5 ms·

YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads

67 points by MBCook 2y ago

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
So the net result of taking media away from legacy industries and handing it over to tech is (1) unskippable ads, (2) surveillance, (3) censorship and revocation of media you don't physically own, and now (4) unpausable media.
- pxx 2y ago
  this isn't Hades II. the media still pauses.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    On mainline youtube, for now at least. Just look at how unusable youtube shorts are. Want to rewind? Too bad for you.
    - MaxikCZ 2y ago
      Never understood the appeal of "take as much control from user as possible" for shorts. Maybe I wouldnt actively hate it if it allowed basic playback control, but for some reason Youtube thinks thats not cool anymore.
    - SllX 2y ago
      If you want to go back on YouTube Shorts you just pause the short and swipe at the bottom (on mobile) and on desktop you don’t even have to pause first, you can just hover the scrubber and drag it around. This did used to suck, but it’s been more a case of the YouTube Shorts player being very behind TikTok and the regular YouTube player and they’ve only slowly made changes. I would argue they took too long to make these QoL improvements, but they did make them.
    - AStonesThrow 2y ago
      I am ashamed to admit that, once or twice, I was curious enough to want to rewind an ad, but that does seem impossible. (Thankfully, commenting on them is impossible as well.)
      - rightbyte 2y ago
        That is somewhat strange since, if the ad was useful, you'd might wanna watch it again. In theory. Like, there is no 'ad viewing history' either. I guess the ad industry does not care about useful at all nowadays. Older commercials was filled with stats, properties and arguments. Like a TV shop channel. Nowadays it mainly seems to be some Amazon sellers that try to convince you with that tactic.
    - numpad0 2y ago
      Just add YouTube Shorts redirect to your browser. It's still available as regular videos.
      - predakanga 2y ago
        I had no idea that was an option, thanks for the tip!
    - rascul 2y ago
      Replace shorts with v in the url to get the regular player
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >So the net result of taking media away from legacy industries and handing it over to tech is (1) unskippable ads, (2) surveillance, (3) censorship and revocation of media you don't physically own, and now (4) unpausable media. No. First, legacy industries didn't have media "taken away" from them. They simply refused to adapt to new technology quickly enough, so new media (WWW) became popular, which replaced the old media the legacy industries were working with (newsprint, OTA TV). 1. a. You can skip ads using an ad-blocker. They work extremely well. Lots of people refuse to educate themselves about them, and even when their tech-savvy friend shows it to them or even installs one for them, they don't use it. 1. b. The legacy industries didn't let you skip ads either: if you were reading a newspaper, the ad was right there next to the text. If you were watching TV, you had to sit through commercials (which were generally timed to appear at the same time on all stations, so you couldn't change channels to avoid them). DVRs didn't come about until much later. 3. "censorship": Legacy industries only printed or aired stuff they wanted you to see, and since there were only a small handful of choices, that wasn't much. revocation: the tech companies haven't taken anything away. You can still buy CDs and Blu-Rays, but people choose to subscribe to streaming services instead. Also, you can download anything you want from YouTube with yt-dlp. 4. This isn't unpausable, they just show ads during pauses (if you refuse to use an ad-blocker).
  - namaria 2y ago
