- cross-posted to:
- degoogle@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- degoogle@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.zip
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YouTube’s argument is the same as Linus’ from LTT: if you watch a video without ads, you’re failing to comply with your side of the transaction, thus essentially pirating that content and stealing the revenue source.
Regardless if we agree or not with that statement, I’ll absolutely side with adblockers always for a deeper issue: it’s my screen, so I get the ultimate say on what content gets rendered. Quite literally. It’s my network, my cable, my screen, my graphics card, my web browser running JavaScript on my CPU - you do not, ever, get to overreach and decide what pixels show up or not. If I don’t want your obnoxious ad for an AI girlfriend to show up, there’s no moral argument to be had here.
EDIT: I think some of you are missing the point of this comment. There’s no reason to reply to me countering the argument in the first paragraph, as it is not my comment, in fact, I specifically mentioned how it’s YouTube (and Linus’) argument.
I was happy with an ad at the side of the video. Then they started popping up over my video, then they started appearing before my video, then they started appearing throughout my video. Companies shot themselves in the foot with online advertising, banner ads and such weren’t much of a problem, but once ads start disrupting the content we visit a site for, then we look to block them ads. More people blocking ads is less revenue, so they make the ads more aggressive… and the cycle continues.
And on a side note, Linus can fuck off.
That and the large ad networks even on sites like YouTube and Facebook literally are advertising scams. Every time I browse shorts on either I get ads that are obvious scams of the “There’s a new $6400 monthly health credit see if you qualify.” variety. On one of Meta’s apps I got an ad that was for male enhancement that was straight up clips of uncensored hardcore porn. Not just nudity but full on PIV sex. If they can’t even do the work to properly screen their ads they can get fucked, I’m blocking all of it that I can.
Yeah I don’t mind ads if they’re relevant - I scroll through insta reels from time to time, and am always getting ads about concerts I’m interested in, restaurants I haven’t tried and sales at shops I go to.
I honestly don’t mind so much, and if it’s not relevant to me I can scroll past without having to watch.
In order to get relevant ads you have to opt in to give them your data. Do you do that?
In order to use the platform in the EU, you either opt into personalised ads or pay a monthly subscription. So yes, I’m aware they’re using my data for the ads.
Google does as well, but they don’t seem to be able to offer me even relatively relevant ads based on my interests.
Non disruptive ads were meant to advertise.
Slightly annoying ads were meant to be seen more, since people just ignored banners by default.
Hidden ads (like an ad in an article which you really could tell it was an ad) were meant to increase the image of a company.
Disruptive ads like in YouTube or Spotify aren’t meant for advertising. They don’t really care about the advertising money, they want to force you to buy premium. The more annoying the ad is the higher the chances you pay 20€ a month for them to go away.
These days maybe, but disruptive ads started way before subscriptions became a thing.
Yeah, the pre-ads (unstoppable) and the massively increased loading times of the basic Youtube page makes it impossible to successfully Rickroll people
By that logic using a VCR to record television and fast-forwarding adverts is piracy.
And you see digital tv providers trying to implement fast forward blockers without chasing away their customers too much
Any time I fast forward and have to wait for a commercial that interrupted my fast forwarding, it’s an immediate cancelation of the service and I’m on the phone with customer support to try and get my couple of bucks for that month back.
Fuck your shitty service, I’m grabbing my hat and sword.
That argument was in fact made when VCRs first came out. I don’t remember how exactly it played out but in the end the courts here in the US said that VCRs were fine.
At least a few TV service DVRs stop you from skipping ads.
Some even from forwarding at all through the actual content…
The agreement isn’t that you watch the ad, but that you allow the ad to play on your device. That’s it. Whether or not you see it or hear it doesn’t matter; the “cost” for this type of content is a few moment of your device’s time, not your attention.
You know what, I actually agree with YouTube’s argument. Ad blocking is piracy. In fact, no, it’s worse than piracy. If I pirate a movie, Disney makes no money, but it costs them nothing at all. If I watch YouTube without an ad blocker, I’m depriving YouTube of its revenue source and I’m costing them money. Morally, ad blocking sits somewhere between piracy and actual theft.
The thing is? I don’t care. I ad block YouTube all the time and feel not a lick of guilt. The reason: Google brought this on themselves. I used to happily pay for YouTube Red. But they have continuously, both before and after that point, been actively hostile to the people actually producing the content they make. Their willingness to bow down to copyright trolls and complete inability to properly apply fair use. They extremely harsh policies on acceptable content, stopping people talking about sex education or mediaeval weaponry being able to reliably makes money.
And the straw that broke this camel’s back was when they changed the requirements to be in the Partner Program, locking out all the smaller creators from ever being able to make money on YouTube. I never considered myself a “creator”, but over the 5 years prior to that I occasionally uploaded stuff I was doing anyway. I had amassed almost $100 over those 5 years. Not an impressive amount, for sure, but having that taken away from me made me feel unwelcome. I don’t think I’ve uploaded anything public since, and I’ve been blocking ads on the site since then.
Even worse, not long after this change, they decided to start showing ads even on videos from non-partnered videos, so you can get ads on my videos even though I don’t see a single cent.
So fuck YouTube. Ad blocking is worse than piracy, and I say good.
Google: You’re pirating our content!
Us: Yeah, so what?
Google: You’re pirating our content!
