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This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads. It's bec

This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads. It's because they've become increasingly obnoxious. Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter or maybe an animated GIF banner with 3 frames. No, adblockers became popular because ads kept getting more loud (both visually and audibly), in your face, and resource hungry (remember those flash ads that'd keep your CPU pegged?). The web became unusable if you didn't have a blocker installed. Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.

stcroixx 3y ago
Not why I block ads. I simply hate them in any form.
frankfrankfrank 3y ago
My list or reasons I go hard against ads, even though I can appreciate quality ads that can serve a legitimate purpose: 1) tracking me across in serval ways, only making me more fanatical about it by selling my information and activity to who know whom. 2) malware/virus injections … it still happens way too often. 3) garbage ads; for garbage products, products/services I just purchased, or the infamous scam ads to defraud people.
tjpnz 3y ago
Ads also constitute a security and privacy threat and are frequently an attack vector for phishing schemes - even on Google search. I'm not going to disable my adblocker and risk becoming a crime victim.
ianbutler 3y ago
I recently unblocked ads on a website that I use semi frequently in an effort to contribute to them as they had crossed my threshold for something I feel I should pay for. The page erupted into animation and sound. I immediately turned my blocker back on. Sorry website, you're quite useful but I won't subject myself to that.
- asdff 3y ago
  It would be one thing if it was just a little couple kb image banner ad but this stuff is just abusive to your local resources. Taking the moral high ground and unblocking ads like some HN users seem to do basically says "I will tolerate an underperformant computer and diminished battery life for the rest of this devices shortened lifespan, and contribute to the ewaste crisis ever sooner"
  - paulcole 3y ago
    > It would be one thing if it was just a little couple kb image banner I guarantee that if all ads were just a little couple kb image banner then the majority of the anti-ad people would decide that this was unacceptable to them for some new reason — or they’d rely on their stance that all advertising is immoral (see elsewhere in these comments for many examples of this).
- 7952 3y ago
  My local newspaper is just unusable without a blocker. Multiple megabytes of ads and dozens of trackers all trying to load in a random sequence. You start reading a story and the site just loads something and moves the text.
- city41 3y ago
  My only ad blocker is the pi hole. So whenever I am away from home, I am always shocked and amazed at how bad ads have gotten. On many sites I feel like an archaeologist digging through layers of ads to find the one tiny morsel of actual content.
savanaly 3y ago
>Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch. I think there's a distinction between that and the tragedy of the commons. Advertisers face a game theory scenario where they can increase the obnoxiousness of their individual ad, which will enrich themselves, but it hurts the industry as a whole because users are marginally more likely to figure out a way to block ads altogether after seeing an obnoxious ad. But it is only fitting since advertising is an arms race regardless of the nature of online advertising or the ability to be obnoxious. All companies would be better off if they collectively decreased their marketing budgets, but that would require coordination and a way to guarantee no one defects.
makestuff 3y ago
I pay for YT premium because the ads were getting ridiculous (I think this is partly their goal to push people to premium subscriptions) and I want to support the creators. However, now every video has a damn host read ad embedded in it. I find it incredibly frustrating that my $15/mo isn't enough. I watch on my TV mainly so I can't use one of those plugins that skips host read ads. I just manually skip them. Maybe that makes me an asshole and anti-creator, but I already pay for premium and its getting ridiculous when a 10-15 minute video as a 60 second host read ad in the middle of it.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  My first inclination is that embedded ads happen because individual creators are having difficulty wrestling the algorithm to funnel enough views and subscribers their way and because not enough of the Premium subscription fee goes to creators. This isn't always true as there are a few giants that do embedded ads too, but most of the sponsor reads I see on YouTube are from smaller or more niche channels.
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    I’ve gotten the impression that for some creators, part of the reason is how easy it is to be demonetised on YouTube. The monetisation filter has become sensitive and puritanical that people even self-censor confronting words now, like “murder”, or “rape”, or “suicide”… I don’t know what TV news or current events shows are like today, but from what I remember watching when I was younger, I doubt any of that would be monetisable on YouTube today.
- hippich 3y ago
  See if you can install https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext - it has sponsorblock in it
- belthesar 3y ago
  In general, I don't mind sponsor reads in a video for a couple reasons: 1. They're produced much more mindfully in context of the video your watching. At their most basic, they're a small ad read at the beginning of a video, at their best, they're a much more likely to be relevant to me (the consumer) ad that doesn't cause me to lose focus on the video's original context. When a YouTube ad plays on my iPad while I'm listening to something during my daily shower, I don't really fear that a sponsor read is going to cause me to lose focus on the topic, largely because the automated ad inserter isn't going to accidentally cut out a second or two before a natural break, or even worse, in the middle of a sentence. 2. I know the proceeds of the ad are going directly to the creator, instead of to a machine that does ads in a way that myself, and a slough of psychologists, believe is damaging to a human. I would much rather pay for YT Premium, or other services for ad free content viewing, however a lack of job security has lead me to sock away that and other funds that would go to paying for content like this to my rainy day fund. If it were a binary choice of pay for YT or not right now, I wouldn't, and I'd miss out on some fun, informative, and entertaining content, but in a way, I wish that was the case. It'd come with some awful consequences for an entire ecosystem of content creators, but ultimately that's the consequences of pedaling tech drugs, and that's a whole different conversation.
matteoraso 3y ago
Don't forget how bloated they are. On some websites, I can halve the amount of RAM used with an adblocker.
paulddraper 3y ago
> Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch. It's a classic case of tragedy of the commons. Your gutter ads don't convert as well and they are blocked just as readily as the loud ones.
ck2 3y ago
How long do you figure until youtube premium also starts showing ads, just promising fewer than the free edition? Because other services have done that model change too. Another possibility is google could kill gmail accounts from youtube ad blockers someday, who is going to stop them?
rightbyte 3y ago
Were you there, when pop-ups were a thing? Like, you opened a site, and there was this new window loaded? Ads has not got that much more obnoxious. For real. It is mainly that the internets have become 'real life' instead of some hidden away tech thing for us. We can't be deprived alone anymore without society falling down in pieces around us ...
fasthands9 3y ago
I feel like the services are well aware of the why but ultimately a video ad is probably worth 50x what a link on the side is. On mainstream sites ads are almost always not that obnoxious imo. Pop-up ads used to be the standard.
binkHN 3y ago
> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium... I'm subscribed as well, but it's becoming less valuable as more and more content creators run sponsored ads in their videos and these play regardless of your subscription status.
vonwoodson 3y ago
Don't forget that we block ads for privacy, too.
Dalewyn 3y ago
While annoyance certainly plays a role, it's not the primary reason why I block ads. No, I block ads because they are fucking malicious and dangerous. As far as I'm concerned, an ad in this day and age is literally malware. I am not going to even try and tolerate that bullshit. Adblockers are an anti-virus measure. Ads are malvertisements and deserve to be blocked with the fury of a thousand suns.
hedora 3y ago
People also block ads because they are worried about privacy and profiling. I can’t pay google to stop profiling me, so there’s no way I’m paying for youtube premium. [edit: honestly, the new three strikes for ad blockers policy looks like a usability improvement to me. It makes sure I don’t watch more than three videos without clearing cookies]
Macha 3y ago
> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads. As many services like Hulu, cable TV or even just premium hardware have shown, paying for a service doesn't mean a company will never succumb to the perceived revenue opportunity of showing ads to paying subscribers too. I also pay for premium, but it's very much a case of "Doesn't affect me.. yet"
giantrobot 3y ago
> Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch. Besides the sensory assault "ads" are also running arbitrary code in your browser and trying to track you individually across websites. I find it absurd when an ad block detector says something like "please support us". It's really "please support us...by letting AdTech track everything you do without informed consent and resell all of that information to innumerable downstream buyers also without consent by the way watch this blaring ad for something entirely unrelated to the topic of this webpage". To make things even worse AdTech networks have ended up to be major malware vectors because they do effectively zero filtering or curation of uploaded content. In principal I don't mind advertisements. Someone has a thing for sale they want to show me is for sale. It's not a big deal. I never really had issues with print advertisements, even a full page ad wasn't intrusive on my life and I could just turn the page if I was uninterested. But modern web "advertising" is just the worst fucking thing. The only sane option is to block it because it is so invasive and intrusive.
Dwedit 3y ago
> Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter or maybe an animated GIF banner with 3 frames There were programs way back then that acted as a proxy server that would remove image tags that matched the size used by banner ads. See WebWasher or Proxomitron.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  > Proxomitron I haven't heard that name in a long time. Is that how it worked, by image size? I thought it was URL pattern matching.
godelski 3y ago
We can also look at pirating as another reasoning. Music pirating happened because it was simply impossible to get a lot of music you wanted to. Then when you could find it, you'd pay a large amount. Maybe not even knowing if you liked the work. Napster and Limewire come in because they let you get whatever and even one song at a time. Music industry comes in with DRM and makes it harder to rip CDs, but the mouse always wins. Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify killed a lot of music pirating because they offered most of the advantages that pirating had: access and portability. It made things easy. Or look at movies. The "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad started in 2004, when a ticket cost under $10 (I think I paid around $6-$8). Now that same ticket is $18-$20, which is $11-$13 in 2004. Not to mention the crazy prices for refreshments. People didn't stop liking going to the movie theaters, they were priced out (along with the studios migrating towards international audiences and diverging from our cultural standards to theirs). Home streaming didn't fix that because they charged the same price or more for a ticket. Netflix killed a lot because people would rather wait (and especially after they started making their own content). Then more streaming services popped up and pirating is back because it re-simplified things. PopcornTime was incredibly popular for a bit and was simple enough for my grandma to use. This is all really due to incredibly short sighted thinking. Chasing one marker to the next not realizing that they're veering away from the actual goal. I know this link isn't exactly the same thing, but we should be able to see the parallels here because it is the exact same game going on[0], just with profit maximization rather than policy making (we can formulate markets as a social choice theory problem). [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw
- zirgs 3y ago
  And now some musicians are whining and saying that we should stop using spotify, because it doesn't pay them as much as they want - that it is as bad as piracy. You can't win with those people.
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
The obnoxious ads generate more money though. Guess what gives YouTube (and creators) more money, an ad that can be skipped after 5 seconds or an unskippable 6 second ad followed by another unskippable 15 second ad? Similarly, what gives the newspaper more money, the unpersonalized ad respecting your privacy or the personalized ad that first loads a fingerprinting framework to track you across the web and then show you more targeted ads?
mihaaly 3y ago
Exactly. But they do not take my second inch, let alone a mile. I simply avoid places with agressive ads, like youtube (and the products advertised), and TV in general long long ago. I stopped to care about the content, not least because the content thinned up with plethora of ad hungry nothing, uninteresting, deceiving, ad optimised nothing. Content pushed on me based on ad strategy and not my interest, navigating to something truely similar or favoured is obscured (just like in movie streaming services wich pushes trends and obfuscates navigation). Not to mention the shameless tracking. No point going to such places, there is plenty of life elsewhere.
skripp 3y ago
> It's because they've become increasingly obnoxious. Earlier this week I got served a 1.5 HOUR long ad by YouTube for a bank here in Hong Kong.
nkrisc 3y ago
I block ads because it’s my computer and I’ll choose what data it downloads (in principle). If publishers don’t like it they can put their content behind a subscription.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
I use an ad locker because, without it, I run out of ram and start using swap memory aggressively while I work
euix 3y ago
This might be okay with me if it weren't for the fact that browsing through an account means Youtube can track my viewing habits.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
What I don't understand is that the whole industry seems to be based on...lying? If I trick the user into clicking on something that looks organic but it's not, I will be paid money. Showing an ad full screen on youtube, forced, won't guarantee that is has any effect on the viewer, but the advertiser has to pay and on top of that, the user experience is ruined. So based on lies, we ruin experience. Isn't there a way to get incentives aligned? The only ads that seem to work on me are Steam, because I open the platform on purpose to find new games. The other is costco giving free food. I'm hungry, I grab something from them and if it's tasty, I'll buy a bag to test if it's something we would like to buy on a recurring basis. Everything else seems to just be annoyances
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Lying is too often cheaper and more effective than honestly building something useful and compelling. There is also the background noise of so many competitors and other things, folks feel compelled to exaggerate to build name recognition. Then there is the fact that we consumers struggle to maintain and communicate a blocklist of bad actors. And even good actors can sell out or slide into mediocrity.
aledalgrande 3y ago
I open the youtube app, search for something, click on the first result to see if it's what I want and I have to watch two 15 seconds ads. Thank you but no.
soligern 3y ago
The problem is people can easily ignore the list of links in the gutter and when it’s your main source of income you can’t have that.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Google was one of te first that served ads that were small, text based and didn't pop-up or do anything shitty (those were still the macromedia Flash times). Oh how the turntables... shorts everywhere and ads longer than usable content.
ojagodzinski 3y ago
> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium It does. Premium doesn't skip ads inside videos added by creator, SponsorBlock addon (that probably will be banned) does.
chaosjevil 3y ago
>Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch. I agree. And for me they're also two (!) good examples of tragedy of the commons. From the side of the advertisers, your ads are only competitive if they're slightly more obnoxious than your competitors, but as you make your ads more obnoxious you're degrading a common resource - the willingness of the public to put up with your crap. Eventually the public says "this is too obnoxious, I'm going to block it". And, from the side of the sites showing ads, you'll want (or need) the additional money brought by one more ad. But once you do it, you're creating yet another ad space - making the market value of ad spaces a tiny bit cheaper. And as everyone is doing this, the price of ad spaces drops down to the bottom, so you need to include more and more ads on your platform to stay competitive (or even to stay online). I would expect governments to intervene in those situations. At the end of the day, a government should, among other things, prevent its citizens from making things worse for everyone, when seeking their own interests. Sadly governments aren't big fans of contradicting megacorps like the Ad Sense (from Alphabet) mafia.
chakintosh 3y ago
> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads. I am willing to give Youtube money just to get rid of the ads once and for all, especially on my TV ... But I can't because Premium isn't available in my country.
throwaway2037 3y ago
I like this post. I agree. One thing I notice with print (not online), the ads don't move. So much easier on the eyes! You said that you subscribe to premium. Quick Google search says about 120 USD per year. What do you get for 10 USD per month?
PurpleRamen 3y ago
> Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter Not true. People are blocking ads whenever they have the chance. Even when they are just a lousy picture on the side, in the text or a banner at the top, they were always annoyed from all of them and found ways to remove them. And it makes sense, because Ads need to have a certain level of "in your face"ness to work, that's unavoidable.
two_handfuls 3y ago
Ads are also the most common attack vector against your browser. Literal malware get distributed via ad networks.
asdfasgasdgasdg 3y ago
While I totally get why people block ads, and I do so myself, I also totally understand antipathy toward adblockers on the part of websites. Making ads better is definitely one approach they can use. But preventing folks who block ads from using the site is also a viable approach! They don't need to care why people block ads, nor do they need to worry about making the site worse for such people. We who block ads are not economic stakeholders in the services.
felipellrocha 3y ago
I think that everyone knows that, but no one knows how to solve that problem.
BlackjackCF 3y ago
I don’t mind the visual part, but the fact that ads are often 2x louder than the content I’m watching is super jarring.
scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
This is a great point. There are two things that pop into my mind here. One is that to pay more for an ad the advertiser wants to know which user explicitly interacted with it or saw it. So non-intrusive ads on the sides of a UI are by far lower in value during sales. The other is that the one way to increase interaction and value is to prove that the ad is the only thing the user was exposed to, ie. eliminate everything else. So what we get today is an entire aesthetic and de-cluttered look. Even when you pay for premium the design is still made so that the machine can read into what your eyeballs are up to.
sigg3 3y ago
Should also mention that on YT the situation is unbearable. I use pihole but was unable to use it properly for YT ads. I have kids that sometimes get to watch something on YT. I can control what they watch but there were way too many bad surprises of gross or scary content in the ads (often by proxy, e.g. the ad of a cable TV company would showcase their explicit or horror offerings..). Using YT kids made no difference, really. I have YT premium now, at least for the time being.
activiation 3y ago
What are you talking about? Ads have been obnoxious since they started appearing on the web... Some were less but ...
omginternets 3y ago
Mark my words, as with cable tv, you’ll soon start to see ads in your YouTube premium subscription.
Xelbair 3y ago
