I'm guessing the viewers who now suddenly aren't being counted were already not contributing to revenue because they block ads.
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.
(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.