It's perfectly fine and valid to question the pile of JS code executing in Youtube webpages, but in this specific instance the performance issues are caused by ABP/AdBlock. The issue has been acknowledged by the developers[1]. It affects only the latest version of both blockers, not previous versions, so it makes no sense to keep speculating Google is at the root of that specific issue.
Out of curiosity I investigated these performance issues myself using profiling sessions[2] and the faulty code is definitely in the latest versions of these extensions.
uBO has the most people working on providing fixes though, and they get them out pretty fast. I've never ran into a situation where I couldn't get YouTube working again by clearing my filter cache so far.
Horrible journalism and simple rage-bait. I wonder if anyone will update these articles or maybe even issue an apology for slander now that they know what was the cause.
Please, a regression bug in an extension wouldn't get that many page views. Better post a slanderous hit piece on a major website, that will pull in the clicks.
Tech journalists mostly just suck. They barely understand what they are writing about. I think their industry resents us taking away revenue from them, so they write these ridiculous articles to stoke FUD against tech.
I absolutely can't wait to see these people automated out of a job. I have zero doubts GPT-4 would have produced a better article given the same source information.
I do find this to be somewhat true as well.
Most tech journalists make news for everyday people and not really for people and not for technical professionals. There's some holdouts but its few and far in-between.
It should. It's the same cognitive error one so often sees software engineers display, in this case reflexively, while speaking with undue confidence outside the field.
Now, how do we fix this? YouTube's ad model sucks. Their algorithm sucks. Their front page sucks. They've captured a bunch of creators though so often YouTube is the only place you can find someone.
I want those creators to benefit from me viewing their videos. I want the fact that I view a video and like it to help other people find that video in their recommendations. I want an algorithm that shows me things that are interesting and relevant not one that promotes the spammiest and most ad heavy videos that barely have anything to do with my watch history.
Having an alternative front end is nice but I don't want to rob YouTube of the money they spend on hosting the videos.
So, how do we do this?
Peer to peer fails when there is little interest in something or when most people leech and it sucks for archiving old content.
Hosting it all in one place is super expensive and hard for a small group to manage without turning into YouTube.
Maybe we could find a way for the creators to host their own content and get paid when people view it while being part of a large federated network for easy discoverability?
Please list any projects you know of, I'm sure there are a lot of people here who would be willing to contribute or donate.
Isn't that basically what Nebula is trying to do? It's a company not a project, but it pays creators and some of my favorite creators do publish their stuff there first. I've subscribed because I think it's important that they succeed.
Yes, Nebula is exactly that. But HNers here prefer to continue supporting Google instead of the service that explicitly wants to cater to their supposed wishes.
I started paying for YouTube a couple of years ago and decided it’s worth the money. I watch YouTube a lot more than, say, Netflix and they’re priced around the same.
When I owned an Apple table I saw this beer ad about 20 times in a row, while watching a conference video. It had an annoying song. And I made a solemn oath to myself I will never buy a beer with that brand again in my life.
The sad thing here is I doubt the beer company is intending this to occur. They just offer Google $X spending, and they are ensuring they get every one of those $s.
A similar thing happens in a lot of the streaming platforms. The same ads are shown relentlessly. Advertisers aren't stupid, and they are aware of ad fatigue. I can't imagine they are possibly happy about the situation. OR...I have no clue what I'm talking about and they are quite tickled about the situation and this is why it continues
I wish your response was more generalized and people would punish brands for intrusive/abusive or advertising in bad taste. In Europe and perhaps other parts of the world advertising is a bit more bearable as compared to what’s the norm in the US.
Advertisers can pay a premium to frequency cap their ads. Usually they get a sweet heart deal on remnant inventory, which sounds like what you’re watching.
But how effective is it for sales? Watchere could get alienated from abusine ads and in turn avoid the brand, does’t anyone really care? It’s all dumb meaningless metrics all the way down?
No, it activated itself a few months ago on mine. There was never any prompt. The setting is way down in a submenu and had two separate switches enabled; no chance I could have hit it by accident.
It's nice to know that it can be toggled back off, though. The ads themselves certainly gave no indication.
Everything gets pushed to its breaking point in the cycle of improvement and then enshittification, and YouTube is the perfect example.
Loads of people were happy with the ads early on. One ad, immediately skippable but occasionally it would grab your attention and you'd stick through it, and then you got to the content.