Us: AND THE BEATINGS SHALL CONTINUE UNTIL YOU LEARN YOUR FUCKING LESSON.
My god… are you… me? Same exact shit. Created my YT account 14 years ago. Made some vids… some got some views… eventually I got a few dollars deposited like for 3 years. Probably totaled the same $100 you mentioned then boom. Shut down.
I uploaded what I think was the first tutorial on how to use Photoshop’s then-new “Content-Aware Fill” to help create panoramas, and also a tutorial about…something, I forget what, to do with the music engraving software Sibelius. They were things I was doing all the time, but there didn’t seem to be any guide on how to do it, so I thought I’d help out. And I got rewarded with a little cash and a few tens of thousands of views. Felt good.
There are much better, higher-polish videos that deal with those subjects now, I’m sure. But still, it didn’t feel good getting that ripped out from under me, and being told I was no longer welcome.
I’d agree with that logic if YouTube kept up their end of the bargain and actually vetted their ad buyers. Instead they show ads for fake stimulus scams, fake news, and blatant malware.
I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network. Not using an adblocker is a security risk that is not acceptable for my company. I pay for YouTube premium because it’s in my means and I get value from the subscription but I don’t blame anyone who takes the same approach
I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network.
You must MITM all traffic and do some magic with stripping/injecting JavaScript then? Because every time I’ve tried with pihole, its just threads and threads of people saying its not possible with DNS blocking because the ads are served from the video servers.
We also deploy a browser extension via GPO/Intune to catch those and protect endpoints when they are off net.
I actually wasn’t in favor of that but the rest of team was so after risk assessing it, we determined that trusting a vendor with the permission to rewrite webpages was less of a risk than drive-by malware or phishing/redirection from a malicious ad
They said they pay for YouTube premium so they might not have to block YouTube ads
TBH I’m just so fucking tired of ads overstepping, back in the day there’s be a little banner on the side of a page advertising a truck or whatever, I’m sick of seeing like, enormous length ads.
One day I had a 3 hour minecraft let’s play uploaded as an ad, you think I should have to watch all of that youtube?
And the frequency is getting crazy.
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I fucking hate billboards man. Get them OUT.
First off, I couldn’t care less about ad blocking and I’m not here to moralise what anyone else does.
I do however think your point is somewhat undermined by the fact YouTube have an ad free option. You can legitimately make the ads disappear and YouTube have no issue with it.
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When YouTube Red first dropped they were putting hour-long pilot episodes of their shows as pre-roll ads. Now I notice ads on shorts are full of obvious scams related to “new monthly health credits”. Still better than getting an ad on Facebook reels that was uncensored hardcore porn.
I’m almost thinking of breaking down and buying YT premium because god, I watch a lot of youtube (I’d go so far as to say it’s my primary entertainment stream at times) but I’m already paying so fucking much for cable that I don’t even want.
Cable’s 80, Internet’s 80, somehow extra fees bring it up to nearly 200, and I can’t convince other members of my household (who watch a grand total of four fucking channels, MSNBC, Weather channel, sports, etc) that we should ditch cable, absolutely miserable.
Nvidia Sheild pro + smartTube Next. I see 0 ads. The app also bypasses the self promotion/hit the like and subscribe button crap as well.
You can put custom apps on the Shield pro? neat.
For Android on phones and tablets look up Revanced. You have to download the YouTube .apk from somewhere like apkmirror, then use the Revanced manager to apply patches to block ads and change functionality. Then you log into your account with their own version of MicroG/gmscore. It was briefly affected by the issue in the main post but was working again in a few hours.
For Android-based smart TVs and streaming devices there’s SmartTube (SmartTubeNext). Not sure how well they’ll do if YouTube goes cat and mouse though.
And for a wider variety of devices (including Apple TV and now WebOS) there’s also Kodi which has a YouTube addon although logging in with it is kind of a pain as you need to get API keys, etc.
& finally on a desktop browser uBlock Origin alone handles all the ads pretty well, and you can optionally add Sponsorblock.
Oh. And check out some of the over the top TV services and see if there are any cheap ones that might meet your needs to replace cable. Though the way the cable companies do their bundling even that might not save you much as the net might jump up to more than $80 standalone.
TL;DR: my property rights trump Youtube’s business model.
The problem is that there is that ad networks and ad placements are just bad actors in the consumer space. Not only has malware been passed time and time again with ads but also false ads to malware. When that happens suddenly the content creator/website/whatever ‘isn’t responsible’ for it. Then there’s the issue of ads being placed everywhere slowing down websites but even worse, getting in the way with auto play audio and video, videos autoscrolling over the content you’re trying to read or whatever, etc.
As a consumer, I should not and ethically do not need to worry about another’s business model. If the business model fails simply because I don’t allow something that model depends on to traverse my network then it is on them to figure it out. If the ads get in the way of the content, then I just want consume the content anyway.
Some news websites use Ad Admiral or whatever it is called and I haven’t bothered trying to bypass the adblock wall for them. I just simply consume the content elsewhere.
If ads were ever responsibly used or perhaps could be argued that there is compromise where consumers wouldn’t mind, then there’d probably be a lot less ad blocker usage. It’s like anything else. When it takes less effort to install an adblocker to have an OK experience, then ad blockers will be popular.
I was around before ad blockers were very popular and even before pop-up blockers were around. Ads kept getting worse which is why ad blockers became more popular and more sophisticated. The Internet had ads for years before ad blockers were the norm.
