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YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

152 points by jdblair 3y ago

not_your_vase 3y ago
Google and Cloudflare pretty much rules at least 98% of the internet. If they don't want you to see something, then you won't see it. Welcome to this brave new world. Though to be fair, it didn't start now. But in the past years people were cheering for the random blocks and removals. The article seems to concentrate on adblockers mostly, but it is even more interesting which news, topics and conversations (etc) reach you, and which ones are not. Google wanting you to see ads isn't too surprising. Google not wanting you to see reporting not fitting their agenda (even if you watch all ads coming with it) is much more interesting.
- deleted 3y ago
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- scubbo 3y ago
  How can Cloudflare prevent content from being seen? If they stop providing CDN support for a given service, there are plenty of other CDNs - the content is just as accessible to consumers if provided via a different CDN. By contrast, if Google delists something from search results, it becomes much harder to discover - and thus, to be consumed (by the average moderately-motivated customer, not to the dedicated person willing to navigate directly to a domain)
  - not_your_vase 3y ago
    Oh, Cloudflare is much more than CDN. Their DNS routing, internet backbone and DDoS protection has much more powerful effect. Most of the internet traffic touches them one way or another (random internet stats say close to 80%). Sure, you can switch CDN, but most of the world will be able to access your site through IP address only, and/or the site will be DDoS'd in a matter of minutes if CF hints that you are the "bad guy du jour". (Do you remember, like 3 or 4 years ago when CF CEO was bragging all over the internet with "oh, today I woke up, and decided to kick off x and y from the internet, lol"? And he really did. It still happens, but without the bragging)
    - scubbo 3y ago
      TIL, thank you! Yup, DNS delisting would be an even greater impact than Google delisting. > Do you remember, like 3 or 4 years ago when CF CEO was bragging all over the internet with "oh, today I woke up, and decided to kick off x and y from the internet, lol"? I do not! And if I did, I would have had a much better idea what you were talking about :)
illegalmemory 3y ago
One good thing that has come out of this is that I have reduced my time on YouTube to nearly zero in the past two weeks.
- bdw5204 3y ago
  Ever since Youtube killed Vanced a few months ago, I've pretty much reduced my time on that web site to NFL Sunday Ticket. If it becomes impossible to watch that without disabling an adblocker, I'll cancel it, save about $450 or so a year and find other ways to watch the Ravens in Philly like I used to do when Sunday Ticket was exclusive to DirecTV.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  Maybe that's exactly what YT wants—get rid of users who won't pay to save costs. I know some banks also do this.
- hugocbp 3y ago
  Same. I personally end up enjoying those user-hostile changes when they happen because they almost always result in my own time spent on those platforms decreasing. I've basically left Twitter after recent changes. Reddit is down to a fraction of what used to be a couple years ago (too aggressive on mobile, I just give up reading it). YouTube was one thing that I used a lot, not always for productive or educational videos. I'll probably just watch a YouTube video from now on when it is really something interesting. Which is good.
- Krasnol 3y ago
  Another good thing is that they're getting even more people to use proper adblocking addons and browsers.
deleted 3y ago
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dixie_land 3y ago
Ironically the first thing I see on this article about adblocker is a pop up
- redder23 3y ago
  Yeah, and it's completely empty for me because the ad inside that huge popup is blocked.
- joecot 3y ago
  I have an ad blocker and it didn't stop me, but I got 2/3rds of the way down the page before it stopped me and said I had to join to read the rest. Basically the same sort of tactics that they're complaining about Youtube using.
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    I found that funny.
JohnMakin 3y ago
Honestly this wouldn't be an issue if youtube's ads weren't such a completely offensive and miserable experience. When they first started pushing ad-free subscriptions to youtube I first noticed the ads got EXTREMELY aggressive and over time seem to not really have got better, only worse. Skip around the video too much? Ad. Skip too many in a row? Congrats, now you have a long-form unskippable ad. I haven't been bothered to measure it but you can't really watch much more than a minute of youtube without being served obnoxious ads. The user experience is terrible and it felt so much that I was being harassed into buying a subscription that I resolved to never do so. Adblockers are a logical response to such hostile behavior towards users.
- duxup 3y ago
  The ads are terrible. I've gotten a bunch of gross out sorta visual ads... who oked that? Also a bunch of really weird conspiracy theory type products. Like dude a hat that protects me from "brain fuzz" because it has effect on EM or something ... wtf? Having said that it's easy to complain about how terrible they are but I don't think the ads sucking is as much an issue as that people just don't like ads... don't want to pay.
- ljm 3y ago
  I think the worst part is how poorly curated they are. It's not an advert when your playlist is interrupted by 'ads' that go from several minutes to several hours long, meaning you always have to be aware of when to skip them. I like to leave YT stuff on in the background and it's amazingly disruptive when it's interrupted by 30 minutes of some shitty mumble rap music video/ad, or some obscure London mayoral candidate delivering an 8 minute long speech.
tekla 3y ago
I'm happy to pay for services and a Ad free YT experience.
- MBCook 3y ago
  Same. I keep seeing the discourse recently and it’s all framed as if only two options exist: People can use ad blockers, or Google can block them and annoy people. There is a very good third option for people: pay for the (expensive due to bandwidth) service you’re using and you see no ads. And Google won’t block it because it’s encouraged as the solution to this exact issue. The level of “I should get everything for free with no ads” entitlement is only getting worse. I get the ads suck and many sites have an unreasonable level of them. But if the only two options are give everything away for free or put everything behind a paywall, the internet as everyone knows it is dead.
  - iforgotpassword 3y ago
    I wouldn't mind the ads if the amount were reasonable, which was the case maybe even as recently as a year ago. But having a 30 second ad before a 5 second meme video is beyond ridiculous. While I don't think the price of premium is too high, I'll never ever actively give Google even a single cent. One forever blocked Google account and too many killed services have burned that bridge for me.
