- YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
- Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
- Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
Imagine being on the YouTube ad team…that has to be the most depressing team in tech history. Your whole existence revolves around peddling ads before people can watch the ads they want.
Your whole existence revolves around peddling ads before people can watch the ads they want.
Ah, what. Who wants or likes to watch ads at all?
A lot of creators have just turned into corporate shills. I stopped watching ETA Prime’s channel about tech reviews because it was becoming pretty clear that mostly everything he got was paid for by the company. Also, most creators are putting their own ads into their content.
I know right… Why should content creators be able to make money from content. Am I right?
The same reasons as open source software devs.
Some content creators but not most of them. A lot of open source software advertises too.
Even better, you work for one of the wealthiest corporations in the world with virtually unlimited resources at your disposal, and you still get your asses handed to you by a handful of people with laptops.
If they didn’t have to support the web, and various legacy platforms, the could lock it all down with drm more easily.
Hence Google’s proposal to DRM the web
And people’s response has shown its not easy or even working.
in tech*. most people don’t even know or care about it
That’s far less true now that they’re breaking the functionality of tons of adblockers that it was a few years ago.
most normies i know don’t care about it.
i have no idea how they use the internet without them, but here we are.
So tell the content creators you like that you don’t like YouTube. While YouTube Premium is the same price as like two coffees a month… Maybe your content creator will help you if you can’t afford it.
Well, to begin with, both the watcher and the creator are clients of the platform. Both sides feel bound to it, even if both dislike it.
Then, YouTube premium is literally 20 machine coffees a month in my first world country. 15 if they’re done by someone. You seem to be speaking “privileged minority”.
I’m sorry… I didn’t realize the reason that there are so many Starbucks in America, like literally caddy corner from one another is because their customer base is the “privileged minority.” I’ll have to remember that line.
In all seriousness, you could argue that ads prey on poor vulnerable people unable to afford YouTube Premium that just want to use it to learn, and that would be a semi-coherent argument.
deleted by creator
I agree with you, but you can also think about it as a one sided battle where youtube keeps shooting themselves in the foot
Not really. YouTube provides a lot of tools to make most of their services and content pretty accessible from third party clients. If Google wanted to prevent ad blockers and force you to watch ads, trust me they could. At this point I think some users that only know how to install third party software are going to start claiming they won and ruin a good thing for everyone. You don’t want ads? Then don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Once upon a time Google used few and non-intrusive ads. The ads were soo well-placed and relevant, that they almost seemed like a service to the user, rather than being forced upon you. Some of us even added exceptions for Google ads in our ad blockers, so we would not miss out.
I miss those days.
I don’t know of any day where I unblocked ads and felt good cause they were targeted directly at me
I’ve been downloading my subscriptions and loading them into Plex. Plenty of room for improvement in that system, but I get a nostalgic hit of YouTube long ago. Man, it’s fallen so far over the years.
Also related, I’ve hit 2.4TB of internet use for the first time last month doubling my previous record.
Which downloader do you use?
Not OP but I use the arr family of services (Sonarr and Radar, though there are more) and NZBGet as my downloader.
Lol NZBGet is not typically used for getting free content.
It’s one of the preconfigured downloaders for sonarr and radarr which is really a fancy front page for adding media from usenet? So, I would disagree.
Well… if your idea of “free” content is something you don’t pay for then yes, but if your idea of free content is something that was intended to be distributed for “free” then no.
Is it free if it supported by ads?
People don’t use NZBGet for that reason. It is literally a platform & distribution model primarily intended for pirating content in a way that is much quicker and more reliable than torrents. Usenet would probably have died without NZBs.
On the one hand I understand they aren’t serving billions of hours of video for their own health. Not sure how one can justify the expenditure as a “loss leader”. But at the same time, the ad experience is horrendous.
In the last month I have consumed YT on desktop browser, mobile, and regular TV. Guess which is by far the worst experience?
On desktop, you can use an alternate browser or do a reg edit to re-enable manifest v2 plugins (for now) in Chrome, and continue blocking (for now). On mobile you can use alternate apps and frontends.
