At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what.
And to be clear, I am not trying to equate Adblocking to video piracy. To me, the fact that I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn’t constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube. I would also never click on an ad purposefully, no matter what it is for.
With all that being said, I am a hopeless cause and I don’t think that anything will convince me to buy YouTube premium, but I also used to think that about MP3s.
My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?
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It may be too late to turn this ship around, but there are a few things that, at least for me, would make YouTube ads less of a problem:
- Vet all the ads. Do not allow links to malware sites, scams, or low-quality merchandise and services to be on the platform.
- Make the ads less annoying. Don’t stick them into weird spots on a video.
- Stop tracking me and trying to display targeted ads. I value my privacy, and like OP, I am never going to click an ad.
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I’m not removing my ad blocker until Youtubers start reporting that demonetizations and content strikes have gotten a lot more fair, with published rules they consistently maintain, and adopt some form of due process. While Youtube hardly acts in good faith, so they shall expect no good faith from me.
they make too much money off of each of these for google to consider doing any of them, other than maybe improving insertion algorithms so placement is in ‘better’ spots… but ‘better’ for you and the viewing experience and ‘better’ for them and click-thru rates are likely different outcomes.
too much money
That’s the rub. There’s a LOT of money on the table.
I guess? I don’t get how they make ANY money since nobody clicks on ads.
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More people than you think do
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They can correlate ad buys with sales pretty effectively, so even if you don’t click, if you make a purchase later, they can still see that the ad had an effect.
The biggest thing for many ads is brand recognition. It helps the early stages of businesses just trying to get their name out there. It also helps larger businesses stay relevant vs all the competition.
Like, I would never use mail chimp but I know mail chimp is a thing because of advertising. If someone asked me I would rep for them because it was funny for all of 2 seconds.
Oh absolutely. It’s much harder to put a dollar amount on that, but it’s a substantial effect.
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I think its ad model problem as it’s only “sustainable” through shitty practices that lead to ad blocking. Most people who get adblock do it because they’re just tired of ads and it should be this way. Small fair ads are fine with almost everyone but greedy assholes would never give in for that - it has to be in your face, unvetted spam.
This, I don’t mind ads besides my content, I despise ads replacing the content, multiple times, with the same ad I already saw.
I don’t mind paying for no ads, but not at those prices.
I tend to agree. Especially with midroll ads. And I also see YouTube Red/Premium/Plus as too expensive especially compared to free.
I wonder if it cost $1-$3 per month instead of $14 if they wouldn’t get so many more subscribers that they would still end up making more money.
Of course they would still be incentivized to slowly raise prices over time but I could be talked into $2 a lot quicker than $15.
They had me as a paying customer when the Premium Light tier was a thing and just offered ad free viewing at a reasonable price. Then they got rid of that plan at the very same time they rolled out this mission to beat ad blocking plugins. That’s bad faith right there. My choice now is to get a plan at at least 50% more a month with added extra crap I didn’t ask for and would never use (music, etc).
So I’m not their customer anymore.
These companies clearly won’t be satisfied and I’m sure a ton of their customers will just keep forking over more and more money for worse and worse service, but I’m done. I’m pulling up stakes on all streaming video platforms. Good luck to them I guess.
I was about to buy premium when the upped their prices. I would have paid for it if my wallet wasn’t downstairs. The next day the jacked the prices or announced it(can’t remember). It turned me off of paying for it.
I watch a lot of YouTube. But it’s not worth $14+/mo and who knows if they’ll increase it on a whim.
I installed ublockorigin and haven’t looked back.
I’d pay $5/mo for ad free YouTube at this point. No more. Adblocking is more convenient. I have no problem watching the sponsor blocks for the channels I watch. I typically enjoy them because they are relevant to my interests.
It looks like you paid around $7.50 USD for the lite tier. At the current rate of ads per 5 minute video (where each video under 8 minutes has only one ad spot), you’d have to watch approximately 213.5 5 minute videos for YouTube to make the same amount in ad spots that they do with your subscription. I honestly think Google did away with this tier either because some percentage users were exceeding that amount of views per month, or because of greed (I’m inclined to believe both). I assume they thought that they could increase the price by doing away with that tier and forcing those users to buy the next more expensive tier because those users had become accustomed to adfree viewing and given the hellscape described by other users using the ad supporter tier, they are probably right that it did goad some users to buy the regular premium tier at $10.99 (USD). now they are raising that price to $13.99 (USD) to further that income vs ad-clicks. I think that is specific because they know there is a limit to the number of ads people will watch/what can be shoehorned into a given videos especially with the popularity of apps like Tik Tok and the short form video (similar to Vines and YouTube shorts) where adding more than one ad just doesn’t work and content creators would obviously leave the platform for.
Given all of that, I can’t blame you or others like you for leaving. I do think using a different front end like new pipe is a good idea. I also think using adblock origin is a good alternative. I feel the way you do about pretty much all streaming services at this point. But since I have been on the paid tier of premium at a grandfathered in $8 a month for more than a decade I’m kind of already invested and will continue to pay for the services I use.