  - rpgbr 3y ago
    Alphabet profited nearly USD 20 billion last quarter. Not revenue; net profit. I'm pretty sure they can afford airing less ads per video watched without any damage to their bottomline. So… sorry, but there's a third, better way. The problem is: it doesn't work in a late capitalist environment where Google/Alphabet and all public trade companies operate.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - itsoktocry 3y ago
      >I'm pretty sure they can afford I'm pretty sure you can afford to give away a huge chunk of your earnings, too. Do you? How much earnings are "fair"?
thanatropism 3y ago
YouTube may have peaked as the outstanding source of impressively high quality content on a very wide range of topics about 3-5 weeks ago; possibly with Horses' guide on surviving in a desert island. It's still so, so good. --- I remember a film of Salvador Dali talking to a cheering crowd and saying in full dictator voice "... in the future... toilet bowls will be made of gold..." (roaring crowd). That's what's happened to the internet at large.
- bt4u 3y ago
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nwellinghoff 3y ago
I think it would be better if they made the video author choose the ad points in their video rather than having it happen automatically. Maybe it gets bypassed if you move forward in the video or whatever. But its the ad just fires off in the middle of sentence or something that is crazy annoying.
- ljm 3y ago
  Do they not do that? I remember watching one or two videogamedunkey videos that included ads and he specifically scripted the video around when they would appear.
  - somethingreen 3y ago
    I believe both options are available. But inserting ads manually is more work on content creator's part, so they often use algo provided.
  - 0xfae 3y ago
    I think the creator can do that, so some use it creatively. Otherwise, the algorithm seems to pick the "most rewatched" places, so the most interesting part of the video will be interrupted by an ad, regardless of how jarring it is for the viewer.
  - royalsand 3y ago
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cjbgkagh 3y ago
YouTube is an addiction for me and this crackdown has been very helpful for me to break the addiction. Youtube has gotten worse since the algorithm went from rewarding short content to rewarding long content so there has been a flood of mediocre content - at least it's not facebook. Eventually I'll set up an auto-download system for the few shows I already like and am already a patreon for.
- dieselgate 3y ago
  There are so many ads it's pretty self-regulating for me
PedroBatista 3y ago
It's amazing to me how Google is allowed to control every side of the market with no real repercussions. I don't want to be the cynic who says Google has been paying lots of money to "the right people" in order to keep the status quo, but.. Google has been paying lots of money.. That might be a moderate huge win for Firefox.. until someone at Google makes a phone call to Mozilla's offices. Worst case scenario it helps me consume less YT videos which would be a huge win for me.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Regarding YouTube specifically: bandwidth is still an issue. It's nontrivial to stand up a service that can provide storage and reliable streaming of video, and the costs impact directly upon the provider. So it's an ecosystem where competition is risky (and if someone succeeds too well, Alphabet can just buy and squash them).
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  Why are you consuming any YT videos, then? Why are so many people feel entitled to YT videos without ads?
  - dixie_land 3y ago
    No one is entitled to YT videos without ads. But at the same time, Google is not entitled to dictate how my user agent renders a page, locally, on my own computer. I'd have no problem if google just inject ads directly into the video streams. ( by which time, equally I'm entitled to configure my own video player to skip whichever frames I want )
    - zdragnar 3y ago
      If allowing ads is part of the terms of their service for non-paying users, then they are in fact free to not grant you access to the video feed. It's still shitty, but this isn't a thing where you can have your cake and eat it too.
Workaccount2 3y ago
It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust. I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Even going so far as believing they have a right to free lemonade...
- yifanl 3y ago
  Well, you can't pay for Youtube. You can pay for a bundle of some mostly unrelated products that's named Youtube Premium, or you can live with an insanely degraded product experience on Youtube, but you can't pay for Youtube.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    YouTube Premium is ad-free YouTube. That's literally "paying for YouTube". But it sure seems that you're trying to rationalize your unwillingness to pay for something and it does sound very entitled.
    - yifanl 3y ago
      Am I paying for an ad-free Youtube or a Spotify competitor? I'm not at all confident the money I'd be paying is going to the creators of the videos, or even feature development of the main Youtube platform.
      - JAlexoid 3y ago
        Creators get the income from views, with any copyrighted material licensing subtracted and a cut to YouTube. But no one is forcing you to use YouTube, it's just way more accessible for any content creator that can't spend weeks in getting a commercial license for music and such. But I have good news for you. Many creators have Patreons, that serves video.
    - 3y ago
foobarian 3y ago
Youtube has been a fantastic demonstration of how valuable it can be to enable democratized, low-barrier-to-entry content publishing. Think of how much treasure there is on the service, with millions upon millions of hours of educational, informative, or archival content, all published and viewable for free, with incredible reliability and availability. Of course this is also fantastically expensive to build and maintain; I believe that we have been fortunate that Google's ad business was willing to subsidize it for us for so long with so little required in return. Unfortunately it appears that possibly the screws are getting turned, and there is less appetite for the subsidy. In a better, more utopian timeline I imagine an equivalent service supported by taxpayers or nonprofit means. Just how the 1900s gave us the public library system, imagine if the 2000s give us a video platform without for-profit encumbrances - what a world it would be!
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  What screws are really being turned though? This content is still available completely free of charge to anyone with an internet connection. You just need to watch a couple of ads if you're not willing to pay.
  - thot_experiment 3y ago