I'm mostly blocking ads due to security and performance concerns. those aren't static images, nor text anymore - but javascript trackers. And i won't be turning off my adblocker ever. no matter how nicely someone asks. If you block me from your site, I'll find the content i want somewhere else. The risk is too high, and frankly - it's my device, and i can pick what software i want to run on it(for now). side note about hostile sites: if you mess up with the scrolling in any way I'm immediately leaving the site.
sheepybloke 3y ago
Exactly. I'm OK with ads on YouTube if they are placed in OK positions in the videos. For example, if they are placed in a natural break in the video. However, YouTube has decided to destroy their user experience by placing the ads to maximize "user engagement", aka, "where is the worst spot we could put an ad in the video?" For example, take a slow mo guys video. They will place the ads right as the interesting section of the video is happening, say when the water balloon is hitting the guy in the face. At that time, I'm definitely watching the video, so I see the ad, but holy cow do I hate YouTube and the advertiser for interrupting the best part of the video. I'm tempted to get Premium just because of this; however, I feel like I'm giving into YouTube making their product more shitty to make me want to get Premium. I don't want to reward them making their service worse causing me to give them money for the experience their product used to be.
traveler01 3y ago
Its a vicious cycle. The more adblocking people do the worse that ads get since they need to be more agressive to make more money to make for the people who use AdBlock.
- pixelpoet 3y ago
  "Need to" is doing a lot of work here; do they really need to, or are they just hungry for countless more low-tax billions (i.e. want to)?
- kergonath 3y ago
  “You made me do it” is a standard gaslighting technique, common in abusive relationships. If they want compliance, they just have to be nice. A sequence of 3 ads, some of them uninterruptible, before a 10-minutes video, plus breaks in the middle is not being nice, particularly as they jump up the volume to painful levels every time. No amount of content justifies subjecting ourselves to this brain washing. And I’m not even talking about malware in ads (not on YouTube, but since you mention Adblock…)
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    > “You made me do it” is a standard gaslighting technique Is the comment wrong? Or is it right?
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      It's wrong. In a magical world with zero ad blocking, advertising is still multiple different players all competing with each other who will jump at ramping up effectiveness no matter how damaging it could be. It's a competition for a limited resource and there's a ratchet effect.
  - timmg 3y ago
    > "You made me do it” is a standard gaslighting technique, common in abusive relationships.... Amusingly, when I first started reading this I thought you were referring to all the comments justifying using ad blockers for the various reasons. Funny that things like this go both ways...
EA-3167 3y ago
Some ads also contain(ed) crypto miners and malware in general, in addition to all of what you said. My feeling is that Google should be free to do what they feel they have to, and ad-blockers should feel free to engage in an arms race with them. The worst that happens is Google drives away a chunk of its user base, opening the door for competition.
- howinteresting 3y ago
  Google controls the vast majority of the "user agents" on the internet, and I suspect Manifest v3 has some role to play in this.
marban 3y ago
Worst thing is even if you pay, they'll throw them at you. Looking at WSJ, FT, NYT,...
- js2 3y ago
  Does the clothing you wear sport a logo? That's an advertisement, right? Does your computer have an Intel Inside sticker on it? An Apple maybe? Perhaps it's emblazoned with Lenovo. How about the car you drive? Does it not proudly display the manufacturer's logo? Did you ask the dealer to remove their stickers and plate surround? As I look around my house, all I see are ads! For things I paid for!
  - evandale 3y ago
    > Does the clothing you wear sport a logo? Yeah but it's not against their TOS to buy the clothes and cut the logo out. > Does your computer have an Intel Inside sticker on it? Yeah but it's not against their TOS buy an Intel processor and take the sticker off. > An Apple maybe? Yeah but it's not against their TOS to buy an Apple laptop and put a sticker with a 4 pane window on top of the Apple sticker. > Perhaps it's emblazoned with Lenovo. Perhaps it is, but it's not against their TOS to put an IBM sticker over the Lenovo sticker. > How about the car you drive? Does it not proudly display the manufacturer's logo? Did you ask the dealer to remove their stickers and plate surround? Yeah but it's not against the TOS to.. Hopefully the point is clear.
    - js2 3y ago
      I was being cheeky and besides, the person I was replying to didn't mention Terms of Service. So this is a new argument. But it's not against the TOS to block ads on WSJ, FT, or NYT either. Here's NYT: https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014893428 https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014893428 I didn't check the others.
      - evandale 3y ago
        Why are you being cheeky and muddying the waters in a serious discussion? We're discussing more than if the WSJ, FT, and NYT allows ad blockers or not. We're discussing how stupid it is that a service shows ads in the first place for premium service people pay for. WSJ and NYT are only two examples. We're discussing how there's precedent to pay for a service and still see ads and how it wouldn't be a shock if Google pulled the same stunt. We're discussing concepts and ideas, not specific companies and their policies. Furthermore, the link you provided has a section "4. PROHIBITED USE OF THE SERVICES" which is an overly broad section that reads exactly like Google's TOS and could be interpreted as banning ad blockers if NYT wanted to say that's its purpose.
jbm 3y ago
Let's not forget that so many advertisements are for things that are objectively damaging to you. "It's good for the economy and OK for you" school of advertising. High interest loans, fast foods, cable channels (with more advertising), sports gambling, et cetra. I still cannot understand why I paid to get a specific streaming service (Sportsnet) and had to sit through Wayne Gretzsky ruining his legacy by selling sports gambling to my 3 children.
- joeythedolphin 3y ago
  It's shocking, these days you can even buy a paid service and still be forced to watch ads (Hulu)
  - sujinge9 3y ago
    Not sure why it's shocking. In the same space, you pay for cable and still are shown ads. Same for movies at the theater. Though most of the ads are for new shows/movies to encourage recurring usage/payment.
  - paulcole 3y ago
    Yeah it’s crazy. You’d think that magazines, newspapers, and cable television would’ve thought of this model.
- jasonlotito 3y ago
  > I still cannot understand why I paid to get a specific streaming service (Sportsnet) and had to sit through Wayne Gretzsky ruining his legacy by selling sports gambling to my 3 children. Why did they do it? Money. They wanted more money and you wouldn't stop watching your sport. It's not a surprise. If given the option, people will actively shop to get the best bang for their buck. Given two options, they will opt for the one that gets them the most of what they value. Why did you do it? Because you valued your viewing habits over other things. It's all really simple.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    How much do I have to pay them to not?
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Compare it with TV though, which is what youtube is; nobody blocked ads because they couldn't, there was no escaping them unless you physically exit the room. In my country that worked, because ads were neat 5 minute blocks every 15 odd minutes, but in the US it seems every few minutes there's an ad interrupting - but they're too short to tune out / do something else. The news channels are even worse, where the energy levels of the ads overlap with the news so there's less of a clear boundary between the two. Re: web ads, they were bad, but then Google came in and showed that they can be non-disruptive as well, their plain text ads took over the online ad market. For a while anyway.
- hendersoon 3y ago
  Speak for yourself, I blocked TV ads since 1999 when I bought a TiVo series 1.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  > Compare it with TV though, which is what youtube is; nobody blocked ads because they couldn't, there was no escaping them unless you physically exit the room. VCR & fast forward. > In my country that worked, because ads were neat 5 minute blocks every 15 odd minutes, but in the US it seems every few minutes there's an ad interrupting - but they're too short to tune out / do something else. The US television ads switched to that format to make them more obnoxious and harder to fast forward over. This battle between attention spam and users thinking that's obnoxious has been going on for decades.
- tehwebguy 3y ago
  TV here is pure hell now. I turn it on in a hotel periodically and always regret it. There’s plenty to watch but the ads are louder and dumber and have naturally become saturated with insanely high margin / LTV scam products like testosterone pills, the worst pay-to-win game imaginable or literally just gambling.
  - troyvit 3y ago
    Same. And then when I go to the homes of people I love, and their TVs are blaring commercials in the background of their lives, it's such this weird "I thought I knew you" feeling.
dylan604 3y ago
>No, adblockers became popular because ads kept getting more loud (both visually and audibly), Too bad the FCC's CALM act can't be applied to the internet as well: "The CALM Act applies only to commercials aired on television—it does not apply to radio commercials or commercials aired on the internet or via streaming services." https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/areas/sound-volume-commercials-calm-act https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/areas/sound-volume-commercia...
- HWR_14 3y ago
  The FCC cannot regulate internet communications, by law. That's not the proper agency. Maybe the FTC or maybe a new federal law.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Like I said, it's too bad. Doesn't matter the hows and whys of the fact.
oofnik 3y ago
