This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads.
It's because they've become increasingly obnoxious. Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter or maybe an animated GIF banner with 3 frames. No, adblockers became popular because ads kept getting more loud (both visually and audibly), in your face, and resource hungry (remember those flash ads that'd keep your CPU pegged?). The web became unusable if you didn't have a blocker installed.
Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.
Compare it with TV though, which is what youtube is; nobody blocked ads because they couldn't, there was no escaping them unless you physically exit the room. In my country that worked, because ads were neat 5 minute blocks every 15 odd minutes, but in the US it seems every few minutes there's an ad interrupting - but they're too short to tune out / do something else. The news channels are even worse, where the energy levels of the ads overlap with the news so there's less of a clear boundary between the two.
Re: web ads, they were bad, but then Google came in and showed that they can be non-disruptive as well, their plain text ads took over the online ad market. For a while anyway.
I pay for YT premium because the ads were getting ridiculous (I think this is partly their goal to push people to premium subscriptions) and I want to support the creators. However, now every video has a damn host read ad embedded in it. I find it incredibly frustrating that my $15/mo isn't enough. I watch on my TV mainly so I can't use one of those plugins that skips host read ads. I just manually skip them. Maybe that makes me an asshole and anti-creator, but I already pay for premium and its getting ridiculous when a 10-15 minute video as a 60 second host read ad in the middle of it.
I recently unblocked ads on a website that I use semi frequently in an effort to contribute to them as they had crossed my threshold for something I feel I should pay for. The page erupted into animation and sound. I immediately turned my blocker back on. Sorry website, you're quite useful but I won't subject myself to that.
What you have to understand about the contemporary media industry is that their primary business objective is to sell advertisements. Your attention is the product now; the more of it they can sell to advertisers, the more profitable the business becomes. It's much easier to present positive quarterly earnings reports by selling eyeballs and clicks than it is selling pretty much anything else. In the before times, when media companies were primarily in the business of selling content for a monthly or yearly subscription fee, this was much less of an issue.
You can't block access to their most profitable raw material and expect them to just sit and take it.
What I don't understand is that the whole industry seems to be based on...lying?
If I trick the user into clicking on something that looks organic but it's not, I will be paid money.
Showing an ad full screen on youtube, forced, won't guarantee that is has any effect on the viewer, but the advertiser has to pay and on top of that, the user experience is ruined.
So based on lies, we ruin experience.
Isn't there a way to get incentives aligned?
The only ads that seem to work on me are Steam, because I open the platform on purpose to find new games. The other is costco giving free food. I'm hungry, I grab something from them and if it's tasty, I'll buy a bag to test if it's something we would like to buy on a recurring basis.
I've had adblockers installed for decades. I'm always amazed at how bad the internet is without them when occasionally I view a website on my phone. When there's one completely unrelated video ad playing, and then a second also unrelated video ad pops up on top of the first, I wonder if the first advertiser knows or cares that their ad is being covered by another ad. And then I have two or more audio streams playing simultaneously, so I can't understand any of them ... and I regret working in tech.
On this point, I realized recently is that at one time, auto-plying audio or video on a web site would have been a cause for torches and pitchforks. It was one of the most asshole things a site could do. Now a significant fraction of the websites I hit (esp anything 'news') immediately pop up an unrequested live video window with full audio, and even if I close it, as soon as you scroll over any media on the site, it auto-plays, and when you scroll past, the window pops back up playing video.
When did this become ok? Telling them to get off my lawn hasn't worked.
Let's not forget that so many advertisements are for things that are objectively damaging to you. "It's good for the economy and OK for you" school of advertising.
High interest loans, fast foods, cable channels (with more advertising), sports gambling, et cetra.
I still cannot understand why I paid to get a specific streaming service (Sportsnet) and had to sit through Wayne Gretzsky ruining his legacy by selling sports gambling to my 3 children.
Some ads also contain(ed) crypto miners and malware in general, in addition to all of what you said. My feeling is that Google should be free to do what they feel they have to, and ad-blockers should feel free to engage in an arms race with them.
The worst that happens is Google drives away a chunk of its user base, opening the door for competition.
I listen to some podcasts to sleep and it is infuriating to get even 12-45 (!) min long ads! I wouldn't be that upset with 5-10s ads every 10 minutes (as long as the volume level doesn't kill me) but half a freaking hour? What the hell is this?
If there was a company with clear community intentions and sound morals, yeah I would consider paying for it and support the creators. But YT that treats me like trash with their dark patterns and algorithms showing me stuff to hijack my brain instead of stuff I am looking for? No way in hell.
>Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.
I agree. And for me they're also two (!) good examples of tragedy of the commons.
From the side of the advertisers, your ads are only competitive if they're slightly more obnoxious than your competitors, but as you make your ads more obnoxious you're degrading a common resource - the willingness of the public to put up with your crap. Eventually the public says "this is too obnoxious, I'm going to block it".
And, from the side of the sites showing ads, you'll want (or need) the additional money brought by one more ad. But once you do it, you're creating yet another ad space - making the market value of ad spaces a tiny bit cheaper. And as everyone is doing this, the price of ad spaces drops down to the bottom, so you need to include more and more ads on your platform to stay competitive (or even to stay online).
I would expect governments to intervene in those situations. At the end of the day, a government should, among other things, prevent its citizens from making things worse for everyone, when seeking their own interests. Sadly governments aren't big fans of contradicting megacorps like the Ad Sense (from Alphabet) mafia.
>No, adblockers became popular because ads kept getting more loud (both visually and audibly),
Too bad the FCC's CALM act can't be applied to the internet as well: "The CALM Act applies only to commercials aired on television—it does not apply to radio commercials or commercials aired on the internet or via streaming services."
We can also look at pirating as another reasoning.
Music pirating happened because it was simply impossible to get a lot of music you wanted to. Then when you could find it, you'd pay a large amount. Maybe not even knowing if you liked the work. Napster and Limewire come in because they let you get whatever and even one song at a time. Music industry comes in with DRM and makes it harder to rip CDs, but the mouse always wins. Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify killed a lot of music pirating because they offered most of the advantages that pirating had: access and portability. It made things easy.
Or look at movies. The "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad started in 2004, when a ticket cost under $10 (I think I paid around $6-$8). Now that same ticket is $18-$20, which is $11-$13 in 2004. Not to mention the crazy prices for refreshments. People didn't stop liking going to the movie theaters, they were priced out (along with the studios migrating towards international audiences and diverging from our cultural standards to theirs). Home streaming didn't fix that because they charged the same price or more for a ticket. Netflix killed a lot because people would rather wait (and especially after they started making their own content). Then more streaming services popped up and pirating is back because it re-simplified things. PopcornTime was incredibly popular for a bit and was simple enough for my grandma to use.
This is all really due to incredibly short sighted thinking. Chasing one marker to the next not realizing that they're veering away from the actual goal. I know this link isn't exactly the same thing, but we should be able to see the parallels here because it is the exact same game going on[0], just with profit maximization rather than policy making (we can formulate markets as a social choice theory problem).
> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads.
As many services like Hulu, cable TV or even just premium hardware have shown, paying for a service doesn't mean a company will never succumb to the perceived revenue opportunity of showing ads to paying subscribers too. I also pay for premium, but it's very much a case of "Doesn't affect me.. yet"
People also block ads because they are worried about privacy and profiling.
I can’t pay google to stop profiling me, so there’s no way I’m paying for youtube premium.
[edit: honestly, the new three strikes for ad blockers policy looks like a usability improvement to me. It makes sure I don’t watch more than three videos without clearing cookies]
Exactly. I'm OK with ads on YouTube if they are placed in OK positions in the videos. For example, if they are placed in a natural break in the video. However, YouTube has decided to destroy their user experience by placing the ads to maximize "user engagement", aka, "where is the worst spot we could put an ad in the video?" For example, take a slow mo guys video. They will place the ads right as the interesting section of the video is happening, say when the water balloon is hitting the guy in the face. At that time, I'm definitely watching the video, so I see the ad, but holy cow do I hate YouTube and the advertiser for interrupting the best part of the video. I'm tempted to get Premium just because of this; however, I feel like I'm giving into YouTube making their product more shitty to make me want to get Premium. I don't want to reward them making their service worse causing me to give them money for the experience their product used to be.
> Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.
Besides the sensory assault "ads" are also running arbitrary code in your browser and trying to track you individually across websites. I find it absurd when an ad block detector says something like "please support us". It's really "please support us...by letting AdTech track everything you do without informed consent and resell all of that information to innumerable downstream buyers also without consent by the way watch this blaring ad for something entirely unrelated to the topic of this webpage".
To make things even worse AdTech networks have ended up to be major malware vectors because they do effectively zero filtering or curation of uploaded content.
In principal I don't mind advertisements. Someone has a thing for sale they want to show me is for sale. It's not a big deal. I never really had issues with print advertisements, even a full page ad wasn't intrusive on my life and I could just turn the page if I was uninterested. But modern web "advertising" is just the worst fucking thing. The only sane option is to block it because it is so invasive and intrusive.