    The problem is you can't just tape the shows and fast forward through the ads etc, or at least that's the direction things are going, it's a very very bad precedent.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - mvdtnz 3y ago
      How do you suggest creators are paid and infrastructure is maintained in your ideal world? And don't say people will donate because we all know that's BS.
      - thot_experiment 3y ago
redder23 3y ago
Just know this, and it becomes somewhat clear in this article. Adblock Plus is a SCAM! Their founder (or key person, not remember) made his money with scam "free SMS (texts)" websites and has a very shady past. They invented their "acceptable ads" that are ENABLED BY DEFAULT, were totally silent about the fact that they basically blackmailed advertisers to let them pay money to get on their whitelist and scam users into this "acceptable ads" scam BY DEFAULT and show them ads. Acceptable ads are the WORST ads, that are the ads that flow with the text, that are not obtrusive and not as annoying and therefore the most effective ads actually for me, I would say. Like they said, Google paid them back in the days to get on their whitelist, they were eventually forced to make their shady backroom deals public and do this shit in the open. DO NOT USE Adblock Plus ever, even if it has a checkbox to block all ads, they operate an adblocker to make money by showing people ads, you can not make this shit up. Most disgusting scam. Use uBlock Origin. Or use Brave, but they are not up to speed with the current YT thing, but their adblocker is written in Rust I think and based/inspired by UBO. Would be interesting to know if it also suffers from this "mistake" that unloaded tabs let requests go through while UBO is loading that happens in Chrome but not in Firefox. I guess not as it's integrated at the core of the browser.
plz-remove-card 3y ago
The ads on Youtube have really become unbearable though. I tried to watch a podcast on my tablet, while I was preparing dinner using bluetooth headphones and couldn't readily skip ads or fast forward the video. I was subjected to at least 3 youtube ads and maybe an equal amount of ads from the youtuber themselves it was absurd. Even if I were to pay for an add-free youtube experience, it only culls half the ads in that case!
reisse 3y ago
Not really related, but one can always use a VPN with exit node in Russia instead of ad blocker. It still puzzles me what was their motivation to disable ads in Russia after the conflict began.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
Has anyone here successfully used a CDN + self-hosted videos & players to avoid YouTube? Thoughts?
endisneigh 3y ago
At the end of the day people just don’t want to pay: ad blockers, piracy, etc. Of course people will whine when you stop them from getting stuff for free.
- preciousoo 3y ago
  I don’t think that’s true. The Netflix model proved that a good UX is preferable, and now every media org is trying to cash in. Piracy usually gets a boom when said media orgs start optimizing for cash in exchange for UX
- TremendousJudge 3y ago
  Google created the youtube "moat" by giving away the service for free for 15 years. In that time, an actually good, sustainable, paid video service could have emerged and everybody would be ok with it. Instead we got current Youtube, with its inescrutable algorithmic feed, content restrictions, and demonetization rules, and Google are asking us to pay for that with the argument that nothing else like it exists. Of course it doesn't, it couldn't exist since free Youtube was in the way.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    Nothing is stopping a paid service now.
  - iowemoretohim 3y ago
    But it hasn't been free for 15 years. There's been ads on YouTube since 2009 (14 years). The narrative you are trying to paint is built on an incorrect premise.
jjcm 3y ago
I'm fine with them blocking adblockers now that they offer a no-ad paid tier. I think it's likely healthy for consumers to know they have to pay one way or another. What I'm really curious about though is whether competitors can do the same - can a YouTube rival today launch with anti-adblockers and a paid tier and compete? This might be a barrier to entry that's too high for your day to day consumers, especially for a new platform. I'm not sure what the solution is here (aside from kickstarting with VC funded free tiers and pivoting later once users are hooked, which feels bad), but I hope at the very least that the general population adjusts to this "ad or paid" future that we seem to be heading in.
anm89 3y ago
The google shills are out in force in this thread
grishka 3y ago
Living in Russia does have its benefits — since YouTube premium isn't available, and no ads are shown to Russian users anyway, I only watch this unfold from afar without experiencing it first-hand.
crop_rotation 3y ago
I think sadly there are no good solutions here. YouTube did a very very good job of hosting videos for everyone, and for a long long time didn't care about adblock or ytdl. All that might be fine if relatively few people used it (hence ytdl type tools were cli only and not some flashy GUI). But the usage of adblockers is rising (for all the good reasons, modern web with ads is horrible), so YouTube needs to do this at some point. They can't wait till adblocker usage is >50% since then it would be near impossible. YouTube premium exists, and is very good value. And hosting videos is really expensive, e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/15/22979126/vimeo-patreon-creators-price-increase https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/15/22979126/vimeo-patreon-cr.... Sadly what might happen in the end in the far future is youtube usable only with a login and with some kind of a subscription/one off transfer or ads. Some kind of netflix type solution, which is worse for everyone but hard to complain about.
Animats 3y ago
Google could go further. The next step is listening on the microphone to make sure the audio from the ad is coming out. Then using the user's camera to pause an ad if the user isn't looking at it.
lacoolj 3y ago
"Help us pay for the services we provide or don't use them" Why is this a strange message for everyone to digest? Ads pay for the content you watch, or your subscription fee covers it. Getting mad at the ad-blocking avoidance is like getting mad you can't walk into Disney Land without a park pass.
- scubbo 3y ago
  > Why is this a strange message for everyone to digest? Because the services were previously provided for free, and the bait-and-switch feels bad; and because the perception (admittedly inaccurate) is there is no service being provided, that the content is what is paid for (the average consumer has no conception of the costs involved in storage, transmission, recommendation, content auditing, legal compliance, etc.)
  - acdha 3y ago
    They were never free: you might have broken your end of the agreement but they’ve been ad supported since the 2000s.
MarkusWandel 3y ago
