5 ms·

> you're circumventing the method of paying for content. I disagree. If you were buying every advertised product and falling for every advertised scam then fai

by Nextgrid 11mo ago

> you're circumventing the method of paying for content. I disagree. If you were buying every advertised product and falling for every advertised scam then fair enough. But assuming you were ignoring them, there is no issue with offloading the thing you would do anyway to a computer and save everyone the time/bandwidth.

danpalmer 11mo ago
The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you, not the right to a sale. Whether they convert you is up to them, their product, their offering, etc. I think you can never buy a single product from an ad and this is still piracy. That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is not to get you to buy a coke today, it's to have a positive impression that builds over years. This sort of advertising is very hard to attribute sales to, but a good example of how you don't need to buy a product for seeing the ad to be worth something to the company.
- Nextgrid 11mo ago
  And I have the right to pay someone to watch the ads + videos for me, and then summarize me the video minus ads. Just like I have the right to hand my ad-full newspaper to someone, have them cut out the ads and hand me back the now ad-free one. If both of those are legal and ethical (I’d be curious what argument someone would make against this), then offloading this work to a machine should be just as ethical.
  - JAlexoid 11mo ago
    You can rationalize this any way you want, but at the end of the day you're screwing over not a faceless corporation - but the very people who put out videos on YouTube. It's fine if you're OK with it, but don't pretend that you're not doing that.
    - pessimizer 11mo ago
      You're not replying directly to the last comment because it posed a hard question, and you've resorted to an emotional appeal.
    - Nextgrid 11mo ago
      I’m totally cool with “screwing over” people who make their income screwing gullible people into falling for scams or buying useless, overpriced junk they don’t need. I don’t need to rationalize it for myself, I’m just trying to show some people the error in their ways, but maybe their portfolio of ad-related stocks is clouding their vision?
      - JAlexoid 11mo ago
        I hate to break it to you, but you're not doing any of that. You seem like you have a robin hood complex or something similar.
        sidrag22 11mo ago
        the creator is being harmed in no way at all, the ad free viewer is still a viewer and still could potentially generate more traffic to that creator by word of mouth algo pushing based on more views etc. Its still a net positive for the creator, just not AS net positive as an ad viewer. its not some secret that some % of viewers, block ads.. either you lean into it and utilize it, or you pretend people should be obligated to only watch your videos by paying or watching ads, in that case find a new platform.
    - aspaviento 11mo ago
      The choice of an individual to skip an advertisement has minimal impact on the content creator or the platform. This person isn't accountable for the decisions of others regarding whether they watch the ad or not. Ultimately, their actions only affect themselves and do not influence anyone involved in the advertisement process.
    - mrguyorama 11mo ago
      The Youtubers I like don't make any money from Google ads, because Google's draconian content policies and un-auditable "demonitization" system prevents them from making any money on such objectionable content as "Literally talking about how bad slavery was" or "Showing pictures of people who died in the Holocaust" or "mummifying a store bought chicken carcass" Are you watching creators who don't share such sentiments? You should consider that the creators who make large sums from youtube ad rev are the absolute worst quality you can find. People like Mr Beast or Logan Paul. It primarily means you are slinging garbage every single day and literally hurting people for money, because that's what google's algorithm optimizes for. Google wants to burn you out churning out slop despite the fact that youtube is already significantly overfilled. Meanwhile, all those youtube creators who made their living doing high quality animation a couple decades ago? Youtube killed their business by fiat because different content was more profitable for them. Multiple very prominent and influential animators who go all the way back to the early Newgrounds days were forced out of their job by that change. The entire reason Youtube creators started taking sponsorships is because Google has repeatedly reduced their advertising payouts, by staggering amounts. Several times Google killed entire swaths of the smaller content industry simply because they felt like taking more of the money. They can do this because there are no alternatives. The reason Floatplane and Nebula and friends exist is entirely because Youtube constantly punishes you for making Non-Mr Beast content, and repeatedly cuts how much money you get per hour of watched content, with no warning or justification even offered. The creators I watch do not want me to watch them on youtube. They want me to watch them on Nebula, Floatplane, and Patreon. This includes many channels that predate Youtube being bought by Google, and ads existing on the service at all. Several of these creators, especially the animators, were prominent on Newgrounds, and made zero dollars from their work. Most of them have day jobs or other avenues of monitizing their talents, like touring or merch or music. Youtube added a feature to compete with Patreon where you can pay to be a "member" of a channel, and that channel can produce "members only" videos that you can only watch if you pay that channel money. Just recently, Youtube, without any warning or checking with creators or asking opinions started forcing those videos in front of users who are not members, and cannot see them, polluting feeds and making it harder to select the next video you want to watch and creators, including LTT, are adamantly against this and do not want it Youtube does not GAF what creators want, never has, and is almost always a hostile and adversarial entity in the relationship. I am not screwing over the creators by blocking ads, Google is screwing over the creators to take more profit from those ads.
