6 ms·

YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

56 points by pagefair 13y ago

wnevets 13y ago
When will advertisers realize shorter and more direct ads work best on the web? When Hulu was in beta they only had 5 second ads and I still remember some of them after all of these years simply because I had no reason to direct my attention away from them. Now when Im forced to watch a 30 second ad I just change the tab and check my email or whatever.
- pierlux 13y ago
  Also, repeating the same ad over and over is pretty annoying. If you binge watch a series on Hulu Plus, you'll get the same ad at least twice per episode, for every 24 min episode. I can recite some of them by heart, with the same intonation.
toastedzergling 13y ago
Youtube wasn't the breaking point for me, twitch.tv was. Granted, the streamers themselves do have control over this, I found it utterly annoying to see the same 1 or 2 ads played over and over in my face. Once I had ABP installed, the whole internet suddenly became faster to load too. The only annoying thing is, some websites that have those annoying ads that scroll across the webpage will now result in a dead-iframe blocking its content. Fortunately, I know how to right click, inspect element, navigate to the iframe container, and delete it, which, takes about 5 seconds.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  That's a huge factor. I remember watching seasons of TV shows on my local broadcaster's websites. Obviously, they were ad-supported and I was okay with this. The frustration was they'd show the same ad over and over and over again as I consumed a season-full of content. If you gave me the kind of variety we're used to in a TV broadcast, I'd tolerate the ads. But repeated? No. That's when I start looking to hack my way around them.
- freehunter 13y ago
  Not just faster, but more secure as well. I couldn't tell you how many malware outbreaks I see at work because of a rogue advertisement on a popular site. Adblock keeps these from getting the best of your users. We did a pilot group with some folks who commonly use their work computers without the benefit of our corporate proxy or firewall (these are the users most at risk of advertising-based malware) by having them install Adblock. The results were pretty drastic, even if it wasn't a statistically significant sample size.
sp332 13y ago
Why are the screenshots in this article taken from klout.com instead of twitter or facebook or wherever they were actually posted?
- jaytaylor 13y ago
  It looks like he may just have my klout chrome or Firefox extension installed, which adds klout scores to twitter. He may also be using a 3rd party client with a klout integration.
  - pagefair 13y ago
    Correct, just the Klout chrome extension adding scores to Twitter =)
a3n 13y ago
I didn't realize adblock would block pre-rolls. That damn web development company with the animated little guy and the tiles of site examples has really gotten annoying. Installed adblock a few minutes ago. Bliss.
- DanBC 13y ago
  YOU'VE BEEN CODING LIKE A BEAST AND NOW IT'S [skip] It's weird that there's no mechanism for me to veto ads. I have no use for that service, which makes the ad even more annoying to me. A while ago Crucial RAM were showing a really irritating ad. Normally I don't skip ads, but there have started being more ads that I hate and need to skip. And it's weird to get a 4 minute pre-roll ad on a 9 minute youtube video.
ancarda 13y ago
Websites are expensive and other than charging users money, ads are an easy way to generate revenue. I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock. However, YouTube forced me to. Back when YouTube used a small ad in the top-right, it was fine. Banner overlays were a bit more annoying, but still tolerable. Pre-rolls? No way, they stop me from getting to the content I want. I wish I could switch to Vimeo but there's not a lot of content there.
- isomorphic 13y ago
  I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock. I remember years ago when Ars Technica ran the article "Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love": http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-d... So I disabled AdBlock on Ars Technica. I was immediately greeted with a horrible blinking ad claiming some nonsense that was completely insulting--the IT equivalent of those "punch the monkey" ads. I turned AdBlock back on. I've never turned it back off on Ars Technica. Websites that run advertising cannot pretend that advertising is somehow separate from the site. Advertising becomes part of the content. Ads are therefore representative of the site. Website owners should curate the ads as carefully as the site's main content. Otherwise they're committing some of the same sins as spammers.
  - Flimm 13y ago
    You haven't explained why you decided against avoiding visiting Ars Technica altogether.
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  Aren't most pre-rolls 3 seconds before you can watch the video? And it's funny to me to watch people smugly use AdBlock. All you folks who use it understand that Google could detect that you AdBlocked, and then refuse to show the video, right? I mean, you get that, right?
  - 13y ago
criley2 13y ago
I don't know about y'all, but on Chrome right now, no ad-blocker works on Youtube anymore. The adblocking works on every other site, even other video sites. But Youtube pre-rolls continue to play no matter what extension or filters I use (and making sure that "acceptable ads" are off). Anyone else experiencing this?
- onli 13y ago
  Works for me. You could try a different adblocker, but it should work. Did you try turning it off and on again? ;) I don't even find the option anymore to not block the pre-rolls, which was an experimental option for some time. Seems to be on by default now (or even integrated into the filter lists?)
- shawabawa3 13y ago
  I'm using adblock plus with easylist and fanboys list, and "allow non-obtrusive advertising" off. Works for me
- consonants 13y ago
  Try a different adblocker that isn't being paid by Google to whitelist their ads. Try different blocklists, and for the real scummy domains I use a host redirect through my firewall.
danielweber 13y ago
I like how reddit discussion threads is now proof of how everyone feels.
- JTon 13y ago