Yeah I wasn’t using an Adblock on YouTube when this all started. Then the ads got so intrusive it was seriously hindering content. These days I don’t watch much YouTube, but it’s with Adblock
Another argument proving that Linus Media Group is a bunch of morons
Linus Short Sebastian is an asshole. I like his channel and even bought a water bottle, but he is an asshole nontheless. His opinions are always 5 years outdated. He used to hate reddit but now liked Reddit. Probably a contrarian too.
Cool, let’s body shame people.
I mean, the argument falls short when YT (or LTT) spew literal garbage. I might have a hint of sympathy if it wasn’t a dumpster fire of decaying babies.
The few people I sub do and do yt as a monitory source, I support elsewhere. Fuck YouTube acting as a sleezy middle-man and simultaneously playing the victim.
I mean, the argument falls short when YT (or LTT) spew literal garbage.
The fact that you don’t like the product doesn’t really change that their expected transaction is “watch an ad to receive it”. Every argument against the idea of not watching the ads being piracy seems to be, essentially, either “the product isn’t good” or “the price is too high”, neither of which is relevant to the fact that they’ve put a “price” on it and you’re skipping the part where you “pay”.
Quality of the videos is irrelevant. Intrusiveness of the ads is irrelevant. The ads are the price, the videos are the product. You’re getting the videos without seeing the ads.
I agree that the “price” is too high, the ads are awful, and the videos are frequently bad. I will continue to block those ads as long as I am able, but I’m not going to delude myself into thinking that I’m not skipping out on the cheque, as it were, when I do so.
I might have a hint of sympathy if it wasn’t a dumpster fire of decaying babies.
Literally no one is asking you to have any sympathy. Why get so defensive when it’s pointed out that skipping ads is skipping on your side of the transaction when using an ad supported service?
I liked the service up until ~2016 and was a yt red family subscriber. Then they upped the prices, then they started pushing more ads + more frequently, then they got butthurt about third-party apps, then they raised prices again…
My “expected transaction” is to host decent-or-better content (not shovel clickbait disinformation nonsense) in a fashion that is palatable to me, and they are failing miserably on the first and are fighting to fail miserably on the second. If you go to a restaurant expecting decent food but are served actual shit, are you going to be like ‘thank you sir may I have some more’? We have been the frog in the pot of boiling water for the last 15+ years of bullshit like this, where a company makes a compelling product, then makes it shit but incrementally so ‘it’s not so bad compared to the last update’ but compared to a few years ago it’s completely garbage. And they want more money for a worse experience? Are for fucking shitting me?
Quality of the content is relevant. I guarantee you aren’t going to the movies to watch something that scored a 4% on RT. Everyone wants to be like’ poor yt/alphabet, they only got 63 billion this quarter 'but if it was a real issue they’d be doing stuff like charging fees to upload content (goodbye 9 year-olds screaming about fortnite skins) or something else to curb the amount of content they host. Google knew what they were getting into when they bought yt - at least they sure as fuck should. Nobody has ever made a profitable video service afaik. There’s what, yt, vimeo, and… liveleak is dead, uh… crickets.
I’m not even pretending to skip out on the bill. I’m screaming from my table “this is fucking terrible and you should all feel awful about it” before proudly walking out.
Also I’m not asking for sympathy? I’m saying “this service has turned to shit”. Also none of my above comment, or this, is defensive; it’s being pissed off that a company is fucking people on both sides of the transaction and still complaining that they don’t get enough of a cut, while actively making their service worse for their customers and doing nothing to save it themselves. They are a sinking ship complaining that they need more help chucking buckets of water overboard, while they simultaneously poke additional holes in it.
I don’t really disagree with any of that, and it’s all a great argument in favour of just not using YouTube. Hell, it might even be a good argument in favour of using it as much as possible while blocking ads just to consume bandwidth on their dime while denying them ad revenue.
None of it really counters the idea that using it without viewing ads is skipping out on “paying” for that usage, which is the entire “argument” being presented, which you claimed falls short. The content being bad doesn’t change the fact that they expect you to view ads (or pay) to see that content, and we’re not paying.
Fuck YouTube acting as a sleezy middle-man
A sleezy middleman that happens to foot the substantial YT infrastructure bill.
They’re hurting real bad lemme tell ya. If only you understood what they’re freely extracting from you.
Nobody is forcing YT to exist, so…
if a content creator doesnt want people to be able to skip the ads/demonetize the content, then they should post on a platform that makes ads mandatory.
problem is that no one will watch crap on that sort of platform
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The same Linus who can’t be arsed to spend $500 of various people’s time to properly test a product is now telling us what to do?
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I don’t see how that’s relevant. If you want to engage in the paid YouTube subscription, go for it, it’s an entirely different thing though.
My computer requests from YouTube’s server a video, the server gives me a stream of data - I didn’t steal it, I didn’t hack it, the server provided me this because it wanted to - and this stream contains an ad and a video. What I do with this stream is only my concern, you can’t force me to watch the ad. That would be like walking in the street and somebody says you’re unethical because you didn’t look at an outdoor advertisement banner, and that you will be forced to either pay a fee or look at the ad.
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I have no social contract with YouTube. The whole “if you access this site, you agree with this ToS” isn’t even legally valid here.
