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Ask HN: Is it just me or has YouTube gone fanatical on ads?
I never used to have a problem watching the first 5 seconds of a sponsored commercial on some of the more popular YouTube videos, but I've noticed a startling increase in the amount of ads being served to me. It is at the point where I would say 3 in every 4 videos plays an ad now. It's disgustingly frustrating.
Has anyone else noticed this?
If so, has there been an announcement regarding this that I've missed? Perhaps even something to do with Google+ IDs being used for user accounts?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- OafTobark 13y agoUsers enable ads on their account I believe. If people are choosing to monetize their videos, thats going to happen more and more.
- HaEB4zcjbp 13y agohttps://adblockplus.org/ https://adblockplus.org/ https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl
- herbig 13y agoAfter having used adblock plus for like the last 2 years, I disabled it the other day and have been amazed at how terrible the Internet is without it.
- dethstar 13y agoWhenever I use someone else's computer I'm always amazed and wonder how can they stand it. I have noticed people actually getting frustrated at ads making sounds and what not.
- yeukhon 13y agoYou should read this: https://adblockplus.org/blog/acceptable-ads-by-the-numbers https://adblockplus.org/blog/acceptable-ads-by-the-numbers after hearing a talk Robert Hansen gave at AppSec USA, I then realize why adblock plus has been doing a poor job :( it can't stop most of the pop ups and ads anymore.
- HaEB4zcjbp 13y agoIt does if you uncheck "Allow some non-intrusive advertising"
- nullymcnull 13y agoI think you misunderstand. AdBlock doesn't force this whitelisting, it merely defaults to using it.
- yeukhon 13y agoDid you just say they default to use the whitelist ad program?
- nullymcnull 13y agoYes, I believe if you just blindly click through the initial install for the extension, the limited whitelisting (for 'unobtrusive ads') will be in effect. That's the whole idea, isn't it - to whitelist for the majority of users who don't read the fine print or tweak things, while still allowing anyone who cares to shut it off.
- alan_cx 13y agoCould not agree more. Its almost frighting. It kinda reminds me, as a long standing Formula 1 fan, of what NASCAR looked like on TV when I first started watching it. It was like being assaulted with brand names. Quite a culture shock. However, these days, I try to be oh so generous and disable the adblock for sites that I, in my "wisdom", want to get the ad revenue. Hell, I'll even click a few if Im feeling especially generous!!!!
- foobarqux 13y agoDon't you know it's your solemn duty to brainwash yourself so that others can get paid?
- comex 13y agoPersonally, while I'm almost frustrated enough with YouTube ads to use an ad blocker, I'm hesitant to do so because the authors of the videos I watch are often precisely the kind of people I want to support, and I've heard YouTube is hard enough to depend on for income without people blocking ads. I'd love to have an option to directly pay money instead, but I doubt it'll ever happen. Twitch.tv is similar but considerably more annoying - but it provides such an option, and I'm considering buying it, although (unlike YouTube) I probably don't watch enough Twitch videos for it to be worthwhile.
- dredmorbius 13y agoFor people who are missing your second link: youtube-dl is a video downloader, and it works on far, far more than just YouTube. The benefits: you download videos at your discretion and preference. You can archive them if you want (I do this largely for documentary / lecture videos), and play them back locally using the video player of your preference. I generally prefer either mplayer or xine, both offer keyboard controls over playback, vastly better rewind / forward control than YouTube's default player (or anyone else's for that matter), consistent video controls for all videos, and the ability to speed up (I run most straight presentation videos at 120 - 160% of normal) or slow down (things going boom) videos as desired. Embedded players are OK for getting a quick sample of something or very brief content, but not for serious viewing.
- gizmo686 13y agoAlso, using clive, I noticed that I get much more consistent download speed.
- chaz 13y agoFF/RW problems may be your ISP and not YT. TWC is notorious for routing YT through its own servers and it's terrible; others may be just as bad. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5276772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5276772
- dredmorbius 13y agoNot using TWC. It could be my ISP's peers, but my ISP itself is both rather competent and very network neutral.
- cupcake-unicorn 13y agoGive AdblockEdge a try. It's a true open source clean fork of AdblockPlus, and it doesn't have the "acceptable ads" whitelisted, which are only whitelisted in some cases because Google/etc. paid them off.