  Ha! Good catch. As a redditor, I sometimes fall into the same trap. Because, you know, who doesn't browse reddit? /s
marquis 13y ago
There's this great small village where everyone makes stuff and buys stuff from each other: good ecosystem, works well and popular stuff makes more money than less popular, as expected. Someone comes up with an idea to make money off the stuff by giving it away for free but putting some ads on it. People don't mind much: the stuff is free now and the people making popular stuff make good money from their share of the ads. What happens next seems to be some kind of bizarre need to make more money. This is the part I don't really understand. So the people giving away the free stuff with the ads put more ads, which starts to put the people off watching it for free. The people getting the free stuff start to try and find ways of getting the free stuff without the new annoying ads, which makes the people making the ads want to make more ads and make it criminal to block the ads. People stop making stuff because they aren't making as much money as in the hey-day of free-stuff-and-not-too-many-ads and people stop watching stuff and maybe go outside and watch the sunset (still free) or play card games and charades (not yet patented) or make their own stuff and put it on FaceGramSnap (which has ads but not yet so annoying). The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong.
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago
  > The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong. greed
  - varelse 13y ago
    Also spelled Wall Street. And if at any point you come under the delusion that Wall Street is of any benefit to anyone but themselves, go read some analyst's alternate reality review and recommendations for a technology/company you understand top to bottom as an engineer. It's a terrifying Morlock/Eloi dichotomy that explains a lot (at least to me). Add in blind allocation at Google and they themselves are doing their very best to hire smart people who have no passion whatsoever for the job they're doing, staying only for the compensation and perks, perhaps fleetingly hoping that one day they can transfer to a fun project they believe in.
  - bittercynic 13y ago
adamb_ 13y ago
Reminds me of "Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?"[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6382188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6382188
pit 13y ago
Let's also not forget youtube-dl: http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
- lakwn 13y ago
  And Youtube Viewer: https://code.google.com/p/trizen/ https://code.google.com/p/trizen/
  - okasaki 13y ago
    You can play videos with youtube-dl: mplayer -really-quiet -cache 3000 $(youtube-dl -f 18 -g $(xclip -o))
rmckayfleming 13y ago
A fair size chunk of the pre roll ads I see also don't show anything interesting in the first five seconds. They have some sort of banner and just as the five seconds are up the ad content actually starts.
byjove 13y ago
It's an evidence free nonsense article, but to answer that quoted tweet: YouTube for Schools doesn't contain ads http://www.youtube.com/schools http://www.youtube.com/schools
- kurtbingham 13y ago
  What evidence are you expecting? It's an opinion piece that merely connects a few dots. Google paid adblock plus, that's a fact. Did you see the Reddit article? Half of the comments were citing YouTube as a major reason for installing adblock.
cromwellian 13y ago
Ads are the least bad option. The Web functions best if content is available without paywalls. The Web is about friction-free use, you click a link, you are faced with walls. If we went to a micro-transaction based Web, where every link was behind a payment service, it would destroy crawlability, hamper sharing, and cast a chilling effect on people's behavior with respect to consuming content. The people producing content do need to eat and datacenters cost money too. You can either turn the entire Web into a giant App Store Mall where you pay for everything on demand, or we can have a free, open web, where 'curl' works, but you have to suffer the annoyance of banner ads and profiling (which people can do anyway with paywalls anyway) To me, it's a worthwhile tradeoff. I'd rather not see the Web behind a bazillion freemium pay-me links like we have on native. The real debate should be over how to make ads less annoying, more relevant, more pleasant, and let those who don't want to make the tradeoff make a micro-payment instead to opt-out of ads. If I could pay $50/year for an ad-free YouTube experience I probably would.
- josu 13y ago
  >If I could pay $50/year for an ad-free YouTube experience I probably would. When you can install adblock and get the same experience for free I'm not sure that many people would think that way. And the problem is that for most of the people that I have installed adblock for don't understand the moral implications of using it. I've tried to teach them how to deactivate it for pages they like, but they just didn't care because they didn't see the problem with having it always on. Most of the regular people around me don't understand how webpages make their money. They may say advertising, but if you question them any further all I get is blank stares.
  - ninjac0der 13y ago
    I don't think tools like noscript, adblock would be nearly as popular if the content publishers hadn't gotten so greedy. I'll use the verge as an example, it's mostly text content yet hitting any page on their site feels like I'm loading a damn application. I want print, not a shifty application around the print. The pendulum will swing.
  - ljf 13y ago
gabriel34 13y ago
This bit caught my eyes: "while paying AdBlock Plus to whitelist their other Adwords ads" So, adblock sells the ability to display ads to it's users? Isn't that just plain wrong?
bzelip 13y ago
Here's a related and interesting article [1] titled 'Unraveling Google’s Product Strategy' from the author of a post that is linked to on the HN front page (Ode to Little Data)[2]. The author in this related article is really showing the total commitment to ads by google. I find it very unsettling. [1]http://katsenblog.com/post/58721533658/unraveling-googles-product-strategy http://katsenblog.com/post/58721533658/unraveling-googles-pr... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6782205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6782205

