YouTube's new ads will ruin the best part of a video on purpose | Hacker News Reader

YouTube's new ads will ruin the best part of a video on purpose

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55 pointsnamanyayg56 comments

"If you’re an advertiser, this might sound like a brilliant move. For viewers, it’s pretty much the worst possible timing"

associating your product with a negative experience is not a brilliant move.

Data proves otherwise.

you guys know downvoting a fact doesn't make it stop being true, I presume.

Youtube (like every other popular web platform) will keep pushing the button that says "make more money by degrading the user experience" until it (eventually) stops working. It's basically the iron law of encrapification.

they are trying to move to subscription model, seems like a reasonable alternative

Are they? I’m not convinced that could make more revenue from subscriptions compared to ads.

I've been a subscriber for years. I want the creators to get money. They have a music app attached that's free. It's honestly really great.

I'm in a similar boat (grandfathered from Gplay), but remain apprehensive that the prices will continue to rise and the window will continue to shift towards enshitification.

I'm not worried as long as Google keeps their generous revenue split. The way it's set up now, effectively 50-50, means that the incentives of the creators and the service are aligned. Both parties want as much viewership as possible. If Google stops sharing revenue, then Google has an incentive that doesn't align with the creators, as the quality of the product effectively isn't important, and the quality creators will leave to another platform.

When that happens, I'll likely just move to Nebula.

Yeah and they're not alone, Amazon Prime Video is getting really obnoxious too.

what are people going to do, switch? There are no other viable (across a number of dimensions) alternative, it'll take many many years even at the worst levels of user experience before youtube dies. And large companies like this do not do long-term planning.

> There are no other viable (across a number of dimensions) alternative

There is: you pay to skip ads.

I'll pay for an adblocker first just to reward their design choice. Do no evil turned into don't do any good either.

I could just watch less videos. Content quality has been declining for ages. Fresh stuff all looks and sounds the same. Video structures are all very similar, and even for niche channels they only look at very specific sorts of topics. The only good stuff is old videos dumped on youtube.

Indeed that is the good point, even without switching, just watching less content, shorter will hit them right in the wallet.

Not even that you have to restrain yourself, but I also noticed that more and more annoying ad recently kills the excitement to use the platform and to start random linked video by curiosity. Like giving electric discharges to an animal when he does something specific will hard wire into his brain that the activity is not interesting and more frustrating than providing dopamine.

Even looking at their feature, I'm wondering if the side effects are well understood by them: "or emotionally charged moment"

An advertisement at the wrong moment, like at the highly emotional moment will not just kill the moment in fact? Like losing the connection you had this the viewer?

For example, if I'm about to cry because of how emotional is the current moment, I'm deeply in, suddenly an advertisement for chips will show up, and when I come back to the show I'm totally in another state of mood, like "ok it's terrible, but who cares?"

This was my first thought. I would probably actively avoid a product if I saw ads pop up in the most annoying way possible.

I already have Premium, so this won’t really impact me, but I hope it fails.

I’ve really liked the engagement graph on videos, so I can jump to key moments, but I guess this is the monkey paw of that feature.

Though I do expect the AI to get it wrong. A significant number of peaks on the graph are after ad reads or when text is flashed on screen quickly, which people go back to read. These aren’t necessarily peaks points of the narrative.

They want to make it unusable without Premium. This will just get worse and worse until everyone gives in.

or until revenues drop because people either watch less or avoid buying from companies that pay money to ruin videos...

More premium users means fewer ad slots to sell. Which should drive up the price of each ad spot. Or, as you suggest, they can cram more ads in per video, and risk repelling the audience. I wonder what the equilibrium point is.

This is also an opportunity to start showing ads in premium and then create a ultra-premium subscription with none of these ads.

This is pretty much what happened in India with all the OTT subscriptions (looking at you Disney+Hotstar)

Eventually they'll just start driving up the price of premium too to make up for the lost ad revenue. The equilibrium is probably that no one bothers to use it without a subscription, and the subscription is way overpriced.

No wonder Chrome has been cracking down even harder on ad blockers recently...

or you know, just don’t use the fucking platform. last time I loaded youtube … it’s been years

If consumers don't own the tech they rely on, they should expect it to be weaponized to control them

This is why almost all communities need to be built on platforms backed by nonprofits and social ventures rather than on the shifting sands of corporate technofeudal overlords. The threat of being extorted and held hostage by corporate demands is an ever-present Sword of Damocles.

But that can happen and if I have anything to say about it (and I do), it will.

Firefox and uBlock continue to be a must for navigating the web.

Firefox is actively blocked by many services.

What? I use it (or its forks) exclusively and can't remember the last time I was blocked from anything.

Never encountered that, do you have an example?

F1 TV

You’re right. Refers to the faq for more info but no faq found anywhere. What a shit site.

For everything else, there are the high-seas.

A few years ago, T-Mobile's website actively blocked Firefox in Private Browsing mode. I filed an FCC complaint about that because I could not pay online and was being charged $5 to pay over the phone.

Today, MS Teams does not work in Firefox.

And Safari with Wipr. uBlock Lite for Safari is in beta too.

I've noticed on iPhone Youtube Premium I've had overlay ad widgets appear. I think they're for a creator's own merchandise, but I'm guessing that there's some sort of revenue mechanism for Youtube being happy to include these. To me it's still an ad and it's what I pay for to avoid seeing it.

