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It is not just about youtube. The whole internet is bloated with ads right now, and the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete. I just cannot bro

It is not just about youtube. The whole internet is bloated with ads right now, and the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete. I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting. I could count the times that I have found an internet ad interesting in my lifetime using half the fingers of one hand. Personalised or not, the vast majority is useless, badly made, that just takes processing time both for the computer and my brain. I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads. If a website says that I have to disable the adblocker to view it, and I cannot go around it, 99% of the times I do not visit it, I do not care. I pay the people I want to support directly and that's it. I use bandcamp to buy the music I like directly. I subscribe to patreon to the ones that I feel they bring value to my life. But for the occasional or ephemeral video or entertainment, I will just as easily live without, as the disruption ads cause is worse than not viewing that content. I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites). If a website blocks this, I am not going to sacrifise my experience and I am not interested in browsing it.

bilekas 3y ago
> I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites). Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads. Being able to manipulate my own machine and what I want to view is entirely up to me. This can't be infringed. There is always the option today to block from the client side, but I can see this changing if there's enough money involved.
- raffraffraff 3y ago
  You also use swype style keyboard input?
  - bilekas 3y ago
    I don't but I am on my phone. I'll clean up the grammar shortly!
    - raffraffraff 3y ago
      Oh, I just recognized a specific swypey mistake that I've seen myself make lots of times. But maybe they'd also happen on regular text prediction too? My sister in law regularly uses voice input, and her Whatsapp messages have totally different types of errors.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  > Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads. The part I dislike about this is that they will demonetize a video for content reasons, but still show ads on it. I also don't know how it works with YouTube Premium. If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching? I feel like that's not likely
  - bilekas 3y ago
    > If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching? I'm not a content creator but Google do claim that a small % of the pool goes to the creators you watch, I guess kind of like a Spotify model. > Will creators still be paid with YouTube Premium? Yes. In fact, YouTube Premium gives a secondary revenue stream for creators in addition to what you're already earning today through ads. [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwill-creators-still-be-paid-with-youtube-premium https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en#zipp...
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
>I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting not saying this applies to you but might it be that ads are distracting enough that they would be an actual accessibility problem affecting people with ADHD - if so is not allowing people to block ads likely to run into legal issues?
- xattt 3y ago
  Yes! Ad blockers are an accessibility tool for people with executive functioning disorders! Can you imagine the uproar if a mainstream website blocked screen readers for people with low vision?
  - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    Then Google might be liable under various laws that support disabilities, varying per jurisdiction obviously.
    - worldofmatthew 3y ago
      All Captcha's could in the USA be illegal aswell under the ADA.... As some people with learning disabilities won't be able to complete them.
redbell 3y ago
I totally agree on this! Some websites just keep throwing an enormous number of ads into your face to the the extent you start losing consciousness why you came here in the first place. On computer, you still able to use an AdBlock but on mobile, I suffer terribly, not only because I could not disable ads but because on some sites while you are reading an article a random ad video that took about half of the screen keeps playing and scrolling down with you, even clicking the X doesn’t work most of the time but generally triggers an external link. At the bottom of the page, you start reading “best job offers in XYZ” where this XYZ is your city name deduced from your IP address, the thumbnail, as you might expect, is a “s_x_” girl lying on a bed :( I know, free content should be supported by ads but I believe this is not the way to do it.
- butterNaN 3y ago
  uBlock origin works perfectly with Firefox on mobile, just in case you didn't know.
- somat 3y ago
  if on android u-block origin works well on firefox. If ios you are probably stranded, Hopefully apple allows it's users to block some ads. That is if they don't become an advertising company.
  - idle_zealot 3y ago
    On iOS uBO seems to work in Orion. Losing tab syncing is a shame though.
  - 76SlashDolphin 3y ago
    On iOS you can install AdGuard in Safari (or pay for a few of the other ad-blocker extensions) or install Brave which has an ad-blocker built-in. Both work well in my experience.
- whackx 3y ago
  On iOS you can install browser extensions from firefox and chrome to the Orion browser. I've found it a few month back in this threat here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34562553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34562553, it is working sufficiently so far, seems even a bit faster than safari to me, too.
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
The problem with YT is: - I start the video, an ad is shown within 30 secs. - I fast forward a few minutes, the SAME ad is shown again. - I jump to anywhere on the timeline, the SAME ad is shown again. At least show me something that is relevant, like facebook does. The ads there reflect what I usually look for. On YT, none of the ads are relevant to me, ever. It's just ridiculous.
- knorker 3y ago
  At least for YT there's a solution: YT Premium. Sure, as other comments have said, it doesn't scale to all websites, but youtube isn't just any website.
  - secondcoming 3y ago
    Does YT Premium block the sponsored ad slots? Because if not, that's a pointless product.
    - knorker 3y ago
      That's fair. Because also probably the people the advertisers want to reach MOST are exactly the people who have the spare money (and willingness to spend it) to shell out for YT Premium. But yeah I'd pay to get rid of all the "this video is sponsored by brilliant/nordVPN/whatever". Sigh.
      - Feuilles_Mortes 3y ago
        Check out SponsorBlock
    - eropple 3y ago
      You mean embedded native stuff? No, but SponsorBlock does and I use both. YT Premium pays creators for YT views and the analytics don't appreciably differentiate whether you watched an ad or skipped it, so I'm pretty comfortable with the two. (The apps don't work with SponsorBlock and that does drag, but I mostly don't watch native-advertising videos on my TV so whatever.)
