These tech companies have underestimated their utility. They are mostly providing mindless time wasters. If you try to charge money or create inconvenience, people will look for something else to do.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere. The VC grow-at-all-costs business model is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t scale when profitability becomes a priority.
Youtube produces almost none of their own content, instead they rely on other humans to create that content.
Use your ad blocker if you want, but stop treating youtubers as google employees (they’re not, they often have a much more frustrating relationship than you do) and start supporting them through other means.
To you, those people are just helping you waste your time. if that’s your real argument here, stop wasting your fucking time and do something else more worth your precious time, or start supporting content producers directly through non-youtube methods. Or just stop fucking watching.
Those people aren’t on youtube because they’re buying into corporate google dick-wrangling, they want to produce videos and have them get watched, and youtube is a place that hosts their videos for free AND gives them ad revenue share for hosting youtube ads.
You aren’t some hero for adblocking youtube but still watching it. google won’t notice your small dip in their revenue, but the youtuber who made it will.
Wanna support the people who entertain you (or, i guess, “waste your time”, if that’s what you consider entertainment to be — if all you want is to waste your time, don’t ads do the same thing for you?). Pay them directly for their content. Want to take a fake stand that supports nobody but yourself and your own inconveniences, install an ad blocker and boast on the internet about how you’re totally fucking over google and the people who create youtube content by doing so. But don’t treat yourself like some hero for doing so.
I was defending the people who produce content on youtube, and who do not enjoy the benefits of google’s wealth and market position, and are just trying to create their content.
adblock youtube if you want, but unless you’re also supporting the creators of your content outside of google, i have never paid google a dime either. don’t pretend this is about a big corporation. you just think you deserve to be entertained for free, regardless of who put in the effort to create it.
If you’re REALLY anti-google/youtube, STOP USING THEM. If you watch them with adblock, google can still spin your usage statistics into something that will appeal to investors, but youtube creators will be wondering why their numbers dwindle, because they don’t have investors to (lie to / spin numbers at). You’re still helping youtube, even with an adblocker.
On the other hand, if you support content creators outside of youtube? you are supporting them directly, without youtube’s involvement and without google even getting a cut. I do this for several youtubers, and support even more through merch and etc.
But sure keep telling me i’m defending the landlords because i’m getting mad at you for mistreating the staff and pretending you’re sticking it to the landlords.
To your point about watching YouTube with adblockers still helping Google due to viewership numbers. That’s exactly why after I stopped supporting blizzard (at first due to the blutzchung controversy, then everything else that happened) I immediately stopped playing hearthstone, yes, I was playing it free, I never spent any money on it, but I didn’t want to even indirectly help by giving them usage statistics, or by giving paying people even a little bit of a quicker matchmaking.
The modern Internet community has an interestingly illogical take on free services. Either use them or pay for an alternative. But the average user has grown up on free services and will happily insist on having their cake and eating it too
If content creators provide 90% or even 60% of value to YouTube, why is Google a trillion dollar company while major content creators are fighting for scraps that fall from their table? Why are content creators who aren’t in the top tier compensated so little for what they bring to the table?
YouTube is nothing without content. Unionize. Stand together and get paid what you’re worth.
where do i find the 10-40% percent of youtube-produced content on youtube you’re talking about?
Google is a trillion dollar company because they do far more than youtube, and make the majority of their money from taking a percentage of ad revenue. This does include youtube, and youtube is only profitable to google because they can sell ads on top of it, because video hosting on the internet is fucking expensive.
i pay google nothing, just like you. i do, however, support my favorite youtubers outside of google revenue streams with my own money, either through direct support or merchandise.
Both installing an adblocker and not even going to youtube will cost google money. I don’t care which you do. But if you do watch specific youtubers regularly, support them directly, even if you do use an ad blocker.
You’re not a hero for adblocking google. You’re a hero if you support content creators outside of google, whether or not you watch them on youtube using an adblocker.
I pay for Premium now since it includes music streaming which is convenient to use. If they raise the price too much, I’ll absolutely just go back to mp3s and deal with the ads on YouTube and just watch less content on there. $15 is about my cap before I do that.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere.
👍
My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I’m there if I don’t pay (or view ads). Instead they’ve chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they’d rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!
Edit: Oh look, half a dozen lectures about how Google has to make money somehow. Hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.
I will quite happily pay a reasonable price for the privilege of avoiding ads.
I understand why people block ads, even though they are a a free tier, even if I don’t agree with it.