My guy, that’s why there is DRM. Your screen are loading pixels, because they let you. Those third party apps and frontends work because they let the users have a little freedoms.
If you steal something off the mall and bring it to your home, it doesn’t make it yours. People thinking all that code, infrastructure and labour to run something on the internet should be free because they have an internet connection are entitled as the sovcit bunch. Just cringe.
Advertisers, Malwares and Ad blockers are all to blame for the current state of the internet. We’re heading for paywalled internet and entitled basement dwellers are going to complain you miss the “old internet”
Seriously, I use adblockers but the rationale people make up for this like countless others are just plain stupid.
Fuck that victim-blaming nonsense. The entire reason ad blockers were invented in the first place were because ads in the 90s and early 2000s were somehow even worse than they are now. You would click on a website, and pop-up ads would literally open new windows under your mouse cursor and immediately load an ad that opened another pop-up ad, and then another, and another, until you had 30 windows open and 29 of them were pop-up ads, all of them hoping to trick you into clicking on them to take you to a website laden with more and more pop-up ads. Banner ads would use bright, flashing, two-tone colors (that were likely seizure-inducing, so have fun epileptics!) to demand your attention while taking up most of your relatively tiny, low-resolution screen.
The worst offenders were the Flash-based ads. On top of all the other dirty tricks that regular ads did, they would do things like disguising themselves as games to trick you into clicking them. (“Punch the monkey and win a prize!” The prize was malware.) They would play sound and video–which were the equivalent of a jump scare back then, because of how rare audio/video was on the Internet in that day. They would exploit the poor security of Flash to try and download malware to your PC without you even interacting with them. And all this while hogging your limited dialup connection (or DSL if you were lucky), and dragging your PC to a crawl with horrible optimization. When Apple refused to support Flash on iOS way back in the day, it was a backdoor ad blocker because of how ubiquitous Flash was for advertising content at the time.
The point of all this is that advertisers have always abused the Internet, practically from day one. Firefox first became popular because it was the first browser to introduce a pop-up blocker, which was another backdoor ad blocker. Half the reason why Google became the company it did is because it started out as a deliberate break from the abuses of everyone else and gave a simple, clean interface with to-the-point, unobtrusive, text-based advertisements.
If advertisers and Google in particular had stuck to that bargain–clean, unobstrusive, simple advertisements that had no risk of malware and no interruption to user workflow, ad blockers would largely be a thing of the past. Instead, they decided to chase the profit dragon, and modern Google is no better than the very companies it originally replaced.
My guy, that’s why there is DRM. Your screen are loading pixels, because they let you.
When I ping YouTube’s server it provides me with a stream that contains an ad and a video. What I do with that stream is my problem, and if I want to chop it up it’s something I can freely decide.
Your server can send any data it wants, but it can’t decide what I do with it, are you nuts?
Advertisers, Malwares and Ad blockers are all to blame for the current state of the internet.
So the thing that blocks the first two is equally to blame?
I remember the day I started using an Ad blocker. I used to not care at all about ads on sites, “it’s how they make money. I can live with it.” And then I encountered a banner ad that screamed “HELOOOOOOO!” every time my mouse went over it. I couldn’t download an ad blocker fast enough.
Advertisers and Malware are to blame for Ad blockers. Advertisers will get more and more annoying and intrusive until people reach the point that they won’t put up with them anymore. Seeing as the internet is one big bucket and I can’t block some ads, then I will block all ads.
MY hardware and infrastructure was not free either and I and ONLY I get to decide how it is used.
If something allows it then it’s morally justified. You can’t be naked intentionally and ask me to not look at same time.
At this point id rather see youtube die than watch ads
I was watching a long video on chromecast today and I had ads every three minutes or so. That’s a two hours video. The amount of ads is disgusting.
YouTube is unwatchable without an ad blocker.
My kid would watch his videos with ads and I offered to set him up with an alternative with no ads. He said no, I like the ads. I said ok then. That was two years ago. Last week he was losing his shit because of all the ads that made it unwatchable. I set him up with the ad free alternative and I get thanked every day for it.
Youtube is tanking their own platform.
This is why I pay for YT Premium. No way in hell am I watching ads, but I do want to be able to use the platform, and the money has to come from somewhere. So far it’s been pretty good value, although SponsorBlock is of course still required.
I would like to pay for YT Premium, but I think the service is bad. The product is good, and the service is bad.
If I say I don’t want to see this video, I don’t want to see this fucking video again, youtube. I said don’t recommend this channel, and you said I won’t see it again, but I just refreshed, and there it is. I am not dutch, I don’t speak dutch, I’ve never even been to the Netherlands. I shouldn’t be seeing videos in dutch.
Routinely, I have to go through my home page and try to train the algorithm but I’ve just given up. I got an extension now that just permanently removes channels and videos I don’t want to see.
The thing is… the product is the videos, and youtube doesn’t do the videos. Youtube does the service, and the service is bad. I understand that the ads pay the youtubers but the truth is I don’t care. That pay is trash, and if they want my premium money, youtubers should unionize and force youtube to improve the service.
Edit: I watch the youtuber’s sponsor spot and I buy merch.