Ads also constitute a security and privacy threat and are frequently an attack vector for phishing schemes - even on Google search. I'm not going to disable my adblocker and risk becoming a crime victim.
There is a saying that goes something like this: It is difficult to get a man to understand something that his paycheck depends on his not understanding.
This annoyed me particularly because I pay for YouTube premium... but I can't sign into my Google account on my work computer. So if they block ad blockers, paying for YouTube isn't even enough to get rid of the ads for me.
While I totally get why people block ads, and I do so myself, I also totally understand antipathy toward adblockers on the part of websites. Making ads better is definitely one approach they can use. But preventing folks who block ads from using the site is also a viable approach! They don't need to care why people block ads, nor do they need to worry about making the site worse for such people. We who block ads are not economic stakeholders in the services.
> Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter
Not true. People are blocking ads whenever they have the chance. Even when they are just a lousy picture on the side, in the text or a banner at the top, they were always annoyed from all of them and found ways to remove them. And it makes sense, because Ads need to have a certain level of "in your face"ness to work, that's unavoidable.
The obnoxious ads generate more money though. Guess what gives YouTube (and creators) more money, an ad that can be skipped after 5 seconds or an unskippable 6 second ad followed by another unskippable 15 second ad?
Similarly, what gives the newspaper more money, the unpersonalized ad respecting your privacy or the personalized ad that first loads a fingerprinting framework to track you across the web and then show you more targeted ads?
> Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter or maybe an animated GIF banner with 3 frames
There were programs way back then that acted as a proxy server that would remove image tags that matched the size used by banner ads. See WebWasher or Proxomitron.
This is just so funny to me. Google has to have the absolute worst PR for any company I've ever seen to make this happen. Somehow, they've duped the general public (at least on HN) into believing they insert the ads into videos. All they need to do is run a marketing campaign about how as a content creator you get to decide when ads play, whether they're unskippable, and how many ads to place in your video. Blast that all over the internet so people realize that the ads in videos are not there because of YT (unless that channel has < 1K subs and < 4K watch hours, then that's definitely YT).
Leave angry comments on the videos you watch and tell the creators your pissed at them for how many ads they place. This is one area YT gives almost full autonomy to the creator. They can choose everything except which ads get played.
>“YouTube’s ad-supported model supports a diverse ecosystem of creators, and provides billions of people globally access to content for free with ads,” the company’s statement says.
Let's at least be 100% honest with everyone and stop with the disingenuous garbage:
1. Ad-blocker usage is roughly 25-30% of US users.
2. The average YouTube content creator makes less than 0.02 per ad view and thus why many of the large ones choose to use sponsors instead. Most YouTube content creators aren't making ANY money, let alone enough for them to care all that much. For those that are, they're doing just fine w/ad-blockers being used.
3. Google made nearly $70 billion in Q1; they're not hurting at all, especially their executives.
4. The on-going rise in the use of ad-block technologies is simply because platforms, sites, etc, are all absolutely inundating viewers with so much trash in an effort to make more money that it's almost a requirement to use them without having a shitty experience.
If you're on iOS, I highly recommend Yattee[1], a free Youtube app with no ads, background playback and sponsor block built-in.
The way they get around App Store restrictions is by claiming that they aren't a Youtube app. They're technically a video-watching app which is supposed to be used with your own personal server. The server API they require, however, is supported by Invidious[2], an open-source, privacy-preserving Youtube front end. If you configure an Invidious instance in settings[3] (you don't have to host your own, there are plenty of them out there), you effectively get access to the entirety of Youtube.
It's not a replacement for the official app by any means, it doesn't have a recommendation feed, it doesn't let you log in with a Google account, so it doesn't sync watch history with your other devices, it doesn't let you cast to Youtube-enabled devices, post comments, scroll through shorts etc, but if you have a playlist or a specific, longer video in mind, it's quite good. It also supports Invidious accounts, which let you manage channel subscriptions.
So YouTube is going to make it impossible to watch without ads. Reddit's communities are going dark because Reddit (essentially) wants more ad revenue. Facebook and Instagram have been plastered with ads for longer than they haven't.
And we're just a short hop from ads being "Attention required" with eyeballs tracked. I wonder if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance.
I don't really understand either side of the equation here.
So, on the one hand you have people who use ad blockers. The first retort that comes to mind here is: Well, we'll take our business elsewhere. Which is odd because without ads they aren't paying and them leaving is the goal.
