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Google is feeling pretty pumped about a new way of showing you ads on YouTube
- nashashmi 2y agoI just started seeing very long ads on YT that I could not skip. I turned YT off immediately.
- mpalmer 2y agoWhat has Google done to make YouTube better in the last five years? I can name several things its made a lot worse: Chromecast "at-rest" screen now looks like a DVR from hell, showing only clickbait-y revenue-driven Youtube crap and ads. Ads REPEAT all the time. I've grown to hate several advertisers simply because Youtube puts them in front of me so often. The ads themselves suck. For a video to hard cut to someone's face filling the screen talking directly to me about how therapy works... do they think I'm using a phone? Is that why I'm getting this lame Insta/TikTok-format video ad? It's jarring, invasive and stupid. No one as young as me should feel this old! \s
- lifestyleguru 2y ago> I've grown to hate several advertisers Their currency is your attention. They got it, your feelings don't matter.
- mpalmer 2y agoAh, you think I don't know that? I mute and look away every time.
- rchaud 2y agoThat's not how advertising works. Advertising is supposed to keep the brand top of mind, so you'll recall it when going through your options. That's why ads used to have memorable jingles, instead of crappy cover songs designed to imitate memorability, while skipping out on having to pay license fees. Forming a negative opinion on an ad is only beneficial if it is polarizing enough that many more people like it than hate it. These ads are not polarizing, they are simply annoying and repetitive.
- lifestyleguru 2y agoDepends on the sophistication and strategy of the marketing folks. Some simply want their brand name in your brain.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoOkay, but that actively works against their interest. There are a decent number of brands that are very much in my brain... wrapped in enough loathing to ensure that I avoid them every time.
- JohnMakin 2y agoYou are not their customer - advertisers are. This is a good change for the advertisers.
- realusername 2y agoThat's only because Google is shortsighted and stuck in the ads business, the ARPU is abysmal with ads even compared to a mediocre paying user. YouTube gets the lowest revenue per user of all the major platforms and shoving even more ads through the pipeline won't help that.
- JohnMakin 2y agoI'm not commenting on whether it's good for business or youtube, just more that this is the lens in which you need to view these changes that seem otherwise baffling because it's so bad for the end user experience.
- mpalmer 2y agoIt's true and it's no mystery to me, just tragic and irritating.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoThe thing is: >> I've grown to hate several advertisers simply because Youtube puts them in front of me so often. It eventually backfires on their customers, too. I've started dropping products that I see advertised.
- sambazi 2y ago> I've grown to hate several advertisers simply because Youtube puts them in front of me so often. familiar feeling from the days of watching linear tv. but it's like the rest of politics; knowledge of that brand is burnt into your brain, it has a presence in your thinking and it doesn't really matter if your memory is mostly bad.
- okdood64 2y agoAvid YouTube viewer since the beginning of time, and am pretty plugged into the space. Tons of improvement for Creators and advertisers. Smaller sets of UI changes for viewers which IMO have been positive overall. (The dislike counter removal was dumb, though.) All of your complaints are about ads. I've been a Premium subscriber for years, and have trained the algorithm well to show me what I want. I've been pretty satisfied.
- mpalmer 2y agoYou're absolutely right, all of my complaints are about ads. I could also complain about the incentives Youtube gives creators to make phenomenally irritating thumbnails, video structures (everything is 20 goddam minutes long now), the list goes on. Also, when the ads are this aggressively bad, I'm somehow less inclined to pay for Premium. It's like paying a "protection fee" to be saved from their own terrible UX.
- Workaccount2 2y agoYou are free to use any other video service that doesn't serve ads and doesn't charge a subscription.
- digging 2y agoI pay for other services (I plug Nebula often), and I disagree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. YouTube is practically a monopoly on video.
- Workaccount2 2y agoMy comment was a joke, there are no charity video platforms.
- mpalmer 2y agoOh yeah absolutely, I'll just stop sharing my opinion of one of the most highly trafficked websites in the world.
- rchaud 2y agoIt's Shareholder Driven Development, the guinea pigs to whom these changes are A/B tested on are irrelevant.
- seneca 2y agoSmart TVs really do seem to be the worst of the worst when it comes to vendor abuse. I'm not surprised that's where Google is piloting this nightmare. Closed systems with generally low tech users, I suppose it should be expected. New and innovative ways to make things horrible for users.
- phantomathkg 2y agoThis is not new and you could expect this to be rolled out to all streaming app, web, mobile, TV, STB, everywhere. This is all driven by companies struggled to drive the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) up to satisfy the infinite demanded by share holder.
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- SoftTalker 2y agoAlready is, Roku does it (or is working on it) across apps so they get the revenue not the content creator or streaming service.
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- lifestyleguru 2y agoThank you, Google and YouTube engineers!
- zxcvgm 2y agoThis sounds like what Roku had patented, except it injects ads when it detects that a HDMI-connected device has paused: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/roku_tv_ad_patent/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/roku_tv_ad_patent/
- hnburnsy 2y agoThought HDMI was secure to the screen.