Hell YEAH they should unionize!!! YouTube has m effectively NO system in place for recourse when their shitty system fucks up and decides to nuke someone’s channel - Such as, when “supporting subject a” is against YouTube policy, a channel may make a video criticizing others who support “subject a”, YouTube’s stupid algorithm will punish them FOR AGREEING WITH YOUTUBE and never actually manually review their shit when it fucks up. A union can grab YouTube by the nuts and FORCE THEM TO LISTEN and that is painfully needed. Unions force power structures to listen to democracy and I like democracy. MORE UNIONS! the people DOING the fucking work need to be heard!
Yes - AND I like that being a premium subscriber compensates creators I watch EVEN WHEN they are otherwise “demonetized” - like, if they cover news and the news contains upsetting information, YouTube will reduce their ad exposure. But my views still award them as much credit as ever, and count for, like, dozens of ad-supported views under normal circumstances.
Nope bankrupt youtube and rebuild from the ashes
Personally, I don’t think a service is in the wrong for trying to protect against ad block, especially when their revenue comes from ads. However I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with adblockers continuing to innovate to circumvent that. I’m rooting for Ublock Origin lol
One 10-15 sec ad for an 5-10 mins video would be fair. Because if you calculate the ad shown in Cable TV it was similar I would watch them no problem. But NOOO these greedy fckrs want 3-5 ads of >15secs unskipable ads shoved down our throats. They have record profits. In a business if you are in profit then it’s a good thing. But these fcks want to increase profit year by year, not stable profit for the number of users. That want infinite growth and profit from a finite source and they crazy or what? So if anyone says blocking ads on YouTube is piracy, then fck you and those greedy fckrs. They crossed the limit long time ago and they are reaping what they had sowed.
No amount of ads are “fair”
I’m done wasting my life for other people.
Go ahead tho, you do you boo
I’m done wasting my life for other people.
I do enough of that at work as it is. I’ll be fucked if I do it during my downtime, too.
AMEN BROTHA
How do you propose YouTube should pay for infrastructure costs (servers, Internet etc), staff costs (engineers, designers, moderators) and the content creators?
Have a paid service that doesn’t have adverti…
Oh wait…
Google Ads on the webpages of all the webpages on the Internet, similar to their status quo.
I don’t think any of us should be concerned about Google’s cash flow. It’s their job.
Are you saying that the ads shouldn’t be video ads but webpage ads, instead?
It’s their job.
Yeah, exactly why they are enforcing anti-adblock rules…
If this is how Youtube advertised, I wouldn’t block the ads. I refuse to sit through ads when I’m searching through videos and I don’t even know if the video is the one I want to watch. It’s going to take a three minute search into a 10 minute search.
stop paying executives and shareholders. liquidate assets. I don’t care.
I would’ve been fine paying if the price reflected what I was actually paying for (not being advertised to) which would be <$0.005 per viewed video (let’s be generous and call it 1 or 2$/mo) but noo they have to ask for 25$/month like greedy little shits.
That price wouldn’t even begin to cover it. Infrastructure is expensive at that quality. Engineers to maintain such infrastructure are also expensive. Content creators make a ton of money too. Their profits are much lower compared to peers - https://mannhowie.com/youtube-valuation
Also, 22$/month gets you a family plan for 5 people so wtf are you talking about?
I don’t give 2 shits about YouTube, I use ad block where I can too. I’m just saying that people who complain about YouTube’s anti-adblock stuff are being unrealistic, you can’t fault them for trying to block people from stealing from them.
They’re publicly traded, they have to. Thats not an excuse mind you, but if you ever like a service and they go public, just understand the end users are no longer the focus.
Being publicly traded does not force companies to become greedy, immoral scum… Stop spreading this piece of misinformation
PS: this goes hand in hand with the “you got to be an asshole to succeed”… You don’t, the problem is that most people can’t find anything else to imitate
It doesn’t force them legally, but it does effectively guide their behavior. There are a lot of things in this world we aren’t legally forced to do, but still have to do to participate in society. It’s not misinformation, it’s just the reality. It’s true that you don’t have to be an asshole to succeed, but it’s also true that you don’t have to go public to succeed either.
Not even… If the entire point was to maximize profit for shareholders, we would see you he obscene compensation packages for C-suite execs or ridiculously luxurious perks for board members, etc
This has just been the excuse to do away with ethics and morals… And repeating this is “the way it has to be” just makes it easier for them
Television shows are 22-24 minutes, because cable TV should show 6-8 minutes of ads every half hour. 30 second ads in blocks of 3 or 4, multiple times per show.
15 seonds ads are almost too short for a trip to the kitchen. I’m not saying they’re good, but if you want to compare to cable TV, you need to remember the dark times.
Star Trek TOS episodes (1 hour show) were about 52 minutes long, with 8 minutes for commercials. By the time of TNG, episodes were down to 42 minutes. I regularly see ads every 5-6 minutes on YouTube.
Businesses never understand that it’s THEIR obnoxious, sh*tty advertising that kills something profitable, and when it finally dies, it’s surprised Pikachu faces all around.
I refuse to use the official youtube app. Its so trash… I use newpipe and its amazing to just have all my favorite videos bookmarked locally in different lists.
If they take that away from me i will just stop using youtube.
Better start preparing for the coming exodus. Try Odysee, Peertube and Nebula and see what works for you. Once the enshittification hits critical mass, you’ll be ready to let go of that sinking ship.
Odysee
ewwwwww… 99% far right garbage, zero moderation there last time I took a look.
Yeah, there’s garbage too, but I don’t subscribe to any of that. Just watch Linux and electronics tinkering videos instead.