  - danpalmer 11mo ago
    But in those cases someone is still seeing the ads. It's when no one is seeing the ads that it becomes piracy, in my opinion. A summary is not the same as the content either, that's a fairly well tested concept (fair use, etc).
    - Nextgrid 11mo ago
      Ok, let’s switch it up a bit. I give the ad-full newspaper to someone not speaking the local language. Or an illiterate person. Or a monkey trained to be good with scissors. Is this also piracy? At what point does it become piracy? How little of an ad should someone see/understand before it counts as a “valid” ad view? A few words? A full sentence? Etc.
      - danpalmer 11mo ago
        You're trying to nit-pick where the line is drawn. The point is not where the line is drawn, it's that there is a line. Installing an ad-blocker in your browser and never seeing an ad while consuming hours of content for free, depriving those creators of revenue, depriving the platform of revenue to support your usage of it, is in no way comparable to these at-the-margin contrived examples.
        sidrag22 11mo ago
        depriving? the creators are posting their content on a free platform, with hopes that it will generate enough views so that enough of those viewers are ad watching viewers so that they will gain revenue. you're acting like the view is 100% meaningless and ONLY a bad thing, and its quite the opposite. the "free" view costs the creator literally nothing, and it gains them an additional view, if its a good video its potentially gonna help spread the video elsewhere where maybe they can find some suckers to mindlessly consume ads. and lets be real, the platform you are "depriving of revenue" is google... they operated ad free to create massive market capture to create the current monstrosity that is youtube in 2025, think they can't cut off all users that block ads right now? there is a reason they aren't doing so.
    - 11mo ago
- cm2012 11mo ago
  Also, Youtube pays out more to creators than anyone else on the web, they dwarf Patreon 10x. People who make youtube videos rely on ads to get paid.
  - Nextgrid 11mo ago
    They’re welcome not to make videos. But if they make them and lay them out there for free alongside some garbage I have the right to ignore, don’t blame me if I do look at them and ignore the garbage, and since there’s so much of it I eventually get my machine to ignore them, not unlike wearing gloves when dealing with a messy task as to save you the time of scrubbing your hands from dirt/oil/etc.
    - danpalmer 11mo ago
      Ignoring the "garbage" is absolutely valid, but hiding it so that you never see it is what makes it piracy.
      - MonitorBird 11mo ago
        I hope you never get a chance to talk to Congress.
      - timcobb 11mo ago
        You can say it's immoral or violates terms of service but as others have pointed out this isn't piracy, which has a very specific definition
    - cm2012 11mo ago
      If its so gross you dont have to use/watch youtube!
  - mrguyorama 11mo ago
    This is frankly wrong. All the creators I watch make their money from Patreon and use Youtube basically as a way to advertise Patreon to people. This was such a problem for Youtube that they flirted with banning linking to Patreon or suggesting viewers go to it. Not because it was taking money from google, but because it was money being paid not to google. Then Google competed by adding their own form of Patreon built into the system, and creators liked that and embraced it, and recently Youtube abused the membership system to pollute non-member's screens with videos they could not watch without paying, and creators did not want this, but Youtube does not care what creators want. The people who make most of their money from Youtube ad-rev are the worst the platform has to offer. They are beholden to the algorithm, so they have to put out slop every single day, and make the most aggressive A/B tested clickbait they can manage, and even pay to advertise their video on other channels and videos, and they are all better off on TikTok anyway. It's things like Five Minute Crafts and their made up videos.