- dgesang 13y agoAgreed, "Adblock Edge" is the way to go. Original "Adbock Plus" gets money from Google to not filter their ads: Google has tried to fight back against Adblock, partly by paying Adblock to whitelist some of their ads. Google’s business model is all about ads but as awareness of Adblock grows it’s increasingly difficult to get ads in front of online users. src: http://socialtimes.com/youtube-pre-roll-ads-drive-users-install-adblocker_b137843 http://socialtimes.com/youtube-pre-roll-ads-drive-users-inst... Also: https://adblockplus.org/blog/acceptable-ads-by-the-numbers https://adblockplus.org/blog/acceptable-ads-by-the-numbers
- fhd2 13y agoI work on Adblock Plus and would like to clarify some things: 1. Adblock Plus is fully open source, has always been, will always be. Everything else we do is open source too, including our infrastructure and backend systems. (https://hg.adblockplus.org/ https://hg.adblockplus.org/) 2. Adblock Edge is an unmaintained (edit: Not true, there've been some changes lately) fork of an old Adblock Plus version, with the Acceptable Ads feature removed. 3. Acceptable Ads are an opt-out feature which whitelists ads that comply with the Acceptable Ads criteria. Large sites have to support the project in return, but there's no way around the criteria. (https://adblockplus.org/en/about https://adblockplus.org/en/about) As an aside, we're currently looking into a way of making it easy for users to whitelist ads on YouTube channels they like automatically. Pre-roll video ads will never be acceptable and hence never will be whitelisted for all users by default, but many people still want to support individual YouTubers.
- spyder 13y agoI don't think it's fair to say that Adblock Edge is unmaintained when it has more recent updates than Adblock Plus: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/versions/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/versions/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/...
- zmitri 13y agoI noticed this recently as well. I had not seen any ads for a long time as I use AdBlock and AdBlockPlus for Chrome but they have started slipping through in the past few weeks.
- yRetsyM 13y agoI've found that YouTube ramps up ad volume as you increase your viewing. I can do a short session of a video or two (5minutes) without any. But if I increase that to long form content or longer session then ads seem to get center stage.
- alanctgardner2 13y agoI don't know why it did't happen sooner. I started pre-roll seeing ads on mobile as well, which I don't remember until recently. I don't get why it's disgusting. This is how video creators and Google are supposed to get paid. It's annoying to me that people want free content, and they keep pushing companies to "get traction first, then monetize". This is what has to happen, or else Google has to keep subsidizing progressively larger bandwidth bills - and the people who are creating the content have to keep their day jobs.
- cclogg 13y agoI guess it's just annoying that it's practically on everything now... like everyone is trying to make that 4 cents in ad revenue off of their kitten rolling around or whatever lol >< I've personally stopped watching several videos just because an ad started (as in I closed the browser tab after seeing I had to wait 15s or 30s). Youtube still has dominance now but if you keep getting in the way of people, something better will come along and usurp you (ie StackOverflow vs Experts Exchange).
- enneff 13y ago> I've personally stopped watching several videos just because an ad started If you don't like ads, keep doing this. YouTube will notice and it will affect their decision making.
- gizmo686 13y agoYoutube has 2 types of users it needs to worry about: viewers, and uploaders. One of its major offerings to uploaders is the ability to monotize. It is difficult to see how a competitor can offer this without advertisements.
- daveid 13y agoPerhaps paid subscriptions per channel, with free tiers (or amounts) of content?
- graeme 13y ago
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sjtgraham 13y agoI have definitely noticed this too. It also brought to my attention how much I use YouTube as I noticed how often I felt pissed because of yet another pre-roll.
- sudomal 13y agoUnless they've changed things recently, you can always subscribe to channels and watch those videos on a smart TV. I don't see ads on that... yet.
- hemdawgz 13y agoEh, the ads are easy enough to circumvent on a PC. I think what OP is complaining about is just the fact that they're being pushed a lot harder recently.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoI can confirm that. It also used to skip pre-rolls when you reloaded the page, now it will keep displaying the pre-roll until you watch it.
- simcop2387 13y agoI've had it show the pre-roll ad every time I watch a video before, i suspect it's a malfunction but can never be sure.
- drawkbox 13y agoCompared to hulu and others they haven't yet but it is more pervasive. The 'skip' link is still in after you watch one longer ad in a series. At least they have that because watching ads for online videos is not the same as TV. Back in the day on TV you'd get 10-15 minutes of entertainment before a commercial. Here you are watching :30 spots for another minute long video or maybe a few minutes on most occasions. So ad sites really need to take that into consideration. Noone wants to watch more ad time than actual video time, keep at least a sane balance. A balance that will keep people watching not turn them away forever.
