7 ms·

I don't really understand either side of the equation here. So, on the one hand you have people who use ad blockers. The first retort that comes to mind here

by Verdex 3y ago

I don't really understand either side of the equation here. So, on the one hand you have people who use ad blockers. The first retort that comes to mind here is: Well, we'll take our business elsewhere. Which is odd because without ads they aren't paying and them leaving is the goal. Of course on the other hand ... when I read the title my thoughts weren't that I would be okay because I don't ad block youtube. My thought wasn't that I should buy youtube premium to avoid ads. My thought WAS that if I ever get falsely flagged, then I'll just buy a nebula subscription (or whatever) and never use youtube again. In fact I went over to nebula to check it out. Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable. But youtube got big via offering a free service and now if feels like they're trying to pull up the ladder behind themselves.

dayvid 3y ago
It costs a lot of money to run YouTube. If someone wants to make a competitor, they’re free to do so, but most will charge because of how expensive it is or you could use a PeerTube-like system. I pay for YouTube Premium and get value out of YouTube. I’m also an adult with a decent paying job so it’s not a big deal for me. Maybe the mistake of these conglomerates is getting people accustomed to a certain level of service for free.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Nebula charges about $10 a year, and makes a pretty good profit right now.
  - kdbg 3y ago
    Pretty sure that price is only for your first year if you sign up with a code/link from one of their creators. The advertised rates are currently $5/month or $50/year.
- neop1x 3y ago
  It costs YouTube a lot of money because they pretended to be a free service and allowed anyone to upload enormous amounts of video data which they now have to continue storing and serving.
- BowBun 3y ago
  It's not a mistake, they do it on purpose. Most tech companies spin up with free offerings to acquire critical mass, and then pull the rug out from under their users once they feel like they can squeeze money out of them without scaring all of them away. Social media does it (Reddit, Twitter). Video games do it (COD, yearly releases, DLC). eCommerce does it (Walmart, Amazon). IaaS does it (Heroku). Don't give them the benefit that it's a 'mistake', it's very intentional. CAC is a metric used by all tech companies and is calculated to build network effects and large user-bases. I find it unethical and borderline fraudulent to build these community pillars and then defile them for profit. We'll be left with absolutely nothing free in life, no town squares and no transfer of information without fees. Whether you or someone else can afford $10/mo is completely irrelevant.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
The problem is, that in many cases, the amount of ads is higher than the amount of usable content in a video, even without counting the in-video ads (by the content creator). This is also true for many "normal" websites, where (especially some news sites) almost literally beg you to turn adblock off, since they cannot write content without it, and you naively do so once, to be bombarded by 50 different autoplaying ads, popups, overlays, banners, ads that move while you scroll, ads that break content into many small pieces, etc., forcing you to turn the adblock off, or with no alternative, to just close the page, because it's unusable.
nness 3y ago
It's almost like the growth plan of every tech company in the last decade or so... Grow big by burning capital ("to hell with cost of acquisition our CLV will be so high once they're locked in"); build an ad network; realise an operating profit; fight tooth and nail to protect that ad network... Even Uber is becoming an ads company...
- xp84 3y ago
  Question: If you'd rather they didn't exist than be ad-supported, why not just ignore them? Surely VC money wasn't going to keep things like YouTube, Uber, and the rest artificially cheap or free with no strings forever, right? I feel like due to the VC-enabled delayed monetization that tends to happen with startups, we have all (me included) become convinced that it's sustainable to expect a bunch of ad-free, subscription-free content that just creates itself and teleports onto our computer, forever and ever. TANSTAAFL though.
- Verdex 3y ago
