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YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

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Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#771

Post by Mindwipe »

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #722
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,…

On mobile YouTube right now I see two unskippable ads before every video. How long before some genius needs to juice his numbers this quarter and come up with the bright idea of three unskippable ads? Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo? If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Goog…

> Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo?

YouTube might (but probably doesn't) make $30 billion in revenue. It certainly doesn't make $30 billion in profit. It's questionable if it even breaks even, and even if it does it's certainly nowhere near paid back the amount of money that has been spent keeping it afloat post acquisition.

> If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today?

Because testing something is pretty much always a good idea.

> Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product.

That's not a radical idea, it's a bad one if you lose money on most customers and are hoping to make it up at scale. Ad blocking users are unquestionably money losers for Google.

> And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship.

What competitor do you think is coming that will be willing to (at a very conservative estimate) set fire to $75 billion+ for a decade to build this competitor, and the investors who loan that $75 billion dollars on a very risky ten year bet not expect a very significant ROI in exchange?

YouTube objectively should never have existed - it was extremely predatorily priced in terms of lowered ad load or subscription charging to actually exist as a business, and Google kept it going to scare competitors away. If a competitor actually comes it will be significantly, significantly more monetised than YouTube is.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#772

Post by bheadmaster »

Gareth321 wrote: post #736
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,…

You've hit on the reason I think the Brave token is such a great idea ( https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ ). I know it's en vogue to trash gimmicky cryptocurrencies, and to be honest I don't care how this gets implemented. The concept is great: a shared, fungible way to easily support random websites one visits, and control the kinds of ads one accepts. If sites had a little tip jar which I could easily tap to avoid a…

The whole point of advertisements is that the person pushing them doesn't earn anything from them - but rather, force-feeds information about the existence of their product to the public. Now, instead of ruining our public space with horrible billboards and kitschy flashing lights, they ruin our digital space with horrible pop-ups and kitschy lust-provoking videos.

I don't care about those who run ads, nor those who allow ad companies to run ads on their content. If you earn money through ads, that's your problem, not mine, and it's not my responsibility to watch them. Ads are fundamentally intrusive, and pretending like the society at large has some kind of "responsibility" towards those who earn money from ads is laughable.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#773

Post by numpad0 »

mojo74 wrote: post #727
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While it is irritating the frequency of them, personally I prefer ads that aren't relevant. I'll spend my money when I want and I don't like to be manipulated by an ad. Plus I like to feel that online marketers know as little about my preferences as possible and are wasting their advertising budget just showing me useless products and services. I'm looking at you Grammarly...

It’s weird that I didn’t realize this for long. Chances are you are probably in market for presumably irrelevant products, it’s only that a lot of us don’t find those topics entertaining.

I wouldn’t mind a nice representative calmly onboarding me with an exciting new middle eastern investment opportunities, I might even enjoy listening to those with a glass of tap water on one hand. That of course is because it is an extremely relevant topic to me /s

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#774

Post by littlestymaar »

climb_stealth wrote: post #221

It's incredible how many people go "I was almost ready to give them money" whilst using Youtube all the time with an ad blocker. I know it, I was one of them for years. Just buy the subscription. You get the free trial for a month. Nothing changes, the money is not missed, but you actually pay for something you use a lot. The biggest benefit is not being subjected to ads anymore just by being next to family members w…

> The biggest benefit is not being subjected to ads anymore

Until they have reached a critical mass of subscribed users, and they start serving ads to paid users too (à la Netflix)

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#775

Post by smeagull »

jamiequint wrote: post #724
red_admiral wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad-blocking also gives you similar if not more extra security to anti-virus software, with fewer downsides (faster not slower). I'm afraid the ad ecosystem is so big that occasionally, threats slip through.

This may be true on random-site-X on the internet, but is not true on sites like YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Facebook, etc that run their own first-party ad platforms.

Facebook ads have certainly been used to deliver malware in the recent past.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#776

Post by colinsane »

climb_stealth wrote: post #221

It's incredible how many people go "I was almost ready to give them money" whilst using Youtube all the time with an ad blocker. I know it, I was one of them for years. Just buy the subscription. You get the free trial for a month. Nothing changes, the money is not missed, but you actually pay for something you use a lot. The biggest benefit is not being subjected to ads anymore just by being next to family members w…

i’m an edge case: my computers are amnesiac: if i wanted to watch YT Premium, i’d have to log in again every morning. i have an old Google account, but it was setup with 2FA (TOTP) and Google’s made that login method as burdensome as they can to push users to prefer their apps. even if it were easy to login, i prefer to be logged out so that i don’t get sucked into those godawful YT comment arguments.

i watch a couple 5-minute YT videos each day: sure, i’d happily pay 10x whatever they make from me in ads, but there’s no way they could implement that in a way which doesn’t worsen my experience overall. not to mention the whole angle of providing Google with my undeniable legal name.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#777

Post by littlestymaar »

deltree7 wrote: post #78
wnevets wrote: post #4

On a related note as someone who uses YouTube constantly YouTube Premium is absolutely worth it.

HN/Reddit : For years, "I'm happy to pay for services that has no/few ads". Companies: Here's a ad-free version. Subscribe HN/Reddit: Why are you asking me to subscribe? I hate this

Plot twist: the content is actually not ad-free. (sponsored sections aren't removed from the videos)

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#778

Post by SpaceNugget »

jamiequint wrote: post #724
red_admiral wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad-blocking also gives you similar if not more extra security to anti-virus software, with fewer downsides (faster not slower). I'm afraid the ad ecosystem is so big that occasionally, threats slip through.

This may be true on random-site-X on the internet, but is not true on sites like YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Facebook, etc that run their own first-party ad platforms.

I almost fell for a scam yesterday from an instagram ad. There was an ad for fun printed workout shorts for only €4. I added a couple different prints and was about to pay when I noticed the URL was neehd dot com and the site title was some other random word. I couldn't find any reference to either name online and went back to instagram. The VERY NEXT AD was for an identical site with a different random 5 letter url. I reported both ads and now neehd com is "no longer available". Very glad I didn't put any payment details into the site. If they employ people to vet ads full time they should have easily been able to catch those ads before it was shown to a user. I have seen ads for those shorts non stop for a few weeks before I finally tapped the ad to see how much they were.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#779

Post by testHNac »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #399
crop_rotation wrote: post #126

YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases). Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources (And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs). Vime…

This exactly, but even one step further - it’s time consuming and expensive to produce the videos themselves! Who’s going to create quality content if they can’t get paid for it?! This is the major value YouTube provides. They bridge the gap between consumers who don’t want to pay with producers that NEED to get paid. Want free peer to peer streaming? Hard to build a content ecosystem on that.

> Who’s going to create quality content if they can’t get paid for it?!

Many Youtube creators are Demonetized. They make money from other sources.

Also, not all creators making money are creating Quality Content. In fact a lot of content is recycled.

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