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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

#941

Post by j-bos »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #922
john___matrix wrote: post #905

To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money. Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly),…

> To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money. I cannot think of any subscription that offers literally no upside beside what a free browser extension that you install in 1 click already provides. Youtube Premium is literally the worst value for money that I can think of, because I can get effortlessly the same for 0 cost.

This strikes me as eating the commons.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#942

Post by joshmanders »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #922
john___matrix wrote: post #905

To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money. Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly),…

> To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money. I cannot think of any subscription that offers literally no upside beside what a free browser extension that you install in 1 click already provides. Youtube Premium is literally the worst value for money that I can think of, because I can get effortlessly the same for 0 cost.

In Google/YouTube's defense, this mentality is why we can't have nice things. You think it's cheap to host the content YouTube does? Paying for premium to remove ads is a way of saying "Thank you for providing me this service, instead of displaying me irrelevant ads, just take my money"

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#943

Post by dnedic »

jeffbee wrote: post #932
barneygale wrote: post #927

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uBlock Origin is literally free

The cost is you have to give another party total access to all of your data on all sites.

Except it's open source and anyone can audit the code any time.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#944

Post by bagacrap »

DanielHB wrote: post #924

One argument I heard at some point is that google is better of if people who don't click ads use ad-block. If you care enough that you install ad-blockers you will not click on any ads anyway. If they block ad-block then their click-per-view metrics will go down which looks bad to advertisers and makes ad spots sell for less Of course that is a very simple view of a very complex problem, but there is definitely some…

Definitely Google is better off serving exactly the ads a user will click, including no ads for the user who will never ever click any ad, even one from their favorite sneaker brand. But I think a lot fewer people are actually in the never ever camp than they think. And even though I know I click ads on occasion, I still run an ad blocker.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#945

Post by cynicalsecurity »

runtime_blues wrote: post #910
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #902

They are going to start an arms race. This will likely lead to much further advances in ad-blocking that would be a bad outcome for them. This is a balancing act for sure. I guess they must see lots of people blocking ads to think it's worth while going for it. This could even be a smaller team looking at bumping up their metrics or hit perf goals without seeing the larger impact across the company.

Google is big, wealthy, and tech-savvy enough to, at the very least, make ad blockers unreliable and annoying most of the time for most of the users. This is not good news, and it's probably not going to be a lesson in humility for the company.

It's not about tech, it's about human psychology, monetisation and business planning.

A YouTube user with an AdBlock is highly unlikely to click on any ads making them pretty much useless. So why keep bothering them?

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#946

Post by RobotToaster »

raincole wrote: post #931
iLoveOncall wrote: post #922

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money. I cannot think of any subscription that offers literally no upside beside what a free browser extension that you install in 1 click already provides. Youtube Premium is literally the worst value for money that I can think of, because I can get effortlessly the same for 0 cost.

By this logic, buying e-books from Amazon is the worst value I can think of, because I can get them effortlessly from libgen and other "sources", and a single book can cost as much as the whole year of YouTube premium.

Considering Amazon can literally just erase e-books that you supposedly "own", like they literally did with 1984[0], very much yes.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#947

Post by reportgunner »

raincole wrote: post #931
iLoveOncall wrote: post #922

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money. I cannot think of any subscription that offers literally no upside beside what a free browser extension that you install in 1 click already provides. Youtube Premium is literally the worst value for money that I can think of, because I can get effortlessly the same for 0 cost.

By this logic, buying e-books from Amazon is the worst value I can think of, because I can get them effortlessly from libgen and other "sources", and a single book can cost as much as the whole year of YouTube premium.

But it is.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#948

Post by joshmanders »

inetknght wrote: post #915
kingstoned wrote: post #908

What is the best way to detect if a user has enabled uBlock or Adblock? I wanted to do it for a project I'm working on, but many solutions fail.

> What is the best way to detect if a user has enabled uBlock or Adblock? 1. Don't. 2. If the user blocks your advertisements, then the user doesn't want them. You should respect the user's desires. 3. If the user blocks your scripts, then the user doesn't want them. You should respect the user's desires. 4. If your site breaks because of things, then your site sucks. You should build your site to fail gracefully.

On the flip side:

It's their site, they pay for the resources, provide the work, if they want to block people who block their ads, they have that right.

You are not entitled to my website because I put it up.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#950

Post by yifanl »

gjadi wrote: post #926
techwiz137 wrote: post #904

They will try and fail. The solution that will be left...is one that many will not like, especially if your personal and/or work email is on Google.

I'm not sure why they would fail if they really wanted to. From what I understand, currently, the ads are distinct videos, which is why external tools can block them. For example, you don't get ads with youtube-dl. But if Youtube used the uploaded video to create a new one, with ads injected in it, I can't see how adblockers could block that reliably. Perhaps you could build a database of timestamp of ads per video?…

Like, per video on the server stitch in ads to the video file before serving it up? You'd still have to have specific behaviours encoded to specific segments of that video file (i.e. clicking on the video during ad should link somewhere different than clicking on the video during the video), and that would probably be detectable.
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