  > Even Uber is becoming an ads company... Yeah, with youtube it kind of makes sense that the ads would be there. Uber (TIL), Windows 11, and non-media experiences/services/goods in general looking for ways to sell ads makes my skin crawl. Just wait until doorbells play you an ad when you press the button. If given a single magical wish, I wonder how much havoc I could wreck by wishing that immediately before someone intends to purchase ad time or join an ad network or whatever they mystically gain an understanding of exactly what the ROI is going to be for them. My conceit is that 99% of entities that purchase ad time have a significantly negative ROI because at the end of the day the only thing that an advertiser has to be good at selling to exist is their own services.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    Things like doorbells/thermostats/light switches I'm not too worried about because they don't have network effects -- I can build my own with very little time investment and it can have better features and more reliability than most other options. The boundary here is currently probably TV's, it's insane to me that I can't get an affordable high quality TV without tracking and ads. I can block the TV at the router, but something like Amazon Sidewalk could be used to get around my sandboxing. Platforms which require network effects to function like YouTube, Twitter, Email (deliverability), etc have a different dynamic. They're very difficult to abandon once you've come to rely on them.
Larrikin 3y ago
Why would you not use an ad blocker?
- recursive 3y ago
  Perhaps because you believe that using an ad blocker escalates an arms race that leads to bad outcomes for all internet users.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Whether or not you use one doesn't change this arms race from existing. It just gives you a moral fig leaf without changing anything substantiative.
    - recursive 3y ago
      At least I have a fig leaf then. I'm open to suggestions.
      - salawat 3y ago
        You're acknowledging the legitimacy of people who justify their existence by automating "Hey,listen!" That is foisted on every other individual on the planet, without their consent.
        recursive 3y ago
        In this case, it's only foisted on people that visit the site in question. That's the main variable I control.
Brometheus 3y ago
They could also, like, go back where they would show a meaningful ad every 10 videos. and not 4 with every video you attempt to watch.
- Loughla 3y ago
  My child watched a 10 minute video the other day on a machine that doesn't have an adblocker installed on it. There were 4 "commercial breaks" of 2, unskippable 30 second ads. So, 4 minutes extra. That's an extra 40% of the original video length (10 minutes). That's 30% of the total length (14 minutes). It's almost exactly the same as broadcast tv, maybe slightly high? TV averages 12-20 minutes per 60 of tv being ads. Not really sure what to do with that. It feels like I should be upset, but really, it's proportionate to what already exists and I'm only upset because it's worse than it was 10 years ago.
  - Reubachi 3y ago
    In your summary, you described: -A service you pay for (traditional cable) has 30-40 percent of it's time -dedicated to charging you more. (time cost to watch the ads). -It has gotten worse both traditionally and on streaming media. -Your child, who is in no way associated with the payment structure, is forced to absorb malicious ads despite being too young to consent to the information being "forced". -(my observation) Media spot advertising does not work, is largely targeted incorectly. We're PAYING for our kids to become desensitized to attention-vampiricity and we're unsure if it is ok to be upset? Yes!
    - Loughla 3y ago
      So that's not what I was getting at. I was simply comparing the ad content from YouTube to traditional media. The original post claimed that it has too many ads, so I thought I'd do the math. I was surprised it turned out the way it did. Maybe that is just conditioning? Your argument is a different thing. Valid as well, but completely different.
XorNot 3y ago
The key about ads and ad-blocking is simple: I don't care. I don't care about any of these companies. I don't care about their costs or business model. And I don't particularly care about their product, because it is ephemeral and optional to me. There's far too many people in "business" today who think they provide anything of any real, determinable value to me rather then a passing fancy which will be easily replaced or discarded. And this doesn't just apply to the content hosters: it also applies to their advertisers. There is nothing of value being advertised these days. It's all misrepresented junk, when it's not outright scams. It isn't worth ever exposing yourself to.
- pengaru 3y ago
  +1000 My first thought upon hearing this was "oh, I guess my time lost to youtube-dl + mpv of those few channels I have bookmarked will finally be reclaimed!" (assuming this breaks it) This move makes zero sense on their part. Cutting off your addicts is a horrible approach to being a drug dealer. You always keep them hooked to your supply, if you wholly interrupt it they'll quickly seek replacement. That's literally what created the illicit opioid crisis - folks lost their prescription opioids and immediately pivoted to street dealers. Surely youtube has better options than outright blocking users of adblockers... Why wouldn't you first just restrict the quality of videos they can access to extremely low-res. It lessens the bandwidth burden on you, and may be enough to keep them under your spell and away from the competitors supply.
