People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may be about how the billboards block a scenic view but that also seems like another way of complaining about the irrelevance. Similarly, if I am watching a Youtube video, I am never thinking that a disruptive message from a commercial business is relevant to my current activities (uh, passivities?). No advertisement is relevant, not even in-video direct sponsorships, hence SponsorBlock.
If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them. I might need tires and realize I can get that taken care of while I’m at Costco. Nearly every advertisement I see at Costco is relevant because it’s selling something I can buy in the same building, indeed usually something juxtaposed close to the advertisement.
I don’t complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they’re irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.
That's not true. We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.
The YouTube ads are hated because that's the whole point. YouTube has something we want (the video), and they're keeping it from us until they we do something we don't want to do (watch an ad). We dislike these ads almost by definition. If we liked them, we'd seek them out, and we'd call them something else, like "movie trailers" or "Super Bowl ads."
And it's rapidly getting worse
Glad you're cool with it though, I guess? Cuz I've considered running for office on the sole platform of having them perpetually removed and perpetrators prosecuted.
There are literally signs advertising to hire people to place more signs.
Just to be clear, the advertisements that I'm referencing are ones like this (https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-signs-at-roadside-advertis...), where the goods being sold are sold on the property the sign is on, ie, they're basically shop signs. They are usually pretty small too, with larger ones needing the approval of the local authority. There does seem to be pretty good enforcement on this too. I'm definitely against advertisement billboards: those big slabs that are just there to distract you with any arbitrary advertisement that paid to be wallpapered onto it.
1. I saw one last week advertising a halloween party, so it's been in the ground for over 6 months. It is on a sidewalk near the university and is passed by about 1000 people per day, and in 6+ months not ONE SINGLE PERSON said "Oh, I should talk this down".
2. I once saw a city employee get off their riding lawn mower to move one of these signs out of their way, cut the grass, then get off the mower again to put the sign back!
And echoing the GPs comment, what really gets me about these is that we all have our lives diminished so that one person or company can earn a little extra...maybe. Or in other words, 1000's of people are subjected to this and perhaps 1 person might bite?
I'll close with my favorite interpretation of advertising: Advertisers essentially steal your sense of self-satisfaction so they can sell it back to you.
Weren't you one of those people? Why didn't you do it?
Why wouldn't they? It's not their job to remove the sign and dispose of it. By leaving it in place, taking up space, eventually enough of these signs will pile up and cause such a problem that the powers-that-be will be forced to deal with the situation.
Earlier you indicated nobody noticed (yourself excluded). Now 1,000s of people are being subjected to it?
> Go to church or the devil will get you!
This is, of course, completely ignored.
There are also signs stuck on wire next to freeway exits or other prime traffic areas. Typically they're on public land because a property owner would want permission or would just remove it.
There are people who angry enough about the sign proliferation that they cut the sign in half so you can't read the phone number or address or whatever.
You should be able to go online and pay a small fee (like $1 or even $.25) per sign that you put up for your garage sale or business. The money could be divided among the city, the pole owner, and people who are paid by the city to remove signs that don't have a QR code or has one that expired.
The fee could be adjusted so that garage sale signs cost much less than business signs. Business signs could only be allowed for businesses who started less than X days ago. Etc.
I think that rule helps strike a decent compromise: Adjacent local businesses can draw attention to themselves, but it blocks the business-plan of erecting a forest of billboards to auction off, flogging cell-phone providers or prescription drugs etc.
Except digital billboards, especially those that can switch to blinding white backgrounds at night. Those can rot in hell.
You can still find your way around, and discover things, but looking around feels like you are finding things instead of looking at things yelling at you to find them.
To be clear, this is my primary point because I’m driving, not shopping. Something that gets close to maybe agreeable (I would still dislike it) would be an advertisement for a gas/charging station on a long highway. But even then we already have official roadsigns that only show logos and are otherwise relatively unobtrusive. Similar ones for fast food, actually.
Such signs seem agreeable given there is some relevance (I legitimately might be low on gas/battery charge/food satiation levels in a context which I am actually likely to have a specific product need from one or more of the advertised businesses) and they are small enough to be ignorable when they are not actually relevant. The biggest issue I think about with that is how a business gets themselves on the sign but it’s probably not that hard once they are operating next to a highway exit.
(I loathe advertisements, so when I say “agreeable” I mean something like “not wholly disagreeable”.)
Driving-related products like tires are annoying on a billboard on the side of the road because I am obviously not going to look at my tires while I am driving, and it is usually not something you have an urgent need for. They are however relevant (and therefore less annoying) in a gas station, where you can check your tires as you are filling up your tank. It may even give you the idea of checking tire pressure, which is a good thing. One of the most clever driving-related ad was a letter I received from the garage I did car maintenance with, reminding me a couple of weeks before the next scheduled maintenance that it was to be done (with, of course, an offer on their part). It was useful, yet 100% an ad.
And yeah, we usually call things "ads" when they are annoying and by some other word when they are not, and advertisers tend to avoid the word for this reason. Calling it "sponsored" for instance. But it doesn't change that fact.
Ads are just mental warfare against you. Its someone trying to manipulate you for profit.
If I drive somewhere I know where I want to go. If I need supplies I can pull over and check on the map where the nearest store is.
In such case I don't care what store it's, just it's proximity.
So you'd go to a hardware store for food? Surely you need to know what they sell.
Or is it natural?
If advertising has hammered in to me that Tesco sells food and Screwfix sells power tools then my brain has a ready made map of what those chains sell. I don't have to visit and find out for myself.
Yes, I would. When I'm looking for something, I search for it until I find it, and then after that I'm not looking for it anymore. I don't go for a drive through the countryside in the hopes that system76 have put up a billboard which blocks the view of the countryside but shows me the specs for their latest laptop model.
You can tell me you can pull over and look at a map, or program it on your navigation app. Not only it is not the most convenient, maybe even unsafe, but how do you think that gas station ended up on that map? Most likely the business paid for that, making it an ad.
That's the idea, we dislike that laptop ad because we usually don't buy laptops while we are on the road, it is an irrelevant attention grab, especially when that billboard is disproportionately large. But a gas station, restaurant or convenience store is relevant to a significant fraction of the people on the road, and when the sign is reasonable, we don't usually call it a billboard, even though it is an ad and not a sign like a speed limit.
Well, actually, in all serious travel I do, I tend to know exactly where I'm going to stop for fuel before I ever set off. It's programmed into my gps as part of my route. And I'm going to find it using my gps software.
If I'm doing a less-serious trip somewhere and I don't pre-plan my stops, the way I find places to stop for fuel is I drive along on my route, and if I need fuel, when I see a "gas" station, I stop there. Again, no billboards needed.
> You can tell me you can (snip) program it on your navigation app. Not only it is not the most convenient,
I find it super convenient. Much much more convenient than running out of fuel or not knowing if I have enough to make it to a particular place.
> how do you think that gas station ended up on that map? Most likely the business paid for that, making it an ad.
Well, that's debatable. It's a listing for an amenity of a certain type (fuel station) on openstreetmap. To be in the "Fuel" category that shows up on my gps software, you'll need to sell fuel (or your entry will get edited and you'll show up in a different category). In much the same way as a sign saying "public toilet, this way" isn't an ad.
But the debate about the blurry lines of "what is an ad?" is beside the point: have you noticed how that pattern of: "I want a thing, I search for it, I find it, and then I'm not looking for it anymore" holds true here? And also how no obnoxious billboards were involved?
Even if it is an "ad", it's in an appropriate place - on openstreetmap, in the "fuel" category, and searchable by gps coordinates. I can toggle whether I want things in the 'fuel' category to be visible in my gps software very easily - I can turn that "ad" off with exactly 2 button presses if it bugs me. It's not a huge obnoxious billboard blocking my view of the countryside, lit up with 10000W of lights at night time.
Mucking with apps while driving isn't particularly safe.
I don’t want AR glasses for productivity or the social media bs they want to push; I want them to blight out every f’n ad that is everywhere. When they can do it in-device with no internet connection and I’ll fork over 1k for glasses immediately.
(I too would love there to be AR glasses that you can put arbitrary software on, only under your control, rather than that of some rapidly-enshittifying company that has the device locked down. I suppose it's not strictly impossible that that might happen, but it doesn't seem like it's the way to bet.)
If an ad is placed in a way that forces you to look at it you have every right to want to remove it. If it's in my personal power, I do.
I however can confidently stand by my no purchase claim. I'm guessing you arent actually clicking facebook ads(if u don't run adblock for some odd reason.) It's not difficult to avoid that.
Cheap signs along the road don’t trip that heuristic because they cost so little it doesn’t change the underlying economics.
I was actually interested in some of those privacy/info removal services but after doing research found those to - as you said - lack value for the money.
Advertising intensely to us is the absolute best way to lose us as a customer.
When I am at a laptop or desktop I am online. When I am not, I am offline.
However when you’re advertising a VPN on a cooking channel the cost per customer is quite high so they need to recuperate that high cost by charging extra. This is more true the longer the advertising campaign runs and the less a channel is related to the product, each of which drive up new customer acquisitions costs.
Obviously it’s not a perfect predictor, but it doesn’t need to be.
Well that's the only place I ever hear of them. They all say they're great! I've never seen them or had anyone else attest to it except ads that all came out of nowhere. Seems like a play to make big moves in the headphone market. They sure did spend a lot on marketing, I hope enough went to design to make em actually good.
Now, I don't own any raycons because as I said seeing this behavior makes me skeptical of the product.
Meanwhile the main headphones I use I've never seen an ad for once. A friend recommend the m50x's when we were djing. I tested em and loved em. After getting them I notice they are basically an industry standard for audio which is my work. I suspect the quality product with savvy ads in appropriate places lead to this situation. No doubt in audio magazines audio technica runs ads.
When every YouTuber has done an incogni, nord, raid shadow legends, or a few others, I have to suspect they spent more on marketing than they did their product which makes me think(and has been shown a few times) that these products kinda suck.
Being the value option is enabled by lower advertising spend but it also needs less advertising spend because it doesn’t look overpriced in comparison. PR firms for example may be able to get a few articles written quietly pushing your product. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html However spending 100x as much doesn’t get you 100x as many articles. Diminishing returns hit hard and YouTube or other mass market advertisers is low on that list.
Companies can employ multiple strategies, Lexis and Toyota are car brands under the same entity targeting essentially completely different customers bases with two completely independent advertising budgets.
If person X says "ads don't work on me", the state "I experience no influence from ads because they don't work" is indistinguishable from "I experience no influence from ads because they're so sneaky that they only affect me subconsciously".
Unfortunately, it's very hard to get individual-level evidence. You can get population-level evidence, but sometimes that evidence shows that the ads don't actually work (for instance, The Correspondent's 2019 articles about the subject).
They have always had powerful psychological tools but they are next level nowadays. Best to just avoid.
* https://i.imgflip.com/2yg87r.png
(I don't think pokemon intentionally wants such a toxic secondary market tbf)
If you read the rest of the paragraph it becomes clear that this is what was meant by irrelevant.
The ad that convinces you to buy something you hadn’t thought of before (while watching a video related to that topic) would be considered relevant by the ad industry. But that’s still irrelevant in common usage because you were watching a video, not shopping.
I like billboards when I'm driving down an interstate and I want to decide if I should get off at the next stop and I want to know what food options there are. (example: Driving down I5 from SF to LA). I like billboards when they tell me about an attraction coming up. (Winchester House has a billboard) I like billboards when they advertize concerts/entertainers. (Driving down the I15 from Ontario to Oceanside there are ads for who's playing at Yaamava (https://www.yaamava.com/yaamava-theater), Pala (https://www.palacasino.com/entertainment/upcoming-concerts/), etc...
I like these things but I do not seek them out.
Fixed that for you.
Oh and I pay for plenty of services just not from vampires like youtube who rip off the actual talent and hold their audience captive.
Arrr Matey, the sails may have been luffin but they be full again!
Kind of seems like how the economy works quite a lot of the time
Well, I don't complain about road signs.
That value still needs to be compared and evaluated for delivering information vs delivering annoyance. If information were delivered by giant, flashing, multicolored road signs every 50 meters the answer would be different. My 2c.
Road signs are relevant so we dont complain about them despite being an ugly eyesore.
While relevance has some correlation to value, that correlation is pretty weak; it is easy to find examples of high relevance and very negative value. We should not conflate those.
Your opponent (with whom I agree) argued that the problem with most YT ads and billboards is negative value. Which will stay even if google makes them relevant. My 2c.
Regardless, we all agree: roadsigns are ugly but ok, billboards are just plain bad.
I don’t mind watching a video with an ad. My child and I can preoccupy ourself. When it’s a 90 second ad we are forced to watch just to watch a 45 second video I’m gonna make certain we don’t watch that ad
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no...
Elaborate.
> Nothing is wrong with billboards, I can look the other way. When the billboards show up on my dashboard and I have to stare at it before I can turn off my exit then we have problems
> I don’t mind watching a video with an ad. My child and I can preoccupy ourself. When it’s a 90 second ad we are forced to watch just to watch a 45 second video I’m gonna make certain we don’t watch that ad
There are places where billboards act as rather effective sound barriers, shielding quiet neighborhoods from road noise.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.[1]
I am not blind to commercial imperatives, but expecting people to ever feel anything more positive than low-level irritation with advertising is unrealistic. People do not like feeling that others matter more than them, particularly where money is involved. Spaces without adverts in them, whether physical or virtual, are simply more mentally enjoyable to people than those with them. Imagine one of the worlds wonders, natural or otherwise. Imagine the Acropolis, the Coliseum, the Buddha of Leshan - or Lake Annecy, or the Great Barrier Reef, or the Amazon. Now try and imagine a single advert which is so wonderful that it would improve any of them, contextual or otherwise. You can't, and you won't. They're pollution that we tolerate.
"Adverts" are a pretty incoherent category here. There are a lot of things that are technically advertising — placement of a product, or informational content about that product, paid for by some company's marketing department — that most people would never think to call "an ad."
For example, the end-caps in a grocery store? Ad space, auctioned off by the retailer each month!
But you're already shopping, looking for things you need, comparing brands; and these end-caps are effectively just putting things you might have been looking for anyway, where you'll find them sooner. So people don't tend to think of these as ads.
(They are ads, insofar as they succeed in getting many people to never go to the regular place in the store where that thing is, and therefore never doing a fair compare-and-contrast of the product to its alternatives, being swayed by alternatives that might be running sales, etc.)
But do they steal your time? No, in fact the opposite; if you pay attention to products on store end-caps at all, and ever buy anything from them, then they mostly will end up saving you a tiny bit of time. So consumers don't tend to perceive these as ads.
---
Now take this one little bit further: sponsored search results. These sometimes feel like ads and sometimes don't.
If you think about it, sponsored search results are a lot like store end-caps... except that their existence makes the regular "store shelves" of the SERP page take longer to get to.
If they end up showing you the thing you were actually looking for (as they might if you're searching for a specific brand, and that brand has paid-for placement for their own name — perhaps to defend against others placing for their name; or perhaps they're bad at SEO and their website ranks badly in the organic SERPs for their own name) then these sponsored SERPs feel like they performed a genuine service for you.
Likewise, if they end up showing you something better than what you were looking for (as they might if the organic listings, ranked by SEO-ness, end up ordered askew to actual product value or popularity; while the sponsored listings, ranked by auction, end up ordered by, essentially, the paying company's stock price, and thereby by how much consumers already interact with them), then you also might come away pleased with the existence of these "ads."
But the other maybe 90% of the time, they look and feel and act like ads — things less-relevant than the organic SERPs, that you want to just get out of the way of the search — and so are perceived as ads.
---
And now, consider, say, the catalog of other products available for purchase, that used to come in-box with products from some manufacturers. You'd buy e.g. a LEGO set, or a couch from Sears, and end up with a glorified flyer telling you about all their other products — often in much greater detail than you'd get by viewing the products in a retail store. (This has been mostly superseded by the existence of online stores and product unboxing+review videos — but it's still a good object lesson.)
Were these catalogs, ads? Maybe. Probably the majority of people who received such a catalog never ordered anything from it, and had their time wasted having to dispose of it. But because these catalogs were being sent to people who the manufacturer knew already had shown willingness to purchase from them, it's likely that a much larger percentage of people were "called to action" by these catalogs than by what you'd normally think of as an advertisement.
And, in fact people sometimes would just read this type of "ad" for fun: fantasizing about things they might one day own! (I recall doing this myself, as a child, with certain toy-brand catalogs)
---
One more turn of the screw: is a movie or TV show that stands on its own as a work of entertainment, but which was made at least in part with the motivation of getting people interested in purchasing things from the franchise licensor's universe of branded products... an ad?
Certainly, back in the 80s, when advertising laws were more lax, and there were kids' cartoons running untrammeled with "integrated" advertising: embedding ads for the merchandise itself; showing the equivalent merch in the show; etc — there was every reason to call those shows "ads."
But is Hello Kitty and Friends (2020) an ad?
Now, if you said yes to that, try again with: is a Marvel movie an ad?
If you said yes + no: what's the difference? Prestige?
You raise some interesting points, and I'm probably pretty unusual in finding most of those things even low-grade annoying (I am genuinely slightly irked by producers having influence over store merchandising because I'd rather be free to try and choose products which genuinely suit my needs rather than having my attention nudged by certain products being shoved into my eye line).
Movies are about the only one of those areas where I'd be hesitant, but that's mainly because I'd say yes, Hello Kitty is basically an ad, and Marvel Movies... I'm not sure. I'd say the movies themselves would be worth making financially without the merchandising spinoffs, and so they can be considered a product in themselves (and perhaps also because I've never bought a single item of Marvel merch despite having seen many of the films). But you're right to point out that in many cases the line is blurry. That said, for things like YouTube - it isn't blurry in the slightest, in most cases!
If there really was a way to magically make all adverts relevant then yes - users would like them!
But that's a totally impossible ask. Not only do websites mostly have no idea what's relevant to me (even with all the tracking) but they obviously have huge financial pressure to show me crap that I wouldn't ever want.
So, yes. Relevant advertising is good, but also basically impossible.
Bane: For you
I dislike them because they're loud, flashy, annoying, and (most of all) because YT saturates them. It even tries to put them in the middle of songs when it detects a transitional pause. And they are served so often. It's literally worse than broadcast TV, which is an incredibly low bar to step over.
Platforms should not allow advertisers free speech. They should limit the content to static imagery/shots, dissolves, and spoken narration, ie the form rather than the content. Don't tell it can't work, this was how adwords worked on Google Search for years and everyone made handsome profits. Advertising is cancer if allowed to go full spectrum. The people who work at Youtube should be deeply ashamed of what they have allowed it to become and the trash monetization incentives they've established.
It’s pretty clear that companies can’t stop salivating over how lucrative ads are, and will continue to shove ads down our throats inside of paid products as long as we live.
Many hybrid products/services exist to lower costs by taking on some ads. The low tier Netflix plans and $200 smart TVs are examples of this.
Sports TV is just a monopolist scam though.
Most advertising is seeking the less intelligent consumer. Or the young and still naive consumer.
They outnumber you 1 million to 1.
It's why female musicians make more money putting their name to a makeup brand then their music.
It's why Elon will make some promise that is unrealistic.
It's why Apple put low paid everyday tech support staff in their stores and called them Geniuses.
