Website idea: a downdetector-like site that uses reddit's "here now" numbers to give insight into whether something is going on with a certain thing.
edit: Has anyone else not really been affected by the new youtube adblock policy at all? I think I have seen the warning a single time, and I use youtube all the time. I only use ublock origin and privacy badger... on chrome. Maybe that's it.
My wife uses YouTube a lot more than I do. I watch occasional tech related videos or stuff that's been sent to me. She uses it for audiobooks, music, some podcasts. She subscribes to a bunch of channels. It's her account that's logged in on the TV. I've never seen a message warning about adblocker use on my account, whereas her account got temporarily disabled. She ended up paying for premium.
> Has anyone else not really been affected by the new youtube adblock policy at all?
not really. firefox + privacy badger + ubo. once a week or so i do get blocked but then i clear cookies, restart firefox and relogin and then it works.
I think they are just updating their measures frequently, so not really anything technical. In other words: Youtube is continuously spending a lot of money to put out new patches block the latest circumventions.
If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made? Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads?
Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay. They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
First they destroyed the old internet by “forgetting” sites from search and created “platforms”.
Then they abused adnetworks to take the biggest share and control over what users can do or will likely do with their user agents.
Then they degraded every site and product searchability into ads-favored keyword matching.
Then, when people started using their well-setup cardboard box traps to their taste, they demanded to either pay for that or to forcefully watch ads.
I’m not gonna play a reasonable guy here, because it’s not a logical issue. I never wanted or expected to live in an internet like that. Google can go cry in a corner and look miserable.
And everyone should install ublock origin. Think of it as Python 3 or ESM or Democracy. It’s much better, you all just have to figure out new life with it.
> If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made?
I'd argue that _content_ is a fairly gross word that we've all come to use because we're in the industry -- "I need some _content_ around my ads so that we get some impressions". There are plenty of other words that are less marketing associated and more clearly connotative with creatively produced material - article, report, essay, story, paper, proposal, manifesto, gallery, video, photographs, exhibit, website, blog post - even material. _Content_ is efficiently produced filler. As such, yes, in the extreme less _content_ gets made, and in the absence of _content_ there is organically more of the latter category.
You can still make money on the internet without ads. Ads have in recent history been an easier, higher margin route. If the entire online ad industry fumbles, will we be substantially worse off? I don't think so: the number and size of websites would for sure shrink, but those left would have a much higher signal to noise.
No, but I also don't expect Google to change, I want their business model to become untenable so better alternatives can get a larger market share. If content creators don't think they get anything out of enabling advertising on YouTube, then they'll stop or move to other platforms which are not based on providing algorithmically generated feeds with interspersed ads based on user profiles. I hate advertising; I think it results in perverse incentives which promotes short-form generic low-effort entertainment. I therefore want to actively steal compute resources from companies whose business model is based on online advertising without giving them ad impressions and pay content creators that I like via other means such as Patreon.
I also just think 99% of advertising is bad taste which makes me mentally exhausted and puts me in a bad mood, so I just want it out of my sight.
Yes, I could pay for YouTube Premium, but that would go against my own interests since I would be financially supporting a platform with perverse incentives for content creators.
> If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made?
I can't speak for anybody else but my content will still get made.
> Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads?
Maybe, maybe not, whose to say what Google will do. Maybe they will value the influence or the goodwill more than the lack of income. Maybe some of the content will be free and other bits will be walled off (effectively this is already the case with youtube music). Maybe there will be less MFY content and that's perfectly ok with me, 99.99% of it is crap anyway. Youtuber isn't a profession I recognize.
> Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay.
And that's ok.
> They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
If we win the war against Ads lots of content won’t get made. But, the content that thrives in an Ad driven world is mostly toxic rage bait. I would argue that losing this content and instead only being left with content that people will actually pay for is a big net win for humanity.
Likely we will never see a world without Ads but I can dream.
It's utterly bizarre to me that this people still get this idea that everything would just stop?
Peertube et al exist. Patreon exists. Vimeo, Twitch, Tiktok. On one hand I'm absolutely aware that the TYPE of video content we have would change.
On the other, I'm not at all convinced that the destruction of YouTubes particular monetizing model would be a bad thing. I don't think much of value at all would be lost if people couldn't make money off Youtube the way they do now.
I personally prefer free content made by volunteers and would like the whole web to be ad free. It would be fine for me if Youtube stopped operations and if all "income-oriented" content producers went away. I feel the same about websites. The Internet was fine before it became commercialized. I'm both creating and consuming free content (why not?) but I'm not willing to waste my time on watching ads or anything like that. For other things, I'm willing to pay.
Other people's mileage may differ, of course. It's just a personal preference.
I pay for Nebula, I pay for Patreon. I cannot find it in me to give Alphabet a red cent of my money. Alphabet's primary goal is to turn the internet into cable and I honestly have no stomach for it.
Furthermore, I have precious few moments on this earth, I have no desire to have to spend them watching propaganda from corps (and sometimes just unfiltered political propaganda).
But most of all, ads are a privacy and security risk like no other. They follow you across the internet for ages, sell your data to the highest bidder (sometimes that bidder is the feds) and are the foremost distribution network for malware.
