YouTube stops working for millions as war against ad blockers intensifies
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Pay for the stuff you use or don't use it. But you don't get to complain about companies treating you like the product.
A Youtube family plan is a fairly cheap way to access a lot of content. You also get access to Youtube Music which is... fine. That's less than $5 per user per month. If you are already there a few hours a week, it's a steal.
What's funny is that creators and Youtube get much more than 2x the amount of earnings from $5 than from all the ads you were being served. If more people paid, creators would probably resort to fewer of the much, much worse VPN or game ads that get hard-baked right into the vids.
if Youtube Premium included SponsorBlock, I might pay for it
The last time I tried YouTube Premium, I found out that the iOS app will frequently loose your last viewed video in the background, because I turned off the playback history. I would turn it on, except it is the only way of stopping Google from using your views for, you guessed it, targeted advertising.
This makes sense, because Premium users are more attractive advertising targets. The only way to be truly safe is with an adblocker.
But the actual way to stop Google from using your view for ad targeting is just turn off personalized ads. Or - in the unlikely case you object only to use of YouTube history but not other data - there appears to be a separate control just for that:
https://myadcenter.google.com/u/1/controls/ads-data/youtube-...
If you don't trust those settings, why would you trust the setting to turn off history?
The last straw was the most recent price increase for no benefit other than more revenue for Google. I unsubscribed, and mostly stay away from YouTube now. The value isn't worth the cost, whether its paid using with my attention or my dollars.
If you consider that any track or music video ever uploaded to Youtube is now in their library, available to be thrown in any offline playlist, that's pretty cool. I have a bunch of old Japanese jazz albums that never got US distribution in one playlist. I have a bunch of random vaporwave and remixes in another. And I have another that is ambient noises for sleeping on the road.
I pay for Kagi because it does what I want it to and it doesn’t spy on me. With YouTube you get shitty product that spies on you.
but do you think the people who make content on Youtube get paid for it ?
The vast majority of them, no.
Remember how Youtube came to life ?
I run Firefox + ublock origin + decenteraleyes + sponserblock + privacy-badger. I never see ads anywhere.
Since these Google article started coming out, I fear youtube is going to stop working... And yet, through the last few months, I haven't noticed any changes. All videos play instantly and with no ads.
I suggest that YouTube should work on proving to the users that advertisers are trustworthy. You know, that unlike LiveIntent, an advertiser will allow and acknowledge a complaint, has a contact address, is not arrogant as hell.
The obvious reason they haven't added in ads is that the subscription model is more profitable, and the lack of ads is the only reason anyone is actually subscribing. The moment that stops being the case and they start showing ads on videos again, even at a lower frequency, is the moment they burn a $10 billion / year business to the ground.
So I don't think it'll happen. But if it does, so what? I'll just cancel my subscription for the future, and likely stop using YouTube entirely. It won't erase the benefits I had from the subscription until then. Like, they can't make me retroactively watch ads.