You have to put yourself in the shoes of the mainstream buyer. They see a headline and believe it.
I always thought the geniuses were the second-level (or higher) Apple support that you escalate to when your problem isn't readily solved by the first level?
Also wouldn't we farm & sell our ad-free accounts
PS: maybe they could just show us Coke ads, whichever ubiquitous brands necessarily advertise to stay in our consciousness etc.
But lots of companies are now allowing people to pay to not see ads.
Not the naive young ones. Who are also the prime target for radicalisation.
To be clear, it's not only Google, all the big providers have so much information on all of us, but they don't seem to take advantage of it at all. I've turned the AD "customization" on/off for all kinds of things and it doesn't seem to matter in the slightest. Nearly everything I see is irrelevant to me.
If a geeky movie studio pays X to show an ad to people of your profile, while a car manufacturer pays X*2, Google is better off showing you the car, even if they are internally 100% sure you'd buy the movie instead.
Even if you pay-per-view of an ad, a company selling tampons will not pay as much for 1 thousand views of their ads on a youtube channel for construction workers, as on a youtube channel for girl's fashion. Because the former drives no clicks/revenue, and the latter does.
So yes relevance is extremely relevant to make money.
Well, yeah. Those companies will pay to send their ad to all middle aged men. Those companies could slice and dice more to get better demographics, but they don't think it's worth it.
Google's business isn't to slice and dice the demographics to show you better ads. It's to slice and dice the demographics in any way that the advertisers will pay for.
Because the people who are willing to pay money are, ultimately, the customers.
For one thing, if you're suddenly in the market for a truck, you'll see the brand that was in an ad a long time ago and you think "Oh yeah I've heard of Ford, never heard of Isuzu, let's look at the Ford much closer.". Even a tiny nudge that the ad did helps, when selling to millions. Obviously a truck is a big purchase, and you individually probably would do more research, but the nudge applied to millions might move the needle in the heads of a few dozen people.
Target is a fun example - they had cases where they revealed pregnancies through targeted ads. Now, they'll put an ad of a lawnmower (untargeted) next to the bassinet (targeted) and customers are less creeped out
My XP at an ad-tech is that there is only so many targeted ads, and the advertisers cap how many times they want to show you an ad. When it comes time to bid to show you an ad, all of the targeted ads might have exhausted their campaigns (shown you the ad X times already, or the campaign ran out of spend). In this case, all the advertisers that would bid a _lot_ in auction are sitting out. There are still other bidders, but these are less targeted and are bidding less money. Because the highly targetted ads are exhausted, these lower targeted ads might look random. Their targeting might be instead of based on gender, city, income, the targeting might be based on just geography. The fewer targeting parameters, the lower the bid.
In effect, once all the highpy targeted campaigns are done with you, they stop bidding, and the ads with less targeting which have cheaper bids are now the auction winners. If those are exhausted too, then there is a very large pool of low rent ads which have even less targetting.
https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-t...
There is zero situation where this technology doesn’t get co-opted by adverse interests to make your life measurably worse.
Better to keep them dumb and then grow a regulatory spine to put a stop to the endless proliferation of ads. It was done for advertising on other media.
No it doesn't. Google is highly restrained when it comes to using what it knows about you to serve you ads. Way more restrained than for example Meta or the newer Chinese apps like TikTok.
Managers want their rewards that are tied to earnings and stockholders want to earn more.
And once they both get their money, the next year reward will be tied to even more earnings. And stockholders will want to earn more.
Anyway, not there yet. Frog is boiled slowly, slow enough that people dont notice until it is to late.
First they need to kill ad blockers tier. Then you increase number of ads to unbearable (they are already doing that) and get as much people as possible to paid content. Also market must be ripe enough, so there will be no more ships to jump. Then you will get ads, different tiers to pay, segmentation of content etc.
And there is more content in the world right now than any single person will ever be able to consume. I have zero concerns about dropping a service.
If everyone just paid like you pay for anything else in life, YouTube would work for users, and be dramatically better.
Unsurprisingly, the people who consume resources while giving nothing back are the ones making it suck the most.
They had so much time to do that, yet TFA is about ads getting more aggressive, not less.
For Google, don't worry. You have payed them, with your data, thousand times over. And if you stop providing today, your existing data will be exploitable for years to come.
On top of it, by paying, you create a direct trail from watched video (data) to your account, from there to your credit card and from credit card to physical person. So you are giving them even more data.
Anyway, if Google goes bankrupt, because of you, you can consider yourself a saint.
Someone who has really done something very good for the whole planet and human society.
I will lit a candle each day into your honor.
I struggle to see the difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.
It's the same shitty recommendation algorithm. It's the same "you will watch shorts or else". It's the same nerfed unusable search. It's the same "we randomly decided that your bandwidth isn't enough, here's a 480p version of the video you're currently watching".
Yeah. That's the difference. That's literally it, the rest is window dressing. You are choosing the monetization strategy: ads or money. If you're not living paycheck-to-paycheck, and you watch a lot of YouTube, paying $13 or whatever is the sensible choice.
Yes, lots of things about the product suck, as you've described. But the content on it is good and the recommendation algorithm is pretty good, at least in its obvious goal of bringing me to new-to-me channels on a regular basis.
If you pay premium: they'll add ads to premium too.
If you watch ads: they'll add more ads.
If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video.
If you use another platform: the said platform will need to monetize and you are back to square one.
If they do this then the right arrow becomes your best friend. If it's part of the stream then they have no way of blocking things so you can't skip past them. If they embed some way of notifying the app that it needs to block skipping here or there then that's what adblock would start triggering from. I'm assuming that's why they don't do it now.
Someone will eventually make an AI adblocker that will dynamically update the video with all ads removed or replaced. For example, let's say that I specify to my AI streaming video editor that "detect all bottles and glasses with alcohol and replace their contents with water and their labels with Liquid Death"
Similar technology will be/is already used to e.g. display a Coke can for some markets and a Beer can for other markets, depending on who paid for that market.
Content creators have no loyalty to YouTube and will share their content elsewhere when YouTube annoys their paying fans.
What will happen is, that content creators will spread to different providers, that also have managers and stockholders/owners.
Look what Netflix was like and how many various payable video streaming providers you have now. More than you are prepared to pay for content.
In few years, you will be torrenting content that today you watch for free.
And only because people decided to pay, showing the world that there is money to be made in YT model.
None of that helps you if you want it to be free, but for those of us willing to pay, we can happily ally with creators if YouTube gets shitty.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s a good deal now and I’m happy to take it. None of that matters if you are comparing it to piracy… obviously.
Again, this is nothing new. It already happened with video streaming, where Youtube now is Netflix then.
Yes, it ain’t perfect. The alternative is the creator literally stop making videos. YouTube is already not serving ads for demonetized videos. People doing it for the love of filmmaking can already do it for free.
And now you will tell, that people are not disciplined enough for that, that majority wont pass the marshmallow(2) experiment? That some Mike Judge movie was actually documentary?
Yes, I know.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_trap , A common trick is to provide victims with a simple solution to a problem, for example, leaving only one door open in an otherwise secure building, luring them straight toward the firing mechanism
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
They already get 55% of revenues at YouTube which is basically the highest percentage in any creator industry. How do we pay creators under your rubric and allow them to be discovered?
Classic consumer-only socialist. You have no model for production except business is bad. If you care about labor then you care about labor getting paid. So far you've demonstrated that you have no model of paying content creators. You would rather they go away then actually pay for their services. You pretend you should be able to get it for free. If you have no model of production, then you have no model.
And in our case, it is paid in current model (actually even in model with less ads). It doesn't need any growth of profit.
Everything else is pure greed. Now the question opens, are you paying for videos or greed?
> And in our case, it is paid in current model (actually even in model with less ads). It doesn't need any growth of profit.
Who are you to decide that?
The whole thing about Google is that they are not software company (as people like to falsely believe), they are advertising company, financing everything else from ads. Including search, youtube, android, gmail and all other side projects.
And those side projects brings them data, to advertise more efficiently.
Now, seeing a trend to monetize their side toys is just pure greed, they don't really need that.
This is also the reason, why no one can compete with them. As competing with free products is impossible unless you have side financing.
By the way, did you (and everyone else) maybe read this study? https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/leave_my_br... It is very eye opening.
Don't be afraid, they have calculated people not paying into the strategy.
And it wont stop working because you wont pay Google extra money. But it will become worse for most of people, including you, if you set yourself into position of slave and pay, confirming their theory that they can exploit you so much more.
Btw, did you check the link? You should really learn from it.
Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.
No they are the decipline you are talking about, the delusion is, if everyone used paper straws we would save the ecological destruction of the oceans. The structural problems of endless profit maximization machines can not be addressed by appealing to individual action.
> Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.
That depends on the amount of pieces, don't you think?
Or said differently: plastic straws are only a minor part in ocean pollution, while people not voting with their wallet is the main reason for all corporate shenanigans we are experiencing.
And yes, I agree it depends on number of pieces, but I don't put any trust into USA as state, even without Trump, being able to persecute billion $ corporation.
That's what I'm getting at is wrong. The paper straws are an analogy, if everyone stopped driving cars and lived in the woods we could reduce carbon emissions significantly, therefore the reason we can't stop climate change is people not voting with their wallets. Everything is people not voting with their wallets, it applies to everything, that's why it applies to nothing.
I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.
I recall that even logging into Youtube with your Google account could have that danger: if for some reason Google decided that your name isn't your real name, under its "real names" policy your whole account could get banned, even from other services like Gmail and Google Talk. It's for that reason that I've been very careful to never log into Youtube with my Gmail account, even though that account always used my real name, and even though Google+'s deep integration with YouTube is AFAIK no longer relevant.
Ad blocking is already free and was free for two decades, why would I want to start paying for it now? It's not like I am breaking ToS (despite their pop-ups stating otherwise) and even if I did it is my computer and it is entirely up to me what kind of content it is and isn't going to display.
Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile.
Everyone wins aside from me, the end user. I am paying for something that is already free to do, I get nothing out of it (I still have to run stuff like Sponsorblock to get the content I actually want) and I participate in the upkeep of a business model that not only doesn't have my interests in mind but also has no issues with tricking me (there is no content moderation for YouTube ads and there are plenty of cases in which users are served scam ads).
Then stop watching youtube. You're just free-riding on the backs of whatever mechanisms exist to motivate the people who make videos to keep doing so. Plenty of other things to do in life other than watch videos you think are worth precisely zero <currency-units>.
Why would I, since I can watch it for free without ads ?
> Plenty of other things to do in life other than watch videos you think are worth precisely zero <currency-units>.
Oh they definitely are worth something. But I also definitely do not want to give Google money.
If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
Reminds me of the early justification of Napster where people would complain the latest B. Spears song was garbage and not worth paying for, yet it was the most downloaded song.
This is a big part of it. It drives the price up a lot but I don't want it so I pay for nothing,
> If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
I don't pay and I use adblock and sponsorblock. I don't watch enough to make it worth it and with ads YT is literally unwatchable now. I watched a mentour pilot video the other day without the blockers and every 2-3 minutes there was an ad interruption, every time for the same stupid car. Not even relevant because I don't buy or use cars.
And there is no competition for YT right now.
Also, I really don't care about the ethics. I don't care if you think it's wrong. I'm just saying why I do it, not trying to justify it ethically. Because I have no ethics when it comes to big corporations. Just like they don't towards their customers.
The most common throughline of all pro-piracy discourse is that there's a lot of people who feel completely entitled to free entertainment, and they will come up with all sorts of bizarre mental gymnastics to justify that as something other than "I want free entertainment and don't want to see ads."
I don't think anyone could articulate a coherent logical argument as to why they feel they should get YouTube's services, and the entertainment produced by the creators who are on YouTube, while not paying either of them through any means, other than pure selfishness.
And since I'm taking what they are giving me for free, then whether or not I decide to watch the parts they try to force on me to try to entice me to buy something I have no intention of buying is none of their business.
If they didn't leave this door wide open then I would be forced to decide if it's worth enough for me to pay to use it. But since they do I do what I want. It's not up to me to make sure that YT's and creator's business models are making them money.
Maybe because it was not monetized originally, and so those who were around back then argue it must remain that way?
Not really. I cancelled netflix and I went back to torrents. And I'm sure there were many like me.
I don't think I deserve it free, but by doubling the price for the adfree option they just got to the point where I didn't care anymore.
I just get it free because I can, not because I think I deserve it. I don't have ethics when it comes to megacorps. Just like they screw us over whenever they can.
Previously I subscribed because watching on netflix is less hassle than downloading. But now the price is too much of an annoyance to bother with downloading. I used to be on the 720p plan which is enough for me, and when they dropped that and included ads on the cheaper 1080p plan, I would have had to move to the ad-free 1080p and that was just too much. Literally double the price.
maybe, hard to say. but the people who make videos, and get 55% of the revenue (give or take a bit), frequently are not (unless you insist on watching mega channels only).
For example, there's a guy who rebuilt a early-1900's sailing boat from scratch, funded almost entirely by revenue from his channel. The videos are crazy high quality hand-construction porn and would never exist without the monetization aspect. Oh, and I had no prior and no current interest in boat building.
Most of the channels I follow (via RSS, rather than YT itself) are like this, and YT generally does an excellent job at putting new channels in front of me from time to time that marry my interests (even one's I didn't know I had) with phenomenally great story telling via video.
But people like linus tech tips, marcus brownlee etc, they have really gone over the edge of commercialisation. I don't bother watching them anymore.
I currently pay for Apple Music though ha
* I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it.
* I pay for youtube but I don't always get to use my account. Other people's houses and devices exist. Other people's accounts exist even on my own device.
* I pay for youtube and still have to get all the baked in ads.
* I pay for youtube and have a wonderful black screen with no suggestions or discoverability because I have history turned off. (the feature does not depend on the history data, because for years this was never a problem, only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows). This even after I partially gave in and subscribed to a bunch of channels, which previously I never did.
* I pay for youtube and still have no control to disable shorts. (don't tell me about browser plugins. The world is far more varied than one browser on one pc. There is no youtube browser plugins for roku or the 100 other platforms that have youtube players. And even on a pc, you're not always on your own pc where you are free to hack on the browser.)
Here is the value you get from paying for youtube:
It's having only 8 of your fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.
I'm extremely skeptical that the company that makes most of it's money on the collection of data isn't still collecting data on your viewing habits (and other assorted account-related activities) just because you clicked a checkbox. I don't have a lot of great evidence to back this up but I would still see videos related to my viewing history in the after-video suggestion grid as recently as a few months ago ( before I realized I could zap it with Ublock)
But the checkbox claims that they aren't logging, and so by clicking it they know your intention is not to cooperate in their fundamental business model.
It's just yet another little deniable dark pattern pressure, making the service suck a little when you don't do what they want.
And my outrage point is you get this dark pattern pressure even while you are actually paying money at the same time.
They make more money from the free users and ads than they do from subscriptions. They actually don't want paying users, they just kind of hsve to offer the option to keep those users pacified.
The whole point of YouTube is watching your subscriptions or recommendations based on your previous history. What is your use case if you don't even want to be logged into it?
Subscriptions less and less. I can think of two that I regularly watch, and even those I'll just binge their most recent 2-3 every couple of months.
For me it's Ctrl/CMD+L "y [thing I'm searching for]" Enter.
I've dabbled with tools like PinchFlat to archive/stream via Jellyfin but there's niggles I haven't tackled.
"then don't use youtube" is a non-sequitur to that.
After all the creators already get paid more for premium views.
Answer is paying does not make it nice. Paying does one thing, which is significant, but the experience ovarall still sucks, including even that one thing, ads, because you still get ads.
Youtube can take a hike, I’m not giving that company a dime and hope it fails. After some changes in my personal life as well, it’s good that I am not spending too much time on that awful website
I say this number so people know how to think economically about this. Anyone who is complaining about this is annoyed, but not $14/month level annoyed on net. Otherwise they'd just get the subscription, or stop watching YouTube.
> I don't complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they're irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.
They're normalized because we've been conditioned over many decades to accept them.
We were psychologically manipulated to associate brands with specific feelings engineered by advertising firms. Cigarettes were "torches of freedom". The Marlboro Man was a symbol of masculinity and confidence. Coca-Cola was the happy Christmas drink. Ads with catchphrases became cultural phenomena: "Just do it", "Whasssuuuuup", and so on.
We watched ads on cable TV even though we were paid subscribers. We watched 30 minutes of ads before a movie in the cinema. We read ads in newspapers and magazines even though we paid for them, and then when we could get them for "free", we liked even more paying with our attention than our money. We consumed TV and radio shows where "brought to you by" was just part of the content. We accepted ~20 minutes of ads for every hour of TV we watched.
So it was natural for advertising to also take over the internet. With the technology built for advertisers by very smart people who got rich in the process, they're able to create campaigns that target potential buyers much more accurately. They can build profiles of people in various invasive, shady and inventive ways, and their profits have never been higher because of it.
Never mind the fact that the same technology is used to manipulate people into thinking and acting in certain ways unrelated to their purchasing behavior, and that this is largely responsible for corrupting democratic processes, toppling governments, and the sociopolitical instability of the past decade. Several birds, one stone.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the whole thing. There is nothing good about ads, ever. If I want information about a product, I'll go looking for it, and I won't go to an advertiser. If I'm looking to watch a YouTube video, there is absolutely no condition under which I want to hear about a product unless that's explicitly what I went to that video to hear about.
All ads are lies. There is never an ad that tells you about the flaws in a product or compares it honestly to competing product. I'm simply not interested in being lied to.
Not only are they largely irrelevant, but they are frequently in the wrong language. If I want to immerse myself in the local language, I will go outside and interact in that language. If I am listening to a podcast in English, typically around Anglophone cultural or political topics, why would they invade my space with non-English content?
I don't want to hear local music or K-Pop when I am listening to classical music.
In many cases, the language isn't even local to the country which I reside in. If I cannot have an English-only space on my own computer, I won't be using the site. There's a time and a place for immersion into other cultures. My personal computer in my home office isn't the place.
Where they’re also “irrelevant”.
But the relevancy to our current activities isn’t tied to their effectiveness.
I know that they’re effective, because I had impressionable teens tell me they wanted me to pick up Prime drinks at the store, all because they were convinced drinking Prime was cool.
But let me be clear — I hate ads, too. I hate them on TV, radio, YouTube, billboards, in my mailbox, in my email inbox, and when they cover up 50% of real estate on websites. Pretty much everywhere they show up.
But the purpose of ads aren’t for me to like them, or to be tied to where I’m at a place I can purchase something.
The purpose is to leave a lasting impression.
And, like it or not, they’re effective enough, for some people and for some products, that they’re going to keep doing them, regardless of the fact that nearly everyone hates them.
The mailbox ads can actually be quite useful. Since I started looking at them instead of just tossing them straight into the recycling bin I've discovered they often contain coupons for good deals at restaurants that I semi-regularly already go to. Those coupons have saved me noticeable amount of money on those visits.
Similarly on groceries. In the grocery case it is not coupons but advertisements of sales. 97% of the time I shop at the large supermarket nearest my home, which usually has the best prices. But occasionally there is a very good deal on something expensive like meat somewhere else and it is their mailbox flyers that let me know about it.