Sorry, I rather YouTube go away than have to agree to the above.
This reminds me of a business colleague of mine who truly does not understand why anyone would write software and then release it for free. There are many people willing to do that, and many people willing to create content on YouTube for free. We aren’t all driven by the almighty dollar.
Because those companies are just taking the piss. They are like an abusive boyfriend that wants to know what you're up to all the time. They pretend you can pay them off so they won't have to stalk you, but the prices they ask are greatly exaggerated and exist solely to try and fool regulators.
But if you're happy to pay whatever is asked of you, that'll be a 100 dollars thanks
> Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay.
I don’t think it’ll ever be possible to get everyone to pay, but if it’s easy to pay and priced low enough, paying becomes the easiest option for a lot of people. Why bother pirating music in 2023 when any number of music streaming services are about $10-11/mo?
YouTube Premium bundles YouTube music and costs $19/mo. This is higher than (or on par) a lot of streaming subscriptions.
Another annoyance is that it’s bundled with a music service. Some non-US markets experimented with a cheaper ad-free-YouTube only tier for less than half the price. When that tier of service can be offered, it is very hard to think most of the $19 goes towards storage, bandwidth, and operational overhead.
> They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
That just means, by definition, that the prices YouTube are trying to charge are too high, doesn't it? What we're seeing is basically a negotiation tactic: you either reduce the price, or we'll keep using ad blockers.
Not to mention, most creators don't really live off YouTube ads, those pay too little for the vast majority of channels as far as I understand. Creators live off their own sponsorships, Patreon etc.
Note, I'm actually someone who thinks YouTube Premium is good value for my money and am already paying for it.
I block ads both because $14/mo is too much for me (I simply don't use YouTube enough to get that much value out of it), I object to ad-funded models (I don't want to watch a few ads instead of pay for Premium), and I strongly object to giving Google money because of their extremely broad portfolio of evil behavior (e.g. the terrible DMCA process - it's actually bad for creators to stay, and I want them to leave!)
I would pay to watch videos using microtransactions on a platform that is not owned by a depraved company. I have no objections to compensating creators for their work in general (unlike a lot of people here, who feel entitled to get everything for free).
> If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made?
I'd be quite fine if the only "content" is funded by patreons (I give £60/month to various patreons) or just people doing it for non-financial reasons.
If content creators leave YouTube for better platforms, and those platforms become even better as a consequence, I count that as a big win. I would love if platforms like Nebula would get a real chance at life. But nebula is only for educational content. I miss the comedy part of YouTube and would gladly pay the same I pay nebula for an extra "comedy tube" subscription of comparable content quality.
I still won't pay because I consider YouTube predatory with their ads. they are not a company focused on providing a service and making a reasonable profit on top. their ad policies are about maximum extraction from the platform, couple with aggressive behavior towards content creators that make the platform. I used to be fine with the ads, but they got greedy and ratcheted it up way to much. now I block them all or don't use the service. yt could have had my ad views, but they demanded too much.
Youtube and friends only have themselves to blame: the tighter they turn the ad screw the more people they push to ad blockers. We went from a single tolerable, skippable 5 seconds ad segment to multiple unskipable very long segments in just a few years.
I say this as someone who pays for YouTube Premium.
Sure and platforms _say_ they will give you an ad free experience if you pay them a monthly fee but they always wind up adding ads once they’ve captured their audience.
Taking it to the extreme is pointless: the other extreme is that YT is only ads. That doesn't make sense either.
Here is my problem with the ads: the same ads will repeat many times over the course of a video, some ads will blast obnoxiously loud, and there are just way too many ads.
Also when I say too many ads, it's not just YouTube - we are bombarded by ads everywhere now. A few days ago I was watching a 4hr YT stream on my Fire Stick (and don't block ads there) and they were cutting to ads every 5min. Also I sometimes like to listen to music during walks and cutting to an ad in the middle of a 3min song is so ridiculous and obtrusive.
YouTube premium is expensive, especially if you have other streaming services.
This is Google's problem to solve, not ours. When you are "at war" with your customers, then the business needs to stop and think "what am I doing wrong". Under capitalism, it's the buyer that decides what your product or service is worth. YouTube Premium isn't worth $14/mo to me, so yes, I will continue to block ads as much as I can.
Twitch "permanently" won by injecting ads directly on the feed, right now best you can do is sneak swap the small resolution version that stay on the side until they also removed this.
There’s no need at all to rely on Chrome: If Google wanted to, they could enable DRM for all videos on Youtube today. Almost every desktop and mobile browser supports it.
They’d lose a couple of legacy client apps, but much less traffic than they would if they were to make it Chrome-only.
For me the opposite: chrome was making an entrance on account of supporting WebMIDI and I gave them the benefit of the doubt for a bit but this is the bit that did it for me and besides some compatibility testing FF all the way for me.
Google is already receiving plenty of money, if they promoted youtube as a commons they should maintain it as a commons. This bait-and-switch crap has gone more than far enough.
Remember, not all that long ago their mantra was 'we don't care about ad blockers because it is only such a small percentage'. Look now.
