people to pay you. Because that's what ad-supported YouTube is: free. It's absolutely free for everyone. They just happen to send you noise alongside the signal. Easily filtered out.
Not to mention the fact Google's still extracting value out of you via surveillance capitalism. Better pay for the creator's patreon instead, that's a perfectly ethical way to make money.
It's not free, they've made that clear, just because you are able to take something without paying doesnt make it free. You can justify being a leech all you want it doesn't impact me because i neither work for YouTube nor produce content for it but it also doesn't change what you are.
When the server returns a 200 and the video to my request of 'video for free please', that is them choosing to accept my request for the video. Just as the common refrain goes that 'if you don't like ads, you can just not use Youtube', the argument that 'if Youtube doesn't like me blocking ads on my computer, they can just not serve me the videos' applies equally.
> I feel much more intelligent after this conversation with you
You're welcome. Hopefully you'll feel like being less of a leech too.
We're proposing they stop pretending the service is free when it's not. If they keep giving us free stuff, who are we to refuse?
First I'm a leech, now I'm a literal cracker who hacked his way into the trillion dollar monopolist corporation's servers and forced them to serve me videos at their expense. Even mined some Monero on their data centers while I was at it.
Are you for real my man? I'm not even gonna read the rest of your comment.
Seems like it’s more accurate to say that you have a moral objection to either ads you don’t like or things you have to pay for?
So perhaps my moral objections are to obnoxious, in your face, unavoidable advertisements.
This is the reason advertising works. Because people think it doesn’t work on them lol.
“I want what you have and I’m going to take it from you in any way I desire regardless of your thoughts on the matter”
It's actually offensive that these corporations even think they have any say at all about what goes on in our machines. The nerve.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38329083
Refined these over years here by discussing the subject with like-minded people. I always post smaller versions of it when people start trying to shame us for not tolerating ads.
There might even be more than two of us! HN unfortunately due to it's inherent bias (vis-a-vis their origin/benefactors/audience) will tend to skew a little more against this train of thought.
> You might enjoy this mantra I like to recite in every ad blocking thread:
I agree with the vast majority, but some of the phrasing I think betrays a certain militantness on the issue that might turn people off. Specifically, your point about it being mind rape. I agree with the point you try to make with that, but that can conflate it with some other unsavoury topics that make it easier to try to attack your argument. The way I see it, it's not quite mind rape, but it is assault and battery on the dignity of the human mind.
There are many. Someone here once told a tale of a hero who picked up a paintball gun and drove around the city blasting billboards.
A brazilian city banned billboards:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
I want to propose a similar law for my own city. The advertising is obnoxious.
> assault and battery on the dignity of the human mind
Agreed.
I don’t mind they offer alternative ways of monetizing than a subscription. A lot of folks can’t afford to pay like I can. But I deeply value the option to pay.
I’m not a fan of ad blocking on services you use that offer a pay option. I am fine with blocking in general, but if they offer the chance to just give them your money and you can afford it, you should. Every service should offer a chance to just give them your money instead of data harvesting and ad spamming as the only option.
I’m a huge supporter of open source and free software for over 35 years now, but people who make a living off their software, media, art, music, etc, should be supported as well. There’s nothing wrong with making a living doing what you love, but there’s something wrong with expecting people to give you their labors and services for free.
Where is the eula that spells out in simple language the details of the devil’s bargain that these data thieves offer?
They are selling trinkets to the natives that have no idea what they are giving up.
https://www.eff.org/fr/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interop...
GDPR means all tracking is overt. I have a page where I can see all the things Google tracks about me and what they are used for and I can disable different categories such as location or watch history or search history or browsing history etc.
So Ad blocker + IP from Cambodia still works like a charm.
But YouTube got so bad, they seem to force you towards premium at the moment.
Minute long ads forcing me to interact on chrome cast. It’s a pain.
I don’t mind paying for a good subscription but it’s gotten a bit crazy. Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Disney, prime, regular tv. You can lease a cheap car for that combined.
Add a cheap ereader and libgen and even better. Better than that? A cheap paperback.
In all seriousness, I would guess seeing the ad so much would mean you have more brand awareness of it?
And I get them on Megadeth HQ album videos. Not generally the kind of audience that goes for these specific things being advertised.
And on top of it I don't get forcefully logged in to it anymore (I never wanted that in the first place).
I don't mind the ad recommendations on home and after a video, but having to watch an extended ad or 2 before a video, and continuosly throughout the video, is enough for me to get off YouTube as an entertainment platform.
Still useful for tutorials, but that much advertising makes the experience completely unenjoyable. Doubly so if the ad has to be "skipped" or else will run for 3 minutes, and I'm in the middle of something with hands occupied (cooking, working out...)