What you have to understand about the contemporary media industry is that their primary business objective is to sell advertisements. Your attention is the product now; the more of it they can sell to advertisers, the more profitable the business becomes. It's much easier to present positive quarterly earnings reports by selling eyeballs and clicks than it is selling pretty much anything else. In the before times, when media companies were primarily in the business of selling content for a monthly or yearly subscription fee, this was much less of an issue. You can't block access to their most profitable raw material and expect them to just sit and take it.
- mihaaly 3y ago
  Well, content providers provide less consumable content now (while the raw amount explodes), that is for sure, we see it, we experience it. The result? We do not try consuming content since we see there is much less, but with much more garbage and adverse consequences. We - wife, me, and some I know - cancels providers as they are not serving the consumer, and we feel that. Let them sell their service to ad companies then, when less and less consumers go to their site, good luck with that in the long run. They lost one customer for sure, and looking at the mood here there may be more, or will be more if they carry on like this.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  Content is also advertisement. They benefit just as well from platform-specific content that, statistically, puts ads in front of a lot of people, and more relevantly, creates a market for people to pay YouTube to place their content in front of people. I'm far from convinced this isn't relevant to YouTube history with controversial content. I think somebody is paying to do that, covertly or overtly. Sort of payola? I think there are ways to pay off YouTube to promote your content.
  - amatecha 3y ago
    Heck, content is also advertisement in the sense that the show/film you're watching is an advertisement for all the related merchandise that will be on store shelves the same day as the media is published :) I wonder how many $millions Baby Yoda has brought in for Disney?
haburka 3y ago
I don’t understand why this is top comment. Ads on youtube are skippable after a few seconds and you can pay to not watch them. It’s weird to conflate that with some adspam website, which may have a ton of flashy ads and a video. However, more importantly, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Ads enable content creators to get paid. Frankly, youtube barely eeks out a profit. When you block ads instead of paying to remove them, you’re making it harder for Youtube to justify its existence. Personally, I think it’s fine to block ads if you’re actually quite poor or if it makes the web unusable. But if you’re just doing it because “web advertisers deserve it” or some other kind of hare brained rationalization, then you should reconsider your position. It’s not rebellious or brave to use an adblocker when there are affordable paid ad free experiences, it’s simply theft.
- jamesnorden 3y ago
  >it’s simply theft Me watching a video of a creator I don't like 50 times without ads so he loses money with every view, that's how it works right?
- highwind 3y ago
  I block ads by default and turn it on for the sites that I want to support. Main reason for blocking by default is privacy. I don't want super targeted ad. If I'm on a particular site consuming particular content, that should be sufficient context for choosing what ad to show me. Do not follow me around all over the internet trying to sell me on stuff.
- kurthr 3y ago
  I'm not sure how variable this is, but I've definitely experienced unwatchable levels of ads (mostly on mobile/Android). Having an ad before you even know if the content has interest is already a challenge (eg a how to video), and most that I see are in the 5-15sec range before watching and every 5-10min after that. However, I have had a dual 30sec ad before starting a video that repeated every 2min on something I actually wanted to watch, but quickly stopped, because it was "unwatchable". I consider that level to be at about 10% of watch time (regular TV is about 25% 8/30 min in larger blocks).
kjs3 3y ago
On this point, I realized recently is that at one time, auto-plying audio or video on a web site would have been a cause for torches and pitchforks. It was one of the most asshole things a site could do. Now a significant fraction of the websites I hit (esp anything 'news') immediately pop up an unrequested live video window with full audio, and even if I close it, as soon as you scroll over any media on the site, it auto-plays, and when you scroll past, the window pops back up playing video. When did this become ok? Telling them to get off my lawn hasn't worked.
antisthenes 3y ago
I started blocking ads personally when I saw the double-click ads. You guys will know what I'm talking about - random words in text, underlined twice, which if you hover over, will get an obnoxious ad. Google bought them not long after: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick.... Ads have been obnoxious for at least 15 years already.
- hendersoon 3y ago
  Much longer than that! The first really user-hostile move was pop-up ads, then pop-UNDER ads, which were just offensively intrusive, so bad that all the browsers stopped them. Then the advertising industry started to innovate, and it became necessary to block everything. I've been blocking ads since the late 90s. Once they lose you, once you get so pissed off that you go to the trouble to install and configure an adblocker, they NEVER get you back. They do not understand this, and so they'll simply push more people to adblockers. Maybe Chrome's manifest v3 won't suffice, so people will move to Firefox or Brave to do it. Either way, Google loses.
crazygringo 3y ago
[flagged]
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  YouTube has gotten progressively worse with its ads over time, though. They're slowly turning up the heat to eventually boil the frog. Without opposition, YouTube ads will eventually be as bad as TV ads have become. On that note, I haven't watched network TV in over a decade because to the ads. None of the content on offer on cable and satellite TV is worth the asking price of both a subscription fees and ads, especially when most of it can be found in other legitimate sources, usually in higher quality.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    > YouTube ads will eventually be as bad as TV ads have become. There's no evidence of that though. Users will easily close a tab because the preroll ad is too long, because there are plenty of other immediate things on the internet. In a way that TV viewers had no choice, because the other channels are just as bad. Yes, YouTube ads have been getting a little longer from their previous almost-nothing. But YouTube has also been extremely conservative in that direction, as they know they're walking a fine line. The idea that ads will get as bad as broadcast TV seems exceedingly unlikely.
    - jowdones 3y ago
      I have YouTube premium but sometimes I can't login to my Google account and have to use plain, ad-infested version of YouTube and it's really unusable. I swear that listening to a 3 minutes content I am played at least 6 ads of at least 20 non-skippable seconds and in volleys of 2 or sometimes even 3 ads one after another. It's not "getting terrible", they're already way past that.
      - crazygringo 3y ago
        What country are you in? I've watched YouTube for years and years and I've never in my life encountered more than 2 ads in a row. I've never encountered an unskippable ad longer than 15 seconds, and every ad that is skippable is skippable after just 5 seconds. And while ads are often included at the start, once they've played I've never seen ads get inserted before the 3-minute mark -- they're usually around minute 4 or 5. (It's true that after a 3-minute video finishes playing they've started playing another set of ads, but you can just hit pause and navigate to your next video. You never need to watch them.) I've never encountered anything even remotely close to 2 minutes of ads to watch 3 minutes of content as you're describing. It's usually 10 or 15 seconds total. But I'm in the US, maybe there are countries where it's different? I'm particularly curious if there are objective stats around this. It's crazy to me that our experiences could be so completely opposite.
saeirtkawierjt 3y ago
I've had adblockers installed for decades. I'm always amazed at how bad the internet is without them when occasionally I view a website on my phone. When there's one completely unrelated video ad playing, and then a second also unrelated video ad pops up on top of the first, I wonder if the first advertiser knows or cares that their ad is being covered by another ad. And then I have two or more audio streams playing simultaneously, so I can't understand any of them ... and I regret working in tech.
- worksonmine 3y ago
  You can use uBlock Origin (and a few other addons) on Firefox for Android.
gsatic 3y ago
TV/Cable/Radio ads are regulated I think. You can't play more than some N minutes of Ads per hour of content. But the fucking Internet ad world there doesn't seem any upper limit to how much of someone's time you can waste.
badtension 3y ago
I listen to some podcasts to sleep and it is infuriating to get even 12-45 (!) min long ads! I wouldn't be that upset with 5-10s ads every 10 minutes (as long as the volume level doesn't kill me) but half a freaking hour? What the hell is this? If there was a company with clear community intentions and sound morals, yeah I would consider paying for it and support the creators. But YT that treats me like trash with their dark patterns and algorithms showing me stuff to hijack my brain instead of stuff I am looking for? No way in hell.
- crummy 3y ago
  That's crazy. What podcast was this that had 45min long ads?
  - badtension 3y ago
    Don't remember since I browse random stuff that don't absorb me too much as I fall asleep. The only thing I know is it was some religion related crap... seriously. Like a protestant sermon or something.
  - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    I have seen ads that are OVER ONE HOUR LONG, often on long-form interviews. Am I really the demographic that "they"re trying to sell me late-night-infomercial bullshit?!? ...I guess so.
- mysterydip 3y ago
  Some of the kids youtubers have 3min long ads, multiple times, in a 20 min video.
  - badtension 3y ago
    This is much worse than TV, if you had told me that 10 years ago I would have laughed.
pimanrules 3y ago
This annoyed me particularly because I pay for YouTube premium... but I can't sign into my Google account on my work computer. So if they block ad blockers, paying for YouTube isn't even enough to get rid of the ads for me.
figassis 3y ago
Interestingly premium is not available in my country, so my choice is ads or no youtube. I pick the latter.
metiscus 3y ago
There is a saying that goes something like this: It is difficult to get a man to understand something that his paycheck depends on his not understanding.