Whilst you're correct about Costco, advertisers don't care where you are to show you an ad. The data shows that if you are laying on the couch watching YouTube and an ad appears relevant to you, that it sells. I don't think advertisers are sitting there scratching their heads as to why people don't like them. No advertiser looks at a billboard in the countryside and thinks people enjoy looking at them, its a profit making opportunity, even if that means hijacking your YouTube video on tech reviews for an Audi commercial.
The difference with Costco in your example is that the ads don't impeded on your ability to continue shopping around Costco. If you were walking around Costco and had to stop to listen to someone market to you about clothing when you were simply there to buy some bread and milk you'd get annoyed.
Disagreeable to whom, exactly?
Personally, I would rather the adverts were irrelevant if it meant I didn't have my every move tracked on the web.
The main problems I have with ads are, in order from most problematic to least:
* the lengths that ad networks go to to track me, * the very real possibility of getting malware, * the lengths advertisers go to to ensure their ads are seen. (We have popup blockers in pretty much every browser nowadays for a reason.)
Take away those, and you could convince me to disable my ad blocker. Until then? Not a chance in hell.
I could see an ad for the exact thing I need and I still wouldn't click it. Either it's a scam, or it's technically not a scam because offering 90% off in the first month of a 12 month contract is legal, or it's the worst product on the market and the only way it can get users is blowing VC cash on ads, or there's something else that will surely disappoint me.
One of the blogs I used to read was The Last Psychiatrist. The author had a saying: "if you're seeing it, it's for you". In other words, if someone goes to the effort of putting something in front of you, they did it for a reason. Usually that reason is not "my company is growing via word of mouth and organic PR efforts because our product is so good, but I just want to grow faster."
This is because tracking data is google's moat.
They don't want people to offer content-based ads. Why? Because they will find out that they work pretty well while preserving privacy. And will start using them. But then Google has a problem, because to offer those you don't need a global pervasive tracking network to do it. Anyone with a few million can set up an ad network and compete with Google.
So, they try to double down on their tracking driven approach because it's something only they and a few other big ones can do. Content-driven ads they discourage with propaganda that they don't work, just not offering or making them difficult to use.
I absolutely hate advertisements in stores specifically because of their releavance. If I go there to buy cereal, I expect to go to the cereal shelf, look at the options, evaluate them and pick the optimal one for my set of criteria.
What I absolutely do not want is for one cereal brand to be placed right as I come in, exploiting my psychological quirks to get me to either buy it on the spot without going to evaluate other options or just occupy a slightly larger part of my attention to skew my evaluation process when I get to the shelf.
Advertising is just another money multiplier. If you have a ton of money to throw at ads, you'll make more money than those that don't. And to make up the ad investment, you'll necessarily have to be a worse deal for consumers.
The product which is easiest to reach - for an adult on cereal shelves and a child in the toy section - pays a premium to be there. The smaller unknown brands are pushed to the bottom and on top where you have to stretch.
It's no different to a large Kellogg's cereal advert in your face as you walk in the shop.
If you were alive before ad tech ate the world, you'd have a very different take on this whole thing.
I view advertising as something brought to my attention that I wouldn't otherwise buy. Being made aware of special offers is more to tweak the moment of buying stuff I was going to buy anyway but waiting for a decent price.
If I go to MediaMarkt and there's a signpost at the phone area saying "Samsung S25 100 euro discount" then I don't think this is advertising. After all the S25's are lying on the shelf right there whether the offer is there or not. I am there to at least consider buying one and I am there already looking for one before I saw the sign, it's just a notification that the price is low.
If you visit content on the internet that the Google Ad network thinks suggest you might be interested in purchasing new tyres, then showing you ads for companies that sells tyres is, unfortunately, relevant no matter what your doing now, because you're more likely to click them, or remember the company/brand when choosing a purchase.
Also a large proportion of ads aren't designed to affect immediate purchase - cars, movies, coca-cola, and other brands are hoping to get into your (sub) consciousness so you'll remember when you buy days, weeks or months later.
They also are a distraction, which seems pretty ironic when billvoarda are used to remind drivers to not drive distracted.
I disagree but not for the reasons I was seeing in the existing replies here. I believe that advertising is manipulative, and I don't want advertising companies to use the fact that most of my data is in their hands to pull the right strings and push the right buttons to try to get me to buy a product I wouldn't have otherwise.
However it seems impossible to last for our society with all the tracking, product placement and astroturfing.
We hate advertisements because they unsolicited manipulations to get our money.
The more relevant ads are, the worse they are. Relevant ads are more distracting and more likely to hijack the user's attention and focus against their will.
Well, obviously. If the message was relevant or a good offer for the customer, they wouldn't need to pay to advertise it. Advertisement is for products which have low enough cost/benefit for the customer to not sell themselves.
First pay with your identity (carrier phone number required for a Google account). Then double pay through Premium in the illusion you won't end up seeing ads anyway.
Calling it like it is.
> billboards [...] countryside
I think people simply find this to be an ugly thing. They object to the ugliness of it. They're in the countryside -- i.e. not the town/city -- and they find themselves unable to escape (even here!) from this seedy miasma. Putting disgust into words is not a simple thing, perhaps this is the reason for the inconsistent reasoning you've noticed.
All advertising is ugly, it's an ugly business -- money grubbing manipulation. It's inherently weird to be subjected to the endless torrent of uncanny twisted art that is advertising every day for your entire life. The ads on Youtube are normalised by the same force that normalises all the other advertising -- the ads in one context normalise the ads in another. The ads on the side of the bus, on the LCD panels on the train, on the same screen that shows the timetable at the station, before the movie starts, by the seemingly sensible ads in Costco. One hand washes the other.
Youtube is offering access to entertainment in exchange for 30s ads, that's a valuable proposition to many.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the system that disputes my indisputable right to ignore them. If I paid someone to cut the adverts out of my newspaper before I read it, would I be stealing from the publisher?
Silicon valley has spent the last 30 years getting the internet to run on lies, and depends upon the charity of people willing to be lied to. Now that trillions of dollars depend upon this system, they can no longer afford to leave it up to charity, and believe that they must go to war. This is a war that they will lose.
Ban advertising, formally enshrine the right of adblockers to operate, and use the new regulation to work out a new business model, or perish in the arms race that you are absolutely destined to lose.
Your eyes are the supply. The demand (customer) is people wanting your eyes. Relevance in ads is if your eyes are a candidate to at some point buy their product.
What your taking about at costco is essentially house ads or really signage.
Remember unless you are a brand you are not the customer for ads.
But the real customer, the brand, cares if the ad is relevant to you because they are either paying for impressions or traffic. Either way, if the ad is not relevant the analytics tools will show that campaigns in Google perform worse than campaigns bought in, say, Meta or TikTok.
Moreover, it's now also a matter of fending off GenAI content (AKA slop) for the sake of sanity.
So, I'm clearly not the audience. Which raises the question, what is YT in the business of selling, they are trying to enforce? Lifetime?
Shit I rather willingly give info about myself so irrelevant ads can be filtered out and I dont have to waste time on them and the advertiser doesnt waste money on me
But then YouTube started PERMANENTLY interrupting what I was watching with never-ending commercials or full-on infomercials... forcing me to manually use the Skip button to stop the commercial onslaught and return to the show I was watching. And they forced me to herd the show along like this every few minutes.
I put stuff on to watch while I'm cooking or doing something; I can't run to wash my hands so I can mash the control on the remote, over and over and over.
So that's when I installed a third-party YouTube client that skips ads. Google took someone who was willing to watch ads, and turned him into someone who never sees one. So Google cost itself and the content creators, through its asshole behavior.
Then they had the gall to WHINE about the uptick in ad-blocking. It's right out of the Trump/Putin playbook: attack someone, and then feign outrage and whine when they fight back.
I'd argue that even in a supermarket they're mostly useless and manipulative. I came in to buy bananas, you don't need to tell me doritos are buy 9, get 3 free.
Fuck ads.
Your eyes are the supply. The demand (customer) is people wanting your eyes. Relevance in ads is if your eyes are a candidate to at some point buy their orid8.
What your taking about at costco is essentially house ads or really signage.
Remember unless you are a brand you are not the customer for ads.
If you’re Coca Cola and you spend £1,000,000,000 on a Christmas TV ad of a bear drinking cola, does that increase your sales? No. It does nothing. But every year they’ll do it.
The only marketing that works is at the point of sale, and free samples. Anything which is just random and in public will not result in anything.
But the genius of the scam is, it’s not measurable. You bill £1,000,000,000 a year for marketing, and they can’t measure if it worked. How do you know if a TV ad worked? But they can’t withdraw the funding, because you’ll tell them their competitors will win. So the scam keeps going.
Well this is one of them too, unfortunately.
Ads work extremely well. Often they are the single most important aspect of product. Google and Meta are two of the largest corporations on Earth entirely because thin brains click their ads all day. Your hate for ads isn't misguided, but you are hitting the wrong mark.
The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a lot more scrutiny for the ads they choose to run.
This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90. The ad pods are also defined so that you get a set number say something like 3:00 max.
YT has scammy ads where if you are just trying to let something stream in the background while you focus on other things where an ad plays past the 5s skippable time, they have some that are full on half hour if not even longer infomercials that takes completely out of the flow of whatever you were watching. That's down right criminal to me. The fact that long form content can be used as something that interrupts someone else's content is such a strange thing to allow. They must pay out the nose for those ad impressions
You are absolutely on to something. I think the seemingly random length of ads makes them feel somewhat more jarring to me. I also hate how sometimes the ads are just randomly interjected into a video. I know creators can control this to some degree, but older videos seem to suffer more.
I have had ads on Youtube that were hours long. Obviously, at that length, they can be skipped. I know have some kind of 'trauma response' that when I watch Youtube on a computer while laying down, AFK, I have to have my wireless mouse in close proximity in case one those long ads appears. If I could predict the intervals in which the ads occurred and for how long, then I would probably just let them run and tune them out of my mind.
Regardless, I swear Youtube serves me such long ass ads as a punishment sometimes. Sadly, my suspicion is supported by extremely weak evidence and confirmation bias. I'll just say this... Sometimes when I get served the same ad too many times, I report the ad for something like being offensive, inappropriate, or whatever. The ads seem to never come back, but I swear within a day or two, I start getting longer ads -- even movie-length ads. I have also reported ads if they happen to be something like +30s and unskippable. This makes the ad instantly dismiss (or it used to, at least).
I doubt they actually do that, but I’m sure it would increase ad view times. Im probably just only remembering the ads I don’t immediately skip.
This also reminds me of the Idle Detection API they tried adding in Chrome. [1]
[0] https://developers.google.com/android/reference/com/google/a...
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/idle...
I also let the hour long ads play when I'm holding my phone (just to mess with the algorithm) so maybe that is just my experience.
I'm not saying I like it. I'm saying that because I don't like it I don't watch.
Being unable to accept critical comments and just brush them off with "just don't watch" is just really not appropriate. You can also just not reply to comments on HN when you don't have anything that contributes the conversation, but yet you chose not to do that yourself.
You can always pay for it and not have any ads .
There shouldn’t be an expectation that a free service should confirm to any standards ? Why should a service be free and of high quality in its free variant ?
If Google refuses to offer a paid version or made it unaffordable then it would be different , but the paid version is pretty affordable with lower pricing in countries with less purchasing power
You can have only so many channels, so they has to be acceptable to plurality of people over whom you are transmitting and therefore needs content(and ad) moderation and acceptable standards.
YouTube is not a shared public good, does not have a technical limitation for another provider with different flavor to compete.
---
More comparable is Cable TV. No content restrictions apply to Cable TV, this is why HBO doesn't have to censor by blurring/bleeping even common swear words as CBS/NBC/ABC/Fox do, or follow regulations around what kind of content can be shown on prime time versus late night or allocate time for just news.
There are plenty of low quality cable channels and they make money(i.e. enough people want them) like reality TV, pure telemarketing channels, televangelists or porn or anything in between, there are no standards that they need to comply whatsoever.
While the confusion is understandable, few people actually get their TV over airwaves, for most consumers it looks like it is all cable or IP these days, the comparison is not valid.
Expecting standards in a shared public limited good does not compare against expecting it from YouTube.
---
[1] Meaning AM/FM stations. Modern Radio (i.e. Podcasts) or Satellite services (SiriusFM etc) can do whatever they want.
The still frame ads are always NSFW games or ads for viagra-like products. In shorts, the ads are always scams of some kind. Usually deepfakes of elon musk “giving investment advice” but also “medical experts” recommending likely dangerous scams, or “free money the government isnt telling you about” if you give them all your information, or weird ai generated videos advertising mystery products that certainly don’t actually exist.
In front of (and in the middle of) actual videos, it’s a mix of the all the scams, plus the occasional ad for a legitimate product, but rarely in my native language. Usually Spectrum internet ads exclusively in spanish.
I got a gun ad a few times several months ago. Advertising features such as “no license required” and “easy to sneak through security”. As blatantly illegal as it was, the ad ran for at least a full month. I reported it every time I saw it, but I’m convinced those reports aren’t ever viewed by anyone.
I continue blocking these ads on my desktop without remorse. I only encounter the ads on my iPhone.
It’s crazy how bad and mistargeted it all is.
WHAT?? This (and similar anecdote in parent comments) is completely shocking, I had no idea this was a thing. All ads I get on YouTube are blue chip companies or (big budget) movie trailers...seeing a porn still in an ad on YouTube would floor me
Maybe YouTube puts us into different ad groups, or something like that.
So, from my perspective, YouTube ads have an opposite effect... when I see something advertised on YouTube, I automatically suspect that it is some kind of scam.
If you don’t like ads pay for the service. You don’t deserve content for free.
Google already makes untold amounts of money from spying on me. Yesterday I started seeing new recommended videos related to a show I watched on my private jellyfin server.
Google spies on me everywhere, tracks me across the open internet and my local network, then sells this data to whoever for God knows how much money and you want to tell me I owe Google even more money?
Buddy you need some perspective.
You see the content you choose to click on. Should my premium membership mean that Youtube blocks me from viewing Superbowl commercials the day after? Or movie trailers? Premium is simply paying Youtube so that Youtube will not show you Youtube's ads.
I have paid but I still see ads.
Why should I reward that by paying them?
Seems awfully convenient.
If I were blocking the ads, I wouldn't be aware of how bad it's gotten.
Their story reveals that all these people hating on YouTube are actually just selfish children doing mental gymnastics.
Their savior came, disrupted YouTube pretty deeply, then went bankrupt.
Nebula might have a shot at breaking the stranglehold, and I support them, but it remains to be seen if they can do it. A lot of content creators would have to move there, and there's a lot of random stuff (recorded lectures, video instructions, music, etc) that probably never will because it doesn't fit their premium original content model.
The whole point of Nebula is NOT to become another YT, it's meant to be curated source of media.
Nebula has no shot. It has a <1% conversion rate. Creators make almost nothing from it compared to their yt channel.
My point is that the fundamental problem with the Internet and Internet services is the users entitlement to free things. The Internet would be a dramatically better place if it worked for users and not for advertisers. Vid.me was dramatically better, but it died learning that 99% of people in threads like this is full of shit and actually just entitled.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/9agg5f/how_does_yo...
> Per user, creators usually get a LOT more from premium than ads. If I divide my monthly views by my monthly unique viewers, I get about 1.9 cents per viewer.
> The way premium works is, first youtube takes a cut--I believe it's 45%. The remaining amount is divided among all the creators you watch based on how much you watch them. I believe that's based on view time.
> So if the YT premium price is $13.99, the creators get 55% or $7.69. You would have to watch 405 different creators for each one to get 1.9 cents.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/16c80eb/how_do_you...
But what's with the weirdly aggressive second part of your message?
There are not enough people with your willingness to make this mechanism work by itself.
So the choice is either to have the content exist, but rely on ads, or not have the content exist. And it's not your choice - it's the content creator's choice.
For a long time, my criticism was that Youtube Premium is needlessly bundled with Youtube Music, which is redundant for me as a Spotify user and which I refused to pay for accordingly.
Now, in at least a few countries, there's "Youtube Premium Lite", which is basically regular Youtube but without ads. If you live in one of these, in my view that's close to the ideal scenario: Everybody gets to choose between watching ads and paying.
While time is finite and valuable, if I am already on YouTube, then I have already committed to choice of wasting that nebulous amount of time in the first place.
As much as youtube can waste time, I also feel like I’ve been given genuine value by certain people on the site, so I wouldn’t say it’s simply wasting time.
If one's patreon did have perks associated with it, then I would be more inclined to 'donate', as well.
Sounds like awfully convenient motivated reasoning.
Split up any and all monopolies, and nationalize what should provide a common good such as payment networks and internet infrastructure.
Yes, society has deemed that it’s fine to make use of the avenues that have been explicitly created to reduce your tax burden - that’s why they were created. Society is also relatively fine with using unintended loopholes for the same purpose (although it is a lot more controversial and criticized), because we don’t tend to punish people for breaking laws, rules and regulations that don’t exist. When we end up caring a lot about them, we plug the gaps
The other person was talking about straight up not paying for goods and services that are sold at a given price, which is stealing. The more apt comparison would be to tax evasion (actually breaking the law), which is a crime, widely considered wrong and punished accordingly
You only use this argument for Youtube content creators because it's trivial to avoid payment and then backsplain it with unique moral justifications.
“What goes around comes around,” shouldn’t be surprising.”
These "rules" weren't voted upon by either creators or consumers. Most of them are arbitrary and capricious. Features implemented by YouTube, like showing where people skip to the most, are also an attempt to cut into sponsorship dollars, was that within the "rules"?
Let me be clear: Following the "rules" under these monopolistic circumstances is the philosophy of cowardice in the face of power and doesn't hold as much intellectual merit as you might think.
I’m receptive to various arguments here that invoke power differentials, pragmatism, even deliberately breaking the terms of a service to help affect change, etc. I’m not necessarily someone who always follows the rules, and even though I do pay for YouTube I don’t view it as a real moral failing to use the free service with an ad blocker turned on
The comment I responded to didn’t have any of that, it just boiled down to “I can do it and they can’t stop me, so they can suck a dick”. Maybe not the end of the world when it’s directed towards Alphabet, but I hope that mindset doesn’t extend to everyone they interact with
My computer is my property, it will do what I ask it to just like my refrigerator, my tv, and my paper and pencil. I will remove corporate logos from my belongings, and entirely fail to look at the advertising that comes in my mail box. And if google tries to tell my computer to show me advertising, I am _entirely_ within my rights to tell my computer not to.
Metrocop: She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)#The_B...
We're already halfway there with ad blocker blockers anyway; once the sum of "lost revenue due to collateral damage of blocked users on old/non-DRM-supporting browser versions" and "increased revenue due to finally defeating ad blockers" is positive, it'll happen.
Do you want to have a great YouTube experience? Paying for it gets you that.
I watch YouTube videos frequently. Never see an ad. It’s great.
But that's not how YT works. YT doesn't charge you for good stuff. It charges you for not delivering crap. That's not legitimate business, that's a racket. I have no qualm punishing YT for that. Content creators are free to find other ways to monetize their labor, if their labor is actually valuable. (And so many of the good ones do, quite successfully.)
This “It charges you for not delivering crap.” line is bullshit. Serving video content costs money, they’ve given you the choice of how to pay for it, and you don’t like the choices but want to keep getting the content.
21st century nation states can better solve video scale delivery without middle parasites like Google.
