https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/digging-deeper-youtub...
I guess if everyone was hit equally across the board then those sponsors will eventually adjust to the new metrics, but I assume some genres have more tech-savvy audiences which are more likely to use ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how evenly distributed this penalty falls.
Is it? If I proactively click skip, that means that sponsor is offering something of no use to me. As the sponsor, they successfully make an impression for a second or two anyway. And as a viewer that skip ahead button is much better than pressing right arrow button multiple times
Likewise with NordVPN and Raid: Shadowlegends. Never used any of them, don't really intend to, but I do know the name.
Remember how Youtube used to be a nice cage with lots of air holes and fun toys to occupy you? Light ad enforcement, tools to help you build your viewership etc? People are starting to feel the pinch of those being removed. That cool room is starting to look like what it really is--an industrial cage.
Skip Ahead is only for Premium subscribers. The logic probably being native-ads/sponsorships are in fact ads, and Premium users are paying for an ad-free experience.
I’m not sure. They want influencers to make profit using their platform, so they want to make them rich. On the viewcount, a skipped sponsor still looks like a view. No sponsor is going to look at the proportion of watching each part of the video, they just care about the view counter.
What Youtube may want, though, is for paying customers to be able to skip ads. “If you pay you should have no ads”.
It feels rare that I agree with Google on anything these days, but if that is the case... sounds fair.
Then these adult children go an complain there are no competitors. No shit, you scoff at subscriptions and wear your ad-block like a badge of honor. Who the hell would invest in making a platform for non-paying users?
Edit: I guess this is a YouTube premium feature?
Youtube has no incentive to accurately report this data and no apparent accreditation in their methodology.
If Google shows everyone how ineffective ads actually are, they’d crumble.
The two main options advertisers have are:
* Brand Lift Studies: split audience into treatment and control, use surveys on a small fraction of participants to measure impact
* Conversion Lift: again split audience into treatment and control, compare downstream actions like purchases ("conversions")
These both work on YouTube IIRC.
Anyways, I was mostly referring to sales at physical locations; I assume it's pretty viable to build a system to figure out if someone who previously bought a lot of shein is now buying a lot of temu.
Offline purchases are harder, of course, but pretty sure you can still do this: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9994849
(Once I understand your claim I'll be better able to respond: I think "there's effectively no way to be caught" is not true under both of the interpretations I see)
Such as?
I agree, and find it even wilder that first party metrics from Meta and Google are trusted by most major advertisers (including ad agencies). I'm talking about six-seven figure budgets spent without any third party validation.
I've seen some studies on click fraud[0], but when advertisers are effectively choosing from a duopoly that has limited incentives not to lie in their metrics, I find it strange that there are no popular, widespread and accessible independent validation tools.
Many of the advertisers that sell on these platforms are quite familiar with buying ads directly from "old school" media companies. So they have the competence and familiarity to be put off by the metrics but are apparently not in a position to force Google and Facebook to match standards used in other contexts.
(1) Hey, imagine I had a plugin that monitored the behavior of several viewers of each video and could collate where most people skipped a big chunk of video, then, oh I don't know, offered a feature where if lots of people skip one chunk, it'll automatically skip it for you when you're playing the video....
Nah, that'll never work.
Unclear what premium uses to disburse the 55% share that goes to creators; hopefully it's not those ones.
The fact that I have Premium is irrelevant; if YouTube isn't getting the metrics that says I watched a video, then it won't be counted.
Certainly YouTube could change the method they use to count views so it would work in my case, but they probably don't have an incentive to do so.
IIRC it even has lots of options such as enabling you to allow/disallow self-sponsor segments (the creator promoting their own product), "like and subscribe" calls to action, shock-and-awe intros, podcast recaps, and several other segment types.
As the old joke goes:
“Doctor, it hurts when I do this”
“Then don’t do it”
If it's using the same profiling to determine if you're unique, and sending it to the same datacenter that builds the ad profiles, how is the adblocker to know that the endpoint is really only invisibly tallying a view count?
You're acting as if the way Google does it would be the _only_ way to do it. Obviously untrue.
I suppose Man was never meant to know Hacker News User's mind.
To ensure my premium subscription dollars are making it to the creators I've now disabled uBO for the entire youtube domain.