56 points by pagefair 13y ago

When will advertisers realize shorter and more direct ads work best on the web? When Hulu was in beta they only had 5 second ads and I still remember some of them after all of these years simply because I had no reason to direct my attention away from them. Now when Im forced to watch a 30 second ad I just change the tab and check my email or whatever.

pierlux 13y ago
Also, repeating the same ad over and over is pretty annoying. If you binge watch a series on Hulu Plus, you'll get the same ad at least twice per episode, for every 24 min episode. I can recite some of them by heart, with the same intonation.

toastedzergling 13y ago

Youtube wasn't the breaking point for me, twitch.tv was. Granted, the streamers themselves do have control over this, I found it utterly annoying to see the same 1 or 2 ads played over and over in my face. Once I had ABP installed, the whole internet suddenly became faster to load too. The only annoying thing is, some websites that have those annoying ads that scroll across the webpage will now result in a dead-iframe blocking its content. Fortunately, I know how to right click, inspect element, navigate to the iframe container, and delete it, which, takes about 5 seconds.

Pxtl 13y ago
That's a huge factor. I remember watching seasons of TV shows on my local broadcaster's websites. Obviously, they were ad-supported and I was okay with this. The frustration was they'd show the same ad over and over and over again as I consumed a season-full of content. If you gave me the kind of variety we're used to in a TV broadcast, I'd tolerate the ads. But repeated? No. That's when I start looking to hack my way around them.
freehunter 13y ago
Not just faster, but more secure as well. I couldn't tell you how many malware outbreaks I see at work because of a rogue advertisement on a popular site. Adblock keeps these from getting the best of your users. We did a pilot group with some folks who commonly use their work computers without the benefit of our corporate proxy or firewall (these are the users most at risk of advertising-based malware) by having them install Adblock. The results were pretty drastic, even if it wasn't a statistically significant sample size.

sp332 13y ago

Why are the screenshots in this article taken from klout.com instead of twitter or facebook or wherever they were actually posted?

jaytaylor 13y ago
It looks like he may just have my klout chrome or Firefox extension installed, which adds klout scores to twitter. He may also be using a 3rd party client with a klout integration.
- pagefair 13y ago
  Correct, just the Klout chrome extension adding scores to Twitter =)

a3n 13y ago

I didn't realize adblock would block pre-rolls. That damn web development company with the animated little guy and the tiles of site examples has really gotten annoying. Installed adblock a few minutes ago. Bliss.

