We’ve gone full circle
You can at least pay (quite a lot less than a cable subscription) to remove them. It beats paying $80 a month for the great privilege of spending 30% of the time watching ads.
For now, of course.
You can at least pay (quite a lot less than a cable subscription)
Well I should bloody well hope so, considering you also get far less than cable.
YouTube is still mostly amateur or indie content, most of it short-form, and most of it frankly just not very good. There’s still stuff on there worth watching, and I know some people really do consume a lot of content on there in the manner of watching TV back in the day, but objectively it really isn’t the same thing as professional studio content. I can watch some random guy in Ohio do a 15 minute review of some niche thing I’m interested in as much as anyone can, but there’s no way I’d consider that worth the same value as a long form TV series or feature film.
Less? I’d argue YouTube gets you way more than cable
There’s a buttload of high quality content
No, full circle would be more and longer ads.
Anyway, I’m a Smart Tube User :)
I certainly prefer fewer and longer ad breaks, over several short ones, but this still sucks.
Why prefer any of it…block em all and tell corporations to pound sand.
Don’t negotiate with terrorists.
This will probably pull down votes, but I really do want the discuss this honestly.
I despise ads. I block them on everything that I can. I am fine with anyone and everyone blocking anything they don’t want to see.
What I don’t understand is why everyone is so upset with YouTube for trying to get people watch ads?
They have to pay for all the infrastructure somehow and I’m sure it isn’t cheap. What are they supposed to do?
This isn’t rhetorical or argumentive, I’m genuinely asking what the ethical approach to maintaining this infrastructure is.
Personally, I don’t mind the idea of paying YouTube to remove ads. I’m pragmatic enough to understand that you don’t get shit for free, particularly when that shit is using unimaginable amounts of data.
What I object to is that the YT Premium family plan is now more than £20 a month.
For the cost of Disney+ and Apple TV+ I can watch semi-professional video makers talking at a camera for ten minutes. Video makers who aren’t getting paid all that much for what they do. Video makers who also include sponsors reads.
So I fired up the trusty VPN, “flew to Ukraine” and signed up for around £3 a month. Fuck ‘em.
The mad thing is; if there was a £5 a month tier that only removed ads and didn’t include YT Music, I’d sign up to that without question. I watch a good amount of YouTube content on my Apple TV; I’m happy to pay. But I’m not happy to pay what YT are asking.
THANK YOU. I’ve been saying this for ages. I really wouldn’t mind even £8 a month for the no ads since I spend a lot of time on YouTube, but I am in no way paying extra for bells and whistles I don’t need. I already have Spotify, I don’t want to and nor am I going to pay for an extra music service that I just won’t use. I’m on an unlimited data plan for god’s sake, I don’t care about downloading videos.
My major grip with the current ads are that they are obtrusive and repetitive.
On broadcast TV, I dont mind ads as much because the shows were written, filmed, and edited with predictable ad breaks in mind. I have a good idea how long the ad break will be and when they happen. Makes it easy to plan bathroom breaks, drink refills, or discuss what we’re watching.
On Youtube, the ads seemingly pop up at random, usually in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes, there will be 2 ad breaks, and other times, there are 4 ad breaks for similar videos. If youtube would make ads consistent (30 second ad break at the half way point for < 10 mins vids; 15 second at break at 1/3 of the way through the video and a second one at 2/3 of the video for 10 - 30 min vids; etc) and content creators would edit their vidoes for these predetermined ad breaks, they would be much more palatable.
I get that the ad pool is based on tracking data/video content, but watching the same pool of 3 or 4 ads makes me less likely to buy something. Throw in some random ads in there, too, to break up the monotony.
If youtube would make ads consistent (30 second ad break at the half way point for < 10 mins vids; 15 second at break at 1/3 of the way through the video and a second one at 2/3 of the video for 10 - 30 min vids; etc)
This seems like a crazy amount of ads to me. On live TV, I wouldn’t expect more than one ad break every 15 minutes of broadcast, with fewer on things like feature films. YouTube is mostly short form content; there’s no reason why there couldn’t just be ads at the beginning for the vast majority of content, with only the longer videos needing a different approach. If you’re mostly watching <20 minute videos, you’re still getting a similar number of “ad breaks” per viewing hour.
The idea of having a 30 second ad break 5 minutes into a 10 minute video would 100% be unacceptable to me.
It was just an example of different ad structures for different length videos, not anything close to a final proposal. I mostly watch very long form content (>30mins), so my example is probably not the best for shorter vids.