- greenavocado 2y agoI get better organic search results on yandex.com and use LLMs for all other knowledge related discovery tasks. I resort to Google, Bing, and Yahoo for maybe one of a thousand queries these days.
- ecuzzillo 2y agoIt's funny that an article complaining about ads is itself riddled with ads.
- rchaud 2y agoExponentially less funny when you hear it for the 10^100th time on HN.
- Workaccount2 2y agoWake me up when they start showing ads to premium users. If you are not paying for a product, you are the product.
- chabes 2y agoThe solution isn’t to pay YouTube either
- chris72205 2y agoIt might be coming soon... they've rolled out this terrible screen saver functionality to premium users (sans ads for now).
- codedokode 2y agoToday usually you are paying for the product while being the product at the same time (example: ads in smartphones, Windows).
- dleslie 2y agoAlso, basically all Prime services.
- globular-toast 2y agoIt's been that way for ages. I was genuinely shocked as a child when I learnt people who paid for satellite TV still got ads, but apparently this is normal and nobody else seemed bothered. Who can blame them for double dipping when nobody cares?
- brutus1213 2y agoPay for premium. On my work machine, I don't co-mingle my personal accounts. it is impossible to watch lectures with the amount of ads.
- sunaookami 2y agoIf you are paying for a product you are still the product. Google still tracks and monetizes your data.
- harrisonjackson 2y agoI didn't realize how annoying Youtube ads were until I upgraded to premium for download offline capabilities. Now the ads seem much worse whenever I have a non-premium experience on the service.
- lambdaba 2y agoBetween adblockers and YouTube Premium, I haven't seen an ad in ages. Ads are to me mythical creatures I hear about, mostly on HN (amusingly enough). One of these days I'll take a quick dive into a regular ad experience, like a sort of digital travel experience.
- MeImCounting 2y agoKind of shocked at the number of HN users in this thread who dont use adblock. I would assume this population to be much more likely to use adblock.
- basil-rash 2y agoOn my laptop sure, but not iPhone or TV.
- RobotToaster 2y agoIs there no revanced equivalent for iphone?
- lotsofpulp 2y agoWipr works for me, most of the time.
- sogen 2y agoreposting: StopTheMadnessPro is a browser plugin that can skip YouTube ads, works on iOS and also on Mac.
- rokkitmensch 2y agoI absolutely have adblock on my TV. My TV is a dumb monitor for an el-cheapo Linux box that just does web and local video files. I'll not be subjecting my dependents to any miserable privacy-compromising "smart" spyware from a monitor provider...
- hiatus 2y agoBy your description, you don't have adblock on your TV but on your linux box.
- rokkitmensch 2y agoTechnically correct! The best kind of correct!
- seydor 2y agoWell they could make deepfakes of youtubers to recommend products during videos.
- htrp 2y agoYou mean AI Assisted Advertising Avatars. If you're a google PM reading this, please don't be a part of the problem
- basil-rash 2y agoThis already exists. Channels like Freakin Reviews are experimenting with deep fake product review AIs. Bit different because their entire channel purpose is product reviews, but the results are so compelling that it will certainly spread.
- hnburnsy 2y agoSo sick of the 30 seconds commercials every 4 minutes on ATV, mostly car commercials, but I got the paused ad yesterday, and that was the last straw. They really take advantage of you when on a TV device. If you don't skip in some cases the ads are endless. Other methods have been implemented and no ads at all.
- ykonstant 2y agoAll I am looking for now is a way to add an item to the right click menu on Firefox to open a video with mpv. This way, I can give my relatives an easy to understand procedure for watching videos without eye cancer.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoPeertube supports importing from YouTube if I recall.
- ykonstant 2y agoRight, but I want a two-click solution from vanilla youtube, because it is not for me; it is for non-technical relatives. For myself I just open everything through mpv anyway.
- shscs911 2y agoYou can try ff2mpv. https://github.com/woodruffw/ff2mpv https://github.com/woodruffw/ff2mpv
- sogen 2y agoStopTheMadnessPro is a browser plugin that can skip YouTube ads
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoYouTube in 2024 is basically what Idiocracy predicted. All that’s left is to fill every house in America with Roku TVs that can’t be turned off. Ever.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoSay what you will about cable but it's the last bastion of skippable ads, full control over the video stream. The DVR could never be invented today, it's too beneficial to the user.
- rchaud 2y agoThere's a 30 Rock episode from 2011 where NBC executives decide to boost viewership and quarterly earnings by broadcasting skin flicks but using a black bar to censor, and showing ads inside of that real estate. The satire-to-reality clock is almost at midnight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBDtmAX_vNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBDtmAX_vNs
- ARandumGuy 2y agoWhat's this going to do to content that expects or incentivizes the user to pause the video? Some youtubers put little gags that you only get when you pause the video (Jay Forman does this frequently). Others put "info blasts," where they put non-necessary info on screen for a second, so that people who are interested can read it, but others can safely ignore it (Tantacrul does this occasionally). Still others explicitly tell you to "pause the video" to solve a puzzle (Agadmator, does this so the viewer can determine the best move in a chess position). There's likely other use cases that I haven't even thought of. Will these just have to go away due to the new pause ads? This seems like an obnoxious way to serve even more ad content, which will make the content on Youtube noticeably worse and less creative.