TV viewing of YT is the worst experience, as there are no native alternative apps and DNS ad blocking doesn’t block YT ads. The native YouTube app (on Samsung and LG TVs at least) is horrendous. You get midroll ads sometimes mid-sentence as the content presenter is speaking. Sometimes you get pre-roll ads, disruptive mid roll ads, and then wash it down with a POST-roll ad at the end of the video. Depending on how the content is structured it is disorienting as to whether the video has ended or not.
Say for example its a 30 minute video. I would rather they show 5-7 minutes of predictable ads at the beginning of content, so I can at least have the same experience as broadcast TV, and make an informed decision to get up and use the restroom and feed the pets while the ads roll. Then once the content starts, don’t randomly interrupt it.
Imagine the YT model applied to broadcast television. The quarterback drops back to throw a deep pass towards the endzone, and suddenly you find yourself watching an undskippable ad for diarrhea medication, while the football is in the air.
And we wonder why people have ADD.
Fundamentally what YouTube is doing is an unprofitable model. Google bought them when they were in their “we can solve internet unprofitability with scale and more efficient data centres!” phase, but that has never really gone as planned for YouTube.
For a while I was very hopeful that YouTube Premium would solve that, but as they started removing features and making it an overall worse experience it became no longer worth the money. I don’t have an answer to this. If I did I could probably make a lot of money on that answer. What I do know, however, is that Google’s answer isn’t the right one.
If they want to fight hard, they just add the ads into the stream.
Like Twitch you mean? I think that has been blocked as well. And other addblockers can even skip adds within yt videos
What do you use to block twitch ads?
The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I’d rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.
I’ve had YouTube Premium since the days when it was called YouTube Red, so like a decade. I’ve grown used to not seeing any ads from Google and anytime I watch a video not using my account it’s torture.
Same here. FreeTube for desktop and NewPipe are all you need though if you don’t want to pay and/or have access to music.
As a recent YT premium-tryer, it’s amazing how many ads they put in that aren’t obviously adverts - comparing between non-premium and premium browsing.
Not sure I’ll keep YT premium beyond the free trial, until I find more decent content producers. Even then, it’s skipping those video’s paid promotion segments.
So it’s like paying for a streaming platform to not get ads… But still getting adsI agree… however, that is an issue with the content creators relying on using content promotions. I have noticed when skipping ahead in videos that it usually indicates in the progress bar where the promotion ends. If the content producers utilized other ways to contribute and I liked them enough, then I’d do that. YouTube now has a subscriber only feature that should help with this. There are also extensions that are supposed to block sponsors too. I don’t think YouTube has implemented any functions to make blocking sponsored ads more difficult, especially for paying users… who knows though.
Tubular is newpipe + sponsorblock BTW
I use pipepipe but it’s less stable
I haven’t tried that yet. I think Libretube also does SponsorBlock too & have seen it on F-Droid.
You could pay for YouTube Premium
I’m just glad someone is thinking of the shareholders
I forgot… where can I get my free data center with petabytes of storage & 300TB/s fiber interconnects?
Google makes enough money evading taxes already. Not gonna help them make more.
I don’t care if you use ad blockers. I get annoyed when people publish articles like… “Google is losing the adblockers war” cause then advertisers are going to start pushing harder for Google to actually prevent adblockers entirely, which they could have done already. Thus far Google, despite issues, does quite a lot of good things… Android is the only open source OS out of Apple & Windows. Android lets you install third party app stores. Chrome (Chromium) is open source… etc.
These users writing this content don’t even develop the apps to block YouTube ads. If you’ve ever explored the APIs by YouTube, then you’d know that Google despite pushing ads for users without blockers, is still rather friendly to third party apps.
It’s only a matter of time until the premium users get ads. Just like Netflix, and cable TV before that. You will inevitably wind up paying to be advertised to.
Netflix has ads now? I thought that was only for their lower tier service? I had to cancel Netflix cause they haven’t came out with two more seasons of Stranger Things yet.
Is that what they are trying to do? Push crap ads and try to kill adblock to get a little extra user share to pay for yet another subscription?
PS: let me add that I also watch TV and the balance between quality of content and ads and their placement is much better (yes, some countries are worse than others with this). I don’t know what they are doing in youtube ads, but it’s anti-human (not just the ads, but the design too: super slow loading, tricks you into clicking the wrong content). Like they don’t want you to “pay” by watching ads, they want to torture you until you subscribe, go away or get adblock.
