YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads | Hacker News Reader

YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads

theverge.com

67 pointsMBCook64 comments

YouTube 2030: the entire interface is a single button "I'm feeling lucky". You insert a coin and click the button, the screen starts changing rapidly a kaleidoscope of pictures until it randomly selects one. It's ad that you must watch before you can press the button again. When you press the button again, the whole process repeats and it again shows an ad. After many tries you score a win, finally: a video of some guy advertising something. The dopamine rush gives you energy for the next round of attempts. Eventually you run out of money, unable to remember what you'd watched that day. YouTube always wins, as the old wisdom says.

So the net result of taking media away from legacy industries and handing it over to tech is (1) unskippable ads, (2) surveillance, (3) censorship and revocation of media you don't physically own, and now (4) unpausable media.

>So the net result of taking media away from legacy industries and handing it over to tech is (1) unskippable ads, (2) surveillance, (3) censorship and revocation of media you don't physically own, and now (4) unpausable media.

No. First, legacy industries didn't have media "taken away" from them. They simply refused to adapt to new technology quickly enough, so new media (WWW) became popular, which replaced the old media the legacy industries were working with (newsprint, OTA TV).

1. a. You can skip ads using an ad-blocker. They work extremely well. Lots of people refuse to educate themselves about them, and even when their tech-savvy friend shows it to them or even installs one for them, they don't use it.

1. b. The legacy industries didn't let you skip ads either: if you were reading a newspaper, the ad was right there next to the text. If you were watching TV, you had to sit through commercials (which were generally timed to appear at the same time on all stations, so you couldn't change channels to avoid them). DVRs didn't come about until much later.

3. "censorship": Legacy industries only printed or aired stuff they wanted you to see, and since there were only a small handful of choices, that wasn't much.

revocation: the tech companies haven't taken anything away. You can still buy CDs and Blu-Rays, but people choose to subscribe to streaming services instead. Also, you can download anything you want from YouTube with yt-dlp.

4. This isn't unpausable, they just show ads during pauses (if you refuse to use an ad-blocker).

I'm glad prevalent behavior is to not use ad blockers. It turns watching ads a tax on ignorance, and lets that usage fly under the radar.

This is an understandable position, and probably explains why ad-blockers have been tolerated for so long, however it seems it isn't working so well any more because the media giants have been pouring a lot of resources in recent years into defeating ad-blockers. Many websites will refuse to load the page until you turn off the ad-blocker (of course it's an arms race, as the ad-blockers will figure out how to block this ad-block detection), YouTube is apparently working very hard at defeating ad-blocking (with varied results so far), etc. So it seems that ad-blockers have gotten popular enough that these companies believe they're "losing" too much money (i.e., not getting money they think they should) to ad-blocking and are stepping up efforts to fight back.

Of course, the worse they make the ads, the more people turn to ad-blockers. Back when ads were new, no one really cared much about a banner ad here or there. But then the advertisers came up with pop-up ads, and users (rightfully) revolted, and tools to block these ads were devised, even building them directly into web browsers because these pop-ups were so awful. The same is happening now, I believe: YouTube ads weren't so annoying in the past, only showing at the video start, but now they inject 30-minute ads at random times, so more and more users are turning to blockers.

> YouTube is apparently working very hard at defeating ad-blocking (with varied results so far), etc.

They could embed the ad in the video stream. It would be a pita to circumvent. Essentially you'd need to record the video and fast skip the ads.

There must be technical reasons that YouTube hasn't already used this approach, otherwise it seems that they would have done it by now. I'm guessing it would require transcoding for every video played, and the energy cost of that (even with optimized GPU units for this job) just isn't worth what they get paid in ads.

this isn't Hades II. the media still pauses.

On mainline youtube, for now at least. Just look at how unusable youtube shorts are. Want to rewind? Too bad for you.

Never understood the appeal of "take as much control from user as possible" for shorts. Maybe I wouldnt actively hate it if it allowed basic playback control, but for some reason Youtube thinks thats not cool anymore.

If you want to go back on YouTube Shorts you just pause the short and swipe at the bottom (on mobile) and on desktop you don’t even have to pause first, you can just hover the scrubber and drag it around.

