It is not just about youtube. The whole internet is bloated with ads right now, and the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete.
I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting. I could count the times that I have found an internet ad interesting in my lifetime using half the fingers of one hand. Personalised or not, the vast majority is useless, badly made, that just takes processing time both for the computer and my brain.
I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads. If a website says that I have to disable the adblocker to view it, and I cannot go around it, 99% of the times I do not visit it, I do not care. I pay the people I want to support directly and that's it. I use bandcamp to buy the music I like directly. I subscribe to patreon to the ones that I feel they bring value to my life. But for the occasional or ephemeral video or entertainment, I will just as easily live without, as the disruption ads cause is worse than not viewing that content.
I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites). If a website blocks this, I am not going to sacrifise my experience and I am not interested in browsing it.
Ad-blocking also gives you similar if not more extra security to anti-virus software, with fewer downsides (faster not slower). I'm afraid the ad ecosystem is so big that occasionally, threats slip through.
Performance and security may be my primary reasons for using an ad-blocker, but I must also admit that I would not remove the blocker even if those issues were addressed. On the rare occasion that I have used a computer without an ad blocker, I have found that advertising is so intrusive that I would rather not use the web.
I run a PiHole in the cloud and VPN into it from my phone. Does the job of blocking ads pretty damn well.
What often ends up happening though is there will be a big empty box where the ad is supposed to be. And it's outright appalling how many ads they try to shove onto your screen. Every paragraph is separated by an ad.
Indeed. Some years ago a fairly well-known news site here in Norway had their ad platform hacked, and it started serving a payload that exploited a vulnerability to infect a machine visiting the site with zero user interaction and zero visibility.
The payload would then proceed to hijack the browser and intercept sessions to the most popular online bank, allowing it to redirect funds behind the scenes without alerting the user.
That's the point when I realized ad blockers aren't a nice-to-have, but an essential protection element.
This may be true on random-site-X on the internet, but is not true on sites like YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Facebook, etc that run their own first-party ad platforms.
YouTubes "first-party ad platform" is delivering some of the worst ads on the whole internet.
It's not only the big-boobed characters promoting mobile games, there are (video) ads for pyramid and other "get rich quick" schemes, conspiracy theories (government will force everyone to become transgender!) and whatnot.
They don't give just the tiniest bit of a shit for all of this, as long as they are earning money with it.
>…there are (video) ads for pyramid and other "get rich quick" schemes…
Oh my dog. Before I set up Invidious to ensure my experience on iPad and such could be ad free, the one that really shocked me is one of the two ads that would show up mid-roll for a creator I watched regularly was SIXTY SIX MINUTES in length. Yes, an hour and six minutes! I can’t imagine what that must cost, but clearly whatever they were selling must cover the costs of a 66-minute ad well enough!
I've been wondering what the purpose of those super-long ads is for some time, but now it suddenly occurred to me: they're for unattended youtube players.
Plenty of shops, waiting rooms, lounges, bars, etc have a TV which is simply tuned to a youtube playlist. Whoever is issuing those ads is counting on that the operators of those TV's for whatever reason (either because they don't care, don't notice, or don't have access to the controls) don't skip them.
Not entirely. I sat through a 12 minute ad once. We could have skipped it after 5 seconds. But it was a charming video of a lady cooking a hamburger and I rather enjoyed watching it. I wish more ads were like that
I do not! It was years ago. And unfortunately there is no tracking of ads, I wanted a link to that video too. You can't even back up and re-watch an ad!
I have heard of their “system”, they auction ad space out in real time with a bunch a descriptors for the ad buyers who then bid for the space. Google really doesn’t give a crap who wins it or if it matches your interests/needs. Advertisers are free to advertise to anyone as long as they win the bid.
I've seen it said that newsfeeds/ads/etc. feed you what they think you will engage with, so you may want to wonder why you're seeing that type of content. I've never seen anything of the sort on any large tech platform, and I'm probably in an appropriate demographic to be recommended that stuff.
Those algorithms tend to be "people who liked X also liked Y", which is very prone to false positives for people who don't fit conventional stereotypes.
For example, someone who watches the Forgotten Weapons channel on Youtube might get recommended far-right conspiracy videos, because people who like guns often like far-right politics. They might also get recommended Scott Manley and Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles because all three have deep dives into interesting historical technology.
Ideally, there would be more manual knobs for communicating one's preferences about such things to recommendation algorithms.
