Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

404media.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 316 posts

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#161

Post by MarkusWandel »

It's their toy and they can pick it up and go home with it (i.e. Google and Youtube). Network TV got so annoyingly ad infested that I gave up on it in 1998 or so, never to return. Others soldiered on with record-and-then-clip solutions (TiVO).

Record-and-clip would work with Youtube too. The adblocker "watches" the whole video, ads and all, and then when it has enough buffered up plays back the clipped version to you. Traditionally this would be defeated by wiring the ads into the content so seamlessly that the blocker can't find them automatically. But here, Google already has the next thing up their sleave, the WEI thing, whereby they can just deny service altogether that is not an approved, unmodified web browser.

My personal tolerance threshold is watching about 30 seconds of preroll ads. But when the midroll ads come in every few minutes, I'm getting close to the "quit network TV" thing again.

Of course back then there was Pay TV, and now there is Youtube subscription. Some will find it worth paying for it, others will just walk away and maybe their lives will be better for it.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#162

Post by scubbo »

not_your_vase wrote: post #2

Google and Cloudflare pretty much rules at least 98% of the internet. If they don't want you to see something, then you won't see it. Welcome to this brave new world. Though to be fair, it didn't start now. But in the past years people were cheering for the random blocks and removals. The article seems to concentrate on adblockers mostly, but it is even more interesting which news, topics and conversations (etc) reac…

How can Cloudflare prevent content from being seen? If they stop providing CDN support for a given service, there are plenty of other CDNs - the content is just as accessible to consumers if provided via a different CDN.

By contrast, if Google delists something from search results, it becomes much harder to discover - and thus, to be consumed (by the average moderately-motivated customer, not to the dedicated person willing to navigate directly to a domain)

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#163

Post by throwawayqfjwoe »

JAlexoid wrote: post #27
PedroBatista wrote: post #14

It's amazing to me how Google is allowed to control every side of the market with no real repercussions. I don't want to be the cynic who says Google has been paying lots of money to "the right people" in order to keep the status quo, but.. Google has been paying lots of money.. That might be a moderate huge win for Firefox.. until someone at Google makes a phone call to Mozilla's offices. Worst case scenario it help…

Why are you consuming any YT videos, then? Why are so many people feel entitled to YT videos without ads?

Nobody is "consuming" any "YouTube videos". I couldn't care less about YouTube. It is just an intermediary to content that I would enjoy if it was published on any other website. More often than not, YouTube gets in the way instead of helping, too: hiding notifications and new publications, exposing my favourite creators to abuse through comments, financially and legally abusing them themselves with crappy copyright practices (e.g. video taken down because someone DMCA'd based on static noise, or video demonetized because it is political or mentions a curse word, etc.), directing my attention away from them by their awful recommendations (recommendations which are horrid in and of themselves and provide even less value as days go by), and so on, and so on...

And then, it is not like paying and ad block are mutually exclusive. I do actually pay for YouTube because I don't want the ads on my living room TV, but I have many devices with many browsers and I don't want to log in on all of those. For example I have a Chromium profile dedicated to shopping, on which I deliberately don't log in to any Google or other services, because, among other reasons, if I did, all my YouTube recommendations would be product reviews. And then, many apps of YouTube are just plain unpleasant, so on my main phone I use NewPipe, despite being logged into YouTube as a paying premium user.

So, just because I don't want to log in on every device and browser combo, and prefer alternative apps, am I supposed to see the ads, which I pay to not see? Just because a website I couldn't care less about needs to make money off the backs of people whose work I like, all the while abusing them deeply and causing them to burn out?

And I am not even beginning about how godawful YouTube ads are. Not a decade ago YouTube was liberally allowing Musical.ly ads in which half naked underage girls were dancing suggestively and getting explicitly objectified on nearly every video. And now _most_ of these ads are scams, disgusting politics, more scams, get rich quick schemes, and other godawful things. At least on TV the ads don't threaten your mental health. Why would I support a business as filthy as this? Just for the privilege of _sometimes_ being spared from it.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#164

Post by TremendousJudge »

digging wrote: post #139
bravoetch wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, you're really just paying to remove ads. The rest of the product is available free already.

