I’m surprised at this point that people are still trying to circumvent Terrible. Just stop using YT altogether.
Just stop using YT altogether
YT spent the last 15 years stomping out all competition, so now that they have accomplished that, they jack up the rates… (or in this case jack up the ads)
classic capitaism
It’s what they always should have done anyway. I’m not so entitled that I think I should get content delivered absolutely free, but I am entitled enough to sandbox and restrict how many discrete domains my browser windows will talk to.
“Virtually impossible?” I haven’t had ads on YT in over 6 years, and I don’t even use a blocker or alt client.
So what’s your trick?
I pay for YT Premium. It’s 100% worth it based on my very high usage of YT for entertainment and learning. Best streaming service bargain by far. Netflix’s pile of shitty self-made movies is a ripoff by comparison.
Fuck off, shill
No need to get vulgar, there, chief. I’m just a satisfied customer who doesn’t understand why watching YT videos has to be such a deathmatch with their engineering team all the time. I’ll bet that the majority of people here get the value from YT that Premium charges for, and a sizable number of people here pay for some streaming service that they actually use less than YT. Yet because YT is a website with a free tier, the arms race of ad blocking / countermeasures is never ending. People wind up hating YT and talking about them like the third reich, when it’s really a service that all of us love and depend on. Shrug?
Youtube is a festering shithole. Overflowing with the absolute worst kind of clickbait and vacuous content. It brings together everything wrong with society under a single URL. For what little useful content there is youtube should be the one paying visitors to sift through the shit to get to it.
Your account is a festering shithole. My YT is full of woodworking and gardening tutorials, geopolitics and cosmology explainers, Tolkein lore and a few other fun things I enjoy. I’m sorry yours is not as fulfilling.
My gut reaction is that this won’t work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there’s a way to do that there’s a way to detect ads.
Of course, there’s always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they’re used; they’ve done similar before.
Feedback across the Firefox and YouTube subreddits highlighted that it could break timestamped video links and chapter markers. However, YouTube knows the length of the ads it would inject, and can offset subsequent timestamps suitably.
The move also adds a layer of unnecessary complexity in saving Premium viewers from these ads. If they are added server-side, the YouTube client would have to auto-skip them for Premium members, but that also means ad segment info will be relayed to the client, opening up a window of opportunity for ad blockers to use the same information meant for Premium subscribers and skip injected ads automatically.
It sounds like there’s a silver lining after all.
The ads won’t be baked in beforehand, they’ll be injected into the stream in real time. Videos are broken into chunks and sent over HTTP, they’ll just put ad chunks in during playback. There is no need to re-encode anything. If you deep link to a timestamp, the video just starts from that timestamp as normal. If you are a Premium user, the server just never injects the ads.
But you are correct that the client needs to be aware that ads are happening, so they can be indicated on screen, and so click-throughs are activated.
This is why Chrome went to Manifest v3 - so you can’t have any code looking for ad signals running on the page to try to counter it.
I already barely watch YouTube. It’s mostly for music videos. Google can fuck itself to death.
What do you propose Google do instead? Run YouTube at a loss?
Google is operating at a 24% net profit margin. They don’t need to get their shareholders more money…
Do you actually understand how this works? It’s a beautiful statement and oh so noble, but it just flies against how the world really works.
At some point, maybe not today, but at some point, you’re going to be saving up for your retirement. Your money will be invested; either passively or actively. If active, a fund manager (or maybe even yourself) will be spending time, every single day, wondering how to maximise the invested cash. If passive, you’re letting a WHOLE lot of fund managers make the decisions for you (wisdom of the crowd). Either way, Google better fucking perform or the investors will go elsewhere.
And you’ll be an investor too, asking for Google to do better than anyone else or you’ll take your savings elsewhere.
If investors go elsewhere then they’re trading for a higher risk and return ratio than a massive company with rich history like Google. Plus, it frequently performs large buybacks and offers, and even offered a dividend recently. There is always going to be something attractive to investors, here.
I mean, yeah. It did so for years.
Yes right. But what does the investor environment look like today? Profit, not users, is what everyone is counting. If Google says “we’re burning cash in all businesses but search, but hey we’re nice”, investors will take their investments to more profitable businesses.
They actually have a pretty huge net profit margin and what basically amounts to a monopoly on advertisement, so even if their ads reached less intended targets it wouldn’t hurt their bottom line much.
I sort of spent a decade uploading and streaming to it, started before it was even bought by Google, so I’ve really dug myself a pit at this point.
People will find a way to get around it, I could see buffering a video for 5 mins or even downloading the entire video ala locally playing podcasts, then using AI or some type of frame analyzation technique t to skip ads. Or just skip them like good old fashion Tivo from your player.
TBH I don’t expect AI to be able to solve this.
Over the past years I’ve been reducing my youtube and twitch viewership anyways. Its literally the lowest form of entertainment and its not worth a single moment of ad watching. I’ll just do something else. Most youtube content sucks anyways. I don’t even remember most of the channels I used to watch.
They’re just going to increase their own server costs chasing some tiny fraction of viewers who will do anything to avoid ads. they should be grateful for the adviewers they have.
