YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

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56 pointspagefair61 comments

There's this great small village where everyone makes stuff and buys stuff from each other: good ecosystem, works well and popular stuff makes more money than less popular, as expected. Someone comes up with an idea to make money off the stuff by giving it away for free but putting some ads on it. People don't mind much: the stuff is free now and the people making popular stuff make good money from their share of the ads.

What happens next seems to be some kind of bizarre need to make more money. This is the part I don't really understand. So the people giving away the free stuff with the ads put more ads, which starts to put the people off watching it for free. The people getting the free stuff start to try and find ways of getting the free stuff without the new annoying ads, which makes the people making the ads want to make more ads and make it criminal to block the ads. People stop making stuff because they aren't making as much money as in the hey-day of free-stuff-and-not-too-many-ads and people stop watching stuff and maybe go outside and watch the sunset (still free) or play card games and charades (not yet patented) or make their own stuff and put it on FaceGramSnap (which has ads but not yet so annoying). The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong.

> The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong.

greed

Also spelled Wall Street. And if at any point you come under the delusion that Wall Street is of any benefit to anyone but themselves, go read some analyst's alternate reality review and recommendations for a technology/company you understand top to bottom as an engineer. It's a terrifying Morlock/Eloi dichotomy that explains a lot (at least to me).

Add in blind allocation at Google and they themselves are doing their very best to hire smart people who have no passion whatsoever for the job they're doing, staying only for the compensation and perks, perhaps fleetingly hoping that one day they can transfer to a fun project they believe in.

Agreed. Greed.

I work in a sort of purgatory of the broadcast/internet TV space, and with regards to ads, completely agree.

Broadcasters have gotten accustomed to very high rates for the ads shown on television. They're trying to get these rates on the web, but advertisers don't want to pay them (which is crazy, since you can directly measure response on the web; not as much with broadcast). So they show more ads. A lot more ads, to try to get to the same revenue level as broadcast television.

During the day, I sometimes feel like I'm watching two dinosaurs fight over a carcass as the meteorite comes screaming towards the ground.

Entitlement. You have to remember that old media is a monopoly biz. That explains alot about the culture. The people believe they are entitled to be at a certain level of power/money/presitge in society. Its not surprising they are masters of political interventions to support their positions. They don't do product as much as they do monopoly business model, legislated advantage(s) and regulatory capture. From that position, it's just extraction by contract terms.

>The people believe they are entitled to be at a certain level of power

That's a very good point to make: old school media (broadcast media/print) set the cultural standards for a society. That's changing: the Internet is allowing everyone to learn together what they think, or want to think. We know that anyone losing power will do anything to try and keep it, as they fall deeper into the well of redundancy. You just helped me realise that broadcast is going away, but we'll maintain our celebrity/expert hierarchies based on new media explorations (e.g. XKCD, notch, Colonel Hadfield)

While I understand the tone of the comment, to think song writers/singer or movie creators or even software developers will stop creating because its harder to make money is not a reality. People will continue to create regardless, but to be compensated for it, is nice.

>People will continue to create regardless

Yes I think that's a given. Yet thinking of my colleagues who are full-time artists, I think we as a society to work really hard to justify not paying for their work and I find it hard to fathom.

Ads are the least bad option. The Web functions best if content is available without paywalls. The Web is about friction-free use, you click a link, you are faced with walls. If we went to a micro-transaction based Web, where every link was behind a payment service, it would destroy crawlability, hamper sharing, and cast a chilling effect on people's behavior with respect to consuming content.

The people producing content do need to eat and datacenters cost money too. You can either turn the entire Web into a giant App Store Mall where you pay for everything on demand, or we can have a free, open web, where 'curl' works, but you have to suffer the annoyance of banner ads and profiling (which people can do anyway with paywalls anyway)

To me, it's a worthwhile tradeoff. I'd rather not see the Web behind a bazillion freemium pay-me links like we have on native.

