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.
Watching live TV is outright painful with the sheer amount of time spent on ads.
I mean, just watching a show on whatever streaming source...a "30 minute" show is typically more like 21:30 to 22:30 long. That means 7:30 to 8:30 of the time is ads. At least 25% of the time.
6 minutes of content, 2 minutes of ads. It's awful, and it feels so much worse when watching a movie. Movies are all about building tension for an hour or more, and that feeling of build-up is just destroyed by ad breaks.
And of course it's not 22 minutes of content and 8 minutes of ads, it's 1 minute of ads played 8 times, because that's more effective at brainwashing you than not buying up all the ad space to prevent anyone else from getting your attention.
And then the ads are designed to be seen one time, so when they get repetitive you start noticing things that you wouldn't care about after one showing but will drive you insane after you see it for the 50th time in a row. An actor flubbed their line and they didn't fix it, a laugh sounds a little awkward, a sound is out of place, all sorts of things that pique your subconscious and you can't tune out.
How many of you can sing an advertising jingle from your childhood decades later? That is clearly a crime against humanity.
VW has this really cute ad for one of their EVs. It was amusing the first few times I saw it. It airs about 20 times per game on MLB.tv, every game. I’ve probably seen that same ad 500 times now.
I own a VW. I like my VW. I will not be buying their EV product. Ever.
>there was no escaping them unless you physically exit the room.
I have no idea what you did when TV was still relevant, but when ads came on my family used to either change channel or mute the tv and talk about stuff until the show came back on. You got very good at feeling out how long ad blocks were and switching back at the right time.
Regardless though, there were strict laws on the ads that you could put on TV, the claims you could make, how you could master them (ie sound volume), and in what timeslots.
Based on the scams you endlessly see in YouTube ads, I'm pretty sure they don't bother with any of that.
I only ever watch TV when there's a sporting event on. But every time I've noticed two things:
- Just how many ads there are. And it's not even that there are a bunch of different ads, it's the same 3-4 ads played in a loop.
- The absurd number of drug commercials. The last time I was I was at a friends place to watch a football game we played a drinking came called "ask your doctor". Anytime a drug ad said "ask your doctor is X is right for you", you take a shot. We were all drunk by the end of the game.
I'm assuming you're not watching American football. That has become so much 'the game is filler between the ads' that they stop the live game in the stadium (TV timeout) so as not to annoy people being fed ads watching it on TV.
Maybe that’s why they won’t promote soccer in the US. 2x45 minutes of game separated by only 15 minutes. And I wish the NBA was like F1 where you pay a subscription and you have access to pretty much everything. I don’t mind sponsored labels and name drops.
Don't mean to go off on a rant here...but soccer will always struggle in the US until the refs start aggressively calling simulation aka 'diving' (and maybe changing some penalty kick rules to discourage it) on the Neymar wannabes flopping around and acting like they've been shot by a tazer at the slightest touch. I've played soccer since I was like 10, and I've been a season ticket holder at my local MLS team since they started, so love the game. But I'm often too embarrassed to even bring up soccer with lots of my US based, sports-mad friends because inevitably the conversation devolves into how games turn on eye-roll worthy acting on the field, refs buying into it, and I can't argue they're wrong (esp since I played rugby as well so have little sympathy for "fake ouchies").
And since we're on the topic...soccer also needs to adopt rugby's rule that only the team captain can talk to the ref and question calls, and respect is required. But, you know...baby steps.
Soccer will always struggle in the US because of culture. Outside of the US, soccer is the sport everyone gathers around the TV to watch, but here in the US that's usually the NFL. If American Football never came to existence and we played soccer like the rest of the world I bet that the US would have dominated and we would have clubs like PSG and Real Madrid. But because we have American Football here, all the money and attention is on that sport and soccer is just a niche sport.
The MLS can do alot to become more popular but it won't ever be what soccer in the rest of the world is because to do that they would have to dethrone American Football which is just never happening.
I wondered how this could reliably distinguish between a scene cut and a cut to commercial without content hashes and/or program schedules being shared through the network, then realized that 20 years ago was already 2003 and of course home internet was common by then.
Apparently one offline technique was checking for black frames inserted by local stations.
TV here is pure hell now. I turn it on in a hotel periodically and always regret it. There’s plenty to watch but the ads are louder and dumber and have naturally become saturated with insanely high margin / LTV scam products like testosterone pills, the worst pay-to-win game imaginable or literally just gambling.
Same. And then when I go to the homes of people I love, and their TVs are blaring commercials in the background of their lives, it's such this weird "I thought I knew you" feeling.
> 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.
VCR & fast forward.
> 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 US television ads switched to that format to make them more obnoxious and harder to fast forward over.
This battle between attention spam and users thinking that's obnoxious has been going on for decades.
Back when I still watched cable which was ~14 years ago at my parents' house, I used a TiVo to do so partially because it allowed me to skip ads (the other reason being so I could catch late night programs the next day).
After moving out I never subscribed to cable or satellite and don't watch terrestrial broadcasts either, partially because of the advertising. If I were to subscribe now it'd probably be contingent on my ability to use a modern TiVo-like DVR for the same reasons.
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.
In general, I don't mind sponsor reads in a video for a couple reasons:
1. They're produced much more mindfully in context of the video your watching. At their most basic, they're a small ad read at the beginning of a video, at their best, they're a much more likely to be relevant to me (the consumer) ad that doesn't cause me to lose focus on the video's original context. When a YouTube ad plays on my iPad while I'm listening to something during my daily shower, I don't really fear that a sponsor read is going to cause me to lose focus on the topic, largely because the automated ad inserter isn't going to accidentally cut out a second or two before a natural break, or even worse, in the middle of a sentence.
2. I know the proceeds of the ad are going directly to the creator, instead of to a machine that does ads in a way that myself, and a slough of psychologists, believe is damaging to a human.
I would much rather pay for YT Premium, or other services for ad free content viewing, however a lack of job security has lead me to sock away that and other funds that would go to paying for content like this to my rainy day fund. If it were a binary choice of pay for YT or not right now, I wouldn't, and I'd miss out on some fun, informative, and entertaining content, but in a way, I wish that was the case. It'd come with some awful consequences for an entire ecosystem of content creators, but ultimately that's the consequences of pedaling tech drugs, and that's a whole different conversation.
My first inclination is that embedded ads happen because individual creators are having difficulty wrestling the algorithm to funnel enough views and subscribers their way and because not enough of the Premium subscription fee goes to creators.
This isn't always true as there are a few giants that do embedded ads too, but most of the sponsor reads I see on YouTube are from smaller or more niche channels.
I’ve gotten the impression that for some creators, part of the reason is how easy it is to be demonetised on YouTube. The monetisation filter has become sensitive and puritanical that people even self-censor confronting words now, like “murder”, or “rape”, or “suicide”… I don’t know what TV news or current events shows are like today, but from what I remember watching when I was younger, I doubt any of that would be monetisable on YouTube today.
I don’t find live-read ads nearly as offensive. They at least have some personal touch to them and they often vary each time (they are live, after all). I tend to listen to those in podcasts when they are truly one-off live reads (TWiT has historically done pretty well at this, for example).
What are terrible are the tone-deaf pre-packed injected ads that blare out of your speakers into your skull.
> I tend to listen to those in podcasts when they are truly one-off live reads (TWiT has historically done pretty well at this, for example)
TWiT uses pre-recorded ads pretty often, and has admitted to trying AI-read ads which mimic the host. I prefer either to the meandering before and after banter that bookends the off-the-cuff ad reads. Thankfully it appears their paid Club TWiT excludes both ads and annoying wind up / wind down around them.
(Full disclosure, I work for a company that facilitates ad-free podcast offerings)
100%. A couple of the podcasts I'm listening to are moving more towards pre-packed ads and they are horrible. I think what advertisers don't realize is how much more the live ads are worth. I'm much more likely to listen through the hosts riff while doing an ad read vs someone who sounds like they are talking through a forced smile.
That's partially why I don't want to pay for YT Premium right now... The ads are getting really bad, always being placed at the worst moment of a video, and I don't want to reward YT for destroying my user experience. They made their product worse, just to force me to pay $15/mo because I'd get so frustrated with how bad it has gotten.
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.
It would be one thing if it was just a little couple kb image banner ad but this stuff is just abusive to your local resources. Taking the moral high ground and unblocking ads like some HN users seem to do basically says "I will tolerate an underperformant computer and diminished battery life for the rest of this devices shortened lifespan, and contribute to the ewaste crisis ever sooner"
> It would be one thing if it was just a little couple kb image banner
I guarantee that if all ads were just a little couple kb image banner then the majority of the anti-ad people would decide that this was unacceptable to them for some new reason — or they’d rely on their stance that all advertising is immoral (see elsewhere in these comments for many examples of this).
My local newspaper is just unusable without a blocker. Multiple megabytes of ads and dozens of trackers all trying to load in a random sequence. You start reading a story and the site just loads something and moves the text.
My only ad blocker is the pi hole. So whenever I am away from home, I am always shocked and amazed at how bad ads have gotten. On many sites I feel like an archaeologist digging through layers of ads to find the one tiny morsel of actual content.
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.
Content is also advertisement. They benefit just as well from platform-specific content that, statistically, puts ads in front of a lot of people, and more relevantly, creates a market for people to pay YouTube to place their content in front of people.
I'm far from convinced this isn't relevant to YouTube history with controversial content. I think somebody is paying to do that, covertly or overtly. Sort of payola? I think there are ways to pay off YouTube to promote your content.
Heck, content is also advertisement in the sense that the show/film you're watching is an advertisement for all the related merchandise that will be on store shelves the same day as the media is published :) I wonder how many $millions Baby Yoda has brought in for Disney?
Well, content providers provide less consumable content now (while the raw amount explodes), that is for sure, we see it, we experience it. The result? We do not try consuming content since we see there is much less, but with much more garbage and adverse consequences.
We - wife, me, and some I know - cancels providers as they are not serving the consumer, and we feel that. Let them sell their service to ad companies then, when less and less consumers go to their site, good luck with that in the long run. They lost one customer for sure, and looking at the mood here there may be more, or will be more if they carry on like this.
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.
Lying is too often cheaper and more effective than honestly building something useful and compelling. There is also the background noise of so many competitors and other things, folks feel compelled to exaggerate to build name recognition.
Then there is the fact that we consumers struggle to maintain and communicate a blocklist of bad actors.
And even good actors can sell out or slide into mediocrity.
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.
Not sure why it's shocking. In the same space, you pay for cable and still are shown ads. Same for movies at the theater. Though most of the ads are for new shows/movies to encourage recurring usage/payment.
The ads could be worse: drugs that treat cancer, diabetes in 1 month, supplements that cure Hepatitis and so on. If YouTube can show fast food and gambling ads instead, that would be a nice improvement.
I assume because the ads are in language and region Google don't care as much, there's less priority or resource to filter them out. Maybe they should ask Meta how to do it since FB and Insta ads are way more "reasonable".
What good are ads for cancer drugs? If I have cancer then I'll go to a doctor who should know the relevant drugs. If I don't trust my doctor, I'll get second opinions from other doctors. If I don't trust any doctor, I'll hit the books and start doing searches of the academic literature. At no point is it rational for me to turn on the television and see what cancer drugs are being advertised on it.
I believe the GP is saying that in their language, they're getting advertisements for over-the-counter cancer "treatments".
Sure, if everyone is smart, well-educated, rational, and has access to affordable licensed doctors, there isn't much harm in such garbage advertising. However, the problem is that these advertisements are being displayed to people who live in the real world.
The Doctors are being privately lobbied behind the scenes. Then the patient comes in with the idea for the drug. A preemptive match is already made in heaven. It's capitalizing and profiteering off medical conditions. What they do to Doctors is probably far worse than their idiotic ads warning you of sudden heart failure, stroke, etc.
> 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.
Why did they do it?
Money.
They wanted more money and you wouldn't stop watching your sport.
It's not a surprise. If given the option, people will actively shop to get the best bang for their buck. Given two options, they will opt for the one that gets them the most of what they value.
Why did you do it?
Because you valued your viewing habits over other things.
I had to turn off the sports. Used to love NHL (and TV), but it was not worth the dark destructive undercurrent in my life. It really robbed me of happiness and potential. It became much easier just to turn hockey off. If a service does not have an ad-free version, it is simply not available to me.
The irony is that, in Japan, the NHL offered a service with no advertising for a fair price.
I assume making a decent return off a large number of people is of less importance than fleecing true fans.
I used to think the Japanese baseball league was insanely commercial due to it using corporate sponsor names instead of the city name (Hanshin Tigers, Yomiuri Giants, etc..) but in retrospect, the commercialization was only skin deep while the NHL is completely and unapologetically corrupted.
You can’t. To believe that everything has to have some sort of grass root, personal choice-based solution, is a fallacy¹. You could not boycott your way out of Standard Oil.
Stop paying them anything. Get everyone you can to stop paying them anything.
The transphobic fiasco with bud light made it pretty clear that boycotts WORK, if only we had the balls to do them, and maybe endure minuscule """suffering""" to continue them.
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.
Newspapers were never free of ads even with subscripts. Ads subsidized your subscription. $0.25 for a full news paper and $1.50 for the bigger sunday addition is never going to pay for everything on its own (assuming a subscription actually lowered the full rate).
The only thing that I recall that was ever advertised as free from ads with a subscription was premium cable like HBO. Even magazines were full of ads. Hell, certain magazines were bought more for the ads than the content (thinking fashion mags).
Back when newspapers involved paper, providing an ad-free experience for people that subscribe would have been extremely expensive: A very large part of a newspaper's footprint was actually setting the paper into pages in a sensible fashion, printing and distribution. Printing an extra copy of the paper that has no ads would have been quite expensive, regardless of advertiser revenue.
Today, it'd be quite simple, as most ad blockers prove every day. I'd argue that today, many small newspaper websites are virtually unreadable without an ad blocker. 2-3 videos playing all at once, plus regular banner ads, while trying to make close buttons invisible. The same number of ads appear in a mobile browser too, leaading to basically no space to read any of the actual content.
I'm not buying your premise. You seem to be implying that the cost of running the paper could have been sustained by subscription only foregoing any ad sales. I'm saying the exact opposite in that even if 100,000 people paid full price for the paper every day, that would not raise enough money to run the paper. This is why it is said subscriptions were subsidized by the ads. To eliminate ads, the subscription price would have to increase significantly beyond what people would accept.
You seem to only be coming from the expense of layout which is just not true. The world has increased in size from only paying attention to the local news with maybe a few specialty sources. Now, you can have access to news from any country at any time. Expecting people to pay for subscriptions to that is not realistic either. So since people are not paying for subscriptions, each company is depending on income for other places which has always been ads. The key difference today for me is that ads can now be malicious beyond their original purpose. Seeing an ad in print or tv or hearing one on the radio was never able to drain you of resources whether that be compute power or something much more nefarious. Because they cannot (or will not) control that, they have lost all sympathy from me about ads.
As someone who has worked with WSJ/NYT/LAT/Tribune on adtech in the past: that completely ad free subscription cost is significantly more expensive than you think.
Partially because those sponsored articles (native ads) pay a lot of money to be there.
Partially because they'd have to build and support a whole other version of the newspaper without ads, and if the subscriber count is low, that engineering/infrastructure cost isn't spread as much.
Those Google display ads do pretty much pay garbage though.
When we ran the numbers, it'd have to be a 3-5x increase in subscription cost to replace advertising completely. None of those newspapers think anyone would be willing to pay those costs.
The usual reason is people who are willing to pay to avoid ads are also the most valuable people for advertisers to advertise to. That decreases the value of their advertising business, which means they have to push the subscription prices up even further, which may make the business unviable. Especially because they have to compete with other businesses that will happily copy their content and put ads on it with no paywall.
I know this isn't exactly the same, but I used to work at an adtech startup and my boss was very savvy in the industry, and right in front of me did some quick napkin math showing that Hulu probably makes about $20 a month off of people in the free tier, and only $13 from their ad-free* subscription.
So by subscribing Hulu makes less money off of you.
The main reason is video ads pay the most, which doesn't apply to papers, but does apply to websites. So what's their excuse now?
Yeah but it's not against their TOS to buy the clothes and cut the logo out.
> Does your computer have an Intel Inside sticker on it?
Yeah but it's not against their TOS buy an Intel processor and take the sticker off.
> An Apple maybe?
Yeah but it's not against their TOS to buy an Apple laptop and put a sticker with a 4 pane window on top of the Apple sticker.
> Perhaps it's emblazoned with Lenovo.
Perhaps it is, but it's not against their TOS to put an IBM sticker over the Lenovo sticker.
> How about the car you drive? Does it not proudly display the manufacturer's logo? Did you ask the dealer to remove their stickers and plate surround?
I was being cheeky and besides, the person I was replying to didn't mention Terms of Service. So this is a new argument. But it's not against the TOS to block ads on WSJ, FT, or NYT either. Here's NYT:
Why are you being cheeky and muddying the waters in a serious discussion?
We're discussing more than if the WSJ, FT, and NYT allows ad blockers or not. We're discussing how stupid it is that a service shows ads in the first place for premium service people pay for. WSJ and NYT are only two examples.
We're discussing how there's precedent to pay for a service and still see ads and how it wouldn't be a shock if Google pulled the same stunt.
We're discussing concepts and ideas, not specific companies and their policies.
Furthermore, the link you provided has a section "4. PROHIBITED USE OF THE SERVICES" which is an overly broad section that reads exactly like Google's TOS and could be interpreted as banning ad blockers if NYT wanted to say that's its purpose.
If left uncontested, yes, yes, yes, and yes. All of those are ads, offensively and intolerably on things I paid for.
I don’t understand how everyone else seems to be okay with this norm. I dyed the advertisement on my rain jacket black to make it invisible. I disassembled my phone dock and ripped out the glowing advertisement. I sought out a foil-backed sticker to fully block the illuminated advertisement on the lid of my laptop. I ordered custom printed stickers to cover the advertisement on the frame of my bicycle. I ripped out the advertisements embroidered onto my shoes.
As I look around my house, I see sanctuary from our dystopia.
Slightly expanding on my previous comment, the only “individual billboard” logos that would seem justifiable in principle would b certain foss projects since the overall community benefits from greater awareness. With anything else, the increased brand awareness only serves to further enrich that company.
Is at least my quick assessment. Interested in your thoughts
Agreed, there’s a distinction between absentmindedly promoting commercial schemes and deliberately promoting causes that you think are worthwhile. I’m certainly not without agenda and several of the commercial ads I’ve covered are replaced by designs with socio-political purpose.
No, no and yes but also yes for me. I won't say it's particularly common, but there are absolutely some of us out there that will go out of our way to be a free walking billboard. For me personally, a manufacturer identifying their product is fine but anything else I will aggressively squash (e.g. My car manufacturer's logo is fine, but I absolutely make the dealer remove anything they've added with their name/logo on it for every car I buy).
Specifically that car point struck me the other day when I was walking on the street and took in how blatantly car manufacturer logos are plastered about. The subconscious brand awareness is a hell of a thing
I was a subscriber more than 10 years ago but gave up when they started to have pushy, navigation blocking ads. It was like being unable to turn page before some time passed on the ad. How hostile is that?! Very! Analogy: you see an ad in the street and you are not allowed to walk on for some period of time, forced to stay at the ad. I requested ad free subscription for elevated price or promising cancellation, it became a cancellation.
I still buy the paper format occasionally, I love their articles - it is also easy jumping over ads in the physical format -, but I will not subscribe for paper version due to the amount of paper used and my trust in their electronic version is gone. I did not try their app since (and my tablet use sinked too, I might need much more push now to give a second try).
> I requested ad free subscription for elevated price or promising cancellation, it became a cancellation.
I listen to the audio edition nowadays, that has no ads. Also, I haven't found any good alternatives to it. The weekly issues and the regional columns are a very convenient format for me to consume the news.
Whats even worse are the newsletters from news organizations imo. There's no ublock origin for Apple Mail content viewers. I either lose content like imagery or I have to go all in and load all their remote content, tracking pixels, the works. The ads will be for things like "pills the doctor doesn't want you to know about" and other phishy sounding stuff.
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.
I have seen ads that are OVER ONE HOUR LONG, often on long-form interviews. Am I really the demographic that "they"re trying to sell me late-night-infomercial bullshit?!? ...I guess so.
Don't remember since I browse random stuff that don't absorb me too much as I fall asleep. The only thing I know is it was some religion related crap... seriously. Like a protestant sermon or something.
>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).
And now some musicians are whining and saying that we should stop using spotify, because it doesn't pay them as much as they want - that it is as bad as piracy.
You can't win with those people.
> 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.
Much longer than that! The first really user-hostile move was pop-up ads, then pop-UNDER ads, which were just offensively intrusive, so bad that all the browsers stopped them. Then the advertising industry started to innovate, and it became necessary to block everything. I've been blocking ads since the late 90s.
Once they lose you, once you get so pissed off that you go to the trouble to install and configure an adblocker, they NEVER get you back.
They do not understand this, and so they'll simply push more people to adblockers. Maybe Chrome's manifest v3 won't suffice, so people will move to Firefox or Brave to do it. Either way, Google loses.
> 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.
>Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.
I think there's a distinction between that and the tragedy of the commons. Advertisers face a game theory scenario where they can increase the obnoxiousness of their individual ad, which will enrich themselves, but it hurts the industry as a whole because users are marginally more likely to figure out a way to block ads altogether after seeing an obnoxious ad.
But it is only fitting since advertising is an arms race regardless of the nature of online advertising or the ability to be obnoxious. All companies would be better off if they collectively decreased their marketing budgets, but that would require coordination and a way to guarantee no one defects.
I'm mostly blocking ads due to security and performance concerns.
those aren't static images, nor text anymore - but javascript trackers.
And i won't be turning off my adblocker ever. no matter how nicely someone asks. If you block me from your site, I'll find the content i want somewhere else. The risk is too high, and frankly - it's my device, and i can pick what software i want to run on it(for now).
side note about hostile sites: if you mess up with the scrolling in any way I'm immediately leaving the site.
But they do not take my second inch, let alone a mile. I simply avoid places with agressive ads, like youtube (and the products advertised), and TV in general long long ago. I stopped to care about the content, not least because the content thinned up with plethora of ad hungry nothing, uninteresting, deceiving, ad optimised nothing. Content pushed on me based on ad strategy and not my interest, navigating to something truely similar or favoured is obscured (just like in movie streaming services wich pushes trends and obfuscates navigation). Not to mention the shameless tracking. No point going to such places, there is plenty of life elsewhere.
One is that to pay more for an ad the advertiser wants to know which user explicitly interacted with it or saw it. So non-intrusive ads on the sides of a UI are by far lower in value during sales.
The other is that the one way to increase interaction and value is to prove that the ad is the only thing the user was exposed to, ie. eliminate everything else.
So what we get today is an entire aesthetic and de-cluttered look. Even when you pay for premium the design is still made so that the machine can read into what your eyeballs are up to.
Google was one of te first that served ads that were small, text based and didn't pop-up or do anything shitty (those were still the macromedia Flash times).
Oh how the turntables... shorts everywhere and ads longer than usable content.
Should also mention that on YT the situation is unbearable. I use pihole but was unable to use it properly for YT ads.
I have kids that sometimes get to watch something on YT. I can control what they watch but there were way too many bad surprises of gross or scary content in the ads (often by proxy, e.g. the ad of a cable TV company would showcase their explicit or horror offerings..). Using YT kids made no difference, really.
I have YT premium now, at least for the time being.
Its a vicious cycle. The more adblocking people do the worse that ads get since they need to be more agressive to make more money to make for the people who use AdBlock.
“You made me do it” is a standard gaslighting technique, common in abusive relationships. If they want compliance, they just have to be nice. A sequence of 3 ads, some of them uninterruptible, before a 10-minutes video, plus breaks in the middle is not being nice, particularly as they jump up the volume to painful levels every time.
No amount of content justifies subjecting ourselves to this brain washing. And I’m not even talking about malware in ads (not on YouTube, but since you mention Adblock…)
Part of it is justifying the ad load by comparison with American broadcast TV (up to 18 minutes of every hour), while not recognizing that that level of ad load is not well known in Europe, for one thing.
That’s a false equivalence, actual power is only on one side. I was personally affected by this; I used to watch YouTube regularly until their ever more obnoxious ads put me off for a couple of years. So yeah, my behaviour is the consequence of their abusive behaviour over the years. I did not start this and I am not trying to shame them into compliance.
Now I watch without ads, so sue me. I’d grant them the moral high ground the day they stop tracking me across the internet and put a reasonable amount of ads time before their videos (interrupting a video is a deal breaker, I cannot believe that so many years after TiVo some companies still think it’s a good idea). They want to play whack-a-mole, that’s their right. But then it is my right to control what’s running on my computer. In the end, if they persist to treat me as a nuisance even though I used to be a model consumer before their hostile behaviour put me off, then they’ll lose me for good and I’ll just send some money Nebula’s way. At least they seem to respect their users.
It's wrong. In a magical world with zero ad blocking, advertising is still multiple different players all competing with each other who will jump at ramping up effectiveness no matter how damaging it could be. It's a competition for a limited resource and there's a ratchet effect.
Adblocker use is not responsible for Google's need to constantly impress its shareholders every quarter.
Don't forget YouTube used to let you skip all ads, it wasn't even that long ago.
None of this is the result of blockers. It's the result of Alphabet needing to earn more money and becoming increasingly desperate to snatch up every little bit left on the table.
On the plus side, this is only making it easier to compete with them. They're increasingly turning YouTube into what broadcast television has become; a raging dumpster fire of advertising and propaganda.
While annoyance certainly plays a role, it's not the primary reason why I block ads.
No, I block ads because they are fucking malicious and dangerous. As far as I'm concerned, an ad in this day and age is literally malware. I am not going to even try and tolerate that bullshit. Adblockers are an anti-virus measure.
Ads are malvertisements and deserve to be blocked with the fury of a thousand suns.
Were you there, when pop-ups were a thing? Like, you opened a site, and there was this new window loaded? Ads has not got that much more obnoxious. For real.
It is mainly that the internets have become 'real life' instead of some hidden away tech thing for us. We can't be deprived alone anymore without society falling down in pieces around us ...
> 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.
I am willing to give Youtube money just to get rid of the ads once and for all, especially on my TV ... But I can't because Premium isn't available in my country.
> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium...
I'm subscribed as well, but it's becoming less valuable as more and more content creators run sponsored ads in their videos and these play regardless of your subscription status.
I open the youtube app, search for something, click on the first result to see if it's what I want and I have to watch two 15 seconds ads. Thank you but no.
My list or reasons I go hard against ads, even though I can appreciate quality ads that can serve a legitimate purpose:
1) tracking me across in serval ways, only making me more fanatical about it by selling my information and activity to who know whom.
2) malware/virus injections … it still happens way too often.
3) garbage ads; for garbage products, products/services I just purchased, or the infamous scam ads to defraud people.
YouTube has gotten progressively worse with its ads over time, though. They're slowly turning up the heat to eventually boil the frog. Without opposition, YouTube ads will eventually be as bad as TV ads have become.
On that note, I haven't watched network TV in over a decade because to the ads. None of the content on offer on cable and satellite TV is worth the asking price of both a subscription fees and ads, especially when most of it can be found in other legitimate sources, usually in higher quality.
> YouTube ads will eventually be as bad as TV ads have become.
There's no evidence of that though. Users will easily close a tab because the preroll ad is too long, because there are plenty of other immediate things on the internet. In a way that TV viewers had no choice, because the other channels are just as bad.
Yes, YouTube ads have been getting a little longer from their previous almost-nothing. But YouTube has also been extremely conservative in that direction, as they know they're walking a fine line. The idea that ads will get as bad as broadcast TV seems exceedingly unlikely.
I have YouTube premium but sometimes I can't login to my Google account and have to use plain, ad-infested version of YouTube and it's really unusable.
I swear that listening to a 3 minutes content I am played at least 6 ads of at least 20 non-skippable seconds and in volleys of 2 or sometimes even 3 ads one after another.
It's not "getting terrible", they're already way past that.
I've watched YouTube for years and years and I've never in my life encountered more than 2 ads in a row. I've never encountered an unskippable ad longer than 15 seconds, and every ad that is skippable is skippable after just 5 seconds. And while ads are often included at the start, once they've played I've never seen ads get inserted before the 3-minute mark -- they're usually around minute 4 or 5.
(It's true that after a 3-minute video finishes playing they've started playing another set of ads, but you can just hit pause and navigate to your next video. You never need to watch them.)
I've never encountered anything even remotely close to 2 minutes of ads to watch 3 minutes of content as you're describing. It's usually 10 or 15 seconds total. But I'm in the US, maybe there are countries where it's different?
I'm particularly curious if there are objective stats around this. It's crazy to me that our experiences could be so completely opposite.
I don’t understand why this is top comment. Ads on youtube are skippable after a few seconds and you can pay to not watch them. It’s weird to conflate that with some adspam website, which may have a ton of flashy ads and a video.
However, more importantly, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Ads enable content creators to get paid. Frankly, youtube barely eeks out a profit. When you block ads instead of paying to remove them, you’re making it harder for Youtube to justify its existence.
Personally, I think it’s fine to block ads if you’re actually quite poor or if it makes the web unusable. But if you’re just doing it because “web advertisers deserve it” or some other kind of hare brained rationalization, then you should reconsider your position. It’s not rebellious or brave to use an adblocker when there are affordable paid ad free experiences, it’s simply theft.
I'm not sure how variable this is, but I've definitely experienced unwatchable levels of ads (mostly on mobile/Android). Having an ad before you even know if the content has interest is already a challenge (eg a how to video), and most that I see are in the 5-15sec range before watching and every 5-10min after that.
However, I have had a dual 30sec ad before starting a video that repeated every 2min on something I actually wanted to watch, but quickly stopped, because it was "unwatchable". I consider that level to be at about 10% of watch time (regular TV is about 25% 8/30 min in larger blocks).
I block ads by default and turn it on for the sites that I want to support. Main reason for blocking by default is privacy. I don't want super targeted ad. If I'm on a particular site consuming particular content, that should be sufficient context for choosing what ad to show me. Do not follow me around all over the internet trying to sell me on stuff.
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.
I don't think content creators can choose not to have ads in their videos. Creators can turn off monetization, but YouTube can still play ads, they just won't pay the creator.
I do agree with your general point. Creators can choose to show less ads, and we should prefer channels that choose to monetize less.
EDIT: I'm no longer sure whether YouTube is displaying ads when you do this. The wording I found in their help pages is ambiguous. I think they reserve the right to display video ads if monetization is off, but they are not displaying ads (currently).
Well now I'm intensely curious about this. I've turned off monetization on this video https://youtu.be/liJac6RysE4 . Please let me know if you see any ads on the video, I'm curious if YT will still display them regardless of my input. (So far I'm not seeing any ads).
Edit: Also, when I click on the help icon next to the monetization bubble, the entire Google help article[0] talks about turning on ads. Which seems to imply they're off by default, but they don't mention turning off ads, so who knows if that's just "clever" writing to indicate there's no way to turn ads off.
That said, I checked the parent's video, watching it all the way though... and I also didn't see any ad (and I even watched it on my Chromecast, which usually triggers a lot more ads on Youtube, which is a reason why I never use it for Youtube, but only for Netflix, Disney+, etc.)
I assume that ads might be shown, but only rarely. Probably Youtube wants to run them, to have the flexibility to recoup on some of the infra costs for videos which wouldn't otherwise earn revenue (i.e. they aim net zero for non monetized videos... but this is my speculation)
Partners can choose to disable all types/placements of ads ("skippable video ads", "non-skippable video ads", "pre-roll ads", "mid-roll ads", and "post-roll ads") except for "display ads" (that is, banner ads). As for whether those options actually work, I can only assume so, but the article you linked is specifically about non-partners.
Another point is that the algorithm (which decides what videos are shown on the homepage, sidebar recommendations, notifications, etc. and provides the majority of views to videos) essentially ceases to promote at all any video that's not monetized.
Which I think is fair -- after all, I think they're already doing non-monetized creators a favor by footing the entire bandwidth bill, they don't owe them free promotion!
But it obviously puts a limit on what a creator can do about ads if they are actually trying to make money (even if they don't want any Adsense money and only want to do their own in-video sponsors, or heck, even if they're just looking for "exposure"). If they turn off monetization, they'll drop off the face of the Earth, essentially.
Hence why creators care so much about a single demonetized video, basically it means the video goes into a black hole and earns them basically no views. It exists, but it may as well not.
Many videos feature music that is not free-to-use. Music rightsholders demand their pound of flesh on those regardless of what the creator says. "let's play" videos (where people upload and comment themselves playing) is a gray zone, if only because of the music rights, which can cause ads to show as well.
But keep in mind it would kill YT business model. Youtubers disabling ads means fewer ad views and clicks, so less profit for YT. Less reach also means advertisers agree to pay less, so even less profit. And finally there is no reason to sub to premium, so even less profit.
YT doesn't want to be just a free hosting because transcoding and serving petabytes is expensive I guess, and it does not want to be a paid hosting because it would make YT a commodity and no one wants to be a commodity.
Haven't a substantial number of creators turned towards sponsorships and embedded advertising because they felt like YouTube was being too capricious with their monetization policies?
yes, but those creators typically don't turn off youtube monetization. they just decided they wanted even more money than they were getting from youtube ads.
