To provide some clarity on this, it likely isn't targeting specifically non-Chrome browsers.
Disclaimer: fmr Googler, used to work on YouTube
Likely, this isn't necessarily targeting Firefox/Safari/Etc, but rather is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors. It _is_ however an anti-adblock measure meant to determine if the video is automatically getting skipped forward.
The reason on why changing your useragent "fixes" the problem, is that you're changing the tuple and the anti-adblock system won't serve the code-at-issue until it determines whether you'd be a good candidate for the experiment.
Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
> YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
Google has big financial incentives to punish non-Chrome user agents.
First, we've seen that Google pays a large amount of money to be the default search engine in competing browsers. A big reason for funding Chrome development is so that Google doesn't have to pay someone for the majority of its search traffic. If Google is paying out 30-40% of search ad revenue from non-Chrome browsers, that's many billions of dollars if they can get more people to use Chrome. If non-Chrome browsers are a bad experience on one of the most popular sites on the internet, that pushes people to use Chrome.
Second, Google is altering Chrome so that ad blockers won't be as effective. If they can push people to use Chrome, they'll get more ad revenue since ad blockers won't be as effective.
Google has been pushing Chrome because people using Chrome makes them billions of dollars. Maybe YouTube itself doesn't have a financial incentive, but Google definitely does.
If Chrome vanished tomorrow, Google would then face steep fees when their deals with Mozilla and Apple were up for renewal since they'd be dependent on traffic from Firefox and Safari. Instead, Google can keep paying Mozilla less and less money over time as more people use Chrome instead of Firefox.
In addition, Google is still run disorganized-bag-of-cats management style and YouTube is so indpendent from the mothership they're almost their own company.
Conspiracy is unlikely purely because Neal Mohan is empowered to tell the Chrome team to pound sand and will do so if he thinks they'd make a call that would damage YouTube's numbers.
Instead of just "stop using it" (pay isn't actually an option here, people who are paying are still getting the delay), let's force them to comply with reasonable antitrust regulation under threat of fines. Or preferably, break them up, youtube shouldn't be part of google and neither should chrome.
Not to mention, if performance with YouTube is slow, there's no clue for users that Firefox is the problem. There's no banner telling you "for faster YouTube performance use Chrome". And it's extremely unlikely that your average user is going to try to compare with Chrome, or even the thought occurs to them. They probably think their ISP just got worse or something.
If this were an actual mechanism to try to get users to switch, it would be an idiotic one.
I mean if it is "is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors" in a way which causes Chrome UAs to get preferential treatment, isn't that specifically targeting non-Chrome browsers?
Making Chrome the dominant browser has been a huge focus of Google since Chrome's inception. You may not know this, but Google owns YouTube.
To provide some clarity on this, it's not specifically coded into the system to prefer one particular browser over another, but rather, it's independent of all browsers and using the useragent as a string as part of a group.
Chrome could equally be as effected by this as any other browser.
If that's an A/B test where user agents are randomly added to either control or a test group, and you change your user agent, then you are reassigned, because you changed the user agent
> To provide some clarity on this, it likely isn't targeting specifically non-Chrome browsers
It's not targeting non-chrome browsers, it's just a before penalty that only applies to ... non-chrome browsers?
> Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
With Google's ongoing desire to break ad-blockers in Chrome, and make tracking a mandatory web specification via essentially monopoly browser status[1], Google has a _very_ strong financial incentive to punish non-chrome UAs - anything that pushes people to Chrome over browsers that they don't control is a win for them.
[1] let's be real: the only reason many sites work in browsers other than chrome is iOS safari, that's it
To provide some additional context and clarifying points that I see in the lower comments:
>> Regarding financial incentives:
Google is an insanely large organization, and the priorities and KPIs of one org (Chrome) largely don't impact another org (YouTube).
Additionally, YouTube is a regarded as a red-headed step-child within Google and is generally outside of the general interactions with other orgs.
That's based on years of working on that fine line.
>> Regarding Useragent Targeting:
The targeting scheme treats the useragent as a string, rather than a distinct value that the useragent is set to. Chrome is likely to hit this bug as much as any other browser vendor.
> Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
Nonsense. A Google controlled browser runs plugins Google allows with privacy settings Google creates. More data and no ad blockers is worth many billions of dollars to YouTube in the long run.
They directly benefit from people thinking Firefox is slow.
If you keep breaking the site guidelines like this, we're going to have to ban you. We've already warned you once (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34557733) and you've unfortunately continued to do it repeatedly, not just in this comment but in other recent ones:
shrug. I was unnecessarily rude in two of the 5 comments, if you were just replying to those i'd understand, but i don't really understand the others (including the previous warning and the one you are replying to now), especially the one you're replying to now. I can try to be more civil but considering there are only two valid complaints out of my entire comment history, if you really want to ban me there's nothing i can do for you.
