The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That’s not to say whether or not the advertisement is for a product or service for which the viewer is interested in purchasing but how it relates to the context in which it is viewed.
People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may be about how the billboards block a scenic view but that also seems like another way of complaining about the irrelevance. Similarly, if I am watching a Youtube video, I am never thinking that a disruptive message from a commercial business is relevant to my current activities (uh, passivities?). No advertisement is relevant, not even in-video direct sponsorships, hence SponsorBlock.
If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them. I might need tires and realize I can get that taken care of while I’m at Costco. Nearly every advertisement I see at Costco is relevant because it’s selling something I can buy in the same building, indeed usually something juxtaposed close to the advertisement.
I don’t complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they’re irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.
> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
That's not true. We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.
The YouTube ads are hated because that's the whole point. YouTube has something we want (the video), and they're keeping it from us until they we do something we don't want to do (watch an ad). We dislike these ads almost by definition. If we liked them, we'd seek them out, and we'd call them something else, like "movie trailers" or "Super Bowl ads."
Steel-manning the argument, near where I live, it's not that uncommon to see small to moderately sized advertisements along the road, such as a sign outside/near the entrance of a farm that's selling eggs, meat, etc. I am wholly unopposed to this. In fact, I'm very supportive of this, and used them to find a farm to buy local honey from. Whereas the stereotypical massive slabs whose advertisements get wallpapered on, I think those are distracting menaces, particularly if the primary way you see them is by driving.
And where I live it's an ever growing hell of political signs, dominos pizza, and anyone else who realizes there is no enforcement against this wide scale littering. The signs are never removed and continue piling up. Abandoned / unmonitored lots are also a frequent target.
And it's rapidly getting worse
Glad you're cool with it though, I guess? Cuz I've considered running for office on the sole platform of having them perpetually removed and perpetrators prosecuted.
There are literally signs advertising to hire people to place more signs.
I highly doubt a billboard is thick or dense enough to effectively block freeway sound. It’s not like you have a seamless wall of billboards “protecting” a neighborhood
In the case of advertising that is the million dollar question. Determining the relationship between ad spend and revenue is next to impossible, whatever bullshit ad companies feed you to get you to spend more on ads.
Nothing is wrong with billboards, I can look the other way. When the billboards show up on my dashboard and I have to stare at it before I can turn off my exit then we have problems
I don’t mind watching a video with an ad. My child and I can preoccupy ourself. When it’s a 90 second ad we are forced to watch just to watch a 45 second video I’m gonna make certain we don’t watch that ad
They’re disagreeable because you’re having your attention robbed unsolicited for the purpose of someone else trying to get your money. The whole concept is an insult. At best they drive materialism.
Not true, cable TV runs ads and costs money. Many sports channels cost money in a cable package and still have ads. The *paid* Netflix plans have ads now.
It’s pretty clear that companies can’t stop salivating over how lucrative ads are, and will continue to shove ads down our throats inside of paid products as long as we live.
I completely agree, though with a twist. Google knows everything about me and yet I get ADs for things that I would never purchase. Just because I'm a middle aged male I see trucks, and beer, and football advertisements all day long. Those are irrelevant to me. If Google would only use their immense knowledge of me and what I like, I might be more amenable to watching their ADs. Where are the ADs for geeky movies that I might enjoy (is there a new Superman movie coming out)? Or books by my favorite authors? Or video games or computer equipment or electric cars? Hell, I have grandkids so stuff for them might work on me.
To be clear, it's not only Google, all the big providers have so much information on all of us, but they don't seem to take advantage of it at all. I've turned the AD "customization" on/off for all kinds of things and it doesn't seem to matter in the slightest. Nearly everything I see is irrelevant to me.
Their incentive is to make money, not serve you relevant ads.
If a geeky movie studio pays X to show an ad to people of your profile, while a car manufacturer pays X*2, Google is better off showing you the car, even if they are internally 100% sure you'd buy the movie instead.
Consuming content online has always been about agency. You choose the content. Previous media landscapes were largely passive endeavors. Broadcast media choices were limited. You either muted the ads, turned off the TV/radio or endured the advertisements. I often find myself closing YT when ads are played.
Not only are they largely irrelevant, but they are frequently in the wrong language. If I want to immerse myself in the local language, I will go outside and interact in that language. If I am listening to a podcast in English, typically around Anglophone cultural or political topics, why would they invade my space with non-English content?
I don't want to hear local music or K-Pop when I am listening to classical music.
In many cases, the language isn't even local to the country which I reside in. If I cannot have an English-only space on my own computer, I won't be using the site. There's a time and a place for immersion into other cultures. My personal computer in my home office isn't the place.
I don’t get how YouTube advertises. Because we use VPN in China, YouTube simply pushes ads in whatever local language my proxy server happens to be. Which baffles me quite a lot since even the most basic tracking and use history (I have two decades in Google) would tell them at least the language I can understand.
The parasitic nature of ad tech attracts the laziest get rich quickest tech workers who go on to management where they hire the griftiest of grifters into their ranks.
The value I get for paying YouTube doesn't match the price.
Ad blocking is already free and was free for two decades, why would I want to start paying for it now? It's not like I am breaking ToS (despite their pop-ups stating otherwise) and even if I did it is my computer and it is entirely up to me what kind of content it is and isn't going to display.
Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile.
Everyone wins aside from me, the end user. I am paying for something that is already free to do, I get nothing out of it (I still have to run stuff like Sponsorblock to get the content I actually want) and I participate in the upkeep of a business model that not only doesn't have my interests in mind but also has no issues with tricking me (there is no content moderation for YouTube ads and there are plenty of cases in which users are served scam ads).
You lose on long run. In few years, you will pay more and still watch ads while YT will no longer be free. (let me remind you of video streaming services)
Managers want their rewards that are tied to earnings and stockholders want to earn more.
And once they both get their money, the next year reward will be tied to even more earnings. And stockholders will want to earn more.
I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years. The value I get is vastly greater than Netflix or any other streaming service. But if they ever start putting ads in the paid subscriptions (like many streaming services now with their basic tier) I’ll jump ship.
Yep, you were a test project. Will people pay for free content or punish them by leaving the platform. And will they start to pay if you increase number of ads. Now they moved to next stage.
Anyway, not there yet. Frog is boiled slowly, slow enough that people dont notice until it is to late.
First they need to kill ad blockers tier. Then you increase number of ads to unbearable (they are already doing that) and get as much people as possible to paid content. Also market must be ripe enough, so there will be no more ships to jump. Then you will get ads, different tiers to pay, segmentation of content etc.
I hear you, but I can only live in the now and not whatifs. I refuse to watch ads and will pay to avoid them. If a service I use makes that impossible, then I’ll no longer use the service.
And there is more content in the world right now than any single person will ever be able to consume. I have zero concerns about dropping a service.
But you don't need to drop a service. You can keep it as good as it is. You just don't reward google predatory tactics by paying, as you are literally making YT worse.
So if I don't pay and I don't want to watch ads then what? I'm not going to jump through mental gymnastics to not pay creators and Google for offering the service. If you truly don't want to reward Google, then don't use anything from Google.
How did it work until now? Anyway, we both know that care for "creators" is "think of the children" thing, but I will play along: pay them using patreon (or, I have bought this: https://theduranshop.com/the-duran-gold-eagle-premium-t-shir..., triple time overpriced but they deserve it).
For Google, don't worry. You have payed them, with your data, thousand times over. And if you stop providing today, your existing data will be exploitable for years to come.
On top of it, by paying, you create a direct trail from watched video (data) to your account, from there to your credit card and from credit card to physical person. So you are giving them even more data.
Anyway, if Google goes bankrupt, because of you, you can consider yourself a saint.
Someone who has really done something very good for the whole planet and human society.
Not sure what you mean. I was a test subject? The test still seems to be ongoing after 10 years. I fail to understand how any of these alleged experiments involve me.
So what's your alternative if I don't want ads (content is not free to make), want the creators to be paid, and paying for premium is tempting YouTube to abuse pricing? (or so you say)
Exactly, it's the enshittification trajectory as explained by Cory Doctorow. Without laws and regulations that stop companies from doing that, it's inevitable.
> I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years.
I struggle to see the difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.
It's the same shitty recommendation algorithm. It's the same "you will watch shorts or else". It's the same nerfed unusable search. It's the same "we randomly decided that your bandwidth isn't enough, here's a 480p version of the video you're currently watching".
Yes, it’s mostly just the ads. There are some nice-to-haves like video downloads and background audio on the iOS app. I almost never use search, recommendations, or shorts, but I’m sure you’re right to criticize those features.
Can you download the videos to mp4 or is it some proprietary DRM thing that only plays on YouTube? If not that just sounds like a worse version of yt-dlp
Yes, businesses want money. The point is that YouTube has no leverage on creators. they have to play nice because the barrier to entry is nil as competitors already exist in Twitch, Dailymotion, Nebula, Vimeo, Dropout, etc.
None of that helps you if you want it to be free, but for those of us willing to pay, we can happily ally with creators if YouTube gets shitty.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s a good deal now and I’m happy to take it. None of that matters if you are comparing it to piracy… obviously.
We will see how prepared you will be to pay, where each of creators you watch will be on different network and you will have to pay for each network $10/month, while you watch 20 creators.
Again, this is nothing new. It already happened with video streaming, where Youtube now is Netflix then.
This already happened with Dropout.tv when college humor left YouTube.
Yes, it ain’t perfect. The alternative is the creator literally stop making videos. YouTube is already not serving ads for demonetized videos. People doing it for the love of filmmaking can already do it for free.
No, the alternative is that you DONT pay. That you deliberately not do what is the easiest move(1) and on top of that even feel special for doing it. That you suffer a short time for better next. That you fight them with technical means. That you vote with your wallet, squeeze your teeth hard and show them you just wont pay and they will lose ad watcher if they show more ads.
And now you will tell, that people are not disciplined enough for that, that majority wont pass the marshmallow(2) experiment?
That some Mike Judge movie was actually documentary?
Yes, I know.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_trap , A common trick is to provide victims with a simple solution to a problem, for example, leaving only one door open in an otherwise secure building, luring them straight toward the firing mechanism
They already get 55% of revenues at YouTube which is basically the highest percentage in any creator industry. How do we pay creators under your rubric and allow them to be discovered?
Looks like it worked and it works, without any changes, while the number of views is keeping their earnings to small group that will not increase as there is not infinite number of time to watch the movies. And dont "creators" me. It is about google earning more money for their stockholders and managment collecting their rewards, not about "think of the children".
>And dont "creators" me. It is about google earning more money for their stockholders and managment collecting their rewards, not about "think of the children".
Classic consumer-only socialist. You have no model for production except business is bad. If you care about labor then you care about labor getting paid. So far you've demonstrated that you have no model of paying content creators. You would rather they go away then actually pay for their services. You pretend you should be able to get it for free. If you have no model of production, then you have no model.
"vote with your wallet" is like trickle down economics, it's like if only everyone used paper straws we could prevent climate catastrophy. Split up FANGM should be the bare minimum.
It is not, but discipline is needed instead consumerism. And every half intelligent marketing guy will make it harder than to just pay.
Paper straws you mentioned are just paper straws.
Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.
> Paper straws you mentioned are just paper straws
No they are the decipline you are talking about, the delusion is, if everyone used paper straws we would save the ecological destruction of the oceans. The structural problems of endless profit maximization machines can not be addressed by appealing to individual action.
> Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.
That depends on the amount of pieces, don't you think?
Content creators have loyalty to the magic money tree on the internet, they will shake as many of the trees they can, right down to begging for $1 from every 'fan' to add to the $50,000 they make a month.
I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. I've never heard of Google banning somebody for rejecting adverts. But if I pay them money, there's a chance there will be a problem with the payments, and that risks triggering false positives on automatic fraud detection. If that happens I assume I would be banned with no recourse and no human intervention. The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to.
I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.
Agreed. This isn’t a situation where you can’t pay. YT has a clear, reasonably priced solution for no ads. It also comes with YT music.
If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
Reminds me of the early justification of Napster where people would complain the latest B. Spears song was garbage and not worth paying for, yet it was the most downloaded song.
> If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
The most common throughline of all pro-piracy discourse is that there's a lot of people who feel completely entitled to free entertainment, and they will come up with all sorts of bizarre mental gymnastics to justify that as something other than "I want free entertainment and don't want to see ads."
I don't think anyone could articulate a coherent logical argument as to why they feel they should get YouTube's services, and the entertainment produced by the creators who are on YouTube, while not paying either of them through any means, other than pure selfishness.
I pay for youtube too and it still completely sucks. I hate when people try this bs.
* I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it.
* I pay for youtube but I don't always get to use my account. Other people's houses and devices exist. Other people's accounts exist even on my own device.
* I pay for youtube and still have to get all the baked in ads.
* I pay for youtube and have a wonderful black screen with no suggestions or discoverability because I have history turned off. (the feature does not depend on the history data, because for years this was never a problem, only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows). This even after I partially gave in and subscribed to a bunch of channels, which previously I never did.
* I pay for youtube and still have no control to disable shorts. (don't tell me about browser plugins. The world is far more varied than one browser on one pc. There is no youtube browser plugins for roku or the 100 other platforms that have youtube players. And even on a pc, you're not always on your own pc where you are free to hack on the browser.)
Here is the value you get from paying for youtube:
It's having only 8 of your fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.
I have paid for Youtube Premium for a long time. Now it’s pushing shorts (you tried to hide the section and it told you “ok, we won’t show you shorts for 30 days.” I don’t want to see them ever, respect my goddamn choices. Now you can’t hide shorts any more), telling I’m not interested is like yelling into the void, search is useless to the point of being insulting and full of clickbait. Youtube Music is so smart it keeps putting non-music videos in my playlists. Creators are deplatformed, demonetised and paid even less.
Youtube can take a hike, I’m not giving that company a dime and hope it fails. After some changes in my personal life as well, it’s good that I am not spending too much time on that awful website
At least it respects it for 30 days, the Facebook app (which I use to keep in touch with family) is a desolate place where literally every time you open the app your feed is filled with shorts and posts from people you aren’t friends with. And those aren’t event the ads!
Why would you pay though its really simple to block ads and youtube is already rich enough. Why bow down to consumerism and enrichment of the already rich?
This is still hacker news not well behaved consumer news. A friend once said to me „if you have some
self respect as a techie you don’t pay for streaming“ ;)
Yes, I also appreciate the skip ahead feature that lets you fast forward over the sponsorship ads that a lot of creators have started insetting into their videos.
> If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them
If you visit content on the internet that the Google Ad network thinks suggest you might be interested in purchasing new tyres, then showing you ads for companies that sells tyres is, unfortunately, relevant no matter what your doing now, because you're more likely to click them, or remember the company/brand when choosing a purchase.
You're right to point out the "relevance factor" is not what people commonly take it to be. The context is (as always) crucial. Of course, the degree to which an individual tolerates advertising varies for a multitude of reasons.
> billboards [...] countryside
I think people simply find this to be an ugly thing. They object to the ugliness of it. They're in the countryside -- i.e. not the town/city -- and they find themselves unable to escape (even here!) from this seedy miasma. Putting disgust into words is not a simple thing, perhaps this is the reason for the inconsistent reasoning you've noticed.
All advertising is ugly, it's an ugly business -- money grubbing manipulation. It's inherently weird to be subjected to the endless torrent of uncanny twisted art that is advertising every day for your entire life. The ads on Youtube are normalised by the same force that normalises all the other advertising -- the ads in one context normalise the ads in another. The ads on the side of the bus, on the LCD panels on the train, on the same screen that shows the timetable at the station, before the movie starts, by the seemingly sensible ads in Costco. One hand washes the other.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
Bane: For you
I dislike them because they're loud, flashy, annoying, and (most of all) because YT saturates them. It even tries to put them in the middle of songs when it detects a transitional pause. And they are served so often. It's literally worse than broadcast TV, which is an incredibly low bar to step over.
Platforms should not allow advertisers free speech. They should limit the content to static imagery/shots, dissolves, and spoken narration, ie the form rather than the content. Don't tell it can't work, this was how adwords worked on Google Search for years and everyone made handsome profits. Advertising is cancer if allowed to go full spectrum. The people who work at Youtube should be deeply ashamed of what they have allowed it to become and the trash monetization incentives they've established.
This pretty much applies to all ads everywhere. I mean Im a guy and I get ads for tampons on TV or a million odds for all sorts of diseases I dont have.
Shit I rather willingly give info about myself so irrelevant ads can be filtered out and I dont have to waste time on them and the advertiser doesnt waste money on me
Even if they were relevant, they'd still be holding global internet video culture behind a paywall.
First pay with your identity (carrier phone number required for a Google account). Then double pay through Premium in the illusion you won't end up seeing ads anyway.
Imagine if the tire advertisement at Costco stood in front of you for 30 seconds and wouldn’t let you pass or turn around until a minimum amount of time passed.
I don't like ads but keep in mind the only 100% "relevant" ad is disguised as content. Is that what you want? Sponsored or generated stuff that feeds you some agenda while you think you watch something different...
The most successful marketing campaign of all time was the marketing department convincing companies that they need marketing.
If you’re Coca Cola and you spend £1,000,000,000 on a Christmas TV ad of a bear drinking cola, does that increase your sales? No. It does nothing. But every year they’ll do it.
The only marketing that works is at the point of sale, and free samples. Anything which is just random and in public will not result in anything.
But the genius of the scam is, it’s not measurable. You bill £1,000,000,000 a year for marketing, and they can’t measure if it worked. How do you know if a TV ad worked? But they can’t withdraw the funding, because you’ll tell them their competitors will win. So the scam keeps going.
I don't drink cola myself, but it seems logical to me. The point of the expensive advert is showing everybody how rich Coca Cola is. That increases the trust people have in their products being safe and reliable because they know Coca Cola has something to lose. If they didn't advertise they'd be like those Chinese sellers named as random strings of uppercase letters. I definitely wouldn't buy cola from one of those.
I live in a west-Eu country with several well-defined language borders. Each time we cross a border (on holiday), the youtube ads change language. When I’m logged in. I don’t have a driver’s license, yet the most common ad I get is for second hand cars. I’m in a relationship, yet I regularly get ads for dating sites. I have a job, get ads for jobhunting advice. And the other day I got an add specifically for people born before my birth-year minus one.
YouTube’s ads are on the same level as Spotify’s nagging for their subscription: it’s meant to annoy users into buying their ad-free plan. They use real ads as a thin veneer.
Well, it works. Unfortunately it doesn’t remove sponsored content in the videos. I’m paying for an ad free experience, but I’m still hearing about AC1. Annoying.
Thank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting.
The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a lot more scrutiny for the ads they choose to run.
> we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting
This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90. The ad pods are also defined so that you get a set number say something like 3:00 max.
YT has scammy ads where if you are just trying to let something stream in the background while you focus on other things where an ad plays past the 5s skippable time, they have some that are full on half hour if not even longer infomercials that takes completely out of the flow of whatever you were watching. That's down right criminal to me. The fact that long form content can be used as something that interrupts someone else's content is such a strange thing to allow. They must pay out the nose for those ad impressions
> This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90.
You are absolutely on to something. I think the seemingly random length of ads makes them feel somewhat more jarring to me. I also hate how sometimes the ads are just randomly interjected into a video. I know creators can control this to some degree, but older videos seem to suffer more.
I have had ads on Youtube that were hours long. Obviously, at that length, they can be skipped. I know have some kind of 'trauma response' that when I watch Youtube on a computer while laying down, AFK, I have to have my wireless mouse in close proximity in case one those long ads appears. If I could predict the intervals in which the ads occurred and for how long, then I would probably just let them run and tune them out of my mind.
Regardless, I swear Youtube serves me such long ass ads as a punishment sometimes. Sadly, my suspicion is supported by extremely weak evidence and confirmation bias. I'll just say this... Sometimes when I get served the same ad too many times, I report the ad for something like being offensive, inappropriate, or whatever. The ads seem to never come back, but I swear within a day or two, I start getting longer ads -- even movie-length ads. I have also reported ads if they happen to be something like +30s and unskippable. This makes the ad instantly dismiss (or it used to, at least).
I’m curious if YouTube tracks the phone angle/motion through the gyroscope. I swear I always get the hour-long ads when my phone is not in my hand, and I’m not able to skip it immediately.
I doubt they actually do that, but I’m sure it would increase ad view times. Im probably just only remembering the ads I don’t immediately skip.
It’s absolutely #%^*ing insane how bad and often inappropriate the ads are, to the point that I swear YouTube is in growth trouble. It feels like there’s just management layers who need their bonus or promotion, driven by some percent growth or some KPI so their standards are at the floorboards. I’ve seen porn in the still frame ads on mobile once (much worse than Evony Online if you remember those ads…)
I have all ad targeting features turned off on my account - which I assume means i unfortunately get the bottom-of-the-barrel ads.
The still frame ads are always NSFW games or ads for viagra-like products. In shorts, the ads are always scams of some kind. Usually deepfakes of elon musk “giving investment advice” but also “medical experts” recommending likely dangerous scams, or “free money the government isnt telling you about” if you give them all your information, or weird ai generated videos advertising mystery products that certainly don’t actually exist.
In front of (and in the middle of) actual videos, it’s a mix of the all the scams, plus the occasional ad for a legitimate product, but rarely in my native language. Usually Spectrum internet ads exclusively in spanish.
I got a gun ad a few times several months ago. Advertising features such as “no license required” and “easy to sneak through security”. As blatantly illegal as it was, the ad ran for at least a full month. I reported it every time I saw it, but I’m convinced those reports aren’t ever viewed by anyone.
I continue blocking these ads on my desktop without remorse. I only encounter the ads on my iPhone.