Now it's multiple ads, many unskippable, and then randomly inserted ad breaks with zero respect for the content (you would think that Google would have the AI chops to find appropriate "intermission" points), all so you can watch the content where the creator is pushing snake-oil supplements, pillows and VPN products. It has reached the point of absurdity. For a content system where a tiny fraction of creators are yielding all of the rewards.
And while Premium seems like the solution, at least for the former problem, we all surely realize that once Google has captured enough of the market in Premium, "trials" of Premium, "curated" ads will begin. Something something support creators.
As a total aside about ads, I'm surprised the ad industry has made zero headway into ad customization or even variations. There's some gambling ad that plays over and over again during NFL games here in Canada (and probably all other sports) that has a guy talking about his "system" for gambling responsibly or some such whitewashing of a garbage industry. The other guy then reveals his system and it's a cat pawing at some balloons. I've seen this ad literally thousands of times. I don't even know what fungible, evil gambling company runs the ads because it's tuned out so much. But couldn't they have dozens of variations of the guy revealing his system? How is that not a thing? 100s of variations. Thousands. It would probably capture my attention instead of always the same cat balloons thing.
> But couldn't they have dozens of variations of the guy revealing his system?
Interesting thought. There is a big cost to this on the ad creator side. I also wonder about how they would make a customizable standardization for this?
In email we can use fields like your name and job title, for example with targeted LinkedIn recruiters.
I can foresee video ads which utilize AI calling your name.. I guess this is Minority Report..
But underlying this modern web ads already give us granular targeting though interests. So most of the benefit is already there.
Who is the "user" in this case? The viewer, the publisher, or the advertiser? They all have very different needs. Two of them are being served very well in all of this as long as not too many viewers are being pushed away.
I am not defending this. In fact, as a "user", I am actively using Youtube less over this. Just providing the example of these internal concepts can be twisted by perspective.
Though I do suspect I'm in the minority on this website, £12.99 a month (£155.88 a year) for one website is very hard to justify when you're on very little income.
I would pay much more for YouTube if they offered proper search and filtering tools. There's so much interesting stuff hidden behind light years of fluff. Ymmv, of course.
> £12.99 a month (£155.88 a year) for one website is very hard to justify when you're on very little income
They are positioning YouTube as a super-premium product (relative to other streaming services). An underlying takeaway might be that advertisers no longer value users "on very little income" in a positive real-rate environment.
It's not just advertisements, though -- individual creators run sponsors, Patreons, and their own midroll ads. A pretty crazy percentage of YouTube is ads, even with uBlock Origin.
I agree it sucks, but if we are being honest here, technology was never for people on very little income. Everything has been free for so long because of ads, but then people started using ad blockers, so the services responded by adding more ads, leading more people to use more ad blockers.
I don't think most people who use ad blockers understand that the ads are literally the price you pay for the service. If you think your time is worth more than the ad length, work for an hour and pay the subscription. I know it sounds crazy when I put it this way, but there's no such thing as free internet video.
If you own anything that breaks during that year, you can probably recoup all that money by watching a YouTube video with instructions of how to fix it.
Edit for the angry down voting hackers: Try searching YouTube next time you have a problem with your vehicle or household appliance. There is usually somebody there who made a video showing you exactly how to fix it by yourself, so you don't have to buy a new one or pay somebody to fix it. There is no better resource AFAIK.
What about people that were willing to pay Premium Lite and got fucked by YouTube when they summarily ended that subscription tier to push people into the more expensive Premium with unnecessary features? Are those paying users getting shafted or do those end up in "not being worth focusing on"?
I paid YouTube Premium Lite to get rid of ads, I will not pay 2x for the same feature since I do not need offline, Music, nor background play, if they decided to cut my use case from their offering by forcing me to pay extra rent then I can decided to not pay them and use an adblocker.
I do not need to bend over for a digital feudal lord.
No one is forcing me except there's no other place on the internet to find educational content about some of my hobbies. I don't have a choice to go somewhere else to watch them and learn (and for some, not even read, it's mostly in video tutorial form); they are exclusively on YouTube because there's no other place to upload them to be syndicated in a discoverable way... Give them an open standard for that and there will probably be competition so I can move away from YouTube.
You are either being extremely naive about the state of the internet in 2024, or do not use YouTube for the content I do, or are just being obtuse to try to make a point.
