Please YouTube, make things even worse by embedding ads into the video itself, like twitch does. After I had to watch the same ad over and over for the new Zelda, then Aquaman 2 , I eventually managed to delete my twitch account and stop losing my time there. Hopefully will be the same with youtube, I didn't watch a single ad in 12 years, I don't understand how people does it.without sponsorblock and ublock, youtube is worse than the tv.
Paying because a service is making itself suck on purpose to create “fake value” to make you relent to their suckage is objectionable business practice, and all those that support YouTube by buying premium need to think a little deeper about the kind of future their are supporting with their money: you’re paying for pain relief instead of innovation and, frankly, condemning the Internet.
You are missing something key. There is a very popular strategy that YouTube and Uber and a bunch of other companies followed. If you have a product with network effects you don't sell it for what it's worth right away. First, you heavily subsidize the price to maximize your user base, only then do you start charging what the product was worth all along. You got convinced that the unreasonably good initial offering is the norm and resent the inevitable switch to the sustainable real offering. That makes sense, a lot of people will be in your boat as that is basically the entire point of the strat, get you to join the nework by giving you a false impression of the service / product. I'm sure there is some greed there too, but it's not fair to ignore this part of it. Yes, they are making the service worse in order to make more money, that is a fact, however I think some / most of that is needed to cover costs and was planned from the beginning. The argument should be what fraction is needed. Zero, as you seem to imply, seems clearly too low to me. Regardless, it seems best to evaluate a service based on how much you currently get from it for the price (and relative to current competition) rather than to what you used to get for the old price. I get so much value from YouTube that I do not mind paying for Premium. Yes, it is now a much worse deal than before. I think it is still a very good deal.
> First, you heavily subsidize the price to maximize your user base, only then do you start charging what the product was worth all along.
More and more I feel this should run afoul of anti-trust laws. It's one thing to subsidize a product short term. It's another to subsidize a product for years upon years so you can squeeze out any competition in the market. In the example of Uber and Lyft, how many start-ups that weren't flush with hundreds of millions of VC cash completely failed or never even got off the launchpad because there was no way for them to compete against a company selling it's services at a loss for years at at time?
I'm not an attorney, but have sat through many sessions with our legal team in the past on this topic (pricing models). Agree the practice may fee icky, but I'm not sure this case would qualify as anticompetitive (in the US). First, lawyers would have a field day at defining and redefining the market. Related, it is unclear what other services we as consumers no longer have access to due to them executing this strategy. So across consumer harm, market power/monopoly, and predatory pricing the legal case might be challenging to construct. Back to your point, maybe this practice SHOULD run afoul with anti-trust laws, but the laws may need to change to apply to this situation.
Honestly, this is why I got rid of YouTube premium when their prices increased. The amount of ads reduced my YouTube usage to only videos that I "really" wanted to watch. Try turning off your blocker if you want to decrease your consumption :-)
It will mute the sound and blank the screen for 12 second, then restore them (adjust as desired). Mac doesn't give programmatic access to the screen brightness, so that cannot be restored perfectly.
This isn't a good technical solution to ads, but it might be an acceptable life solution. Enjoy the blank screen, look around the room, breath, enjoy the quiet. And be content that this "solution" will work to block ads so long as users have control over their own computers.
The amount of ads they started adding in the last months or a year at this point is sick. Basically two at the start of every video and often not skippable. It coincided with increased offers for YouTube premium. Honestly I'd pay at this point, but know it's not going to be enough sooner or later. They'll add premium with less ads for half the price, then they'll increase the price gradually until the premium with ads costs the same as premium used to cost and so on. It's really tiring to get squeezed to the last drop on every turn, and at the same time living allegedly in a free market.
Ha! I just knew I won't need to waste money on a faster Internet to watch YouTube smoother. YouTube slows you down anyways.
But in all seriousness:
1) YouTube can slow it down all you want, ban my account if you have to, I'll not remove my adblocker.
2) YouTube should really reconsider their business strategy, and charging their advertisers more. The total amount of the garbage ads from garbage publishers on their platform is out of control, that's why I installed adblocker in the first place. Raise the price, kick those shitty ads out, good for everyone.
3) Intentionally piss off your viewers is great at converting an objective annoyance to something more personal.
From what I've heared sort of around the block:
Shitty ads actually pay more per view. Scam artists have rather fat margins and are more desperate to get their ads shown.
IMO the __actual__ solution to youtube ads is unironically to buy premium (and use sponsorblock). Cheap enough and I personally find the experience of ads shoved down my throat actually degrading (so have been using adblockers). Probably would get those 5-10$ worth of ads not being shown in couple evenings/mornings while listening to stuff during commute.
Alternatively, something like floatplane, but the the whole yt premuium costs like 3-5 channels on floatplane, and general lack of site-wide subscription tier is a deal-braker to me, so no.
Thing is, video production, storage and distributions are expensive af. There are little to no alternatives explicitly because, especially at small scale, the model is unsustainable. If youtube presumably keeps loosing money to google, there will be no youtube outside of paid tiers, or, indeed, something like floatplane.