I don’t care if you block ads… but to act like Google owes you and that you deserve free content is called entitled.
I’ll never understand the entitlement of these companies when it comes to ads. You send the content freely to my computer along with BS ads. It’s my computer. I’ll display what I want using programs I want.
If you want me to pay for that content with $ or by watching ads - then put up a hard paywall and stop sending the content for free. You can’t get uppity and complain about ad blockers - it doesn’t make any sense…
The real problem is your content sucks and nobody is willing to pay for it. And that’s your problem - not mine.
Here’s some free apples. There’s a newspaper ad stuffed in there as well. Oh you ate the apples without reading the newspaper? Foul ball! /facepalm
Edit: never mind the fact that many ads have been served that are downright malicious code…
“Your content sucks… And I can’t stop watching it. I also got herpes by watching too much brain rot”
Sounds like users are trying to end up in the find out phase.
YouTube… “We provide these APIs and make our apps and privacy policies more accessible than most, but we still can’t give everything away for free.”
Users… “Haha scum of the earth we think we’re beating you and that you have no way to stop us from circumventing your ads without paying.”
My dude, white knighting a company that had almost $60 billion in profit in 2022 and $73 billion profit in 2023 isn’t a good look.
My dude… There are 100s of legitimate things about Google to complain about, but you pick the weakest argument and then say I’m white knighting them. YouTube doesn’t owe you cause they made profit… you’ve been able to still bypass their ads for this long, and so now users are complaining that they were able to circumvent something easier in the past?
There are 100s of legitimate things about Google to complain about
But you’re not. You’ve made several comments on this post criticizing the people who 1. want control over their own devices and 2. are sick of ads being forced into every aspect of their lives.
you pick the weakest argument
And I happen to think that a company throwing such an entitled fit over money, when they are making an immoral amount of profit that is increasing YoY, is super relevant when discussing the profitability of one of their services.
YouTube doesn’t owe you cause they made profit
Pretty sure I didn’t say they did.
you’ve been able to still bypass their ads for this long, and so now users are complaining that they were able to circumvent something easier in the past?
People always complain when their convenience is removed from them. Welcome to the human condition.
But you’re not. You’ve made several comments on this post criticizing the people who 1. want control over their own devices and 2. are sick of ads being forced into every aspect of their lives.
They have control over their devices. You’re not making sense and can’t even articulate how they don’t have control. If they want even more control, they can install GrapheneOS or a plethora of third party ROMs that removes all Google services. Apple users can’t even do that. No one is making them use YouTube either. Google allows third party apps that blocks ads. It isn’t like a… “Ha, Google you’re idiots we are smarter than you cause you are too stupid to block ads.” Seriously, what kind of dumb person takes this attitude?
And I happen to think that a company throwing such an entitled fit over money, when they are making an immoral amount of profit that is increasing YoY, is super relevant when discussing the profitability of one of their services.
Dumb users are the ones throwing an entitled fit. Why is making profit immoral? If you want to say, “I’m anti-capitalist and don’t think the world should be about money…” then just say that. It is a much stronger argument and one that should be discussed more, but singling out Google is dumb. In terms of ethics, they are still way better than most companies, including Apple & Microsoft… In what realitydoes it make sense to attack the more ethical companies before going after the least ethical?
YouTube doesn’t owe you cause they made profit
Read your previous comment.
People always complain when their convenience is removed from them. Welcome to the human condition.
Not always. If I go to a coffee shop and they give me a free one out of convenience… I don’t go back and demand they keep giving them to me for free cause they did it once.
Meh, paywalling some videos behind Google+ (or whatever the current iteration is) would’ve been the honest option. But they chose ads and tracking for everything (makes more money), i can understand why people circumvent them.
I can understand why people circumvent them too. I can’t understand why they’d claim… “Hey Google, you suck at blocking ads. You can’t stop us from doing it.”
Seriously, fuck people that do this. Google knows people use third party apps that block ads. They might as well say… we’re not happy not having ads. We want Google to block it entirely so we can be even more pissed off.
