7 ms·

There is clearly a significant increase in ads on youtube. It's now as bad as old cable TV channels, its disgusting, personally started reducing youtube consump

by gnivol 5y ago

There is clearly a significant increase in ads on youtube. It's now as bad as old cable TV channels, its disgusting, personally started reducing youtube consumption. They must've turned on the "milk youtube" knob. Hoping there will be a youtube competitor, they are pretty much a monopoly .

rawtxapp 5y ago
Those competitors will also need to cover their costs somehow, they'll either resort to ads or subscriptions. YT premium is just 12$/month, it's the best 12$ I spend every month, YT music is a bonus.
- TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
  For those who don't want to support YouTube or Google, an app called NewPipe can be installed with F-droid that lets you watch videos without ads.
  - what_ever 5y ago
    > don't want to support YouTube or Google AND the content creator as well. Disc: Googler.
    - TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
      YouTube doesn't support the content creators I watch, they've mostly been demonetized or had their viewership hit by random algorithmic changes. I use patron or streamlabs to support the people who make what I like, not the monopolies who control the infrastructure and try to influence the overton window of society.
      - throwaway3699 5y ago
        Yep. Almost every creator I watch is either demonetized or got banned. I'm sick of watching podcasts or gaming videos where people are saying creepy codewords to get around the censorship algorithm.
      - wffurr 5y ago
        Wow what the heck kind of videos are you watching?! Nevermind, I don't think I want to know.
      - edrxty 5y ago
        For everyone else, it's not just objectionable political stuff (right wing bullshit) being demonetized, it's stuff advertisers don't like. Tons of good content is getting cut just because someone decided they didn't like how it made their corporation look. Anything related to computer/physical security, firearms technology, and of course, anything an AI deems to be copyrighted, regardless of what it actually is. Also, usage of profanity (because who the fuck swears these days), any mention of a controversial issue (regardless of the maturity of the discussion), and anything they deem overly referential to other content, including your own.
    - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
      This 'think of the creators' argument is a low-effort appeal to emotion that deviates from the core issue. Neither youtube premium or youtube ads value my privacy. I am happy to support content creators through patreon or whatever monetization platform they choose. What I am not ok with is having every single click and watching period profiled and stored. I would happily not block your ads if you weren't building up user profiles. A business model with generic vanilla ads based on the video I am watching instead of my profile would still provide millions upon millions for Google and shareholders. Targeted ads only benefit Google by selling the illusion of advertisement metrics to marketers. Neither users or content creators stand to benefit from targeted advertisement quite the contrary.
      - bllguo 5y ago
        sure. and the principled way to not support them is to not consume their content. I will never understand how people rationalize this to themselves as if they're on the moral high ground here.
        DoingIsLearning 5y ago
        This is a fragile holier-than-thou argument to claim that you can go through the modern world without looking at a youtube video someone linked. The claim of moral ground is made even less robust when they literally have a platform that attempts to track your every single move in order to monetize on targeted advertisement. There are other business models to achieve the same profitability without privacy invasion, and I do pay for and favour those business models. I will repeat it again targeted ads only benefit Google by selling the illusion of advertisement metrics to marketers. Neither users or content creators stand to benefit from targeted advertisement quite the contrary. Targeted advertisement should be as illegal as robocalls.
        bllguo 5y ago
        This is my picture: you are presented two options to pay, through ads or through plain cash. you refuse both and yet still feel entitled to the content. what do you object to in this framing? To be clear, in the context of this discussion I don't care how you feel about paying through ads. It is their right to lock their content behind those gates.
    - milkytron 5y ago
      I'm not familiar with how content creators get paid by YouTube. If it's by views or view duration, does NewPipe not increase those on YouTube when a video is viewed via NewPipe? And there are other ways to support creators if someone were to insist on it. A lot of channels that I support have moved to Nebula, other channels have Patreons, or push their own products.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - bin_bash 5y ago
        You expect advertisers to keep paying if nobody is actually watching the ads?
    - unionpivo 5y ago
      > AND the content creator as well. Ahh mostly not. Most youtubers I watch gave up on youtube ads long ago. They make money with parteon, merchandize and in video sponsors. The ones who still get some kind of relevant revenue from Youtube constantly bitch about demonetization, takedowns and some big entities calming their content. Your own creators are your own worst critics.
- jiehong 5y ago
  “This video is sponsored by xxx”. You can’t escape that. Well, almost (https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/)
  - napsterbr 5y ago
    My trained hand hits the +10s button in a fraction of a second :) Usually when I'm watching "mainstream" content on Youtube I just skip the first one or two minutes entirely. There's always a lot of ceremony, "don't forget to like and subscribe", fancy intros etc. It takes me a couple of seconds to find out where the content _actually_ starts -- and it almost always starts after the 1 minute mark.
    - Tommah 5y ago
      https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant > The Wadsworth Constant is an axiom which states that the first 30% of any video can be skipped because it contains no worthwhile or interesting information.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Ha, for me YouTube Music is a small but negative value contribution. I'd rather choose to never see any YouTube Music-related UI or marketing even if I am technically paying for it as part of YouTube Premium.
