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I do understand this push, and honestly I'm surprised it took them this long. I'd love to know how many people end up subscribing vs allowing ads vs reducing v

I do understand this push, and honestly I'm surprised it took them this long. I'd love to know how many people end up subscribing vs allowing ads vs reducing views drastically vs just never using YouTube again. I assume this will bite me soon, and I think I'll be in the "reducing views drastically" because there's very little I watch on YouTube that I'd want to sit through any ads for.

Ancalagon 3y ago
I wonder how long it takes for the ad-blockers to get around this.
- Krasnol 3y ago
  I wonder how long it takes until a different platform becomes more popular because of all this.
  - recursive 3y ago
    And I wonder who's in a position to pay for it.
  - kevinh 3y ago
    Seems like a platform base comprised of users who neither want to watch ads nor pay for an ad-free experience is not primed for success
    - Krasnol 3y ago
      It was never 1 or 0. It's just the market pressure to generate even more every quarter. There are ways around this and ways to still generate profits. It's not like nobody was watching ads. It's not ever ENOUGH people to watch ads because you have to deliver more for the shareholder horde.
- recursive 3y ago
  And after that, I wonder how long it will take google to get around that.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    This is going to lead us to a terrible place IMHO, where the ads are just encoded directly into the video stream so everything comes from the same origin making it very difficult for ad blockers by not giving them a different origin to block. Plus maybe rolling out widevine (DRM) for good measure. God I hate these races to the bottom.
    - chaosbolt 3y ago
      Sponsorblock does this well for sponsored segments, it even works on yt-dlp and you can download a video without the sponsored parts.
      - freedomben 3y ago
        whoa amazing, thanks! It does make me mad that I pay for youtube premium and still have to see those sponsored segments.
        MaxikCZ 3y ago
        Pirating was always a big part about convinience (and accesibility), not just money. Cracked games running without needing to scavenge for CD-rom etc. You know you fail when you gimp your free service and allow users to ungimp it for cash, while someone else ungimps it better for free. Big corps never understood this, with Valve being the only counterexample I can think of.
    - gattilorenz 3y ago
      I already use sponsorblock, for the ads encoded in the video stream.
      - 3y ago
- anonymousab 3y ago
  Given how a Google account or IP address ban or punishment on any of their services can basically annihilate your ability to use any of their services forevermore, including never being able to touch your emails or files ever again, I can see YouTube being very effective with this crackdown. Especially since they can/do also target any of your secondary accounts, and can also hit family members depending on various backend circumstances that users can't really know about.
  - MaxikCZ 3y ago
    And you know what? There is life without google, too.
    - anonymousab 3y ago
      It is a major inconvenience for users of Google to lose access to Google services, especially if you have years and years of stuff in Gmail or drive or photos or YouTube. Regardless of the fact that you can find some sort of replacement for any of those things individually, it would be a major stumbling block and disruption for most users to suddenly no longer have access to their email/history. The average person does not have forwarding or mirroring of all that stuff set up. I posit that that disruption is enough of a deterrent to get users to stop using ad blocking on Google services once the consequences start being applied. Though that reminds me, I don't quite know what happens to your chrome bookmarks and settings if Google obliterates your profile's account. I assume that merely syncing will stop working, but perhaps more might be disrupted.
      - pepa65 3y ago
        It really doesn't take long to "take out" all your Google content and continue life elsewhere -- highly recommended for future-proofing.
chaosbolt 3y ago
Youtube has become garbage and it was only a matter of time before Google's lack of identity infected it as well, you can now search for a video and only get shorts and other algo suggestions completely unrelated to your search. My guess is they're going to quickly back down on that... I tried the iphone for a year before going back to android and I just stopped using youtube there, you quickly realize how unnecessary you find it, because there is no way in hell any same person is going to endure a 30 second ad for the garbage content you find there now.
- passion__desire 3y ago
  Do you actively use "Not Interested"? It helps a lot. Another hack that I have is if I like a particular topic, I click on as many related videos as possible in the bottom suggestion list in order to "guide" the algorithm, even if I won't get back to all of them. Not sure if this has any effect but it has worked out quite well for me.
  - chaosbolt 3y ago
    I have the history and suggested content features off, I used to only rely on searching for what I wanted to watch, now it stopped working, both google search and youtube search now are trash, and search is their original product.
  - MaxikCZ 3y ago
    Not parent comentter but I even asked HN on my issue with Youtube started to ignore my "Not interested" and suggest me the videos over and over. Currently the only way to get rid of it is "Dont reccomend channel", but as soon as youtube forces ads trough adblock I just stop using it, just as I did on mobile.
  - johnnyworker 3y ago
    I know got one of two (always one or the other) execution clips (as in, a human kneeling in front of someone with a weapon, at least according to the thumb, never watched it) when scrolling to far totally benign searches (namely remixes of songs that have a lot, trying to find some I like). I did click "not interested", and after a few months it popped back again. up Couldn't find it right now, so maybe it got reported often enough, but my guess would be the "algorithm" "realized" that this video got a lot of clicks regardless of search, so why not sprinkle it into all searches, right? And that's silly, and I claim it would be even with perfectly good intentions. It's just wasting huge amounts of energy on something that is worse, and cannot ever be good (that is, the whole algorithms second guessing people stuff). Give me "dumb" search that returns things that contain the terms in the title or description, or that are linked in the descriptions of videos that contain them. Or even find an open way (i.e. not restricted to Google, and not "the way Google likes it", but decent and simple and clean) to show videos on web pages that contain them. Page rank is not perfect and can be gamed, but it's actually feasible to make that good -- it used to be stellar compared to what we have now, now imagine what we could do with all that was learned and invented in the meantime. Crafting searches to make pinpoint landings on what you are looking for, if it exists, is a delightful art. Remember http://www.fravia.net/ http://www.fravia.net/ ? It's like remembering having and being able to use a screwdriver, instead of there being this fairy that you can ask for help, which sometimes shows up instantly and fastens the screw, and sometimes shows up pretending to not know what a screw is while reaching in your pocket... which is at best as good as having and being able to use a screw driver, and potentially infinitely worse. So on average, it's infinitely worse. Logic :D And when it comes to clicking "not interested", I know that in the long run my wishes aren't respected anyway, and I've gotten so cynical about this stuff that I basically just view it as a further signal to a bad actor (if not abuser) that yes, I saw this thing, didn't just scroll by it, noticed it enough to strongly dislike it, and am now offering a futile plea to please not show me that again. I'd rather close the tab altogether. This rant wasn't directed at you or your suggestion, not at all! But I just had to get it out, I hope you understand. I'm so over the whole web as a worse version of TV, where the middlemen get the vast majority of profits plus information on how to better poison you, and you get the poison. Teach people digital literacy instead of giving them "free" assistants that very well might one day become their captors or worse, to the degree they aren't already.
mjr00 3y ago
> I do understand this push, and honestly I'm surprised it took them this long. I'm not too surprised it took this long -- the % of viewers who are on a PC, not a phone, and technically savvy enough to install an ad blocker is relatively small, so it wasn't worth the effort. But now, with the death of ZIRP and the demand that these tech companies which were experiencing infinite growth somehow continue to grow infinitely, they're very much in "squeeze blood from a stone" mode.
somesortofthing 3y ago
I think the reason they don't is because the overlap between users with the general internet savvy to use an ad blocker and users who have the general internet savvy to literally never pay attention to or click on ads is pretty high. It's sort of the same problem reddit had -- There's just no way to monetize users like this other than locking the entire service behind a paywall for everyone, shutting out the much more lucrative remainder of your customer base.
Gigachad 3y ago
Google has been posting the numbers on this. Premium subscriptions are skyrocketing year on year.

