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Today I was gonna watch a ~14 minute video on YouTube while having a quick lunch. After the 1:30 mark, YouTube showed me a five second ad. Fair enough. After 4

by diggan 1y ago

Today I was gonna watch a ~14 minute video on YouTube while having a quick lunch. After the 1:30 mark, YouTube showed me a five second ad. Fair enough. After 4 minutes, it served me a 30 seconds ad, bit less fun, but fine, YouTube gotta get theirs also. After 6 minutes they showed me a 1 minute ad, and now I started getting frustrated. At the 7 minute mark they tried to show me another 1 minute ad, but at that point I just shut off the TV as it's just too frustrating when they're trying to shove in as much ad-time as there is real-content-time. One of the initial reasons YouTube was better than TV was because it lacked so much ads everywhere. Same for the streaming services. They're quite literally shooting themselves in the foot with adding so much ads... Now my fingers are itching to build a tiny little service for myself, where I can have a bunch of YouTube channels in a .txt file, and have yt-dlp iterate over them once a day and add automatically to Jellyfin, or something similar, almost solely out of spite. Realistically, I'll probably just avoid YouTube on the TV for a week, until I forget how painful that experience is.

bongodongobob 1y ago
The "they" that is shoving those mid-roll ads in the video is the content creator, not YouTube. YouTube won't stick ads in the middle of the video unless the creator opted in to monetize it.
- j1elo 1y ago
  Do you mean that creators choose explicitly how many ads to insert and their length? Because if it's just an ON/OFF switch and then Youtube proceeds to put almost equal lengths of ads than of content (1+ min ad after 2 minutes of content, as per the previous comment) then that's truly terrible. Also... ads after only 2 minutes? Am I the only one who thinks that feels much worse to bear than longer ads more spaced out? There's something that feels odd with having to get interrupted by an ad after mere 100 seconds of watching something.
  - bongodongobob 1y ago
    Yes. They can either let YouTube stick ads in or they can manually place them if they opt into mid-roll ads.
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  This is a bit misleading, IIUC. "Content creator" in this case means the nominal copyright-holder, which often means someone simply claiming copyright, in practice, and not necessarily the uploader ("Fair Use" be damned). The person who uploaded the video might have fully intended there to be no ads run during playback, but has little say in the matter if someone comes along and claims that their content is used in the video.
derektank 1y ago
YouTube Premium is a very reasonably priced service that actually results in more money going to the creators of videos than watching ads does.
- homefree 1y ago
  +1 I can understand people being annoyed by in video sponsorship if it’s done too much, but if you’re not paying for premium and you’re complaining about ads you’re not worth taking seriously. Being able to pay to remove ads is one of the best things about the new media ecosystem. When I go to my parents house and see them watch cable it’s dystopic how many ads there are for a service with primarily trash content that’s still ridiculously expensive.
  - anonym29 1y ago
    People who have no ads AND don't pay a penny look at you the same way you look at your parents. It's dystopic how much you're willing to pay for something that is already free and effortless.
    - homefree 1y ago
      I'm sure the people stealing stuff from Walgreens in SF also think the rest of us are chumps, but that doesn't make them right. I'm happy to pay to support the people making stuff I like - and the ability to do that directly instead of indirectly via ads (which I hate) is nice.
      - anonym29 1y ago
        Goods in Walgreens are fundamentally dissimilar to YouTube videos. When you steal something from Walgreens, a legal person has had private property unjustly taken from them that prevents the rightful owner from using or obtaining benefit from the scarce physical good (in Walgreens' case, sale of that good). Conversely, even full-blown piracy of copyrighted content does NOT deprive the owner of private property, there is no prevention of the rightful owner to watch the video, nor is the rightful owner prevented from obtaining benefit, because there was no scarce physical good lost. Courts might say you can "own" an idea. I disagree, it's plainly and obviously ridiculous to compare a speaker or some snacks to a infinitely reproducible digital file, to say nothing of a single stream of an infinitely reproducible digital file that was intentionally uploaded to a platform that makes content available to non-paying users.
chomp 1y ago
ytdl-sub, I use it to load educational content into jellyfin for my kids, the config file format is poor, but it works well
- smitelli 1y ago
  Good for occasional use. Feed it a big playlist and you might find yourself IP-banned for a week.
  - anotherhue 1y ago
    haha, yes can confirm.
Larrikin 1y ago
You're only stuck watching YouTube ads if you are on an Apple device. There are multiple ways to get around ads on every other platform.
- mathgeek 1y ago
  The discussion is specifically talking about watching on TVs. Those (usually) don’t have ad blockers natively. You can of course block outside of the platform.
  - echoangle 1y ago
    Get a TV stick and put Smarttubenext on it, or put it on to the TV directly if possible.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  You can block YouTube ads in Safari on iOS/iPadOS. There are also alternative players you can sideload with AltStore or other methods, all without jailbreaking.
  - b3ing 1y ago
    Can you share some methods? I have Pi-Hole but of course that doesnt work.
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      AdGuard or other Safari extensions for adblocking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGuard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGuard
- rasz 1y ago
  web Youtube started preliminary work on muxing video on server - js player no longer fetches two separate standard video & audio sources, it gets binary encoded bundle instead. They will at some point hard switch to this method of injecting ads.
- 1y ago
bigyabai 1y ago
If you're not sideloading an alternative YouTube client then yeah, you gotta put up with the ads.
kristjansson 1y ago
Or just pay them their $14/mo (or is it $8 now?). It’s revelatory.
- diggan 1y ago
  It's 18EUR/month, or 21 freedom dollars, for me in Spain. Compared to what I used to pay for it, not worth it in the end.
RajT88 1y ago
YouTube hack: when you see an ad, refresh the page.