Man, you’re definitely spot on with this. For me, it’s a fast, easy source of superficial distraction that I can put on for background noise and don’t have to pay attention to. It’s ultimately what cable TV used to be for me. I’ll even leave on a streamer playing a game in the background on low volume if I’m going to sleep just for white noise. At this point, the behavior and desire for that kind of content is so ingrained in me that it’s sort of like an addiction. I wish there were alternatives to youtube, but that era of video content might just be straight up dying for some of us. I guess if anything I’ll start fleshing out my plex server with old t.v. shows and just put Gilligan’s Island or something on in the background.
Yea, a plex server for idle viewing would be a way better alternative. Just make a custom nickelodeon, comedy central, etc and have it run random episodes of random shows.
I’ve actually always wanted to do this! Download a load of old school Nickelodeon stabs and episodes and find some software that can play them all together in random order haha… Any advice on how to go about setting this up?
It’s actually built into plex. If you have a library of t.v. shows you can just click the Shuffle button and it’ll play random episodes. Or you can make Categories of shows and shuffle those. If you’re asking how to get started with Plex and downloading content, well…I don’t want to get banned for piracy related reasons, so I’ll just say that, totally unrelated to this discussion, there’s a wealth of resources regarding how to get started with bittorrent and usenet. Which you can use for perfectly legal purposes, like downloading Liinux ISOs and open source textbooks.
Nah I’m good for Linux ISOs and open source textbooks, just wasn’t aware that some of these media players had a shuffle button 😝 thanks folks!
They just escalated the arms race between ad and ad blocker. All this could have been avoided if they actually did something about the scam ads.
No, it could not have been avoided. I don’t watch ads. Ads don’t need to be “scam ads” for me to not watch them. I just don’t. Full stop.
So, how will content creators be reimbursed for the long hours they put into creating YouTube videos? There are honest people out there who made content creation their job. I say that to express I’m not talking about content farms, clickbait creators or “Mr. Beast” types - those are all media companies, although they also have bills to pay.
Did you get a premium account?
No everything has to be for profit in this life.
I’ve no contract with them, I’ve not made any purchases. They post something online for anyone to see.
They are completely free of locking their content behind a paywall, there are plenty of platforms for that.
But I want to make my first statement clear: no every single thing any human being does has to be done just for the sole purpose of getting an economical profit. That would be the death of humanity.
I still remember 90s internet when we had tons of websites with lots of content that was just there because the creators were fans of such content, no further intentions. Barely any ads or monetization whatsoever. The ‘shark’ mentality is killing internet.
Sure. But nobody had to invest multiple hours each day into maintaining their Geocities page - there are only so many animated GIFs you could load over a modem connection anyway. Also, are we really comparing the hosting expenses of fucking YouTube with static 90s fan pages?
People expect edited videos from content creators these days. Even someone filming a hobby in their home shop will get barked at for having bad audio quality, if, this week for once, they forgot to charge the batteries on their wireless Rode lavalier mic.
That’s why so many content creators do have e. g. Patreon. Many of them are providing peeks behind the scenes and create transparency to show how much effort a single video takes, and even individuals often hire someone to do the video edits for them.
If you’re fine watching unedited, 5-10 minute videos that can be churned out with next to no effort, all good. I’m really into 40-90 minute long videos and personally view YouTube as an alternative to obtain the content type I prefer, but I’d rather not sacrifice quality. I also prefer creators who provide a serialized format and upload a video every week - in that way, I guess I’m old fashioned.
This type of content is impossible to make without financial support, which I’ll gladly provide one way or the other. However, how much the average person can afford in terms of monthly subscription fees is certainly limited, so a company offering access to multiple creators for a flat subscription fee is absolutely reasonable.
I think the unskippable and autoplaying ads are the point for me where I start actively finding ways to avoid ads. Anything that tries to force itself in front of my eyes or eclipses the actual content is kind of a no go.
It’s not that Youtube creators don’t deserve to be compensated (many if whom provide content to YT for free just to share, let’s remember) it’s that Google needs to find less obnoxious means of serving ads.
I’d be really curious to see the actual numbers of how much Google gets in revenue from YT and how much actually goes to paying creators. I’m betting the ratio is not as slim as they make it sound.
some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.
Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
What would be terrifying about it?
Yeah, I don’t see what’s terrifying. Countries can make laws, if YouTube wants to operate in that market it has to follow the laws there.
There seems to be an abundance of the false notion that large corporations are somehow above governments on Lemmy … and that’s simply not true, at least for corporations that want have legitimate business within the country.
EDIT: So as to say … perhaps the commenter (at least in the moment) was a bit awestruck seeing laws apply to tech (which often seems to feel as though it’s above the law in some way).
Myanmar, as a country, has a GDP of 62.26 billion usd.
Google has a market cap of 2.17 Trillion usd and made a profit of $305 billion usd last year.
Google makes more money in profit than moves through Myanmar in a year by nearly 5 times. If Google chooses not to operate in their country because of some law they don’t like, what’s to stop them?
Google definitely has national government level influence, especially considering the pervasiveness of their product suite. Implying that they’re above the law might be too far, but they for sure influence it.
If the most extreme happens and Google decided that some EU law was too much to deal with compared to the gains, a lot of Europeans could find themselves in a position where Google doesn’t operate in their country. Imagine every Android device becoming unable to use the majority of the service they operate on, or the most common browser, search engine, email service, and video streaming services simultaneously being disabled. I can’t imagine the people will be very happy about that.