You should be banning the google employee pretending they have "no financial incentive" to shut down their competition. It's obviously inflammatory and absurd. Every company has financial incentive to impede their competition. He works at google, he knows this and is lying or propagandizing or who knows.
They already use their dominance in one platform (android) to achieve dominance in another (chrome), the exact same way Microsoft have been found guilty of years ago.
If the US govt wanted to sue google for it, they would have years ago.
Sure, but I think this particular case is would be more clear cut.
If a person can measure the time the page spends loading with a complete break down across a number of different browsers both on the same machine and on identically-specified machines together with a an external running stopwatch, then they would be able to show that which browsers are being slowed down.
There is less hand-waving here with questions like, "Well, does bundling Chrome on Android really affect the browser market?" . We know that slower load times is a worse user experience, and if this claim is true, then YouTube and Google are squarely to blame.
It's pretty trivial to write a yt-dlp one-liner to batch download all your subscriptions. You can even have it slice out sponsor segments using the SB API automatically. There's also projects like TubeArchivist which give a web ui to download and play youtube videos. There are also projects that provide alternative UIs for Youtube. The world is drowning in solutions to this problem, yet people keep whining and complaining about it.
It is obvious that anyone who still uses YT while complaining about these measures should quit their BS learned helplessness and take an afternoon to figure out an alternative.
Yes and no. While there are ways to circumvent the issue ( including the ways you mention ), the issue itself a little more complicated than that. Some of us don't like to play cat and mouse game. At certain size, company has to realize that their decisions that attempt to extract maximum amount of dough may draw close scrutiny of regulators. And its not like Google is not in their crosshairs already.
I am definitely not going to wait for the regulators fix up YT, but rather quit watching. We already have a family premium account because my partner couldn't stand the ads. I refuse to pay them. YT music is also shit quality. I bought a new pair of headphones and thought they were defective until I listened to my own ~160 kbps opus encoded content. Yes, it's that crappy, possibly 96 kbps or below. However I still listen to it because its bundled and paid for and still sounds better than FM radio. Totally not worth even half of what they're asking for.
Here are the quality setting on YouTube Music according to Google:
Low
Uses the least storage on your device
Bitrate: 48 kbps AAC and OPUS
Normal
Default setting
Bitrate: 128 kbps AAC and OPUS
High
Higher-quality audio will use more storage on your device
Bitrate: 256 kbps AAC and OPUS
Seems like it is automatically set to normal on WiFi and Mobile Data. It also seems like there is another option for streaming labeled "Always High" which forces 256 kbps stream over bad connection.
I typically only use Youtube Music for discovery then buy albums that I like (or rip them if they're not available for purchase). I, personally, have never experienced low quality audio on YT Music.
I've checked now and mine is set to normal. But it's still shit on mobile. I have the same song encoded by yours truly from flac to opus@160 kbps and the quality difference is audible. On the desktop I fail to see any difference at the normal setting, so it might downgrade to 48 kbps over LTE.
Step 1: Buy a VPN subscription. It's about $3/month
Step 2: Run script
I'm a lot happier to pay for VPN and hard disks than for Google's bait-and-switch games. Youtube and Google became popular based on a social contract where I gave them by content, and now that it's a near-monopoly, they're breaking that social contract. That's not illegal, but it is sleazy, and I feel dirty giving money to support sleazy.
No. Of these mechanisms, the ones I have personally used (yt-dlp and TubeArchivist) do not rely on signing in with an account. They could ban my account on IP association alone, but that would result in massive false positives and backlash (everyone behind a VPN would be screwed for one).
You don't need an account for youtube. I have a Google account for gmail, and since I use Android I unavoidably have a Google account because of it, but there's no reason to use that account for youtube. In fact, there is (or, at least, there used to be) a good reason to never use a Google account for youtube: they have (or, at least, used to have) a "real name" policy for youtube, so if they for some reason decide that your real name is not your real name, you could lose access to your whole Google account, including more important services like Google Talk. Therefore, whenever I watch any video on youtube, I very carefully make sure that the browser is not logged into the Google account, and watch it anonymously.
For all that is good, do not do this on an account that does anything else! Run it in the cloud, if you can on a separate IP, and stream it from there.
I've had my Google play store account locked down for "fraud" (they never told me what it was) that caused all of my Google services to be stopped (googlefi, gmail, google domains, etc) and I could still always use their SSO to log in to things. I also make youtube comments with zero hesitation to harass Trump fans and am frequently suspended on youtube and it just stops me from being able to comment.
My NAS has been using yt-dlp to download various Warhammer 40k videos from youtubers for 3+ years, I'm around 10TB.
My working theory is there is no way to actually get banned from using google services permanently unless perhaps you do a charge back or something I haven't tried.
I also do everything I can to not use google services after my "fraud" lockdown. I've made longer comments about it here before in my history if you want the full story.