If it's that easy, why has nobody done it?
(Hint: governments don't want to run YouTube, probably shouldn't run YouTube, and nobody else wants or can afford the immense costs that come with running YouTube.)
Most governments operate a postal service. Why then should governments not provide bare bones email and video services? You have government agencies using Zoom and similar. The analogy would be discontinuing the USPS and sending official government post via a wholly unregulated Fedex. It's absurd.
Zoom and email are not natural monopolies.
USPS is not a natural monopoly, it's a government service that no one else wants to do (nor would they).
> if you watch the tracking you'll see that they just hand off to USPS in Anchorage.
Because it's cheaper to do so. They can't offer a competitive rate because USPS is eating the cost in that case. To be clear I don't think that's a bad thing it just needs to be pointed out that if USPS didn't exist Fedex (or whoever) would deliver but would charge a much higher price to the person shipping the package.
You are the one who brought up natural monopolies and I'm not sure why. Private couriers exist yet the government still finds it worthwhile to run a public one. I asked why the same should not be true of digital communication platforms for email and video. Recall that the context of my original reply was a government operated youtube.
Or maybe there just won't be any cat videos, because the state has decreed them unnecessary or even harmful? How about political messages, is the state going to allow those to be posted on its platform? There are bound to be a few that go against state policy...
You could argue that the same is true for broadcast TV, and I would 100% agree. The state has no business running or even funding public television.
The problem here is that we're already only having this debate because people refuse to pay, even when what they're paying with is functionally intangible (i.e. their letting an ad play on their PC for 30 seconds.
So any model which relies on people physically paying real actual money* is doomed to fail to begin with because you're not solving the issue.
There's also an issue with the payment model. Creating an account, sharing a bunch of personal info, and subscribing on a recurring basis is entirely different from the USPS model where I walk into the post office and pay a one time fee in cash to get my letter where it needs to go. I suppose an analogous service might charge $/gb/mo paid up front without requiring an account. Like catbox.moe except paid.
Also remember that legitimate creators keep being demonetised for no reason because AI moderation has a brainfart and no human is in charge.
And then there's the clusterfuck around malicious copyright strikes made for bad faith reasons by non-owners.
With public infrastructure there's at least some nominal possibility of democratic accountability - not so much in the US, large parts of which are pathologically delusional about public infrastructure as a concept, but it should be an option in countries with saner and more reality-based policies.
"The gov't should pay for it" is not a solution to private problems.
Because US citizens would benefit? Preventing outsiders from incidentally benefiting isn't a constitutional mandate (yet).
Would you oppose an anti-pollution measure even though it would also provide cleaner air to neighbouring countries?
I’m just glad others feel this way.
Why the hell can’t I have my own spam free email account from the post office? Because the ads, the precious ads.
On average creators get paid more for premium views than they get from ads .
The browser is my agent, just like my screenreader is.
Google is to blame here - and I'm saying that as an author who does advertise there because of marketshare.
Especially if I'm protecting myself.
But at the same time, these yt creators are relying on google ads . Which are intrusive, doesn't acknowledge and care about privacy. If you turn on ad privacy, you see gambling, scams ,crypto ads. How is that responsible? You as a creator is ok with getting money and ok with indirectly making people addicted, fall for scams? That's not right.
I am ok with sponser ads and am against sponsorblock. They are not tracking me, violating my privacy and telling me about new products .
youtube subscription doesn't stop youtube for collecting you data and use it for ads during other google service .
If they want to sell a service in exchange for payment, then they are free to do so. For legal reasons they are not doing that. The explicit legal definition used by lawyers and politicians is that advertisement supported services are not a payment, but an optional content that the viewer might or might not look at. This optional aspect of advertisement is how laws distinguish between it and a sale. From a legal perspective there is a difference between selling a sample product for 1 cent, compared to giving it away for free. One is a sale, and the other is a free giveaway, and thus they are under different legal definitions.
There are similar legal theory for when a platform should be held legal responsible their products, for their advertisement, and when local laws applies and how. News papers, radio, and TV has each been forced to handle local advertisement laws and regulation, and there is a reason why most had departments to curate which advertisement they could publish. They also get held responsible if they break local law.
even if I did pay for a subscription, they would find a way to jack up the price or insert new ads while collecting my data. The landscape isn't competitive enough. People like this idea that "if you don't pay for the product, you are the product" but it's not complete. Just because you pay for a product doesn't mean you're not the product. We used to pay for cable TV, only to still get ads. We used to pay for windows licenses, now with ads!
I will continue to waste their bandwidth while blocking ads until they hopefully go bankrupt and get replaced by some bittorrent-like p2p solution.
Indeed, if there was a 'thin adblock writer line' flag it'd already be on my bumper. Than you for your service, we salute you.
I have been astounded at how scammy those ads are. There is a major class of ads that make fairly significant bullshit medical claims and I’m semi convinced the purpose is not for someone to make money but to wage psychological warfare on vulnerable people. Another class of ads says “the US government is going to collapse and that’s why you should buy a freedom battery” and the ad couches itself as a battery advertisement but how many vulnerable people hear that in the background 16 times a day and don’t end up subconsciously accepting some part of it?
In any case it’s all a manipulative cesspool and it’s bizarre to me that a property that Google otherwise values is willing to sling such slop at its users. I suspect a large part of this is that the executives who run YouTube never see their ads.
Most users are regular non-tech folks who are (unknowingly perhaps) well tracked and profiled. They (like my family members) get normal big name ads like you see on TV.
You can... just not visit youtube, right?
Seriously, go see what happened to them.
Turns out everyone complaining about YouTube, when given the option to jump to a new fresh user focused service, still blocks ads and refuses subscriptions.
This thread, and the hundreds like it, are why people nope the fuck out when considering creating a YT competitor.
> Read up on vid.me, which broke YouTube's "monopoly" back in 2016-2017
Okay, sounds interesting.
> May 21 (Reuters) - Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google has persuaded a federal judge in California to reject a lawsuit from video platform Rumble (RUM.O), opens new tab accusing the technology giant of illegally monopolizing the online video-sharing market.
I see what I expected: that google cheated and got away with it. Where is the betrayal?
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-defeats-rumb...
I don't know if you are confused, but Vid.me was a totally different platform than whatever Rumble is...
So even if you’re trying to use YouTube for something of value, you’re battling ads. Or at least our kids are.
I’ve tried cancelling my subscription, thinking it would make me watch less YouTube. I didn’t last 48 hours. The ads were too annoying and I signed back up.
I find it hard to justify paying for 2 music streaming services, so I cancelled Apple Music, because I'm paying for YouTube Music through Premium. However, I don't like it, so I'm back to manually managing a local music library in Apple's Music app. This is probably a better long-term approach than renting access to a music library on a monthly basis.
The whole "YouTube music free!" is just marketing and a music focused app wrapped on YouTube.
YouTube premium without YouTube music would be pretty much the same cost.
YouTube premium would not be any cheaper without YouTube music. It's a marketing gimmick.
I appreciate the fact that you brought up the possibility of paying for ad-free content, but frankly I don't buy this. You can either see 100% of the content for free with some mildly annoying ad content mixed in from time to time, or you can pay them a pretty small amount to not see the annoyances.
Google is a for-profit company trying to sell a product that you find valuable. Not everything they do is squeaky-clean, but this offering couldn't be much fairer, really.
Media, on the whole, is a good thing. We know more about the world. We know more about the excesses of the aristocracy. We know more about the violence committed by violent people (and I don't mean local petty crime. Genocide.) Before we can improve these things, we need to know about them. "just don't consume media" is a regression to a time where people knew little outside their local sphere.
Youtube/Google has a monopoly on one part of the modern media landscape and it has to be fixed. Not just put our heads in the sand.
Of the various streaming platforms I subscribe to, I probably get the most value from YouTube.
Though I wish there was an option to get it for less without YouTube Muisc, that didn’t also lead to ads on YouTube itself. I was excited when I saw Lite announced, then I read the details and my excitement quickly faded and turned into disappointment.
Not paying for it because it might become bad some time in the future is not a great argument.
Google can surely figure this out and still turn a profit on Youtube. Greed stops them from doing this.
At the very least they could guarentee that YouTube Premium tracking doesn't get used for profiling later. I think that would be a very acceptable solution but they don't offer it.
You pay but you're still snooped on.
I've been thinking about it for a long time (years). I don't really have the right words for my thoughts, and I think charity is probably closest.
But yes, at this point, I think that many "free" services should be charities to prevent them from being corrupted by rugpulls.
Why people say this? You can either not use Youtube or pay for premium. Nobody is forcing you to download hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of video?
The fact is free YouTube is only possible with ads, and potentially only with the extremely detested ads we're talking about here. The other major UGC video platform (Twitch) is not profitable.
Broadcast TV and even cable or fixed content library streaming is A LOT cheaper to run than something like YouTube. I don't mean purely machine-wise, I also mean in terms of salaries, and those do matter to keep the service up and running, not to mention growing
If you don't like them, then pay for Youtube Premium and you can get ad-free experience. Although if it's not available in your country, then adblocking is a reasonable approach.
They deliver targeted advertising due to the information they have. That's the model. They make literally zero dollars a year selling personal information.
I'll wait.
That is exactly what I said. They sell targeted advertising.
Not as fun to write about as coercion is, though.
American courts have had no difficulty in holding that TOS are binding IF done correctly. It wouldn't be prudent to imagine that YouTube's lawyers don't know how to do that.
Santa Clara Law professor Eric Goldman knows approximately everything about this subject. He posts frequent updates on his blog.
https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/category/licensingcont...
/s
I'd highly recommend everyone try reducing their intake of passive entertainment like youtube and redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.
You're right, I could probably finish my motorcycle build projects without videos. But why??
I just checked my uBlock stats inside of AdNauseum on my personal laptop. This is a machine I have not used regularly in over 2 years. Being generous I am assuming every ad blocked was static, not animated, had no sound, and required no interaction by me to skip, so just was a one second glance.
I have gotten back 115+ days of my life to do things I actually want to do. 10.34 million ads. From one single machine, in just Firefox. I now have AdGuard on my network and use Tailscale to block ads on all my devices. There is no world where I ever go back to seeing ads that I can block and definitely will not be rewarding them for trying to push ads on what was a great product.
Nebula is there, it’s not free either.
This argument doesn't really hold.
Again, yea, there are monopoly concerns, but you’re going to move the goalposts to “anything scalable” being worth stealing from then good luck to you.
I’m not going to pretend I don’t use Adblock, but when sites actually enforce using it, I’m not going to pretend they’re evil for doing it.
Why not charge creators for the infrastructure cost?
You mention revenue sharing - but either you are a publisher and share both revenue and responsibilities with creators, or you are not a publisher.
If we for a moment imagine that they are a publisher, then they better pay their content creators a livable wage - or not sign them - and the content creators better not show ads, as I have already paid them through YouTube.
If we imagine for a second that they are merely a distribution platform, then they better not interfere with what I see with ads, or make a value judgement on my curated feed - ISPs also don't interject ads into your browsing.
I never said that they should not be able to make money. But services like YouTube tries their absolute best to both have the cake on eat it. And that is not fair.
> when they offer an option to not track my activity
if all i'd watch are tv shows like netflix its one thing, but yt has such broad content i'd rather not be advertised/tracked about stuff i just clicked once and never again...
You can change it from Google account > Data & Privacy > History Settings > youtube History
If you have youtube premium + a general purpose ad blocker + disable watch history its really hard to tell if you are being tracked.
If you do decide to disable watch history, be prepared for just how terrible the median youtube interest is. All recommendations become beyond worthless.
They are trying to block ads blockers as some manager wasn't able to get reward. Or is worried he wont get it. And this means that money that can be collected from ads has peaked. Now come the "optimizations", now payable, then no longer free, later payable with ads, then they will squeeze content creators, that will move to other platforms where you will have to pay for multiple platforms where you were once watching it for free on YT.
Sounds familiar?
Made it as short as possible, but this could be wall of text, from comparing to what happened to streaming services etc. Without piracy (not advocating but it is a fact that it forced publishers into internet model) we would probably still buy content on CDs and DVDs, maybe BluRays.
Greed of infinite growth in finite system has destroyed the planet and you can bet it will destroy YT too.
It used to be practically shameful for large companies to run ads on their websites. They had clean websites with only their content. Especially for subscribers. Now they’re all filled with ads!
I think $15 for a whole month of entertainment, tutorials, and useful content and to pay the people who create the videos is worth it.
If the LTV of a "good" user (e.g. user who buys things from ads) is X, you price the non-ad tier at X + Y. Y is the premium you pay for not wanting to see ads.
So you're right, but also wrong, in that you can extract EVEN MORE money from the user you were talking about through a non-ad tier.
Companies (Meta, Google, etc) get better at advertising -> LTV goes up -> non-ad tier goes up
The type of people who have already indicated that they have disposable income, and are willing to pay for a service, are more attractive to advertisers than people who are known to have opted for a worse experience for free
I don't want to pay for 6 members. I don't want YouTube Originals. I sure as hell don't want YouTube Music. And I'd really like it if I didn't have to manually set my videos to the premium bitrate every damn time.
I'd be fine with paying 10€ for no ads + premium. But for almost 20€/month, I'm thinking of just going back to adblockers.
For 20€/month I expect them to not allow any sponsored content in my feed, including those served by the authors.
Luckily I kinda have that option with sponsorblock.
on top of all the things already mentioned like privacy issues, etc.
- you'll also still see "Branded Content" when paying Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branded_content
- because of Googles "monopoly", they take a big % of your money, instead of you actually paying the content creators themselves.
> redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.
1. They still serve ads. Often for Google products underneath the videos and in the feed. Content creators are also allowed to turn on contextual ads over the top of videos, as well as merchandise underneath their videos.
2. Sponsored segments are unbelievably widespread now, and can take up significant portions of the video. These are ads, and they are also permitted by YouTube.
3. YouTube has been making the service worse and worse as time goes on. I cannot turn off shorts, even though I despise them. They're all over my feed. Removing the downvote score means I cannot tell if a video is spam before clicking on it now. Ostensibly YouTube serves more video hours now, but at our expense.
4. YouTube recently raised my price 40% overnight.
There was space for reasonable prices without making their service worse. They crossed that line for me and I think for many others too.
1. Fully block ads with uBlock Origin
2. Block in-video sponsorships with Sponsorblock
3. Block all shorts permanently with Hide Youtube-Shorts
These 3 extensions fix your issues. There is also an extension to bring back downvotes. I do not use it but I think it is widespread enough to be useful as spam detection.
This also allows you to listen to videos with your screen turned off and gives you the option to have the video playing in a tiny screen so you can watch it while doing other things on your phone.
There's also uYouPlus if you have a way to load apps without going through the store.
Specifically though:
2. Content creators shill for things, sure. Youtube doesn't stop you from fast-forwarding through these segments. These creators are real human beings that put a ton of work into bringing me content and I don't begrudge them making some money. These are the ads that work on me; I deliberately use their affiliate links. I want them to spend more time making content. Hell there are a dozen different Youtube creators I pay monthly on Patreon just because!
I don't find these sponsorships terrible and at any rate it's not Youtube's fault.
3. Yeah I would love to have a Shortblocker extension in my browser, no argument there. But I don't think the visible downvotes make any material difference. The recommendation algorithm is excellent and I don't see spam.
4. The price is still extremely reasonable compared to the value I get. Maybe it isn't for you, that's fine. But the fact is you can pay for no-ads; complaining about adblock behavior rings incredibly hollow.
It does though. It blocks the modal ads by content creators, the merchandise ads, and the feed ads for Google products. With other extensions I can skip through sponsored segments and see a downvote approximation.
> Content creators shill for things, sure. Youtube doesn't stop you from fast-forwarding through these segments. These creators are real human beings that put a ton of work into bringing me content and I don't begrudge them making some money. These are the ads that work on me; I deliberately use their affiliate links. I want them to spend more time making content. Hell there are a dozen different Youtube creators I pay monthly on Patreon just because!
My house is an ad free space and I do find these ads intolerable. I'm happy to pay for content I like, but there is no way for me to pay for this content without these ads. Indeed, YouTube Premium was sold to me as paying content creators more than ads, and I purchased it on that premise. This wasn't enough for content creators, however, and they wanted to make even more money. That's fine, but I refuse to listen to their ads, and I do not owe them my attention to watch their ads. So I use SponsorBlock.
> Yeah I would love to have a Shortblocker extension in my browser, no argument there. But I don't think the visible downvotes make any material difference. The recommendation algorithm is excellent and I don't see spam.
The downvote score makes an ENORMOUS difference to MANY people. It allows us to determine what is spam at a glance. YouTube is filled with low quality content which isn't helpful and is often harmful. YouTube does a terrible job of policing this content. Often the very worst content will trick a large number of people into clicking on it, which makes the algorithm think it's good content, and promotes it to even more people. This is great for YouTube's bottom line, but serving people DIY advice which could harm them is bad for us, the users. A high downvote ratio indicates that the content is inaccurate, harmful, or spam, and we can avoid it BEFORE we sit through the whole video.
I got rid of the Youtube app from my Roku many months ago, and I haven't missed it. That wouldn't be the case for most other streaming apps that I still have.
I think for me - right from the day Youtube launched - I never liked the interface. It's the worst streaming interface of all the streaming services.
What there is is people (and companies) uploading stuff. Some useful, some entertaining, some mindless, some for me, some not for me.
I cannot say "YouTube content" is -- or is not -- for me because the notion is meaningless. Individual videos and channels are definitely for me, and are hard to find elsewhere. YouTube by itself is not a thing.
Thats exactly what some mobster would say to you when asking/forcing you for some money to buy protection for his etablisment.
I see that you can argue that you use a service that costs money. Yes. But the advertising is unacceptable not only because it is advertising, but also because of its content AND the way it is delivered. You can't support that.
So I do now, but only since I moved to a country where it doesn't cost so much. I watch maybe 6 hours absolutely tops of YouTube a month? I get charged $7/m for it, which still feels usurious, but in the UK they want almost $17/m which is firmly in "go fuck yourself" territory. I'd like them to tier pricing so casual users like me aren't paying for people who are using YouTube as their primary entertainment mechanism.
So... yes it is?
https://www.google.com/search?q=12.99+GBP+in+USD
> It's funny how people are so dishonest on HN
seriously?
The only answer is to support companies that do not receive any money from ads (i.e. Kagi). Until that exists for streaming, I'm blocking ads and not giving them a cent.
I find the argument of "how much you don't need in your life" not very compelling.
On one hand, we "need" very little: health, food, shelter. On the other, a life worth living is made of everything else that is not, strictly speaking, truly needed: ideas, hobbies, passions, entertainment, projects, etc.
However, I will add 2 counterpoints. Firstly, I don't think consuming a huge amount (e.g. the amount I was) of passive video content is good for your wellbeing. Second, I think it's interesting to examine why youtube must "drive" your hobby/interest to a large degree. Is there perhaps a mental trap of thinking you must be in with the crowd and the latest and greatest? What about growing your creative pursuit organically through your own journey? Just things to consider - may or may not be applicable. It was applicable for me and my photography hobby. There's tonnes of photography content out there but most of it is generic crap and I've found it more rewarding to go my own path so to speak.
No? There's the "human as a social animal" aspect, I enjoy being part of a community.
Nothing particular to YouTube here.
