They have a plethora of ways to make the app and website suck for non-paying users now, including and not limited to:
* faking an interruption when starting to play
* random errors mid-play
* no longer playing on hover on-web or in-app
I've just taken that as a good signal I should read more books instead, but I imagine it kills view-counts
As soon as I'm on Safari or Brave with an adblocker, YouTube is teeth-grinding irritating. I checked my screen time and I'm down to about 15 minutes per week, whereas before I'd watch my subscriptions for about 2h per week. Can't say I miss it.
I'd assume most adblock users on web would disable it to continue watching. I doubt their crackdown on adblock users would affect view counts that much, but I'm just speaking from anecdotal evidence and a few Google searches
When the ad starts, just refresh the page. It will act as though it's already played the ads, even if it is an unskippable ad.
I click a video by accident. It begins to play the ad before the video. I have to watch the add before I can go back to looking for what I wanted to watch. eugh
I continue to find it amazing just How Big the impact of "advertising" is in the brain of a median HN commenter vs. the attention paid (almost none) to it by citizens at large.
Like, that Liberty Mutual Duck is just weird to most folks, but to us it's somehow the greatest assault on our freedom imaginable?
Maybe the humor was bad. But the point stands: advertising has been with us since the dawn of "media" and no one cares outside our oddball bubble. People sat through ads on their sitcoms in the 70's and they sit through the annoying insurance birds, and... who cares?
It's only here that people somehow believe that contra all evidence, somehow advertising on the internet is a unique affront to all that is holy. When... it's just ads!
Far beyond the time wasted, they're an invasion of privacy.
I’m also annoyed because this is a bit of a rug pull by youtube. The videos I watch of some obscure mechanical repair on a motor uploaded 15 years ago aren’t being monetized and they do not cost youtube enough to justify the multiple ads at the start and another in the middle that I have to sit through now to see it.
Youtube is going through major enshitification and is destroying the experience of consuming the largest video library in the world.
We nerds have been on our anti-internet-advertising kick for like 20 years now at least. I think the ship has sailed for that particular analysis.
This is not a safe assumption. Personally, I've stopped using YouTube entirely for entertainment; the level of annoyance dealing with it vs the value I get out of it is just not worth it any more. I'm doing other things with my time now instead of watching YouTube. Some of that is watching video on other platforms, and some of that is spending time on other hobbies instead.
Not sure if I'm typical (probably not!) but I never disable the ad blocker; if a video or site doesn't work with an ad blocker, I just move on.
If youtube is doing any of those things, instead of just saying "pay", they're dumb as dirt. Why would I want to pay for what is perceived as a junky, buggy site?
I do genuinely want to watch YouTube videos, but I don't want to have to deal with anti-adblock measures ruining the experience. So I pay. Which is reasonable, no? Either I pay with cash or by allowing myself to be manipulated into buying things I don't want or need. If those are the choices, I choose not to pay with my attention.
People's income levels change.
Training them that your product is utter and complete garbage, means those people won't ever become customers. Ever.
The truth of the matter is, that just like their search, every other aspect of Google's infra is in a state of decay. Youtube is slow and takes forever to start now. Google search is pathetic, takes forever to give results in some circumstances, and randomly locks people out with captchas.
The Google of today must be complete chaos internally, it's the only explanation I can see. If the problem is AI, you never give up a cash cow whilst you pivot. You don't let what you have fall to tatters, whilst you pursue some other goal.
Especially when Google has the scope and capability to maintain and yet also pursue other avenues.
I suspect, but could be entirely wrong here, that Google has pulled key people, drivers, movers, which are a rare breed -- out of key positions in all of their structure and focused them on something else.
But anyhow.