It depends on ones experience, but a script which runs yt-dl shouldn't take much time. And as a side note I'd argue that constantly counting your time as money loss may lead to neurosis. Some digital housekeeping can be pleasantly distracting from work, while also making your computer environment more comfortable.
I already have docker / docker-compose installed for development purposes, so in my case it was literally running git clone ..., then docker-compose up -d.
Considering this is about losing 5 seconds lost for every video being watched on youtube, I am pretty sure this time investment would amortize in <1 month of yt watching.
Do you show the same concern for how cheap the time is for the people spending their time bitching on reddit / HN / twitter about this issue for weeks on end?
Get a little dopamine hit everytime one remembers what a sweet deal or setup they have. Conversely, feels bad to pay for convenience on conditions one objects to. It's like when deal hunters spend undue effort to save some money on frequently used items or services that will get used for years. Does dollar equivalent in effort to save get amortized over time? Frequently, but not always. But the satisfaction of knowing you got one over the dealer keeps on paying for itself.
A lot of people seem to think so, consider how they will spend hours trying to avoid paying $30 a month or whatever to get rid of the ads and support the creators.
I think money ruins things that it touches, and the things that are made in pursuit of money, especially in today's computerized world, will be predatory and exploitative.
The Internet used to be for hobbyists, making content out of passion in addition to having actual jobs (sort of like free software).
But then they made content creation their jobs. Then the platforms got "professionalized". Now, content creators have to be professional eggshell dancers while the consumers are trapped in mind prisons where advertisers have the keys. We're now cattle in some corporate money printing machine, of which the creators are hapless contractors.
That's never what I signed up for. I didn't ask the creators to do this for money. I never opted into the game their playing (I also didn't read the EULA ;D). I also wouldn't pay money for Asmongold's 500th "IS THIS THE NEXT POGGERS MMO?" video (but I will watch it for free for like 15 seconds, then question my life choices and close it before watching some better video for free). So I don't care. As far as I'm concerned, they should go back to being hobbyists, get real jobs for their livelihood, and the Internet should be demonetized.
Money itself does not do anything. Required is a human’s ego and desire to compete, possibly to improve probabilities of landing a specific mate? Or maybe just securing certain resources?
Saying that money itself does not do anything is a truism.
Money is a tool to get people to do something that they don't want to do otherwise. That's all it is. All trade is fundamentally a person who has a thing and doesn't want to give it up giving it up in exchange for money. Labor is the same with a persons time.
There are plenty of instances where the thing you get someone to do is "evil": bribes, assassinations, creating and distributing propaganda, having people fight in unjust wars, etc.
While it is unlikely that most money is used to cause "evil" acts, it is very likely that most "evil" acts occur due to money changing hands.
> All trade is fundamentally a person who has a thing and doesn't want to give it up giving it up in exchange for money. Labor is the same with a persons time.
I disagree. What is a farmer going to do with 100 bushels of wheat? What is an oil producer going to do with 1 million gallons of oil? Trade happens (much of the time) because a person who has Thing A would rather have Thing B and is willing to give up Thing A for it. And person with Thing B would rather have Thing A and is willing to give up Thing B for it. And money is the technology that enables this exchange to happen more quickly and easily.
>While it is unlikely that most money is used to cause "evil" acts, it is very likely that most "evil" acts occur due to money changing hands.
This has nothing to do with money or trade. A bushel of wheat or barrel of oil could have changed hands instead of money. The evil act occurred because someone wanted it to occur, and it could occurred with or without a trade.
I often post the same complaint ("What happened to all the hackers?"), but endlessly posting "Script X doesn't work with browser Y, now I'm forced to view ads, somebody do something," isn't hacking.
If they weren't cheap about it they would just serve a video that has the ads built into it. Instead they try and play them separately because that is cheaper. It would also be a better user experience because there wouldn't be these sharp edges between playing the ad and the content that are separately buffered.
Youtube doesn't produce the videos. Are you suggesting they should re-encode them with the ads inserted into that particular video file? That seems worse, with little gain. Plus think about all of the additional storage and streaming cost required for that, because you'd have to duplicate that ad in all the videos now. Meaning each 15sec ad would add a tiny bit to each of 1B videos, instead of just being a separate 15sec video all by itself. And separate cached in all the places where that video is cached.
I'm fairly certain you could inject ads directly into the video stream at the protocol layer (HLS/DASH) without too much difficulty. Both operate by sending self-contained chunks of encoded media at a time. The real issue there is then preventing the user from skipping those parts of the video.
There are hundreds of reasons why this wouldn't work, mainly the fact that almost nobody watches the same ads, meaning you're just rendering 100,000+ different versions of the same video depending on who watches it.
You don’t need to render the whole video, just the frames between the last keyframe of the content and the first keyframe of the ad. The rest can just be cached as is.
Yeah, I'm not sure this is a technical problem for them. Twitch embeds ads into the stream so they can't be blocked.
Honestly, I think YouTube/Google is doing this to setup an argument that ad-blockers are piracy tools so they can be legislated away. Much easier than investing time into a technical solution.