Am contemplating buying a Chromecast with Google TV, and installing SmartTubeNext on it, just so I can escape the ad barrage: - 2 ads on video start, unskippable - multiple (at least 2) 2 ad breaks during even a 10 minute video, almost always unskippable.
And the worst thing? It's the same 5-10 ads that you get!... they rotate in and out on a weekly basis, but the sensation is you see the same frickin ones over and over again! I don't work in marketing, but if I ever get to speak to someone who does, I'll definitely tell them that repeatedly seeing your ad will definitely put me off your client's product, even if it is the best choice on the market.
I already own a Chromecast Ultra, but it sits unused for more than a year now.
I'll never get YouTube Premium. I (maybe) can afford it, but it's too much for what I get in return.
You don't want to make inconveniencing you profitable for others.
Could this be a country-specific thing?
Firefox said it will adopt Manifest V3 in the interest of cross-browser compatibility.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes...
Manifest V2 is the old model. The Chrome Web Store no longer accepts Manifest V2 extensions, but browsers can still use them. For now. Manifest V3 is supported generally in Chrome 88 or later and will be the standard after the transition planned to take place in June 2024.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/decla...
I hate it when YouTube / Google needs to exploit everyone's data and privacy in order to make money.
They makes it a design point that Kagi should work even without javascript enabled.
I still design web sites without JS first. In fact, I design them without even CSS. It's called progressive enhancement. Many of them have only a sprinkling of convenient but not necessary JS.
They serve the ads from the same domain, as the site itself.
For twitter.com a filter option here on HN would be nice but a domain blocker might do.
This may all change. But the friction\value trade offs are a bit ‘shrug’ for me. Maybe instant video is still novelty and waiting a few seconds to see it, isn’t so different.
I’d like to see some combination of ad nauseum (play ad in an invisible/silent background to support the content creators) and auto-mirroring to bittorrent (to let the real video play while google thinks the ad is playing, and also, for anti-censorship).
Oh, haven't heard of this technique before. Very cool!
There are methods (due to various regions having various prices) that one can find YTP cheaper than listed - but I'll leave that up to people to explore.
and then they'll add ads to premium too
To me this has never been a valid reason (and there have been many) to not get Premium.
My data is worth way more to me and, obviously, them.
Want to justify $14/m? Try giving me feature in-line with me as a viewer or customer. Instead it'd rather drop the service entirely. So they're going to war with me, and eventually i'll just leave.
Frankly though i'm happy to see these moves affect the community. I want to see more competition, and i'd love to give money ($7/m seems good to me) to a company that is more in-line with features i want.
So your suggestion is to just turn off recommendations? You can hide them from view using the chrome extension unhook if you want to see what that experience is like. I do it myself when I'm trying to avoid distractions but when I'm actively looking for them i turn it off.
And if you can't even imagine something other than the dumb "global toddler average" can exist, then it's just very sad
And I know what the non suggest experience is like, it's great, also removing the comments is nice, but then there is plenty of other rec nonsense that's harder to disable (especially on a phone). So yes, that's ONE OF the options I suggest, though you haven't said what's wrong with it, does it not count as an alternative to toddler average?
Give me some examples of alternatives for choosing videos for a homepage where you don't track any data about the viewer.
It doesn't count as an alternative because it requires you to know what you want to view next in advance every time.
There's literally no context where it makes sense for these sociopaths to not advertise to us. They'd put ads under our eyelids if they could. They'd put ads in our dreams.
At that point, people would revolt to the extent money loses its meaning.
Even when ad blocking extensions work, it's only for browsers. If you're on Android you can install hacky modified apks, but YouTube breaks them every once in a while and then you're waiting for an update and having to go through some patching process again (I have to do this with YouTube Vanced to watch YouTube on the cheap Kindle Fire I use exclusively for YouTube in bed). If you're watching on a smart TV YouTube app or Apple TV or something... I assume there's options, but you're again gonna be wasting so much time on maintenance and keeping things up to date in the ad-blocking arms race, I'd rather just pay. And I don't know why anyone should expect YouTube to be infinitely ad-free and payment-free forever. All that storage and data transfer ain't free.
Far from it that I'll defend Google, but I don't know what's so special about YouTube where it's the one service people use more than anything else they pay for, but they won't pay for it.
You can just tap right on your keyboard a few times to get past those anyway.
What is really annoying is the mobile app. The mobile app is constantly pushing shorts on me, I have no interest, that’s not why I use YouTube and if I only used the mobile app I don’t think I’d pay and instead use YouTube less. The mobile app Home Screen is junk content for me now where as the TV app brings relevant longer content…although they are sneaking in one or two shorts.
