I realise that online ads have other implications such as tracking that, say, a blu-ray rip downloaded from a torrent doesn't have, but the reason for piracy doesn't change the fact that it is.
So it is a payment?!? Through out the last decades advertisement has not been liable under customer protection laws that regulate sales of products, and generally avoided local laws. The stated reason has been that advertisement is not a sale since the viewer is not recompensating the publisher. A product given for free is in a completely different category of law than that of a sale.
Im old enough to remember when phone companies tried the tactic of giving away mobile phones for free, but which carried a binding contract with the carrier. Courts found that to be illegal and forced companies to sell them for 1 cent since a free product can not have a binding contract, which turned the transaction into a sale. The outcome of that meant that information of the full cost must be given to the customer in no unclear terms, since we are now dealing with a sale.
Products given for free with advertisement is also exempted in EU from value added tax. The given reason (can't find the original legal source) was that viewers may watch nothing, some or all the advertisement, and that makes putting a monetary value and taxing it difficult. If you buy a subscription it can be taxed, but watching it free with adds do not. This is true for both physical and non-physical goods.
Piracy involves you deciding to acquire content that has not been made freely available.
I don't really use YouTube, but when ads play on random videos and it irritates me, I just close my eyes, the simplest version of content-blocking. (If the ad is painfully loud, I may also cover my ears in contexts where this is not extremely socially awkward)
Can we say it's immoral for me to close my eyes? Can someone's business model be the basis of an argument that it's immoral for me to exert this simple bodily function?
Is there some contract that I've signed where people have the right to my attention in any context? If they've based their business model on the assumption that this consent exists, and it does not, is it fair to say that the business model should fail?
consumer: I want to fill my content hole with content someone made through hard work right now and for free and how dare they delay that by 5 seconds after which I can press Skip. I will employ sophisticated tricks and run untrusted code in my browser to work around that delay.
also consumer: I will totally not be pissed at all if there is no free content for me anymore. Their business model should fail because I did not consent to ads. How dare anyone consider and live within an objectively true reality that things have costs?
Is not you since you said you don't use youtube. but it is what many youtube users seem to think.
if tomorrow youtube decides only paid subscribers can view videos... do they maintain that market share?
Did I just pirate my drive to work?
These are honest questions and it seems way too fuzzy to me to be making moral judgments about the whole mess.
I think one does have the right to block ads on one’s machine if one chooses.
However, personally, because of the “if ad blocking was universalized, the services I appreciate would likely not exist” reasoning, I choose not to block ads.
As for other things like “muting/covering ads on screen”, yeah, that does seem a bit fuzzy. Sometimes I’ll even use a browser extension to fast forward an ad somewhat.
I do think this is something for the individual to decide how they will deal with ads. When I mute an ad, I don’t think I’m really free riding? For one thing, I don’t think it is contrary to the expectations of those being sold the ad slot. Me fast forwarding the ads a bit probably is contrary to their expectations, so I don’t have as good justification for it, but I don’t feel like I’m cheating when I do it. (Or, if I do, it is because the particular ad is objectionable enough that I’m willing to stick it to the advertiser)
It's the same mistake libertarians make when they assume a fully informed and rational society.
It's not a way to model reality, terrible or otherwise. That’s not what it purports to do.
How how-well-things-work depends on the number of people doing a thing, varies from thing to thing. For some things, as long as one or more people behave in a particular way, a thing goes well. For other things, if even one person does a particular thing, things go badly. And there are plenty of situations in between.
These different situations call for different responses, I think.
If their copyright monitoring algorithm recognises the tracks being performed and the licence holders have opted to receive a share of ad revenue rather than issue a takedown notice, then I think the answer might well be yes.
I never claimed that ads can't be profitable; I was responding to a commenter who implied that ads are necessary in order to have a viable streaming business, which is very obviously not the case.
I'm paying for Youtube Premium, but its a plain utilitarian decision after they started hassling me with captchas and intimidations that someone at my IP address was using an ad blocker. So yeah, I'm paying protection money. But I don't feel in the least good about it.