Google crossed the line and pissed off users who were previously willing to watch ads, by implementing NEVER-ENDING ads that require the user to continually press Skip to herd the program along... over and over and over, while they're trying to do something else (in my case, it's usually cooking, with stuff all over my hands).
I watched YouTube ads when they were normal blocks of short ads. But now they aren't, and I watch YouTube with no ads at all. This punishes content creators, and the blame lies firmly on Google.
Per societal norms today, the perpetrator of the offense is now whining about people fighting back. And in doing so, Google has popularized ad blockers among people who would never know they existed. Morons getting what they deserve.
The number of ads is getting pretty bad now. I use the YouTube app for Apple TV (so no chance for an ad blocker) and it has been slowly increasing the last two years. I even get surveys asking "How is the Ad experience?" and I always answer the lowest.
I frequently get 30 seconds of unskippable ads multiple times in a video. One set at the beginning and following sets at approximately 3 minute intervals.
At least some mid-rolls are skippable but they are totally random. Like, maybe a set of 2 ads where the first is 15 second and the second is 15 seconds that is skippable after 5 seconds. The combination of length and skippable is confusing.
More annoying is the tendency to sneak a 3 minute ad in there that is skippable. So unless I am in the room and near the remote it will just play the whole thing. I've had ads that are up to 15 minutes long.
If they would offer me a sign-up deal I'd probably just get YouTube premium at this point.
I once had the whole AMD event revealing a new Ryzen generation and some GPU as an ad, like more than an hour. The fact that you can just put whatever as an ad is wild.
I had an ad that was 30 minutes or an hour long at one point, it was for a watch.
The unfortunate thing was, the ad itself was actually interesting, going into a lot of manufacturing details but I didn't have time to watch it them and there is no way to find it.
I went through a (short) period where they were serving me ads that close together. Logged in too. Sometimes I would get one in the first 30 seconds (on top of the pre-video ads). I started to close the page immediately on getting an ad I thought was too soon and not looking at Youtube for the rest of the day. The schedule went back to being more reasonable. I have no idea if my tactic really worked personally, or whether it was just general testing that was scheduled to finish anyway.
Same experience for me. The first video I watched after my premium sub expired, I was given two preroll ads. Then, 30 seconds into the video, an ad. Finally, at the end of the 5 minute video, another ad.
It was jarring. But I’m also not sure complaining is fair. Hosting and serving video is expensive. I definitely don’t expect to receive it for free.
I don't expect it for free either. But they already get my user data. This seemed to work well for the last 20 years.
Now they want my user data AND want me to pay on top by creating such a bad user experience for the free tier that one feels like Pavlov's dog being conditioned to wait for the "skip" button to appear to get the movie rewards.
That seems to vary by video. I never log in, and some videos I found had zero or few ads, while others get an ad every few minutes. I am not sure how much of that is controlled by content creators[1] and how much of that is pushed by advertiser demands[2].
I think this underlines the misconception by YT of who the customer is.
Is it the advertiser who buys ad-space, is it the content creator who makes videos, or the viewer subscriber? Satisfying all three parties at scale is incredibly hard.
now i am curious how much the slowdown is for adblockers compared to the slowdown through ads. at that rate i suspect even with buffering the adblocker version is still faster, at least at lower bandwidth.
Don't know about MotoGP but for F1 there are no ads if you watch the paid subscription stream. The stream on cable TV is indeed full of ads that it's worth paying for the subscription with some friends to share the cost.
Ever since that executive email about reverting some change in Chrome because people aren’t going to meet quotas and get their bonuses, I imagine that conversation happening every time they crank up the ad volume on YouTube.
I have firefox with ublock origin, privacy badger, and a pi-hole. I haven't noticed any slowdowns. Though, last week one day youtube woldn't play videos at all for a couple of hours for me.
Please keep making it shitier to the point I consume less and less of YouTube.
These tactics are nothing new for non-Chrome users. Most of the "Oh they just didn't have Firefox in mind, no malice on Google's part" it's just bullshit at least in part.
This is just one more instance of it, and it's getting pettier and pettier..
You not watching YouTube is literally what Google wants, you're a net negative to them, so they're making your experience as miserable as possible to make sure you don't come back without money or the ability to watch an ad.
Kinda, platforms like YouTube's lifeblood are the huge amount of eye balls aka "views" so they can sell ads to companies hopeful those eye balls watch and click their ad.
Of course I'm "a free loader" but there is still some residual "value" in me.
Either way I don't care about Google, if they "win" I also would win by not wasting my time watching videos.
They'll make it login only like Facebook, Instagram and now Twitter. It's the only option that the MBAs can come up with. That will also be the end of Youtube.
Depends. If the check is only about superficial stuff like User Agent etc then that is easy.
But they can fingerprint on all layers (tls, http, web api, js engine). To fake that all requires a lot of effort. Not all can be changed with an extension alone.