  - rconti 5y ago
    Another component of "negative value" is that videos keep playing in the background on mobile. Killing the app is the easiest way to get it to shut up.
    - yegle 5y ago
      FWIW you can turn background play off.
    - jonny_eh 5y ago
      You can change that in the settings. In addition to disabling it, you can have it enabled only if headphones are connected.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jonas21 5y ago
  Just as importantly, those competitors will need to attract content creators. And guess what most of those content creators want... more ad revenue.
bubblicious 5y ago
...or you could go ad-free with youtube premium?
- bilal4hmed 5y ago
  based on the responses from the past stealing, I mean not paying is easier for many of the replies youll get.
- taylodl 5y ago
  I have YouTube TV - which is great by the way - but the fact it doesn't include YouTube Premium for free or the ability to add YouTube Premium for something like $5/month just sticks in my craw. So being the stubborn mule that I am I refuse to pay the $12/month for YouTube Premium and now I'm watching less and less of YouTube as a result.
  - goseeastarwar 5y ago
    That’s an odd hill to die on. YouTube without ads is a lovely experience for what I’d consider a very reasonable price.
    - notyourwork 5y ago
      I’m on the same hill, I just think twice about YouTube altogether now. I don’t lose sleep over it.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
haunter 5y ago
I download every video with yt-dl before watching. Started doing since the enforced age verification, won't give my CC or ID to Google for sure
jandrese 5y ago
Google is heavily pushing YouTube premium now, so they're trying to make the experience as crappy as possible for free users. I don't watch nearly enough YouTube to justify $12 a month, but I'm starting to consider ad blockers. Or just stop watching Youtube altogether, which wouldn't be all that hard. There are only a couple of channels I check out from time to time, and one isn't monetized so the ads are fairly reasonable. The other however had ad breaks every 5 minutes, which is just killing it for me.
- maneesh 5y ago
  Pro tip from SWIM: Vpn into india just one time during signup and pay ~$1.50/mo
- napsterbr 5y ago
  > I'm starting to consider ad blockers Go for it. You won't regret. Youtube is unusable without ad blocker (regardless if it's their premium offering or a browser extension).
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
I whole heartedly refuse to use the youtube app or youtube on a vanila browser. If I use youtube it is typically because someone sent me a link. I used to open it in firefox with ublock (both on desktop and Android). Youtube has gone one level beyond with the auto play nuissance and the new hostile EU consent forms. I am at a point that I will just refuse to engage with the platform and only play a video by copying the video id into the url: www.youtube.com/embed/<video-id> And then just open it in ff or mpv They could have extracted a fortune with banner ads and the like. But it is never enough for shareholders, they wanted to scale this further and keep hogging data and profiling everyone. Targeted advertisement should be as illegal as robocalls.
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  >I am at a point that I will just refuse to engage with the platform and only play a video by copying the video id into the url: n.b. that if you have `youtube-dl` and `mpv` built with lua support, mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...` Just Works. Also handy for red-band trailers. Further, you can also do things like mpv --no-video https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=5qap5aO4i9A # chilled cow which is very nice inside a tmux pane or something.
pvorb 5y ago
uBlock Origin works pretty good on YouTube. I've no idea why video ads are built in a way that can be blocked quite easily.
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  At a guess, for the same reasons visual ads are - they've got some kind of targeting logic that needs to pick from a pool of ads and send them to the viewer. Though of course if YT started serving them all from indistinguishable sources, or composited them together on the fly, or ... I'd be sad.
m00x 5y ago
No fucking way. Cable TV channels had as much ads as they had content. Youtube is around 2x1min ad per 30 min video, longer ones are skippable and you get no ads if you pay for $15/m for it. You paid cable TV $90/m for 12-15 min of ads on 30 min shows.
- hctaw 5y ago
  Cable TV has 12-15 minutes of ads per hour depending on network. It's been that way for a very long time, but slightly on the rise for the last few years.
- elymar 5y ago
  Aside from noise cancelling headphones and a roomba, paying for YouTube to avoid ads is the best quality of life improving purchase I have made.
  - snypher 5y ago
    Youtube Vanced. Google can't expect my $10 when they take all my data for free.
    - Crash0v3rid3 5y ago
      So you’re willing to hurt creators earnings because Google has some data on you?
      - wallwarp 5y ago
        A lot of creators have multiple revenue streams that one can support (merch, patreon, affiliate links). Not watching youtube ads does not have to mean you are hurting creators.
        missedthecue 5y ago
        Not watching YouTube ads means they get less money. Yes, there are still alternatives for them to eek out some revenue, but they are making less than if you just watched the ad or got YT premium
barbazoo 5y ago
I don't know why and I don't want to jinx it but I get no ads at all when using youtube on my laptop. Only on my mobile which is why I don't watch youtube there.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
PikachuEXE 5y ago
https://freetubeapp.io/ https://freetubeapp.io/ for PC https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/ https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/ for TV Sorry I don't watch YT on mobile so I have no suggestion for that
- gpas 5y ago
  NewPipe on Android
aero-glide2 5y ago
I use ublock origin, no advts. on Youtube. I turn the addon off if I want to support the creators. For android, I use NewPipe.
flohofwoe 5y ago
IME, uBlock Origin does a pretty good job of blocking YouTube ads (assuming you're not on a locked down mobile platform of course).