- jasonjayr 2y agoRemember when Youtube was a web-only thing, and videos could have embedded clickable areas, and how creative folks made awesome interactive video presentations with it? And how much interactive content was lost when Google disabled that? And didn't even try to make an effort to support it, or offer alternatives? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
- digging 2y agoPerhaps they will start uploading to Nebula as well, with a disclaimer that "this video won't work properly on Youtube" or something, but realistically Nebula is never going to get anywhere near the viewership YT gets unless something catastrophic happens to google via legislation, etc.
- allturtles 2y agoAnother case: As a boardgamer, I frequently pause videos to read rules/cards/components in board game reviews/unboxings. I'm sure there are similar use cases for all kinds of other hobbyists (e.g. movie buffs pausing a scene to study lighting/blocking/etc., musicians pausing to study fingering, etc.)
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y agoANY video about learning how to repair something or "instructions" kind of video, including all software dev tutorials out there benefit from being able to pause the video. I mean, it's 2024 and I give for granted that I'm able to watch at a still frame if I need to.
- Nevermark 2y agoJust wait for AI driven automatic product placement in any video you post. It will start subtly, but become pervasive as our loyal viewers acclimatize and learn to love this great new feature! Your T-shirt, your soda can, that wall of books behind you, walls and windows - all a canvas for our creative ad team to enhance your video for you! And if it is just too great for you to handle, you can opt out if you generate significant ad revenue or pay a fee! We put you, the content creator, in control! -- And now a rare exclusive peak into the future from Google Labs: "Deep Ads"! You know those AI pics that look normal, but when you squint you see something else? Well it turns out, when that effect is animated they work even better! So we can now embed full-frame omnipresent ads in your videos, without interrupting your videos at all! And one more thing! ... the complementary audio effect! We call it "Ad Whisperer"! So powerfully subconscious it is the unintrusive ad experience your fans have been begging for! Compatible and complementing all our other great ad technology! -- Ad revenue + insatiable shareholders driving innovation ... in social/psychological value extraction.
- crowcroft 2y agoWhy wait! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awX_tAf3BaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awX_tAf3BaQ https://www.rembrand.com/technical-overview https://www.rembrand.com/technical-overview
- notrealyme123 2y ago"And it can't be skipped or ignored" How about making content that consumers want to see?
- JR1427 2y agoLike someone else has mentioned, I can imagine that this will spawn new trends in videos to get people to pause. I dislike youtube shorts, and wish I could just not see them. I really hate that a lot of short creators have very packed shorts that then "seamlessly" join with the start of the video, so people watch multiple times. I pay for premium, but I still feel like a cow being milked.
- chankstein38 2y agoAgreed, and the fact that, when I click the X on the shorts bar thing it says "The shorts will be removed for 30 days" like no you assholes, I want it GONE. I don't want to just have to do this again in a month.
- JR1427 2y agoThank you so much! I didn't know about the X, as I don't see it in the android app, which I use 99pct of the time. Just used desktop to hide those awful shorts for 30 blessed days!
- arrakeen 2y agoit's unbelievable how the X just isn't there on the android version, probably the most user hostile/disrespectful dark pattern i've ever personally encountered. that said, i'm surprised that it's available on the desktop version. i wonder if it's some sort of malicious compliance?
- COGlory 2y agoYou can use an adblocker hide the element permanently.
- JohnFen 2y ago> we saw strong traction from the introduction of a pause ads pilot on connected TVs, a new non-interruptive ad format that appears when users pause their organic content That's an interesting interpretation of the phrase "non-interruptive" right there. I guess interruptive is the new non-interruptive?
- sogen 2y agoI wonder if they even considered all the possible scenarios. Imagine there's a fire at a bar, but the TV is so loud that you need to pause it so people can hear you... but instead of absolute silence, you get an unstoppable 30s ad for Shein, blasting at full volume...
- poisonborz 2y agoI fear we will look back nostalgically at times when advertising was obvious and direct: intermittent video, image banners, text prompts and the like. The future may see Truman Show-style placement by characters, agents modifying the content itself on the fly to add hard-to-see changes and cues. This is already illegal in most of the world, but it will be easier to do and harder to detect on a large scale.
- sogen 2y agoYes! Imagine the possibilities! Coke for one segment, Pepsi for others, and Mountain Dew for the young people. All we need is a VC
- tmaly 2y agoThis is what happens when MBA's take over a creative platform. They can't help themselves.
- rchaud 2y agoPray tell, who are these demonic MBAs? And why would the presumably technical leadership bow to their pricing demands?
- butz 2y agoCouldn't care less. Quitting watching youtube freed up so much time for other activities. Sure, I still watch a few videos on other platforms, like makertube or tilvids, but no more binge watching until late hours of night.
- hnburnsy 2y agoBetween the in content promotional material, Youtube delivered ads, and the 'subscribe to premium' popups, the ad load on AndroidTV feels like it exceeds commercial TV (which is about 20 minutes per hour). And BTW, can the content producers choose where in the content the Youtube ads appear? The mid-sentence interruptions are annoying.