The fact that the cost of YouTube Premium almost doubled overnight is making me rethink my ethics, when my current subscription is up for renewal, I will be reassessing whether to cease watching YouTube, watch YouTube with ads or determine another way of supporting content creators.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you. Attention is all the currency they’ll ever get from you, that’s totally cool, absolutely. I’m totally that way too. But they’ve got to make money somehow, so if you’re not the paying customer, someone else has to be.
I’m not saying it has to be ad sales either, but if we want a world in which we can use services for free without ads, we need to come up with an alternative way for them to make money. It has to come from somewhere, and by the bucketload.
If every user thinks like you, then it doesn’t matter how many people you talk to or share links with, you’re not a net gain on their service, you bring nothing to it.
Why should they, or anybody, be thankful that you honour them with your presence, if you contribute nothing of value? What makes you so entitled to use somebody’s product for free with no strings attached?
Ads suck, I’m eager for us to move past them once we figure out an alternative that keeps products in business and us receiving things for free. But we can’t deny the reality we live in right now either. Even huge companies like Google (who yes, do suck) have to make money to survive.
But they have been, and for years. All the years I’ve run a smartphone Google has harvested and profited from my data. From Gmail to Chrome (before I switched) to Maps, etc - they have profited from people’s data at scale. So the argument that they need to make money somehow falls flat for me.
Also, if they charged like $2 a year to block ads, plenty of people would buy it. But like most things lately, the enshitification of our user experience continues. It’s not enough for companies like Google to “make money” - it’s never enough and their greed has no boundaries.
That’s why you see people like us pushing back - enough is enough.
Google doesn’t make money directly from harvesting your data, they make money from harvesting your data then showing you ads based on that data. So if you’re running an ad blocker then they aren’t making money from you (unless you pay them for stuff like subscriptions and apps). As ad blocking becomes more common they are definitely going to get more draconian to try to claw back that money (growth is infinite, profits must go up /s).
Also BTW Google probably makes more like $50 per user per year on average (looking at revenue and internet population) so they would never offer a $2/year ad block unless forced to by regulation.
YouTube creates no content and it’s reliant on people volunteering their time and talent to them. Fuck the idea that we need to pay google to access content they only host and don’t pay fairly for.
To answer your questions - users such as this bring something more valuable than ad money. They bring data. Google harvests data and metrics on users in a million ways, packages this up, and sells it for considerably more than they make on ads. In free services such as this, YOU are the product.
Ads suck, nobody wants to watch them, and they simply represent google maximizing shareholder value at every opportunity, as they are legally bound to do under American capitalism. YouTube ads are not a critical revenue stream that will make or break them.
Copy-pasting this from a comment I made a few days ago. I’m so tired of this misconception. Google’s business model literally disincentivizes selling personal data. The business model is built on selling targeted advertisements. Google wants to keep this data to itself because it gives them a competitive advantage in the ad space.
Selling your data would give competitors power in the marketplace. So yes, Google collects data and uses it, but no, Google does not sell your data. It sells targeting BASED on your data.
Very different, regardless of if it is any better.
Not all interested buyers are in the ad business, and governments can make payments in a way that is difficult to audit from a third party perspective, definitely not in any currency or a change in the balance sheet. I wish things where different but seems to me that paying won’t protect me from them harvesting every bit they can.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you.
I understand the message about needing to fund services to exist, but that stance I feel doesn’t always really work too well. Since if other users were like them then it’d also mean there might be a lot of stuff that doesn’t exist anymore which could be a pro like microtransactions ceasing to exist and move to subscription model failing.
And for YouTube might be completely different where depending on their taste maybe click baits turned people away if the person hated them, so those don’t exist. And long winded videos attempting to take advantage of the algorithm failed if they were someone who didn’t like videos that wasted their time, and everyone is like them.
Reddit might still support third party apps if everyone was like them, and lemmy bigger. That’s why if everyone was like them argument is just a weird one, since it turns minority actions into a majority and changes way too many things to focus on one singular thing.
I think generally you will find that people of this opinion hold that it is unreasonable that we have privatized basically all of the internet infrastructure. These people tend to be in favor of expecting the consumer spends more on hardware for hosting, and enthusiasts, hobbyists, non-profits, and occasionally companies develop the software necessary to make the internet function, rather than companies just paying for tons and tons of warehouses of servers, and then just forcing the software to all become fucked up walled gardens while the actual utilities everyone rests upon is left to rot.