I would argue though that digital community is a tenuous definition in comparison to in-person community. I won't claim this doesn't differ person to person but for me doing a hobby with people has no comparsion to watching youtube videos about the hobby (even though I am introverted). I like to consider to myself: "is this digital interaction preventing or taking the place of an in-person interaction I could be having right now?" 6 hours of youtube a day was preventing a lot. Further I considered my own hobbies which themselves were primarily digital and may be unhelpful for finding fulfilment in social aspects of life.
Agreed that anyone can fill their own free time with whatever they want. But youtube is just junk food for the mind, packaged as stuff that interests you. It’s conveniently split to increase ad revenue, uses clickbait to drive engagement, and all the techniques developed on TV the past 80 years to keep us glued in front of the screen. Youtube and the “content” itself is designed to keep you watching.
And I say that as someone who used to mainly watch long form essays, not the trending bullshit. It’s all just distraction and opium for the masses, disguised as edutainment.
This is demonstrably false.
There's no such thing as "YouTube stuff", there's thousands of people uploading videos, some interesting to you, some not, some junk, some very in-depth, some garbage, some very thoughtful -- Sturgeon's Law applies. There are music videos, science videos, history videos, hobby videos, videos analyzing everything under the sun (e.g. the amazing Every Frame A Painting), etc.
I don't know which videos you watch, but mine aren't "junk food".
Well, I strongly disagree with this (widespread) premise. It is still marketing-driven consumption and another form of pervasive distraction which plagues the modern world, whether you spend 6 hours watching reality TV or essays on the conquests of Genghis Khan. What matters is how much time you spend in a stupor passively receiving useless information, to detach yourself from a reality you have no control over; the content itself is just a matter of taste.
I want to stress there is of course a difference between decompressing with a nice and well-written YouTube video after dinner and wasting your life watching memes. But it is still a form of distraction, and YouTube does its utmost to make the experience as exciting and addictive as possible, just like McDonalds.
Exactly, it is a philosophical issue, whereas the person I was replying to was debating on the grounds of “knowledge is good”. I grew up with computers, saw the spread of the Internet but lately I cannot wonder if what we as a society, as tech workers have achieved over the past 20 years to be a net negative for humanity. I very much subscribe to the thesis that the effect of any form of technology, however small, has a radical effect on society; it profoundly changes the world in ways no one can predict, and I wonder whether the common place belief that technological research and innovation, often driven by pure greed, is not at utterly reckless and destructive philosophy.
Yet this is still a fringe position. People are starting to get disillusioned, but the common opinion is that this is good, progress is good, and the solution to the ills of society is more technology, more Internet, more data and more algorithms.
Humanity doesn’t need more knowledge, nor does it need more data and more information. In fact, I would claim this hunger for data, to know more, to measure more, to be a primary cause of the ills of modern society. We have become machines, operant and dependent on information, we forgot the human and biological dimension of our lives.
This is not my position at all.
It seems to me that you need to argue extremes and strawmen in order to sustain your point of view.
I'm not arguing in favor of unchecked technology or "more of everything". That's your burden to bear, not mine.
Please do me the courtesy of actually engaging with what I'm saying, not what you believe I might be saying.
I do not get why you disagree with such hostility, and take it personally.
It is fine to disagree, you know. It would be better to debate the opposing opinion instead of getting so defensive, but alas. This is getting tiring. Good day to you.
> You operate under the assumption that more knowledge and the more you know about things, the better. So from your point of view spending 12 hours watching philosophy essays and history videos can only be a good thing.
See? This was addressed to me, not in general.
> Exactly, it is a philosophical issue, whereas the person I was replying to was debating on the grounds of “knowledge is good”.
"The person I was replying to" is me, so again you're singling me out.
And I'm not hostile, or do you think people pointing out you're misrepresenting their opinions are "hostile"?
> It would be better to debate the opposing opinion instead of getting so defensive, but alas.
Alas, for this to work, you would need to engage with what the person you're replying to actually wrote, defend your position ("it's junk food for the mind", "it's opium"), be open to having your mind changed if the arguments are good, and avoid making unsupported assertions about my belief system or what I think about knowledge and technology.
Don't act all offended now just because I called you out.
Apologize if you made wrong assumptions, and resume the argument in good faith, and for all that's good and honest -- lose the "I know better" attitude.
Yes, yes it is. I only have to find one non-junk video to invalidate your assertion, and since I've found hundreds, your assertion is false.
> You operate under the assumption that more knowledge and the more you know about things, the better. So from your point of view spending 12 hours watching philosophy essays and history videos can only be a good thing
No, I said nothing of the sort. It's very difficult to discuss anything with someone having such a difficulty engaging with the arguments as stated.
By the way, if you're going to make the claim that knowing more (or being curious about the world) is not a good pursuit in life, then... good luck with that! You won't find many people who agree.
> What matters is how much time you spend in a stupor passively receiving useless information, to detach yourself from a reality you have no control over; the content itself is just a matter of taste.
Wow. Stupor? Useless? Who are you to determine what is stupefying or useless to others? (By the way, I fixed my toilet thanks to a YouTube video teaching me how. Was this useless and stupefying?).
> But it is still a form of distraction, and YouTube does its utmost to make the experience as exciting and addictive as possible, just like McDonalds.
Everything that is not sleeping, eating and taking a dump is a form of distraction. This doesn't provide any insight.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that the kind of videos you find in YouTube is what someone else arguing with you is watching. Maybe you watched junk videos, and they shaped your opinion of YouTube. Maybe you're logged off, in which case YouTube's recommendations are so random and garbage, they could give you a bad impression. I'm always logged in, and the recommendations I get are mostly relevant and good quality; I seldom get recommended meme videos or garbage.
PS: I'm sure someone once made the same argument you're making, only about books.
As for youtube, I just pay for ad free. If they ever start violating that they'll also be banished to the corn field.
Probably because it wasn’t. In my experience even the stuff people consider quality on YouTube is still kinda gross engagement bait, especially things like video essays (which are an absolute plague imo)
The lazy way would be to VPN somewhere as far away as possible and throttle your bandwidth. That would get you 250ms of round trip latency for free. In Antarctica we had up to 3000ms on a bad day. You learn to do stuff offline, build from source instead of download compiled binaries and use Kiwix. Nowadays it's less of an issue because you can ask LLMs questions and have them search for you and all you need to transfer is text. Much much easier than loading heavy websites.
This app looks fun: https://jagt.github.io/clumsy/index.html (randomly interferes with your packets)
I also pay for Kagi which has the ability to block certain domains from results. I'd imagine that blocking Instagram, Reddit, Youtube, etc. would also prevent rabbit-holing.
If an actual ad played, I'd be irritated beyond belief. But when there's a 12 second buffer, I have enough patience training for slow load times that I instinctively just quickly check my email or spend a brief moment lost in thought. Especially when it's every video. If it was one in every 5 videos, I'd notice it and be bothered. When it's every video, it's part of the experience and my brain just cuts it out automatically.
TOS is like me putting a sign up at the end of my driveway saying if you approach my home, you owe me $10. If you pull up to my house, I demand the $10, and you don't pay me, I cannot forcibly take $10 from you, nor can I call the cops or sue over the $10.
You never agreed to anything and certainly not in any legally binding format.
Notices are not contracts and TOS notices are notices.
You keep using the word "theft". Let's grab the definition of "theft" from a legal dictionary:
> Theft is the taking of another person's personal property with the intent of depriving that person of the use of their property. Also referred to as larceny.
The intent of depriving another of their property is a key element of theft. When one receives a copy of data, no one is deprived of their property. It's substantially similar to how I can not steal your car by taking a photo of it.
Not only that, but the typical intellectual property industry nonsense of referring to unauthorized copying as "theft" does not apply. Google, who have acquired a right to distribute this data, are serving it to you.
> You can get into whatever legalize [sic] you want but that doesn’t change the fact that you are doing what the vast majority of people recognize as the common definition of theft.
The legalese matters because it's the best way we've come up with to consistently reason about topics like this regardless of shared values.
There is no theft happening in the case of blocking ads.
Your claim about "the vast majority of people" is patently absurd -- because you have not provided and almost certainly do not possess any evidence to substantiate it -- and lacks a basis in fact. Regardless, we do not reason about these things based on the fluctuating opinion of the masses. There is no case in which blocking ads meets "the common definition of theft".
I never made that agreement. And if some software on my computer somehow gets YouTube to deliver me the content anyway, that's not my fault. In my view, it's a cat and mouse game, they can do whatever they want to try to stop me, and vice versa. If they win, I won't complain; but if I do, so be it.
By clicking on the video you did. It is in their terms of service.
How is you purposefully trying to block ads not your fault? Whose fault is it that you installed an Adblock? If you went to a grocery store and told the clerk you already paid and they let you leave would that not be your fault either?
TOS is a NOTICE, not a contract.
There's zero agreement happening when you visit a website.
Assuming you didn't do something actually illegal while using their service, without a contract the most they can do is ban you from the service, or try to.
Here is an example of ToS being enforced: https://kennedyslaw.com/en/thought-leadership/article/2023/n...
Another example https://www.internetlibrary.com/cases/lib_case392.cfm
Here is an example of ToS being enforced: https://kennedyslaw.com/en/thought-leadership/article/2023/n...
Half right. Only if I accept them affirmatively with a clickwrap, like your article mentions. Implicitly accepted ones do not count. I’m not signed into youtube.com, so there is no acceptance of ToS.
I've held the position that, if YT wants to, they can block me from their platform for using an adblocker, and I would have no moral ground to stand on.
However, that isn't what they do. They try to circumvent it. They try to make it technically impossible. They try to mislead users into thinking their extensions are malicious.
But don't worry, something else will eventually kill YouTube. Most likely they'll miss some sort of disruptive innovation. Like maybe in 30 years everyone will have content beamed directly into their neutral implants and only a few old people will still watch online videos.
If Google wants to make YouTube a service with actually binding contracts and not TOS notices no one reads or respects, it can put the whole thing behind a login and end un-authed public web traffic. They're free to do that but they won't because they know that would kill the site dead, and quickly so.
> Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
I don’t even do that, I just watch it as-is. I just don’t need to imagine that YouTube and I have agreed to anything.
That’s what they are actually trying to do lol.
Having said that, I 100% agree. If Google allows for non-logged in users, it's a public website and we can consume it however we like, until Google decides to try to block us. That's what it's doing now, trying to block users from consuming the content however they like, a core feature of the public web. Fortunately, blocking us is very very hard for sites not behind a login. If they want not-logged in use, they either go to war with my tech, favored by platform, or they let it slide.
Now, Google owns Chrome, so they can also go to war in the browser and standards bodies as well. But for now, the web is open and accessible and that means, wiht the right technology (Firefox plus uBlock Origin for me) you can watch all those video ad-free and there's nothing Google can do to stop you.
We often rationalize using ad blockers because ads can be intrusive or annoying. But let’s asking ourselves: Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?
This isn’t a moral judgment. I genuinely want to understand the reasoning.
On YouTube, we went from a banner on the video to a few seconds of a video before to multiple ads before the video to multiple ad pauses even on relatively short videos (under 10 minutes). Add to that the sponsored sections of the video itself, which are added by the content creator, and other ads (stores, tickets, etc) that sometimes YouTube adds under the video even if you pay for premium.
Google Search pages used to have one or two ads at the top, with a different background colour than search results. Now sometimes I have to scroll down to see organic content, because sponsored content fills my screen.
I don't think I'm entitled to have access to all this for free, but we went too far... and so I use an adblocker on all my devices.
Pretty much all article-based sites, recipes, news, blog posts, anything built with wordpress to blogspot. Their algorithm seems to ensure that there is always 1 ad visible on screen at all times. With font sizes as big as they are these days this means 1 ad every two paragraphs.
And the auto placement is enabled by default on new accounts, and all these new "features," get automatically enabled from time to time. I'm sure there is a mountain of webmasters that didn't even notice that their websites have gotten filled with ads.
The worst one is that interstital that appears whenever you click a link. I'm pretty sure Google had a rule against that type of popup, and then they literally made the popup themselves.
On the other hand, all of this can be disabled.
The question is how much money does a website need to make to stay online. If it could survive with fewer ads, I'm sure there would be fewer.
Here's an attempt at a double-negative answer: you can't be ethically compelled into an unethical contract, and since advertisements are manipulative, voyeuristic and seek to take advantage of the limitations of human attentional control, it's a priori impossible for watching an ad or downloading a tracker to ever be ethically compulsory.
It makes me wonder: is there room for meaningful competition or an alternative platform? And if so, how could it be made sustainable? Are there any viable revenue models beyond ads and surveillance capitalism?
You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
You are not obligated to watch ads. You are opting to watch them in exchange for the free content, then skipping out on a commitment you volunteered for while still taking the free content.
The "unethical contact" argument is bullshit, because you made a choice but didn't live up to it. Instead of either paying or not watching, you watched anyway.
Thee provider made the content public on the Web. That means I can view it under any terms I chose until they find a way to exclude me without excluding all the attention that being on the public Web gives them.
There are not 2 options as you claim. There are infinite options to the user here. Google may prefer you engage in only one of two ways, but they have no legal ground to require that with content on the public Web.
This is the unsung argument everyone forgets! It goes to the very start of why someone might register a domain name and set up a website on the... World Wide Web... for people to visit with their User Agent software, ask for some HTML and get some HTML back. "HOW DARE YOU NOT DO A RANDOM SOCIALLY DEFINED THING AFTER ASKING FOR OUR HTML (AND OTHERS' MP4S)?"
- I, as the user, (or my user agent on behalf of me) ask for a resource.
- YT, as the provider, (or the server on YT's behalf) decide whether to send that resource to me.
- If you do, I'll use or not use it in accordance with my user agent configuration.
I asked for the video, and YT chose to send it to me. I'm not going to lose sleep over the morality of using the web as it was intended to be used.
You're wrong in both parts.
1. There is no way to pay to only remove all ads. YT premium bundles some music nonsense and also doesn't remove ads added by creators.
2. "Watching" isn't part of the contract, only "injected ads" are. Do you read every billboard in exchange for the benefit of better roads financed with ad revenue?
What we choose to watch on youtube is also up to us.
They are. YT shows content, and has several mechanisms of including paid ads in that content. From content consumption perspective there is no difference which specific mechanism is used.
> by your logic i wouldn’t be allowed to watch a movie trailer
No, that's your own twisted logic. By my logic you'd be free to consume directly whatever you want, just be able to "pay and get no ads"
Stop fallaciously pretending they’re the same thing.
> Ads however may appear on ... Shorts, and when you search or browse.
So again, you can't pay just to replace ads. (By the way, there is another huge difference - premium is a subscription, so not tied to ad time replaced)
Let's be honest here, ads are trying to get you to buy things, but "psychological abuse" is a pretty extreme hyperbole, especially for people already in such tight poverty. They've got enough going on that someone trying to get them to buy shitty knives or switch their car insurance isn't going to be impactful.
The issue is that those are not the only ads Youtube is showing to people. You can basically upload any video and make it an ad. Sometimes Youtube's moderation fails and some nasty stuff slips through the cracks:
> In the latest incident, a Redditor describes how their young nephew was exposed to an explicit ad while watching a Fortnite stream by the well-known YouTuber Loserfruit.
> “My 7yr nephew was watching Loserfruit (Fortnite streamer) and then came up to me asking what Loserfruit is doing because this ad started playing,” the concerned uncle shared.
Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-explicit-ads-proble...
Hell, they'll show weight loss ads to people with eating disorders - and this one might just be intentional rather than a failure of Youtube's moderation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckeatingdisorders/comments/18gx1v... (Just one example but it's not hard to find more)
"Psychological abuse" is very much not hyperbole in the worst case scenarios. And as an extra bonus, Youtube promotes scam ads as well:
“In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and suspended 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year,” the platform told us at the time.
Psychological abuse doesn’t even begin to describe experience.
Nothing about anything I saw rose even close to the level of psychological abuse.
Are they? The last time I made the mistake of watching youtube without an ad blocker I got served US right-wing propaganda. I live in Spain, always have, and Google knows enough about me to know I'd despise that content.
The provider is welcome to serve ads, and i am welcome to not watch them. When there are Ads on TV and I get up to go to the kitchen, am i skipping out on a commitment? Am I now a freeloader? Should the TV have a camera to make sure I watch all the ads like a good little boy?
People have been fastforwarding/skipping ads for decades. this is nothing new.
Principally - the latter actually affects the compensation given to the creator of whatever video you're watching. The former does not.
TV, speaking of cable, is exclusively for entertainment. YouTube is used for pretty much everything these days. Imagine being in a panic, looking for a video how perform CPR, and getting 30 seconds unskippable ad.
Unlike DVR for TVs, you are not welcome to skip playing them entirely. They've been pretty clear that skipping them via the use of ad blockers is a violation of the terms of service.
Advertisers do care about them. It's just that they don't have a way to track/measure it.
> Your honor, they agreed to our terms and conditions which stipulate you MUST stay in the recliner facing forward the whole time. By getting up to <do something important and not waste their life watching ads>, they've defrauded our advertisers! We demand to be repaid in the form of 43 lazyboy hours per year.
Of course it’s all about everyone getting paid! I always just find it silly when my fellow plebeians try to echo some false obligation to abide by this system when people like us have been avoiding it for as long as it has existed.
Wrong. The content provider explicitly states “ad-free”, yet I still see ads from content creators themselves.
I haven't done that with Youtube because 1) I don't need to, 2) Google is pretty bad about paying content creators properly (they prefer keeping the money for themselves) and 3) I feel no guilt whatsoever about not sponsoring trillion dollar companies by exposing myself to the pain of watching their shitty ads.
Luckily for Google, most people aren't smart enough to figure out ad blockers. Which is why they are making lots of money with Youtube and why they are a trillion dollar company. Good for them; no need to feel sorry for them.
Luckily for me, Google seems pretty conflicted about fixing this properly because they are making so much money with the way things are. If they lock down Youtube properly (not that hard technically), users and content creators might move elsewhere. They can't afford to. So good for me.
It's that simple. There is no moral dilemma here.
With how user-hostile and anti-competitive Google is behaving, this is like asking why soldiers feel entitled to shoot at the enemy. Keep giving them money, keep watching their ads that they sell on rigged auctions [1], and eventually the only way to access the web will be with locked-against-the-user browsers [2], and everything will be surveilled (though it nearly already is - Google never asks itself why it should feel entitled to follow users around the web, or in real-life, despite opt-outs [3], and you'll find support for any alternative OSes mysteriously withering due to secret anti-competitive contracts between Google and manufacturers [4]). I know this isn't the reasoning people use, but that is what the outcome will be.
As for ads - it has always been hard, nearly impossible to block them, and few people did. Just like you can't block a billboard next to the freeway, you can't block a jpeg that's served as part of the webpage you're visiting, as it's programmatically indistinguishable from native content.
What people actually block are not ads, but a hybrid half-ad-half-surveillance entity, that's called an "ad" by historical accident.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/11/25/google-is-three-t...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
[3] https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20200311172517/https://www.proto...
I get that Google has infinite money and infinite evil. But how convenient you also get to skip out on paying the majority expense, which goes to the creator...
And yes virtuous commentor, I know you are one of the 1.5% that convert to a patreon supporter. Now ask everyone else why they get to eat for free (while endlessly complaining that the restaurant sucks).