Of course on the other hand ... when I read the title my thoughts weren't that I would be okay because I don't ad block youtube. My thought wasn't that I should buy youtube premium to avoid ads. My thought WAS that if I ever get falsely flagged, then I'll just buy a nebula subscription (or whatever) and never use youtube again.
In fact I went over to nebula to check it out.
Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable. But youtube got big via offering a free service and now if feels like they're trying to pull up the ladder behind themselves.
If Google had the power to implement a device that forced your eyelids open to look at ads they would do it. Their company is user hostile and we should move as far as possible away from their services.
I mean they want you to subscribe to YouTube premium.
At least they’re being honest about this and give you the option. I have a few issues with google but this isn’t one (After being forced to spend many hours upgrading to google analytics rev 4….)
It’s expensive, but I’ve done it, but it also includes YouTube music which I like.
I've had an adblocker in my browser for ages, but I wasn't a big youtube user because it just didn't have sufficient information density for me, even before google put ads in the platform. (Google only stuck ads in YT after they ran all of their competitors out of business!)
Finding Vanced (and now ReVanced) with adblocking, SponsorBlock, and the ability to set the speed higher than 2x made it so that I actually use YouTube more regularly. (Despite the name, SponsorBlock can skip over a lot more than just sponsor segments - intros, outros, recaps, jokes, etc.)
Any time I see YouTube on someone else's device I'm shocked by how awful it's become in it's default state. If I can't watch YouTube without adblock/sponsorblock/etc, I'll probably just go back to not watching YouTube.
The one point where YT has improved over the years is the comment section. Aside from the occasional scammer impersonating the creator and trying to get me to send them money off-platform, the comments don't seem nearly as awful as I remember from 5-10 years ago.
Also, as an aside, I pay for Nebula, and out-of-the-box, Nebula is a far superior experience to YouTube. But, I still think ReVanced has a leg up on Nebula thanks to skipping intros and the like. However, the biggest problem with Nebula is that it just doesn't have as much content that I'm interested in as YT does. It does seem to be improving, though.
The primary reason I use an adblocker is to prevent malware / viruses.
I would be more accepting of ads in general if:
1 - they were all served from the primary websites server - eg yahoo blaming third party ad servers for injecting virus scripts and taking no responsibility is not okay with me.
2 - I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level, not just browser level.
3 - no flashing animated ads on static text pages. I am amazed at some pages I see trying to read 6 sentences and instead I get three at a time with 3 moving ads taking up most of the space.
Obviously it'd be fine to have moving ads during a 'commercial break' in a video.. but overlay a banner over it or next to it and having it moving is just wrong imho.
I didn't use youtube much at all for a long time, but have recently trained the thing to give me interesting videos about CSS, new tools like framer io, clickup, AI, 'productizing' and other helpful content is now available to me easier now..
So if I could not block ads on youtube now, I would have to pay the $12 for premium if that's what it costs.. I would suggest having a checkbox to add in a $5 bucket for tips to content creators and give a way to tip multiple of 10 cents or something - as I would like to support some of the folks adding value to the platform, and I'm guessing going 12 premium wouldn't help them much if at all.
A few days ago I brought up some lists of 'YT watch history' - it's a decent amount for me the past few months
- if 2 minutes of time was added to each one, and I had an employer, that company would be burning a fair amount of money for me to wait for ads each week at this point.
I also worry that ads at beginning of videos can be unfair when it seems a good percentage of videos I click then skip into a bit and find that they are not what I was expecting / hoping for and the click itself, 3 second buffering, and 2 second seek - were a huge waste of time, I can't imagine getting hit with added ads in those equations.
I'll sooner stop using youtube than watch it with the ads. I've been watching it exclusively via smartyoutubetv app (an open source android TV app). Every couple of months youtube does something to break the app. Every single time the app it fixed within a couple of hours.
It's not even about just the ads. I use it because it let's me remove all the crap I don't want force fed to me while all I want it watch my subscribed channels (shorts, news etc). Smartyoutubetv let's me disable all of it. "
Also, it is technically impossible to ensure users watch these ads. The more elaborate detection they use, the more elaborate emulation of these ads being watched will be made.
Additionally, I used to have mixed feelings about using an ad blocker so I'd give the normal youtube client a chance now and then. Interestingly on the very first video watched I'd get pretty reasonable ads (maybe 2x5s of unskippable ad, the rest can be skipped in a 10min video), or one 30s unskippable ad in an hour long video. But continue watching and the number of ads (by ~5th video) will continue raising to obscene amounts. So no, I have no bad feelings for using the ad blocker.