stcroixx 3y ago

Not why I block ads. I simply hate them in any form.

frankfrankfrank 3y ago

My list or reasons I go hard against ads, even though I can appreciate quality ads that can serve a legitimate purpose: 1) tracking me across in serval ways, only making me more fanatical about it by selling my information and activity to who know whom. 2) malware/virus injections … it still happens way too often. 3) garbage ads; for garbage products, products/services I just purchased, or the infamous scam ads to defraud people.

tjpnz 3y ago

Ads also constitute a security and privacy threat and are frequently an attack vector for phishing schemes - even on Google search. I'm not going to disable my adblocker and risk becoming a crime victim.

ianbutler 3y ago

I recently unblocked ads on a website that I use semi frequently in an effort to contribute to them as they had crossed my threshold for something I feel I should pay for. The page erupted into animation and sound. I immediately turned my blocker back on. Sorry website, you're quite useful but I won't subject myself to that.

asdff 3y ago
It would be one thing if it was just a little couple kb image banner ad but this stuff is just abusive to your local resources. Taking the moral high ground and unblocking ads like some HN users seem to do basically says "I will tolerate an underperformant computer and diminished battery life for the rest of this devices shortened lifespan, and contribute to the ewaste crisis ever sooner"
- paulcole 3y ago
  > It would be one thing if it was just a little couple kb image banner I guarantee that if all ads were just a little couple kb image banner then the majority of the anti-ad people would decide that this was unacceptable to them for some new reason — or they’d rely on their stance that all advertising is immoral (see elsewhere in these comments for many examples of this).
7952 3y ago
My local newspaper is just unusable without a blocker. Multiple megabytes of ads and dozens of trackers all trying to load in a random sequence. You start reading a story and the site just loads something and moves the text.
city41 3y ago
My only ad blocker is the pi hole. So whenever I am away from home, I am always shocked and amazed at how bad ads have gotten. On many sites I feel like an archaeologist digging through layers of ads to find the one tiny morsel of actual content.

savanaly 3y ago

>Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch. I think there's a distinction between that and the tragedy of the commons. Advertisers face a game theory scenario where they can increase the obnoxiousness of their individual ad, which will enrich themselves, but it hurts the industry as a whole because users are marginally more likely to figure out a way to block ads altogether after seeing an obnoxious ad. But it is only fitting since advertising is an arms race regardless of the nature of online advertising or the ability to be obnoxious. All companies would be better off if they collectively decreased their marketing budgets, but that would require coordination and a way to guarantee no one defects.

makestuff 3y ago

I pay for YT premium because the ads were getting ridiculous (I think this is partly their goal to push people to premium subscriptions) and I want to support the creators. However, now every video has a damn host read ad embedded in it. I find it incredibly frustrating that my $15/mo isn't enough. I watch on my TV mainly so I can't use one of those plugins that skips host read ads. I just manually skip them. Maybe that makes me an asshole and anti-creator, but I already pay for premium and its getting ridiculous when a 10-15 minute video as a 60 second host read ad in the middle of it.

kitsunesoba 3y ago
My first inclination is that embedded ads happen because individual creators are having difficulty wrestling the algorithm to funnel enough views and subscribers their way and because not enough of the Premium subscription fee goes to creators. This isn't always true as there are a few giants that do embedded ads too, but most of the sponsor reads I see on YouTube are from smaller or more niche channels.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  I’ve gotten the impression that for some creators, part of the reason is how easy it is to be demonetised on YouTube. The monetisation filter has become sensitive and puritanical that people even self-censor confronting words now, like “murder”, or “rape”, or “suicide”… I don’t know what TV news or current events shows are like today, but from what I remember watching when I was younger, I doubt any of that would be monetisable on YouTube today.
hippich 3y ago
See if you can install https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext - it has sponsorblock in it
belthesar 3y ago
In general, I don't mind sponsor reads in a video for a couple reasons: 1. They're produced much more mindfully in context of the video your watching. At their most basic, they're a small ad read at the beginning of a video, at their best, they're a much more likely to be relevant to me (the consumer) ad that doesn't cause me to lose focus on the video's original context. When a YouTube ad plays on my iPad while I'm listening to something during my daily shower, I don't really fear that a sponsor read is going to cause me to lose focus on the topic, largely because the automated ad inserter isn't going to accidentally cut out a second or two before a natural break, or even worse, in the middle of a sentence. 2. I know the proceeds of the ad are going directly to the creator, instead of to a machine that does ads in a way that myself, and a slough of psychologists, believe is damaging to a human. I would much rather pay for YT Premium, or other services for ad free content viewing, however a lack of job security has lead me to sock away that and other funds that would go to paying for content like this to my rainy day fund. If it were a binary choice of pay for YT or not right now, I wouldn't, and I'd miss out on some fun, informative, and entertaining content, but in a way, I wish that was the case. It'd come with some awful consequences for an entire ecosystem of content creators, but ultimately that's the consequences of pedaling tech drugs, and that's a whole different conversation.

matteoraso 3y ago

Don't forget how bloated they are. On some websites, I can halve the amount of RAM used with an adblocker.

paulddraper 3y ago

> Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch. It's a classic case of tragedy of the commons. Your gutter ads don't convert as well and they are blocked just as readily as the loud ones.

ck2 3y ago

How long do you figure until youtube premium also starts showing ads, just promising fewer than the free edition? Because other services have done that model change too. Another possibility is google could kill gmail accounts from youtube ad blockers someday, who is going to stop them?

rightbyte 3y ago

Were you there, when pop-ups were a thing? Like, you opened a site, and there was this new window loaded? Ads has not got that much more obnoxious. For real. It is mainly that the internets have become 'real life' instead of some hidden away tech thing for us. We can't be deprived alone anymore without society falling down in pieces around us ...

fasthands9 3y ago

I feel like the services are well aware of the why but ultimately a video ad is probably worth 50x what a link on the side is. On mainstream sites ads are almost always not that obnoxious imo. Pop-up ads used to be the standard.

binkHN 3y ago

> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium... I'm subscribed as well, but it's becoming less valuable as more and more content creators run sponsored ads in their videos and these play regardless of your subscription status.

vonwoodson 3y ago

Don't forget that we block ads for privacy, too.

Dalewyn 3y ago

While annoyance certainly plays a role, it's not the primary reason why I block ads. No, I block ads because they are fucking malicious and dangerous. As far as I'm concerned, an ad in this day and age is literally malware. I am not going to even try and tolerate that bullshit. Adblockers are an anti-virus measure. Ads are malvertisements and deserve to be blocked with the fury of a thousand suns.

hedora 3y ago

People also block ads because they are worried about privacy and profiling. I can’t pay google to stop profiling me, so there’s no way I’m paying for youtube premium. [edit: honestly, the new three strikes for ad blockers policy looks like a usability improvement to me. It makes sure I don’t watch more than three videos without clearing cookies]

Macha 3y ago

> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads. As many services like Hulu, cable TV or even just premium hardware have shown, paying for a service doesn't mean a company will never succumb to the perceived revenue opportunity of showing ads to paying subscribers too. I also pay for premium, but it's very much a case of "Doesn't affect me.. yet"

giantrobot 3y ago

> Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch. Besides the sensory assault "ads" are also running arbitrary code in your browser and trying to track you individually across websites. I find it absurd when an ad block detector says something like "please support us". It's really "please support us...by letting AdTech track everything you do without informed consent and resell all of that information to innumerable downstream buyers also without consent by the way watch this blaring ad for something entirely unrelated to the topic of this webpage". To make things even worse AdTech networks have ended up to be major malware vectors because they do effectively zero filtering or curation of uploaded content. In principal I don't mind advertisements. Someone has a thing for sale they want to show me is for sale. It's not a big deal. I never really had issues with print advertisements, even a full page ad wasn't intrusive on my life and I could just turn the page if I was uninterested. But modern web "advertising" is just the worst fucking thing. The only sane option is to block it because it is so invasive and intrusive.

Dwedit 3y ago

> Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter or maybe an animated GIF banner with 3 frames There were programs way back then that acted as a proxy server that would remove image tags that matched the size used by banner ads. See WebWasher or Proxomitron.