Except viewer counts are a factor for baked in ads. In this case, all the sleuthing and videos about the change are the probably the only thing that will alleviate/lessen the seemingly-worse ad rate negotiation position youtubers with less viewers suddenly find themselves in.
The ad business is far older than the internet and there is a lot of old knowledge that apples directly to the internet. Those buying backed in ads should be aware of and tracking such efforts.
Some were paying big money to streamers with 20,000 live viewers. Even though 19000 of those were fake.
The sponsor then sees the ad and did terribly and doesn't sponsor anyone else in the future.
1. It seems views from Premium users who use adblock might also not get counted—and I'm not sure if the revenue from a Premium view in that circumstance would be counted or not (more research needed).
2. YouTube's recommendation engine weights views heavily in the system, which means channels with a more technical, traditional desktop viewing audience (probably a substantial portion of HN users) will be most impacted, and will not be able to grow an audience to help fund projects, yadda yadda.
YouTube creators with younger, mobile, less FOSS-y, and less tech-savvy audiences are therefore rewarded with more views/mindshare.
I know some here are like "go get a REAL job, influencers are scum", but I think that discounts the helpful work of many tech creators. Not only in direct contributions to open source projects, but also in being a voice to balance out the paid 'product showcase' style videos for many tech products that come to market.
In other words: if adblock users disincentivize creators like me from spending time and resources on YouTube, then video content will more quickly settle into the online magazine/news status quo, where 99% of the articles you read are just PR spin. Which you could argue would bring about YouTube's downfall earlier... or would lead us even more quickly to an Idiocracy-style society :D
I'm not saying adblock is bad or wrong or anything—I can't stand the YT ad spam, so I pay for Premium. To each their own. In any case, YouTube shoulders some of the burden, but will be the main entity to profit in any scenario.
This is all completely subjective of course.
Signing up for the creator's patreon or buying merch is the more widely adopted reaction by the those actually enjoying the content.
I run AdGuard (on a Mac). It has a filter log feature.
Poking at the log while playing a video, I do see calls to ttps://{{clusterid?}}.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1758173247&...
However, this call is not being blocked.
I suspect that this is the "keep watching" feature that tracks where I am in various videos (switching from one logged in device to another keeps the same position). Watching the video all the way through, I don't see any requests relating to this getting blocked while on Premium. This feature is also likely more than sufficient data to attribute a view (and monetization of the view).
There was also a call to ttps://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/log_event?alt=json that was not blocked.
I do see some doubleclick.net links being blocked, thought that could be from any number of other pages I've got open.
Going to an incognito session and pulling up the same video (Once Around Trappist 1)...
There's now a call (that has gotten blocked) to ttps://www.youtube.com/api/stats/watchtime...
That call was not something that I saw when logged into premium. This rule is described as "@@||www.youtube.com^$generichide (AdGuard Base filter)"
while true, choosing to base your income on the wellbeing of a company and its ad placement, no matter how well your video does or how good you are at producing videos is absolute insanity to me.
You become a slave to the latest monetization techniques and if you don't adopt them your revenue goes down, and your videos get put in front of fewer people, resulting in less income. This is bizarre to me, and definitely unwanted, because the things you need to do will never stop ramping up. A video used to do better because the thumbnail had a reaction face on it, now it's required just to keep your view count where it normally should be. People got used to that, and now ignore it. But it's still required if you want to get your video in front of people.
Now thumbnails must be rotated out frequently for the first few days of a video's life until the thumbnail which results in the most views is found. Soon people will become immune to this tactic just like they became immune to the reaction faces, and something new will come up to replace it. Except you don't stop with the reaction faces and the thumbnail rotation, you have to keep doing those.
Advertising requires this constant escalation to counter people's ever-increasing ability to ignore advertisements, and this will never stop so long as revenue determines how often a video is placed on the youtube.com homepage for a given viewer. it will never stop until advertisement is no longer a thing at all. a content creator must continually escalate what they are doing in order to stay right where they are in viewership, and even then they are subject to constant drops in revenue because of the whims of Google and advertising partners.
The whole thing is absolutely insane and I can't understand why someone would choose this to be their primary source of income. If people didn't choose to make youtube a career, there would be far fewer ads on youtube, because people would not be fighting so hard for views.
I don't know... To me, it just seems like a textbook move from a Corporate Abuse Playbook. I bet someone at Google is laughing about it right now.