Anecdotally, I just made the switch to FF from Chrome. And my only complaint is that Google Earth is practically unusable. Other than that, I love the customization and have no difference from Chrome. Extension support is just as good.
If we annoy Google enough they'll have 3 different adblock detectors available and 2 of them won't ever be loaded on the filterlist maintainers computers :)
Youtube seems to me to be a bullshit test platform.
They will work around ad blockers and continue to pile on repetitive and banal adverts that have nothing to do with the user until they reach breaking point (where people flee and seek alternatives), and then they will relax their system to show marginally less bullshit.
The confusing part of this battle is the app users, who do not agree with the avalanche of adverts, don't want to pay to scroll shorts until their brains leak from their ears, and cannot kick the awful habit.
Video hosting is expensive and needs to be paid for somehow. Any competitor will have the same problems as Youtube does.
You can go the Nebula route and require users to pay (which means far fewer users) or require creators to pay (which means far fewer creators). You could also require creators to host the videos themselves, but that also requires money, expertise and causes downtime when a video goes viral.
There's also P2P, but far too many users are on mobile and behind NATs these days for that to make sense. Even if this wasn't the case, P2P is a privacy and legal nightmare, it's trivial for companies to track what IP addresses watch what videos, and seeding of copyright-infringing content usually has far worse legal consequences than merely watching.
Sure, ad revenue is an important method of funding media, but that is a very different claim from saying that YouTube's implementation of ad delivery is anything close to good.
The simple fact is that the ad ecosystem YouTube directs has produced lots of low effort "content" farming, enterprises focused on raw output at the expense of quality, truth, and frequently the intellectual property of others.
>Any competitor will have the same problems as Youtube does
I think there's still plenty of room for innovation in the ad serving front. YouTube is far worse than it used to be. It currently has multiple ads in a 10 minute video many of which have one 5-10 second mandatory clip followed by a much longer clip that can be skipped after 5-10 seconds.
The "you have to have the remote in hand to prevent even more ads" is pretty user hostile.
To make matters worse, on Android TV/Roku, many ads require HDCP so it's pretty normal for the device to require a reboot when ads start playing if the HDCP negotiation fails.
Youtube Premium is pretty expensive for a casual user ($144/yr).
The cost of servers/bandwidth isn't lost on me and Google gets the best rates in the industry, nonetheless. They're sufficiently big they can stick cache devices all over the place directly inside ISP networks (I assume they don't pay power/bandwidth on these since ISPs end up saving money)
I used to host video on a custom site, mainly lecture material for an audience of about 100-200 people so there were no economies of scale involved. A VPS with 2TB of transfer was about 10eur/m. Video was encoded for about 500MB/hr (encoders have improved, but hosting prices have probably increased so figures are just ballpark).
As a (very) small scale provider video was costing me about 0.25 cents / hour. It is certainly cheaper for a larger provider. Ad rates are not that low, the margins involved are huge.
For a premium server I would take a heavy user as a model, say 8hr/day, giving a cost of 60 cents per month. Assume processing fees and overheads are about 30%, and a user is willing to pay $10/m for a service. That still leaves $6.40 to be split between platform and content creator.
Yes, video is expensive compared to text. But in absolute terms the costs are not that expensive.
> Any competitor will have the same problems as Youtube does.
PeerTube distributes the load among many independent servers, which can be even run by individuals. So no, not every competitor will have the same problems.
>Video hosting is expensive and needs to be paid for somehow
If it's SO expensive, and SO needs to be paid somehow by someone why do they waste so much time and money trying to push videos on me I've either A) Already watched, B) have blocked and said "Don't recommend this channel" or C) are not even related to my search query at all, yeah YouTube I'm aware Sniperwolf and MrBeast exist, No I don't want to watch them now or ever I'm searching for pasta recipes and I'm certain you have more than 4 you could show me before trying to get me to watch asinine sniperbeast content.
I don’t know. When youtube bypassed adblockers on iOS, I found it quite natural to break that habit and stop using youtube.
I stopped watching TV 20 years ago, I have been using ad blockers as soon as they were introduced. The habit of not having to sit and watch some commercials is the most entrenched one in me. Hard to reverse a 20y habit.
This could be simply a coincidence, but it's possible they already relax their system based on user behavior.
I used to watch YT through the TV app until the ads became insanely outrageous (six unskippable ads for a 10 min video, including two ads one minute after the video has started). Then I just bought a mini pc and plugged it in the TV and everything was fine (except for HDR that for some reason doesn't work) and without ads.
Then a couple of weeks ago I opened the YT app on TV and it was actually a much better experience than before: skippable ads, no ads on some videos. As if they're trying to lure me to use it again.
I reset the TV app whenever the ads become unreasonable, and every time I do that, the skip ads button reverts back to the original style (skip all ads after 5 seconds).
But if I login to an account, or use an anonymous session for long enough, the skip ads button will switch to the progress ring style, with 60+ seconds of unskippable ads. When that happens, I reset the app again.
I still can't believe there wasn't greater pushback to the removal of visible dislikes. They were incredibly useful as a quick indicator to see if something might be wrong with a video.