by gnivol 5y ago

rawtxapp 5y ago

Those competitors will also need to cover their costs somehow, they'll either resort to ads or subscriptions. YT premium is just 12$/month, it's the best 12$ I spend every month, YT music is a bonus.

TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
For those who don't want to support YouTube or Google, an app called NewPipe can be installed with F-droid that lets you watch videos without ads.
- what_ever 5y ago
  > don't want to support YouTube or Google AND the content creator as well. Disc: Googler.
  - TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
    YouTube doesn't support the content creators I watch, they've mostly been demonetized or had their viewership hit by random algorithmic changes. I use patron or streamlabs to support the people who make what I like, not the monopolies who control the infrastructure and try to influence the overton window of society.
    - throwaway3699 5y ago
      Yep. Almost every creator I watch is either demonetized or got banned. I'm sick of watching podcasts or gaming videos where people are saying creepy codewords to get around the censorship algorithm.
    - wffurr 5y ago
      Wow what the heck kind of videos are you watching?! Nevermind, I don't think I want to know.
    - edrxty 5y ago
      For everyone else, it's not just objectionable political stuff (right wing bullshit) being demonetized, it's stuff advertisers don't like. Tons of good content is getting cut just because someone decided they didn't like how it made their corporation look. Anything related to computer/physical security, firearms technology, and of course, anything an AI deems to be copyrighted, regardless of what it actually is. Also, usage of profanity (because who the fuck swears these days), any mention of a controversial issue (regardless of the maturity of the discussion), and anything they deem overly referential to other content, including your own.
  - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    This 'think of the creators' argument is a low-effort appeal to emotion that deviates from the core issue. Neither youtube premium or youtube ads value my privacy. I am happy to support content creators through patreon or whatever monetization platform they choose. What I am not ok with is having every single click and watching period profiled and stored. I would happily not block your ads if you weren't building up user profiles. A business model with generic vanilla ads based on the video I am watching instead of my profile would still provide millions upon millions for Google and shareholders. Targeted ads only benefit Google by selling the illusion of advertisement metrics to marketers. Neither users or content creators stand to benefit from targeted advertisement quite the contrary.
    - bllguo 5y ago
      sure. and the principled way to not support them is to not consume their content. I will never understand how people rationalize this to themselves as if they're on the moral high ground here.
      - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
        This is a fragile holier-than-thou argument to claim that you can go through the modern world without looking at a youtube video someone linked. The claim of moral ground is made even less robust when they literally have a platform that attempts to track your every single move in order to monetize on targeted advertisement. There are other business models to achieve the same profitability without privacy invasion, and I do pay for and favour those business models. I will repeat it again targeted ads only benefit Google by selling the illusion of advertisement metrics to marketers. Neither users or content creators stand to benefit from targeted advertisement quite the contrary. Targeted advertisement should be as illegal as robocalls.
        bllguo 5y ago
        This is my picture: you are presented two options to pay, through ads or through plain cash. you refuse both and yet still feel entitled to the content. what do you object to in this framing? To be clear, in the context of this discussion I don't care how you feel about paying through ads. It is their right to lock their content behind those gates.