red_admiral 3y ago
Ad-blocking also gives you similar if not more extra security to anti-virus software, with fewer downsides (faster not slower). I'm afraid the ad ecosystem is so big that occasionally, threats slip through.
- jamiequint 3y ago
  This may be true on random-site-X on the internet, but is not true on sites like YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Facebook, etc that run their own first-party ad platforms.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    Yet.
  - martin_a 3y ago
    YouTubes "first-party ad platform" is delivering some of the worst ads on the whole internet. It's not only the big-boobed characters promoting mobile games, there are (video) ads for pyramid and other "get rich quick" schemes, conspiracy theories (government will force everyone to become transgender!) and whatnot. They don't give just the tiniest bit of a shit for all of this, as long as they are earning money with it.
    - worrycue 3y ago
      I have heard of their “system”, they auction ad space out in real time with a bunch a descriptors for the ad buyers who then bid for the space. Google really doesn’t give a crap who wins it or if it matches your interests/needs. Advertisers are free to advertise to anyone as long as they win the bid.
      - jamiequint 3y ago
        Your security is not affected by you seeing bad ads.
    - MrFoof 3y ago
wafriedemann 3y ago
I see no ads.
jcarrano 3y ago
> the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete. This is the main point IMO. When you have a printed newspaper or magazine you are not annoyed by the ads. If we had ads that (1) do not move, (2) are not modal/do not pop up, (3) do not track you outside the website, (4) do not take MB's of data I would be willing to tolerate them and they could even be helpful. Youtube has become unwatchable without ad blockers. It used to be better than TV, now it is worse and you cannot skip them.
tmtvl 3y ago
> I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads. Okay, but how do you square that with the fact that hosting content costs money? Are the people and companies which provide the content you look at not allowed to earn money to keep the servers running and the sysadmins fed?
- philbo 3y ago
  Producing television shows also costs money, but no-one forces me to watch the ads there. I can change channel, or skip past them if recorded, or just leave the room while they're on.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Why can’t you do that with YouTube? Changing the channel is as easy as closing the tab and you certainly can leave the room or mute it during ads.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- pmx 3y ago
  I would have no problem with ads if they weren't so obnoxious. They cause the page layout to shift as they load in, they block the loading of actual page content, they play sounds, play videos, pop up over the content i'm trying to read. Advertising doesn't have to be like that and that's why i block it.
- selfmodruntime 3y ago
  If you rely on ad revenue and people do not enjoy using your product more than enduring your ads, maybe your business model is wrong to begin with?
  - anthonypasq 3y ago
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
On mobile YouTube right now I see two unskippable ads before every video. How long before some genius needs to juice his numbers this quarter and come up with the bright idea of three unskippable ads? Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo? If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today? To the bean counters who seem to have overwhelmed Google, losing a few users might seem like a dog losing some fleas. They are out of ideas for growth. Once blitz scaling has reached the limits of user acquisition the only play left to juice the numbers seems to be “boil the frog”, going to war with their Oort cloud of free users, pay up or else. Are the c-suite types at Google aware that this is exactly the mindset that will make their decline into irrelevance inevitable? Elon Musk inadvertently turned Twitter into a howling wasteland in a few short months, which shows what happens when you boil the user frog too quickly. Imagine how Twitter would look today if Elon instead doubled down on making Twitter the best user experience, offering users tools to make Twitter more relevant, making it an unmissable service for users, and in turn unmissable for advertisers? But instead he pulled the lever all the way from utopia to hellscape, attempting to shake down users to restore some functionality to a clearly degraded product. Enshitifying (thanks Cory Doctorow) the user experience is not a compelling reason to subscribe. Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product. I'm not against advertising per se, I’m against being shaken down to regain a user experience that should be the default. Here are two examples of successful advertising models: 1. Lex Friedman does an ad read at the beginning of his podcast. It’s intentionally skippable, I skip it 90% of the time. But when I'm busy with bread dough on my hands or whatever, I'm still hearing the ads, which are mostly repeat offerings anyway. Advertising is not always appropriate, eg at a kids birthday party or showing a video in a lecture. The lesson: MAKE IT SKIPPABLE! 2. Inserts into shows / product placement, like on VFX Artists React. These seem harder for a behemoth to monetise but I like these because I know that the actual creators are getting paid. Youtube doesn't want to deal with creators with anything closer than a dashboard. This is not the end users fault, it’s not the content creators fault, it’s a symptom of absentee capitalism. Youtube should invest in creators and form true partnerships. The lesson: INVEST IN DEALING FAIRLY WITH HUMANS! I’m not going to pay, I will continue to avoid ads but watch them occasionally. I’m going to keep playing the game of whack-a-mole finding software / hardware solutions. And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship.
Gareth321 3y ago
You've hit on the reason I think the Brave token is such a great idea (https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ https://brave.com/brave-rewards/). I know it's en vogue to trash gimmicky cryptocurrencies, and to be honest I don't care how this gets implemented. The concept is great: a shared, fungible way to easily support random websites one visits, and control the kinds of ads one accepts. If sites had a little tip jar which I could easily tap to avoid ads, I'd use it. There's just too much friction today in supporting sites, and all of them want a subscription.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  The whole point of advertisements is that the person pushing them doesn't earn anything from them - but rather, force-feeds information about the existence of their product to the public. Now, instead of ruining our public space with horrible billboards and kitschy flashing lights, they ruin our digital space with horrible pop-ups and kitschy lust-provoking videos. I don't care about those who run ads, nor those who allow ad companies to run ads on their content. If you earn money through ads, that's your problem, not mine, and it's not my responsibility to watch them. Ads are fundamentally intrusive, and pretending like the society at large has some kind of "responsibility" towards those who earn money from ads is laughable.