> scroll shorts until their brains leak from their ears
I use a little user script that redirects me from YT shorts URLs to a normal video player URL. I found that it adds just enough friction to getting the next video that just scrolling shorts for an hour doesn't happen anymore.
Added bonus is that you can rewind a bit of video if you want to, instead of having to watch the entire video again.
If what you're saying is that people who don't watch ads and don't pay for Premium will leave the platform, that seems like a desirable outcome to Google.
Unlikely. They need all the uploaders, and the uploaders need all the viewers, and they need both of those to be in the unholy massive numbers. Well, they want. No one actually needs to be a trillion dollar business instead of a million dollar business.
But the point is it's unlikely they want all non-premium users to go elsewhere, not even merely the non-premium ad-blocking users.
In fact, they don't even really want premium users if it means not still showing them ads somehow and still collecting data on them. They offer premium more or less begrudgingly because they sort of have to in order to excuse the user-hostile behavior everywhere else.
Like donating to Firefox. They donate to firefox only so that they can make chrome as terrible as they want, and point to the existense of firefox as the answer to any complaints. They don't actually want anyone to use firefox. But it's better to let a few escape than to have the bulk decide to make laws they don't want.
Ptemium is the same. They don't really want any premium users. Or rather, sure they'd happily collect a subscription from everyone AND still show ads and collect data.
Which is pretty much what they do actually. Premium doesn't actually remove all the bad elements of youtube. It just goes from pulling 8 of your fingernails out to only pulling 5 of your fingernails out.
I've found that you can also refresh the page until YouTube knows you're just wasting their bandwidth and gives up serving ads for a while, or open the video in Incognito mode where it seems to give you a grace period.
For extra fun, install one browser with Adblock Plus (with acceptable ads disabled) and one with uBlock Origin and swap between them as needed.
They're expanding the testing -- I recently got a warning when in private browsing and not logged in, but I haven't had an ad or warning when logged in (yet).
People will leave Youtube once enough bullshit piles on. There is a point. The question is, will Google push it and trigger an exodus? I'm not sitting through ads to watch stuff. I'd rather not watch things at all than watch ads.
Peer to peer networks are still around. Vimeo still exists. Pretty sure DailyMotion and friends also still exist.
PeerTube and other stuff are making it easier for video communities to support themselves.
Eventually the only thing Youtube will be good for is supporting influencers and whatever mainstream media BS is going on.
But the people spending time making the content at a quality that’s not a shaky 320p video are not going to those because they rather make money via ads. So the users won’t leave
Most of the people who upload content to YouTube are doing it because of the ads. So many people have managed to become full-time YouTubers because of the revenue sharing from ads. And these people upload the content that we all enjoy watching. It's a virtuous cycle that I don't think can be replicated with PeerTube.
> And these people upload the content that we all enjoy watching.
Maybe you should speak only for yourself. It is possible that most people uploading to youtube do it because of the adds, but there are plenty of people who have other reasons. Most people I watch regularly do not even have enough views to get any add revenue. There are plenty of us who prefer contents that was not created with adds in mind.
I don't understand this viewpoint. There are plenty of us who find YouTube useful and willing to pay for the service. I'm not as sure as you are that an exodus will happen.
I'm surprised more content creators do not upload their content to other platforms. the video is already made. is yt really the ONLY monetizing platform outthere?
Given the amount of incredible content I don't see myself ever leaving YouTube. Instead of complaining about "the bullshit" I simply pay a few shekels a month for premium, which is easily worth it.
I have tried Peer Tube many times. It, to be frank, sucks.
what i’m reading from these comments: we will do anything, including leaving youtube, but for sure we will not be either watching ads or paying for content.
I can appreciate your point, but there's a broad history of paid services introducing ads, ads getting longer and more abrasive, content people having paid for being disappeared at the whim of the network, algorithms dictating how people are introduced to content or pushed to keep using an app, etc. I don't have much trust that many services do the right thing for subscribers.
A few services I pay for (Spotify, Xero, etc) seem to lock a user in and then push up pricing while adding functionality I have no need for.
Not to mention the split of content across an increasing number of networks. Having to juggle 5-8 paid streaming services, to watch a few 90s films that feel like they should be on all of them, seems rough to me.
I don't see how any of that is an excuse not to pay for youtube. If there is no ad-free version and no alternative products then I get blocking ads, I do too. But when I'm given an option to pay to remove ads, I generally pay.
For websites that give me a popup saying disable adblock or no content, I immediately hit the back button and let them rot in no-view hell.
I'm kind of torn. On one hand, I agree that if you use a service, paying for it so it can continue to be enjoyed by all makes sense. On the other, I'm not sure there's a tech company fighting against my interests as a regular person harder than Google is, and I don't really want to give them money out of principle. Maybe there's some hyperbole in that last sentence but hopefully my point is made at least.
Depending on your age you've either been paying for the service that is youtube with your data and content for your entire life or for at least as long as Youtube has existed. Please don't waste any time feeling bad about Google not getting what they're owed. Trust me, at this point they owe you.
The story is a bit different when it comes to the creators themselves who would get money from those ads. They offer their videos for free, and you have no obligation to support them monetarily, but if there is a youtuber whose content you really want to support there is probably some means already to pay them directly without giving anything to Google.
