At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what.
And to be clear, I am not trying to equate Adblocking to video piracy. To me, the fact that I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn’t constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube. I would also never click on an ad purposefully, no matter what it is for.
With all that being said, I am a hopeless cause and I don’t think that anything will convince me to buy YouTube premium, but I also used to think that about MP3s.
My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?
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It may be too late to turn this ship around, but there are a few things that, at least for me, would make YouTube ads less of a problem:
- Vet all the ads. Do not allow links to malware sites, scams, or low-quality merchandise and services to be on the platform.
- Make the ads less annoying. Don’t stick them into weird spots on a video.
- Stop tracking me and trying to display targeted ads. I value my privacy, and like OP, I am never going to click an ad.
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they make too much money off of each of these for google to consider doing any of them, other than maybe improving insertion algorithms so placement is in ‘better’ spots… but ‘better’ for you and the viewing experience and ‘better’ for them and click-thru rates are likely different outcomes.
too much money
That’s the rub. There’s a LOT of money on the table.
I think its ad model problem as it’s only “sustainable” through shitty practices that lead to ad blocking. Most people who get adblock do it because they’re just tired of ads and it should be this way. Small fair ads are fine with almost everyone but greedy assholes would never give in for that - it has to be in your face, unvetted spam.
This, I don’t mind ads besides my content, I despise ads replacing the content, multiple times, with the same ad I already saw.
I don’t mind paying for no ads, but not at those prices.
I tend to agree. Especially with midroll ads. And I also see YouTube Red/Premium/Plus as too expensive especially compared to free.
I wonder if it cost $1-$3 per month instead of $14 if they wouldn’t get so many more subscribers that they would still end up making more money.
Of course they would still be incentivized to slowly raise prices over time but I could be talked into $2 a lot quicker than $15.
They had me as a paying customer when the Premium Light tier was a thing and just offered ad free viewing at a reasonable price. Then they got rid of that plan at the very same time they rolled out this mission to beat ad blocking plugins. That’s bad faith right there. My choice now is to get a plan at at least 50% more a month with added extra crap I didn’t ask for and would never use (music, etc).
So I’m not their customer anymore.
These companies clearly won’t be satisfied and I’m sure a ton of their customers will just keep forking over more and more money for worse and worse service, but I’m done. I’m pulling up stakes on all streaming video platforms. Good luck to them I guess.
Personally I delight in blocking all youtube ads. I won’t stop if I have a choice.
Using ublock origin and sponsorblock is the right thing to do. I will never allow ads for as long as I live. And I will never pay/buy YouTube premium since I can get all the features for free through modded versions of apps/browser extensions.
Yep. They use and sell your data whether you block ads or not. So they’re still making money off of those of us who block ads. I don’t owe them anything lmao. It’s sad seeing so many people in other threads defending YouTube/Google while they’re increasing the price of premium and locking shit like background play and higher bitrates behind a paywall all while selling out data. Nah fuck em
I agree, fuck em
Dunno if YT can be saved, I don’t belive that enshittification is a reversible process
My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”?
Their goals is definitely not to convert everyone. This is just to make using adblockers annoying enough that they can convert a substantial amount of adblock users into Youtube Premium users. They will eventually stop the war and allow the small minority of successful adblockers to continue if they can’t find an easy way to eliminate the most popular extensions entirely.
Their end goal is to make YT Premium more of a standard like it is for other streaming services so people consider it the default way to engage with Youtube and not as an extra service.
I guess it’s harder to do this after 13 years of default “free” content. It’s easier for someone like Spotify to do that because there has always been the option to pay for premium.
I remember in the earlier days of Spotify there were a lot of ways to get half priced service just by finding xyz code or paying $5 for a code on eBay that got you a year of half priced Spotify. I don’t know where those came from or how those existed but it was definitely what finally convinced me to subscribe.
(I’ve since cancelled in favor of buying CDs again but I realize I’m the oddball in that scenario)
I just stopped using YouTube. I can get all my music elsewhere.
They need to stop rapidly changing the terms of the agreement. This is the problem endemic to the platform. It’s starting to lose shape because the ads are the problem.
If this was an issue with the quality of content:
ideally creators would get to choose their ad roll spots. This would make it less jarring to the watcher. It’s also terrible that you can get ads for something like BP on a video that’s basically surmised as “That time BP poisoned a lot of children”. (See climate town) l. Also, if the ad revenue split was better, creators wouldn’t then have to shoe horn in extra ad spots into the content of their videos.
However, I don’t think it’s a problem with quality of the content, but the quality of the ads.
I believe Adblocking is not piracy issue to the end user as much as it is protection measure from malicious content. It’s up to the user to qualify what is “malicious” or not in the end. Users who use adblock do not have a good relationship with online advertising not because it annoys them, it’s because it threatens them. This is less so just a YouTube problem and more of a entirety of Google’s business model problem.