Try Tubular, newpipe + sponsor block combo!
I’ve never tried that one. Can you share a safe link please? Thanks!
Great! Thanks so much!
“because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership”
not like Youtube rewards creators for viewership either (and then lying to the advertisers as well)
I think YouTubers make fractional pennies from Ads, and mostly only if its fully watched and sometimes clicked to go to the website. So if you get a 15 second ad, and skip to the content, you didn’t give the creators any money.
Also, shout out to those ads being horrible. My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign, that had body horror. 15 year old me didn’t want to smoke, nor wanted to after, but it was so disturbing that I learned how to avoid them.
Not even going into the disturbing or weird ads. One time I got an ad for a “Ching Chong Fing Fong shirt company” as a way of mocking Chinese people because their government sucks. Another time, I got a full 12 hour video by a Vietnamese couple just grilling in their backyard. No subtitles, not even sure if they were aware they enabled their videos to do that, or didn’t fully understand the process of uploading videos.
Anytime I see actual ads on the internet, not just YouTube, it just makes me go “I am perfectly justified in not seeing these weird ads.” I don’t give them any money no matter what I do, so why not have my eyes saved from bright flashing colors and scam artists?
If I recall correctly, ever since videos could be called up as ads you can just pay for any video to be an ad, as long as it’s on YouTube, and it doesn’t have to be yours. I don’t know if this has changed, but an essays channel figured out that that’s the fastests way someone could target a competitor’s channel. Paying to have someone else’s video as an ad tanks that video ad revenue and discoverability instantly. Ad views count as views to the video and skipping an ad counts as a skip on the video which signals the algorithm to think that nobody wants or likes to see that video. Do it to enough new videos and you can entirely kill a previously profitable channel in a couple of months.
TheSpiffingBrit did video on that.
If it hadn’t been for ublock origin, I’d not be on YT this long
My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign
Those ads made me want to take up smoking out of spite.
That was the purpose. You see, Big Tobacco actually sponsors the anti-smoking campaigns, which does give them some creative input. They tell the writers to make them as annoying as possible.
They started messing with me on YT. When Piped began giving me errors last week, YT suddenly started behaving, but nagging me to try YT again. Google is truly evil, and dasterdly to boot .
Ouch. Cutting off the nose to spite the face.
They could probably retain users simply by running ads every 10 minutes, rather than every 3 minutes.
Oh but they don’t care about anything but short form content. If they could ditch supporting long form content today they would.
Nah they want lots of short form and also like 10 hour long videos that can play 200 ads in it that you forget is on in the background. They want tiktok and broadcast TV.
They really just want to show you ads.
The cold, hard steel of the sword of truth.
Such a fantastic series :) (the books, not any of the garbage adaptations)
This reply makes me so happy. The books are always better.
Money/s is the more used metric. Retention is secondary or even tertiary to money/s. Behold the algorithm, great and terrible, sheathed in robes of black and grasping sickle white.
Ah, but you’re one layer off. Projected/potential money/s (in the next 1-2 quarters mainly) is what is truly king.
It doesn’t have to be a good idea, it can be a terrible one - but good sounding words in the board room are what matter
“Hey, so we’ve decided to see if we can run 10 unskippable ads back to back. Simultaneously, we’ve launched a war on ad blockers. This time it will surely work because we found out you can ignore your customers - Elon Musk has shown us the way, he only lost bots with all his innovation. We expect people to get over it in 3 months and estimate we’ll lose 4 users. Between 10x more ads and half our users off ad blockers, we project 20x ad revenue next quarter!”
-Words of a future CEO, probably
I haven’t seen an anti adblocker popup on youtube for a couple months now, I though they gave up. It looks like the uBlock developers and block list maintainers are just doing an excellent job staying ahead of whatever youtube is doing.
Revanced update fixed it on their end about two weeks ago also.
Bless the Revanced guys. They made my mobile youtube binge watches as smooth as my desktop firefox + ublock setup.
The web should have had a Terms of Usage from start. Something like
“If you broadcast content on the internet, expect people to download it.”
This. I always say this exact thing.
If you provide content for free, expect people to take it for free.
Even if you don’t intend to provide it for free, if it’s possible to, expect it. No different from Walmart complaining about increased theft after replacing cashiers with self checkout - tiny violins.
everything still fine here on firefox + ublock origin
Wish I could say the same.
I’m also using firefox + ublock, but Ive noticed when I’m watching shorts, I’ll occasionally get an ad that’s disguised as a short. There’s no like/dislike buttons or anything.
Just block shorts alltogether, it’s a win win.
But… my doomscroll :<
Just read climate news.
BitchPeas.
deleted by creator
I found some website that had a line of code that could be added to my adblocker to completely remove them.
Haven’t seen them since.
I think it was this: https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts
That’s intended. Even to premium subs youtube pushes adds which try and promote engagement. Its fucking awful.
Does get me out of the loop sometimes though, so I guess Im thankful for that.
Sometimes I have to reload the page when using these 2. the page will load but just have a youtube icon in the centre of the player or the spinny circle until i hit f5
Yup same here, on android
Oh, I definitely have experienced “The following content is not available on this app.” Before, but I thought it was just a thing of my Revanced version outdated because I rarely update it… Which I’m gonna do just now 😁
I hope this doesn’t bring too many issues to Smart Tube, which is where I do 99% of my YT usage (and I have yet to be bothered with any bug).