Relatedly, easily the highest item on my wishlist for YouTube features is algorithm customizability. Half the time I'm recommended the same 5 channels, while the other half I'm recommended amazing videos from fantastic smaller YouTube channels.
Being able to at least switch between some presets for the algorithm would be amazing.
I think it's more the lack of other analytics data, due to uBlock Origin and a PiHole in my network, that they fall back to those ads. Maybe I'd have some nice ads for cooking supplies if I were to allow tracking, not sure.
I almost fell for a scam yesterday from an instagram ad. There was an ad for fun printed workout shorts for only €4. I added a couple different prints and was about to pay when I noticed the URL was neehd dot com and the site title was some other random word. I couldn't find any reference to either name online and went back to instagram. The VERY NEXT AD was for an identical site with a different random 5 letter url. I reported both ads and now neehd com is "no longer available". Very glad I didn't put any payment details into the site. If they employ people to vet ads full time they should have easily been able to catch those ads before it was shown to a user. I have seen ads for those shorts non stop for a few weeks before I finally tapped the ad to see how much they were.
- I start the video, an ad is shown within 30 secs.
- I fast forward a few minutes, the SAME ad is shown again.
- I jump to anywhere on the timeline, the SAME ad is shown again.
At least show me something that is relevant, like facebook does. The ads there reflect what I usually look for. On YT, none of the ads are relevant to me, ever.
We were watching Eurovision singing contest the other day from YT and my gawd was that annoying. Adds in the middle of every song, volume being cranked up for the adds, and as a icing on the cake, probably due to bug somewhere, the playback went to pause after each ad (iPhone airplaying to AppleTV).
You know, if someone would constantly burst into rooms shouting at the top of their lungs for you to give them money, we'd beat them with a wrench. Yet this same behavior is not only tolerated and excused, but encouraged, when done in the name of business profits.
I'd rephrase that to "and there are people who want to debate whether blocking advertisements is morally defensible" as this is not so much an indictment of "society" as it is an exposition of the moral bankruptcy of the advertising industry. The question should not be whether blocking ads is morally defensible but the other way around, whether exposing yourself and others to "modern" advertising is defensible - to which the answer is a wholehearted "Hell No".
Give me a catalogue full of ads like the Computer Shopper [1] magazine of yore and I'll sing praise of the advertisers who clearly showed what they sold for which prices. I actually bought the thing - imagine that, paying money for a telephone book-sized magazine filled with nothing but ads - because it was useful in showing what the market had to offer. A modern-day Computer Shopper would be filled with...
...lifestyle-related drivel
...virtue signalling diversity statements without any relation to whatever product is sold
...celebrities doing things they only do because they get millions for it
...clearly stupid clueless men who only make it through their day because they have women and girls to correct their stupid mistakes, bad choices and silly habits
...some more diversity statements but this time with celebrities
...etc.
Now I understand I'm not really part of the target market the advertisers are trying to brainwash and that the nothing-but-a-list-of-products-with-prices style of advertising does not appeal to everyone. Find some other way of reaching your target market which shares the simplicity and honesty of this type of advertising, stop shouting, stop the brainwashing, get rid of the subliminal messaging, ditch the lifestyle drivel, just quit being bottom feeders and get back to advertising products and prices, no more and no less. Unless you want to be beaten with a wrench that is but in that case you better start wearing helmets and toques.
TV ads (almost) never interrupted the flow of the show you were watching, because the show was specifically designed around the ad breaks. Radio ads always came between songs.
YouTube is now just sticking ads in any old where in videos. The middle of a song. The middle of a sentence. It's revolting, and in many cases it ruins the content you're actually trying to watch.
"Night mode", if it is present, should also do this to a lesser extent. I am grateful for this feature in movies where light chit-chat is interrupted by window-shattering explosion sounds.
I had one of those but it was built into our TV, a Magnavox. It relied on a small black frame that local broadcasters used to insert their ads. National broadcaster like NBC would stream to their local affiliates. And the stream would have blank spaces to an insert their own ads. It’s very fast ,0.1s, that your eye would see briefly but to smart enough electronics was very perceptible. Once the commercial block was detected volume goes down. And the subsequent black frame turns it back up.
I wonder if those devices simply looked at the volume and said, "If it's high [perhaps for a few seconds at a time], then it's probably an ad". Seems like a pretty good heuristic.