This did used to suck, but it’s been more a case of the YouTube Shorts player being very behind TikTok and the regular YouTube player and they’ve only slowly made changes. I would argue they took too long to make these QoL improvements, but they did make them.

I am ashamed to admit that, once or twice, I was curious enough to want to rewind an ad, but that does seem impossible. (Thankfully, commenting on them is impossible as well.)

That is somewhat strange since, if the ad was useful, you'd might wanna watch it again. In theory.

Like, there is no 'ad viewing history' either.

I guess the ad industry does not care about useful at all nowadays.

Older commercials was filled with stats, properties and arguments. Like a TV shop channel. Nowadays it mainly seems to be some Amazon sellers that try to convince you with that tactic.

Just add YouTube Shorts redirect to your browser. It's still available as regular videos.

I had no idea that was an option, thanks for the tip!

Replace shorts with v in the url to get the regular player

I pay for YouTube Premium and saw a full browser screen ad for adding the MAX channel. I wasn’t sure if I clicked on something or if this is a new thing they’re doing. I’ll be pretty unhappy if the latter.

I swapped to Revanced on mobile and a combo of UBO + sponsorblock on desktop after the most recent price increase. Definitely not regretting it after hearing this.

So, instead of canceling you subscription and using a competing service, you instead choose to... steal? Classy.

More like cutting out the funnies from a newspaper and trashing the ads.

But you bought the news paper (or someone else did).

FYI I use revenced as well, it's just your argument doesn't sound very sane.

Newspapers are actually also financed by ads, the few dollars people pay don't cover for the production costs and journalism...

Like a sibling comment mentioned, I was considering that newspapers got non-trivial amounts of funding from ads. Classifieds in particular, if I remember correctly. If that's still not satisfactory, then just consider the case of free papers & magazines.

You could argue that paying for the internet service to reach a website is equivalent to buying the newspaper.

How? Buying the newspaper pays the people printing the newspaper and making the paper. Whereas not a cent from paying for internet service goes to third party websites like YouTube.

It's like saying stealing from stores is okay because paying taxes for the upkeep of roads is equivalent to paying for the stores.

Physical newspapers lost money on printing and distribution. Subscription fees and purchase price did not cover the cost of printing and distributing that bundle of paper. The vast majority of their income was from ads. So your argument is really even worse with that in mind - physical newspapers were more dependent on ads than internet websites. And even with that in mind, I don't think anyone would say having a robot cutting out newspaper ads to be stealing.

It's funny that this poor argument is used as a justification for the use of poor arguments.

It's not really a poor argument. This was the understanding of how the internet worked before we decided to use the internet to replace TV. There was never a guarantee of payment to anyone running a public web server.

But I think you've highlighted exactly why net neutrality is terrible in practice (people effectively stealing bandwidth by blocking ads).

This is a terms of service violation at best. There's no theft, nor even copyright infringement.

The obvious parallel is Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios which established that time shifting - recording a TV broadcast to play back later - is fair use.

Someone using a DVR with a "+30 seconds" button to skip an ad was not stealing from the broadcast company.

What competition? All the videos are on YouTube.

Dailymotion, Vimeo, PeerTube, Odysee, etc.

I’ll give you Dailymotion, but…

Vimeo hasn’t tried being a direct YouTube competitor in years — just look and use their site at any point after 2014? 2016? It’s been a while.

While I’d like to see PeerTube succeed, it is hardly a competitor. The content is very… early.

So, instead of staying sane and do the right thing to vote with wallet, you instead choose to... be the big-corp-bootlicker and shill? Nice.

why are you here? are you lost?

I'm a premium subscriber too, and got a full page ad (that was hard to dismiss) for -- I don't really remember -- something related to football, I think?

Regardless, that was way over the line and so I am finally leaving YouTube entirely. Screw them.

It takes my breath away every time someone says they're paying for YouTube.

I only pay ($2.50 a month) because they killed youtube vanced project, and I want to use it on my phone without ads and with the screen off. I signed up with a VPN in a developing country to make it much cheaper

It's not so hard to understand. I pay because I don't want to see the ads, but I do want to see the videos.

