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Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

imlefthanded.com

641–650 of 844 posts

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, if you owned YouTube with an overhead of tens of millions of dollars per year, how would you monetize it without ads/commercials, just to even keep up with operational costs?

I'm honestly appalled by the price for YouTube Premium. It's $15/month. That's the same as HBO Max, almost twice of Disney+ and more expensive than F1TV or Showtime which come in around $10. Per month this is 50% more than Prime! Only my UltraHD Netflix plan is more expensive. This price to me is outrageous, given that Google, unlike everyone else listed here, doesn't provide any of the content and their services is…

It's worth it in my opinion:

you can listen to any video on mobile in the background, also no ads on mobile (so you don't need some hacky 3rd party app)

And you get YouTube music, which is comparable to Spotify (I prefer it in fact)

There's more content on YouTube then any other video platform, so in my opinion 15 per month is worth it

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately goverment and b2c things like banks and insurance dont show ads, tho they are probably selling your data

Actually, I have seen government web sites with ads in the last couple of years. The Cook County (Illinois) Assessor used to have them. There's a new assessor now, and a new web site design, but you can still see the space for the banner ad on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20130708043842/http://www.cookco... As for banks, yes, some banks to have ads for other companies on their web sites. I see them when I…

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Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#643
post #130

I've started to think about it differently. I no longer use any ad blockers. I actually want to experience the web (and its decline) the way it is, to take it all in, feel the pain and strengthen my patience in the process. Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't…

It's not just ads, it's also about blocking potential security threats with third party scripts and rogue domains, especially on "adult" websites such as xxx, crypto, piracy related stuffs and what not.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#644

I call it a malware blocker, rather than an adblocker - here's my reasoning: One day I was on a classifieds site[1], browsing listings, when after a few pages, I was met with a page redirect to one of those scammy support center sites (taking over the browser), advising that my computer had been infected by a virus (obviously hadn't) and I needed to call in to "Apple's Support Center" immediately. This was on Safari…

If it's not detecting malware, then it's not a malware blocker.

As far as I know, ad blockers work based on host name and css selectors. If there was an actual anti-malware that was so trivially bypass-able, it would be laughed out of the room. uBO blocks hosts of advertisers. AFAIK they don't distinguish between malware and non-malware, nor do they detect malware from other sources.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#646

Open ended question, is there a solution? Inherently people trying to make money from their website either have to charge people directly with money for access or indirectly by having them see/hear ads. Advertisers inherently want their ads to be seen/heard, which means there is pressure to make their ads more intrusive. Yet the more intrusive the ads become, the more annoyed the person accessing the content becomes…

> Open ended question, is there a solution?

Regulation. It's a harsh measure, but I doubt there is another one. The last 20 years people tried to find alternative solutions. We have pay-walls, we have crowdfounding, we have various subscription models, I fail to see a solution that hasn't been tried, but yet every single year we get exposed to more ads. It seems extremly unlikely that there is something that could replace ads.

But what is the logical solution when there is a damaging thing in society that can't be replaced by healthy alternatives? It's regulation.

Now I know that a ban on ads seems unlikely. But I honestly don't think we have a choice. Because the alternative is that the ad-industry keeps creeping into every single aspect of our lifes, like they have done ever since their emergence. And with the advance of AR, smart homes and AI assistants this seems like a bad idea.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the only reason youtube ads exist is to get people to pay youtube to get rid of ads. My parents have a smart TV and the youtube app w/o the paid youtube premium makes it a really bad experience. On iOS devices, I have yet to find a free ad blocker that properly blocks youtube ads after they put in new measures to defeat content blocker based ad blockers.

It also provided some incentive for creators to edit and post video. I had a problem that I figured out the solution to and put up a video of it that made me a few dollars a month. Then YouTube moved the goalposts and demonetized it because I don’t (and frankly, won’t) have 1000 subscribers. So that’s the end of my video posting on YouTube. I’ve discovered some “hack” repairs to other devices (common washing machine…

Please share your knowledge, if you don’t expect to have 1000 subscribers surely you wouldn’t expect revenue anyway. Maybe a better approach would be to encourage ‘buy me a coffee’ donations. Either way, you’re punishing society for google being an asshole.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel zero guilt about ad blocking. There was some period of discussion on the subject back in like 2003 but the ad companies went to war against human civilization and there's been no going back. It corrupts and twists everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash and an entire generation has now reached adulthood knowing nothing but that hustle touching every bit of media they ever interact with. W…

> It corrupts and twists everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash This cannot be overstated. Everything today is a battle for eye-balls and ad money. The corruption is insane. You can't even buy appliances designed perform their function well. Instead you can buy cheap junk for less than cogs because they make money selling your data to ad companies instead of making money by making products that…

> Instead you can buy cheap junk for less than cogs because they make money selling your data to ad companies instead of making money by making products that are actually good

Oh this heinous shit is not just limited to cheap tat. Samsung will happily sell you their highest end TVs for four figures with unremovable banner ads in the source menu.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subscribing to what amounts to a search+CDN video w/ads service wholesale isn't even in the same ballpark as throwing money directly at the creators you want to support. The salient point is YouTube/Alphabet has completely missed the opportunity of facilitating Patreon-style commerce, despite being best positioned to do so. But instead of enabling creators to receive money directly from audiences, an advertising jugg…

Youtube has a Patreon competitor service literally built into the platform, you can "Join" a channel and it behaves exactly like Patreon. They were just very late to the party and most creators promote their Patreon more heavily.

Is that something only available to paying subscribers?

I've never even had a YouTube login, but the few channels I access fully via the web interface only ever spam me with YouTube Premium offers for eliminating ads.

There's zero offering/marketing of direct-to-creator subscriptions, not that I've seen.

There's also zero chance of my buying YouTube Premium, but a non-zero chance of my giving money exclusively to the specific creators I value - even if YouTube took something along the lines of a haircut for making just those channels ad-free.

Hopefully the difference is clear.

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