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Ask HN: Is it just me or has YouTube gone fanatical on ads?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or has YouTube gone fanatical on ads?

#61

Post by chii »

comex wrote: post #21
HaEB4zcjbp wrote: post #4

https://adblockplus.org/ https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl

Personally, while I'm almost frustrated enough with YouTube ads to use an ad blocker, I'm hesitant to do so because the authors of the videos I watch are often precisely the kind of people I want to support, and I've heard YouTube is hard enough to depend on for income without people blocking ads. I'd love to have an option to directly pay money instead, but I doubt it'll ever happen. Twitch.tv is similar but conside…

check out subbable.com , they sure trying to make content the same way npr does. thru donations and funding drives.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or has YouTube gone fanatical on ads?

#62

Post by Detrus »

judk wrote: post #58
Detrus wrote: post #49

It's totally obnoxious now and destroys usability. I was on a slow internet for a while and youtube mercilessly shoved ads on it. It was impossible to use. I found Youtube center and it smoothed the experience, allows me to disable ads and download video easily. I also got it on the faster connection. It really makes life better. I'm willing to pay a few bucks to never see ads. Until that's an option youtube and dese…

Are the ads higher bandwidth than the content?

If you intend to watch content in 360p the ad may be 480p. Either way you have to wait for the ad to finish before the video would begin to buffer. And one in 5 ads didn't forward to the video because of some bug, so you have to refresh the page, watch the ad again.

On fast connections youtube often doesn't switch quality to 720p fast enough, so if you switch it yourself it will often stall. Then you have to refresh the page, watch an ad, then see updated quality.

YouTube center fixes this.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or has YouTube gone fanatical on ads?

#63

Post by Urgo »

In short yes there are more ads, but it's actually not anything that new. Let me explain..

Around summer 2007 (when I started using YouTube myself) YouTube started its beta version of the "partner program" where they salaried somewhere a bunch of people for a year and monetized their videos. In about Dec 2007 they let anyone apply for the program doing the rev share on videos we see today. I myself became a partner around March 2008. Anyway until about May 2011 the program ran like this, you applied, waited months normally for a reply, and hopefully got accepted, or if rejected tried again and waited..... In May 2011 they started trailing out a program where accounts in good standing could monetize videos w/o ever applying for partner, launching the start of the "monetization" program. In about March 2012 they basically killed off the apply for partner program and replaced it with this where basically everyone on YouTube was a partner. It's been since then that any video COULD be monetized, its just as time has gone on more and more people actually monetized them.

My dates may be slightly off as its thanksgiving evening and I'm doing this off the top of my head but thats basically how things have gone. It's really nothing new...

FYI I run a website that reports YouTube & Twitch statistics called Social Blade so youtube data is something I've been watching for quite a while now. Hope that helps :)

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or has YouTube gone fanatical on ads?

#65

Post by DigitalSea »

I don't see any problem with it. Google are providing a free service to everyone (brands, content curators and those who consume it), why shouldn't they monetise that asset? A site like Youtube consumes so much bandwidth and space on a scale most people cannot imagine.

I am surprised the whole ad strategy wasn't rolled out a lot sooner.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or has YouTube gone fanatical on ads?

#67

Post by Amadou »

ceejayoz wrote: post #26
Amadou wrote: post #19

The net is soooo ripe for a distributed replacement of Youtube, Facebook, Gmail, etc. Once upon a time those sorts of sites provided real value in hosting files, pictures, video and providing a well-known endpoint like gmail. But now we have phones with 64GB of flash for canonical storing of files, p2p protocols for efficient transfer of files and distributed hash tables for finding files. Someone is going to come al…

> But now we have phones with 64GB of flash for canonical storing of files, p2p protocols for efficient transfer of files and distributed hash tables for finding files. And 2 GB data caps. I don't want my phone's hard drive, processing power, and my cell phone bill all being used up for P2P videos.

So, let your phone hold the canonical copy and let the swarm handle the efficient transfer of files -- not everybody will be on cellular data plans, hell you won't be on a cellular data plan when you are within range of a wifi AP like at home or the office.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or has YouTube gone fanatical on ads?

#68

Post by sologrrl »

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #8

I don't know why it did't happen sooner. I started pre-roll seeing ads on mobile as well, which I don't remember until recently. I don't get why it's disgusting. This is how video creators and Google are supposed to get paid. It's annoying to me that people want free content, and they keep pushing companies to "get traction first, then monetize". This is what has to happen, or else Google has to keep subsidizing prog…

Edit: Found the article, here it is http://socialtimes.com/youtube-pre-roll-ads-drive-users-inst...

Can't find the article now, but I recently read that the Youtube ads getting more obnoxious is hurting a lot of small advertizers and sites. Because of the annoyance, even many non tech people are increasingly looking for solutions and installing ad blocks, which block all ads and not just Youtube's. Google can get around this somewhat by paying Adblock Plus to unblock it's own text ads, but a number of small fish cannot.

Previous discussion of Youtube ads on Reddit here. http://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/18m95j/has_anyo...

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or has YouTube gone fanatical on ads?

#70

Post by dredmorbius »

chaz wrote: post #60
dredmorbius wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people who are missing your second link: youtube-dl is a video downloader, and it works on far, far more than just YouTube. The benefits: you download videos at your discretion and preference. You can archive them if you want (I do this largely for documentary / lecture videos), and play them back locally using the video player of your preference. I generally prefer either mplayer or xine, both offer keyboard con…

FF/RW problems may be your ISP and not YT. TWC is notorious for routing YT through its own servers and it's terrible; others may be just as bad. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5276772

Not using TWC. It could be my ISP's peers, but my ISP itself is both rather competent and very network neutral.
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