I don't know of any data that backs this up but my perception is advertising on YouTube has gotten way heavier in the last 12 months. Used to be short ads, usually 1, that you could skip after a few seconds. Now it seems there are multiple ads on each video, some unskippable, even the longer ones.
I don't expect YouTube to be completely free, and of course it's their platform they can do what they like, but at what point are they just getting greedy and should perhaps realize the result of that is going to be more people using ad blockers. I mean, their 2019 revenue was 15bn, it was almost 30bn in 2022. They hardly struggling to monetize. Will be interesting to see where this goes. Perhaps it's an attempt to push people to premium.
Apparently they did that even without asking content authors, so even those that don't do ads, were surprised to wake up to a sea of complaints regarding ads on their content.
Def got heavier, used to get 1 ad at the beginning, now its 2, then another 2 after 5 mins or so?
If I pause the video to do something, another couple of ads will play after restarting.
I wouldn't be surprised if they ramped up the ads the more you used it, new users would get less ads to make it more attractive. After you build up some hours, have some subscribers they might reckon they could squeeze more in there as you're more invested in the platform.
Out of all the monthly subscriptions I have, YouTube Premium is by far my favourite. I don’t see an issue with paying for something I use so much everyday.
Let’s be real, at this point YouTube is too big to fail. Without Google’s capital it would be impossible to do this at scale. Also I would much rather support Google and independent creators rather than Netflix and the entertainment industry.
> Also I would much rather support Google and independent creators
Of the independent creators I know about, not a single one is satisfied with YouTube and their draconian rules. They all have their own sponsors in the videos and Patreon accounts. Google, like other major tech companies, has proven time and again they care about their bottom line above all. Let’s not pretend they are good guys standing up for the little guy.
> rather than Netflix and the entertainment industry.
Wasn’t Netflix specifically a big supporter of independent creators, giving a lot of them a chance they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise? There was even a running joke that anyone could get a show on Netflix. Perhaps I’m mistaken or that has changed but it seems like any other of the big streaming services would be a better target for that comment.
YouTube premium is a great example of a convenience product. My main YouTube consumption has moved from my browser to my Apple TV, where there's no good way to block ads, so I just pay for premium. Added benefit is being able to share ad-free with a few friends. I really don't like giving YouTube the money, but I REALLY don't like seeing ads.
Ask yourself this: "If youtube stopped existing tomorrow, what would I do?"
Chances are your first thought was something along the lines of "Hm, well I'd probably just...", as opposed to simple abject despair.
And I bet same goes for content creators. They'd find a way. And it might even be better.
In fact, the more prudent ones already have more than one basket for their eggs already, such that if and when youtube does "that thing", their patrons will know exactly where to find them next, with minimal friction.
Good, it’s the time for YouTube to die for good, no more useless contents, no more “content creators” having silly faces as a thumbnail to trick the algo, maybe another service will arise soon that has the same contents as the old youtube and somehow like tiktok now, an interest based, for fun and entertainment videos, posted by average cameras and normal people unlike the atrocities we see now in YT..
This is a bad take. There’s a lot of genuinely good content on YouTube, it’s just that band content tends to get more attention. Even with the bad content, that’s not a reason for YouTube to “die for good.” Just because you have to spend more time seeking out good content doesn’t make the platform invaluable.
invaluable: of great value, priceless. Seriously, youtube is not that. Let's go with a more reasonable definition that youtube is valuable. Value of time vs value of content. I can easily see having to spend more time seeking content resulting in the platform no longer being valuable.
Of course there’s good content on YouTube, but the vast majority is crap or even anti-content and YouTube pushes bad content with its algorithm.
I think it’s a function of preferring longer content to show more ads so what was once a 4 minute read blog post is now a 15 minute video that meanders around and around killing time.
People watch it, very much, so it’s not YouTube’s fault entirely. But I wish they would incentivize valuable content over chaff. I think there’s a lot of bloat wastage that exists only because YouTube pays more and encourages it.
While there is a lot of that, there's still an awful lot of good content, especially for niche interests, you don't have to watch the stuff you don't like. I don't have much, if any, come up on my feed.
I don't understand the mentality that everything on YouTube should be free. Sure, there's plenty of junk, but there are glorious slices that I am compelled to support, both via YouTube Premium and via Patreon where applicable.