Never had any outage in SmartTube either, unless they pushed a faulty release (I’m on the beta channel), but even then they have reacted super fast with fixes.
So far I’m using NewPipe x Sponsorblock on my phone - apparently it has been discontinued & archived, but still works just fine as well. Only the comment view is broken since a couple weeks, but I really don’t care about those to begin with.
Nowadays I’m using tubular which is newpipe with sponsor block and youtube dislike incorporated.
Smart Tube in TV and Tubular on phone (plus Grayjay, but but I’m not fond of their UX).
Grayjay
Yeah, it kind of sucks, and the performance on my phone is worse than NewPipe, but I haven’t found anything else that combines feeds from other sources (Odysee, Nebula, etc), so I still use it.
There are also some missing features, like browsing channel playlists.
It has a ways to make it go, for sure. That UX reminds me of WinAmp way back in the day 🤣
WinAmp was awesome! I loved having it as a floating bar to control my music.
But honestly, the UX is mostly okay for me, except the settings, that really needs some cleanup. Also, rotation is completely broken.
WinAmp was awesome! I loved having it as a floating bar to control my music.
Tell me we’re old without saying that we’re old 🤣
And in Grayjay, I the one thing that’s flawless for me is the screen rotation.
100% agree that the menus and settings need a serious overhaul.
Oh good to know, I wasn’t looking for alternatives as long as it still works, but that’s going to be the future then. Thanks!
Did they fuck up revanced again?
Nope, it still works…
Removed by mod
It was patched within a couple hours…
https://sodawithoutsparkles.github.io/revanced-troubleshooting-guide/00-first-start/
Removed by mod
Dude you should prolly gtfo YouTube
And it was down a couple weeks ago, it hasn’t been down since and this was the first time this has happened since they added the anti adblock popups that were also patched the same day in ublock
Removed by mod
Oh that’s not nearly as bad as watching YouTube 8 hrs straight. Music is good for you
In Germany, there is a law that regulates the amount and intervals of advertising for private television broadcasters: 20% or 1/5 per broadcast day may be used for advertising. Programs that are shorter than 30 minutes may have a break, otherwise there must be 20 minutes between commercial breaks - 30 minutes in the evening. Unfortunately, there are still some loopholes.
Children’s programs are not allowed to have commercial breaks.
It’s a shame that this law still doesn’t apply to YouTube.
It’s a shame that this law still doesn’t apply to YouTube
If Germany is anything like Canada and other countries, applying public broadcast laws to YouTube would be a monkey’s paw deal. Sure you might get tighter control over advertising, but youtube would also be forced to do things like show you x% of content made in your country/language, resulting in state mandated control of the content you see online and potentially limiting/warping international audiences for content creators, and potentially other ramifications I’m not considering.
Now if they made a law specifically for youtube and other online video platforms that dealt with advertising in that context, that would be a different story.
Sure you might get tighter control over advertising, but youtube would also be forced to do things like show you x% of content made in your country/language, resulting in state mandated control of the content you see online and potentially limiting/warping international audiences for content creators, and potentially other ramifications I’m not considering.
This is false. You can create laws restricting advertising without creating other laws forcing companies to display domestic content. The point about the Canadian government wanting YouTube to promote domestic content is irrelevant.
Way to miss my entire point.
In this case, a law wouldn’t be created, youtube would just be integrated in already existing laws for public TV broadcasts, which is the wrong way to go about it because obviously youtube doesn’t work like TV.
Makes me miss a time where they couldn’t tell if ads were actually watched or not.
Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.
Kind of like going to the bathroom during commercials.
Then again I wish we had a real alternative to YouTube. (Don’t point me to the fediverse video stuff … that’s not what I mean.) There is no real competition for a place to freely upload videos … or on the other side find all that content. No one wants to scale enough to compete. (Very few probably could considering the amount of new content per minute).
If only there was real competition, then YouTube would have to fight over our attention/usage by lowering ad count.
No competition means worse for all.
There’s a tool that does this. It speeds up the ad so it takes only a couple of seconds. The ad is “watched” but muted the whole time so you don’t actually have to deal with it.
Edit: The article isn’t great but the tool is sort of the same as what you mentioned. https://9to5google.com/2023/11/25/youtube-ads-speed-up-workaround/
Well, YT is literally getting petabytes uploaded to it. Every single day. Thats 1000 terabytes, and thats 1000000 gigabytes.
I bet you haven’t even seen a petabyte of storage in one place (assuming you didn’t go to a data center yourself). How is a small company, or even fediverse, gonna handle that? Thats absolutely insane amount of data and, without moderation or curation, it is not feasible.
It’s a giant waste of space and resources, to be honest. Most videos are seen once, and the rest is mostly spam or bad quality content.
Actually the cost issues wouldn’t be the storage it’s self. Storage is pretty cheap, it’s content delivery networks. YouTube is supported by being owned and run by one of the worlds larges content delivery networks. There’s virtually no latency, videos play immediately.
Having millions (potentially billions in YouTube’s case) of people accessing data at once is an immense challenge and YouTube perfected it pretty early on, that’s part of why there’s no competition.
Content delivery is not cheap, but not hard to do, either. I’d wager storage would be a bigger problem, because it just keeps rising. Sadly, YouTube is the one with money, and the monetization comes from people.