by diggan 1y ago

bongodongobob 1y ago

The "they" that is shoving those mid-roll ads in the video is the content creator, not YouTube. YouTube won't stick ads in the middle of the video unless the creator opted in to monetize it.

j1elo 1y ago
Do you mean that creators choose explicitly how many ads to insert and their length? Because if it's just an ON/OFF switch and then Youtube proceeds to put almost equal lengths of ads than of content (1+ min ad after 2 minutes of content, as per the previous comment) then that's truly terrible. Also... ads after only 2 minutes? Am I the only one who thinks that feels much worse to bear than longer ads more spaced out? There's something that feels odd with having to get interrupted by an ad after mere 100 seconds of watching something.
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  Yes. They can either let YouTube stick ads in or they can manually place them if they opt into mid-roll ads.
h2zizzle 1y ago
This is a bit misleading, IIUC. "Content creator" in this case means the nominal copyright-holder, which often means someone simply claiming copyright, in practice, and not necessarily the uploader ("Fair Use" be damned). The person who uploaded the video might have fully intended there to be no ads run during playback, but has little say in the matter if someone comes along and claims that their content is used in the video.

derektank 1y ago

YouTube Premium is a very reasonably priced service that actually results in more money going to the creators of videos than watching ads does.

homefree 1y ago
+1 I can understand people being annoyed by in video sponsorship if it’s done too much, but if you’re not paying for premium and you’re complaining about ads you’re not worth taking seriously. Being able to pay to remove ads is one of the best things about the new media ecosystem. When I go to my parents house and see them watch cable it’s dystopic how many ads there are for a service with primarily trash content that’s still ridiculously expensive.
- anonym29 1y ago
  People who have no ads AND don't pay a penny look at you the same way you look at your parents. It's dystopic how much you're willing to pay for something that is already free and effortless.
  - homefree 1y ago
    I'm sure the people stealing stuff from Walgreens in SF also think the rest of us are chumps, but that doesn't make them right. I'm happy to pay to support the people making stuff I like - and the ability to do that directly instead of indirectly via ads (which I hate) is nice.
    - anonym29 1y ago
      Goods in Walgreens are fundamentally dissimilar to YouTube videos. When you steal something from Walgreens, a legal person has had private property unjustly taken from them that prevents the rightful owner from using or obtaining benefit from the scarce physical good (in Walgreens' case, sale of that good). Conversely, even full-blown piracy of copyrighted content does NOT deprive the owner of private property, there is no prevention of the rightful owner to watch the video, nor is the rightful owner prevented from obtaining benefit, because there was no scarce physical good lost. Courts might say you can "own" an idea. I disagree, it's plainly and obviously ridiculous to compare a speaker or some snacks to a infinitely reproducible digital file, to say nothing of a single stream of an infinitely reproducible digital file that was intentionally uploaded to a platform that makes content available to non-paying users.

chomp 1y ago

ytdl-sub, I use it to load educational content into jellyfin for my kids, the config file format is poor, but it works well

smitelli 1y ago
Good for occasional use. Feed it a big playlist and you might find yourself IP-banned for a week.
- anotherhue 1y ago
  haha, yes can confirm.

Larrikin 1y ago

You're only stuck watching YouTube ads if you are on an Apple device. There are multiple ways to get around ads on every other platform.

mathgeek 1y ago
The discussion is specifically talking about watching on TVs. Those (usually) don’t have ad blockers natively. You can of course block outside of the platform.
- echoangle 1y ago
  Get a TV stick and put Smarttubenext on it, or put it on to the TV directly if possible.
aspenmayer 1y ago
You can block YouTube ads in Safari on iOS/iPadOS. There are also alternative players you can sideload with AltStore or other methods, all without jailbreaking.
- b3ing 1y ago
  Can you share some methods? I have Pi-Hole but of course that doesnt work.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    AdGuard or other Safari extensions for adblocking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGuard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGuard
rasz 1y ago
web Youtube started preliminary work on muxing video on server - js player no longer fetches two separate standard video & audio sources, it gets binary encoded bundle instead. They will at some point hard switch to this method of injecting ads.
1y ago

bigyabai 1y ago

If you're not sideloading an alternative YouTube client then yeah, you gotta put up with the ads.

kristjansson 1y ago

Or just pay them their $14/mo (or is it $8 now?). It’s revelatory.

diggan 1y ago
It's 18EUR/month, or 21 freedom dollars, for me in Spain. Compared to what I used to pay for it, not worth it in the end.

RajT88 1y ago

YouTube hack: when you see an ad, refresh the page.