9 ms·

Adblock Plus and (a little) more

53 points by Wasserpuncher 3y ago

IanCal 3y ago
This may be controversial but YouTube ads are surely ones that meet all the reasonable criteria. They're not a surprise, you know it's an ad supported business. They're served from YouTube so it's not random companies tracking you while you use a different service. And you can get rid of them by paying for the service. What's the proposed alternative where you contribute for the service? Just paywall the whole thing?
- orangepanda 3y ago
  > And you can get rid of them by paying for the service. Get rid of _some_ of them
  - 2devnull 3y ago
    Get rid of _some_ of them for now It only has to be relatively less ad laden than the free version. Whenever ads get cranked up on the “free” normal person YouTube, they’ll get cranked up on sucker pay-pig YouTube in direct proportion. If anything, they have less concern about the small fraction who (amazingly) pay them for what they’re doing.
- gray_-_wolf 3y ago
  Probably an unpopular opinion, but I just do not want to have a "business" relationship with google. I would not mind paying for youtube, if it was a separate company. But google does not need my money, and any money the get are used to actively making the world worse (WEI, SEO spam, Search getting worse, ...). On a separate note, there are reports of people getting their whole google account locked for payment issues, expired cards and such. There is no way to reach a human there, and I really do not want to risk loosing my account I use on my phone as well (android :/) just because some bot decides it does not like me. Would be fine if I could just have a separate youtube account, but no, that would make tracking harder... Aaaand there still will be ads inside the videos (sponsored segments), and product placement.
  - ssl232 3y ago
    I wouldn't mind paying for YouTube if its subscription cost was anywhere close to reasonable.
    - bad_user 3y ago
      I'm paying $8.30 / month for the Family option. That's like 2 or 3 coffees. In other countries this is more expensive, but it's adjusted for local buying power. Both you and the parent simply come up with reasons to avoid paying, getting the service for free. No matter how you look at it, what you're doing is immoral, because if everyone did it, YouTube would be permanently paywalled and placed under DRM. You're a privileged individual that prefers to be subsidized by those that pay or that watch ads.
      - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
        > That's like 2 or 3 coffees Expensive coffee at Starbucks which I would never buy. With $10 I can buy coffee for 3 months. It’s way too expensive for me. I also consider every form of advertising to be brainwashing. Last but not least, I watch 1 YouTube video per month, so you would have to adapt your scenario for me to be interested in a subscription.
        guraf 3y ago
        [flagged]
      - i8comments 3y ago
        A coffee costs 30 cents.
      - franczesko 3y ago
        There's nothing immoral about blocking ads. Avoiding paying taxes might be, yet Google does it anyway.
        3y ago
- anothernewdude 3y ago
  Blocking functionality, playing audio that is not kid friendly and wasting my time are all not reasonable.
- franczesko 3y ago
  The alternative might be Google paying their fair share of taxes. I might consider supporting their product then. Ad blocking is not as severe as tax avoidance though. I have no sympathy for the service. If it's not profitable, Google can cover it from their other revenue streams with ease.
  - dewey 3y ago
    That sounds like one of these reasons that people come up with to justify their unwillingness to pay. Are you also boycotting every other large company that uses the tax system in a legal way that you don't agree with? I'm all for big companies paying their fair share, but I'm not blaming the company, I'm blaming the people in charge who don't close these loopholes. Same issue as with Ireland in the EU, undercutting all the other EU countries with tax rates. One option if you want to fight back in the exact same way: Sign up for YouTube Premium through a cheaper country and pay $2/month instead of 15.
    - meindnoch 3y ago
      They game our tax system, we game their ad system. It works both ways.
    - franczesko 3y ago
      Ad blocking is not illegal. If I can do it, as Google does with taxes, I see no reason why I shouldn't.
    - logifail 3y ago
      > Are you also boycotting every other large company that uses the tax system in a legal way that you don't agree with? Umm, where possible why wouldn't one choose to avoid giving your money to companies that behave in ways you object to?
      - dewey 3y ago
        Voting with your wallet is always the best, my point was that most (all?) big companies will use the tax system in a way to give them the best outcome that's possible through legal means.
- pravus 3y ago
  I currently pay $5/month to the Kevin Richardson channel as a member and have been a member since inception for over 4 years now. When I went to the members section of YouTube to view my members-only videos I received the blocking message and was denied access to the video player. This is in addition to other wildlife charities for which I send monthly donations directly. I use uBlock Origin on YouTube specifically to work around many UI issues related to their recommendations and player. I will not turn it off. One example is that they will not honor my closed-caption settings on all videos so I have a filter rule to remove the call to the captions URL to eliminate them. That's one of countless issues. They are now denying me access to a service for which I do actually pay for. I consider that to be illegal. My proposal is simple: * Give me an option to pay for what I use. I do not want music, 99.9% of live streams, news, or tons of the other content they try to force on me for money-making purposes. * Make the price reasonable. The videos I watch are primarily educational lectures. This really shouldn't cost much more than the price of disk storage and network egress (both of which are cheap at scale). * Give me a recommendations and preference system that actually work. I spend more time curating my list of videos than watching anything meaningful to my interests. At one point I was watching 2 luthiery channels and "guitar necks" came up as a category. What the ever living fuck? Related yes, but not quite the topic I really want to focus on. I would remind people that this is a multi-billion dollar company with PhDs that has changed the face of AI and hyper-scale computing as we know it. * In general, operate like a long-running business... offer good value to your paying customers. Now that the customers are not advertisers, Google will need to rethink their sales strategies. They have not yet convinced me.