...Yes you absolutely can. The web was never meant to be your monetization tool. A bunch of mouth breathing, money grubbing assholes came up with the idea that the web should be the next great advertising frontier.
And as the creation of the Universe was, so to was the web becoming the next advertising frontier widely considered a bad move. So get off my web, and go set up your monetized fiefdom elsewhere. This place was not meant for your ilk. Leave us, and take your shitty rip-off content syndication farms with you. Leave and sully our search indexes no more! Go and find your own damn playground.
Oh, wait, what's that? Don't want to move somewhere or build a network that requires opt-in to your shitty monetization schemes because you'd miss out on all the eyeballs that won't follow you?
Well... Now you know why we complain. Because your arse feels entitled to pollute the shit out of our indexes and poison our wells.
The problem with ads is that the ad-pushers basically forced people to use adblockers. In the early days, people put up with a few ads here and there as the cost of seeing stuff for free, plus ad-blockers didn't exist yet. But then the ad-pushers kept making the experience worse and worse, and the ads more and more intrusive and obnoxious. People invented ad-blockers, and as the ads got even worse (and even dangerous: many were laden with viruses), more and more people turned to ad-blockers, even if before they were ambivalent or even wanted to support the advertising model.
This story is as old as the WWW. It's the same thing now. YouTube ads weren't that bad before, but as several comments here have noted, they're getting worse and worse. So before, only die-hard ad-haters would employ ad-blockers, but now the advertisers are pushing more people to use them.
I can and will complain. Youtube ads are bad in two ways:
1) they have these ads that pop-over and hide the content
2) there ad breaks are cut into content at in-opportune moments. At least on TV, the content is designed around the ad breaks
Collectively, those two things make the ads on YouTube infuriating. It's then made worse by the ramp up in the volume of ads. Either work with content creators on when ads are displayed to make the content and ad experience better (a la tv) or come up with a different method. And for the love go god, git rid of those stupid ads that pop over the content.
Youtube made it free in the first place so they could win a monopoly over people who charged for subscriptions. I'm happy to contribute directly to people who produce things I like, but I don't understand the mentality of people who say that we should be compelled to support Youtube's business model.
Businesses that rely on user-provided content plus network effects are squatting on a natural monopoly that doesn't belong to them. YouTube wants to show me ads or charge me a monthly fee, and in exchange they pay creators a pittance for the right to distribute content that YouTube is not in any way responsible for making.
What would replace YouTube if it didn't exist? Well, PeerTube gives an example of one possible direction, Discord (or IRC) another. YouTube's continued existence prevents any better alternatives from developing. It's squatting on the conceptual space for "where I go to watch short videos" and acting as a middle-man between me and creators, then using its monopoly over that connection to shaft us both.
Sure, ads are the price you pay for getting the content, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But if ads are the price, they just doubled the cost, and that's worth a bit of complaining.
Something in Google/YouTube's books is horribly wrong. I feel surprised there aren't major articles about "something seems very unhealthy at YouTube." The last 12 months of advertising on YouTube has taken a nosedive:
- Regularly see static ads for fake Mario Android games that are an OBVIOUS violation of Nintendo copyright.
- Regularly see snakeoil ads. Complete garbage that Google used to be too good for. Now they'll take anyone's money.
- Regularly get an entire page of ads when I search for something on mobile. Not a single actual result until I scroll below 3 rows of ads.
- Ad breaks have seemingly doubled.
- Unskippable ads were 5, then 7, now up to 15 seconds.
If ad blockers are blocked on Youtube I will just stop using Youtube and buy a sub to Nebula/Curiosity stream instead because most of the interesting Youtubers are slowly migrating over to it.
not OP but "uBlock Origin" is the golden standard. I use that + "Behind The Overlay", "NoScript", "Google Search Ad Remover And Customizer", "Personal Blocklist(not by Google)", "SponsorBlock for YouTube - Skip Sponsorships"
Firstly it's interesting that they think they get to decide whether the user runs an adblocker or not. I'm going to decide that for myself thank you very much yt.
