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YouTube will "lose" the war, but they'll make adblocking difficult enough for a while that it might get some premium subscribers in the short term in exchange f

• jimmaswell 3y ago
  They haven't lost any good will from me. I don't feel entitled to use an ad supported service for free without the ads. Personally I've been paying for premium for a while and I find it worth it.
  • meiraleal 3y ago
    > I don't feel entitled to use an ad supported service for free without the ads So don't watch things for free. Many people think that if a company is giving things for free you are not obligated to pay them in any way. The company can stop it if they can't afford anymore.
  • bluescrn 3y ago
    Did you always watch the ads on live TV? you never changed the channels, muted it, went to the loo, or fast-forwarded through the ads when you'd recorded something to VHS? Ad-avoidance is hardly a new thing. And as ads have got increasingly obnoxious and untrustworthy, ad-avoidance technology has inevitably become more popular.
• Analemma_ 3y ago
  If you're neither paying YouTube any money nor watching their ads, meaning you're a pure money sink, why should they care about your goodwill?
  • hanniabu 3y ago
    That viewpoint will extend to others
  • CuriouslyC 3y ago
    If I'm referring thousands of people to YouTube, and I stop doing that while simultaneously joining the chorus of anti-YT sentiment on the internet, their bottom line should care.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • jamespo 3y ago
      good job you're not doing that then!
    • xboxnolifes 3y ago
      At this point I don't think anyone over the age of 3 doesn't know what YouTube is. I don't think much referring is happening by you.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • hombre_fatal 3y ago
      Wow, someone actually playing the "you won't get a dime from me because you'll get something more valuable: exposure!" card against Youtube.
  • willk 3y ago
    I'd guess those people have friends that they share videos and shorts with. Those people might want to pay for premium or watch ads.
    • Analemma_ 3y ago
      This is precisely isomorphic to the logic of not paying freelancers because "you're getting exposure", which every freelancer knows is bullshit.
      • sroussey 3y ago
        Reminds me of DJT stuffing his caterer for his wedding — “but you will be able to tell potential clients that you catered my wedding!” — which was no help at all when she had to pay bills for the food and staff.
  • frebdo 3y ago
    Because you're an active user and thus help make the site "popular". We're seeing on Twitter what happens when management starts ignoring this basic logic of the internet.
    • adrr 3y ago
      Twitter pissed off their advertisers by pulling back content moderation. That is their biggest problem in terms of cash flow.
      • hotnfresh 3y ago
        They're currently forcing logged-in users to share screenshots if they want to share something with non-logged-in friends and preserve any context whatsoever (you can no longer see replies, or what a xit was in response to, if you're not logged in—all you can see is a single xit). Search also doesn't work anymore if you're not logged in, and if you visit a user's page, their xits are ordered by some even-more-nonsensical-than-usual algo that puts years-old xits near the top. The site's basically totally unusable if you don't have an account. This may be making some metric (account signups, presumably?) go up, but sure seems risky to me.
    • jsnell 3y ago
      On Twitter and Reddit, the users most affected were also the people providing most value to the platform (tweets, reddit submissions, discussion, moderation). They're fairly symmetric platforms. On YT, the people providing the value are the content creators. That is the same content creators who get a revenue share from ads and premium. They're the ones who benefit the most from blocking ad blockers. The people watching videos with ad blockers (and sponsor block)? They're not providing anything in exchange, to the platform or the creators.
  • sircastor 3y ago
    Nobody using the site is a pure money sink. Every video watched, in what order, on what topics, is data contributed to the machine. The fact that you’re blocking ads is even useful information.
  • meiraleal 3y ago
    That's the price they pay for being ubiquitous. The alternative is to lose a good % of their userbase to a competitor that can make a better use of this audience.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    I occasionally buy content from Youtube (primarily complete episodes of various series, occasionally a movie or movie rental).
  • serf 3y ago
    a) there is no such user that is a pure money sink. Even without a subscription and all the ad blockers in the world they're still leaving a valuable data trail. b) YT is a propaganda engine, too. It serves that end to allow nearly-unlimited membership.
• pstuart 3y ago
  After luxuriating in an ad-free YouTube it was shocking coming back to the "real world" -- too many, too often, and of no interest (and with all the info Google has on me?!) Brave Browser has been great so far...
• crimsontech 3y ago
  I paid for premium for a while but had to use scripts to block the “other people watched” and other junk like shorts showing in my search results. Eventually I stopped my subscription and used adblockers instead. I use YouTube to search for videos on subjects I want to watch, but it seems that Google want YouTube to be like a TV channel where you just turn it on and watch what they show you.
  • dylan604 3y ago
    No TV channel that I've watched has stopped a few minutes into a program and asked me if I was still watching requiring interaction for the content to continue playing. Ever.
• Shekelphile 3y ago
  I don't think they will lose. The average luddite doesn't care about seeing ads and will look perplexed at you if you tell them about ad blockers. Other services injecting ads into video streams have already been 'winning' for years. Ultimately youtube will push the envelope until even the people paying for premium will be seeing ads and savvy people will move on to pre-downloading videos and stripping ads from them before watching or similar janky solutions.
  • ls612 3y ago
    I suspect it’ll be like Twitch where they tried hard for a while and then stopped because of the diminishing returns. YouTube will probably shake out everyone who doesn’t really understand tech and then find they are spending the same amount for less gains. And then the situation will stabilize again.
    • crop_rotation 3y ago
      Where did twitch stop? Unless you do more and more custom shenanigans, uBlock origin has not blocked twitch ads for a long long time, and the ads are extremely repetitive.
      • ls612 3y ago
        You just use one script to block the ads. They used to work around that script all the time in 2021 but it has been stable for over a year now.