HWR_14 3y ago
> Proxomitron I haven't heard that name in a long time. Is that how it worked, by image size? I thought it was URL pattern matching.

godelski 3y ago

We can also look at pirating as another reasoning. Music pirating happened because it was simply impossible to get a lot of music you wanted to. Then when you could find it, you'd pay a large amount. Maybe not even knowing if you liked the work. Napster and Limewire come in because they let you get whatever and even one song at a time. Music industry comes in with DRM and makes it harder to rip CDs, but the mouse always wins. Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify killed a lot of music pirating because they offered most of the advantages that pirating had: access and portability. It made things easy. Or look at movies. The "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad started in 2004, when a ticket cost under $10 (I think I paid around $6-$8). Now that same ticket is $18-$20, which is $11-$13 in 2004. Not to mention the crazy prices for refreshments. People didn't stop liking going to the movie theaters, they were priced out (along with the studios migrating towards international audiences and diverging from our cultural standards to theirs). Home streaming didn't fix that because they charged the same price or more for a ticket. Netflix killed a lot because people would rather wait (and especially after they started making their own content). Then more streaming services popped up and pirating is back because it re-simplified things. PopcornTime was incredibly popular for a bit and was simple enough for my grandma to use. This is all really due to incredibly short sighted thinking. Chasing one marker to the next not realizing that they're veering away from the actual goal. I know this link isn't exactly the same thing, but we should be able to see the parallels here because it is the exact same game going on[0], just with profit maximization rather than policy making (we can formulate markets as a social choice theory problem). [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw

zirgs 3y ago
And now some musicians are whining and saying that we should stop using spotify, because it doesn't pay them as much as they want - that it is as bad as piracy. You can't win with those people.

tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago

The obnoxious ads generate more money though. Guess what gives YouTube (and creators) more money, an ad that can be skipped after 5 seconds or an unskippable 6 second ad followed by another unskippable 15 second ad? Similarly, what gives the newspaper more money, the unpersonalized ad respecting your privacy or the personalized ad that first loads a fingerprinting framework to track you across the web and then show you more targeted ads?

mihaaly 3y ago

Exactly. But they do not take my second inch, let alone a mile. I simply avoid places with agressive ads, like youtube (and the products advertised), and TV in general long long ago. I stopped to care about the content, not least because the content thinned up with plethora of ad hungry nothing, uninteresting, deceiving, ad optimised nothing. Content pushed on me based on ad strategy and not my interest, navigating to something truely similar or favoured is obscured (just like in movie streaming services wich pushes trends and obfuscates navigation). Not to mention the shameless tracking. No point going to such places, there is plenty of life elsewhere.

skripp 3y ago

> It's because they've become increasingly obnoxious. Earlier this week I got served a 1.5 HOUR long ad by YouTube for a bank here in Hong Kong.

nkrisc 3y ago

I block ads because it’s my computer and I’ll choose what data it downloads (in principle). If publishers don’t like it they can put their content behind a subscription.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

I use an ad locker because, without it, I run out of ram and start using swap memory aggressively while I work

euix 3y ago

This might be okay with me if it weren't for the fact that browsing through an account means Youtube can track my viewing habits.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago

What I don't understand is that the whole industry seems to be based on...lying? If I trick the user into clicking on something that looks organic but it's not, I will be paid money. Showing an ad full screen on youtube, forced, won't guarantee that is has any effect on the viewer, but the advertiser has to pay and on top of that, the user experience is ruined. So based on lies, we ruin experience. Isn't there a way to get incentives aligned? The only ads that seem to work on me are Steam, because I open the platform on purpose to find new games. The other is costco giving free food. I'm hungry, I grab something from them and if it's tasty, I'll buy a bag to test if it's something we would like to buy on a recurring basis. Everything else seems to just be annoyances

paulryanrogers 3y ago
Lying is too often cheaper and more effective than honestly building something useful and compelling. There is also the background noise of so many competitors and other things, folks feel compelled to exaggerate to build name recognition. Then there is the fact that we consumers struggle to maintain and communicate a blocklist of bad actors. And even good actors can sell out or slide into mediocrity.

aledalgrande 3y ago

I open the youtube app, search for something, click on the first result to see if it's what I want and I have to watch two 15 seconds ads. Thank you but no.

soligern 3y ago

The problem is people can easily ignore the list of links in the gutter and when it’s your main source of income you can’t have that.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

Google was one of te first that served ads that were small, text based and didn't pop-up or do anything shitty (those were still the macromedia Flash times). Oh how the turntables... shorts everywhere and ads longer than usable content.

ojagodzinski 3y ago

> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium It does. Premium doesn't skip ads inside videos added by creator, SponsorBlock addon (that probably will be banned) does.

chaosjevil 3y ago

>Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch. I agree. And for me they're also two (!) good examples of tragedy of the commons. From the side of the advertisers, your ads are only competitive if they're slightly more obnoxious than your competitors, but as you make your ads more obnoxious you're degrading a common resource - the willingness of the public to put up with your crap. Eventually the public says "this is too obnoxious, I'm going to block it". And, from the side of the sites showing ads, you'll want (or need) the additional money brought by one more ad. But once you do it, you're creating yet another ad space - making the market value of ad spaces a tiny bit cheaper. And as everyone is doing this, the price of ad spaces drops down to the bottom, so you need to include more and more ads on your platform to stay competitive (or even to stay online). I would expect governments to intervene in those situations. At the end of the day, a government should, among other things, prevent its citizens from making things worse for everyone, when seeking their own interests. Sadly governments aren't big fans of contradicting megacorps like the Ad Sense (from Alphabet) mafia.

chakintosh 3y ago

> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads. I am willing to give Youtube money just to get rid of the ads once and for all, especially on my TV ... But I can't because Premium isn't available in my country.

throwaway2037 3y ago

I like this post. I agree. One thing I notice with print (not online), the ads don't move. So much easier on the eyes! You said that you subscribe to premium. Quick Google search says about 120 USD per year. What do you get for 10 USD per month?

PurpleRamen 3y ago

> Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter Not true. People are blocking ads whenever they have the chance. Even when they are just a lousy picture on the side, in the text or a banner at the top, they were always annoyed from all of them and found ways to remove them. And it makes sense, because Ads need to have a certain level of "in your face"ness to work, that's unavoidable.

two_handfuls 3y ago

Ads are also the most common attack vector against your browser. Literal malware get distributed via ad networks.

asdfasgasdgasdg 3y ago

While I totally get why people block ads, and I do so myself, I also totally understand antipathy toward adblockers on the part of websites. Making ads better is definitely one approach they can use. But preventing folks who block ads from using the site is also a viable approach! They don't need to care why people block ads, nor do they need to worry about making the site worse for such people. We who block ads are not economic stakeholders in the services.

felipellrocha 3y ago

I think that everyone knows that, but no one knows how to solve that problem.

BlackjackCF 3y ago

I don’t mind the visual part, but the fact that ads are often 2x louder than the content I’m watching is super jarring.

scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago

This is a great point. There are two things that pop into my mind here. One is that to pay more for an ad the advertiser wants to know which user explicitly interacted with it or saw it. So non-intrusive ads on the sides of a UI are by far lower in value during sales. The other is that the one way to increase interaction and value is to prove that the ad is the only thing the user was exposed to, ie. eliminate everything else. So what we get today is an entire aesthetic and de-cluttered look. Even when you pay for premium the design is still made so that the machine can read into what your eyeballs are up to.

sigg3 3y ago

Should also mention that on YT the situation is unbearable. I use pihole but was unable to use it properly for YT ads. I have kids that sometimes get to watch something on YT. I can control what they watch but there were way too many bad surprises of gross or scary content in the ads (often by proxy, e.g. the ad of a cable TV company would showcase their explicit or horror offerings..). Using YT kids made no difference, really. I have YT premium now, at least for the time being.

activiation 3y ago

What are you talking about? Ads have been obnoxious since they started appearing on the web... Some were less but ...

omginternets 3y ago

Mark my words, as with cable tv, you’ll soon start to see ads in your YouTube premium subscription.