I never used any of these platforms, but I can guess the reason: these platforms were always paid, which sets the expectation that one has to pay to get access to them. YouTube, on the other hand, has for a very long time been available as non-paid (and even logging in is optional, with rare exceptions). Furthermore, YouTube has for a very long time worked even when the user has an ad blocker installed and enabled (few people customize their ad blocker; if they installed it because they were annoyed with DoubleClick animated ads, or with DoubleClick tracking their every move across the whole web, they won't care what else the default lists of their ad blocker blocks). People are used to viewing YouTube without having to pay, and if they use ad blockers, without ads (and people who are not used to viewing ads are going to be more annoyed at excessive ads then people who are already used to watching some ads). It's natural to feel some anger at the other party altering the deal, and having to pray they don't alter it any further.
And beyond that, it has always been socially acceptable to ignore and/or reject ads; I might be showing my age with these examples, but things like going to the bathroom during the ads, muting the audio, pausing the recording during an ad break (or fast-forwarding through them during playback), and so on, were always acceptable, and nobody would scream that you MUST watch the ads or you're stealing from the TV station. Why should YouTube be any different (and it even has "Tube" in its name to make the analogy stronger)?
No, I will not endure ads to "sample" your site. If you want to charge for it then great, I applaud you, but you need a way to let have a trial or some way to know if they want to sign up to pay, and also set the price right. Your little niche website is not the same value as youtube or netflix.
Netflix et al are simple models: they pay upstream providers like Hollywood studios for works and they charge viewers to access them. It is a private space; it's like showing a film in a cinema. They get to charge access, but they also have to pay for the films.
YouTube doesn't pay upstream providers anything, nor do they produce anything (of worth) themselves. They get their content for free because they are a public space. It's like a town square: they get performances for free, but they don't get to charge access.
Except they do want to charge access. In other words, they want to have their cake and eat it too.
I'm not a compulsive viewer. It's simply not worth it to me to pay a subscription fee for something I use sporadically. That's why I don't pay for Netflix etc. or any other subscription I don't get value from.
A pay by usage model I would be more likely to get behind. In fact, I already do pay some uploaders via Patreon. But I would also expect to be able to download the videos and play them on repeat without incurring extra costs (after all, it's a waste of bandwidth to watch stuff on repeat and I have my own storage space). This way I could also be sure my payment is going towards worthwhile contributions and not the brain rotting garbage they seem to want me to watch.
Really? No ads baked-in into videos by the creators? I.e. those skipped by another add-on, sponsorblock?
> and I support creators.
Are you sure about that? Why do they need to put their own ads into videos then?
By paying Netflix, Amazon Prime, or other streaming service, you surely would: Netflix and Amazon have to pay for the content. But Youtube? They get it for free.
> my conscience is clean,
But your privacy-awareness should be on alert. For YouTube premium, you have to be logged in. You can bet, that Google profiles you based on what you watch. They just don't show you the ads right on the YouTube, but surely they do elsewhere on their network.
Think of it like browser equivalent of the smart tv connected to net.
Sponsorblock, yes.
> Are you sure about that? Why do they need to put their own ads into videos then?
For the people who use ad-blockers. Not me specifically and youtube doesn't provide a functionality to skip certain parts on paid views.
> But your privacy-awareness should be on alert. For YouTube premium, you have to be logged in. You can bet, that Google profiles you based on what you watch. They just don't show you the ads right on the YouTube, but surely they do elsewhere on their network.
I use kagi (paid), and ad-blockers for everything else.
I can live with google having access to my [poor] music taste and view history.
YT cut off my favorite channels' monetization all the time. They'll never get a dime out of me.
>download videos locally on your phone
>the audio continues in the background when you switch to another phone app
Y... you mean like NewPipe already does?
I follow a bunch of developers and engineering channels on it and I learn a lot of stuff on YouTube in general.
A couple of years ago, after running AdguardHome on my network, I’ve noticed that YouTube ads became more and more aggressive and that was hard to unnotice since I mostly consume YouTube on mobile devices that don’t have adblockers. I just gave up and convinced myself that YouTube, of all the services, is the one that probably deserves my money, so here I am, paying for the student plan which is 6.99€ a month. Now, after almost a year of premium, it’s probably the only plan I could not give up along with Spotify’s. I’m not used to ads anymore, I listen to a lot of stuff in background mode and I love it more than before.
Only thing that got on my nerves is that they now decided that if you don’t activate watch history you’re not going to get a Home feed, which is crazy if you ask me.
There's absolutely nothing stopping the arms race from continuing past the point which you are currently satisified.
Just look at Hulu, for example.