This seems like a crazy amount of ads to me. On live TV, I wouldn’t expect more than one ad break every 15 minutes of broadcast, with fewer on things like feature films
It’s sadly not when compared to live TV. The thing to remember about live TV ad breaks is that commercials are longer, and so are the breaks. On TV, each commercial is closer to 30 seconds, and the breaks are closer to 3 minutes. ~12 mins/hour (4x 3 mins breaks per hour) for TV vs ~3 mins/hour (6x 30s breaks) for my example. Even if youtube doubled up and put 2x 30s ad breaks in a 10 mins vid, that’s still 6min/hour of ads.
Front-loading the ads makes sense for shorter vids. I chose the middle because youtube seems to want to put them during the video, even on the shorter vids. I chose 30 seconds based on ads being 2x 15 seconds long each, which is what I normally see while watching Youtube without adblockers. Maybe prioritize shorter ads in shorter vids? So, 2x 5 second ads instead of the 2x 15 second ads.
I can’t recall a time in history before this last 10 hellish years where I’ve been required to watch ads. If CBS had required that I have some sort of pressure plate to make sure my ass was in the seat during the ad breaks they’d be getting hate too. They can serve all the ads they want, I can choose to watch them. They’re violating the 2nd part of it and incurring the hostility that they should. Everything is turning into a timeshare presentation.
YouTube premium is very expensive for what it is. It should be like $5 a month to be worth the value, for me personally.
I honestly don’t see the problem with video ads embedded in the video stream. It seems like it’d be far harder to slip something malicious to the computer in there than banner ads served from somewhere else. It’s a system that worked for broadcast TV for decades.
To the extent they offer a paid service with no ads, that also seems ethical to me.
The part where Youtube kind of falls down for me is unlike TV shows where the broadcaster is paying for the content, youtube content is basically free to Youtube. So them collecting money seems unfair and leaves the content creators to do sponsored / ad breaks themselves to pay for the content.
YouTube is fully enshitified. Useless app.
I open the vanilla app on someone else’s computer the other day. Not logged in, in private browser mode, and the algorithm was immediately suggesting clips from Fox News and one of those loser Ben Shapiro types.
Even trying to find videos now. The search results seem to be clogged up of junk. Used to use it all the time to find a 30 second video for how to do some procedure or something. Now every single video is 10 minutes long and it’s some idiot talking for 9 minutes about something unrelated and somewhere in the video buried between bullshit is 1 minute of useful content.
Came to YouTube because it was faster and easier than reading the manual but that’s just not the case anymore.
so, what? 4-5 minutes instead of 2? yea, that’ll keep people watching…
something else
The problem is: what else?
Lots of things?
🏴☠️
They really can’t seem to grasp the concept they what people prefer, if they have to watch ads, is 1 short ad per video.
Not multiple short ads per video nor 1 long ad. Just 1 short (15 seconds tops) ad and that’s all.
They are going in the opposite direction
Oh they get it, there’s no way they don’t, they just want more Ad dollars with for less content that isn’t giving them Ad dollars.They’re looking for that sweet sweet middle ground where they can play more ads and you won’t just stop watching.
Cool, more reason to use Grayjay or ReVanced
The new ads suck. It’s so frustrating to use. I’m hoping a PiHole will get rid of em but I think I remember reading that Google does some nasty shit to dodge that
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You can get rid of any ads right now, you only need the right solution depending on where you see the ads. Smarttubenext for TV, ReVanced for your phone, Firefox + Ublock Origin for your PC. Pihole for the rest and Adguard DNS on my phone just to be sure. I can’t tell you when I saw the last ad in my life.
The Monkey’s Paw has curled.
I know of SmartTube for android TVs, but has anyone found a solution for TVs running Tizen?
The availability of Tizen apps is abysmal
I looked around a year ago and I couldn’t seem to find anything. People just don’t seem to develop for Tizen. I ended up buying Google TV and sideloading everything I needed.
So, TV then… 🙄
I wish there was a way to stop ads on Roku. I’d rather watch on my TV, but my phone doesn’t have ads, so I usually use it.
There’s this: https://github.com/iBicha/playlet
But I haven’t quite figured out how to use it yet.
There are no ads.
This community is obsessed with YouTube ads lol
To clarify, not trying to advocate for ads of whatever idc, just wish I didn’t see a dozen posts a day about YouTube Ads
Youtube ads, what musk did today, something about trumo, youtube add blockers, what musk said today, abortion in the us, youtube code on FF, what muck corp did today…
The fediverse news cycle.