  - wincy 3y ago
    They’ve already done that in a way, I can only watch 720p on mobile with safari + Adblocker and it always always between each video resets to 360p unless I tap to change it every time. To get higher res than that I have to download the app.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
Good point. I don't know what were their expectations for audience reaction. It surely wasn't "oh I need to turn off my adblocker then" or "oh, YouTube Premium, that's neat, lemme get my credit card". For me, it was, in order: - "Three strikes" and... what? Red alert! Let me drop everything and read the damn article right now, because it could be "three strikes and you lose your Google account", which is kinda big fucking deal. - [Couple paragraphs later] oh, only disabling playback. Whew, cancel red alert. - My kids will not be happy though the first time it hits. Neither will we, because YouTube + AdBlock is the easiest way to play our 4yo and 2yo music, without exposing them to the brain poison of modern advertising at this early age. - (The next easiest one is NewPipe or yt-dlp, + some manual fixup, + an old phone working as an off-line music player.) - (Also no joke on brain poison. The way kids react to an ad that occasionally slips by us is a perfect measure of how fucked up advertising is.) - Oh well, let's hope NewPipe keeps working. - ... also, what took them so long? I expected this so many years ago that I actually forgot this could happen. BTW. is it only me, or is 2023 the year of "enshittification" of SaaS shifting into high gear? Like the layoff wave earlier, this also feels like suddenly happening everywhere at the same time.
- charrondev 3y ago
  > YouTube + AdBlock is the easiest way to play our 4yo and 2yo music, without exposing them to the brain poison of modern advertising at this early age. How is this easier than paying a subscription? You get ad-free YouTube and YouTube music. I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements. We paid a few dollars more for a family plan and now my father and grandfather no longer watch ads either.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    > I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements. If most people choose to do this, your premium subscription will start to have a few premium, curated ads, and you'll have to buy the next tier up to get ad-free again. Four years later, you'll have to by the next tier up just to get the premium, curated ads back.
pca006132 3y ago
I'm really puzzled with the ad business model. I always wonder if those silly mobile game ads can get really bring the mobile game developer additional revenue? And even for other ads that look less stupid comparing with those mobile games, I think I had never been attracted to purchase something due to ads, nor I would prefer them when I actually need to buy something (note that I keep my spending minimal, so I am probably not their targets anyway...)
- gbear605 3y ago
  The mobile games are the weirdest to me, because most of them that I see are ads for games that are also primarily ad supported. It’s ads all the way down. I suspect that a lot of it is riding on VC funding that will eventually dry up, breaking everyone’s business models.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
toastercat 3y ago
> So, on the one hand you have people who use ad blockers. The first retort that comes to mind here is: Well, we'll take our business elsewhere. Which is odd because without ads they aren't paying and them leaving is the goal. I use an ad blocker. If I can no longer block ads on YouTube, yes I will just stop using YouTube, or use an Invidious/Piped instance. I think your mistake is believing everyone who uses ad-block also believes ad-free YouTube is worth paying for. I do not. Further, if Invidious, Piped, NewPipe, and yt-dlp stop working as well, I will simply just watch drastically less YouTube, which is what Google wants. > Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable. I don't care. Would I care if YouTube was run by a small company that didn't employ dark patterns or fuel unhealthy addiction of innappropriate content in kids? Probably, but YouTube is run by megacorp, so no, I don't care about their server costs.
- kristiandupont 3y ago
  >I think your mistake is believing everyone who uses ad-block also believes ad-free YouTube is worth paying for. I do not. No, they are saying that they will not "lose your business" because there was no business in the first place, which is true.
  - asdff 3y ago
    Nonpaying users still have value. If they didn't, companies wouldn't pay for bots to follow them on social media.
  - toastercat 3y ago
    It was hard to parse that sentence; I see now what they meant, thank you. Although that also seems to imply ad-block users are indignant. I don't mind leaving YouTube.

