YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

Post by Destiner » Thu, May 11, 2023, 9:21 AM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #639

seanhunter wrote: post #627

I would happily pay for youtube premium if: - They removed the useless "shorts" - They removed the "mix" things that keep coming back like a bad smell - They let me remove youtube music - Their suggestions were less terrible. Like seriously they run the biggest data centers in the world, have some of the best ML researchers and know what I actually watch. How do they manage to be so consistently bad at this? - Their…

I don’t understand. You would pay for YouTube premium if youtube had less features? I don’t use shorts and for a long time I didn’t use YouTube music either (despite paying for premium). I now use it because it’s rather good. And YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is crazy good, but you have to tune it. It’s a tool. You tune it by not watching shitty videos you don’t like; if you do, remove them from your history aft…

Post by pgeorgi » Thu, May 11, 2023, 9:26 AM UTC

Natsu wrote: post #616

Veserv wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it perfectly showcases that people do not want to pay 1000% more money for the privilege of paying a monthly subscription. Youtube Premium costs $12/month [1]. Ads average something like $2 per 1000 views to the creators (in some of the most common categories) [2]. Youtube takes a ~45% cut, so Youtube makes ~$4 per 1000 views from ads. So, to reach $12/month, you would need to average 3000 views per month. At a a…

Also there's the fact that once enough people get on board with the ad free subscription services, they usually just start adding ads anyway.

Post by philbo » Thu, May 11, 2023, 9:30 AM UTC

tmtvl wrote: post #714

freehorse wrote: post #615

It is not just about youtube. The whole internet is bloated with ads right now, and the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete. I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting. I could count the times that I have found an internet ad interesting in my lifetime using half the fingers of one hand. Personalised or not, the vast majority is useless,…

> I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads. Okay, but how do you square that with the fact that hosting content costs money? Are the people and companies which provide the content you look at not allowed to earn money to keep the servers running and the sysadmins fed?

Post by probably_wrong » Thu, May 11, 2023, 9:36 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #200

Nextgrid wrote: post #82

Invidious is a third-party frontend (you can self-host) that solves this problem: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious As a bonus, it is super fast because it doesn't have to justify the salaries of dozens (hundreds?) of frontend developers and can get away with server-side-rendered HTML and minimal amounts of Javascript.

I think you can be pretty sure that if Google doubles down on this, third party clients (as well as downloaders like yt-dlp) will stop working.

Post by meindnoch » Thu, May 11, 2023, 9:40 AM UTC

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #654

freehorse wrote: post #615

It is not just about youtube. The whole internet is bloated with ads right now, and the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete. I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting. I could count the times that I have found an internet ad interesting in my lifetime using half the fingers of one hand. Personalised or not, the vast majority is useless,…

The problem with YT is: - I start the video, an ad is shown within 30 secs. - I fast forward a few minutes, the SAME ad is shown again. - I jump to anywhere on the timeline, the SAME ad is shown again. At least show me something that is relevant, like facebook does. The ads there reflect what I usually look for. On YT, none of the ads are relevant to me, ever. It's just ridiculous.