YouTube has decided that my family is African American and Spanish speaking at some point, and nothing will convince them otherwise. We are neither of those things. At one point a few years ago my daughter wanted to listen to the Peppa Pig album in Spanish and I guess maybe that’s why?
people deserve to get paid for the work they put into creating content and building platforms, no? books, movies, tv shows, news, etc, are all distributed in some way or another that costs the consumer either money or their time viewing advertising. if you don't want to watch ads, pay YouTube for a subscription.
YouTube spent about a decade and a half running unintrusive banner ads. Until they secured enough of the market that network effects locked content creators and consumers together in a two-sided market where it's hard for either group to leave unilaterally. Then they ramped up the length and intrusiveness of their ads while flouting content regulations on what they're even allowed to advertise.
There are not enough people with your willingness to make this mechanism work by itself.
So the choice is either to have the content exist, but rely on ads, or not have the content exist. And it's not your choice - it's the content creator's choice.
Perhaps controversial, but I rather just have ads. Not that I do not think this is a preferable model, but rather, donates cost real money and ads cost nothing except time.
While time is finite and valuable, if I am already on YouTube, then I have already committed to choice of wasting that nebulous amount of time in the first place.
I’d absolutely rather give money. For me there’s a lot less friction in that even if technically it costs time all the same. With a job I have control over how I convert time into money; not so with watching ads.
As much as youtube can waste time, I also feel like I’ve been given genuine value by certain people on the site, so I wouldn’t say it’s simply wasting time.
I watch quite a large array of channels. I am not sure I could feasibly afford to donate a meaningful amount to all them. So then, I am forced into the dilemma of deciding which ones are more worthy than others, and that is not something I am particularly willing to do.
If one's patreon did have perks associated with it, then I would be more inclined to 'donate', as well.
If enough people do it, monetizing on Youtube becomes untenable for most, driving creators to hopefully healthier platforms who might now stand a chance.
So if I don't like Visa and Mastercard, do I also get moral carte blanche to not pay anyone because hey I'm totally urging them to only use merchants that I prefer?
Sounds like awfully convenient motivated reasoning.
That’s how the market works. You avoid paying extra taxes than required right? Even though that denies the government extra funding. The only difference being one has been decided as wrong and the other is fine.
Yes, society has deemed that it’s fine to make use of the avenues that have been explicitly created to reduce your tax burden - that’s why they were created. Society is also relatively fine with using unintended loopholes for the same purpose (although it is a lot more controversial and criticized), because we don’t tend to punish people for breaking laws, rules and regulations that don’t exist. When we end up caring a lot about them, we plug the gaps
The other person was talking about straight up not paying for goods and services that are sold at a given price, which is stealing. The more apt comparison would be to tax evasion (actually breaking the law), which is a crime, widely considered wrong and punished accordingly
The browser is my agent, and it will do my bidding, not google's. You building your company on something that can be legally circumvented is not my problem.
If I can actually pay someone for content, then, if I don't pay, I should expect not to be granted access to content.
But that's not how YT works. YT doesn't charge you for good stuff. It charges you for not delivering crap. That's not legitimate business, that's a racket. I have no qualm punishing YT for that. Content creators are free to find other ways to monetize their labor, if their labor is actually valuable. (And so many of the good ones do, quite successfully.)
YouTube gives you two (2!) ways to pay for content. You can choose to pay with money, or you can choose to pay with your time and attention. If you don’t like paying with your time and attention, then either pay with money, or don’t use the service.
This “It charges you for not delivering crap.” line is bullshit. Serving video content costs money, they’ve given you the choice of how to pay for it, and you don’t like the choices but want to keep getting the content.
> 21st century nation states can better solve video scale delivery without middle parasites like Google.
If it's that easy, why has nobody done it?
(Hint: governments don't want to run YouTube, probably shouldn't run YouTube, and nobody else wants or can afford the immense costs that come with running YouTube.)
I'm unconvinced. I suggest that YT's outlay is a sneeze among the budget of the US. In my estimation, all nations are lagging in the definition of what constitutes a public utility. In a decade we will be facepalming why advertisements were even needed for this common infrastructure.
Most things are a sneeze compared to the budget of the federal government of the US, that doesn't mean that's a reasonable expectation for the US government (or any government) to run them.
I challenge the idea that private enterprise could solve the scaling component better than a government could. We've reached this comedy of ads and surveillance capitalism because private strategies are flailing.
As a thought experiment, is it realistic to get every tax payer to pay for funny cat videos? Because that will be a reality in your non-capitalist utopia.
Or maybe there just won't be any cat videos, because the state has decreed them unnecessary or even harmful? How about political messages, is the state going to allow those to be posted on its platform? There are bound to be a few that go against state policy...
You could argue that the same is true for broadcast TV, and I would 100% agree. The state has no business running or even funding public television.
No, but if someone is handing out free DVDs with adverts on them I can put a sticker over the adverts. If the adverts are in the movie, I'm allowed to skip them.
Google are free to ban me, free to not hand me the data. But if I tell them who I am, what agent I'm using, and then they hand me data... I'm also free to throw half that data in the bin.
No. Youtube is a monopoly. For a huge amount pf historical video, they are the only game in town. Regulating the hell out of them -- especially gigantic fines for the insane amount of copyright piracy their business model depends upon -- is LONG overdue.
It's incredible to me how YouTube has an uncountable number of "movie clip" and "TV show clip" channels with randomly generated names, to the point that you can watch pretty much any movie end-to-end, but people lose their minds about AI training using books.
Yes, although the problem is that trying to regulate them out of existence will destroy the archive. Especially if you try to insist on copyright traceability.
I was visiting my kid’s class one day. They were using some YouTube product that seemed oriented at schools, that I’d never seen before. An ad would pop up, and one of the kids (whosever turn it was next?) would run up and tap the skip ad button.
So even if you’re trying to use YouTube for something of value, you’re battling ads. Or at least our kids are.
Harder than it sounds! So much of what we interact with online winds up with YouTube in the dependency chain. Kids' coursework, how-to videos, etc. I could also just pay the $$/month to "solve" this problem, but I need my petty cash more than Google does. I'm confident the brilliant minds there can figure out how to monetize my visit even without the real-time bidding industrial complex burning my CPU cycles.
Download the content offline, make a playlist. You can also archive the content forever. No distractions, its organized however you want. Yes, it does take some effort but it fixes all the problems
So long as we're pretending to care about the Youtube TOS, offline downloading without premium is against their TOS. And even then you're only permitted to download and view offline through the YouTube phone app.
I appreciate the fact that you brought up the possibility of paying for ad-free content, but frankly I don't buy this. You can either see 100% of the content for free with some mildly annoying ad content mixed in from time to time, or you can pay them a pretty small amount to not see the annoyances.
Google is a for-profit company trying to sell a product that you find valuable. Not everything they do is squeaky-clean, but this offering couldn't be much fairer, really.
You can also just not watch TV. And not listen to the radio. And not receive newspapers. All mediums that have advertisements, and those advertisements are regulated to stop the most egregious types (eg. advertising sugary foods at children, tobacco products, hopefully gambling products soon).
Media, on the whole, is a good thing. We know more about the world. We know more about the excesses of the aristocracy. We know more about the violence committed by violent people (and I don't mean local petty crime. Genocide.) Before we can improve these things, we need to know about them. "just don't consume media" is a regression to a time where people knew little outside their local sphere.
Youtube/Google has a monopoly on one part of the modern media landscape and it has to be fixed. Not just put our heads in the sand.
YouTube shows ads that would never be allowed on network television, including tobacco advertisements. They can get away with it because it's hard for regulators to observe.
I resisted paying for premium (out of spite) until very recently and only because my girlfriend complained.
I have been astounded at how scammy those ads are. There is a major class of ads that make fairly significant bullshit medical claims and I’m semi convinced the purpose is not for someone to make money but to wage psychological warfare on vulnerable people. Another class of ads says “the US government is going to collapse and that’s why you should buy a freedom battery” and the ad couches itself as a battery advertisement but how many vulnerable people hear that in the background 16 times a day and don’t end up subconsciously accepting some part of it?
In any case it’s all a manipulative cesspool and it’s bizarre to me that a property that Google otherwise values is willing to sling such slop at its users. I suspect a large part of this is that the executives who run YouTube never see their ads.
I've seen ads on YouTube that are straight-up illegal. Including ads for tobacco. And one that was a deepfake of the Canadian minister of finance pitching a crypto investment as being risk-free and backed by the government. Another that was a deepfake of Elon Musk saying he was going to give free money to people who click the link. YouTube will run anything because they know they won't get in trouble.
Without the ads, I'd probably spend way too much time on YouTube. I need something to push me into the rage-quit territory after enough time has passed.
That’s the thing about modern capitalism. Making profit isn’t enough, the profit has to keep growing. So once the market is saturated, you either reduce perks, jack up prices, bundle new features to jack up prices (my GSuite bills doubled in ~3 years before I went in and adjusted the plan; the latest price hike “reflects the significant added AI value”), or find new ways to monetize the same users (ads, “partners”, etc.). It’s inevitable.
How about advertising without the tracking? Advertising not shown specifically to me because of any attributes Google thinks apply to me? Advertising limited to a 5s lead in at the start of the video (today, this video is sponsored by …) and a static banner hidden when going full-screen. Advertising held to high standards, and advertising which can be vetoed by the video's uploader. In short, ethical advertising.
Google can surely figure this out and still turn a profit on Youtube. Greed stops them from doing this.
Both sound like good options to me. Split it up or turn it into a nonprofit. Although I suppose the former would man paying 15 bucks to each baby YouTube, so maybe not.
Or you could instead give them the middle finger and take anything they put out there. TOS are not binding contracts and until you're contractually bound to do otherwise, taking what they're handing out is completely reasonable.
I'm sorry, but Youtube got to keep its servers up somehow and pay the content creators. This means ads.
If you don't like them, then pay for Youtube Premium and you can get ad-free experience. Although if it's not available in your country, then adblocking is a reasonable approach.
YouTube has an estimated worth, if it were a stand-alone company, of $475 billion to $550 billion. I'm sure they'll survive off just fine continuing to sell my personal information just like that always have.
Google do not, and literally never have "sold your personal information."
They deliver targeted advertising due to the information they have. That's the model. They make literally zero dollars a year selling personal information.
Source? Google is literally an online ad monopoly, and being sued for it. They did track and continue tracking users, and they sell data though their SSP, DSP, ad networks, ad exchanges they own.
I'm shocked and appalled that you'd call the "virtual harems" YouTube tries to get me to install either scammy or wildly inappropriate. I've reported them a dozen times, and they're still on the platform, so I'm sure Lord Google knows something I don't about their saintlihood.
I recently stopped watching youtube altogether and surprisingly haven't been missing it. And I used to watch a LOT (like hours per day) of youtube, mostly quality educational/scientific content. But ultimately you'd be surprised how much you don't need in your life. And side effect is no more ads. If someone sends me an occasional youtube video to watch, I'll take a look, but otherwise no engagement with the platform.
I'd highly recommend everyone try reducing their intake of passive entertainment like youtube and redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.
Or just block the ads, let others subsidize it for me until the executive greed eventually turns the product to crap and we collectively move on to the newer options that have filled the gap. Cable used to mostly be ad free as well. Now normal TV shows are 21 minutes with 9 minutes of ads. Older TV show reruns are actually sped up with parts cut out of them.
Google created a monopoly by making the product great with unobtrusive ads and now is trying to change the deal. There is absolutely already a plan in place where the number of paying premium users hits some critical number and they "test out" short ads. I am not going to reward them.
I just checked my uBlock stats inside of AdNauseum on my personal laptop. This is a machine I have not used regularly in over 2 years. Being generous I am assuming every ad blocked was static, not animated, had no sound, and required no interaction by me to skip, so just was a one second glance.
I have gotten back 115+ days of my life to do things I actually want to do. 10.34 million ads. From one single machine, in just Firefox. I now have AdGuard on my network and use Tailscale to block ads on all my devices. There is no world where I ever go back to seeing ads that I can block and definitely will not be rewarding them for trying to push ads on what was a great product.
Making any profit at all on a service that hosts and streams 4K video from everyone to everyone over the Internet while also compensating the creators of that video is no mean feat.
They split revenues 55/45 with creators. That level of profit sharing is basically unheard of in television, film, books, etc.
Again, yea, there are monopoly concerns, but you’re going to move the goalposts to “anything scalable” being worth stealing from then good luck to you.
I’m not going to pretend I don’t use Adblock, but when sites actually enforce using it, I’m not going to pretend they’re evil for doing it.
I’d gladly pay for YouTube or other Google services when they offer an option to not track my activity at all. For me it’s not about seeing ads just on YouTube, but being tracked all through the web and still being served inappropriate or spammy ads.
> when they offer an option to not track my activity
this right here, im not opposed to paying for content, but the tracking and sharing is a big concern for me too
if all i'd watch are tv shows like netflix its one thing, but yt has such broad content i'd rather not be advertised/tracked about stuff i just clicked once and never again...
While I strongly doubt this fully disables tracking, you can at least disable your watch history on youtube which will have the effect of the recommendation algorithm not adjusting to your preferences.
You can change it from Google account > Data & Privacy > History Settings > youtube History
If you have youtube premium + a general purpose ad blocker + disable watch history its really hard to tell if you are being tracked.
If you do decide to disable watch history, be prepared for just how terrible the median youtube interest is. All recommendations become beyond worthless.
People dont understand how world works. Management reward are tied to earning more money. As long this is true, the next year, the reward will be tied to earning even more. The more you pay, the more it will cost. And when people wont be prepared to pay more, alternative model will be invented, like adding ads to paid content. There is only one way to stop this - break it from the start and make it nonviable, don't pay.
They are trying to block ads blockers as some manager wasn't able to get reward. Or is worried he wont get it. And this means that money that can be collected from ads has peaked. Now come the "optimizations", now payable, then no longer free, later payable with ads, then they will squeeze content creators, that will move to other platforms where you will have to pay for multiple platforms where you were once watching it for free on YT.
Sounds familiar?
Made it as short as possible, but this could be wall of text, from comparing to what happened to streaming services etc. Without piracy (not advocating but it is a fact that it forced publishers into internet model) we would probably still buy content on CDs and DVDs, maybe BluRays.
Greed of infinite growth in finite system has destroyed the planet and you can bet it will destroy YT too.
Except the alternative model will be invented even when people can pay more — do both and make even MORE.
It used to be practically shameful for large companies to run ads on their websites. They had clean websites with only their content. Especially for subscribers. Now they’re all filled with ads!
Yeah, I'm with you on this one. I pay for YT premium family, and it's basically the only subscription in 2025 that feels worth it to me. My wife watches YouTube instead of cable TV, so it's already a cheap cable bill. But you also get YouTube music! Which I'll admit is a slightly janky music app since it also kind of sits on top of YouTube videos that it decides are mostly music. But their actual music selection is good if you kinda know how to navigate the UI to the "real" music.
Unfortunately, the way ads work, the people who pay to avoid ads are inevitably the ones worth advertising to. The Nash equilibrium is that every user sees ads.
That sounds off to me. I would think that the people who pay to avoid ads are very likely to jump to ad blockers if the ad-free subscription ceases to exist. Not to mention that they’re going to be very unlikely to convert on advertising.
My higher point was you probably don't need video entertainment in your life. Surely you would agree that just about any hobby is more holistically enriching than watching youtube? Not to mention other issues surrounding mass video content.
YouTube provides a lot of information and learning material for hobbies. That’s what I mostly use it for, besides music, and movie reviews which save so much time compared to having to watch the movie (so do reduce time spent with video entertainment).
If someone really likes Youtube content - sure, I guess. For me the cost isn't worth it - when I compare with other streaming services.
I got rid of the Youtube app from my Roku many months ago, and I haven't missed it. That wouldn't be the case for most other streaming apps that I still have.
I think for me - right from the day Youtube launched - I never liked the interface. It's the worst streaming interface of all the streaming services.
Hm, in my opinion there's no such thing as "YouTube content". Content, that's the blanket word I object to.
What there is is people (and companies) uploading stuff. Some useful, some entertaining, some mindless, some for me, some not for me.
I cannot say "YouTube content" is -- or is not -- for me because the notion is meaningless. Individual videos and channels are definitely for me, and are hard to find elsewhere. YouTube by itself is not a thing.
So I do now, but only since I moved to a country where it doesn't cost so much. I watch maybe 6 hours absolutely tops of YouTube a month? I get charged $7/m for it, which still feels usurious, but in the UK they want almost $17/m which is firmly in "go fuck yourself" territory. I'd like them to tier pricing so casual users like me aren't paying for people who are using YouTube as their primary entertainment mechanism.
£12.99, which is around $17 USD, which is what the person you're replying to stated, though American defaultism kicked in and they didn't specify which dollar, but still.
i deleted my youtube accounts and switched to patreon- can still see new videos on youtube from my patreon people cause im notified but it's far more intentional and quality content
I’m increasing obsessed with the idea that the user—not some engagement algorithm—should be in the drivers seat. This is an interesting way to go about it…
I’m starting to look at “engagement” as an anti-statistic. Like, if you’re chasing engagement, what other more meaningful thing are you ignoring? Or, the more engagement something has, the less value it has to society.
I have also greatly decreased the time I watch YT and I have not been missing it. I used to have playlists, favs, lots of channels to follow. I stopped doing all that. Occasionally I’d “watch“ something on the background while I work, but it has to be non-engaging. The truth about YT is—you don’t need it.
For some of us, YouTube is part of our creative and mindful pursuits. It either drives our interests (much like reading a magazine about specialized topics would, in the past), or explains how to do something, or simply builds a community of like minded people all over the world.
I find the argument of "how much you don't need in your life" not very compelling.
On one hand, we "need" very little: health, food, shelter. On the other, a life worth living is made of everything else that is not, strictly speaking, truly needed: ideas, hobbies, passions, entertainment, projects, etc.
Each to their own. I'm not saying youtube is all garbage useless content, definitely there are quality conversations about varying topics. The level of community probably varies between interests and for my interests, youtube was hardly a core facet of the hobby. Perhaps for you it's different.
However, I will add 2 counterpoints.
Firstly, I don't think consuming a huge amount (e.g. the amount I was) of passive video content is good for your wellbeing.
Second, I think it's interesting to examine why youtube must "drive" your hobby/interest to a large degree. Is there perhaps a mental trap of thinking you must be in with the crowd and the latest and greatest? What about growing your creative pursuit organically through your own journey? Just things to consider - may or may not be applicable. It was applicable for me and my photography hobby. There's tonnes of photography content out there but most of it is generic crap and I've found it more rewarding to go my own path so to speak.
Passively consuming content is not the same as reading a magazine or a book.
Agreed that anyone can fill their own free time with whatever they want. But youtube is just junk food for the mind, packaged as stuff that interests you. It’s conveniently split to increase ad revenue, uses clickbait to drive engagement, and all the techniques developed on TV the past 80 years to keep us glued in front of the screen. Youtube and the “content” itself is designed to keep you watching.
And I say that as someone who used to mainly watch long form essays, not the trending bullshit. It’s all just distraction and opium for the masses, disguised as edutainment.
I did the same thing with Netflix. Also, killed off my Prime subscription and quit the entirety of Amazon. Well, except for AWS, because that's going to be impossible until they accidentally all the data.
As for youtube, I just pay for ad free. If they ever start violating that they'll also be banished to the corn field.
Top tip from using only high-latency satellite internet for long periods: add a significant delay to every request to problematic sites. As soon as the dopamine loop is broken, you'll find the wait so frustrating that you won't bother.
I install the "Undistracted" extension in all of my Brave instances. In addition to having the ability to block arbitrary URLs it has many site-specific options like blocking YouTube recommendations or the LinkedIn timeline, all of which I ruthlessly enable. You can also set it to only work on certain days and times of the week. It's immensely useful.
I also pay for Kagi which has the ability to block certain domains from results. I'd imagine that blocking Instagram, Reddit, Youtube, etc. would also prevent rabbit-holing.
I started reading again. Which has been quite enjoyable after the initial bump of "reading is boring compared to <favourite new video content>". Also putting more time into things I know I find more rewarding. And sometimes, just doing nothing much is nice as a brain break.
Probably because it wasn’t. In my experience even the stuff people consider quality on YouTube is still kinda gross engagement bait, especially things like video essays (which are an absolute plague imo)
I've been getting these buffer loading times recently, and ironically, I don't mind them all that much. The annoyance of ads isn't primarily in the time it takes up, but in having the audio play and a video feed run that isn't the video I clicked on.
If an actual ad played, I'd be irritated beyond belief. But when there's a 12 second buffer, I have enough patience training for slow load times that I instinctively just quickly check my email or spend a brief moment lost in thought. Especially when it's every video. If it was one in every 5 videos, I'd notice it and be bothered. When it's every video, it's part of the experience and my brain just cuts it out automatically.
The extension is stealing from them. I get stealing a zero marginal cost good is minor but the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video. Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?
TOS is not an agreement, it's a notice, an assertion from the provider that mandates absolutely nothing from you.
TOS is like me putting a sign up at the end of my driveway saying if you approach my home, you owe me $10. If you pull up to my house, I demand the $10, and you don't pay me, I cannot forcibly take $10 from you, nor can I call the cops or sue over the $10.
You never agreed to anything and certainly not in any legally binding format.
Notices are not contracts and TOS notices are notices.
> the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video
I never made that agreement. And if some software on my computer somehow gets YouTube to deliver me the content anyway, that's not my fault. In my view, it's a cat and mouse game, they can do whatever they want to try to stop me, and vice versa. If they win, I won't complain; but if I do, so be it.
By clicking on the video you did. It is in their terms of service.
How is you purposefully trying to block ads not your fault? Whose fault is it that you installed an Adblock? If you went to a grocery store and told the clerk you already paid and they let you leave would that not be your fault either?
There's zero agreement happening when you visit a website.
Assuming you didn't do something actually illegal while using their service, without a contract the most they can do is ban you from the service, or try to.
I've never said they should, they are free to implement any anti-ad-block for all I care. I just pointed out their lack of honesty about the source of the problem, they should say they are actively blocking the extension rather than the extension is malfunctioning.