- schlauerfox 3y ago
  That was the original intention of HashCash, the inspiration to Bitcoin. Antispam micropayments to add some trivial level of cost to online interactions to make scale unaffordable.
- freehorse 3y ago
  This looks like a good idea indeed. I would not mind something like that, as long as some reasonable level of control from the user side exists. I will try it in my mobile as I use brave anyway there.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y ago
> The whole internet is bloated with ads right now Internet? I think you mean everything. The whole everything is bloated with ads right now. Look around you, I bet you can see at least a dozen brand names without even leaving your chair. People who work in marketing and ads should quit their jobs if they care at all about society, but of course they don't or they wouldn't be in marketing and advertising. Alternatively, we should just stop putting up with their bullshit because they have a long history of abusing every inch they are given.
- account42 3y ago
  And guess what, people pay extra for having some of these brand names on their shit. What a clown world.
unsupp0rted 3y ago
Since I live in countries other than my own, there's a 0% chance that any given ad is relevant to me. Chances are it's in a language I don't speak or for a product I'm not eligible for, much less something I'd actually want. This works out great because my brain doesn't get so distracted by ads, even physical billboard ads. But at the same time I use an ad-blocker to avoid wasted screen real estate.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
I think the core issue is: * People don't like ads, because ads suck * Youtube offers premium, an ad-less experience Never have I seen self-entitled people so furious as when YT requests they buy premium in order to remove ads. What, should YT be hosted for free without ads and without a subscription? I get that ads suck and companies suck, but self-entitled people suck too; most of us here are devs and we get paid because our company has to make money _somehow_. YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription. They refuse either option and instead are furious that YT doesn't offer itself completely for free.
- mitchdoogle 3y ago
  I don't like ads and I don't mind paying. What I don't like is paying for an ad-free experience and my data continuing to get mined. I consider companies entitled if they demand to have both my data and my money
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- YoshiRulz 3y ago
  > YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription. I wouldn't say it offers 2 great options. The ad-funded offering is a non-starter given the reality of its ad market. The paid option sounds great, but if the goal is to finance the creators you enjoy most, it doesn't work. The success of Nebula, plus several of YouTube's policy changes or lack thereof, imply that YouTube doesn't actually care, it's just driven by greed.
- aio2 3y ago
  Don't forgot data mining is a very profitable industry.
- Broken_Hippo 3y ago
  Youtube is part of the reason I have an adblock. I do not watch youtube on my phone because of the ads. Reasonable ads would be fine. 10-15 seconds of ad on a short video, 30 seconds on a longer one. A choice to watch a 3 minute ad to watch a 2 hour video uninterrupted. I kind of long for the banners of days gone by. But that's not what is going on. They'll play an ad in the middle of a music video. ad after ad after ad. And I get ads in videos because they are "sponsored". It has been designed to be as intrusive as possible to try to extort you out of money. And honestly, I despite them for this. If they can't possibly let music play for 4 minutes without an interruption or two, they can't possibly care if I'm watching for "free" nor care about the folks making their content.
gdilla 3y ago
wait till chatgpt folks realize how much the opportunity cost is of not monetizing their page views (yes, even for paid folks).
mitchdoogle 3y ago
What people mean when they say all these things is that, "I can easily access things I want for free, so why would I ever pay?" Yes some people give voluntarily through donations or Patreon, but it's a tiny amount of the actual number of people who derive satisfaction from the content. The best solution for someone who hates ads is a subscription model. The thing that bothers me is that publishers still collect massive amounts of data and sell it, and some continue to have advertising or product placement. Give me ads or give me a completely untracked experience for a fee. Don't do something in between and claim that it's ad-free.
- 93po 3y ago
  Any website that doesn't want me able to choose what I do on my own computer with the information they've freely given me is welcome to move to a different protocol that requires a locked down operating system that forces display of their content in the manner that they dictate. Until then, they can choose to stop freely sending me information or accept I'm going to use information on my own computer however I want (short of redistributing it).
  - theragra 3y ago
    When they try to add these protocols, though, everybody complaints a lot.
    - mike741 3y ago
      and? the changes are either worth it or they aren't. if they're not worth it then don't make them.
midnightGhost 3y ago
Bandcamp is interesting and I am considering it and cancel Spotify. How do you go about discovering music? I use Spotify for not only listening to my artists but for music discovery too.
- freehorse 3y ago
  Oof this is a great question, it actually deserves a thread of its own tbh. I do not think I have figured that out completely in a satisfactory way. Bandcamp is not that great at that as in providing a feed of songs suggested to you by your preferences, it does not have "autoplay", and searching for content in a more classic way there is messy. But it does provide a list of suggestions under each album, with a list of albums that a number of people who own that album also own, which is quite decent. It is particularly useful if what you want to find something that is similar to style to something you like. I find it quite reliable actually in finding similar stuff, probably because buying an album is quite strong measure to use to correlate albums. Also, I find quite a few genre-specific compilations in bandcamp (and elsewhere), and this is probably my favourite way to discover new bands, because usually compilations include decent bands and some of their strongest tracks, so you do not get lost as much. And as far as internet is concerned, other places I find new inspiration are genre specific forums, pages etc, and actually pages/accounts of the bands themselves (they often suggest bands they themselves like - bandcamp has even an option for artists to recommend material from others to their audience, which is actually quite nice). In general, I would say that discovering new music in bandcamp is possible, but it is rather an active process (you look into an album you like and browse through the suggested albums, play each of them etc) and takes time. In contrast, with dj youtube it is easier because it is predominantly passive, by automatically playing new suggested tracks and once in a while you hear sth that clicks. I admit that I have discovered some of my favourite bands through dj youtube this way. I have not used spotify but I assume it is somewhat similar? Tbh I appreciate the active process, in the sense that I feel that the experience of the internet has become too passive, a very common experience is scrolling through lines, posts, pages of suggested content or letting one video play after the other, and everything is tailored/measured so that you scroll or watch more (and see more ads) being fed a constant stream of information typically with a very low signal to noise ratio. However, it is also nice sometimes to just relax and have an algorithm choose a next track because one has as much energy to spend in looking through stuff, and probably in music it works better than social media. I have not found something similar to that.
shaky-carrousel 3y ago
A side effect of ads (and something that ad blockers mask, giving websites a normal appearance) is that ad supported websites have the wrong incentive. When you browse a website with no ads, you are the public. Content is provided for your use, and that's all. When you visit an ad supported website, you are only the means to achieve an end, which is to have you in the site as much as possible, clicking on as much ads as possible. That usually had the effect of making the website content bloated. Not all sites begin like that, but they all end like that. And ad blocking hides that ugly truth under a layer of normalcy.
- aio2 3y ago
  I agree with that. However, it feels that ads are a waste of time, so I'd rather not disable it everytime I log into a website. I do agree with you, though!
winternett 3y ago
I have a massive collection of Mp3s and wav files on my phone... Have cultivated it for decades now. I rarely stream music because of ads and bandwidth throttling that my mobile data provider implements. About 2 weeks ago, I heard Black Player (App), which already works in a very unexpectedly and illogically difficult and frustrating manner, started injecting ads into my normal music library. I may just need to charge up my old iPod from now on, it doesn't ever need weekly software updates for some strange reason like everything else.
- freehorse 3y ago
  Yeah I do similar, I actually use musicolet to listen to my offline music library (https://krosbits.in/musicolet https://krosbits.in/musicolet), an android app that is just offline, no ads, no network permission at all, nothing. It does the job very well and it does not mine any data or show any ads. I highly recommend to give it a try (I assume you use android?). And to add, while it is free and I could have continued just fine not paying anything to use it, I have paid for the "pro features" that I did not even need (apart from chromecast which I do not use, the other pro features were mainly aesthetic) just to support the developer for providing such a great app that respects my privacy and does not bloat my phone. People think that somehow those who do not want to pay to youtube just want to get everything for free. I have no issue with paying for any service that adds value to my life and respects my privacy, but youtube/google is not just that, and the fact that I use youtube for free does not mean that I would use it the same way if I had to pay for it or had to watch ads all the time. And to be honest, the fact that the app did not require me to support it in order to not send me ads or whatever, made me more incentivised to actually support it, because the incentive to support comes exactly from the appreciation of the experience it provides. Maybe this sounds like an ad for that app, and it actually is so. I think that such pieces of software that really respect the privacy and provide an alternative to shameless streaming services like the one discussed here are worth being advertised by their happy users.
tempera 3y ago
A good way to think about the tracking urls attached to majority of websites these days, is as many different cameras tracking each person as it enters buildings and stores, using face-recognition. Thus it stores all the places you have been and with ML and AI create some sort of personal file, with all kinds of attributes. (the more the better) uBlock and others block these cameras from seeing your face.
DirkH 3y ago
To me your view is just common sense. I find it bizarre how some people seem to be treating ad-blockers like the equivalent of stealing in the comments. It is YouTube's right to prevent me from using their site if I use an ad-blocker just as much as it is my right to stop using their service altogether if they prevent me from using it with an ad-blocker.
- zavertnik 3y ago
  I totally agree, even if I hate it. There are a lot of internet users out there who have this expectation that they are owed a certain level of access for free to these services. Those expectations aren't unfounded: most content on the internet has been, more or less, free to access. It was a good time, but surely we all knew that it couldn't last forever? The era of ultra monetization we're being ushered into is new and obviously its going to create some discomfort. But that doesn't change the reality that these expectations are totally irrational and unreasonable. We can argue that the information should be free, that content should be accessible, that the sharing and proliferation of information without barriers of entry benefit all of us in the short and long term. But those esoteric philosophies can't win a debate against a corporations desire or fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Money is tight for everyone across the board, borrowed or not (except maybe for apple). Why wouldn't they amputate the minority of users who are only costing Youtube money? I can't think of a good argument against it, other than "I hate it". People are enraged by Netflix cracking down on account sharing, people were enraged by article paywalls, and people are and will be enraged by Youtube blocking ad blockers. Unlike Netflix and article paywalls, Youtube has no real viable competitor. I get why the NYT allows me to bypass their paywall with a browser extension: if they truly make it impossible for me to bypass the article, I'll be able to find some other website that has reposted or reworded it. I get why Netflix allows me to bypass their account sharing: if they make it impossible for me to view the content without paying, I can just torrent it. But Youtube is uniquely different. The product there is not just the body of content but their ecosystem which contains essentially every video on the internet and all the connective tissue to traverse billions of minutes of video. I use an adblocker on Youtube, but if they lock me out of that option, I'll still use YouTube, because where else would I go? No where. Maybe I won't go to Youtube as often, but they'll have effectively converted me from being an extremely active viewer getting a free ride to an infrequent semi-active viewer that generates revenue.