Before you tell me about all the ways to just block the YouTube ads, I know about them. They just aren't for me.

Why? No ads + Youtube Music is a good deal.

Yeah. Why don’t they just steal and not support creators.

I pay for content I like.

That's a curious thing to say. YT pays some creators hundreds of millions a year, and my mental picture is that "people who care about supporting the creators" would normally also not be ok with such a skewed distribution.

How much will YT pay creators if everyone blocks ads?

Or is it ok because it’s a two tier system? Those who know how to block ads get it for free and those who don’t just keep suffering through more and more ads to carry the freeloaders?

You didn't address my observation at all (and that's ok, you have nothing to answer for)

This can be annoying if you want to pause the video to look closely at something.

"Genie, I wish that Youtube would practice customer-centric design to support customer needs and use-cases."

*poof* "It is done."

"Hey, this isn't what I wished for! This video experience is crap!"

"To them you are not the customer. You are a resource. Their customers are advertisers and they are happy with these changes."

On the very rare occasion I use youtube, the stuff that already pops up on the bottom of the video on pause (video recs?) was already annoying. If they're keeping that and adding ads as well, a paused video is going to look like early '00s web to me lol

Or if you want to pause for conversation

I find everything about youtube's player to be infuriating. It has completely driven me off the platform, and caused me to set up tube archivist with a jellyfin plugin, so I can just watch all my videos through jellyfin.

This has the advantage of no annoying pop-ups over the videos, I can pause, resume where I left off, and actually have a decent platform to keep track of videos I have/haven't watched. Not to mention, it removes ads.

Even for one off videos, I get so frustrated by youtube's interface I leave or end up just using yt-dlp. I don't understand how anyone actually likes youtube (I don't mean the content, but the actual site).

Yeah and lots of videos expects you to pause and read some texts.

I look forward to updating my YouTube browser extension to hide this as well steeples fingers

pets white Persian cat in lap

I watch youtube using mpv (with yt-dlp) so this doesn't affect me. I already hated that when you pause a youtube video, and a bunch of UI shows up.

I wonder if SponsorBlock is optionally available on yt-dlp..

https://github.com/po5/mpv_sponsorblock

Yes: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp?tab=readme-ov-file#sponsorb...

Invidious has Sponsorblock support at least.

I swear, man. Until every surface is used to display ads I don’t think advertisers will rest.

Surely we all see where this is going. Every day new ways to show ads are devised. More and more blank and negative spaces (which have inherent value as-is) are considered fair game for advertising.

already the number of times per day that I must mentally say “no” to an advertisement is exhausting. It’s already way, WAY past my worst childhood predictions. It just isn’t ever going to stop, is it? Advertisers just won’t be happy until they’ve created a dystopia.

I want off this ride. It’s no longer fun.

Rejoice! Now that AI is a thing, it's a matter of short years before AIs begin making ads just for you. Obviously not ideal, except that then it will just be a matter of decades until most ads are targeted to AIs and the humans that remain go to hide in Zion. Maybe we will be free of ads there.

> I swear, man. Until every surface is used to display ads I don’t think advertisers will rest.

"[...] We estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field before inducing seizures."

(from a scene in the Ready Player One movie)

Sounds like a way to annoy the last few people so much so that they too start using an ad blocker

There are this services in which you can earn money watching ads with certain intervals. One could just use that to be shown on a paused video with mute instead of letting it google do it for you.

lots of things the advertising companies like Google do makes more sense if you think of it like this: line has to go up and to the right forever. if natural demand isn't going up, then they'll squeeze the stone harder, doing stuff like this, or breaking adblockers, or more ads for non-premium users, etc etc

the idea of "revenue and profit shouldn't/can't go up forever and that's OK" is not a concept the CEO will accept.

I must say browser extensions are a god send. The browser and web being a fairly open platform. With ublock origin I can block specific parts of a site.

Can't do any of it with locked down mobile apps.

Youtube is now at late stage capitalism trying to juice every little real estate they can with ads.

Enshittification at it's finest.

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