Also, it's ridiculous that YouTube was able to convince people it's acceptable to have audio pause when in the background. If YouTube on Desktop paused audio when the tab was not the active tab it would be fundamentally unusable.
Soon there’ll be a premium premium with no ads at a premium cost, $30 a month.
You're not locked into subscribing to YouTube until you die. This is a misunderstanding I see frequently among hackers. They also seem to think that changing the default web browser is equal in severity to building a battleship...
It's good to have a healthy tension between consumer wants and corporate financials. If everyone stops using ad block today then Google reports one quarter of increased profits. Afterward, investors are normalized to that expectation, the fact everyone is watching ads is meaningless, and Google pursues whatever their next step is for squeezing blood from stone.
I want to live in a world where products are as good for me as possible without corporations going under. I do not want to live in a world where products are as poor as I'll tolerate just for profit maximization.
Lately I find I waste a lot of time "relaxing" on YouTube, but I've noticed it's become TV for me; a habit like smoking was. Sure, there's thought-provoking stuff on there, but that's not what seems to show up in my feed. It looks like cable TV. I suppose I have terrible viewing preferences. This is just my experience, of course.
So, I'm ready to kick the YouTube habit and to do more "pulling" of information. Having experienced what cable TV did (eventually throwing a huge amount ads into an expensive subscription) the new fee structure makes kicking the habit an easier, healthier, and more prudent choice. I think I know where they're heading.
I'm thankful for it, frankly. It's wind at my back to pull away from too much screen time. It'll be much easier to break the habit. I've paid enough by providing my viewing preferences anyhow. And when already-profitable monopolistic non-essential services start squeezing tighter, it's surprisingly refreshing to search for new pastures.
If/when Reddit kills "old" reddit, that'll be good too.
They also decided to get rid of Google Play Music, one of the best music streaming platforms ever created, and replace it with Youtube Music - which is absolutely god-awful. I want to play music, not watch music videos, not be limited to what's on Youtube and upload my own music to stream...
Purely for removing background play alone, they don't deserve 15 dollars a month (or whatever they're charging right now)
I also run a small channel mostly with ROIO bootlegs. The channel has never been penalized, it has a small but growing user base, and all the videos have been monetized by someone else. I also sometimes watch a video from my cellphone where the ads run.
These might be the factors why I still didn't get the Youtube stick.
P.S they've been monetized by companies that have no rights to monetize them whatsoever. However I have no rights over the material and if legal holders wish to battle the record companies that hogged my videos, that's great. If I have a recording of TV broadcast of singer-songwriter playing his material in a public festival, the record label that paid and released studio version of those songs has no stake in that. There can be a complex contract between broadcaster, festival and the performer, but I'm sure record company is not part of it unless it has explicitly funded the festival or the broadcast, which is a rarity, not applicable to my videos. The algorithm IDs these tracks as studio versions or as official live version which then trigger "ownership" by those record companies.
So let's not pretend Youtube is some fair entity that needs to be paid fairly. They don't play fair themselves.
If you want to use a service in a way that the service provider doesn't want you to, I think it's best to just say so. It's obvious there's a difference between things that are hard to figure out automatically, and deliberately not playing fair.
If they don't like that, they have venues. One of them is paywall, the other is move to closed ecosystem with proprietary service client. Both would have huge negative impact on the business. So they need to cope with downsides on hosting their service over an open standard in an open ecosystem, where power users can and will take control of how their devices are rendering the content.
My point is that there's no point pretending we're righting any injustices, or the organisations we do this to deserve this behaviour. We do it because we it's hard to stop us, and there's nothing inside us stopping us from gaining from another's effort.
Peertube is there for those folks. People keep whining about the monopoly but won’t go to another service to help grow it.
People also whine about sponsor ads, as if you have to watch those videos or those channels. Don’t consume their content if you don’t like it.
At the end of the day, if you don’t want to be tracked, hate ads and hate Google the solution is simple: stop using YouTube.
The anti Facebook people understand this, which is why we don’t see incessant posts about facebooks anti-Adblock on HN. The kind of people on HN who hate Facebook probably just don’t visit the site at all. Same with Reddit vs mastodon. Twitter vs threads. Quora vs ChatGPT.
Anti YouTubers seem unique in their constant whining yet reluctance to stop using what they hate.
Simple: the videos they want to watch don't exist elsewhere. PeerTube doesn't help you if nobody you watch publishes to it.
I use PeerTube, I run my own instance. PeerTube really sucks compared to YouTube. Even with all of the enshittification and google crippling the service, the quantity, quality, and discoverability of videos on YouTube has no comparison at all anywhere.
People use YouTube for the reason they use anything: there simply is no viable alterative.
Whining at people to use PeerTube doesn't help. You have to convince people to publish there before anyone can use it.