It's their toy and they can pick it up and go home with it (i.e. Google and Youtube). Network TV got so annoyingly ad infested that I gave up on it in 1998 or so, never to return. Others soldiered on with record-and-then-clip solutions (TiVO). Record-and-clip would work with Youtube too. The adblocker "watches" the whole video, ads and all, and then when it has enough buffered up plays back the clipped version to you. Traditionally this would be defeated by wiring the ads into the content so seamlessly that the blocker can't find them automatically. But here, Google already has the next thing up their sleave, the WEI thing, whereby they can just deny service altogether that is not an approved, unmodified web browser. My personal tolerance threshold is watching about 30 seconds of preroll ads. But when the midroll ads come in every few minutes, I'm getting close to the "quit network TV" thing again. Of course back then there was Pay TV, and now there is Youtube subscription. Some will find it worth paying for it, others will just walk away and maybe their lives will be better for it.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  I was watching some free Tubi programming (on someone's smart TV) and they seem to do really well with ad placement. More at the beginning and end and the midway ads seem to come at good pause points for a bit longer but less frequent interruptions. I ended up watching quite a bit, taking bathroom breaks or getting drinks the old fashioned way. Their content unlike Netflix isn't the most popular titles which most everyone's already seen, but lesser known but still a curiosity to someone like me.
VohuMana 3y ago
I feel like Google shot themselves in the foot a long time ago on this front. This is all based on my experience, I sometimes follow along with some cooking YT videos to try new things, for awhile the ads were not that bad usually a couple 5-15s ads at the beginning and maybe some in the middle for a longer video. I would say a few years back they totally killed that for me because multiple times I would get hour long ads advertising the first episode of some show coming out, sure I could skip it but as I was actively cooking this meant I had to wash my hands to click the skip ads button which made for an extremely frustrating experience. The worst part is clicking skip ads didn't seem to exempt me from seeing hour long ads later in the video. Needless to say between that and getting 4+ ad blocks in a 5 minute video pushed me to just block ads on devices I can and not watch videos on devices I can't. For me what all of this is going to do is change how I consume videos. Not all content creators do this but I would much rather use YouTube with ads as a sample of the content you're creating and then pay you some percentage of the money I would use to pay for YT Premium for access to your videos outside of YouTube.
DueDilligence 3y ago
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holysantamaria 3y ago
I think everyone should pay for Youtube Premium, there should be no free tiers. And we should ban sponsorship too, a creator should be banned if the content is sponsored. It lowers the quality of the content, the user experience and, worse imo, introduces biasis and conflict of interests. Also mandatoring a paid plan could help get rid of all those scam bots. Also creators could get paid more if everyone was a Premium user. There is no free lunch. At some point you have to pay people for their work. Not paying is slavery. Either pay with your attention span or pay with money to get an adless experience. The Premium plan gives you more features (and a music streaming that would cost you 10$ in and of itself if you were to use another music streaming service). I am glad Youtube takes this issue seriously.
arrakeen 3y ago
i was a YouTube Premium subscriber ever since i was grandfathered in with the closure of Play Music up until last month. every single new feature worsened my experience until i couldn't take it anymore and cancelled. i gave feedback with every new feature and trial but i never got a reply and things just kept getting worse and worse. the worst offenders: * forcing Music content in my YouTube feeds -- i use YouTube solely for videos and Music for music. even so, i would say around 1/2 of the items on my YouTube feed are music and useless playlists. you cannot turn this off * forcing Shorts down my throat -- i'm sure their numbers shows huge engagement numbers with Shorts but it's the exact opposite kind of content i use YouTube for. i watch longer-form videos, not short form clips. they show up in my feed, in my search results, and i'm pretty sure one time i was A/B'd into the app launching into Shorts by default. you cannot turn this off * Search is abysmally bad -- for each query, it will return 2 or 3 videos maybe possibly related to all synonyms of all the words in my query OR'd together, followed by unrelated Shorts, followed by completely unrelated videos i've already watched, followed by completely unrelated videos with inappropriate clickbait thumbnails, and on and on and on. you cannot turn this off * did i mention they were forcing Shorts down my throat? because the straw that broke the camel's back was when they informed me that they were introducing Music Shorts. as if the playlistification of music listening turning music into muzak weren't bad enough, now we have Shorts which incentivize yet another race-to-the-bottom for music. i understand my music listening preferences do not match those of the masses, but there's no way i can turn it off. for those reason and plenty more i don't feel like typing out, google can lick my asshole. adblock forever.
- hightrix 3y ago
  The most frustrating part, for me, is that Google Play Music was the perfect music streaming service. It just worked.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Controls "the Internet"? Rather it shows how many of you are addicted to YouTube and free content
joak 3y ago
Hey why everyone thinks it's legitimate to pay for content? So if you are poor, access to content should be denied to you? Most of the people on the internet are poor accessing youtube with $40 smartphones. They cannot pay premium, why send them ads? What's the point? Make them waste their precious time and bandwidth?
friend_and_foe 3y ago
https://archive.ph/oOv5l https://archive.ph/oOv5l
fgomez209 3y ago
The idea of a company forcing me to watch something that I don't want to watch, and telling me what software can or cannot run in my own computer goes well beyond 1984 and all those dystopias.
nojvek 3y ago
I pay for YouTube. Although they jacked up price from $9.99 to $17.99 with 0 difference in offering. I know the latest cool post pandemic is to keep on jacking up price until you see churn but that really rubbed me off. It felt very fuck-you-pay-me! Google has a huge monopoly and I’m sure they can double the price without losing much customers since they’re the big game in town. Unfortunately I ended up cancelling Netflix and Disney to make up for it. Perhaps this is the game they’re all playing. I only got a fixed dollars per month to spend on entertainment and each one wants to get it all at the loss of others.

