YouTube now flooding your ad-block with "fake" ads that slow the browser
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I wonder how much money they're spending in trying to fight this rat race. It's not just engineering hours but also people switching from chrome to Firefox, and the bad press associated with it.
I never thought adblocker usage was so prevalent, but this is just personal experience. No one I knew personally, normal people I mean, used adblocked. I remember I had a class in university where they encouraged people to install adblock, only a handful of us already had it installed. There were some pretty interesting ethical arguments for using adblock, sad that I can barely remember any!
Besides Google does other things to slow YouTube down on Firefox so this isn’t really a compelling reason to switch browsers for most people. They’ll likely just disable their ad blocker. For the person who values privacy that much, they’re likely staying off Google properties anyway, and for the average user, their YouTube experience is more important.
There’s 2 different issues here: privacy and user experience. A lot of YT users are probably signed in to YT through their gmail/google account, in which case the ad blocker is not providing them privacy. If you don’t care about privacy and only care about user experience (e.g. not seeing any ads) there will not be an alternative to YT for long that can operate free to the user without showing ads.
Most people will opt for a better content catalog, load times, and device battery life over leaving YT, even the computer savvy.
We're a drop in the ocean, unfortunately.
It’s hard to find concrete data but I’ve seen everything from 30% up to 70% depending on the type of audience.
"Ad blockers are an important way of safeguarding users online, since they effectively protect against malware attacks carried out by externally embedded advertising."
https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Themen/Verbraucherinnen-und-Verbr...
Ads do finance some infrastructure, especially platforms like youtube and large commercial social media sites. But that is not all infrastructure at all and I believe there is a strong ethical case that you should protect people from unwanted advertising in any case.
That was... not a bad thing?
It seems like there's a sometimes-auto-downgrading where any video above 360 p gets throttled and causes buffering. I've recently been trying out a Chrome extension called Clear Skies which has been working well. It's not an adblocker but it does hide and skip ads and avoids the performance hit that I was seeing previously when viewing youtube with Firefox.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/time-make-amends-googl...
on a serious note, i can't reproduce with firefox maybe it's not rolled out yet
Seriously, though, advertisement is a tumor on society. It's psychological manipulation we've allowed for profit purposes. I don't think we take it seriously enough. It's an addiction machine and a life waster, designed to ruin your brain slowly over time. I consider hyper-consumerism an addiction, but even if you look past that into food, tobacco, alcohol, and medicine you'll see "real" addiction.
Anyway, my pet theory is that if advertisement was simply banned we'd solve a lot of problems. Ones we don't even intend to solve.
Music videos, DJ mixes, live music streams, 10 hours of _____, classical for studying, etc. all pop up in Music.
It's actually kind of nice if you spend any time on things like lofi girl, DJ mixes, "___ Hours of ___ for ___", since Music's interface is more lightweight and those videos can be added to otherwise audio-only playlists.
when looking at these thing you gotta ask yourself what would happen if everybody does it ? would the company be satisfied and say yes we got enough money, or would they just try to squeeze more juice out of you because where else would you go ?
So you can already do exactly what you want with just the single subscription. I'm sure you're delighted to hear this, and won't react by moving the goalposts.
I want to say this snark is unjustified, but I also wouldn't be willing to bet on it.
Yes.
> I support creators directly because it’s a more fair exchange imo
Ok that's nice. But what you're doing is an add-on, not a replacement for the original product being sold at the seller's terms (what you're complaining about).
If the creators you want to support choose to distribute their content exclusively from an ad-funded system, then you have no choice to but to either (1) watch the ads (2) pay to not watch the ads or 3) stop supporting the creator.
If you choose (2) and the creators still sneak ads into their content, then you have still the choice to (2a) watch the ads (2b) fast forward the ads (3) stop supporting the creator.
You're choosing (1) and then complaining that you have to watch ads, which doesn't make sense.
And again, I'm not complaining about anything. I run adblockers, my youtube consumption is probably < 30 minutes a year so it's not even an issue for me personally. I'm just pointing out the double standard applied to creators: we're hurting them when we block ads but we should be fine getting served ads from them even when we're paying for an ad free experience.
Why that double standard exists? No clue.
Well this thread is about how using an adblocker is becoming increasingly difficult, which is causing a lot of upset. And "contribute in other ways" is not really a solution. If everyone did what you do, YouTube would shut down.
> I'm just pointing out the double standard applied to creators
I don't think it's a double standard. The creators are choosing to inject ads into their content because they want more money. If people like you were paying for Premium instead of blocking ads maybe they wouldn't feel the need to do this as often, who knows.
Either way, it's their choice and they're free to make their channel 99% ads if they think it will benefit them. As a paying Premium subscriber, I don't like injected ads either. If I see them I fast forward, and if that gets too annoying then I unsubscribe.
Absolutely, I'm just asking why they get a pass. If companies do it we're all enraged but if creators do it it's fine. It's just plain weird.
> If I see them I fast forward
Would you do the same if youtube started showing you ads even though you're subscribed to premium? Would you just shrugh it out as a "well they want more money"? I'd bet no, you'd probably be pissed and rightfully so.