by Verdex 3y ago

dayvid 3y ago

It costs a lot of money to run YouTube. If someone wants to make a competitor, they’re free to do so, but most will charge because of how expensive it is or you could use a PeerTube-like system. I pay for YouTube Premium and get value out of YouTube. I’m also an adult with a decent paying job so it’s not a big deal for me. Maybe the mistake of these conglomerates is getting people accustomed to a certain level of service for free.

mrguyorama 3y ago
Nebula charges about $10 a year, and makes a pretty good profit right now.
- kdbg 3y ago
  Pretty sure that price is only for your first year if you sign up with a code/link from one of their creators. The advertised rates are currently $5/month or $50/year.
neop1x 3y ago
It costs YouTube a lot of money because they pretended to be a free service and allowed anyone to upload enormous amounts of video data which they now have to continue storing and serving.
BowBun 3y ago
It's not a mistake, they do it on purpose. Most tech companies spin up with free offerings to acquire critical mass, and then pull the rug out from under their users once they feel like they can squeeze money out of them without scaring all of them away. Social media does it (Reddit, Twitter). Video games do it (COD, yearly releases, DLC). eCommerce does it (Walmart, Amazon). IaaS does it (Heroku). Don't give them the benefit that it's a 'mistake', it's very intentional. CAC is a metric used by all tech companies and is calculated to build network effects and large user-bases. I find it unethical and borderline fraudulent to build these community pillars and then defile them for profit. We'll be left with absolutely nothing free in life, no town squares and no transfer of information without fees. Whether you or someone else can afford $10/mo is completely irrelevant.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

The problem is, that in many cases, the amount of ads is higher than the amount of usable content in a video, even without counting the in-video ads (by the content creator). This is also true for many "normal" websites, where (especially some news sites) almost literally beg you to turn adblock off, since they cannot write content without it, and you naively do so once, to be bombarded by 50 different autoplaying ads, popups, overlays, banners, ads that move while you scroll, ads that break content into many small pieces, etc., forcing you to turn the adblock off, or with no alternative, to just close the page, because it's unusable.

nness 3y ago

It's almost like the growth plan of every tech company in the last decade or so... Grow big by burning capital ("to hell with cost of acquisition our CLV will be so high once they're locked in"); build an ad network; realise an operating profit; fight tooth and nail to protect that ad network... Even Uber is becoming an ads company...

xp84 3y ago
Question: If you'd rather they didn't exist than be ad-supported, why not just ignore them? Surely VC money wasn't going to keep things like YouTube, Uber, and the rest artificially cheap or free with no strings forever, right? I feel like due to the VC-enabled delayed monetization that tends to happen with startups, we have all (me included) become convinced that it's sustainable to expect a bunch of ad-free, subscription-free content that just creates itself and teleports onto our computer, forever and ever. TANSTAAFL though.
Verdex 3y ago
> Even Uber is becoming an ads company... Yeah, with youtube it kind of makes sense that the ads would be there. Uber (TIL), Windows 11, and non-media experiences/services/goods in general looking for ways to sell ads makes my skin crawl. Just wait until doorbells play you an ad when you press the button. If given a single magical wish, I wonder how much havoc I could wreck by wishing that immediately before someone intends to purchase ad time or join an ad network or whatever they mystically gain an understanding of exactly what the ROI is going to be for them. My conceit is that 99% of entities that purchase ad time have a significantly negative ROI because at the end of the day the only thing that an advertiser has to be good at selling to exist is their own services.
- reaperman 3y ago
  Things like doorbells/thermostats/light switches I'm not too worried about because they don't have network effects -- I can build my own with very little time investment and it can have better features and more reliability than most other options. The boundary here is currently probably TV's, it's insane to me that I can't get an affordable high quality TV without tracking and ads. I can block the TV at the router, but something like Amazon Sidewalk could be used to get around my sandboxing. Platforms which require network effects to function like YouTube, Twitter, Email (deliverability), etc have a different dynamic. They're very difficult to abandon once you've come to rely on them.