Xelbair 3y ago

I'm mostly blocking ads due to security and performance concerns. those aren't static images, nor text anymore - but javascript trackers. And i won't be turning off my adblocker ever. no matter how nicely someone asks. If you block me from your site, I'll find the content i want somewhere else. The risk is too high, and frankly - it's my device, and i can pick what software i want to run on it(for now). side note about hostile sites: if you mess up with the scrolling in any way I'm immediately leaving the site.

sheepybloke 3y ago

Exactly. I'm OK with ads on YouTube if they are placed in OK positions in the videos. For example, if they are placed in a natural break in the video. However, YouTube has decided to destroy their user experience by placing the ads to maximize "user engagement", aka, "where is the worst spot we could put an ad in the video?" For example, take a slow mo guys video. They will place the ads right as the interesting section of the video is happening, say when the water balloon is hitting the guy in the face. At that time, I'm definitely watching the video, so I see the ad, but holy cow do I hate YouTube and the advertiser for interrupting the best part of the video. I'm tempted to get Premium just because of this; however, I feel like I'm giving into YouTube making their product more shitty to make me want to get Premium. I don't want to reward them making their service worse causing me to give them money for the experience their product used to be.

traveler01 3y ago

Its a vicious cycle. The more adblocking people do the worse that ads get since they need to be more agressive to make more money to make for the people who use AdBlock.

pixelpoet 3y ago
"Need to" is doing a lot of work here; do they really need to, or are they just hungry for countless more low-tax billions (i.e. want to)?
kergonath 3y ago
“You made me do it” is a standard gaslighting technique, common in abusive relationships. If they want compliance, they just have to be nice. A sequence of 3 ads, some of them uninterruptible, before a 10-minutes video, plus breaks in the middle is not being nice, particularly as they jump up the volume to painful levels every time. No amount of content justifies subjecting ourselves to this brain washing. And I’m not even talking about malware in ads (not on YouTube, but since you mention Adblock…)
- paulddraper 3y ago
  > “You made me do it” is a standard gaslighting technique Is the comment wrong? Or is it right?
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    It's wrong. In a magical world with zero ad blocking, advertising is still multiple different players all competing with each other who will jump at ramping up effectiveness no matter how damaging it could be. It's a competition for a limited resource and there's a ratchet effect.
- timmg 3y ago
  > "You made me do it” is a standard gaslighting technique, common in abusive relationships.... Amusingly, when I first started reading this I thought you were referring to all the comments justifying using ad blockers for the various reasons. Funny that things like this go both ways...

EA-3167 3y ago

Some ads also contain(ed) crypto miners and malware in general, in addition to all of what you said. My feeling is that Google should be free to do what they feel they have to, and ad-blockers should feel free to engage in an arms race with them. The worst that happens is Google drives away a chunk of its user base, opening the door for competition.

howinteresting 3y ago
Google controls the vast majority of the "user agents" on the internet, and I suspect Manifest v3 has some role to play in this.

marban 3y ago

Worst thing is even if you pay, they'll throw them at you. Looking at WSJ, FT, NYT,...

js2 3y ago
Does the clothing you wear sport a logo? That's an advertisement, right? Does your computer have an Intel Inside sticker on it? An Apple maybe? Perhaps it's emblazoned with Lenovo. How about the car you drive? Does it not proudly display the manufacturer's logo? Did you ask the dealer to remove their stickers and plate surround? As I look around my house, all I see are ads! For things I paid for!
- evandale 3y ago
  > Does the clothing you wear sport a logo? Yeah but it's not against their TOS to buy the clothes and cut the logo out. > Does your computer have an Intel Inside sticker on it? Yeah but it's not against their TOS buy an Intel processor and take the sticker off. > An Apple maybe? Yeah but it's not against their TOS to buy an Apple laptop and put a sticker with a 4 pane window on top of the Apple sticker. > Perhaps it's emblazoned with Lenovo. Perhaps it is, but it's not against their TOS to put an IBM sticker over the Lenovo sticker. > How about the car you drive? Does it not proudly display the manufacturer's logo? Did you ask the dealer to remove their stickers and plate surround? Yeah but it's not against the TOS to.. Hopefully the point is clear.
  - js2 3y ago
    I was being cheeky and besides, the person I was replying to didn't mention Terms of Service. So this is a new argument. But it's not against the TOS to block ads on WSJ, FT, or NYT either. Here's NYT: https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014893428 https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014893428 I didn't check the others.
    - evandale 3y ago
      Why are you being cheeky and muddying the waters in a serious discussion? We're discussing more than if the WSJ, FT, and NYT allows ad blockers or not. We're discussing how stupid it is that a service shows ads in the first place for premium service people pay for. WSJ and NYT are only two examples. We're discussing how there's precedent to pay for a service and still see ads and how it wouldn't be a shock if Google pulled the same stunt. We're discussing concepts and ideas, not specific companies and their policies. Furthermore, the link you provided has a section "4. PROHIBITED USE OF THE SERVICES" which is an overly broad section that reads exactly like Google's TOS and could be interpreted as banning ad blockers if NYT wanted to say that's its purpose.

jbm 3y ago

Let's not forget that so many advertisements are for things that are objectively damaging to you. "It's good for the economy and OK for you" school of advertising. High interest loans, fast foods, cable channels (with more advertising), sports gambling, et cetra. I still cannot understand why I paid to get a specific streaming service (Sportsnet) and had to sit through Wayne Gretzsky ruining his legacy by selling sports gambling to my 3 children.

joeythedolphin 3y ago
It's shocking, these days you can even buy a paid service and still be forced to watch ads (Hulu)
- sujinge9 3y ago
  Not sure why it's shocking. In the same space, you pay for cable and still are shown ads. Same for movies at the theater. Though most of the ads are for new shows/movies to encourage recurring usage/payment.
- paulcole 3y ago
  Yeah it’s crazy. You’d think that magazines, newspapers, and cable television would’ve thought of this model.
jasonlotito 3y ago
> I still cannot understand why I paid to get a specific streaming service (Sportsnet) and had to sit through Wayne Gretzsky ruining his legacy by selling sports gambling to my 3 children. Why did they do it? Money. They wanted more money and you wouldn't stop watching your sport. It's not a surprise. If given the option, people will actively shop to get the best bang for their buck. Given two options, they will opt for the one that gets them the most of what they value. Why did you do it? Because you valued your viewing habits over other things. It's all really simple.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  How much do I have to pay them to not?

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

Compare it with TV though, which is what youtube is; nobody blocked ads because they couldn't, there was no escaping them unless you physically exit the room. In my country that worked, because ads were neat 5 minute blocks every 15 odd minutes, but in the US it seems every few minutes there's an ad interrupting - but they're too short to tune out / do something else. The news channels are even worse, where the energy levels of the ads overlap with the news so there's less of a clear boundary between the two. Re: web ads, they were bad, but then Google came in and showed that they can be non-disruptive as well, their plain text ads took over the online ad market. For a while anyway.

hendersoon 3y ago
Speak for yourself, I blocked TV ads since 1999 when I bought a TiVo series 1.
yencabulator 3y ago
> Compare it with TV though, which is what youtube is; nobody blocked ads because they couldn't, there was no escaping them unless you physically exit the room. VCR & fast forward. > In my country that worked, because ads were neat 5 minute blocks every 15 odd minutes, but in the US it seems every few minutes there's an ad interrupting - but they're too short to tune out / do something else. The US television ads switched to that format to make them more obnoxious and harder to fast forward over. This battle between attention spam and users thinking that's obnoxious has been going on for decades.
tehwebguy 3y ago
TV here is pure hell now. I turn it on in a hotel periodically and always regret it. There’s plenty to watch but the ads are louder and dumber and have naturally become saturated with insanely high margin / LTV scam products like testosterone pills, the worst pay-to-win game imaginable or literally just gambling.
- troyvit 3y ago
  Same. And then when I go to the homes of people I love, and their TVs are blaring commercials in the background of their lives, it's such this weird "I thought I knew you" feeling.

dylan604 3y ago

>No, adblockers became popular because ads kept getting more loud (both visually and audibly), Too bad the FCC's CALM act can't be applied to the internet as well: "The CALM Act applies only to commercials aired on television—it does not apply to radio commercials or commercials aired on the internet or via streaming services." https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/areas/sound-volume-commercials-calm-act https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/areas/sound-volume-commercia...