Are they really trying? They have vast resources and engineering talent. I doubt they are sincerely trying and failing to implement something that radio and broadcast television have managed to do for the better part of a century.
I’m happy to make the agreement I need to so I can access the thing I like, then turn around and violate those terms when it benefits me. Why should I feel a sense of personal obligation towards google?
You're not even making an agreement. You're reading a notice, if that. In most cases it's entirely moot legally and only really useful as a policy tool for the provider to hang its "we're blocking you" authority on.
Having said that, I 100% agree. If Google allows for non-logged in users, it's a public website and we can consume it however we like, until Google decides to try to block us. That's what it's doing now, trying to block users from consuming the content however they like, a core feature of the public web. Fortunately, blocking us is very very hard for sites not behind a login. If they want not-logged in use, they either go to war with my tech, favored by platform, or they let it slide.
Now, Google owns Chrome, so they can also go to war in the browser and standards bodies as well. But for now, the web is open and accessible and that means, wiht the right technology (Firefox plus uBlock Origin for me) you can watch all those video ad-free and there's nothing Google can do to stop you.
How are you making an agreement? You can’t say “I’ll watch this video in exchange for X minutes of ads” because YouTube will never tell you how many minutes they’re going to show you, and because they have zero interest in committing to some number of minutes of ads. It’s constantly getting worse, and this process will continue until it kills the service.
It won't kill the service. The media executives who run YouTube are well aware of how advertising volume affects viewership so they'll titrate up or down as needed to maximize profit.
But don't worry, something else will eventually kill YouTube. Most likely they'll miss some sort of disruptive innovation. Like maybe in 30 years everyone will have content beamed directly into their neutral implants and only a few old people will still watch online videos.
The agreement is you watch the ads YouTube serves you. Why would that agreement have to include the amount of ads served? If you are unhappy with their business model you can always pay for premium or stop using it. Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
There is no agreement. TOS is a notice not a contract. It's not stealing because it's public content, publicly accessible to anyone with the technology to do so.
If Google wants to make YouTube a service with actually binding contracts and not TOS notices no one reads or respects, it can put the whole thing behind a login and end un-authed public web traffic. They're free to do that but they won't because they know that would kill the site dead, and quickly so.
That’s not an agreement, that’s just YouTube doing whatever they want. Which they can—but then—I can just do whatever I want, too. You don’t need to imagine some sort of covenant being involved.
> Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
I don’t even do that, I just watch it as-is. I just don’t need to imagine that YouTube and I have agreed to anything.
> Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?
I've held the position that, if YT wants to, they can block me from their platform for using an adblocker, and I would have no moral ground to stand on.
However, that isn't what they do. They try to circumvent it. They try to make it technically impossible. They try to mislead users into thinking their extensions are malicious.
It certainly has to be better than getting an ad that fills no need of mine. I can't say I noticed any slow loading times on youtube though that might be because the last clip I watched was probably a month ago. Only search for diy fixes on problems I have, rest online attention goes to fediverse nowadays.
> On Firefox this is easily resolvable - you can use a HTML filter to filter out the script tag from the source HTML before the page even starts being parsed. But that relies on extension APIs that Chromium doesn’t support.
Youtube pushing ads in this way has convinced several non-technical friends who couldn't care less about their browser-choice to switch to Firefox with uBlock origin. Blocking ads in Chrome became such a hustle and is basically not working for Google's own services. Recommending people how don't care to not use chrome in the past was basically hopeless and now I have seen some switch basically from their own. Which I don't want to interpret too much into, but gives a little hope.
The second Chrome drops uBlock Origin (as part of their "Manifest V3 without blocking Web Request" plan), I'm off to an alternative browser. Enough is enough.
I agree, but I do need to keep a chromium browser around for the odd times that: my webcam decides to flicker uncontrollably during a meeting, a website just happens to put JS that runs terribly on Firefox in the hot path and it slows to a crawl, or a new feature is being demonstrated with Chrome only support.
Beats ads, as far as I'm concerned, but I can't help but feel like your average user wouldn't agree.
I worked for Mozilla for 25 years and kept other browsers around the whole time. There's nothing wrong with having other browsers, and nothing technical that prevents it, so do that :D
I can't think of a time I didn't have more than one browser, even in 1995 when I made Netscape my default, I kept Cello around for some things. More browsers are better than fewer, not only for the industry, but for individuals too.
I used to keep a Chrome-based browser installed "just in case." But for about the last 5 years I've simply refused to have it on my machine. It's not needed.
Didn't this already happen? It just seems like it was only progressively rolled out to Chrome browsers. My work PC was hit with this about a month ago, and now I get ads there...
Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute?
We often rationalize using ad blockers because ads can be intrusive or annoying. But let’s asking ourselves: Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?
This isn’t a moral judgment. I genuinely want to understand the reasoning.
Back when I started using Google Adsense, they had a 3 ad per page rule. You could be banned if you went above that limit. Today you can easily find web pages with 10, 15 or even more ad spots... one after each paragraph, sidebar, full page "popup", etc.
On YouTube, we went from a banner on the video to a few seconds of a video before to multiple ads before the video to multiple ad pauses even on relatively short videos (under 10 minutes). Add to that the sponsored sections of the video itself, which are added by the content creator, and other ads (stores, tickets, etc) that sometimes YouTube adds under the video even if you pay for premium.
Google Search pages used to have one or two ads at the top, with a different background colour than search results. Now sometimes I have to scroll down to see organic content, because sponsored content fills my screen.
I don't think I'm entitled to have access to all this for free, but we went too far... and so I use an adblocker on all my devices.
You're asking the question in a way that's unreflective of how people think. They can do it and want to do it and would need a reason to not do it. So the question is, what would make someone feel like they were ethically compelled to watch an advertisement? It sounds impossible to me, maybe someone with a very unique perspective could chime in about themselves.
Here's an attempt at a double-negative answer: you can't be ethically compelled into an unethical contract, and since advertisements are manipulative, voyeuristic and seek to take advantage of the limitations of human attentional control, it's a priori impossible for watching an ad or downloading a tracker to ever be ethically compulsory.
You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
You are not obligated to watch ads. You are opting to watch them in exchange for the free content, then skipping out on a commitment you volunteered for while still taking the free content.
The "unethical contact" argument is bullshit, because you made a choice but didn't live up to it. Instead of either paying or not watching, you watched anyway.
>You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
Thee provider made the content public on the Web. That means I can view it under any terms I chose until they find a way to exclude me without excluding all the attention that being on the public Web gives them.
There are not 2 options as you claim. There are infinite options to the user here. Google may prefer you engage in only one of two ways, but they have no legal ground to require that with content on the public Web.
>I can view it under any terms I chose until they find a way to exclude me without excluding all the attention that being on the public Web gives them.
This is the unsung argument everyone forgets! It goes to the very start of why someone might register a domain name and set up a website on the... World Wide Web... for people to visit with their User Agent software, ask for some HTML and get some HTML back. "HOW DARE YOU NOT DO A RANDOM SOCIALLY DEFINED THING AFTER ASKING FOR OUR HTML (AND OTHERS' MP4S)?"
The pedantry comes not from someone using their User Agent however they want to use it. It comes from a company trying to (with receipts and lawsuits to prove it) LITERALLY redefine the World Wide Web into their own money making machine, and punish anyone who rocks their boat. They can cry "legal argument" all they want. At the end of the day, they're trying to force pedantry on their users. The only problem is most of the public has bought it Hook, Line and Sinker.
> The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
You're wrong in both parts.
1. There is no way to pay to only remove all ads. YT premium bundles some music nonsense and also doesn't remove ads added by creators.
2. "Watching" isn't part of the contract, only "injected ads" are. Do you read every billboard in exchange for the benefit of better roads financed with ad revenue?
The music nonsense is bundled because YouTube is full of music videos and music in the backgrounds of videos and they have to pay the record labels to play the music in. They have "YouTube Premium Lite" that doesn't include music, but then you get ads on videos that have music in them.
This makes no sense, it's not hard to filter out music videos, and music in regular videos wouldn't cost the same as the whole music premium, also Lite isn't just about music:
> Ads however may appear on ... Shorts, and when you search or browse.
So again, you can't pay just to replace ads. (By the way, there is another huge difference - premium is a subscription, so not tied to ad time replaced)
I actually pay, rather than watch the ads, but a large part of that was also dumping Spotify and using the YouTube music app instead for listening in the car.
If they can't afford a YouTube subscription, they're not going to be buying anything that would be advertised anyway.
Let's be honest here, ads are trying to get you to buy things, but "psychological abuse" is a pretty extreme hyperbole, especially for people already in such tight poverty. They've got enough going on that someone trying to get them to buy shitty knives or switch their car insurance isn't going to be impactful.
> Let's be honest here, ads are trying to get you to buy things
The issue is that those are not the only ads Youtube is showing to people. You can basically upload any video and make it an ad. Sometimes Youtube's moderation fails and some nasty stuff slips through the cracks:
> In the latest incident, a Redditor describes how their young nephew was exposed to an explicit ad while watching a Fortnite stream by the well-known YouTuber Loserfruit.
> “My 7yr nephew was watching Loserfruit (Fortnite streamer) and then came up to me asking what Loserfruit is doing because this ad started playing,” the concerned uncle shared.
Hell, they'll show weight loss ads to people with eating disorders - and this one might just be intentional rather than a failure of Youtube's moderation:
“In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and suspended 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year,” the platform told us at the time.
I wonder what proportion of those 5.5 billion inappropriate ads were removed only after people watched and reported them.
Are they? The last time I made the mistake of watching youtube without an ad blocker I got served US right-wing propaganda. I live in Spain, always have, and Google knows enough about me to know I'd despise that content.
The provider is welcome to serve ads, and i am welcome to not watch them. When there are Ads on TV and I get up to go to the kitchen, am i skipping out on a commitment? Am I now a freeloader? Should the TV have a camera to make sure I watch all the ads like a good little boy?
People have been fastforwarding/skipping ads for decades. this is nothing new.
Then it seems that blocking ads is the more honest thing to do! Otherwise the company placing the ad would be unfairly paying money for a service not actually delivered. This also makes the market more efficient, as blocking ads is a clear signal their products aren't desired.
Except TV and YouTube can offer similar, but not necessarily same, purpose.
TV, speaking of cable, is exclusively for entertainment. YouTube is used for pretty much everything these days. Imagine being in a panic, looking for a video how perform CPR, and getting 30 seconds unskippable ad.
Technically, the provider only really cares that the ads played, not that you were paying attention to them.
Unlike DVR for TVs, you are not welcome to skip playing them entirely. They've been pretty clear that skipping them via the use of ad blockers is a violation of the terms of service.
When Apple first launched face ID, there was talk (I can't remember where) of developers being excited about the possibility of tracking where their users were looking.
Ironically, they'd try to get you ... or someone... anyone! on fraud. Can you imagine the same argument made in the example of getting up and going to the kitchen?
> Your honor, they agreed to our terms and conditions which stipulate you MUST stay in the recliner facing forward the whole time. By getting up to <do something important and not waste their life watching ads>, they've defrauded our advertisers! We demand to be repaid in the form of 43 lazyboy hours per year.
Very simple. I don't self flagellate because it hurts and I don't like it. And there's no need for me to self flagellate. So why would I? In exactly the same way, there's no need for me to watch stupid ads. I've had ad blockers ever since they came into existence. There is no incentive for me to disable them. When I need to, I actually pay for content on Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Apple, etc. It's not a money issue.
I haven't done that with Youtube because 1) I don't need to, 2) Google is pretty bad about paying content creators properly (they prefer keeping the money for themselves) and 3) I feel no guilt whatsoever about not sponsoring trillion dollar companies by exposing myself to the pain of watching their shitty ads.
Luckily for Google, most people aren't smart enough to figure out ad blockers. Which is why they are making lots of money with Youtube and why they are a trillion dollar company. Good for them; no need to feel sorry for them.
Luckily for me, Google seems pretty conflicted about fixing this properly because they are making so much money with the way things are. If they lock down Youtube properly (not that hard technically), users and content creators might move elsewhere. They can't afford to. So good for me.
With how user-hostile and anti-competitive Google is behaving, this is like asking why soldiers feel entitled to shoot at the enemy. Keep giving them money, keep watching their ads that they sell on rigged auctions [1], and eventually the only way to access the web will be with locked-against-the-user browsers [2], and everything will be surveilled (though it nearly already is - Google never asks itself why it should feel entitled to follow users around the web, or in real-life, despite opt-outs [3], and you'll find support for any alternative OSes mysteriously withering due to secret anti-competitive contracts between Google and manufacturers [4]). I know this isn't the reasoning people use, but that is what the outcome will be.
As for ads - it has always been hard, nearly impossible to block them, and few people did. Just like you can't block a billboard next to the freeway, you can't block a jpeg that's served as part of the webpage you're visiting, as it's programmatically indistinguishable from native content.
What people actually block are not ads, but a hybrid half-ad-half-surveillance entity, that's called an "ad" by historical accident.
Just want to point out, adding on to OP, that creators on youtube get 55% of revenue.
I get that Google has infinite money and infinite evil. But how convenient you also get to skip out on paying the majority expense, which goes to the creator...
And yes virtuous commentor, I know you are one of the 1.5% that convert to a patreon supporter. Now ask everyone else why they get to eat for free (while endlessly complaining that the restaurant sucks).
Creators choose to host their content on platform that puts it on the public Web where ads are easily blocked. If creators have an issue, it is with Google, not my ad blocker.
I don't owe creators anything; I have no agreements with them. Google is the one with creator contracts.
Google may owe creators something, but I certainly don't and I'm not going to adopt Google's burden on that.
Honestly the kind of video out there made solely to make money aren’t what I’m looking after, I wouldn’t mind if they all went away.
YouTube has always been the guy showing how to replace a 97 Honda civic oil filter in an unedited 5 minutes video and 240p, or the one sharing their passion. You know, the genuinely interesting stuff.
There’s no morality one way or the other. Google couldn’t care less about me; I have no personal connection with anyone there. They’ll treat me as poorly as the law allows (and then some) if it increases their bottom line. By the same measure, I’ll do as much as I can get away with to remove the bad aspects of their service. If we lived in a system where I was using a service made by a person I knew and could talk to, then maybe there’d be more obligations to the exchange, but in this impersonal setup I feel no such obligation.
I've harped on this before: the problem is that the ads if they are fraudulent or harmful in other ways and the companies making money when presenting deserve get their shit blocked. Especially if they can target ads to vulnerable people. These are huge profitable companies that moderate the content they profit of but as soon as someone pays them they turn the blind eye.
Ads are a litmus test for how much a service values its users and the ecosystem it’s built upon. When premium cable first replaced broadcast television it had no ads in lieu of a subscription cost. Now you pay a subscription and get ads. The same is true for streaming services which switched to ad supported subscriptions.
Let’s look at YouTube; in the early years ads were few and far between, then came mid roll ads, then end roll ads, then multiple ads in a row. Now YouTubers started doing their own ad reads, baked into the video.
We’re in a growth oriented era, so companies and individuals will take more and more, as much as they can to keep the numbers going up. What they’re taking is your time; a very precious commodity in my opinion.
Why do I Adblock? Because a line must be drawn or else this marketing growth engine will consume everything. I mean literally without any consumer pushback this attention extraction engine will continue expanding until every moment of digital consumption is monetized. It’s already destroyed too much of the internet.
> Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute?
In this situation, the ads are contributing barely anything to the content creation, and storage and distribution drop in price every year while youtube increases the amount of ads and decreases the video quality. So people get upset and block everything. That's part out of being fed up, and that's part out of having no way to make the ads become less bad in a non-block way.
Perhaps one justification for blocking ads is protecting users from personal information harvesting, tracking, and malware delivered through advertising networks. Aside from that, I can't think of a justification.
I actually think it would be good if there were filter lists that whitelisted ads that were not harmful to users in those ways, but that sounds difficult/impossible to fairly maintain, and I doubt anyone else wants it.
Some websites will stop me from accessing content because I use an ad blocker. I think that’s fair play, and take my attention somewhere else. I don’t hide that I use adblocker, and it’s easy enough to identify.
Great analogy. Its the same reason why I grab stuff off of supermarkets and walk out. If they really cared about it, they'll invest in better technology to stop me. Suckers.
How much is a media service worth? How much does it cost to produce? Can I pay a reasonable fee to the right people?
Most websites do not offer reasonable payment options. They'd earn fractions of a cent from the ads they'd show me, but the cheapest subscriptions they offer are several dollars.
On YouTube, the value of the service is provided by creators, but too little of the subscription is going towards the creators. To make matters worse, Google seems to pull every string they can to make creators as miserable as possible. Their actions are a detriment to the service, and not worth supporting. An 80/20 revenue split would seem much more reasonable.
Advertising is predatory by design. It is my moral duty not only to resist advertising, but to do everything I can to make it as ineffective as possible.
> Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute?
Shall we do the same to open source?
“Watch this ad for 30 seconds before checking out a branch! Git commit, oops: RAID SHADOW LEGENDS”
This is the same situation as with the media industry, e.g. music and movies and piracy. Studies have shown that people who pirate wouldn't buy the product even if they had the opportunity (i.e. is if they had the money or if it was easy to buy). So I guess the content is not good enough.
Once you have something, you don’t want to let it go. Even if it’s not morally justifiable.
Otherwise wealth would be much more equally spread across northern and Southern hemisphere.
Personally I hate advertisement, i will do everything I can to disable it but I know that at this point I’m almost pirating. There is no shame in that, internet is the Wild West : Google and their AI crawling bots aren’t better than me, they leech contents other made, other host, to build their ai and then makes money on top of it.
I pay for YouTube Premium, but I don’t share your moral opposition to ad-blocking. It’s not entitlement, because the service is totally free to stop serving me the videos.
Because I control my computer, and if I don't want to see ads, I have the right to automatically filter them out on my side. (Yes, yes, and Google has the right to block me from accessing their servers.)
Huh? You're on their website to watch videos. And it costs them money to send you those bits. And they offer two ways for you to compensate. Watch ads, or pay premium.
What is so difficult for you to understand this business relationship?
It's Google. The relationship is not consensual but adversarial. Google attempts to get free things from me. I attempt to get free things from Google.
It's like asking a lawyer why does he defend an obviously guilty client? Because it's adversarial system, his job is to protect his client, not to worry about the other side. The other side is trying to maximize their advantage too. Google has defined my relationship with it in such terms through its behavior.
If YouTube were still an independent operator I would be more amenable to your argument.
In any case, the fact I can recite an ad from memory shows that I am at least watching some of their ads, notably on mobile.
It takes a lot of time, money, care, education and love to grow human individual. Who would dare to even start considering paying high fees for the honor of receiving some of their time and attention? Why are video provider not paying people to obtain this privilege? No one dare to think they can get that for free, right?
Back when I listened to Spotify Premium, they would mess around with the shuffle or add a “smart” shuffle to the UI that you can’t opt out of. They would try to insert songs to my playlists where they don’t belong. Gtfo let me listen to my music.
I listen to Spotify Freemium. There’s a special ad that says: “Enjoy the next 30 minutes of ad-free listening”. 2 minutes later I get 2-3 ads back to back.
Enough. Happy Jellyfin user. I’ll buy up my music gradually.
I don't, I pay for YouTube premium. I think YouTube deserves money for its service, and it needs money for its employees and infrastructure.
I'd block ads if there wasn't premium (or if premium had ads). YouTube still deserves and needs money, but ads don't "extract" the money from me. At best (and most likely*) every ad shown to me is effectively the advertiser paying YouTube to waste my time. At worst (if I actually buy the product), the ad is effectively me paying the advertiser and getting something useless or harmful. The chance a YouTube ad shows me something beneficial is too small to remotely justify the other ads which waste my time (or if I buy, the Earth's resources or my attention or etc.).
I also block ads on newspapers and other smaller sites, but don't buy their premium. Honestly, I don't think this is fair, although I think it's small in the grand scheme of things. The problem is, I don't feel those sites justify me paying, and I'd be spending well over $100/month if I subscribed to every one; I'd rather not see each site than pay, although currently I do see them without paying which is unfair (showing me ads is wasteful, as explained earlier, so I don't even consider it an alternative). You know what, I'll probably subscribe to a few (maybe AP and Reuters) and every other story I encounter, see if I can find the version on one of those sites.
* "But ads work on you subliminally." I hear and read this a lot, but I really doubt it for invasive ads like YouTube's (also billboards etc. I'm not talking about covert ads or "good" non-invasive ads like Show HN). First, I recognize many of the big advertisers (e.g. those VPNs and sodas) and will never buy their products, so those ads shown to me specifically are wasted. Moreover, I'm particularly methodical when buying things. I always go in with a plan: sometimes it's a simple plan like "buy the second-cheapest with a good description and decent reviews" or "buy what your parents do", but I never buy something because I recognize it. In fact, if something seems familiar I pay extra attention, and if I recognize it was invasively advertised, I become less likely to buy it, because I suspect invasive ads correlate with low value and want to actively dissuade invasive ads in general. "But your parents and the reviewers buy based off ads, and you buy based off them"...OK, show my parents and reviewers the ads, not me.
Ultimately, invasive ads waste my time and annoy me, and I don't see their benefits which justify that. I'd rather pay a small fee than see or hear every invasive ad (like with YouTube premium), and I suspect the advertisers would benefit from that too.
Watching ads just offloads the cost on other people. I would go as far as saying that watching ads is immoral (if you can avoid it), as you are effectively stealing from others.
Your brain baffles me. I have already decided that i will never ever buy any of the shit in these ads, it would save THEM TIME AND MONEY AND LYING TO THE AD BUYERS to not show me the ads. THEY are doing the immoral thing here to force waste my time for no positive benefits
It's because people are fucking lazy and completely lost in the digital world. Thinking YouTube should somehow be free is absurd and I'm sick of seeing this bullshit on this site in particular where a lot of the people here are actively involved in this kind of thing. Avg salary on this site is probably north of $200k and they're bitching about paying a few bucks a month for YouTube.
ads are awful on a good day. YOUTUBE ads are 5x worse.