Meanwhile, Youtube engineers and uBlock Origin volunteers are in a war of attrition, updating both the website (youtube, to block ublock) and uBlock Origin (the ad blocker, to unblock the ublock blocker) multiple times a day every day
Oh, of course not. But uBlock Origin and pihole aren’t going anywhere. Hell, they’d probably have to get legislation to slow it down, but good luck fighting that battle. Hollywood’s war against piracy is a good comparison.
I’m scared that that’s the endgame here. By educating people about ad blockers, they might be purposely tanking their business model so they can cry to the government to ban ad blockers to save them.
Not even, they’ve already tried to make the case of Anti-adblock bypass violating DMCA and it hasn’t gone anywhere. Unlike piracy where it can and is claimed as a violation of copyright law.
Reminds me of the IM wars back in the latter 90s / early 00s. At one point, briefly, AIM and Trillian were pushing updates to negate each other every few hours.
Honestly, Google did this to themselves with not properly vetting the advertisers that they sell space to, and with oversaturation of ads.
If they’d have stopped granting ad space to scammers and malware spreaders, and if they’d have stopped adding advertisements at the line most people find tolerable (which seems to be a single ad between videos… not multiple at a time, and certainly no mid-rolls), they wouldn’t have triggered quite the level of ad blocking that they did.
I see this “problem” that they have as being entirely of their own making.
Next logical step is to modify the uploaded video itself to contain ads around the video frame or on automatically detected clear surfaces in the video.
Technology circumvention and copyright infringement are just about the only power consumers have against the near monopolies and cartel like behavior from the tech/media industry since our government regulators have been neutered.
I am grandfathered into a family Premium plan from the old Youtube Red days. The price is close to doubling come April. In the absence of competition or government intervention to punish anti-compeitive, anti-consumer behaviour I will be relying on ad-blocking and other circumvention measures next year. I am willing to pay a fair price but costs of living have gone up a lot while incomes for regular people are stagnant. The executives running these companies are completely disconnected from reality.
I didn’t have ublock installed on my machines. I’d removed it a year ago because it was breaking sites and my pihole does a pretty good job, but I kept getting pop ups from sites about “turning off my adblocker”. I didn’t have an adblocker running. I was using vanilla firefox. I got so irritated, I looked up how to get rid of those messages and everything pointed me to ublock.
So, shout out to thinkgeek for reminding me what its like to browse the web without a ton of ads. If it wasn’t for your annoying popup about my non-existent adblocker, I would never have installed an adblocker.
Oh, and I hadn’t realized how awful youtube became over the last year or so with the ads. I was just dealing with it like an asshole. When I put ublock back on, my enjoyment of youtube shot up!
I was considering paying for premium too because I want to normalize paying for content and supporting things I like on the web. But I was struggling with the decision because usually you either pay with your data or pay with money. In this case I know I’d be doing both since Google will gladly take my money and also hoover up my data. Then they jacked the rates up to $14 a month…and now I have ublock installed again.
Its still a problem with the apps on my phone and appletv’s though. If they made it $4.99/mo I’d probably fork it over but $14 is more than my other streaming services and they create their own content. Youtube just hosts content.
Edit: how-to geek not thinkgeek. I think they went out of business.
you said you weren’t using an Ad Blocker but getting pop-ups saying you were. it’s because the pi-hole is blocking ads at a DNS level so the site detects that and sends that message instead.
Oh, and I hadn’t realized how awful youtube became over the last year or so with the ads. I was just dealing with it like an asshole. When I put ublock back on, my enjoyment of youtube shot up!
Try getting some kind of sponsorblock, too. I didn’t realize how annoying those little messages were until I didn’t have to manually speed through them.
God, how far Thinkgeek has fallen. Why would a retail site even need ads? You already there to do shopping. I don’t think I’ve bought anything since they got bought out.
So the article.claims that Youtube’s plan backfired because uninstall rates on some AD blockers increased and a percentage of those users cited “YouTube” as the reason.
I don’t know if it’s just me but that’s a massive stretch. I would like to hear numbers from YouTube themselves before jumping to any conclusions. These companies operate on scale and usually have enough data to back these decisions. Can it go wrong, sure. Has it already backfired. Not sure.
The article mentions people moving from Chrome to Edge to try and get around this. With how ubiquitous Chromium is as an engine behind a wide range of browsers, it seems most people won’t actually move away from a browser that Google has some control over.
Adblock plus was the standard for so long until maybe 5 or so years ago when they were bought out or something and they were hinting at letting some ads in. I think only the very online people switched to uBlock Origin before Adblock Plus tanked itself. That is all from hazy memory but it wouldn’t surprise me that normies got recommended Adblock Plus and used it until it didn’t work right only to seek out better options now that youtube is serving them so many ads.