  - milkytron 5y ago
    I'm not familiar with how content creators get paid by YouTube. If it's by views or view duration, does NewPipe not increase those on YouTube when a video is viewed via NewPipe? And there are other ways to support creators if someone were to insist on it. A lot of channels that I support have moved to Nebula, other channels have Patreons, or push their own products.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - bin_bash 5y ago
      You expect advertisers to keep paying if nobody is actually watching the ads?
  - unionpivo 5y ago
    > AND the content creator as well. Ahh mostly not. Most youtubers I watch gave up on youtube ads long ago. They make money with parteon, merchandize and in video sponsors. The ones who still get some kind of relevant revenue from Youtube constantly bitch about demonetization, takedowns and some big entities calming their content. Your own creators are your own worst critics.
jiehong 5y ago
“This video is sponsored by xxx”. You can’t escape that. Well, almost (https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/)
- napsterbr 5y ago
  My trained hand hits the +10s button in a fraction of a second :) Usually when I'm watching "mainstream" content on Youtube I just skip the first one or two minutes entirely. There's always a lot of ceremony, "don't forget to like and subscribe", fancy intros etc. It takes me a couple of seconds to find out where the content _actually_ starts -- and it almost always starts after the 1 minute mark.
  - Tommah 5y ago
    https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant > The Wadsworth Constant is an axiom which states that the first 30% of any video can be skipped because it contains no worthwhile or interesting information.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tshaddox 5y ago
Ha, for me YouTube Music is a small but negative value contribution. I'd rather choose to never see any YouTube Music-related UI or marketing even if I am technically paying for it as part of YouTube Premium.
- rconti 5y ago
  Another component of "negative value" is that videos keep playing in the background on mobile. Killing the app is the easiest way to get it to shut up.
  - yegle 5y ago
    FWIW you can turn background play off.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    You can change that in the settings. In addition to disabling it, you can have it enabled only if headphones are connected.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jonas21 5y ago
Just as importantly, those competitors will need to attract content creators. And guess what most of those content creators want... more ad revenue.

bubblicious 5y ago

...or you could go ad-free with youtube premium?

bilal4hmed 5y ago
based on the responses from the past stealing, I mean not paying is easier for many of the replies youll get.
taylodl 5y ago
I have YouTube TV - which is great by the way - but the fact it doesn't include YouTube Premium for free or the ability to add YouTube Premium for something like $5/month just sticks in my craw. So being the stubborn mule that I am I refuse to pay the $12/month for YouTube Premium and now I'm watching less and less of YouTube as a result.
- goseeastarwar 5y ago
  That’s an odd hill to die on. YouTube without ads is a lovely experience for what I’d consider a very reasonable price.
  - notyourwork 5y ago
    I’m on the same hill, I just think twice about YouTube altogether now. I don’t lose sleep over it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

haunter 5y ago

I download every video with yt-dl before watching. Started doing since the enforced age verification, won't give my CC or ID to Google for sure

jandrese 5y ago

Google is heavily pushing YouTube premium now, so they're trying to make the experience as crappy as possible for free users. I don't watch nearly enough YouTube to justify $12 a month, but I'm starting to consider ad blockers. Or just stop watching Youtube altogether, which wouldn't be all that hard. There are only a couple of channels I check out from time to time, and one isn't monetized so the ads are fairly reasonable. The other however had ad breaks every 5 minutes, which is just killing it for me.