bilekas 3y ago

> I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites). Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads. Being able to manipulate my own machine and what I want to view is entirely up to me. This can't be infringed. There is always the option today to block from the client side, but I can see this changing if there's enough money involved.

raffraffraff 3y ago
You also use swype style keyboard input?
- bilekas 3y ago
  I don't but I am on my phone. I'll clean up the grammar shortly!
  - raffraffraff 3y ago
    Oh, I just recognized a specific swypey mistake that I've seen myself make lots of times. But maybe they'd also happen on regular text prediction too? My sister in law regularly uses voice input, and her Whatsapp messages have totally different types of errors.
bluefirebrand 3y ago
> Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads. The part I dislike about this is that they will demonetize a video for content reasons, but still show ads on it. I also don't know how it works with YouTube Premium. If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching? I feel like that's not likely
- bilekas 3y ago
  > If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching? I'm not a content creator but Google do claim that a small % of the pool goes to the creators you watch, I guess kind of like a Spotify model. > Will creators still be paid with YouTube Premium? Yes. In fact, YouTube Premium gives a secondary revenue stream for creators in addition to what you're already earning today through ads. [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwill-creators-still-be-paid-with-youtube-premium https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en#zipp...

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

>I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting not saying this applies to you but might it be that ads are distracting enough that they would be an actual accessibility problem affecting people with ADHD - if so is not allowing people to block ads likely to run into legal issues?

xattt 3y ago
Yes! Ad blockers are an accessibility tool for people with executive functioning disorders! Can you imagine the uproar if a mainstream website blocked screen readers for people with low vision?
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  Then Google might be liable under various laws that support disabilities, varying per jurisdiction obviously.
  - worldofmatthew 3y ago
    All Captcha's could in the USA be illegal aswell under the ADA.... As some people with learning disabilities won't be able to complete them.

redbell 3y ago

I totally agree on this! Some websites just keep throwing an enormous number of ads into your face to the the extent you start losing consciousness why you came here in the first place. On computer, you still able to use an AdBlock but on mobile, I suffer terribly, not only because I could not disable ads but because on some sites while you are reading an article a random ad video that took about half of the screen keeps playing and scrolling down with you, even clicking the X doesn’t work most of the time but generally triggers an external link. At the bottom of the page, you start reading “best job offers in XYZ” where this XYZ is your city name deduced from your IP address, the thumbnail, as you might expect, is a “s_x_” girl lying on a bed :( I know, free content should be supported by ads but I believe this is not the way to do it.

butterNaN 3y ago
uBlock origin works perfectly with Firefox on mobile, just in case you didn't know.
somat 3y ago
if on android u-block origin works well on firefox. If ios you are probably stranded, Hopefully apple allows it's users to block some ads. That is if they don't become an advertising company.
- idle_zealot 3y ago
  On iOS uBO seems to work in Orion. Losing tab syncing is a shame though.
- 76SlashDolphin 3y ago
  On iOS you can install AdGuard in Safari (or pay for a few of the other ad-blocker extensions) or install Brave which has an ad-blocker built-in. Both work well in my experience.
whackx 3y ago
On iOS you can install browser extensions from firefox and chrome to the Orion browser. I've found it a few month back in this threat here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34562553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34562553, it is working sufficiently so far, seems even a bit faster than safari to me, too.

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

The problem with YT is: - I start the video, an ad is shown within 30 secs. - I fast forward a few minutes, the SAME ad is shown again. - I jump to anywhere on the timeline, the SAME ad is shown again. At least show me something that is relevant, like facebook does. The ads there reflect what I usually look for. On YT, none of the ads are relevant to me, ever. It's just ridiculous.

knorker 3y ago
At least for YT there's a solution: YT Premium. Sure, as other comments have said, it doesn't scale to all websites, but youtube isn't just any website.
- secondcoming 3y ago
  Does YT Premium block the sponsored ad slots? Because if not, that's a pointless product.
  - knorker 3y ago
    That's fair. Because also probably the people the advertisers want to reach MOST are exactly the people who have the spare money (and willingness to spend it) to shell out for YT Premium. But yeah I'd pay to get rid of all the "this video is sponsored by brilliant/nordVPN/whatever". Sigh.
    - Feuilles_Mortes 3y ago
      Check out SponsorBlock
  - eropple 3y ago
    You mean embedded native stuff? No, but SponsorBlock does and I use both. YT Premium pays creators for YT views and the analytics don't appreciably differentiate whether you watched an ad or skipped it, so I'm pretty comfortable with the two. (The apps don't work with SponsorBlock and that does drag, but I mostly don't watch native-advertising videos on my TV so whatever.)

red_admiral 3y ago

Ad-blocking also gives you similar if not more extra security to anti-virus software, with fewer downsides (faster not slower). I'm afraid the ad ecosystem is so big that occasionally, threats slip through.