No, I prefer to communicate with people able to understand sarcasm in light of the context. The best I can offer is for you to block me to avoid being exposed to my ultra-high level, military grade sarcasm.
You prefer to communicate with people who assume you’re being sarcastic? That’s kinda weird. I prefer to communicate with people who take my words at face value. You’re not worth blocking.
Telling that you think being blocked is a good thing. You’re not harassing me, you’re not trying to dox me, you’re just being annoying and bad at sarcasm. Hence, you’re not worth blocking. But you’re certainly also not worth talking to.
Not really making fun of it, just genuinely curious. Are people still installing Adblock Plus? It has had an Acceptable Ads Committee for over a decade now. What were people using if not that?
I stopped using that when it stopped working. Is there a working version? I thought they got kiked off the app store for “interfering with internet data” or something.
More like most people don’t have the patience to learn the difference between uBlock and UBlock Origin. Also, a lot of people just install Ad Block because they you tell them to install a ad blocker, they just install the one called AdBlock.
Dns is what translates urls (google.com, lemmy.world, etc) into ip addresses (207.94.56.21) which your computer can actually understand. Dns can be used to track you but a good dns can also very slightly speed up your Internet because it gets you the address to websites a bit faster. I use adguard and have Cloudflare DNS upstream from that
I’d like to elaborate a bit on why DNS can be used to track you.
Nearly all web traffic is encrypted (https), you can check by looking at the padlock next to the URL in your browser. But DNS requests aren’t encrypted by default. This means anyone, most likely your ISP our the admin of your home network, can see what domains you’re accessing. That means just google.com, lemmy.world, etc. and not lemmy.world/post/… This isn’t a huge amount of info, but it does tell anyone who’s looking approximately what you’re doing (googling something, looking at lemmy, etc.).
To fix that there are a few different ways to encrypt DNS requests, the most common of which (afaik) is DNS over HTTPS, which will encrypt DNS requests like any other web request your browser makes. I don’t know why this hasn’t been made the default yet. Firefox has a setting for DNS over HTTPS, it calls it secure DNS.
In video ads = no relevant ads based on the user. Less relevant ads = less revenue generated for people paying YouTube for hosting those ads. Thus, people would pay less to YouTube to host ads. Thus, less profits for YouTube.
I think it wouldn’t be that dificult to figure out what is interesting for people watching the video since channels themselves already usually have a target audience. If I am watching a video from a dude who focus on video games or tech odds are I’d be more interested in tech adds. But if Google REALLY wants to know what we need/want then yeah maybe you’re right. Shit it happened so many times me just saying the word pizza would set off a pizza ad later in my phone. These mfers want to inject ads in our souls.
I don’t get targeted ads anymore but it took a lot of work to get here and I don’t have a lot of the conveniences as other folks who use google play, oauth, etc.
Not rlly. Your point would be relevant for niche YouTube videos. What about generic videos tho? Say something like music videos. Kinda everyone watches them. In fact, music videos get the highest amount of views. Ads inserted in such videos based purely on the content of these videos would be too generic, thus of lower average relevancy to the viewer, thus ultimately translating to less revenue.
Ad is inserted into stream. Either one of two things happens depending upon the way it is implemented:
The length of the video stream increases as the ad is inserted suddenly. The ad blocker can simply calculate the difference and skip the difference worth of time, thus skipping the ad.
The length of the video doesn’t increase to prevent this. Thus, you get the ad stream overlapping in front of the actual video stream. This would thus kinda be on the frontend, which could easily be blocked.
The ad is inserted in the beginning itself at some random time in the video. Hence, the length of the video doesn’t change suddenly like in scenario one. However, remember that regulations require you to visually indicate that a given piece of media is an ad or not. This is why YouTube ads have “Ad” in a yellow box. This could thus very easily be detected by an adblocker that analyses every frame that the box is present in, and skips that frame. This however, would be a little heavier for the user using the adblocker.
Trust me lol. There is literally no way you can prevent ad blockers.
if the platform decides which and where the ads will run during the video on page load, not during video pIay then I dont see how this could be blocked.
Anither thing they can do is enforce policy and start deleting/banning accounts blocking ads. I have some stuff on google account. Wouldn’t be fun to have it deleted.
Since their pop-up already mentioned using AdBlock violating their TOS, I’ve started using a different Browserprofile with a dedicated Google account which I’ll exclusively use for YouTube.