You should go tell drug addict to just stop, not that hard. Maybe also to everybody complaining about house pricing, after all our ancestors build theirs with log and dirt why would you need something else.
So all this is about being the "Special Few" who can get away with it, despite often positioning themselves as the Moral Choice because the adverts are bad.
* 500 Subscriber
* 3 'valid' uploads in the past 90 days
and either of
* 3k public watch hours or 3m shorts views
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/more-ways-for-creators-...
That or go viral somehow and bootstrap yourself (which is likely why the shorts views are so high). Obvious not impossible as people still do it but the math seems suspect to me.
YouTube gets thousands of hours of video uploaded every second. I'm not sure what the ratio of monetized accounts to non-monetized accounts is, but if YouTube can run a channel "for free" for a year because they aren't monetizing it yet, it seems there's a threshold they are willing to accept to serve videos "nobody wants to see" until enough people do want to see it and they advertise on it.
So the high profile creators are costing YouTube money to serve their videos and YouTube wants help paying that cost. But they only extract it from channels they know are profitable because there are a lot of eyeballs on those videos.
Almost like they are promising X ad views to advertisers and want to keep that numbers game rolling. I feel like ad based spending is going to go through a correction in the next decade.
No, if you get 3k watch hours on a video you are good to go, you don't have to wait a year. I've seen plenty of channels get monetized within weeks since they already had an audience.
It’s especially funny to see this sentiment on hacker news. “Those stupid content creators, clearly if they want to make money, just don’t use YT!”. I’m curious, what’s the alternative? Cable? Good luck. Udemy? What if I’m trying to make entertainment videos? Oh, I guess I could just build my own low latency highly efficient video hosting site and get a paid subscriber base that manages to cover hosting costs and make a profit! Yea, because that’s completely realistic…
If you do want to make videos that reliably earn you money, charge money for them! Make it explicit. Don't rely on implied contracts that other people may or may not honor at their discretion.
Not a pointed question, I just find it genuinely interesting where people draw the line.
Ultimately in all scenarios you are consuming resources from a third party, and avoiding paying for them.
This isn’t the right analogy. It’s more like someone opens up a shop where you can walk to the counter and ask for some food, and they stick a sample of some product in the bag when they give you the food. It’s not immoral to throw away the sample if you don’t want it, just like it’s not immoral to not play back the ad you get served along side a video you request if you don’t want to watch it.
Remember the whole "news" part of HN works because people are allowed to link to "unpaywalled" version of paywalled content. It's what HN is about -- stealing premium content. If these kinds of links are banned HN will lose a lot of traffic.
Also, Google it's already mining my data thru cookies/Android and earning money because of it. Thus, it's an even match.
Google has every right to restrict who gets to access their services (although antitrust concerns do come up) and every user has the right to control the software on their devices.
This is different, you aren't copying youtube videos and sending them to a friend using your own resources, you are using their server capacity to watch it yourself.
So you are costing Youtube money just like stealing from a store costs the store money. So the old "copying is not theft" argument doesn't hold here. It does work for torrenting etc, but not when you stream directly from their servers.
With respect to server/network resources, like I said Google is free to restrict access as they see fit.
The post you responded to didn't say that those two were the same, it clearly shows those two as different levels of bad if you read the next line:
> "Not a pointed question, I just find it genuinely interesting where people draw the line."
So your point here is just you not understanding and reacting with a meme since his post sounded a bit similar to an argument you have seen before.
Not viewing ads is a lot more like not looking at billboards on the highway or not reading the inserts you get in your free local newspaper.
Pirating movies is a method of showing disdain for extractive and manipulative IP law that lines the pockets of nasty old rich fuds while not paying the actual artists that made a work. I would not pirate an indie film for instance.
Stealing from large supermarkets is basically just preventing them from throwing the unsold food away at the end of the profit cycle. Again the only person youre stealing from is the ruling class who profit off of hunger and poverty.
I don’t remember the numbers well enough to quote it but it’s barely anything. I recommend to look it up.
And the biggest surprise for me was that older videos get even less.
The money isn't great by itself but it's still money coming in too.
There goes all the useful tutorials for graphics software.
And home maintenance.
https://advancetitan.com/news/2020/12/09/how-youtube-is-chan...
And there's no guarantee anything will actually come along to replace it if it goes away. Hosting video is very, very expensive.
The Cloudflare TOS does not allow you to serve video from a Cloudflare address unless you’re using a Cloudflare product that is meant for video. So no, you can't make a youtube clone and make Cloudflare pay that bill for you.
Cloudflare makes their money by making users overpay for other things than egress. Video hosting is one of the exceptions where they can't make up that on other costs which is why they have another service for it.