I'm not going to sit there, waste my time, watching the same ads for the 5th time that has no relevance to me. Adblockers make youtube tolerable. If there were no adblockers i genuinely would be unable to use it.
Has nothing to do with a sense of entitlement, they are ads for things I would never purchase. so whats the point then? Why is it OK for people to pay to waste my time just because they paid to? What gives them the right to force me to watch that? Hard no. It's my browser, and I'll do as i damn well please.
I WOULD pay for youtube if it was a good product. But it's not. I'm not going to opine on all the reasons it's not. if/when they make it good i'll pay. That's a them problem.
but there is NO WAY i am going to start accepting ads back into my life. I'll just stop watching youtube.
It's not free when they already track and sell user data to the highest bidder. YouTube is just trying to double-dip at this point. I'd gladly pay for premium if there was a guarantee that my user data would not sold.
> This locks a few global objects by using Object.defineProperty to set them as non-writable, which prevents later code from overwriting them with a Proxy that alters their behaviour. So uBlock Origin can only proxy JSON.stringify if it can run before this locker script does.
This seems like a bug in browsers, or possibly in the spec. Page content and scripts should never be able to restrict what browser extensions can do.
oh its a Chrome feature! Around 2 years ago Chrome pushed an update that speedup time to load first initial page by delaying Extension initialization. Last page you closed Chrome on will load before uBo, will be able to bypass all filters/block and will be able to detect uBo being loaded.
I don't care when YouTube does a buffer thing because blocking ads for me is about distractions and context switching. My cognitive load is already very high and it's extremely frustrating to have to filter out more garbage.
How is it possible to have a high cognitive load while watching YouTube? Are you watching surgery training videos in the middle of conducting a heart transplant or something?
I am trying to stay as recent with offerings from teams like LangGraph. The rate these frameworks, research, etc. is fast. Either way, if I've set aside some time to focus on a video about X it's very frustrating for me to first disregard a few unrelated Y.
You could just pay the $13/month? Would save the worries about context switching further taxing your already high cognitive load? And I would expect your high cognitive load helps you earn well above $13/month?
SponsorBlock is amazing. It tells you how much time you've saved. It adds up quick. I can't say I've met anyone who misses random two minute breaks about weird scam cooking services, etc.
There are no ads when I use YT premium, except for the creators' Hello Fresh type segments. Which perhaps they'd be less incentivized to pursue if people didn't use ad blockers.
To be clear, you mean it doesn't remove YouTube-placed ads inside the video? Edit: I'm not talking about the creator's own sponsorships, or the YouTube homepage showing static ads for movies or whatever.
I pay for YouTube premium, it absolutely removes YouTube-placed ads. Creators also get a kickback when premium users watch their videos, as they don’t make money off the YouTube ads anymore.
I wish it would also remove YouTube's internal advertising. I pay for YouTube Premium, but I can't permanently hide shorts or prevent it from popping up whatever random topic they want me to engage with. Every 30 days or so, I have to click "Show Fewer Shorts" and every week or two, I have to opt out of the topic du jour, and I have to do this separately on every device.
There is too much good content on YouTube to simply stop using it. It is a gold mine of tutorials on niche subjects. I just watched best ways to patch an air mattress, and a video on making theater quality popcorn! (and it was delicious)
I asked kagi’s llm for a recipe on theater quality popcorn (which I do all the time), and it gave the basic recipe (though it suggested butter, when clarified butter is superior in my opinion) with a list of tips. I’ve been having trouble with unpopped kernels (maybe a few dozen per batch), and one of the tips pointed to an excellent tutorial on avoiding unpopped / burnt kernels:
This took me far less time than watching YouTube videos, since that’s one of 5 references the LLM summary included, and the other 4 are information I didn’t need.
How would you know you won’t get sick? LLM’s scare me with the random stuff. It can be useful in specific cases but I certainly wouldn’t get any recipes that way. I would seriously reconsider friend.
Except they want it both ways. I tried Youtube Premium for a few months. Slowly but surely the ads came back, so back to blocking and not paying I went.
Youtube premium can look very different between places/people. Many with premium still see them. Youtube seems to be testing various markets to see how many ads it takes before people cancel their subscriptions. Also, you have to accept google cookies and such for them to identify you as a subscriber, so many privacy-focused users will see ads regardless of premium subscriptions.
Giving them money rewards them for pulling a bait and switch where they set the price of hosting plus watching video at free, but are now trying to extort the ecosystem after so many people spent effort uploading. Don't encourage hostile behavior.
Sure, that would have been one honest option. Dumping an artificially free option into the market crowded out other options from being adopted or even developed.
I create a different kind of content that Google used to train their AI and offer AI summaries. Those same summaries mean I will soon need to find another way to make rent.
It's not stealing from creators. The creators have an agreement with Google not with me. If they feel they have been shorted, they can take it up with Google.
I support a _shitpile_ of creators on Patreon and Kofi and more. I subscribe to Nebula, and I get as much as I can from the creators' own pages on those services.
I'm doing my best to move my viewing off of YouTube, and move the money off of YouTube, in hopes that it eases the creators moving off of YouTube.
But you'll invariably watch from a way way bigger shitpile of creators, so without some more efficient mechanism you won't be able to spread your support properly
Not the same poster, but: Products and services that someone actually signed a contract to pay for. Google is free to not send me free video if they don't want to, I'm just connecting to their website using my browser.
But the only reason so many creators are exclusively on youtube is the fact that anyone can watch there. Google tolerates my ad blocker to some degree (unlike other sites) because the alternative is losing market share and they know it.
If creators feel cheated, they can ask youtube to stop serving their videos for free for its own interests. I'd like to see the status quo change actually.
Exactly. YouTube wants to have its cake and eat it too. YouTube would not be what it is today if it wasn't public and free at the point of use.
Anyone is free to do something in private and ticket people for it. I'm doing a concert tonight in my home, it's 100 credits for a ticket, hope you'll come! I can't guarantee anyone will come, but I can guarantee anyone who comes will pay.
There are platforms like Floatplane that use this model.
Then there's the busking model. You do it in public. You can't guarantee anyone pays, but they'll definitely come, and some will probably pay.
YouTube wants both. It wants to be the place where people busk (like the public square) but also force advertising on you. You can't have it both ways. Either go private or accept that this is public and I will do what I want with my browser.
I find it hard to discern whether your post is sarcasm. Assuming it’s not, I’m surprised that someone is so cheerfully and voluntarily paying an extra fiat to the virtual landowner.
It's not stealing. It's using. I have no obligation under any legal framework to use their content the way they wish I would. Trust me, or pay a lawyer to learn the same truth at considerably more cost.
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.
Injecting the ads directly would make them skippable. Unskippable ads are inherently detectable (because the unskippability has to be communicated to the client-side player controls), so there’s no easy way out.
Twitch seems to have won the war against adblockers by injecting directly into the video stream. It’s been months now and I still see ads. I assume it isn’t as easy as you say to skip them otherwise uBlock would have done it already.
It has to be a cost thing. HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.
I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.
It would break all the time stamps as well, unless you had fixed length ads. Sponsorblock already skips ads embedded in videos, so I don't think this would make ads much harder to block.
Agree, it has to do with cost, considering the sheer number of videos they have. Plus, oftentimes the ad won't be relevant after a week or two, in which case they can't re-encode again.
They don't want to boil the frog too quickly. Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream. As the post mentions:
To be clear this isn’t server-side ad insertion; the ad and content streams are still separate (YouTube is doing a server-side ad insertion experiment, but that’s separate from fake buffering)
Yep. It's been pretty funny actually both here but especially on r/youtube.
Pretty much since YouTube started cracking down on adblockers, r/youtube top post Every. Single. Day. is usually someone complaining that they just got hit with "adblock detected" and comments split between "Yeah it sucks, hit me last month" and "Huh, uBlock Origin works fine for me. I must be super smart. YouTube can't defeat me"
> Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream
We've all seen what they're doing with AI-generated video, and we know their market and political power. Eventually they'll be remaking the video so the person or animal or rock or tree on the screen is giving AI-generated product testimonials.
There exists crowdsourced adblocking based on timestamps (SponsorBlock, Tubular). Soon we will have realtime on-device content-aware AI adblocking. They will ever win.
I use content aware ad blocking to remove inserted and native ads from podcasts. The next level adblocking will be rewriting content that is overly commercial.
I imagine you can do it by AI-transcribing the podcast while preserving timestamp metadata for each symbol. Use LLM to identify undesirable segments (ask it to output json or something) and then cut them out from the audio with ffmpeg.
Then you would need to set up a server that would do all this and serve as a 'mirror' to your podcasts without the ads.
If you've gone through that much effort, you might as well turn it into a subscription service. It would be resource intensive, but some people would gladly pay through their nose to rid their podcasts of ads.
It’s already a race to the bottom, blocking tech improves and so does marketing. The latter will pump out as much as you’re scientifically proven to accept before switching off.
In the future, everything will be like that vapid chicken wing podcast (the one where they bring on an interesting, talented person and then waste half an hour interviewing her about sriracha)
So Ira Glass will be narrating This American Life while simultaneously reviewing different varieties of Doritos, etc.
...or the producers of The Rest is History will add the Planters Peanut Man as a third host
...or Marques Brownlee will review every product in relation to how well it works with Bose headphones
Even though I hate advertising I think Hot Ones is one of the few efforts to do a good job with this.
1. Interviewing a guest while they are eating insanely spicy food is an extremely novel idea and the guest's reactions and answers end up being really interesting and unexpected as a result. It humanizes famous people in a way I've never seen before because you can't just bluff your way through it.
2. The hot sauce vendors are often small companies or indie makers (at least they used to be). This is way different than reviewing 11 bags of Superman Transformers 3D Doritos Walmart Product Placement for the next blockbuster.
3. Hot sauce is interesting! Nearly every culture on every continent has hot sauce. They are made from a huge variety of interesting and unusual ingredients but are also simple and can be made at home. Hot sauce hasn't been explored in this way in popular culture.
My favorite relentless one is Tracker (Amazon Prime), who spend approximately 30% of screen time dedicated to showing off a GMC pickup and Airstream, but the most egregious was one dialog line:
> As Colter enters and gives them hugs, Velma remembers that they got a gift for him. Reenie hands him the gift - very conspicuously packaged in an Amazon box with its trademark logo and blue tape - and says, "I've gotta say, next-day delivery is pretty sweet. Thank you, Amazon Prime!"
that is not what they do on hot ones. sean is an intelligent interviewer and their team goes above and beyond to find interesting lore in people’s past to showcase. guests are routinely impressed.
All I ask is that I can pay the creator directly for content without any middle-man. Anything less will be routed around.
It's not like sneaking into a concert. It's like attending a free concert at a mall and wearing a mask so the cameras can't read your lips. Or covering your phone screen with your hand when you show a friend a private photo of a special moment.
Who pays for the electricity, upkeep, security and airconditioning of the mall? Who pays for the sound stage, the technicians, the lighting of the mall?
The band decided to perform at the mall, because they like the facilities there. They always had a choice to perform at their house ("own website"), but they chose the mall ("YouTube") and as long as YouTube is hosting their videos, YouTube deserves to be compensated.
One could splice ads out of the video on the client just as easily as they splice them in, assuming you can detect them (which could be done via crowdsourced databases a la sponsorblock).
Sure, and I can use "technology" to identify those splices, and fix them in various ways that work for me because I control the client (unlike Chrome users) and that gives me the power to make the web behave how I want it to, if I'm willing to put in the effort (or someone else does it for me.)
YouTube is currently running an A/B test for server-side insertion according to what some other people have posted. I'm not getting SSAI ads so I can't really know much about them though.
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.
How does Twitch do it? They're super aggressive and even using third party clients that do a good job and not displaying ads, you still get an occasional "commercial break" screen where they're not serving you the content, or the ad, just a "let's all go to the lobby" screen.
Twitch puts the ads directly in the HLS stream, but as seperate segments from the content (a HLS stream is made of many small video files, on twitch they're about 2s long). They're trivial to recognize and filter out (they're actually explicitly tagged as ad segments) but it still won't serve you the actual stream you were trying to watch - the ad segments override it. The best you can do is just block until the first non-ad segment arrives.
Those clients could be doing a better job - when twitch starts playing an ad on the main stream, they also provide a secondary stream that shows the actual content.
Maybe; I don't know anything about it. I will note that that belief could easily develop, true or not, if twitch streams start out in low resolution and increase as you buffer them.
A third-party client has room to make a dramatic improvement on the twitch experience by not dropping audio while you make the switch from the ad stream to the content stream.
I've also wondered about this for a long time. It seems like there must be something difficult about it, but I can't even guess. Otherwise it seems like they would be, no?
They are working on it. Web YT player no longer fetches separate video and audio streams from the server, it requests them pre bundled and receives a single server side muxed stream.
The creators themselves will include sponsor segments in their videos, but some users go a step further and use sponsorblock to automatically skip through.
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.
IIRC i stopped using this because it takes way too long to toggle on/off and another crucial mistake they make is that YouTube acts like its chrome incognito where you want full privacy and an anonymous browsing experience, I do not want that, I still want to be able to see my own history like my last few search bar queries, I just dont want NEW entries added when in incognito mode. essentially i want read only mode
I would love something like what Spotify has - private listening. In the meantime, I just go into the YouTube history and remove anything that I don't want to pollute my recommendations. Turning off search history entirely also is good.
I'd be happy to pay for premium if it actually removed all ads from the platform. I wish they forced creators to declare which segments of a video are ads for their sponsors and then removed or skipped them for premium users. Basically built-in Sponsorblock except not crowd-sourced.
Alternatively, many creators already upload ad-free versions to their Patreon or other paywalled platforms, they could upload those to YouTube as well to be shown to premium users if YT allowed for it and forced them to.
Alas I'm not willing to pay 13€ a month for just slightly fewer ads.
I don't think YouTube should get further into the dangerous spiral of chaperoning the content of videos. If there are too many sponsored segments in a video, take it up with the creator or stop watching that channel.
I'd love an option to be able to filter out all videos from my feed that have sponsored segments. For me, I find the best content is the underground stuff made by folks who don't have a clear profit motive.
yeah I think the free market can figure ad load out. creators who go overboard on sponsored segments will get less views, less engagement. there's a natural equilibrium.
In many countries ad sections have to be clearly marked for another reason the "free market" hasn't solved: disguised advertising. I wish the US got with the times.
Good time as any to inform about existence of PeerTube instances. And maybe, to think about better use of your time and watch less videos on the internet? This video could've been a blog post and all that jazz :)
I wouldn't be adverse to paying for YT (or similar services) if they took cash payments. But no, you have to get a subscription. Which involves giving Google your personal details, thus giving the world's biggest data hoarder even more data.
Imagine going back in time 20 years. You want to buy a newspaper from a stall. And the vendor tells you to wait and stare at an add for 30 seconds before you can pick up the magazine. The alternative is that you give that vendor a copy of your ID and credit card. It's insane.
Most of these problems would go away if we had "online cash" (please don't start talking about cryptocurrency). Want to watch a video? Watch an add or pay €0.01. Of course all the money-laundering hysteria will prevent that from happening.
I was wondering when buffering was going to be a thing. I’ve been seeing it on YT and figured it’s the Adblock wars getting heated up.
The next step is to scrape the videos, strip the ads, store them on a torrent magnet and serve that instead. Yes it would have to be from a shady RU or CN or NK or IN site. I’m fine with that.
If copyright laws were reasonable and limited to what was necessary to serve their stated purpose, I would agree with the critique - that it seems like entitled behaviour. But in a world where copyright terms are 150 years, in my opinion any premise that it serves the public is gone.
Consider that it's a monopoly. You can't get 99% of this content anywhere else (not even if it's marked as creative commons¹ or any other free license, publicly funded, etc.) but I don't agree with Google's/Alphabet's practices either. One could:
Option 1: be a hermit and not watch anything on YouTube ever. You can't look up repair guides, fully use a news website that I'm subscribed to that got rid of their self hosted version, watch a subset of public broadcasts that we pay for via taxes, etc. It's not just entertainment / a Netflix replacement
Option 2: give in and enrich this monopolistic tracking company
Option 3: try to pirate the content
I'd feel very different if this were Spotify or an individual artist: I can use three other music services with massively overlapping offerings from different jurisdictions. Or supermarkets, for the same reason. But if it's irreplaceable and gatekept, I can understand both sides here
I find it frustrating that so many people expect some kind of morality from consumers but not companies. It’s cold, hard business logic to use an adblocker when you have the knowhow and are annoyed enough, just as its cold, hard business logic to fight adblockers up to a point.
I just use yt-dlp (YTDLnis on Android, which has a great UI that makes it quite YouTube-like). Downloading instead of streaming (read: downloading then automatically deleting) is so much better.
1. It's all offline play, so I can use my favorite players like VLC. Also, no buffering (after the initial download, of course).
2. I can do anything I want to the video: make edits, splice ads out, extract audio, generate subtitles or dubs, etc.
3. It saves Google server costs! Well, comparing to streaming the same video from them multiple times with adblock on, at least.
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 ideas?
its creating a problem and selling the solution to that problem. im surprised there isnt more of a distaste for youtube out there for just their overall product... ads aside. One of the better things ive done for myself this past year is remove the right sidebar as well as almost all of the homepage.
my youtube homepage is just that left sidebar, which has dots if a new video for one of the channels i care about uploads. It totally frees me from clickbait thumbnails, and "youtube rabbit holes".
youtube has just been getting slaughtered with horrible trends of mindless content, low effort documentary stuff, all sorts of low effort garbage with high effort thumbnails/titles. it is so nice to just rid myself of all of it.
At least on TV I occasionally catch randomly interesting ads... sometimes. On YT, I'm stuck with the same obnoxious commercial from a company whose service I strongly dislike, playing on loop ever since they associated me to some related product category. They think pestering me with more interruptions will win me over, but their analytics are working in reverse. I can't understand why they're so clueless.
Is it actually expensive though? Or does it just feel that way? A movie costs $15, or roughly 13 cents per minute of watch time.
The average daily YouTube watch time is north of 40 minutes per day for adults in the US. That's a penny per minute for YouTube... 11x cheaper than a movie.
It’s a psychological problem. Going from $0 to $1 is a mountain.
Starting a product or service at $30 / month sets expectations up front (no ad supported free tier)
This is an incompatible strategy with venture backed “get all the market share possible by offering services for free to crush competitors so we can have a monopoly to exploit later” mindset
Premium is a good deal if you would have already had Music, and Music is pretty great while also being a good deal. They also have a cheaper 'Premium Lite' these days, though apparently some content still has ads if you use it.
I would pay that 130€ / year if I was alone. I have to be responsible with the money I earn as I have to feed 3 kids and my wife is not working. We also use other different streaming services like netflix, spotify family... adding youtube premium seems not reasonable for me at the moment.
Commenting to share my experience: I ran into and ended up with youtube because it bundles youtube music as well, allowing me to consolidate. I was able to invite my household to the same account.
I also wanted to ensure my views resulted in the creators being paid, it goes without saying that the royalties for streaming are abysmal and is a separate conversation, but it was a contributing factor for me.
In the USA I subscribe to Youtube Premium family. The rate is just $3.00 a month more than Spotify family. For that price you get both the Spotify-equivalent Google-owned service (confusingly called YouTube Music) AND you get ad-free Youtube as a bundle. Basically just $3/month for no ads on Youtube is worth it and much easier to justify for a household on a tight budget.
It might be worth looking into if the pricing differential is similarly minimal where you live.
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
In 2025 it's actually not that expensive. CDNs aggressively drive down the cost of streaming video.
A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates.
You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure.
Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,000 bill from your ISP because your content went viral but nowadays their value proposition is more about network effects plus built-in revshare scheme.
Youtube is $14/month. netflix is $17/month. That is VERY expensive, considering that most of Netflix's cost is production. Youtube has almost no production costs. Their users create content.
Maybe if they paid their users more, so they didn't also have to add 'sponsor segments' inside their video's it would make more sense. The bundling music for the same price is the same crap cable and phone companies have been doing for decades, that most people hate. Let me buy just youtube without ads, and keep spotify.
But as it sits right now, $14/month for video's without youtube ads, but still with ads added by the creators themselves (or paid promotion, I guess) is pretty expensive, compared to $17/month for actual movies with no ads at all.
YouTube gives, I think, 55% of revenue (not just profits) to creators, which could be considered similar to production costs making up a majority of expenses.
I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music a couple of years ago because of Spotify showing disruptive ads/promotions on the premium plan. YT Premium for Music + Videos is worth it for me, being about 2.5USD more expensive per month than Spotify where I live. But I agree that one should just be able to subscribe to them separately.
You're not wrong, but the amount of content on YouTube (that they need to index, store, and stream) is several orders of magnitude more than what's on Netflix.
And for that matter, the number of active viewers is also significantly higher since there's no paywall. AND they also support live streaming.
while ad blocking has grown in prevalence over the years, for something like youtube I'd figured it was more than counteracted by the shift to mobile / TV (where ad blocking is more complicated)
whatever the merits, this (and google's neutering of extensions in chrome) signals a fundamental attitude shift from ~10 years ago; they're more interested in squeezing margins out of their dominant platforms instead of growth
Yeah, it's true. iOS 9 Safari actually had the ability to play YouTube in the background without paying for that, and in iOS 10 they went out of their way to prevent it. And Apple signaled willingness to go along with WEI back when that was on the table.
I've seen several people argue about the quality of ads on YouTube. For me it's not about that. I've been using ad blockers for almost 15 years now. Youtube has been free AND ad free for me for a very long time. I don't want to be interrupted with ads now or ever regardless of their quality.