I'm not against ads in general but I'm strongly against the idea to turn Internet into TV 2.0 e.g. interuptive ad delivery channel. Text and banner ads allow the user to chose their level of engagement but forced video ads attempt to force the user to interrupt their normal flow without other options. I find it unacceptable.
TV Providers (we called them broadcasters in my day) have no idea how many people are watching. They relied on the guess work from Nielsen. So I'm not really sure what you're implying they can do.
It wasn't until digital cable boxes before they could start tracking your account watched what channel at what time on what box. Or at least what was being decoded on that device whether eyeballs saw it or not.
In other words, you're focused on entirely the wrong thing if you're being pedantic with "nor do the web ads themselves". Thanks, as if I was confused on the subject. We're all adults here and understand the video bits are not tracking but the code used to deliver them.
Random question: has anyone here ever purchased something they found via a youtube ad?
I never have. Approximately 100% of youtube ads I've seen are for harmful, time-wasting, unhealthy, mediocre, scammy products/services. They also tend to be blastingly-loud, and somewhat anxiety-inducing. I've never seen an interesting or informative one.
Why doesn't youtube put effort into ad quality and relevance, rather than hostility toward users who quite naturally want to avoid grotesque influences.
Ads work on the brain on many levels. Often affecting us below conscious recall. They work on us even if we don't like them.
For example a feel good video from a car company won't make us go out and buy the car. That's not the intention. The aim is not for you to click through right then and spend. The intention is about feeling of the brand. So maybe in 2 years time when you have forgotten the specific ad and are in a position of trading in your old car you will choose this brand of car compared to a similar one from a company that didn't advertise.
Ads are worse than we think. They work on many levels to manipulate us.
In fact I have a list of products that show in ads that I make sure to never purchase. I assume that if you have to advertise hard to sell your product you probably suck. Products that are amazing are sold by recommendation from enthusiastic customers.
I know people may not agree, but it’s been pretty effective for me.
> I have a list of products that show in ads that I make sure to never purchase.
That's hardcore, I like it.
I don't think it's black and white regarding need to advertise. Good products can advertise too, it's just that they tend to be tasteful or even inspiring, informative, imaginative, helpful or have some other positive effect on the viewer. I never perceive those qualities in youtube ads. (to be fair, the vast majority of ads outside of youtube also fail to exhibit those qualities).
> Why doesn't youtube put effort into ad quality and relevance, rather than hostility toward users who quite naturally want to avoid grotesque influences.
Because the purpose of the ad is just to keep your brain busy for a period of _your_ time.
If YouTube outright prevents access from browsers that block ads, then suddenly a huge number of the most tech-savvy viewers will be motivated to seek/develop/fund better ad blockers and/or alternative ways to access videos.
It's a difficult position. On the one hand, these users are chewing up compute and bandwidth, without providing any ad revenue. On the other hand, if they leave, it contributes to a vicious cycle (or virtuous cycle, depending on your perspective) of eyeballs being elsewhere, and content creators looking elsewhere to reach those eyeballs.
Sure, initially content creators will be posting to YouTube as well, but even a moat like YouTube's can be filled in over time.
>content creators looking elsewhere to reach those eyeballs.
If content creator can not monetize those eyeballs very well there is little incentive to target that niche. YouTube would be losing a niche of a niche that are not as profitable to try and platform.
It is less the ads that bother me. Although, I do remember a time with TV where there was a commercial break every 30-45 min if you are luck and every 15 min when not.
Didn't bother me. Bathroom break.
What bothers me with this is the amount of surveillance that comes with it.
Isn't called surveillance-capitalism for nought. And the best part.. it has already been debunked that targeted ads are as effective as they would like them to be.
1. Chrome had to support adblockers to outcompete firefox.
2. Adblockers were really powerful pieces of arbitrary logic making blocking them infeasible, so manifest v3 had to first be introduced to weaken them.
3. With lean times upon us, everyone is understanding of their move to block ads.
All of these steps were necessary, and had to happen with some time inbetween. Sort of an embrace-extend-extinguish play.
Edit: Well it seems manifest v2 is being phased out very very gradually and it's not done yet. No new extensions are allowed but uBlock might still be around for a few more months.
What is interesting is that I use Firefox on Mac and Windows and I have been slowly moving over to Windows after a decade of using Macs. Anyways, the point is, on the Mac, Youtube keeps complaining about adblock and not letting me watch stuff without using a Violent Monkey patch but on Windows they don't complain yet, which I know won't last for long, but in the meantime is a nice Windows win.
On my TV YouTube wouldn’t skip to video if ads didn’t load. One could say that’s an effective guard against an adblocker as you would just get a black screen for a minute.
Of course you would also get a blank screen when the ad server wasn’t responding, because the ad server is not hooked up to the local cdn
This! Worse than unskippable ad breaks are high resolution ads that come with lag.
Sometimes a 20 second unskippable and turns out to take 60 seconds or more with lag and buffering. Even thought I don't have issues on the video itself.