- fn-mote 11mo ago
  > The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you Is this the way YouTube ads work? If I don’t load the ad, is someone paying?
- tailrecursion 11mo ago
  No, piracy is defined as stealing a vendor's exclusivity by making copies and putting them up on a web site. Ad blocking is not the same as making copies and distributing. You might as well argue that covering your ears during a TV advertisement is piracy. That's a strange definition of the word if I ever saw one.
  - danpalmer 11mo ago
    I think content piracy is generally accepted to not require re-distributing. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if I search "watch free movies online" and find a site streaming bad DVD rips, I fully believe that I am pirating that content against the wishes of the content owner.
    - aspaviento 11mo ago
      Generally accepted by whom? There are many countries that only consider distribution illegal so I don't think it's generally accepted at all.
      - its_ethan 11mo ago
        I'd say generally accepted by the majority of English speaking/western society? If someone said they were going to "pirate a movie" there's next to zero chance they are referring to the distribution side of that endeavor. I feel like OP isn't asserting anything even remotely controversial in that definition lol
        aspaviento 11mo ago
        Um... no? Maybe that's true for English speakers (I'm not a native speaker, so I won't make assumptions), but thinking that Western society views it that way is a big stretch, especially with streaming sites. While some might admit to watching something on a pirate site, many people don't refer to it as piracy when they're using a streaming service.
- marssaxman 11mo ago
  > the right to put an advert in front of you The advertiser may well think that's what they're buying, but what they're actually getting is the right to send my browser a URL, which they hope I will fetch and view. I would prefer not to, so I don't.
- venturecruelty 11mo ago
  Nobody has the right to put things on my screen that I don't want to see, first of all. Second, I'm never going to "convert", so I'm actually saving them money by blocking their ads, because now the ad will go to someone else who doesn't block it who might buy whatever Temu nonsense is being forced on them. Edit: oh, I see you work at Google.
  - Loudergood 11mo ago
    You mean DoubleClick. It's clear which business model took over after the merger.
    - venturecruelty 11mo ago
      I keep forgetting that they bought DoubleClick. Google has been a surveillance company for so long now that I've kind of forgotten there was ever a Before Times.
      - joquarky 11mo ago
        Doubleclick actually took over Google. Perhaps not literally, as in on the financial books. But certainly in leadership "values".

danpalmer 11mo ago

The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you, not the right to a sale. Whether they convert you is up to them, their product, their offering, etc. I think you can never buy a single product from an ad and this is still piracy. That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is not to get you to buy a coke today, it's to have a positive impression that builds over years. This sort of advertising is very hard to attribute sales to, but a good example of how you don't need to buy a product for seeing the ad to be worth something to the company.

Nextgrid 11mo ago
And I have the right to pay someone to watch the ads + videos for me, and then summarize me the video minus ads. Just like I have the right to hand my ad-full newspaper to someone, have them cut out the ads and hand me back the now ad-free one. If both of those are legal and ethical (I’d be curious what argument someone would make against this), then offloading this work to a machine should be just as ethical.
- JAlexoid 11mo ago
  You can rationalize this any way you want, but at the end of the day you're screwing over not a faceless corporation - but the very people who put out videos on YouTube. It's fine if you're OK with it, but don't pretend that you're not doing that.
  - pessimizer 11mo ago
    You're not replying directly to the last comment because it posed a hard question, and you've resorted to an emotional appeal.
  - Nextgrid 11mo ago
    I’m totally cool with “screwing over” people who make their income screwing gullible people into falling for scams or buying useless, overpriced junk they don’t need. I don’t need to rationalize it for myself, I’m just trying to show some people the error in their ways, but maybe their portfolio of ad-related stocks is clouding their vision?
    - JAlexoid 11mo ago
      I hate to break it to you, but you're not doing any of that. You seem like you have a robin hood complex or something similar.
      - sidrag22 11mo ago
        the creator is being harmed in no way at all, the ad free viewer is still a viewer and still could potentially generate more traffic to that creator by word of mouth algo pushing based on more views etc. Its still a net positive for the creator, just not AS net positive as an ad viewer. its not some secret that some % of viewers, block ads.. either you lean into it and utilize it, or you pretend people should be obligated to only watch your videos by paying or watching ads, in that case find a new platform.