Welcome to my world of browser emulation. But then again, all depends on what they check :)
I've been catching low bandwidth recently, even on Android with YouTube Premium on WiFi. I have quality configured to "Higher picture quality, more bandwidth" yet still get something like 240p on a video with 1440p max resolution. They are getting user-hostile
That's funny, I've actually been seeing this with Brave but it's limited to the first video per tab session i watch.. Then it seems to be fine. I put it down to excessive AdBlock scripts being added, but if it's related to this that's quite a scummy move.
I find it weird that so many people think they should be entitled to everything for free. Who's paying the creators for the content they watch? Who's paying Google for delivering that content?
Instead of an ad-blocker, try a YT premium subscription. Or use a different platform that doesn't serve ads. Or sign up for some other subscription service. Whatever.
Do people also get mad at barbers that don't give free haircuts?
While I largely agree with you, I think a lot of people are in an annoying in-between when it comes to buying a Youtube subscription. I maybe watch 5 minutes a day, averaged out. That's not nearly enough to make it worth it to me to buy a subscription. On the other hand, the ads have gotten really annoying. Being able to skip after 5 seconds on most is nice, but I'd almost rather they were just 10 seconds long and unskippable. It's frustrating to watch 5 seconds, skip, and then immediately need to do that again, especially if it's something you have on 'in the background.'
If they had one based on a scale of how many videos you watch, I'd be much more keen. Of course, I expect they wouldn't do that for multiple reasons.
I once had a website that would have been profitable if not for ad blockers, so I definitely get it. I don't know what the real solution is. Ideally they could block ad blockers and then keep the number of ads under control, but I doubt they'd actually reduce the numbers if they did manage to stop ad blockers.
Infrequent use is an interesting use-case. Assuming no friction (no sign up, no tracking, etc - completely hypothetical) - would you pay 5 cents, or 25 cents, to watch a video once? Ignore the details - just in sprit, would you do it?
I'd imagine I'd want it to be time based, not per video, but yeah. I'd probably want a counter right on the page of how much I've spent, and perhaps a toggle right up there if I decide I've spent enough that month and would rather have ads again.
For your actual numbers, 5 cents would be fine. I don't think I'd go for 25 cents.
This comes up absolutely every time Youtube ads are mentioned. For most people, the issue isn't ads/no ads. The issue is that Youtube without an ad-blocker is unusable. There are regularly 6+ short ads in the first 4-5 minutes of the video. If you try seek in the video, there are ads. I'd happily watch a reasonable number of ads, in the same way I'm happy to listen to 1 or 2 ads in the middle of a podcast. I'm not watching videos where the content is broken up literally every 2 minutes with ads.
If google is serious about YT premium then they should ban sponsored videos. I don't want to pay for YT premium just to watch a channel tell me why I should give money to their sponsor.
I have never watched a show on TV stop for 3 minutes to tell me why I should be using NordVPN with their code to SAVE TODAY!
I know about product placement and certainly don't care for it. It isn't intrusive to me as I can just ignore it while getting the information I want. Additionally, it is clearly not the same.
I cannot ignore an individual talking about NordVPN for 3 minutes.
Those examples blend in a lot better than most YouTube sponsors. I don't mind subtle product placement. Those didn't even name the product out loud, they just showed it off a bit.
It's psychological warfare against me. Why should I play nice when they aren't?
>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.
No, people are getting mad because Youtube has been letting people use it with ad-blockers for 18 years (in practise, at least) and have now hardened their stance considerably. In other words, they got to the dominant position by being very lenient, and now that they are on top they are tightening the screws.
This means that people who watched Youtube for up to 18 years with ad blockers are now forced to decide whether they want to pay money, watch ads, or stop using the service.
None of those choices is better, except possibly morally, than the now-unavailable but previously-very-available choice of getting Youtube for free with no ads.
If Google showed text ads for a few seconds before every search and used technical means to prevent people from bypassing that process, there would be a similar outcry -- even though everybody knows that it costs Google money to provide search results.
I don't mind paying a small fee, assuming it goes to the creator (that's a strong assumption, youtube loves to demonetise creators if they don't stick to the doxa). But how can I do that without being tracked to death. I want to have nothing to do with the google ecosystem. I don't want google to create a stasi file of every video I watched in my life. I don't want to be fed their recommandation engine. Privacy is my primary reason for having an ad blocker and using firefox in the first place.
you have a bunch of barbers in a city, well, i open up a business where i cut hair. BUT I do a shitty job, so you kinda need to come back maybe 3 times for a decent haircut. Wow it sucks. Yeah. BUT...
I also put in a giant screen with ads, and an advertiser that counts people watching the ads. And then I say... ITS FREE.
Woah okay. At first not much happens, but eventually the other barbers start to lose money, thats because they can't compete with my free haircut business. I quickly expand and now have shops all over town, and competition is dying.