jamiequint 3y ago
This may be true on random-site-X on the internet, but is not true on sites like YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Facebook, etc that run their own first-party ad platforms.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  Yet.
- martin_a 3y ago
  YouTubes "first-party ad platform" is delivering some of the worst ads on the whole internet. It's not only the big-boobed characters promoting mobile games, there are (video) ads for pyramid and other "get rich quick" schemes, conspiracy theories (government will force everyone to become transgender!) and whatnot. They don't give just the tiniest bit of a shit for all of this, as long as they are earning money with it.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    I have heard of their “system”, they auction ad space out in real time with a bunch a descriptors for the ad buyers who then bid for the space. Google really doesn’t give a crap who wins it or if it matches your interests/needs. Advertisers are free to advertise to anyone as long as they win the bid.
    - jamiequint 3y ago
      Your security is not affected by you seeing bad ads.
  - MrFoof 3y ago

wafriedemann 3y ago

I see no ads.

jcarrano 3y ago

> the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete. This is the main point IMO. When you have a printed newspaper or magazine you are not annoyed by the ads. If we had ads that (1) do not move, (2) are not modal/do not pop up, (3) do not track you outside the website, (4) do not take MB's of data I would be willing to tolerate them and they could even be helpful. Youtube has become unwatchable without ad blockers. It used to be better than TV, now it is worse and you cannot skip them.

tmtvl 3y ago

> I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads. Okay, but how do you square that with the fact that hosting content costs money? Are the people and companies which provide the content you look at not allowed to earn money to keep the servers running and the sysadmins fed?

philbo 3y ago
Producing television shows also costs money, but no-one forces me to watch the ads there. I can change channel, or skip past them if recorded, or just leave the room while they're on.
- acdha 3y ago
  Why can’t you do that with YouTube? Changing the channel is as easy as closing the tab and you certainly can leave the room or mute it during ads.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
pmx 3y ago
I would have no problem with ads if they weren't so obnoxious. They cause the page layout to shift as they load in, they block the loading of actual page content, they play sounds, play videos, pop up over the content i'm trying to read. Advertising doesn't have to be like that and that's why i block it.
selfmodruntime 3y ago
If you rely on ad revenue and people do not enjoy using your product more than enduring your ads, maybe your business model is wrong to begin with?
- anthonypasq 3y ago

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

On mobile YouTube right now I see two unskippable ads before every video. How long before some genius needs to juice his numbers this quarter and come up with the bright idea of three unskippable ads? Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo? If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today? To the bean counters who seem to have overwhelmed Google, losing a few users might seem like a dog losing some fleas. They are out of ideas for growth. Once blitz scaling has reached the limits of user acquisition the only play left to juice the numbers seems to be “boil the frog”, going to war with their Oort cloud of free users, pay up or else. Are the c-suite types at Google aware that this is exactly the mindset that will make their decline into irrelevance inevitable? Elon Musk inadvertently turned Twitter into a howling wasteland in a few short months, which shows what happens when you boil the user frog too quickly. Imagine how Twitter would look today if Elon instead doubled down on making Twitter the best user experience, offering users tools to make Twitter more relevant, making it an unmissable service for users, and in turn unmissable for advertisers? But instead he pulled the lever all the way from utopia to hellscape, attempting to shake down users to restore some functionality to a clearly degraded product. Enshitifying (thanks Cory Doctorow) the user experience is not a compelling reason to subscribe. Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product. I'm not against advertising per se, I’m against being shaken down to regain a user experience that should be the default. Here are two examples of successful advertising models: 1. Lex Friedman does an ad read at the beginning of his podcast. It’s intentionally skippable, I skip it 90% of the time. But when I'm busy with bread dough on my hands or whatever, I'm still hearing the ads, which are mostly repeat offerings anyway. Advertising is not always appropriate, eg at a kids birthday party or showing a video in a lecture. The lesson: MAKE IT SKIPPABLE! 2. Inserts into shows / product placement, like on VFX Artists React. These seem harder for a behemoth to monetise but I like these because I know that the actual creators are getting paid. Youtube doesn't want to deal with creators with anything closer than a dashboard. This is not the end users fault, it’s not the content creators fault, it’s a symptom of absentee capitalism. Youtube should invest in creators and form true partnerships. The lesson: INVEST IN DEALING FAIRLY WITH HUMANS! I’m not going to pay, I will continue to avoid ads but watch them occasionally. I’m going to keep playing the game of whack-a-mole finding software / hardware solutions. And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship.

Gareth321 3y ago

You've hit on the reason I think the Brave token is such a great idea (https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ https://brave.com/brave-rewards/). I know it's en vogue to trash gimmicky cryptocurrencies, and to be honest I don't care how this gets implemented. The concept is great: a shared, fungible way to easily support random websites one visits, and control the kinds of ads one accepts. If sites had a little tip jar which I could easily tap to avoid ads, I'd use it. There's just too much friction today in supporting sites, and all of them want a subscription.

bheadmaster 3y ago
The whole point of advertisements is that the person pushing them doesn't earn anything from them - but rather, force-feeds information about the existence of their product to the public. Now, instead of ruining our public space with horrible billboards and kitschy flashing lights, they ruin our digital space with horrible pop-ups and kitschy lust-provoking videos. I don't care about those who run ads, nor those who allow ad companies to run ads on their content. If you earn money through ads, that's your problem, not mine, and it's not my responsibility to watch them. Ads are fundamentally intrusive, and pretending like the society at large has some kind of "responsibility" towards those who earn money from ads is laughable.
schlauerfox 3y ago
That was the original intention of HashCash, the inspiration to Bitcoin. Antispam micropayments to add some trivial level of cost to online interactions to make scale unaffordable.
freehorse 3y ago
This looks like a good idea indeed. I would not mind something like that, as long as some reasonable level of control from the user side exists. I will try it in my mobile as I use brave anyway there.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y ago

