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YouTube's Ad Blocker Crackdown Spurs Record Uninstalls

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Re: YouTube's Ad Blocker Crackdown Spurs Record Uninstalls

#41

Post by datpiff »

solardev wrote: post #15
PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #3

I think many content creators have recognized that it's important to expand their brand outside of youtube so they're not so beholden to youtube. I wonder if this is opening cracks for competitors.

There's Nebula. https://nebula.tv/ Many of my favorite channels (mostly civil engineering, science, history) are there, and release there first before YouTube. Sadly the UI is not as good, and there are no automatic captions like YouTube. But it's cheap and it works... And of course there's Patreon.

Patreon doesn't seem to do video very well (or at all anymore?)

Most Patreon accounts I've seen just link to unlisted Youtube videos.

Re: YouTube's Ad Blocker Crackdown Spurs Record Uninstalls

#42

Post by Longlius »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #8
PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #3

I think many content creators have recognized that it's important to expand their brand outside of youtube so they're not so beholden to youtube. I wonder if this is opening cracks for competitors.

I don't see how this comment tracks with the events. Content creators on Youtube are paid from ads and subscriptions. If they want to give their content away for free, they can turn off Youtube ads since they are the ones turning them on in the first place.

Youtube runs ads on content that isn't monetized, the creator just doesn't see any of that money.

Re: YouTube's Ad Blocker Crackdown Spurs Record Uninstalls

#43

Post by vetinari »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #14
pprotas wrote: post #5

I wonder if anyone in the industry has any insights in how a regular developer can help improve ad blockers? Where to get started? As a huge fan of blocking ads, this makes me feel inspired to join the fight against Google. How can I help?

Boycott YouTube in favor of other video services? Pay for YT Premium? Why spend so much energy bypassing compensation for an otherwise free service? It just pushes more ads in front of less sophisticated users or encourages producers to lock all content behind paywalls.

Note that when paying for YT premium, you have to be logged in. Google will still collect the data, build your profile, just not show you the resulting ads on youtube. But they will use that data to show you targeted ads elsewhere. Plus now you cannot invalidate that data by dropping cookies, etc.

Re: YouTube's Ad Blocker Crackdown Spurs Record Uninstalls

#45

Post by prophesi »

alexb_ wrote: post #12

misread ignore this lol

I'm also a bit confused by the article; I think the record uninstalls are users looking around for a blocker that works, or even trying different browsers, so I highly doubt the crackdown is working as well as it purports.

Re: YouTube's Ad Blocker Crackdown Spurs Record Uninstalls

#46

Post by Workaccount2 »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #3

I think many content creators have recognized that it's important to expand their brand outside of youtube so they're not so beholden to youtube. I wonder if this is opening cracks for competitors.

No one wants to be a competitor. People are so deluded on this topic that they cannot even think straight.

No one wants to watch ads.

No one wants to pay a subscription.

Those two things are factually true, and why youtube sucks, why it has no competitors, and why the future looks bad for it.

Vid.me ran an experiment a few years ago and made a serious push to upend youtube. They had great success and it really took off. But eventually they went bankrupt and closed shop. Why?

No one wants to watch ads.

No one wants to pay a subscription.

Get this through your skull everyone.

Re: YouTube's Ad Blocker Crackdown Spurs Record Uninstalls

#47

Post by llm_nerd »

The YouTube app on my AppleTV never showed me ads until the past few days. I do use NextDNS, but by all accounts it did nothing for YouTube ads. On my desktops I have ublock origin so I didn't see ads there and attributed it to that extension. It was glorious.

Then suddenly YouTube started showing ads. Terrible. Literally worse than classic "free" television in its prime. Multiple ads pre-roll. Frequent ads just injected randomly at times through the video. Horrendous.

Re: YouTube's Ad Blocker Crackdown Spurs Record Uninstalls

#48

Post by charles_f »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #14
pprotas wrote: post #5

I wonder if anyone in the industry has any insights in how a regular developer can help improve ad blockers? Where to get started? As a huge fan of blocking ads, this makes me feel inspired to join the fight against Google. How can I help?

Boycott YouTube in favor of other video services? Pay for YT Premium? Why spend so much energy bypassing compensation for an otherwise free service? It just pushes more ads in front of less sophisticated users or encourages producers to lock all content behind paywalls.

Have you seen YouTube with ads? They slap 2-3 15s ads in a 5m video. It's unwatchable.

Re: YouTube's Ad Blocker Crackdown Spurs Record Uninstalls

#49

Post by teeray »

pprotas wrote: post #5

I wonder if anyone in the industry has any insights in how a regular developer can help improve ad blockers? Where to get started? As a huge fan of blocking ads, this makes me feel inspired to join the fight against Google. How can I help?

Eventually it will have to become content extraction. Load the page in the background, load the ad, capture frames from the video window and use some process to detect and remove the frames that show an ad. Take the clean video feed and show it in another interface than the original page. This would also be a countermeasure against direct injection of ads into the content stream.
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