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Those of you defending youtube on this, have you actually tried watching anything on the site without ad blockers? It's not just that they serve you occasional,

Those of you defending youtube on this, have you actually tried watching anything on the site without ad blockers? It's not just that they serve you occasional, only moderately annoying ads as a subsidy for not paying, they do it in such an intrusively pervasive manner that it seems intentionally designed to make it nearly unusable. The sheer quantity of garbage interrupting your music or anything else you care to watch goes way beyond reasonable and right into the land of "fuck you until you pay". It's downright shitty from a highly profitable company whose content volume is entirely created by other users themselves who in any case regularly get demonetized from the ads in their own content for all sorts of arbitrary X and Y bullshit reasons, to the point that those running most of my favorite channels don't even make anything from the very same ads that youtube crams down everyone elses throats.

izacus 3y ago
My YouTube with premium subscription works just fine across all platforms with no ads. They give me service, I give them money, sounds fair.
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  Well good for you, would you like a pat on the back? You completely missed the main points I'm making, that the very body of content you enjoy was started and created by users themselves and at one point with much of it being in violation of copyright rules with YT fully benefiting from that, only to now get morally righteous about ad blockers being used to block a deliberately, grossly enshittified viewing experience. Even content creators themselves barely benefit from these ads, because an incredible percentage of them are constantly demonetized for endless arbitrary algorithmic reasons.
jefftk 3y ago
> Those of you defending youtube on this, have you actually tried watching anything on the site without ad blockers? That's how I normally watch YouTube. It's fine? The ads are mostly skippable after a few seconds. If I was more into YouTube I'd probably pay to remove ads, but I probably average 15min a day.
mrweasel 3y ago
Because the tech and finance industry is kinda stupid like that, we pretty much only know how much revenue YouTube have, not the profit. I think it's fairly safe to assume that YouTube is generating a substantial profit for Alphabet, has they have no qualms about shutting down a service if the profit isn't large enough (Google Domains comes to mind). So there's a level of greed at YouTube as there certainly could be fewer ads, and lower margins. I also don't think it's unreasonable to question if there is a "quality" ad market large enough to support YouTube at it's current profit level. They show a lot of ads, and they are pretty terrible, they also can't be worth much. For $23 you get YouTube Music and YouTube Premium, for six people. The largest chunk of that money is actually for YouTube Music (I believe it's $11 for Music and $4 for Premium, for a single person). I'd be surprised if YouTube isn't making money on both the single and family plan. YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips have pointed out publicly that YouTube Premium contributes a fair chunk of money in their revenue, so not all of the cost of the subscription goes to YouTube. That means that either the ads are subsidizing Premium or the ads bring in just a few dollars per month per user. While I have no insights and I'm just speculating, it's currently my belief that online video ads are close to worthless, meaning that they are also cheap enough that the shittiest companies can afford to buy them. So you need to show more and more, and accept increasingly intrusive ads to generate the same profit as earlier.
averageRoyalty 3y ago
Yes. I haven't used adblockers anywhere for a good decade. Ads in articles my brain now skips, and unskippable video ads I usually mute and do something else. I wouldn't use Youtube to listen to music any more than I'd use my toaster to cook bacon. It could do it, but I have better tools for purpose.

izacus 3y ago

My YouTube with premium subscription works just fine across all platforms with no ads. They give me service, I give them money, sounds fair.

southernplaces7 3y ago
Well good for you, would you like a pat on the back? You completely missed the main points I'm making, that the very body of content you enjoy was started and created by users themselves and at one point with much of it being in violation of copyright rules with YT fully benefiting from that, only to now get morally righteous about ad blockers being used to block a deliberately, grossly enshittified viewing experience. Even content creators themselves barely benefit from these ads, because an incredible percentage of them are constantly demonetized for endless arbitrary algorithmic reasons.

jefftk 3y ago

> Those of you defending youtube on this, have you actually tried watching anything on the site without ad blockers? That's how I normally watch YouTube. It's fine? The ads are mostly skippable after a few seconds. If I was more into YouTube I'd probably pay to remove ads, but I probably average 15min a day.

mrweasel 3y ago

Because the tech and finance industry is kinda stupid like that, we pretty much only know how much revenue YouTube have, not the profit. I think it's fairly safe to assume that YouTube is generating a substantial profit for Alphabet, has they have no qualms about shutting down a service if the profit isn't large enough (Google Domains comes to mind). So there's a level of greed at YouTube as there certainly could be fewer ads, and lower margins. I also don't think it's unreasonable to question if there is a "quality" ad market large enough to support YouTube at it's current profit level. They show a lot of ads, and they are pretty terrible, they also can't be worth much. For $23 you get YouTube Music and YouTube Premium, for six people. The largest chunk of that money is actually for YouTube Music (I believe it's $11 for Music and $4 for Premium, for a single person). I'd be surprised if YouTube isn't making money on both the single and family plan. YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips have pointed out publicly that YouTube Premium contributes a fair chunk of money in their revenue, so not all of the cost of the subscription goes to YouTube. That means that either the ads are subsidizing Premium or the ads bring in just a few dollars per month per user. While I have no insights and I'm just speculating, it's currently my belief that online video ads are close to worthless, meaning that they are also cheap enough that the shittiest companies can afford to buy them. So you need to show more and more, and accept increasingly intrusive ads to generate the same profit as earlier.

averageRoyalty 3y ago

Yes. I haven't used adblockers anywhere for a good decade. Ads in articles my brain now skips, and unskippable video ads I usually mute and do something else. I wouldn't use Youtube to listen to music any more than I'd use my toaster to cook bacon. It could do it, but I have better tools for purpose.