Strange move, people use adblockers for a reason, 2-3 unskipable bs ads. Instead better limit quality to 480/720p. This way they'll save money for traffic. No adblocker?, Can go up to 1080p. Yt premium?, Welkome to 4k. Yt premium+?, Welcome to >8k
I feel this was the inevitable outcome of the increased availability/popularity/awareness of ad blockers - a tragedy of the commons scenario that's set us on an escalating feedback loop that won't end well for anyone involved.
EDIT: I do wonder if the price point of youtube premium is too high to capture an audience that simply doesn't want ads but doesn't care about any other features. $6/mo feels higher than the typical per-user ad revenue.
EDIT2: While I don't know youtube's average revenue per user, both Facebook and Google's ARPU for the NA segment is ~$100-$200/y, which would put $6/mo quite close to the replacement cost of lost ads revenue.
Most ads are a pile of garbage crafted in a way to brainwash people into thinking they need something that they actually don't. And the more sophisticated they are, the more costly they become and need to be pushed again and again down the users throats to remain profitable. My point is that unless there is some sort of pro-users regulation against advertising, ads use will be abused just like anything that is not regulated is abused by the strongest animals in the pack at the expense of the weakest. Those of us who remember how was surfing the web in its infancy recall the text ads, the small banners, then side frames, then animated ones, then popups, then interstitials, then videos with one ad at the beginning, then more ads scattered during play time, etc. Advertising has been growing since day one, and will continue to grow; no matter what the users accept today, it won't be enough tomorrow, and more and more annoyances will come. This must be stopped, either by regulation or by the use of ad blocking.
I think we'll see some development in AI regarding this field. If i had the skills, I'd explore the possibility of a headless browser that unbeknownst to Google uses local AI to fully play ad filled videos, then remove all crap and pass them to the user browser.
" YouTube users will have only two options: to disable their ad blocker and allow ads or subscribe to YouTube Premium to get rid of all advertisements."
Since about a year ago, we entered the era of consolidation. The margin call of tech. A decade of outsized unprofitable interest-free investments sure is fun, but there comes a time to pay it back. That time is now.
Companies that are not profitable should very soon be profitable. Companies that are profitable yet are stagnating need to show their next growth. And that's why you have this intensity in amping up monetization across several companies.
You can be absolutely sure that tech leaders are keenly watching the effects of bold moves at Twitter, Reddit, the like. Companies testing the waters to see how far they can go.
We had it coming and probably shouldn't complain that much. As the dutch saying goes: when shaven, sit still. Your expectations are based on party mode, but the party stopped.
I already have backed off of youtube so much because of how awful they have made the experience, this will be it for me entirely if they implement this.
A few day ago I disabled my ad blocking to test something and then browsed some of my daily sites. If ad blocking ever becomes impossible, I'll quit using the web immediately.
I get that people hate companies but $7 a month for unlimited video on any device with 500 hours uploaded every minute. That's a decent deal. The only drawback is that you don't get Sponsorblock on smart devices. People seem to overestimate how much the average person care about online outrage. Netflix, Reddit, Twitter.. They all seem fine despite being declared dead numerous times.
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|2 years ago|reply
It's because they've become increasingly obnoxious. Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter or maybe an animated GIF banner with 3 frames. No, adblockers became popular because ads kept getting more loud (both visually and audibly), in your face, and resource hungry (remember those flash ads that'd keep your CPU pegged?). The web became unusable if you didn't have a blocker installed.
Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|2 years ago|reply
Re: web ads, they were bad, but then Google came in and showed that they can be non-disruptive as well, their plain text ads took over the online ad market. For a while anyway.
[+] [-] makestuff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianbutler|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oofnik|2 years ago|reply
You can't block access to their most profitable raw material and expect them to just sit and take it.
[+] [-] Fire-Dragon-DoL|2 years ago|reply
If I trick the user into clicking on something that looks organic but it's not, I will be paid money.
Showing an ad full screen on youtube, forced, won't guarantee that is has any effect on the viewer, but the advertiser has to pay and on top of that, the user experience is ruined.
So based on lies, we ruin experience.
Isn't there a way to get incentives aligned?
The only ads that seem to work on me are Steam, because I open the platform on purpose to find new games. The other is costco giving free food. I'm hungry, I grab something from them and if it's tasty, I'll buy a bag to test if it's something we would like to buy on a recurring basis.
Everything else seems to just be annoyances
[+] [-] saeirtkawierjt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjs3|2 years ago|reply
When did this become ok? Telling them to get off my lawn hasn't worked.
[+] [-] jbm|2 years ago|reply
High interest loans, fast foods, cable channels (with more advertising), sports gambling, et cetra.