> The whole internet is bloated with ads right now Internet? I think you mean everything. The whole everything is bloated with ads right now. Look around you, I bet you can see at least a dozen brand names without even leaving your chair. People who work in marketing and ads should quit their jobs if they care at all about society, but of course they don't or they wouldn't be in marketing and advertising. Alternatively, we should just stop putting up with their bullshit because they have a long history of abusing every inch they are given.

account42 3y ago
And guess what, people pay extra for having some of these brand names on their shit. What a clown world.

unsupp0rted 3y ago

Since I live in countries other than my own, there's a 0% chance that any given ad is relevant to me. Chances are it's in a language I don't speak or for a product I'm not eligible for, much less something I'd actually want. This works out great because my brain doesn't get so distracted by ads, even physical billboard ads. But at the same time I use an ad-blocker to avoid wasted screen real estate.

fennecfoxy 3y ago

I think the core issue is: * People don't like ads, because ads suck * Youtube offers premium, an ad-less experience Never have I seen self-entitled people so furious as when YT requests they buy premium in order to remove ads. What, should YT be hosted for free without ads and without a subscription? I get that ads suck and companies suck, but self-entitled people suck too; most of us here are devs and we get paid because our company has to make money _somehow_. YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription. They refuse either option and instead are furious that YT doesn't offer itself completely for free.

mitchdoogle 3y ago
I don't like ads and I don't mind paying. What I don't like is paying for an ad-free experience and my data continuing to get mined. I consider companies entitled if they demand to have both my data and my money
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
YoshiRulz 3y ago
> YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription. I wouldn't say it offers 2 great options. The ad-funded offering is a non-starter given the reality of its ad market. The paid option sounds great, but if the goal is to finance the creators you enjoy most, it doesn't work. The success of Nebula, plus several of YouTube's policy changes or lack thereof, imply that YouTube doesn't actually care, it's just driven by greed.
aio2 3y ago
Don't forgot data mining is a very profitable industry.
Broken_Hippo 3y ago
Youtube is part of the reason I have an adblock. I do not watch youtube on my phone because of the ads. Reasonable ads would be fine. 10-15 seconds of ad on a short video, 30 seconds on a longer one. A choice to watch a 3 minute ad to watch a 2 hour video uninterrupted. I kind of long for the banners of days gone by. But that's not what is going on. They'll play an ad in the middle of a music video. ad after ad after ad. And I get ads in videos because they are "sponsored". It has been designed to be as intrusive as possible to try to extort you out of money. And honestly, I despite them for this. If they can't possibly let music play for 4 minutes without an interruption or two, they can't possibly care if I'm watching for "free" nor care about the folks making their content.

gdilla 3y ago

wait till chatgpt folks realize how much the opportunity cost is of not monetizing their page views (yes, even for paid folks).

mitchdoogle 3y ago

What people mean when they say all these things is that, "I can easily access things I want for free, so why would I ever pay?" Yes some people give voluntarily through donations or Patreon, but it's a tiny amount of the actual number of people who derive satisfaction from the content. The best solution for someone who hates ads is a subscription model. The thing that bothers me is that publishers still collect massive amounts of data and sell it, and some continue to have advertising or product placement. Give me ads or give me a completely untracked experience for a fee. Don't do something in between and claim that it's ad-free.

93po 3y ago
Any website that doesn't want me able to choose what I do on my own computer with the information they've freely given me is welcome to move to a different protocol that requires a locked down operating system that forces display of their content in the manner that they dictate. Until then, they can choose to stop freely sending me information or accept I'm going to use information on my own computer however I want (short of redistributing it).
- theragra 3y ago
  When they try to add these protocols, though, everybody complaints a lot.
  - mike741 3y ago
    and? the changes are either worth it or they aren't. if they're not worth it then don't make them.

midnightGhost 3y ago

Bandcamp is interesting and I am considering it and cancel Spotify. How do you go about discovering music? I use Spotify for not only listening to my artists but for music discovery too.

freehorse 3y ago
Oof this is a great question, it actually deserves a thread of its own tbh. I do not think I have figured that out completely in a satisfactory way. Bandcamp is not that great at that as in providing a feed of songs suggested to you by your preferences, it does not have "autoplay", and searching for content in a more classic way there is messy. But it does provide a list of suggestions under each album, with a list of albums that a number of people who own that album also own, which is quite decent. It is particularly useful if what you want to find something that is similar to style to something you like. I find it quite reliable actually in finding similar stuff, probably because buying an album is quite strong measure to use to correlate albums. Also, I find quite a few genre-specific compilations in bandcamp (and elsewhere), and this is probably my favourite way to discover new bands, because usually compilations include decent bands and some of their strongest tracks, so you do not get lost as much. And as far as internet is concerned, other places I find new inspiration are genre specific forums, pages etc, and actually pages/accounts of the bands themselves (they often suggest bands they themselves like - bandcamp has even an option for artists to recommend material from others to their audience, which is actually quite nice). In general, I would say that discovering new music in bandcamp is possible, but it is rather an active process (you look into an album you like and browse through the suggested albums, play each of them etc) and takes time. In contrast, with dj youtube it is easier because it is predominantly passive, by automatically playing new suggested tracks and once in a while you hear sth that clicks. I admit that I have discovered some of my favourite bands through dj youtube this way. I have not used spotify but I assume it is somewhat similar? Tbh I appreciate the active process, in the sense that I feel that the experience of the internet has become too passive, a very common experience is scrolling through lines, posts, pages of suggested content or letting one video play after the other, and everything is tailored/measured so that you scroll or watch more (and see more ads) being fed a constant stream of information typically with a very low signal to noise ratio. However, it is also nice sometimes to just relax and have an algorithm choose a next track because one has as much energy to spend in looking through stuff, and probably in music it works better than social media. I have not found something similar to that.