  - aspaviento 11mo ago
    The choice of an individual to skip an advertisement has minimal impact on the content creator or the platform. This person isn't accountable for the decisions of others regarding whether they watch the ad or not. Ultimately, their actions only affect themselves and do not influence anyone involved in the advertisement process.
  - mrguyorama 11mo ago
    The Youtubers I like don't make any money from Google ads, because Google's draconian content policies and un-auditable "demonitization" system prevents them from making any money on such objectionable content as "Literally talking about how bad slavery was" or "Showing pictures of people who died in the Holocaust" or "mummifying a store bought chicken carcass" Are you watching creators who don't share such sentiments? You should consider that the creators who make large sums from youtube ad rev are the absolute worst quality you can find. People like Mr Beast or Logan Paul. It primarily means you are slinging garbage every single day and literally hurting people for money, because that's what google's algorithm optimizes for. Google wants to burn you out churning out slop despite the fact that youtube is already significantly overfilled. Meanwhile, all those youtube creators who made their living doing high quality animation a couple decades ago? Youtube killed their business by fiat because different content was more profitable for them. Multiple very prominent and influential animators who go all the way back to the early Newgrounds days were forced out of their job by that change. The entire reason Youtube creators started taking sponsorships is because Google has repeatedly reduced their advertising payouts, by staggering amounts. Several times Google killed entire swaths of the smaller content industry simply because they felt like taking more of the money. They can do this because there are no alternatives. The reason Floatplane and Nebula and friends exist is entirely because Youtube constantly punishes you for making Non-Mr Beast content, and repeatedly cuts how much money you get per hour of watched content, with no warning or justification even offered. The creators I watch do not want me to watch them on youtube. They want me to watch them on Nebula, Floatplane, and Patreon. This includes many channels that predate Youtube being bought by Google, and ads existing on the service at all. Several of these creators, especially the animators, were prominent on Newgrounds, and made zero dollars from their work. Most of them have day jobs or other avenues of monitizing their talents, like touring or merch or music. Youtube added a feature to compete with Patreon where you can pay to be a "member" of a channel, and that channel can produce "members only" videos that you can only watch if you pay that channel money. Just recently, Youtube, without any warning or checking with creators or asking opinions started forcing those videos in front of users who are not members, and cannot see them, polluting feeds and making it harder to select the next video you want to watch and creators, including LTT, are adamantly against this and do not want it Youtube does not GAF what creators want, never has, and is almost always a hostile and adversarial entity in the relationship. I am not screwing over the creators by blocking ads, Google is screwing over the creators to take more profit from those ads.
- danpalmer 11mo ago
  But in those cases someone is still seeing the ads. It's when no one is seeing the ads that it becomes piracy, in my opinion. A summary is not the same as the content either, that's a fairly well tested concept (fair use, etc).
  - Nextgrid 11mo ago
    Ok, let’s switch it up a bit. I give the ad-full newspaper to someone not speaking the local language. Or an illiterate person. Or a monkey trained to be good with scissors. Is this also piracy? At what point does it become piracy? How little of an ad should someone see/understand before it counts as a “valid” ad view? A few words? A full sentence? Etc.
    - danpalmer 11mo ago
      You're trying to nit-pick where the line is drawn. The point is not where the line is drawn, it's that there is a line. Installing an ad-blocker in your browser and never seeing an ad while consuming hours of content for free, depriving those creators of revenue, depriving the platform of revenue to support your usage of it, is in no way comparable to these at-the-margin contrived examples.
      - sidrag22 11mo ago
        depriving? the creators are posting their content on a free platform, with hopes that it will generate enough views so that enough of those viewers are ad watching viewers so that they will gain revenue. you're acting like the view is 100% meaningless and ONLY a bad thing, and its quite the opposite. the "free" view costs the creator literally nothing, and it gains them an additional view, if its a good video its potentially gonna help spread the video elsewhere where maybe they can find some suckers to mindlessly consume ads. and lets be real, the platform you are "depriving of revenue" is google... they operated ad free to create massive market capture to create the current monstrosity that is youtube in 2025, think they can't cut off all users that block ads right now? there is a reason they aren't doing so.
