I don’t understand this. And not saying it to stir up hate, or troll. This came up for me, I closed the pop-up, and watched the video with no ads. It only added a single click to the whole thing. And they’ve since gone away for me. Don’t know why they stopped, though they have.
I believe Google is “testing” it right now, so for some people it’s been slowly escalating to where they were allowed 3 videos before it stopped them from watching anymore videos with the ad blocker enabled.
I think the term is A-B testing. When a company wants to see what effect a change will have, they don't force it on everyone at once, just on a certain number of people (A), and then see what happens compared to the rest (B).
This is why you'll always get people saying, "Huh, I haven't seen that. It's not doing it for me on [browser]." They're in the (B) group...for now.
The data the company wants is to know if, do the test people like the change (or are at least willing to tolerate it)? Or do they spend less time on the site? If so, how much? If the results are within their predictions, they'll expand the testing until everyone is in (A).
There can also be A-B-C-D-etc testing, where some people who get the blocking windows would be able to close it, and some wouldn't. How many of each ended up disabling their adblock?
This also helps to "boil the frog", where they can slowly get people used to the idea that this is happening, rather than having a whole wave of surprised outrage at once.
First, well I've been able to get ublock origin to just block the pop-up itself, YouTube now has some scroll event override that locks you to the top of the page. You can't view the comments or recommended anymore... Not that any value is lost there but still.
Second, the pop-up triggers a "three strike" system where they won't let you close the pop-up until you disable ublock. That may be easy enough to defeat today, but if YouTube has already gone to these lengths to force you to watch ads, they may eventually stop loading videos altogether until you do.
Just sign out and remove all the youtube cookies and the adblockers still work just fine. Sign in when you want to comment or use another browser that is signed in and never watch the video on that browser. Simple solution. Another option is watch the video by right clicking and opening in a “new private window” instead of watching while signed in. That works really well until you want to comment.
I don’t understand why people are just taking it for granted that everyone’s watching youtube.
I’ve watched maybe a video a month on youtube for the last decade. It’s a noisy loud messy platform and I don’t understand what people enjoy about it.
I watch Netflix a bit and at least the shows there are actual produced shows and not just some bullshit some teenager made up in their spare time. Even if a lot of them are still trash there’s a much higher signal:noise ratio than on youtube.
So my solution is: just don’t use youtube? And obviously use an ad blocker or piped.video if you do occasionally visit it.
Many people follow specific channels and only look at content from them, not random bullshit teenager videos that show up in the random/new/trending pages. If you only look at these contents, then yes, you’re going to get those bullshit annoying videos.
It’s the same with Reddit, Lemmy, and others, people follow the specific channels they want and avoid the trending/random/new stuff.
For an example, I follow Digital Foundry channel for their detailed analysis/reviews, The SciShow, Sorted Foods, and so on. I click my subscriptions on youtube and it only shows these high quality content for me. Our family spend hours on these contents. They’re not available anywhere else.
Ok, if I remember correctly, YouTube barely generates, but generates nonetheless revenue for Google. There are many ways to make more money without fucking over its users by cutting costs:
downgrade old videos with small watch count to 720p30
make people pay for hosting >1080p60 content
do not allow private/unlisted videos
straight up remove 10h looped videos - they take so much space, but are technically spam - both for bandwidth and storage
And my go-to solution: focus on sponsorships as main source of revenue. They are the only ads I can tolerate and are actually effective from my experience. YouTube can just take a cut from every sponsorship on YouTube video and everyone will be happy.
Actual unpopular opinion: get yt premium. It gives creators the money they would’ve got for you watching an ad, while giving you an ad free experience, and also includes yt music which might take some adjustments if you’re used to Spotify, but then you will also not be supporting Spotify which is probably the worst streaming service in terms of paying artists.
(They’re all bad and many people would argue similarly against supporting Google via YouTube, so perhaps it’s a moot point, but that’s part of how I justify my sub to myself anyways.)
Or you could just become a member of their channel. I look at it this way though. If a youtuber I’m watching has lots of subscribers, one more member in that community probably isn’t going to make a difference. If a youtuber I’m watching doesn’t have the subscriber numbers they deserve, I will become a member. I always choose the highest tiers for them too. And join their patreon and do the same there. If I do that, I will actually listen/watch on patreon then put both YouTube versions in my watch list for when I need background noise and just upvote both videos.