I still cannot understand why I paid to get a specific streaming service (Sportsnet) and had to sit through Wayne Gretzsky ruining his legacy by selling sports gambling to my 3 children.
[+] [-] EA-3167|2 years ago|reply
The worst that happens is Google drives away a chunk of its user base, opening the door for competition.
[+] [-] marban|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badtension|2 years ago|reply
If there was a company with clear community intentions and sound morals, yeah I would consider paying for it and support the creators. But YT that treats me like trash with their dark patterns and algorithms showing me stuff to hijack my brain instead of stuff I am looking for? No way in hell.
[+] [-] chaosjevil|2 years ago|reply
I agree. And for me they're also two (!) good examples of tragedy of the commons.
From the side of the advertisers, your ads are only competitive if they're slightly more obnoxious than your competitors, but as you make your ads more obnoxious you're degrading a common resource - the willingness of the public to put up with your crap. Eventually the public says "this is too obnoxious, I'm going to block it".
And, from the side of the sites showing ads, you'll want (or need) the additional money brought by one more ad. But once you do it, you're creating yet another ad space - making the market value of ad spaces a tiny bit cheaper. And as everyone is doing this, the price of ad spaces drops down to the bottom, so you need to include more and more ads on your platform to stay competitive (or even to stay online).
I would expect governments to intervene in those situations. At the end of the day, a government should, among other things, prevent its citizens from making things worse for everyone, when seeking their own interests. Sadly governments aren't big fans of contradicting megacorps like the Ad Sense (from Alphabet) mafia.
[+] [-] dylan604|2 years ago|reply
Too bad the FCC's CALM act can't be applied to the internet as well: "The CALM Act applies only to commercials aired on television—it does not apply to radio commercials or commercials aired on the internet or via streaming services."
https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/areas/sound-volume-commercia...
[+] [-] godelski|2 years ago|reply
Music pirating happened because it was simply impossible to get a lot of music you wanted to. Then when you could find it, you'd pay a large amount. Maybe not even knowing if you liked the work. Napster and Limewire come in because they let you get whatever and even one song at a time. Music industry comes in with DRM and makes it harder to rip CDs, but the mouse always wins. Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify killed a lot of music pirating because they offered most of the advantages that pirating had: access and portability. It made things easy.
Or look at movies. The "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad started in 2004, when a ticket cost under $10 (I think I paid around $6-$8). Now that same ticket is $18-$20, which is $11-$13 in 2004. Not to mention the crazy prices for refreshments. People didn't stop liking going to the movie theaters, they were priced out (along with the studios migrating towards international audiences and diverging from our cultural standards to theirs). Home streaming didn't fix that because they charged the same price or more for a ticket. Netflix killed a lot because people would rather wait (and especially after they started making their own content). Then more streaming services popped up and pirating is back because it re-simplified things. PopcornTime was incredibly popular for a bit and was simple enough for my grandma to use.
This is all really due to incredibly short sighted thinking. Chasing one marker to the next not realizing that they're veering away from the actual goal. I know this link isn't exactly the same thing, but we should be able to see the parallels here because it is the exact same game going on[0], just with profit maximization rather than policy making (we can formulate markets as a social choice theory problem).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw
[+] [-] Macha|2 years ago|reply
As many services like Hulu, cable TV or even just premium hardware have shown, paying for a service doesn't mean a company will never succumb to the perceived revenue opportunity of showing ads to paying subscribers too. I also pay for premium, but it's very much a case of "Doesn't affect me.. yet"
[+] [-] hedora|2 years ago|reply
I can’t pay google to stop profiling me, so there’s no way I’m paying for youtube premium.
[edit: honestly, the new three strikes for ad blockers policy looks like a usability improvement to me. It makes sure I don’t watch more than three videos without clearing cookies]
[+] [-] ck2|2 years ago|reply
Because other services have done that model change too.
Another possibility is google could kill gmail accounts from youtube ad blockers someday, who is going to stop them?
[+] [-] sheepybloke|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antisthenes|2 years ago|reply
You guys will know what I'm talking about - random words in text, underlined twice, which if you hover over, will get an obnoxious ad.
Google bought them not long after:
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick....
Ads have been obnoxious for at least 15 years already.
[+] [-] giantrobot|2 years ago|reply
Besides the sensory assault "ads" are also running arbitrary code in your browser and trying to track you individually across websites. I find it absurd when an ad block detector says something like "please support us". It's really "please support us...by letting AdTech track everything you do without informed consent and resell all of that information to innumerable downstream buyers also without consent by the way watch this blaring ad for something entirely unrelated to the topic of this webpage".