Just figured maybe others could make a more informed decision if they knew the context.
Personally I delight in blocking all youtube ads. I won’t stop if I have a choice.
Using ublock origin and sponsorblock is the right thing to do. I will never allow ads for as long as I live. And I will never pay/buy YouTube premium since I can get all the features for free through modded versions of apps/browser extensions.
Yep. They use and sell your data whether you block ads or not. So they’re still making money off of those of us who block ads. I don’t owe them anything lmao. It’s sad seeing so many people in other threads defending YouTube/Google while they’re increasing the price of premium and locking shit like background play and higher bitrates behind a paywall all while selling out data. Nah fuck em
I agree, fuck em
I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn’t constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube
Now that’s a nice feature! The adblocker that drains your bladder, automatically 😂
Shut up and take my money
Comcast is currently working on that right now only it pees for you so you can stay and watch the commercials.
In podcasts, where I can’t block ads effectively, I will instantly skip any canned ads and even avoid podcasts that have too many canned ads. On the other hand, when podcast hosts do their own ad reads, it doesn’t bother me too much. In the best cases, they are funny enough that I feel like I’m missing out with the ad-free premium feeds (I subscribe to some podcast Patreons).
I also don’t really mind sponsored segments from YouTube hosts, though it’s highly dependent on the content. Most of the channels I follow have ad reads that are reasonably well aligned with the content and tone. In some cases, they are actually useful. I still run SponsorBlock, but I do often read through the video descriptions of my favorite channels to see what they’re hocking.
There is no imaginable scenario where I would tolerate hypercheerful actors talking about insurance or cars. Get outta town.
I’m surprised there isn’t a SponsorBlock equivalent for podcasts yet. I mean, I’m sure it works if I watch a video podcast on YouTube, but I’d prefer a hook in Pocket Casts or something.
The dynamic insertion of arbitrary-length ads into podcast files at download time makes SponsorBlock tricky (probably not impossible?) in podcasts that also have non-dynamic sponsor reads.
If someone chapters a podcast, noting an ad (dynamically inserted) for an online casino at 4:33-4:54 and a sponsor break read by the host (baked in to the original file) at 10:12-11:43, those times are mostly invalidated when someone else downloads the file and hears an ad for a business credit card at 4:33-5:21. Now the sponsor break section is going to cut the actual content early and come back before the read is over.
Multiply that problem by 3-4, depending on the episode, and you can start to see the issue.
This is a similar problem to that of Twitch. They bake the ad into the main video stream, meaning you can’t block it without also blocking the content. If YouTube ever does it, it’s game over; but I have a feeling they can’t for some technical or scaling reason, or they would’ve done so first.
Hmm I guess I don’t listen to any podcasts with ‘automatically inserted’ ads, they’re all sponsor reads by the hosts.
Also, Twitch ad blocking is totally possible. I do it on my desktop, phone, and TV fairly easily. No content lost.
I’m expecting someone smart at Google to figure out how to encode ads as part of the video file as it is delivered, making it literally undifferentiatable in the data we receive, and then there’s no way around it. They’ll make millions in ads and billions licensing it out.
The sponsorskip extension already has the functionality to get around something like this.
Yeah but that’s because the content creator cannot dynamically change the time at which the sponsored part is. For ads, Google could dynamically insert ads at every 1/3rd of videos with a variation ± 1mn, and there’s nothing an extension like sponsorblock could do without triming on the original video’s content.
A solution to that would just be to save a snapshot of a video frame every second or so, then skip segments that don’t match.
great use case for ai
Disadvantage of said system for Google would be the fact that if you do that, people can skip ads much faster and they won’t be able to do any tracking of interaction at all. For advertiser’s point of view, that would be just worse version of TV commercial.
You could do banner ads, shrink the video, randomly add a banner to top/bottom and a 2nd left/right. If you skip the ads, you skip the content too.
That’s how twitch does it.
It’s been very effective at making me watch less twitch, but it does serve the ads no matter the adblocker now
TTV LOL seems to be working for me, at least when I last watched Twitch a few days ago.
I also use a modded app on Android and s0und on Android TV and neither have ever failed me.
And TiVo already has the tech to skip ads in recorded media. I only point this out to show that it is possible to do context based filtering and skip to timestamps. Smart programmers will find a way, and the war continues.
I’m hopeful that reencoding on the fly or even merging preencoded files into a single stream is too expensive because it needs a lot of compute power and invalidates caches .
encode ads as part of the video file
I suspect that an AI could be trained to be able to recognize ads, or at least the most annoying, ads.
Also, a community driven project, like SponsorBlock, where users identify ads to build up a database could be created.
These are just a couple of ideas to defeat embedded ads, and I’m not a genius programmer by any means. This is just another front in a war that has been going on since at least the 90’s and as long as blocking ads is less annoying than watching them, we’re winning.
At that point you might just end up with some kind of YouTube ‘piracy’ with Premium subscribers uploading mirrors to Peertube servers or something.
