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YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

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Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#51

Post by walthamstow »

ranger_danger wrote: post #9

I'm surprised they don't just inject the ads directly into the video stream, I think that would solve their issue overnight (not that I want any ads personally). You could also rate-limit it to the playback speed to prevent pre-downloading the stream easily. But now that everything uses HLS/DASH, it's easy to inject different content right in the middle of the stream without re-encoding anything.

That's how some podcast houses do it. Sometimes they'll be mid sentence and the ad will come in.

I pay for a subscription to The Athletic, who used to offer ad free podcasts in their app. Last month they signed an exclusive deal with Acast, and now I cannot possibly listen to their podcasts without ads.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#53

Post by wat10000 »

theMMaI wrote: post #21
wat10000 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s a rationalization. Most people just don’t like ads no matter what they are. And I can’t blame them, ads are terrible. But this is a case where they offer a nice subscription that takes them all away, so people ought to buy that instead.

The YT Premium subscription suffers from being low value imo, forced bundling with YT Music which inflates prices, and little to no synergy with Google One subscriptions in most countries.

I find it to be an excellent value. It’s the only streaming service I pay for. It’s full of stuff I want to watch and well worth the price.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#54

Post by bitpush »

Barrin92 wrote: post #38
brentm wrote: post #14

YouTube Premium costs about the same as 2 cold brew coffees and is worth the money.

Paying 13 bucks per month, which is a non trivial amount for a lot of people if it competes with other subcription services, merely to block ads on a website that doesn't even produce its own content is in my opinion one of the worst deals on the internet. That's equivalent to a Netflix subscription, which puts what, 20 billion into original content each year?

> doesn't even produce its own content

How do you think those video bits get streamed all around the world? Magic?

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#55

Post by magicalhippo »

sc11 wrote: post #39
magicalhippo wrote: post #2

I get they want to work against ad blockers, but as a Premium member I really wish there was an easy way to watch a video without it polluting my history or recommendations. I don't want to watch ads just due to that.

You can remove videos from your watch history and in my experience that does have an impact on the recommendations as it's not factored in anymore

Right, but that's annoying and you gotta remember. Something easier would be nice.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#56

Post by ranger_danger »

simion314 wrote: post #13

I have no respect for Youtube/google developers, like they have apps where you need to pay to use them with the screen turned off, so they screw your battery (reducing your device live) and wasting energy so their boss gets a bigger yacht (cecause it seems ads are not enough)

How else would you propose they make money (and satisfy contract obligations)? Because nobody else has figured out a better solution.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#58

Post by bitpush »

Teever wrote: post #33
_345 wrote: post #6

What if people just paid for services they use and depend on frequently

What if Google didn't horde whatever data it could about me from the analytics systems that it has installed on a myriad of websites without my consent? What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this? What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?

> What if Google didn't horde whatever data it could about me from the analytics systems that it has installed on a myriad of websites without my consent?

Arent you voluntarily using their website? Nobody is forcing you to open your browser, and type y-o-u-t-u-b-e-dot-c-o-m.

> What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?

MKBHD, LTT and others are willingly uploading videos to YouTube. YT doesnt have an exclusive deal with any of those. Infact, those folks are free to upload the same video to Vimeo, Twitch and others. What is YT doing wrong here?

> What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?

Such as?

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#59

Post by nick_g »

xandrius wrote: post #34
ttyyzz wrote: post #29

Having to pay for something so that's "less annoying" is the worst business model. YouTube Premium is very expensive. I had it for a while when I got a Pixel smartphone with a few months of YouTube Premium included. It was great. I also understand that streaming on this scale must entail incredibly high operating costs; the money has to come from somewhere. It's simply a dilemma. But there has to be a better way. Any…

Create a built-in Patreon to access premium videos and communities and take a cut.

They’re attempting that now with “memberships.” I’m not a heavy patreon user, but the current implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I expect they’ll be able to iterate on it.

An unfortunate aspect is that I’m frequently recommended videos which I would have to pay to watch. As a youtube premium subscriber, feeling like I’m constantly being upsold has begun to grate on me. I’d really appreciate a feature to hide these videos as a premium subscriber, which I have little faith in them implementing. On my laptop it’s easy enough to hide these thumbnails (as I already do with shorts) using ublock origin. However this is making me reconsider my subscription. Why should I have to use a third party tool to best use this service which I’m paying a fairly significant fee for? I’ve similarly used ublock origin to work around recent change where only three videos were shown on each row

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#60

Post by rafram »

ndriscoll wrote: post #45
brentm wrote: post #14

YouTube Premium costs about the same as 2 cold brew coffees and is worth the money.

A family plan says it's $23/month. That's well over the cost of a 3 lb tin from Costco ($18.69 by me), which is several weeks if not a month of cold brew.

We're kind of getting off track here, but a 3-lb tin of preground coffee is not going to taste very good by the time you finish it, if it ever tastes good at all. It's pretty likely to be low-quality and stale before you even pull it off the shelf.
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