Secondly, the yt experience without adblocking is so poor that I cringe any time I have to watch something on a device (eg my phone) that I don't have adblocking set up on. For whatever reason at the moment I get bombarded with get-rich-quick scams promising to teach me trading (thanks but I used to work in the city - I don't need your bs "advice") and deepfake scams saying Elon Musk is giving away his money.
It's not really that difficult. If the ads are blocked the servers can just return 403 for the videos. Since they have their own ad platform they can easily verify if a specific ad was served from the server which is difficult to work around from the client. Even if someone puts in the work to download the ad without playing it to satisfy the server Google still makes money so they're happy.
When it comes to corporations like Google I don't really mind watching ads but I don't want to help them with their revenue.
After analyzing the code I see that it's indeed the server that's supposed to return whether to display this popup (so presumably the video info data would not be included in that response).
However this still doesn't mean there's a reliable channel to detect whether the ad was actually displayed, and as far as I understand there might be some architectural limits as to what data can be collected by a given server (for example, the CDN).
Now, I don't think advertisers 'd be very happy if Google counted simply downloading the ad as an impression :)
> Now, I don't think advertisers 'd be very happy if Google counted simply downloading the ad as an impression :)
That's how it's been done for years, and verified with tracking pixel from a third-party to correlate numbers. I used to work at a startup in the ad space ages ago and most third-parties were on block lists, we weren't. So we couldn't get paid for real impressions because the numbers didn't add up.
How would a site confidently verify that a video was actually played as opposed to simply downloaded? The path of least resistance is good enough, and Google is Google, advertisers do what they say. If they're unhappy is there even a way to let them know?
I was refering to the fact that before a click is recorded, YT uses a thing called BotGuard, presumably to prevent malicious clicks (I might be misunderstanding the use of BG here), so I thought they use similar measures when counting impressions in general.
I'm confused, are you now arguing that it's difficult to work around Youtubes mitigations and that they have all kinds of checks to make sure an ad was viewed? That said I'm sure bot detection is more interesting for the adsense part of their business to catch malicious publishers and content creators not adblockers.
A simple check that the rest of the video is requested at least $now >= ($ad_request_time + $min_skip_or_view_time) will catch most adblockers while degrading none of the regular users. All done server-side, no need to complicate things. Sure the adblocker could play some elevator tunes and display a spinner while waiting, but what's even the point. Next step they require a hash of the ad in the next request as proof and on it goes.
See facebooks markup for the "Sponsored" string for a similar example in the wild. Last I checked ublock origin gave up.
More like I'm arguing that if they use their BG detection for catching adblockers as well, then that part _might_ be attacked with a greater force than before - and if broken, might hurt them more than adblockers did. Of course it's just pure speculation.
Back to the technical argument, I was refering to the fact that a DB read to check if an ad should be served (done on the player page) as well as the DB write to check if the video was downloaded earlier (on the CDN, we have signatures there and expiry date passed as a parameter) might be infeasible from the architectural/performance point of view, but I gotta admit I actually don't have any relevant knowledge here so I'm just speculating because this seems interesting.
It would be done in-memory on whatever server the load-balancer assigns the visitor to, at the same time that the request is checked for permissions anyway. Compared to the rest of the data Google collects the extra timestamp isn't even a rounding-error and doesn't need to be persisted in long-term storage (the request is in the logs anyway).
They could have gone paywall but Ad revenue is too good. FTC should check them for promising to be a free of cost video host but having such strings attached to viewing content as well
Bold move.
I don't know of any data that backs this up but my perception is advertising on YouTube has gotten way heavier in the last 12 months. Used to be short ads, usually 1, that you could skip after a few seconds. Now it seems there are multiple ads on each video, some unskippable, even the longer ones.
I don't expect YouTube to be completely free, and of course it's their platform they can do what they like, but at what point are they just getting greedy and should perhaps realize the result of that is going to be more people using ad blockers. I mean, their 2019 revenue was 15bn, it was almost 30bn in 2022. They hardly struggling to monetize. Will be interesting to see where this goes. Perhaps it's an attempt to push people to premium.
Apparently they did that even without asking content authors, so even those that don't do ads, were surprised to wake up to a sea of complaints regarding ads on their content.
