Seems like a balanced approach, people can watch videos with adblockers but it won't count towards youtube's public facing metrics.
It’s dumb in almost every direction I can imagine. The only one that makes sense is if you’re simply at war with adblockers and you’re trying to turn the public tide of opinion against them.
Imagine the headlines if Google did do something - "YouTube implements advanced user tracking to counter act Privacy and Ad blocker"
It makes sense to have the view count only show views that could be useful for ad revenue ... This way you can be honest with advertiser's about roughly how many eyeballs they can expec5
Google did not implement a change to stop counting views. An ad blocker intentionally[1] choosing to block the long-standing API calls used for the view statistics. How would you propose Google fix this, when there is an adversarial team in control of what requests many browser may make, and are choosing to use it to break the site?
[0] Or rather, an URL block list used by many ad blockers.
[1] It was almost certainly an honest mistake originally. But when the blocklist authors were informed of the problem and chose to not roll back the change, it became intentional.
They are trying to increase ad revenue, but by increased Nguyen ads and making it harder to skip them it ironically is causing much worse practices such as ad blocking.
But to your point, the site is borderline social media nowadays when you consider all the features.
Bragging rights for sure. Many channels are parasocial relationships, and that number matters a lot to both the creator and the viewers.
It’s also mildly informational. If I see a completely out-of-whack suggestion in my feed, but it has a billion views, suddenly I know why it’s in my feed.
There are probably other reasons. I remember there was ongoing reporting about a race between two channels on YouTube racing to have… I dunno, the first video with a billion views or something. The number of video views for Gangnam Style was something everyone was talking about.
Plus, it’s nice to have. That’s reason enough imo.
You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source and no other reason. View metrics and monetization are what count, not your subjective experience. YouTube does not care one tiny bit about how much you like the site or interface or what you think of the view counter.
This is completely separate from the YouTube platform ads and monetization which is what the ad blockers are blocking.
Imagine a creator whose viewers all watched with ads blocked (and without YT Premium either). That creator is, objectively speaking not partnering with Google in any way, they're just using the platform as a free CDN. So the failure of Google to provide that person with accurate metrics for him to operate his business (that Google isn't a part of) isn't all that offensive.
So someone losing visibility to their "views" if it's because of non-monetized views (adblocked ones) seems proportionally fair.
There's always self-hosting your videos, but yes, that's expensive. It's a tradeoff the content creator has to make: A cut of your revenue + a ton of content restrictions, in exchange for discoverability + free CDN.
What Google gets out of it is free content for their platform, which other platforms seem to be only able to dream about, and accurate metrics would be something like the lowest possible bar to provide. But well, turns out you can do just about whatever if you're the defacto monopoly and the experience doesn't matter anymore, not for creators, not for the consumers.
But they are getting something in return: a near monopoly in this particular market.
Not providing correct view counts just because some of those viewers use adblockers feels kinda petty.
That doesn't really apply because these creators' video views aren't entirely adblocked. Just some portion of the views are. So it would be dumb for Google to punish the creators so harshly.
Also, you're telling me that you think there would be fewer pitchforks out if Google just started deleting and banning channels due to their users' adblocking behavior?
The point is that a view counter should show an accurate and honest count of views, because that's what it's presented as and lying is bad. Why should ad blocking have anything to do with that? Companies should aim to protect their revenue stream by providing a good service, not cripple their service to match the basest vision of their revenue incentives.
When I looked at the same video while in incognito (and signed out), I could see some requests originating getting blocked that were not at all present during my watch of the video under premium.
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For YouTube, what is a "view?" If a chunk is downloaded, is that a view? If the next chunk is downloaded, is that two views? How do you verify that it's not the person who watched the first chunk?
YouTube doesn't appear to be counting views based on chunks downloaded as there are lots of ways to download chunks. Even doing things like scrubbing the video back 5 minutes would produce incorrect chunk download counts.
From this it appears that YouTube is counting views based on an API call from the page that identifies you (arguably through privacy issues) so that you downloading 1 chunk or 10 chunks only counts as one view. That API call appears to now be blocked.
Counting chunks downloaded would arguably be even less truthful or accurate than counting API calls.
So turn off your ad blocker so you don’t lie about your views.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo...
Has 2 million users which isn't a ton but just mentioning that it is used and it works well.
With something like YouTube there are so many different parties involved. Sponsor, creator, Google, advertiser, consumer. Clearly the system could be optimized for any of them, or it can present some balances that naturally make one or more of the groups unhappy. Clearly it's easy to criticize the system if it's not optimized to your perspective of it.
It's very unpopular to say it, (cue downvotes) but on the whole I think Google mostly gets it right. Advertisers have a channel to reach consumers [3]. Creators have a way to earn income [1], consumers watch for free [2], Google makes money (and provides infrastructure).
[1] sponsorships are allowed, although none of that revenue flows to Google, which I think is fairly tolerant of Google.
[2] Google has an option to turn off ads with YT Premium.
[3] Ad blockers serve consumers, but hurt the whole system. I get that they're very popular here, but they are effectively a tax on Google, and now on creators. A more ethical approach IMO (and ethics are both personal and subjective) is to pay for YT Premium if you'd prefer to suppress ads. Then you are "paying your way" not free-loading.
Labeling people who use ad blockers as unethical is hypocritical, to say the least.
