YouTube is loading slower for users with ad blockers yet again
tomsguide.com
tomsguide.com
uBlock Origin is not affected.
I posted this on HN earlier today[1], but it unfortunately gained no traction. I guess outrage spreads easier. Gorhill explicitly points out some websites that spread the outrage, but not the real diagnosed issue.
However I tend to do youtube while signed in, and I also consume youtube on my phone, perhaps they are happy they push enough adverts to my when I use a phone that they ignore the browser use.
One must be careful with these kinds of posts that imply YouTube is exerting network effect forces on its users as a way to squeeze revenue.
I mean, yeah that scenario is plausible, and the slow performance observation can be construed of such an action; however, one must also be careful and play devil's advocate in these ones, for a balanced debate to happen.
Because it has not been updated to the problematic version, which is 5.17. In fact AdBlock on AMO is still 5.4.2, i.e. 13 versions behind latest official AdBlock version, it was last updated in Feb. 2023.
What has been happening to me is that, for the last decade or so, I only see ads in languages that I don’t speak or understand. I wrote about it—a lot. Nothing. A friend worked as the head of Analytics for that part of YouTube and he told me, “They don’t care.” I pointed out that it’s so common that Antonio Garcia Martinez wrote about it in his book _Chaos Monkeys_ (in 2012) and estimated that, at the time, it costs Facebook 4% of their ad revenue. I can confirm because I raised that point internally not once (in 2016 and it was fixed) but twice (the fix was overruled and I saw it again in 2020). In 2024, they are still wasting their time and energy, and 4% of Meta’s revenues isn’t chump change.
That’s not counting on pervasive ads for alcohol (illegal where I am), gambling (having an opt-out is mandatory in most jurisdictions), tax evading services (also illegal where I am), and specifically on Threads and Twitter, literal prostitution, and/or romance scams (I didn’t investigate which, tried to report, but was told that’s fine by their community guidelines).
I’m not a security researcher, and I refuse to investigate further than strictly necessary for my sanity (I expect deserved judgment from this community for that) however, in spite of that, I know ads are a constant vector for malware. Not much is done to address basic vectors, like not running any executable code in ads.
The only reason why enormous waste at scale, rampant illegal activity, and gaping security holes aren’t the only topics of conversation online is that everyone who can explain what’s happening has opted out. Forcing them back in isn’t the solution.
> Beauties From Eastern Europe > Chat and meet real Slavic women > Sponsored > love-stories
with a photo (presumably AI-generated) where to be completely honest, I could see that she was wearing red lacey underwear and had had a full bikini wax.
Do you know what kind of question I want to have from my boss when discussing a vendor? NOT WHY DOES GOOGLE THINK I WOULD FINANCIALLY SUPPORT LITERAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING.
So guess what I’m activating on my browser to NOT GET FIRED.
A brain the size of a planet, and Google still can't figure out this is the last thing I would click on?
So several times a week, i got YT Ads in russian. I did not understand a word.
I get the joke that it reveals what I do in private. I’ve made it myself when people are complaining about Twitter—usually after confirming the rest of their activity matches the prejudice that I’m lobbing at them. What I can assure you is not happening, in public or in private, is me speaking Finnish or Cantonese.
I like seeing ads for conferences (assuming my boss will grant me the budget to go and not assume I’m supporting human trafficking). And, as I mentioned, I’m comparing vendors, so seeing ads for competitors of what I’m searching now would be great (relevant ones comparing their offers, not funneling to pointless sales calls with people who couldn’t get out of Vim if they ever figure out how to start a computer).
Perhaps I misunderstand how their models work, but aren't they wasting only their customers' time and energy (and money)?
Most Meta’s “customers,” the advertisers, see a higher number of ads shown per client acquired. That doesn’t really change their decision to advertise, and their budget as long as the cost per client (click to the site or converted client, depending) is the same.