HWR_14 3y ago
The FCC cannot regulate internet communications, by law. That's not the proper agency. Maybe the FTC or maybe a new federal law.
- dylan604 3y ago
  Like I said, it's too bad. Doesn't matter the hows and whys of the fact.

oofnik 3y ago

What you have to understand about the contemporary media industry is that their primary business objective is to sell advertisements. Your attention is the product now; the more of it they can sell to advertisers, the more profitable the business becomes. It's much easier to present positive quarterly earnings reports by selling eyeballs and clicks than it is selling pretty much anything else. In the before times, when media companies were primarily in the business of selling content for a monthly or yearly subscription fee, this was much less of an issue. You can't block access to their most profitable raw material and expect them to just sit and take it.

mihaaly 3y ago
Well, content providers provide less consumable content now (while the raw amount explodes), that is for sure, we see it, we experience it. The result? We do not try consuming content since we see there is much less, but with much more garbage and adverse consequences. We - wife, me, and some I know - cancels providers as they are not serving the consumer, and we feel that. Let them sell their service to ad companies then, when less and less consumers go to their site, good luck with that in the long run. They lost one customer for sure, and looking at the mood here there may be more, or will be more if they carry on like this.
Applejinx 3y ago
Content is also advertisement. They benefit just as well from platform-specific content that, statistically, puts ads in front of a lot of people, and more relevantly, creates a market for people to pay YouTube to place their content in front of people. I'm far from convinced this isn't relevant to YouTube history with controversial content. I think somebody is paying to do that, covertly or overtly. Sort of payola? I think there are ways to pay off YouTube to promote your content.
- amatecha 3y ago
  Heck, content is also advertisement in the sense that the show/film you're watching is an advertisement for all the related merchandise that will be on store shelves the same day as the media is published :) I wonder how many $millions Baby Yoda has brought in for Disney?

haburka 3y ago

I don’t understand why this is top comment. Ads on youtube are skippable after a few seconds and you can pay to not watch them. It’s weird to conflate that with some adspam website, which may have a ton of flashy ads and a video. However, more importantly, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Ads enable content creators to get paid. Frankly, youtube barely eeks out a profit. When you block ads instead of paying to remove them, you’re making it harder for Youtube to justify its existence. Personally, I think it’s fine to block ads if you’re actually quite poor or if it makes the web unusable. But if you’re just doing it because “web advertisers deserve it” or some other kind of hare brained rationalization, then you should reconsider your position. It’s not rebellious or brave to use an adblocker when there are affordable paid ad free experiences, it’s simply theft.

jamesnorden 3y ago
>it’s simply theft Me watching a video of a creator I don't like 50 times without ads so he loses money with every view, that's how it works right?
highwind 3y ago
I block ads by default and turn it on for the sites that I want to support. Main reason for blocking by default is privacy. I don't want super targeted ad. If I'm on a particular site consuming particular content, that should be sufficient context for choosing what ad to show me. Do not follow me around all over the internet trying to sell me on stuff.
kurthr 3y ago
I'm not sure how variable this is, but I've definitely experienced unwatchable levels of ads (mostly on mobile/Android). Having an ad before you even know if the content has interest is already a challenge (eg a how to video), and most that I see are in the 5-15sec range before watching and every 5-10min after that. However, I have had a dual 30sec ad before starting a video that repeated every 2min on something I actually wanted to watch, but quickly stopped, because it was "unwatchable". I consider that level to be at about 10% of watch time (regular TV is about 25% 8/30 min in larger blocks).

kjs3 3y ago

On this point, I realized recently is that at one time, auto-plying audio or video on a web site would have been a cause for torches and pitchforks. It was one of the most asshole things a site could do. Now a significant fraction of the websites I hit (esp anything 'news') immediately pop up an unrequested live video window with full audio, and even if I close it, as soon as you scroll over any media on the site, it auto-plays, and when you scroll past, the window pops back up playing video. When did this become ok? Telling them to get off my lawn hasn't worked.

antisthenes 3y ago

I started blocking ads personally when I saw the double-click ads. You guys will know what I'm talking about - random words in text, underlined twice, which if you hover over, will get an obnoxious ad. Google bought them not long after: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick.... Ads have been obnoxious for at least 15 years already.

hendersoon 3y ago
Much longer than that! The first really user-hostile move was pop-up ads, then pop-UNDER ads, which were just offensively intrusive, so bad that all the browsers stopped them. Then the advertising industry started to innovate, and it became necessary to block everything. I've been blocking ads since the late 90s. Once they lose you, once you get so pissed off that you go to the trouble to install and configure an adblocker, they NEVER get you back. They do not understand this, and so they'll simply push more people to adblockers. Maybe Chrome's manifest v3 won't suffice, so people will move to Firefox or Brave to do it. Either way, Google loses.

crazygringo 3y ago

[flagged]

kitsunesoba 3y ago
YouTube has gotten progressively worse with its ads over time, though. They're slowly turning up the heat to eventually boil the frog. Without opposition, YouTube ads will eventually be as bad as TV ads have become. On that note, I haven't watched network TV in over a decade because to the ads. None of the content on offer on cable and satellite TV is worth the asking price of both a subscription fees and ads, especially when most of it can be found in other legitimate sources, usually in higher quality.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > YouTube ads will eventually be as bad as TV ads have become. There's no evidence of that though. Users will easily close a tab because the preroll ad is too long, because there are plenty of other immediate things on the internet. In a way that TV viewers had no choice, because the other channels are just as bad. Yes, YouTube ads have been getting a little longer from their previous almost-nothing. But YouTube has also been extremely conservative in that direction, as they know they're walking a fine line. The idea that ads will get as bad as broadcast TV seems exceedingly unlikely.
  - jowdones 3y ago
    I have YouTube premium but sometimes I can't login to my Google account and have to use plain, ad-infested version of YouTube and it's really unusable. I swear that listening to a 3 minutes content I am played at least 6 ads of at least 20 non-skippable seconds and in volleys of 2 or sometimes even 3 ads one after another. It's not "getting terrible", they're already way past that.
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      What country are you in? I've watched YouTube for years and years and I've never in my life encountered more than 2 ads in a row. I've never encountered an unskippable ad longer than 15 seconds, and every ad that is skippable is skippable after just 5 seconds. And while ads are often included at the start, once they've played I've never seen ads get inserted before the 3-minute mark -- they're usually around minute 4 or 5. (It's true that after a 3-minute video finishes playing they've started playing another set of ads, but you can just hit pause and navigate to your next video. You never need to watch them.) I've never encountered anything even remotely close to 2 minutes of ads to watch 3 minutes of content as you're describing. It's usually 10 or 15 seconds total. But I'm in the US, maybe there are countries where it's different? I'm particularly curious if there are objective stats around this. It's crazy to me that our experiences could be so completely opposite.

saeirtkawierjt 3y ago

I've had adblockers installed for decades. I'm always amazed at how bad the internet is without them when occasionally I view a website on my phone. When there's one completely unrelated video ad playing, and then a second also unrelated video ad pops up on top of the first, I wonder if the first advertiser knows or cares that their ad is being covered by another ad. And then I have two or more audio streams playing simultaneously, so I can't understand any of them ... and I regret working in tech.

worksonmine 3y ago
You can use uBlock Origin (and a few other addons) on Firefox for Android.

gsatic 3y ago

TV/Cable/Radio ads are regulated I think. You can't play more than some N minutes of Ads per hour of content. But the fucking Internet ad world there doesn't seem any upper limit to how much of someone's time you can waste.

badtension 3y ago

I listen to some podcasts to sleep and it is infuriating to get even 12-45 (!) min long ads! I wouldn't be that upset with 5-10s ads every 10 minutes (as long as the volume level doesn't kill me) but half a freaking hour? What the hell is this? If there was a company with clear community intentions and sound morals, yeah I would consider paying for it and support the creators. But YT that treats me like trash with their dark patterns and algorithms showing me stuff to hijack my brain instead of stuff I am looking for? No way in hell.

crummy 3y ago
That's crazy. What podcast was this that had 45min long ads?
- badtension 3y ago
  Don't remember since I browse random stuff that don't absorb me too much as I fall asleep. The only thing I know is it was some religion related crap... seriously. Like a protestant sermon or something.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  I have seen ads that are OVER ONE HOUR LONG, often on long-form interviews. Am I really the demographic that "they"re trying to sell me late-night-infomercial bullshit?!? ...I guess so.
mysterydip 3y ago
Some of the kids youtubers have 3min long ads, multiple times, in a 20 min video.
- badtension 3y ago
  This is much worse than TV, if you had told me that 10 years ago I would have laughed.

pimanrules 3y ago

This annoyed me particularly because I pay for YouTube premium... but I can't sign into my Google account on my work computer. So if they block ad blockers, paying for YouTube isn't even enough to get rid of the ads for me.

figassis 3y ago

Interestingly premium is not available in my country, so my choice is ads or no youtube. I pick the latter.

metiscus 3y ago

There is a saying that goes something like this: It is difficult to get a man to understand something that his paycheck depends on his not understanding.