That way they get all the things I can possibly do for them without giving youtube as much as I give the creators. This is my understanding of how that works though. With premium, if they actually give any of that money to the creators (my heart says no, corporations suck), it would be way less than the channel membership would give them. I don’t actually know how much premium costs though.
Please do correct me if I’m wrong. At the moment I don’t have very many people on my memberships. And I know most people these days probably can’t afford to do that, but even a $1 or $2 membership to one or a couple of them can make a difference to the ones you really support and who probably need it more than they’d get from premium.
My biggest one is $30 total. That’s also my only patreon currently. I will do more of those soon. I have a list. The youtube memberships probably add up to somewhere around that amount in total. Yes it’s probably way more than premium. I really loved the pay what you want phase of music, but at that time I was broke.
I am a big believer of supporting talent whenever I can. I am grateful that I have the chance to do so now. My current budget for that stuff is low right now because we are working on moving.
Thanks to the state of the US, we would have been considered middle class before, but now it’s back to lower. Your dollars don’t stretch very far. I’m lucky to have a husband who feels the same way I do. We will never be rich in money, but we help as much as we can wherever we go. We also make donations to non-profit organizations we know don’t use that money to line their own pockets. So those are the smaller places that always get overlooked. I foster kittens, and we sponsor each one. That means we pay the fees associated with adopting said kitten.
Apologies for the info dump, but it’s a subject I love. I’ve been dreaming of the day I could do these things since I was in single digits.
The few cents a creator gets from your youtube premium subscription is way more than they would ever get from you watching ads, so yes, OP is actually right.
Just because they’re not gonna get a massive cut from your sub doesn’t mean it’s not the most beneficial solution for everyone.
Sorry but I deeply disagree. Youtube is not the solution, it’s the problem. Giving money to youtube/google, hoping they will give back a fair share to creators is in absolutly no way “the most beneficial solution for everyone”. Sorry to say but that’s capitalism brainwashing. On bandcamp, you set your own price and get 90℅ of the revenues. Patreon, sponsoring, Tidal are all much more interesting solution. Soon enough, self-hosting will make services like youtube irrelevant, and we will finally get to create fair revenues for creators. Meanwhile, trusting any of the Gafam is just reinforcing their position.
Even more unpopular opinion: come to terms with the fact that it’s not unreasonable for even a large company to want to charge a fee for the service that they provide and that I consume for several hours a week.
I remember when YouTube first came out. It wasn’t a “career” there were no content creators. People made and uploaded videos because they wanted to. Then ads appeared on channels that were monetised, they got a cut. This I was fine with. Now non monetised channels have ads everyone has ads
They don’t really make much from the YouTube ads though. You might make $2000 if your video hits a million views and chances are that money is going to be split between a crew of people. There is a reason you see all of them having their own does or their own merch or a long list of Patreon subscribers. If you actually want to pay the content creators, buy their stuff or subscribe to them via Patreon.
I’m self-hosting a Piped server, and it’s working great. I was able to import my YT subs from a Google Takeout dump, and I continue to add more channel subs on the Piped server. So far, no YouTube ads, plus it uses SponsorBlock, so I can skip that content too.
For mobile client, LibreTube is working quite well for me. It talks to my Piped instance, so subs (but not watched history, unfortunately) are maintained on the server. I’m still looking for a Piped client for Chromecast GTV to complete the ensemble for me. Right now, I still use my YouTube account with SmartTube Next (which also avoids YT ads and uses SponsorBlock).
I moved to YouTube premium a few years ago, family subscription, to share with up to 5 people. YouTube is my main source of entertainment and the 15 bucks total (or whatever the conversion rate is) is less than 90 minutes of a movie in a cinema, nit even including transportation and snacks. I get my news, tech news/reviews, tutorials, documentaries, inspiration and laughs on there. I watch it while getting ready in the morning, on my lunch break and for a longer while in the evening. I share it with 2 other people so it works out to around 5 bucks a month. And the creators I like get a big portion of that.
Sure, around 60 bucks a year might sound a lot, but it’s the only service I pay for (except the 2 bucks a month Disney plus trial until December). As a small bonus YouTube music transformed my Google home devices into a multi-room audio Sonos alternative for under 1/3 of the price.
I still use NewPipe on my phone for downloads for offline use and yt-dlp for content I want to hoard.
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