- chopete 13y agoIn Chrome, I use Magic Actions for YouTube. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magic-actions-for-youtube/abjcfabbhafbcdfjoecdgepllmpfceif https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magic-actions-for-.... Not only it blocks ads, it removes annoying annotations as well.
- razvanr 13y agoThe problem is that most people go to YouTube for quick content. It becomes useless when you have to stop 3 out of 4 times for 5-30 seconds, as OP pointed out. It completely changes the YouTube experience and just doesn't feel "right" or scalable as a business model. Or, if Google sticks to it then the sort of content that gets consumed might change. I already find myself skipping to see videos under 2 minutes if there's an ad before. I never felt pushed around by ads on Netflix, South Park or any other premium content though.
- Amadou 13y agoThe net is soooo ripe for a distributed replacement of Youtube, Facebook, Gmail, etc. Once upon a time those sorts of sites provided real value in hosting files, pictures, video and providing a well-known endpoint like gmail. But now we have phones with 64GB of flash for canonical storing of files, p2p protocols for efficient transfer of files and distributed hash tables for finding files. Someone is going to come along with a distributed system that gains enough traction and just wipe all of these guys off the map. To paraphrase the founder of RedHat, whatever comes next won't be the size of Youtube, it will make youtube the size of a bittorrent tracker.
- ceejayoz 13y ago> But now we have phones with 64GB of flash for canonical storing of files, p2p protocols for efficient transfer of files and distributed hash tables for finding files. And 2 GB data caps. I don't want my phone's hard drive, processing power, and my cell phone bill all being used up for P2P videos.
- Amadou 13y agoSo, let your phone hold the canonical copy and let the swarm handle the efficient transfer of files -- not everybody will be on cellular data plans, hell you won't be on a cellular data plan when you are within range of a wifi AP like at home or the office.
- eloff 13y agoIf you think it's so easy, then you build it. Some of that has been done, some of it has yet to be done. But so far it sucks compared to the centralized system.
- judk 13y agoWell how did YT make their money before Google acquired the-- oh. They didn't.
- _nvs 13y agoI agree - think WebRTC and take a look at what PeerCDN is doing about it (https://peercdn.com https://peercdn.com).
- gojomo 13y agoChristmas marketing season?
- rcthompson 13y agoIncidentally, I find that having a "skip" button available to me actually makes me more interested in the commercial, because I have to make an active decision about whether to watch it or not.
- fierycatnet 13y agoGlad I am not the only one. In the last week or so I've noticed increase in ads as well. It's really annoying now, I frequently just skip watching video all together, I have a short attention span for this nonsense. 30 second ad so I can watch 1 minute video, no thank you.
- tjmc 13y agoFrustrating yes. Disgusting no. YouTube is provided to you as a free service and advertisers pickup the tab. Google paid over $1B for YouTube and people upload over 10 new hours of video every minute. Did you honestly expect they'd wear that kind of expense for ever?
- ars_technician 13y agoThe ads are mainly to spur content creation by the uploaders, not to foot google's bill.
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoIs YouTube even profitable yet? A few years later, despite being one of the most visited websites on the internet, it still was at a loss I think.
- nutanc 13y agoSkipping ads is so ingrained in us, YouTube has now taught my 6 year old daughter to skip ads. She was not doing that 2-3 months back. But now she does it and she does not even need help doing it.
- aroman 13y agoJust today I started noticing this, yes. It's driving me insane.
- robryan 13y agoDoes youtube do anything smart around showing the same ads multiple times? I watch a fair bit on twitch who don't have a lot of ads targeted at Australia. I think they do the advertiser and the viewer a disservice by repeating the same ad over and over again. Say for example they are running an xbox one ad, after I have seen it for the 10th time in say a week I think it has really reached the maximum effectiveness that it is ever going to on me, showing it more is likely just blowing Microsoft's money. We have a platform where everything can be precisely measured but the advertising is being shown like the traditional TV medium where there was no way to track how many times something was view by each viewer.
- Guest2931 13y agoIt would be up to the advertiser and if they want to cap impressions per user or not. Some advertisers simply don't care, and they'll pay to show their ad to the same person hundreds of times. Others will cap it at 3 impressions per user. YouTube/Google doesn't care, they'll show the ads for whoever is willing to pay the most.
