121–130 of 781 posts
YouTube will "lose" the war, but they'll make adblocking difficult enough for a while that it might get some premium subscribers in the short term in exchange for the loss of goodwill.
It’s streaming, YouTube can just embed the ads directly into the stream.
Apart from the Youtube stuff, the post also highlights something else, entitlement towards free services like uBlock origin. > It’s one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It’s quite another to deal with a wave of angry users. > And then one of the moderators actually deleted their Reddit account. “The ID in the post wasn’t updated because my mother was hospitalized,” they said. It’s sad to see them leave becau…
> I have seen this becoming more and more common on open source projects and totally free services, where people act as if they are entitled to something as if it is their god given right. Do you count YouTube as a "free service" (with ads) in this case? I wonder if there is an overlap with people that expect free stuff and people that use uBO on YouTube. YT does offer most users YT premium, which gives users an ad f…
Partly this is by design, where it seems to decide that a creator having a "merch" ad integration doesn't count as an ad. Which might be understandable (but still not what I want) if merch meant creator's face on a mug, but it also includes products where a home fix it channel will have an overlay of products from Home Depot which is literally just an ad with no caveats (an overlay that obscures the video on Chromecast, it's part of YT UI not embedded in the video).
Though I guess I'm also unclear how often I see that because Premium is buggy and how often it's intentional. Ever since they made YT on Chromecast an "app" it's been a disaster of account state bugs where it also keeps trying to enforce safe mode (which blocks half of everything, including practically any music video) because it says it's not logged in even though I'm trying to cast from a phone that is logged in.
At a technical level, what prevents Google from deploying unblockable ads on YouTube? I’m honestly surprised adblockers are able to block YouTube at all. The easiest way to prevent an adblocker from blocking is to make ads and real content indistinguishable in frontend code and network requests. Tie ads and real content together in a way that if you block ads, the video also doesn’t load. Or in the case of video ads,…
It would raise the server-side costs by an order of magnitude, because instead of just serving prerecorded content from storage, you would need to do non-trivial GPU-intensive stream processing.
Why, from first principles, should YouTube allow this? Why shouldn’t they go thermonuclear? I understand ads are annoying - I block as many as I can! - but I’ve never seen someone put together a coherent defense of the practice.
I can see a privacy argument being made by folks who don't want their viewing history associated with one account but also don't want ads. I'm not an expert, but I'm not sure what monetization strategy would appease those folks. Proof of work on crypto mining for each video you want to watch, with any found coins going to Google?
I use NewPipe on my phone, SmartTubeNext on my Android TV, and uBlock+FF inside of a container without being logged in on my laptop. I was at a friend's house yesterday and they showed me a video on YouTube. I couldn't believe how many ads there were. It was unwatchable. Not sure how people don't pay for premium or block ads. What a miserable experience.
Why, from first principles, should YouTube allow this? Why shouldn’t they go thermonuclear? I understand ads are annoying - I block as many as I can! - but I’ve never seen someone put together a coherent defense of the practice.
If I were an advertiser on YouTube I would be very wary of YouTube's efforts on this. I wouldn't want to be paying YouTube for ad views of people who find advertising so annoying that they make such an effort to block it. Best case scenario, frustrated ex-adblock-users will ignore my ads by muting them or looking away, so I'm paying the same price for less value, sometimes as low as zero. Worst case scenario, these u…
Then when you're at the store or buying a service, you are more likely to choose a product you are familiar with. Even if you don't consciously acknowledge that familiarity.
Nobody is immune to advertising - the people who fool themselves into thinking they're immune are less likely to notice its effects.
At a technical level, what prevents Google from deploying unblockable ads on YouTube? I’m honestly surprised adblockers are able to block YouTube at all. The easiest way to prevent an adblocker from blocking is to make ads and real content indistinguishable in frontend code and network requests. Tie ads and real content together in a way that if you block ads, the video also doesn’t load. Or in the case of video ads,…
Ads that the creators themselves put in their videos are exactly what you're suggesting. Yet there exist fairly-effective (if not perfect) ad blockers for those, too.
YouTube will "lose" the war, but they'll make adblocking difficult enough for a while that it might get some premium subscribers in the short term in exchange for the loss of goodwill.
They haven't lost any good will from me. I don't feel entitled to use an ad supported service for free without the ads. Personally I've been paying for premium for a while and I find it worth it.
Ad-avoidance is hardly a new thing. And as ads have got increasingly obnoxious and untrustworthy, ad-avoidance technology has inevitably become more popular.
At a technical level, what prevents Google from deploying unblockable ads on YouTube? I’m honestly surprised adblockers are able to block YouTube at all. The easiest way to prevent an adblocker from blocking is to make ads and real content indistinguishable in frontend code and network requests. Tie ads and real content together in a way that if you block ads, the video also doesn’t load. Or in the case of video ads,…
The only issue would be discovery, but at this point most of what I watch is either from people I already follow or from their "network".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither side is wrong. Youtube has every right to try as hard as it can to get users to view ads. And users have every right to try as hard as they can to block those ads. I don't have a right to ad-free youtube, but I do have every right to try and control what things get sent to and viewed on my computer. If I (and people like me) are abundant enough and succesful enough, then youtube and other services will be for…
I think this is a great take, with one exception: I think the loss of (free) ad-supported YouTube would be a devastating loss for the world at large.