The real debate should be over how to make ads less annoying, more relevant, more pleasant, and let those who don't want to make the tradeoff make a micro-payment instead to opt-out of ads.

If I could pay $50/year for an ad-free YouTube experience I probably would.

>If I could pay $50/year for an ad-free YouTube experience I probably would.

When you can install adblock and get the same experience for free I'm not sure that many people would think that way. And the problem is that for most of the people that I have installed adblock for don't understand the moral implications of using it. I've tried to teach them how to deactivate it for pages they like, but they just didn't care because they didn't see the problem with having it always on. Most of the regular people around me don't understand how webpages make their money. They may say advertising, but if you question them any further all I get is blank stares.

People pay for itunes when they can get music for free, people pay for netflix when they can torrent or stream for free. Some people are happy to pay for services they like. Some aren't. But I think that you can make a business out of those that can be happy to pay, if the product is right.

I don't think tools like noscript, adblock would be nearly as popular if the content publishers hadn't gotten so greedy. I'll use the verge as an example, it's mostly text content yet hitting any page on their site feels like I'm loading a damn application. I want print, not a shifty application around the print. The pendulum will swing.

> The real debate should be over how to make ads less annoying, more relevant, more pleasant

Doesn't it seem like Google would be the right company to determine how to make ads more relevant? Does it seem like they're getting better at this, or worse?

Step 1. Find companies I actually care about and convince them to make ads to show.

$50/year is wishful thinking.

I pay $10/month for Spotify. Thats $120/year. I doubt YouTube would be cheaper

Spotify is working in the realm of artist royalties. Much less content on YouTube would be subject to this and if some form of royalty did go into effect, youtube would have a huge say in how it was setup.

Websites are expensive and other than charging users money, ads are an easy way to generate revenue. I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock.

However, YouTube forced me to. Back when YouTube used a small ad in the top-right, it was fine. Banner overlays were a bit more annoying, but still tolerable. Pre-rolls? No way, they stop me from getting to the content I want.

I wish I could switch to Vimeo but there's not a lot of content there.

I often switched to embed. (youtube.com/watch?v=x89eyhj => youtube.com/embed/x89eyhj)

I do it because I might want to watch a video full screen in one monitor and continue to work on another. Embed automatically takes up the full window. An added side effect is that the pre-roll ads disappear. The banner ads are still there.

For me, I find the Youtube has just gotten worse as time's progressed. At this point, the player's buggy, the site doesn't adjust well to different screen sizes, I have playback issues like crazy, the interface is unintelligible.

I just automated the downloading and playing of Youtube videos from the command line. Here's the script that'll do it: https://gist.github.com/lelandbatey/7594106

actually, you do raise a very good point. The playback has been super buggy for me the last six months or so. Often times beyond usable. It seems the only way to get it actually play is using watching the embedded video. I do it so much out of habit anymore that I often don't notice.

I do actually have that installed (or at least something like it) I actually use it a fair bit for things I want to watch but don't want to listen too. Somewhere between comcast and youtube I find it nearly impossible to stream 1080p quality videos. I feel like youtube doesn't buffer like it used to.

Yeah, I think they started to get really aggressive about controlling how people access Youtube videos, trying to keep from sending more data than is absolutely necessary over the wire to keep costs down.

  I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock.

I remember years ago when Ars Technica ran the article "Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love":

http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-d...

So I disabled AdBlock on Ars Technica. I was immediately greeted with a horrible blinking ad claiming some nonsense that was completely insulting--the IT equivalent of those "punch the monkey" ads. I turned AdBlock back on. I've never turned it back off on Ars Technica.

Websites that run advertising cannot pretend that advertising is somehow separate from the site. Advertising becomes part of the content. Ads are therefore representative of the site. Website owners should curate the ads as carefully as the site's main content. Otherwise they're committing some of the same sins as spammers.

You haven't explained why you decided against avoiding visiting Ars Technica altogether.

Why is everyone so whiny? Should everything be free in life? In a time when PBS's budget is drastically cut I am glad free content still makes it out and I am happy to support it. No one is forced to watch ads.