The point is, I'm making zero excuses about why I don't want to see ads on youtube. It's been that way and I want it to remain that way. No subscriptions and no ads. People watching yt on their phones and TVs will still see ads or pay for premium and they can support the service.
Fake buffering is much better than watching an ad, even if it were longer. Looking at a wait spinner probably is much better for the brain than some attention grabbing ad content.
youtube’s not reacting to adblockers, they’ve been planning for a post openweb model for years. this just lines up with that. killing adblock is one piece. the bigger shift is turning the site from a semiopen platform into something way more locked down limited playback, enforced UI, no 3rd party clients, all of that.
just track what they’ve stopped letting you do. there’s a pattern. they’re tightening every surface they used to ignore. because ig they're done pretending the open parts matter
Even as a uBlock and Firefox user, I get the occasional delay at the start of some videos. My workaround is to click on another random video (which, for some reason starts playing immediately), and then go back to my original video, and that starts playing straight away. No-mo waiting.
If YouTube's ads were like the TV ads of olden days, they might even be marginally tolerable. They're not however.
In my experience, they not only deliberately increase volume to pretty much screech whatever insipid bullshit is being offered at you, but they also can sometimes run for dozens of minutes unless you manually go to your device and press "skip". TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.
I even wonder how anything so fucking hostile and annoying to a YT free user can possibly be effective? Who's actively paying for all this garbage ad placement with such scummy little playback mechanics?
It was around that time that I stopped watching cable television altogether.
If you want to back down memory lane, search on YouTube for old recordings of network TV ad breaks from the late 90s and early 2000s- they’re just obnoxious.
Yeah, I was reading this and thinking wut, TV sucks. Like half the time watching a show (most likely a rerun) is ads, even if it's a paid cable channel. And even after that 2010 law, pretty sure the ads are louder than the shows. And the ads are even worse nowadays because the ads exclusively target old people, so 90% are drugs or gold-buying scams. Somehow the cable STBs are super laggy nowadays too, like they rewrote the video decoder in Javascript or something, cause it used to be fine.
The only thing I miss at all is being able to leave a TV on and have it keep playing something reasonable, not convince itself that watching a car review means I want to watch a screaming kid trolling in Minecraft followed by the Syrian Civil War.
Oh the gold buying ads come by mail, you only sell your gold on TV. I heard they pay even higher than market rate if you order some orbexlitol with it.
I also noticed fake buffering[0], it is disgusting but it seems like they are usually on their adblocker blocking spree for a few weeks and then they give up. Their goal is to annoy you not to unblock adblocker and watch ads but to make you buy YouTube Premium because they would earn more money from subscription than they would from you watching ads.
Discovery is always going to be an issue, but for those who want to get away from doomscrolling their life away for the algorithm-god, it’s a rather comfy way to enjoy content.
Having sailed the high seas since middle school I suppose it was only natural that I continue to build upon my multi-terabyte horde of movies, archived websites, books, music, and video games to include content from hobbyist HAM radio operators and long-form urban legend documentaries from YT channels.
the topics at the top of the homepage, sorting comments by timestamp, the little card when you click on someone's profile picture with other comments on the same channel (which was only on mobile for a while), they improved auto captioning recently and are toying with dubbing, modern codecs… it's the little things that make it better
I do appreciate the auto captioning and codec fight. shakes fist at patent trolls
Could care less about the social bits. Comments have been filtered better but I will never trust their black box. With Enhanced YouTube extension I remove all of that so I can retain focus apart from the video at hand.
This stuff is freely available on the open web and I don't deal with ads or pay for premium because there's zero compelling reason to do so.
If creators have a problem with the revenue loss, their contract is with Google and they should take up those concerns with Google. If Google has a problem with how I consume their public content, they can make it non-public or try to block me in some other way.
I owe neither of those entities anything and until they either make the content non-public or find a way to block me without blocking others they want to see their content, I'll keep on consuming it how I like.
If adblock stopped working I would leave, which is interesting to me as I wonder what I'd do with my new time.
Funny I make YT videos too trying to build an audience, I'd like to not put ads on it but not my choice
I don't understand how people can just accept ads it drives me insane when some random shit starts playing
I already lost money with YT, I bought so many UHD movies on their platform ($20 ea) and they won't stream it in HD unless you're on a supported device or ad-ridden tv
edit: alright, aftrer seeing it's $13 I will get it, I have been converted
You pay to make the content. You would have to "pay" to make the content no matter where you hosted it. You don't pay YouTube to host it. That's a silly argument.
You seem to ignore that you would probably have no audience - or have a significantly smaller audience - were it not for YouTube hosting your content. They are providing you a service, but you seem to think that nobody - not you, not your viewers - should have to trade anything for that service, despite the hosting and streaming of video being one of the most expensive possible tech services in the world (bar perhaps running genAI models.)
I dunno it's just very annoying how a lot of people have memed themselves into this train of thought where the big tech companies aren't actually providing them anything of value, when if they decided to suddenly stop providing their services they would be up a creek without a paddle.
YouTube Premium has existed for years now... You're absolutely able to pay for an ad-free experience, and it provides more financial support to creators than ads do
That's different though. Paying through Patreon is directly giving the creators a larger share, but neither party (you or the creator) pays for video hosting service in this transaction.
Your argument only makes sense if you watch the creator's videos exclusively on Patreon (paid by the cut they take from your transaction) or on a platform like Vimeo (paid directly by the creator for hosting). In which case, what Youtube does isn't relevant to you.
YT Premium revenue goes to the same creators you watch otherwise but they get compensated more for your views than they do for any other person's views.
e.g. Linus Tech Tips posted up their share of revenue from AdSense in 2024; YT Premium made up 37% of their revenue despite being 29% of their views.
The existence of premium is not the same as parent poster’s, “make us pay for it” idea, aka a paywall.
If YouTube and its content actually has value, then presumably a paywall would have no effect of revenues of YouTube or creators. On the other hand if the content is actually nearly worthless, the vast majority of people would find something better to do with their time.
the OP said "make us pay" not "give us the option to pay"
Until they make us pay, put the entire site behind a paywall or similar, I'll keep enjoying their public web content using my clients of choice, some of which modify the content in various ways for various reasons, entirely of my choosing.
I run Brave on multiple devices and there's now a "glitch" a few seconds after what wouod be the ads, starts. I put up with this because the alternative is to put up with ads that treat viewers like morons with one hand in the mouse and other in the wallet.
Another thing they are sometimes doing is failing to add videos that you watched with ad blocking on to your history.
That means if those videos show up in a search, or on your home page, or in a recommendation they do not have the red bar on the bottom that indicates that you have already watched them.
! Stop sites from prompting to sign into Google account
||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p
! Stop annoying reels from littering friend feeds
www.facebook.com##[aria-label="reel"]:upward(2)
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element-show
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
! Don't use the obnoxious new bold font for titles, use the old font instead
www.youtube.com###title h1 yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;)
www.youtube.com##h3.ytd-playlist-panel-renderer .title .yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;)
! Remove branding bugs in the bottom corner
www.youtube.com##div.iv-branding
www.youtube.com##.annotation.annotation-type-custom.iv-branding
! Disable live video previews on hover
www.youtube.com##+js(aeld, /^(?:mousemove|pointermove|pointerenter)$/, buttons)
! Remove "Scroll for details"
www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-fullerscreen-edu-button
! Remove "This video contains paid content" warning
www.youtube.com##.ytp-paid-content-overlay
! Remove badges
www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.badges
www.youtube.com##ytd-badge-supported-renderer.ytd-video-primary-info-renderer
! Remove badges in lists, expand video title to fill that space again
www.youtube.com##.ytd-badge-supported-renderer.style-scope.badge-style-type-verified.badge
www.youtube.com###menu > .ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.metadata:style(padding-right:0!important)
! Remove chat
www.youtube.com###chat
! Remove sidebar
www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer.ytd-app.style-scope
www.youtube.com##ytd-app[mini-guide-visible] ytd-page-manager.ytd-app:style(margin-left:0px!important)
! Remove the shadow over the top of videos
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-top
www.youtube.com##.ytp-chrome-top
! Reduce opacity of the shadow over the bottom of videos
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-bottom:style(opacity: 55% !important)
! Reduce opacity of video length labels
www.youtube.com##ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer.ytd-thumbnail.style-scope:style(opacity:75% !important)
! Remove Next button. I only ever hit this accidentally, losing my place
! and my playback buffer >:-[
www.youtube.com##.ytp-left-controls > .ytp-button.ytp-next-button
! Remove Miniplayer button
www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-miniplayer-button
! Force YouTube to display the complete copyright information in the description
www.youtube.com###expanded-metadata:style(display:block !important)
! Don't load the preview image before the video loads (saves some bandwidth)
||i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/*/maxresdefault.webp
||i.ytimg.com/vi/*/maxresdefault.jpg
! Remove interactions (eg if you never login to YouTube)
www.youtube.com###like-button
www.youtube.com###dislike-button
www.youtube.com###sponsor-button
www.youtube.com###hover-overlays
www.youtube.com###subscribe-button
www.youtube.com###flexible-item-buttons
www.youtube.com###button-shape
www.youtube.com###reply-button-end
! Remove sidebar items that are only applicable to logged-in users
www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1)
www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)
! Remove "Watch Later" and "Add to Queue"
www.youtube.com###hover-overlays
! Remove the "skeleton" shown before the page loads
www.youtube.com##.skeleton
www.youtube.com###info-skeleton
www.youtube.com###meta-skeleton
www.youtube.com###owner-name
www.youtube.com##.skeleton-bg-color
www.youtube.com###home-page-skeleton
www.youtube.com###masthead-skeleton-icons
||www.youtube.com/s/desktop/*/cssbin/www-main-desktop-watch-page-skeleton.css
||www.youtube.com/s/desktop/*/cssbin/www-main-desktop-player-skeleton.css
! Remove the live previews on the scrubber bar (saves some bandwidth, but
! not worth it IMO)
||i.ytimg.com/sb/*
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip-bg
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip-image
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip:style(border-radius:0px;!important)*
Not sure if it's the same one, but I managed to consistently click the "includes paid promotion" banner on video thumbnails so I open a tab with the help page explaining what sponsorships are instead of the video.
So you buy premium - now you don't have ads from YouTube anymore. But now YouTubers such as LinusTechTips and who else not want monthly payments for their exclusive content. Yea, that's not going to work. Now your watchers don't watch your content.
It’s crazy to ram as they did a revenue breakdown recently and the sponser segments was way tinier than I expected - like 10% or in that range. I was annoyed just knowing they shit on their videos just for that tiny profit boost.
Perfectly fair. It's not like YouTube is some free open source platform. Infra needs to be paid, creators need to be paid, they have a whole eco-system. Why not just pay for premium if you use it that much?
As a young person, I get perfectly normal corporate advertisements on YT, with the very rare porno dating ad. My parents on the other hand, get a never ending stream of the shittiest scams, AI voiceovers of Joe Rogan and Zelensky, dick pills. It's clear their tracking targets elderly users with scams. I would never pay for YT premium.
I downloaded some free songs back in the Napster days but now I happily pay for or watch ads for any content that I consume. I have zero interest in ad blockers / other tricks as I want the content creators to get compensated.
I have to wonder whether they are tracking changes in consumer confidence. Subjectively, I have noticed a significant drop in confidence from my peers. I do not know whether my experience generalizes, but if it does, they are playing with fire.
I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too) and am happy with the lack of ads, even though many creators still mix paid sponsors into their videos. It seems the creators are motivated to keep things minimal or they will lose engagement.
What I am not happy with is a lack of control over the homepage and recommendations. I would really like to be able to easily block channels from ever showing up, but you can only sort of do this if you click "don't recommend this channel anymore" from the homepage. But you can't do this if a video shows up recommended from another video. And overall, it just feels like they are spending so much effort trying to get me to watch the next video instead of enjoy the one I am trying to watch.
For my kids, I came up with an ad hoc policy where they can watch from the homepage / recs on weekends but during the week have to stick to a personal playlist they can only add videos to on the weekends. This removes the algorithmically driven addictive nature of YouTube and unsurprisingly they end up moderating their use of Youtube within their alotted screen time much better. It distinguishes between, "I want to watch this" and "I want to pull the slot machine lever." But I would be a lot happier if I could better curate access to content for my kids too. Youtube Kids sucks, it ends up filtering out a bunch of interesting stuff like carpentry and nature content that hasn't been marked "for kids" in favor of videos of kids shopping for toys and stuff.
The "don't show this channel" feature also feels like there is some kind of expiry because I've blocked a few channels multiple times now via that method.
Totally a theory but sometimes YouTube has a button that says roughly "show me something new". I think that may be the source of those channels returning.
Agreed. I've told YT about a thousand times I have zero friggin interest in YouTube Shorts and lo and behold a few weeks later they guiltily try to sneak back into the home page.
> I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too)
I'm curious about a buyer's perspective: would you say this is "tying"? (Seems like an ambiguous word for it but I can see no other translation for koppelverkoop)
To me it seems like trying to undermine the market for music streaming (which is currently somewhat healthy with a handful of competing services worldwide where you can get access to most artists' work) by abusing the monopoly on videos that people often want a subscription on. The parent corp has so much cash to spare, giving away music for nearly free is worth it to make it extremely difficult to compete in this other market. From an individual's point of view, you're a thief of your own wallet if you don't get this two in one deal (assuming you want both). I'm not sure how to feel about people who buy this
Are you mostly watching short videos? I mostly watch videos that are 10+ minutes and I've never had YouTube come anywhere near either the number or total length of ads that I saw on cable or that I see on broadcast TV.
When was that? I'm genuinely asking, since I remember the breakdown from when I was recording TV to my computer and editing out the commercials, as 10 minutes of commercials and 20 minutes of TV show.
Absurd but true in a similar way: I get a tiny spark of nostalgia on those occasions where a bit of sponsored promotion pops into part of some podcast i'm listening to as a YT video while I do chores. (Ublock running, so no third party ads at least)
The thing about those idiotic third party ads on YouTube, which is so grotesquely annoying is that, unlike TV ads of old, some of then can literally run for dozens of minutes at auto-increased volume unless you go to your device and skip them at some point. That is some particularly shitty nonsense right there.
The point of most ads isn't to get you to buy things. Most ads just want you to think of the product and be aware it exists. Their objective is to slowly hijack your brain.
If you know what "it gives you wings" or "the happiest place on earth" means, the ads already worked.
Ads are trying to combat obscurity. A brand with bad reputation is far better than a brand nobody's ever heard of.
No they do not have that right. They do not have the right to try to circumvent what I'm telling my browser to do. If they don't like what it's doing, they can block me from the platform.
I'm curious, has someone tried the authenticated Youtube Premium API in third-party clients?
I'd love to use Invidious or Peertube to watch the videos, but I also want my subscription money to go to the video creators. Youtube allocates it proportionally to the viewing time.
Yep, they need viewers to click the like/subscribe button. They need that so content creators keep on providing content to Google for free in exchange for popularity metrics. Which they need to close sponsorship deals (because Google isn't paying them a whole lot).
So, Google is merely optimizing the ad clicks and impressions here. If they succeed in becoming too obnoxious with their ads, viewers might leave for other platforms, and then content creators would follow. So, fighting ad blocking has diminishing returns and can actually have a negative impact on them. Which is why ad blocking is still effective in 2025 and why Youtube has thrived by being not too effective with their anti ad blocking measures. This is more about selling the notion to advertisers that they are a really good advertising platform than it is about fighting the minority of users who block their ads no matter what. It won't work. But it won't matter as long as advertisers keep on paying for advertising on Youtube.
The irony of their latest efforts is that it is driving away users from Chrome to more effective alternatives (Firefox, Brave, etc.) and it's driving content creators to depend on sponsor ship deals instead of advertising money from Google. The only reason Chrome exists is actually ads. So, more effective counter measures against ad blocking in Chrome could end up hurting their ad revenue. And Google's behavior is actually causing for increasingly stronger calls to break up Google. None of that is good for Google and their advertising revenue.
I mean most adblocking software is open source and easily acquired, a lot like torrenting software it’d be near impossible to actually enforce anything.
Ransomware doesn't have to be illegal in North Korea to convict a North Korean who did it, either in absence or with extradition, in the country where the damage was done
With Alphabet being from a country with extreme capitalism, the comment you're replying to seems applicable no matter where the viewers are (regardless of whether I agree with their viewpoint/outlook). YouTube's owners can choose to block or prosecute whoever doesn't comply with their terms. Not saying that's likely, just that: this isn't a matter of needing to be on the American continent
Edit: perhaps interesting to realise that, conversely, laws in North Korea might make it illegal for Alphabet to have certain terms if they want to serve consumers in their market. (A better example here would be EU with copyright legislation that makes it illegal to sign away your moral rights, for instance.) It works both ways and both could legally prosecute the other at the same time and both win in their area! But with YouTube being able to gatekeep the content here, one has more power than the other..
If they ran less hostile ads, people wouldn't be as hostile to watching their ads. Some of the ads they run are just ridiculous and awful. Ads for scams, soft-core porn ads, just the worst of the worst.
Where are you located? I've never seen any of those.
Pretty much all of my YouTube ads are for TV shows, movies, cars, mobile games, consumer products, and various consumer services. Volkswagen, Dove, TurboTax, etc. All incredibly mainstream.
Maybe you're located in a country or region maintain advertisers avoid?
I don’t get soft core porn ads but I do scams all the time. Bullshit supplements, pyramid schemes, “buy my program to make money” type things. Otherwise it’s mostly political ads, more legitimate consumer products like dishwasher detergent, gambling, and mobile games. NE USA for reference
Personally, for my own value system, I consider the gambling ads to be as bad as scam ads. I think we'll soon come to see the social harm of gambling ads to be as bad as tobacco ads. We should strive for a culture where people see an ad for addictive services or substances and feel an instinctive, pre-conscious disgust. They are the dirty, disgusting, bloodsucking bedbugs of society.
I agree and feel it is a reflection on social decline. While I don’t think prohibition it the way forward it is unsettling that we tolerate this as a society. Would we tolerate youtube advertising for heroin or even recreational marijuana? We certainly don’t for tobacco and we probably shouldn’t for alcohol.
I work in mental health and I am seeing more people who spend a substantial amount on “parlays”. Many examples downplay or hide the behavior from their social network and the extreme examples spend a significant amount. The advertising is obviously predatory and goes against what we know about control dynamics in addict behavior but we tend to view that as a personal moral failing rather than exploiting basic biology and as a result allow the dealer to ruin countless lives before any action is taken (see Purdue and Teva lawsuits)
I'm in America. I only see these scummy ads I talk about, and I assume it's because I'm extremely aggressive about preventing myself from being tracked and profiled. My friends made the horrible mistake of looking into cryptocurrency on Google while signed into their account, so they got targeted by scum crypto ads.
It sounds like you've explicitly opted yourself into the lowest common denominator ads. It's understandable that mainstream companies want to maximize their advertising impact by only targeting the viewers where there is data to suggest the viewers will actually be interested in their products.
I'm honestly not really sure why you're complaining. If you don't want to be tracked or profiled, you're going to get the lowest quality ads. Why do you think higher-quality advertisers should be wasting money trying to reach you, when you are going out of your way to avoid any interest in them?
To be clear, I'm not criticizing what you're doing to avoid tracking, or your stance against it. But I'm questioning why you would then complain about the ads you receive.
I'm not complaining that higher-quality advertisers aren't spending money trying to reach me. I'm saying the fact that the lowest common denominator ads are so hostile is reason enough to completely avoid them.
This might be a controversial take, but I don't want to see soft-core porn ads. I don't want to see scam ads. I don't want to see the worst of the worst. It is not a necessary state of affairs that the lowest common denominator ads are ads that are explicitly attempting to prey upon the least informed, most vulnerable members of society.
The fact that the worst ads are the way that they are is indicative of YouTube's willingness to engage in user-hostile activities.
If they were less willing to engage in hostile ads, there would be less hostility towards their ads.
YouTube's solution is extremely simple: vet ads and don't accept money to run hostile ads.
Right, then avoid them. Either don't use YouTube, or else pay for Premium so you don't see them.
You claim people are hostile to watching YouTube's ads because of their quality. But I don't think so -- I think they're mostly seeing normal ads, not scammy ones. Because they're not taking measures against tracking. Your experience would seem to be very much an outlier.
I simply don't see the ads you're talking about, not even a little bit, so I can't really speak to YouTube's acceptable ads policies. But just so you know -- you can also mark checkboxes in your Google profile around which categories of ads you are and aren't interested in. I actually did that, and got less ads for categories I have zero interest in. That may help your ads experience, and make your ad quality complaints go away, if you're philosophically OK with that, since you're providing data freely rather than through tracking.
No, I'm going to continue watching YouTube while also avoiding their ads. If they want to engage in an adversarial relationship then I will as well. Until there's another competitor in the space that provides the same value, I will just take value from the only game in town. They don't owe me their service, but I also don't owe a bad faith monopolist anything. I do pay for premium, and I also block all of their analytics and ads at the network level.
EDIT: also, I think everyone should block ads. We should snub advertisers and surveillers all of the time. If they want to be hostile towards users, users should be hostile towards them.
Capitalists have had it too good for too long. It's time consumers stop caring about how the poor capitalist will make their dime.
Until the capitalists take the time to respect us, the consumers, we don't owe them anything.
It's time for reciprocity. If they're hostile, we reciprocate. If they're cooperative, we reciprocate.
giving them $13/month is not being hostile to them, it’s being a long term customer. they have exactly the relationship they want with you,
minus your adblocking. i too pay for premium, run a pihole and use ubo. i pay for premium because the company sells a quality product at a good price and adfree. sponsor segments is another thing, but solveable. i also use sponsorblock and have a docker setup to autoskip segments on devices connected to my wifi. but out of all streaming services out there, yt actually seems like the least vampiric.