- byjove 13y agoSince when did HN become a YouTube support area?! I personally haven't seen any uptake in ads nor will your anecdotal observations attract any sort of factual comments. Also I don't think that a supposed 75% of videos showing ads is excessive (to get a perspective on "exessive" I suggest you take a look at Hulu). Bandwidth isn't cheap and video creators deserve a paycheck, whinning about this sort of stuff strikes me as petty and a mark of false entitlement, also the FUD about G+ is unwarranted. If you're truly wondering about related updates check their blogs, it's where the announcements usually are.
- Detrus 13y agoIt's totally obnoxious now and destroys usability. I was on a slow internet for a while and youtube mercilessly shoved ads on it. It was impossible to use. I found Youtube center and it smoothed the experience, allows me to disable ads and download video easily. I also got it on the faster connection. It really makes life better. I'm willing to pay a few bucks to never see ads. Until that's an option youtube and deserving content creators will lose a few bucks. Oh well. Just won't tolerate the current volume of ads.
- judk 13y agoAre the ads higher bandwidth than the content?
- Detrus 13y agoIf you intend to watch content in 360p the ad may be 480p. Either way you have to wait for the ad to finish before the video would begin to buffer. And one in 5 ads didn't forward to the video because of some bug, so you have to refresh the page, watch the ad again. On fast connections youtube often doesn't switch quality to 720p fast enough, so if you switch it yourself it will often stall. Then you have to refresh the page, watch an ad, then see updated quality. YouTube center fixes this.
- eru 13y ago> Until that's an option youtube and deserving content creators will lose a few bucks. Not necessarily. Allowing the people most willing to spend money to opt out of ads, removes exactly the people someone would want to advertise to.
- Detrus 13y agoNot sure what profit is from the average youtuber, but if it's $5 or lower that could work. Enough people might pay the fee instead of blocking ads and eating bandwidth.
- Resident_Geek 13y agoIt's important to remember that the ads you're shown on Youtube videos are controlled by the channel owner, not by Google. Youtube itself doesn't have much control over how many ads you see.
- judk 13y agoDo paid videos (like GoT and BrBa) have these ads?
- Urgo 13y agoIn short yes there are more ads, but it's actually not anything that new. Let me explain.. Around summer 2007 (when I started using YouTube myself) YouTube started its beta version of the "partner program" where they salaried somewhere a bunch of people for a year and monetized their videos. In about Dec 2007 they let anyone apply for the program doing the rev share on videos we see today. I myself became a partner around March 2008. Anyway until about May 2011 the program ran like this, you applied, waited months normally for a reply, and hopefully got accepted, or if rejected tried again and waited..... In May 2011 they started trailing out a program where accounts in good standing could monetize videos w/o ever applying for partner, launching the start of the "monetization" program. In about March 2012 they basically killed off the apply for partner program and replaced it with this where basically everyone on YouTube was a partner. It's been since then that any video COULD be monetized, its just as time has gone on more and more people actually monetized them. My dates may be slightly off as its thanksgiving evening and I'm doing this off the top of my head but thats basically how things have gone. It's really nothing new... FYI I run a website that reports YouTube & Twitch statistics called Social Blade so youtube data is something I've been watching for quite a while now. Hope that helps :)
- axansh 13y agoIf youtube will come with paid plan like 99$ for year without ads in videos,user surely go for that.
- DigitalSea 13y agoI don't see any problem with it. Google are providing a free service to everyone (brands, content curators and those who consume it), why shouldn't they monetise that asset? A site like Youtube consumes so much bandwidth and space on a scale most people cannot imagine. I am surprised the whole ad strategy wasn't rolled out a lot sooner.
- bekman2 13y agoYoutube doesn't show in-video ads from where i live. (Africa)
- arcticf0x 13y agoYep, noticed this annoying feature too, I guess its been there for a while but till now Adblock used to block it. Google has found a way to bypass it.
- kitsune_ 13y agoThe problem I have is the really shitty targeting. With as much as Google must know about me, their ads usually are about stuff I have absolutely no interest in. I am from smaller country, so I get that the pool of advertisers must be smaller too. I bought a new bike this year and religiously researched this topic and consumed a ton of cycling videos. What ads do I see? Cars. I don't have a driver's license. Facebook isn't any better. Last year I was in South Korea and logged into Facebook once. After my return, FB managed to exclusively display ads in Korean for over a month. Then there are the occasions where you research a topic, buy a product, and then get to see ads for the product you already bought for a year after (I saw ads for the NI Maschine midi controller for over a year after my purchase).
- dsuth 13y agoYou want to talk about shitty targeting, I pull up a Radiohead clip and the entire background becomes an ad for Rihanna. Great work YouTube.