To make things even worse AdTech networks have ended up to be major malware vectors because they do effectively zero filtering or curation of uploaded content.
In principal I don't mind advertisements. Someone has a thing for sale they want to show me is for sale. It's not a big deal. I never really had issues with print advertisements, even a full page ad wasn't intrusive on my life and I could just turn the page if I was uninterested. But modern web "advertising" is just the worst fucking thing. The only sane option is to block it because it is so invasive and intrusive.
[+] [-] tjpnz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcroixx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metiscus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pimanrules|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsatic|2 years ago|reply
But the fucking Internet ad world there doesn't seem any upper limit to how much of someone's time you can waste.
[+] [-] asdfasgasdgasdg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulddraper|2 years ago|reply
It's a classic case of tragedy of the commons.
Your gutter ads don't convert as well and they are blocked just as readily as the loud ones.
[+] [-] PurpleRamen|2 years ago|reply
Not true. People are blocking ads whenever they have the chance. Even when they are just a lousy picture on the side, in the text or a banner at the top, they were always annoyed from all of them and found ways to remove them. And it makes sense, because Ads need to have a certain level of "in your face"ness to work, that's unavoidable.
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|2 years ago|reply
Similarly, what gives the newspaper more money, the unpersonalized ad respecting your privacy or the personalized ad that first loads a fingerprinting framework to track you across the web and then show you more targeted ads?
[+] [-] Dwedit|2 years ago|reply
There were programs way back then that acted as a proxy server that would remove image tags that matched the size used by banner ads. See WebWasher or Proxomitron.
[+] [-] _gabe_|2 years ago|reply
Leave angry comments on the videos you watch and tell the creators your pissed at them for how many ads they place. This is one area YT gives almost full autonomy to the creator. They can choose everything except which ads get played.
[+] [-] garciasn|2 years ago|reply
>“YouTube’s ad-supported model supports a diverse ecosystem of creators, and provides billions of people globally access to content for free with ads,” the company’s statement says.
Let's at least be 100% honest with everyone and stop with the disingenuous garbage:
1. Ad-blocker usage is roughly 25-30% of US users.
2. The average YouTube content creator makes less than 0.02 per ad view and thus why many of the large ones choose to use sponsors instead. Most YouTube content creators aren't making ANY money, let alone enough for them to care all that much. For those that are, they're doing just fine w/ad-blockers being used.
3. Google made nearly $70 billion in Q1; they're not hurting at all, especially their executives.
4. The on-going rise in the use of ad-block technologies is simply because platforms, sites, etc, are all absolutely inundating viewers with so much trash in an effort to make more money that it's almost a requirement to use them without having a shitty experience.
[+] [-] miki123211|2 years ago|reply
The way they get around App Store restrictions is by claiming that they aren't a Youtube app. They're technically a video-watching app which is supposed to be used with your own personal server. The server API they require, however, is supported by Invidious[2], an open-source, privacy-preserving Youtube front end. If you configure an Invidious instance in settings[3] (you don't have to host your own, there are plenty of them out there), you effectively get access to the entirety of Youtube.
It's not a replacement for the official app by any means, it doesn't have a recommendation feed, it doesn't let you log in with a Google account, so it doesn't sync watch history with your other devices, it doesn't let you cast to Youtube-enabled devices, post comments, scroll through shorts etc, but if you have a playlist or a specific, longer video in mind, it's quite good. It also supports Invidious accounts, which let you manage channel subscriptions.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629 [2] https://invidious.io/ [3] https://gonzoknows.com/posts/yattee/
[+] [-] sircastor|2 years ago|reply
And we're just a short hop from ads being "Attention required" with eyeballs tracked. I wonder if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance.
[+] [-] Verdex|2 years ago|reply
So, on the one hand you have people who use ad blockers. The first retort that comes to mind here is: Well, we'll take our business elsewhere. Which is odd because without ads they aren't paying and them leaving is the goal.
Of course on the other hand ... when I read the title my thoughts weren't that I would be okay because I don't ad block youtube. My thought wasn't that I should buy youtube premium to avoid ads. My thought WAS that if I ever get falsely flagged, then I'll just buy a nebula subscription (or whatever) and never use youtube again.
In fact I went over to nebula to check it out.
Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable. But youtube got big via offering a free service and now if feels like they're trying to pull up the ladder behind themselves.
[+] [-] user3939382|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|2 years ago|reply
It’s expensive, but I’ve done it, but it also includes YouTube music which I like.