    I'm glad prevalent behavior is to not use ad blockers. It turns watching ads a tax on ignorance, and lets that usage fly under the radar.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      This is an understandable position, and probably explains why ad-blockers have been tolerated for so long, however it seems it isn't working so well any more because the media giants have been pouring a lot of resources in recent years into defeating ad-blockers. Many websites will refuse to load the page until you turn off the ad-blocker (of course it's an arms race, as the ad-blockers will figure out how to block this ad-block detection), YouTube is apparently working very hard at defeating ad-blocking (with varied results so far), etc. So it seems that ad-blockers have gotten popular enough that these companies believe they're "losing" too much money (i.e., not getting money they think they should) to ad-blocking and are stepping up efforts to fight back. Of course, the worse they make the ads, the more people turn to ad-blockers. Back when ads were new, no one really cared much about a banner ad here or there. But then the advertisers came up with pop-up ads, and users (rightfully) revolted, and tools to block these ads were devised, even building them directly into web browsers because these pop-ups were so awful. The same is happening now, I believe: YouTube ads weren't so annoying in the past, only showing at the video start, but now they inject 30-minute ads at random times, so more and more users are turning to blockers.
kristianp 2y ago
This can be annoying if you want to pause the video to look closely at something.
- magnetowasright 2y ago
  On the very rare occasion I use youtube, the stuff that already pops up on the bottom of the video on pause (video recs?) was already annoying. If they're keeping that and adding ads as well, a paused video is going to look like early '00s web to me lol
- wodenokoto 2y ago
  Yeah and lots of videos expects you to pause and read some texts.
- klyrs 2y ago
  Or if you want to pause for conversation
- Terr_ 2y ago
  "Genie, I wish that Youtube would practice customer-centric design to support customer needs and use-cases." *poof* "It is done." "Hey, this isn't what I wished for! This video experience is crap!" "To them you are not the customer. You are a resource. Their customers are advertisers and they are happy with these changes."
- l72 2y ago
  I find everything about youtube's player to be infuriating. It has completely driven me off the platform, and caused me to set up tube archivist with a jellyfin plugin, so I can just watch all my videos through jellyfin. This has the advantage of no annoying pop-ups over the videos, I can pause, resume where I left off, and actually have a decent platform to keep track of videos I have/haven't watched. Not to mention, it removes ads. Even for one off videos, I get so frustrated by youtube's interface I leave or end up just using yt-dlp. I don't understand how anyone actually likes youtube (I don't mean the content, but the actual site).
browningstreet 2y ago
I pay for YouTube Premium and saw a full browser screen ad for adding the MAX channel. I wasn’t sure if I clicked on something or if this is a new thing they’re doing. I’ll be pretty unhappy if the latter.
- DoktorDelta 2y ago
  I swapped to Revanced on mobile and a combo of UBO + sponsorblock on desktop after the most recent price increase. Definitely not regretting it after hearing this.
  - toastercat 2y ago
    So, instead of canceling you subscription and using a competing service, you instead choose to... steal? Classy.
    - ramenbytes 2y ago
      More like cutting out the funnies from a newspaper and trashing the ads.
      - ranguna 2y ago
        But you bought the news paper (or someone else did). FYI I use revenced as well, it's just your argument doesn't sound very sane.
        netsharc 2y ago
        Newspapers are actually also financed by ads, the few dollars people pay don't cover for the production costs and journalism...
        toastercat 2y ago