I don't owe creators anything; I have no agreements with them. Google is the one with creator contracts.
Google may owe creators something, but I certainly don't and I'm not going to adopt Google's burden on that.
YouTube has always been the guy showing how to replace a 97 Honda civic oil filter in an unedited 5 minutes video and 240p, or the one sharing their passion. You know, the genuinely interesting stuff.
55% is OK
Why do I Adblock? Because a line must be drawn or else this marketing growth engine will consume everything. I mean literally without any consumer pushback this attention extraction engine will continue expanding until every moment of digital consumption is monetized. It’s already destroyed too much of the internet.
If Google want to force ads, they can put them in the video stream. If not, then they’re trying to have it both ways.
Most websites do not offer reasonable payment options. They'd earn fractions of a cent from the ads they'd show me, but the cheapest subscriptions they offer are several dollars.
On YouTube, the value of the service is provided by creators, but too little of the subscription is going towards the creators. To make matters worse, Google seems to pull every string they can to make creators as miserable as possible. Their actions are a detriment to the service, and not worth supporting. An 80/20 revenue split would seem much more reasonable.
In this situation, the ads are contributing barely anything to the content creation, and storage and distribution drop in price every year while youtube increases the amount of ads and decreases the video quality. So people get upset and block everything. That's part out of being fed up, and that's part out of having no way to make the ads become less bad in a non-block way.
It's my browser, my copy of the website, and I'll have my user agent do whatever I want.
Shall we do the same to open source?
“Watch this ad for 30 seconds before checking out a branch! Git commit, oops: RAID SHADOW LEGENDS”
The burden of proof is on the ads to justify why they should be watched, given that the ads themselves provide zero value to the viewer.
YouTube ads in particular are a cesspit of scams. I don't want to watch ads for things like Scientology.
What is so difficult for you to understand this business relationship?
It's like asking a lawyer why does he defend an obviously guilty client? Because it's adversarial system, his job is to protect his client, not to worry about the other side. The other side is trying to maximize their advantage too. Google has defined my relationship with it in such terms through its behavior.
If YouTube were still an independent operator I would be more amenable to your argument.
In any case, the fact I can recite an ad from memory shows that I am at least watching some of their ads, notably on mobile.
Perhaps you also have to show your YouTube history when you enter the US.
I understand ad blocking isn't morally perfect but I can live with it.
Why they think I should waste my finite time, compute and bandwidth on things I don't want needs justification.
Why do advertisers feel entitled to my attention when I never agreed to give it to them? Simply visiting a page with ads doesn't mean I agree to view ads.
One can always pay more attention at the continuous flow of local events that cosmos provide to self, instead of whatever other humans wish they would focus on.
I'd rather not use Youtube entirely (aka be blocked off by Google) than ever be subjected to even a single microsecond of an ad. Ads are psychological manipulation and I refuse to subject myself to some slimy marketer's ad campaign. If I were made God Emperor of the Earth for the day, the one and only thing I'd do with that power is make sure these people rot away in a dark hole forever, that's how much I detest this whole "market" and the "people" involved in it.
Even paying for this stuff isn't a guarantee of anything. Their "Lite" tier has verbiage to the effect of "No* Ads (* Some will still be shown)". We've seen with cable television that the insidious cancer that is advertising creeps its way in as well, and cable was NOT cheap. Plus, it's known that for advertisers, people who actually shell out cash are even juicier targets, and you'd have to be a genuine imbecile to trust the likes of Google or Meta to not abuse you even harder, even if you pay for the service.
MAYBE I'd be willing to pay Google if I had a guarantee that no advertisement will EVER be shoved in anywhere in the future, and that I get a guarantee that they will punish those sponsored sections that creators put into their videos if I pay for it, and if I get a guarantee that they won't continue to profile me incessantly to shove ads at me everywhere other than YT. We all know that's not happening though, and I have absolutely 0 interest in lining their coffers with both my money and my data.
I listen to Spotify Freemium. There’s a special ad that says: “Enjoy the next 30 minutes of ad-free listening”. 2 minutes later I get 2-3 ads back to back.
Enough. Happy Jellyfin user. I’ll buy up my music gradually.
Otherwise wealth would be much more equally spread across northern and Southern hemisphere.
Personally I hate advertisement, i will do everything I can to disable it but I know that at this point I’m almost pirating. There is no shame in that, internet is the Wild West : Google and their AI crawling bots aren’t better than me, they leech contents other made, other host, to build their ai and then makes money on top of it.
But they seem hesitant to, probably because that would risk losing the engagement of those users.
I actually think it would be good if there were filter lists that whitelisted ads that were not harmful to users in those ways, but that sounds difficult/impossible to fairly maintain, and I doubt anyone else wants it.
https://youtube.com/shorts/cdyhoTqWFSc?si=aSV46HfI8_0kUIy1
^ Replace the women with any "why" arguments you might have for not using ad blockers.
I'd block ads if there wasn't premium (or if premium had ads). YouTube still deserves and needs money, but ads don't "extract" the money from me. At best (and most likely*) every ad shown to me is effectively the advertiser paying YouTube to waste my time. At worst (if I actually buy the product), the ad is effectively me paying the advertiser and getting something useless or harmful. The chance a YouTube ad shows me something beneficial is too small to remotely justify the other ads which waste my time (or if I buy, the Earth's resources or my attention or etc.).
I also block ads on newspapers and other smaller sites, but don't buy their premium. Honestly, I don't think this is fair, although I think it's small in the grand scheme of things. The problem is, I don't feel those sites justify me paying, and I'd be spending well over $100/month if I subscribed to every one; I'd rather not see each site than pay, although currently I do see them without paying which is unfair (showing me ads is wasteful, as explained earlier, so I don't even consider it an alternative). You know what, I'll probably subscribe to a few (maybe AP and Reuters) and every other story I encounter, see if I can find the version on one of those sites.
* "But ads work on you subliminally." I hear and read this a lot, but I really doubt it for invasive ads like YouTube's (also billboards etc. I'm not talking about covert ads or "good" non-invasive ads like Show HN). First, I recognize many of the big advertisers (e.g. those VPNs and sodas) and will never buy their products, so those ads shown to me specifically are wasted. Moreover, I'm particularly methodical when buying things. I always go in with a plan: sometimes it's a simple plan like "buy the second-cheapest with a good description and decent reviews" or "buy what your parents do", but I never buy something because I recognize it. In fact, if something seems familiar I pay extra attention, and if I recognize it was invasively advertised, I become less likely to buy it, because I suspect invasive ads correlate with low value and want to actively dissuade invasive ads in general. "But your parents and the reviewers buy based off ads, and you buy based off them"...OK, show my parents and reviewers the ads, not me.
Ultimately, invasive ads waste my time and annoy me, and I don't see their benefits which justify that. I'd rather pay a small fee than see or hear every invasive ad (like with YouTube premium), and I suspect the advertisers would benefit from that too.
I'm not going to sit there, waste my time, watching the same ads for the 5th time that has no relevance to me. Adblockers make youtube tolerable. If there were no adblockers i genuinely would be unable to use it.
Has nothing to do with a sense of entitlement, they are ads for things I would never purchase. so whats the point then? Why is it OK for people to pay to waste my time just because they paid to? What gives them the right to force me to watch that? Hard no. It's my browser, and I'll do as i damn well please.
I WOULD pay for youtube if it was a good product. But it's not. I'm not going to opine on all the reasons it's not. if/when they make it good i'll pay. That's a them problem.
but there is NO WAY i am going to start accepting ads back into my life. I'll just stop watching youtube.
It's not free when they already track and sell user data to the highest bidder. YouTube is just trying to double-dip at this point. I'd gladly pay for premium if there was a guarantee that my user data would not sold.
I live in a west-Eu country with several well-defined language borders. Each time we cross a border (on holiday), the youtube ads change language. When I’m logged in. I don’t have a driver’s license, yet the most common ad I get is for second hand cars. I’m in a relationship, yet I regularly get ads for dating sites. I have a job, get ads for jobhunting advice. And the other day I got an add specifically for people born before my birth-year minus one.
YouTube’s ads are on the same level as Spotify’s nagging for their subscription: it’s meant to annoy users into buying their ad-free plan. They use real ads as a thin veneer.
Now it is "I hate how ads are irrelevant."
People need to understand that ads will never be 100% perfect, otherwise you would buy something every time you saw an ad. 99.99% of the ads will miss the target, and that is normal. It would be insane if it worked any other way.
For what it is worth Google has a page where you can customize what sort of ads are relevant to you. https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...
> Now it is "I hate how ads are irrelevant."
This is an HN echo-chamber complaint, made by people who work for advertisers trying to come up with a way to make their ads seem less awful.
The fact is, relevant ads aren't better. They're still ads, and ads are still inherently bad.
If I'm looking for a used car, I do not want to hear ads from Bob's Lemon Shop about why they're the best place to buy cars. If Bob's Lemon Shop is the best place to buy cars, I'll find that out from independent reviewers who have shopped their before. An ad from Bob's Lemon Shop is relevant to my interest, but that makes it worse because now I'm susceptible to manipulation by the company that paid the most for ads instead of making a more rational decision based on true information from unbiased sources. Having more relevant ads is not good for me, it's good for advertisers.
When the largest ad company in the world, which also has the largest fingerprint silo in the world, spews out ads that are 100% irrelevant …
I'm shocked
Beats ads, as far as I'm concerned, but I can't help but feel like your average user wouldn't agree.
I can't think of a time I didn't have more than one browser, even in 1995 when I made Netscape my default, I kept Cello around for some things. More browsers are better than fewer, not only for the industry, but for individuals too.
“If they press their shoe on me even further, then I’m leaving!”
Firefox been free and there for you for decades, yet you still use this spyware crap from an Ad company. Disgusting.
GOOD plan
On the other hand, the golden era of YouTube has passed. You aren't losing out on much if you simply stop using it.
Obviously not the ads the content creator has put into the video itself.
I'd like to think some content creators are more scrupulous than others, and I have good enough taste not to watch the unscrupulous ones ;-)
But yes, uBlock and Sponsorblock together do a much better job of removing the ads.
Just sponsored shorts and banners when browsing. But we're talking about videos here.
https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/perfect_popcorn/
This took me far less time than watching YouTube videos, since that’s one of 5 references the LLM summary included, and the other 4 are information I didn’t need.
I’ve been doing #1 for over 5 years and will never do anything different (up to say $50-ish USD a month).
This isn't really germane to what's right. We all know how the surveillance industry operates - subsidizing investment, lock in, and then enshittification. And sure, it seems to work for it in a pragmatic sense. But that doesn't mean we should find virtue in rewarding it, which was what the original argument is about.
> YouTube doesn't even have much of a network effect
I'm not interested in arguing with goalposts being moved, especially by ignorance.
The cost of hosting still seems to be free. Isn’t it the watching that comes with a cost?
I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.
Not really. They'll just need to recode for you that one minute with the ad. The rest of the video can stay the same.
If they're doing it smartly, they can even avoid full recompression and just splice in the ad.
To be clear this isn’t server-side ad insertion; the ad and content streams are still separate (YouTube is doing a server-side ad insertion experiment, but that’s separate from fake buffering)Pretty much since YouTube started cracking down on adblockers, r/youtube top post Every. Single. Day. is usually someone complaining that they just got hit with "adblock detected" and comments split between "Yeah it sucks, hit me last month" and "Huh, uBlock Origin works fine for me. I must be super smart. YouTube can't defeat me"
We've all seen what they're doing with AI-generated video, and we know their market and political power. Eventually they'll be remaking the video so the person or animal or rock or tree on the screen is giving AI-generated product testimonials.
Then you would need to set up a server that would do all this and serve as a 'mirror' to your podcasts without the ads.
I also have a setup like this, I transcribe with Whisper and send it to OpenAI 4o-mini to detect ads then clip those segments with pydub, but my prompt must be lacking because the success rate on detecting ads is maybe 60%
I think it's better than 60%, but I should definitely set up some evals.
I split the text by sentence, but was considering having the LLM try and put into paragraph (that might conceptually chunk commercial sentences together), but what I've got has been good enough for me.
I wanted to switch to Flash 2.5, but it looks like they increased the price a lot.
I think I could do a fair bit of ad identification just with text heuristics: "This podcast is sponsored/supported by...", etc.
In the future, everything will be like that vapid chicken wing podcast (the one where they bring on an interesting, talented person and then waste half an hour interviewing her about sriracha)
So Ira Glass will be narrating This American Life while simultaneously reviewing different varieties of Doritos, etc.
...or the producers of The Rest is History will add the Planters Peanut Man as a third host
...or Marques Brownlee will review every product in relation to how well it works with Bose headphones
My favorite relentless one is Tracker (Amazon Prime), who spend approximately 30% of screen time dedicated to showing off a GMC pickup and Airstream, but the most egregious was one dialog line:
> As Colter enters and gives them hugs, Velma remembers that they got a gift for him. Reenie hands him the gift - very conspicuously packaged in an Amazon box with its trademark logo and blue tape - and says, "I've gotta say, next-day delivery is pretty sweet. Thank you, Amazon Prime!"
1. Interviewing a guest while they are eating insanely spicy food is an extremely novel idea and the guest's reactions and answers end up being really interesting and unexpected as a result. It humanizes famous people in a way I've never seen before because you can't just bluff your way through it.
2. The hot sauce vendors are often small companies or indie makers (at least they used to be). This is way different than reviewing 11 bags of Superman Transformers 3D Doritos Walmart Product Placement for the next blockbuster.
3. Hot sauce is interesting! Nearly every culture on every continent has hot sauce. They are made from a huge variety of interesting and unusual ingredients but are also simple and can be made at home. Hot sauce hasn't been explored in this way in popular culture.
...it powers through tough grease and grime
...with no harsh smells!
The future is Fantastik®.
This is like saying I was able to sneak into a concert. Sure, but at some point the restrictions are gonna come down hard.
It's not like sneaking into a concert. It's like attending a free concert at a mall and wearing a mask so the cameras can't read your lips. Or covering your phone screen with your hand when you show a friend a private photo of a special moment.
Who pays for the electricity, upkeep, security and airconditioning of the mall? Who pays for the sound stage, the technicians, the lighting of the mall?
The band decided to perform at the mall, because they like the facilities there. They always had a choice to perform at their house ("own website"), but they chose the mall ("YouTube") and as long as YouTube is hosting their videos, YouTube deserves to be compensated.
A third-party client has room to make a dramatic improvement on the twitch experience by not dropping audio while you make the switch from the ad stream to the content stream.
--
[1] They do send a super low resolution stream with no audio, but not the actual quality you are watching in.
[2] Right now Twitch does not stop sending content in markets where they don't have ad inventory. So there are actually browser extensions already that will use a custom foreign market server to proxy the video during ad breaks, so that you can still have an 100% effective ad blocker.
Anything that JS on the client can do is also under control of browser extensions. We are talking about YouTube’s options under that constraint.
The only other alternative is to make the video a live stream of indefinite length where the user can’t skip forward beyond the farthest point they already played.
I pay for a subscription to The Athletic, who used to offer ad free podcasts in their app. Last month they signed an exclusive deal with Acast, and now I cannot possibly listen to their podcasts without ads.
They own the hosting website, if they want to show their user ads, they will find a way, even if it takes a few year.
1) ads as irrelevant intrusions (in spite of all data Google collects, ads are mostly irrelevant for any person)
2) ads as ugly or blockers of beauty
3) ads as thieves of attention or downright theft (scam ads, illegal products)
Then, should we pay to get rid of ads or not? Two opposite opinions:
1) paying YouTube support creators
2) paying YouTube rewards the "shitification" of the platform
But even for those who pay there are issues: the content creator's own sponsorships, shorts, the risk of account banning by Google.
Then how about compensating creators directly? (Patreon or PayPal for example)
What I don't get is the questioning on the morality of ad blocking. No one should be obligated to watch an ad in one's own device, regardless of whatever "Terms of Service" (which is not a contract). It may be unfair to the content creator who relies on that revenue though.
Ads shouldn't exist. The fact that most human endeavours now are forced to use ads is insane.
If you say no ads should exist, then what alternatives would you have for that challenge?
Many of the people I watch add "jump ahead" buttons for these sections now, which is neat.
As someone who uses an ad blocker I do think it's immoral, and I do pay for YouTube premium and other stuff where reasonable.
> 1) paying YouTube support creators
> 2) paying YouTube rewards the "shitification" of the platform
I have a third opinion. I expect that if enough people pay Google, they will remove the free service altogether, add ads to the paid service, and perhaps introduce a new, more expensive ad free tier. Paying them not only rewards the enshitification, it encourages the next step.
My household uses Newpipe we don't pay for shit.
I'm doing my best to move my viewing off of YouTube, and move the money off of YouTube, in hopes that it eases the creators moving off of YouTube.
But the only reason so many creators are exclusively on youtube is the fact that anyone can watch there. Google tolerates my ad blocker to some degree (unlike other sites) because the alternative is losing market share and they know it.
If creators feel cheated, they can ask youtube to stop serving their videos for free for its own interests. I'd like to see the status quo change actually.
Anyone is free to do something in private and ticket people for it. I'm doing a concert tonight in my home, it's 100 credits for a ticket, hope you'll come! I can't guarantee anyone will come, but I can guarantee anyone who comes will pay.
There are platforms like Floatplane that use this model.
Then there's the busking model. You do it in public. You can't guarantee anyone pays, but they'll definitely come, and some will probably pay.
YouTube wants both. It wants to be the place where people busk (like the public square) but also force advertising on you. You can't have it both ways. Either go private or accept that this is public and I will do what I want with my browser.
Is it wasted time? That's up to you to decide, then choose whether you want to keep doing that or not.
If you want to charge for it directly, then sell tickets for a concert (put videos on Patreon).
As for the creators, it's up to them to decide whether they want to publish under these terms and risk having their content viewed without being paid for, or not put it on YouTube.
If anything the cost of making the video is sunk by the creator just once and then rapidily payed off.
Once that happens it's just hosting costs and Moore's, Kryder's and Koomey's Laws are brining that down exponetially.
Funnily enough though you never see the amount of avertising shown getting shorter to represent the lower costs involved eh?
This seems like a bug in browsers, or possibly in the spec. Page content and scripts should never be able to restrict what browser extensions can do.
oh its a Chrome feature! Around 2 years ago Chrome pushed an update that speedup time to load first initial page by delaying Extension initialization. Last page you closed Chrome on will load before uBo, will be able to bypass all filters/block and will be able to detect uBo being loaded.
It’s not so much that I don’t want to see ads - nobody does, but very very often the ad breaks the vibe of what I am watching and it displeases me to the point I will invest my soul and energy to block ads. Some real-life examples:
- watching a video about coding where the creator has a monotonic, calm voice that keeps me engaged, and VS Code in dark mode which is easy on my eyes in my dark room at 2am, then suddenly comes an ad with bright lights, incredibly high sound and a high-energy backtrack.
- watching a meditation video, the exact same ad appears.
You get the idea.
At the very least, please ensure the ad is in the same volume as the original video. That alone wouldn’t be too hard. In addition, please at least try to match the background overall brightness or color, and the vibe. All this would create value because people would actually watch much more ads.
Google wants you to watch ads OR pay for a subscription, but it doesn't necessarily care which; they make money off you either way.