- hendersoon 3y ago
  I am not responsible for sustaining Google's monetization. There is no such social contract. If their business model isn't sustainable, they should find a new one. That's their problem, not mine.
  - IanCal 3y ago
    You're not, and they're not responsible for delivering you video if you don't want to pay them or watch ads. I'm not sure what's contradictory here.
    - tomjakubowski 3y ago
      I think GP is just responding to your comment's premise that they have to propose any alternative, or that they have to "contribute" to YouTube in some way.
- causality0 3y ago
  I spent years having to click "No, I do not consent to creating a Google+ profile" every time I used YouTube so I refuse to give them money on principle.
- kmbfjr 3y ago
  Paying for the service replicates the cable TV industry. In order to get what I want and support, I end up supporting what I don’t want and don’t want to support. I am under ZERO obligation to watch advertising, that is the risk the industry takes. The ad industry has long ago tipped the scales in the trade of attention for content and now they resort to shaming the viewers into compliance. Everyone supporting the adblock countermeasures are hypocrites; as if they never went to the bathroom during a TV show commercial break.
- Ylpertnodi 3y ago
  >They're not a surprise. Ha! Try getting 10 minutes into this example and not bring surprised by a fucking pasta ad. https:// https://
- 13415 3y ago
  Ads are very surprising to people who have been using ad blockers for decades. The web experience is totally different. On a side note, I stopped watching TV in the 90s and turned to "internet only" because ads were too annoying. It's weird that companies advertising with Google think people like me could potentially buy something based on ads.
- etedor 3y ago
  They are a surprise. They’re variable length and appear at random moments. Their volume can greatly differ from the content you are watching. No thanks. The proposed alternative is Google can continue to bankroll it. They are not hurting for money.
  - IanCal 3y ago
    Your proposed alternative is that it's simply run at a loss? I don't think that's a particularly reasonable business proposal.
    - etedor 3y ago
      What makes you think Google is running at a loss?
      - missedthecue 3y ago
        He's talking about YouTube. If no one watches ads or pays for premium, how will YouTube make money?
martin_a 3y ago
Never forget that Adblock Plus is a commercial product developed by a company which you can pay to get your ads listed as "acceptable ads" which makes them pass the filtering. uBlock Origin is still probably the best tool for blocking ads: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/
- hendersoon 3y ago
  Indeed, and unlike the morally unacceptable Adblock Plus, uBlock Origin continues to work on YouTube ads, although you will have to manually update your filter lists every day or so.
- breakall 3y ago
  i love ublock origin and have used it for years. i recently migrated to macos and was disappointed to find that ublock origin doesn’t work with safari. what’s the best ad-blocking option for safari on macos?
  - occz 3y ago
    Why not just use Firefox? It's available on macOS.
    - dharmab 3y ago
      Firefox has poor battery life on macos.
      - olex 3y ago
        That is a thing of distant past. It runs beautifully natively on M1/M2 chips and has no noticeable difference in power consumption vs Safari.
      - toyg 3y ago
        Not the case anymore, even on pre-M1 Macs.
    - deleted 3y ago
kouteiheika 3y ago
> We know how important it is for our users to browse YouTube without ads for free. And we hope to come up with a solution soon! No need to wait. Just switch to uBlock Origin where this is already fixed. Here's a guide if they still show up and you're using UBO: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/178yasm/youtube_antiadblock_and_ads_october_16_2023/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/178yasm/youtu... (Basically you need to make sure you're up to date, and you disable any overzealous filter lists or custom filters so that the anti-adblock detection doesn't get tripped.)
- muro 3y ago
  It costs about 15 per month to watch YouTube without ads.
  - eur0pa 3y ago
    No thanks
  - dchest 3y ago
    You can't buy YouTube Premium everywhere.
    - missedthecue 3y ago
      Is there any place where you can't buy it, yet you get ads?
      - dchest 3y ago
        Yes.
  - randunel 3y ago
    It's my browser running on my computer, I get the final say in how content is presented to me.
    - 3y ago
AraceliHarker 3y ago
Google is desperate to display ads on YouTube. YouTube videos, even of poor quality, often rank highly in Google search results. This means that Google can double its profits by displaying ads on YouTube, in addition to its search advertising revenue.
- echelon 3y ago
  Google is too big. All of the giant tech companies are. This behavior is a symptom of reaching across industries in search of growth. Is there any reason a grocery store should be a movie studio? This sucks the air out of the room for smaller companies to innovate. Search would be much better if it wasn't being shoved down our throat by a single company that controls (or buys access to) all of the panes of glass Americans use to compute.