        You could argue that paying for the internet service to reach a website is equivalent to buying the newspaper.
insin 2y ago
I look forward to updating my YouTube browser extension to hide this as well steeples fingers
- euroderf 2y ago
  pets white Persian cat in lap
akomtu 2y ago
YouTube 2030: the entire interface is a single button "I'm feeling lucky". You insert a coin and click the button, the screen starts changing rapidly a kaleidoscope of pictures until it randomly selects one. It's ad that you must watch before you can press the button again. When you press the button again, the whole process repeats and it again shows an ad. After many tries you score a win, finally: a video of some guy advertising something. The dopamine rush gives you energy for the next round of attempts. Eventually you run out of money, unable to remember what you'd watched that day. YouTube always wins, as the old wisdom says.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
juliangmp 2y ago
Sounds like a way to annoy the last few people so much so that they too start using an ad blocker
Elfener 2y ago
I watch youtube using mpv (with yt-dlp) so this doesn't affect me. I already hated that when you pause a youtube video, and a bunch of UI shows up.
- iszomer 2y ago
  I wonder if SponsorBlock is optionally available on yt-dlp..
  - k4rli 2y ago
    Invidious has Sponsorblock support at least.
  - Elfener 2y ago
    https://github.com/po5/mpv_sponsorblock https://github.com/po5/mpv_sponsorblock
  - Izkata 2y ago
    Yes: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp?tab=readme-ov-file#sponsorblock-options https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp?tab=readme-ov-file#sponsorb...
sharpshadow 2y ago
There are this services in which you can earn money watching ads with certain intervals. One could just use that to be shown on a paused video with mute instead of letting it google do it for you.
naikrovek 2y ago
I swear, man. Until every surface is used to display ads I don’t think advertisers will rest. Surely we all see where this is going. Every day new ways to show ads are devised. More and more blank and negative spaces (which have inherent value as-is) are considered fair game for advertising. already the number of times per day that I must mentally say “no” to an advertisement is exhausting. It’s already way, WAY past my worst childhood predictions. It just isn’t ever going to stop, is it? Advertisers just won’t be happy until they’ve created a dystopia. I want off this ride. It’s no longer fun.
- dsign 2y ago
  Rejoice! Now that AI is a thing, it's a matter of short years before AIs begin making ads just for you. Obviously not ideal, except that then it will just be a matter of decades until most ads are targeted to AIs and the humans that remain go to hide in Zion. Maybe we will be free of ads there.
- cesarb 2y ago
  > I swear, man. Until every surface is used to display ads I don’t think advertisers will rest. "[...] We estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field before inducing seizures." (from a scene in the Ready Player One movie)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
josefritzishere 2y ago
Enshittification at it's finest.
bananapub 2y ago
lots of things the advertising companies like Google do makes more sense if you think of it like this: line has to go up and to the right forever. if natural demand isn't going up, then they'll squeeze the stone harder, doing stuff like this, or breaking adblockers, or more ads for non-premium users, etc etc the idea of "revenue and profit shouldn't/can't go up forever and that's OK" is not a concept the CEO will accept.
nojvek 2y ago
I must say browser extensions are a god send. The browser and web being a fairly open platform. With ublock origin I can block specific parts of a site. Can't do any of it with locked down mobile apps. Youtube is now at late stage capitalism trying to juice every little real estate they can with ads.