Now some people realized they can take a quick nap while getting a haircut so they don't see the ads. And suddenly I kick out anyone who takes a nap. Those people can no longer get haircuts because everyone else closed down because they couldn't compete with my free. And as those people complain everyone says "EVERYONE WANTS A FREE HAIRCUT BUT NOT WILLING TO PAY FOR IT!"
Edit: I also start selling packages of 20 ad-free haircuts a month. Most people think this package is a bit insane given that they don't get 20 haircuts in a month. Or every month. And they still have to listen to the barber push their "cancer cures" and other nonsense they keep pushing every time they get a haircut.
You read these posts about people hating youtube, hating ads, over my dead body will I pay for premium. The same people talking about how their needs to be a competitor in the space.
It is completely lost on them that maybe the reason there is no competition is because nobody wants to watch ads or pay for premium.
The barber stopped giving free haircuts and now people are pissed that nobody wants to open up a "competing" free-haircut barber shop.
A lot of people would be happy to support a 3rd party video platform. I know I would. I paid for Vimeo for years. The sad truth is that there are not enough people that would.
But I cannot and refuse to pay Google, especially youtube given their stance on censorship.
The issue is always that creators themselves don't upload their videos to those 3rd parties. That forces you to come back to Youtube one way or another.
As for a lot of things there is a big network effect at play here.
It is your device playing the video. Shouldn't you be able to control what is playing on your device? You can bet I will do everything I can to not display ads.
And I understand the other side of this. It is fair game for youtube to try to insert ads one way or another and make it as difficult as possible for me to remove them.
And about supporting creators: Yes, that needs to be done. I give directly to creators through patreon or other. Youtube is a middleman that provides very little value.
There is no "predicament". I simply believe that it is my right to block ads as much as it is Youtube right to not send me videos anymore.
At the end of the day, I'm issuing an API request to youtube servers and they are free to reply to me or block me. I'm also free to do whatever I want with the reply, which includes NOT displaying the ads.
This logic is a little bit of "They are free to remove self-checkout. But as long as they allow self checkout, I'll allow myself to skirt a few things around it."
You cannot equate sending a request and them sending back a response to "stealing". There is nothing illegal in not displaying ad.
What is the next step? I should be forced to LOOK at it as well? If not it is "stealing" as indirectly the companies advertising are not getting what they pay for?
There is a cost associated with creating those bits (the content creators) and a cost associated with serving you those bits.
So how do you propose people compensate the creators and the servers for the cost they incurred?
Pay directly? Ok, there is a yt premium, or patreon, or nebula, or netflix, hulu, etc.
Pay with ad views? Well then just watch the ads on these services that have them.
Rely on others to pay for you? Not a sustainable model for obvious reasons.
Another method?
I will send you $50,000 if you can name another good monetization method. But you'd be an idiot to tell me since it since the solution would be worth literally hundreds of billions of dollars to the tech industry. But no one knows it since it's about the same as the question of free energy.
I guess my question would be -- where do you draw the line? You seem to be implying that adblock is not ethical. YouTube is not the only site that relies on ad revenue to cover operation costs. And it's not just visual ads; one can argue that trackers are equally as important to maximizing profits for a site that relies on advertisement. Then, do you recommend browsing the internet without any adblock to honor this implied contract between user and website?
No, I recommend paying for services you use because the ad-model is pure cancer, and freeloading is unethical.
Most people in the ad-block camp want no ads and no subscriptions. But they are then wholly dependent on honest users to keep their choice services alive. There is this intense cognitive dissonance that prevents people from recognizing that.
Use ad-block, I can't stop you, but don't pat yourself on the back like you're the hero of the open internet waging some kind of war. Recognize that you're just dead weight making the situation even worse. Its either pay directly or pay through ad views. That's it.
My point is you can name-call adblock users as "freeloaders", "pirates", "entitled", but this idea has to be consistent and apply to adblock users on sites other than YouTube.
If you have adblock turned on, whether it's an extension or built into your browser, you are undoubtedly one of these freeloaders as well. The only "honest" users as you put it are those with ad and tracker blocking completely disabled when they browse the internet.
I agree. But platform dependant throttling should be prevented by good regulation, if that means Youtube's business model is less viable I frankly don't care.
All I know is I'm keeping my eyes open for their next swing at remote attestation. If you follow the money, it's a logical step.
Possibly a hot take, but youtube premium is too expensive. I don't care about youtube music, I don't care about offline use, I don't care about background play/queue on my phone. I just want to watch ad-free video, which I don't believe is worth $14/month.
Ideally the offline/background play/queuing should be included because they're unrelated to the cost of serving video, but any other features like music/4K/etc should be an extra purchase. However, I strongly doubt enough people would even bother with those to justify having as separate features.
> Instead of an ad-blocker, try a YT premium subscription
Why is YouTube Premium $14/m? I find it hard to back into the economics based on either comparisons with Netflix, Hulu, etc or based on the amount YouTube have to pay creators per viewer per month for a typical amount of engagement.