"No one is forcing you" is a non-sequitur, it's a thought-terminating cliche that does not work when platforms have taken over and fenced off huge parts of the internet, c'mon. I'd love to avoid YouTube if there was another option, there simply isn't.
Comparing YouTube with Hulu and BBC is... Just stupid. What do these services have in common apart from "they display videos"?
Which are now also starting to add ads to their "basic" offerings, even though the "basic" offer is costing more than the "full package" used to cost 2-3 years ago.
It's not a marriage. It is a string of relationships with different people, all of them with a history of abuse and manipulation and a unfounded belief of "this one will be different". No, thank you. I rather preempt the whole thing and stay away from all of them.
Let me summarize: I do not accept the premise that I owe them anything for viewing the videos that are publicly available. I do not accept the premise that they are entitled to their business model. I do not accept the premise that they can dictate how I watch the video or how my browser (aka the user agent) must behave.
If they do not want to serve content for customers that do not pay, they need to authenticate and paywall their site. Destroying the competition by price dumping and changing the rules after you are a de-facto monopoly is not only immoral, it is illegal.
It's turning out to be worse than a monopoly, it's becoming a feudal system, we are all paying rent to the lords (Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.) through our attention, through our piecemeal data that ends up creating a whole identity of ourselves to their systems. We are feeding all of them with free work about what we like or dislike and allowing them to shape our behaviours based on this free labour.
They fenced of parts of the internet, there's no way to compete with Google on YouTube, there's no way to create an alternative marketplace to Amazon, they control these now and we all need to pay rent.
If you take off the hate-tinted glasses and think about YouTube without prejudice, then I think you could come to another conclusion. YouTube is one of very few places were an independent or small-time creator can publish their content just in the way they please and get paid for it without having to do anything else aside for publishing their work. That's incredible. That gives so many people a chance to make a living by their creativity. Compare with Spotify, which is the only other comparable platform that exists. They pay peanuts to their creators in comparison to YouTube. Instagram, Facebook and all other social media pay nothing at all.
It would be cool if some other platform appeared, that paid creators better. But YouTube is the only platform letting anybody be a paid creator that exists for video. Expecting creators to set up their own distribution channel and payment platforms would mean that only creators who are also web developers deserve to be paid.
YouTube in 2024 is also completely different to YouTube in 2014. It has much more quality content than all other streaming platforms combined, just because of the immense of amount of content there. If you set up your subscriptions right, it is a good experience.
Why should we let content creators off the hook, if the money they make is tainted and originally gained from a company that exploits user data and used its capital to outspend the competition until they were no more?
Why is that only YouTube can pay so much? If no competitor can come close to them, does it occur to you that perhaps this is a problem?
Of course you don't have to let them off the hook. If you don't like them, don't watch them. That's how boycotting works. You don't need to pay them any mind at all. There is plenty of room for competition against YouTube, as evident by YouTube not even being the largest service in the sector. That is still Netflix and cable TV. And they pay their content creators much more than YouTube do, but only the content creators that they choose for you to watch.
They are not entitled to their business model. If a content creator wants money to let me watch a video, then they either make this explicitly by forcing a transaction or they make their content public with the hopes that a percentage of them will convert into ad views or sponsors. What they can not do is force me to watch the video on their terms or expect that the extensive distribution guarantees them an income.
Simply "boycotting" won't do much here. The idea is to find a way to signal to content creators that relying on Youtube is a losing proposition.
Why not? They're not forcing anybody to watch their videos. You know this. And they're explicit about ad-blockers not being welcome. YouTube is not a losing proposition, it is the only platform accepting everybody as content creators. You haven't provided an alternative.
But I hope that the entire platform becomes premium only and ad-free. That would be a fair solution for everybody.
> They're not forcing anybody to watch their videos. (...) You haven't provided an alternative.
They operated their business at a loss until they were the only alternative.
Remember Joost? Remember Vimeo? Again, why do you think that no other competitor managed to compete with YouTube? What is more likely to happen: Google has created a product so inherently good that no one can even come close to it, or Google has cheated its way into a winning position?
> They're explicit about ad-blockers not being welcome.
"Not being welcome" is not something they can enforce in a contract and there is already legal action against them in the EU, because they can not discriminate against users of ad-block without collecting user data.
> But I hope that the entire platform becomes premium only and ad-free. That would be a fair solution for everybody.