They effectively can't turn off monetization and get any benefit from the platform. YT doesn't promote non-monetized videos so they may as well be unlisted, cuz that's how many views they'll get. Which I think is fair -- it's a free service, if Youtubers want free promotion it's fair for YouTube to get their beak wet with some of the profits from the video.
and the downvotes on this comment prove it's working. nobody wants to believe that their favourite youtubers are actually the ones who want all these ads, it's much more comfortable to blame the big evil company instead.
Do you not think YouTube will penalize channels for choosing to present less ads? I know that I go with their suggested defaults, on the assumption that I will be punished if I depart from that. I assume that people will run adblockers if they've got any sense: my demographic is probably more likely to do that.
I'm on desktop, adblocking the entire internet to the best of my ability. I daresay if YouTube got pushy with me as a video watcher, I would watch less and would be the better for it. Go ahead, make my day ;)
> Do you not think YouTube will penalize channels for choosing to present less ads? I know that I go with their suggested defaults, on the assumption that I will be punished if I depart from that.
Sounds like grounds for an investigation that could develop into a lawsuit.
Yes, it would fall under the category of 'dark patterns'.
If you're not allowed to block ads, you sure as hell don't have a right to be promoted while refusing to RUN ads. I've assumed the worst for years now.
There isn't a law against "dark patterns", and selective/weighted recommendations aren't even generally considered an example of a dark pattern.
The FTC has brought lawsuits against deceptive practices, like tricking people into signing up for something they didn't mean to -- that might be what you're referring to?
But I don't see any deceptive practice here. YouTube favoring more profitable videos is no different from grocery stores putting candy next to you while you wait to check out. Companies are trying to manipulate you into selecting the most profitable thing all the time, that's the norm. But you still get to choose which video to click on, the same as it's your choice whether or not to buy the candy at checkout.
The court current hold that growing a plant on your own land to feed to your own animals is "interstate commerce"[0]. Lawyers can squeeze some kind of case out of this. You might not win in the courts, but such a lawsuit can also build political support for things like anti-trust enforcement, data protection laws, advertising regulation, etc.
Also, I believe that the algorithm prioritises monetized videos over non-monetized ones. I wouldn't be surprised if videos choosing more ads are also prioritised.
No. I don't think they do that. Creators will naturally want to turn on ads because the return is amazing. YouTube just recommends videos that it thinks individual users will enjoy the most.
If people though of ads as something the creator controls, I suspect many creators would turn off ads, or maybe do a single pre-roll ad, and double down on sponsorships instead. It places the creator much more in control over the exact ad content that plays, and if you manage to get a good match between channel and sponsor can be much less jarring than youtube ads.
Of course youtube wouldn't want that, because they don't get any money out of that deal. And judging by how things are going at Twitch, the platform trying to get a cut by forcing sponsorship deals to happen via their platform just gets people up in arms.
Then you'd protect youtube by pitting creators vs viewers and giving creators incentive to decrease youtube's income.. the total effect of this might not be so great.
Sounds like an absolutely terrible business strategy for YouTube. You can't fix this problem through product decisions when the problem is that they are an advertising company with a profit motive.
>“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.
You touch on what is effectively the biggest problem I see with ads: how aggressive they are.
Interrupting my watching experience so you can show me 15 seconds of some chips bouncing around on the screen only serves to frustrate me and cause me to despise whatever you're selling. It's reminiscent of the "butt in chair" managerial mindset, and does not convey a solid understanding of how an intelligent person makes purchase decisions or meaningfully interacts with whatever you're peddling.
The most effective advertisements are the ones you don't even realize are advertisements. If you've ever searched reddit for product recommendations, you've likely read covert marketing campaigns disguised as casual suggestions. I'm not saying those are better, they're actually just as bad if not worse, because they are fundamentally dishonest.
In my opinion, a tolerable ad is one that does not aggravate me. Non aggressive, non intrusive, quick, to the point, and at least somewhat relevant without having to spy on me. Showing me ads for travel or hotel bookings during a video about videogames or hobby model making isn't useful to me (or anybody I presume).
It's like spam having obvious misspellings as a bandpass filter for lowered reasoning faculties. YouTube ads are made to appeal to the type of person who doesn't use adblocking. They don't care if they're intolerable to you - they already know you're not going to engage.
The question is, if ads are forced on the rest of us and we can't walk into the proverbial other room while they're on, how might we allow ads, make them useless for capturing real data about us, but have them appear valuable?
Spam is unsolicited, and will keep coming no matter what you do.
Web ads are implicitly solicited. You go to websites knowing that they will serve ads. If you don't like it, you can stop going to said websites and no more ads.
Email spam is implicitly solicited. You open your email knowing people are sending you spam. If you don't like it, you can stop opening your email and no more spam.
Don't forget that YouTube will actively "demonetize" videos of small/medium creators, and take whatever ad rev. was made on it for themselves and kill the reach of a video.
Curiously the same content from bigger brands gets a pass.
I think you're being completely disingenuous here. Using an ad-blocker is free-riding and nothing less. We consume a service provided by Google through server capacity, monetization enginea, and improved discovery and by the creators through sweat and tears in creating video content without paying for it. You can consume the content without being exposed to ads while paying Google and the creators their share by buying Youtube Premium but you choose to instead steal it by both consuming it and not paying for it.
It's completely fair to argue that Google makes more than enough money to not have to rely on your ad revenue but after all you're still free-riding.
Users are also part of the content-generation algorithm. Youtube uses my view history in their recommendation algorithm to others. YT uses my interactions the same way, whether it's engaging with the creator in the comments or providing feedback for other viewers or just simply giving it a like.
Yes, I'm consuming the service, but I'm also contributing to it. Less users = less engagement, and maybe that's good for YT's bottom line but it's harmful to the ecosystem.
Using words like 'theft' to describe visiting an openly-accessible webpage with a browser extension that modifies the presentation of that webpage is a bit extreme.
If these sites were truly concerned, why not just put youtube behind a paid username and password like netflix or hbo go or any other streaming content service today? Its because there is massive value in having your content be open to the world and not gatekept behind a subscription. The financials of this business don’t suggest its lacking a means to cover its costs, so why should I pay out my attention for a rate far below I quote anyone else in the market for it?
Did Google ever unfairly dominate competition? Did Google ever use their power tyrannically? Did Google ever release a product or design that caused untold social damage? Does Google deserve stellar treatment because they treat us stellar? Even if you view their ads or buy their product, is the product still not free of exploiting you? Why is it not the correct moralism that we have a right and a duty to take everything from them until they are no more?
Calling it free-riding is somewhat absurd in this framing, though. Is it free-riding of google to literally play music in my house? They don't pay for it, after all. Consider, you could easily frame this such that they are free riding on my trust to let them sell access to other companies. That they can't deliver on that purchased transfer of trust is their problem, not mine.
Ya people want their cake and eat it too. Or we want a free and open internet and that means ads or we really don’t want ads and that means to the app/platform/creator/website to go private and with a paywall. It will never be sustainable to have something free out there without ads and quality. Quality in anything won’t just come out of nowhere when it require investment, sweat and tears.
Alternative take, Google introduced the "customer as the product model", at least they did that at scale. Then honestly, we became dependent on their services as the web became Google, so I don't think it' totally fair to take that view.
No, I think most people are fine with paying for a service, it's just that most people in this thread are completely right.
1.) Google drove up ad coverage in front of videos to the point where I have to watch 2, sometimes 3 ads before I can watch a video. This is insane. I'd rather go back watching TV instead.
2.) Simultaneously, they have made it impossible for creators to support themselves by using ad payouts - indicated by how many creators chose to go with third party sponsorships. So even when I'm using adblock, I'm watching ads, only this time I'm usually okay with it, because I can skip them and even if not, it supports the creators I'm watching (although I'm sure advertisers will slowly figure this out as well and creep over to surreptitious advertising).
> that means to the app/platform/creator/website to go private and with a paywall
You pretend like this isn't already happening. Google is so detached from their customer-base, that Linus Tech Tips is currently starting his own streaming service, that does exactly this. Using their YouTube platform as a way to advertise it.
Larger content creators will just build their own platforms, as Linus proves.
> No, I think most people are fine with paying for a service
> I have to watch 2, sometimes 3 ads before I can watch a video. This is insane. I'd rather go back watching TV instead.
Your 2 statements contradict themselves. If you and others are fine to pay for a service and hate to watch 2-3 ads then why not take YouTube Premium? Now you just said you will prefer not to pay and go watch TV.
> they have made it impossible for creators to support themselves
You can literally pay a subscription to a channel you want to directly support now. How is that not helping to support content creators.
> You pretend like this isn't already happening.
I think you start to reading way too deeper here because I was literally pointing that it is happening and has to happen if people want quality. Or you go free with ads or you go private with a paywall.
Truth is you are already kinda answering what is happening right now:
> So even when I'm using adblock, I'm watching ads, only this time I'm usually okay with it, because I can skip them and even if not, it supports the creators I'm watching (although I'm sure advertisers will slowly figure this out as well and creep over to surreptitious advertising)
During Covid the internet ad market exploded but the price also went way down. If it’s ads on Facebook Google or even YouTube. A lot of people are more on the web with lock downs. They shop even more on Amazon and e-commerce shops. But this influx of new (regular) users made also cost of the ads per user crash because of the influx itself and because of the financial situation.
Coming back on YouTube that’s when and why YouTube started to show a lot more ads before it was 1-2 it went to 2-3 or so. And usually not skipable.
Add to this like you said in your comment people that want to support a channel and do watch ads but never click, advertisers will “figured it out”. Well they already did figured it on out. And they is them and Google Facebook etc. The market already corrected itself at the beginning of Covid. That’s why now you have to see more ads on YouTube because the cost per click is way down.
We can’t just zoom in and avoid all the economic situation. Forget how we got here. And avoid to see what YouTube offers to support content creators and yell that they don’t do a thing when really everything is already there. The question is are people defending this narrative going to fight to always things free with no (little) ads or are they going to put their money where their mouth is?
Still not free-riding when you consider the data they are collecting from viewers even with ad-blockers. People still have accounts to save channels/videos, lots of people or households have Android phones that makes it stupidly easy to link to people, places and purchases. There is significantly more value they still gain from it even if youtube itself operates at a loss.
Maybe if they weren't allowed to collect so much information, or had to pay back the users they are collecting data on could I see the point that ad-blocking is free-riding.
> The average YouTube content creator makes less than 0.02 per ad view
The number I see tends to fluctuate between $1 to $1.50 per 1,000 views, or about $0.001 to $0.0015 per view. (YouTube makes around twice that in direct gross revenue, and splits it up 55% to 45% between the creator and the platform, respectively.)
This obviously fluctuates substantially: if you produce videos that are viewed by prime demographics advertisers are more interested in, you tend to make more. YouTube also has better individual deals signed with their topmost creators, giving them a better revenue split or a different advertiser pool that’s willing to pay more for the most popular YouTubers. Shorts and livestreams also work a bit differently, but that’s too complicated to get into here.
Sponsors, meanwhile, typically offer massively better rates. Estimates very a lot more, and it depends on your individual track record as a creator, but I’ve seen numbers thrown around ranging from $2.50 to $10 per 1,000 views at the lower end. The biggest creators are apparently being quoted $50 or more per 1,000 views, and that number goes up exponentially as your channel grows.
That’s why seemingly every YouTuber is taking those deals, they’re unbelievably lucrative compared to the integrated YouTube ads. Combine that with a healthy Patreon and it’s no wonder why YouTubers are still able to do so well despite Google infamously difficult behavior.
Very disingenuous argument. That's their revenue, not their profit, and that includes their entire business, not just YouTube. Or is your point just that Google is big, therefore even if YouTube is operating at a loss (I don't know if it is or not) they should maintain that indefinitely just because they can?
No one is forcing YouTube to operate, at a loss or otherwise. They can stop any time they want.
If YouTube disappeared tomorrow it would arguably the best thing that happened to internet video since its inception. You can only imagine the variety of services that would spring up, maybe a standard way of finding and viewing videos would emerge.
People don't realise how damaging (essential) monopolies are, abusive or not.
By your standards, Google is acting even more juvenile. It will not defeat or reduce adblocking and will likely alienante paying customers. It's less than pointless.
Which is so strange, to have a government agency recommend violating terms of service. I suppose they can't advocate for better legislation or regulation of ads themselves.
1. Youtube creators move to sponsors where Youtube isn't getting a cut, which means youtube has to keep the lights on with only ad revenue.
2. Many users want to keep blocking/avoiding ads & don't want to pay. So they want to use the service for literally free. What other monitization method do you propose?
3. Their parent company's revenue doesn't matter. Is Google expected to run a free service that is very expensive and serves billions of users?
4. Youtube demonitizes people to keep advertisers on the platform. Users blocking ads & not paying ("freeloaders") only exacerbate the issue by being a drain on resources and further incentivizes Youtube to keep striving to preserve revenue by demonetization.
>>“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.
Before I switched to using adblocking on my phone for youtube (like I did for my desktop), I made sure I will never ever buy whatever crap was presented in YT ads.
I believe I am not the only one for which ads have a contrary effect to the desired effect.
So, some companies payd Youtube money and end up actually losing money from sales.
When I was younger, and more energetic, I would actually seek out an owner's website after seeing an advertisement. There would be a big splash ad for a movie on IGN or something, and I'd find the site for the movie, find the email address, and write some internet-crazy rant about how I'd never watch the movie, and tell everyone I knew that the movie sucked, all because I was shown an advertisement for the movie. It was pretty immature of me, but I felt so strongly about it at the time.
I am looking to build a house, and a few days ago I was driving on the highway and saw a billboard for a custom house builder. I made a mental note never to contact that company. If your ad is on the highway, you are not building my house :)
Always wondered how anyone picks an attorney from a billboard, as it seems that would be a negative signal but it must work because there are so many of them.
I get very suspicious of things I see advertised too much. It either implies that the company has way too much money and is blowing it on ads, implying some predatory monetisation, or that it's spending money it doesn't have on ads, which means it's going to either implode in a few months or have to jack up prices.
Remember: "Ad-supported content" isn't really ad-supported, it's supported by the customers of whoever's buying the ads.
>3. Google made nearly $70 billion in Q1; they're not hurting at all, especially their executives.
This is disgusting. Google's executives do an incredible amount of valuable work, easily thousands of times more than other employees, and deserve rich compensation packages. People need to be willing to pay a lot for Premium, or watch more ads, so that these executives can afford bigger yachts.
Not me, I fully support billionaires in yachts. I think they should all have yachts and spend lots of time with the exuberant aquatic wildlife off the Iberian coast.
>3. Google made nearly $70 billion in Q1; they're not hurting at all, especially their executives.
The CEO of YouTube is probably sweating as their performance is tied to YouTube net profit. YouTube is one of many revenue streams that Alphabet will be tightening over the years. I expect the Android division to also start bringing in revenue that is not connected to Google Play.
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.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but as I was reading through the list of features this doesn't have, I just got more and more excited. My watch pattern is pretty much watching videos to solve problems or research some particular thing, and I feel like I find most of them through Google or YouTube search. The recommendations can be pretty good, but there's always those clickbaity, completely unrelated ones mixed in, trying to pull me into a totally separate rabbit hole.
Yattee + Tailscale + Piped greatly increased my consumption of Youtube videos.
Missing most of the features mentioned (recommendations, watch history, google account, shorts) are all pros instead of cons to me. Just an app for intentionally watching content in a no-frills private environment, it's refreshing.
A lot of these alternatives allow you to keep track of subscriptions without a Google account and actually show a chronological feed (which IMO is one of the most annoying things about the official YouTube app). For mindless watching TikTok is my default.
I actually have tried to use TikTok a few times. However I live in a country where I'm not a native speaker and there is no way to set the TikTok region to anywhere except your geographic location. Even when using a VPN, reinstalling the app, and creating an entirely new account, it still knows exactly what country I'm in. That's scary enough to make me not use it much.
But I was bored so I figured, the algorithm is supposed to be good right? It should learn I want English videos pretty quickly.
Nope, I spent about an hour searching exclusively for videos in English, and 99% of all the recommendations were still in Vietnamese. I guess I should be grateful that one privacy invading timewaster is unavailable to me!
I use Vinegar[1] with Safari on all platforms which provides HTML5 video (and PiP etc) but with the other YouTube features. I have the Subscriptions page bookmarked so I get a reverse chronological list from my favourite creators. You could also use channel RSS to do this without an account.
I also use Vinegar, it's great. I recommend the developer's other apps, too. They tend to be simple apps which do one useful thing well, and also have a sense of humour.
Musi on iOS [0] is a fantastic YouTube client which removes ads. The trick, albeit slightly inconvenient, is to copy/paste the exact YT title you wish to view. The search functionality isn’t that good. Some things live like streams don’t work however this has never been an issue for me.
I pay for Premium. Sadly it doesn't stop creators from inserting their own ~ads~ sponsorships into the videos directly so Sponsorblock is still a non-negotiable component of Youtube for me.
I highly recommend Nebula. Not only is it adfree and sponsor free, it’s also much more curated than YouTube so the odds of finding good quality videos there are very high.
Plus I paid for the lifetime subscription there so … no subscription for me.
I looked at all (I think?) of the people on Nebula. I only recognize a few and none of them are people I follow on Youtube. The average quality might be higher, but it doesn't seem like Nebula is a platform for the niche YouTubers that make the platform worthwile for me.
And it is inferior since it lacks sponsor block. I have premium that I use on my phone and it is pretty annoying that pretty much each video still has ads in them in the form of a sponsor segment
At some point I will probably cancel my subscription and use an unofficial app with sponsor block. And that aldo hopefully blocks shorts ad well
It's cheaper if you pay annually (129usd, afair). And YT Premium also includes access to YT Music, which is also ad-free. Plus the annual subscription doesn't auto-renew.
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.
The commercialization of the internet ruined it for the most part. Ads and tracking everywhere and people are centralized in a handful of networks of a handful of companies that want to make the most profit at all costs.
It's refreshing to see how people are starting to revolt on platforms like Reddit and Twitch. People are done with this stuff. Even if it is only a small percentage of the total amount of users, it allows for new platforms to thrive and grow, while the old platforms slowly decay. I hope this day will come for Youtube as well.
It’s too late for that. On YouTube even if you pay for premium, you still get ads in the form of sponsored segments, and probably in the recommendation algorithm (I’d be surprised if big corps had no way to pay to bump their videos in search results).
More and more platforms will try the « paid subscription with ads » in the coming years.
When people recognize how cognitively harmful ads really are, there will be a movement to pirate and rehost all content decentrally, edited to remove interstitials and sponsored segments.
Ads targeting children would be an international crime if our world was just.
People have been warned about the cognitive harm from advertisements for probably over 100 years now. Its not going anywhere unfortunately, its too profitable.
The sponsored segments as in advertising that creators have negotiated directly? I have YouTube Premium and that's the only type of ad I get, I don't get anything else.
When a free experience can do better than the premium experience, your product have a problem.
I’m not even sorry about SponsorBlock, creators still get their money, I don’t have to watch the sponsored segment, and advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it. So it’s zero impact on the creator, big impact on my sanity.
> advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it
Actually per-segment viewership gets tracked by YouTube and displayed in the YouTube creator tools. I wouldn't be surprised if those statistics get used when negotiating deals with sponsors.
Yeah, it's unquestionably tracked what exact portions of a YT video your browser actually loads and plays. All playback is controlled by JS and there's no reason YT doesn't hook into those actions and record metrics of every play/pause/seek/mute/etc. user action (in addition to actual network requests made by the browser).
I'd like to imagine a future where I can stream fractions of a cent per minute/hour to the video provider or creator in exchange for consumption of that content. That way I only pay for however much I actually consume and the platform doesn't have to serve me ads to be profitable or sustainable. This could even work without needing to register for an account, using the HTTP 402 Payment Required response status code that already exists [0][1], something your browser could handle in the background.
I know all things cryptocoin are anathema here on HN, but one of the stated goals in the satoshi whitepaper was enabling micropayments. I don’t want to give my credit card info out to every video creator I watch, but what if I could load a digital wallet and pay for streams exactly as you suggest?
This makes sense in my head, if there's an incredibly small cost to watching someone (which would add up if that someone thousands of views) and the experience doesn't revolve constantly around trying making me constantly want to consume something else.
In late 90s and early 2000s, before all Youtube, Facebook and Instagram crap, some passionate people produced content wich was available for free on their web pages.
I don't feel the need for need mass culture and mass entertainment crap, but if I would feel such a need, I would install cable TV and/or pay for it.
This era had shoutads/clickagents, eads and doubleclick for monetization. Banner ads were obtrusive and complained about at the time. I remember text ads google was pushing were actually a welcome change.
Most people are probably too poor to do too many direct payment options, so they'll get choosier about what they consume, and advertisers will still be SOL. Strangely I don't feel any pity for the human-shaped turds.
They're doing another promotion for cosmetics too. And it's not even per sandwich, it's per purchase. So to get them all, you have to have 4 separate transactions.
Nah Reddit is pretty much back to normal. The protest is over.
There are a few big subreddits like r/interestingasfuck that are still closed, but these are more like meme channels than communities. People can just get the same dozen gifs a day from r/damnthatsinteresting, r/whoadude, etc.
That might be true today - but tomorrow (1st July) may be different; that's when the API changes take effect and 3rd party apps no longer work.
If, as is widely (self) reported, many mods and power users interact with reddit via 3rd party apps; we won't see the true impact of the API changes until they're active.
Already, r/all is now a lot more of strange subreddits (trurateme?) that really shouldn't be there and were founded on much smaller communities.
If what the mods say about their tools is in fact true, then:
Next, you're going to see a lot more spam as mods tools are gone and most of America is on a long weekend with a family holiday at the end.
Next, the spammers are going to quickly figure out the mods are asleep/gone and up the crap game even more.
Next, the creeps are going to post more less-than-kosher material, with reporting of it essentially going into unread inboxes by overworked mods.
Next, r/all is going to be, well, boring and gross. All the spam will make you go, huh, that's not very interesting. All the less-than-kosher stuff is going to make you go yuck.
Then, you're going to say to yourself, we'll see how long this lasts. And if it lasts until ~July 8th or so, you'll have found your next reddit fix.
Again, all predicated on what the mods are saying is true.
> Next, the creeps are going to post more less-than-kosher material, with reporting of it essentially going into unread inboxes by overworked mods.
If anything can hurt Reddit, it's that kind of material. Advertisers really, really don't like controversial content, and are the first to pull out of any service that even smells of controversy or political incorrectness, see what happened to Twitter revenues after the Musk takeover. The Reddit protests would have been far more effective if people started posting (and/or moderators stopped removing) gore, porn and Swastikas everywhere, maybe with a sprinkling of racism and homophobia on top.
I can't wait. Reddit will not be able to afford moderation like FB/Twitter (which already isn't sufficient) and will run afoul of content laws in multiple countries. Sweet karma.
Not really though. The impact of the API issue being protested hasn't even occured yet. It'll be up to individuals tomorrow to cope with the objectively worse experience of browing reddit mobile on browser with the ads and annoying naggy pop-ups or the official app. I went back to reddit after the protests, but I fully expect the degraded experience to naturally nudge me towards lemmy and HN. I just can't imagine dealing with that shit when I whip out my phone during a toilet break.
That may look like it, but I think the most important 1% has already left or will leave Reddit this week. Those people are the people that are also the bigfest contributers of the platform, be that as content creators, moderators or app/tool developers.
Even more important: Alternative platforms had a huge surge in usercount. They don't reach the number of Reddit of course, but rheu don't need to. They are their own thing and many do now have enough users to replace Reddit for most usecases of many users.
I've been having a blast on the Ferdiverse for the last few weeks. I'm also trying out tildes.net and squabbles.io. It's all very refreshing and reminds me of early reddit and old forums.
I'm actually somewhat glad this all happend. I'd have never dicovered all these platforms otherwise. And I'm not alone in that perspective
I’m willing to bet that we’re not far off from YouTube including ads even if you pay. We’ve already seen other streaming services start to do this. I think the streaming services will become more interested in ad revenue than they are in paying subscribers.
What about in 5 years, when they've normalized subscriptions with the ad levels you expect today, and their shareholders demand more dividends. What then? Ads baby. Why would it stop when literally every public corporation's ONLY goal is to extract more money out of you, the consumer? Foolish thinking.
What country are you in? I have YouTube Premium and I don't get _any_ ads at all from YouTube, only the sponsored segments from creators directly (and no, NordVPN, I don't need a VPN, yes I know you exist).
Why should they? YouTube Premium literally says ad-free.
Not my problem how Google moderates their videos. They’re pretty efficient in demonetizing videos or entire channels for a couple of swear words or god forbid a nipple somewhere, but taking a mental dump in my head with some useless shit that I don’t care about is apparently fine.
Yes sponsorblock, which I cited above. But at this point, why pay for YouTube premium? If I have to install sponsorblock, I might as well install uBlock origin and get a better user experience for free.
The point is, uBlock origin is supposedly not going to work with the new system. You claimed that there "will be no way to avoid ads", which is strictly untrue. Youtube Premium + sponsorblock is the counterpoint.
Youtube won't take my money even if I wanted to give it to them. I've got no credit card nor the desire to get one, and it's the only payment method accepted.
> I wonder if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance.
Sadly, very unlikely. I recommend AdBlockers and YouTube app alternatives without ads to basically everyone and the vast majority of people would rather watch ads than deal with installing something even if it'll take a few seconds.
There's enough of us (adblock users) for Google to want to take profit from but not enough to make a dent in YouTube's monopoly even if we all moved to something else.
Not impossible. It's not like they're going to DRM this shit with treacherous execution environments and all that. Your browser is still your user agent. I'm sure an extension to bypass this would pop up days after the wide rollout, if any.
> if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance.
Yes, I'm sure everyone is fighting for an audience who refuse to pay and block all ads. And of course the audience who do sit through ads or pay are therefore not going to switch and stick with YouTube.
So unless you want to burn money, I really don't see a viable business model there. Unless you think you can take the initial hit to grow a big enough audience and then force ads and paid subscriptions on everyone to make that money back.
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.
Good point. I don't know what were their expectations for audience reaction. It surely wasn't "oh I need to turn off my adblocker then" or "oh, YouTube Premium, that's neat, lemme get my credit card".
For me, it was, in order:
- "Three strikes" and... what? Red alert! Let me drop everything and read the damn article right now, because it could be "three strikes and you lose your Google account", which is kinda big fucking deal.
- [Couple paragraphs later] oh, only disabling playback. Whew, cancel red alert.
- My kids will not be happy though the first time it hits. Neither will we, because YouTube + AdBlock is the easiest way to play our 4yo and 2yo music, without exposing them to the brain poison of modern advertising at this early age.
- (The next easiest one is NewPipe or yt-dlp, + some manual fixup, + an old phone working as an off-line music player.)
- (Also no joke on brain poison. The way kids react to an ad that occasionally slips by us is a perfect measure of how fucked up advertising is.)
- Oh well, let's hope NewPipe keeps working.
- ... also, what took them so long? I expected this so many years ago that I actually forgot this could happen.
BTW. is it only me, or is 2023 the year of "enshittification" of SaaS shifting into high gear? Like the layoff wave earlier, this also feels like suddenly happening everywhere at the same time.
> Three strikes" and... what? Red alert! Let me drop everything and read the damn article right now, because it could be "three strikes and you lose your Google account", which is kinda big fucking deal.
This is an interesting point. Like, they're not doing it today, but ... yeah, I might checkout the alternative streaming services again when I get a moment. Because you know if this initiative doesn't make a chart start to go upwards, then sooner or later somebody in a board room is going to suggest it. Better to just get off of youtube now.
> (Also no joke on brain poison. The way kids react to an ad that occasionally slips by us is a perfect measure of how fucked up advertising is.)
My kids absolutely freak out whenever they see an ad. "What's happening? Is the TV broken?" I feel like their reaction is proof that I've done at least one thing right as a parent.
Yeah, Google has me by the balls because they have my Gmail account. Time to write to my representatives telling them that Google is too big and I support anti-trust enforcement.
Or migrate to Fastmail. It's painful but doable if you have a gmail address (redirect all mail to your new address with an out-of-office automatic reply about the change). While you're at it, get your own domain (through Fastmail or others) so this never happens again (https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753394-Cus...). I was lucky enough to start out on Gmail with my own domain back when that was free, and it meant that I could migrate to Fastmail without anyone even noticing.
No affiliation with them, just very happy I made the switch.
Honest question: if you and your kids use YouTube to the degree you describe, why not pay for the ad free experience? Why go through so many hoops? Is it the amount of money, is it the principle, or something else?
> YouTube + AdBlock is the easiest way to play our 4yo and 2yo music, without exposing them to the brain poison of modern advertising at this early age.
How is this easier than paying a subscription? You get ad-free YouTube and YouTube music.
I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements. We paid a few dollars more for a family plan and now my father and grandfather no longer watch ads either.
> How is this easier than paying a subscription? You get ad-free YouTube and YouTube music.
First of all, isn't YouTube Music dead? Didn't it die twice already? Secondly, I don't know. I didn't look into YouTube Premium precisely because they're pushing it way too hard. I don't trust Google, I don't trust them handling ads and child-related content on YouTube right, after various YouTube Kids fiascoes. I don't trust people who are pushing their products/services this hard - so far, I was never wrong. Whatever curiosity I had about YouTube Premium, they burned it by the third time in a day I got interrupted by a full-screen "activate a trial" ad, optimized to have distracted people subscribe by mistake.
Not to mention, the way YouTube Premium story evolves, this really feels like extortion. It technically isn't, and they're in their rights, but perception matters - and because of that, I'm willing to spend a lot of effort, and even a lot of money with someone else, just to not have to deal with YouTube Premium, YouTube ads and other YouTube bullshit, while retaining easy access on the relatively infrequent occasion I want to play something from their catalogue.
Good points. Just to answer, Google is dying. Search and YouTube are legacy technology. It looks like they hit a runaway economic train where they must enshittify their product worse to keep the balance shit, which drives more people away, which requires further enshittification. Google is in major trouble.
> I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements.
If most people choose to do this, your premium subscription will start to have a few premium, curated ads, and you'll have to buy the next tier up to get ad-free again. Four years later, you'll have to by the next tier up just to get the premium, curated ads back.
> your premium subscription will start to have a few premium, curated ads, and you'll have to buy the next tier up to get ad-free again.
This has never happened to me even once with any service that I pay for. Hulu is the closest, but they replaced a free tier with a cheap-with-ads tier. Their expensive tier at least once had "some ads that were contractually required" but i never saw them.
And I think if "most people" paid for YTP they'd be drowning in revenue so I doubt that they'd be desperate to screw that up by repositioning YTP as something other than "ad-free."
I might get flamed for this, but while I see the reason to hate and adblock mainstream sites that have awful ads and have no paid ad-free option (see most newspapers and TV stations, especially local ones, everything that has those idiotic bottom-feeding ads at the bottom of an article, Yahoo, AOL, Newsweek, Gizmodo etc.) ... in contrast, YTP is there, it's twelve bucks a month, I don't see why anyone wouldn't pay for it instead of trying to cheat. Not saying it's a crime or even immoral, but they don't owe you video content and trying to subvert the conditions they place on access seems like basically cheating. Kind of like not paying your water bill (when you could afford it) and just using the public restroom next door 10 times a day. Not illegal, but... seems like a bad plan.
Not to mention you basically can't skip the in-video sponsors that content creators need to survive. I pay for premium and watch it on the TV (no SponsoBlock there), so it's getting to a point where I'm holding the fucking remote/phone to skip ads on every freaking video.
Yes. It's in line with the social media industry: the top ~0.1% gets ridiculous amounts of money from sponsors and ads, while everyone else can barely scrape by.
Jeez it's like HN just learnt a new word. Would love to never read enshittification again. Someone uses it on every other submission. This is what happens when cheap money ends and businesses actually need some profitability.
I hope the word becomes more pervasive. I would like to see people start calling tech CEOs "Chief Enshittification Officers". The more the word enters the lexicon, the more the enshittifiers will begin to feel at least some resistance -- similar to the way "second-hand smoke" helped to trigger the decline in cigarette use in the west.
The era of free money may be over, but that doesn't mean we're required to present our gaping maws willingly as receptacles for the enshittifiers' effluent.
No totally. But it was fun while it lasted and if you don't want to help them make some money that's fair enough. No point being too disappointed though. C'est la vie
I hate this word, but it seems to have caught on, so I don't feel like quibbling over the label we use to name the problem - it kind of distracts from the problem itself. Specifically, I gave up after I discovered this term was either coined or popularized by Cory Doctorow - if he's pushing it, I may just as well accept it.
I think it's because it's happening everywhere, even outside of less profitable businesses. I flew United the other week and they played me 4 min of ads blasted through the cabin and on my screen after the safety video, even after I paid for my flight and in my mind, the "United premium". They are a heavily profitable company, making $11 billion Q4 '22, and yet, they consciously decided to make my experience flying United worse for a small profit. To me, that's the difference between "enshittification" and trying to make a viable business.