  - 11mo ago
cm2012 11mo ago
Also, Youtube pays out more to creators than anyone else on the web, they dwarf Patreon 10x. People who make youtube videos rely on ads to get paid.
- Nextgrid 11mo ago
  They’re welcome not to make videos. But if they make them and lay them out there for free alongside some garbage I have the right to ignore, don’t blame me if I do look at them and ignore the garbage, and since there’s so much of it I eventually get my machine to ignore them, not unlike wearing gloves when dealing with a messy task as to save you the time of scrubbing your hands from dirt/oil/etc.
  - danpalmer 11mo ago
    Ignoring the "garbage" is absolutely valid, but hiding it so that you never see it is what makes it piracy.
    - MonitorBird 11mo ago
      I hope you never get a chance to talk to Congress.
    - timcobb 11mo ago
      You can say it's immoral or violates terms of service but as others have pointed out this isn't piracy, which has a very specific definition
  - cm2012 11mo ago
    If its so gross you dont have to use/watch youtube!
- mrguyorama 11mo ago
  This is frankly wrong. All the creators I watch make their money from Patreon and use Youtube basically as a way to advertise Patreon to people. This was such a problem for Youtube that they flirted with banning linking to Patreon or suggesting viewers go to it. Not because it was taking money from google, but because it was money being paid not to google. Then Google competed by adding their own form of Patreon built into the system, and creators liked that and embraced it, and recently Youtube abused the membership system to pollute non-member's screens with videos they could not watch without paying, and creators did not want this, but Youtube does not care what creators want. The people who make most of their money from Youtube ad-rev are the worst the platform has to offer. They are beholden to the algorithm, so they have to put out slop every single day, and make the most aggressive A/B tested clickbait they can manage, and even pay to advertise their video on other channels and videos, and they are all better off on TikTok anyway. It's things like Five Minute Crafts and their made up videos.
fn-mote 11mo ago
> The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you Is this the way YouTube ads work? If I don’t load the ad, is someone paying?
tailrecursion 11mo ago
No, piracy is defined as stealing a vendor's exclusivity by making copies and putting them up on a web site. Ad blocking is not the same as making copies and distributing. You might as well argue that covering your ears during a TV advertisement is piracy. That's a strange definition of the word if I ever saw one.
- danpalmer 11mo ago
  I think content piracy is generally accepted to not require re-distributing. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if I search "watch free movies online" and find a site streaming bad DVD rips, I fully believe that I am pirating that content against the wishes of the content owner.
  - aspaviento 11mo ago
    Generally accepted by whom? There are many countries that only consider distribution illegal so I don't think it's generally accepted at all.
    - its_ethan 11mo ago
      I'd say generally accepted by the majority of English speaking/western society? If someone said they were going to "pirate a movie" there's next to zero chance they are referring to the distribution side of that endeavor. I feel like OP isn't asserting anything even remotely controversial in that definition lol
      - aspaviento 11mo ago
        Um... no? Maybe that's true for English speakers (I'm not a native speaker, so I won't make assumptions), but thinking that Western society views it that way is a big stretch, especially with streaming sites. While some might admit to watching something on a pirate site, many people don't refer to it as piracy when they're using a streaming service.
marssaxman 11mo ago
> the right to put an advert in front of you The advertiser may well think that's what they're buying, but what they're actually getting is the right to send my browser a URL, which they hope I will fetch and view. I would prefer not to, so I don't.
venturecruelty 11mo ago
Nobody has the right to put things on my screen that I don't want to see, first of all. Second, I'm never going to "convert", so I'm actually saving them money by blocking their ads, because now the ad will go to someone else who doesn't block it who might buy whatever Temu nonsense is being forced on them. Edit: oh, I see you work at Google.
- Loudergood 11mo ago
  You mean DoubleClick. It's clear which business model took over after the merger.
  - venturecruelty 11mo ago
    I keep forgetting that they bought DoubleClick. Google has been a surveillance company for so long now that I've kind of forgotten there was ever a Before Times.
    - joquarky 11mo ago
      Doubleclick actually took over Google. Perhaps not literally, as in on the financial books. But certainly in leadership "values".