The reason Youtube offers a premium tier at all is to cater to the minority market of time-poor money-rich users who would rather pay than watch ads, which is just a smart move to broaden their audience and diversify their revenue streams. But it's not the primary way Youtube makes money and likely never will be.
Using a $20 CPM [1] (Cost Per Mille, the money advertisers pay per 1000 views), $12 turns out to be 12/20 * 1000 / 30 = 20 ads per day. I would argue that the average youtube premium user watches less than that.
And I would argue that youtube really knows the numbers, and google would not lose money. Don't forget they've turned evil ;)
[1] source is the most recent Big Time video
Every premium subscription Youtube accepts reduces the value of its ad-supported audience, not just in an absolute sense (i.e. this user won't watch ads anymore), but in the sense that it lowers the CPM advertisers are willing to pay for the remaining “cheapskates”. The premium subscription price has to account for that, which is why the price should be significantly higher than the average ad revenue per user.
Actually I suspect the logical operator here is `AND`. In fact, this is largely what holds me back from paying for any Youtube subscription; frankly I don’t trust them to show me zero ads ever regardless of what fee I pay. So I will keep playing the cat-and-mouse game as long as it lasts.
If they ever start doing that, you could stop paying. But not paying now for the hypothetical possibility that they may start serving you ads in the future sounds more like an excuse.
I get that as a premium subscriber you still see in-stream sponsored content, but that's because the creator wants that, not Google. I think Google would rather have those sponsored messages be run as regular Youtube ads instead, so they can take their 45% (?) cut of the ad revenue while letting premium subscribers skip them.
It's not enough of course.
Anyway, ads being annoying and disruptive is the point, they want to sell premium subscriptions because a steady $10 a month on a subscription often forgotten about for years is more valuable and profitable to them than showing ads. (I presume)
I haven't watched YouTube since.
I'm very skeptical about this statement.
There is a simple way to stop watching ads: pay for premium. It's 100% effective and works right now.
What you are saying is that you want Google to make your ad experience better because you don't want to pay money to use their service.
You somehow use it enough for ads to bother you but not enough to pay for it.
This paradoxal type of user is too common and makes no sense to me.
I'm perfectly happy paying for two $5 coffees a month that I hardly remember consuming, just because I was perched and a bit tired while on a walk in the city. I pay $25 for a more comfy seat for a 3 hour flight. I pay $15 for a single movie ticket, and another $15 for $3 worth of snacks. I pay $30 for a 30 minute cutting of my hair. I pay $20 for a 3 minute slingshot at the fair. I pay $30 for a 20min taxi.
Yet I refuse to pay $14 for Youtube that I use 30 hours a month, because with adblockers I don't have to. And if Youtube makes adblocking awful enough, I simply will pay. As annoying as youtube ads are, I'd never think to complain about them because it has an easy solution.
For now. With the ever increasing number of "premium" services that promised no ads, but slowly start introducing them, it is just a matter of time before YouTube does the same.
Thus trying to reintroduce ads to the premium users will remove the only reason I’m paying for it in the first place.
I am not claiming that Google is the only company doing that; it is not. But there is a reason that bait and switch is illegal in most places. My 2c.
It may be effective at not showing you ads on YouTube specifically, but then you’re helping Google build a more accurate profile on you (from your watch habits) to exploit further. Personally, I’m not comfortable with that because Google has proven time and again that it cannot be trusted.
I would pay for Nebula.tv if it had a few other specific creators.
Humans don’t value things as a binary decision between it either being worth it as free or equal to the cost it’s being sold at. Everyone has a price point for a service they think is fair, for which they’ll start seeking alternatives when exceeded. This is how markets work.
Time spent does not correlate with cost-independent value. This is doubly true with social media platforms.
Requires getting out a credit card. Even simpler is an ad blocker.
As for the ethics of ad blocking, I'll consider unblocking ads when Google stops with the unethical (think Tai Lopez) and downright malicious ads (deepfakes of Elon suggesting to invest in crap like "Quantum AI"), and only then will I reconsider removing the blocker and maybe even paying.
Put simply, ad blockers provide a safer browsing experience.
- music mixes, good lord - three minutes into some great mix and suddenly I'm hearing from Uber Eats yet again
I want to support the creators, but thank goodness for yt-dlp
YouTube is the most creator friendly social media platform that exists now. Creators choose when to include ads and receive a large amount of the revenue.
Google clearly has the AI know-how to label when videos are important medical videos. They could skip ads and skip forced sign-in, but they don't care enough. There was a viral tweet once about somebody's grandma choking on a fishbone where YouTube responded telling them to buy YouTube Premium, so they're probably aware, but don't care enough. And they're implementing more measures like the forced sign-in for scraping prevention that happen to disproportionately affect public networks at restaurants and hotels. That's negligence.
Why's it so unreasonable?
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2475463?hl=en "YouTube may also place ads on videos in channels not in the YouTube Partner Program."
If you become eligible and join the YouTube partner program I believe there may be a toggle then, but for non partners it's completely up to YouTube.
And the forced sign-in of course never was controllable by creators.
A) sincerely, trustfully, optimistically, etc.
...or...
B) critically, skeptically, experimentally, observationally, etc.
Funny enough, awhile back they made it so that if you turned off watch history, they would disable the front page feed. Not sure if that was seen as a punishment to try to encourage people to turn back on watch history but that also ended up being a welcome change.
I wish that was a configureable feature. I do have watch history turned on, and I find it useful and want to keep it, but I would love to have a cleaner less noisy front page.
I don't see anything on my home page.
I specially open youtube when I want to look at something and I have to search for it.
I still watch related videos, but it's way better compared to what I got on home page.
Alternatively, many creators already upload ad-free versions to their Patreon or other paywalled platforms, they could upload those to YouTube as well to be shown to premium users if YT allowed for it and forced them to.
Alas I'm not willing to pay 13€ a month for just slightly fewer ads.
This approach could work well, since it makes users think their blocker broke YT. Both brilliant and evil.
I don't care if the fake buffering is 100% of the ad length. Not having to see the pre-roll ad and no ad breaks during the video is worth the wait.
The next step is to scrape the videos, strip the ads, store them on a torrent magnet and serve that instead. Yes it would have to be from a shady RU or CN or NK or IN site. I’m fine with that.
Option 1: be a hermit and not watch anything on YouTube ever. You can't look up repair guides, fully use a news website that I'm subscribed to that got rid of their self hosted version, watch a subset of public broadcasts that we pay for via taxes, etc. It's not just entertainment / a Netflix replacement
Option 2: give in and enrich this monopolistic tracking company
Option 3: try to pirate the content
I'd feel very different if this were Spotify or an individual artist: I can use three other music services with massively overlapping offerings from different jurisdictions. Or supermarkets, for the same reason. But if it's irreplaceable and gatekept, I can understand both sides here
Content is uninterrupted without having to engage in the arms race. Music selection is great. Random movies are available.
My home page is on average 60% wasted/irrelevant.
I'm a little surprised they haven't added "AI" yet. They add some prompt "tell us what you like". I tried it the opposite "Do not show me cat videos!" and of course it was just keyword based and started showing me cat videos.
On the video front, my Japanese is pretty good. I watched one high level Japanese language video. Now my feed is full of beginner Japanese language videos. I'm pretty confident if I could ask some LLM "Don't show me beginning level Japanese videos" it could figure it out.
Same with Music. If I play any song from the 80s their shit algo will decide what I want is "hits of the 80s", not "more songs similar to the song I just played". Again, I feel like I could tell an LLM that. Play me songs by band X and songs similar to band X". "Play me songs that influenced band X" (LLM can reference interviews for that).
Fair point. I wonder if this is connected to the way that YouTube seems to rely more on presenting an array of suggestions than flowing linearly through a stream. In any case, I turn off autoplay and am trying to rely as much on search, follows, and curation as algorithmic recommendations, so the hit and miss quality of the recommendations doesn't bother me much personally, I could see how it might not be a great set-and-forget music replacement (for which I already have plenty of options going back into terrestrial radio origins).
YouTube on the other hand...
45% (which is a lot) of the money goes to the giant corporation. The other 55% gets divided up among the people whose content you watched.
I mostly watch smaller creators, so I don't mind 55% of my membership fee ending up in their pockets so they can keep making videos for me to enjoy.
I don't watch ads, the people I watch get paid because I watched. And obviously I'm not happy about the cut google takes and I would rather a higher percentage of my money go to the creators.
1. It's all offline play, so I can use my favorite players like VLC. Also, no buffering (after the initial download, of course).
2. I can do anything I want to the video: make edits, splice ads out, extract audio, generate subtitles or dubs, etc.
3. It saves Google server costs! Well, comparing to streaming the same video from them multiple times with adblock on, at least.
Download the video and then open with `mpv --vf=negate --hwdec=no`.
whatever the merits, this (and google's neutering of extensions in chrome) signals a fundamental attitude shift from ~10 years ago; they're more interested in squeezing margins out of their dominant platforms instead of growth
I just use Vinegar [0] and watch YT on Safari. It also allows me to listen to the videos with the phone locked.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...
Agreed about Orion, I keep it around and update it and try it out every now and again but I don’t think the experience is there yet.
my youtube homepage is just that left sidebar, which has dots if a new video for one of the channels i care about uploads. It totally frees me from clickbait thumbnails, and "youtube rabbit holes".
youtube has just been getting slaughtered with horrible trends of mindless content, low effort documentary stuff, all sorts of low effort garbage with high effort thumbnails/titles. it is so nice to just rid myself of all of it.
like a forest preserve deciding theyd like billboards in the middle of their paths after a few years.
I also wanted to ensure my views resulted in the creators being paid, it goes without saying that the royalties for streaming are abysmal and is a separate conversation, but it was a contributing factor for me.
It might be worth looking into if the pricing differential is similarly minimal where you live.
The average daily YouTube watch time is north of 40 minutes per day for adults in the US. That's a penny per minute for YouTube... 11x cheaper than a movie.
Starting a product or service at $30 / month sets expectations up front (no ad supported free tier)
This is an incompatible strategy with venture backed “get all the market share possible by offering services for free to crush competitors so we can have a monopoly to exploit later” mindset
It's for content that use music. As you said of you want ad free music you need the full one.
An unfortunate aspect is that I’m frequently recommended videos which I would have to pay to watch. As a youtube premium subscriber, feeling like I’m constantly being upsold has begun to grate on me. I’d really appreciate a feature to hide these videos as a premium subscriber, which I have little faith in them implementing. On my laptop it’s easy enough to hide these thumbnails (as I already do with shorts) using ublock origin. However this is making me reconsider my subscription. Why should I have to use a third party tool to best use this service which I’m paying a fairly significant fee for? I’ve similarly used ublock origin to work around recent change where only three videos were shown on each row
That's older than the "membership" concept. They licensed a bunch of television and movies and made them pay-per-view.
A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates.
You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure.
Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,000 bill from your ISP because your content went viral but nowadays their value proposition is more about network effects plus built-in revshare scheme.
Maybe if they paid their users more, so they didn't also have to add 'sponsor segments' inside their video's it would make more sense. The bundling music for the same price is the same crap cable and phone companies have been doing for decades, that most people hate. Let me buy just youtube without ads, and keep spotify.
But as it sits right now, $14/month for video's without youtube ads, but still with ads added by the creators themselves (or paid promotion, I guess) is pretty expensive, compared to $17/month for actual movies with no ads at all.
And for that matter, the number of active viewers is also significantly higher since there's no paywall. AND they also support live streaming.
Imagine going back in time 20 years. You want to buy a newspaper from a stall. And the vendor tells you to wait and stare at an add for 30 seconds before you can pick up the magazine. The alternative is that you give that vendor a copy of your ID and credit card. It's insane.
Most of these problems would go away if we had "online cash" (please don't start talking about cryptocurrency). Want to watch a video? Watch an add or pay €0.01. Of course all the money-laundering hysteria will prevent that from happening.
Ultimately, terrorism is why we have ads.
I was skeptical of SmartTube but it really is the only way YouTube is tolerable anymore.
"Random" advertising is completely irrelevant, and a total waste.
"Targeted" advertising is an unwanted intrusion on my privacy.
Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it -- George Monbiot [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...
In my experience, they not only deliberately increase volume to pretty much screech whatever insipid bullshit is being offered at you, but they also can sometimes run for dozens of minutes unless you manually go to your device and press "skip". TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.
I even wonder how anything so fucking hostile and annoying to a YT free user can possibly be effective? Who's actively paying for all this garbage ad placement with such scummy little playback mechanics?
Until the CALM Act was passed in 2010, networks actually did increase the volume on advertisements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...
If you want to back down memory lane, search on YouTube for old recordings of network TV ad breaks from the late 90s and early 2000s- they’re just obnoxious.
The only thing I miss at all is being able to leave a TV on and have it keep playing something reasonable, not convince itself that watching a car review means I want to watch a screaming kid trolling in Minecraft followed by the Syrian Civil War.
Haha, so then what if i'm young but want some shady gold investments while I look into trying Ambien?
just track what they’ve stopped letting you do. there’s a pattern. they’re tightening every surface they used to ignore. because ig they're done pretending the open parts matter
I run Brave on multiple devices and there's now a "glitch" a few seconds after what wouod be the ads, starts. I put up with this because the alternative is to put up with ads that treat viewers like morons with one hand in the mouse and other in the wallet.
That means if those videos show up in a search, or on your home page, or in a recommendation they do not have the red bar on the bottom that indicates that you have already watched them.
Google is so greedy that they don't care the slightest bit about being fair.
I'd love to use Invidious or Peertube to watch the videos, but I also want my subscription money to go to the video creators. Youtube allocates it proportionally to the viewing time.
.. or a competitor (who's a competitor to LTT? GamerNexus? MKBHD?) would take their place.
LTT does have some interesting videos, but yeah, most of their output is full of ads.
The point is, I'm making zero excuses about why I don't want to see ads on youtube. It's been that way and I want it to remain that way. No subscriptions and no ads. People watching yt on their phones and TVs will still see ads or pay for premium and they can support the service.
Could care less about the social bits. Comments have been filtered better but I will never trust their black box. With Enhanced YouTube extension I remove all of that so I can retain focus apart from the video at hand.
! Stop sites from prompting to sign into Google account
||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p
! Stop annoying reels from littering friend feeds
www.facebook.com##[aria-label="reel"]:upward(2)
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element-show
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
! Don't use the obnoxious new bold font for titles, use the old font instead
www.youtube.com###title h1 yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;)
www.youtube.com##h3.ytd-playlist-panel-renderer .title .yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;)
! Remove branding bugs in the bottom corner
www.youtube.com##div.iv-branding
www.youtube.com##.annotation.annotation-type-custom.iv-branding
! Disable live video previews on hover
www.youtube.com##+js(aeld, /^(?:mousemove|pointermove|pointerenter)$/, buttons)
! Remove "Scroll for details"
www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-fullerscreen-edu-button
! Remove "This video contains paid content" warning
www.youtube.com##.ytp-paid-content-overlay
! Remove badges
www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.badges
www.youtube.com##ytd-badge-supported-renderer.ytd-video-primary-info-renderer
! Remove badges in lists, expand video title to fill that space again
www.youtube.com##.ytd-badge-supported-renderer.style-scope.badge-style-type-verified.badge
www.youtube.com###menu > .ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.metadata:style(padding-right:0!important)
! Remove chat
www.youtube.com###chat
! Remove sidebar
www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer.ytd-app.style-scope
www.youtube.com##ytd-app[mini-guide-visible] ytd-page-manager.ytd-app:style(margin-left:0px!important)
! Remove the shadow over the top of videos
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-top
www.youtube.com##.ytp-chrome-top
! Reduce opacity of the shadow over the bottom of videos
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-bottom:style(opacity: 55% !important)
! Reduce opacity of video length labels
www.youtube.com##ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer.ytd-thumbnail.style-scope:style(opacity:75% !important)
! Remove Next button. I only ever hit this accidentally, losing my place
! and my playback buffer >:-[
www.youtube.com##.ytp-left-controls > .ytp-button.ytp-next-button
! Remove Miniplayer button
www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-miniplayer-button
! Force YouTube to display the complete copyright information in the description
www.youtube.com###expanded-metadata:style(display:block !important)
! Don't load the preview image before the video loads (saves some bandwidth)
||i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/*/maxresdefault.webp
||i.ytimg.com/vi/*/maxresdefault.jpg
! Remove interactions (eg if you never login to YouTube)
www.youtube.com###like-button
www.youtube.com###dislike-button
www.youtube.com###sponsor-button
www.youtube.com###hover-overlays
www.youtube.com###subscribe-button
www.youtube.com###flexible-item-buttons
www.youtube.com###button-shape
www.youtube.com###reply-button-end
! Remove sidebar items that are only applicable to logged-in users
www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1)
www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)
! Remove "Watch Later" and "Add to Queue"
www.youtube.com###hover-overlays
! Remove the "skeleton" shown before the page loads
www.youtube.com##.skeleton
www.youtube.com###info-skeleton
www.youtube.com###meta-skeleton
www.youtube.com###owner-name
www.youtube.com##.skeleton-bg-color
www.youtube.com###home-page-skeleton
www.youtube.com###masthead-skeleton-icons
||www.youtube.com/s/desktop/*/cssbin/www-main-desktop-watch-page-skeleton.css
||www.youtube.com/s/desktop/*/cssbin/www-main-desktop-player-skeleton.css
! Remove the live previews on the scrubber bar (saves some bandwidth, but
! not worth it IMO)
||i.ytimg.com/sb/*
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip-bg
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip-image
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip:style(border-radius:0px;!important)*Why?
I didn't write the filter, hence, "Mostly stolen from elsewhere."
Funny I make YT videos too trying to build an audience, I'd like to not put ads on it but not my choice
I don't understand how people can just accept ads it drives me insane when some random shit starts playing
I already lost money with YT, I bought so many UHD movies on their platform ($20 ea) and they won't stream it in HD unless you're on a supported device or ad-ridden tv
edit: alright, aftrer seeing it's $13 I will get it, I have been converted
I do pay for it, the time to make the content
Sucks how everything is like that nowadays, IG, Reddit
(have to join a platform to be seen)
You seem to ignore that you would probably have no audience - or have a significantly smaller audience - were it not for YouTube hosting your content. They are providing you a service, but you seem to think that nobody - not you, not your viewers - should have to trade anything for that service, despite the hosting and streaming of video being one of the most expensive possible tech services in the world (bar perhaps running genAI models.)
I dunno it's just very annoying how a lot of people have memed themselves into this train of thought where the big tech companies aren't actually providing them anything of value, when if they decided to suddenly stop providing their services they would be up a creek without a paddle.
Your argument only makes sense if you watch the creator's videos exclusively on Patreon (paid by the cut they take from your transaction) or on a platform like Vimeo (paid directly by the creator for hosting). In which case, what Youtube does isn't relevant to you.
e.g. Linus Tech Tips posted up their share of revenue from AdSense in 2024; YT Premium made up 37% of their revenue despite being 29% of their views.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeCP-0nuziE
Whether that makes a given creator more money versus Patreon depends on how much you watch them, frankly.
If YouTube and its content actually has value, then presumably a paywall would have no effect of revenues of YouTube or creators. On the other hand if the content is actually nearly worthless, the vast majority of people would find something better to do with their time.
I know which outcome I’d be betting on!