Eurovision is basically a big tourism add wrapped in a sell of the cheapest, dullest more forgettable pop songs available. Watching publicity is the whole experience
While it is irritating the frequency of them, personally I prefer ads that aren't relevant. I'll spend my money when I want and I don't like to be manipulated by an ad. Plus I like to feel that online marketers know as little about my preferences as possible and are wasting their advertising budget just showing me useless products and services. I'm looking at you Grammarly...
It’s weird that I didn’t realize this for long. Chances are you are probably in market for presumably irrelevant products, it’s only that a lot of us don’t find those topics entertaining.
I wouldn’t mind a nice representative calmly onboarding me with an exciting new middle eastern investment opportunities, I might even enjoy listening to those with a glass of tap water on one hand. That of course is because it is an extremely relevant topic to me /s
The only point i would add is the long ads that require an action to skip (30+ minutes).
More recently I have also been getting clear scams as ads and no amount of reporting can get rid of them.
These are the reasons I spent the time blocking the ads on all devices. Maybe Google should fix their ads to make them less awful instead of starting the death of Youtube.
> I'm not paying for anything until they remove the "this is the bubble we have prepared for you" recommendation algorithm.
Indeed, and what bothers me most is that it is "one" bubble. I wish there was a selection of tags to choose what mood I am in. Sometimes I only want math and science suggestions, sometimes I want to watch 3Dprinting or FreeCAD video's and other times I just want to discover some music. But Youtube mixes these three different moods together (even though I never play music on Youtube in the morning, nor watch math video's in the late evening).
Please Youtube, let me choose my current 'bubble'.
The ios app lets you do that at least. At the top of the Home Screen I can choose “podcast”, “history” etc though within those it’s still recommendation based.
Repitition reinforces the ads, just like in other 'learning', advertisers will always want us to retain their ads, I can't see the 'waterboard them with annoying ads' technique going away in any country that Capitalism manages to keep its talons embedded in.
Yeah, but I will never put winter tires on my car, because it's useless where I live. So, maybe, the targeting was subpar. Also, repetition reinforces me to enable ublock again.
That's fair. Because also probably the people the advertisers want to reach MOST are exactly the people who have the spare money (and willingness to spend it) to shell out for YT Premium.
But yeah I'd pay to get rid of all the "this video is sponsored by brilliant/nordVPN/whatever".
You mean embedded native stuff? No, but SponsorBlock does and I use both. YT Premium pays creators for YT views and the analytics don't appreciably differentiate whether you watched an ad or skipped it, so I'm pretty comfortable with the two.
(The apps don't work with SponsorBlock and that does drag, but I mostly don't watch native-advertising videos on my TV so whatever.)
Or other YouTube clients with ads disabled :) There is even a SmartTV YouTube App that works like a charm. It even skips as blocks in the video itself. Only casting then uses the original app with ads.
Edit:// as long as I would need 2 premium accounts for all my active devices I don't accept that as a real solution
Vanced has essentially been disabled recently, unable to play anything. I don't know if YouTube is going on a murdering spree of everything that threatens ads on the platform.
On mobile it's annoying yes, but there is always a working solution around. On TV however the app "SmartTubeNext" seems to update faster than YouTube patches. (Afaik there are multiple Vanced clones like revanced in case you are using the original)
The ad I most frequently get on YouTube - we’re talking three times per video, every other video - is for a shingles vaccine targeted at adults over 60.
No amount of spaced repetition is going to make me, an adult decades under the age of 60, talk to my doctor about that shingles vaccine. This cannot possibly be a truly cost-efficient ad platform.
Yeah, I think Facebook has the better algorithms for knowing what I'm interested in.
I use Instagram more than Facebook but quite a few times I've seen ads for things that have caught my attention. I've even bought something because of one.
I've never bought anything by looking at a Google ad. They are almost always something I know about already. What good is an ad for something I know about?
This is how brand advertising works, it's psychological 'trickery' to try and associate that brand with what people find positive, such associations influence us when we make buying choices or when we react to other people's buying choices.
For many years I thought I was immune to such ads, but really I think we are all affected by them -- increased desire for 'things', with reduced happiness for anyone who can't or won't buy them.
> This is how brand advertising works, it's psychological 'trickery' to try and associate that brand with what people find positive, such associations influence us when we make buying choices or when we react to other people's buying choices.
Not sure how cursing at highly repetitive ads that aren’t relevant to me is a considered “positive”.
So far YouTube's ads haven't convinced me to invest - much less invest with those advertised companies; frankly, I would probably go to my bank if I were to get into investing, I mean I already trust them with my money.