Several creators I watch have said they get more profit sharing from premium views than ad views. So even though it pains me to give money to Google "just" to make their product not shitty (removing ads and allowing background play, back when I had goog products on my phone), it's also paying content creators more. I prefer to subscribe and watch on Nebula to support them more... but YouTube has such a good mix of co…

Do they get paid from premium views if their videos were demonetized?

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#165

Post by scubbo »

lacoolj wrote: post #155

"Help us pay for the services we provide or don't use them" Why is this a strange message for everyone to digest? Ads pay for the content you watch, or your subscription fee covers it. Getting mad at the ad-blocking avoidance is like getting mad you can't walk into Disney Land without a park pass.

> Why is this a strange message for everyone to digest?

Because the services were previously provided for free, and the bait-and-switch feels bad; and because the perception (admittedly inaccurate) is there is no service being provided, that the content is what is paid for (the average consumer has no conception of the costs involved in storage, transmission, recommendation, content auditing, legal compliance, etc.)

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#166

Post by VohuMana »

I feel like Google shot themselves in the foot a long time ago on this front. This is all based on my experience, I sometimes follow along with some cooking YT videos to try new things, for awhile the ads were not that bad usually a couple 5-15s ads at the beginning and maybe some in the middle for a longer video. I would say a few years back they totally killed that for me because multiple times I would get hour long ads advertising the first episode of some show coming out, sure I could skip it but as I was actively cooking this meant I had to wash my hands to click the skip ads button which made for an extremely frustrating experience. The worst part is clicking skip ads didn't seem to exempt me from seeing hour long ads later in the video. Needless to say between that and getting 4+ ad blocks in a 5 minute video pushed me to just block ads on devices I can and not watch videos on devices I can't.

For me what all of this is going to do is change how I consume videos. Not all content creators do this but I would much rather use YouTube with ads as a sample of the content you're creating and then pay you some percentage of the money I would use to pay for YT Premium for access to your videos outside of YouTube.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#167

Post by hn8305823 »

contravariant wrote: post #64
Workaccount2 wrote: post #15

It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust. I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Ev…

This isn't about paying for youtube, this is about ads. People don't want youtube ads, and frankly it's their good right to not have to download, display and watch them if they so choose. What youtube now wants is proof that people have watched ads. This is problematic for 2 reasons. The first is that there is no way to prove you've watched an ad in a way that's not a privacy nightmare and extremely hostile to users.…

> I'm not disgusted with the idea of a paid youtube, I'd simply go somewhere else, I'm disgusted by having ads shoved down my throat and that of others.

The only issue I have with paid Youtube is privacy. We are talking about Google after all....

I know there are other techniques like fingerprinting but I prefer to use youtube as anonymously as possible and payment+login violates that completely.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#168

Post by turtlebits »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #15

It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust. I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Ev…

Because piracy is easier (just install adblock). Once it becomes inconvenient enough, people will start paying for it.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#169

Post by fluoridation »

chess_buster wrote: post #135
LightHugger wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The endgame here is adblockers that spoof ad views and even sometimes clicks rather than just blocking them. This is very very bad for google if they force adblockers to work like that. People will do it.

And the business buy the ads which get seen by no one, yet still Google makes money, just like with their other ads.

Or, the businesses realize what's going on and they stop buying ads from Google, since nobody sees them anyway, and Google makes less money. Google isn't holding all the cards like they might think, here.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#170

Post by preciousoo »

endisneigh wrote: post #92

At the end of the day people just don’t want to pay: ad blockers, piracy, etc. Of course people will whine when you stop them from getting stuff for free.

I don’t think that’s true. The Netflix model proved that a good UX is preferable, and now every media org is trying to cash in. Piracy usually gets a boom when said media orgs start optimizing for cash in exchange for UX
Post reply on HN