You already get a lot of that lol. The govt can already produce stuff and get it promoted with their corporate partners it happens constantly. Youtube already demonotizes whatever it wants, and what does that privilege? The prerogatives of corporate america broadly via the advertising market.
Doing it democratically would mean that instead of privileging addiction and watch time, we might include other metrics that relate to educational value or public interest and would prevent censorship due to the 1st amendment being directly applicable.
The government is a site of democratic struggle. The corporate world is a group of allied dictatorships.
For the past couple months once they started popping up that request to disable ad blockers, the videos will often play for a few seconds and then just stop. This is chrome. It hasn't happened in the last week, but typically I see it more when there are updates that require chrome to restart. It seems like either an unintentional bug or a dark pattern. But punishing users that are blocking ads is the hardest sell.
I've gotten viruses from ads, and I will not allow them. Google is never going to sell me on that.
Maybe instead of slapping users, they should have had some fiscal responsibilities in the good times and not setup a complete adult daycare for their employees.
Then pay for youtube premium. why should google provide you a service for free, without ads? They aren't slapping users, they are offering ads or paid. Free ad-free was never a sustainable solution.
If a business opens up in my neighborhood and offers free pizza with no strings attached I'll gladly eat that pizza.
If they change their mind and then start offering free pizza but only if I take a stack of advertisements I will take the pizza and throw the ads in the trash.
If they then start having people follow me home and harassing me for not looking at every ad, I will take the pizza and tell the harasser to fuck off and throw the ads in the trash in front of them. If they refuse to serve free pizza after that I'll just go pay for higher quality pizza elsewhere.
What I won't do is pay the harasser. It's even crazier when the harasser isn't even making the pizza, just delivering it
It is more of free pizza will arrive while you wait in line and watch ads. But now you want to jump ahead and snatch free pizza before your turn comes. In normal neighborhoods people look down upon such behavior. But nowadays such behavior seems sign of cool dudes.
> If they then start having people follow me home and harassing me for not looking at every ad
YouTube isn't following you, as soon as you close the browser window it goes away. Youtube doesn't do anything to harass you when you leave, but they will try to make you watch the advertisement as long as you continue sitting there and continuing eating.
Did you know you can get free food at some church gatherings? Then when they want to talk to you about their beliefs you can spit in their face, tell them where to shove it and throw their pamphlets in the garbage. You can also take as many free napkins and ketchup packets as you want from McDonalds to bring home. If the staff starts complaining you can flip them the shocker and stomp on a few ketchup packets like a real hacker so they have to clean up the floor after you leave.
I find this entire discussion difficult, as with any other service not agreeing to the terms of sale just means you don't use it.
But online this seems to have become "Socially Acceptable Theft".
It's not like youtube access is a human right, there's a million other alternatives to entertainment online, if you can't agree to terms of one just use another?
I won't mind paying if it is a fair transaction - that is I'm being charged for (paying the creators + infra costs + profit). But Google is still siphoning my data and selling it to advertisers. If these companies can do business in an ethical manner, there wouldn't be this much backlash. People know that these companies will take money from their users and still sell them out to advertisers.
I've been seeing this behavior on brave and assumed it was a built-in feature of the browser to stop autoplay.
tbh, I don't find it obnoxious at all, if they're really doing that to try and annoy me, they've instead brought back the ability to disable autoplay, which I'm thankful for.
I have Firefox with no premium and a lotta stuff running on Youtube when I load (ublock, Youtube Enhancer add-on, and a few Tampermonkey scripts)... it only takes a second.
Maybe they are slowing down premium users?
I might be a sucker but I bought YouTube Premium about a year ago and it's definitely been worth it for me. I love watching those 10-20min length YouTube videos instead of watching TV shows, so skipping the ads is really clutch and has saved me probably 24+ hours of my life lol.
There is nothing wrong with paying for a service you use.
If you are a normal techie. Ask yourself: How many hours will I spend circumventing this, then having to deal with when it breaks etc. Vs. paying the bill. For me, it was an easy call, and one I don't regret.
Also: I watch Youtube on my TV. So circumnavigating ads is not as simple as installing adblocker.
Also 2: I got rid of Spotify because of that so that's a win. (Considering the payment changes they are making now + Joe Rogan and anti-vax stuff from during the pandemic, not going back there)
The people wasting their lives trying to figure out how to not pay other people for their entertainment are the suckers, you'd think Premium was 60 bucks a month with the way some people here are talking about it.
Premium costs about 10X what ads costs in terms of how much money Google takes in from a typical viewer. Why would I give Google a 10X win when I can spend just 10 seconds updating my invasion filters to prevent hostile content from showing on my computer screen?
From earlier reports you can just change the user-agent header to appear as chrome and the problem goes away.
How do they keep pulling this anti-competitive bullshit? Do they not realise what they are doing, or are the fines still too low for them to take it seriously?