Until they make us pay, put the entire site behind a paywall or similar, I'll keep enjoying their public web content using my clients of choice, some of which modify the content in various ways for various reasons, entirely of my choosing.
I pay for YouTube and Nebula.
I'll compromise, I'll get premium but still have my adblock
Source: I have Premium and have adblock disabled on YouTube - no ads.
Google is intentionally throttling YouTube, slowing down users with ad blockers
I have a bookmarklet:
javascript:(function() {window.location=window.location.toString().replace(/^https:\/\/www.youtube\./,'http://fixyt.');})()
and whenever I want to watch a YouTube video, I just click that and enjoy an ad-free experience.
I watched a mentour pilot video recently on a machine which did not have adblock or sponsorblock (a meta quest headset). I got the same stupid car ad every 2-3 minutes of it. It is basically unwatchable now with ads.
On top of that, the guy had a 5 minute sponsor crap thing in it also.
Youtube is just ridiculous now.
Rewarding sensationalism without any oversight is the core problem with society today.
Profits over priciples.
What's nuts is reading thought this thread and reading comments from all the people who think that earning money with digital content is a right. And worse, that because they've earned money in the past, they're entitled to do it forever.
There are no longer any guard rails on sensationalism and since the only measure of success is by the very Fox guarding the Henhouse, it's optimized for the Fox's profit, not public's health and society's principles.
Advertising ruined the world. Ad Tech is a cancer.
If creators have a problem with the revenue loss, their contract is with Google and they should take up those concerns with Google. If Google has a problem with how I consume their public content, they can make it non-public or try to block me in some other way.
I owe neither of those entities anything and until they either make the content non-public or find a way to block me without blocking others they want to see their content, I'll keep on consuming it how I like.
This means they’re also collecting data about some random person in my area but I don’t have a Google account either so that data isn’t really useful.
Ad block FTW
At some point I gotta do a network-wide block instead of per computer.
Maybe this is not the norm but I don't perceive most advertising as being particularly effective.
What I am not happy with is a lack of control over the homepage and recommendations. I would really like to be able to easily block channels from ever showing up, but you can only sort of do this if you click "don't recommend this channel anymore" from the homepage. But you can't do this if a video shows up recommended from another video. And overall, it just feels like they are spending so much effort trying to get me to watch the next video instead of enjoy the one I am trying to watch.
For my kids, I came up with an ad hoc policy where they can watch from the homepage / recs on weekends but during the week have to stick to a personal playlist they can only add videos to on the weekends. This removes the algorithmically driven addictive nature of YouTube and unsurprisingly they end up moderating their use of Youtube within their alotted screen time much better. It distinguishes between, "I want to watch this" and "I want to pull the slot machine lever." But I would be a lot happier if I could better curate access to content for my kids too. Youtube Kids sucks, it ends up filtering out a bunch of interesting stuff like carpentry and nature content that hasn't been marked "for kids" in favor of videos of kids shopping for toys and stuff.
Totally a theory but sometimes YouTube has a button that says roughly "show me something new". I think that may be the source of those channels returning.
I'm curious about a buyer's perspective: would you say this is "tying"? (Seems like an ambiguous word for it but I can see no other translation for koppelverkoop)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
To me it seems like trying to undermine the market for music streaming (which is currently somewhat healthy with a handful of competing services worldwide where you can get access to most artists' work) by abusing the monopoly on videos that people often want a subscription on. The parent corp has so much cash to spare, giving away music for nearly free is worth it to make it extremely difficult to compete in this other market. From an individual's point of view, you're a thief of your own wallet if you don't get this two in one deal (assuming you want both). I'm not sure how to feel about people who buy this
Besides from that I feel that I waste a lot of time there anyway so I partially hope it happens.
It will be our personal content censor.
Sure AI will stream Youtube for you, but it will be chock-a-block full of its own ads.
The actors will pause mid sentence, turn to the camera and smile while they slam down a coke and tell us all about the latest samsung phone.
The thing about those idiotic third party ads on YouTube, which is so grotesquely annoying is that, unlike TV ads of old, some of then can literally run for dozens of minutes at auto-increased volume unless you go to your device and skip them at some point. That is some particularly shitty nonsense right there.
What’s worse is the privacy side. Discord apparently leaves the microphone open even when you’re using push-to-talk. There’s been anecdotal evidence from users monitoring their network traffic that mic input is still active in the background, likely being piped to local buffers or held in memory under the guise of latency reduction. That might sound innocent, but the distinction between “open but not recording” and “recording” is razor thin when the user has explicitly told the app not to listen until a key is pressed. At minimum, it’s a trust violation — at worst, it’s surveillance theater.
This is the standard bait-and-switch. Build a good product, earn user trust, then slowly degrade it with tracking, telemetry, ads, and manipulative UX until it’s barely recognizable. Discord used to be a breath of fresh air compared to Skype or Teamspeak, and now it’s another data-harvesting machine with a gamer paint job. It’s telling that more users are looking into self-hosted options or jumping to alternatives like Matrix or Mumble. Discord doesn’t have ads yet, but all the groundwork is being laid — and people are right to be wary.
videos getting more bloated, recycling the same crap with 90% filler. just like google blog spam.
and tell me how much are your shitty ads worth without anyone to watch them?
YOUTUBE is getting F_CKED!!
We all just think that we are entitled to get all that for free?
If you don't want ads, just pay for the damn thing.
If you know what "it gives you wings" or "the happiest place on earth" means, the ads already worked.
Ads are trying to combat obscurity. A brand with bad reputation is far better than a brand nobody's ever heard of.
I'm not the kind of person to be inclined to buy 'premium' because they progressively enshittified their free service to make premium seem like the only rational option, but I'm even less inclined to give money to a company that promotes the complete trash and borderline adult and often fraudulent content of their shorts.
I usually refuse to login to YouTube to find the occasional thing, and I'm always bombarded with this trash.
How can anyone support that? Gross.
Also, it should not be forgotten that the FBI, no less, recommend ad blocking just for general internet safety. YouTube has just as much scam advertising as the rest of the internet, since it's almost all Google (who don't seem to be able to police their own platform, and don't seem to be held to account for such dereliction of duty).
I see also now that the "don't recommend channel" option has been removed (at least for me) which was handy for removing AI slop recommendations. It's fast coming to the point where I'll just avoid YouTube for spending some idle time.
So, Google is merely optimizing the ad clicks and impressions here. If they succeed in becoming too obnoxious with their ads, viewers might leave for other platforms, and then content creators would follow. So, fighting ad blocking has diminishing returns and can actually have a negative impact on them. Which is why ad blocking is still effective in 2025 and why Youtube has thrived by being not too effective with their anti ad blocking measures. This is more about selling the notion to advertisers that they are a really good advertising platform than it is about fighting the minority of users who block their ads no matter what. It won't work. But it won't matter as long as advertisers keep on paying for advertising on Youtube.
The irony of their latest efforts is that it is driving away users from Chrome to more effective alternatives (Firefox, Brave, etc.) and it's driving content creators to depend on sponsor ship deals instead of advertising money from Google. The only reason Chrome exists is actually ads. So, more effective counter measures against ad blocking in Chrome could end up hurting their ad revenue. And Google's behavior is actually causing for increasingly stronger calls to break up Google. None of that is good for Google and their advertising revenue.
Capitalism always wins
Not everyone is American.
With Alphabet being from a country with extreme capitalism, the comment you're replying to seems applicable no matter where the viewers are (regardless of whether I agree with their viewpoint/outlook). YouTube's owners can choose to block or prosecute whoever doesn't comply with their terms. Not saying that's likely, just that: this isn't a matter of needing to be on the American continent
Edit: perhaps interesting to realise that, conversely, laws in North Korea might make it illegal for Alphabet to have certain terms if they want to serve consumers in their market. (A better example here would be EU with copyright legislation that makes it illegal to sign away your moral rights, for instance.) It works both ways and both could legally prosecute the other at the same time and both win in their area! But with YouTube being able to gatekeep the content here, one has more power than the other..
Fundamentally, ads are bad. There just isn't a change you can make to ads that makes them okay.
At a personal level, ads distract us, they tell us we don't have enough, aren't attractive enough, just generally aren't enough. They don't inform us: a one-sided view of a product absent criticisms or comparison to competing products is effectively just a lie.
At an economic level, ads break any benefit to capitalism. Instead of companies competing to provide the best product at the lowest cost, ads make it so a worse product at a higher cost can become the market leader. Ads are one of the primary drivers of the enshittification of everything. Ads allow companies to launch with garbage products that nobody would ever pay money for, slap ads on them to monetize, and thereby prevent competing products actually worth paying for from ever even coming to market.
The only answer is to refuse, on principle, to view ads. If a company receives money from advertisers, you're the product, not the user. If a product has a "free" tier paid for by ads, paying to hide ads doesn't help because you're still competing with advertisers for that company's loyalty, and advertisers will always win in the end (i.e. ads in cable TV--mark my words, there will be ads in all the premium-tier streaming services eventually).
Pretty much all of my YouTube ads are for TV shows, movies, cars, mobile games, consumer products, and various consumer services. Volkswagen, Dove, TurboTax, etc. All incredibly mainstream.
Maybe you're located in a country or region maintain advertisers avoid?
I'm honestly not really sure why you're complaining. If you don't want to be tracked or profiled, you're going to get the lowest quality ads. Why do you think higher-quality advertisers should be wasting money trying to reach you, when you are going out of your way to avoid any interest in them?
To be clear, I'm not criticizing what you're doing to avoid tracking, or your stance against it. But I'm questioning why you would then complain about the ads you receive.
This might be a controversial take, but I don't want to see soft-core porn ads. I don't want to see scam ads. I don't want to see the worst of the worst. It is not a necessary state of affairs that the lowest common denominator ads are ads that are explicitly attempting to prey upon the least informed, most vulnerable members of society.
The fact that the worst ads are the way that they are is indicative of YouTube's willingness to engage in user-hostile activities.
If they were less willing to engage in hostile ads, there would be less hostility towards their ads.
YouTube's solution is extremely simple: vet ads and don't accept money to run hostile ads.
Right, then avoid them. Either don't use YouTube, or else pay for Premium so you don't see them.
You claim people are hostile to watching YouTube's ads because of their quality. But I don't think so -- I think they're mostly seeing normal ads, not scammy ones. Because they're not taking measures against tracking. Your experience would seem to be very much an outlier.
I simply don't see the ads you're talking about, not even a little bit, so I can't really speak to YouTube's acceptable ads policies. But just so you know -- you can also mark checkboxes in your Google profile around which categories of ads you are and aren't interested in. I actually did that, and got less ads for categories I have zero interest in. That may help your ads experience, and make your ad quality complaints go away, if you're philosophically OK with that, since you're providing data freely rather than through tracking.
EDIT: also, I think everyone should block ads. We should snub advertisers and surveillers all of the time. If they want to be hostile towards users, users should be hostile towards them.
Capitalists have had it too good for too long. It's time consumers stop caring about how the poor capitalist will make their dime.
Until the capitalists take the time to respect us, the consumers, we don't owe them anything.
It's time for reciprocity. If they're hostile, we reciprocate. If they're cooperative, we reciprocate.
You pay for Premium?
Then why are you complaining about ads when you don't even see them?
And why are you talking about being hostile to a company when you pay them every month?
I'm even more confused than before.
Speaking of PSAs, the US federal government issued a PSA a couple years ago recommending use of an ad blocker to avoid becoming a victim of financial scams/fraud (purged now for some reason). Why they don't prosecute the ad companies for being the ones to select and deliver the mark is anyone's guess.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221221123349/https://www.ic3.g...
I work in mental health and I am seeing more people who spend a substantial amount on “parlays”. Many examples downplay or hide the behavior from their social network and the extreme examples spend a significant amount. The advertising is obviously predatory and goes against what we know about control dynamics in addict behavior but we tend to view that as a personal moral failing rather than exploiting basic biology and as a result allow the dealer to ruin countless lives before any action is taken (see Purdue and Teva lawsuits)
> Ads however may appear on music content, Shorts, and when you search or browse.
Youtube/google ads? Never bought anything, automatically assume they are a scam.
Note: when security shows up, I'm going to tell them "maybe later" if I'm asked to leave.
I was watching hours every day, and I don’t even miss it. There’s so much content to watch on streaming platforms that I can never run out.
That's equivalent to a Netflix subscription, which puts what, 20 billion into original content each year?
How do you think those video bits get streamed all around the world? Magic?
That's not a bug, but a feature. Its the same difference as a high end restaurant, and a hole in the wall restaurant. Both are serving food, yes, but they are doing business in different categories. You cant go to the second restaurant and be like, the food you served didn't come with a smile like this other restaurant here. They seem to have figured it out, why cant you.
Or similarly, you cant go to the high end restaurant and be like - you charge for water now? Why cant you be like this other hole-in-the-wall restaurant.
They're curating nothing, there's garbage everywhere and you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
To me, YouTube is the gateway to those wonderful hole-in-the-wall places where you get real food made from scratch by people who care. Yeah, there's also a ton of shit. You have to actually make choices, not just take whatever it puts at the top of your recommendations. But the good stuff is there, and it's really good. A gigantic corporation may be intermediating, but the content is real stuff from real people.
Services like Netflix are the soulless mega-chain restaurants serving committee-designed meals that have been focus-grouped and cost-optimized to death.
meanwhile youtube is actively attempting to keep user's viewing as long as possible... netflix probably doesnt really care if you watch for 2 hours a week vs 10 hours a day, they just want the monthly payment.
Then dont go to the restaurant if the "hygiene" is not upto your standards? Why do you insist on eating food from that resturant, and insist that it needs to be free?
It could be ludicrous, if that argument were being made.
For example: What value does your comment provide the world? Enough value to offset the carbon emissions from transmission/storage/retrieval/display? Personally, I'd answer no. Thus your comment itself is a waste of energy.
Only pointing it out because of the irony given the content of your post
Otherwise yeah, don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say
I respectfully disagree.
> don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say
They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy. I shared my "tautology" to illustrate while OP's point may be largely correct, greed is not unique to Google.
More then that, sure they show you ads, GREAT but they screw your device and environment, this makes them no money , a small fraction of users might buy premium but the rest of the users will waste energy and bdevice life, the developers contribute to killing devices and wasting energy.
Furthermore, the appropriate solution to this "problem" would be to stop letting people read anything for free.
Today Big Tech moto should be "Be as evil as you are able if it makes money".
Hopefully some civilized countries can add laws about wasting energy and killing devices for no good reason.
EDIT: The Google/Samsung exampel is affecting the entire planet not only the individual that "choose" that he really wants his device to be screwed and his energy bill to increase. So the individual "freedom" is screwing the entire planet for no fucking good reason , at least if you waste the battery to show ads I can understand it.
What about those electronic devices that will end their life sooner because of that?
My hope is that other people will read my comment, add their own support or feedback and maybe at least one single person will think mroe and had the morals to refuse implementing anti environment and anti user features.
Do they make money from those millions of devices that run with the screen on? How ? Is some devil paying them for the damage caused to the environment?
For ads it makes sense but not for this shit policy, if they hate the users that they use youtube for free and ads are not enough for them then either put more ads, or find some other methods that do not screw then environment (maybe use the sound of crying babies each 30 seconds if you are not a premium )
If people hosted video elsewhere, I would gladly never visit youtube again.
Creators are not going to start paying for uploads when they can push their costs to the viewers.
If I "blamed" the creators, you'd be telling me it's not their fault, they're just incentivised by the system, they're just playing the game.
But when I "blame" the system, you're telling me the system is not at fault, that it's individual choice to choose a near-monopoly on video discoverability that is propelled by and heavily benefiting from the same company's actual monopoly of search.
Is it "YT's problem?"? No, it's to YT's massive benefit, it's my problem when I have to suffer through adverts.
But isnt YouTube a mere player in the game as well?
Not that this was part of the suit, but the whole practice of giving things away for free and subsidizing them with stalking and ads obviously distorts or completely destroys markets, so yes they can be blamed for doing that. The behavior of these companies is so bad that people in a recent thread were claiming things like chat services (where a single computer can provide service for millions of users) cannot be sustainably run by charging money.
I can't think of an adjective less suitable for Alphabet/Google/YouTube than "mere".
So of course they're never going to pay. That's the problem advertising solves -- infrequent users can be monetized.
YouTube already has an option to pay to avoid ads, for frequent users. And lots of people subscribe to it.
What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
Arent you voluntarily using their website? Nobody is forcing you to open your browser, and type y-o-u-t-u-b-e-dot-c-o-m.
> What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
MKBHD, LTT and others are willingly uploading videos to YouTube. YT doesnt have an exclusive deal with any of those. Infact, those folks are free to upload the same video to Vimeo, Twitch and others. What is YT doing wrong here?
> What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
Such as?
I still fail to understand how this is a fault of a company? Would you blame Apple if everyone bought iPhones? What should Apple do? Ask people not to buy their phones?
You're operating under this unrealistic assumption that Google is an innocent entity that has not broken the law to get to the position that they are in.
This is false. Google does not play by the rules and as such your assertion that people should in turn play by the rules when interacting with Google is unreasonable.
Imagine all the restaurants in the world used IKEA for their tables & chairs. Can you say OMG IKEA has a monopoly? No sir, IKEA didnt go into the stores and install the tables & chairs, the restuarants did. Will you be angry with IKEA?
I can certainly imagine such a thing but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the situation as IKEA has as far as I'm aware never been ruled to be a monopoly while Google has.[0]
Ultimately my position on this subject comes down to this: Google does things that are hostile to me. They do things that are hostile to you. They do things that are hostile to society writ large. They break the law and violate the social contract. My morals necessitate responding to such an entity with disregard for whatever they're legally entitled to.
I don't like the way that I'm surveilled by Google and I don't like the way that they abuse their monopoly position and lobby the government to make it impossible for me to evade that surveillance.
To bring the conversation back to where it started: I already pay them with my privacy, I pay for the economic harm their monopolistic practices have on society, and I pay for the corrosive effects their lobbying has on the political structure.
I'm not going to be paying them for an ad free Youtube experience.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/05/business/google-loses-antitru...
Google Analytics is not going around tracking users. They provide a service that the website you decided to go to (cnn.com, bbc.com) is using. If you have to be angry, be angry with cnn or bbc.
Also, client side scripts do not run on the website's property. They are taking advantage of the wide-open security model of web clients (the model they coincidentally get to define because they dump massive amounts of money into giving away a free browser, making competition in the space nearly impossible) to use people's computers for unauthorized purposes. It's a malware payload just like a crypto miner. They should be treated the same way (or more severely) that they would be if they published miners and told web developers to add them to get free money (taking their own cut of course). The operator and the tool creator should both be blamed for shady behavior when the tool is designed and advertised for shady purposes.
Manufacturers make things when there's a market. If Google didnt build Google Analytics, someone else would (Maybe Microsoft, or Apple) because the demand exists.
If GA didn't exist there's no guarantee that the alternatives would create the same negative externalities that damage privacy of strangers while delivering value to the users of the software.
Google Analytics ultimately operates the way it does not because it's necessarily the best way to provide value to the sites that use it, but because it serves Google's monopolistic and unscrupulous interests.
Why haven't they created crypto miners for even more profit? It would be more ethical and less wasteful than the surveillance/ads combo. Obviously others will and have done it.