  - izacus 3y ago
    Ok, so if Google is too big and YouTube is split away from Google... who exactly will pay for bandwidth, server and transcoder costs for all the adblocking freeloaders? If you ever tried to host videos yourself, you'll quickly see that it costs a stupid amount of money to manage. Why would a standalone YouTube LLC. allow anyone to access it with an adblocker and without subscription? (People seem to lose their mind on HN every time someone even tries to recommend something as ridicolous as paying for YouTube.)
    - RunningDroid 3y ago
      > If you ever tried to host videos yourself, you'll quickly see that it costs a stupid amount of money to manage. Why would a standalone YouTube LLC. allow anyone to access it with an adblocker and without subscription? Why would anyone host a peertube instance? https://instances.joinpeertube.org https://instances.joinpeertube.org
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      > Ok, so if Google is too big and YouTube is split away from Google... who exactly will pay for bandwidth, server and transcoder costs for all the adblocking freeloaders? If a "business" can only exist when artificially propped up, should it exist? > People seem to lose their mind on HN every time someone even tries to recommend something as ridicolous as paying for YouTube. People on HN also regularly endorse Nebula, so it isn't paying that's the problem (if we pretend HN is a monolith).
lapcat 3y ago
[self-promotion] On iOS and macOS, StopTheMadness auto-skips YouTube video ads. https://underpassapp.com/news/2023-10-19.html https://underpassapp.com/news/2023-10-19.html
- jshier 3y ago
  Workable, I suppose, though it still plays a split second of the ad while the skip happens. Perhaps a pause (or mute?), skip, then resume might be possible?
  - jdjdjdhhd 3y ago
    [dead]
- vGPU 3y ago
  Use this extension on iPhone. Worth the money. Prevents sites from disabling PiP video too.
tjpnz 3y ago
What value do advertisers get in losing a portion of their ad spend to those who are even less likely to engage? I would be curious to see what click through rates typically look like post this change.
- michaelt 3y ago
  People who advertise with Google are used to losing a decent portion of their ad spend to bot views. People who use ad blockers are at least human. And advertising to the guy who sees 100 adverts a day might have much higher impact than advertising to the guy who sees 1000. From Google's perspective, they want to get paid, so the more ads the better. If the advertisers, users and content creators don't like it, why would that matter to Google? The farmer doesn't care about the turkey's opinion on christmas.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  For Youtube/Google it's a win-win: they can show advertisers that the ads that can't be hidden, and annoyed users will be more pressured to buy Premium to hide the ads.
- voiceblue 3y ago
  Afaict top of funnel ads don't need engagement, they are mostly to spread brand awareness and they influence you in ways other than immediate conversion. That seems to be what most Youtube ads are.
botanical 3y ago
It looks like YouTube's dark-pattern marketing strategy (highlighting the "Allow YouTube Ads" button), is they'd rather have you enable ads than pay for premium. They're getting too greedy with demonetising videos and still making money off of them, to the amount of ads they play; same goes for other streaming platforms. So far on Firefox with uBlock Origin I haven't come across it.
- guraf 3y ago
  What are you talking about? The vast majority of people would rather disable their adblocker on YouTube then subscribe and pay $15 a month... How is it a dark pattern for YouTube to suggest the most likely option?
- lionkor 3y ago
  They're doing A/B testing - I'm on firefox + uBlock and I get the full video blocking thing
quadrifoliate 3y ago
Honestly, the only product that can really compete with uBlockOrigin at this point is a version of AdNauseum for Youtube -- something that registers a click on every single ad that YouTube shows until it stops showing you more ads. There is currently no negative feedback for YouTube ads. They are free to show you ads every single minute if some manager there thinks that this will increase monetization by 1%. And no, paying for YouTube Premium isn't going to work; Amazon Prime Video was this way (I paid for it, and got ad-free shows in return), but they are now introducing "limited ads" that you will need to pay $3 extra a month for. The only reasonable negative feedback is to have too many clicks on ads, so the advertiser stops showing you them because the person paying for ads is not getting the desired clickthrough rate. The advertising industry likes to make up scary terms like "ad fraud" for this, but that's ridiculous -- a human can totally click an ad link and then make a decision not to engage further with the product. I do it all the time. Having an extension make that decision on my behalf would be fantastic.
- rubatuga 3y ago
  Interesting idea, is this the only recourse consumers have?
- missedthecue 3y ago
  Adnauseam clicks aren't charged to advertisers. Google's click tracker is smarter than that.
lionkor 3y ago
I get those complete blocks of youtube videos when I have any kind of adblocker. I'm not entirely sure how they detect an ad blocker? They could reasonably terminate my entire Google account for having settings that look like an ad blocker. Use piped.video and others to get around it, I guess? I can't afford YouTube premium, and the ads are usually offensive, sometimes inappropriate, and never something I would buy or use. Im subscribed to around 950 channels so I have all the reason to stay, but this weird invasive behavior is inappropriate and I'm not sure I care enough about the entertainment value.