67 points by MBCook 2y ago

So the net result of taking media away from legacy industries and handing it over to tech is (1) unskippable ads, (2) surveillance, (3) censorship and revocation of media you don't physically own, and now (4) unpausable media.

pxx 2y ago
this isn't Hades II. the media still pauses.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  On mainline youtube, for now at least. Just look at how unusable youtube shorts are. Want to rewind? Too bad for you.
  - MaxikCZ 2y ago
    Never understood the appeal of "take as much control from user as possible" for shorts. Maybe I wouldnt actively hate it if it allowed basic playback control, but for some reason Youtube thinks thats not cool anymore.
  - SllX 2y ago
    If you want to go back on YouTube Shorts you just pause the short and swipe at the bottom (on mobile) and on desktop you don’t even have to pause first, you can just hover the scrubber and drag it around. This did used to suck, but it’s been more a case of the YouTube Shorts player being very behind TikTok and the regular YouTube player and they’ve only slowly made changes. I would argue they took too long to make these QoL improvements, but they did make them.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    I am ashamed to admit that, once or twice, I was curious enough to want to rewind an ad, but that does seem impossible. (Thankfully, commenting on them is impossible as well.)
    - rightbyte 2y ago
      That is somewhat strange since, if the ad was useful, you'd might wanna watch it again. In theory. Like, there is no 'ad viewing history' either. I guess the ad industry does not care about useful at all nowadays. Older commercials was filled with stats, properties and arguments. Like a TV shop channel. Nowadays it mainly seems to be some Amazon sellers that try to convince you with that tactic.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Just add YouTube Shorts redirect to your browser. It's still available as regular videos.
    - predakanga 2y ago
      I had no idea that was an option, thanks for the tip!
  - rascul 2y ago
    Replace shorts with v in the url to get the regular player
shiroiushi 2y ago
>So the net result of taking media away from legacy industries and handing it over to tech is (1) unskippable ads, (2) surveillance, (3) censorship and revocation of media you don't physically own, and now (4) unpausable media. No. First, legacy industries didn't have media "taken away" from them. They simply refused to adapt to new technology quickly enough, so new media (WWW) became popular, which replaced the old media the legacy industries were working with (newsprint, OTA TV). 1. a. You can skip ads using an ad-blocker. They work extremely well. Lots of people refuse to educate themselves about them, and even when their tech-savvy friend shows it to them or even installs one for them, they don't use it. 1. b. The legacy industries didn't let you skip ads either: if you were reading a newspaper, the ad was right there next to the text. If you were watching TV, you had to sit through commercials (which were generally timed to appear at the same time on all stations, so you couldn't change channels to avoid them). DVRs didn't come about until much later. 3. "censorship": Legacy industries only printed or aired stuff they wanted you to see, and since there were only a small handful of choices, that wasn't much. revocation: the tech companies haven't taken anything away. You can still buy CDs and Blu-Rays, but people choose to subscribe to streaming services instead. Also, you can download anything you want from YouTube with yt-dlp. 4. This isn't unpausable, they just show ads during pauses (if you refuse to use an ad-blocker).
- namaria 2y ago
  I'm glad prevalent behavior is to not use ad blockers. It turns watching ads a tax on ignorance, and lets that usage fly under the radar.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    This is an understandable position, and probably explains why ad-blockers have been tolerated for so long, however it seems it isn't working so well any more because the media giants have been pouring a lot of resources in recent years into defeating ad-blockers. Many websites will refuse to load the page until you turn off the ad-blocker (of course it's an arms race, as the ad-blockers will figure out how to block this ad-block detection), YouTube is apparently working very hard at defeating ad-blocking (with varied results so far), etc. So it seems that ad-blockers have gotten popular enough that these companies believe they're "losing" too much money (i.e., not getting money they think they should) to ad-blocking and are stepping up efforts to fight back. Of course, the worse they make the ads, the more people turn to ad-blockers. Back when ads were new, no one really cared much about a banner ad here or there. But then the advertisers came up with pop-up ads, and users (rightfully) revolted, and tools to block these ads were devised, even building them directly into web browsers because these pop-ups were so awful. The same is happening now, I believe: YouTube ads weren't so annoying in the past, only showing at the video start, but now they inject 30-minute ads at random times, so more and more users are turning to blockers.

kristianp 2y ago

This can be annoying if you want to pause the video to look closely at something.

magnetowasright 2y ago
On the very rare occasion I use youtube, the stuff that already pops up on the bottom of the video on pause (video recs?) was already annoying. If they're keeping that and adding ads as well, a paused video is going to look like early '00s web to me lol
wodenokoto 2y ago
Yeah and lots of videos expects you to pause and read some texts.
klyrs 2y ago
Or if you want to pause for conversation
Terr_ 2y ago
"Genie, I wish that Youtube would practice customer-centric design to support customer needs and use-cases." *poof* "It is done." "Hey, this isn't what I wished for! This video experience is crap!" "To them you are not the customer. You are a resource. Their customers are advertisers and they are happy with these changes."
l72 2y ago
I find everything about youtube's player to be infuriating. It has completely driven me off the platform, and caused me to set up tube archivist with a jellyfin plugin, so I can just watch all my videos through jellyfin. This has the advantage of no annoying pop-ups over the videos, I can pause, resume where I left off, and actually have a decent platform to keep track of videos I have/haven't watched. Not to mention, it removes ads. Even for one off videos, I get so frustrated by youtube's interface I leave or end up just using yt-dlp. I don't understand how anyone actually likes youtube (I don't mean the content, but the actual site).

browningstreet 2y ago

I pay for YouTube Premium and saw a full browser screen ad for adding the MAX channel. I wasn’t sure if I clicked on something or if this is a new thing they’re doing. I’ll be pretty unhappy if the latter.