I think the core issue is:
* People don't like ads, because ads suck
* Youtube offers premium, an ad-less experience
Never have I seen self-entitled people so furious as when YT requests they buy premium in order to remove ads. What, should YT be hosted for free without ads and without a subscription?
I get that ads suck and companies suck, but self-entitled people suck too; most of us here are devs and we get paid because our company has to make money _somehow_.
YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription. They refuse either option and instead are furious that YT doesn't offer itself completely for free.
I don't like ads and I don't mind paying. What I don't like is paying for an ad-free experience and my data continuing to get mined. I consider companies entitled if they demand to have both my data and my money
Youtube is part of the reason I have an adblock. I do not watch youtube on my phone because of the ads.
Reasonable ads would be fine. 10-15 seconds of ad on a short video, 30 seconds on a longer one. A choice to watch a 3 minute ad to watch a 2 hour video uninterrupted. I kind of long for the banners of days gone by.
But that's not what is going on. They'll play an ad in the middle of a music video. ad after ad after ad. And I get ads in videos because they are "sponsored". It has been designed to be as intrusive as possible to try to extort you out of money. And honestly, I despite them for this. If they can't possibly let music play for 4 minutes without an interruption or two, they can't possibly care if I'm watching for "free" nor care about the folks making their content.
> YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription.
I wouldn't say it offers 2 great options. The ad-funded offering is a non-starter given the reality of its ad market. The paid option sounds great, but if the goal is to finance the creators you enjoy most, it doesn't work. The success of Nebula, plus several of YouTube's policy changes or lack thereof, imply that YouTube doesn't actually care, it's just driven by greed.
As another commenter said, roads are paid for with taxes, usually a special road tax collected from car-owning citizens, sometimes even from the specific area the road is in. I hope you pay your taxes.
What a ridiculous comparison, though. Like, really? If I were to use the same logic surely I could just walk into your own house and just live there free of charge. You cook my meals and clean up for me too, thanks. Oh wait, that's absurd.
> the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete.
This is the main point IMO. When you have a printed newspaper or magazine you are not annoyed by the ads.
If we had ads that (1) do not move, (2) are not modal/do not pop up, (3) do not track you outside the website, (4) do not take MB's of data I would be willing to tolerate them and they could even be helpful.
Youtube has become unwatchable without ad blockers. It used to be better than TV, now it is worse and you cannot skip them.
> I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites).
Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads.
Being able to manipulate my own machine and what I want to view is entirely up to me. This can't be infringed.
There is always the option today to block from the client side, but I can see this changing if there's enough money involved.
> Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads.
The part I dislike about this is that they will demonetize a video for content reasons, but still show ads on it.
I also don't know how it works with YouTube Premium. If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching?
> If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching?
I'm not a content creator but Google do claim that a small % of the pool goes to the creators you watch, I guess kind of like a Spotify model.
> Will creators still be paid with YouTube Premium?
Yes. In fact, YouTube Premium gives a secondary revenue stream for creators in addition to what you're already earning today through ads.
> I also don't know how it works with YouTube Premium. If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching?
Oh, I just recognized a specific swypey mistake that I've seen myself make lots of times. But maybe they'd also happen on regular text prediction too? My sister in law regularly uses voice input, and her Whatsapp messages have totally different types of errors.
>I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting
not saying this applies to you but might it be that ads are distracting enough that they would be an actual accessibility problem affecting people with ADHD - if so is not allowing people to block ads likely to run into legal issues?
Some websites just keep throwing an enormous number of ads into your face to the the extent you start losing consciousness why you came here in the first place.
On computer, you still able to use an AdBlock but on mobile, I suffer terribly, not only because I could not disable ads but because on some sites while you are reading an article a random ad video that took about half of the screen keeps playing and scrolling down with you, even clicking the X doesn’t work most of the time but generally triggers an external link. At the bottom of the page, you start reading “best job offers in XYZ” where this XYZ is your city name deduced from your IP address, the thumbnail, as you might expect, is a “s_x_” girl lying on a bed :(
I know, free content should be supported by ads but I believe this is not the way to do it.
If you don't mind using Opera mobile, their ad blocking is very good, at least for the sites I frequent (including youtube). They're Chinese owned now, but I don't ever use it for banking, shopping or social media. For those I use Firefox.