53 points by Wasserpuncher 3y ago

This may be controversial but YouTube ads are surely ones that meet all the reasonable criteria. They're not a surprise, you know it's an ad supported business. They're served from YouTube so it's not random companies tracking you while you use a different service. And you can get rid of them by paying for the service. What's the proposed alternative where you contribute for the service? Just paywall the whole thing?

orangepanda 3y ago
> And you can get rid of them by paying for the service. Get rid of _some_ of them
- 2devnull 3y ago
  Get rid of _some_ of them for now It only has to be relatively less ad laden than the free version. Whenever ads get cranked up on the “free” normal person YouTube, they’ll get cranked up on sucker pay-pig YouTube in direct proportion. If anything, they have less concern about the small fraction who (amazingly) pay them for what they’re doing.
gray_-_wolf 3y ago
Probably an unpopular opinion, but I just do not want to have a "business" relationship with google. I would not mind paying for youtube, if it was a separate company. But google does not need my money, and any money the get are used to actively making the world worse (WEI, SEO spam, Search getting worse, ...). On a separate note, there are reports of people getting their whole google account locked for payment issues, expired cards and such. There is no way to reach a human there, and I really do not want to risk loosing my account I use on my phone as well (android :/) just because some bot decides it does not like me. Would be fine if I could just have a separate youtube account, but no, that would make tracking harder... Aaaand there still will be ads inside the videos (sponsored segments), and product placement.
- ssl232 3y ago
  I wouldn't mind paying for YouTube if its subscription cost was anywhere close to reasonable.
  - bad_user 3y ago
    I'm paying $8.30 / month for the Family option. That's like 2 or 3 coffees. In other countries this is more expensive, but it's adjusted for local buying power. Both you and the parent simply come up with reasons to avoid paying, getting the service for free. No matter how you look at it, what you're doing is immoral, because if everyone did it, YouTube would be permanently paywalled and placed under DRM. You're a privileged individual that prefers to be subsidized by those that pay or that watch ads.
    - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
      > That's like 2 or 3 coffees Expensive coffee at Starbucks which I would never buy. With $10 I can buy coffee for 3 months. It’s way too expensive for me. I also consider every form of advertising to be brainwashing. Last but not least, I watch 1 YouTube video per month, so you would have to adapt your scenario for me to be interested in a subscription.
      - guraf 3y ago
        [flagged]
    - i8comments 3y ago
      A coffee costs 30 cents.
    - franczesko 3y ago
      There's nothing immoral about blocking ads. Avoiding paying taxes might be, yet Google does it anyway.
      - 3y ago
anothernewdude 3y ago
Blocking functionality, playing audio that is not kid friendly and wasting my time are all not reasonable.
franczesko 3y ago
The alternative might be Google paying their fair share of taxes. I might consider supporting their product then. Ad blocking is not as severe as tax avoidance though. I have no sympathy for the service. If it's not profitable, Google can cover it from their other revenue streams with ease.
- dewey 3y ago
  That sounds like one of these reasons that people come up with to justify their unwillingness to pay. Are you also boycotting every other large company that uses the tax system in a legal way that you don't agree with? I'm all for big companies paying their fair share, but I'm not blaming the company, I'm blaming the people in charge who don't close these loopholes. Same issue as with Ireland in the EU, undercutting all the other EU countries with tax rates. One option if you want to fight back in the exact same way: Sign up for YouTube Premium through a cheaper country and pay $2/month instead of 15.
  - meindnoch 3y ago
    They game our tax system, we game their ad system. It works both ways.
  - franczesko 3y ago
    Ad blocking is not illegal. If I can do it, as Google does with taxes, I see no reason why I shouldn't.
  - logifail 3y ago
    > Are you also boycotting every other large company that uses the tax system in a legal way that you don't agree with? Umm, where possible why wouldn't one choose to avoid giving your money to companies that behave in ways you object to?