• adrr 3y ago
  It’s streaming, YouTube can just embed the ads directly into the stream.
  • mhh__ 3y ago
    The youtube client I use is able skip (some) mid roll ads.
  • buggeryorkshire 3y ago
    It's not Twitch, video is encoded in advance in various formats for different devices. Embedding the ads into the stream is pretty difficult.
    • chii 3y ago
      It's not uncharted territory. It's just more expensive comput-wise, and I expect google to make that calculation to conclude it's not worth the cost yet. But compute costs could drop, and change the equation.
      • rstuart4133 3y ago
        It's not just compute. It's storage, and network costs too. Right now they can cache the ads and video next to the user. But Google likes to target ads at particular users, in fact they formalised this in FLoC. In FLoC (since renamed to Topics API and now shipping in Chrome) groupings of users are called cohorts. There are lots of cohorts, eg: male / female, baby boomer / gen-Y / gen-Z / millennial, parents / single, religious / secular, conservative / liberal, income range. An ad might be targeted at a specific combination, such as conservative male parent. But there are a lot of possible combinations. Not 10's but 100's. This means you have to produce version of the video that targets each possible combination, and that in turn means your storage, network and computer costs balloon by 100's. It's a big number. They avoid it by having the browser doing the mixing. I can't see that changing.
  • pasttense01 3y ago
    They don't want to show the same ads to everybody: they maximize their advertising income when they show different ads to different people depending on what people are interested in and buy.
• blindseer 3y ago
  I think YouTube will "win" this war, unfortunately. Even people that "join" individual channels cannot watch content from those channels if they use AdBlock. At some point these people are either going to buy premium or turn off the ad-blocker. It boggles my mind that engineers and managers that have kids and are working on the YouTube team think this is okay and this is what the future of the platform should look like. It's the beginning of the end of an era, and I'm immensely sad to see what the internet has become and where it is heading.
  • crimsontech 3y ago
    > At some point these people are either going to buy premium or turn off the ad-blocker. Or they stop going to YouTube. In the past 12mo my use of these platforms has reduced a huge amount. I no longer visit Twitter or Reddit because they blocked 3rd party apps, forcing me to view adverts, I would rather not be a user on a user hostile platform. Deep down, most of us know these are huge time sinks providing very little real value to ours lives so it doesn’t take much friction added by the platform to make people turn away from their bad habits.
    • tapoxi 3y ago
      What's the viable alternative to YouTube? Tiktok?
      • taftster 3y ago
        There are no good alternatives. There's literally no place left to get good topical or technical content without just loads of crap to go with it. It's either a very depressing thing, or maybe an opportunity, depending on how rose colored your glasses are.
      • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        Various channels mirror their content to Nebula (also a pay platform, but with premium features), Odysee, Rumble, and yeah Tiktok.
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• dotnet00 3y ago
  I think this is a bit backward in that the reason they're having to force it and facing resistance in the first place is that they've burned a ton of goodwill over the years through increasing ads, refusing to fix their DMCA process and letting their AI run rampant banning and demonetizing people at random with almost no way of actually talking to a human. It's also kind of interesting to see people acting like it's entitled for people to be mad that the service that drove most other early competitors out by showing unsustainably low ads is now bait and switching by showing increasingly more ads. There's a reason there are more smaller competitors starting to pop up as YouTube has burned through leftover goodwill.
• repelsteeltje 3y ago
  Let's start by looking at YouTube's incentives: * don't waste infrastructure on freeloaders * convince advertisers audience is seeing the ads they pay for The content is free in the sense Google pays (close to) nothing and in the sense that creators can go to a different platform (as long as viewers come too). Cost centers are data centers, bandwidth and labour maintaining the platform. Wrt. the latter, I would estimate the anti ad blocker stuff has significant costs, but isn't eating into the dev cycle in an existential way yet. At some point they might be in trouble. Anyone have an idea when?
• a257 3y ago
  What makes you think that Youtube will "lose"? From a technical perspective, they have been rather conservative in their efforts so far. It can get so much worse, they could bake ads directly into the video stream or automatically randomize their API. Don't forget that Google also owns Chrome, which by its dominance over the market can be used to effectuate DRM (such as widevine, or web integrity). They also own the Chrome Web Store, and they can ban any extensions that bypass Youtube ads (they already ban extensions with the ability to download Youtube videos, strangely they allow downloaders for any other site). Google has a lot of money, and a lot of fingers in critically important pies, to make their wishes a reality should they deem to do so.
  • CuriouslyC 3y ago
    Pirates and crackers have won every single time in the history of BigCo vs BlackHat. The more draconian and clever google gets, the more talented hackers are drawn to the cause of defeating them, and the more motivated people become to spite them. The only winning move is not to play.
    • a257 3y ago
      Depends on what you consider winning. Consider that out of the 20% of internet users that have adblock today, only a fraction will be willing to turn to illicit means should Google get serious, especially if it requires anything more complicated than installing an extension. Also keep in mind that pirate groups are able to crack L1 Widevine only because some companies let the keys slip in a breach. The keys are burned as soon as they are discovered, making it impractical to disseminate them for public use. It's only because individual movies/tv shows have a high enough value (versus the cost of cracking it, the risk of your keys being burned) that pirate groups are able to thrive. This wouldn't work well with Youtube as it's value is primarily derived from having a large quantity of content. I don't think many people would be willing to pay per Youtube video as they do for a movie.
    • nvm0n2 3y ago
      No they haven't. Consoles are the clearest example of where they lost, but also how frequently do new jailbreaks for modern iPhones appear? Big tech can afford well paid security teams and uBlock Origin is a bunch of frustrated volunteers who are quitting now they're facing serious resistance for the first time. And Google haven't even exhausted 5% of their options.