152 points by jdblair 3y ago

Google and Cloudflare pretty much rules at least 98% of the internet. If they don't want you to see something, then you won't see it. Welcome to this brave new world. Though to be fair, it didn't start now. But in the past years people were cheering for the random blocks and removals. The article seems to concentrate on adblockers mostly, but it is even more interesting which news, topics and conversations (etc) reach you, and which ones are not. Google wanting you to see ads isn't too surprising. Google not wanting you to see reporting not fitting their agenda (even if you watch all ads coming with it) is much more interesting.

deleted 3y ago
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scubbo 3y ago
How can Cloudflare prevent content from being seen? If they stop providing CDN support for a given service, there are plenty of other CDNs - the content is just as accessible to consumers if provided via a different CDN. By contrast, if Google delists something from search results, it becomes much harder to discover - and thus, to be consumed (by the average moderately-motivated customer, not to the dedicated person willing to navigate directly to a domain)
- not_your_vase 3y ago
  Oh, Cloudflare is much more than CDN. Their DNS routing, internet backbone and DDoS protection has much more powerful effect. Most of the internet traffic touches them one way or another (random internet stats say close to 80%). Sure, you can switch CDN, but most of the world will be able to access your site through IP address only, and/or the site will be DDoS'd in a matter of minutes if CF hints that you are the "bad guy du jour". (Do you remember, like 3 or 4 years ago when CF CEO was bragging all over the internet with "oh, today I woke up, and decided to kick off x and y from the internet, lol"? And he really did. It still happens, but without the bragging)
  - scubbo 3y ago
    TIL, thank you! Yup, DNS delisting would be an even greater impact than Google delisting. > Do you remember, like 3 or 4 years ago when CF CEO was bragging all over the internet with "oh, today I woke up, and decided to kick off x and y from the internet, lol"? I do not! And if I did, I would have had a much better idea what you were talking about :)

illegalmemory 3y ago

One good thing that has come out of this is that I have reduced my time on YouTube to nearly zero in the past two weeks.

bdw5204 3y ago
Ever since Youtube killed Vanced a few months ago, I've pretty much reduced my time on that web site to NFL Sunday Ticket. If it becomes impossible to watch that without disabling an adblocker, I'll cancel it, save about $450 or so a year and find other ways to watch the Ravens in Philly like I used to do when Sunday Ticket was exclusive to DirecTV.
behnamoh 3y ago
Maybe that's exactly what YT wants—get rid of users who won't pay to save costs. I know some banks also do this.
hugocbp 3y ago
Same. I personally end up enjoying those user-hostile changes when they happen because they almost always result in my own time spent on those platforms decreasing. I've basically left Twitter after recent changes. Reddit is down to a fraction of what used to be a couple years ago (too aggressive on mobile, I just give up reading it). YouTube was one thing that I used a lot, not always for productive or educational videos. I'll probably just watch a YouTube video from now on when it is really something interesting. Which is good.
Krasnol 3y ago
Another good thing is that they're getting even more people to use proper adblocking addons and browsers.

deleted 3y ago

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dixie_land 3y ago

Ironically the first thing I see on this article about adblocker is a pop up

redder23 3y ago
Yeah, and it's completely empty for me because the ad inside that huge popup is blocked.
joecot 3y ago
I have an ad blocker and it didn't stop me, but I got 2/3rds of the way down the page before it stopped me and said I had to join to read the rest. Basically the same sort of tactics that they're complaining about Youtube using.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  I found that funny.

JohnMakin 3y ago

Honestly this wouldn't be an issue if youtube's ads weren't such a completely offensive and miserable experience. When they first started pushing ad-free subscriptions to youtube I first noticed the ads got EXTREMELY aggressive and over time seem to not really have got better, only worse. Skip around the video too much? Ad. Skip too many in a row? Congrats, now you have a long-form unskippable ad. I haven't been bothered to measure it but you can't really watch much more than a minute of youtube without being served obnoxious ads. The user experience is terrible and it felt so much that I was being harassed into buying a subscription that I resolved to never do so. Adblockers are a logical response to such hostile behavior towards users.

duxup 3y ago
The ads are terrible. I've gotten a bunch of gross out sorta visual ads... who oked that? Also a bunch of really weird conspiracy theory type products. Like dude a hat that protects me from "brain fuzz" because it has effect on EM or something ... wtf? Having said that it's easy to complain about how terrible they are but I don't think the ads sucking is as much an issue as that people just don't like ads... don't want to pay.
ljm 3y ago
I think the worst part is how poorly curated they are. It's not an advert when your playlist is interrupted by 'ads' that go from several minutes to several hours long, meaning you always have to be aware of when to skip them. I like to leave YT stuff on in the background and it's amazingly disruptive when it's interrupted by 30 minutes of some shitty mumble rap music video/ad, or some obscure London mayoral candidate delivering an 8 minute long speech.

tekla 3y ago

I'm happy to pay for services and a Ad free YT experience.