If there will be a slow weekend coming up, I’ll set up a self hosted piped instance
Look at point 3. I explained this could still be skipped due to them having to visually indicate that it was an ad. This visual indication could easily be skipped by the local user.
As for them deleting accounts that blocked ads, how would they identify if someone blocked ads? Generate a secret key for every ad, that would be returned every time a user watched ads? This could easily be overcome, as an adblocker could simply extract this key and send it back to the server.
Trust me… If there was a way to block ad blockers, the greedy capitalists would’ve done so a loooong time ago.
Ok so this is how I think it works behind the scenes: the actual devs at Google don’t give af whether ppl use adblockers or not. I think it’s probably just the execs who come across stuff like this and tell the devs to “fix the problem”. Look at how Vanced was there for a long time. Only when it started becoming too popular (especially when they released an NFT), did YouTube crack down on it.
The reason why ublock origin is still in the Chrome store is because the execs prolly don’t know about it much. Maybe they are afraid that ppl would immediately hop onto Firefox if they did anything stupid like that? I dunno… However, I’m pretty confident that they’re going to do something stupid like banning ad blockers from the Chrome store quite soon. It would be quite hilarious to see the aftermath of that!
That IS how YouTube works. Let’s say you are watching a YT video. What your YouTube app/ website does, is that it downloads a certain portion of the video from the server. This small part is called a “buffer”. That’s where the word “buffering” comes from. Now, for the ad to be displayed within the video stream itself, it would need to be downloaded in this buffer somehow. Therefore, while there is a buffer in place, all of my above points would apply.
Completely eliminate the buffer you say (ie., stream the video bit by bit by reducing the buffering size dramatically) ? Well, then you would need an ultra stable internet connection to YouTube’s servers, without any ping difference. Good luck with that. Especially, good luck with doing that in developing countries, whose populations make up the majority of the world.
If that is true, then how is it possible for software to determine the difference between a commercial and content? They are streamed from a different source. I’m suggesting that YouTube could encode the commercial in the same stream as content, and as far as the player is concerned, there would be no difference.
Read point 3 again. Regulations require companies to visually distinguish between ads and non-ads. That’s why u get the yellow box with “ad” written in it, which indicates that the video that u r watching currently is an ad.
Software could thus use this factor very easily by scanning the stream for such an indicator. The moment it finds something like this, it skips to a frame where this indicator isn’t present.
In video ads, even those by the content creators themselves, can generally be dealt with using SponsorBlock. This is community driven, users mark the segment of the video that’s just sponsor filler or credits or whatever.
You can even get a NewPipe fork that includes SponsorBlock.
That’s the thing, even if 95% of users currently using ad blockers block ads anyway or leave the service, YouTube still wins big.
They aren’t worried at all about alienating users from which they can’t extract ad revenue. Those on the margin that turn off ad blockers or subscribe to a paid plan are the target, not everyone else.
This doesn’t make sense because they have the monopoly on video now. By monetizing a bit they are creating a a huge demand for a competitor, risking their monopoly.
I want to believe that you are right - but don’t think you are. I wanted to switch over to rumble. But, except two, none of the creators i regularly watch are there. Fine, let’s try Odysee: geoblocking my location atm.
The only reason, why i use other platforms is Grayjay. It aggregates content from wherever you want and creates one feed. If it wasn’t for this app, i’d probably only use YT with better adblocks.
Same problem, except it is even more niche. Does not really make sense as a YT stand-in. Tied into a collected feed it makes sense, which luckily is enabled by apps like Grayjay.
Part of the value of a service is the size of it’s user base, not just the size of the monetized user base. Right now, Youtube is just about the only game in town, but if half their users just Leave, even if it was the half that used effective ad blockers, the value of the site as a whole, for creators and advertisers both, is diminished.
That’s true to all extent, but the more present online folks do end up driving behaviors about regular users as well. There was a tube when even having an ad blocker at all was a “power user” thing, now everyone does it. If they fail to accommodate the people that will put energy into circumventing ads then they will just find and normalize a new work around.
It’s similar to content piracy. You will never get rid of piracy altogether, but if you make content accessible and affordable you can mitigate how common it is.
For YouTube, they need to balance how intrusive the ads are against how easy it is to get around them.
Encourage content creators you enjoy to use patreon, buy me a coffee, or some other non-google donation system, then watch with FreeTube or other options. Google/Youtube are billionaire greeders who try to charge US after we become their product to sell to other billionaires. Fuck em. Un-google.
Add comment