The Verge reports that YouTube is rolling out advertisements that show up when you pause videos, continuing experiments that the company started a year ago. A YouTube representative confirmed that the practice will now become commonplace “as we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response.”
The representative said that advertising on paused videos is designed to create a “less interruptive” experience. But as The Verge notes, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to see a drop in the increasing load of obnoxious and often unskippable advertising on YouTube. And since I’m seeing more and more creators pack their videos with sponsorships, I somehow doubt that the people making YouTube’s content are going to get a bigger slice of the advertising pie.
“We estimate we can sell up to 80 percent of an individual’s visual field before inducing seizures,” said the fictional CEO (of a company that bears more than a passing resemblance to Google) in Ready Player One.
Apropos of nothing, it’s possible to block every single ad on YouTube — even the sponsorships that are baked into the videos themselves — on both desktop and mobile.
There was a Black Mirror episode where if you close your eyes, the ad stops playing and continues only when you open your eyes again.
This is next.
I’m sorry to tell you that you’re not even the first one thinking of this. I’ll have to look for the source but a company was trying to do this on phones. Basically they’d track your eyes with the phone camera to stop the ad when you’re not looking at your screen.
Edit: found it
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/moviepass-relaunches-ads-track-eyeballs-face-recognition/
How the fuck did they get access to the camera?
New Google PayForAccess™
You’re not doing that scene justice. It blares a loud siren and bright lights until you open your eyes again.
blares a loud siren
IIRC, it was a high-pitched sound, like a screeching cicada.
a Black Mirror episode where if you close your eyes, the ad stops playing
And a deafening high-pitched sound started to play, until the character opened his eyes to resume viewing the ads.
YT emailed us yesterday to say that they believed our family Premium account is not, in fact, based in Ukraine where Premium is a fraction of the cost of other countries in Europe.
Anyway, by the time they’ve pulled the plug on us I’ll have FreeTube set up and rolling. Fuck ‘em.
I’m more than happy to sling them a fiver a month to get shot of adverts, but they can lick my arsehole if they think I’m ponying up £20 a month just so my wife and I can watch stuff without being advertised at as much as they think is reasonable.
Cunts.
Same. I just use an ad-blocker and still watch YouTube. If their prices were lower and their app better, I’d pay. I pay for Nebula afterall, so I’m not unwilling, I just don’t see the value.
If YouTube ever actually blocks me out, I’ll just stop watching, simple as.
So, aside from numerous other angry words I could say…
How is this going to affect incoming phone calls? Will I be able to at least talk with my friend, without having to hear ads the whole time because I was watching a video?
Just a friendly reminder, https://grayjay.app/ is a thing, screw the YouTube app.
What is the industry as a whole trying to get out of this advertisement craze anyway? In the 80s many people in the developed world earned more than twice of what they needed for living. They had lots of cash to just shop around. Now most people barely earn enough to get by and we’re bombarded with easily a hundred times more ads or more. Sorry, but I can’t afford your millionth AI powered NFT sneakers subsciption model no matter how many ads you throw at me. I just cant’t.
They’re banking on people spending more than they have, putting them in debt to banks (which they want) so they can own you more. They want you right on the edge so you are never able to achieve true freedom from under their thumb.
Fucking hell, I had to check several times that I wasn’t reading an onion-y article.
I barely use YouTube and when I do, I use tubular or freetube apps, but I think I’m going to use it even less from now on.
No. Use more. Via proxys. Cause them lots of traffic and zero revenue.
A YouTube representative confirmed that the practice will now become commonplace “as we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response.”
Anyone else get the idea that these two “responses” were vastly different?
What they mean to say is, “Surprisingly, this didn’t annoy people nearly as much as we had assumed. Score!”
More like “we forced an ad while the video was paused and only 30% of viewers immediately closed the window”
PeerTube & FreeTube? I’ve been hearing some good things about both 🧐
I so look forward to seeing an ad when I pause a video to inspect whatever is on the screen at that moment.
That won’t push me to use yt-dlp to just download the fucking video and watch it locally or anything, completely giving up on using their shitty fucking site. VLC has no ads on pause.
I guess it’s time for a “mark this time so I can go back to it” feature, to reduce the need to pause. 🤷♂️
Or just… block ads.
Or just… ditch Youtube and de-google the digital life.
I ditched Youtube many months ago. I really try to avoid, at all costs, to access Youtube videos, preferring Odysee, for example.
Odysee is behind clownflare. I’m more partial to peertube.
I just downloaded FreeTube today after seeing that.
When these tools hit their bottom line enough, they will go the extra mile to block them.
The nice thing about FreeTube and Invidious is that they don’t use the YouTube API and the most YouTube can do (at the moment) is issue takedown requests. You can just self-host invidious (which I believe FreeTube uses). The code is unlikely to be taken down as YouTube-dl has successfully fought off those takedown requests.