As for YouTube, what should they do? I see 3 options but maybe I'm missing some:
1. Make everyone pay
2. Make everyone either watch ads or pay, user's choice
3. Eliminate all ads. Since there would be little reason to sign up for YTP once ads are eliminated, they're going to have to have "Pledge drives" where they try to beg you to pay just out of generosity, to support a public service for all. Somehow this seems like it'll never not lose huge amounts of money.
4. (sort of the status quo up till now) Nerds get to block ads, and are subsidized by Premium subscribers and suckers.
Admittedly option 3 sounds stupid, I just can't think of any other options for YouTube where it doesn't cease to exist.
Option 2. is unstable - if you split users into two camps, "watching ads" and "paying", it so happens that it's the second camp that the advertisers want the most to reach: people with disposable income and willingness to spend it. You can expect significant pressure from the business side to somehow advertise to that second group.
This is, in fact, a point raised by many commenters in the thread - it's very likely that Premium will stop being ad-free once it gains a large enough user base. See also: cable TV, or any other paid-for medium whose initial value proposition was... "we charge you for it, but there are no ads!".
Option 3. - nah, can't imagine it either.
Option 4. - that would be going back to the "good years". I don't think it's possible for YouTube - they'd have to somehow undo or reverse the pressures that got them to the situation today. See also: image hosting service cycle - they start bullshit-free, then they get progressively worse, but it's only when they go past the "nerds block ads, whales pay, suckers get ads" stage - when they disturb that balance - that they die.
> This is, in fact, a point raised by many commenters in the thread - it's very likely that Premium will stop being ad-free once it gains a large enough user base.
I mean... then you stop paying and download an ad blocker. Why not enjoy the utopia of paid commercial free video content while it lasts. It's not like you're locked in somehow.
HN readers massively overestimate the willingness of the average person to "fight the power" or whatever. When Netflix cracked down on password sharing, I was fully expecting people to realize how bad Netflix has become and to move on to other platforms. Everyone here thought they were shooting themselves in the foot. But no, the password sharing fix did exactly what they wanted it to do, and subscriptions actually increased. The truth is that no one but a couple of techies know or care what NewPipe or yt-dl are. This move by YouTube will work and there's not really anything we can do about it.
More than half of my non-techie friends have cancelled their Netflix subscriptions in the last few months because of the changes. They were already on the edge of having it anyway, so when Netflix said to pay twice as much they just left.
I'll bet Netflix lost a lot of viewers who were not subscribers though. That might be okay for them, or it might not be. It depends on just how valuable all that mindshare and all those eyeballs are for them above and beyond the subscription costs.
They were good while they were the first-mover with all the good distribution contracts signed. Now everyone and their dog runs their own streaming service, and keeps tight control of any IP they may have. Netflix catalogue was never that big - they were, and are, just very good at hiding it with UI dark patterns; now, it's even smaller. They're trying to back-fill it by funding... well, take your pick:
- Charitable view: a very broad selection of productions aimed at smaller, niche audiences, so that everyone can find something unique they like.
- Cynical view: B-rate shit, going for quantity over quality, and hoping something sticks.
Either way, at this point, many Netflix users have long ago watched everything remotely worth watching on the site, and keep the subscription out of habit (or to keep access to something they like to rewatch). It doesn't take much to lose those subscribers.
Netflix is fine for what it is, it's just there was a golden era where essentially everything was on Netflix for a reasonable monthly fee, and then content owners realized they could make their own streaming services for just their stuff and charge the same amount.
> BTW. is it only me, or is 2023 the year of "enshittification" of SaaS shifting into high gear?
I think the West is escalating its war on user control of anything networkable, and content blocking is a security hole. Western governments prefer that everyone be using the same few monitorable, censorable, and compliant communication mediums in the same way, and is ignoring or supporting massive private media/tech businesses when needed in order to reach that goal.
I wonder how many subscribers watch YouTube on a smart TV? That's solely the reason I subscribe myself as I can't install an ad blocker there and as far as I know things like pi-hole cant block ads in Smart TV streams either.
> because it could be "three strikes and you lose your Google account", which is kinda big fraking deal.
Google accounts are fragile like people; they can suddenly cease operation, for no known reason.
I keep everything Google isolated. It's all in it's own browser or container. As for youtube, it ~only gets watched on a dedicated device attached to a TV.
It's almost like the growth plan of every tech company in the last decade or so... Grow big by burning capital ("to hell with cost of acquisition our CLV will be so high once they're locked in"); build an ad network; realise an operating profit; fight tooth and nail to protect that ad network...
Yeah, with youtube it kind of makes sense that the ads would be there. Uber (TIL), Windows 11, and non-media experiences/services/goods in general looking for ways to sell ads makes my skin crawl.
Just wait until doorbells play you an ad when you press the button.
If given a single magical wish, I wonder how much havoc I could wreck by wishing that immediately before someone intends to purchase ad time or join an ad network or whatever they mystically gain an understanding of exactly what the ROI is going to be for them. My conceit is that 99% of entities that purchase ad time have a significantly negative ROI because at the end of the day the only thing that an advertiser has to be good at selling to exist is their own services.
Things like doorbells/thermostats/light switches I'm not too worried about because they don't have network effects -- I can build my own with very little time investment and it can have better features and more reliability than most other options. The boundary here is currently probably TV's, it's insane to me that I can't get an affordable high quality TV without tracking and ads. I can block the TV at the router, but something like Amazon Sidewalk could be used to get around my sandboxing.
Platforms which require network effects to function like YouTube, Twitter, Email (deliverability), etc have a different dynamic. They're very difficult to abandon once you've come to rely on them.
> Things like doorbells/thermostats/light switches I'm not too worried about because they don't have network effects
Until the government comes in and mandates you need such and such light switch/thermostat/doorbell because of some regulation and conveniently all of the ones on the market which meet that spec are adware-infested nightmares.
And it doesn't even need to be some sort of authoritarian thing. Someone could just offer really cheap, highly functional devices that just happen to also have ads.
You can get your own doorbell, but if everyone else has a doorbell with ads on it, then you kind of still have to deal with it.
"It's okay, I'll just text them instead of going to their front door." Oh they'll consider that too. The free monthly subscription is only valid when you end up with at least 10 ad plays during that month. You don't even have to push the button, the doorbell sees you and plays the ad. And your friends have an incentive to take just a few extra seconds to get to the front door even though they texted back that the door was unlocked and they're right there.
I doubt this will happen but then again I never saw “Gas Station TV” (the most obnoxious ads ever at the fill pump) coming.
I saw a brand new machine for measuring blood pressure at the store and sat down because why not. It had unskippable screens demanding my personal info then it says “gathering your data” for a full THIRTY seconds after measuring my blood pressure which was conveniently just the amount of time to show me a commercial. It made me want to throw up.
I’m sure Walmart threw out all the old blood pressure machines that worked for 30 years and put these abominations in. It just makes my skin crawl how dystopian that machine was.
Question: If you'd rather they didn't exist than be ad-supported, why not just ignore them? Surely VC money wasn't going to keep things like YouTube, Uber, and the rest artificially cheap or free with no strings forever, right?
I feel like due to the VC-enabled delayed monetization that tends to happen with startups, we have all (me included) become convinced that it's sustainable to expect a bunch of ad-free, subscription-free content that just creates itself and teleports onto our computer, forever and ever. TANSTAAFL though.
Maybe? Every gas pump I've gone to in the past half decade has had a TV playing ads at me. So at least part of the oil company ecosystem has an ad component.
I recently moved back to a city where I rarely have to drive, which is nice, but I was driving a lot last year, and "do the pumps have those godawful TV ads or not" became my #1 criterion when deciding where to buy gas. What an unbearable racket!
The key about ads and ad-blocking is simple: I don't care. I don't care about any of these companies. I don't care about their costs or business model. And I don't particularly care about their product, because it is ephemeral and optional to me.
There's far too many people in "business" today who think they provide anything of any real, determinable value to me rather then a passing fancy which will be easily replaced or discarded.
And this doesn't just apply to the content hosters: it also applies to their advertisers. There is nothing of value being advertised these days. It's all misrepresented junk, when it's not outright scams. It isn't worth ever exposing yourself to.
My first thought upon hearing this was "oh, I guess my time lost to youtube-dl + mpv of those few channels I have bookmarked will finally be reclaimed!" (assuming this breaks it)
This move makes zero sense on their part. Cutting off your addicts is a horrible approach to being a drug dealer. You always keep them hooked to your supply, if you wholly interrupt it they'll quickly seek replacement. That's literally what created the illicit opioid crisis - folks lost their prescription opioids and immediately pivoted to street dealers.
Surely youtube has better options than outright blocking users of adblockers... Why wouldn't you first just restrict the quality of videos they can access to extremely low-res. It lessens the bandwidth burden on you, and may be enough to keep them under your spell and away from the competitors supply.
They’ve already done that in a way, I can only watch 720p on mobile with safari + Adblocker and it always always between each video resets to 360p unless I tap to change it every time. To get higher res than that I have to download the app.
> 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.
I use an ad blocker. If I can no longer block ads on YouTube, yes I will just stop using YouTube, or use an Invidious/Piped instance. I think your mistake is believing everyone who uses ad-block also believes ad-free YouTube is worth paying for. I do not.
Further, if Invidious, Piped, NewPipe, and yt-dlp stop working as well, I will simply just watch drastically less YouTube, which is what Google wants.
> Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable.
I don't care. Would I care if YouTube was run by a small company that didn't employ dark patterns or fuel unhealthy addiction of innappropriate content in kids? Probably, but YouTube is run by megacorp, so no, I don't care about their server costs.
It was hard to parse that sentence; I see now what they meant, thank you. Although that also seems to imply ad-block users are indignant. I don't mind leaving YouTube.
It costs a lot of money to run YouTube. If someone wants to make a competitor, they’re free to do so, but most will charge because of how expensive it is or you could use a PeerTube-like system. I pay for YouTube Premium and get value out of YouTube. I’m also an adult with a decent paying job so it’s not a big deal for me.
Maybe the mistake of these conglomerates is getting people accustomed to a certain level of service for free.
It's not a mistake, they do it on purpose. Most tech companies spin up with free offerings to acquire critical mass, and then pull the rug out from under their users once they feel like they can squeeze money out of them without scaring all of them away.
Social media does it (Reddit, Twitter). Video games do it (COD, yearly releases, DLC). eCommerce does it (Walmart, Amazon). IaaS does it (Heroku).
Don't give them the benefit that it's a 'mistake', it's very intentional. CAC is a metric used by all tech companies and is calculated to build network effects and large user-bases. I find it unethical and borderline fraudulent to build these community pillars and then defile them for profit. We'll be left with absolutely nothing free in life, no town squares and no transfer of information without fees.
Whether you or someone else can afford $10/mo is completely irrelevant.
It costs YouTube a lot of money because they pretended to be a free service and allowed anyone to upload enormous amounts of video data which they now have to continue storing and serving.
My child watched a 10 minute video the other day on a machine that doesn't have an adblocker installed on it.
There were 4 "commercial breaks" of 2, unskippable 30 second ads. So, 4 minutes extra.
That's an extra 40% of the original video length (10 minutes). That's 30% of the total length (14 minutes).
It's almost exactly the same as broadcast tv, maybe slightly high? TV averages 12-20 minutes per 60 of tv being ads.
Not really sure what to do with that. It feels like I should be upset, but really, it's proportionate to what already exists and I'm only upset because it's worse than it was 10 years ago.
In your summary, you described:
-A service you pay for (traditional cable) has 30-40 percent of it's time -dedicated to charging you more. (time cost to watch the ads).
-It has gotten worse both traditionally and on streaming media.
-Your child, who is in no way associated with the payment structure, is forced to absorb malicious ads despite being too young to consent to the information being "forced".
-(my observation) Media spot advertising does not work, is largely targeted incorectly.
We're PAYING for our kids to become desensitized to attention-vampiricity and we're unsure if it is ok to be upset? Yes!
So that's not what I was getting at. I was simply comparing the ad content from YouTube to traditional media. The original post claimed that it has too many ads, so I thought I'd do the math. I was surprised it turned out the way it did. Maybe that is just conditioning?
Your argument is a different thing. Valid as well, but completely different.
I'm really puzzled with the ad business model. I always wonder if those silly mobile game ads can get really bring the mobile game developer additional revenue? And even for other ads that look less stupid comparing with those mobile games, I think I had never been attracted to purchase something due to ads, nor I would prefer them when I actually need to buy something (note that I keep my spending minimal, so I am probably not their targets anyway...)
The mobile games are the weirdest to me, because most of them that I see are ads for games that are also primarily ad supported. It’s ads all the way down. I suspect that a lot of it is riding on VC funding that will eventually dry up, breaking everyone’s business models.
You're acknowledging the legitimacy of people who justify their existence by automating "Hey,listen!" That is foisted on every other individual on the planet, without their consent.
The problem is, that in many cases, the amount of ads is higher than the amount of usable content in a video, even without counting the in-video ads (by the content creator). This is also true for many "normal" websites, where (especially some news sites) almost literally beg you to turn adblock off, since they cannot write content without it, and you naively do so once, to be bombarded by 50 different autoplaying ads, popups, overlays, banners, ads that move while you scroll, ads that break content into many small pieces, etc., forcing you to turn the adblock off, or with no alternative, to just close the page, because it's unusable.
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.
How are they user hostile? It's people who do not want to pay for the service and do not want to watch ads to use the service who are the problem. How else should Youtube make money from those users? They must literally lose money on those users.
They steal your data without telling you (complex legal verbiage on multi-pay TOS's is not a justification). After they steal your data, they push you advertisements that are devoid of morality. Even if I buy their service, I cannot go to their home page without them pushing violence, animal abuse, drug use, provocative sex, biased politics, etc. Even if I buy their service, I must expect they are funneling my data in terrible ways. Even if I follow all the rules, the service continues to abuse me.
Paying for services doesn't prevent advertising companies from continuing to insert ads. Consumers would be stupid to trust that game as you advise, flock to the membership program and promote continued YouTube dominance. You advise a kind of "penny wise (fewer ads now!) pound foolish (anyone complaining should just start paying them)" approach.
Neither does your ad blocker. If you don’t want to give Google tracking data - a very valid position - don’t use their services at all. They don’t need to sell an ad to track what you watch, from where, or what devices you use.
Sure - on third party sites where Google can’t see the traffic. Do you really think YouTube refuses to share that data internally with Google’s core business?
I did consider paying. But I also want to do quite a bit of YouTube in private browser tabs. their age gate already makes that quite annoying. I certainly won't pay and still get such blocks...
Then that's nothing against YouTube, you've basically ruled out paying for any service on the internet because you refuse to stay logged in and apparently can't be bothered to log in each time you open a private tab.
Not really sure how you expect content creators to be paid at all for what they produce, then.
Youtube really was something else before content creators. It would be interesting if we still had such services. You know, people just uploading things because its genuinely funny or interesting, not because they want to scrape pennies off of it.
It's not really a problem to lose money on some users if they are making money over all. And they are, because Youtube is very profitable and drives billions of dollars in ad revenue a year. They never really cared about every user being a profit generator for them. Except, last quarter, they missed their ad revenue growth expectations—as did much every big company around—and they are freaking out. That's what this is. It's not a question of whether Youtube can afford to keep the lights on, it's that Alphabet wants them to be continually _growing_, and this seems like a way to do that. I think Netflix empowered them to do this by cracking down on shared passwords, which was successful for them (at least in the short term).
> It's not really a problem to lose money on some users if they are making money over all.
Both sides of this argument are laden with assumptions. It’s a more opinion-based discussion than most. It’s a philosophical wormhole with no clear answer.
(Not saying I agree with this.) It’s a perfectly reasonable conclusion that using an ad blocker is morally wrong.
I’m sure both content creaters and google tout their views still from all of these supposed “freeloaders” who are showing advertisers and shareholders that there is engagement with the site. If google wants to put their money where their mouth is, an adless view wouldn’t actually register as a true view.
> How else should Youtube make money from those users? They must literally lose money on those users.
For example, YouTube could increase the price of advertising on their platform to make up for the fact that a certain fraction of users never see the ads, thus keeping everyone who matters happy.
Why should advertisers pay more for ads that fewer people watch? Why would an advertiser be okay with sponsoring people that avoid their ads? It's not the advertisers' jobs.
Neither is it my job to buy the advertisers' product. Why should the advertiser have to pay for being shown to people who are so hostile to advertisements that they would block them if they could?
When I used to watch broadcast television I used to do the utmost to avoid the ads by muting during ad break. However, on the occasions that an ad would actively interfere with my watching experience, such as an animation on the channel logo, or a sudden ad break with an ad premeditatedly designed to catch you by surprise (often by "sponsors") I made an explicit decision to boycott said product if I had an opportunity. There are brands that I stopped buying because of these things.
Because there is no alternative to youtube for putting ads in front of the entire internets video hosting service. Google, meta, twitter, all have such massive captive audiences: their advertisers. Why not squeeze money from their actual customers that have so much of it compared to dubiously effective penny scraping from users? Are the major shareholders of these companies overleveraged in the advertising firms or something?
People who react with antipathy to ads have been removed, increasing the value of the brand messaging by negating brand damage in large-scale ad campaigns.
1. That kinda already happens to a degree. A significant part of the youtube audience is outside of US & Europe and so those users are worth less to advertisers because advertising budgets are somewhat proportional to the population's disposable income. However youtube still has the same cost whether they're serving a user who advertisers would pay a lot for or a user where advertisers won't pay a lot for.
2. That's just making the experience worse for the people who do watch ads. Imagine it's a restaurant and you're raising the price so half the people can eat for free (this way everybody stays happy).
This makes no sense. The fact that users don't want to pay and don't want to watch ads is a pretty clear indication that YouTube is user hostile.
And why are you assuming that YouTube should make money at all? It is YouTube'job to find a business model that works without coercing users. If users don't want to pay (money or attention) then YouTube is not offering anything worth paying. And it's their fault, not the users'
I'm confused at this argument, you're saying that since it's easy to steal the content we should assume it's youtube's fault for trying to charge for it?
I imagine most things that people pay money for they'd prefer to get for free, but that's not an actual option on the table.
YouTube provides a service you can either pay for with money or attention, and sure if people don't think it's a worth while expenditure of either then by all means they shouldn't watch it.
Why are you assuming YouTube should provide their service for no compensation?
That's for you to decide, and if you (and the other tens of people that think the same) end up leaving the platform that would reduce YouTube's costs, which makes sense for them.
Your argument is basically the same people use for piracy. If you don't want to pay for Photoshop, don't use it. If you don't want to pay for YouTube, don't.
They aren't coercing anyone. They're offering a service with a service agreement. It's as much coercion as my ISP saying they won't give me internet access if I don't pay.
Both outcomes of "pay and we'll give you access" and "I won't pay and I won't get access" are reasonable outcomes in a free society.
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.
At least over here in Finland you can get premium light which is just 6.99e per month, and does not include youtube music.
Which was the thing that finally made me upgrade, as I already have a preferred music streaming service, I refused the premium bundle out of principle for a long time.
As a principle, I think each product and service should stand by itself and bundling things up just makes the experience worse for the end user (Teams etc). But that's a bit different discussion.
But that still does not allow for offline playback, background playback from a mobile app so they can still suck it.
It also makes no sense that you need a family account for more than one profile with a single paid account. At least price wise it is a tough sell against actual streaming services with actual (developed or licensed) content that do offer multiple profiles per account.
I found YouTube Music surprisingly full-fledged. The library is not as complete as Spotify or Apple Music of course, but, you also get the user uploads, which is a much more reliable resource for those few odd tracks.
With Premium you also get to minimize the YouTube app on the phone. It's nice for talks and discussions that are not uploaded as podcasts.
With Apple Music you can add your privately owned music to the library too. It even outdates Apple Music with a now legacy service called iTunes Plus that allowed you to stream your private music collection with iTunes from ‘the cloud’ for €25/year.
Back in the day I even used this to ‘white-wash’ low quality mp3 files to 256kbps acc files instead.
I think it is actually user-hostile to force users to pay for YouTube Music when you want access to ad free YouTube videos, probably why in Europe YouTube Premium Lite exists (without Music), because tie-in purchases (translated term) are generally not allowed here.
SponserBlock will block in-video ads. Also if you use Safari, the Vinegar plug-in replaces the video player with a native one which blocks all ads, allows Picture in Picture, background play, huge improvements overall
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.
Yeah, I really want one of those ethical ad programs to go somewhere – limit the JavaScript substantially and serve everything first party, use Cloudflare/Apple’s PAT scheme to assert real user presence vs. spoofing, etc. The problem is that advertisers really want cross domain tracking so we really need tracking protection to become popular enough that they’re willing to give up that dream, and that’s not going to happen with Chrome.
> they were all served from the primary websites server -
- If your website is YooToo dot com, then serve the ads from your server - not a subdomain (easy to offload to other server), - I've seen many instances where malware was injected by web sites that pull their ads from third party servers.. sometimes it's a third party ad network, sometimes it's a bad actor that makes a deal with a desperate site to host ads server from their server,
(I'd see a fair amount of offers from lesser known entities offering to place flash ads on sites for a few hundred a month back in the day, I'm sure it's still a thing using javascript and similar these days, I've seen things flagged from sites that host video files lately)
There's been malware ads served from yahoo dot com - that were injected by a third party server - I think the details show they fake the ad for X city where XY company is located and server the viruses to other cities.. this is also sketchy for data tracking (outside jurisdictions?) and other issues.
> I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level -
I don't think it's right to serve ads for alcohol to people that do not want them, same with gambling and similar - think about it this way, the technology exists to push weight loss, abilify, and other drugs to people who have been flagged as depressed, we should be able to prevent ads in the same way.
I've seen opt-out of ad networks by going to a site and checking off tracking / targeted marketing / remarketing from a, b - z networks - but these I believe add a cookie to the browser you are using - so you opt out of targeted ads in that one browser on that one device
- I think people should be able to sign a document online and opt out of gambling, drugs, sugar, alcohol, and many other types of ads if they want to block them, and it should be via ip address - so it's blocked on phones, chromecasts, vizio tvs, playstations, laptops, tablets - all the things that connect... the big ad networks should be able to handle this with minor code changes.
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.
I don't block YouTube ads and watch YouTube quite a bit. I've not had this experience. I don't think I've ever seen an unskippable 30 second ad. It seems to me unskippable tops out at 15 seconds. When YouTube flipped the switch a few years ago to drastically increase the number of ads it was super painful. But I have to admit I've totally gotten used to it. It's still dramatically better than cable. To me, YouTube ads are just on the cusp of acceptable.
I’ve seen multiple unskippable consecutive 15 second ads on the YouTube app on the Apple TV, and I’ve pretty sure I’ve also seen unskippable ads longer than that. I just don’t use the app anymore and plugged an old MacBook from 2011 into the tv and with Firefox and brave. My wife actually prefers that to an Apple TV now.
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
Its not worth it. You don't watch YouTube videos for the fancy graphics, you listen to it for the commentary with some visual guides. 480p is more than enough for most
You might not, but there’s a ton of great content where the quality is very noticeable – anything related to nature, astronomy, sports, the tons of niche genres which involve looking at real world things in detail like rail fans, building/architecture fans, bird watchers, etc. is really unpleasant to watch at 480p. That’s the size of an iPad icon!
Stuff like conference talks, of course, really don’t matter but there’s so much material that no generalization won’t be inaccurate for millions of watchers.
I watch a lot of gaming videos or instructional videos that benefit from better resolution when viewing on my iPad. It is beyond aggravating I can't set them to at least 1024 by default.
imo it's woth it not for the sake of user conversion, but for the sake of minimizing the cost for network load. Technically they'll have the same revenue, but profit will increase due to optimizing the delivery and since most yt users dont have premium I believe this can be a big chunk of money
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.
> I do wonder if the price point of youtube premium is too high to capture an audience that simply doesn't want ads
It's this plus the fact that I get virtually no value-add with YouTube. I have to fight with its algorithmic recommendations more than I would ever want to if I were paying any money for the service. I also don't want YouTube Music and would like it completely removed from my YouTube experience altogether. My music listening is done through a separate universe using my own collection.
I would happily pay money for a service that could provide the videos I watch regularly with a reasonable recommendation system that worked for me. And it needs to be priced for basically what it is: network egress.
I'm curious about that myself. We dropped our Youtube premium family plan when they upped the price to $22. We just recently got an email that Paramount was doubling our Paramount+ subscription price and "adding" Showtime. I don't want showtime. I just want to pay a small price to be ad free. The lower price tier is with Ads.
The trouble is apparently that Ads are worth more to these companies than ad-free subscribers.
agree with the last part. The average YouTube user seems to be clicking through ads more often than we think. This is similar to credit cards, where banks get most of their interest revenue from few users.
YouTube brought this on themselves by ratcheting up the ads like crazy. Back in the day I preferred YT because they were one of the only video sites that didn't have preroll ads. YouTube used to basically have adsense ads and little banners below the video for years. Unobtrusive and I didn't mind them at all.
Then they added postroll ads. Then preroll ads. Then midroll ads. With these ads I find YouTube unusable for any period of time.
Ok, I thought it was just me. For the past several weeks I've noticed a marked uptick in ADs on YouTube. Just last night I was watching a short (~5min) video on how to clay bar your car and there were almost more ADs than content. I even completed the survey before the video thinking that would buy me some time. Nope!
I'm okay with this if it means more platforms start to offer paid access with no ads. There are so many ad supported services out there that don't even have a paid option.
> 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.
It will end just fine. It'll become a bit harder to adblock, less people will do it as a result, and because of that it will drop off the radar again and we can keep adblocking as usual.
All Google has to do is remove the dependency on the users browser from the "advertising" system. No other form of advertising in history required users to partake in the process of displaying the ad. The only reason we can block them is because they're forcing us into the process. Calling them "ads" is a euphemism, they're tracking mechanisms first and foremost.
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."
Or, more likely, wait until adblock developers figure out how to circumvent adblock detection.
In the mean time you could probably switch your VPN country to Russia, as there's literally zero advertisements right now from google.
You mean, setting up a computer with image recognition to listen to RSS feeds (multiple of https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=WHATEVER), go to the videos in the feeds when new ones show up, and record only non-ad sections to a capture card? You would then be able to watch the videos ad-free from a USB stick or SSD at a later time.
Should have specified further. Sure, if you are only looking at memes and youtube shorts, TikTok might be an alternative. Personally my youtube use is mostly 20min / 1 hour educational videos or background noise played on a TV. Nothing but youtube really covers this use case well.
I’m quite satisfied with the platform since all the enshitification is removed on the premium version which provides pretty good value for money.
Yeah, YouTube is great if you want to see long form videos from people youre already subscribed to, but I find their recommendations to be quite inferior to tiktoks. Less than 10% success rate.
Come to think of it, the only people I've newly subscribed to on YouTube in the past year I've discovered through TikTok.
It's a shame YouTube prioritizes ads so far above user experience - they have everything needed to build the best video recommendations platform besides the will to prioritize that above ad revenue.
My girlfriend insisted for months that she watches educational non-meme content on tiktok but even she ultimately had to admit it’s just a cope for scrolling tiktok for hours for the dopamine hit.
Eh, I think it's a bit harsh. I've gotten so many good music, makeup, fashion, cooking, adhd, and art recs from TT. If your interests map to TT's format then it works well, if it doesn't then it doesn't.
If you're gonna spend a few minutes scrolling through your phone because you have an awkward amount of time then TT is to me the cream of the crop. Reddit/News/Twitter just makes me angry and feel bad, Pinterest/Tumblr are stale, Facebook is for old people.
I think the fact that you felt the need to explain that heroine actually feels way better than cigarettes (after I didn't even say otherwise) and personally insult me for saying otherwise (after I didn't) should give you pause.
Tiktok would much more aptly compared to vaping - they are both addictive, but youtube is much more harmful because it's filled with toxins - their algorithm sends you to videos about conspiracy theories and hate rhetoric instead of just "interesting stuff that may encourage continued scrolling".
Further, youtube's algorithm rewards creators that waste their viewers' time, while tiktok punishes it.
Chances that creators you like are there are basically zero. These alternatives are potential, not actual. The biggest of them, Vimeo doesn’t even have a user-facing frontpage.
Last I saw, Vimeo charged the uploader to host the content. And it's only use case was corporate videos where you wanted to ensure there was no suggested content or adverts around your own content. Though these days I'm not sure companies care as I haven't seen a vimeo link in a long time.
I listed 6 and you choose to complain about one. I don't care about any creators, I have a life. I use videos as a tool, if it fits what I'm searching for
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.
Honestly, my feed is so full of rubbish, clickbait thumbnails and misinformation that I really can't even believe it's a Google product. It's just so polluted.
It's really come to the stage where I actually "hope" the search helps me find what I'm looking for, the sea of bullshit on YT is vast and difficult to navigate now.
For a time, I would say I was quite addicted to YouTube, but now I'm so turned off by it and I find that it is mostly full of really low grade content. I hardly even think to look the front page it unless I'm looking for something very specific. I treat it like a bank job now, race in, get what I need then straight back to the get away.
Personally, I feel similar to you, if they force me off it with Ads, good. I had though about paying but the smut they suggest I watch is just a turn off.
> Honestly, my feed is so full of rubbish, clickbait thumbnails and misinformation that I really can't even believe it's a Google product. It's just so polluted.
This is not all that different than my experience with even Google Search these days. Half the time I search for something on Google the top 10 are all ads/SEO spam sites.
There are certain things that I search that still give the best results out of all search engines (usually very specific queries), but more and more I want to be able to pay Google to leave out the shit.
Did someone say top 10!?? Top 10 ad platforms 2023! Our top picks for adblockers this year! Top 10 ways to add numbers 2023! Best notepAD trusted reviews! Best adblue products on amazon in 2023!
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.
I remember people saying years ago that reddit's redesign is not a problem because it has API access and you can use third party clients...
The $7 is the current price, it does not reflect future changes. If the pool of potential customers is dry, they will try other means of increasing revenue, including increases of that price.
They might also turn the $7 into a requirement to watch YouTube at all, and show ads anyways.
> They might also turn the $7 into a requirement to watch YouTube at all, and show ads anyways.
Yep. All cable channels started out ad-free. When cable was introduced, the cost was $35/mo for all channels (there were no movie channels initially), justified by not having ads.
>$7 a month for unlimited video on any device with 500 hours uploaded every minute.
This is irrelevant. 99.9% of content is garbage and / or not relevant to me. Also, I really don't watch that much so why should I be paying ~8 EUR a month to watch a few videos without ads? Moreover, I don't earn that much, so even that amount is a noticeable loss.
I'm not entirely convinced that youtube is actually worth $7 a month. Ofc, I'm also far away from saying it is worth nothing, but not gonna pay 7USD unless I'm getting something extra (I mean content, maybe movies???) than just no ads. Otherwise once blocked will switch to other platforms, eg. https://d.tube/, vimeo, etc...
I think I would pay for a respectful video service which also pays the people who make the videos.
Giving money to Google though, would hurt so much!
I'll consider it the day they stop the dark patterns company wide and commit to stop being ad-supported. Making the users pay for the service is a step in the right direction but I don't see them stop the ads company wide and I don't want to feed this.
YouTube is actually regarded quite high in terms of revenue sharing and Linus has praised them numerous times. It's for example partly (26% in 2020) why LTT have around 100 employees. YouTube do have a ton of other issues (spam, lack of support, content moderation, etc) but I don't believe revenue sharing is a big one.
It's not their content though. Most people upload stuff without any intent to monetize or otherwise control it. YT, like other large sites, was built through mass-scale theft of what was supposed to be public domain works.
Sure it's their servers, but then it's their fault they don't allow redistribution via third party channels.
it kind of boils down to a question of who is the actual customer? me or advertisers? if i'm paying a subscription to youtube, then i don't want post-adpocalypse censorship & sanitization.
Two things spring to mind: My experience with a YouTube premium trial ended immediately upon being told that I couldn't play music in a second place at the same time. And ad-blocking is part of my security posture.
I have plenty of local storage. Moving forward, maybe good videos won't just go into a playlist with the assumption that YouTube will continue to be available.
YouTube needs a history-less mode. I want to watch random videos without them impacting my recommendations. I have Premium, but I'll use ad blocker in a private browsing session specifically for this.
This was exactly the reason I cancelled my subscription. I'm paying for no ads, so don't shove them down my throat when I want to watch something without it fucking up the algorithm. Just because I want to watch a video my friend swnt to me of Alex Jones say some disgusting heinous shit one time doesn't mean I want to have it fed to me like I'm being prepared to be made into foie gras.
I’m the type that wouldn’t even tap the link if I saw that it was garbage (seriously, you can set boundaries with friends, an Alex Jones clip will do nothing to improve your life); but for the odd misclick, or if I go in not knowing what I’m watching, I instantly nuke that shit from my history.
I go to History afterwards and delete specific videos from there with “x”. That still works.
But even self-curated history and other tips I’ve got here still produce an echo chamber. Even “New to you” tab which appears once a month for few minutes becomes too narrow. I gave up recently and removed youtube from my bookmarks bar, to suffer less often. I find the idea of paying for it pretty… strange?
YouTube without recommendations is absolute pure cancer. On chrome desktop there is an option to delete cookie everytime you close browser. That resets your recommendation history.