Larrikin 3y ago

Why would you not use an ad blocker?

recursive 3y ago
Perhaps because you believe that using an ad blocker escalates an arms race that leads to bad outcomes for all internet users.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Whether or not you use one doesn't change this arms race from existing. It just gives you a moral fig leaf without changing anything substantiative.
  - recursive 3y ago
    At least I have a fig leaf then. I'm open to suggestions.
    - salawat 3y ago
      You're acknowledging the legitimacy of people who justify their existence by automating "Hey,listen!" That is foisted on every other individual on the planet, without their consent.
      - recursive 3y ago
        In this case, it's only foisted on people that visit the site in question. That's the main variable I control.

Brometheus 3y ago

They could also, like, go back where they would show a meaningful ad every 10 videos. and not 4 with every video you attempt to watch.

Loughla 3y ago
My child watched a 10 minute video the other day on a machine that doesn't have an adblocker installed on it. There were 4 "commercial breaks" of 2, unskippable 30 second ads. So, 4 minutes extra. That's an extra 40% of the original video length (10 minutes). That's 30% of the total length (14 minutes). It's almost exactly the same as broadcast tv, maybe slightly high? TV averages 12-20 minutes per 60 of tv being ads. Not really sure what to do with that. It feels like I should be upset, but really, it's proportionate to what already exists and I'm only upset because it's worse than it was 10 years ago.
- Reubachi 3y ago
  In your summary, you described: -A service you pay for (traditional cable) has 30-40 percent of it's time -dedicated to charging you more. (time cost to watch the ads). -It has gotten worse both traditionally and on streaming media. -Your child, who is in no way associated with the payment structure, is forced to absorb malicious ads despite being too young to consent to the information being "forced". -(my observation) Media spot advertising does not work, is largely targeted incorectly. We're PAYING for our kids to become desensitized to attention-vampiricity and we're unsure if it is ok to be upset? Yes!
  - Loughla 3y ago
    So that's not what I was getting at. I was simply comparing the ad content from YouTube to traditional media. The original post claimed that it has too many ads, so I thought I'd do the math. I was surprised it turned out the way it did. Maybe that is just conditioning? Your argument is a different thing. Valid as well, but completely different.

XorNot 3y ago

The key about ads and ad-blocking is simple: I don't care. I don't care about any of these companies. I don't care about their costs or business model. And I don't particularly care about their product, because it is ephemeral and optional to me. There's far too many people in "business" today who think they provide anything of any real, determinable value to me rather then a passing fancy which will be easily replaced or discarded. And this doesn't just apply to the content hosters: it also applies to their advertisers. There is nothing of value being advertised these days. It's all misrepresented junk, when it's not outright scams. It isn't worth ever exposing yourself to.

pengaru 3y ago
+1000 My first thought upon hearing this was "oh, I guess my time lost to youtube-dl + mpv of those few channels I have bookmarked will finally be reclaimed!" (assuming this breaks it) This move makes zero sense on their part. Cutting off your addicts is a horrible approach to being a drug dealer. You always keep them hooked to your supply, if you wholly interrupt it they'll quickly seek replacement. That's literally what created the illicit opioid crisis - folks lost their prescription opioids and immediately pivoted to street dealers. Surely youtube has better options than outright blocking users of adblockers... Why wouldn't you first just restrict the quality of videos they can access to extremely low-res. It lessens the bandwidth burden on you, and may be enough to keep them under your spell and away from the competitors supply.
- wincy 3y ago
  They’ve already done that in a way, I can only watch 720p on mobile with safari + Adblocker and it always always between each video resets to 360p unless I tap to change it every time. To get higher res than that I have to download the app.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

