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YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

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Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#231

Post by matheusmoreira »

gwd wrote: post #191
wredue wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that for YouTube to get that payment, I have to give them, and other ad networks a major view in to my whole life. Ad networks are currently scum of the earth, easily giving lawyers a good name. If ad networks were riddled with crime, invasion of privacy, and other bullshit, people would be much more willing to entertain them. Today though, they’re obnoxious AND invade your privacy AND may actually jus…

> The problem is that for YouTube to get that payment, I have to give them, and other ad networks a major view in to my whole life. Wait... does that mean, Google could offer "DoubleClick Premuim", where I pay to not see any DoubleClick ads whatsoever, anywhere on the web, but the websites I visited would still get their funding? I think I'd pay $10/mo for that.

Don't fall for that scam. If you pay for such a service, it only increases the value of your attention even further. You're clearly demonstrating you have enough disposable income to pay their extortion fees. It only makes them want sell to you even more. You're paying to segment the market for them.

There is no context where a rational businessman would choose not to advertise to you. Someone will at some point realize they're leaving money on the table and the policy will be reverted.

They have no limits. They'd put ads under our eyelids if they could. In our dreams. The only way to deal with such people is to block their ads unconditionally and with extreme prejudice.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#232

Post by userbinator »

matrix_overload wrote: post #123
cj wrote: post #76

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,…

Different users are shown different ads, so you would need to dynamically edit the video and audio stream, injecting additional content into it. 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.

It's not that hard to splice the stream, as this is clearly being done for DTV already, but as you pointed out, needing to splice in different content for each user in the same connection is not easy, especially when the segments probably reside on different servers.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#233

Post by leosanchez »

lamontcg wrote: post #176
ketzo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd pay for YT if it wasn't run by Google. Google wants to track me and sell the data and wants me to pay for it, and I'm not willing to be abused that badly.

I payed YouTube premium for 2 months. When they come up with Web Integrity API and Topics API I felt guilty. Felt like I am funding something bad

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#234

Post by Tao3300 »

bootlooped wrote: post #153
Mordisquitos wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use an ad blocker just as a blanket response to too much crap on websites and being uninterested in having advertising be in my face as much as it would be without. However, that's not to say that all advertising is irrelevant, or that I'm immune to it. When an ad gets through usually my response is something to the tune of "oh well". The devil's advocate argument against your second to last point is that you'd act…

> 10% of the total ads somebody sees

I have a special reserve of hatred tucked away for advertisers who take up that much of my consciousness. It's top-shelf, cask-conditioned hatred. Rare, excellent stuff.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#235

Post by nmz »

lamontcg wrote: post #176
ketzo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd pay for YT if it wasn't run by Google. Google wants to track me and sell the data and wants me to pay for it, and I'm not willing to be abused that badly.

They'll have your data regardless if you pay for the service or not. And nothing is free, they need to pay for the service, now, if you do pay for the service they should enable more privacy.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#236

Post by pseudalopex »

acdha wrote: post #199
bluish29 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the comparison is not 1:1 but the result is the same in the two cases. I don't see the ads, one of them I have more control on how effective I can prevent ads. Also in both cases I pay for the bus from my money so that I pay for the internet connection from my own money. The internet is built on free protocols and I can use it whatever I want. Google does not pay TCP/IP..etc designers/operators a portion of the…

This all comes down to consent: someone who pays for a billboard knows that not everyone will look at it, people who create open source software or open standards know that other people will use their work to make money, etc. The problem is that YouTube is not providing free video but rather ad-supported video. If you don’t like that, it’s like seeing someone else’s GPL code: your choice is take it on the terms offer…

Someone who pays for a YouTube ad knows some people will block it. And advertisers do not value consent.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#237

Post by xboxnolifes »

seydor wrote: post #99

I wonder why Youtube does not try other kinds of ads.why not ads in the sidebar, under the videos etc. They know which products and keywords are mentioned, and sometimes i google them anyway. Why do they insist on silly clickbait ads that are much worse than old-time TV ads. I don't want that because i don't like people wasting my time beyond a few hundred milliseconds. They d probably have made more money if they sh…

Old YouTube used to. I assume banner ads were deemed useless.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#238

Post by ndriscoll »

ketzo wrote: post #229
trimethylpurine wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could be hosted elsewhere. Why should free education material that is already funded by donations be locked behind ad based hosting? Hosting is not that expensive if you're using only those services. Especially in the countries where it's mostly being used.

> not that expensive yeah, but it’s hard to overstate how much less expensive “free” is than anything else. I don’t know how you do free video hosting for the entire world without YouTube’s model.

ipfs or torrents integrated into the browser. The "sharing economy" and p2p were huge back before corporations figured out how to get it under control and corral people back onto centralized, ephemeral streaming platforms.

Instead of a "like" people could give a video a pin, and then they'll have their own offline copy as long as they want it, and also help share it.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#239

Post by xboxnolifes »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #220
xboxnolifes wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just cost effectiveness. It's about how awful you will make the user experience for real users if you tried to bring fraud truly to 0. It's essentially the security-convenience tradeoff. In terms of YouTube, it's the monetization-experience tradeoff.

Yes, because the corporations are optimizing for cost effectiveness (return on sales or return on investment). Corporations don't care what the user experience is for its own sake. They care about keeping and retaining paying users. After a point they don't bother making the user experience better, because it isn't cost effective to do so.

But cost effectiveness makes it sound like you can fix it by throwing money at it. The point is that you cannot fix it, even with infinite money, because you will reach zero users before you reach 0 fraud.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#240

Post by kikokikokiko »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #126
Mordisquitos wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The trouble is that ads frequently don't try to make you love a brand. What they do is build up familiarity - for example, a rule of thumb they all use, that you will notice everywhere, is to repeat the product name at least 3 times. 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 im…

This is simply wrong. For instance, when buying medicine, I make it a matter of honor to buy "the generic version of brand X, please". It can even be the same price. I would NEVER, EVER, buy the one that uses a gimmick and advertise itself. Ads are just like hypnosis, they work on the gullible/dumb share of the populace.
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