maneesh 5y ago
Pro tip from SWIM: Vpn into india just one time during signup and pay ~$1.50/mo
napsterbr 5y ago
> I'm starting to consider ad blockers Go for it. You won't regret. Youtube is unusable without ad blocker (regardless if it's their premium offering or a browser extension).

DoingIsLearning 5y ago

I whole heartedly refuse to use the youtube app or youtube on a vanila browser. If I use youtube it is typically because someone sent me a link. I used to open it in firefox with ublock (both on desktop and Android). Youtube has gone one level beyond with the auto play nuissance and the new hostile EU consent forms. I am at a point that I will just refuse to engage with the platform and only play a video by copying the video id into the url: www.youtube.com/embed/<video-id> And then just open it in ff or mpv They could have extracted a fortune with banner ads and the like. But it is never enough for shareholders, they wanted to scale this further and keep hogging data and profiling everyone. Targeted advertisement should be as illegal as robocalls.

hprotagonist 5y ago
>I am at a point that I will just refuse to engage with the platform and only play a video by copying the video id into the url: n.b. that if you have `youtube-dl` and `mpv` built with lua support, mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...` Just Works. Also handy for red-band trailers. Further, you can also do things like mpv --no-video https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=5qap5aO4i9A # chilled cow which is very nice inside a tmux pane or something.

pvorb 5y ago

uBlock Origin works pretty good on YouTube. I've no idea why video ads are built in a way that can be blocked quite easily.

blacksmith_tb 5y ago
At a guess, for the same reasons visual ads are - they've got some kind of targeting logic that needs to pick from a pool of ads and send them to the viewer. Though of course if YT started serving them all from indistinguishable sources, or composited them together on the fly, or ... I'd be sad.

m00x 5y ago

No fucking way. Cable TV channels had as much ads as they had content. Youtube is around 2x1min ad per 30 min video, longer ones are skippable and you get no ads if you pay for $15/m for it. You paid cable TV $90/m for 12-15 min of ads on 30 min shows.

hctaw 5y ago
Cable TV has 12-15 minutes of ads per hour depending on network. It's been that way for a very long time, but slightly on the rise for the last few years.
elymar 5y ago
Aside from noise cancelling headphones and a roomba, paying for YouTube to avoid ads is the best quality of life improving purchase I have made.
- snypher 5y ago
  Youtube Vanced. Google can't expect my $10 when they take all my data for free.
  - Crash0v3rid3 5y ago
    So you’re willing to hurt creators earnings because Google has some data on you?
    - wallwarp 5y ago
      A lot of creators have multiple revenue streams that one can support (merch, patreon, affiliate links). Not watching youtube ads does not have to mean you are hurting creators.
      - missedthecue 5y ago
        Not watching YouTube ads means they get less money. Yes, there are still alternatives for them to eek out some revenue, but they are making less than if you just watched the ad or got YT premium

barbazoo 5y ago

I don't know why and I don't want to jinx it but I get no ads at all when using youtube on my laptop. Only on my mobile which is why I don't watch youtube there.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

PikachuEXE 5y ago

https://freetubeapp.io/ https://freetubeapp.io/ for PC https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/ https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/ for TV Sorry I don't watch YT on mobile so I have no suggestion for that

gpas 5y ago
NewPipe on Android

aero-glide2 5y ago

I use ublock origin, no advts. on Youtube. I turn the addon off if I want to support the creators. For android, I use NewPipe.

flohofwoe 5y ago

IME, uBlock Origin does a pretty good job of blocking YouTube ads (assuming you're not on a locked down mobile platform of course).