I wish that as well, but it would require them to willingly stop with their (unethical) practices that put them at an advantage. Do you realistically think this is going to happen?
Let me put another way: what odds do you give for them closing down YouTube for non-paying customers in the next 3 years? If we make a bet where I pay $10.000 that they will not close, and you have to pay $1.000, do you take it?
If you actually read my comment, I haven't predicted anything about YouTube's business model. I wrote that I hope they would paywall their entire catalog (like Netflix). That's what I would personally prefer, nothing more. And it's not out of the question, things are changing quite rapidly now that we're a few years into a global economic depression. Once honest advertisers realise how low the return of online advertising has become, it will become more difficult for Google, Meta and others to attract them. Left will be the scam advertisers (who are already a large part of online ads), driving customers away from the product and maybe even start attracting the interest of the law. I'm surprised that all these tech giants haven't yet been prosecuted and fined billions for allowing outright scams on their platforms.
What is the real value in YouTube? It's the videos, and there's a much greater amount of videos and a much greater amount of the highest quality videos on YouTube than on any other platform. Yet, many more people pay for Netflix and cable. As long as YouTube has the free, ad-supported tier, many people will not pay for the product. Only because of psychology and the way that "free" messes with people's reasoning. If YouTube became paid only, I think a lot of consumers would rethink.
You went from arguing that people must comply to YouTube terms if they want to watch the videos to "I hope they paywall their catalog, but I don't think they would do it" while being "surprised they haven't yet been fined billions for allowing outright scams on their platforms".
You really don't see a problem here? Do you think that people should not react to this complete disregard for ethics? Do you think that people should just accept that content creators (who are in on it and stand to gain from that) are just victims in this system and should still be protected?
If there is no ecosystem -- if there is no way for creators to make money for the countless hours they put into creating content -- that's a net negative for users.
Just look around -- a lot of amazing creators talk about how YouTube is what really enables them to do what it is they do. Mark Rober, Destin Sandlin, Linus Sebastian, Marques Brownlee, etc have all made statements to that effect.
If you, as a user, don't want ads, that's okay. There's a no-ads version of YouTube, YouTube Premium.
I find it very funny that everybody bemoans the ad supported ecosystem of the internet, then Google gives an ad free alternative with a monthly cost, and everybody complains that the cost is too high.
I pay for YouTube premium, I see no ads and the content creators are supported. I’m glad Google is going to war with ad blockers in this context where there is a paid alternative.
Exactly, just like cable TV, the next step is paid with ads!
Once an advertiser, always an advertiser.
There was a great 20 retrospective on CNN (24 years ago in June and no doubt put together by a thoughtful intern) that showed the CNN anchor talking about how being a paid cable news program meant they could be trusted not to be influenced by advertisers... then they cut to advertising!
We heard this tale many times already. Funny thing: if they started showing ads even to YouTube premium subscribers, they wouldn't even be first. Ridiculous.
I dont understand this perspective. "Will you still like the product if all its functionality is removed?" Obviously not, but so what? When that day comes you can easily get rid of it.
The point is that paying YouTube now is encouraging them to do that in the future.
The whole thing is enshitification. YouTube is now making their product worse in order to push people to pay them more for it. Those who go along with this are likely to keep on paying as they gradually increase prices while reducing functionality.
Those who choose refuse to pay more to avoid having hour long unskippable ads and other nonsense are telling YouTube that this whole process will not be better for them in the long run. That they are fighting an unwinnable battle.
I get it when people were willing to pay before. Maybe they actually care about having YouTube Music, and they liked it as a convenient way to pay creators, and also chip in a bit for YouTube. What I don't get are those who choose to pay now that YouTube has started deliberately making their service worse by adding a ton more ads and now trying to keep you from blocking them.
And I very much do not understand anyone who is okay with any company going after adblock users, as you're just encouraging the Internet to get worse--either showing more ads or having to pay to access.
This is mostly due to an artificial timeout written within YouTube’s code to act as a laggy internet connection. While this action taken by YouTube isn’t brand-new, more users are starting to see the tactic in use.
Crazy. The ad blocker wars are reaching new levels. If this implementation is client-side the fix should be trivial. Thwarting ad blockers and optimizing ad delivery is the main focus at google and other ad-supported tech businesses such as Meta, not Ai or anything else even if Ai is getting all the media attention now.