- benackles 13y agoIt's surprising that none of these content providers are delivering targeted ads. You're totally right, for as much information as we've given these companies, video ads remain completely irrelevant to individuals. For online video in general, it seems like Facebook is the company missing the largest opportunity. With the demographic information they've acquired over the years, they could easily leverage Facebook Connect on all the video platforms where authentication is utilized. It seems like the hardest part is building up ad inventory to support various demographics.
- xerophtye 13y agoFor me, i visit a google-ad website once, or click an ad once, it starts showing up EVERYWHERE. Examples: Leap Motion, and one other vacation site that lets you book hotels in Maldives. Heck, what ever happened to RELEVANT ads? Why not show me more cool tech products?
- damon_c 13y agoYes. I just bought a desk last week. Now all I see is ads for desks! Having just bought a desk, I am probably among the people least likely in the universe to buy a desk! If there was a button that said, "No Thanks, I just got one of these", I'd push it just to help out.
- belorn 13y agoIf you freely give Google access to display ads on your computer, they will do so at every opportunity until you can not take it any more. The obvious method to prevent this is to deny Google free access to your hardware, and thus stop their efforts at displaying ads to you. Alternative, one could stop interacting with Google altogether, but thats a bit more drastic step.
- mongrelion 13y agoI feel your pain, bro. Lately I've been using http://fixyt.com http://fixyt.com which is a website that works on top of YouTube but without the annoying ads and without the stalking that Google does on you.
- jjwiseman 13y agoI worked on the YouTube ads team (Adsense for interactive media, or AFIM) for a while. The people on that team saw themselves as helping to create the replacement for TV, and part of that job was to create a model that paid the expense of hosting and distributing video, with all the associated infrastructure, as well as allowed for content-creators to make money--basically to make it a viable business. Ads are the primary means of making that happen, but they've experimented with other methods too. They care a lot about the user. To contradict another poster, they don't show ads at every opportunity; that's not the Google way, and they have detailed data on exactly how many ads you can show people before they stop watching videos. They also strongly encourage advertisers to use skippable ads--they make users happier and they encourage more interesting ads (it's also not entirely true that advertisers don't have to pay for skipped ads). The only thing worse than YouTube ads are the non-Google attempts at video ads. Google's UI and targeting are 10x better than the competition I've seen. (It's been over a year since I've worked on AFIM, so my info could be out of date.)
- davedx 13y agoInteresting info. > they have detailed data on exactly how many ads you can show people before they stop watching videos Anecdote: YouTube caused me to install AdBlock. I'm not anti-advertising, but the amount of ads shown on YouTube videos reached a tipping point for me sometime earlier this year. I'm not ad-intolerant, but it seemed to be showing me more ads per minute than on regular TV shows. Of course that's just perception.
- option_greek 13y agoAlso, ads in middle of a video are much better than ads at the start of a video. Some times it becomes ridiculous when the ad length is 1/4th of video length (though most become skippable after 5-10 secs).
- stumacd 13y agoI'd like to think I'm in the same boat here. I understand that there's no such thing as a free lunch. But the unskippable 30 second ad for a short video was the end of the line.
- tux1968 13y agoIt would be interesting to try some new ideas that advertising over the internet allows. How about an option for users to consume a few minutes of commercials in a row, and then get X number of videos ad free? Or allowing users to influence the ad selection by manually entering an interest/disinterest list. Could be alot more flexible than the television model.
- sreejithr 13y agoAD BLOCK PLUS. You're welcome.
- nbrogi 13y agoCan't you just use AdBlock..? I haven't seen a YouTube ad in years.
- nicholas73 13y agoThe worst is that they place stickies all over some videos that you now that to click to close.
- ereckers 13y agoI noticed the same thing the other day. The ads I don't care about so much. I immediately notice a performance hit. The experience itself was degraded.
- shellehs 13y agoIt is not me. Here it is like 1 in every 10 or more videos, chances are when I continue to watch videos there could be no ads. Actually, some ads I really like that I want to replay. It is not like in Chinese Youtube-alike online video sites, like Youku, Letv, they have 30 - 60 seconds ads in every beginning of a video, and there was no chance to "skip" the ads, even I use Adblock, it MAY be block the contents but never the ad itself.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- DatrixTSW 13y agoi have had a lot of problems with Ads. Ads used to be ok and not as bad as they are now. They are as bad as those pop ads that used to show up on websites. But no matter what argument is raised as to how good or bad ads are I will always use an Adblocker. And Yes Google+ has gone Fanatical with the Ads ever since they bought out YouTube and I am fed up with it.