    - dewey 3y ago
      Voting with your wallet is always the best, my point was that most (all?) big companies will use the tax system in a way to give them the best outcome that's possible through legal means.
pravus 3y ago
I currently pay $5/month to the Kevin Richardson channel as a member and have been a member since inception for over 4 years now. When I went to the members section of YouTube to view my members-only videos I received the blocking message and was denied access to the video player. This is in addition to other wildlife charities for which I send monthly donations directly. I use uBlock Origin on YouTube specifically to work around many UI issues related to their recommendations and player. I will not turn it off. One example is that they will not honor my closed-caption settings on all videos so I have a filter rule to remove the call to the captions URL to eliminate them. That's one of countless issues. They are now denying me access to a service for which I do actually pay for. I consider that to be illegal. My proposal is simple: * Give me an option to pay for what I use. I do not want music, 99.9% of live streams, news, or tons of the other content they try to force on me for money-making purposes. * Make the price reasonable. The videos I watch are primarily educational lectures. This really shouldn't cost much more than the price of disk storage and network egress (both of which are cheap at scale). * Give me a recommendations and preference system that actually work. I spend more time curating my list of videos than watching anything meaningful to my interests. At one point I was watching 2 luthiery channels and "guitar necks" came up as a category. What the ever living fuck? Related yes, but not quite the topic I really want to focus on. I would remind people that this is a multi-billion dollar company with PhDs that has changed the face of AI and hyper-scale computing as we know it. * In general, operate like a long-running business... offer good value to your paying customers. Now that the customers are not advertisers, Google will need to rethink their sales strategies. They have not yet convinced me.
hendersoon 3y ago
I am not responsible for sustaining Google's monetization. There is no such social contract. If their business model isn't sustainable, they should find a new one. That's their problem, not mine.
- IanCal 3y ago
  You're not, and they're not responsible for delivering you video if you don't want to pay them or watch ads. I'm not sure what's contradictory here.
  - tomjakubowski 3y ago
    I think GP is just responding to your comment's premise that they have to propose any alternative, or that they have to "contribute" to YouTube in some way.
causality0 3y ago
I spent years having to click "No, I do not consent to creating a Google+ profile" every time I used YouTube so I refuse to give them money on principle.
kmbfjr 3y ago
Paying for the service replicates the cable TV industry. In order to get what I want and support, I end up supporting what I don’t want and don’t want to support. I am under ZERO obligation to watch advertising, that is the risk the industry takes. The ad industry has long ago tipped the scales in the trade of attention for content and now they resort to shaming the viewers into compliance. Everyone supporting the adblock countermeasures are hypocrites; as if they never went to the bathroom during a TV show commercial break.
Ylpertnodi 3y ago
>They're not a surprise. Ha! Try getting 10 minutes into this example and not bring surprised by a fucking pasta ad. https:// https://
13415 3y ago
Ads are very surprising to people who have been using ad blockers for decades. The web experience is totally different. On a side note, I stopped watching TV in the 90s and turned to "internet only" because ads were too annoying. It's weird that companies advertising with Google think people like me could potentially buy something based on ads.
etedor 3y ago
They are a surprise. They’re variable length and appear at random moments. Their volume can greatly differ from the content you are watching. No thanks. The proposed alternative is Google can continue to bankroll it. They are not hurting for money.
- IanCal 3y ago
  Your proposed alternative is that it's simply run at a loss? I don't think that's a particularly reasonable business proposal.
  - etedor 3y ago
    What makes you think Google is running at a loss?
    - missedthecue 3y ago
      He's talking about YouTube. If no one watches ads or pays for premium, how will YouTube make money?