I can speak from experience that content delivery is harder than storage. Companies like YouTube tackle the storage issue by having tiered storage levels. Trending content is stored on SSDs, new and often viewed content is stored on harddrives with a caching system similar to optane and archived storage (essentially old videos that very rarely get views) goes on tape storage. It’s really cool, and it allows massive about of storage in a small space, it’s costs alot to implement but because of the tape storage they essentially have “infinite” (it’s not really infinite of course but it’s a problem for next decade not this decade).
Fair enough, but that’s YouTube, who can afford all of it. Of course, if you have tons of money, you don’t need to count pennies where counting them would just slow you down.
But take a competitor - how can a different service be viable if they lack money to have (virtually) infinite storage? Heavy moderation or monetization. Youtube kinda does the second one.
To reiterate, I am not saying you say things that are not correct.
I remember seeing a startup at one point that wanted to put mini-CDNs in people’s homes. Small black boxes that would automatically be a CDN not just for your home, but the whole area. Of course, sites would have to use their CDN network, etc.
I actually thought it was a really interesting idea. Almost like federated CDNs.
Imagine if every Xfinity router has a built-in 16TB CDN: it would be an interesting way to possibly change how bandwidth works and makes it back to the DCs. Most popular stuff would be closer, faster.
God could you imagine the security risks though, having a physical risk in a network, that would be fun. Limewire on steroids.
Well break it up “lemmy wise” or more? I mean nobody can replace youtube but it would be possible having your own fishing channel for example. If it gets wildly watched you probably have to figure out some sponsorship for sure.
BTW no I haven’tseen a PB storage, but I did write visualisation and computation software for treating and seing datastructures up to PB size with hdf5.
Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.
I wish adblockers did this, open the ad in a little silenced sandbox window. I don’t see the ad, creator gets their pay
Even the advertisers don’t lose out because you wouldn’t have paid attention to the ad too. They might even win a little because now one doesn’t have to get annoyed by the ad and deliberately not buy the thing.
Exactly, I don’t overly mind the “paid advertisements” the creators do, the guys I watch that do this are extremely funny in how they do it so if I don’t manually skip I get a good laugh, like the “Adstronaut”
Adnaseum is a fork of unlock that fakes viewing ads. The thing is its banned from chromes app store because google is at its core an advertising company.
Hmm, I only use chrome for my YT chan control, not watching. Watching ANYTHING is done on FF+UBO, but if adnaseum is on FF I may switch. Poor google has YET to show an ad I would be interested in, hell the tv in the 80s showed me more of interest than ads today. Thanks for the suggestion,will check it out!
They do have a ff version
I know what I am checking out tonight
No one wants to scale enough to compete.
I don’t consider scale important from the perspective of making and watching good videos. People get hung up on it when citing barriers to competition with Youtube, and while it’s certainly there, it only matters to Google itself (so it can continue to plausibly lie to its customers about ad impression numbers). In fact YT’s offering was at its creative peak when scale was lacking.
It makes no difference to me whether a knowledgeable hobbyist has 20,000 subs or 250,000. I don’t care about their “content” suitability for advertisers (that creepy term can get nuked). I certainly couldn’t care less whether the algorithm promotes their work, deserving as it may be. This sort of creator operates on the assumption their viewers are intelligent, and is typically savvy enough to route around YT with alternate donation/support mechanisms. These people will continue on any platform. For them, quality is an end in itself rather than a feed-in to a metric. I would rather watch a badly filmed insightful critical appraisal of a new piece of hardware than Canadian/Black Technology Man’s 8K press release rehash full of slick cuts and pointless b-roll.
Scale is the concern of middlemen.
I wonder about this. Youtube is made so that videos has to be long (10 minutes at least, or you won’t get exposure, right?) so we get all those dragged out videos with long summaries.
Also you are supposed to earn money with it, which combined makes videos, IMO, often not very interesting.
Sure, I get it, everyone can’t make videos all day long for free, but isn’t that something that we shouldn’t maybe want?
I prefer a genuine hobbyist making one video a year, than a sponsored person pushing one a day.
Which brings me to hosting and bandwidth needs, youtube needs a lot of that because of its business model, but say Lemmy communities could probably host quality videos without large hassle (especially if small servers wasn’t defederated all the time).
Thoughts?
The problem is the term quality would be used to block out certain creators. The definition would wind up being vague and/or arbitrary.
What one person thinks is quality may not be quality to someone else. In a way that’s a niceness of YouTube. We can each upload what we think is good… or bad.
Even then if a video goes big viral (which is arguably something a creator may want), the bandwidth costs could skyrocket.
Then it’s like: maybe we need CDNs and more storage and boom now it’s even more expensive. I just don’t see fediverse video working great long term without big money to back it.
I thought the 10 minute was a monetization requirement.
Since the initial push, I have not even had to reset my ublock… stop using Chrome
It’s kinda cute how they are utterly loosing with adblocker crackdown and now they are saying they will even handle their party apps. No company will handle an open source project full of talented people pissed of by ads.
Reddit managed pretty well, let’s be real. The 3rd party app protests were essentially a speed bump that lost a tiny subsection of users that advertisers didn’t want anyways. Everyone else just migrated to the official app or website.
In their defense, advertisers weren’t seeing those same people.
You can still use third party apps, they are just not in the playstore. Just like with YouTube right now