I wonder how long we'll go for before we start to see ad-lite Premium, and something like Premium+ to view ad free.

This is why I quit paying for premium as well. The ads were less obnoxious but they were still there. Ads for channel stuff, ads for YouTube premium features, ads for channel memberships and whatnot.

I now pay for Nebula and it is a world of difference. I love that there is nothing but the video. I wouldn't mind comments but there are no related videos and nothing else. I just follow via RSS, click, watch video and leave. No fuss, nothing trying to grab my attention. It is just so relaxing compared to other platforms.

When Twitter enshittified like this and got away with it, the precedent was set.

Oh good Lord. In fact I have noticed that lately YouTube was tracking the "most-watched" periods in every video with a little bar graph below it, so that was inevitable.

I am a satisfied & loyal customer of YouTube Premium Family edition [my "family" consists of 5 separate Google accounts I operate.] However, I still see more ads encroaching from every direction. The latest method is merch -- a lot of influencers will have customized keepsakes on offer, and YouTube will display the wares in the dooblydoo as you're watching each video. Each will link out to the storefront where you can purchase it. You know, tee shirts, mugs, plushies -- the kind of swag that says "I spend my disposable income to line the pockets of obscure entertainers."

The other ads I've got are for show tickets. Any group or troupe or entertainer who tours live will be hooked into YouTube's algorithm to find tickets for their shows. YouTube once told me that the closest venue for my favorite act was next week in Finland. It often leads to consternation because I hate live shows at this point, for many reasons, and sometimes I will price out a single ticket to my most-hated live show to see if it's $300 or $500. Sometimes in guilt for coveting that live ticket, I will donate the same amount to my favorite charity. That is how much I hate live shows and advertising.

The tour dates are completely made up in a lot of cases (no, YouTube, I don't think Tom Petty is playing next month in my town). I have a feeling it's just llm hallucinations that they're dumping on the page.

> "most-watched" periods in every video with a little bar graph below it

I use that to skip the in-video promotions

Sponsorblock extension does that automatically

Dumb move, I don't mind ads during normal viewing but if they happen at the crescendo it will piss people off

I remember when everyone was wishing they could just pay their own ad revenue in money and not have to see any ads.

Google actually offered something along those lines for a few years, called Google Contributor, though I don’t think it applied to video ads like YouTube’s.

I have no inside info on why it didn’t survive even though I worked for Google when it initially launched (not on Contributor), but the fact remains it didn’t survive.

As pure personal speculation, I suspect it didn’t receive enough user uptake for Google to decide that it was worthwhile.

To avoid any confusion: I don’t work for Google now and am certainly not speaking for them in this comment.

You worked there and don't really know much about it. How in the world would Google expect anyone else to have known about it? I personally don't remember such a thing ever existing.

So assuming they did try it, I'd say it died from lack of awareness rather than people just didn't want it.

I knew a bit about it at the time (nothing confidential that I remember now), and saw both internal discussions and external media reports about it at the time. Wikipedia continues to document that it did exist. But sure, I don’t think it was very well publicized.

I will say that Google has generally been bad at product decisions and execution, such as genuinely understanding what their customers and users want or need and effectively giving that to them in a logistically and commercially viable way, more often than they’ve been good at product decisions and execution. (Engineering quality and technical innovation are completely separate questions, and ones at which Google has historically been excellent.)

It’s very possible that better product decisions or better execution could have made Contributor a success.

I’d pay to get them to stop tracking me. There’s no way to implement that without tracking me, so I just go with anyone but Google whenever possible.

The fact that Google has been intentionally making their products worse to enable price gouging (as proven in court) has made it easy for competitors to outperform all of Google’s offerings (except, arguably, YouTube, but that seems pretty moatless / prone to piracy).

> There’s no way to implement that without tracking me

Monero.

maximum transactions per second?

The version that outbid ads was unreliable and not how I want an ad-replacement to work, and then the later version worked on a tiny tiny list of sites.

So even when it existed, I just lamented it didn't work like youtube red.

And that's in addition to them not telling people about it.

Some people want something like that, other people just want ads to not be terrible.

And that desire can vary per-service.

Isn’t that what premium does? Or do they have ads?

That's what premium does. Now that premium exists and is a solution to this problem, the one we specifically wanted, we still complain about the problem instead.

Nonsense. Premium does not stop Youtube from insisting that the people I have been watching and following for 20 years can't say "Fuck". Premium does not stop Youtube from capriciously de"monetizing" a compilation video made up explicitly of videos uploaded to the platform that are all monetized for two years in a row despite explicit support from a youtube account manager that it wouldn't happen again. Premium does not stop youtube from shoving shorts in my face, and giving me no option but "Show less". Premium does not stop youtube putting puritan morals into their terms of service. Premium does not stop youtube from blocking your videos if they contain genuine war footage of historical interest and importance and that you could easily see on daytime news channels.

Paying youtube only rewards them for all this bullshit, and also they will turn around and use that money, not to become a great platform for mid-level groups and teams doing good work and making meaningful science or history contributions, but to mint more Logan and Jake Pauls, to support more Lunchly's, to benefit more assholes. Because that's more profitable even if people pay money directly instead of through advertising.

> Paying youtube only rewards them for all this bullshit

Paying for YT premium removes ads, that's the exchange here. If one doesn't agree with the content the platform provides, one has to find another platform, there are lots out there. They all have different rules.

Monetization of misery for the almighty $$$. Airlines to streaming tier plans.

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