martin_a 3y ago

Never forget that Adblock Plus is a commercial product developed by a company which you can pay to get your ads listed as "acceptable ads" which makes them pass the filtering. uBlock Origin is still probably the best tool for blocking ads: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/

hendersoon 3y ago
Indeed, and unlike the morally unacceptable Adblock Plus, uBlock Origin continues to work on YouTube ads, although you will have to manually update your filter lists every day or so.
breakall 3y ago
i love ublock origin and have used it for years. i recently migrated to macos and was disappointed to find that ublock origin doesn’t work with safari. what’s the best ad-blocking option for safari on macos?
- occz 3y ago
  Why not just use Firefox? It's available on macOS.
  - dharmab 3y ago
    Firefox has poor battery life on macos.
    - olex 3y ago
      That is a thing of distant past. It runs beautifully natively on M1/M2 chips and has no noticeable difference in power consumption vs Safari.
    - toyg 3y ago
      Not the case anymore, even on pre-M1 Macs.
  - deleted 3y ago

kouteiheika 3y ago

> We know how important it is for our users to browse YouTube without ads for free. And we hope to come up with a solution soon! No need to wait. Just switch to uBlock Origin where this is already fixed. Here's a guide if they still show up and you're using UBO: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/178yasm/youtube_antiadblock_and_ads_october_16_2023/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/178yasm/youtu... (Basically you need to make sure you're up to date, and you disable any overzealous filter lists or custom filters so that the anti-adblock detection doesn't get tripped.)

muro 3y ago
It costs about 15 per month to watch YouTube without ads.
- eur0pa 3y ago
  No thanks
- dchest 3y ago
  You can't buy YouTube Premium everywhere.
  - missedthecue 3y ago
    Is there any place where you can't buy it, yet you get ads?
    - dchest 3y ago
      Yes.
- randunel 3y ago
  It's my browser running on my computer, I get the final say in how content is presented to me.
  - 3y ago

AraceliHarker 3y ago

Google is desperate to display ads on YouTube. YouTube videos, even of poor quality, often rank highly in Google search results. This means that Google can double its profits by displaying ads on YouTube, in addition to its search advertising revenue.

echelon 3y ago
Google is too big. All of the giant tech companies are. This behavior is a symptom of reaching across industries in search of growth. Is there any reason a grocery store should be a movie studio? This sucks the air out of the room for smaller companies to innovate. Search would be much better if it wasn't being shoved down our throat by a single company that controls (or buys access to) all of the panes of glass Americans use to compute.
- izacus 3y ago
  Ok, so if Google is too big and YouTube is split away from Google... who exactly will pay for bandwidth, server and transcoder costs for all the adblocking freeloaders? If you ever tried to host videos yourself, you'll quickly see that it costs a stupid amount of money to manage. Why would a standalone YouTube LLC. allow anyone to access it with an adblocker and without subscription? (People seem to lose their mind on HN every time someone even tries to recommend something as ridicolous as paying for YouTube.)
  - RunningDroid 3y ago
    > If you ever tried to host videos yourself, you'll quickly see that it costs a stupid amount of money to manage. Why would a standalone YouTube LLC. allow anyone to access it with an adblocker and without subscription? Why would anyone host a peertube instance? https://instances.joinpeertube.org https://instances.joinpeertube.org
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > Ok, so if Google is too big and YouTube is split away from Google... who exactly will pay for bandwidth, server and transcoder costs for all the adblocking freeloaders? If a "business" can only exist when artificially propped up, should it exist? > People seem to lose their mind on HN every time someone even tries to recommend something as ridicolous as paying for YouTube. People on HN also regularly endorse Nebula, so it isn't paying that's the problem (if we pretend HN is a monolith).