There's zero reason to think that people who are unwilling to sit through ads are also unwilling to pay for content. Many people pay content creators directly. They send donations. They buy merch. They even pay for useless shit like emojis just to show their support publicly.
People simply want to choose which creators they support, when, and how, which is entirely their right
Should that be their right? If somebody is watching a ton of Vincent's videos, but chooses to send donations to Clara that he watches much less, is that fair?
If I paid for YouTube Premium then I voluntarily provide even more tracking data to Google. If they offered an ad free tier where you weren't tracked then I would pay for it.
Since Google don't respect people's right to privacy or to watch content ad free I don't pay them and instead use ad blockers locally and pay for a proxy server with ad blocking DNS.
If you don’t want to be tracked, you have to stop using YouTube. Your ad blocker does nothing to prevent tracking - Google can see what you’re doing because it’s their servers. It only helps on other third-party sites.
The problem is, how these things sometimes go is: you are fed up of ads so you start paying them. Then a year or two later you get ads as a paying user too. There’s a long history of paid products doing this. Look at Windows, Smart TVs, etc…
In my case I was fed up with ads and subscribed to the YouTube Premium Lite offering 2 years ago, in September I got an email with:
> Thank you for being one of our first Premium Lite members.
> We’re writing to let you know that after October 25, 2023, we will no longer offer your version of Premium Lite.
And so I refused to be nudged into a more expensive subscription, YT didn't give me any more information why that subscription wasn't being offered so fuck them, I will use ad blockers for as long as they work.
I've been a paying YouTube user since it was called YouTube Red (remember that? lol) in 2014 and they haven't shown any sign of introducing ads. So that's almost a decade, versus your "year or two".
> but for sure we will not be either watching ads or paying for content.
The quality and quantity of ads is the problem. Getting blasted with Uber Eats ads all the time (I had a two week streak on my tablet for this crap) without any ability to tell Youtube that, no fuck no I will never eat at Uber Eats and their jingle is annoying the fuck out of me, absolutely sucks. And no I don't want to be interrupted every five minutes with an ad break that completely breaks the flow of the video, and especially not right after coming out of a 2 minute "sponsor" block shilling NordVPN, Athletic fucking Greens, Aura or AirUp.
In contrast, regular TV ads are at least placed in joint blocks that leave you enough time to go to a loo and then have 20-30 minutes of uninterrupted video. Oh, and there also won't be low-quality ads for Evony or whatever other free-to-play whale hunter games on TV either.
i pay for premium. But funny thing, this will not disable the tracking, so I still use the ublock. I've also had problems when visiting my parents in another country and background play was blocked bc yt premium was not available there, even if i was a paying customer. At that time I was using yt in firefox mobile with background play. I also still get sponsored ads and need to use the sponsorblock extension, that does not work for yt mobile app. In other words paying premium solves a small subset of problems and gives a worse experience compared to ppl that use ublock+sponsorblock in the browser
Watching ads is like going to the bathroom without washing your hands after. It's simply bad hygiene, and future generations will hopefully look back with disgust at how putrid our current society is for allowing our minds to be polluted for thousandths of a penny.
in due time you'll be paying both for content and watch ads, as is the norm now on more and more platforms.
It's an absolute category error to think you can haggle with for profit corporations worth trillions about when they've extracted enough value from you.
You ever hear the one about the missionary who tried to negotiate with the tiger? He told the tiger he could eat most of him, but he had to stop when he got to his head
Does YouTube show ads in the embedded player? Wouldn't it be easy to make an extension where you can click a button in YouTube when an ad pops up, and it moves the video into an embedded player on a localhost domain? (Or even the extension's local chrome-extension:// domain)
I guess YouTube could always block that domain from embedding videos, but if the extension allowed the user to set a custom domain from /etc/hosts, I'm not sure Google could stop it unless they forbid embedding on hosts that resolve to loopback address.
It downloads a text file maintained by someone at a repository that lists all uBO YouTube Fixes, and compare it to the latest YouTube JS files. Not all JS updates contain anti-adblock codes, so what this website shows is pretty misleading.
Readit News
If there are well over 1,000 "here now" (near top right), this confirms the anti-content blocker code has been updated.
If well below 1,000 "here now", all is fine. At time of writing, it's fine.
* * *
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/
Website idea: a downdetector-like site that uses reddit's "here now" numbers to give insight into whether something is going on with a certain thing.
edit: Has anyone else not really been affected by the new youtube adblock policy at all? I think I have seen the warning a single time, and I use youtube all the time. I only use ublock origin and privacy badger... on chrome. Maybe that's it.
The megathread addresses this:
> I've never seen this message. Is this because of my browser being X or Y? No, YouTube didn't roll this out to everybody yet.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/184fivk/youtu...
not really. firefox + privacy badger + ubo. once a week or so i do get blocked but then i clear cookies, restart firefox and relogin and then it works.
I can also heartily recommend the 'unhook' browser extension, it takes care of all of those upsells and feeds.
If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made? Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads?
Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay. They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
Then they abused adnetworks to take the biggest share and control over what users can do or will likely do with their user agents.
Then they degraded every site and product searchability into ads-favored keyword matching.
Then, when people started using their well-setup cardboard box traps to their taste, they demanded to either pay for that or to forcefully watch ads.
I’m not gonna play a reasonable guy here, because it’s not a logical issue. I never wanted or expected to live in an internet like that. Google can go cry in a corner and look miserable.
And everyone should install ublock origin. Think of it as Python 3 or ESM or Democracy. It’s much better, you all just have to figure out new life with it.
I'd argue that _content_ is a fairly gross word that we've all come to use because we're in the industry -- "I need some _content_ around my ads so that we get some impressions". There are plenty of other words that are less marketing associated and more clearly connotative with creatively produced material - article, report, essay, story, paper, proposal, manifesto, gallery, video, photographs, exhibit, website, blog post - even material. _Content_ is efficiently produced filler. As such, yes, in the extreme less _content_ gets made, and in the absence of _content_ there is organically more of the latter category.
You can still make money on the internet without ads. Ads have in recent history been an easier, higher margin route. If the entire online ad industry fumbles, will we be substantially worse off? I don't think so: the number and size of websites would for sure shrink, but those left would have a much higher signal to noise.
I also just think 99% of advertising is bad taste which makes me mentally exhausted and puts me in a bad mood, so I just want it out of my sight.
Yes, I could pay for YouTube Premium, but that would go against my own interests since I would be financially supporting a platform with perverse incentives for content creators.
I can't speak for anybody else but my content will still get made.
> Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads?
Maybe, maybe not, whose to say what Google will do. Maybe they will value the influence or the goodwill more than the lack of income. Maybe some of the content will be free and other bits will be walled off (effectively this is already the case with youtube music). Maybe there will be less MFY content and that's perfectly ok with me, 99.99% of it is crap anyway. Youtuber isn't a profession I recognize.
> Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay.
And that's ok.
> They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
Yes, or you pay and you still get ads...
If we win the war against Ads lots of content won’t get made. But, the content that thrives in an Ad driven world is mostly toxic rage bait. I would argue that losing this content and instead only being left with content that people will actually pay for is a big net win for humanity.
Likely we will never see a world without Ads but I can dream.
Peertube et al exist. Patreon exists. Vimeo, Twitch, Tiktok. On one hand I'm absolutely aware that the TYPE of video content we have would change.
On the other, I'm not at all convinced that the destruction of YouTubes particular monetizing model would be a bad thing. I don't think much of value at all would be lost if people couldn't make money off Youtube the way they do now.
Other people's mileage may differ, of course. It's just a personal preference.
Furthermore, I have precious few moments on this earth, I have no desire to have to spend them watching propaganda from corps (and sometimes just unfiltered political propaganda).
But most of all, ads are a privacy and security risk like no other. They follow you across the internet for ages, sell your data to the highest bidder (sometimes that bidder is the feds) and are the foremost distribution network for malware.
Sorry, I rather YouTube go away than have to agree to the above.
But if you're happy to pay whatever is asked of you, that'll be a 100 dollars thanks
I don’t think it’ll ever be possible to get everyone to pay, but if it’s easy to pay and priced low enough, paying becomes the easiest option for a lot of people. Why bother pirating music in 2023 when any number of music streaming services are about $10-11/mo?
YouTube Premium bundles YouTube music and costs $19/mo. This is higher than (or on par) a lot of streaming subscriptions.
Another annoyance is that it’s bundled with a music service. Some non-US markets experimented with a cheaper ad-free-YouTube only tier for less than half the price. When that tier of service can be offered, it is very hard to think most of the $19 goes towards storage, bandwidth, and operational overhead.
If centralized hosting of such "content" becomes unsustainable then that's even better.
That just means, by definition, that the prices YouTube are trying to charge are too high, doesn't it? What we're seeing is basically a negotiation tactic: you either reduce the price, or we'll keep using ad blockers.
Not to mention, most creators don't really live off YouTube ads, those pay too little for the vast majority of channels as far as I understand. Creators live off their own sponsorships, Patreon etc.
Note, I'm actually someone who thinks YouTube Premium is good value for my money and am already paying for it.
I would pay to watch videos using microtransactions on a platform that is not owned by a depraved company. I have no objections to compensating creators for their work in general (unlike a lot of people here, who feel entitled to get everything for free).
I'd be quite fine if the only "content" is funded by patreons (I give £60/month to various patreons) or just people doing it for non-financial reasons.
I'm old enough to remember that content creators existed before the youtube monetization machine.
I think if there's one thing we can rely on not stopping, it's people's urge to create and share
I say this as someone who pays for YouTube Premium.
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If the content is made only because of the ads, is it still content or actually an ad ?
Here is my problem with the ads: the same ads will repeat many times over the course of a video, some ads will blast obnoxiously loud, and there are just way too many ads.
Also when I say too many ads, it's not just YouTube - we are bombarded by ads everywhere now. A few days ago I was watching a 4hr YT stream on my Fire Stick (and don't block ads there) and they were cutting to ads every 5min. Also I sometimes like to listen to music during walks and cutting to an ad in the middle of a 3min song is so ridiculous and obtrusive.