The eventual solution for YouTube is to start injecting advertisements into the content packet stream, complete with re-keyframing and altering the metadata files to incorporate the ad segments into the run length. Everything prior to that is their increasingly-desperate attempts to not have to re-code their content streaming server to dynamically modify streams with advertising on the fly. But they won’t have to do that until video ad blockers start playing the ads invisibly in a shadow of the page, without showing them to the user at all. Which is pretty advanced for a regex-based player and not something I expect to see with last-gen ad blocking. Looking forward to it!
YouTube makes money by selling access to your eyeballs. The ad / Adblock arms race is amusing and all, but the only winning move is not to play. Take your attention someplace else.
This is how you win.
I would prefer to pay for a better Adblocker. I won't let YouTube blackmail me with ads.
I also don't trust Google/YouTube with my credit card data (had 15+ fraudulent charges on Google play one day, got the money back but zero explanation how this could have happened with 2fa) so as long as they don't support a secure payment method it's a big no anyway.
Google is literally one of the world's biggest ad companies.
They're constantly toeing the line of messing with ad blockers and letting people use them. It seems that someone has seen ad engagement go down enough to start doing stuff like this.
I’d stop using the service. But it makes no sense for them to not have an ad free option where you just pay them the value of what the ads would have given them.
OK, this has been brewing on for a while, so time for a Plan B. Since I don't have enough karma do do a full AskHN, here's to hijacking a comment thread:
Question : What's the best solution for someone mainly watching STEM channels and various video essayists (Contrapoints, Stories Of Old, various art critics)?
Personally, Youtube Premium feels like paying for a protection racket. So far I'm inclined towards paying for Nebula. Any other ideas anyone?
Some youtubers are uploading their videos to alternative websites, instances of Peertube network. Sure, you probably won't find that video there, but maybe it is time to reduce online video watching or at least start watching something different, something you chose, not the algorithm. Start with tilvids.com and makertube.net . Even archive.org has a lot of stuff to watch.
I’ve been using ublock origin and sponsor block, has been working a treat. Every week or so YouTube will detect I’m using an adblocker, click on ublock origin icon -> cogs icon -> purge all caches -> Update now.
No, you’re still the product if you pay. In fact you are better product.
You’re just verified product and worth more to advertisers and data brokers because you’re card verified and likely legit. With love, this is antiquated thinking and no longer true.
I use Adblock, but also believe creators should be paid and YouTube itself cannot exist for free. If you’re not willing to pay and also don’t want ads, what’s the solution?
YouTube is far, far, FAR more profitable than just its supporting infrastructure. It’s a joke to require ad loads that rival cable television and all its dedicated networks and expense and set top boxes and sales and installation requirements in order to “support” Internet video delivery. The argument holds no water.
The solution is to allow the people who want to pay for premium value to pay and to push delivery onto peer-to-peer delivery like BitTorrent did 20 years ago so that the expense is minimal and shared by the people who actually watch by hosting what they consume.
It’s not hard. Don’t buy the corporate lies on this one.
This is 99 percent less expensive delivery of content YouTube gets for free but poor Google needs help with expenses? Not likely.
They should be encouraging premium subscription by creating premium services and and supporting it with sponsorship for premium content and access to content creators. We already have many working models like this. They just have too many Hollywood execs and MBAs who are so deeply uncreative and unable to be risk takers or jeopardize their cushy job by making innovative suggestions like this that they can’t come up with any other path. They have a culture problem with their products honestly.
We don’t need Internet video to be shit cable over IP networks. Google could actually innovate here.
I was willing to pay for "no ads", YouTube had the perfect product for me, Premium Lite, which I gladly paid for 2 years until I got an email in October:
> Subject: Your Premium Lite membership will be discontinued
> 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. While we understand this may be disappointing news, we continue to work on different versions of Premium Lite as we incorporate feedback from our users, creators, and partners. [emphasis mine on the bullshit]
> To show our appreciation, we’re offering a 1 - month trial of Premium (even if you’ve had a trial before). With Premium, you can watch videos ad - free, offline, and in the background. Plus, stream music ad - free in the YouTube Music app.
I don't need nor want the other features, just no ads, and paid for it for 2 years. Then YouTube decided to fuck me over and force me into a more expensive subscription tier, fuck them, I'll use ad blockers for as long as they work.
The solution is a different platform, I don't trust Google, I will not pay (which entail giving additionnal private information) an advertising platform.
Thank you for the precisely articulated ultimate point in this debate I have with people about copyright, though my conclusion is different to what you're (probably?) alluding too.
My conclusion is: Good.
Traditionally, storytellers and musicians were an important part of society. They were the medium through which ideas and even information would spread. Then came troupes, then came middlemen, then came companies, then came corporations. Each step along the way, the artist was less about her art, and more about the business of making art.
This can be acceptable to many, and I won't knock anyone who enjoys a good Hollywood blockbuster. What I would argue though, is that the pure artist who did it for the art first, and the business second, made better art.
In conclusion; fuck Google, let that dumpster fire burn out.