lapcat 3y ago

[self-promotion] On iOS and macOS, StopTheMadness auto-skips YouTube video ads. https://underpassapp.com/news/2023-10-19.html https://underpassapp.com/news/2023-10-19.html

jshier 3y ago
Workable, I suppose, though it still plays a split second of the ad while the skip happens. Perhaps a pause (or mute?), skip, then resume might be possible?
- jdjdjdhhd 3y ago
  [dead]
vGPU 3y ago
Use this extension on iPhone. Worth the money. Prevents sites from disabling PiP video too.

tjpnz 3y ago

What value do advertisers get in losing a portion of their ad spend to those who are even less likely to engage? I would be curious to see what click through rates typically look like post this change.

michaelt 3y ago
People who advertise with Google are used to losing a decent portion of their ad spend to bot views. People who use ad blockers are at least human. And advertising to the guy who sees 100 adverts a day might have much higher impact than advertising to the guy who sees 1000. From Google's perspective, they want to get paid, so the more ads the better. If the advertisers, users and content creators don't like it, why would that matter to Google? The farmer doesn't care about the turkey's opinion on christmas.
wildrhythms 3y ago
For Youtube/Google it's a win-win: they can show advertisers that the ads that can't be hidden, and annoyed users will be more pressured to buy Premium to hide the ads.
voiceblue 3y ago
Afaict top of funnel ads don't need engagement, they are mostly to spread brand awareness and they influence you in ways other than immediate conversion. That seems to be what most Youtube ads are.

botanical 3y ago

It looks like YouTube's dark-pattern marketing strategy (highlighting the "Allow YouTube Ads" button), is they'd rather have you enable ads than pay for premium. They're getting too greedy with demonetising videos and still making money off of them, to the amount of ads they play; same goes for other streaming platforms. So far on Firefox with uBlock Origin I haven't come across it.

guraf 3y ago
What are you talking about? The vast majority of people would rather disable their adblocker on YouTube then subscribe and pay $15 a month... How is it a dark pattern for YouTube to suggest the most likely option?
lionkor 3y ago
They're doing A/B testing - I'm on firefox + uBlock and I get the full video blocking thing

quadrifoliate 3y ago

Honestly, the only product that can really compete with uBlockOrigin at this point is a version of AdNauseum for Youtube -- something that registers a click on every single ad that YouTube shows until it stops showing you more ads. There is currently no negative feedback for YouTube ads. They are free to show you ads every single minute if some manager there thinks that this will increase monetization by 1%. And no, paying for YouTube Premium isn't going to work; Amazon Prime Video was this way (I paid for it, and got ad-free shows in return), but they are now introducing "limited ads" that you will need to pay $3 extra a month for. The only reasonable negative feedback is to have too many clicks on ads, so the advertiser stops showing you them because the person paying for ads is not getting the desired clickthrough rate. The advertising industry likes to make up scary terms like "ad fraud" for this, but that's ridiculous -- a human can totally click an ad link and then make a decision not to engage further with the product. I do it all the time. Having an extension make that decision on my behalf would be fantastic.

rubatuga 3y ago
Interesting idea, is this the only recourse consumers have?
missedthecue 3y ago
Adnauseam clicks aren't charged to advertisers. Google's click tracker is smarter than that.

lionkor 3y ago

I get those complete blocks of youtube videos when I have any kind of adblocker. I'm not entirely sure how they detect an ad blocker? They could reasonably terminate my entire Google account for having settings that look like an ad blocker. Use piped.video and others to get around it, I guess? I can't afford YouTube premium, and the ads are usually offensive, sometimes inappropriate, and never something I would buy or use. Im subscribed to around 950 channels so I have all the reason to stay, but this weird invasive behavior is inappropriate and I'm not sure I care enough about the entertainment value.