I agree, I don't know why people criticize Google but not the creators. Personally, I'm not criticizing either.
> I'd bet no, you'd probably be pissed and rightfully so.
I'd be disappointed, and then I'd have to decide if I wanted to keep paying them or take my business elsewhere. I wouldn't be pissed, though. Because Google doesn't owe me anything.
Just like the creators, they're running a business, so it is what it is. I believe in free markets and if Google stops making a product worth paying for it will work itself out via a competitor taking market share or something else.
I feel strongly about that, and in general, I'm willing to pay to avoid ads, or to forego things that have unavoidable ads.
As far is the web goes, I've been blocking ads since ~2000 (using Intermute's AdSubtract at the time).
One time I took a plane flight where they began the flight by turning off the in-flight entertainment controls, playing some ads on the in-seat TVs, and piping the audio over the plane's PA system. I wrote to the airline as well as the advertisers to express my disgust for that practice. (Thankfully, that doesn't seem to have become a regular thing since then.)
The only ads I'm subjected to on any regular basis are highway billboards, and I write to my representatives every year or two to remind them that we should ban billboards, or at least hold a referendum so that citizens can decide whether we should be allowing them. (Which I expect would pass overwhelmingly, with a margin like the Alaskan ballot measure.)
So, yeah, that's how I feel about ads.
As I've said, the problem with YouTube Premium is just that it's bad value for my use... if I stop being able to access ad-free YouTube, it's probably cheaper for me to just stop fixing my own things (e.g. I'll pay the dealer to swap my air filters and I'll just throw out the sodastream and buy a new one.) I guess if I ever run into high-value things to fix myself, I'll just churn YouTube like people do other streaming platforms; sign up for Premium, fix my thing, (and save the video, assuming yt-dlp still works) and then cancel my subscription.
It's also worth mentioning that Youtube Premium will only help Google build better profiles of its subscribers. Subscribers will be required to surrender their contact information and be forced to log in before watching videos.
So how do you suggest we fund content creators? Or should they all just start working for free to entertain you without exposing you to those horrible dangerous ads?
Name one. And please make sure your solution actually exists and isn't just a fantasy of how the world should work.
> It's also a poor excuse as most of them can't live off of what Google pays them to begin with
It's not all or nothing. Creators can be incentivised to earn money even if it's not enough to live off of. And by the way, many do quite well, to the point where it replaces and surpasses their family income.
YouTube would not be what it is today without the money incentive.
> Not to mention that Google's bots can take away that revenue on a whim
Agree but that's a risk they've determined is worth taking, again because of the money incentive.
Patreon, Nebula, Floatplane
Looks like barely any content on there compared to YouTube. Probably an steep uphill battle for them to get to the point where creators can make anything close to what they can make today on YouTube. And I can only watch one video before I have to get my credit card out. Hard pass.
> Patreon, Floatplane
I don't think the "subscription fee per content creator" model is a good comparison. We have subscription fatique already. Imagine if YouTube required you pay $/month per channel to watch anything. No way.
What a ridiculous assumption. If you can't even agree that conducting mass surveillance or distributing malware should be off limits, there's nothing you can do to make me take your claims seriously.
> It's not all or nothing.
Exactly, Google doesn't have to screw over people this hard to deliver ads. But they do it because they can.
> And by the way, many do quite well, to the point where it replaces and surpasses their family income.
That sounds exactly like what you'd hear from a get rich quick scheme. Still doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people aren't going to "make it." It's not a reliable source of income.
> Agree but that's a risk they've determined is worth taking
Creators haven't determined anything, they just have no choice because network effects and barrier to entry is granting Google a monopoly.
Everybody has a choice.
You've decided to boycott Google (I'm assuming, otherwise you're a massive hypocrite), which is also a perfectly fine choice.
If it’s on a centralized site like bandcamp or YouTube/Vimeo, that’s fine. If not, I can host the files myself.
Source: my own experience. I never use Youtube directly. I use Peertube to distribute whatever video content I publish - not much but there is some - and use a proxy of some sorts whenever I have to get something from Youtube. When the proxy stops working - which happens every now and then since they are essentially web scrapers - I search elsewhere using my own SearxNG instance. If I do not find the video elsewhere I usually just wait for the proxy to start working again. Only in exceptional circumstances will I go to the Youtube site directly and in those cases only in a 'private' browser window/tab. I do not remember the last time I had to do this so it is not a regular occurrence but what I do remember for the few times I visited that site is just how slow and bloated it is compared to my normal way of using it.
- Stats on what I watch
- Stats on how far in I watch
- Whether I skip over embedded host-read advertising
- What I search for
- What sidebar vids I tend to click on and whether I watch those or tap out
All of this information is already sold to other companies, and already used to push ads in the Google search results. They can f*$% off with their ads in the video.
That's not how it works. This information gets them money by displaying targeted ads that advertisers pay for. If they can't show you ads, collecting and processing that data is pure cost.