I am not Google's accountant. They can figure it out.
> In 2024 the company made a revenue of $350.01 Billion USD
Now assuming that let's check how much it costs to host/recode/stream stuff. How dare companies want to profit right?
The outcome for me is identical. I don't see an ad, and I won't buy something.
It's the same reason why DVR recording was never piracy. It's the same thing as if I watched the show, except the DVR does it.
The difference is you still see the beginning of the ad and some people see a big part of it because they don't have the habit of muting and looking away out of fear of missing the beginning of the video for example.
> The outcome for me is identical. I don't see an ad, and I won't buy something.
You still see the beginning of the ad. Whether you buy something or not is not always what the ad is trying to do sometimes it's just raising awareness
[citation needed]
You're saying no content would be created if there were no payments?
Have you never met a real artist?
99% of internet content is complete crap, the equivalent of email spam, that only exists because each piece makes a few dollars a month from ads. On the old internet, without ads, there was plenty of useful content and much less spam.
And the spam crowds out good content, as seen in recipe sites for example.
If they were unable to gain any revenue from advertising, they would go out of business if they could not find an alternative source of income.
I feel that they are more likely to find an alternative than go out of business. That alternative might not motivate people to make content that no-one wants and trick viewers into watching. If it were a system where the users being happy dictated their income perhaps the service might be better than a system where the happiness of advertisers defines how much they get
Similar reason to why DVR recording is not pirating.
2. I don't care.
I choose what code runs on my machine, not Google. Google can run their own code on their own machines, that's fine. Once data is in my processor, I'm going to do what I want with it. Google doesn't have to concern themselves with what I'm doing on my own computer.
Simply re-asserting your opinion doesn't lend any extra weight to your argument. If both sides just repeat their opinions, that's not a discussion.
Whatever, you already said you don't care about actual rational discourse and regard everyone else as (un)paid actors, so this is pointless.
I disagree. If you were buying every advertised product and falling for every advertised scam then fair enough. But assuming you were ignoring them, there is no issue with offloading the thing you would do anyway to a computer and save everyone the time/bandwidth.
That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is not to get you to buy a coke today, it's to have a positive impression that builds over years. This sort of advertising is very hard to attribute sales to, but a good example of how you don't need to buy a product for seeing the ad to be worth something to the company.
If both of those are legal and ethical (I’d be curious what argument someone would make against this), then offloading this work to a machine should be just as ethical.
It's fine if you're OK with it, but don't pretend that you're not doing that.
You seem like you have a robin hood complex or something similar.
its not some secret that some % of viewers, block ads.. either you lean into it and utilize it, or you pretend people should be obligated to only watch your videos by paying or watching ads, in that case find a new platform.
Are you watching creators who don't share such sentiments? You should consider that the creators who make large sums from youtube ad rev are the absolute worst quality you can find. People like Mr Beast or Logan Paul. It primarily means you are slinging garbage every single day and literally hurting people for money, because that's what google's algorithm optimizes for. Google wants to burn you out churning out slop despite the fact that youtube is already significantly overfilled.
Meanwhile, all those youtube creators who made their living doing high quality animation a couple decades ago? Youtube killed their business by fiat because different content was more profitable for them. Multiple very prominent and influential animators who go all the way back to the early Newgrounds days were forced out of their job by that change.
The entire reason Youtube creators started taking sponsorships is because Google has repeatedly reduced their advertising payouts, by staggering amounts. Several times Google killed entire swaths of the smaller content industry simply because they felt like taking more of the money. They can do this because there are no alternatives.
The reason Floatplane and Nebula and friends exist is entirely because Youtube constantly punishes you for making Non-Mr Beast content, and repeatedly cuts how much money you get per hour of watched content, with no warning or justification even offered.
The creators I watch do not want me to watch them on youtube. They want me to watch them on Nebula, Floatplane, and Patreon. This includes many channels that predate Youtube being bought by Google, and ads existing on the service at all.