YouTube premium is expensive, especially if you have other streaming services.
This is Google's problem to solve, not ours. When you are "at war" with your customers, then the business needs to stop and think "what am I doing wrong". Under capitalism, it's the buyer that decides what your product or service is worth. YouTube Premium isn't worth $14/mo to me, so yes, I will continue to block ads as much as I can.
Until Google changes how the web works and all other browsers will align. And they can do that, since they almost own the web trough Chrome.
They’d lose a couple of legacy client apps, but much less traffic than they would if they were to make it Chrome-only.
Don't play the game. It's not a new game. Remember when Linux was "evil commie software"?
Maybe they are making such a fuss because it works and people end up switching to chrome / removing ad block :(.
Would be nice to see recent download graph of firefox or ublock origin so see if there is any impact.
Google is already receiving plenty of money, if they promoted youtube as a commons they should maintain it as a commons. This bait-and-switch crap has gone more than far enough.
Remember, not all that long ago their mantra was 'we don't care about ad blockers because it is only such a small percentage'. Look now.
They will work around ad blockers and continue to pile on repetitive and banal adverts that have nothing to do with the user until they reach breaking point (where people flee and seek alternatives), and then they will relax their system to show marginally less bullshit.
The confusing part of this battle is the app users, who do not agree with the avalanche of adverts, don't want to pay to scroll shorts until their brains leak from their ears, and cannot kick the awful habit.
You can go the Nebula route and require users to pay (which means far fewer users) or require creators to pay (which means far fewer creators). You could also require creators to host the videos themselves, but that also requires money, expertise and causes downtime when a video goes viral.
There's also P2P, but far too many users are on mobile and behind NATs these days for that to make sense. Even if this wasn't the case, P2P is a privacy and legal nightmare, it's trivial for companies to track what IP addresses watch what videos, and seeding of copyright-infringing content usually has far worse legal consequences than merely watching.
The simple fact is that the ad ecosystem YouTube directs has produced lots of low effort "content" farming, enterprises focused on raw output at the expense of quality, truth, and frequently the intellectual property of others.
I think there's still plenty of room for innovation in the ad serving front. YouTube is far worse than it used to be. It currently has multiple ads in a 10 minute video many of which have one 5-10 second mandatory clip followed by a much longer clip that can be skipped after 5-10 seconds.
The "you have to have the remote in hand to prevent even more ads" is pretty user hostile.
To make matters worse, on Android TV/Roku, many ads require HDCP so it's pretty normal for the device to require a reboot when ads start playing if the HDCP negotiation fails.
Youtube Premium is pretty expensive for a casual user ($144/yr).
The cost of servers/bandwidth isn't lost on me and Google gets the best rates in the industry, nonetheless. They're sufficiently big they can stick cache devices all over the place directly inside ISP networks (I assume they don't pay power/bandwidth on these since ISPs end up saving money)
As a (very) small scale provider video was costing me about 0.25 cents / hour. It is certainly cheaper for a larger provider. Ad rates are not that low, the margins involved are huge.
For a premium server I would take a heavy user as a model, say 8hr/day, giving a cost of 60 cents per month. Assume processing fees and overheads are about 30%, and a user is willing to pay $10/m for a service. That still leaves $6.40 to be split between platform and content creator.
Yes, video is expensive compared to text. But in absolute terms the costs are not that expensive.
PeerTube distributes the load among many independent servers, which can be even run by individuals. So no, not every competitor will have the same problems.
Nope. PeerTube and the like is an alternative.
If it's SO expensive, and SO needs to be paid somehow by someone why do they waste so much time and money trying to push videos on me I've either A) Already watched, B) have blocked and said "Don't recommend this channel" or C) are not even related to my search query at all, yeah YouTube I'm aware Sniperwolf and MrBeast exist, No I don't want to watch them now or ever I'm searching for pasta recipes and I'm certain you have more than 4 you could show me before trying to get me to watch asinine sniperbeast content.
I stopped watching TV 20 years ago, I have been using ad blockers as soon as they were introduced. The habit of not having to sit and watch some commercials is the most entrenched one in me. Hard to reverse a 20y habit.
I used to watch YT through the TV app until the ads became insanely outrageous (six unskippable ads for a 10 min video, including two ads one minute after the video has started). Then I just bought a mini pc and plugged it in the TV and everything was fine (except for HDR that for some reason doesn't work) and without ads.
Then a couple of weeks ago I opened the YT app on TV and it was actually a much better experience than before: skippable ads, no ads on some videos. As if they're trying to lure me to use it again.
I reset the TV app whenever the ads become unreasonable, and every time I do that, the skip ads button reverts back to the original style (skip all ads after 5 seconds).
But if I login to an account, or use an anonymous session for long enough, the skip ads button will switch to the progress ring style, with 60+ seconds of unskippable ads. When that happens, I reset the app again.
I use a little user script that redirects me from YT shorts URLs to a normal video player URL. I found that it adds just enough friction to getting the next video that just scrolling shorts for an hour doesn't happen anymore.