Also, if I were an advertiser, I would not want my ads shown by people using ad blockers, no? These are viewers who are least inclined to buy anything. Google should take this as feedback that the ads are bad.
Unfortunately ads work even if the person is very disinclined to the purchase when viewed. When faced with a decision in store many months later, even years, whichever brand you recognize more will be more likely to be purchased. Ads are a very effective form of brainwashing. One might recall the adage that "there is no such thing as bad PR".
I know this is often repeated and believed, and to be honest I sort of believe it can work, but my belief is unsupported.
Are there serious and conclusive studies showing that ads affect purchasing decisions "subliminally" like this? Even when you are not interested in the ad, or even irritated by the fact you're not allowed to skip or hide it?
This is a common argument that some people are using. Maybe it works for many people but for me ans my circle we usually would ignore the products that spam you with ads everywhere. So for example if I am looking for a VPN service I will never even consider Nord VPN in my search quest. Their claims in the ads are unbelievable. I apply this at all products in different areas. So my mind ia trained to, oh this was thr product I saw these ads over and over encouraging me to buy it, so it must be bad let's look into something else.
Your actively thinking of the brand you want to avoid; so at least the ads were successful in registering the brand. Even if your avoiding said brand it's probably counted as success in terms of brand awareness.
I have automatically started to discount companies that need to ram ads in my face.
If you are that desperate for me to buy your product instead of your competitors’, and I don’t see them aggressively advertising, I assume it is because their product is superior and you need to make up the difference with ad dollars.
Even if that wasn’t true, a small part of me won’t want to buy your product out of sheer spite.
Are we sure this is true? The last few years we have seen huge amounts of psychology research be discredited and overturned. Is it possible that the foundational ideas of advertising wouldn’t replicate, but everybody is too scared to look?
> These are viewers who are least inclined to buy anything.
How do you figure? No one likes ads and everyone thinks they are personally immune to them. But they are still effective, somehow. I seriously doubt whether someone has an ad blocker installed is indicative of some characteristic about them that makes them not worth advertising to.
In fact we can gauge from advertiser actions that probably the most relevant fact about them is simply the ad blocker, which is why they want to get rid of the blockers and advertise to them. They know ads work on us, even when we believe otherwise.
You think so? What if the ad industry is stuck in a bubble and has no idea what works and what doesn't? All they need to do is keep their customers (not us) convinced that ads do something for them, and push to maintain the status quo (anti ad blocker solutions).
There was this article on HN in the past few days [1] about a company that gave up on the use of cookies on their site. Go look how full of jargon and dubious inferences it is. Even if they're trying to do a good thing, they still seem isolated in their own marketer's bubble.
There was also an article about some new Google anti email spam protections (lol, Google protecting us from marketing). I'm not going to try and link to that one. Edit: surprising but i found it [2]. If you look at the comments here on HN you'll see some people either honestly believing or pretending to believe that their email newsletters are something that people want. Again, bubble.
Honestly I do waffle between these two views of it. That they do work and so we should avoid them or they don't work and the entire internet is a bubble built on top of a fake idea and so we should avoid them.
I don't see how both can be true and I find both equally compelling, with comparable explanatory power of different things I see. But for the specific purpose of deciphering the actions and motivations of ad companies I think assuming they work is a more useful view. Presumably ad companies are acting as if ads work, and are assuming they work equally well on people running ad blockers, if they can get them past the ad blockers.
I find them corrosive to my soul and culture either way, and ad companies are acting towards me as if they work. So in this context I think it makes sense to also act as if they do.
> Also, if I were an advertiser, I would not want my ads shown by people using ad blockers, no?
This is a good point that marketers will never accept because their livelihood depends on the proposition that what they push down the trough will seem so delicious that the hogs will slurp it up.
I’m an ad blocking zealot and feel a big FU towards ads that slip through. Much less likely to trust the brands or their products, especially the scummy junk that pops up on yt. (“I bet you think doing cardio is the best way to lose weight…”)
This just seems a completely pointless exercise, you could make me wait 5 minutes and I'd either just wait or watch my videos elsewhere. I can't stand the ad format and find the ads on YouTube annoying and stressful.
But you know we can't be that huge of a % of your viewership so maybe just deal with the fact we're unprofitable and focus your engineering efforts on making your ad viewers more profitable and less time on doing things that might just push me away.
