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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

#841

Post by tomjen3 »

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…

I strongly disagree Netflix isn’t a comparable alternative as it enables me to watch moving pictures to occupy my time. Worse YouTube gets their movies for free.

I understand that they are in a bind. Not my problem, however.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#842

Post by fennecfoxy »

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 think the core issue is: * People don't like ads, because ads suck * Youtube offers premium, an ad-less experience

Never have I seen self-entitled people so furious as when YT requests they buy premium in order to remove ads. What, should YT be hosted for free without ads and without a subscription?

I get that ads suck and companies suck, but self-entitled people suck too; most of us here are devs and we get paid because our company has to make money _somehow_.

YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription. They refuse either option and instead are furious that YT doesn't offer itself completely for free.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#843

Post by Night_Thastus »

Ads are a cancer on modern society. People act like they're OK, but I feel like these ads are constantly using up brain space that could be used for something else. Constantly being surrounded with messages telling you what you need, what you want, who or what you should be, how inferior your life is if you don't have X product. Ugh.

They will pry my ad-block from my cold, dead hands. I will sooner stop using YT altogether than give in on this.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#844

Post by gdilla »

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,…

wait till chatgpt folks realize how much the opportunity cost is of not monetizing their page views (yes, even for paid folks).

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#845

Post by xurukefi »

bdlowery wrote: post #635
xurukefi wrote: post #598

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Ad blocker detection is an arms race and considering how big YouTube is, people will definitely fight back and go very far out of their way to avoid ads. This could get really ugly given that Google controls Chrome and its extension ecosystem.

It’s not an arms race. Twitch has already figured it out. It’s absolutely impossible to use any sort of adblocker on twitch. It’s so bad that the best solution to “block ads” on twitch is to use a proxy to a country that isn’t serving ads. Unless twitch has some crazy way of inserting ads into the video stream, YouTube will be able to do exactly what twitch has done.

> It’s absolutely impossible to use any sort of adblocker on twitch.

I have never seen any ads on twitch. I just checked with DevTools and it seems like uBlock Origin simply blocks a script called "v6s.js", that is apparantly responsible for serving ads.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#846

Post by anthonypasq »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #721
tmtvl wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If you rely on ad revenue and people do not enjoy using your product more than enduring your ads, maybe your business model is wrong to begin with?

then websites should be able to stop you from using ad blockers and presumably no one should throw a hissy fit about it, but thats not what happens.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#847

Post by vonseel »

martin_a wrote: post #733
jamiequint wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

YouTubes "first-party ad platform" is delivering some of the worst ads on the whole internet. It's not only the big-boobed characters promoting mobile games, there are (video) ads for pyramid and other "get rich quick" schemes, conspiracy theories (government will force everyone to become transgender!) and whatnot. They don't give just the tiniest bit of a shit for all of this, as long as they are earning money with…

I've seen it said that newsfeeds/ads/etc. feed you what they think you will engage with, so you may want to wonder why you're seeing that type of content. I've never seen anything of the sort on any large tech platform, and I'm probably in an appropriate demographic to be recommended that stuff.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#848

Post by gundmc »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #826
bilekas wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites). Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators sh…

> Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads. The part I dislike about this is that they will demonetize a video for content reasons, but still show ads on it. I also don't know how it works with YouTube Premium. If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay t…

> I also don't know how it works with YouTube Premium. If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching?

> I feel like that's not likely

I believe this is exactly how it works.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#849

Post by acdha »

philbo wrote: post #715
tmtvl wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Producing television shows also costs money, but no-one forces me to watch the ads there. I can change channel, or skip past them if recorded, or just leave the room while they're on.

Why can’t you do that with YouTube? Changing the channel is as easy as closing the tab and you certainly can leave the room or mute it during ads.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#850

Post by acdha »

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…

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

Isn’t that what they’re doing? This thread is full of people who are arguing that they cannot possibly be expected to stop watching YouTube, which sounds like they’re doing a good job attracting both an audience and compelling content. There’s a whole internet full of content out there, tons of options for creators to get paid, but even in a thread full of people saying they hate Google’s business model it seems like few people are willing to give up using YouTube so they must be doing something right.

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