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Comment by NotPractical | Hacker News Reader

Are views also decreasing on channels without ads enabled? Is it possible that some endpoint that needs to be hit to register a view is being blocked by privacy-related (not ad-related) lists that adblockers use?

If the answer to both is no, maybe Google's intentionally punishing creators whose viewers use adblockers. But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?

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> But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?

Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing" but they know it won't work if people see them as the source of the message. They want video makers to internalize their message, do what the boss wants on their own initiative, so Google only want to drop hints.

100%. They are trying to get YouTube a exclusion from the list, or make the list the non-default. I already know the next step is that the "community" is going to fork the list, and the forked list is going to be heavily advertised on YouTube channel as a way to support the channel.

> Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing"

Ah yes, the good old "don't copy that floppy" argument.

The advertising industry brought this upon themselves. The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker. Between malicious ads, drive-by-downloads, content shifting, and other dark patterns, websites are now more ads than content.

It's like in the days of streaming (when it was still good and not enshitified) reducing piracy rates - companies can get me to disable my ad blocker if they start becoming good citizens actually make their site or service usable without it.

Get rid of the invasive tracking, dark patterns, un-dismissable modals, etc. Stop jamming your content so full of ads and SEO spam and maybe I wouldn't need an ad blocker as much.

I bought a new Mac for a secondary computer, particularly for my wife to use, and she was driven crazy by ads in just one hour of browsing on Safari without a proper ad blocker. Adding an ad blocker to Safari required using an Apple account which she doesn't have and I didn't want to use it for mine (never plan on buying NERFed apps from the NERFed mac app store which is 99% spam anyway) so I switched her to Firefox which lets me add an ad blocker without signing in.

Make her an account with throwaway everything or switch her to a sane browser, as you did :)

FWIW wBlock is on GitHub and can be used without an Apple account. I’ve found it to be excellent.

>The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker.

Parts of it are good, and parts are bad. The problem with ad blockers is it distorts the signal for bad sites. Why reduce ads if your page views and time on site metrics are good with them?

Without Ad block when you hit a garbage site you backout and go somewhere else, maybe even blacklist it so you don't end up there in the future. Then their metrics start looking as bad as their site and they shape up or go under.

You wouldn't steal a car.

Well I definitely would if I could torrent it. Facebook would have too.

I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization. This is why the creators all do sponsorships now. But they force creators to monetize to get reach (if the video isn't monetized it won't be recommended, even to subscribers).

My guess is that yeah, now they're going after people's sponsorship revenue by under-reporting views if their monetized content is being viewed by people with adblockers.

Regarding recommendations. I recently disabled history and recommendations and the subscribed tab has everything I’d expect. No more surprises and no more political garbage.

That’s crazy, when I am logged out I only get political garbage and the most insane braunrot you can imagine. My recommendations are really good on YouTube, I find a lot of interesting stuff

You must fight the urge to click on controversial topics. If you mentally subscribe to any fringe idea, the algo immediately feeds you echo chamber / bubble content. It's crazy.

I usually open videos of any topic I don't want in my recommendations in a private window.

Ye if you watch some woodworking bench videos YT spams them at you.

I guess that is what PCA gives you. Lunatic videos is some distinct component too.

> I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization.

Do you have any article about that? How much did the monetization drop for?

I don't know the data but every YouTube author I follow is basically saying the money they get from YouTube is almost nothing compared to the effort they put into their videos. Almost all of them seem to be going for sponsored ads embedded in the video (so not automatically skippable) or Patreon.

How big are the channels? As far as I follow, the revenue numbers creators get from Ads aren't ignorable at all.

I didn't check all of them... I wanna say they range from ~200 to ~500K subscribers? No idea if that's big or not. For comparison, the official Warhammer channel has ~900K subscribers, which I assume is decent.

The argument I've heard repeatedly from them is that the time and effort involved in making a YouTube video that gets enough hits (which means lots of experimentation) is disproportionate compared to the meager return of investment; that for money reasons it's best to get sponsorships.

(I'm not a YouTube author myself, I wouldn't know what's a decent size).

I agree, this seems more like a policy decision to turn creators into anti-adblocker advocates than a technical problem registering views accurately.

Why would most creators be pro ad blocking in the first place? Don’t most of them want to earn money via advertising?

That isn't clear. Some earn money from ads of various forms. Some earn money from patreon like things and the youtube views are loss leaders. Most are not earning enough money from ads to care (generally 0, but sometimes a few bucks).

Even if you earn money from ads, view count is only a proxy at best. Youtube seems to track ads seen not view count (payments from youtube have not changed). Other ads track effectiveness of the ad, and viewcount is only a proxy - if youtube changes the count it means that the constant applied to viewcount in the formula changes but otherwise the payment is the same.

Thus if you get significant money from YouTube adds you care about ad blocking. None of the others need to care (they might, but it could go either way how they feel)

What videos you see on YouTube really varies from one person to another: I have one browser where it shows me predominantly videos with titles like "Why Brand X has lost it's way" or "Why the Y industry is broken" where X could be a fast food chain or a game studio and Y could be housing, video games, private equity, etc.

That kind of creator expresses a lot of negativity towards YouTube, as X is frequently "YouTube" or "Google" and Y is "Big Tech", "Social Media", etc.

Because most creators use the internet and have experienced the internet with ads.

I imagine most don't think about ads seriously, they think about youtube and sponsor revenue.

Isn’t sponsor revenue ad revenue? And I would expect most creators to be smart enough to realize that the money they get from Youtube will be at least loosely related to the ad revenue Youtube can earn from whatever the creator made.

> Isn’t sponsor revenue ad revenue?

It is, but it's functionally different because the content creator you are watching is both directly getting that revenue and often doing the testimonial for you. They have an incentive to avoid being annoying about the ad as it reflects bad on them if they go nuts. It's also usually a lot easier to skip. It doesn't capture your video playback and force watching.

The money you get from youtube make things ambiguous. Especially if someone is watching your stream with youtube premium.

Pro and expressly anti are not the only positions. Some were indifferent because their income from YouTube ads was much less than their income from sponsorships or subscriptions. But view counts affect sponsorship income. Some said blocking ads hurt them but they couldn't blame people when ads included scams. And so on.

My current theory is that this whole "mystery around viewcounts" thing is fabricated by google. From a PR viewpoint it's much better to just imply that adblockers are bad, so in case of backlash they can go "Idk why the community is going ham about this, we didn't even say directly you shouldn't adblock, you people are kwuaazy"

Honestly I'm willing to bet that the contacts/account managers at Google genuinely didn't know that easyprivacy had added their view tracking to the blocklist, and reached out to some people internally who's job is implementing youtube and not anti-adblock features who correctly said they didn't change anything, and would have no reason to know that easyprivacy had changed anything.

Then the AMs just issue vague statements to the youtubers as it feels more like saving face than admitting they have no idea

Is it possible not to have ads? It seems like YouTube puts them in there regardless, unless once your channel is monetizable you can choose to not show ads.

Uploaders can disable mid-roll adverts, ie ones that appear in the middle of the content.

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