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YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

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Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#22
post #5

Websites are expensive and other than charging users money, ads are an easy way to generate revenue. I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock. However, YouTube forced me to. Back when YouTube used a small ad in the top-right, it was fine. Banner overlays were a bit more annoying, but still tolerable. Pre-rolls? No way, they stop me from getting to the content I want.…

Aren't most pre-rolls 3 seconds before you can watch the video? And it's funny to me to watch people smugly use AdBlock. All you folks who use it understand that Google could detect that you AdBlocked, and then refuse to show the video, right? I mean, you get that, right?

Then do it so we can find another way around it.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#23
post #5

Websites are expensive and other than charging users money, ads are an easy way to generate revenue. I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock. However, YouTube forced me to. Back when YouTube used a small ad in the top-right, it was fine. Banner overlays were a bit more annoying, but still tolerable. Pre-rolls? No way, they stop me from getting to the content I want.…

I often switched to embed. (youtube.com/watch?v=x89eyhj => youtube.com/embed/x89eyhj)

I do it because I might want to watch a video full screen in one monitor and continue to work on another. Embed automatically takes up the full window. An added side effect is that the pre-roll ads disappear. The banner ads are still there.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#24
post #6

I don't know about y'all, but on Chrome right now, no ad-blocker works on Youtube anymore. The adblocking works on every other site, even other video sites. But Youtube pre-rolls continue to play no matter what extension or filters I use (and making sure that "acceptable ads" are off). Anyone else experiencing this?

Try a different adblocker that isn't being paid by Google to whitelist their ads. Try different blocklists, and for the real scummy domains I use a host redirect through my firewall.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#25
post #11

There's this great small village where everyone makes stuff and buys stuff from each other: good ecosystem, works well and popular stuff makes more money than less popular, as expected. Someone comes up with an idea to make money off the stuff by giving it away for free but putting some ads on it. People don't mind much: the stuff is free now and the people making popular stuff make good money from their share of the…

> The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong. greed

Agreed. Greed.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#27
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't most pre-rolls 3 seconds before you can watch the video? And it's funny to me to watch people smugly use AdBlock. All you folks who use it understand that Google could detect that you AdBlocked, and then refuse to show the video, right? I mean, you get that, right?

Almost all were but increasingly a lot make me wait 30 seconds or more.

youtube-dl not only bypasses the wait, but also the asinine "age verification".

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong. greed

Agreed. Greed.

I work in a sort of purgatory of the broadcast/internet TV space, and with regards to ads, completely agree.

Broadcasters have gotten accustomed to very high rates for the ads shown on television. They're trying to get these rates on the web, but advertisers don't want to pay them (which is crazy, since you can directly measure response on the web; not as much with broadcast). So they show more ads. A lot more ads, to try to get to the same revenue level as broadcast television.

During the day, I sometimes feel like I'm watching two dinosaurs fight over a carcass as the meteorite comes screaming towards the ground.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#29
post #5

Websites are expensive and other than charging users money, ads are an easy way to generate revenue. I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock. However, YouTube forced me to. Back when YouTube used a small ad in the top-right, it was fine. Banner overlays were a bit more annoying, but still tolerable. Pre-rolls? No way, they stop me from getting to the content I want.…

Aren't most pre-rolls 3 seconds before you can watch the video? And it's funny to me to watch people smugly use AdBlock. All you folks who use it understand that Google could detect that you AdBlocked, and then refuse to show the video, right? I mean, you get that, right?

Google could prepend the ad in such a way that it appears to be part of the main video data stream, so that the ad is impossible to block on a URL basis.

I could write userland software to automatically skip ahead 30 seconds on any YouTube video.

Google could prevent people from skipping the first 30 seconds of any video by delaying the data stream for the remainder of the video at the server level.

At that point, I could go outside and watch the sunset.

Or, I could buy a frak-ton of EC2 instances and cobble together a crappy IsomorphTube--with discreet text-based ads, which might attract viewers simply because Google had turned YouTube into an armed camp (with forced video viewing for all).

Let's remember that even though Google has a huge scale advantage, it isn't Google that's creating the content on YouTube.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#30

Youtube wasn't the breaking point for me, twitch.tv was. Granted, the streamers themselves do have control over this, I found it utterly annoying to see the same 1 or 2 ads played over and over in my face. Once I had ABP installed, the whole internet suddenly became faster to load too. The only annoying thing is, some websites that have those annoying ads that scroll across the webpage will now result in a dead-ifram…

That's a huge factor. I remember watching seasons of TV shows on my local broadcaster's websites. Obviously, they were ad-supported and I was okay with this. The frustration was they'd show the same ad over and over and over again as I consumed a season-full of content.

If you gave me the kind of variety we're used to in a TV broadcast, I'd tolerate the ads. But repeated? No. That's when I start looking to hack my way around them.

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