[+] [-] nfriedly|2 years ago|reply
Finding Vanced (and now ReVanced) with adblocking, SponsorBlock, and the ability to set the speed higher than 2x made it so that I actually use YouTube more regularly. (Despite the name, SponsorBlock can skip over a lot more than just sponsor segments - intros, outros, recaps, jokes, etc.)
Any time I see YouTube on someone else's device I'm shocked by how awful it's become in it's default state. If I can't watch YouTube without adblock/sponsorblock/etc, I'll probably just go back to not watching YouTube.
The one point where YT has improved over the years is the comment section. Aside from the occasional scammer impersonating the creator and trying to get me to send them money off-platform, the comments don't seem nearly as awful as I remember from 5-10 years ago.
Also, as an aside, I pay for Nebula, and out-of-the-box, Nebula is a far superior experience to YouTube. But, I still think ReVanced has a leg up on Nebula thanks to skipping intros and the like. However, the biggest problem with Nebula is that it just doesn't have as much content that I'm interested in as YT does. It does seem to be improving, though.
[+] [-] stevenicr|2 years ago|reply
I would be more accepting of ads in general if:
1 - they were all served from the primary websites server - eg yahoo blaming third party ad servers for injecting virus scripts and taking no responsibility is not okay with me.
2 - I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level, not just browser level.
3 - no flashing animated ads on static text pages. I am amazed at some pages I see trying to read 6 sentences and instead I get three at a time with 3 moving ads taking up most of the space.
Obviously it'd be fine to have moving ads during a 'commercial break' in a video.. but overlay a banner over it or next to it and having it moving is just wrong imho.
I didn't use youtube much at all for a long time, but have recently trained the thing to give me interesting videos about CSS, new tools like framer io, clickup, AI, 'productizing' and other helpful content is now available to me easier now..
So if I could not block ads on youtube now, I would have to pay the $12 for premium if that's what it costs.. I would suggest having a checkbox to add in a $5 bucket for tips to content creators and give a way to tip multiple of 10 cents or something - as I would like to support some of the folks adding value to the platform, and I'm guessing going 12 premium wouldn't help them much if at all.
A few days ago I brought up some lists of 'YT watch history' - it's a decent amount for me the past few months - if 2 minutes of time was added to each one, and I had an employer, that company would be burning a fair amount of money for me to wait for ads each week at this point.
I also worry that ads at beginning of videos can be unfair when it seems a good percentage of videos I click then skip into a bit and find that they are not what I was expecting / hoping for and the click itself, 3 second buffering, and 2 second seek - were a huge waste of time, I can't imagine getting hit with added ads in those equations.
[+] [-] Roark66|2 years ago|reply
It's not even about just the ads. I use it because it let's me remove all the crap I don't want force fed to me while all I want it watch my subscribed channels (shorts, news etc). Smartyoutubetv let's me disable all of it. "
Also, it is technically impossible to ensure users watch these ads. The more elaborate detection they use, the more elaborate emulation of these ads being watched will be made.
Additionally, I used to have mixed feelings about using an ad blocker so I'd give the normal youtube client a chance now and then. Interestingly on the very first video watched I'd get pretty reasonable ads (maybe 2x5s of unskippable ad, the rest can be skipped in a 10min video), or one 30s unskippable ad in an hour long video. But continue watching and the number of ads (by ~5th video) will continue raising to obscene amounts. So no, I have no bad feelings for using the ad blocker.
[+] [-] Moldoteck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RandomBK|2 years ago|reply
EDIT: I do wonder if the price point of youtube premium is too high to capture an audience that simply doesn't want ads but doesn't care about any other features. $6/mo feels higher than the typical per-user ad revenue.
EDIT2: While I don't know youtube's average revenue per user, both Facebook and Google's ARPU for the NA segment is ~$100-$200/y, which would put $6/mo quite close to the replacement cost of lost ads revenue.
[+] [-] squarefoot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
Or Vimeo, or Facebook, or TikTok, or ...
[+] [-] dahwolf|2 years ago|reply
Companies that are not profitable should very soon be profitable. Companies that are profitable yet are stagnating need to show their next growth. And that's why you have this intensity in amping up monetization across several companies.
You can be absolutely sure that tech leaders are keenly watching the effects of bold moves at Twitter, Reddit, the like. Companies testing the waters to see how far they can go.
We had it coming and probably shouldn't complain that much. As the dutch saying goes: when shaven, sit still. Your expectations are based on party mode, but the party stopped.
[+] [-] atonse|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] honeybadger1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michelb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suddenclarity|2 years ago|reply