MBCook 3y ago
Same. I keep seeing the discourse recently and it’s all framed as if only two options exist: People can use ad blockers, or Google can block them and annoy people. There is a very good third option for people: pay for the (expensive due to bandwidth) service you’re using and you see no ads. And Google won’t block it because it’s encouraged as the solution to this exact issue. The level of “I should get everything for free with no ads” entitlement is only getting worse. I get the ads suck and many sites have an unreasonable level of them. But if the only two options are give everything away for free or put everything behind a paywall, the internet as everyone knows it is dead.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  I wouldn't mind the ads if the amount were reasonable, which was the case maybe even as recently as a year ago. But having a 30 second ad before a 5 second meme video is beyond ridiculous. While I don't think the price of premium is too high, I'll never ever actively give Google even a single cent. One forever blocked Google account and too many killed services have burned that bridge for me.
- rpgbr 3y ago
  Alphabet profited nearly USD 20 billion last quarter. Not revenue; net profit. I'm pretty sure they can afford airing less ads per video watched without any damage to their bottomline. So… sorry, but there's a third, better way. The problem is: it doesn't work in a late capitalist environment where Google/Alphabet and all public trade companies operate.
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  - itsoktocry 3y ago
    >I'm pretty sure they can afford I'm pretty sure you can afford to give away a huge chunk of your earnings, too. Do you? How much earnings are "fair"?

thanatropism 3y ago

YouTube may have peaked as the outstanding source of impressively high quality content on a very wide range of topics about 3-5 weeks ago; possibly with Horses' guide on surviving in a desert island. It's still so, so good. --- I remember a film of Salvador Dali talking to a cheering crowd and saying in full dictator voice "... in the future... toilet bowls will be made of gold..." (roaring crowd). That's what's happened to the internet at large.

bt4u 3y ago
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nwellinghoff 3y ago

I think it would be better if they made the video author choose the ad points in their video rather than having it happen automatically. Maybe it gets bypassed if you move forward in the video or whatever. But its the ad just fires off in the middle of sentence or something that is crazy annoying.

ljm 3y ago
Do they not do that? I remember watching one or two videogamedunkey videos that included ads and he specifically scripted the video around when they would appear.
- somethingreen 3y ago
  I believe both options are available. But inserting ads manually is more work on content creator's part, so they often use algo provided.
- 0xfae 3y ago
  I think the creator can do that, so some use it creatively. Otherwise, the algorithm seems to pick the "most rewatched" places, so the most interesting part of the video will be interrupted by an ad, regardless of how jarring it is for the viewer.
- royalsand 3y ago
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cjbgkagh 3y ago

YouTube is an addiction for me and this crackdown has been very helpful for me to break the addiction. Youtube has gotten worse since the algorithm went from rewarding short content to rewarding long content so there has been a flood of mediocre content - at least it's not facebook. Eventually I'll set up an auto-download system for the few shows I already like and am already a patreon for.

dieselgate 3y ago
There are so many ads it's pretty self-regulating for me

PedroBatista 3y ago

It's amazing to me how Google is allowed to control every side of the market with no real repercussions. I don't want to be the cynic who says Google has been paying lots of money to "the right people" in order to keep the status quo, but.. Google has been paying lots of money.. That might be a moderate huge win for Firefox.. until someone at Google makes a phone call to Mozilla's offices. Worst case scenario it helps me consume less YT videos which would be a huge win for me.

shadowgovt 3y ago
Regarding YouTube specifically: bandwidth is still an issue. It's nontrivial to stand up a service that can provide storage and reliable streaming of video, and the costs impact directly upon the provider. So it's an ecosystem where competition is risky (and if someone succeeds too well, Alphabet can just buy and squash them).
JAlexoid 3y ago
Why are you consuming any YT videos, then? Why are so many people feel entitled to YT videos without ads?
- dixie_land 3y ago
  No one is entitled to YT videos without ads. But at the same time, Google is not entitled to dictate how my user agent renders a page, locally, on my own computer. I'd have no problem if google just inject ads directly into the video streams. ( by which time, equally I'm entitled to configure my own video player to skip whichever frames I want )
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    If allowing ads is part of the terms of their service for non-paying users, then they are in fact free to not grant you access to the video feed. It's still shitty, but this isn't a thing where you can have your cake and eat it too.

Workaccount2 3y ago

It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust. I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Even going so far as believing they have a right to free lemonade...

yifanl 3y ago
Well, you can't pay for Youtube. You can pay for a bundle of some mostly unrelated products that's named Youtube Premium, or you can live with an insanely degraded product experience on Youtube, but you can't pay for Youtube.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  YouTube Premium is ad-free YouTube. That's literally "paying for YouTube". But it sure seems that you're trying to rationalize your unwillingness to pay for something and it does sound very entitled.
  - yifanl 3y ago
    Am I paying for an ad-free Youtube or a Spotify competitor? I'm not at all confident the money I'd be paying is going to the creators of the videos, or even feature development of the main Youtube platform.
    - JAlexoid 3y ago
      Creators get the income from views, with any copyrighted material licensing subtracted and a cut to YouTube. But no one is forcing you to use YouTube, it's just way more accessible for any content creator that can't spend weeks in getting a commercial license for music and such. But I have good news for you. Many creators have Patreons, that serves video.
  - 3y ago

foobarian 3y ago

Youtube has been a fantastic demonstration of how valuable it can be to enable democratized, low-barrier-to-entry content publishing. Think of how much treasure there is on the service, with millions upon millions of hours of educational, informative, or archival content, all published and viewable for free, with incredible reliability and availability. Of course this is also fantastically expensive to build and maintain; I believe that we have been fortunate that Google's ad business was willing to subsidize it for us for so long with so little required in return. Unfortunately it appears that possibly the screws are getting turned, and there is less appetite for the subsidy. In a better, more utopian timeline I imagine an equivalent service supported by taxpayers or nonprofit means. Just how the 1900s gave us the public library system, imagine if the 2000s give us a video platform without for-profit encumbrances - what a world it would be!