Good point. I don't know what were their expectations for audience reaction. It surely wasn't "oh I need to turn off my adblocker then" or "oh, YouTube Premium, that's neat, lemme get my credit card". For me, it was, in order: - "Three strikes" and... what? Red alert! Let me drop everything and read the damn article right now, because it could be "three strikes and you lose your Google account", which is kinda big fucking deal. - [Couple paragraphs later] oh, only disabling playback. Whew, cancel red alert. - My kids will not be happy though the first time it hits. Neither will we, because YouTube + AdBlock is the easiest way to play our 4yo and 2yo music, without exposing them to the brain poison of modern advertising at this early age. - (The next easiest one is NewPipe or yt-dlp, + some manual fixup, + an old phone working as an off-line music player.) - (Also no joke on brain poison. The way kids react to an ad that occasionally slips by us is a perfect measure of how fucked up advertising is.) - Oh well, let's hope NewPipe keeps working. - ... also, what took them so long? I expected this so many years ago that I actually forgot this could happen. BTW. is it only me, or is 2023 the year of "enshittification" of SaaS shifting into high gear? Like the layoff wave earlier, this also feels like suddenly happening everywhere at the same time.

charrondev 3y ago
> YouTube + AdBlock is the easiest way to play our 4yo and 2yo music, without exposing them to the brain poison of modern advertising at this early age. How is this easier than paying a subscription? You get ad-free YouTube and YouTube music. I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements. We paid a few dollars more for a family plan and now my father and grandfather no longer watch ads either.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  > I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements. If most people choose to do this, your premium subscription will start to have a few premium, curated ads, and you'll have to buy the next tier up to get ad-free again. Four years later, you'll have to by the next tier up just to get the premium, curated ads back.

pca006132 3y ago

I'm really puzzled with the ad business model. I always wonder if those silly mobile game ads can get really bring the mobile game developer additional revenue? And even for other ads that look less stupid comparing with those mobile games, I think I had never been attracted to purchase something due to ads, nor I would prefer them when I actually need to buy something (note that I keep my spending minimal, so I am probably not their targets anyway...)

gbear605 3y ago
The mobile games are the weirdest to me, because most of them that I see are ads for games that are also primarily ad supported. It’s ads all the way down. I suspect that a lot of it is riding on VC funding that will eventually dry up, breaking everyone’s business models.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

toastercat 3y ago

> So, on the one hand you have people who use ad blockers. The first retort that comes to mind here is: Well, we'll take our business elsewhere. Which is odd because without ads they aren't paying and them leaving is the goal. I use an ad blocker. If I can no longer block ads on YouTube, yes I will just stop using YouTube, or use an Invidious/Piped instance. I think your mistake is believing everyone who uses ad-block also believes ad-free YouTube is worth paying for. I do not. Further, if Invidious, Piped, NewPipe, and yt-dlp stop working as well, I will simply just watch drastically less YouTube, which is what Google wants. > Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable. I don't care. Would I care if YouTube was run by a small company that didn't employ dark patterns or fuel unhealthy addiction of innappropriate content in kids? Probably, but YouTube is run by megacorp, so no, I don't care about their server costs.

kristiandupont 3y ago
>I think your mistake is believing everyone who uses ad-block also believes ad-free YouTube is worth paying for. I do not. No, they are saying that they will not "lose your business" because there was no business in the first place, which is true.
- asdff 3y ago
  Nonpaying users still have value. If they didn't, companies wouldn't pay for bots to follow them on social media.
- toastercat 3y ago
  It was hard to parse that sentence; I see now what they meant, thank you. Although that also seems to imply ad-block users are indignant. I don't mind leaving YouTube.