They got away with it so far which they see as confirmation that they can do whatever they want and that nothing or nobody will ever make a dent in their armor.
If I was a stakeholder in YT I would be worried about users and creators leaving the platform, because YT has become increasingly and more aggressively anti-consumer. I do not mind if the creators incorporate sponsor ads into their content, but what YT does to the user experience is just awful. Inserting multiple, low quality, loud, long unskippable ads into one video, who the heck would want to watch that?! It's clear to me that Google is pressing on to make users buy subscriptions. It's basically a dark pattern, closely resembling coersion.
Don't creators get paid based on how many ads are shown/clicked? They are probably excited by the idea that their revenue will increase by (% of people who use adblockers).
The goals of creators and youtube are more closely aligned than the goals of creators and their audience.
Youtube-served ad revenue is a pittance compared to in-video sponsorships. Every time the served ads piss someone off enough to not continue watching (and therefore deny the video a recorded "view") it probably costs the creator more than they would get from the slightly increased revenue of more aggressive ads across dozens of viewers.
This is not true at all. As others have mentioned, sponsored spots get a producer much more revenue, and unskippable preroll and midroll ads are likely to make a person just not watch the video at all (which in turn makes the sponsored spots less profitable).
Vid.me! Its pretty much a copy of youtube but no-ads and no subscription needed. Has tons of content and lots of creators have started channels there.
Oh wait, thats right, it went bankrupt in 2017. They released a statement saying "Nobody wants to watch ads, nobody wants to pay a subscription, we have no revenue stream."
Creators on YouTube get to decide how many ads appear and when they appear on each video they create (as long as they're in the partner program, which is open to basically anyone with >1000 subscribers).
If the videos you're watching have a lot of ads at inconvenient times it's because the creators wanted them there.
people have been using ad blockers for years, which probably prompted showing the more annoying ads. the option is use an adblocker or buy premium. if people are unwilling to do either, then just don't use the platform.
IF creators want to get paid they should run sponsorships in their videos or have patreons. Which most do. No amount of morally outraged shilling is going to compel reasonable people to watch ads.
I frequently watch all the way through sponsorship segments that are entertaining and most creators vet what sponsorships they take so I also frequently use affiliate links if I am interested in a product.
If google cant afford to host youtube its odd that its been around for decades in its current form but thats their problem. Not mine.
If you ever wanted to see how stupid the "YouTube is bad for blocking ads" thought camp is, this comment is a perfect example.
"If creators wanted to get paid they should just run more ads" fucking LOL
YouTube creates the (so far) unmatched creator compensation system with YouTube Red (now Premium), and now that Premium users generate so much more money for creators than Ads, they have to increase ads to compensate. Blocking ads literally makes you the bad guy, it's hilarious how people are trying to spin this as some freedom thing.
Just say you think you're too good to pay for entertainment.
The outrage from some folks about this is shocking. I just cannot understand being so impassioned about other peoples choice to not subject themselves to tracking and brainwashing in the form of unvetted ads that you type ad hominem and something like "fucking LOL" on an HN comment.
Anyways, Ublock Origin still works great and I highly recommend it to everyone. I also highly recommend supporting the folks who make it as its a wonderful tool. Kind of like I recommend signing up for the patreon of creators you particularly enjoy ;)
Cry me a river, Google steals from creators as well when they put ads on videos that creators explicitly chose not to monetize. I would bet that Google's revenue from this dirty trick dwarfs all the money lost from folks running ad blockers.
Google pays creators out of the revenue they make from ads, and Google doesn’t make revenue from ads that were blocked. I think that would be fraud.
I think this is fair TBH. If you want Google to pay creators, but you also want to access YouTube for free without paying or viewing ads, something isn’t lining up.
This is why I let the ads roll. Even though it’s crumbs for the creator, if enough people do it, they do make money.
There is the third option, though - don't consume the content if the terms by which it's offered aren't acceptable.
You're getting it at someone else's expense. If you're doing that and not giving the expected value[1] in return (ad view, premium sub), then GP is right. That's virtually the definition of freeloading.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong to do so - but I think it is wrong to pretend it's something else.
[1] expected value because those are the terms under which the content is made available.
Or maybe youtube is freeloading off of an open platform that's easy to work with, has tons of users, etc because it's so open and manipulable by design?
If their ad views are so important they can develop their own native application with rootkit drm to make sure you're watching ads, etc.
This seems like such an inopportune time for Google to pick this fight; right when better YouTube (Tik Toc) has gotten popular.
Anyway, all of these viral video sites are concentration destroying garbage. Hopefully YouTube will choose to die on this hill, and then we can ban Tik Toc and be free of this waste.
You have to wonder why none of these big companies has figured out yet that the only things that grow without restraint are cancers. Every other entity has an upper limit to their growth and that's nothing to worry about. You've gotten as large as you'll be, congratulations, you're an adult. Now act accordingly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114