Therefore, I’d argue users aren’t that impacted (unless you count not seeing a relevant ad as a bad thing, which I would, but that’s controversial); advertisers have less impact than they could, but it’s not that it costs them, as much they don’t pay for something they didn’t get. Meta is the one loosing 4% of their potential revenues.
But admittedly, it’s a wider, complex, integrated system. I’d rather not feel like an increasingly large chunk of it is gambling, tax evasion, and human trafficking.
But the ad supported model seems to have slipped past the fair-to-viewers into the completely obnoxious and unbearable to nearly all viewers, so something has to give. Additionally it seems like content producers are getting a smaller amount than they used to get so it's less of an attractive platform, probably more so since the competitors showed up.
The recent change to Amazon Prime, where everyone using "Prime Video" was already "paying for prime video", which recently added advertising, with a new $2.99/month no ads option, implies that even if everyone "paid for premium" the siren song of advertising money would be too difficult for Google/YT to ignore, and even premium would then eventually begin to be infested with advertising.
I think it would be a net gain for the world as people would flock to better platforms with less censorship.
And you want to burn it down because "censorship"... How revealing.
Nobody would benefit from YouTube going down, only assholes who want to watch things collapse because they have no self worth.
YouTube is one of the biggest pilars of education, entertainment, knowledge and history on the internet. Billions of people have been entertained and educated with this website...
From where I sit, YT looks like one of the worst inventions humanity has ever created.
> it bears mentioning that YouTube is one of the last driving treasures of the internet
and you fail to comment on that blanket statement, your bias pierces the pretend mantle of objectivity in which you cloak yourself.
YouTube the site where people can dump videos is incredibly useful because there are visual tutorials for everything.
YouTube the site where people form parasocial relationships with flat-earth-fluencers and break their brains is the worst invention since leaded gasoline.
I am curious to see how this plays out for YouTube and all the social media platforms out there. I am certainly rooting for YouTube to be able to successfully walk that line as it is by far the most valuable platform to me personally.
I met a guy who came out of poverty initially as a backhoe operator, how did he learn? YT, he literally mimiced fist person video of machine operation.
When I want to buy quality toold, ProjectFarm on youtube (of interest to anyone with even slight interst in tools and machines) provides a more objective and comprehensive analysis than any I've yet to see.
YouTube is the toughest one, since it's the videos created by people that I value and care about, rather than YouTube the product. I don't want people to stop producing good content, but I also don't want to support Google financially.
My compromise has been to use an ad-blocker, and to subscribe to the Patreon (or equivalent) of everyone who I watch regularly. It costs me more than a premium subscription would, but at least I feel my money's going where I want it to.
I was willing to pay for "no ads", YouTube had the perfect product for me, Premium Lite, which I gladly paid for 2 years until I got an email in October:
> Subject: Your Premium Lite membership will be discontinued
> Thank you for being one of our first Premium Lite members.
> We’re writing to let you know that after October 25, 2023, we will no longer offer your version of Premium Lite. While we understand this may be disappointing news, we continue to work on different versions of Premium Lite as we incorporate feedback from our users, creators, and partners. [emphasis mine on the bullshit]
> To show our appreciation, we’re offering a 1 - month trial of Premium (even if you’ve had a trial before). With Premium, you can watch videos ad - free, offline, and in the background. Plus, stream music ad - free in the YouTube Music app.
I don't need nor want the other features, just no ads, and paid for it for 2 years. Then YouTube decided to fuck me over and force me into a more expensive subscription tier, fuck them, I'll use ad blockers for as long as they work.
Come to think of it, I think I have 2 ATM; Apple Music through my Apple One thing, and through my ISP.
Though in the case of Jay Foremans channel; those can actually be entertaining.
No reason YouTube Premium should be more expensive than Spotify or Netflix.
As an additional note - I have previously subscribed to YouTube premium and constantly had issues with it repeatedly logging me out, and reverting back to showing me ads. Frustrating! Sure it wasn't intentional but felt like double-dipping.