Ancalagon 3y ago

I wonder how long it takes for the ad-blockers to get around this.

Krasnol 3y ago
I wonder how long it takes until a different platform becomes more popular because of all this.
- recursive 3y ago
  And I wonder who's in a position to pay for it.
- kevinh 3y ago
  Seems like a platform base comprised of users who neither want to watch ads nor pay for an ad-free experience is not primed for success
  - Krasnol 3y ago
    It was never 1 or 0. It's just the market pressure to generate even more every quarter. There are ways around this and ways to still generate profits. It's not like nobody was watching ads. It's not ever ENOUGH people to watch ads because you have to deliver more for the shareholder horde.
recursive 3y ago
And after that, I wonder how long it will take google to get around that.
- freedomben 3y ago
  This is going to lead us to a terrible place IMHO, where the ads are just encoded directly into the video stream so everything comes from the same origin making it very difficult for ad blockers by not giving them a different origin to block. Plus maybe rolling out widevine (DRM) for good measure. God I hate these races to the bottom.
  - chaosbolt 3y ago
    Sponsorblock does this well for sponsored segments, it even works on yt-dlp and you can download a video without the sponsored parts.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      whoa amazing, thanks! It does make me mad that I pay for youtube premium and still have to see those sponsored segments.
      - MaxikCZ 3y ago
        Pirating was always a big part about convinience (and accesibility), not just money. Cracked games running without needing to scavenge for CD-rom etc. You know you fail when you gimp your free service and allow users to ungimp it for cash, while someone else ungimps it better for free. Big corps never understood this, with Valve being the only counterexample I can think of.
  - gattilorenz 3y ago
    I already use sponsorblock, for the ads encoded in the video stream.
    - 3y ago
anonymousab 3y ago
Given how a Google account or IP address ban or punishment on any of their services can basically annihilate your ability to use any of their services forevermore, including never being able to touch your emails or files ever again, I can see YouTube being very effective with this crackdown. Especially since they can/do also target any of your secondary accounts, and can also hit family members depending on various backend circumstances that users can't really know about.
- MaxikCZ 3y ago
  And you know what? There is life without google, too.
  - anonymousab 3y ago
    It is a major inconvenience for users of Google to lose access to Google services, especially if you have years and years of stuff in Gmail or drive or photos or YouTube. Regardless of the fact that you can find some sort of replacement for any of those things individually, it would be a major stumbling block and disruption for most users to suddenly no longer have access to their email/history. The average person does not have forwarding or mirroring of all that stuff set up. I posit that that disruption is enough of a deterrent to get users to stop using ad blocking on Google services once the consequences start being applied. Though that reminds me, I don't quite know what happens to your chrome bookmarks and settings if Google obliterates your profile's account. I assume that merely syncing will stop working, but perhaps more might be disrupted.
    - pepa65 3y ago
      It really doesn't take long to "take out" all your Google content and continue life elsewhere -- highly recommended for future-proofing.