They have a lot of profit but it’s going to dwindle as people start posting more 4k content. Linus has a video on it. https://youtu.be/MDsJJRNXjYI
Def got heavier, used to get 1 ad at the beginning, now its 2, then another 2 after 5 mins or so?
If I pause the video to do something, another couple of ads will play after restarting.
I wouldn't be surprised if they ramped up the ads the more you used it, new users would get less ads to make it more attractive. After you build up some hours, have some subscribers they might reckon they could squeeze more in there as you're more invested in the platform.
Out of all the monthly subscriptions I have, YouTube Premium is by far my favourite. I don’t see an issue with paying for something I use so much everyday.
Let’s be real, at this point YouTube is too big to fail. Without Google’s capital it would be impossible to do this at scale. Also I would much rather support Google and independent creators rather than Netflix and the entertainment industry.
> Also I would much rather support Google and independent creators
Of the independent creators I know about, not a single one is satisfied with YouTube and their draconian rules. They all have their own sponsors in the videos and Patreon accounts. Google, like other major tech companies, has proven time and again they care about their bottom line above all. Let’s not pretend they are good guys standing up for the little guy.
> rather than Netflix and the entertainment industry.
Wasn’t Netflix specifically a big supporter of independent creators, giving a lot of them a chance they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise? There was even a running joke that anyone could get a show on Netflix. Perhaps I’m mistaken or that has changed but it seems like any other of the big streaming services would be a better target for that comment.
I would subscribe if it stopped all the draconian tracking, but unfortunately it doesn't.
YouTube premium is a great example of a convenience product. My main YouTube consumption has moved from my browser to my Apple TV, where there's no good way to block ads, so I just pay for premium. Added benefit is being able to share ad-free with a few friends. I really don't like giving YouTube the money, but I REALLY don't like seeing ads.
I don't think it's too big to fail at all.
Ask yourself this: "If youtube stopped existing tomorrow, what would I do?"
Chances are your first thought was something along the lines of "Hm, well I'd probably just...", as opposed to simple abject despair.
And I bet same goes for content creators. They'd find a way. And it might even be better.
In fact, the more prudent ones already have more than one basket for their eggs already, such that if and when youtube does "that thing", their patrons will know exactly where to find them next, with minimal friction.
Good, it’s the time for YouTube to die for good, no more useless contents, no more “content creators” having silly faces as a thumbnail to trick the algo, maybe another service will arise soon that has the same contents as the old youtube and somehow like tiktok now, an interest based, for fun and entertainment videos, posted by average cameras and normal people unlike the atrocities we see now in YT..
This is a bad take. There’s a lot of genuinely good content on YouTube, it’s just that band content tends to get more attention. Even with the bad content, that’s not a reason for YouTube to “die for good.” Just because you have to spend more time seeking out good content doesn’t make the platform invaluable.
invaluable: of great value, priceless. Seriously, youtube is not that. Let's go with a more reasonable definition that youtube is valuable. Value of time vs value of content. I can easily see having to spend more time seeking content resulting in the platform no longer being valuable.
Of course there’s good content on YouTube, but the vast majority is crap or even anti-content and YouTube pushes bad content with its algorithm.
I think it’s a function of preferring longer content to show more ads so what was once a 4 minute read blog post is now a 15 minute video that meanders around and around killing time.
People watch it, very much, so it’s not YouTube’s fault entirely. But I wish they would incentivize valuable content over chaff. I think there’s a lot of bloat wastage that exists only because YouTube pays more and encourages it.
While there is a lot of that, there's still an awful lot of good content, especially for niche interests, you don't have to watch the stuff you don't like. I don't have much, if any, come up on my feed.
Uh, are those silly faces actually tricking the algo or tricking humans?
I don't understand the mentality that everything on YouTube should be free. Sure, there's plenty of junk, but there are glorious slices that I am compelled to support, both via YouTube Premium and via Patreon where applicable.
Seems unreasonable that you're downvoted for this comment. You can't complain about ads and also complain about paying a subscription.
...Yes you absolutely can. The web was never meant to be your monetization tool. A bunch of mouth breathing, money grubbing assholes came up with the idea that the web should be the next great advertising frontier.
And as the creation of the Universe was, so to was the web becoming the next advertising frontier widely considered a bad move. So get off my web, and go set up your monetized fiefdom elsewhere. This place was not meant for your ilk. Leave us, and take your shitty rip-off content syndication farms with you. Leave and sully our search indexes no more! Go and find your own damn playground.