Several of these creators, especially the animators, were prominent on Newgrounds, and made zero dollars from their work. Most of them have day jobs or other avenues of monitizing their talents, like touring or merch or music.
Youtube added a feature to compete with Patreon where you can pay to be a "member" of a channel, and that channel can produce "members only" videos that you can only watch if you pay that channel money. Just recently, Youtube, without any warning or checking with creators or asking opinions started forcing those videos in front of users who are not members, and cannot see them, polluting feeds and making it harder to select the next video you want to watch and creators, including LTT, are adamantly against this and do not want it
Youtube does not GAF what creators want, never has, and is almost always a hostile and adversarial entity in the relationship. I am not screwing over the creators by blocking ads, Google is screwing over the creators to take more profit from those ads.
A summary is not the same as the content either, that's a fairly well tested concept (fair use, etc).
Installing an ad-blocker in your browser and never seeing an ad while consuming hours of content for free, depriving those creators of revenue, depriving the platform of revenue to support your usage of it, is in no way comparable to these at-the-margin contrived examples.
the creators are posting their content on a free platform, with hopes that it will generate enough views so that enough of those viewers are ad watching viewers so that they will gain revenue. you're acting like the view is 100% meaningless and ONLY a bad thing, and its quite the opposite.
the "free" view costs the creator literally nothing, and it gains them an additional view, if its a good video its potentially gonna help spread the video elsewhere where maybe they can find some suckers to mindlessly consume ads.
and lets be real, the platform you are "depriving of revenue" is google... they operated ad free to create massive market capture to create the current monstrosity that is youtube in 2025, think they can't cut off all users that block ads right now? there is a reason they aren't doing so.
In a newspaper if I skip over ads with my eyes do you think I've marginalized/pirated/stolen from the business that paid for the ad? They paid for placement and not an impression. I'd argue that if YouTube presents the ad and my browser/app/whatever skips it then YouTube satisfied its obligation and that's where it ends. The advertiser, knowing full well the limitations of the access mechanism, made a choice to throw money into this version of the attention economy. It's obviously worth it to them or they wouldn't do it, or haven't made as careful of an economic decision as I would imagine I suppose.
Another way to look at it is additive rather than subtractive. If I visit a site with a text only browser that cannot display ads, what is your position then? And if I then implement the ability for my browser to play only the main video on any page, what then?
When it comes down to it, we have no obligation to view the content on a webpage the way the publisher of said webpage wants us to. You can think of plenty of other examples that make "adblocking is piracy" ridiculous - I invert the colors but the publisher doesn't want me to see it with inverted colors. I wear sunglasses while looking at it, which changes the way it looks. Maybe the site I use always puts an ad in the same place so I stick a bit of tape on my monitor in that location, is that bad?
This was such a problem for Youtube that they flirted with banning linking to Patreon or suggesting viewers go to it. Not because it was taking money from google, but because it was money being paid not to google.
Then Google competed by adding their own form of Patreon built into the system, and creators liked that and embraced it, and recently Youtube abused the membership system to pollute non-member's screens with videos they could not watch without paying, and creators did not want this, but Youtube does not care what creators want.
The people who make most of their money from Youtube ad-rev are the worst the platform has to offer. They are beholden to the algorithm, so they have to put out slop every single day, and make the most aggressive A/B tested clickbait they can manage, and even pay to advertise their video on other channels and videos, and they are all better off on TikTok anyway.
It's things like Five Minute Crafts and their made up videos.
Patreon pays out $300m total across everything people use it for per year.
Not even close in scale.
Is this the way YouTube ads work? If I don’t load the ad, is someone paying?
You might as well argue that covering your ears during a TV advertisement is piracy. That's a strange definition of the word if I ever saw one.
I feel like OP isn't asserting anything even remotely controversial in that definition lol
What the guy was saying is that circumventing payment to watch a movie = pirating, and it seems like you're saying that's not the case. It seems you're saying that people saying "pirating" are referring circumventing payment and distributing, which is not at all what the majority of people mean by pirating.