I have YouTube Red so I'm not affected, but I really hate how it's implemented for Google accounts with your own domain. Bringing your own domain and paying Google for the privilege makes you a second-class citizen with Google services. I oppose this because paying Google is not enough, and often makes for a worse customer experience.
Not yet. See Netflix. They will push ads on paying customers and then add a higher tier that is ad free (saying nothing about you, you might just pay more to stay add free, no judgment about you here)
Remember when you paid for cable so there weren't ads (yeah, I'm old)?
The best was a retrospective (20th or 25th) on CNN one NewYears in the early 2000s, which had old footage of CNN. In one of them, the anchors were bragging about how they didn't have ads that biased their coverage of events... Then it broke to an ad. I had to laugh, because the (unpaid?) intern who put that together had to know how it was going to look when actually viewed by the public.
Anyone know, if there is an adblocker with a "hide" mode instead of a "block" mode?
I mean, instead of blocking the connection fetch the ad, but hide it visually? I would be fine with a YouTube ad blocker, that allows ads to play, but just mutes and `display:none`'s the video player element.
That's really a clever idea. And when companies will realize they are paying lots of cash to YT but very few users are actually watching the ads, maybe they'll stop paying YT.
I hate ads so much that I'm actually paying for Youtube premium. I work in IT, I build systems, I know there are various solutions, but none of them guarantee that I can travel freely with my cellphone and connect it to any smart TV and get an AD-free experience.
So I'll gladly pay for that freedom.
Freedom is very important to me, not just that it's open source, or that I have power over ads, but also freedom of time and leisure. Ads take away freedom from me, it's a powerless feeling when an ad comes on. Real 1stworldproblem here but since we're on the topic...
The only trick I know of is to use a VPN provider to connect to Argentina or Turkey and buy YouTube Premium from there. Works with your normal account. Showed this trick to my dad and he now pays $2 per month instead of $16. In India you can buy a whole year for $16, but our credit cards didn't work.
That's wild, if true. I mean I pay about 11 USD/month for my Youtube premium, but 2 dollars sounds insane. And I think youtube music is included in that.
It is because without price localization, most of USD based subscriptions or purchases would be lunacy. For example if the US price of Factorio was directly converted into Turkish Lira, it would cost ~10% of monthly minimum wage.
But please, I plead people to not abuse it.
It only forces developers to bump up prices and make games and digital goods inaccessible. [1]. There was already a x10 price bump last year with Steam Turkish localization exchange rate update and rumors say another x2 is coming soon.
I understand people like cheap stuff but please don't pull the ladder on us.
I apologize for not being born in the "correct" country but getting out isn't as easy and we deserve to have some minor entertainment meanwhile. There is already an economical crisis going on.
This is the exact reason I still pay for Pandora (music streaming service): to remove the advertisements.
My dentist's office doesn't pay for this service, so I have to hear advertisements while under the drill... which is frustrating. I've even offered to pay for Doc's subscription!
There's a 402 PAYMENT REQUIRED[0], but apparently it's been reserved for future use forever. I'm surprised there isn't a scheme by which websites can charge micropayments for content. In principle, I'm not opposed to loading up an account with $20 and paying $0.10 for an Economist article or $0.02 for a YouTube video or whatever.
I honestly don't know if this exists now or has ever existed, but I would love to directly support content creators without the total garbage game theory equilibrium we seem to have settled into of every expert hocking their nutritional supplements.
I wish this could become a thing. I'd pay for a stupid NYT article every once in a while. I don't want a subscription. Let me just give you 25 cents or something. Even the work arounds are annoying so I end up just not reading the article. No one wins there.
You put money in your account and basically bid against the ads that would be shown on websites you visited. I think you could even pick the images you'd see instead of ads.
For newspapers/magazines, this existed in the Netherlands for some time. It was called blendle[0] and worked exactly as you described. It was a fantastic way to get legit access to a handful of articles from various sources without the need to take any subscriptions. The best thing was money back, no questions asked policy, for every article you bought.
The model failed however (cannot recall the details but there are plenty of writeups [1]) and they switched to a new model which is all you can eat for 10 euro a month. However the selection is trimmed down massively.
I kinda miss it, although typically now I just 12ft or web archive anything I really like to read.
if after loading the wallet it could equally well pay $.05 to YT or $.05 to the same video on Vimeo than YT loses half the benefit of its integration with Google (the ability to get high CPMs via its in-house as platform). it would make it easier for competitors to enter their space: don’t expect it to happen.
You know, if YouTube wouldn't insist on absolutely annoying the living shit out of me with unskippable, bad, long, and frequent ads I wouldn't mind that much. But YouTube with ads is one of the worst things there are.
You pay for the service that they offer now. If they add ads later on you can quit. Not paying now because of something they could do in the future doesn’t make any sense.
I don't like being bullied into a subscription by out of line ads. The subscription doesn't add any value. YouTube still fails to create a viable business model that doesn't depend on bullying.
That's not true at all. There are many advertisements/sponsorships within large YouTube creator channels now. It's regularly 1min or more in every 10min of video. I don't mind so much, because they are skippable and since it's the creators themselves rather than totally unrelated garbage.
They're not ads that are controlled by Google/YouTube, so I guess I'm able to view them as pragmatically different. They also don't bother me much because they're generally presented by the content creator that I'm interested in watching, rather than being completely unrelated.
Imagine paying for an ostensibly free service. It's like getting mugged and then offering to give the mugger even more money. Whose fault is it that YouTube isn't charging enough to cover hosting costs?
I find the service valuable, so I'm happy to pay for it. I don't understand the opposition. If you don't want to pay, they offer an ad-supported version.
Bloody fools. They don't know what beast they are waking up. Certain portion of ad blocker users are zealots. These people are insane and quite a few of them are quite resourceful. Just a few problems that are going to hit YT:
- torrents and other piracy
- rapidly evolving ad-blockers
- undetectable ad-blockers sitting in a new page layer invisible to page scripts
- visual ML ad-blockers detecting ads no matter how they are loaded
- new ad-free P2P video sharing websites
- influential users discouraging everyone from using YT
- popular content creators moving off YT and advertising other hosting options
Friction is enough. At Intel they had a product where they wanted to prevent certain use cases ( I forget which), but they were satisfied keeping out everyone who didn't have $50 of equipment and a little knowledge to defeat their mechanism. They weren't afraid of electrical engineers defeating them -- they expected that. They just put in enough friction to prevent _most_ people -- pareto-optimization.
I can't recommend enough of the spiritual successor to Vanced since the article briefly mentioned that. It's called Revanced. It requires more hoops than usual but I'm sure the intelligent folks here won't have a problem with that.
It's on Github. Other results are probably fake.
I've had plenty enough of a problem with it. The original required me to install a separate app in order to install it. I've yet to successfully make revanced work. Admittedly I only tried once but the hassle was enough to just use newpipe. It isn't perfect at all and is lacking a lot of what I want but it works. It just works.
I wouldn't have a problem with it if it actually worked, it always crashes when patching for me.
NewPipe is another option which works since it's a full client, though it doesn't handle logging in and youtube without an account and personalized recommended is like swimming in a river of garbage.
So... this is pretty evil... but I thought of it a while ago and I'm not that bright, so I'm sure plenty of others have also thought of it.
How long until Google / Meta / whomever just starts having faster response times and higher resolution content for people who have clicked on an add in the past N minutes?
People who don't click on ads either (1) self-select away from the platform (or at least reduce their time on the platform), (2) begin to engage in quasi click-fraud, or else (3) consume fewer of the service's resources.
It seems like a pretty simple way to improve the ratio of consumed resources to ad revenue.
As an advertiser, I don't want them to incentivize people to click on ads, because then people will do it despite lack of interest in my product, and thus just add noise to my numbers. Unless it also leads to an increase in conversions (doubtful) that just makes the individual clicks worth that much less to me.
It simultaneously incentivizes clicking on ads, but also increases the concentration of ad-susceptible users on the platform. Depending on the correlation between a high propensity to click on ads and a high propensity to buy once on a website, such a change might actually increase the quality of clicks that you get.
How are people who don’t pay for what they use customers? They cost YouTube money but if they’re not watching ads they’re not bringing in revenue and it’s highly unlikely that they’re bringing enough promotional value to defray that.
I could see some push for ethical ads or security but at some point you need to pay for what you like, either by subscribing to premium or watching ads.
Until this very moment google has considered the wisest move to be trying to keep all potential users on their platform, and it's arguably part of why they have maintained such dominance. It has always depended on network effects and the nearly uncompensated efforts of creators.
They have been getting greedier and greedier under the relentless quarter over quarter pressure to grow. Now we have mandatory ads on all videos, including non-monetized ones, and creaters who made the mistake of trusting youtube are systemtically defrauded through arbitrary demonetization.
I certainly feel no obligation to pay tithes to google.
Paying for what you use isn’t tithing. It’s straight up capitalism – if you don’t like it, don’t take the deal. It’s completely optional and you’ll probably be better off for it given how many people describe their YouTube usage as an addiction.
That’s what’s happening: YouTube offers things people want which cost money to produce and host, while users pay for those costs either directly (Premium) or by selling their attention and activity data to a middleman (Google).
Understanding that is key to understanding why ad blocker users complaining about being blocked is unreasonable. If you don’t like the terms of a deal, you can ethically walk away from it but not decide you don’t want to pay. If you prefer to mooch, sure, it’s not a huge crime but you don’t have any standing to complain, either.
Here’s another line of thought: YT could have straddled P2P tech and hosting directly (premium 4K offerings etc.). But Google wants all the content and all the control. The world’s video library is controlled by one corporation. They could farm the cost to peer tech but they won’t. So fuck them, I’ll circumnavigate my way into the library to watch some guy in his shed work on his hobby who isn’t begging for likes and subs.
And if I did pay? Google will still be logging my data. So fuck them once again.
Sure, nobody says you have to like them any more than you have to like every restaurant in town. The solution in both cases is not to give them your business – not complain when they refuse to give you freebies.
It's not even capitalism. Socialism definitely involves paying for services rendered. Exchanging something for something else is a basic building block of human society.
It's important to remember that piracy and theft are also capitalist practices. Companies routinely break the law and do unethical things, and consider it a sucess as long as money was made overall. Yet there is somehow this sense that individual consumers MUST play by the unfair rules often set up by these monopolies themselves. The incredible asymmetry in how copyright law is abused is an example. These companies deserve the same level of contempt they show their users.
The definition of "customers" has shifted in the ad-supported tech world. There's nothing inherently wrong with that model when it's unobtrusive and useful ads; It's when they get overly aggressive with the advertising that it drives people to block, IMO.
Also there's a pattern in the industry of introducing ads (or "promotions" to get around legalese) to "ad-free" subscriptions once they have sufficient lock-in.
My point is simply that Google is providing something which costs money to produce. They offer two ways to pay for it but someone who rejects both of them has no reason to expect Google to subsidize their activity – it’s like whining that the concert hall closed the window you used to camp out at for free music.
Customer is generally whoever is giving you money. With YouTube ads it's advertiser with the viewer being a second customer as the viewer gives YouTube the attention/click through. That falls apart if the user refuses to engage in that transaction
I'm pretty sure that the ethics of interacting with the likes of Youtube or Google are a fair bit more complex than you're giving it credit for, but I'm also pretty sure that this isn't the platform for that debate. Suffice it to say that as others have pointed out the definition of "customer" in the world of data brokers and advertising has become a lot less meaningful.
It’s not complicated unless you’re trying to avoid honoring the terms of the deal. YouTube is a completely optional service – you can use it with ads or pay not to have ads, that’s it. If you don’t like it, don’t use the service – and that goes a thousand times over for privacy concerns since there’s no way to avoid giving Google your activity data unless you don’t use their service.
When someone wants to sell me apples, I can pay for them or choose not to buy them. That's capitalism.
But if someone hands me apples for free, they really can't force me to study the ads on the wrapping paper, can they? I have never signed anywhere that I agree to this 'deal'. That's not how capitalism works as far as I understand it.
And their terms aren't legally enforceable.
Where I live adblockers are legal. When I access YT with Firefox and uBlock Origin it's legal for me to filter YTs datastream how I want to.
If this was a capitalistic transaction of goods, I would have to login to use their service. I would have to agree to some kind of legally binding contract. I would first have to pay, and could then use their product or service. But all that isn't necessary to watch videos on YT.
There is no legally binding 'deal' between YT and me.
YouTube never handed you apples, you went there and asked for them because you didn’t want to pay for apples directly and they had a sign up saying “apples are free for ad watchers”.
> There is no legally binding 'deal' between YT and me.
It’s at the bottom of every page. Your continued use of their service is subject to their terms of service, and they are free to block you if you don’t follow the deal you accepted.
At a fundamental level the HTTP protocol is a negotiation, where the client asks (on behalf of the user) for a file from a server, and the server decides (on behalf of the site owner) if it sends the file. HTTP provides plenty of error codes to deny that request. 403 or 451 come to mind. The server sending the file implies that it is OK with my use of the file.
If the server sends a file that's on the server. A license agreement hosted on a server that needs to be accessed in order to read it doesn't change that. Reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide:
>“But the plans were on display…”
>“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
>“That’s the display department.”
>“With a flashlight.”
>“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
>“So had the stairs.”
>“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
>“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
I suggest reading more carefully - I like Douglas Adams too but that’s irrelevant to the situation here. People are whining about Google’s servers not returning the content they want when they’re detected as using an ad blocker.
Googles customers are the advertisers. The viewers are the product. It's amazing google has tolerated bad product (Ad-block users) as long as they have.
Presumably Google (you know, the people who run Ad Sense) find the sheer amount of viewing data valuable on its own, given the marginal cost of "bad product" as you put it. How many advertisers would pay to have that sort of marketing data pipeline?
It’s no coincidence that this is happening against a background of budget cuts. I suspect Google is seeing less demand for ads right now while simultaneously dealing with expectations that their profits not go down correspondingly.
One thing I’m sure the mess over at Twitter has done is getting companies to reconsider the value of their ads in general, too. That’s always hard to measure which means it looks like an east spot to cut, and I believe there’ve been multiple companies claiming that cutting to zero didn’t affect sales so I’d be surprised if Google wasn’t looking at a soft market where cost cutting looks like a more reliable path to improve their profitability.
>I suspect Google is seeing less demand for ads right now while simultaneously dealing with expectations that their profits not go down correspondingly.
This seems like the root of the problem right here. Why shouldn't corporate profits go down when the economy falters? This should be expected. If you just keep running the company the same way and not pissing off the users/customers, things will improve when the economic situation improves. Rocking the boat just increases risk.
We do have that, to an extent: capital-gains taxes are higher for securities held for less than 1 year. Maybe this needs to be extended or improved somehow.
They're completely within their rights to try to enforce their policies. On the other hand there's an approximately 0% chance I'll go back to watching Youtube with ads. People seem to like Youtube Max or whatever they call their subscription fee. On the other hand it's hard to get me to pay for something I already had by taking it away and making me pay to get it back. I bet I'll end up paying them someday, but I think I'll try just not going to Youtube anymore first and see if that sticks.
I don't have a Youtube/Google account and I don't use any of their apps, so how are they going to block me, go for my IP address? I don't see a reason to have an account, RSS works just fine for subscriptions.
From other articles, it wouldn't be an account ban but rather at the video level. So you use a browser with adblock and try to watch 3 different videos, then the video player will stop loading at all, changing browsers or clearing cookies/data would likely reset the count but apply again after 3 detections. Although I do assume they would use a combination of other data like your IP to be more aggressive with detection blocks.
what players do you use for RSS video? right now i use RSS for comics, blogs, and podcasts. i could reuse the podcast stuff probably, but i expect there’s stuff out there tailored more specifically to video.
Personally, one solution is to subsrcibe for Nebula + CurisoityStream bundle to support creators (bought 2 subscriptions for me and friend) https://curiositystream.com/?coupon=nebula and use something like PeerTube for the rest of the stuff.
Youtube have great catalogue of the lectures and other educational material, so it is still kinda irreplaceable
If this really comes, I think it would be not too hard to modify the ad blockers, that ads are being "served" but into the void (muted, invisible container). In a way, that makes it hard or impossible for ad blocker dedection. Blocking youtube ad videos will be more hard to block without detection.
Not an optimal solution, as it still uses more data, but nothing is, if we cannot solve the base problem that we have an ad financed internet.
Ad-free experience: Hey what's up child-rearing nation! I hope you're having a wonderful day! Today we're gonna be about saving your child from choking! I know right, my kid is choking, your kid is choking, it just keeps happening! They're blue in the face and gagging and you don't know what to do! *laughs* But before we get to that, I need to tell you about our sponsor, ridge wallet, fuck, skip ahead alright, that was great, now the first step is to locate your kid, if they're choking they may not be making a lot of noise so you need to look carefully. Then you need to make sure they're actually choking, are they breathing or what, maybe just holding their breaths. Then to fix the problem, well I'm gonna tell you about that but first let me give a shout out to NordVPN, you wouldn't want someone to download your IP address while you're out looking for dying kid tutorials *skip ahead* alright and what you do next is you call 911, and they'll maybe know what to do. Alright, that's it for today, don't forget to slap that like and subscribe button and next time we'll talk about what to do when your frying oil's caught fire [ominous cut to running faucet]
and qualify for additional pay if you work onsite and are prepared to be listed as a first on scene (while the professionals are in transit) responder.
I wonder if we're gonna see an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker kinda race going on here. As long as the code runs in the users' browser, there should be a way around it.
Makes me wonder if they'll ever move to WASM... though I assume there's gonna be ways to block ads regardless.
I'll just stop using YouTube if they make ads unblockable. The quality of content on the site has decreased dramatically as the result of of their pushing corporate media/youtube "creators" to the top of search results. It's literally not worth it to me to pay for a subscription that _might_ reduce the number of ads I see.
This. I recently re-setup my HTPC and forgot to add the usual plugins and suddenly instead of actually being able to watch youtube stuff, there was a BS ad every few minutes. It was essentially unwatchable. But I would never pay premium for that. Sure I care about some of that content, but it's not a lot and if I had to pay for it, I'd rather pay the author directly via say Patreon than to give it to Google and the author may or may not get some of that and they constantly have to try and "be nice to the algorithm" in order to get their share of the money. I really don't care if the algorithm thinks they're worthy of being listed in people's feeds. I like their content, period.
Honestly the algorithm they use to pick and choose which ads they show me is as annoying as video feed algorithm.
I didn't mind the 5-second ads. Two to three of them before a video? I'd deliberately sit through those. Seemed a fair deal. That's now largely gone away (in my experience) and now it wants to show me longer, un-skippable ads. Not only at the beginning but randomly in the middle of videos regardless of what's going on in the video. At least on Television has natural commercial breaks "baked in" to the format.
Oh. And stop showing me the same four cookie-cutter ads every few minutes. It's annoying at best, condescending at worst. If you must advertise to me at least give me some variety.
I'm honestly surprised that Google hasn't directly injected the ads into the video itself, so it can't be skipped beyond some kind of AI looking for drastic scene changes.
SponsorBlock crowdsources the location to skip to. If YouTube spliced ads in the video that would no longer work, as timestamps would be different for each person/region/however they target ads.
Right now they force you to watch for a number of seconds before you can skip ahead. If the ad were in the video, you could skip immediately. Perhaps not to the exact moment it ends, but you can scrub or jump in 10 second increments until there’s no ad. You check with your eyes, no AI necessary. It’s basically what we did decades ago with VCRs.
They definitely have had the idea for a long time. It is almost certainly a technical limitation stopping them. I'd guess that decoding, splicing, and then re-encoding is too compute intensive for it to be worth it.
No need to re-encode the video. Just split the video at a keyframe and inject an ad at that point, no re-encoding required. Most video files have keyframes every few seconds or so. The proper term is I-frames, though they're commonly known as keyframes as well.
That's exactly what's been going on with Twitch for the past several months, and frankly Twitch is winning.
All of the ad blockers are now pretty jank. Sometimes they don't work at all, sometimes you need to refresh a couple times to get the stream to play. I think Alternate Player somehow still works despite being unmaintained, but its stream is always 5+ seconds behind no matter how you tweak the buffer settings.
The easiest way to win this war is if an adblocker is detected just make your site unreliable outright claiming an error is risky (see the infamous AARD code[0]) so better let the user come to the realisation.
im assuming there's gonna be ways to bypass y0utub3 and go straight to the videos. in the meantime g00gle continues to footgun, provide motivation and traction for exodus and competition, and a peertube-like non-exclusive for the masses.
Youtube ads are bad in several ways:
1) they have these ads that pop-over and hide the content
2) there ad breaks are cut into content at in-opportune moments. At least on TV, the content is designed around the ad breaks
3) I have recently seen ads for gambling powered by cryptocurrencies, how can Google allow these ads baffles me
Collectively, these things make the ads on YouTube infuriating. It's then made worse by the ramp up in the volume of ads. Either work with content creators on when ads are displayed to make the content and ad experience better (a la tv) or come up with a different method. And for the love go god, git rid of those stupid ads that pop over the content.
My Browser My Rights. I don't allow ads because no matter how good you are, someone will figure out how to get malware into ads. Once a system is compromised, best to burn it and start over. And now there are UEFI viruses that can reinstall malware even after the OS is wiped. And then there is the recent Gigabyte Motherboard discovery they were loading EXEs silently without approval. So no, I will not lower my protection.
"I don't allow ads" because ads are malware for the human brain. An ad is explicitly designed to hack our minds/emotions, and I, for one, won't go there (as far as I am able).
Exactly. Snow Crash explores the idea of a "mind virus", which seemed a little silly when I originally read the book. But nowadays, it's clear that most ad campaigns are exactly that: hacks of the brain.
Just think about the ad strategies of, say, Coca-cola and Pepsi. They don't tell you about a new product. They don't inform you about any benefits of their product, or advantages relative to the competition. They purely exist to keep the brand names in your head, and associate the brand names with images of people having fun. And the saddest part is, it works! We desperately need regulation to prevent companies from hacking consumer's brains into zombies who grab products on the shelf based on how many times they've heard the name spewed out of their television in the last 24 hours.
On the flip side, I would be happy to allow purely informative, contextual, non-tracking ads in my browser. Objective statements about new products I'm actually interested in? Sure! Privacy invading, mind manipulating mental malware? No thanks.
Recently, this has been reminding me of all the hand wringing about "prompt injection vulnerabilities" - like e.g. when you have an LLM summarizing articles for you, or going over your inbox, and a malicious actor sneaks in a well-crafted bit of text that makes that LLM return you false information, or forward all your e-mails to attacker's address, etc.
Well guess what, ads are exactly such prompt injection attacks, but on humans.
Exactly. They are designed to do exactly that. I remember ads for companies that no longer exist. I remember ad campaigns that the companies abandoned decades ago. That was designed to be in my brain. To be the 'first choice' on products when equivalents exist. Some of this stuff was so effective it literally changed the way people buy things and why they buy them (mmmm bacon).
I mean it works both ways no? Their server their right? If they don't think they can benefit from you viewing the content they serve, they can choose not to serve it?
Yes, which is the reason I don't really care that much. If youtube dies tomorrow, something else will pop in its place. That is how internet is supposed to work. Route damage and whatnot. We all just got really happy and complacent with the current batch of benevolent overlords.
Someone has to pay for the bandwidth and the servers. You can only convince investors so many times to burn their money for years so that everybody has access to video hosting. Maybe governments should step in.
Or.. and I know how people are averse to paying their own money, people don't rely so much on other people's infrastructure? Yeah, it will require people to learn some things, but it would make web a little less unbearable again.
But I dream.
edit: I just thought about a little more. How would that work with UDM. Would they be able to detect that?
edit 2: to the downvoters, tell me how I am wrong. Argue your point. Don't simply assume status quo is the desired state.
I lived through that and had self-hosted video. It's both expensive and painful: YT just delivers video very well, with auto captioning, and comments. I remember when you'd view a random site and hope video would play. If it's YouTube I expect it to work. Huge UX improvement.
That's what 403 errors are for. But once you send your program to my personal machine to be run, I will use whatever tools at my disposal to make it useable, as is my right.
For me is not even a question of security but a question of sanity. It feels like torture. You are watching something with your brain in that context and suddendly, a commercial about something I am not remotely interested is thrown to my face.
I am simply not that kind of consumer. That's not the way I learn about products I'll buy later. In fact, I've never ever bought something I saw in a youtube commercial. IMHO, the current model of advertisement is broken.
I don't think anyone is disputing that? Google isn't saying, for example, that you're violating CFAA or DMCA by blocking ads. They're just saying they're going to block you. That's their right.
Their site, their rights (to block you)? You're going to cost them bandwidth and give nothing in exchange, so it's only fair. Nothing forces you to visit the site.
Here's hoping someone writes a youtube-dl extractor for that site soon. Haven't gotten around to doing it myself, despite manually downloading a bunch of videos using Firefox's network tab.
YouTube premium family is best value for money for all streaming services. Just don’t waste time on adblocking, as it works reliably only on desktop.
I used ublock and it was more or less cuccessfully fighting ads on desktop, but they still were present on phone (new pipe just sucks, and I moved to iPhone anyways), iPad, Xbox and tv.
Premium removed all of them. Also gave downloads for offline viewing.
I still use sponsorblock on desktop though. And miss it a lot everywhere else.
Mandatory disclaimer. I’m Google employee but do not work for YouTube and I’m paying for premium with my own money.
I used to have those "downloads" on Youtube. There are not a real downloads because I do not have an access to the file. Also the feature tends to be misworking - from time to time one of "downloads" just stucks with eating 100% of 1 CPU core and the recipe is to remove all the "downloads". This was one of the stupidiest features I ever had, because if I need a video for offline wieving but do not want to get a file, I can just watch 100% of video (of course with adblock because YT advertisements use to destroy cache) and do not close the tab, then suspend my PC and unsuspend it in the place I want to watch.
Downloads are working and very useful on mobile - they give you offline version on a device that you can later watch.
I click download on videos that I'm interested in morning and have something to listen to during commute without worrying about spotty connections and mobile traffic consumptions. So yes, file is downloaded to the device.
If I want to download something to have it forever, I use yt-dlp on pc.
The downloads feature works pretty good when you are going to be on a plane or train without an internet connection. Predownload a bunch of educational content and then you'll have it for your trip.
I never watch youtube on my phone, always desktop and like you sponsorblock has become essential.
I can't bring myself to give YT money when I can address my use case for free. YT's hostile user approach also rubs me the wrong way, I can't reward that behavior
Aggressively pushing shorts, opaque/biased moderation, lack of appeals, removing power user features such as sorting creator videos, disabled the like button, totally ruined comment hierarchy when G+ was pushed aggressively, etc.
Newpipe has to use workarounds to the limitations put in place by youtube; I find it expected that downloads will be slower, since they won't be using secret shibboleth done by youtube on the backend and on the app but standard web access.
It has been crashing for me as well but since it's so stateless it has never been an issue: playback continues, playlists remain, ads ana tracking stay nonexistent.
interesting discourse around this and ads in general, from people on both sides of the equation. a lot of creator sided things are bunch of bs from what i've experienced myself.
while the public perception with popular channel is that they're making bank (in general), many professional channels are using in-video ads to make the most money. so it is very naive to use that card. not to forget that probably 90+ percent videos don't belong to people receiving the ad revenue through the program.
there was a point about people taking "free" content on the internet for granted. in the current web ecosystem where tracking has carried the platforms for so long, it is not like paying for youtube will get rid of all that. pretty funny how they want it both ways with monetization.
on mobile, youtube has already been twitch-level obnoxious with countering adblock efforts, with large banner ads right below the video and sometimes 20 seconds unskippable ads for a short 40 seconds video.
in terms of running costs, etc, they've already been reducing video quality despite having a fast connection. the culmulation of the above points pushes me away from paying them a single penny out of principle.
I love this idea because finally there is some force which can make me less watching youtube and I certainly am not going to deepen my profile with a bank credentials (but I would pay for premium with crypto if it will be possible)
There is a workaround to this that is quite simple. Get a prepaid visa gift card. You can make up whatever nonsense info you want on those and pair that with the subscription. Then once the balance runs out, get another card and repeat the process. Problem solved.
Nice, then google decides to block your account one day for an unspecified reason and they are asking you for a drivers licence with those credentials to let you back in.
I use Bitcoin + several wallet.dat each of those is bond to a different VPN. It means that I absolutely do not care about on-chain tracking on each wallet.dat because I am sure that nobody can tie my different addresses to a single person.
This seems quite unnecessary and over-complicated. Trust me, Google will have you tracked one way or the other, so it might be better to just grab a prepaid visa gift card for your Youtube Premium subscription and save yourself the trouble. Any grocery or convenience store can sell those to you with untraceable cash with ease.
the real issue, is that when enough people consume a service, it becomes a 'utility', and you are penalized if you don't use it. As such, if a percentage of the population uses something, it should be regulated as a 'utility'. Copyright laws should reflect this also.
Most jobs I've seen (even outside of tech ) require familiarity with Windows and Office, ie. basic skills linked to one platform.
Google is used enough and thus influential enough, it should be classified a public utility and forced to comply with strict utility laws ( which requires government approval to modify prices ).
IANAL, but I'm sure there are layers that could contrive the social penalties of not using Google service.
People make this logical leap in their brains without recognizing it when they use a service for years and rely on it for their daily information, then turn on the high paid exec's who are trying to squeeze a dollar from every user. Red Hat, Reddit, Google, Microsoft, Comcast, all need reigning in because of their necessarily high required utility in civilization.
I agree. Eventually companies become so big that not using them is, in D&D terms, a -2 to all stats for your entire life.
I mean, in exchange for giving them so much money that its gravitational field warps all of democracy, can we not get a little customer service when needed?
mm i understand the argument, but looking at the other utilities around me, i think it has to be a last resort. we have way more options navigating this in the space of bits than we do of matter. monopolies sort of suck no matter how they’re owned or operated: rather to force the non-critical monopolies to break up than to immortalize them as utilities.
For me, being able to block/remove all the videos in the main page, shorts, the other people also..., the video recommendations and all the crap that Youtube have these days is so important.
I would pay a lot for a service that gives me the most useful answers instead of what is most likely to make me watch for longer, I know that is their business model to maximize view time to sell more adds but I wish they would sell me a subscription that allows me to customize the UI to show only a search bar, show only educational content when I use the search function and when I'm watching a video don't show me any recommendation or try to pull any tricks on me to spent more time in the platform, nothing more, I would gladly pay 50$ a month for this type of service on Youtube, until then uBlock origin to the rescue, my attention span and productivity is worth more than all the crap the Youtube team tries to pull.
Majority of them actually, about every channel I sub to mentions about being demonetized for one reason or other and have alternative means to support them, and I do mean majority, guitar channel plays too many bars of a song, demonetized, channel covering ukraine war or other conflicts, demonetized, podcast has a guest, demonetized, news channel covers a topic, demonetized. YT is garbage, but that's just my personal perspective.
This is very bad: If you have ADHD ad-blockers are essential to use platforms like YouTube as they let you block comment sections and suggested content, which are highly distracting.
You can configure uBlock origin to only let through the ads, but still block the other garbage. Or you can pay for youtube - or you can find something else.
> they are simply detecting user agents with ad-blockers
The browser's user agent string doesn't change based on plugins installed, or at all--unless end user changes it purposefully.
The ad-block detection is likely and usually a separate script that runs an interval check on the existence/visibility of ad-related DOM elements (which would be false when hidden/removed by a plugin or even the developer tools)
And 1080p quality is somehow a "premium" feature now. Could YouTube be the next platform to ditch after reddit died? At least the official clients, NewPipe is quite nice.
I had a YouTube Premium family plan (US) for awhile because I don't want my family to see ads. The problem is that I need to use a VPN all the time for it to work because I live outside the US. That gets cumbersome... so I cancelled it and use ad blockers and a rooted LG TV for now.
In the modern world there are so many people that are citizens some place, but work or revel often in other places. These kind of restrictions are a nuisance.
This is a rather disturbing move to me, as I am a YouTube addict and adblocker user. I use NextDNS, a DNS-based service that's like your own PiHole in the cloud.
It is sometimes tricky for me to disable adblocking! There are a couple of approaches. Resetting my DNS servers to defaults is disruptive and error-prone; it's a non-starter. I find it peculiar that there is no knob on NextDNS that says "disable blocking features and act like normal DNS" even though they themselves enable such a feature if you run out of free monthly queries. You can disable a bunch of features one-by-one, but of course that affects all sites, not just the one. You can whitelist any domain you want, but that involves a cycle of testing and guessing which ones are emanating from the site you want to use.
In short, there's no straightforward way of just telling NextDNS "don't block ads while I'm on YouTube.com" and it's for that reason that I sort of miss uBlock Origin. However, YouTube does use native domains for all its ad serving, and I see them all now anyway, so I don't believe that this new policy will adversely affect my usage profile.
If I had to pay for all of the web platforms I use (on top of paying for internet access to begin with) on a daily basis I would have no disposable income. And I'm not ready to live in a world with even more micro micro-transactions. I don't think the world is economically capable of supporting the web the way big tech companies wish to be supported if they couldn't continue just selling our harvested data alone.
I suppose the point is that if someone is a self described addict of a particular service, it's not entirely unreasonable to expect them to pay for that service (directly via premium, or indirectly via ads).
