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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

#861
post #338

Maybe people wouldn't be locking your ads if you didn't have them jacked up to saturation level. I sometimes watch on a console and the number of ads is ridiculous, even worse than broadcast TV. Sometimes you get ads in the middle of songs.

From what I’ve seen YouTube actually has fewer ads than broadcast TV and the ads are mostly shorter. It just seems like they have more because of the timing. Broadcast TV generally syncs the ads with act breaks in the show. YouTube generally doesn’t seem to do any syncing with the content, so ads can suddenly happen in the middle of someone speaking. That’s way more disruptive.

YouTube generally doesn’t seem to do any syncing with the content

No, this is wrong. They can detect pauses and typically slot ads between songs or during applause moments. I don't watch a lot of TV but most days share some family time where we catch news, weather, and some chat show fluff, so I regularly watch some short programs that I tolerate rather than like. If I'm bored by the comedian, I amuse myself by predicting when the ad will come in. I don't think YT even needs o analyze the content as such, they can go by the user behavior: on some clients, when you seek in the video it shows you a graph of most/least favored time offsets based on aggregated play times, so they can easily time ad breaks to fit where people stop watching or skip ahead, and they line up neatly with segment changes. This kind of advertising is a bit intrusive but merely annoying. But when listening to music and being served inappropriate/poorly timed ad selections, it's truly infuriating.

Insuper, Vendo delenda est

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#862

Maybe people wouldn't be locking your ads if you didn't have them jacked up to saturation level. I sometimes watch on a console and the number of ads is ridiculous, even worse than broadcast TV. Sometimes you get ads in the middle of songs.

Let's be real --- ad blockers don't have a setting to let through one ad every 30 minutes. I agree the number of ads is absolutely shocking, which I'm reminded every time I see someone else play youtube, as I've had a subscription for about as many years as it's been available. My time is absolutely worth more than whatever I'm paying to skip these ads.

I whitelisted Youtube for a long time because the ads were not that intrusive. Then something changed and I chose my sanity over their business model.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#863
post #678

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.

- Ads crank up the volume to 11. We were watching Eurovision singing contest the other day from YT and my gawd was that annoying. Adds in the middle of every song, volume being cranked up for the adds, and as a icing on the cake, probably due to bug somewhere, the playback went to pause after each ad (iPhone airplaying to AppleTV).

> We were watching Eurovision

Eurovision is basically a big tourism add wrapped in a sell of the cheapest, dullest more forgettable pop songs available. Watching publicity is the whole experience

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#864

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've said it before and I've said it again: ad-based content and pay content are incompatible business models. YouTube Premium fails because the content isn't worth paying for. The content is not worth paying for because it's been designed from the ground up to sell ads . When a website designed to sell ads fails to sell content, that's not evidence that selling content doesn't work, it's evidence that selling conten…

Okay, so a lot of people are responding that they love YouTube content, and some of them pay for it.

Yes, obviously the largest crowdsourced video service in the world has some subscribers. But the fact is, they aren't enough subscribers to approach its ad revenue. If you don't address why that is, you're not really responding to my point.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#865
post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people mean when they say all these things is that, "I can easily access things I want for free, so why would I ever pay?" Yes some people give voluntarily through donations or Patreon, but it's a tiny amount of the actual number of people who derive satisfaction from the content. The best solution for someone who hates ads is a subscription model. The thing that bothers me is that publishers still collect massi…

Any website that doesn't want me able to choose what I do on my own computer with the information they've freely given me is welcome to move to a different protocol that requires a locked down operating system that forces display of their content in the manner that they dictate. Until then, they can choose to stop freely sending me information or accept I'm going to use information on my own computer however I want (…

When they try to add these protocols, though, everybody complaints a lot.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#866

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 b…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#867
post #569
post #30

If it helps, I have a tool for downloading, written in Go: http://github.com/4cq2/mech

Why not just use the very widely used yt-dlp?

My tool can compile to a single EXE for Windows, macOS or Linux. Plus mine works with Widewine.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#868

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 would pay if they stopped censoring creators.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#870
Makes me really happy that I recently subscribed to Nebula. I had YouTube Premium for a while but the experience kept getting worse. They removed email notifications, added more and more ads for "premium features" that I wasn't interested in and kept making offline downloads a pain (YouTube DL is usually a better experience). On top of that the recommendations are awful and search results have random unrelated ads for "recommended videos" inline with the thing I was actually searching for. At some point I felt mistreated enough and stopped my subscription.

Nebula is great. It feels like they are actually just trying to allow me to watch videos, no nonsense. I have found a few bugs and the support team is nice and responsive. I can't imagine what else I would want.

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