chaosbolt 3y ago

Youtube has become garbage and it was only a matter of time before Google's lack of identity infected it as well, you can now search for a video and only get shorts and other algo suggestions completely unrelated to your search. My guess is they're going to quickly back down on that... I tried the iphone for a year before going back to android and I just stopped using youtube there, you quickly realize how unnecessary you find it, because there is no way in hell any same person is going to endure a 30 second ad for the garbage content you find there now.

passion__desire 3y ago
Do you actively use "Not Interested"? It helps a lot. Another hack that I have is if I like a particular topic, I click on as many related videos as possible in the bottom suggestion list in order to "guide" the algorithm, even if I won't get back to all of them. Not sure if this has any effect but it has worked out quite well for me.
- chaosbolt 3y ago
  I have the history and suggested content features off, I used to only rely on searching for what I wanted to watch, now it stopped working, both google search and youtube search now are trash, and search is their original product.
- MaxikCZ 3y ago
  Not parent comentter but I even asked HN on my issue with Youtube started to ignore my "Not interested" and suggest me the videos over and over. Currently the only way to get rid of it is "Dont reccomend channel", but as soon as youtube forces ads trough adblock I just stop using it, just as I did on mobile.
- johnnyworker 3y ago
  I know got one of two (always one or the other) execution clips (as in, a human kneeling in front of someone with a weapon, at least according to the thumb, never watched it) when scrolling to far totally benign searches (namely remixes of songs that have a lot, trying to find some I like). I did click "not interested", and after a few months it popped back again. up Couldn't find it right now, so maybe it got reported often enough, but my guess would be the "algorithm" "realized" that this video got a lot of clicks regardless of search, so why not sprinkle it into all searches, right? And that's silly, and I claim it would be even with perfectly good intentions. It's just wasting huge amounts of energy on something that is worse, and cannot ever be good (that is, the whole algorithms second guessing people stuff). Give me "dumb" search that returns things that contain the terms in the title or description, or that are linked in the descriptions of videos that contain them. Or even find an open way (i.e. not restricted to Google, and not "the way Google likes it", but decent and simple and clean) to show videos on web pages that contain them. Page rank is not perfect and can be gamed, but it's actually feasible to make that good -- it used to be stellar compared to what we have now, now imagine what we could do with all that was learned and invented in the meantime. Crafting searches to make pinpoint landings on what you are looking for, if it exists, is a delightful art. Remember http://www.fravia.net/ http://www.fravia.net/ ? It's like remembering having and being able to use a screwdriver, instead of there being this fairy that you can ask for help, which sometimes shows up instantly and fastens the screw, and sometimes shows up pretending to not know what a screw is while reaching in your pocket... which is at best as good as having and being able to use a screw driver, and potentially infinitely worse. So on average, it's infinitely worse. Logic :D And when it comes to clicking "not interested", I know that in the long run my wishes aren't respected anyway, and I've gotten so cynical about this stuff that I basically just view it as a further signal to a bad actor (if not abuser) that yes, I saw this thing, didn't just scroll by it, noticed it enough to strongly dislike it, and am now offering a futile plea to please not show me that again. I'd rather close the tab altogether. This rant wasn't directed at you or your suggestion, not at all! But I just had to get it out, I hope you understand. I'm so over the whole web as a worse version of TV, where the middlemen get the vast majority of profits plus information on how to better poison you, and you get the poison. Teach people digital literacy instead of giving them "free" assistants that very well might one day become their captors or worse, to the degree they aren't already.

mjr00 3y ago

> I do understand this push, and honestly I'm surprised it took them this long. I'm not too surprised it took this long -- the % of viewers who are on a PC, not a phone, and technically savvy enough to install an ad blocker is relatively small, so it wasn't worth the effort. But now, with the death of ZIRP and the demand that these tech companies which were experiencing infinite growth somehow continue to grow infinitely, they're very much in "squeeze blood from a stone" mode.

somesortofthing 3y ago

I think the reason they don't is because the overlap between users with the general internet savvy to use an ad blocker and users who have the general internet savvy to literally never pay attention to or click on ads is pretty high. It's sort of the same problem reddit had -- There's just no way to monetize users like this other than locking the entire service behind a paywall for everyone, shutting out the much more lucrative remainder of your customer base.

Gigachad 3y ago

Google has been posting the numbers on this. Premium subscriptions are skyrocketing year on year.