Weird way to blame the victim and not the organization pushing scams on people. I vaguely recall that 20 years ago, Google served things like nonprofit or government PSAs when they didn't know what to serve (or thought you were botting), not financial scams.
Speaking of PSAs, the US federal government issued a PSA a couple years ago recommending use of an ad blocker to avoid becoming a victim of financial scams/fraud (purged now for some reason). Why they don't prosecute the ad companies for being the ones to select and deliver the mark is anyone's guess.
Maybe they just want you to buy Premium and get rid of ads altogether. I think it's really good value now, especially the family plan, if you use YouTube heavily, like my kids do.
I don't get such nasty ads, but the ones I get are extremely repetitive. I see the same 3 ads all the time: one for a car, one for a bank, one for clothes.
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.
I pay for YouTube Premium, but what I am afraid will happen is that once enough users opt to pay for the service, YouTube may pull an Amazon Prime and show ads, and then ask for more money to not see the ads.
Well, I don't particularly enjoy ads on Reddit, Gmail, and, when I used them, Tiktok, Facebook, etc but I wasn't particularly pissed off by them either. On YT it seems just so in your way and in your face and egregious. It's like every couple minutes there's an other ad. You can't even chromecast videos to your tv to play in the background because you have to constantly babysit it or else it will load up an ad that goes on forever or 10 minutes until you come back to skip it.
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.
They offer a cheaper version that isn't bundled with Youtube Music, but then you get ads on official music uploads since I guess that's how the licensing works out. https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite
I don't think it's a rationalization. I have two normie friends who were mostly fine seeing ads on the internet, until one night they saw one too many scum ads on YouTube. They asked me to help them install an adblocker. It was specifically the scumminess of these ads that got them to start using adblockers, which by the way the FBI recommends as a matter of course. People should buy YouTube premium for the convenience features it offers, but everyone should be blocking ads for their own safety and sanity. There is no reason to engage in the ad economy. Everyone should be blocking all ads.
Even google can't keep malware ads out of their system. If we say have geek squad remove the malware, its $149.99, all because google wanted to show me a $0.0001 value ad. No thanks.
You underestimate your attention's value by two orders of magnitude. A typical YouTube ad impression cost is about half a cent or so, sometimes several cents. We're talking serious business here!
Yeah, I find instagram ads not that annoying, and they actually promote things I would buy (I've bought a couple of things over the years through their ads).
Youtube/google ads? Never bought anything, automatically assume they are a scam.
Discord recently started using a fake loading screen if you have an ad blocker enabled. What’s hilarious (and a little infuriating) is that the app is still obviously working under the hood — you can literally see masked text updating in real time when people send you messages. It’s not “loading,” it’s just refusing to render content locally. They’re not even blocking access to the service — they’re just trying to frustrate you into disabling your ad blocker without explicitly saying that’s what they’re doing. Classic dark pattern.
What’s worse is the privacy side. Discord apparently leaves the microphone open even when you’re using push-to-talk. There’s been anecdotal evidence from users monitoring their network traffic that mic input is still active in the background, likely being piped to local buffers or held in memory under the guise of latency reduction. That might sound innocent, but the distinction between “open but not recording” and “recording” is razor thin when the user has explicitly told the app not to listen until a key is pressed. At minimum, it’s a trust violation — at worst, it’s surveillance theater.
This is the standard bait-and-switch. Build a good product, earn user trust, then slowly degrade it with tracking, telemetry, ads, and manipulative UX until it’s barely recognizable. Discord used to be a breath of fresh air compared to Skype or Teamspeak, and now it’s another data-harvesting machine with a gamer paint job. It’s telling that more users are looking into self-hosted options or jumping to alternatives like Matrix or Mumble. Discord doesn’t have ads yet, but all the groundwork is being laid — and people are right to be wary.
Yeah, I will unabashedly shill for YouTube Premium. It’s cheap, it pays video creators more than ads do, and it includes YouTube Music so you can ditch Spotify.
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.
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?
People make videos because there is a platform which makes it incredibly easy to share that video all across the planet without cost to them. And in turn that platform has an enormous base of viewers for that content. To suggest that a world without YouTube (or a similar service) would look the same is ludicrous.
I assume with the same amount of magic as they do at all the other streaming platforms, but they still manage to serve up original content. Hence, as a consumer, this seems like a shoddy deal. You're basically paying for ad-free slop, which by the way like Amazon these days you have to crawl through an entire mountain of because the site barely has any content management features either
We're comparing two different companies here. Netflix et al, are in the business of producing original content (good for them), while YouTube et al are in the business of serving user-generated content.
That's not a bug, but a feature. Its the same difference as a high end restaurant, and a hole in the wall restaurant. Both are serving food, yes, but they are doing business in different categories. You cant go to the second restaurant and be like, the food you served didn't come with a smile like this other restaurant here. They seem to have figured it out, why cant you.
Or similarly, you cant go to the high end restaurant and be like - you charge for water now? Why cant you be like this other hole-in-the-wall restaurant.
the entire point is that in this analogy youtube is quite literally the mega chain self serving restaurant on the most decrepit corner, somehow charging you premium prices despite you having to refill your own water.
They're curating nothing, there's garbage everywhere and you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
> you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
Then dont go to the restaurant if the "hygiene" is not upto your standards? Why do you insist on eating food from that resturant, and insist that it needs to be free?
Netflix costs around double of Youtube Premium for the technical equivalent experience (No ads, UHD playback). It's not like they're charging the same amount for some much better service.
It's interesting to see such different experiences.
To me, YouTube is the gateway to those wonderful hole-in-the-wall places where you get real food made from scratch by people who care. Yeah, there's also a ton of shit. You have to actually make choices, not just take whatever it puts at the top of your recommendations. But the good stuff is there, and it's really good. A gigantic corporation may be intermediating, but the content is real stuff from real people.
Services like Netflix are the soulless mega-chain restaurants serving committee-designed meals that have been focus-grouped and cost-optimized to death.
there are an absurd amount of different takes on it, its pretty crazy. I probably focus too much on the bad content, meant to grab attention. For that reason i have a distaste for youtube because it sorta pushes that type of stuff to the top, which in my mind makes more people make similar cash grab type content.
meanwhile youtube is actively attempting to keep user's viewing as long as possible... netflix probably doesnt really care if you watch for 2 hours a week vs 10 hours a day, they just want the monthly payment.
I don’t care what they pay to create content. I care about how much stuff they have that I want to watch. YouTube knocks this out of the park. Netflix fails. I actually have Netflix for free (with some ads) through my cell phone plan and I haven’t used it in a year. I use YouTube daily and the subscription fee is well worth it to remove the ads.
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)
I don't necessarily disagree but it's not a Google problem. It's a human problem.
For example: What value does your comment provide the world? Enough value to offset the carbon emissions from transmission/storage/retrieval/display? Personally, I'd answer no. Thus your comment itself is a waste of energy.
> Reframing a problem with anything as a human problem is a tautology
I respectfully disagree.
> don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say
They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy. I shared my "tautology" to illustrate while OP's point may be largely correct, greed is not unique to Google.
>They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy.
More then that, sure they show you ads, GREAT
but they screw your device and environment, this makes them no money , a small fraction of users might buy premium but the rest of the users will waste energy and bdevice life, the developers contribute to killing devices and wasting energy.
That is the user's choice. If a user comes to a bookshop wherein they are allowed to read the books for free but only in the store, they have little right to argue that they should be allowed to take the books home like paying customers because the store's lighting is not to their liking and they want to read in 6000K. They are free to picket outside and claim that the store is ruining people's eyesight, but no one sane will take them seriously.
Furthermore, the appropriate solution to this "problem" would be to stop letting people read anything for free.
Can you guess how much is my comment energy usage compares versus all the devices that run YouTube with the screen on?
What about those electronic devices that will end their life sooner because of that?
My hope is that other people will read my comment, add their own support or feedback and maybe at least one single person will think mroe and had the morals to refuse implementing anti environment and anti user features.
it’s funny that you bring up contractual obligations while google ignores the iOS app store rule (contractual obligation) about locking features like PiP behind paywalls.
>How else would you propose they make money (and satisfy contract obligations)? Because nobody else has figured out a better solution.
Do they make money from those millions of devices that run with the screen on? How ? Is some devil paying them for the damage caused to the environment?
For ads it makes sense but not for this shit policy, if they hate the users that they use youtube for free and ads are not enough for them then either put more ads, or find some other methods that do not screw then environment (maybe use the sound of crying babies each 30 seconds if you are not a premium )
.. and that's YT's problem? This is like being angry with Apple, because an app developer created only an iOS app and didnt create an Android. What did Apple do wrong if a developer chose to only create an iOS app?
YouTube is the system, you've not heard of "don't hate the player, hate the game"?
If I "blamed" the creators, you'd be telling me it's not their fault, they're just incentivised by the system, they're just playing the game.
But when I "blame" the system, you're telling me the system is not at fault, that it's individual choice to choose a near-monopoly on video discoverability that is propelled by and heavily benefiting from the same company's actual monopoly of search.
Is it "YT's problem?"? No, it's to YT's massive benefit, it's my problem when I have to suffer through adverts.
Alphabet is the fifth largest company in the world, has earnings higher than most countries' GDP, and is established to have engaged in illegal behavior as a monopolist. It's fair to say they're closer to "the system" than "a player".
Not that this was part of the suit, but the whole practice of giving things away for free and subsidizing them with stalking and ads obviously distorts or completely destroys markets, so yes they can be blamed for doing that. The behavior of these companies is so bad that people in a recent thread were claiming things like chat services (where a single computer can provide service for millions of users) cannot be sustainably run by charging money.
I've always paid for cable without complaining, but the adtech surveillance reality that was innovated by the tech industry makes me less willing to support them.
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?
Arent websites voluntarily embedding Google Analytics? They can decide today, if they wanna switch to Plausible, or any of the other analytics providers right?
I still fail to understand how this is a fault of a company? Would you blame Apple if everyone bought iPhones? What should Apple do? Ask people not to buy their phones?
If airtags were used almost solely to nonconsensually and surreptitiously stalk people (i.e. not to track the belongings of the people buying them), yes I think it would be fair to blame Apple. Especially if that were the advertised purpose, as it is with GA.
Google Analytics is a tool that websites use to track users, similar to how a store might use a pen & paper to keep track of phone numbers or names. The store made the decision to buy the pen to track users. Why are you angry with the pen company?
Google Analytics is not going around tracking users. They provide a service that the website you decided to go to (cnn.com, bbc.com) is using. If you have to be angry, be angry with cnn or bbc.
Pens have a purpose other than surveillance, and aren't as capable as machines. A better analogy would be Bluetooth trackers and cameras with machine vision to identify and watch people's movements and eye gaze as they move around the store. And yes, that is creepy and the manufacturers should be criticized for creating it.
Also, client side scripts do not run on the website's property. They are taking advantage of the wide-open security model of web clients (the model they coincidentally get to define because they dump massive amounts of money into giving away a free browser, making competition in the space nearly impossible) to use people's computers for unauthorized purposes. It's a malware payload just like a crypto miner. They should be treated the same way (or more severely) that they would be if they published miners and told web developers to add them to get free money (taking their own cut of course). The operator and the tool creator should both be blamed for shady behavior when the tool is designed and advertised for shady purposes.
> manufacturers should be criticized for creating it.
Manufacturers make things when there's a market. If Google didnt build Google Analytics, someone else would (Maybe Microsoft, or Apple) because the demand exists.
It's the fault of the company because they leverage their illegal monopoly position to do this.
You're operating under this unrealistic assumption that Google is an innocent entity that has not broken the law to get to the position that they are in.
This is false. Google does not play by the rules and as such your assertion that people should in turn play by the rules when interacting with Google is unreasonable.
I dont follow your logic. The website you visit (cnn, bbc) has made the decision to use Google Analytics. They can very well stop using the GA, and nothing would happen.
Imagine all the restaurants in the world used IKEA for their tables & chairs. Can you say OMG IKEA has a monopoly? No sir, IKEA didnt go into the stores and install the tables & chairs, the restuarants did. Will you be angry with IKEA?
I would imagine that those sites use GA because it's the best tool for their needs. It's probably the best tool for their needs because it is both a very well developed tool with superior integration with other parts of their platforms and has a large developer base that is familiar with it. These advantages come from Google's monopolistic practices and the money and resources that it provides them.
I can certainly imagine such a thing but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the situation as IKEA has as far as I'm aware never been ruled to be a monopoly while Google has.[0]
Ultimately my position on this subject comes down to this: Google does things that are hostile to me. They do things that are hostile to you. They do things that are hostile to society writ large. They break the law and violate the social contract. My morals necessitate responding to such an entity with disregard for whatever they're legally entitled to.
I don't like the way that I'm surveilled by Google and I don't like the way that they abuse their monopoly position and lobby the government to make it impossible for me to evade that surveillance.
To bring the conversation back to where it started: I already pay them with my privacy, I pay for the economic harm their monopolistic practices have on society, and I pay for the corrosive effects their lobbying has on the political structure.
I'm not going to be paying them for an ad free Youtube experience.
I've come to rely on a robust method of adblocking YouTube which I believe to be perfectly reliable and impossible for YouTube to circumvent: avoid watching YouTube. Incidentally this method also reliably prevents false buffering.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That’s not to say whether or not the advertisement is for a product or service for which the viewer is interested in purchasing but how it relates to the context in which it is viewed.
People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may be about how the billboards block a scenic view but that also seems like another way of complaining about the irrelevance. Similarly, if I am watching a Youtube video, I am never thinking that a disruptive message from a commercial business is relevant to my current activities (uh, passivities?). No advertisement is relevant, not even in-video direct sponsorships, hence SponsorBlock.
If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them. I might need tires and realize I can get that taken care of while I’m at Costco. Nearly every advertisement I see at Costco is relevant because it’s selling something I can buy in the same building, indeed usually something juxtaposed close to the advertisement.
I don’t complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they’re irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.
> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
That's not true. We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.
The YouTube ads are hated because that's the whole point. YouTube has something we want (the video), and they're keeping it from us until they we do something we don't want to do (watch an ad). We dislike these ads almost by definition. If we liked them, we'd seek them out, and we'd call them something else, like "movie trailers" or "Super Bowl ads."
Steel-manning the argument, near where I live, it's not that uncommon to see small to moderately sized advertisements along the road, such as a sign outside/near the entrance of a farm that's selling eggs, meat, etc. I am wholly unopposed to this. In fact, I'm very supportive of this, and used them to find a farm to buy local honey from. Whereas the stereotypical massive slabs whose advertisements get wallpapered on, I think those are distracting menaces, particularly if the primary way you see them is by driving.
And where I live it's an ever growing hell of political signs, dominos pizza, and anyone else who realizes there is no enforcement against this wide scale littering. The signs are never removed and continue piling up. Abandoned / unmonitored lots are also a frequent target.
And it's rapidly getting worse
Glad you're cool with it though, I guess? Cuz I've considered running for office on the sole platform of having them perpetually removed and perpetrators prosecuted.
There are literally signs advertising to hire people to place more signs.
> We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers
If you read the rest of the paragraph it becomes clear that this is what was meant by irrelevant.
> If the billboards were all about driving-related products
Well, I don't complain about road signs.
>> that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money.
There are places where billboards act as rather effective sound barriers, shielding quiet neighborhoods from road noise.
I highly doubt a billboard is thick or dense enough to effectively block freeway sound. It’s not like you have a seamless wall of billboards “protecting” a neighborhood
It'll block some. It's not generally big enough to be effective.
Found marketing director of an ad agency.
Then build a sound barrier , no need for an advertisement on them. Or decorate it with art if you want to make them less ugly.
> worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money
That’s not how the economy works.
> That’s not how the economy works.
Kind of seems like how the economy works quite a lot of the time
How do those people end up making money if nobody wants what they are selling.
In the case of advertising that is the million dollar question. Determining the relationship between ad spend and revenue is next to impossible, whatever bullshit ad companies feed you to get you to spend more on ads.
Nothing is wrong with billboards, I can look the other way. When the billboards show up on my dashboard and I have to stare at it before I can turn off my exit then we have problems
I don’t mind watching a video with an ad. My child and I can preoccupy ourself. When it’s a 90 second ad we are forced to watch just to watch a 45 second video I’m gonna make certain we don’t watch that ad
Why should I have to look the other way? It's the billboard that's an imposition, an intrusion, and a nuisance. (Especially when there are multiple)
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no...
> Nothing is wrong with billboards.
Elaborate.
You don't get it. You are not the target
Most advertising is seeking the less intelligent consumer. Or the young and still naive consumer.
They outnumber you 1 million to 1.
It's why female musicians make more money putting their name to a makeup brand then their music.
It's why Elon will make some promise that is unrealistic.
It's why Apple put low paid everyday tech support staff in their stores and called them Geniuses.
You have to put yourself in the shoes of the mainstream buyer. They see a headline and believe it.
They’re disagreeable because you’re having your attention robbed unsolicited for the purpose of someone else trying to get your money. The whole concept is an insult. At best they drive materialism.
You're trading your attention for entertainment you don't otherwise have to pay for.
Not true, cable TV runs ads and costs money. Many sports channels cost money in a cable package and still have ads. The *paid* Netflix plans have ads now.
It’s pretty clear that companies can’t stop salivating over how lucrative ads are, and will continue to shove ads down our throats inside of paid products as long as we live.
OK, but we're very specifically discussing YouTube here, which as discussed, you don't have to pay for; but if you do, you don't see ads.
Except, you do.
https://www.howtogeek.com/more-ads-are-coming-to-youtube-pre...
If you do, you don’t see pre-roll and mid-roll ads. You still see embedded ads, sponsor mentions, “all the tools we used are linked below”, etc.
...for now. But I do wonder how well this statement will age.
I completely agree, though with a twist. Google knows everything about me and yet I get ADs for things that I would never purchase. Just because I'm a middle aged male I see trucks, and beer, and football advertisements all day long. Those are irrelevant to me. If Google would only use their immense knowledge of me and what I like, I might be more amenable to watching their ADs. Where are the ADs for geeky movies that I might enjoy (is there a new Superman movie coming out)? Or books by my favorite authors? Or video games or computer equipment or electric cars? Hell, I have grandkids so stuff for them might work on me.
To be clear, it's not only Google, all the big providers have so much information on all of us, but they don't seem to take advantage of it at all. I've turned the AD "customization" on/off for all kinds of things and it doesn't seem to matter in the slightest. Nearly everything I see is irrelevant to me.
Their incentive is to make money, not serve you relevant ads.
If a geeky movie studio pays X to show an ad to people of your profile, while a car manufacturer pays X*2, Google is better off showing you the car, even if they are internally 100% sure you'd buy the movie instead.
I could be wrong but I was under the impression that ads paid primarily per click, in which case surely the relevancy is important too?
The next Superman movie might correctly conclude that you’re going to go see it anyway, so advertising it to the hypothetical you isn’t very valuable.
Consuming content online has always been about agency. You choose the content. Previous media landscapes were largely passive endeavors. Broadcast media choices were limited. You either muted the ads, turned off the TV/radio or endured the advertisements. I often find myself closing YT when ads are played.
Not only are they largely irrelevant, but they are frequently in the wrong language. If I want to immerse myself in the local language, I will go outside and interact in that language. If I am listening to a podcast in English, typically around Anglophone cultural or political topics, why would they invade my space with non-English content?
I don't want to hear local music or K-Pop when I am listening to classical music.
In many cases, the language isn't even local to the country which I reside in. If I cannot have an English-only space on my own computer, I won't be using the site. There's a time and a place for immersion into other cultures. My personal computer in my home office isn't the place.
I don’t get how YouTube advertises. Because we use VPN in China, YouTube simply pushes ads in whatever local language my proxy server happens to be. Which baffles me quite a lot since even the most basic tracking and use history (I have two decades in Google) would tell them at least the language I can understand.
The parasitic nature of ad tech attracts the laziest get rich quickest tech workers who go on to management where they hire the griftiest of grifters into their ranks.
You can also pay for YouTube. I do. It’s nice, not crazy expensive. No ads. Creators get paid. Everyone wins.
The value I get for paying YouTube doesn't match the price.
Ad blocking is already free and was free for two decades, why would I want to start paying for it now? It's not like I am breaking ToS (despite their pop-ups stating otherwise) and even if I did it is my computer and it is entirely up to me what kind of content it is and isn't going to display.
Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile.
Everyone wins aside from me, the end user. I am paying for something that is already free to do, I get nothing out of it (I still have to run stuff like Sponsorblock to get the content I actually want) and I participate in the upkeep of a business model that not only doesn't have my interests in mind but also has no issues with tricking me (there is no content moderation for YouTube ads and there are plenty of cases in which users are served scam ads).
You lose on long run. In few years, you will pay more and still watch ads while YT will no longer be free. (let me remind you of video streaming services)
Managers want their rewards that are tied to earnings and stockholders want to earn more.
And once they both get their money, the next year reward will be tied to even more earnings. And stockholders will want to earn more.
I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years. The value I get is vastly greater than Netflix or any other streaming service. But if they ever start putting ads in the paid subscriptions (like many streaming services now with their basic tier) I’ll jump ship.
Yep, you were a test project. Will people pay for free content or punish them by leaving the platform. And will they start to pay if you increase number of ads. Now they moved to next stage.
Anyway, not there yet. Frog is boiled slowly, slow enough that people dont notice until it is to late.
First they need to kill ad blockers tier. Then you increase number of ads to unbearable (they are already doing that) and get as much people as possible to paid content. Also market must be ripe enough, so there will be no more ships to jump. Then you will get ads, different tiers to pay, segmentation of content etc.
I hear you, but I can only live in the now and not whatifs. I refuse to watch ads and will pay to avoid them. If a service I use makes that impossible, then I’ll no longer use the service.
And there is more content in the world right now than any single person will ever be able to consume. I have zero concerns about dropping a service.