I did this. I was skeptical at first but it's such a big qol improvement. I got a family plan so now that's what I bring to the streaming service exchange with the family and they love me for it
I was kind of against it since it seemed like a waste to pay for spotify and youtube music, but its honestly worth it just for ad free youtube alone. Only video streaming service I pay for.
How does it work? Youtube for a long time now has been serving video ads from the same domain names as videos so you can not block video ads on DNS level.
As far as I know, the only way to block ads is by using ad blocker in a browser, or modified or 3rd party Youtube app.
I’ve subscribed to Youtube when I found no way to block state propaganda in my country. Instagram lets me hide ads I don’t like, while there’s no way to get rid of them on Youtube. Maybe I’m the proof that the strategy works but now I despise Youtube and Google with a passion while being surprisingly sympathetic with Instagram and happily accepting ads there. Both of them serve completely irrelevant ads for me though.
Yep, I've also commented on how harmful ads seem to be more common on YouTube compared to Instagram and Facebook. Maybe Facebook use more human reviewers in smaller regions compared to Google? Maybe Facebook have better data due to their social network? Idk but the YouTube ads in my country are also shockingly bad compared to YouTube in the US.
The next step in the adblocker-blocker wars will be something like the Firefox ublock origin plugin that instead of blocking the ad, accepts it and plays it (looking to the httpd on the other end like the data transfer has occurred and it's being displayed in the browser), but at the end user GUI end, sends the ad to the graphical equivalent of /dev/null so the adblocker-plugin-user never sees it.
I'm a family premium member. After the recent price hike, it's the most expensive streaming plan I have, by a long shot. uBO does so much more than block ads and I have a no-exceptions policy on whitelisting, even when I'm paying for the service. I'm curious if they'll still try to stop me.
Money from advertisers doesn’t decrease long-term without uBO/yt-dlp users (since they don’t watch ads and pay for them). So less operating costs for Youtube, and more money for creators (in theory, if YT doesn’t keep the costs savings). That should help the platform, not kill it.
I like how this article is currently right next to the "drink verification can" one. IMHO an adblocker is morally equivalent to changing the channel, muting, or leaving the room while an ad is playing on the actual "tube", and forcing me to consume content should be illegal.
Excellent news. One big reason why the deleterious adware economy has no viable competitor is that somewhat sophisticated users can partially opt out of it and get subsidized by the less savvy.
By forcing people to pay for youtube premium (which, in fairness to Google is very reasonably priced) or look elsewhere, non-surreptitiously-paid-for consumer services become much more viable.
Unfortunately, the other reason non-surreptitiously-paid-for services are currently not viable is that most people, including the vast majority of HN seem to be, uhm, not very sophisticated about reasoning about costs (to most people the k-gadzillions that google makes apparently materialize out of thin air, instead of really coming out of large_overhead_factor*k gadzillions they personally proportionally pay for). This seems hard to overcome.
The greedy bastards won't even pay taxes. If there was a good alternative I would switch in a heartbeat.
I am happy to pay content creators, but paying $12 or $18 per month just so they disable some anti-patterns really rubs me the wrong way.
the best type of ads is the sponsorships that youtubers already do. Why doesnt youtube take advantage of them and create a platform for them? the ads they run are disruptive, annoying as F , loud, they last unpredictably long etc etc.
Part of the reason youtube ads are so annoying is that many of them are played at random times while you are watching a video. There is no smooth transition to the ad. When watching news or sports on television the announcers will say "And now we're going to a commercial break" and they play some outro music. Then they play some music to welcome you back.
When watching a sitcom or drama the script writers plan in the commercial breaks where you would have the different acts in a play. They are natural stopping points to take a short break.
Some creators do put in fairly natural ad breaks, since there is an option to manually define where to run ads. RedLetterMedia is the best example that comes to mind; they get to a stopping point and cut to black and then an ad plays, and then they cut back afterwards. If you’re paying for Premium or otherwise blocking ads, it just looks like a segment transition.
The problem is that YouTube has on several occasions actually gone in and added huge numbers of additional automatic ad breaks, showing at random places in the video, and has stated that the “opt-out” is YouTubers manually going in and deleting those new ad breaks for every single video.[1] Most YouTubers don’t care enough to spend the time to manually fix it for every video, or just accept the excuse of “oh, but you get more revenue this way” and don’t bother. So then baking in smooth ad transitions becomes retroactively useless since YouTube is just running ads at random points in the video anyway.
This is great. Now when I really need to watch something important, I'll deal with the ads and for the rest of the junk, it'll piss me off sufficiently to stop watching it. Fantastic news - thanks Google!
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Spotify announced that it would start to crack down on adblockers in 2019 [1], but I've been using ublock origin on their web player since then and haven't noticed any issues (apart from the odd glitch when the blocker is trying to skip the ad). Did they get cold feet or was it mostly a PR move?
Sometimes it's just for the scentiment. For example, YouTube has had a policy since 2015 that you can't have third-party brand logos in your videos unless that brand also buys out all of YouTube's banner and in-video Ads in the video, and it couldn't be a pre-recorded ad, it had to be a sponsor spot integrated into the content. Supposedly there was no outrage and this policy stayed in place, and was just never enforced. https://youtu.be/t17PVwreKEE?t=93
Not at all. They simply must build a function to determine the probability that a given {browser fingerprint, IP} will block ads. If the probability exceeds some threshold (derived from expected potential ad revenue vs cost of service, perhaps), they won’t be served video.
This is downright trivial for a google engineer, and I bet you could and would do it too if your company’s finances (aka your salary/livelihood) depended on it.
Well we don’t have to speculate: if when this comes out generally the solution to everyone’s problem and the downfall of YT is clearing one’s cookies, you win.
>> Before the reliance on ad blockers, people turned to YouTube Vanced to enjoy a Premium-like experience for free. However, the service was shuttered in March last year due to legal pressure from Google. With ad blockers now seemingly on the way out, it looks like free users may only be left with the option of sitting through ads
That is simply not true. There are numerous alternatives to YouTube Vanced, including NewPipe, LibreTube or SkyTube. Only to name a couple. And then there still is invidious. So no, you don't have to sit through ads.
I don't block ads, I block technology, for largely political reasons. I have the technical skills to do so, which almost certainly puts me in a minority. But all the whining from ad-supported corps is just whining, and if that doesn't work an attempt at extortion.
If the copy said "Looks like you're blocking trackers and content from properties we don't own" instead of "Looks like you may be using an ad blocker" it would be more truthful. Maybe somebody should go after them for deceptive advertising.
Honestly, seeing an old spice ad isn't going to make me buy old spice.
And seeing a 1 hour ad for some guy telling me to stop eating what I'm eating to have no-wipe bowel movements isn't going to make me buy the stuff.
There have been studies done about plumbers. The ones that pay money to get on top in the White Pages have worse reviews than the ones that work by word of mouth. I go by the same thing. If you feel that your product needs an ad, it's probably overpriced and / or doesn't do what it says it does.
That's what happens in monopolies. Until we find a way to move most useful YT content to another platform (e.g., Vimeo), we'll have to deal with YT's greedy policies.
A little too much spin there. They don’t have to offer a free service, they choose to. YT can do whatever they want with their platform as far as I’m concerned, but implying that people are stealing is disingenuous. YT got popular in the first place by offering a free service, and they are still offering a free service with ads that I’m not obligated to watch. They could, if they wanted, charge admission for all viewers, and skip the ads, they could choose to not offer free service. They’re intentionally not doing that so that they can have their cake and eat it too by offering a free service but inserting ads into it. It’s YT’s choice alone to offer the costly service for free, their wish is that people watch the ads, but fortunately whether we watch them is our choice. Note that YT’s testing here isn’t primarily to punish people, in part it’s to do an experiment to find out if they’ll lose viewers by demanding they watch the ads, precisely so that they can continue to choose to offer a ‘free’ service, and in part it’s to normalize the kind of spin you’re repeating here, to get people to believe they should submit to ad-watching and that they’re obligated to participate. They have been turning the screw on this for years and they will continue to, because it statistically works, but by participating in their narrative, by suggesting people are grifting when ad-blocking, you’re helping them normalize this concept.
If the venue is fenced and charges admission, then yes sneaking in is stealing. Legally speaking.
Wait, you consider ad-blocking to be stealing, and sneaking into a paid concert, for which you could face legal consequences to be not stealing? That seems very weird.
Anyway that analogy is not at all what YouTube is doing though. The valid analogy would be more like there’s a free concert in the park and people accuse you of stealing if you don’t buy their optional T-shirts, or I dunno watch an optional real-estate presentation beforehand or something.
Hahaha you need to tell YouTube that, not me. Lol why are accusations of bad faith always made in bad faith? I guess you just don’t want to address your own inconsistency? You didn’t answer the question of why you consider sneaking into a paid concert to be not stealing yet claim you must pay for YouTube somehow. That makes no sense. You could be fined or jailed for sneaking into a concert because it’s illegal, it’s stealing by definition. You cannot be fined for not watching YouTube ads.
What, exactly, is your definition of free? Does YouTube agree with your definition, do they say it’s not free? Where? Can you link to language that outlines the non-premium YouTube payment procedure? Can you demonstrate that failure to pay could result in legal consequences?
YouTube is in fact free in the sense that it does not cost the viewer money to watch. And unlike concert tickets or any other paid product, there is no legal obligation or expectation to “pay” for YT with time or attention, and there is no tracking or record of any such payment. Just because they want you to watch ads while not asking for money does not make YouTube not free.
Now that I’m experimenting with blocking YouTube altogether for longer and longer periods of time, I find that I don’t need it at all anymore. I used to heavily rely on it for tutorials but ChatGPT has replaced that; why watch a 30 minute explanation of something that winds up being tangentially related to what you’re doing when you can just talk directly to the documentation and ask follow up questions? Other than that use, everything else on YouTube was just a distraction.
> why watch a 30 minute explanation of something that winds up being tangentially related to what you’re doing when you can just
In the past there used to be well written blog posts and you were able to read them in 15 minutes and better understand the matter.
Now we have to waste 15 mins more of our life to get the same point.
I don’t even bother with blog posts anymore unless they are new information and in that case it’s often easier to use Edge and Bing chat to interrogate the page directly. It’s far better than skimming or ctrl-f
I tried no adblocker on youtube.
I made the mistake of putting Steve Hillage: Rainbow Dome Music on.
So fuck you Barilla pasta for shitting your disgraceful ad right in the middle.
C'è casa? C'è merda.
How the hell people do yoga and other calming things with youtube with ads is way beyond what i can understand.
At least, i tried, although i got burned. Never going back - and if yt manages to defeat me, fuck them too. I'm not against ads per se, but please...try and be tasteful!
I've been using fixyt.com to avoid YouTube grossness for years. Thanks to the bookmarklet below, whenever I land at youtube.com I'm only ever a click away from escaping their awful, awful app.
Students don't even have the option of paying for premium using their school account, and so if you assign them videos to watch (using that account) they must watch ads; is that correct?
I think YouTube should just drop the creators who demanded the greater subscription revenue that must've precipitated this change; go sell your own content.
FWIW, ad-free Khan Academy videos are subsidized by Alphabet/Google/YouTube.
The experience on the platform became so hostile to users, while content is turning into a cable tv, I wouldn't miss it, if I would be blocked.
It's not blocking an ad or two, but a full spam marathon, sometimes longer than a movie itself. Of course, it's not possible to see which movies are worth to watch, as dislikes are not visible, so more video opens, more disappointment, but also... more ads.
While probably unintended, this still benefits them because this normalizes paying for premium either way. And a few years later when they decide to pull the plug, your chance of paying full price will be greater as a result.
Not really. You need a separate payment profile in the country you intend to subscribe to it. My Play Store profile is USA-based, but I'm in Thailand and I subscribe for the 1-year plan for $44.99. A new payment profile is created for YouTube billing, though I deleted it as it's quite a hassle to manage different profile; I'll create a new one if needed.
Thank you, I will definitely use it for short sentences. But my typical scenario is to throw a whole webpage from HN if I am too tired to read it in English. I do not see how deepl can translate a whole webpage, all I see is 1500 symbols with no registration.
Thinking it's wrong to advocate fraudulently billing in a poor country to avoid a small charge, does not preclude thinking it's wrong for corporations or billionaires to commit fraud.
It is not just about thinking that corporations/billionaires are doing something wrong, it is also about them getting away with it, governments doing nothing about it and being powerless yourself to do something about it. If this world rewards the rich cheating for example by using tax havens, why not cheat themselves out of some dollars a month by using a 'cheap haven' yourself? Seems fair to me.
I would pay, but most of YT is junk, filled with clickbaits and commercials. So, it's not worth it for the rare truly interesting thing I can find there.
If I can't watch it with ublock, I will search for some alternative measures that will still allow me to watch without seeing ads. If no such measures will exist, then I'll quit watching youtube. Maybe I'll go for Vimeo or DailyMotion.
I pay for twitch turbo, I even had youtube tv during football season. So I'm not that cost sensitive, and don't oppose giving youtube money for a service.
But logging in on every browser and device I watch youtube on? Fuck, I'd rather not. Also, I never login to my personal google account at work.
Before google bought youtube, my account there was called something like "duntwantacct".
If you can't afford to host the services, don't host the services. If users can't afford to provide you with free content, users shouldn't provide you with free content.
It is immoral to fund an ostensibly free service that you cannot afford to host for free by forcing users to do something they don't want to do.
Granted, Google abandoned "don't be evil" a long time ago
They've become increasingly hostile about ads in general. I sometimes watch youtube on my TV via Roku, which sadly doesn't have ad blockers, and there's been a noticeable rise in long ads that can't be skipped. It's pretty routine now to get 30s long ads that are unskippable, and just a few days ago I got one that was nearly 90s.
> Premium [...] looks like free users may only be left with the option of sitting through ads
False dichotomy.
Free users will continue to either block their ad practices, stop watching in YouTube, download the videos, etc.
It's my computer/devices. I don't simply consume because YouTube decides to operate at a loss to gain market Monopoly and targets competitors in anti competitive ways.
Though I have premium, I actually don't mind Youtube ads that much. Compared to regular old banners ads throughout the internet, Youtube ads feel much nicer and interesting to watch. Much more production value, like TV ads(because they literally are).
Of course, no ads are better than any ad, but I can't ignore the fact that ad-enabled Youtube is free.
“Most of you have browsers, and most of those browsers show you advertisements, and I’m very puzzled about why. The advertisements are annoying most of the time, they slow you down, they injure the concentration that you bring to whatever task it is that you’re doing, and there’s no reason why they show you advertisements; my browser doesn’t show me any advertisements. I don’t see any ads when I read The New York Times, or go to wherever it is that you are happy going to, because my browser has Adblock in it, and that pretty much ends the story. Even in this town, many of you, indeed, I would guess, most of you are probably using the Firefox browser. That means you’re two clicks away from not having any advertising on the net anymore. All you need to do is google “Adblock Plus”, and say “I’m feeling lucky”, [Laughter] thank you very much. Now you know why my friends – and they are my friends – at the Mozilla Foundation are paid tens of millions of dollars every year by Google – basically, not to bundle Adblock Plus into the default distribution of Firefox.
But you also know why all the talk about advertising supported models on the web is just talk, and why it is that in the end, all of those models are fated not to work. Because in digital media, when you give people knowledge, you can’t force them to take advertising, because digital media are filterable – that’s the beauty of them.”
Not sure if it's related, but I'm noticing that my principle Invidious instance (yewtu.be) has been knocked offline, apparently by its cloud provider, and that my usually-reliable Piped fallback (piped.kavin.rocks) is showing YouTube comments on video links ... but not the video itself).
The best solution when you see an ad is to ctrl-click on it dozens of times. Then do it again with as many proxy/VPN/tor IPs as you can. It will cost google or the advertiser money or get them banned for clock fraud. Wish I could automate this. Which reminds me I need to install ad-nauseum again.
Once the ad volume readily affects page load times, or disrupts casting flow (e.g. if my attempt to listen to Brian Eno & Jon Hassell's ambient works is intruded on every 10 minutes with an earbleed level ad for Papa John's Pizza), I just download the content locally and cast it via Emby.
I hardly use YT but yesterday, I searched something which turned out on YT. So I clicked it then I was served two ads before I can actually play it. And in just around 5 minutes or so, another ad popped out again. Thus I don't really see why not try blocking ads.
Could you, in theory, stream a “video” of a website to the user and handle only the input (mouse, keybord) from the user?
The user would then not interact with a website but with a “video” where everything is rendered server side thus making it impossible to block any ads.
Youtube has excellent content form people who put a lot of effort into it, but do not have a lot of subscribers, don't earn a lot and don't produce a lot of traffic.
Then there are millions of low effort videos that produce millions of clicks.
Unless they make the ads part of the video itself by re-encoding it on the fly with the ads inserted, there will be a way around this. Instead of blocking the ads, the ad blocker just needs to download the content anyway and run it off-screen.
inline ads don’t even fix YT’s problem. see: sponsorblock. if you’re inserting targeted ads (where each viewer sees a different length, or ads inserted at a different position), the sponsorblock approach can be modified to function as a catalog of known ads which your browser/app recognizes and skips.
it’s an arms race. it’s the same flaw as DRM. Google wants to control how your device interacts with the bits it’s already downloaded. as long as the device is in your hands, they can make the bits more difficult for you to use in a manner they don’t approve of, but they can never make it impossible.
What I don't understand why so many ads ony face? I work as advertiser and competing with that many other ads is bad, if they were showing the user one meaningful ad , busineses would have better conversion rates and user less annoyed
A lot of people think ads before and after videos, or peppered eveyr 3 minutes within an hour long video are no big deal, but many of us have had enough. I pay google around $20 a month to avoid watching ads. I consider this extortion.
If they got away with blocking adblockers and people signed up for Premium, eventually the money from that wouldn't be enough because Line Always Needs Up. Eventually you'd watch more ad than video, and eventually videos would become unwatchable because every second would be peppered with ads.
Love this, this may actually help me to reduce my consumption of Youtube videos even further. That would be a good thing. All creators I like are also on other paid platforms. Thanks google for helping me migrate.
The price for premium just doesn't make sense. I would buy it if it were $1 or less per month. This seems reasonable to me, how much could they possibly make off of me in a single month with ads?
I’ll likely end up pay tbh. Usually more militant about getting aggressively pushed but in this case - I can see how serving vid isn’t cheap and the value is real so fine whatever
Wow, YouTube really knows how to make friends. Testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers? Good luck with that! I just love how brave browser is blocking all the ads.
I purchased a year of YouTube premium while I was on holiday in Turkey and it didn’t cost much. I mostly did it for YouTube music but the no ads thing is pretty great too.
YouTube Premium is one the best deals in tech. For 10/mo you get a functionally infinite content library that's refreshed every day, and you never see an ad.
Competition has been banned and legislated away. Remember YouTube only became big because it mostly served copyrighted content in the early days. If you tried that now you would get sued into oblivion
Until a competitor devices a revenue stream that is just as profitable as advertising and data capture (obviously it won't be a subscription model) then we're stuck in the perpetual cycle of "enshittification" as companies move to protect their revenue.
The ads business is certainly one of enshittification. But, it becomes too shitty when the incumbents start milking every possible inch of the screen for as many seconds as they can. This happened with tv, cable, newspapers, and now streaming services.
There is a always a chance that the next generation gets hooked on to a different platform. That phase where an emerging competition is eating the incumbent's lunch is the best time to be there.
Hey Youtube: I've never logged in to you because I don't want you tracking me. I've never subscribed to, voted on, or commented on a video because all those things require logging in. For the handful of creators I like, I support them on Patreon. For the other random crap that I occasionally find useful, I use ad blockers or youtube-dl, and I'll continue using them until they stop working. When that day comes, you and I part company.
You do what you gotta do, and I'll do what I gotta do.
If you dislike the ads, pay for YouTube Premium. Otherwise, you pay with your time.
This might be a privileged take, but I wish the entire Internet was like this.
I really hate having to use an ad-blocker for everything, but I also hate that the only way some (many?) companies make money is by shoving as many bandwidth- and resource-stealing ads and tracking scripts into my face as possible.
> “In cases when viewers feel they have been falsely flagged as using an ad blocker, they can share this feedback by clicking on the link in the prompt.”
At this point, such a statement almost feels as though it is explicitly stating that the "feedback" will be ignored. It probably won't be in aggregate but why should I expect that my individual report will be acted upon?
I’m not sure if anyone else feels this way, but the sight of many ads on the internet makes my blood boil like nothing else. I think it’s because some ads treat your intelligence like you’re a brainwashed idiot who will fall for anything. Ads like these are the reason I use adblock.
"Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing programming." --Jamie Kellner
i don't mind it because i pay for premium, but what i mind is not being able to turn off shorts. shorts are ruining the platform and i am very tempted to drop my support because of this.
As someone who has no "special love" for YouTube, I feel like the equation for YouTube is different for me that what they have in mind. YouTube chose to host a public mode of displaying videos that someone in a third world country made or Linus Sebastian made. As long as they don't put everything behind Netflix style login, I will fight tooth and nail with UBO. I don't care about "ethics" of ad blockers. If its public, I will do what I darn want. Want to stop me, well put it behind a paywall.
That does two things.
I don't use Netflix so any content there is of 0 interest to me.
You don't get to stay public and expect ad dollars. It doesn't work like that on the internet.
Same for NYT. I don't pay for it and have no use for content there. If if were an ad supported one, then I could use an ad blocker.
Think of it this way. If you screen your movie in a cinema hall, I will watch it if I pay for a ticket. Fair and square. If it is played on a public roadshow, I will skip all ads or skip it altogether.
The org has to decide. Either make content pay per use or free. No middle ground.
> If its public, I will do what I darn want. Want to stop me, well put it behind a paywall.
The ethics are pretty clear I think: if I navigate with my browser to YouTube, or any site with ads, I'm able to see the content, plus annoying ads. I don't have to watch the ads: I can use an ad-blocker to tell my browser to not render those ads. The site has every right to serve me HTML/JS/video however they wish, but they have no right to tell me what to do with that data. If I want to ignore part of it, that's my right, and if I use automated means to ignore selected parts, that's also my right. If they want to spend massive resources trying to figure out ways to get around my automated means, or to detect my ad-blocker and refuse to send me data, they can do that too, but at what cost?
But if they want to avoid this arms race of ad-blocking, they can just do what Netflix does: require payment and an account to get in.
As for paywalls, those are really the same thing as ads usually: they load the article, then use JS to block it. You can block the JS and read the article.
Yes, in fact the "ethics" is written clearly in web standards principles:
> 2.12 People should be able to render web content as they want
> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts or auto-played videos. We will build features and write specifications that respect peoples' agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.
Exactly. Inundating information with intrusive ads works directly against this goat, so blocking those ads isn't just your right, it's a moral imperative.
I like to keep things simple: Anyone who defends advertising in the age of psychology-hacking is either a sociopath on top, or a wannabe. Don't negotiate with terrorists, etc etc.
I block ads because they're psychological warfare that corporations wage against me. I don't care how unobtrusive the ads are. I don't care if the ads don't track me. I grew up changing the channel on TV when ads came on, and ripping adverts out of magazines before sitting down to read them. I vote for billboard bans whenever I can. I have zero tolerance for ads of any sort.
Advertisers have no morals, they're completely depraved. They'll eagerly exploit a teenager's self-conscious body issues to sell useless beauty products. They sell sugar water to fat people and at every turn promote the rampant consumerist culture that is destroying our planet. They're lower than pond scum and I never want to see a single ad from them ever.
> It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.
Profound. Thanks for sharing this. That really frames what I’ve been struggling to describe. Advertising isn’t some necessary lifeblood of many industries. It can often be something like the endless trench warfare between Pepsi and Coke, vying for slivers of mindshare.
I also think that advertising is often a crutch for incompetence. Build a good product and it can take off all on its own. People advertise for you. Or build crap and hire an industry to manipulate people into wanting your crap. Advertising is manipulation. Watch any ad and ask, “what emotion are they trying to con me into feeling?”
Good products hardly ever take out on their own. I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise.
Advertisement is sometimes just to inform and build awareness, sometimes to build brand, but often to persuade, and sometimes it exploits unethical persuasion techniques. The gap between ethics allowed by society and your own personal ethics are very variable from place to place and person to person. For example in a lot of places it's illegal for doctors and pharma to advertise; some might consider it a good thing not to exploit hypochondriacs, but is it ethical if it results in patients not knowing about an actual cure for their condition? These things are endlessly debatable, they're very far from a black and white situation.
Do good products fail to take off on their own because advertising is an absolute necessity, or is it because advertising allows bad products to saturate the market so thoroughly? In a hypothetical world without advertising, would it still be true that good products couldn't take off on their own merits? Or would they spread effectively by word of mouth in the absence of the noise generated by the advertising industry?
I don't have an answer to this question, it's purely hypothetical. And even if it is true that in this hypothetical world, good products would spread, we're still left with a prisoner's dilemma to resolve in the real world.
While it rings rather hollow at this point, I still find NPR's description of how they differentiate "advertising" from "sponsor messages":
- no qualitative adjectives
That is, you can say "Foo Corp. makes high speed Gizblams that can help you and your family deal with the challenges of flamming" without it being an ad.
BUt if you say "Foo Corp. makes the best anti-flam devices", it's an ad.
I mean sure, it's sort of bullshit, but there's some sort of idea buried in there somewhere.
I really like this. There is a huge difference between,
“We make Foo. Foo helps you Bar the Baz. Check us out at foobarbaz.com”
Vs.
“Look at this scary Baz. Feel emotions about it. We want you feeling anxious and ill-equipped. Okay now here’s Foo. We want you feeling better. Nicer music. Smiles. Good emotions from you. What a relief. If you’re tired of being a dumb idiot who suffers from Baz all the time, we can fix you with Foo.”
HN asks for substantive comments, not memes or internet tropes. HN also asks you not to comment on voting because it's shallow and boring. Written guidelines are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Foo Corp. makes Gizblams." Whether or not they're high speed depends on the other Gizblam manufacturers, whether or not it can help me or my family depends on if I like it or not.
Hey I'd never heard that one before, I like that one a lot. I wouldn't mind ads if they were sponsor messages like that or remember PBS and stuff? Less noise and crap would be great and ads wouldn't be so crap to deal with. If ya want to let me know your product exists just say it does don't try to lie to me then yeah I'd be more okay with ads or "sponsor messages" as you say there.
To NPR's point, I do not find NPR's voices advertising objectionable when they come up once or twice an hour. They're non-offensive and in the same voice, tone, and level as all of the other commentary.
I've been thinking about this comment for a few minutes and do find it interesting. But the extremes of the comments and quotes above make it clear that even displaying your product is an ad; demonstrating how it works to a crowd would be an ad; telling someone that it exists would be an ad; there seems to be no way to tell the market that your product exists without that being defined as an ad.
So I would answer you with, given the extremes defined above, that indeed advertising is a necessity since good products would otherwise rot inside the inventor's home. It being illegal (say, for example) to have ads would mean that it is illegal to even tell anyone that you invented a product.
I think there's got to be some kind of give from the anti-ad side if we want to have _things_ in the world that do stuff - because if I can't even say "I made a better product that does x,y,z" then how the heck is anyone ever gonna find out about it? Where does the word-of-mouth kick off even?
You gotta _tell_ people you made something - but that's an ad.
So I've been producing ads for a couple of decades, and I agree that they're basically psychological warfare. I justify it to myself because I usually get to make ads for products that help people, but the war over mindshare is absolutely depraved. That said, there does need to be a place for people to access information about products and services. I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services, rather than something ingrained in every aspect of modern life.
>So I've been producing ads for a couple of decades, and I agree that they're basically psychological warfare. I justify it to myself because I usually get to make ads for products that help people, but the war over mindshare is absolutely depraved. That said, there does need to be a place for people to access information about products and services. I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services, rather than something ingrained in every aspect of modern life.
I spent a number of years doing market research for advertising, and I couldn't agree more. Data analysis is primarily focused on increasing "top of mind" and "unaided" awareness and linking positively-perceived properties and emotions to the product being flogged.
I got out before "social media" convinced everyone to share everything about their lives with advertisers and their enablers, but back in the day, ad agencies and the marketing departments of large consumer product companies each spend millions every year (cf. BSB Global Scan[0] as an example) collecting a tiny subset of that data.
Given the enormous amount of data available today, I imagine that the levels of manipulation have increased exponentially. And more's the pity.
So I suppose where you are coming from is that you're using dirty tricks to convince people who don't need a product to buy it. Which is not ideal. But I've seen a lot of software engineers write code that is unreliable and causes their users a lot of suffering. Most people do a bit of harm on the margins because their job is part of messy reality instead of some imaginary pure world.
On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products. It is just much easier to sell something useful with sneaky advertising than selling advertising in a vacuum. People not knowing about their options is one of the bigger problems in modern life. There are a lot of things I'd spend money on to change and I'm just not sure how to do it. As far as I can tell that is normal.
"I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services" - when I see people doing that I'll believe it is an option. Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.
> On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products.
How? Take the examples from above about selling beauty products to teenagers, where is the ad saying "you're perfect as you are, no need to drop hundreds of dollars on any of this bullshit"? All the ads in existence will try to extract money from them by playing up body image issues, so the noise WILL NOT cancel out on their own.
> Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.
To think that you know what's better for people than they know for themselves... Tell me, are you an advertising professional? Because your thought process is just as obnoxious.
> To think that you know what's better for people than they know for themselves...
Easy mistake, I suppose. But if you read closely, you'll notice that isn't what I said or implied.
People often know what is in their own best interests, they just don't act on it. Consider, for example, how hard it is for most people to get to the gym even after taking out gym membership. I had a running buddy once solely because the gentleman knew he wouldn't go running unless he had someone else to remind him.
People usually need a little push before they do the sensible thing. That is one of the things advertisers tap in to and why they are so valuable to a business.
Advertisers never push people to do the sensible thing though. There's a reason that "vice" advertising has so much money poured into it.
The gym advertising its memberships would rather you never set foot on their premises.
Beauty products want you to feel good about yourself, but only while you're wearing their products.
McDonalds and Coca Cola do not want you to eat healthier, or enjoy their products only occasionally.
It's actually shocking to see someone frame advertisers as pushing people towards making good decisions for themselves, when we've had to explicitly ban tobacco companies from advertising how sexy and popular smoking would make you.
I agree that way more advertising is aimed at encouraging poor decisions for profit. There's just more money in it. But there absolutely are ads (not just PSAs) that try to get people to help themselves. Profit is still made, but the exchange is much more equitable (or there's no better option).
iPhone advertising back in 2007-era revolutionised computing and managed to convince a lot of people to pa for quality phones instead of putting up with the usual cheap product that most companies produce. It was a two-for-one.
AWS advertising generally has been a major contributor to the success of at least two companies I worked at.
I get reminded from time to time that I could saved quite a bit on my retirement fund if I switched to one with lower fees. One day an ad will probably hit me at the right moment and I'll actually do it.
Local news stations are one of the last bastions of investigative journalism, (generally) reliable and actionable information, and platforms for local non-profits. They're a net benefit to a community, and they only maintain that capacity through promotion.
There are a lot of medical devices that help people with relatively minor or uncommon issues. Even doctors don’t always know about them. The companies that make them can’t usually afford to advertise on larger platforms, but they target ads to try and reach those affected.
Local consumer-facing businesses in general need local advertising to survive. This works better for some industries than others, but keeping a competitive space healthy requires some assistance getting a newer/smaller competitor’s message out.
It's not so much about any particular ad or product, but the attention that ads steal. Most peoples' heads are FULL of ad jingles they never wanted there.
> On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products.
That, in general sense, violates second law of thermodynamics. More specifically, it also feels like going against some physical law with Shannon's signature on it, though its formulation escapes me.
Point being: even in cases where this "cancelling out" happens, it's not a free process. It uses energy, it uses natural resources, it uses victims' attention, it generates entropy. The more advertisers scale it, the more waste it creates.
As for "made based on the quality and usefulness of the products", that's actually the first victim of advertising - all real information gets lost in the sea of lies, while victims' attention is saturated, so they have very little headspace to evaluate competing offers.
I think that the rest of your discussion hinges on this assumption, and I completely disagree with it.
What you need actually is for people to know that your product exist.
People have needs & problem beyond the fake ones created by advertising.
People can _ask_ for what options exist to solve their problem. And that to me is fundamentally different.
Having a way for consumers to go out and pull information in about what options exist is fundamentally different from having advertising shoved down their throat.
> People need can _ask_ for what options exist to solve their problem.
Where do you propose people ask? Who would fulfill those queries? What formats would you allow the information to be expressed in? Would you filter out any non-objective characterization (“best car in the world”)? Would you constrain packaging (eg color, creativity, etc.) so that it isn’t attention-grabbing? Etc.
I’m not sure how it would all work out. But let’s start where we are now with search engines.
Remove the ads and make people pay to use them beyond some number of queries a month. This alone gets rid of the problem of the platform intentionally shoving ads down your throat.
Find a shitty website that SEO’d it’s way to the top and got through the cat and mouse game? Then allow people to blacklist websites so they stop appearing in results. Then as the provider investigate and downrank sites that people downrank and block often.
Maybe also preferentially treat companies that don’t load their own sites with other people’s ads and tracking scripts. Oh and tell the user how many of those trackers exist on the site.