Although my assumption (which could be incorrect) is that storage is not the main driver for cost. For Netflix and Spotify I assume their major cost would be licencing, which YouTube mostly gets to forgo. For YouTube, I would assume bandwidth / data transfer is the biggest factor.
However, they've removed that plan again.
What do they think is going to happen? We'll just be like 'oh well, sorry, we are going to remove adblock'?
LOL, I'd rather write a bypass myself then do this and give it to all my friends who can't code while I'm at it.
In the meantime, I set up a throwaway Google and set that YT profile to have the same subscriptions. Will I pay for YT Premium? Unlikely, but they could make me a pricing offer that's tantalizing enough. I've learned more dev stuff from YT that any Udemy-esque learning service out there.
Even if you splice on a geo & language basis, there are two basic kinds of interest-based audience targeting: content and users.
Putting ads on topic-specific content is OK for brand advertising, but you got to watch out for saturation - you're wasting money if you show the same ads over and over again to the same person. So you want to stop showing a brand ad if someone has seen it too many times already.
Showing ads based on user interests has better performance for action campaigns. It relies on some way of tracking the user and / or their interests, but it leads to better conversion as part of a marketing / sales funnel. So you need to select the ad dynamically based on the interests of the user.
All this adds up to making it hard to avoid dynamically choosing the ads to show. I think it's still probably possible with careful I/O to do the media stream concatenation server-side, and I expect it's probably the direction things will eventually go, as long as latency etc. works out.
Most modern video formats can be sliced and spliced at certain frames without needing to recompress or anything like that. If you operate all your own cache servers (which youtube do, AFAIK) you could splice a different ad into every stream, in real time.
Youtube would have to be careful, as plenty of users are used to being able to refer to timestamps in the video. Right now people are used to telling someone the interesting bit is 2735 seconds into that video lecture, and that's a time without ads counted.
I bought LG OLED TV and WebOS had been utter piece of shit so far. Disconnected it from the internet as soon as I got the Shield (I can also use Shield's remote to control the TV itself)
My amplifier is quite old, so it doesn't have HDMI in or something.
I'm sure Google considers itself all-powerful, but in this case they cannot win. They should look at what happened with the music industry and attempt to engage instead of punish.
Basically Mass surveillance, stop tracking me and I will pay, which is what meta was forced to offer in the EU ( that is also reportedly Not enough, as you can't lock public rights behind a pay wall. )
The content was a advert anyway
It ran from 2016 to 2023, they tried celebs like Will Smith and youtubers like PewDiePie, a variety of episode lengths and formats, and even some content in different languages.
They don't produce it any more; I suspect it was not a commercial success.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_YouTube_Premium_origin...
But even then it goes indefinitely deep: How about a video player that skips ahead once the buffer has enough frames and then plays the ad in the background while showing the caches video? So you need to disable seeking entirely. But what about an extension that preloads videos in your timeline to a buffer of the average ad length and then play from cache and put the ad in the background. So you have to introduce DRM, but I can do the thing above from outside the browser...
I suppose you'd either need to lock down the entire system, have crasy detection algorithms or make the bar just high enough that most people won't bother.
It seems like a lazy effort and one they can spin into advocating for legislation against ad-blockers. There is an argument from some that ad-blockers are piracy tools which is asinine but could easily be sold to older legislators.
I half wonder if they're misapplying whatever filter they have.
try switching your DNS to the google one. I had some issue with the cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1) with youtube, but switching to 8.8.8.8 seems to have fixed it.
Could also be a local DNS cache issue unrelated to the actual DNS, which a switch fixed - i cannot say for sure.
I really hope in some sort of long-term compromise, where adblockers are slightly disadvantaged (slower speed, lower resolution), but can still access YouTube without any login or obstacles.
Look what happened to Facebook, twitter...
"circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage, or otherwise interfere with the Service"
may apply.
If someone doesn't want you on their site, and you haven't paid, they have zero obligation to let you stay. tos aren't binding, they're just a list of things people think you should know.