Oh, wait, what's that? Don't want to move somewhere or build a network that requires opt-in to your shitty monetization schemes because you'd miss out on all the eyeballs that won't follow you?
Well... Now you know why we complain. Because your arse feels entitled to pollute the shit out of our indexes and poison our wells.
>The web was never meant to be your monetization tool.
Who defined what web was meant to?
You’re not asking a rhetorical question. The web was designed and you can read the original paper, https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
And you can read other parts as they were designed and added.
Sure you can.
The problem with ads is that the ad-pushers basically forced people to use adblockers. In the early days, people put up with a few ads here and there as the cost of seeing stuff for free, plus ad-blockers didn't exist yet. But then the ad-pushers kept making the experience worse and worse, and the ads more and more intrusive and obnoxious. People invented ad-blockers, and as the ads got even worse (and even dangerous: many were laden with viruses), more and more people turned to ad-blockers, even if before they were ambivalent or even wanted to support the advertising model.
This story is as old as the WWW. It's the same thing now. YouTube ads weren't that bad before, but as several comments here have noted, they're getting worse and worse. So before, only die-hard ad-haters would employ ad-blockers, but now the advertisers are pushing more people to use them.
I can and will complain. Youtube ads are bad in two ways: 1) they have these ads that pop-over and hide the content 2) there ad breaks are cut into content at in-opportune moments. At least on TV, the content is designed around the ad breaks
Collectively, those two things make the ads on YouTube infuriating. It's then made worse by the ramp up in the volume of ads. Either work with content creators on when ads are displayed to make the content and ad experience better (a la tv) or come up with a different method. And for the love go god, git rid of those stupid ads that pop over the content.
Youtube made it free in the first place so they could win a monopoly over people who charged for subscriptions. I'm happy to contribute directly to people who produce things I like, but I don't understand the mentality of people who say that we should be compelled to support Youtube's business model.
How exactly are you "compelled" to support anything?
> via Patreon where applicable.
This is part of the problem with YouTube. I watch a shitload of ads and the creators still cannot pay their bills.
Businesses that rely on user-provided content plus network effects are squatting on a natural monopoly that doesn't belong to them. YouTube wants to show me ads or charge me a monthly fee, and in exchange they pay creators a pittance for the right to distribute content that YouTube is not in any way responsible for making.
What would replace YouTube if it didn't exist? Well, PeerTube gives an example of one possible direction, Discord (or IRC) another. YouTube's continued existence prevents any better alternatives from developing. It's squatting on the conceptual space for "where I go to watch short videos" and acting as a middle-man between me and creators, then using its monopoly over that connection to shaft us both.
Sure, ads are the price you pay for getting the content, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But if ads are the price, they just doubled the cost, and that's worth a bit of complaining.
Something in Google/YouTube's books is horribly wrong. I feel surprised there aren't major articles about "something seems very unhealthy at YouTube." The last 12 months of advertising on YouTube has taken a nosedive:
- Regularly see static ads for fake Mario Android games that are an OBVIOUS violation of Nintendo copyright.
- Regularly see snakeoil ads. Complete garbage that Google used to be too good for. Now they'll take anyone's money.
- Regularly get an entire page of ads when I search for something on mobile. Not a single actual result until I scroll below 3 rows of ads.
- Ad breaks have seemingly doubled.
- Unskippable ads were 5, then 7, now up to 15 seconds.
If ad blockers are blocked on Youtube I will just stop using Youtube and buy a sub to Nebula/Curiosity stream instead because most of the interesting Youtubers are slowly migrating over to it.
That's news to me. I roll with at least 2 adblockers everywhere I go. I can't stand what the modern web looks like with all that bullshit.
Which ones do you use?
not OP but "uBlock Origin" is the golden standard. I use that + "Behind The Overlay", "NoScript", "Google Search Ad Remover And Customizer", "Personal Blocklist(not by Google)", "SponsorBlock for YouTube - Skip Sponsorships"
Amazing, looks just like all the websites I don’t use! Looks like my video content addiction will have a cure very soon.
The enshittification of Google products continues.