This obviously don’t solve the problem of companies pushing ads onto you. But it:
1. Sets up your information provider to not be the biggest and worse ad pusher of them all.
2. It gives people the tools to start penalizing bad content and ads and to outright block them from their results.
This alone, I strongly believe, would be a great improvement.
Google used to (like, fifteen years ago) go to enormous lengths to break or cripple any kind of SEO - unpredictably revising their algorithm, hand-reviewing sites, and other things that they wouldn't even admit to or hint about (for fear of giving the nascent SEO "industry" a moment of ascendency). There was a brief time in the early teens when the received wisdom was that "SEO doesn't work".
Maybe they still do all that, but I'm not convinced. I see so many transparently SEO-ified sites at the top of search results that I regularly think "I wouldn't have seen that in 2008".
I recently switched to Kagi, and it does most of the things I talk about above. I don’t stumble into SEO crab very often anymore. And when I do, I instantly black hole it.
They recently rolled out a leaderboard where you can see the top sites people block, downrank, uprank, and pin to the top. Extremely useful.
I really believe I have a good idea for this question[1]. There is no reason advertising couldn't be nagging me to do things I want to be nagged into doing anyway. But damn, the actual work to disrupt such an entrenched snakepit of self-justification is daunting. I don't think it's at all impossible to build something much better, just really hard to get the necessary mindshare from an industry built on taking mindshare.
This is an unreasonable set of goals, given that the current system (advertising) fails to avoid any of these issues.
Regardless of current issues with Reddit's business model, it does seem to have been particularly successful as a US/English repository of product knowledge, despite not having any specific strategies to deal with the problems you mention above.
> This is an unreasonable set of goals, given that the current system (advertising) fails to avoid any of these issues.
The proposal that I responded to wanted a system where a consumer can express their desire for a product or service given the problem and that you get back results that don't have the smell of advertising. Put differently, these aspects I enumerated ARE attributes of advertising that the proposal seeks to eliminate.
I actually didn’t require it to stop looking like current advertising. I merely wish for a system in which you come to companies telling them what problem you want and listen to what they have to say.
This is opposed to the current system where they are constantly trying to barge into your life.
It’s about pulling in information when you want it versus having it pushed onto you. See my reply to your other comment.
I recently bought a ski touring pack. It's almost certainly the best pack money can buy. The guy who made it has a waiting list and seems to be happy with his life. He doesn't advertise at all. If you find him, you move in the circles that mean that you want a high quality ski touring pack, and word of mouth will eventually reach you. If you really care about this category of product you can find him. The pack is competitive in price with anything else on the market of similar features and quality. It's not really a "luxury" or "boutique" product.
This is an example of how businesses and customers can be perfectly happy without any advertising. It's not the only example, just the first that came to mind.
I know a Polish guy that makes sleeping bags along much the same model. Best sleeping bags that you can find. He's got a waiting list longer than a year now and people don't mind. Never a single ad, just word of mouth. And no, it doesn't scale but he couldn't care less.
One of my clients make really good products. I would say the best you can get (this is a mobility product) It has ergonomic properties that blows away any competition, and build quality is second to none.
However, it’s expensive. It has been a really tough uphill climb to connect to our audience and convince them the money is worth it here. In a market with marked up shitty quality products it has been a journey to position ourselves, especially since our budgets are maybe 1/10th of that of aforementioned shitty producers who outmarket us.
I honestly feel the work I am doing is near to a community service. Although still advertising our ads are honest of what the products can do.
Put up a non-intrusive entry in a directory that people would use to reach out to you. Let them come to you.
Stop hounding people to be the repeatedly ground in impression by repetition. So much time is wasted today... When I think of all the broadcasting/transmission medium throughput that's eaten up by carrying unsolicited advertisements to people that could either A) be left unused, or used to provide better performance for everyone, or B) utilized for, heaven forbid, the public calling out for proposals from service providers!
You know, we could just bin the entire sector/activity under dishonesty like we did before puffery was enshrined as an acceptable behavior for a business.
Advertisement meant to inform is valuable. However, almost all advertising is meant to bewilder.
Advertising and marketing executives spend all their time thinking up ways to say things that are technically true if construed in the most torturous way possible while implying something else. That is a pure intent to confuse and bewilder and is the lifeblood of the industry.
We can fix this by requiring advertising to inform. Any implication that overstates your product should be false advertising. The test is simple, if your lawyer says: “Well technically…” you lose. You must be truthful, clear, and spend all of your time thinking about how a customer might misinterpret what you say over-positively and nip that in the bud. Obviously, this depends on the target demographic, and the expected viewers who might act on the ad, but the details seem solvable once you approach it from the stated concept.
Advertising should inform, anything else should be the crime of false advertising.
The direct reason for this is the existence of advertisement. In a ideal (also pretty much only theoretical) world where there are no ads, only honest reviewers and comparison sites, bad products would fall pretty quickly, planned obsolesce would be suicide etc etc.
> I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise.
What a strange example. Other than Apple products, I'm not sure if most people could tell you what computer they are using, or can recall seeing an ad for any of them. "PCs" are a generic, interchangeable object to most people.
But for most customers, any brand will suit them. Getting rid of advertising wouldn't really have an adverse effect on them, they'll just buy whatever's at the store and it'll be fine. (As long as there are adequate consumer protections.)
You might've never worked in retail I guess... Most people, if someone they trust chose for them, sure they wouldn't be able to tell the difference. But also, picking a "reputable brand" is a big criterion. By which most people mean, a brand they've at least heard of, preferably in good ways.
So who advertised the wheel to you? The sextant? The hammer? The abacus? Good inventions stand on their own technical merits and don’t need advertising to get others to see that they are good ideas.
You just listed several items invented hundreds or thousands of years ago, it doesn’t really give you a very strong argument.
If I make a website tomorrow that details the best innovation in programming language technology, how is it ever going to find an audience unless I advertise somehow? At some point I have to go around and tell people about it either in person or via ads, either way I am advertising.
You are supporting my point here. You aren’t selling actual tech, you are selling your website, that goes on to describe tech. No one puts out ads for things like c, bash, python, R, whatever. There aren’t billboards for these languages on the highway. This tech stands on its own, and people are guided to one language or another based on either its own technical merits or their own comfort with the language. You could argue things like white papers describing a technology in a relevant publication might be an ad, but I disagree. Those are more or less factual reports where the authors might even test their technologies shortcomings and limitations compared to existing offerings. Hyperbole is rejected by peer review, yet its the default language of advertising.
Ads on the other hand often lie by omission when it comes to the limits of a technology being advertised. They exist to get you on their product simply because the business is leveraged in it, not because its a good product, much less to share findings with potential colleagues about what you’ve discovered that might even tarnish said products initial expectations.
Yeah sure wheels are a good idea. Most people aren't in the market for ideas. If you're in the market for some actual wheels to put on your car, it sure might help if the tires someone's trying to sell you are Goodyear, Michelin, Firestone, or some no-brand piece of rubber.
It's not. Apple advertised massively the iPhone when it came out, and while they did take share away from other phone manufacturers, they almost certainly made the pie bigger for everyone. People weren't routinely buying phones that cost close to $1000 every few years.
The first iPhone was about $600 which wasn’t that high when you consider the price of an iPod + cell phone combined. And people were regularly buying cellphones and that trend would only ever increase.
As for advertising driving consumerism, that’s undeniable but it’s unclear to me that consumerism is a net positive. We certainly can see all the negative things it creates in society. It also distorts the market in a way that funds are directed to things that may not be as important but has better advertising.
>> Good products hardly ever take out on their own. I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise.
As a counterpoint, I chose my last three laptops (Thinkpads, by Lenovo) because I was fed up with the advertisement, in particular grassroots advertisement, by Apple. Lenovo did advertise to people like me, but I was already on the market for a powerful laptop and the last thing I would buy was an Apple laptop, because of all the advertisement as I said. I went with the first thing that was shoved in my face and that looked good enough for my needs.
Honestly I have no idea whose game I'm playing here. When I find the time I'll make a laptop of my own. Only of course it will end up as big as a desktop :)
No, I've built my own computer from parts I've researched that were given by aggregated reviews best ratio of cost/value for me. If I ever saw an ad during that process to any of those components, I would ignore that. If it would be obnoxious enough, I would go for competition instead just because of that.
Computers are actually pretty bad example of this here on HN, folks here do (or at least should) understand pretty damn well what they are buying and ads should never interfere with this process.
Patients shouldn't be researching cures for themselves, they should be given choices by professional doctors. If this process is broken fix that, and not justify amoral for-profit advertising instead.
I literally can't agree with a single sentence you wrote, it all sounds like from person way too deep in PR business justifying their jobs.
I don't think I have ever seen microsoft ads in my country, not for Windows at least.
They didn't make it by advertising rather that having deals to become the default because shipped in the hardware and the price baked in the price of the hardware.
Advertising should be heavily taxed so companies have an incentive to innovate and make better products. All the money that goes to advertising is money that don't go to R&D and salaries.
The internet business model is an exception because there ads actually fund useful services. It's anomally, a clever hack but should really be independant public services whose goal is to expand freedom of associtaion and peer to peer discovery and exchanges and could be funded with taxes.
There is plenty of Microsoft advertising in any country that they're in. But it may be more subtle. There's search advertising. They also subsidize partner advertising (co-marketing).
> The internet business model is an exception because there ads actually fund useful services.
?? Most public information services, including newspapers, radio, and television, are funded in large part by advertising.
>I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise
TBH, I can't recall the last time I saw an ad for a Dell product.
> I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise.
Isn't this the survivorship bias? If aggressively advertising companies outcompete companies not advertising or advertising less - then if advertising wasn't an option, or if the society was more negative towards ads - then perhaps the latter category of companies would be more thrive.
Many established doctors have their habits set after years (or decades) of practice, and aren't particularly interested in new stuff. Many young doctors are unsure of trying something outside of the norm. All are afraid of malpractice. It's very difficult for new treatments to spread in this kind of environment.
> It's very difficult for new treatments to spread in this kind of environment.
No amount of drug advertisements will change that. Solve the root cause and the problem generally goes away, but keep putting lipstick on a pig and you just get more problems.
That’s only because everyone advertises. Kind of nuclear weapons. You gotta have them even if you believe they shouldn’t even exist. Still, many very good products take off on their own (word of mouth) though they’re not very common.
> It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages."
Pay close attention and note that Smith is talking about individuals-as- butchers, brewers, and bakers.
Not multinational conglomerate monopolist meat-packing, alcohol, and shelf-stable baked goods manufacturers.
As individuals, Smith's artisans would have faced ample competition both within a community and from others nearby if they attempted to strong-arm customers or degrade products (though there was plenty of both going on, as attested by food-quality and food-purity laws dating back to Hammurabi). They lacked any appreciable ability to lock in more than a very localised monopoly absent armed force or coercion, though those too were abundantly evident (see: America's Colonies and the British East India Company, both of which Smith also writes of).
Yeah, Smith's little chestnut requires heavy interpretation and contextualization. Definitely not the 'anytime any person or organization sells anything in self-interest it is good for everyone because markets' definition which it often gets dragged out for.
Weren't there trade unions back then, preventing a certain amount of competition? I'm not sure those days were some golden age of healthy market competition.
No. Certainly not general unions amongst unskilled labourers.
As Smith himself notes:
What are the common wages of labor, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties [(masters and workmen)], whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. ... The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of Parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it.
The proto-labour organisations were probably the guilds, which existed in Smith's time, and in fact he helped find alternative employment for one guy who had been blackisted by the local Hammermen's Guild (the blacksmith's union, as it were), goes by the name of James Watt. Had him set up at the University of Edinburgh, and worked on one of the fire engines there. What we'd now call a steam engine.
(And for all that, Smith utterly failed to realise what the import of that particular invention on the economic development of Britain during the 19th century would be....)
The first general unions in the UK date to the 1820s and 1830s, roughly three to four decades after Smith, who died in 1790:
> My parent was somehow dedicating more empathy towards single-man operations than large companies
They were not. They were pointing out that a single-man operation has far less power to dictate market conditions than a 50,000 person conglomerate. Even when they are the only butcher in a whole village, they have nowhere near the price-setting power that a company does (even one that doesn't have the same level of monopoly).
Much of what Smith argues about is power, beginning with among the shortest, pithiest, and clearest sentences in the entire book:
"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power."
Then there is his very long diatribe against joint stock (privately-held, shareholder-based) corporations, which Smith argues should be limited largely to the financial sector (banks and insurance). Itself an interesting distinction and one that's had me think about those areas of economic activity, and why the so-called "FIRE" sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) are linked together.
One interpretation I've arrived at is that all concern the evaluation of future value over a given portfolio: of loans, of insurance policies, and of mortgages (themselves a class of loans). These all ... have some peculiar and similar behavioural characteristics, risks, and moral and morale hazards associated with them. They also tend toward monopolistic in both scale and practices. Among the notable exceptions to anti-trust regulations against conspiring on prices is the exception for insurance underwriting boards, comprised of multiple companies, who share risk, cost, and pricing data to set premiums.
Just to clarify: you mean all those people who were never found personally liable for anything they did on behalf of their corporate employer? The ones who are either already re-employed (most likely at another corporate-type employer, where they're shielded from personal liability), or probably looking for employment at such an employer?
You mean those people? Because I just want to make sure we know who we're referring to here.
Corporate liability doctrine has two major components.
The first is limited liability to stockholders, whose losses are capped at the value of their investment and not for their full personal assets. That is, if you purchase stock in a company, neither creditors nor plaintiffs may seek compensation above and beyond what's already been invested. This is what is meant in the term "limited liability company", though the protection includes firms not described by that specific term. The protection does not apply to sole proprieterships and simple partnerships, so far as I understand (US law).
The second is the so-called "corporate veil", which further protects specific officers and board members of a firm from personal liability for the firm's actions in many cases. A recent notable (and notorious) example of this has been of Perdue Pharma and the Sackler Family, in which the officers (of Perdue) and the shareholders (the Sacklers) escaped most civil and any criminal liability for the deaths of 500,000 slewn for profits via the company's unwarranted and addictive opioid products.
There is no corporate protection, large or small, for shifts in overall economic conditions, particularly as affects individual workers (as opposed to officers, board members, creditors, and/or investors). Though of course, large corporate interests do have much greater influence over both government policy and legislation, and often secure bailouts ... which seem rarely to reach individual front-line workers.
ProPublica has a list compiled in 2008 extending from the Penn Central Railroad (1970, $3.2 billion) to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (2008, $700 billion), Citigroup (2008, $280 billion), and Bank of America (2009, $142 billion).
I'd strongly recommend you respond to what's actually been said by those you're responding to, and based on factual and relevant information. It makes for a more interesting discussion, even where, or rather, especially where, there is disagreement.
With all due respect to Graeber, and acknowledgement of Smith's faults, far more of the apparent contradictions in Smith come from those who grossly misrepresent him, whilst at the same time strongly discouraging others from reading him directly.
I'd compiled a set of quotes from Karl Marx and Adam Smith a ways back and encouraged people to tell which came from whom:
The "butcher, brewer, and baker" quote is most often seen in a form that ties it together with another passage hundreds of pages from it within Wealth. That construction was created in the early 20th century, more than 100 years after Smith wrote his work, by Jacob Viner, at the monopolist-defending University of Chicago. My understanding is that this was initially an exercise to show how much one could twist Smith's meaning by selectively editing his work. It's since come to be taken as a flat statement by Smith, as originally intended, when it is in fact no such thing.
In fact, the chapter in which the vastly over-exaggerated and greatly misconstrued phrase "invisible hand" occurs, begins with a discussion of restraint of trade by monopoly interests, including of the previously-mentioned butchers:
BY RESTRAINING, either by high duties, or by absolute prohibitions, the importation of such goods from foreign countries as can be produced at home, the monopoly of the home market is more or less secured to the domestic industry employed in producing them. Thus the prohibition of importing either live cattle or salt provisions from foreign countries secures to the graziers of Great Britain the monopoly of the home market for butcher's meat. The high duties upon the importation of corn, which in times of moderate plenty amount to a prohibition, give a like advantage to the growers of that commodity. The prohibition of the importation of foreign woollens is equally favorable to the woollen manufactures. The silk manufacture, though altogether employed upon foreign materials, has lately obtained the same advantage. The linen manufacture has not yet obtained it, but is making great strides toward it. Many other sorts of manufactures have, in the same manner, obtained in Great Britain, either altogether, or very nearly a monopoly against their countrymen. The variety of goods of which the importation into Great Britain is prohibited, either absolutely, or under certain circumstances, greatly exceeds what can easily be suspected by those who are not well acquainted with the laws of the customs.
Kennedy's hardly the only person to point this out. John Kenneth Galbraith made much of how Smith was misrepresented during his lifetime, and Steve Keen is amongst present-day economists doing similarly, if memory serves.
Since the post I'm responding to seems to be drawing negative attention, I'd like to make clear: I do respect Graeber, and think that his work on the origins of money in particular are far more credible than that suggested by Smith.
Smith does best where he comments on that which he can observe directly. He's weak on ancient history and what we'd now call archeology and anthropology (Graeber's own specialisation), as well as on contemporary conditions he'd not directly witnessed --- the American Colonies, again, or China, come to mind.
But in observing and commenting on actual trade, commerce, and politics of his own time and place, there's a great deal of wisdom. His commentary on prices suggests to me a number of classes of goods & services (commodities, assets, rents, wages, skilled / privileged work, public goods, capital stock) with distinct pricing tendencies, some of which behave poorly in open markets. His commentary on the components of wages is excellent (I've mentioned this numerous times over the years on HN). His commentary on the practices of privately chartered companies operating as empires and armies abroad are telling (and little commented on by the usual vociferous "champions" of Smith).
It's useful to keep in mind that all authors and authorities have their strengths and weaknesses. The one shouldn't blind us to the other, either way.
(Graeber also has his ... excessive enthusiasms, I'll put it. But he's also intelligent, a keen observer, and doesn't fall slave to orthodoxies and convention.)
> It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements.
In other words, the average person isn't advertising; at least, not in an intrusive way.
Indeed, the best at any particular job probably are not advertising, because the effort they spent on advertising is effort that was not spent on the job. After buying expensive medication in the United States, I come home and the TV is showing a 90 second commercial from a pharmaceutical company with a catchy song and is overall very well made--guess I know why my medication was expensive. Do we even need advertisements for prescription medication?
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are ‘The Advertisers’ and they are laughing at you.
> You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
> Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
> You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs. - Banksy
It doesn't give me a lot of hope we'll be able to reclaim our public spaces from being littered with ads anytime soon.
> Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
Best statement against 1) advertising, and 2) copyright, that I can imagine.
I think it came from his book "Cut it Out". There's some debate about how much of it is original. with some people saying it's similar to an article written in 1999 by someone named Sean Tejaratchi for a magazine called Crap Hound. I've never read the article or the book though, I just found the text online.
And I do mean see it. Read the damned thing, or at least the first dozen pages or so. It's a highly-readable, information-dense, and exceedingly insightful look at the development of commercial publishing in the US at the time, and its author is a magazine publisher himself.
Hard to believe this was already being articulated so clearly over a century ago:
> No wonder that the man who realizes the significance of all these figures and the trend disclosed by them is coming to look upon the editorial department of the newspaper as merely a necessary means of giving a literary tone to the publication, thus helping business men get their wares before the proper people.
> Thus you see advertising has made possible the great complex papers and magazines of the day with their corps of trained editors, reporters, and advertising writers, in numbers and intellectual calibre comparable with the faculty of a good-sized university. Advertising makes it possible to issue a paper far below the cost of manufacturing — all to the benefit of the consumer. So far as I know there is not an important daily, weekly, or monthly in America that can be manufactured at the selling price. But, on the other hand, with the growth of advertising a department had to be created in every paper for its handling. As advertising still further increased, rival papers competed for it and the professional solicitor became a necessary adjunct of every paper, until now the advertising department is the most important branch of the publication business, for it is the real source of the profits. Because the solicitor seeks the advertiser, and, therefore, is in the position of one asking for favors, he puts himself under obligations to the advertiser, and so in his keenness to bring in revenue for his paper, he is often tempted to ask the aid of the editor in appeasing the advertiser. Thus the advertiser tends to control the policy of the paper.
> And this is the explanation of the condition that confronts most publications to-day. By throwing the preponderating weight of commercialism into the scales of production, advertising is at the present moment by far the greatest menace to the disinterested practice of a profession upon which the diffusion of intelligence most largely depends. If journalism is no longer a profession, but a commercial enterprise, it is due to the growth of advertising, and nothing else.
It's interesting to look at what made newspapers reasonably immune to such pressures in the years after Holt's book / lecture. I'm a bit hazy on details, but generally:
- Growth especially of large-city dailies and some consolidation of markets effectively gave newspapers some market leverage over most advertisers. There were still some somewhat-untouchable entities, but for the most part, a reasonably-strong editorial independence was achieved.
- It was also possible to go muckraking in another district --- outlying suburbs or cities elsewhere in a state or country, which didn't contribute advertising to that particular institution.
- Increased reliance on classified advertising and legal notices. Each of these were huge contributors to newspapers' revenues, whilst at the same time giving relatively little risk of an advertising boycott. The dawn of Internet classifieds (Craigslist gets a lot of blame, but it was pretty much inevitable, someone would enter that niche) was absolutely devastating in that regard.
There's another bit of media history that I think pairs excellently with the Holt book. It's a 1970s interview with I.F. ("Izzy") Stone, on the PBS programme "Day at Night". That's on YouTube, which is ... somewhat less accessible to me with its current shenanigans, but might be available here:
In particular, Stone calls out the distinction between major city dailies, which had strong editorial independence over local businesses and politicians in the 1970s, versus small-town and rural newspapers, which were far less independent. Keep in mind that this interview occurred in the shadow of the Watergate scandal, in which two reporters literally brought down the President of the United States --- it was a high-water mark for journalistic independence and power.
> And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.
Actually, one of the main innovations of the past 20 years is that advertising has become easily accessible to those who are not rich. Small businesses and individuals can easily become advertisers on FB, Google, Etc. This has helped, many, many people earn a living. Myself included. I'm certainly not a millionaire.
> It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money.
Does this guy really not understand the difference between someone asking for money in exchange for nothing as opposed to asking for money in exchange for something of value? If Coca-Cola was advertising a Venmo address to send them money in exchange for nothing it would be much more annoying than what they currently do.
In context he's responding to the negative views that his fellow English expressed at the time (1920) towards people who were aggressively selling their services as tour guides in Jerusalem. He's pointing out that they put up with equivalently aggressive sales tactics in London, with the only difference being that it's the rich asking for more money rather than poor people trying to scrape by.
Hasnt there been numerous reports of Coca-Cola consuming so much drinking water in local communities to make their product that the locals end up having to buy Cola for hydration instead?
In some places local communities are also dependent on bottled water because their tap water isn't safely drinkable ... and it's not rare for Coca-Cola to own one of the major bottled water brands, as well as Coca-Cola being a popular drink itself. Everything I just described is true in Mexico for example.
Materially speaking, there's barely a difference. It's actually funny you mention pop/soda, because it's nearly free to produce. It's water with some flavour and sugar, in a plastic or glass bottle.
this is kind of disingenuous. the "bill of materials" for a bottle of soda may be measured in cents, but most of the $1.75 you pay at the store is the cost of getting it there and storing it. it's not a phenomenally profitable business.
but besides that, people actually enjoy drinking soda. I certainly do from time to time, and I don't find the price unfair.
Uhhh, yes, soda is phenomenally profitable, especially considering all the accounting loopholes to make expenses appear far higher than reality (not that this is unique to any given corp).
> CocaCola revenue for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $43.493B
> CocaCola net income for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $9.868B
> CocaCola net profit margin as of March 31, 2023 is 22.69%.
> CocaCola net profit margin as of March 31, 2023 is 22.69%.
Which means that it costs them $1 to produce every $1.23 of soda that you purchase. This is a long-shot from being "nearly free" as you claimed earlier, and materially different from "asking for money in exchange for nothing".
That's not a cost to produce their product, or even ship it, or store it. That's strictly just "buying more customers", which has no bearing on my initial claim - that soda is extremely cheap to produce.
Well if you want to ignore things like advertising and other administrative expenses (which are necessary when running a global beverage company), you will still find that their Costs of Goods Sold is 40% of their revenue: https://investors.coca-colacompany.com/filings-reports/all-s...
Again, materially different from asking for money in exchange for nothing.
> Which means that it costs them $1 to produce every $1.23 of soda that you purchase.
That's not correct. The $1.23 you pay at the store includes wholeseller/distributor and retailer margins. The wholesale price of that soda is maybe a quarter of the retail price. So for Coca Cola the bottle the production cost and shipment to a distributor was less than 20% of the retail price.
the concentrated syrup is indeed much cheaper to get to the retail location, and typically the retailer does make a large margin on fountain drinks. at a restaurant, this typically offsets the very tight margins on their other offerings, similar to alcohol.
tangent: I've been to some restaurants that charge $5+ for a fountain drink, presumably to mitigate the lost profit on alcohol. it would be interesting to know why the business model is that way, instead of just pricing a moderate profit into both food and drink.
In regards to your tangent, it's because drinks are not the attraction, so people are relatively price-insensitive to (or price-unaware of) them. People think "I want a burger", price-compare burgers, and choose the place with the $5 burger over the place with the $7 burger. They don't notice that their side and their drink are each $1 more at the $5-burger place, and that both meals cost the same at both restaurants. Instead they think "geeze, I'm glad we went here. Who'd pay $7 for a burger? That place is a ripoff."
That's only compounded by the tendency for drinks and sides to be impulse-purchases - easy up-sells that no one walked in intending to consume. And, if choosing the $5 burger has maybe embedded the idea that your place is "cheap", then so much the better, as that makes them likely to spend a little more than they would have at the other place: "I saved $2 on the burger, so I can afford an extra side!"
Tl;dr: Commodity restaurants are trapped in an equilibrium where food has to be a loss-leader for sales of drinks and fries.
Its not really for nothing is it? You 'feel good' in exchange for giving money to a poor person. Isn't it the same feeling albeit for a different reason that Coca-Cola is selling?
Every fast food drive thru now asks if you want to "round up" your total for some charity of their choice. Not because they want to make the world a better place, but because all that "rounding up" becomes their charitable donation, reducing their tax burden without costing them a cent in actual charity.
Overall I agree, but I will play devils advocate and say that an ad can also be useful for raising awareness that a product exists. Perhaps rather than outright condemning ads their display could be limited to only immediately after the product is first released (e.g. limited only for N days).
Bless you! In my late 30s, I went serious about getting ads out of my life. I noticed they were propaganda and brainwashing usually with seriously dark undertones. I stopped watching sports and TV, stopped reading news articles, stopped looking at billboard highway signs, etc. I had no idea how much the advertisements controlled how I felt and thought. I wish we could have stricter laws against advertisers. I believe people would be much happier if they took an honest look at their tradeoff of "free things" for advertisement glances. If people did this, I believe we could radically transform our society, and live in one where advertisement is small, and people give small amounts of money to the things they want to see.
wont help much because people are themselves walking ads, always self promoting, constantly mirroring what they are told from somewhere else or by someone else
> In my late 30s, I went serious about getting ads out of my life.
Have you also cut everything out of your life that's financed through ads? So I'm expecting you to not use any Facebook, Google, Twitter, Youtube or other modern web content.
I agree that ads are manipulative. That's their very essence. But they exist for a reason. Not to enrich people, but the uphold one side of a bargin. You can't expect everything to be for free.
Please spare us this moral preaching. Google is block ads because it hurts their bottom line. They could care less about the people who actually make the things people come to the platform for.
All of the examples exist there to enrich those running the platform, and not for the benefit of those producing content. Those companies are worth what they’re worth now because they only pass on a pittance of the advertising money they draw in.
I'm not even talking about those producing content. It's their choice to upload things.
But the platform itself needs to be paid for as well. You think Youtube should provide video hosting for free? Facebook should provide their .. social network stuff for free? Twitter should serve tweets for free? No? Then either pay or watch ads.
A) for a long time most of them did not provide an option to pay to remove ads.
B) Many of these companies have such large content hosting fees because of the very nature they chose to set up under. For example: YouTube chose to centralize and host all of the videos itself, and it chose to continue pursuing that route rather than experiment with technologies that could distribute that load and make their server costs significantly decrease. Why? Because it gives them a choke point with which they can extract money and leverage over everyone else.
Further, just like I don’t have a right to tell Facebook how their computers should run, they don’t have a right to tell me what my computer has to display.
> B) Many of these companies have such large content hosting fees because of the very nature they chose to set up under.
If an economically more viable alternative exists then you are welcome to create a competitor. The fact that there is no such thing is strong evidence that they've already hit the economical sweet spot.
> Further, just like I don’t have a right to tell Facebook how their computers should run, they don’t have a right to tell me what my computer has to display.
Correct. Nor do you have a right to tell them not to try to prevent you from avoiding that ads are being displayed on your computer.
> The fact that there is no such thing is strong evidence that they've already hit the economical sweet spot.
This is a simplistic take. First of all, even if it’s true now it does not make it true for all time. Blockbuster hit a real sweet spot for video rental until the tech landscape changed under their feet.
Secondly, and more importantly. Economical optimal for what end? For extracting profits and creating a system where it’s difficult for either side of the network to go elsewhere? Cause it’s not optimized for providing most of the revenue to the people creating the content.
Further I’m willing to bet that most of these services would be significantly technically easier to run if all of the advertising and tracking aspects were stripped out. Which in turn means that it may be possible to architect them differently since you now have different requirements and constraints.
> Nor do you have a right to tell them not to try to prevent you from avoiding that ads are being displayed on your computer.
Correct. I never argued to the contrary.
The thing to keep in mind is that they need us more than we need them. The world existed and functioned before all of these companies and will continue to do so after they’re all gone.
> This is a simplistic take. First of all, even if it’s true now it does not make it true for all time. Blockbuster hit a real sweet spot for video rental until the tech landscape changed under their feet.
True. I'd love to see a competitor someday whom I can just pay and then have a Facebook-equivalent and Youtube-equivalent that doesn't spam me with ads and does not collect my behavioural data to profile me.
I think people would just be shocked how much they would need to pay for their FB account if that would be an alternative offering. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: 2022 FB had a revenue of about $116bn. With about 3bn users. Let's say half of those are actually dead accounts that people almost never log into. (And that's very generous, this number is probably much higher.) That leaves 1.5bn users. To generate $116bn you'd need $77 from each of them. I know very few people who would pay that much money every year to see their aunts cooking results and their uncles Trump posts.
> Secondly, and more importantly. Economical optimal for what end? For extracting profits
Yes. That's what our market-based economies are optimizing for. Other economic models have not proven to be viable.
I disagree with the framing of the back of the envelop calculation.
First of all, that’s revenue, not profit. Looking at revenue is meaningless since it’s easy to take in lots of money and still be in the red.
Secondly, a competitor to Facebook does not need to have facebook’s profitability in order for it to be a viable business model.
By your analysis we can look Twitter and gry get the amount of money that people would have to pay to Mastadon in order for Mastadon to be a competitor. Except that the analogy breaks down because because the underlying technology is different. I won’t be paying server fees to “Mastadon” I’d be paying to an instance.
Likewise, wow google drive for sending large files to people needs a lot of servers. Or, we set something up torrent style and then there is no separate server.
> The fact that there is no such thing is strong evidence that they've already hit the economical sweet spot.
It would only be evidence for that if there were multiple strong competitors to youtube that use similar methods. The dearth of competition suggests that other forces are the cause.
Consumers just don't want to pay for things they've gotten used to getting for free. You may not like it (I don't), but that's reality. Being angry at "big tech" for this is relieving the general population of their responsibility.
What competitors do you have in mind there? Do any of them get even 5% as much traffic? 1%?
Vimeo wants hosting fees for significant use, there's a few decentralized platforms without ads, nebula charges and doesn't have ads. Dailymotion fits the mold but this ranking site says they get 0.4% as many visits and each visit is 1/4 as long.
I'm not saying that things should all be free, I'm saying that youtube's "economical sweet spot" is one that is basically competition-free and because of that we can't learn much about what other viable forms the market could take.
There is no obligation on you or I to provide those companies with a viable business model, nor any moral compulsion to cooperate with their invasive, privacy and mental-health degrading ad-based monetisation strategy.
edit: My browser, my rules. Don't like 'em? Feel free to go out of business.
>You think Youtube should provide video hosting for free? Facebook should provide their .. social network stuff for free? Twitter should serve tweets for free? No? Then either pay or watch ads.
Not GP, but that would be nice. What would be even nicer is if each and every location that one of those organizations, as well as everyone who works for them or chooses to invest in them should be destroyed/die slowly and painfully.
If that were to happen, the world would be a better place.
Is that a fine enough point, or shall I elaborate further?
Honestly, I think Facebook and "social media" in general would be way better if they were paid services.
It's easy to think that people won't pay for such an experience. I think that's naive. There are plenty of examples of people being willing to pay for a premium experience when free/cheap options are available, like these:
- Apple convinced a LOT of non-audiophiles to pay $249 and $550 for Bluetooth earbuds and headphones (respectively).
- OpenAI is convincing millions to pay $20/month for ChatGPT+.