Hell, I’d support it with my home server if someone made a containerized service for it. Just start uploading my subscription feed somewhere for other people.
This already happens in audio podcasts, it’s annoying as hell
Just wait until YT makes high res video options premium only. :)
Edit: I adblock, because fuck ads. But I also use yt less than ever before. I used to use it for entertainment, but nowadays I only use it when I specifically search for something.
but 4k is already locked behind a paywall
4K is still accessible to me, but a higher bitrate version of 1080p does get paywalled. I wonder if they just turned down the existing 1080p’s bitrate and are now trying to sell the solution to a problem that they’ve created.
Oh, I had no idea. :/
Oh my god no. That will be the end for me, for sure
My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”?
Their goals is definitely not to convert everyone. This is just to make using adblockers annoying enough that they can convert a substantial amount of adblock users into Youtube Premium users. They will eventually stop the war and allow the small minority of successful adblockers to continue if they can’t find an easy way to eliminate the most popular extensions entirely.
Their end goal is to make YT Premium more of a standard like it is for other streaming services so people consider it the default way to engage with Youtube and not as an extra service.
I guess it’s harder to do this after 13 years of default “free” content. It’s easier for someone like Spotify to do that because there has always been the option to pay for premium.
I remember in the earlier days of Spotify there were a lot of ways to get half priced service just by finding xyz code or paying $5 for a code on eBay that got you a year of half priced Spotify. I don’t know where those came from or how those existed but it was definitely what finally convinced me to subscribe.
(I’ve since cancelled in favor of buying CDs again but I realize I’m the oddball in that scenario)
Dunno if YT can be saved, I don’t belive that enshittification is a reversible process
They need to stop rapidly changing the terms of the agreement. This is the problem endemic to the platform. It’s starting to lose shape because the ads are the problem.
If this was an issue with the quality of content:
ideally creators would get to choose their ad roll spots. This would make it less jarring to the watcher. It’s also terrible that you can get ads for something like BP on a video that’s basically surmised as “That time BP poisoned a lot of children”. (See climate town) l. Also, if the ad revenue split was better, creators wouldn’t then have to shoe horn in extra ad spots into the content of their videos.
However, I don’t think it’s a problem with quality of the content, but the quality of the ads.
I believe Adblocking is not piracy issue to the end user as much as it is protection measure from malicious content. It’s up to the user to qualify what is “malicious” or not in the end. Users who use adblock do not have a good relationship with online advertising not because it annoys them, it’s because it threatens them. This is less so just a YouTube problem and more of a entirety of Google’s business model problem.
Becoming a better ad platform is a tough challenge when advertisers by practice operate in a manipulative bad faith space. We don’t trust ads.
Yea, that’s not true…I use ad block because ads are annoying as fuck.
I agree. They do operate in bad faith. And not only do they throw ads into every possible crevice but the advertisers themselves may be bad faith actors. It’s easy for a local radio station to decide not to run ads for a shady local business but YouTube doesn’t really seem to have anything in place to vet advertisers or a robust system to report ads for malfeasance.
I’m interested in the framing of advertising as a threat rather than just an annoyance. I think even ads for something like laundry soap being spammed over and over for hours on end can be harmful even without being directly malicious. As someone who has been blocking ads for 10 years, every time I am on someone else’s device the amount of garbage that just gets thrown into your face by default is just atrocious.
I get YouTube Premium because I pay for YouTube Music, but I’ve tried watching ad supported YouTube on a computer I wasn’t logged into as I was troubleshooting my main computer. I can tell you that I wouldn’t even bother with the ad blockers. If there was something on YouTube that I really wanted to watch, like an old concert or something, I would just download it with JDownloader and add it to my Jellyfin server. If that doesn’t work, if just move on. There’s a lot more entertainment available for free than I could ever possibly consume in three lifetimes.
Yeah similar deal with me. J-Downloader > Plex is my go to now. It’s pretty great. Can stream the stuff on my phone at the gym super easy.
I just stopped using YouTube. I can get all my music elsewhere.
My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?
My initial/gut reaction was “obviously relevant ads based on the content I’m watching”, but I don’t care how relevant the ad is when I’ve seen the same Raid Shadow Legend ad across multiple videos I’m gonna try to skip it (or as I did long, long ago: adblock it).
I don’t even know what actual YT ads are now, only the integrated creator ones that they’re personally sponsored by… the hello fresh and world of tanks and manscape and debrand etc., which I’ve started auto-skipping on a channel by channel basis based on very few criteria: the entertainment value/effort they’ve put into the ad (so Drew Gooden is usually always funny and gets a pass, same for channels like Wulff Den or Th3Jez or Critical Role) but certain ones just get manually skipped regardless (no matter how funny you are, I don’t want to sit here and listen to you talk about Manscape for 3 minutes) and how often I end up seeing them (which in these instances, isn’t often because they’re channel specific usually)
So I guess it mainly boils down to relevant ads that aren’t soulless and that I don’t see 3x every other video?