Whiny? Should everyone accept whatever site operators choose to shove at them? PBS is the wrong comparison; Google is a for-profit company.

In the cold light of capitalism, this is a game theory problem. As a site operator, what ads can I get away with before I drive away my visitors? Will additional advertising reduce the effectiveness of my existing ads, due to visitor burnout? Am I making more money in the long run with the introduction of these ads?

As a user: What content can I get from this site without wasting my time on ads? Are there technologies that let me see the content without the ads? Is this site even worth the hassle?

The capitalist marketing purist would argue that an Ideal Ad is one that suggests something to the viewer that is exactly what he or she actually wants or needs, and said Ideal Ad is so well-done that the viewer does not mind watching it.

Given that Google is the world's largest advertising company, with arguably the best data of any advertising company, how well do you think they are doing that?

Aren't most pre-rolls 3 seconds before you can watch the video?

And it's funny to me to watch people smugly use AdBlock. All you folks who use it understand that Google could detect that you AdBlocked, and then refuse to show the video, right? I mean, you get that, right?

Google could prepend the ad in such a way that it appears to be part of the main video data stream, so that the ad is impossible to block on a URL basis.

I could write userland software to automatically skip ahead 30 seconds on any YouTube video.

Google could prevent people from skipping the first 30 seconds of any video by delaying the data stream for the remainder of the video at the server level.

At that point, I could go outside and watch the sunset.

Or, I could buy a frak-ton of EC2 instances and cobble together a crappy IsomorphTube--with discreet text-based ads, which might attract viewers simply because Google had turned YouTube into an armed camp (with forced video viewing for all).

Let's remember that even though Google has a huge scale advantage, it isn't Google that's creating the content on YouTube.

> Google could detect that you AdBlocked, and then refuse to show the video

Emphasis on "could". They don't. So what?

It's trivial to make anti-anti-adblock filters, so most sites don't even start that arms race.

Are you logged in to YouTube when you're blocking ads?

Google could announce, "Hey, everyone who has ad-blocked over the last year violated our Terms of Use, and so we're deleting their accounts."

Or they could just shut down YouTube, because it's impossible to earn revenue off of people who aren't even willing to watch an ad before they feel entitled to watch a video.

Almost all were but increasingly a lot make me wait 30 seconds or more.

youtube-dl not only bypasses the wait, but also the asinine "age verification".

That's only possible because they have very sensibly decided to avoid that arms race. Why? Because ultimately, the ad is playing on my monitor, linked to my computer, running my browser on my OS. All that stuff is under my control. If I really don't want to see ads, and yet want them to think I'm seeing ads, then I can.

I have seen people put stickers on their monitors over where the ads are... How are they going to detect that?

I'm sure they feel it's much better to be able to tell when people are blocking ads (and therefore not charge for impressions), than it would be to try and force me to watch ads, when I've already demonstrated that I'm willing to do what it takes to block them.

> Aren't most pre-rolls 3 seconds before you can watch the video?

5. But it's only "most", and it's more and more common to find videos where you get 30 seconds unskippable.

Then do it so we can find another way around it.

Centralized websites are expensive.

I didn't realize adblock would block pre-rolls. That damn web development company with the animated little guy and the tiles of site examples has really gotten annoying.

Installed adblock a few minutes ago.

Bliss.

YOU'VE BEEN CODING LIKE A BEAST AND NOW IT'S [skip]

It's weird that there's no mechanism for me to veto ads. I have no use for that service, which makes the ad even more annoying to me. A while ago Crucial RAM were showing a really irritating ad.

Normally I don't skip ads, but there have started being more ads that I hate and need to skip.

And it's weird to get a 4 minute pre-roll ad on a 9 minute youtube video.

Youtube wasn't the breaking point for me, twitch.tv was. Granted, the streamers themselves do have control over this, I found it utterly annoying to see the same 1 or 2 ads played over and over in my face. Once I had ABP installed, the whole internet suddenly became faster to load too. The only annoying thing is, some websites that have those annoying ads that scroll across the webpage will now result in a dead-iframe blocking its content. Fortunately, I know how to right click, inspect element, navigate to the iframe container, and delete it, which, takes about 5 seconds.