DanBC 13y ago
YOU'VE BEEN CODING LIKE A BEAST AND NOW IT'S [skip] It's weird that there's no mechanism for me to veto ads. I have no use for that service, which makes the ad even more annoying to me. A while ago Crucial RAM were showing a really irritating ad. Normally I don't skip ads, but there have started being more ads that I hate and need to skip. And it's weird to get a 4 minute pre-roll ad on a 9 minute youtube video.

ancarda 13y ago

Websites are expensive and other than charging users money, ads are an easy way to generate revenue. I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock. However, YouTube forced me to. Back when YouTube used a small ad in the top-right, it was fine. Banner overlays were a bit more annoying, but still tolerable. Pre-rolls? No way, they stop me from getting to the content I want. I wish I could switch to Vimeo but there's not a lot of content there.

isomorphic 13y ago
I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock. I remember years ago when Ars Technica ran the article "Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love": http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-d... So I disabled AdBlock on Ars Technica. I was immediately greeted with a horrible blinking ad claiming some nonsense that was completely insulting--the IT equivalent of those "punch the monkey" ads. I turned AdBlock back on. I've never turned it back off on Ars Technica. Websites that run advertising cannot pretend that advertising is somehow separate from the site. Advertising becomes part of the content. Ads are therefore representative of the site. Website owners should curate the ads as carefully as the site's main content. Otherwise they're committing some of the same sins as spammers.
- Flimm 13y ago
  You haven't explained why you decided against avoiding visiting Ars Technica altogether.
VikingCoder 13y ago
Aren't most pre-rolls 3 seconds before you can watch the video? And it's funny to me to watch people smugly use AdBlock. All you folks who use it understand that Google could detect that you AdBlocked, and then refuse to show the video, right? I mean, you get that, right?
- 13y ago

criley2 13y ago

I don't know about y'all, but on Chrome right now, no ad-blocker works on Youtube anymore. The adblocking works on every other site, even other video sites. But Youtube pre-rolls continue to play no matter what extension or filters I use (and making sure that "acceptable ads" are off). Anyone else experiencing this?

onli 13y ago
Works for me. You could try a different adblocker, but it should work. Did you try turning it off and on again? ;) I don't even find the option anymore to not block the pre-rolls, which was an experimental option for some time. Seems to be on by default now (or even integrated into the filter lists?)
shawabawa3 13y ago
I'm using adblock plus with easylist and fanboys list, and "allow non-obtrusive advertising" off. Works for me
consonants 13y ago
Try a different adblocker that isn't being paid by Google to whitelist their ads. Try different blocklists, and for the real scummy domains I use a host redirect through my firewall.

danielweber 13y ago

I like how reddit discussion threads is now proof of how everyone feels.

JTon 13y ago
Ha! Good catch. As a redditor, I sometimes fall into the same trap. Because, you know, who doesn't browse reddit? /s

marquis 13y ago

There's this great small village where everyone makes stuff and buys stuff from each other: good ecosystem, works well and popular stuff makes more money than less popular, as expected. Someone comes up with an idea to make money off the stuff by giving it away for free but putting some ads on it. People don't mind much: the stuff is free now and the people making popular stuff make good money from their share of the ads. What happens next seems to be some kind of bizarre need to make more money. This is the part I don't really understand. So the people giving away the free stuff with the ads put more ads, which starts to put the people off watching it for free. The people getting the free stuff start to try and find ways of getting the free stuff without the new annoying ads, which makes the people making the ads want to make more ads and make it criminal to block the ads. People stop making stuff because they aren't making as much money as in the hey-day of free-stuff-and-not-too-many-ads and people stop watching stuff and maybe go outside and watch the sunset (still free) or play card games and charades (not yet patented) or make their own stuff and put it on FaceGramSnap (which has ads but not yet so annoying). The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong.