Cloudflare says it's fine to serve video from R2.
They send people videos for free. They do so hoping you'll watch the ads. At exactly no point does this ever turn into an obligation to "pay" by watching the ads. They only have themselves to blame if their business model isn't working out.
And I guess that's the next line of defense: GPU shaders to just replace ads with something more pretty to look at.
True
>Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears.
Google can have any terms of service they want - it's their service, if you don't like the terms don't use the service?
> It's a violation of my person to try and detect whether I'm not paying attention to your ad.
No it's not.
Or you could, I dunno, don't agree to their terms and use their service anyways?
It's also why it's important to fight against anti user standards.
You look at how many people "quit" twitter over the last year - if even a quarter of those people legit just walked away (either to a different service or left that aspect of the net behind) the social media landscape would be much different right now.
While I'm just annoyed as you are by the ads blasting while I'm refueling, I want to highlight that gas stations don't typically significantly profit from selling gas; their profit might be as little as a few cents per gallon. Instead, the primary source of revenue and profits for them is usually the attached convenience store or other services.
Here's a few sources (unverified, but here for convenience):
https://fortune.com/2022/08/09/energy-profit-margins-gas-sta...
https://thehustle.co/the-economics-of-gas-stations/
https://www.theautochannel.com/news/2021/11/22/1074398-who-m...
https://www.cattlerange.com/articles/2022/04/how-much-do-gas...
https://www.projectionhub.com/post/gas-stations-industry-fin...
Where are they doing this?
No, they are trying to argue it's against their ToS to SKIP it entirely. No one is forcing you to actually pay attention, but you have to wait X seconds. You can close your eyes all you want, but you cannot entirely skip them.
The executives for the networks (in which I include YouTube) believe that you have a legal and moral obligation to watch their advertisements -- it's only a fair trade for supplying free, ad supported programming. By watching the show and closing your eyes and plugging your ears when the ads come on, you are cheating on your end of the deal and "actually stealing programming", and the networks have very powerful lawyers who will argue this very convincingly in court.
You don't have the right to be a thief.
You can absolutely advertise on an intrusive platform, but as consumers, we can aggressively boycott/make your marketing work against you.
Don’t like ads? Don’t like subscription fees? Don’t like large tech companies? Great! Go to the library and check out a book.
For better or worse, the vast majority of my media consumption is youtube these days and of all the subs I pay for, it's the one I get the most value out of. I don't get the cynicism.
They aren't bullying anyone. They are trying to make a business model work as efficiently as possible. Anything that relies on ad revenue is going to be predatory like this.
Youtube premium has been a thing for 8 years now, you have had a really long time to start paying for ad-free youtube. You just didn't bother to even check if it existed until they started to push for it harder recently.
So you are a perfect example why they gave up and started becoming more aggressive now, its because it didn't work to just do it the way you think is "fair".
Tell me you're from the US without telling me you're from the US.
> So you are a perfect example why they gave up and started becoming more aggressive now
They started rolling out aggressive ads before YouTube Red was available in my country to purchase. And by the way, I gave in and do pay for YouTube Premium currently.
But I still stand by my statement, because I see how bad it is on my second account. For decades, YouTube managed to show me a few ads before and after the video just fine. And suddenly it's literally every minute? I'm sure Google is struggling to make ends meet.
I think it's ridiculous that people are only now coming out of the woodwork saying things like "I would pay if they weren't forcing me into it" or "I would pay if it wasn't so expensive now" or "I just want to pay for ad-free and not YT Music".
It's been out for years, and it was cheap before; they even had Premium Lite for a while.
They’re breaking the implied contract, not us.
Now they want all our data, AND for us to pay to skip their ads? I'm not for it.
Encourage what you want to see in the world.
You can do that through patronage, if you have the means. Advertising never leads to that. Every sector that depends on large numbers of people contributing a small fraction (like cinema or music) ends up turning into a race to the bottom, as appealing to the lowest common denominator is the most efficient way to succeed. The advertising internet model the epitome of that.
So at least from we see on youtube the ads leads to more niche content, not less. There aren't enough payers to sustain that many niche channels.
Netflix increased their prices from $10/mo to $16/mo in 2011 and faced massive backlash with tech journalists praising Blockbuster and saying "Up until today, we loved Netflix":
https://www.wired.com/2011/07/netflix-price-hike-anger/
https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/hey-netflix-wtf-6368309
Today Netflix charges $15.50/mo. The price rises and falls every 2 years and we get the same whining every 2 years: https://flixed.io/netflix-price-hikes
Why not pay people to watch the ads by a similar logic?
BTW, curious has anyone ever anywhere in the world, any media, tried creating a channel/stream which just shows ads and pays people if they watch? Wondering if that’ll work.