On iOS you can install AdGuard in Safari (or pay for a few of the other ad-blocker extensions) or install Brave which has an ad-blocker built-in. Both work well in my experience.
On iOS you can install browser extensions from firefox and chrome to the Orion browser.
I've found it a few month back in this threat here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34562553, it is working sufficiently so far, seems even a bit faster than safari to me, too.
> I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads.
Okay, but how do you square that with the fact that hosting content costs money? Are the people and companies which provide the content you look at not allowed to earn money to keep the servers running and the sysadmins fed?
Producing television shows also costs money, but no-one forces me to watch the ads there. I can change channel, or skip past them if recorded, or just leave the room while they're on.
I would have no problem with ads if they weren't so obnoxious. They cause the page layout to shift as they load in, they block the loading of actual page content, they play sounds, play videos, pop up over the content i'm trying to read. Advertising doesn't have to be like that and that's why i block it.
By not caring about how any random website/app/whatever will survive, and only caring about the ones that add value to me.
I am not saying it makes total sense or is perfectly thought through, but I am asking myself for example, how would it be like if I never used/watched this service/app/creator/whatever ever again? Would I feel I lose something, would I care about it? I am not saying just finding some similar alternative, but about the experience itself regardless of alternatives.
Maybe others think differently, but for me, a vast majority of what I may watch on the internet is not really adding value to me and could just easily do without. To the ones that do add value, I support them, but in reasonable ways. If I do not feel it is reasonable, then I do not, and sad truth is that, for me at least, ads as implemented in most places create a bigger distraction than my incentive to support.
One example, I did not mind facebook's ads until facebook got over aggressive in sending me "suggestions" for various meme groups. It was unusable for me after that point. Then, I decided to use FB purity to get read of all ads and suggestions. If facebook had not done that, then I would have continued fine with its normal ads, one of the few ads that I have actually found useful was in facebook. But the alternative to removing the ads was not just seeing the ads after the change, the alternative was to stop using facebook (I have a very curated home page in facebook and unfollow 99% of my friends there) which is sadly not an option right now due to various social factors. Or maybe disabling the facebook feed itself somehow.
Another example is a supposedly private search engine. It had a banner to disable ads to support it, which I tried but then I just had to scroll down to see the first real results after the ads every time I was searching for something, which was non-sense and very annoying. I tried to find a way to donate or sth but there was no such option, so I gave up trying to support that. Maybe I move to another private search engine some point. I am not sure if I should just tolerate scrolling down to see the results everytime, but if there is a private search engine that uses ads in a better way I would be fine using that.
And as much as it is weird in our times, there are websites that do not depend on ads. For example I use bandcamp to buy the music I like, and with buying my music from there I support both the musicians and the website/service itself.
Other than that, I do subscribe/support/donate/buy services/apps etc that add value to me, even if I am not required to do so to use them freely and non-disruptively. I have even paid for games years after I actually played them through pirate versions, because before I did not have the money and I felt they deserved it. I guess if people do more or less something like that, according to each one's financial abilities, everybody will be happy or sth, and things that offer value to an adequate amount of people will be ok.
A side effect of ads (and something that ad blockers mask, giving websites a normal appearance) is that ad supported websites have the wrong incentive.
When you browse a website with no ads, you are the public. Content is provided for your use, and that's all.
When you visit an ad supported website, you are only the means to achieve an end, which is to have you in the site as much as possible, clicking on as much ads as possible. That usually had the effect of making the website content bloated.
Not all sites begin like that, but they all end like that. And ad blocking hides that ugly truth under a layer of normalcy.
I have a massive collection of Mp3s and wav files on my phone... Have cultivated it for decades now. I rarely stream music because of ads and bandwidth throttling that my mobile data provider implements.
About 2 weeks ago, I heard Black Player (App), which already works in a very unexpectedly and illogically difficult and frustrating manner, started injecting ads into my normal music library. I may just need to charge up my old iPod from now on, it doesn't ever need weekly software updates for some strange reason like everything else.
Yeah I do similar, I actually use musicolet to listen to my offline music library (https://krosbits.in/musicolet), an android app that is just offline, no ads, no network permission at all, nothing. It does the job very well and it does not mine any data or show any ads. I highly recommend to give it a try (I assume you use android?).