Not just faster, but more secure as well. I couldn't tell you how many malware outbreaks I see at work because of a rogue advertisement on a popular site. Adblock keeps these from getting the best of your users. We did a pilot group with some folks who commonly use their work computers without the benefit of our corporate proxy or firewall (these are the users most at risk of advertising-based malware) by having them install Adblock. The results were pretty drastic, even if it wasn't a statistically significant sample size.

That's a huge factor. I remember watching seasons of TV shows on my local broadcaster's websites. Obviously, they were ad-supported and I was okay with this. The frustration was they'd show the same ad over and over and over again as I consumed a season-full of content.

If you gave me the kind of variety we're used to in a TV broadcast, I'd tolerate the ads. But repeated? No. That's when I start looking to hack my way around them.

I like how reddit discussion threads is now proof of how everyone feels.

Ha! Good catch. As a redditor, I sometimes fall into the same trap. Because, you know, who doesn't browse reddit? /s

Let's also not forget youtube-dl: http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

And Youtube Viewer: https://code.google.com/p/trizen/

You can play videos with youtube-dl:

    mplayer -really-quiet -cache 3000 $(youtube-dl -f 18 -g $(xclip -o))

Here's a related and interesting article [1] titled 'Unraveling Google’s Product Strategy' from the author of a post that is linked to on the HN front page (Ode to Little Data)[2].

The author in this related article is really showing the total commitment to ads by google. I find it very unsettling.

[1]http://katsenblog.com/post/58721533658/unraveling-googles-pr... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6782205

A fair size chunk of the pre roll ads I see also don't show anything interesting in the first five seconds. They have some sort of banner and just as the five seconds are up the ad content actually starts.

Reminds me of "Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?"[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6382188

This bit caught my eyes: "while paying AdBlock Plus to whitelist their other Adwords ads" So, adblock sells the ability to display ads to it's users? Isn't that just plain wrong?

When will advertisers realize shorter and more direct ads work best on the web?

When Hulu was in beta they only had 5 second ads and I still remember some of them after all of these years simply because I had no reason to direct my attention away from them. Now when Im forced to watch a 30 second ad I just change the tab and check my email or whatever.

Also, repeating the same ad over and over is pretty annoying. If you binge watch a series on Hulu Plus, you'll get the same ad at least twice per episode, for every 24 min episode. I can recite some of them by heart, with the same intonation.

Why are the screenshots in this article taken from klout.com instead of twitter or facebook or wherever they were actually posted?

It looks like he may just have my klout chrome or Firefox extension installed, which adds klout scores to twitter. He may also be using a 3rd party client with a klout integration.

Correct, just the Klout chrome extension adding scores to Twitter =)

I don't know about y'all, but on Chrome right now, no ad-blocker works on Youtube anymore. The adblocking works on every other site, even other video sites. But Youtube pre-rolls continue to play no matter what extension or filters I use (and making sure that "acceptable ads" are off).

Anyone else experiencing this?

I'm using adblock plus with easylist and fanboys list, and "allow non-obtrusive advertising" off. Works for me

Works for me. You could try a different adblocker, but it should work. Did you try turning it off and on again? ;)

I don't even find the option anymore to not block the pre-rolls, which was an experimental option for some time. Seems to be on by default now (or even integrated into the filter lists?)

Try a different adblocker that isn't being paid by Google to whitelist their ads. Try different blocklists, and for the real scummy domains I use a host redirect through my firewall.

It's an evidence free nonsense article, but to answer that quoted tweet: YouTube for Schools doesn't contain ads http://www.youtube.com/schools

What evidence are you expecting? It's an opinion piece that merely connects a few dots. Google paid adblock plus, that's a fact. Did you see the Reddit article? Half of the comments were citing YouTube as a major reason for installing adblock.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com