shaky-carrousel 3y ago

A side effect of ads (and something that ad blockers mask, giving websites a normal appearance) is that ad supported websites have the wrong incentive. When you browse a website with no ads, you are the public. Content is provided for your use, and that's all. When you visit an ad supported website, you are only the means to achieve an end, which is to have you in the site as much as possible, clicking on as much ads as possible. That usually had the effect of making the website content bloated. Not all sites begin like that, but they all end like that. And ad blocking hides that ugly truth under a layer of normalcy.

aio2 3y ago
I agree with that. However, it feels that ads are a waste of time, so I'd rather not disable it everytime I log into a website. I do agree with you, though!

winternett 3y ago

I have a massive collection of Mp3s and wav files on my phone... Have cultivated it for decades now. I rarely stream music because of ads and bandwidth throttling that my mobile data provider implements. About 2 weeks ago, I heard Black Player (App), which already works in a very unexpectedly and illogically difficult and frustrating manner, started injecting ads into my normal music library. I may just need to charge up my old iPod from now on, it doesn't ever need weekly software updates for some strange reason like everything else.

freehorse 3y ago
Yeah I do similar, I actually use musicolet to listen to my offline music library (https://krosbits.in/musicolet https://krosbits.in/musicolet), an android app that is just offline, no ads, no network permission at all, nothing. It does the job very well and it does not mine any data or show any ads. I highly recommend to give it a try (I assume you use android?). And to add, while it is free and I could have continued just fine not paying anything to use it, I have paid for the "pro features" that I did not even need (apart from chromecast which I do not use, the other pro features were mainly aesthetic) just to support the developer for providing such a great app that respects my privacy and does not bloat my phone. People think that somehow those who do not want to pay to youtube just want to get everything for free. I have no issue with paying for any service that adds value to my life and respects my privacy, but youtube/google is not just that, and the fact that I use youtube for free does not mean that I would use it the same way if I had to pay for it or had to watch ads all the time. And to be honest, the fact that the app did not require me to support it in order to not send me ads or whatever, made me more incentivised to actually support it, because the incentive to support comes exactly from the appreciation of the experience it provides. Maybe this sounds like an ad for that app, and it actually is so. I think that such pieces of software that really respect the privacy and provide an alternative to shameless streaming services like the one discussed here are worth being advertised by their happy users.

tempera 3y ago

A good way to think about the tracking urls attached to majority of websites these days, is as many different cameras tracking each person as it enters buildings and stores, using face-recognition. Thus it stores all the places you have been and with ML and AI create some sort of personal file, with all kinds of attributes. (the more the better) uBlock and others block these cameras from seeing your face.

DirkH 3y ago

To me your view is just common sense. I find it bizarre how some people seem to be treating ad-blockers like the equivalent of stealing in the comments. It is YouTube's right to prevent me from using their site if I use an ad-blocker just as much as it is my right to stop using their service altogether if they prevent me from using it with an ad-blocker.

zavertnik 3y ago
I totally agree, even if I hate it. There are a lot of internet users out there who have this expectation that they are owed a certain level of access for free to these services. Those expectations aren't unfounded: most content on the internet has been, more or less, free to access. It was a good time, but surely we all knew that it couldn't last forever? The era of ultra monetization we're being ushered into is new and obviously its going to create some discomfort. But that doesn't change the reality that these expectations are totally irrational and unreasonable. We can argue that the information should be free, that content should be accessible, that the sharing and proliferation of information without barriers of entry benefit all of us in the short and long term. But those esoteric philosophies can't win a debate against a corporations desire or fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Money is tight for everyone across the board, borrowed or not (except maybe for apple). Why wouldn't they amputate the minority of users who are only costing Youtube money? I can't think of a good argument against it, other than "I hate it". People are enraged by Netflix cracking down on account sharing, people were enraged by article paywalls, and people are and will be enraged by Youtube blocking ad blockers. Unlike Netflix and article paywalls, Youtube has no real viable competitor. I get why the NYT allows me to bypass their paywall with a browser extension: if they truly make it impossible for me to bypass the article, I'll be able to find some other website that has reposted or reworded it. I get why Netflix allows me to bypass their account sharing: if they make it impossible for me to view the content without paying, I can just torrent it. But Youtube is uniquely different. The product there is not just the body of content but their ecosystem which contains essentially every video on the internet and all the connective tissue to traverse billions of minutes of video. I use an adblocker on Youtube, but if they lock me out of that option, I'll still use YouTube, because where else would I go? No where. Maybe I won't go to Youtube as often, but they'll have effectively converted me from being an extremely active viewer getting a free ride to an infrequent semi-active viewer that generates revenue.