But you don't need to drop a service. You can keep it as good as it is. You just don't reward google predatory tactics by paying, as you are literally making YT worse.
So if I don't pay and I don't want to watch ads then what? I'm not going to jump through mental gymnastics to not pay creators and Google for offering the service. If you truly don't want to reward Google, then don't use anything from Google.
How did it work until now? Anyway, we both know that care for "creators" is "think of the children" thing, but I will play along: pay them using patreon (or, I have bought this: https://theduranshop.com/the-duran-gold-eagle-premium-t-shir..., triple time overpriced but they deserve it).
For Google, don't worry. You have payed them, with your data, thousand times over. And if you stop providing today, your existing data will be exploitable for years to come.
On top of it, by paying, you create a direct trail from watched video (data) to your account, from there to your credit card and from credit card to physical person. So you are giving them even more data.
Anyway, if Google goes bankrupt, because of you, you can consider yourself a saint.
Someone who has really done something very good for the whole planet and human society.
I will lit a candle each day into your honor.
Not sure what you mean. I was a test subject? The test still seems to be ongoing after 10 years. I fail to understand how any of these alleged experiments involve me.
So what's your alternative if I don't want ads (content is not free to make), want the creators to be paid, and paying for premium is tempting YouTube to abuse pricing? (or so you say)
Block the adverts, and pay the creators via Patreon. And join Nebula to build other alternatives.
Are they paid now? What are you fixing by paying, if nothing is broken (yet)?
Exactly, it's the enshittification trajectory as explained by Cory Doctorow. Without laws and regulations that stop companies from doing that, it's inevitable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Examples
> I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years.
I struggle to see the difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.
It's the same shitty recommendation algorithm. It's the same "you will watch shorts or else". It's the same nerfed unusable search. It's the same "we randomly decided that your bandwidth isn't enough, here's a 480p version of the video you're currently watching".
Yes, it’s mostly just the ads. There are some nice-to-haves like video downloads and background audio on the iOS app. I almost never use search, recommendations, or shorts, but I’m sure you’re right to criticize those features.
Can you download the videos to mp4 or is it some proprietary DRM thing that only plays on YouTube? If not that just sounds like a worse version of yt-dlp
By this logic you lose in long term no matter what you do.
If you pay premium: they'll add ads to premium too.
If you watch ads: they'll add more ads.
If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video.
If you use another platform: the said platform will need to monetize and you are back to square one.
You just described the evolution of every streaming platform out there
I’ll switch to Nebula if that ever happens.
Content creators have no loyalty to YouTube and will share their content elsewhere when YouTube annoys their paying fans.
There is no if. This is how corporate greed works.
What will happen is, that content creators will spread to different providers, that also have managers and stockholders/owners.
Look what Netflix was like and how many various payable video streaming providers you have now. More than you are prepared to pay for content.
In few years, you will be torrenting content that today you watch for free.
And only because people decided to pay, showing the world that there is money to be made in YT model.
Yes, businesses want money. The point is that YouTube has no leverage on creators. they have to play nice because the barrier to entry is nil as competitors already exist in Twitch, Dailymotion, Nebula, Vimeo, Dropout, etc.
None of that helps you if you want it to be free, but for those of us willing to pay, we can happily ally with creators if YouTube gets shitty.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s a good deal now and I’m happy to take it. None of that matters if you are comparing it to piracy… obviously.
We will see how prepared you will be to pay, where each of creators you watch will be on different network and you will have to pay for each network $10/month, while you watch 20 creators.
Again, this is nothing new. It already happened with video streaming, where Youtube now is Netflix then.
This already happened with Dropout.tv when college humor left YouTube.
Yes, it ain’t perfect. The alternative is the creator literally stop making videos. YouTube is already not serving ads for demonetized videos. People doing it for the love of filmmaking can already do it for free.
No, the alternative is that you DONT pay. That you deliberately not do what is the easiest move(1) and on top of that even feel special for doing it. That you suffer a short time for better next. That you fight them with technical means. That you vote with your wallet, squeeze your teeth hard and show them you just wont pay and they will lose ad watcher if they show more ads.
And now you will tell, that people are not disciplined enough for that, that majority wont pass the marshmallow(2) experiment? That some Mike Judge movie was actually documentary?
Yes, I know.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_trap , A common trick is to provide victims with a simple solution to a problem, for example, leaving only one door open in an otherwise secure building, luring them straight toward the firing mechanism
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
How do creators get paid under your rubric?
They already get 55% of revenues at YouTube which is basically the highest percentage in any creator industry. How do we pay creators under your rubric and allow them to be discovered?
Looks like it worked and it works, without any changes, while the number of views is keeping their earnings to small group that will not increase as there is not infinite number of time to watch the movies. And dont "creators" me. It is about google earning more money for their stockholders and managment collecting their rewards, not about "think of the children".
>And dont "creators" me. It is about google earning more money for their stockholders and managment collecting their rewards, not about "think of the children".
Classic consumer-only socialist. You have no model for production except business is bad. If you care about labor then you care about labor getting paid. So far you've demonstrated that you have no model of paying content creators. You would rather they go away then actually pay for their services. You pretend you should be able to get it for free. If you have no model of production, then you have no model.
"vote with your wallet" is like trickle down economics, it's like if only everyone used paper straws we could prevent climate catastrophy. Split up FANGM should be the bare minimum.
It is not, but discipline is needed instead consumerism. And every half intelligent marketing guy will make it harder than to just pay. Paper straws you mentioned are just paper straws.
Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.
> Paper straws you mentioned are just paper straws
No they are the decipline you are talking about, the delusion is, if everyone used paper straws we would save the ecological destruction of the oceans. The structural problems of endless profit maximization machines can not be addressed by appealing to individual action.
> Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.
That depends on the amount of pieces, don't you think?
Most of your suggestions are fiction but tiktok and insta are real competitors to YouTube shorts.
I’m glad there’s competition for the one part of YouTube that I dislike even more than the ads.
Content creators have loyalty to the magic money tree on the internet, they will shake as many of the trees they can, right down to begging for $1 from every 'fan' to add to the $50,000 they make a month.
Number of video streaming services who have removed their ad free tiers: zero.
I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. I've never heard of Google banning somebody for rejecting adverts. But if I pay them money, there's a chance there will be a problem with the payments, and that risks triggering false positives on automatic fraud detection. If that happens I assume I would be banned with no recourse and no human intervention. The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to.
I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.
Agreed. This isn’t a situation where you can’t pay. YT has a clear, reasonably priced solution for no ads. It also comes with YT music.
If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
Reminds me of the early justification of Napster where people would complain the latest B. Spears song was garbage and not worth paying for, yet it was the most downloaded song.
> If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
The most common throughline of all pro-piracy discourse is that there's a lot of people who feel completely entitled to free entertainment, and they will come up with all sorts of bizarre mental gymnastics to justify that as something other than "I want free entertainment and don't want to see ads."
I don't think anyone could articulate a coherent logical argument as to why they feel they should get YouTube's services, and the entertainment produced by the creators who are on YouTube, while not paying either of them through any means, other than pure selfishness.
I pay for youtube too and it still completely sucks. I hate when people try this bs.
* I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it.
* I pay for youtube but I don't always get to use my account. Other people's houses and devices exist. Other people's accounts exist even on my own device.
* I pay for youtube and still have to get all the baked in ads.
* I pay for youtube and have a wonderful black screen with no suggestions or discoverability because I have history turned off. (the feature does not depend on the history data, because for years this was never a problem, only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows). This even after I partially gave in and subscribed to a bunch of channels, which previously I never did.
* I pay for youtube and still have no control to disable shorts. (don't tell me about browser plugins. The world is far more varied than one browser on one pc. There is no youtube browser plugins for roku or the 100 other platforms that have youtube players. And even on a pc, you're not always on your own pc where you are free to hack on the browser.)
Here is the value you get from paying for youtube:
It's having only 8 of your fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.
Sure. All you said is completely true. I have a good solution: don't use YouTube then.
I have paid for Youtube Premium for a long time. Now it’s pushing shorts (you tried to hide the section and it told you “ok, we won’t show you shorts for 30 days.” I don’t want to see them ever, respect my goddamn choices. Now you can’t hide shorts any more), telling I’m not interested is like yelling into the void, search is useless to the point of being insulting and full of clickbait. Youtube Music is so smart it keeps putting non-music videos in my playlists. Creators are deplatformed, demonetised and paid even less.
Youtube can take a hike, I’m not giving that company a dime and hope it fails. After some changes in my personal life as well, it’s good that I am not spending too much time on that awful website
At least it respects it for 30 days, the Facebook app (which I use to keep in touch with family) is a desolate place where literally every time you open the app your feed is filled with shorts and posts from people you aren’t friends with. And those aren’t event the ads!
Why would you pay though its really simple to block ads and youtube is already rich enough. Why bow down to consumerism and enrichment of the already rich?
This is still hacker news not well behaved consumer news. A friend once said to me „if you have some self respect as a techie you don’t pay for streaming“ ;)
I currently pay for Apple Music though ha
Then I’d have to use the official YouTube app, whose UX is utter garbage compared to Tubular.
Except for some reason I have to watch ads installed by the creators themselves despite paying 26 EUR.
I find that annoying too. In case you haven't seen, there's the sponsor block extension for that, which is not limited by anti-adblock measures.
Yes, I also appreciate the skip ahead feature that lets you fast forward over the sponsorship ads that a lot of creators have started insetting into their videos.
Agreed, this is one of the times I'm fully behind a Google business model. I'd happily pay for products rather than have them datamine me senseless.
> If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them
If you visit content on the internet that the Google Ad network thinks suggest you might be interested in purchasing new tyres, then showing you ads for companies that sells tyres is, unfortunately, relevant no matter what your doing now, because you're more likely to click them, or remember the company/brand when choosing a purchase.
You're right to point out the "relevance factor" is not what people commonly take it to be. The context is (as always) crucial. Of course, the degree to which an individual tolerates advertising varies for a multitude of reasons.
> billboards [...] countryside
I think people simply find this to be an ugly thing. They object to the ugliness of it. They're in the countryside -- i.e. not the town/city -- and they find themselves unable to escape (even here!) from this seedy miasma. Putting disgust into words is not a simple thing, perhaps this is the reason for the inconsistent reasoning you've noticed.
All advertising is ugly, it's an ugly business -- money grubbing manipulation. It's inherently weird to be subjected to the endless torrent of uncanny twisted art that is advertising every day for your entire life. The ads on Youtube are normalised by the same force that normalises all the other advertising -- the ads in one context normalise the ads in another. The ads on the side of the bus, on the LCD panels on the train, on the same screen that shows the timetable at the station, before the movie starts, by the seemingly sensible ads in Costco. One hand washes the other.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
Bane: For you
I dislike them because they're loud, flashy, annoying, and (most of all) because YT saturates them. It even tries to put them in the middle of songs when it detects a transitional pause. And they are served so often. It's literally worse than broadcast TV, which is an incredibly low bar to step over.
Platforms should not allow advertisers free speech. They should limit the content to static imagery/shots, dissolves, and spoken narration, ie the form rather than the content. Don't tell it can't work, this was how adwords worked on Google Search for years and everyone made handsome profits. Advertising is cancer if allowed to go full spectrum. The people who work at Youtube should be deeply ashamed of what they have allowed it to become and the trash monetization incentives they've established.
This pretty much applies to all ads everywhere. I mean Im a guy and I get ads for tampons on TV or a million odds for all sorts of diseases I dont have.
Shit I rather willingly give info about myself so irrelevant ads can be filtered out and I dont have to waste time on them and the advertiser doesnt waste money on me
I really hope ads to stay as irrelevant as possible, for as long as possible.
However it seems impossible to last for our society with all the tracking, product placement and astroturfing.
The most disagreeable thing is they are psychologically insidious.
Even if they were relevant, they'd still be holding global internet video culture behind a paywall.
First pay with your identity (carrier phone number required for a Google account). Then double pay through Premium in the illusion you won't end up seeing ads anyway.
Imagine if the tire advertisement at Costco stood in front of you for 30 seconds and wouldn’t let you pass or turn around until a minimum amount of time passed.
I don't like ads but keep in mind the only 100% "relevant" ad is disguised as content. Is that what you want? Sponsored or generated stuff that feeds you some agenda while you think you watch something different...
[dead]
The most successful marketing campaign of all time was the marketing department convincing companies that they need marketing.
If you’re Coca Cola and you spend £1,000,000,000 on a Christmas TV ad of a bear drinking cola, does that increase your sales? No. It does nothing. But every year they’ll do it.
The only marketing that works is at the point of sale, and free samples. Anything which is just random and in public will not result in anything.
But the genius of the scam is, it’s not measurable. You bill £1,000,000,000 a year for marketing, and they can’t measure if it worked. How do you know if a TV ad worked? But they can’t withdraw the funding, because you’ll tell them their competitors will win. So the scam keeps going.
I don't drink cola myself, but it seems logical to me. The point of the expensive advert is showing everybody how rich Coca Cola is. That increases the trust people have in their products being safe and reliable because they know Coca Cola has something to lose. If they didn't advertise they'd be like those Chinese sellers named as random strings of uppercase letters. I definitely wouldn't buy cola from one of those.
Here’s something many people probably don’t know.
I live in a west-Eu country with several well-defined language borders. Each time we cross a border (on holiday), the youtube ads change language. When I’m logged in. I don’t have a driver’s license, yet the most common ad I get is for second hand cars. I’m in a relationship, yet I regularly get ads for dating sites. I have a job, get ads for jobhunting advice. And the other day I got an add specifically for people born before my birth-year minus one.
YouTube’s ads are on the same level as Spotify’s nagging for their subscription: it’s meant to annoy users into buying their ad-free plan. They use real ads as a thin veneer.
Well, it works. Unfortunately it doesn’t remove sponsored content in the videos. I’m paying for an ad free experience, but I’m still hearing about AC1. Annoying.
Thank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting.
The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a lot more scrutiny for the ads they choose to run.
> we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting
This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90. The ad pods are also defined so that you get a set number say something like 3:00 max.
YT has scammy ads where if you are just trying to let something stream in the background while you focus on other things where an ad plays past the 5s skippable time, they have some that are full on half hour if not even longer infomercials that takes completely out of the flow of whatever you were watching. That's down right criminal to me. The fact that long form content can be used as something that interrupts someone else's content is such a strange thing to allow. They must pay out the nose for those ad impressions
> This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90.
You are absolutely on to something. I think the seemingly random length of ads makes them feel somewhat more jarring to me. I also hate how sometimes the ads are just randomly interjected into a video. I know creators can control this to some degree, but older videos seem to suffer more.
I have had ads on Youtube that were hours long. Obviously, at that length, they can be skipped. I know have some kind of 'trauma response' that when I watch Youtube on a computer while laying down, AFK, I have to have my wireless mouse in close proximity in case one those long ads appears. If I could predict the intervals in which the ads occurred and for how long, then I would probably just let them run and tune them out of my mind.
Regardless, I swear Youtube serves me such long ass ads as a punishment sometimes. Sadly, my suspicion is supported by extremely weak evidence and confirmation bias. I'll just say this... Sometimes when I get served the same ad too many times, I report the ad for something like being offensive, inappropriate, or whatever. The ads seem to never come back, but I swear within a day or two, I start getting longer ads -- even movie-length ads. I have also reported ads if they happen to be something like +30s and unskippable. This makes the ad instantly dismiss (or it used to, at least).
I’m curious if YouTube tracks the phone angle/motion through the gyroscope. I swear I always get the hour-long ads when my phone is not in my hand, and I’m not able to skip it immediately.
I doubt they actually do that, but I’m sure it would increase ad view times. Im probably just only remembering the ads I don’t immediately skip.
It’s absolutely #%^*ing insane how bad and often inappropriate the ads are, to the point that I swear YouTube is in growth trouble. It feels like there’s just management layers who need their bonus or promotion, driven by some percent growth or some KPI so their standards are at the floorboards. I’ve seen porn in the still frame ads on mobile once (much worse than Evony Online if you remember those ads…)
I have all ad targeting features turned off on my account - which I assume means i unfortunately get the bottom-of-the-barrel ads.
The still frame ads are always NSFW games or ads for viagra-like products. In shorts, the ads are always scams of some kind. Usually deepfakes of elon musk “giving investment advice” but also “medical experts” recommending likely dangerous scams, or “free money the government isnt telling you about” if you give them all your information, or weird ai generated videos advertising mystery products that certainly don’t actually exist.
In front of (and in the middle of) actual videos, it’s a mix of the all the scams, plus the occasional ad for a legitimate product, but rarely in my native language. Usually Spectrum internet ads exclusively in spanish.
I got a gun ad a few times several months ago. Advertising features such as “no license required” and “easy to sneak through security”. As blatantly illegal as it was, the ad ran for at least a full month. I reported it every time I saw it, but I’m convinced those reports aren’t ever viewed by anyone.
I continue blocking these ads on my desktop without remorse. I only encounter the ads on my iPhone.
YouTube has decided that my family is African American and Spanish speaking at some point, and nothing will convince them otherwise. We are neither of those things. At one point a few years ago my daughter wanted to listen to the Peppa Pig album in Spanish and I guess maybe that’s why?
It’s crazy how bad and mistargeted it all is.
people deserve to get paid for the work they put into creating content and building platforms, no? books, movies, tv shows, news, etc, are all distributed in some way or another that costs the consumer either money or their time viewing advertising. if you don't want to watch ads, pay YouTube for a subscription.
YouTube spent about a decade and a half running unintrusive banner ads. Until they secured enough of the market that network effects locked content creators and consumers together in a two-sided market where it's hard for either group to leave unilaterally. Then they ramped up the length and intrusiveness of their ads while flouting content regulations on what they're even allowed to advertise.
Why should I reward that by paying them?
You can keep bringing up Google, but you're still glossing over the part where you're not paying the people creating the content you're watching.
Seems awfully convenient.
No I'm not blocking the ads, I'm just avoiding YouTube as much as possible and desperate for someone to break their stranglehold.
If I were blocking the ads, I wouldn't be aware of how bad it's gotten.
I'm very much willing to pay for their content, but not in the way of watching ads during the videos.
Your individual willingness is irrelevant.
There are not enough people with your willingness to make this mechanism work by itself.
So the choice is either to have the content exist, but rely on ads, or not have the content exist. And it's not your choice - it's the content creator's choice.
I give my favorite creators money through the ubiquitous patreons.
Perhaps controversial, but I rather just have ads. Not that I do not think this is a preferable model, but rather, donates cost real money and ads cost nothing except time.
While time is finite and valuable, if I am already on YouTube, then I have already committed to choice of wasting that nebulous amount of time in the first place.
I’d absolutely rather give money. For me there’s a lot less friction in that even if technically it costs time all the same. With a job I have control over how I convert time into money; not so with watching ads.
As much as youtube can waste time, I also feel like I’ve been given genuine value by certain people on the site, so I wouldn’t say it’s simply wasting time.
I watch quite a large array of channels. I am not sure I could feasibly afford to donate a meaningful amount to all them. So then, I am forced into the dilemma of deciding which ones are more worthy than others, and that is not something I am particularly willing to do.
If one's patreon did have perks associated with it, then I would be more inclined to 'donate', as well.
If enough people do it, monetizing on Youtube becomes untenable for most, driving creators to hopefully healthier platforms who might now stand a chance.
So if I don't like Visa and Mastercard, do I also get moral carte blanche to not pay anyone because hey I'm totally urging them to only use merchants that I prefer?
Sounds like awfully convenient motivated reasoning.
Are you asking what we should do about this situation?
Split up any and all monopolies, and nationalize what should provide a common good such as payment networks and internet infrastructure.
As a Google shareholder, I would love for YT to be spun out.
That’s how the market works. You avoid paying extra taxes than required right? Even though that denies the government extra funding. The only difference being one has been decided as wrong and the other is fine.
This is a weird framing
Yes, society has deemed that it’s fine to make use of the avenues that have been explicitly created to reduce your tax burden - that’s why they were created. Society is also relatively fine with using unintended loopholes for the same purpose (although it is a lot more controversial and criticized), because we don’t tend to punish people for breaking laws, rules and regulations that don’t exist. When we end up caring a lot about them, we plug the gaps
The other person was talking about straight up not paying for goods and services that are sold at a given price, which is stealing. The more apt comparison would be to tax evasion (actually breaking the law), which is a crime, widely considered wrong and punished accordingly
Relying solely on YouTube monetisation is already untenable for many channels. That's why they do sponsorships and Patreon
Ok, well either pay or don’t use YouTube then if you don’t want ads.
The browser is my agent, and it will do my bidding, not google's. You building your company on something that can be legally circumvented is not my problem.
”I can get away with it, therefore it’s OK” is an interesting moral philosophy
It's how the world has worked for a very long time, and i dont think that has changed much today.
> The browser is my agent, and it will do my bidding, not google's
I've got bad news for you
and that's why people choosing chrome over firefox has that bad news.
If YouTube agreed with this point of view they would put up a paywall, the same way neither Nebula nor Netflix are available for free.
My current thought re: piracy is that I never pirate unless I'd be happy if the company I'm pirating from went out of business.
If I can actually pay someone for content, then, if I don't pay, I should expect not to be granted access to content.
But that's not how YT works. YT doesn't charge you for good stuff. It charges you for not delivering crap. That's not legitimate business, that's a racket. I have no qualm punishing YT for that. Content creators are free to find other ways to monetize their labor, if their labor is actually valuable. (And so many of the good ones do, quite successfully.)
YouTube gives you two (2!) ways to pay for content. You can choose to pay with money, or you can choose to pay with your time and attention. If you don’t like paying with your time and attention, then either pay with money, or don’t use the service.
This “It charges you for not delivering crap.” line is bullshit. Serving video content costs money, they’ve given you the choice of how to pay for it, and you don’t like the choices but want to keep getting the content.
Worse. It charges you by building a profile about you.
21st century nation states can better solve video scale delivery without middle parasites like Google.