Also, I rarely watch YT, so for me personally $15 or whatever the price is, is too high.
Another thing, ad blockers also help in privacy. $15 may result in no ads being shown in YT, but does that also mean that Google is not collecting data? I’ll consider paying to Google for a no-data-collected mode.
Until then, they get no money and I watch no ads.
I am concerned about the new management of Twitter so I deleted my account and stopped using the service. It's very empty to claim you won't pay for a service because you are morally opposed to their service while continuing to use said service.
I don’t see any statements or actions even remotely hinting at feeling entitled to an ad-free viewing experience. They’re simply trying to figure out how to achieve an ad-free experience.
If someone locally modifies a website’s visuals to implement dark mode, would you lambast them for feeling entitled to dark mode?
Although, even on the minimum wage of my country, four hours of work is around half a year of youtube premium. based on the average salary for a developer it's probably around three years of youtube premium.
I will say, if I start to get ads on youtube premium then I'll start building workarounds but until that day, it makes sense to just pay the fee.
I think it’s totally fair if you don’t think it’s worth it for you though. I’m very willing to (and have!) cancel most other services (except for Max which I get for “free” from my ISP) in favor of YouTube because I find the content far more engaging and I can tailor it to my interests far better.
I’ll also add that a decent chunk of my viewing is on mobile (phone or iPad) where ad blocking isn’t slightly more difficult using the YouTube native app.
Also half that money goes to the creators you watch, so it's also about supporting whose content you consume. And if they don't offer you 7.5$ of value per month... why are you even watching them?
However, this is partly on us too. For years we have been blocking ads on services we use, saying we want alternative means of monetization over tracking, blocking ads. Now this is the end result. At least YouTube still offers add supported model. Some websites have been subscription only for a while now.
I do pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime.
For some reason, Google is not really customer friendly. It is so bothersome - just yesterday, I had to watch an ad which interrupted a paid promotion segment in a youtube video. Reminds me of an old Onion article about a starbucks opening inside the restroom of another starbucks. [1]
Some content creators have explicitly opted for non-monetization on their videos, yet ads are shown before, after, and during.
Given Google's frequent change of mind, it's really probable that they amend the terms and conditions so that even premium users have to watch a few ads.
[1] https://www.theonion.com/new-starbucks-opens-in-rest-room-of...
Is one obliged to be moral when dealing with an amoral company?
No one is forcing them to stream me free data. What I do with the data they send me is none of their business. I've never consented or given them permission to access me.
Said differently, this is clearly an arms race. I have more trust in uBlock winning an arms race than any other extension. If it fails then I don't believe any other will succeed.
Relevant green text: https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png
In particular, ads can get stacked if the user doesn't skip, and they get two or three ads where they would only have gotten one if they skipped the first. Then some of the ads will stop at the last frame (I think I saw that on mobile game ads that have a store button ? didn't pay attention so might be mistaken though) until the skip button is pressed.
I think the only question for Google is how much advertiser will pay to annoy their users and when will a user just give up and do something else (I'm with you on the moment of quiet: having ads show up is a good sign to close youtube and go do something else)
But the it ignores the fact that it may be able to work just because it's small.
It makes me sad watching people get excited about releasing their totally new, innovative YouTube extensions as if this is a welcoming space.
These extensions don't exist because they get destroyed not because it's a space ripe for innovation.
[1]https://thenextweb.com/news/how-youtube-killed-an-extension-... [2]https://imgur.com/15gaOf6
I also see many people capitulating, especially among my peers who realize that spending potentially hours every month keeping up with the latest adblocker tricks is not a good use of their time relative to the trivial amount of money they’re saving on YT premium.
The die hards will always fight this battle and don’t seem to care how much effort it takes. Some people derive a sense of satisfaction from gaming the system or “winning” against corporations. They all have their justifications, but it doesn’t matter much.
As long as it’s sufficiently annoying to deal with, the number of people fighting it and succeeding will be negligible small. The problem was when as blockers were so easy that they jumped from a small number of techie users and started catching on among the general public. Once an ad-supported company starts seeing a significant number of users evading the ads and also refusing to pay, they have to do something.
Definitely. The next phase is an AI agent "watching" (through the "analog hole") if necessary and applying computer vision systems to detect and remove ads.
Plugging directly into the computer as a separate device that emulates monitor, mouse and keyboard.
Should YouTube be a free service or what?
It's only a semi-ironic question. Perhaps someone has a vision for how it all works out.
Full disclosure: I work on programmatic advertising technologies.
What is being destroyed by YouTube's current policy that led to this anti adblock attempt, is pushing too far with the ads.
Crap quality and overstuffed.