And to add, while it is free and I could have continued just fine not paying anything to use it, I have paid for the "pro features" that I did not even need (apart from chromecast which I do not use, the other pro features were mainly aesthetic) just to support the developer for providing such a great app that respects my privacy and does not bloat my phone. People think that somehow those who do not want to pay to youtube just want to get everything for free. I have no issue with paying for any service that adds value to my life and respects my privacy, but youtube/google is not just that, and the fact that I use youtube for free does not mean that I would use it the same way if I had to pay for it or had to watch ads all the time. And to be honest, the fact that the app did not require me to support it in order to not send me ads or whatever, made me more incentivised to actually support it, because the incentive to support comes exactly from the appreciation of the experience it provides.
Maybe this sounds like an ad for that app, and it actually is so. I think that such pieces of software that really respect the privacy and provide an alternative to shameless streaming services like the one discussed here are worth being advertised by their happy users.
You've hit on the reason I think the Brave token is such a great idea (https://brave.com/brave-rewards/). I know it's en vogue to trash gimmicky cryptocurrencies, and to be honest I don't care how this gets implemented. The concept is great: a shared, fungible way to easily support random websites one visits, and control the kinds of ads one accepts. If sites had a little tip jar which I could easily tap to avoid ads, I'd use it. There's just too much friction today in supporting sites, and all of them want a subscription.
The whole point of advertisements is that the person pushing them doesn't earn anything from them - but rather, force-feeds information about the existence of their product to the public. Now, instead of ruining our public space with horrible billboards and kitschy flashing lights, they ruin our digital space with horrible pop-ups and kitschy lust-provoking videos.
I don't care about those who run ads, nor those who allow ad companies to run ads on their content. If you earn money through ads, that's your problem, not mine, and it's not my responsibility to watch them. Ads are fundamentally intrusive, and pretending like the society at large has some kind of "responsibility" towards those who earn money from ads is laughable.
That was the original intention of HashCash, the inspiration to Bitcoin. Antispam micropayments to add some trivial level of cost to online interactions to make scale unaffordable.
This looks like a good idea indeed. I would not mind something like that, as long as some reasonable level of control from the user side exists. I will try it in my mobile as I use brave anyway there.
> The whole internet is bloated with ads right now
Internet? I think you mean everything. The whole everything is bloated with ads right now. Look around you, I bet you can see at least a dozen brand names without even leaving your chair.
People who work in marketing and ads should quit their jobs if they care at all about society, but of course they don't or they wouldn't be in marketing and advertising. Alternatively, we should just stop putting up with their bullshit because they have a long history of abusing every inch they are given.
Since I live in countries other than my own, there's a 0% chance that any given ad is relevant to me. Chances are it's in a language I don't speak or for a product I'm not eligible for, much less something I'd actually want.
This works out great because my brain doesn't get so distracted by ads, even physical billboard ads. But at the same time I use an ad-blocker to avoid wasted screen real estate.
A good way to think about the tracking urls attached to majority of websites these days, is as many different cameras tracking each person as it enters buildings and stores, using face-recognition.
Thus it stores all the places you have been and with ML and AI create some sort of personal file, with all kinds of attributes. (the more the better)
uBlock and others block these cameras from seeing your face.
To me your view is just common sense. I find it bizarre how some people seem to be treating ad-blockers like the equivalent of stealing in the comments.
It is YouTube's right to prevent me from using their site if I use an ad-blocker just as much as it is my right to stop using their service altogether if they prevent me from using it with an ad-blocker.
I totally agree, even if I hate it. There are a lot of internet users out there who have this expectation that they are owed a certain level of access for free to these services. Those expectations aren't unfounded: most content on the internet has been, more or less, free to access. It was a good time, but surely we all knew that it couldn't last forever?
The era of ultra monetization we're being ushered into is new and obviously its going to create some discomfort.
But that doesn't change the reality that these expectations are totally irrational and unreasonable. We can argue that the information should be free, that content should be accessible, that the sharing and proliferation of information without barriers of entry benefit all of us in the short and long term. But those esoteric philosophies can't win a debate against a corporations desire or fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit.
Money is tight for everyone across the board, borrowed or not (except maybe for apple). Why wouldn't they amputate the minority of users who are only costing Youtube money? I can't think of a good argument against it, other than "I hate it".
People are enraged by Netflix cracking down on account sharing, people were enraged by article paywalls, and people are and will be enraged by Youtube blocking ad blockers.
Unlike Netflix and article paywalls, Youtube has no real viable competitor. I get why the NYT allows me to bypass their paywall with a browser extension: if they truly make it impossible for me to bypass the article, I'll be able to find some other website that has reposted or reworded it. I get why Netflix allows me to bypass their account sharing: if they make it impossible for me to view the content without paying, I can just torrent it.