There is nothing on youtube that makes me pay for the subscription, so go ahead YT and try to force this measure and see how it goes. bye bye
Firstly it's interesting that they think they get to decide whether the user runs an adblocker or not. I'm going to decide that for myself thank you very much yt.
Secondly, the yt experience without adblocking is so poor that I cringe any time I have to watch something on a device (eg my phone) that I don't have adblocking set up on. For whatever reason at the moment I get bombarded with get-rich-quick scams promising to teach me trading (thanks but I used to work in the city - I don't need your bs "advice") and deepfake scams saying Elon Musk is giving away his money.
I use youtube vanced (now Revanced) for android
That's technically interesting, how do they plan to enforce this?
It's not really that difficult. If the ads are blocked the servers can just return 403 for the videos. Since they have their own ad platform they can easily verify if a specific ad was served from the server which is difficult to work around from the client. Even if someone puts in the work to download the ad without playing it to satisfy the server Google still makes money so they're happy.
When it comes to corporations like Google I don't really mind watching ads but I don't want to help them with their revenue.
After analyzing the code I see that it's indeed the server that's supposed to return whether to display this popup (so presumably the video info data would not be included in that response).
However this still doesn't mean there's a reliable channel to detect whether the ad was actually displayed, and as far as I understand there might be some architectural limits as to what data can be collected by a given server (for example, the CDN).
Now, I don't think advertisers 'd be very happy if Google counted simply downloading the ad as an impression :)
> Now, I don't think advertisers 'd be very happy if Google counted simply downloading the ad as an impression :)
That's how it's been done for years, and verified with tracking pixel from a third-party to correlate numbers. I used to work at a startup in the ad space ages ago and most third-parties were on block lists, we weren't. So we couldn't get paid for real impressions because the numbers didn't add up.
How would a site confidently verify that a video was actually played as opposed to simply downloaded? The path of least resistance is good enough, and Google is Google, advertisers do what they say. If they're unhappy is there even a way to let them know?
I was refering to the fact that before a click is recorded, YT uses a thing called BotGuard, presumably to prevent malicious clicks (I might be misunderstanding the use of BG here), so I thought they use similar measures when counting impressions in general.
I'm confused, are you now arguing that it's difficult to work around Youtubes mitigations and that they have all kinds of checks to make sure an ad was viewed? That said I'm sure bot detection is more interesting for the adsense part of their business to catch malicious publishers and content creators not adblockers.
A simple check that the rest of the video is requested at least $now >= ($ad_request_time + $min_skip_or_view_time) will catch most adblockers while degrading none of the regular users. All done server-side, no need to complicate things. Sure the adblocker could play some elevator tunes and display a spinner while waiting, but what's even the point. Next step they require a hash of the ad in the next request as proof and on it goes.
See facebooks markup for the "Sponsored" string for a similar example in the wild. Last I checked ublock origin gave up.
More like I'm arguing that if they use their BG detection for catching adblockers as well, then that part _might_ be attacked with a greater force than before - and if broken, might hurt them more than adblockers did. Of course it's just pure speculation.
Back to the technical argument, I was refering to the fact that a DB read to check if an ad should be served (done on the player page) as well as the DB write to check if the video was downloaded earlier (on the CDN, we have signatures there and expiry date passed as a parameter) might be infeasible from the architectural/performance point of view, but I gotta admit I actually don't have any relevant knowledge here so I'm just speculating because this seems interesting.
It would be done in-memory on whatever server the load-balancer assigns the visitor to, at the same time that the request is checked for permissions anyway. Compared to the rest of the data Google collects the extra timestamp isn't even a rounding-error and doesn't need to be persisted in long-term storage (the request is in the logs anyway).
So, bought subscription for Nebula for year (maybe should have gone woth Curiosity stream bundle).
I guess it's time to Rumble https://rumble.com
They could have gone paywall but Ad revenue is too good. FTC should check them for promising to be a free of cost video host but having such strings attached to viewing content as well
There literally is a paywall version. Just pay for YouTube Premium.
I will never pay for Youtube Premium even if that means never using Youtube again.
What I like least about youtube is their use of shadowbanning in the comment section. Absolutely shameful. Freedom of speech on Google's terms.
Not exactly pay wall