You think you're irreplaceable but TikTok will launch long form in the next 2-3 years and in 5 years from that you'll be Facebook. So like maybe just be happy you have my eyeballs at all.
For me it has been lagging and terrible the last few days without any adblocker in Firefox and has worked perfectly with uBlock Origin in Opera. So I guess they are missing the target, whatever they are trying to do.
They should disable this for people who use Premium. Although I'm happy to now know why my YouTube fell to bits starting on Friday... I uh.. pay for YouTube Premium so they shouldn't care.
The article suggests YT Premium users are unaffected by the slowdowns.
If you are getting slowdowns, you should message the article author so the article can be updated and YT can be shamed.
I have refused to pay for premium b/c they frequently wrap up paying members in their silly antics, and don't have the foresight to exclude paying users from their ad-block efforts.
It could be redundant. My logic is AdBlock does this full-time time so it should be more up-to-date and generally better vs the Brave blocking stuff. I may very well, be wrong, but that's been the logic. :)
This is what puts me off paying the Danegeld for YouTube more than anything else, I already pay a fair amount of money for Tidal which I'm perfectly happy with. It's bad enough Apple insist on incessantly hawking Apple Music at me with a popup every time I open the music app on iOS for my offline music collection, I don't want a third music service trying to crowbar its way to my life whether I want it or not.
What Youtube does is pretty much the infamous U2 album but with an entire streaming service, forced bundling like that is never not obnoxious in my opinion.
What if I told you that for a decade there has been a separate service where the largest content creators on YT upload their videos without sponsorships + add extras for a monthly subscription? And this site has had issues building + shipping features at scale?
It is, in general, a very poor substitute for the player + server experience YT offers.
Yet 10+ years later, no one at YT has sat up, taken notice and said, "Hey, maybe people don't want to pay for YT directly, but what if they want to support their favorite creators?"
"What if we really doubled down on the creator experience? What if we made it possible for them to post uncensored, subscriber only videos? What if we made it possible for their most loyal fans to ALWAYS see their video without clicking a bell?"
"What if we made it easy for them to sell merch? What if YT channels were actual channels and way more focused on the creator?"
"What if we made a better editing suite? And what if we AGGRESSIVELY paid the largest creators on this other platform to switch to us exclusively for X years?"
And then rolled these features out across the world at insane Google scale. Something this languishing feature-as-a-company can't compete with.
I'm willing to bet that would make far more money than YT driving off creators and users.
Creators are the future of content. With some ads mixed in. Viewers spend billions supporting their creators. Apparently that languishing competitor has a GMV of $2B. It's fair to say that with Google's scale + resources to invest initially, they could easily 10x that.
There's one creator on their platform that has launched a multi-billion dollar brand off of it. An individual creator. And YT gets (almost) none of that sweet sweet upside.
It seems that Google doesn't want to make more money by building a better mousetrap anymore. That kind of thinking clearly isn't welcome at Google/Alphabet/Soup.
edit — "Channel Memberships" and "Subscriptions" are Google's half-hearted version of this, but it's not a serious attempt. It's the usual Google Allo, Google Messages, Google Chat, Google Spaces, Google+, Google Messenger, Google Duo style of product execution. So half-hearted that you probably didn't notice that Google Messenger doesn't exist.
They've never given a serious monetisation strategy a shot. It could be far more valuable than the ad driven market they're serving right now.
As far as I can tell the reason creators put extended videos on alternative sites (not sure why you're being so coy about what service you're talking about) isn't that they make more money there, but as an insurance policy since YouTube is a single point of failure for them. Making subscriber-only videos on YT doesn't help with that at all.
I wonder if this is due to YouTube's www-tampering.js script, which scans the JavaScript environment for patched DOM methods and "suspicious" style / script URIs, and then collects that information into separate arrays.
It isn't entirely clear where that data's going yet, but they are definitely scanning the DOM to check for anything suspicious (read: ad-blocking) added by the user. It's worth running "ytbin.polymer.shared.lib.tampering.info()" in a YouTube tab and checking the results if you get a minute.
Never seen this level of persistence from them before.
Last time i used YouTube without an ad blocker I had 1 minute of ads every 5 minutes. I'm not sure that's even legal where I am. At least for regular TV.
Unfortunately for them, I don't watch talking heads or other kinds of "influencers". My main use was background music.