But Youtube is uniquely different. The product there is not just the body of content but their ecosystem which contains essentially every video on the internet and all the connective tissue to traverse billions of minutes of video. I use an adblocker on Youtube, but if they lock me out of that option, I'll still use YouTube, because where else would I go? No where.
Maybe I won't go to Youtube as often, but they'll have effectively converted me from being an extremely active viewer getting a free ride to an infrequent semi-active viewer that generates revenue.
That brings an interesting question: Would people start torrenting YouTube if it becomes inaccessible without a subscription? YouTube is exploding with high-quality long-form content, maybe pirates will consider those kind of videos worthwhile to torrent? Maybe the creators themselves will consider it worthwhile to host them with their own subscriptions?
What people mean when they say all these things is that, "I can easily access things I want for free, so why would I ever pay?"
Yes some people give voluntarily through donations or Patreon, but it's a tiny amount of the actual number of people who derive satisfaction from the content.
The best solution for someone who hates ads is a subscription model. The thing that bothers me is that publishers still collect massive amounts of data and sell it, and some continue to have advertising or product placement. Give me ads or give me a completely untracked experience for a fee. Don't do something in between and claim that it's ad-free.
Any website that doesn't want me able to choose what I do on my own computer with the information they've freely given me is welcome to move to a different protocol that requires a locked down operating system that forces display of their content in the manner that they dictate. Until then, they can choose to stop freely sending me information or accept I'm going to use information on my own computer however I want (short of redistributing it).
Bandcamp is interesting and I am considering it and cancel Spotify. How do you go about discovering music? I use Spotify for not only listening to my artists but for music discovery too.
Oof this is a great question, it actually deserves a thread of its own tbh. I do not think I have figured that out completely in a satisfactory way. Bandcamp is not that great at that as in providing a feed of songs suggested to you by your preferences, it does not have "autoplay", and searching for content in a more classic way there is messy. But it does provide a list of suggestions under each album, with a list of albums that a number of people who own that album also own, which is quite decent. It is particularly useful if what you want to find something that is similar to style to something you like. I find it quite reliable actually in finding similar stuff, probably because buying an album is quite strong measure to use to correlate albums.
Also, I find quite a few genre-specific compilations in bandcamp (and elsewhere), and this is probably my favourite way to discover new bands, because usually compilations include decent bands and some of their strongest tracks, so you do not get lost as much. And as far as internet is concerned, other places I find new inspiration are genre specific forums, pages etc, and actually pages/accounts of the bands themselves (they often suggest bands they themselves like - bandcamp has even an option for artists to recommend material from others to their audience, which is actually quite nice).
In general, I would say that discovering new music in bandcamp is possible, but it is rather an active process (you look into an album you like and browse through the suggested albums, play each of them etc) and takes time. In contrast, with dj youtube it is easier because it is predominantly passive, by automatically playing new suggested tracks and once in a while you hear sth that clicks. I admit that I have discovered some of my favourite bands through dj youtube this way. I have not used spotify but I assume it is somewhat similar?
Tbh I appreciate the active process, in the sense that I feel that the experience of the internet has become too passive, a very common experience is scrolling through lines, posts, pages of suggested content or letting one video play after the other, and everything is tailored/measured so that you scroll or watch more (and see more ads) being fed a constant stream of information typically with a very low signal to noise ratio. However, it is also nice sometimes to just relax and have an algorithm choose a next track because one has as much energy to spend in looking through stuff, and probably in music it works better than social media. I have not found something similar to that.
On mobile YouTube right now I see two unskippable ads before every video. How long before some genius needs to juice his numbers this quarter and come up with the bright idea of three unskippable ads? Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo? If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today?
To the bean counters who seem to have overwhelmed Google, losing a few users might seem like a dog losing some fleas. They are out of ideas for growth. Once blitz scaling has reached the limits of user acquisition the only play left to juice the numbers seems to be “boil the frog”, going to war with their Oort cloud of free users, pay up or else. Are the c-suite types at Google aware that this is exactly the mindset that will make their decline into irrelevance inevitable?
Elon Musk inadvertently turned Twitter into a howling wasteland in a few short months, which shows what happens when you boil the user frog too quickly. Imagine how Twitter would look today if Elon instead doubled down on making Twitter the best user experience, offering users tools to make Twitter more relevant, making it an unmissable service for users, and in turn unmissable for advertisers? But instead he pulled the lever all the way from utopia to hellscape, attempting to shake down users to restore some functionality to a clearly degraded product. Enshitifying (thanks Cory Doctorow) the user experience is not a compelling reason to subscribe.
Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product.
I'm not against advertising per se, I’m against being shaken down to regain a user experience that should be the default. Here are two examples of successful advertising models:
1. Lex Friedman does an ad read at the beginning of his podcast. It’s intentionally skippable, I skip it 90% of the time. But when I'm busy with bread dough on my hands or whatever, I'm still hearing the ads, which are mostly repeat offerings anyway. Advertising is not always appropriate, eg at a kids birthday party or showing a video in a lecture. The lesson: MAKE IT SKIPPABLE!
2. Inserts into shows / product placement, like on VFX Artists React. These seem harder for a behemoth to monetise but I like these because I know that the actual creators are getting paid. Youtube doesn't want to deal with creators with anything closer than a dashboard. This is not the end users fault, it’s not the content creators fault, it’s a symptom of absentee capitalism. Youtube should invest in creators and form true partnerships. The lesson: INVEST IN DEALING FAIRLY WITH HUMANS!
I’m not going to pay, I will continue to avoid ads but watch them occasionally. I’m going to keep playing the game of whack-a-mole finding software / hardware solutions. And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship.
> Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo?
YouTube might (but probably doesn't) make $30 billion in revenue. It certainly doesn't make $30 billion in profit. It's questionable if it even breaks even, and even if it does it's certainly nowhere near paid back the amount of money that has been spent keeping it afloat post acquisition.
> If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today?
Because testing something is pretty much always a good idea.
> Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product.
That's not a radical idea, it's a bad one if you lose money on most customers and are hoping to make it up at scale. Ad blocking users are unquestionably money losers for Google.
> And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship.
What competitor do you think is coming that will be willing to (at a very conservative estimate) set fire to $75 billion+ for a decade to build this competitor, and the investors who loan that $75 billion dollars on a very risky ten year bet not expect a very significant ROI in exchange?
YouTube objectively should never have existed - it was extremely predatorily priced in terms of lowered ad load or subscription charging to actually exist as a business, and Google kept it going to scare competitors away. If a competitor actually comes it will be significantly, significantly more monetised than YouTube is.
> Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product
Isn’t that what they’re doing? This thread is full of people who are arguing that they cannot possibly be expected to stop watching YouTube, which sounds like they’re doing a good job attracting both an audience and compelling content. There’s a whole internet full of content out there, tons of options for creators to get paid, but even in a thread full of people saying they hate Google’s business model it seems like few people are willing to give up using YouTube so they must be doing something right.
> If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today?
There's a bunch of reasons to do an experiment with a small percentage of users first, and to do a gradual rollout.
First, they don't actually know for sure that this works, since users are unpredictable. You need an experiment to see how they react now and in the longer term. Do all the impacted users just immediately switch to a different ad blocker that isn't getting detected? No point in rolling this out further until that is fixed. Do all of those users churn out entirely, rather than some of them disabling the adblocker or subscribing to Premium? Then there's a business decision to be made, and they didn't have data for it earlier.
Second, there might be technical issues that make the implementation harmful. For example maybe the JS code causes crashes for legit users on a browser you didn't test, or something. You'd like to contain the damage to just members of the experimental group, not all users of that browser.
Third, even if they know this will be a beneficial change, they don't know how beneficial. The people who proposed and implemented the project want to show the impact (an increase of X million in ads revenue, extra Y thousand Premium subscribers, Z reduction in serving costs, whatever their KPI is). The people who funded the team want to know whether they actually got a return on the investment, and whether they should continue staffing further work to improve coverage, etc.
I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting. I could count the times that I have found an internet ad interesting in my lifetime using half the fingers of one hand. Personalised or not, the vast majority is useless, badly made, that just takes processing time both for the computer and my brain.
I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads. If a website says that I have to disable the adblocker to view it, and I cannot go around it, 99% of the times I do not visit it, I do not care. I pay the people I want to support directly and that's it. I use bandcamp to buy the music I like directly. I subscribe to patreon to the ones that I feel they bring value to my life. But for the occasional or ephemeral video or entertainment, I will just as easily live without, as the disruption ads cause is worse than not viewing that content.
I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites). If a website blocks this, I am not going to sacrifise my experience and I am not interested in browsing it.