The supremely unethical behavior is coming from companies who decide to use advertising as their business model, and the entire adtech industry that powers it. They lie, cheat, steal, and exploit user data in perpetuity, yet users are supposed to feel guilty for trying to block all of this hostility? Give me a break.
> consumers watch for free
They don't watch for "free". They pay with their data and attention, which is worth much more than any reasonable price Google could charge for the service. This discrepancy is so large, in fact, that all ad-supported web platforms should be paying users for using their service.
Choosing to pay for YT Premium simply makes the experience more bearable by removing the annoyance of being constantly bombarded with ads, but all the shady data extraction, profiling, tracking, and manipulation still happens behind the scenes, across all Google products, and beyond.
The fact society has accepted a business model that introduces a hostile middleman in all of their business transactions, and that we've been brainwashed into calling this "free", is deeply disturbing. Not least because the same machinery is also used to serve us propaganda and manipulate us not just into buying things, but into thinking and acting in ways that benefit the agenda of whoever has the will and a negligible amount of resources to run an ad campaign. And yet we wonder why society is crumbling around us. It's some perverse version of Stockholm syndrome.
So, no, I will never feel guilty for using ad blockers, and no sane person should. If content creators want my money, they can choose more ethical business models, which are also likely to be less profitable and more difficult to manage. But, hey, that is the price to pay if you care about ethics, and not participating in machinery that exploits your viewers.
If I used an ad blocker you could say I was hypocritical. Since I don't, you can't. You're welcome to disagree on ethics of course, but its not hypocrisy.
>> If content creators want my money, they can choose more ethical business models, which are also likely to be less profitable and more difficult to manage. But, hey, that is the price to pay if you care about ethics, and not participating in machinery that exploits your viewers.
So you want creators to be more ethical, bypassing YT, but in the meantime you'll support Google by watch YT? Which as you point out is tracking you? I'm not sure I follow your argument here...
0: I just side step this entirely these days by paying for premium.
I’ve been a premium member for about 15 years.
For example- if a video has a section about their sponsor from 3:30 to 4:10 and I press the right seek button twice around 3:30 the jump will be to 4:10. It also displays an alert that it's using the feature.
This as an open and celebrated system drives producers to advertise for YouTube via the almost-compulsory every-video mention of liking and subscribing and forwarding videos to friends.
Youtube is well aware of this, hence things like the iconic long running physical play button trophy delivery system.
I'd also say more broadly that making such sweeping claims for YouTube as a collective entity not caring at all about viewers is too reductive. It's more defensible and relatable to claim that, though there may be many people working for YouTube because they deeply care about a mission of democratizing multimedia publishing, the incentives and structures around it being a PBC often lead to decisions which drown out that care from corporate heads who are more profit than mission driven.
How are these two statements not contradictions?
Another way to phrase it is the classic line "If you're not paying for it, you aren't the customer, you're the product."
Agree, however view counts, i.e. metrics tracked by YT, or by sponsors,creators in fancy dashboards isn't the view counter we are shown and nobody is questioning how those are implemented. The View Counter means very specific UI component in YT interface shown to regular users.
> view counter isn't for you
Disagree,
View counter is a important decision making input along with the thumbnail, title and duration of the video on if a user will click on the video to watch them.
It is in effect an advertisement for the video.
If that wasn't the case, then YouTube wouldn't be showing them in every list view and next to every thumbnail. When the numbers no longer represent what the users think they represent I would say it is not far from false advertising.
A fair amount of people on here and I have both YT Premium and also use some adblocker, should our views be counted or not according to this point of view? .
My Verizon cell phone plan offers it at a slightly discounted $10 a month. For a completely ad free (ads from Youtube) experience it's well worth it considering how many car and tech videos I watch.
It also offers a higher bitrate 1080p option on some videos which is a cherry on top.
That's emphatically not what people "people want". People want to get paid. And creators get paid based on views.
So... per the upthread point, paying people based on views that actually generate revenue seems fairer and more optimal, no? If YouTube can't make money from your content, why do you expect them to pay you for it?
That's nonsense, as a viewer of YouTube videos I do not expect to her paid for this.
I guess it'd be nice if I were paid for watching YouTube, so maybe you have a point after all! :-)
No one anywhere was arguing from the perspective of a viewer. Until it turned out that the regression was due to an adblocker change. Now suddenly creators don't matter and it's really the viewer's visibility into view counts that is the important element.
And that seems... insincere.
The only people who would care are YT themselves, the creator, other creators, and advertisers.
I don’t know why they even publicly display the view count.
For the same reason online shops show "Most popular" items and ads say "trusted by X people worldwide". People on average apparently like feeling being part of a bigger crowd. If that doesn't make sense to you, you're probably in the minority (which by that logic shouldn't bother you).
So it's quite amazing that even with that context you still managed to hijack that into a discussion about the merits of what Google did with this "balanced approach" bait. This isn't a balanced approach! It's not an approach at all!
It is the ad blocker willfully choosing to break totally normal and benign site functionality. Google had no agency in this, and doesn't have much recourse.
EasyPrivacy is tracker blocking list.
The culprit was in EasyPrivacy (tracker) list, not EasyList (ad blocking).
The only thing that changed is easylist blocked the API.
Wonder if there's a good reason they started blocking that API?