Pirating != distribution for the vast majority of how people use that word - it means consuming the media without paying for it.
literally OP:
> "watch free movies online" and find a site streaming bad DVD rips
I'm not actually sure what you're issue is at this point. In the US, if someone says they're going to "pirate a movie" they are assuredly not talking about how they are going to be the one distributing the movie, just consuming it - whether that's on a "streaming" site or just downloaded and watched locally.
It seems like your argument is that "piracy" is much more specific than how people actually use the word. SO it's a semantics thing, and that's really fucking stupid lol
This is redistributing.
The advertiser may well think that's what they're buying, but what they're actually getting is the right to send my browser a URL, which they hope I will fetch and view.
I would prefer not to, so I don't.
Edit: oh, I see you work at Google.
Perhaps not literally, as in on the financial books.
But certainly in leadership "values".
Guys, please disable your adblockers
People disable adblockers
Malware!
This is a huge escalation of an already over-stuffed term.
Equating piracy to theft was bad enough, now choosing to not view ads is also piracy, which is theft?
I try to be chill here but no, foot down, absolutely not. Blocking ads is nothing more than determing what content comes in on the wire to the computer you own, or what content is rendered in your web browser. That's it. If that means someone isn't making money when they could be, well, too bad so sad.
It's like, "if you walk past a Nike store without pausing to hear the sales pitch, you are stealing from Nike." Capitalist hellscape.
Or are you going to pretend that there's no agreement between you and YouTube that you're going to watch ads in exchange for the free content?
Entering into a contract doesn't necessarily require you to sign a document. Quite a few contracts that we make every day require no formal acceptance, like entering a shop.
Google wants to show me ads. I don't want to see them. I demonstrated this by blocking them. Google continues to show me videos anyway. Clearly they're ok with the arrangement. They are free to present me with written terms, or gate all their videos behind a login, but they choose not to do so.
You are either very confused or playing stupid for some reason that I don't understand, but it isn't amusing or cute. This will probably earn me a dang warning but I don't really care - you are full of shit. You're making claims all over this thread that you've literally just made up.
Without an ad blocker I can stand up and walk to the next room - optionally muting audio output - then come back.
Is that fraud? Or should I drink a verification can?
When they provide all the equipment necessary to watch the content, and pay for the internet connection and power to my house, only then will they have a claim to what commands are run on my computer.
But my computer, that I paid for, using the power and bandwidth that I pay for, does not play ads.
If they don't like those terms, they can feel absolutely free to not send me any content they don't want me to watch.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...
A data point is TiVo who are, apparently, still around and have a 'skip ads' button on recorded content.
I am allowed to splice up my personal copies of videos.
But in this case you don't have one in the first place.
Legally able to watch and legally able to splice up are at the same level, as far as copyright is concerned. And I don't even need to make an extra copy to do the kind of live splicing an ad blocker does.
Metaphors are dangerous, but, for the purposes of this specific comparison, I see piracy as breaking into a video store and taking a disc, and ad blocking as allowing some people into my house but not others.
YouTube is free to block me as a user or put its content behind a paywall if it doesn't like me doing this, but I am also free to decide what comes into my browser.
Because the payment method is a scam. Imagine if all car owners were charged the same price for fuel regardless of how much they used.
Likewise, imagine watching 10 videos and being charged the same as someone who watches 200 videos.
We should pay for what we watch. The end. Ad blocking is not piracy when the payment option is at best a blunt extraction of funds from my wallet, at worst a sleazy shakedown.
This ship sailed when adblockers first went mainstream. (One of the early developers dropped their product because they thought it was unethical.)
I think we’ve now moved to the consensus that adblocking when viewing content isn’t pirating. It’s similar. But not the same, in intent, mechanism or effect.
You can say that we should not be blocking those ads, that is fine. But blocking ads is not making unauthorised copies of the content.