- Krisp makes a bunch of money over something that has a free alternative (software noise cancelling) because it's just THAT good.
- Tesla convinced a LOT of people to buy a Model 3 or Model Y over the Camry or Accord they were originally going to get.
I would LOVE to use Facebook or something like that but am not willing to have a non-governmental entity surveil my every move online in exchange, nor am I willing to be subjected to an experience that is constantly trying to get me addicted to using it.
It's not that some subset won't pay, its that it wont "grow" at the idiotic volumes that SV VC-based thought requires.
The 'infinite growth at all costs' model has rarely been seriously challenged, and as a result its become blase to think of a smaller scale but more stable and consistently successful business, and instead everything needs to lead towards monopolized or cartel-like "Big Tech".
>> There are plenty of examples of people being willing to pay for a premium experience.
That's true but their number will be extremely miniscule compared to freeloaders who love to consume a freely available resource!
In terms of "revenue/cost per user" metrics (which is more commonly used in IT industry), the ad model thus topples down the subscription model in the eyes of decision makers?
We have a saying in my country that roughly translates to “Stupids gift, but who don’t take are idiots”. If you give something away for free, there will be always someone who takes it. Facebook is free, and people were using it. But they left once people got exasperated due to ads and other stuff. TikTok is free now, but you’ll see a similar migration once the enshitification process begins.
I don’t have ads on YouTube in my country, but my feed is still being manipulated (it’s eery to see how they want my attention). I travel or use a VPN and the experience goes straight down the drain. I could pay, but would they stop manipulating the feed or collecting my data? I’ll be using YouTube as long as they keeping it free. If it becomes paid, I will if the terms are worth it.
I think it's impossible to get it down to 0, but yes, all though services were worked out of my life. I don't expect them to be free, I expect to pay for more services than your average person, and that's the point of my above post.
> psychological warfare that corporations wage against me
I see them as environmental pollution that affects the mind instead of the body (this also includes offline ads btw, I actually wish there were adblockers for the real world).
This seems like one of the best possible applications for consumer AR. I'd love glasses that would replace display cute animals on top of real-world ads.
when click rates go down, advertisers always choose to make the ad more noticeable by making it more obnoxious. at first it was a very small movement every few seconds. then two. then more movement more frequently until there were full games in the space of an ad. sounds and video came. interstitial ads came, and full page ads which covered what you were reading as you scrolled.
so, ad blockers were developed. at first they blocked simple URL patterns and that was enough to completely block ads from those who serve them. advertisers caught on and changed how they serve ads. rapidly. adblockers had to advance to keep up.
where does it end? it can't end, because one side or the other will win and there are enough people who don't want that outcome so they keep fighting for their own side.
things that are bad often follow this pattern, it seems. if you are in an arms race of any kind you are either someone or something who wants money or authority more than anything else, or you are fighting against that force. both sides feel 100% justified in their actions. everyone nearby suffers.
I also block ads - BUT I do go pay for services that I use daily and get benefit from. Otherwise, the sites that I love would go away because it's not sustainable to employee people to write code and run servers without some sort of revenue.
I paid for YouTube for a few months, even though I run everything through pihole, but found that I didn't get enough value to justify the cost.
They're essentially charging 80% surplus to tack on a poor man's version of Spotify. I also don't get any other improvements to the service.
If they'd just give me a feature that gives continuity of play between devices I'd pay the full monthly price without blinking.
So many small QoL improvements that would make a huge difference but instead they're too busy removing voting buttons and testing obnoxious autoplay thumbnail ads.
Hm, I have the opposite point of view: I don’t see why anybody uses Spotify when Youtube gives you the same thing for the same price and throws in ad free youtube at no extra charge.
I tried YouTube music for a few months and it felt much more spaghetti-at-the-wall than Spotify.
My opinion is that this is because of the way that Spotify applies algorithm and curation in a highly unified way.
Spotify Radio, Release Radar and Discovery playlist are just wonderful. Right down to the ordering of the lists it accounts for broad tastes, current personal trends, building accessible gateways to new genres and so on.
YouTube Music felt a bit like the video algorithm. "You watched a Minecraft video? Prepare for the avalanche of tenuously related but quite obnoxious Minecraft content"
This is was weird to read... I was a Spotify user for a rather long time, but realized that instead of getting better, recommendations got worse, ultimately becoming quite repetitive. I've since ditched them, now using Deezer. The difference is like day and night - with Deezer, if I want it to generate a playlist based on a particular song, I actually get a playlist of songs which are similar to the one I chose and not just the popular songs of bands similar to the band of the song...
As for Discover Weekly, it was the worst offender, rehashing stuff Spotify knew I had listened to.
That is strange as it's not my experience, but I don't know how the algorithm functions internally. Sadly we are at the whim of it's hits and it's misses.
I am however left to assume, based on Spotify's broad success and appeal, that it hits a bit more frequently than it misses.
Curious if you found another viable alternative. Ive gone over to using Plex/Plexamp for music sync/cloud play and its been pretty okayish on the whole. Biggest issues are my server strength and internet connection
Source: I just tried it on my phone right now. platform - iOS (don't know about others). Also, possibly not possible for all songs or countries in the world.
Really the only reason I used Spotify over YouTube Music at all was that I could use my own clients with Spotify, but once Spotify killed that it was over to YouTube music for me for my streaming usage (though I buy a lot more downloads these days than my peak spotify usage days). YouTube Music doesn't have third party clients either, but with that selling point removed, ad-free youtube was a better add-on than anything spotify offered.
I was a mopify/mopidy fan for a while but my installation fell over about a year ago and I never returned to fix it - does that no longer work at all with Spotify APIs? If so, that's definitely a huge downside to Spotify (though I have no idea if it's possible with YT music).
Welcome to the wonderful world of A/B testing and/or gradual rollouts!
I have had the "continue playing from another device" feature for a good couple months at least, and it is clearly labeled as a "Premium" benefit.
Whenever I pause a video on one device, and open Youtube on another (Confirmed web desktop -> mobile app or mobile app -> web desktop, but I don't have a TV to test), the video that was playing on the other device shows up paused, as the given platform's miniplayer. Below you can see a desktop screenshot.
>Welcome to the wonderful world of A/B testing and/or gradual rollouts!
Good A/B testing only works if you're measuring for the right things. When you get into the realms of "engagement is down but revenue generated is at $X" and X meets a goal, you're doing it in bad faith.
Given that a big fat ad thumbnail is a pre-selected item that fills half the screen on the YT TV client, we are left to assume that engagement resigned from Google a while ago.
>Whenever I pause a video on one device, and open Youtube on another (Confirmed web desktop -> mobile app or mobile app -> web desktop, but I don't have a TV to test), the video that was playing on the other device shows up paused, as the given platform's miniplayer. Below you can see a desktop screenshot.
This doesn't work at all for me TV -> TV. TV -> mobile device also does not work. I'd be interested to know, if you do try this with TV, whether you can get it to work.
If I ever get the chance to try it I will attempt to tell you the results, but don't hold your breath. I don't know anyone with smart TVs who would also be okay with me spending an hour messing up their settings to log in with my account.
> Good A/B testing only works if you're measuring for the right things. When you get into the realms of "engagement is down but revenue generated is at $X" and X meets a goal, you're doing it in bad faith.
Sure, and that doesn't stop people from doing it anyway. Pointless mass-gaslighting, but it makes you look busy.
> If they'd just give me a feature that gives continuity of play between devices I'd pay the full monthly price without blinking.
What specifically are you looking for? e.g. was watching a video on my computer, powered that off, opened youtube on my phone and the video I was watching was most recent thing in youtube history there with my position in the video tracked. Similarly I can use my phone or laptop to control Youtube on my TV. Seems like what you're looking for is already mostly here.
(I've been a Youtube Premium subscriber for the last year or so thus far).
This is the inconvenient version of what I want that takes several menu navigations to achieve it.
'Continuity' for me means a seamless experience. For example, Netflix used to be one click and is now two or three clicks which I find to be a worse experience.
The _perfect_ version of this for me would be a "Send to device" function to send from TV to TV in different rooms. Even being able to do a quick switch via my phone as I'm in transit (like I do with Spotify) would be a worthy middleground.
I was at first super confused by this comment, because cross play has been a thing for at least a year or two without YouTube premium. You just have to enable YouTube history and it will populate across devices. I know a lot of people disabled YouTube history because it tailors the experience but it's a fair tradeoff for continuity.
YouTube history is not the seamless experience that I get from literally every other content provider charging even less money than they do. Netflix, Amazon, BBC iPlayer, Spotify etc. all give me access to continue the last thing I was watching with a click, or even do so automatically (or have the option to). Some even have a "switch to room" function which is further empowering.
Having it hidden three menus away is archaic and not the 'continuity' I'm looking for. It's a small thing but it's a) painfully simple to implement and b) one of many of these kinds of small usability gripes that make it a lesser experience.
What about the ad-free experience? Isn't that worth paying for premium, considering the enormous amount of content on YouTube you can watch without ads?
> If they'd just give me a feature that gives continuity of play between devices I'd pay the full monthly price without blinking.
Probably you wouldn't. Then it would be some other feature needed to open the wallet.
> What about the ad-free experience? Isn't that worth paying for premium, considering the enormous amount of content on YouTube you can watch without ads?
To restate what I already said: will I pay to remove ads? Yes. Will I pay the price they're asking when I compare to the value and quality of service / UX other services I pay for? No.
> Probably you wouldn't. Then it would be some other feature needed to open the wallet.
You're wrong, but I don't need to justify it, I stated why in the original post. There's no need to be stubborn about it.
I think this is one of the biggest sales problem for any online service. People will not think about the actual value proposal, but instead compare it to things that are extremely free or cheap. Pay for Fastmail? Why would I when Gmail is free? Pay for Kagi search? Why would I when Google is free? Pay for a newspaper subscription? Why would I when they want the same monthly price as Netflix, and I watch Netflix every night.
My question is why do you compare? Just because both things are on a computer or telephone screen? I've never heard people compare with other things they purchase. Why would I pay for this cup of coffee when I get 15 minutes of use from it, when there is so much free content online? Why would I pay for this restaurant meal when I get several months of entertainment on Netflix for the same price?
People will agonize for weeks over a $5 or $10 subscription, but outside of the digital they won't think about spending the same amount on parking, a pint of beer, etc.
Since we have the idea that everything on the computer should be free, we get upset over the slightest annoyance and cancel/decide not to continue the service. But is that rational? Like people are itching for the slightest excuse to not pay.
YouTube has an enormous amount of entertainment and also educational content, like videos on how to fix things that have personally saved me at least hundreds of dollars. It's a great value IMO.
Yeah. I'm not about to pretend I have a right to get content for free, so if the site offers a paid option to remove ads that I find obnoxious I'll take advantage of it.
A hill I’m happy to die on is: the standard of behavior appropriate for websites is you send whatever (not actively malicious or illegal) content you want, and the user renders it however they want.
If sites want to send me useful content and additional annoying content, I’ll just render the useful bit.
If sites decide they aren’t willing to send the useful bit unless enter some other sort of arrangement with them, that’s fair on their part, I’ll evaluate their other options.
I don’t feel any obligation to render ads or make their business model viable, of course it is no problem if they decide they don’t want me around as a result!
But then to circle back on the submission, do sites have any obligation to make it easy (or no harder than it initially was) for you to separate the useful from the annoying? No more than you have right (which I agree with) to render it differently to their desire, I'd argue.
I don’t think they do have that obligation. But the business model where ads are hosted in some ad network makes it pretty easy to differentiate between the good and bad content. It is a happy coincidence that this is the source of the most annoying ads generally.
Of course, business models might change. In that case my preferences probably will too, but I don’t think my reasoning will.
What if the “arrangement” is a TOS that you agree to, wherein you agree to render the content how they want? Will you stop using the site, or just ignore the TOS?
I will follow their TOS if they follow my local laws regarding advertisements and legal liability (both in term of providing honest and fully disclosed commercial messages and in cases of malware). I strongly doubt they want that deal.
I’m not a lawyer but in the US at least, from what I’ve heard TOS requires affirmative consent.
I try to quickly check if I’m agreeing to a cookie consent thing, or if it is a full TOS. But sites have so much garbage when you first show up nowadays. I’ll have to be more careful there.
Just circling back a bit, what IS advertising? I work at a relatively unknown company - it's not in anyone's daily vocabulary. It exists, but barely. It will actually die if it's not marketed, advertised.
Now I can just go, fuck it, I don't want to work for any company that advertises. Great. Where should I work?
If advertising was required, nobody would be using most open source applications. Nobody had to sell me linux.
A company website that tells me what the elevator pitch is, is advertising arguably, but is not in the same category as putting a message in something I want to consume. The difference is push vs pull. If I have to seek out your message, if I ask you a question, then it's perfectly acceptable to answer.
The second you answer a question I've never asked, you are morally repugnant and harming society as a whole. It's an inevitable slippery slope to literal mental manipulation at that point. There is no "push" advertising that can NOT go that route, as it is inherently a hostile relationship, with independent competitors.
I feel like the problem here is that we do not have an effective way to match products with consumers who may find it useful without bad actors gaming the system. Companies with a modest marketing budget try to be as targeted as possible with advertising but companies with stupidly large budgets will optimize for “engagement and enragement” which will end up with them creating obnoxious advertisements that are spammed across all channels they can regardless of relevance because they can.
It’s a sad problem that we can’t expect to solve if we continue to limit our discussion around the symptoms of the diseased advertisement industry rather than the root causes of this cancer that ruins it for everyone like your company and most other small and medium sized players.
100% agreed. If content is provided for free along side content (ads) that the site wants me to view for their own reasons, I'm under no obligation to view the content they want me to view.
If the site needs me to view content in a specific sequence, then they need to deliver it as such. Otherwise, I'll ignore (technically block) any content other than that in which I'm interested.
Everybody should have line item veto rights for code running on their computer.
if youtube wanted to make the ads unblockable, they could embed them in the primary video stream. They won't do that because then they would have to expend the computational effort of muxing the content instead of offloading it onto your computer. They want their code (javascript) to manage the ads to run on your computer and they want to be able to treat your computer as their slave.
Sadly, a Youtube Premium subscription only removes the ads. They still collect all the data about you.
Remember that you are not just paying with ad eyeballs, but also with your data. When what where how much you watch. That's nobodies business. I'd pay for not having this be in somebodys DB, ready to be exploited (and/or leaked).
And they definitely don't need to join it with data about my phone location history and my search history. Or evaluate which video I have watched for how long. Subscriptions, fine. Recent history, fine. Until I delete those, then I want them gone, not just some "delete" flag turned on.
I might consider paying for premium if this wasn’t Google we’re talking about, which I imagine is tracking your viewing habits in their profile of you so they can serve targeted ads on other sites that use Google Ads.
> I might consider paying for premium if this wasn’t Google we’re talking about, which I imagine is tracking your viewing habits in their profile of you so they can serve targeted ads on other sites that use Google Ads.
So basically, you won't pay for premium because Google makes money by serving ads, but you also use an Adblocker (assumption)?
It’s not just established companies that you know to subscribe to. How does someone set up a new company or start selling a new product without advertising. People that are perfectly reasonable about some things can be so short sighted out how society even works.
> Advertisers have no morals, they're completely depraved. They'll eagerly exploit a teenager's self-conscious body issues to sell useless beauty products. They sell sugar water to fat people and at every turn promote the rampant consumerist culture that is destroying our planet. They're lower than pond scum and I never want to see a single ad from them ever.
Well said. While I recognize the right of people to put out messaging, advertisers seem to put out some of the most disgusting messaging ever.
The recent pushing of incredibly obese people as all healthy and normal is a very dangerous phenom. Many of us could afford to lose a few pounds, but the idea that BMIs > 40 are healthy is going to get people killed for certain.
Remember, they're not regular people putting out messaging because they believe in something (or even lying because it's funny), they are part of a machine that is incentivized financially to put out messaging regardless of whether the people making it believe what they're saying. That's a different ball game, and tbh, it should be illegal or tightly controlled.
Most people you see on the media are unhealthy. From the largest to the smallest, they're mostly all unhealthy and performing very dangerous things like prolonged dehydration.
So it's interesting to see how much focus gets shifted onto obesity specifically while ignoring all else. It's all disgusting messaging, that young model selling you a perfume who hasn't eaten anything but an almond all day, that shredded guy telling you to buy compression shorts, those obese people telling you these pants stretch.
In all honesty, I think you're hearing the wrong thing when you hear what the fat acceptance-people are saying.
Given the context that:
- Dieting, on a population level, has proven to be an ineffective means of curbing obesity (the only statistically effective method is bariatric surgery)
- The message that has, throughout the obesity epidemic, been pushed is that those that suffer from obesity are to blame for their own condition, and that they are essentially less valuable human beings for it in more than a few ways
- Obesity appears to be, according to the best research currently available, a disorder of the brain
Most of the fat acceptance people are merely trying to counteract the less valuable-part of how obese people are viewed in society. It's not a single-messaged group, and some of the things that some of them say is probably not a force for the better, but the message that obese people should not be scolded, chastised or in any other way treated negatively for their condition is actually a good message which any empathetic adult should follow.
> "I grew up changing the channel on TV when ads came on, and ripping adverts out of magazines before sitting down to read them."
Ultimately, this is the thing that matters. Back when I was a kid, I muted the TV or changed the channel during the ads break. Imagine if the technology had existed back then to prevent me from muting the sound or changing channels!
Imagine... just imagine if ads were broadcast directly to your brain like in Minority Report. Would people here also defend the advertisers, "you can't have stuff for free!".
Ultimately, I don't want to see ads. I'm sorry that so much of the current "freemium" web wants me to see ads, because I don't.
I pay for YouTube Premium because of several reasons, but before it I used an adblocker. I adblock the web.
When broadcast-ads-to-your-brain tech becomes real, I sure hope I'll be able to block it too.
I wish this view was mainstream. I also used to change the channel when ads came on, or at least muted and briefly did something else. I will never tolerate ads, and especially never pay to be advertized at.
I still do, though I hardly watch much regular TV anymore. Can’t listen to a radio either, not enough music in between stations to get away from ads.
I pay for a few subscription services and get my entertainment _mostly_ ad free. Unfortunately there’s no similar subscription I can buy to escape advertising as I walk down the street.
I block ads because they're a security risk. I have encountered browser-based attacks from ads that are supposed to come from reputable ad brokers, including on YouTube once. As long as the brokers don't properly vet the ads, those malware bits are not getting into my computer.
I really don't understand how Google and Facebook lost control of their own platforms to the extent that they actually serve malicious advertising.
Some people use the excuse of 'scale', and "can't monitor everything", but it's not like Google and Facebook don't have the resources to solve it, it's just that they have no motivation to solve it because it's not costing them anything to be a platform for malware and scams.
>it's just that they have no motivation to solve it because it's not costing them anything to be a platform for malware and scams.
While that's true, it glosses over the fact that not only is it "not costing them money," it's bringing in revenue -- those malware/scams are paid-for ads after all, aren't they?
What's ironic in my case is that I actually liked looking at ads in print. It doesn't matter if it's newspaper, magazine or comics.
I agree with the other commenter that ads have become so obtrusive that it's being dealt with in the same vein as malware. It's just malware from the techno oligarchy.
I like coupons, which are ads. Companies are paying me for my attention. Maybe I get a few dollars off a sandwich that I otherwise wouldn't have bought, but it's a pretty fair deal.
ads in print are one of the few ads I see as somewhat okay. if I want to go and look in the classified section of the newspaper for a car or a specific service or something else, fantastic. I can choose to do that and then look away and do something else. it isn't moving and flashing in my face, it isn't assaulting my ears, it isn't even a smell that's been carefully engineered to be recognisable from 30m down the street. it's still not ideal, especially when it's a full colour spread on the first page of the publication, but it's better. the other ads I see as acceptable are for example in the window of an estate agent or in a brochure for a particular service or set of services. stuff you have to actually consent to see
They also sent us boxes and boxes of magazines. We had a stack of National Geographic magazines that was at least seven feet high. We had Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Popular Science/Mechanics, and others I can't remember now.
When I was growing up in the east, we received boxes of recorded TV from our relatives in the USA. I loved watching all the ads especially the toy ads. All my friends wanted to hangout in our place because we have so much movies, cartoons and tv shows on VHS.
> I block ads because they're psychological warfare that corporations wage against me. I don't care how unobtrusive the ads are.
I hate ads as much as the next guy. But that's the economic model most of the web is built on. Anybody without a youtube premium subscription who rants about youtube ads is just hypocritical. How should this be financed? Either you give your money or your eyeballs. Nobody is going to work for free so you can watch cat videos.
Please don't come with morals here. Expecting things for free is just as morally problematic.
They made people to expect stuff for free. It was their market strategy to offer basically free service to get people locked in. It is their fault they should pay for it.
It is called bait and switch which is a blatant fraud. Only that they stretched it into long years.
Now they switch by introducing pains option and making free one unusable by shoving ads every minute.
> It is called bait and switch which is a blatant fraud.
Sorry, this is just not true. If you let yourself get baited, then it's your responsibility. Don't lift the responsibility from the general populace of mostly mature adults. If they like to see ads then it's their problem.
I don't know what you're saying here. Bait and switch is fraud. When adults fall for fraud it is still the fraudster who is in the wrong, not the victims.
If enough people get baited, that creates a network effect and locks creators into that, no matter how much of a smart fish you are. Most people don’t like to see ads. They like to see the content without thinking too much about a platform it resides in.
It's easier to criticize the baiter than the baitee, but that may be barking up the wrong tree. Tech companies are acting within the economic and regulatory framework. Criticizing them for doing so is not helpful. Ironically, I'd guess that the majority of the HN crowd is actually making their living directly or indirectly off that.
Mostly mature adults addicted to cigarettes, caffeine, alcohol and cheap dopamine.
Voting for whoever shouts louder.
Don’t overestimate being mature. I’m 35 and look at my aunts and uncles turning 65 and 70 it is so much different view from when I was 15 to 25… it is just people.
I agree! I'm very disappointed with my fellow humans too! But what do you want to do? If you reduce how much the general population can impact their life then you are doing democracy a disservice. As sad as that is.
I don't follow. I don't have integrity because I'm consistent in my replies?
I also don't see how turning this discussion into ad hominem against myself is meaningful. Attacking that I'm using a throwaway? Seriously?
Yes, my comments may be dark. It's because my view on society is dark. It just does not help to blame big tech for the laziness of people to not want to pay and watch ads instead.
face it, the youtube offering is just kinda shitty. its like with piracy of music, movies and such, it is a distribution problem. Does it make it legal in the case of music/movies? probably not. Is it legal to adblock? in most places, yes.
could one make an argument of it not being morally justified? maybe.
does youtube, in the way google/alphabet wants to run it suck? most definitely. Is it possible to easily work around some of the biggest stuff here? yes.
well this is what a great many people choose to do, and youtube had better accept reality and deal with it. If they make it impossible to block ads, that is probably within their rights (assuming they implement some technical solution themselves), but that will come with some consequences
If the current economic system doesn't allow for a web where I can watch cat videos for free without being psychologically terrorized by megacorps, then perhaps the economic system is the problem.
You want an economic system that provides you cat videos for free?
I'm quite ok with markets and capitalism. Should be regulated, but if you get your wish then there will be 300+ Americans who also want a wish. I rather have people pay for their wishes.
This model not only profits from the aforementioned, but also aggressively competes with other activities people could participate in instead of watching ads mixed with highly monetized cat videos. The implied question here is what would happen if it fails? The answer is something else, not the end of the world. If it can’t be financed (or at least behave) otherwise, maybe it simply shouldn’t.
Apparently most people don't care though. So, whom are you criticizing? Youtube for providing a service that's populare despite their way of financing which you personally don't like, but others don't have a problem with? Or the other viewers for not joining your boycott?
The ads interrupt the videos in really obtrusive ways: not at sensible commercial break points like TV ads or before the movie like in a movie theater, but frequently with timing that totally destroys the mood and experience of the surrounding seconds or minutes of the video. And they're getting longer and longer - I recently experienced half a minute of two back-to-back ads partway through an 8-9 minute video, and I'm not at all sure there wasn't also an ad before the video in addition to that. What an awful ratio of content to ads.
It bothers me far less to have ads at the start of a video, between videos, or even at transition points between coherently separate segments within a video than what YouTube is now doing. That's not hypocritical.
(Tangent: I do have a YouTube Premium subscription, but for irrelevant reasons we usually watch using my wife's account and she does not have one. So I see the ads anyway. Maybe that's the reverse kind of hypocrisy to the one you mean, where I'm wasting my money instead of being stingy?)
Check out enshitification. No one went into google or youtube knowing that in 20 years time, their service would be overrun with ads. Everyone has been lured into cheap services by the deliberate and dishonest behavior of the providers.
As a consumer, I do not care. If I can get a thing for free AND ignore your suggested content, I will do it 10 times out of 10.
If you don't want to offer a thing for free, then don't offer a thing for free.
If your business model is to offer a thing for free and then to somehow profit from that, well then it is your problem. When you give away a thing for free, expect people to take it for free.
They're not offering it for free. They're offering it with the arrangement that you pay for it by rendering ads. The fact that you can get away with violating that arrangement is frankly a starkly amoral attitude
It's the exact same logic as stealing from a roadside honesty box (or a corner shop who can't easily detect petty theft) and then saying "tough! Their business model isn't my problem! I could take it for free so clearly I should be allowed to" when morally called out for it
I disagree entirely that stealing from a corner store and not rendering ads are comparable. In one instance, I take an item that another person has paid for and expects to sell it at a profit. If I steal it, I am depriving the store owner of that item and the profit they would have made.
If I choose to view free content and not render ads, no one has lost anything. While yes, the site owner does not get the profit from "selling the ad", it is not theft in the same way if I were to walk into a store, look around, and not buy anything is not theft.
This reminds me of a softer version of the famous Bill Hicks standup routine on advertising that hilariously really pisses off people in advertising in Youtube comments. Advertising does a lot of good for the world according to people that majored in marketing. Alas, I have to agree with Bill on this one.
>I block ads because they're psychological warfare that corporations wage against me. I don't care how unobtrusive the ads are.
Lol, then there are ads like the Liberty Mutual ads. All I know is I will never, ever purchase car insurance from that shithole from having been made to watch their obnoxious ads on loop.
Your comment gave me one of those funny moments where you realise something that should have been obvious but you never saw it being done, or heard about it being done, and simply never thought of it...
You can just rip the adverts out of magazines. I shall be indulging in this on the rare occasions that I end up reading something of that sort when I'm out and about. Cheers.
In that case, you better either subscribe to Youtube premium or not watch Youtube. It makes me sick when people "exploit" all of these amazing videos people have made on Youtube but refuse to help compensate them for their work by not at least subscribing to premium.
Every creator I watch gets their money through merch, patreon, sponsors, basically everywhere BUT youtube, because nearly every single video will be "unmonitized" or copyright claimed by someone who doesn't even own the rights and cannot be challenged in an unbiased setting.
The only people who make meaningful advertising money from youtube are the ones in the extreme high value advertising niches, like Swell Entertainment when she does a tech related video (though she still makes way more money from sponsorships) or all the Logan pauls making clickbait screaming content for literal children to mindlessly consume all day because their parents can't afford baby sitters because all the money goes to advertising behemoths instead of the workers.
I actually WANT youtube to be a great, pro-creator platform, where I have to pay to see people who feel that youtube gives them support and good tools to do their damn job. But that's not an option. The only option available is for me to pay youtube to remove their horrifically overbearing advertising, often from advertisers that are fraudulent, so I can watch videos from creators who genuinely hate youtube for making their lives hell.
I will not give youtube a dime until they stop viewing creators as replaceable cogs in a machine designed to grind them to dust for every second of content they can produce and then cast them aside.
I mean fuck, does youtube even send content creators documents to help them prepare their taxes? These people are all technically self employed, couldn't a behemoth like google help them get a pooled health care scheme that was affordable to middle size creators?
I also run an ad blocker, with extra rules to ban content I don't want to see, such as the terrible "shorts" mind-ebola, as well as a bunch of regexes for clickbait titles and a big ban list of channels that is updated often.
SponsorBlock to remove baked-in advertisements and other misfeatures like interaction reminders.
Now I am also using the beta DeArrow extension to disarm the thumbnails/titles a little bit by replacing them with random frames from the video.
I think the hip way to say it is "I'm between jobs" currently, but when I had a stable income source I would do eventual donations to channels of my interest, which according to some creators even a single USD is way more than the average lifetime return of a single viewer due to ads/YTP.
The only reason I haven't subscribed to Nebula / CuriosityStream instead, which seems to be a much healthier platform, is precisely because they advertise it so much. Also because I do appreciate more entertainment-y videos sometimes, not just edutainment.
A couple uBO filter rules, paste it to the "My filters" tab on the settings:
! Nuke high contrast elements
www.youtube.com##ytd-feed-filter-chip-bar-renderer
www.youtube.com##yt-chip-cloud-renderer
! Nuke news sections and other "engagement boosting" sections of the homepage
! This breaks the channel page, I temporary disable the filter rules when I need to go in there. Selector can probably be refined
www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer
! Nuke Shorts
www.youtube.com##[is-slim-media]
I also have a couple fixes on https://userstyles.world/style/6382/my-youtube-fixes which you can apply using the Stylus addon, these compact the layout a bit more, lowers contrast of "calls to action" like the Subscribe or comment buttons, as well as attempts to make the Theater view actually take all of the available screen space (without being actually fullscreen).
There is so much content on YT where the creators don't even get paid though. Even a popular video that would make money can become demonetized (but still runs ads!!). I much prefer to subscribe via patreon or other forms to support creators more directly.
This also ignores the in-video sponsorships and ads that creators will often include.
It's not like Youtube made the amazing videos, though. They might pay the actual creators a pittance, but they extract literal billions of value for the privilege.
I don't mind compensating the creators. I do mind compensating the middleman leech in between.
It's not that simple, though, because premium represents a lot more money than a normal month of ad income. It doesn't make me sick when people want to avoid spending >$100 a year. $2 a month to a random patreon would compensate creators more.
Ads can be useful for marketing moves, e.g. if you sell at discount or just a new product. Otherwise people would never know you have X too (or cheaper) because they remember that you didn’t last time.
But every time I turn adblock off accidentally or on purpose, it’s the same generic shit unrelated to my obvious interests. Nasal sprays, supplements, car dealerships, be-a-programmer courses. I have a non-zero, negative interest in these.
Need? Sure. But there are plenty of things that would make my life better that I learned about through ads.
I do run an ad blocker, because the web has spent too long spreading viruses and malware through ads to be safe _not_ running one. But I don't mind ads conceptually; they just need to be safe, not obnoxious, and not take up more of my time than the placement is worth (ie, a 20s ad pre-roll on a 15 second video).
I've recently come to the realisation that this happens in the streets too.
Every shop in my town is shouting at you to come in a buy crap with flashy signs and displays. Then recently I was in Münster (Germany) where they have some old-school facades for most shops that includes standardised lettering and zero advertisements. Its so much nicer.
I feel exactly the same as you about ads, and have built/owned my own ad network, as well as run nearly 90% of my business through ads. My business partners don't use ad block but I always use it, and they always tease me about it. Even if 1 second of my precious energy and mental well being is spent on hearing an ad accidentally I feel sick.
+1 about the 'waste my time filling my mind with unwanted trash' vibe. Like someone is killing me, suffocating me, taking my life away, or similar. Relates to "you are what you eat" ... I am what I think, experience, and am influenced to do.
There's a difficult problem of maladaptation and misleading that, to me, is coming from the meaning resulting from the repeated and well-known answer to, "who gets the money in the end", these days. I believe society would benefit from discussing value-propositions of adtech and the attention economy. I wish that we would take more seriously the social impact of our businesses, the richness or depravity which our business activity imputes.
More musing:
I used to work in adtech, not by choice, was transferred to that dept. Worked in in-app purchase tech throughout my 6-years at that co.
A trend in technology, now, seems to me to include: the crisis of Generative AI devaluing humans own ability (and effort) to recreate prior art, the dissatisfying Reddit value-exchange of creators feeling disrespected by site-operators, and the dissatisfying politics of left and right pursuits towards winning instead of promoting healthy human interdependence resulting in disaffected populace.
So in short, I think pop technology has overshot the goal.
Adtech is the simplest way to make money off provided-experiences, I believe. Subscriptions require too much buy-in, by comparison. Adtech is "just there".
This view (of the reality of content creation) imposes, I believe, an expectation upon all of us (who want to create or consume content) that there is nothing better - no better approach to celebrating human experiences than +1'ing to share one's individual influence/record-of-attention...and to me it conflates the point of life as being something to do with short-term financial success.
When it overlooks more true base human goals / pursuits of having babies, that happiness and comfort in safety, and the joy of growth.
I'd like for emoji-reactions, +1's, impression counts to be segregated more formally by businesses, so the boards of managing companies and stockholders could see also see the social impact of businesses.
Right-on. EG Often-repeated chirpy jingles with imperative lyrics will hang around in heads for decades. Couple of oldies:
"See the USA in your [??] ..."
"You'll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with [??] ..."
Carpenter's They Live was great pointing out how many 'OBEY's are buried in adverts. 30 years before, Vance Packard The Hidden Persuaders was published. 2010, Eldon Taylor's Mind Programming.