Becoming a better ad platform is a tough challenge when advertisers by practice operate in a manipulative bad faith space. We don’t trust ads.
Yea, that’s not true…I use ad block because ads are annoying as fuck.
I agree. They do operate in bad faith. And not only do they throw ads into every possible crevice but the advertisers themselves may be bad faith actors. It’s easy for a local radio station to decide not to run ads for a shady local business but YouTube doesn’t really seem to have anything in place to vet advertisers or a robust system to report ads for malfeasance.
I’m interested in the framing of advertising as a threat rather than just an annoyance. I think even ads for something like laundry soap being spammed over and over for hours on end can be harmful even without being directly malicious. As someone who has been blocking ads for 10 years, every time I am on someone else’s device the amount of garbage that just gets thrown into your face by default is just atrocious.
Just wait until YT makes high res video options premium only. :)
Edit: I adblock, because fuck ads. But I also use yt less than ever before. I used to use it for entertainment, but nowadays I only use it when I specifically search for something.
but 4k is already locked behind a paywall
In podcasts, where I can’t block ads effectively, I will instantly skip any canned ads and even avoid podcasts that have too many canned ads. On the other hand, when podcast hosts do their own ad reads, it doesn’t bother me too much. In the best cases, they are funny enough that I feel like I’m missing out with the ad-free premium feeds (I subscribe to some podcast Patreons).
I also don’t really mind sponsored segments from YouTube hosts, though it’s highly dependent on the content. Most of the channels I follow have ad reads that are reasonably well aligned with the content and tone. In some cases, they are actually useful. I still run SponsorBlock, but I do often read through the video descriptions of my favorite channels to see what they’re hocking.
There is no imaginable scenario where I would tolerate hypercheerful actors talking about insurance or cars. Get outta town.
I get YouTube Premium because I pay for YouTube Music, but I’ve tried watching ad supported YouTube on a computer I wasn’t logged into as I was troubleshooting my main computer. I can tell you that I wouldn’t even bother with the ad blockers. If there was something on YouTube that I really wanted to watch, like an old concert or something, I would just download it with JDownloader and add it to my Jellyfin server. If that doesn’t work, if just move on. There’s a lot more entertainment available for free than I could ever possibly consume in three lifetimes.
Yeah similar deal with me. J-Downloader > Plex is my go to now. It’s pretty great. Can stream the stuff on my phone at the gym super easy.
My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?
My initial/gut reaction was “obviously relevant ads based on the content I’m watching”, but I don’t care how relevant the ad is when I’ve seen the same Raid Shadow Legend ad across multiple videos I’m gonna try to skip it (or as I did long, long ago: adblock it).
I don’t even know what actual YT ads are now, only the integrated creator ones that they’re personally sponsored by… the hello fresh and world of tanks and manscape and debrand etc., which I’ve started auto-skipping on a channel by channel basis based on very few criteria: the entertainment value/effort they’ve put into the ad (so Drew Gooden is usually always funny and gets a pass, same for channels like Wulff Den or Th3Jez or Critical Role) but certain ones just get manually skipped regardless (no matter how funny you are, I don’t want to sit here and listen to you talk about Manscape for 3 minutes) and how often I end up seeing them (which in these instances, isn’t often because they’re channel specific usually)
So I guess it mainly boils down to relevant ads that aren’t soulless and that I don’t see 3x every other video?
FYI your title has a typo. It says “abblock”
Fuck abs. All my homies hate abs.
My preferred abblocker ice cream. 100% effectiveness for me, no abs in sight!
At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking.
Lol, no, they aren’t. If they wanted to they could just throw everyone with an adblocker out. The only reason they aren’t doing this right now is not wanting to piss off their users (and some vague EU data privacy laws).
The absolute best you could accomplish against them as a user is hiding the ad, but you’d still have to wait instead of being able to skip.
Besides that: I thought about getting YouTube premium (+ music), but now they’re already jacking the prices further up. So I’ll just keep using uBlock Origin and if that no longer works cut back on my video watching time.
They’ll lose…they already forgot why they beat out yahoo for search.
There’s other platforms salivating at YouTube imploding.
What I meant is that they have the technical capability to lock you out when using an adblocker. They already do in a few countries (you can watch 3 videos then get kicked out). It’s not a technical issue for YouTube.
There’s not a single decent platform out there to replace YouTube. Even Vimeo is tiny and can barely keep up with demand.
And why should someone sink a massive amount of money into infrastructure without a way to make profit? If you try to monetize it from the start you’ll never build a large enough userbase.
They already do in a few countries (you can watch 3 videos then get kicked out)
And people already figured out a way around this. They can only ever kick out adblock users temporarily, not permanently.
They absolutely can, it’s not that difficult. The only thing they can’t really avoid is video sharing (like a download site where you can re-host the videos), besides throwing lawyers at them.
But to block you watching on youtube.com? Easy as fuck.