Added bonus is that you can rewind a bit of video if you want to, instead of having to watch the entire video again.
But the point is it's unlikely they want all non-premium users to go elsewhere, not even merely the non-premium ad-blocking users.
In fact, they don't even really want premium users if it means not still showing them ads somehow and still collecting data on them. They offer premium more or less begrudgingly because they sort of have to in order to excuse the user-hostile behavior everywhere else.
Like donating to Firefox. They donate to firefox only so that they can make chrome as terrible as they want, and point to the existense of firefox as the answer to any complaints. They don't actually want anyone to use firefox. But it's better to let a few escape than to have the bulk decide to make laws they don't want.
Ptemium is the same. They don't really want any premium users. Or rather, sure they'd happily collect a subscription from everyone AND still show ads and collect data.
Which is pretty much what they do actually. Premium doesn't actually remove all the bad elements of youtube. It just goes from pulling 8 of your fingernails out to only pulling 5 of your fingernails out.
The problem is the moat. The moat is money.
If I see an ad I just close YT for the rest of the day.
For extra fun, install one browser with Adblock Plus (with acceptable ads disabled) and one with uBlock Origin and swap between them as needed.
I'm sure that's exactly the behavior YT wants here.
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/21/youtube-as-infinite-file-sto...
Peer to peer networks are still around. Vimeo still exists. Pretty sure DailyMotion and friends also still exist.
PeerTube and other stuff are making it easier for video communities to support themselves.
Eventually the only thing Youtube will be good for is supporting influencers and whatever mainstream media BS is going on.
Maybe you should speak only for yourself. It is possible that most people uploading to youtube do it because of the adds, but there are plenty of people who have other reasons. Most people I watch regularly do not even have enough views to get any add revenue. There are plenty of us who prefer contents that was not created with adds in mind.
Definitely not giving Google any money.
Is it really worth $13.99 to die on - nope it is not.
Not convinced. Many watch influencers and monetized channels and they won't leave.
I have tried Peer Tube many times. It, to be frank, sucks.
A few services I pay for (Spotify, Xero, etc) seem to lock a user in and then push up pricing while adding functionality I have no need for.
Not to mention the split of content across an increasing number of networks. Having to juggle 5-8 paid streaming services, to watch a few 90s films that feel like they should be on all of them, seems rough to me.
For websites that give me a popup saying disable adblock or no content, I immediately hit the back button and let them rot in no-view hell.
The story is a bit different when it comes to the creators themselves who would get money from those ads. They offer their videos for free, and you have no obligation to support them monetarily, but if there is a youtuber whose content you really want to support there is probably some means already to pay them directly without giving anything to Google.
People simply want to choose which creators they support, when, and how, which is entirely their right
If I paid for YouTube Premium then I voluntarily provide even more tracking data to Google. If they offered an ad free tier where you weren't tracked then I would pay for it.
Since Google don't respect people's right to privacy or to watch content ad free I don't pay them and instead use ad blockers locally and pay for a proxy server with ad blocking DNS.
> Thank you for being one of our first Premium Lite members.
> We’re writing to let you know that after October 25, 2023, we will no longer offer your version of Premium Lite.
And so I refused to be nudged into a more expensive subscription, YT didn't give me any more information why that subscription wasn't being offered so fuck them, I will use ad blockers for as long as they work.
The quality and quantity of ads is the problem. Getting blasted with Uber Eats ads all the time (I had a two week streak on my tablet for this crap) without any ability to tell Youtube that, no fuck no I will never eat at Uber Eats and their jingle is annoying the fuck out of me, absolutely sucks. And no I don't want to be interrupted every five minutes with an ad break that completely breaks the flow of the video, and especially not right after coming out of a 2 minute "sponsor" block shilling NordVPN, Athletic fucking Greens, Aura or AirUp.
In contrast, regular TV ads are at least placed in joint blocks that leave you enough time to go to a loo and then have 20-30 minutes of uninterrupted video. Oh, and there also won't be low-quality ads for Evony or whatever other free-to-play whale hunter games on TV either.
(Point being people paying for premium are also mad at these tactics)
It's an absolute category error to think you can haggle with for profit corporations worth trillions about when they've extracted enough value from you.
You ever hear the one about the missionary who tried to negotiate with the tiger? He told the tiger he could eat most of him, but he had to stop when he got to his head
I'm using this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ I've set it up to only redirect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\* so I can still use the regular YouTube UI for browsing videos. This invidious instance feels surprisingly snappy, perhaps even faster than the 'native' YouTube player.
I guess YouTube could always block that domain from embedding videos, but if the extension allowed the user to set a custom domain from /etc/hosts, I'm not sure Google could stop it unless they forbid embedding on hosts that resolve to loopback address.
javascript:void(location.href='https://deturl.com/play.php?v='+location.href.split('=')[1])
when you're on a yt video click it and it will redirect using the id
It downloads a text file maintained by someone at a repository that lists all uBO YouTube Fixes, and compare it to the latest YouTube JS files. Not all JS updates contain anti-adblock codes, so what this website shows is pretty misleading.
> If it's red, it means we're either still working on a fix or the latest script didn't defeat our current filters.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/184fivk/youtu...