Worse yet: TV tearing a great movie up into shreds punctuated with adverts (imagine doing that to famous paintings). I eventually dropped cable as a result.
"Lower than pond-scum" = all the disciples of Freud's nephew Ed Bernays.
In an ideal world a heavily modified form of ads could provide societal value. As a way to spread awareness that a problem has been solved, that there is someone who can provide actual utility.
E.g. I recently talked to an acquaintance about cooking and told them there's a kitchen utensil that would solve a problem they were describing.
Ads should be performed by 3rd parties (a mix of reviews and match-making?) that get paid by both the customer and the company whenever they facilitate a useful transaction.
And pay the customer when they took up their time with useless information (thus incentivizing getting out of there way when they're not doing their job).
This is the kind of clear headed thought the world needs right now. Thank you!
The world is run by scummy, greedy and straight up evil people and they have created a global public consciousness where that fact in itself is almost impossible to spread.
Advertising is how you make people aware of goods and services. It’s not inherently evil. No one is waging warfare with you, and advertisers aren’t completely depraved. How do people get away with saying this shit? This is crazy.
Have you bought anything from Youtube advertisement? Any time I tried to disable adblock in order to get acknowledged about what's up is advertizing I finished with immediate return. There is no category of goods which might be safely consumed from Youtube ads, probably because only idiots use to watch those ads nowadays.
> Do you pay for ad-free experiences when available?
Not OP, but I block ads for similar reasons. I do pay for ad-free experiences, but
1) often I'm shown ads anyway, and
2) there's typically no privacy-preserving way to pay. So in practice paying often implies a significant loss of control over managing your privacy
So my personal take is that we're not there yet in terms of having robust viable alternatives to the ad-block experience.
> 2) there's typically no privacy-preserving way to pay
This is exactly my problem. I log into as few services as possible and clear my cookies on browser exit. Of course this is supplemented by ad-blocking and blocking most 3rd-party scripts and cookies to avoid cross-site tracking. I have no way to pay for a service while maintaining that level of privacy.
Amen. I see advertising as a personal affront to my dignity. I try to remove or deface as much advertising as I can in my life without getting into legally black areas.
Storing and streaming is an expensive model, and the subscription price is a premium in the majority of the world. It’s actually impressive that so much content (both incredible and bad) is available, for “free” to so many.
I’m an ideal world there would be no ads, but we don’t live in one.
If you have such disdain for ads you should probably pay the premium or not use YouTube.
Right! Most days I'm just mindlessly clawing around my house, desperately unaware of what I "need" to live without the aid of hundreds of slow-loading data-tracking overwrought boxes of advertising festering my every vantage point.
Just this morning, I was on the toilet, about to finish up a shit. I reached instinctively to my left to grab... wait, the little roller is empty!
But...what used to be there? What was I about to grab? This is crazy, my mind is completely blank!
If only there were some kind of an unskippable 30 second movie with dancing animated bears that could remind me what product I might use adjacent to a toilet bowl to complete my biological morning ritual!
I laughed, but it's about finding new stuff not stuff you already know exists, and it works sometimes. Of course they made ads too intrusive so we block them now, but even then I did buy something I found very useful after seeing some of the few ads that slipped.
I think early 2000 adsense ads were the best. Just simple text or images and contextual to the content of the page you were on.
I find that ads are usually a very poor source of information when trying to figure out what product to buy. Ads are designed to deceive. They're supposed to make the product larger than life, more perfect than possible, and absolutely essential to your continued existence.
What I find more helpful is authentic experience from other consumers of that product. The authentic part is getting harder and harder to validate, of course.
Some adverts are informative. I saw a poster a few years ago saying Jason Donovan was in Joeseph in London as Pharaoh, I likely wouldn’t have known that without that poster at the station.
I didn’t mind skippable YouTube preroll adverts. Now they are unskippable, multiple ones, and appear mid video.
Howver I don’t watch YouTube enough to justify paying more than Netflix and Disney combined just to skip adverts (but not skip the burnt in sponsor adverts)
Is that how much it really costs??? Damn. I have to go to the top and read the comments again with this new information. I pay the equivalent of around $2.5 for 6 people. No way I would pay the same amount as Netflix or Disney, let alone the two together.
Ok so you want to find out about new products or services from other customers. So how do those other customers find out about the product? At some point there are no customers or so few that you never run into one of these customers. So what does a small company do at the stage where they have no word of mouth?
Imagine if it were your business for a second, you’ve created a new website or a new physical product and you want to get more customers or users, what do you do? It’s not going to sell itself if nobody knows it exists no matter how good it is.
I wanted a new small camera recently. How did I find it? By trying to find opinions of people who had owned different cameras, and comparing their opinions about the ones that they owned.
I didn’t need an ad to tell me to buy a camera. I didn’t see any ads at all! Rather, I decided “I wish I had something to take pictures with”, so I started researching how I could accomplish that thing.
And ads would not have helped me find the best camera option at all, in fact it’s probably a slightly negative signal — they must have big profits to spend lots of money on ads, compared to a company that just makes the best product and has their customers promote it for them.
Same thing with any other product. I see my coworkers using a terminal app I’ve never seen. It looks better than the normal one, so I ask them about it.
Yea aside from it indicating less budget for R&D, anything that’s ridiculously promoted probably means u would b spending significantly more than you should be for that lol.
It’s very simple and not even nuanced I’m just unsure why many seem to gloss over that. Perhaps I’m more jaded than most
I will always have a need for a VPN. I will never pay for NordVPN. Their level of advertising has me convinced they are up to no good regardless of whether that is true or not.
Hahah the other day a buddy asked me about Nord and after suggesting Mullvad for the life of me I couldn’t remember why I was wary about Nord. But that’s what it was, their incessant advertising.
Both of you are missing the point because you're confusing online advertising with traditional media advertising. PPC advertising is about making a conversion on the spot, since ROI can be directly measured. Media advertising is about context poisoning for eventual conversion.
You already know you need toilet paper. There are only so many brands to choose from. Every month, you have to make a decision about one of them based on whatever factors are important to you at that time. (For me, it's usually cost, ply count, and how likely it is that someone in the house is going to flush a massive wad of it and clog the pipe.)
The point of print/radio/television ads are to groom you into associating some positive feeling with a specific choice, whether or not it's new or you know about it. So the next time you're looking at the wall of toilet paper, you recognize the bear, the colors, the jingle, the florid language about its delicate softness upon your tender starfish, and get you to feel something positive enough to get you to gravitate toward it despite its higher price. Joy, lust, anger, and vanity are easy to appeal to.
They're not trying to inform you of anything or make you a die-hard fan. They're buttering you up to tilt your next purchasing decision in their favor. That's why advertising never stops; it's an endless loop of a handful of charlatans competing with each other to coerce you into buying their version instead of the other guy's.
Like, what new stuff? If that’s something that’s been around for years (like cameras), go ask friends or read some reviews or bug a salesperson in a camera shop. If that’s something that nobody knows about (yet) - well, you don’t know it exists hence you don’t need it. Don’t overcomplicate, keep it simple. That’s basic mental hygiene.
The new stuff you can buy is always limited to whats already available at your market. Your market might be your grocery store, walmart, amazon, a little local bodega, whatever, but if its not there you don't get it ads or not, and if its there chances are you can find it without an ad by going down the right aisle or using the right keywords.
Plus ads are fundamentally inefficient sources of information. Billboard lawyers like to flood the interstates with their "Accident? call me" signage, on the off chance someone without a lawyer has an accident and looks up and sees Jacob Emrani smiling on them. Big payoff for the lawyer if they do get a job from this ad, but for the vast majority of the millions of commuters a day who pass such an ad its probably a useless waste of thought to even catch one in your periphery.
Professional review sources like Consumer report, ATK, and Wirecutter are far better sources than a random ad. I don't think I would ever buy a random product from an ad without reading reviews unless it was something completely disposable, like a new soda, or something that you have to willfully make terrible to screw it up, like a t shirt
It was an half rack with width that can be regulated.
I knew I wanted an half rack or a rack, but the recommended ones on blogs and such were always too big for my taste (also I'm not gonna lift heavy, especially at home).
I actually stopped looking for one because I thought there were none fitting my needs,
then one day an ad slipped with this model that had good features and reviews and I bought it (after researching it more of course).
Not OP but anecdotal experience: Every once in a while I'll go to a store and wander the isles. I see things that I find interesting, but most of the time I don't buy them. Sometimes I think to myself: I would love to know more about topic X. So I use search engines and forums to look for more information on topic X. I happily filter ads because there is no net positive benefit from them for my life. I get excited about things without them, find things I need without them, and have no trouble with either.
Yes, this is the question for the ages. How can you possibly survive if you don't buy more stuff you didn't even know you needed. Clearly, that more than justifies any and all intrusive, exploitive, unethical practices. Won't someone think of the children (buying stuff they don't need).
P.S.: I have had any number of marketing types push back (vehemently) when I expressed my distaste for oppressive ad overload with "well you tell me what the alternative is...how else am I supposed to reach customers". And I have stopped even trying to be nice about it: Figuring that out is your goddam job. My job would be vastly easier if I could just say "all that stuff about ethics, regulation, legislation and simple common decency...that's really inconvenient and I'm going to ignore it". But I don't get to ignore any of that; I still successfully do my job. So why should marketing be somehow different.
Anyone in marketing who says "You tell me how to do my job without crapping on people" is lazy and incompetent.
I see ads when I watch Youtube on my TV, and basically not otherwise. I have never seen one and thought Oh yeah I want/need that, more often it's laughably off base. They could've trivially targeted to the video, but instead decided I might have some niche health concern which is demographically impossible.
Typically the content I'm trying to watch (even if unsponsored) is a far superior advert. I didn't know I wanted a powered/active cooler box (and definitely don't need one) until I saw an AvE video of one last night. Now I'd quite like Makita's, and in fact now I come to think of it I did even share the link with someone who is in the market for one. But the malgorithms did their best to make me learn about and want to buy shitty VPNs and maltesers instead. If I'm watching tool/DIY videos give me the tool ads? I might actually be interested? I might warm to the brand, associating it with my favourite channels?
Not that I want to be manipulated like that, it just seems bafflingly poorly targeted whenever I do see them that it's irritating and I'm glad I block them everywhere else.
Without advertisements, you have to be bothered by things enough to actually want to implement or look up a solution. When it comes to banal consumer goods, if you can't think of a product on your own, you probably don't actually need it.
Talking to people, and seeking things out myself when I perceive a need for something. If my shoes wear out then I'll decide for myself to seek out new shoes at a shoe store. If I don't know what brands are good, I ask other people what brand they use and if they're happy with it.
If I'm missing out on some product that I might like but I've never heard of because I block ads, that doesn't matter to me. If I don't know that I would want it, then I don't want for it. But generally, people talk about things worth talking about and I'd rather hear about new products from real people who don't have a commercial stake in promoting the thing.
This is either a sad reflection on society, or awesome sarcasm.
(Hoping for the latter, but have you seen society lately?)
The need comes first. If I have a need, I (re)search for solutions. The ad does not create the need.
Ads still work. They can generate a want, but if I never see the ad, I'll live happily on in blissful ignorance.
Building awareness is important for new products. Heck, I might like them. Not complaining about ads in general, just the ones that try to get between me and what I really want my to do. The ones that try to make my attention non-optional.
Those must die a fiery death.
The earlier 99 percent of human history was pretty garbage. Ads are pretty garbage too but I really don't get why people keep doing this thing where they're like "well how did we manage in the past?" In the past we just died of war and disease and stuff. The past is awful.
The past was awful for lots of reasons of course, but one was that we just weren’t very productive. We’re pretty productive nowadays. We could at least try a system where there’s enough stuff, but we find it naturally or by carefully weighing the pros and cons.
>but we find it naturally or by carefully weighing the pros and cons.
This system doesn't make sense... the incentives for producers don't line up with reality. Producers are incentivized to find ways to break your rules and advertise as if they do it alone, they will profit massively.
I call BS on that. People don't magically stop consuming just because they don't get ads shoved in their faces all the time. I block ads everywhere and haven't really seen an ad in years, but I still sometimes buy useless shit I don't need. It turns out search engines and price directories do a pretty good job of finding useless shit when you actively seek it out. As long as there is a demand for things, people will find it and buy it.
Hah I've run into this exact issue. I've always been the same way, if a medium has unblockable/unremovable ads I'd tend not to consume it; things like radio, magazines, etc. But I realized when I wanted to buy something I didn't even know what brands were in the space. It made doing research a bit trickier.
That doesn't mean ads are necessary though, frankly any system which depends on spending more than your competitors will never produce the best recommendations. Instead I learned to first build a list of companies in a space, then research those companies. I use things like Wirecutter, Reddit, and Productchart to help decide as well.
What I need aren't ads; I need good, user-centric, recommendation and discovery products. Sadly we fell into the local-minimum of ads instead. That said sometimes I do choose to let a company advertise to me in a specific channel (separate email or social media account) so I can keep up with their products and potential deals. That seems like a good middle ground for me.
At least if I get an advertisement I immediately understand the biases behind whoever served it to me, with stuff like reddit or blogs I can never be sure how astroturfed it is, or whether the people reviewing things even know what they are talking about.
I'm not a proponent of advertising in the modern sense, but it's probably the least dishonest way that companies pay to promote their product. Professional reviewers are a good medium but it takes time to find those in a new space where you're not sure if their standards and preferences match yours
That's where my mind went, too. I think part of the answer is that a lot of it can be replaced by nothing. Some of this stuff driving all these ads doesn't even enrich our lives anyway.
If I want to find new stuff then I would like to access a dedicated resource where all the promoted material could be promoted. Like a promotional book or email tab.
Everything is psychological warfare designed to make people consume as much as possible, beyond advertising. Even something simlpe such as a sale (FOMO), or pricing (99 cents).
The ENTIRE POINT of an advertisement is to extract wealth from you by getting you to spend money you wouldn't otherwise spend. If I want to learn about products and decide what to buy or try and solve a problem I have, advertising provides negative value to that, because advertising is inherently inaccurate and dishonest.
Advertising is just a disgusting tax on capitalism by a few cartels.
Get a billboard ban passed in your state. It's absolutely wonderful.
>To those men in their oddly similar dark suits, their cold eyes weighing and dismissing everything, the people of this valley were a foe to be defeated. As he thought of it, Dasein realized all customers were "The Enemy" to these men. Davidson and his kind were pitted against each other, yes, competitive, but among themselves they betrayed that they were pitted more against the masses who existed beyond that inner ring of knowledgeable financial operation.
>The alignment was apparent in everything they did, in their words as well as their actions. They spoke of "package grab level" and "container flash time" -- of "puff limit" and "acceptance threshold." It was an "in" language of militarylike maneuvering and combat. They knew which height on a shelf was most apt to make a customer grab an item. They knew the "flash time" -- the shelf width needed for certain containers. They knew how much empty air could be "puffed" into a package to make it appear a greater bargain. they knew how much price and package manipulation the customer would accept without jarring him into a "rejection pattern."
>And we're their spies, Dasein thought. the psychiatrists and psychologists - all the "social scientists" we're the espionage arm.
If that was the case why would YT be tolerating adblockers for so long and initially not even be playing so many ads? Why would they change their tune now?
Ah, could it be that they need to first get a market share that's so significant that they can actually enforce these rules, because there are only very limited options to choose from for people?
Cry me a river about YT not being able to pay their bills. That's ridiculous.
Because interest rates were historically low for the entirety of YT’s existence until recently. You’re seeing this happen with multiple platforms and companies suddenly caring way more about being profitable.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to explain this using interest rates. I mean, for sure, low interest rates made it easy to collect a lot of capital and lure users into a "free" service. It doesn't explain though why one would find this an acceptable and ethical form of doing business in the first place.
It was clear from day one of low interest rates that those wouldn't stick around forever. This business model is a pile of s** that breaks itself.
It appears as if the most 'successful' business people actually don't think a lot about any kind of sustainability in their decisions. It's just about quick growth. And when push comes to shove, they wine that they aren't able to pay the bills anymore, because of 'evil' users who don't want to watch their crappy ads.
I never opted into this economic arrangement. It's not my problem if businesses are operating business models that wouldn't work without advertisements. I'll continue blocking them, and if the business dies or needs to start charging me money to survive, then I'll decide if it's worth it to me to pay them or cry about the dead business.
Yes. Companies get paid to use psychological weapons on you.
Would you tolerate a cafe in Ukraine having reduced prices because it informs Russia when soldiers are visiting, so Russia can use weapons on the soldiers (i.e. shoot them in the face) and Russia pays it for that?
They're making a much broader point about advertising in general, while you're fixated on internet advertising.
What benefit do freeway billboards provide to my life? How about the spam mail I get in my mailbox? The bright and flashy signs for businesses along the road?
Every time I'm on the freeway I pass a few dozen ads selling liposuction or some other expensive and unhealthy "beauty" treatment. What value are those companies bringing to the world, and why should I have to put up with their ads? Just because someone bought property adjacent to the freeway?
Is it stealing if you watch the ad but close your eyes and plug your ears?
Why does Google want to charge advertisers to show ads to someone so determined to ignore them? If anything, if they force me to watch their ads and I ignore them, then Google is the one stealing from the advertisers.
I'm not going to buy an advertiser's product regardless of whether or not I'm forced to see its advertisement, and any counterargument to that must be built on the premise that advertisements can nonconsensually convince me to take action, in which case we're back to the beginning arguing about psychological warfare, where I certainly have a right to defend myself.
> YouTube, streaming services, etc. provide you a service in exchange for you also allowing ads to be loaded on your computer.
Users don't 'allow' anything: YouTube send data, the owner of the receiving device can choose what to do with that data (modulo copyright infringement, hate speech laws, etc.).
YouTube's business model is to bet that adspace included alongside videos can be sold for a profit. The price they can charge for that adspace depends on market conditions, which includes factors like the prevalence of adblocking. Blocking ads is not 'stealing', in the same way that using coupons isn't 'stealing'.
> YouTube has every right to try to punish this behavior or stop providing their service to you - such as by blocking ads, or even by deleting your account.
Obviously. That's why it's never 'your' account; it's owned by them, they can do what they want (modulo copyright infringement, hate speech laws, etc.).
> YouTube, streaming services, etc. provide you a service in exchange for you also allowing ads to be loaded on your computer.
I don't remember signing a contract with YouTube. They send my browser a list of "things" and their URLs required to render a page and, as my agent, my browser can freely load or ignore them.
> access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as expressly authorized by the Service; or (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the respective rights holders;
> circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;
Tell me where this shows up in the process of watching a YouTube video. On a fresh device I can navigate to their page, select a video, and watch it. Never in that chain of events is this agreed upon.
> Your use of the Service is subject to these terms, the YouTube Community Guidelines and the Policy, Safety and Copyright Policies which may be updated from time to time (together, this "Agreement").
> Please read this Agreement carefully and make sure you understand it.
> If you do not understand the Agreement, or do not accept any part of it, then you may not use the Service.
Even if it's not binding, it illustrates what Google intends to do (stop providing the service via an anti-adblocker script) if you do not follow their TOS.
I wonder if the reverse would also work. If my browser's source code included a "TOS" that "by uploading content to and executing code on my machine you give me a permanent and irrevocable right to view/read the content using any software of my choosing" would that bind Google as well? Wouldn't that illustrate my intent in accessing Google's services just as a EULA I never get to read illustrates theirs?
Right. If they get to push a TOS on me, I get to push one on them.
I want Google to pay my rent for the next decade, and Sundar has to offer a naked lapdance at the Pink Poodle every time they send me an ad I did not explicitly request to be shown.
> it illustrates what Google intends to do (stop providing the service via an anti-adblocker script) if you do not follow their TOS.
Yes. They have complete discretion over what 'list of "things" and their URLs required to render a page' they decide to send any particular user agent (modulo copyright infringement, hate speech laws, etc.). There is no requirement that HTTP connections to 'youtube.com' should receive video data; or even HTML; or even that anything's listening on that port.
From some Tor exit nodes (not all!), YouTube does present a modal to make you agree to the ToS before you are allowed to interact with the page. Probably some localities actually legally require you to do this, and so Alphabet complies.
They can wave that EULA around all they want but I'm not going to sign it. And even if I signed it, I wouldn't honor it. Why should I play fair with corporations, particularly corporations the likes of google?
That would appear to be describing attempting to hijack or interfere with the YouTube servers. Someone instructing a program on their computer to do something other than what the operators of the Service thought it would do has no bearing on the Service's ability to continue operating or on the availability of the Content.
It's sad to see this sort of thing on HN. A web browser is a user agent that operates on behalf of the user. Let's say it again for emphasis: the web browser serves the user, not the site owner. The user is free to manipulate the received web page however they see fit. If the site operator wants to get paid, they can put the service behind a login paywall, or else they can go pound sand. There has never, ever been an obligation for users to respect the wishes of site owners; once it is off your server and on my machine, it is my data to do with as I see fit, including blocking whatever ads the data happens to contain.
> If the site operator doesn't like it, they can put the service behind a paywall or they can go pound sand.
see:
> YouTube has every right to try to punish this behavior or stop providing their service to you - such as by blocking ads, or even by deleting your account.
That doesn't absolve the first sentence that attempts to frame adblocking as theft. This is playing into the propaganda from companies like Google that are attempting to ahistorically distort the social contract by asserting that they control the content that is displayed on my screen, which is not how the web works or has ever worked. It's not "stealing", "freeloading", "privateering", it's a public resource that companies have imposed themselves upon and are now attempting to assert ownership of.
The upside if they stop is, they’ll stop for our entire class of people. The reason we watch Youtube is that our entire generation watches it instead of doing something else.
If an entire class of people were drawn to something else, such as watching Nebula or going to coffee shops, both would be more interesting than they are now.
I'm sure there are some people out there who feel such entitlement. I haven't seen anyone claiming such entitlement here though.
Personally, I agree with the 'my device, my rules' comment. If YouTube want to (try to) block me, they can go ahead. They're under no obligation to serve me video content even if I didn't block ads, so it makes little difference.
Why do so many people feel entitled to tell me how to use my computer? If they choose not to serve their webpages to me, that's fine. To be realistic, I probably won't even notice their attempt because my adblocker will already have updated to bypass their silly attempt.
But yes, it is their right to try. Just as it is my right to install & use an adblocker.
You really do not want to use those kind of words around places with value added tax. The law basically says that if a person or company is providing a service in exchange for money, goods or services, the seller will have to pay value added tax on that exchange.
The way that advertisements in the past has managed to avoid paying this tax is that the service or product is given away for free along side the advertisement. Since it is not an exchange of services, and the product is being giving away for free with no expectation of any money, goods or services, there is no tax to be applied.
I realized a truism years ago: Anytime there are 3 or more parties involved in a business deal, at least one of them is getting fucked. And it's usually the least powerful party, which 99% of the time is just the ordinary user/consumer/taxpayer. However, not always. And sometimes it's two parties getting screwed. This happens a lot with government contracts. Where the people paid for it, the government got garbage, and the contractor(s) got rich.
And advertising is almost always a 3 party business deal. The merchant. The advertiser. The unwitting public. Sometimes the merchant gets screwed. Sometimes it's the advertiser. But almost always the target audience.
So when it comes to adblocking, I have zero sympathy for the advertiser or the merchant. I want zero advertisements in my life. But I get them anyway.
Online advertising is even more fun than that: There's the merchant/website, the advertiser, the ad network, and the public. You can even add the advertiser's competitors! The public gets ads they don't want, the merchant can fake some of their traffic, or maybe it's the advertiser's competitors. The ad network is ultimately not all that interested in giving the advertiser that great a deal, or even if they are, they might still lose to those trying to steal ad revenue. You then see a company that was trying to sell ads to sports fans in indiana, that see that all their budget really went to ads placed in front of a bot farm from Philippines. I know of a failed alcohol startup who, after analysis, saw that 40% of their youtube marketing budget ended up attached to channels playing Peppa Pig.
So sure, adblock away, but don't think that the consumer is the sole loser in the ads race: It's far worse than that.
I have never seen an ad that was more valuable to me than when I go out looking for a product or service to solve a problem or ask a friend for advice. The shotgun affect of push advertising makes even those theoretically "useful" ads negative value, because they have to compete for my brain and attention with all the other ads, meaning they have to be just as optimized for manipulation.
You are inherently freeloading off of everyone that does pay for Premium or watches ads.
I didn't say that doing is is immoral, or that we should collectively feel ashamed, just that it is inherently <not paying> for YouTube, and that YT has every right to try to stop this behavior - of course, balancing kicking people off the platform with any ground they lose to competing UGC streaming services.
> You are inherently freeloading off of everyone that does pay for Premium or watches ads.
You seem to be assuming that watching ads would reduce the number of them, or reduce the price of Premium. All evidence is to the contrary (e.g. the presence of ads on pay-for TV, like cable)
It wouldn't reduce the rate of ads or price of premium, but if everyone ran an ad blocker and didn't pay for Premium, YouTube would either shut down or make the uploaders pay per watch or per GB served, perhaps, leading to a worse experience.
Would that lead to a worse experience? It would certainly cut down on spammy, AI generated content. I already fund many of the creators I watch through Patreon or other means so I suspect it wouldn't change much for me.
Yeah, my 9-year-old grandson could not upload his hillarious videos about dinosaurs anymore. Please explain to him that he can open some Patreon to support his Youtube fees instead.
There's many other platforms serving video. Youtube highly constraints their content, in the same way Google does, in ways that often don't align with my searches
More and more I end up using other platforms like Rumble or Rutube
What YouTube's/Google's greed and hubris will likely result in, are more programmers aggressively testing ad blockers that can defeat their new approach or users more aggressively looking for alternatives to YouTube.
And I'm totally amazed that execs at YouTube/Google haven't figured out that maybe a cheaper tier premium service for just no ads, might be a viable enough solution, versus thinking they are going to bully and intimate their customers. At least give it a try, and give users more options. Make a new basic tier for maybe $15 dollars a year, where there are no ads. There are just too many programmers in the world, to think "aggressive intimidation" is really going to work.
Several media players will do that in the background for you, 'mpv' and 'vlc' come to mind. 'mpv' even has a sponsorblock script that will skip the sponsored segments if you so chose.
I occasionally use this for convenience, even though I pay for YT Premium.
Unpopular opinion, ad blockers are the same as piracy.
There's basically an agreement that in return for watching some video for free, you have to 'pay' by watching an ad. On YouTube a significant amount of this money even goes to the creator.
Not really sure how you can defend your entitlement to free content with no ads, refusing to support the creator and provider, when the ad free version is reasonably priced, and even includes music.
To me it sounds like thinking a restaurant is too expensive so you just dine and dash.
Is getting up and going to pee during an ad break the same as piracy? Do I steal half the content if I close my eyes during the ad? What about muting and switching tabs? Do I pay with my inconvenience if I do it manually? Is this just about the creator getting paid, or about the poor company that's advertising to me as well?
Sure, YouTube deserves the money. They should find a more reliable way than third party advertisements to get the money.
Advertisers pay content creators money directly to feature sponsored ad-reads on their video, knowing full well that a lot of people will skip straight through them. If I skip an ad-read, I'm not stealing from the advertiser, even though the advertiser is expecting to get money from me. The advertiser has paid the money to deliver this ad-read to me, but I'm not paying them back.
Similarly, YouTube keeps on hosting "free" video content with third party ads, knowing full well that a lot of people will block them. If I block ads, YouTube has paid for the content to be delivered to me, but I'm not paying them back.
Both are investments that don't always see return on the individual level. If everyone stops buying sponsored products that appear in ad-reads, advertisers will stop paying for ad-reads. If everyone starts blocking ads, YouTube will find other ways to get compensation for the storage and bandwidth.
I watched a video for free and "paid" for it with that personal data that we were constantly told was the new oil, the stuff that runs modern life, the stuff that countries go to war over. Who's really entitled here? :)
Doubt I watch as many as 3 videos per month on YouTube. I hate everything about it, it's cesspool of scamming, racism, conspiracy nutters and people debasing themselves for clicks. I hope this kills it.
It's weird, I feel like the people who refuse to use YouTube with an account are the same people who insist all the content is garbage. I use it logged in and ~70% of my recommendations are math videos or other things I would like. When I see something I don't want to watch, I just select "not interested" and I feel like it immediately improves my reccommendations. This way I see maybe one reactionary/misogynist/conspiracy video every two months, and I just don't watch it and say I'm not interested.
On the contrary, I use youtube exclusively without account. I use a Firefox container to ensure cookies don't stick. I follow a bunch of channels via RSS.
Oh I'm sure there is, but dealing with all the awfulness is enough to make me not bother. Those stupid faces people pull in their thumbnails actually have quite a strong repellent effect on me (yes, I've got clickbait remover installed, yes I also use Vinegar because the YouTube player is deliberately designed for mis-clicks). The whole thing is just Idiocracy and I end up angry at the sheer stupidity and lack of dignity of the human race.
What I've been doing for 3 or so years, which works great for me, is have a Firefox container just for YouTube with cookies disabled, ublock origin, subscribe to these channels via RSS, and crucially don't discover content via YouTube's own discovery.
Oh man! I watch a ton of YouTube. I'll take up an opportunity to promote some of my favorites. Presented in no order, just scrolling through my subscriptions:
Older tech: LGR, Cathode Ray Dude, Techmoan
Video games: Cinemassacre, Masahiro Sakurai, Jeremy Parish, Cybershell, Basement Brothers, Retro Game Mechanics Explained, Brian David Gilbert, GTV Japan, Displaced Gamers
Synthesizers/music theory: Red Means Recording, Alex Ball, Andrew Huang, Rob Scallon, Rachel K Collier, David Bruce
For Guitar, I'd remove Rhett Shull, dude is just a YouTube channel hocking gear he gets for free. It used to be interesting when he talked about touring but now that he's a full time YouTuber and doesn't play live or touring he's just selling ads and his courses. Courses, which, frankly are not that unique or good.
I'd add a few different guitarists in here though. Paul David's genuinely seems like a great dude. Stewmac has fun stuff though it is generally driven around selling their stuff, but I think they're still highly educational most of the time. Emerald City Guitar's has some really cool videos now and again, and I dig their videos on some of the vintage gear they have and find inspiration in that. Gracie Terzian has great music theory videos, she's the one that helped me fully understand the circle of fifths. I also really enjoy Eric Haugen, he has a few courses on TrueFire now as well.
I also dig Alamo Music Center, watching Cooper shred an acoustic is always a good way to spend 10-15 minutes. Dude can play.
A super solid recommendation is the series on nuclear submarines, I also really enjoyed the one about how carburetors work (he makes a clear plastic one to use as a demo, it's... wildly cool). In general this channel is just _full_ to the brim of really great stuff.
A fellow Michigander Alexis Dahl has really cool videos about a bunch of unique places in Michigan and the state's history:
There's some really great stuff on YouTube, I'm sad that it's only offered on YouTube and wish some would move to something else simultaneously, like Floatplane or something where I could just pay a small monthly fee to get the videos at the same time.
Awesome, thanks! I love SmarterEveryDay. I’m subscribed (to his email list, which I appreciate a lot). Physics Girl is amazing too. I really hope she gets better.
I’ll definitely check out the Rodney Mullen video.
I think both floatplane and Nebula are promising. There are some pretty solid creators or Nebula (though they also tend to be some of the bigger more recommended YouTube channels)
It really depends what you're into and the languages you speak. Given we're on hackernews, maybe you're an English speaker who could be interested in math? 3Blue1Brown[1] is a nice channel.
I watched a 23-episode Yale class on the History of Ukraine, by prof. Tim Snyder. In fact I binged it. Then I went out and bought Bloodlands and On Tyranny. On Tyranny is a thin book, I read it in a couple of hours. But Bloodlands is fat; I read it in two days.
Snyder is a very engaging lecturer. I wish even one of my uni lecturers had been half so engaging.
In the first lecture, he asked his students to report back on whether any other universisty was offering classes on Ukrainian history; several students researched it, and came back in lecture 2 to tell him his class was unique in the USA. Which in the light of contemporary events seems pretty sad.
I won't be dropping my UBlock pants for Youtube. I watch about an hour every two weeks, on average; I certainly don't rely on it, and I certainly won't pay for Premium.
The channels that I had in mind when I wrote that are channels by experts in their fields, which somehow often happen to be low production value - because you know real scientists are about substance, not style :-)
So here's a random one in that category: this guy decided to try and build a mass spectrometer from scratch
That's more of a "you" problem. There may be a lot of garbage, but there's also a great deal of quality content made by some amazing people. Your unnecessarily broad dismissal of YouTube completely omits this. As with most social media, it's all about the company you keep. Be selective, curate your connections, and you'll find the quality of your experience changes for the better, dramatically.
Doubtful that it will kill it. But if it can jumpstart some alternatives and normalize video hosting outside of YouTube, we'll get a healthier market of options for watching videos. Like you, I probably watch a single-digit number of videos per month on YouTube. But there's no other option for the folks who I follow, who are simply following the path of least resistance to "get people to watch my videos on the internet." Paying for YouTube Premium isn't even a real option for me because I'd end up paying multiple dollars per video based on my viewing habits. Strange that YouTube seems to want to incentivize heavy viewership per user, even for paid accounts -- I suppose that tells you that the user data is actually the most valuable part of your account!
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.