Florin_Andrei 13y ago
> The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong. greed
- varelse 13y ago
  Also spelled Wall Street. And if at any point you come under the delusion that Wall Street is of any benefit to anyone but themselves, go read some analyst's alternate reality review and recommendations for a technology/company you understand top to bottom as an engineer. It's a terrifying Morlock/Eloi dichotomy that explains a lot (at least to me). Add in blind allocation at Google and they themselves are doing their very best to hire smart people who have no passion whatsoever for the job they're doing, staying only for the compensation and perks, perhaps fleetingly hoping that one day they can transfer to a fun project they believe in.
- bittercynic 13y ago

adamb_ 13y ago

Reminds me of "Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?"[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6382188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6382188

pit 13y ago

Let's also not forget youtube-dl: http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

lakwn 13y ago
And Youtube Viewer: https://code.google.com/p/trizen/ https://code.google.com/p/trizen/
- okasaki 13y ago
  You can play videos with youtube-dl: mplayer -really-quiet -cache 3000 $(youtube-dl -f 18 -g $(xclip -o))

rmckayfleming 13y ago

A fair size chunk of the pre roll ads I see also don't show anything interesting in the first five seconds. They have some sort of banner and just as the five seconds are up the ad content actually starts.

byjove 13y ago

It's an evidence free nonsense article, but to answer that quoted tweet: YouTube for Schools doesn't contain ads http://www.youtube.com/schools http://www.youtube.com/schools

kurtbingham 13y ago
What evidence are you expecting? It's an opinion piece that merely connects a few dots. Google paid adblock plus, that's a fact. Did you see the Reddit article? Half of the comments were citing YouTube as a major reason for installing adblock.

cromwellian 13y ago

Ads are the least bad option. The Web functions best if content is available without paywalls. The Web is about friction-free use, you click a link, you are faced with walls. If we went to a micro-transaction based Web, where every link was behind a payment service, it would destroy crawlability, hamper sharing, and cast a chilling effect on people's behavior with respect to consuming content. The people producing content do need to eat and datacenters cost money too. You can either turn the entire Web into a giant App Store Mall where you pay for everything on demand, or we can have a free, open web, where 'curl' works, but you have to suffer the annoyance of banner ads and profiling (which people can do anyway with paywalls anyway) To me, it's a worthwhile tradeoff. I'd rather not see the Web behind a bazillion freemium pay-me links like we have on native. The real debate should be over how to make ads less annoying, more relevant, more pleasant, and let those who don't want to make the tradeoff make a micro-payment instead to opt-out of ads. If I could pay $50/year for an ad-free YouTube experience I probably would.

josu 13y ago
>If I could pay $50/year for an ad-free YouTube experience I probably would. When you can install adblock and get the same experience for free I'm not sure that many people would think that way. And the problem is that for most of the people that I have installed adblock for don't understand the moral implications of using it. I've tried to teach them how to deactivate it for pages they like, but they just didn't care because they didn't see the problem with having it always on. Most of the regular people around me don't understand how webpages make their money. They may say advertising, but if you question them any further all I get is blank stares.
- ninjac0der 13y ago
  I don't think tools like noscript, adblock would be nearly as popular if the content publishers hadn't gotten so greedy. I'll use the verge as an example, it's mostly text content yet hitting any page on their site feels like I'm loading a damn application. I want print, not a shifty application around the print. The pendulum will swing.
- ljf 13y ago

gabriel34 13y ago

This bit caught my eyes: "while paying AdBlock Plus to whitelist their other Adwords ads" So, adblock sells the ability to display ads to it's users? Isn't that just plain wrong?

bzelip 13y ago

Here's a related and interesting article [1] titled 'Unraveling Google’s Product Strategy' from the author of a post that is linked to on the HN front page (Ode to Little Data)[2]. The author in this related article is really showing the total commitment to ads by google. I find it very unsettling. [1]http://katsenblog.com/post/58721533658/unraveling-googles-product-strategy http://katsenblog.com/post/58721533658/unraveling-googles-pr... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6782205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6782205