I found out this Christmas that it's impossible to give Premium as a gift, which stings hard with this ongoing crackdown. There's no gift card mechanism so you'd have to log into their account and buy it for them.
I don't block the ads any more, but I also don't watch the ads. I watch that little block showing how long the ads have to run, waiting for the Skip link.
I’d be interested to hear a creator’s (more than 100K subs) perspective. Folks keep whining about ads but don’t pay, there’s always an excuse it seems. You literally don’t have to watch ads, if you don’t watch the videos to begin with.
YouTube premium is bad because it supports Google. It’s bad because it includes other things. Fundamentally anll YouTube music is, is a visual wrapper around YouTube. All of the “music” is literally just YouTube videos. Ads put in by the creator themselves are bad too because reasons.
It’s very simple. Do not watch. Done. Folks on here got the message with Facebook, but not yet with YouTube.
I hope YouTube finds a way to just fully stop working for all ad blockers. Creators deserve to be paid, YouTube deserves to exist. 55% of revenue goes to creators.
I do, but the creators still insist on adding sponsorships and putting other content on private platforms for yet an additional fee. I respect and support the work that goes into it, but my support has limits.
I hope YouTube finds a way to just fully stop working. I'd really like to see the ad-driven internet go away. I'd rather see Nebula or any other no-ad platform do better and get more features.
None of the creators I follow have any complaints with adblock users, in fact they encourage the use of adblock. They're not making much of their money from those ads, and they're pretty fed up with Google's abusive bs.
They make most of their money from things like channel memberships, which do not involve as much of having to deal with Google's many ways of robbing creators of their money when it comes to advertising.
Creators also get paid by ads and by Premium subscriptions. A whole lot more than any other platform pays, and without gatekeeping to boot. As far as I know there are no other significant platforms except YouTube and Spotify that allows _anyone_ to try to make an income from their work without having to be vetted. I'd be happy to know of any other platforms.
They aren't offering it for free. That's the entire point. It's offered ad-supported. You are so accustomed to theft you are incorrectly interpreting this.
You cannot steal something like youtube. Stealing would imply that you were taking it from somebody. Nobody loses anything when you pirate a movie. Nobody loses anything when you block ads. Taking a picture of the mona lisa doesnt take the mona lisa from anybody. Reading a free newspaper and not looking at the ads isnt stealing the newspaper. Listening to the radio and switching stations when ads come on isnt stealing the music. Watching TV and switching stations when ads come on isnt stealing the TV show.
You seem like you might be part of the population who are the kinds of people to get outraged when people fake drinking their verification cans.
What do you call sneaking into a movie theater or a magic show or other live performance? What do you call not paying for your ticket and still obtaining the value of the experience created?
I make videos, they cost me real money to make. When you steal views, you are costing me the money I should have been paid for your view to help cover those costs associated with entertaining you.
See you make actually made a great point here! Take the movie theatre example. When a movie theatre shows a movie they dont let you in unless you buy a ticket. This is in contrast to Youtube where if you can connect to the address of the page the content will be streamed. If you want to charge per view of your videos then I suggest you find a different service to host them because that is just not how youtube works. Nothing is being stolen.
Not when Google is just doing a money grab and is doing a terrible job at filtering ads. They have some ads that are 1.5 hours long. That shouldn't be possible.
I also recently reported an ad that was clearly AI generated content of Elon Musk doing a crypto scam. Report was ignored.
Eh. There isn’t enough on YT to be worth Premium. I subscribe to a bunch of streaming services, always paying the higher price to not watch ads. YT just doesn’t have anything worth the money.
The only reason I use it is because I work on vehicles as a hobby sometimes and people often put up a video of how to do some specific thing. They don’t get paid for it because it’s niche and views are too low, but I still have to sit through ads.
Also, I do not click on ads. In fact if I see something being advertised I immediately put it on my shit list for interrupting me and am LESS likely to buy the thing in the ad as a result. I know that’s not everyone, but I also don’t think I’m alone. Ads are a scourge. YT can bite the bullet and go subscription only and I am sure that would change a lot. But as is, it’s getting less usable every year while providing fairly marginal value to the users.
30 unstoppable seconds of ads every 1 minute of video, as well as ads that are inappropriate, scams or outright illegal.
People do deserve to get paid for their work. But the only way to safely browse is to block this shit. If Google did a halfway decent job of managing their ad network to keep the scum off, I’d consider turning off ad blocking.
https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/...