A 5 second ad on a 4 minute video? Fine.
1:30 ad, one of TWO... on same video?
Fuck. That. Noise.
It's the same segmentation issue as piracy, y'all get hyperfocused on the group that will NEVER play ball, and ruin the experience so much for those that would, that they "swap teams".
If users blocking ads is enough to make the service unprofitable, the service should switch to a paid model or shut down.
It's an adversarial relationship. The service is within their rights to shove ads down your throat, and you're within your rights to fight back.
(I pay for YouTube Premium)
The amount of effort people spend on these sophist explanations of why they don’t have to pay for the services they use is just amazing.
Those services are fooling themselves.
Consider television. Is it immoral to mute the TV during a commercial? No. Is it immoral to go get up and get a snack or go to the bathroom during a commercial? No. TV advertisers have absolutely no expectation that TV viewers will watch their ads. So why's it that when it comes to internet advertising all the advertisers suddenly wring their hands and whine and moan about their poor business model? Ads are nonsense, I won't watch them, stop wasting my time with them, and if you want to cover costs for your service, charge me for the privilege to access it. In the meantime, if you're foolishly giving away something for free, I'm going to consume it without remorse.
The entire ad business model is nonsense, and it's not our responsibility as consumers to prop up the companies that have based their fragile fortunes on it.
I believe consumers are in their right, moral or not, to block ads, and Youtube/Google is in their right to disable ad blockers.
I am wondering if someone has a solution because I would really be interested in hearing it.
I'm way more likely to donate to a channel I like than I am to put up with loud annoying obnoxious ads for things I'm never going to buy anyway if I don't have to.
There's one I like, or at least used to, King's Fine Woodworking, that.. I don't know he clearly has some setting enabled that others don't, that means his channel is plastered in text link ads that just make it look crap, and you have to scroll way down to get to 'Uploads' (vs playlists of old videos you've seen before). Ads cheapen every channel they touch, the more there are the worse it is. 'Creators' are better off focussing on direct monetisation imo. Or sponsored unbiased content, product reviews etc. where it is actually related to the channel. Not like VPNs or backup battery systems are everywhere.
I do understand that means maybe they have to show more to people not blocking them, or start charging, or something. I'm not saying it should be provided free and adless, I'm just saying that doesn't matter, it's not the point, if it's free and can be adless then it will be. It's not my job to make sure it's sustainable by sitting through ads.
Yes. They were loss leader for more than a decade and killed all competition because nobody had coffers deep enough to fight Google. Now because of their dominant position it’s impossible to migrate from it, because of network effect.
So f** them, not my problem. I’m willing to pay for stuff that I enjoy (old videos from 10+ years ago), I’m not going to pay for modern cancer (just open YouTube in incognito tab to understand what I mean).
Google did destroy the competition on the space forcing a monopoly.
So if there was a similar competing service with the same content quality and revenue models, would you subscribe/watch the ads?
Don’t misunderstand me, I do watch YouTube ads on my TV, but I’m pissed that nobody can challenge them anymore.
Would the advertisers really want to pay for their ads to be shown to people who aren't interested in their products? Every ad view costs them money. (I know, there are also the advertisers who just want to spread their message and aren't selling any products..)
If the ads are actually useful to people, would they still jump through all these hoops to block them?
The ad supported model is only sustainable for the ad company if it is a win for both advertisers AND end users.
"You are not paying for the (premium) service, so we will degrade your service and force you to watch ads so we can pay our bills" is usually a sign that youtube is chasing after short term profits at the detriment of it's own advertisers / end users imo.
I know this is a little too simplistic and I don't have any real answers... but this is how i'm looking at this whole debacle.
Second, Youtube gained outsized winner-take-all popularity by the anticompetitive dumping of hosting and development effort at below the apparent cost. This created a simulation of the early Internet's liberating spirit while killing any competitors that could have been based around sustainable economics (ideally some combination of publisher hosting plus p2p). Blocking ads is continuing the relationship as Youtube created it.
Third, just fuck ads in general. The original post is a fun piece of art, but even seeing those three quick blips in the demo video was still an unneeded mental attack. The less I have to suffer and mentally repel corporate attempts at faking social proof, especially interruptive video/audio ones, the better my life is. If I could get AR glasses that blocked billboards, I would.
My only concern of Youtube somehow going out of business would be losing the back catalog, which I think is better served by independent archiving rather than framing business revenue as some kind of collective responsibility.
When I'm given the choice, I only pay companies that I respect. If they successfully block ad blockers, I'll mute the ads and do something else while they're playing.
I'm fine paying for YouTube as soon as it's not in Google's hands. Until then, I'd consider it an ethical wrong for me to pay for it.