DoktorDelta 2y ago
I swapped to Revanced on mobile and a combo of UBO + sponsorblock on desktop after the most recent price increase. Definitely not regretting it after hearing this.
- toastercat 2y ago
  So, instead of canceling you subscription and using a competing service, you instead choose to... steal? Classy.
  - ramenbytes 2y ago
    More like cutting out the funnies from a newspaper and trashing the ads.
    - ranguna 2y ago
      But you bought the news paper (or someone else did). FYI I use revenced as well, it's just your argument doesn't sound very sane.
      - netsharc 2y ago
        Newspapers are actually also financed by ads, the few dollars people pay don't cover for the production costs and journalism...
      - toastercat 2y ago
        You could argue that paying for the internet service to reach a website is equivalent to buying the newspaper.

insin 2y ago

I look forward to updating my YouTube browser extension to hide this as well steeples fingers

euroderf 2y ago
pets white Persian cat in lap

akomtu 2y ago

YouTube 2030: the entire interface is a single button "I'm feeling lucky". You insert a coin and click the button, the screen starts changing rapidly a kaleidoscope of pictures until it randomly selects one. It's ad that you must watch before you can press the button again. When you press the button again, the whole process repeats and it again shows an ad. After many tries you score a win, finally: a video of some guy advertising something. The dopamine rush gives you energy for the next round of attempts. Eventually you run out of money, unable to remember what you'd watched that day. YouTube always wins, as the old wisdom says.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

juliangmp 2y ago

Sounds like a way to annoy the last few people so much so that they too start using an ad blocker

Elfener 2y ago

I watch youtube using mpv (with yt-dlp) so this doesn't affect me. I already hated that when you pause a youtube video, and a bunch of UI shows up.

iszomer 2y ago
I wonder if SponsorBlock is optionally available on yt-dlp..
- k4rli 2y ago
  Invidious has Sponsorblock support at least.
- Elfener 2y ago
  https://github.com/po5/mpv_sponsorblock https://github.com/po5/mpv_sponsorblock
- Izkata 2y ago
  Yes: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp?tab=readme-ov-file#sponsorblock-options https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp?tab=readme-ov-file#sponsorb...

sharpshadow 2y ago

There are this services in which you can earn money watching ads with certain intervals. One could just use that to be shown on a paused video with mute instead of letting it google do it for you.

naikrovek 2y ago

I swear, man. Until every surface is used to display ads I don’t think advertisers will rest. Surely we all see where this is going. Every day new ways to show ads are devised. More and more blank and negative spaces (which have inherent value as-is) are considered fair game for advertising. already the number of times per day that I must mentally say “no” to an advertisement is exhausting. It’s already way, WAY past my worst childhood predictions. It just isn’t ever going to stop, is it? Advertisers just won’t be happy until they’ve created a dystopia. I want off this ride. It’s no longer fun.

dsign 2y ago
Rejoice! Now that AI is a thing, it's a matter of short years before AIs begin making ads just for you. Obviously not ideal, except that then it will just be a matter of decades until most ads are targeted to AIs and the humans that remain go to hide in Zion. Maybe we will be free of ads there.
cesarb 2y ago
> I swear, man. Until every surface is used to display ads I don’t think advertisers will rest. "[...] We estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field before inducing seizures." (from a scene in the Ready Player One movie)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

josefritzishere 2y ago

Enshittification at it's finest.

bananapub 2y ago

lots of things the advertising companies like Google do makes more sense if you think of it like this: line has to go up and to the right forever. if natural demand isn't going up, then they'll squeeze the stone harder, doing stuff like this, or breaking adblockers, or more ads for non-premium users, etc etc the idea of "revenue and profit shouldn't/can't go up forever and that's OK" is not a concept the CEO will accept.

nojvek 2y ago

I must say browser extensions are a god send. The browser and web being a fairly open platform. With ublock origin I can block specific parts of a site. Can't do any of it with locked down mobile apps. Youtube is now at late stage capitalism trying to juice every little real estate they can with ads.