mvdtnz 3y ago
What screws are really being turned though? This content is still available completely free of charge to anyone with an internet connection. You just need to watch a couple of ads if you're not willing to pay.
- thot_experiment 3y ago
  The problem is you can't just tape the shows and fast forward through the ads etc, or at least that's the direction things are going, it's a very very bad precedent.
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  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    How do you suggest creators are paid and infrastructure is maintained in your ideal world? And don't say people will donate because we all know that's BS.
    - thot_experiment 3y ago

redder23 3y ago

Just know this, and it becomes somewhat clear in this article. Adblock Plus is a SCAM! Their founder (or key person, not remember) made his money with scam "free SMS (texts)" websites and has a very shady past. They invented their "acceptable ads" that are ENABLED BY DEFAULT, were totally silent about the fact that they basically blackmailed advertisers to let them pay money to get on their whitelist and scam users into this "acceptable ads" scam BY DEFAULT and show them ads. Acceptable ads are the WORST ads, that are the ads that flow with the text, that are not obtrusive and not as annoying and therefore the most effective ads actually for me, I would say. Like they said, Google paid them back in the days to get on their whitelist, they were eventually forced to make their shady backroom deals public and do this shit in the open. DO NOT USE Adblock Plus ever, even if it has a checkbox to block all ads, they operate an adblocker to make money by showing people ads, you can not make this shit up. Most disgusting scam. Use uBlock Origin. Or use Brave, but they are not up to speed with the current YT thing, but their adblocker is written in Rust I think and based/inspired by UBO. Would be interesting to know if it also suffers from this "mistake" that unloaded tabs let requests go through while UBO is loading that happens in Chrome but not in Firefox. I guess not as it's integrated at the core of the browser.

plz-remove-card 3y ago

The ads on Youtube have really become unbearable though. I tried to watch a podcast on my tablet, while I was preparing dinner using bluetooth headphones and couldn't readily skip ads or fast forward the video. I was subjected to at least 3 youtube ads and maybe an equal amount of ads from the youtuber themselves it was absurd. Even if I were to pay for an add-free youtube experience, it only culls half the ads in that case!

reisse 3y ago

Not really related, but one can always use a VPN with exit node in Russia instead of ad blocker. It still puzzles me what was their motivation to disable ads in Russia after the conflict began.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

Has anyone here successfully used a CDN + self-hosted videos & players to avoid YouTube? Thoughts?

endisneigh 3y ago

At the end of the day people just don’t want to pay: ad blockers, piracy, etc. Of course people will whine when you stop them from getting stuff for free.

preciousoo 3y ago
I don’t think that’s true. The Netflix model proved that a good UX is preferable, and now every media org is trying to cash in. Piracy usually gets a boom when said media orgs start optimizing for cash in exchange for UX
TremendousJudge 3y ago
Google created the youtube "moat" by giving away the service for free for 15 years. In that time, an actually good, sustainable, paid video service could have emerged and everybody would be ok with it. Instead we got current Youtube, with its inescrutable algorithmic feed, content restrictions, and demonetization rules, and Google are asking us to pay for that with the argument that nothing else like it exists. Of course it doesn't, it couldn't exist since free Youtube was in the way.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  Nothing is stopping a paid service now.
- iowemoretohim 3y ago
  But it hasn't been free for 15 years. There's been ads on YouTube since 2009 (14 years). The narrative you are trying to paint is built on an incorrect premise.

jjcm 3y ago

I'm fine with them blocking adblockers now that they offer a no-ad paid tier. I think it's likely healthy for consumers to know they have to pay one way or another. What I'm really curious about though is whether competitors can do the same - can a YouTube rival today launch with anti-adblockers and a paid tier and compete? This might be a barrier to entry that's too high for your day to day consumers, especially for a new platform. I'm not sure what the solution is here (aside from kickstarting with VC funded free tiers and pivoting later once users are hooked, which feels bad), but I hope at the very least that the general population adjusts to this "ad or paid" future that we seem to be heading in.

anm89 3y ago

The google shills are out in force in this thread

grishka 3y ago

Living in Russia does have its benefits — since YouTube premium isn't available, and no ads are shown to Russian users anyway, I only watch this unfold from afar without experiencing it first-hand.

crop_rotation 3y ago

I think sadly there are no good solutions here. YouTube did a very very good job of hosting videos for everyone, and for a long long time didn't care about adblock or ytdl. All that might be fine if relatively few people used it (hence ytdl type tools were cli only and not some flashy GUI). But the usage of adblockers is rising (for all the good reasons, modern web with ads is horrible), so YouTube needs to do this at some point. They can't wait till adblocker usage is >50% since then it would be near impossible. YouTube premium exists, and is very good value. And hosting videos is really expensive, e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/15/22979126/vimeo-patreon-creators-price-increase https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/15/22979126/vimeo-patreon-cr.... Sadly what might happen in the end in the far future is youtube usable only with a login and with some kind of a subscription/one off transfer or ads. Some kind of netflix type solution, which is worse for everyone but hard to complain about.

Animats 3y ago

Google could go further. The next step is listening on the microphone to make sure the audio from the ad is coming out. Then using the user's camera to pause an ad if the user isn't looking at it.

lacoolj 3y ago

"Help us pay for the services we provide or don't use them" Why is this a strange message for everyone to digest? Ads pay for the content you watch, or your subscription fee covers it. Getting mad at the ad-blocking avoidance is like getting mad you can't walk into Disney Land without a park pass.

scubbo 3y ago
> Why is this a strange message for everyone to digest? Because the services were previously provided for free, and the bait-and-switch feels bad; and because the perception (admittedly inaccurate) is there is no service being provided, that the content is what is paid for (the average consumer has no conception of the costs involved in storage, transmission, recommendation, content auditing, legal compliance, etc.)
- acdha 3y ago
  They were never free: you might have broken your end of the agreement but they’ve been ad supported since the 2000s.

MarkusWandel 3y ago

It's their toy and they can pick it up and go home with it (i.e. Google and Youtube). Network TV got so annoyingly ad infested that I gave up on it in 1998 or so, never to return. Others soldiered on with record-and-then-clip solutions (TiVO). Record-and-clip would work with Youtube too. The adblocker "watches" the whole video, ads and all, and then when it has enough buffered up plays back the clipped version to you. Traditionally this would be defeated by wiring the ads into the content so seamlessly that the blocker can't find them automatically. But here, Google already has the next thing up their sleave, the WEI thing, whereby they can just deny service altogether that is not an approved, unmodified web browser. My personal tolerance threshold is watching about 30 seconds of preroll ads. But when the midroll ads come in every few minutes, I'm getting close to the "quit network TV" thing again. Of course back then there was Pay TV, and now there is Youtube subscription. Some will find it worth paying for it, others will just walk away and maybe their lives will be better for it.

karmakaze 3y ago
I was watching some free Tubi programming (on someone's smart TV) and they seem to do really well with ad placement. More at the beginning and end and the midway ads seem to come at good pause points for a bit longer but less frequent interruptions. I ended up watching quite a bit, taking bathroom breaks or getting drinks the old fashioned way. Their content unlike Netflix isn't the most popular titles which most everyone's already seen, but lesser known but still a curiosity to someone like me.

VohuMana 3y ago

I feel like Google shot themselves in the foot a long time ago on this front. This is all based on my experience, I sometimes follow along with some cooking YT videos to try new things, for awhile the ads were not that bad usually a couple 5-15s ads at the beginning and maybe some in the middle for a longer video. I would say a few years back they totally killed that for me because multiple times I would get hour long ads advertising the first episode of some show coming out, sure I could skip it but as I was actively cooking this meant I had to wash my hands to click the skip ads button which made for an extremely frustrating experience. The worst part is clicking skip ads didn't seem to exempt me from seeing hour long ads later in the video. Needless to say between that and getting 4+ ad blocks in a 5 minute video pushed me to just block ads on devices I can and not watch videos on devices I can't. For me what all of this is going to do is change how I consume videos. Not all content creators do this but I would much rather use YouTube with ads as a sample of the content you're creating and then pay you some percentage of the money I would use to pay for YT Premium for access to your videos outside of YouTube.

DueDilligence 3y ago

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holysantamaria 3y ago

I think everyone should pay for Youtube Premium, there should be no free tiers. And we should ban sponsorship too, a creator should be banned if the content is sponsored. It lowers the quality of the content, the user experience and, worse imo, introduces biasis and conflict of interests. Also mandatoring a paid plan could help get rid of all those scam bots. Also creators could get paid more if everyone was a Premium user. There is no free lunch. At some point you have to pay people for their work. Not paying is slavery. Either pay with your attention span or pay with money to get an adless experience. The Premium plan gives you more features (and a music streaming that would cost you 10$ in and of itself if you were to use another music streaming service). I am glad Youtube takes this issue seriously.

arrakeen 3y ago

i was a YouTube Premium subscriber ever since i was grandfathered in with the closure of Play Music up until last month. every single new feature worsened my experience until i couldn't take it anymore and cancelled. i gave feedback with every new feature and trial but i never got a reply and things just kept getting worse and worse. the worst offenders: * forcing Music content in my YouTube feeds -- i use YouTube solely for videos and Music for music. even so, i would say around 1/2 of the items on my YouTube feed are music and useless playlists. you cannot turn this off * forcing Shorts down my throat -- i'm sure their numbers shows huge engagement numbers with Shorts but it's the exact opposite kind of content i use YouTube for. i watch longer-form videos, not short form clips. they show up in my feed, in my search results, and i'm pretty sure one time i was A/B'd into the app launching into Shorts by default. you cannot turn this off * Search is abysmally bad -- for each query, it will return 2 or 3 videos maybe possibly related to all synonyms of all the words in my query OR'd together, followed by unrelated Shorts, followed by completely unrelated videos i've already watched, followed by completely unrelated videos with inappropriate clickbait thumbnails, and on and on and on. you cannot turn this off * did i mention they were forcing Shorts down my throat? because the straw that broke the camel's back was when they informed me that they were introducing Music Shorts. as if the playlistification of music listening turning music into muzak weren't bad enough, now we have Shorts which incentivize yet another race-to-the-bottom for music. i understand my music listening preferences do not match those of the masses, but there's no way i can turn it off. for those reason and plenty more i don't feel like typing out, google can lick my asshole. adblock forever.

hightrix 3y ago
The most frustrating part, for me, is that Google Play Music was the perfect music streaming service. It just worked.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Controls "the Internet"? Rather it shows how many of you are addicted to YouTube and free content

joak 3y ago

Hey why everyone thinks it's legitimate to pay for content? So if you are poor, access to content should be denied to you? Most of the people on the internet are poor accessing youtube with $40 smartphones. They cannot pay premium, why send them ads? What's the point? Make them waste their precious time and bandwidth?

friend_and_foe 3y ago

https://archive.ph/oOv5l https://archive.ph/oOv5l

fgomez209 3y ago

The idea of a company forcing me to watch something that I don't want to watch, and telling me what software can or cannot run in my own computer goes well beyond 1984 and all those dystopias.

nojvek 3y ago

I pay for YouTube. Although they jacked up price from $9.99 to $17.99 with 0 difference in offering. I know the latest cool post pandemic is to keep on jacking up price until you see churn but that really rubbed me off. It felt very fuck-you-pay-me! Google has a huge monopoly and I’m sure they can double the price without losing much customers since they’re the big game in town. Unfortunately I ended up cancelling Netflix and Disney to make up for it. Perhaps this is the game they’re all playing. I only got a fixed dollars per month to spend on entertainment and each one wants to get it all at the loss of others.