> 21st century nation states can better solve video scale delivery without middle parasites like Google.
If it's that easy, why has nobody done it?
(Hint: governments don't want to run YouTube, probably shouldn't run YouTube, and nobody else wants or can afford the immense costs that come with running YouTube.)
I'm unconvinced. I suggest that YT's outlay is a sneeze among the budget of the US. In my estimation, all nations are lagging in the definition of what constitutes a public utility. In a decade we will be facepalming why advertisements were even needed for this common infrastructure.
Most things are a sneeze compared to the budget of the federal government of the US, that doesn't mean that's a reasonable expectation for the US government (or any government) to run them.
why should US taxpayers subsidize a service for which non-US citizens could get a benefit from without paying any taxes?
"The gov't should pay for it" is not a solution to private problems.
I challenge the idea that private enterprise could solve the scaling component better than a government could. We've reached this comedy of ads and surveillance capitalism because private strategies are flailing.
As a thought experiment, is it realistic to get every tax payer to pay for funny cat videos? Because that will be a reality in your non-capitalist utopia.
Or maybe there just won't be any cat videos, because the state has decreed them unnecessary or even harmful? How about political messages, is the state going to allow those to be posted on its platform? There are bound to be a few that go against state policy...
You could argue that the same is true for broadcast TV, and I would 100% agree. The state has no business running or even funding public television.
The mental gymnastics some will go through to justify being a cheapskate...
I block ads, everywhere, because I keep getting epilepsy-inducing ones.
The browser is my agent, just like my screenreader is.
Google is to blame here - and I'm saying that as an author who does advertise there because of marketshare.
So is your DVD player but it doesn't mean you don't have to pay for the movies
No, but if someone is handing out free DVDs with adverts on them I can put a sticker over the adverts. If the adverts are in the movie, I'm allowed to skip them.
Google are free to ban me, free to not hand me the data. But if I tell them who I am, what agent I'm using, and then they hand me data... I'm also free to throw half that data in the bin.
Especially if I'm protecting myself.
Idk man instead of freeloading how about paying for the service? I generally avoid dismissive comments like these but I think it needs to be said.
If you don’t like ads pay for the service. You don’t deserve content for free.
> The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us...
You can... just not visit youtube, right?
No. Youtube is a monopoly. For a huge amount pf historical video, they are the only game in town. Regulating the hell out of them -- especially gigantic fines for the insane amount of copyright piracy their business model depends upon -- is LONG overdue.
It's incredible to me how YouTube has an uncountable number of "movie clip" and "TV show clip" channels with randomly generated names, to the point that you can watch pretty much any movie end-to-end, but people lose their minds about AI training using books.
Yes, although the problem is that trying to regulate them out of existence will destroy the archive. Especially if you try to insist on copyright traceability.
Or just pay for Youtube.... $8/ month gets rid of most of the ads in videos, $15/month to remove ads from music, shorts, and search results.
Lite is not available everywhere, also those streaming services basically up their price every year, like we're frogs.
I was visiting my kid’s class one day. They were using some YouTube product that seemed oriented at schools, that I’d never seen before. An ad would pop up, and one of the kids (whosever turn it was next?) would run up and tap the skip ad button.
So even if you’re trying to use YouTube for something of value, you’re battling ads. Or at least our kids are.
I hope there's no ads before educational videos on how to do CPR or perform the Heimlich manoeuvre!
Harder than it sounds! So much of what we interact with online winds up with YouTube in the dependency chain. Kids' coursework, how-to videos, etc. I could also just pay the $$/month to "solve" this problem, but I need my petty cash more than Google does. I'm confident the brilliant minds there can figure out how to monetize my visit even without the real-time bidding industrial complex burning my CPU cycles.
Download the content offline, make a playlist. You can also archive the content forever. No distractions, its organized however you want. Yes, it does take some effort but it fixes all the problems
So long as we're pretending to care about the Youtube TOS, offline downloading without premium is against their TOS. And even then you're only permitted to download and view offline through the YouTube phone app.
I care about their TOS as much as they care about their users
> I need my petty cash more than Google does
I appreciate the fact that you brought up the possibility of paying for ad-free content, but frankly I don't buy this. You can either see 100% of the content for free with some mildly annoying ad content mixed in from time to time, or you can pay them a pretty small amount to not see the annoyances.
Google is a for-profit company trying to sell a product that you find valuable. Not everything they do is squeaky-clean, but this offering couldn't be much fairer, really.
They're a monopoly benefiting from network effects.
You can also just not watch TV. And not listen to the radio. And not receive newspapers. All mediums that have advertisements, and those advertisements are regulated to stop the most egregious types (eg. advertising sugary foods at children, tobacco products, hopefully gambling products soon).
Media, on the whole, is a good thing. We know more about the world. We know more about the excesses of the aristocracy. We know more about the violence committed by violent people (and I don't mean local petty crime. Genocide.) Before we can improve these things, we need to know about them. "just don't consume media" is a regression to a time where people knew little outside their local sphere.
Youtube/Google has a monopoly on one part of the modern media landscape and it has to be fixed. Not just put our heads in the sand.
YouTube shows ads that would never be allowed on network television, including tobacco advertisements. They can get away with it because it's hard for regulators to observe.
I'm going to assume thats much more difficult than one would expect.
> Thank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting.
Indeed, if there was a 'thin adblock writer line' flag it'd already be on my bumper. Than you for your service, we salute you.
I resisted paying for premium (out of spite) until very recently and only because my girlfriend complained.
I have been astounded at how scammy those ads are. There is a major class of ads that make fairly significant bullshit medical claims and I’m semi convinced the purpose is not for someone to make money but to wage psychological warfare on vulnerable people. Another class of ads says “the US government is going to collapse and that’s why you should buy a freedom battery” and the ad couches itself as a battery advertisement but how many vulnerable people hear that in the background 16 times a day and don’t end up subconsciously accepting some part of it?
In any case it’s all a manipulative cesspool and it’s bizarre to me that a property that Google otherwise values is willing to sling such slop at its users. I suspect a large part of this is that the executives who run YouTube never see their ads.
I've seen ads on YouTube that are straight-up illegal. Including ads for tobacco. And one that was a deepfake of the Canadian minister of finance pitching a crypto investment as being risk-free and backed by the government. Another that was a deepfake of Elon Musk saying he was going to give free money to people who click the link. YouTube will run anything because they know they won't get in trouble.
Screencapture it and you may have a lawsuit
Or just pay for Premium... No one's forcing you to do anything.
Without the ads, I'd probably spend way too much time on YouTube. I need something to push me into the rage-quit territory after enough time has passed.
Wait until Google shows ads in premium too. Paid-for cable TV did the same rugpull decades ago.
Sure, then stop paying for it when they start showing ads in premium. It's a monthly subscription.
Not paying for it because it might become bad some time in the future is not a great argument.
That’s the thing about modern capitalism. Making profit isn’t enough, the profit has to keep growing. So once the market is saturated, you either reduce perks, jack up prices, bundle new features to jack up prices (my GSuite bills doubled in ~3 years before I went in and adjusted the plan; the latest price hike “reflects the significant added AI value”), or find new ways to monetize the same users (ads, “partners”, etc.). It’s inevitable.
So what's your argument? That YouTube shouldn't exist, or that it should be a charity? Something else?
How about advertising without the tracking? Advertising not shown specifically to me because of any attributes Google thinks apply to me? Advertising limited to a 5s lead in at the start of the video (today, this video is sponsored by …) and a static banner hidden when going full-screen. Advertising held to high standards, and advertising which can be vetoed by the video's uploader. In short, ethical advertising.
Google can surely figure this out and still turn a profit on Youtube. Greed stops them from doing this.
Google almost certainly doesn't turn a profit on YouTube now. It would unquestionably lose billions of dollars a year with the advertising you want.
Both sound like good options to me. Split it up or turn it into a nonprofit. Although I suppose the former would man paying 15 bucks to each baby YouTube, so maybe not.
Or, you could just honor the terms you clearly understand the content is being offered under, and just not use the service.
Not as fun to write about as coercion is, though.
Or you could instead give them the middle finger and take anything they put out there. TOS are not binding contracts and until you're contractually bound to do otherwise, taking what they're handing out is completely reasonable.
Alright, but when they give the middle finger back at you in other ways, you made your bed.
I'm sorry, but Youtube got to keep its servers up somehow and pay the content creators. This means ads.
If you don't like them, then pay for Youtube Premium and you can get ad-free experience. Although if it's not available in your country, then adblocking is a reasonable approach.
The sheer resistance to paying for YouTube Premium is proving the need for ads.
YouTube has an estimated worth, if it were a stand-alone company, of $475 billion to $550 billion. I'm sure they'll survive off just fine continuing to sell my personal information just like that always have.
Yes, it's a perfectly suitable model. I don't have a problem with it. (but I do use YouTube frequently enough that I decided to pay for premium)
Google do not, and literally never have "sold your personal information."
They deliver targeted advertising due to the information they have. That's the model. They make literally zero dollars a year selling personal information.
Source? Google is literally an online ad monopoly, and being sued for it. They did track and continue tracking users, and they sell data though their SSP, DSP, ad networks, ad exchanges they own.
I'm shocked and appalled that you'd call the "virtual harems" YouTube tries to get me to install either scammy or wildly inappropriate. I've reported them a dozen times, and they're still on the platform, so I'm sure Lord Google knows something I don't about their saintlihood.
/s
I recently stopped watching youtube altogether and surprisingly haven't been missing it. And I used to watch a LOT (like hours per day) of youtube, mostly quality educational/scientific content. But ultimately you'd be surprised how much you don't need in your life. And side effect is no more ads. If someone sends me an occasional youtube video to watch, I'll take a look, but otherwise no engagement with the platform.
I'd highly recommend everyone try reducing their intake of passive entertainment like youtube and redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.
Or just pay for it? I have my whole family on my plan. Nobody gets ads. It is a bargain.
You're right, I could probably finish my motorcycle build projects without videos. But why??
Or just block the ads, let others subsidize it for me until the executive greed eventually turns the product to crap and we collectively move on to the newer options that have filled the gap. Cable used to mostly be ad free as well. Now normal TV shows are 21 minutes with 9 minutes of ads. Older TV show reruns are actually sped up with parts cut out of them. Google created a monopoly by making the product great with unobtrusive ads and now is trying to change the deal. There is absolutely already a plan in place where the number of paying premium users hits some critical number and they "test out" short ads. I am not going to reward them.
I just checked my uBlock stats inside of AdNauseum on my personal laptop. This is a machine I have not used regularly in over 2 years. Being generous I am assuming every ad blocked was static, not animated, had no sound, and required no interaction by me to skip, so just was a one second glance.
I have gotten back 115+ days of my life to do things I actually want to do. 10.34 million ads. From one single machine, in just Firefox. I now have AdGuard on my network and use Tailscale to block ads on all my devices. There is no world where I ever go back to seeing ads that I can block and definitely will not be rewarding them for trying to push ads on what was a great product.
Everyone wants to talk about other people being greedy when justifying their own coincidental preference for not giving away money they don’t have to.
Nebula is there, it’s not free either.
Things at scale are so incredibly cheap if you take out unnatural profits.
This argument doesn't really hold.
Making any profit at all on a service that hosts and streams 4K video from everyone to everyone over the Internet while also compensating the creators of that video is no mean feat.
We don’t know that YouTube has become profitable yet.
They split revenues 55/45 with creators. That level of profit sharing is basically unheard of in television, film, books, etc.
Again, yea, there are monopoly concerns, but you’re going to move the goalposts to “anything scalable” being worth stealing from then good luck to you.
I’m not going to pretend I don’t use Adblock, but when sites actually enforce using it, I’m not going to pretend they’re evil for doing it.
I’d gladly pay for YouTube or other Google services when they offer an option to not track my activity at all. For me it’s not about seeing ads just on YouTube, but being tracked all through the web and still being served inappropriate or spammy ads.
if all i'd watch are tv shows like netflix its one thing, but yt has such broad content i'd rather not be advertised/tracked about stuff i just clicked once and never again...
While I strongly doubt this fully disables tracking, you can at least disable your watch history on youtube which will have the effect of the recommendation algorithm not adjusting to your preferences.
You can change it from Google account > Data & Privacy > History Settings > youtube History
If you have youtube premium + a general purpose ad blocker + disable watch history its really hard to tell if you are being tracked.
If you do decide to disable watch history, be prepared for just how terrible the median youtube interest is. All recommendations become beyond worthless.
People dont understand how world works. Management reward are tied to earning more money. As long this is true, the next year, the reward will be tied to earning even more. The more you pay, the more it will cost. And when people wont be prepared to pay more, alternative model will be invented, like adding ads to paid content. There is only one way to stop this - break it from the start and make it nonviable, don't pay.
They are trying to block ads blockers as some manager wasn't able to get reward. Or is worried he wont get it. And this means that money that can be collected from ads has peaked. Now come the "optimizations", now payable, then no longer free, later payable with ads, then they will squeeze content creators, that will move to other platforms where you will have to pay for multiple platforms where you were once watching it for free on YT.
Sounds familiar?
Made it as short as possible, but this could be wall of text, from comparing to what happened to streaming services etc. Without piracy (not advocating but it is a fact that it forced publishers into internet model) we would probably still buy content on CDs and DVDs, maybe BluRays.
Greed of infinite growth in finite system has destroyed the planet and you can bet it will destroy YT too.
Except the alternative model will be invented even when people can pay more — do both and make even MORE.
It used to be practically shameful for large companies to run ads on their websites. They had clean websites with only their content. Especially for subscribers. Now they’re all filled with ads!
Yeah, I'm with you on this one. I pay for YT premium family, and it's basically the only subscription in 2025 that feels worth it to me. My wife watches YouTube instead of cable TV, so it's already a cheap cable bill. But you also get YouTube music! Which I'll admit is a slightly janky music app since it also kind of sits on top of YouTube videos that it decides are mostly music. But their actual music selection is good if you kinda know how to navigate the UI to the "real" music.
A lot of people will spend $30 at a coffee shop in a week. Maybe $150 in one month.
I think $15 for a whole month of entertainment, tutorials, and useful content and to pay the people who create the videos is worth it.
You also have to account for whatever awful thing Google is likely to do with your $15.
I'm barely sure that the long term strategy of YouTube is "more ads". The premium account won't be always ads free
This is a big misunderstanding of the business model. The price might go up, but there will always be a tier with no ads.
Unfortunately, the way ads work, the people who pay to avoid ads are inevitably the ones worth advertising to. The Nash equilibrium is that every user sees ads.
That sounds off to me. I would think that the people who pay to avoid ads are very likely to jump to ad blockers if the ad-free subscription ceases to exist. Not to mention that they’re going to be very unlikely to convert on advertising.
But it is now. And there's no contract, so it's easy to cancel if that ever changes.
My higher point was you probably don't need video entertainment in your life. Surely you would agree that just about any hobby is more holistically enriching than watching youtube? Not to mention other issues surrounding mass video content.
YouTube provides a lot of information and learning material for hobbies. That’s what I mostly use it for, besides music, and movie reviews which save so much time compared to having to watch the movie (so do reduce time spent with video entertainment).
If someone really likes Youtube content - sure, I guess. For me the cost isn't worth it - when I compare with other streaming services.
I got rid of the Youtube app from my Roku many months ago, and I haven't missed it. That wouldn't be the case for most other streaming apps that I still have.
I think for me - right from the day Youtube launched - I never liked the interface. It's the worst streaming interface of all the streaming services.
Hm, in my opinion there's no such thing as "YouTube content". Content, that's the blanket word I object to.
What there is is people (and companies) uploading stuff. Some useful, some entertaining, some mindless, some for me, some not for me.
I cannot say "YouTube content" is -- or is not -- for me because the notion is meaningless. Individual videos and channels are definitely for me, and are hard to find elsewhere. YouTube by itself is not a thing.
> Or just pay for it?
So I do now, but only since I moved to a country where it doesn't cost so much. I watch maybe 6 hours absolutely tops of YouTube a month? I get charged $7/m for it, which still feels usurious, but in the UK they want almost $17/m which is firmly in "go fuck yourself" territory. I'd like them to tier pricing so casual users like me aren't paying for people who are using YouTube as their primary entertainment mechanism.
No it isn't. YT Premium in the UK is £12.99.
It's funny how people are so dishonest on HN when it comes to paying for things.
£12.99, which is around $17 USD, which is what the person you're replying to stated, though American defaultism kicked in and they didn't specify which dollar, but still.
So... yes it is?
They want 23.99€ for a family account for me. It's hard to say if it's fair or reasonable but it's too rich for me.
$17 is about £12.69 at the moment so there does not seem to be any dishonesty in the claim.
> No it isn't. YT Premium in the UK is £12.99.
https://www.google.com/search?q=12.99+GBP+in+USD
> It's funny how people are so dishonest on HN
seriously?
i deleted my youtube accounts and switched to patreon- can still see new videos on youtube from my patreon people cause im notified but it's far more intentional and quality content
I’m increasing obsessed with the idea that the user—not some engagement algorithm—should be in the drivers seat. This is an interesting way to go about it…
You can use YouTube with just the subscriptions list and never visit the algorithmic tab. That’s how I use it most of the time.
I’m starting to look at “engagement” as an anti-statistic. Like, if you’re chasing engagement, what other more meaningful thing are you ignoring? Or, the more engagement something has, the less value it has to society.
Large parts of the world population are addicted to these platforms. It’s tobacco 2.0
Tiktok is opium 3.0, but this time it's not UK selling the drugs.
I have also greatly decreased the time I watch YT and I have not been missing it. I used to have playlists, favs, lots of channels to follow. I stopped doing all that. Occasionally I’d “watch“ something on the background while I work, but it has to be non-engaging. The truth about YT is—you don’t need it.
For some of us, YouTube is part of our creative and mindful pursuits. It either drives our interests (much like reading a magazine about specialized topics would, in the past), or explains how to do something, or simply builds a community of like minded people all over the world.
I find the argument of "how much you don't need in your life" not very compelling.
On one hand, we "need" very little: health, food, shelter. On the other, a life worth living is made of everything else that is not, strictly speaking, truly needed: ideas, hobbies, passions, entertainment, projects, etc.
Each to their own. I'm not saying youtube is all garbage useless content, definitely there are quality conversations about varying topics. The level of community probably varies between interests and for my interests, youtube was hardly a core facet of the hobby. Perhaps for you it's different.
However, I will add 2 counterpoints. Firstly, I don't think consuming a huge amount (e.g. the amount I was) of passive video content is good for your wellbeing. Second, I think it's interesting to examine why youtube must "drive" your hobby/interest to a large degree. Is there perhaps a mental trap of thinking you must be in with the crowd and the latest and greatest? What about growing your creative pursuit organically through your own journey? Just things to consider - may or may not be applicable. It was applicable for me and my photography hobby. There's tonnes of photography content out there but most of it is generic crap and I've found it more rewarding to go my own path so to speak.
Passively consuming content is not the same as reading a magazine or a book.
Agreed that anyone can fill their own free time with whatever they want. But youtube is just junk food for the mind, packaged as stuff that interests you. It’s conveniently split to increase ad revenue, uses clickbait to drive engagement, and all the techniques developed on TV the past 80 years to keep us glued in front of the screen. Youtube and the “content” itself is designed to keep you watching.
And I say that as someone who used to mainly watch long form essays, not the trending bullshit. It’s all just distraction and opium for the masses, disguised as edutainment.
True, I have the same feeling. It's nice to limit my time spending on yt or other passive entertainment.
I did the same thing with Netflix. Also, killed off my Prime subscription and quit the entirety of Amazon. Well, except for AWS, because that's going to be impossible until they accidentally all the data.
As for youtube, I just pay for ad free. If they ever start violating that they'll also be banished to the corn field.
Turns out some of the best science shows are on PBS and Nebula.
3-2-1 Contact
What do you do with all the extra time? How do you keep from sliding back?
Top tip from using only high-latency satellite internet for long periods: add a significant delay to every request to problematic sites. As soon as the dopamine loop is broken, you'll find the wait so frustrating that you won't bother.
I love this idea, what sort of technical methods do you have in mind for implementing it?
I install the "Undistracted" extension in all of my Brave instances. In addition to having the ability to block arbitrary URLs it has many site-specific options like blocking YouTube recommendations or the LinkedIn timeline, all of which I ruthlessly enable. You can also set it to only work on certain days and times of the week. It's immensely useful.
I also pay for Kagi which has the ability to block certain domains from results. I'd imagine that blocking Instagram, Reddit, Youtube, etc. would also prevent rabbit-holing.
I started reading again. Which has been quite enjoyable after the initial bump of "reading is boring compared to <favourite new video content>". Also putting more time into things I know I find more rewarding. And sometimes, just doing nothing much is nice as a brain break.
Wait you people have extra time?!?
> mostly quality educational/scientific content
Probably because it wasn’t. In my experience even the stuff people consider quality on YouTube is still kinda gross engagement bait, especially things like video essays (which are an absolute plague imo)
Not surprising at all. We delude ourselves into thinking we're better because our brand of slop is educational, but it's still slop.
I've been getting these buffer loading times recently, and ironically, I don't mind them all that much. The annoyance of ads isn't primarily in the time it takes up, but in having the audio play and a video feed run that isn't the video I clicked on.
If an actual ad played, I'd be irritated beyond belief. But when there's a 12 second buffer, I have enough patience training for slow load times that I instinctively just quickly check my email or spend a brief moment lost in thought. Especially when it's every video. If it was one in every 5 videos, I'd notice it and be bothered. When it's every video, it's part of the experience and my brain just cuts it out automatically.
Yeah I've been getting the initial delay with the popup "find out why playback is slow." No thanks, I already know, and it's not so bad.
Out of curiosity I clicked the link and it is funny how they try to blame the extension when is them actually causing the problem.
The extension is stealing from them. I get stealing a zero marginal cost good is minor but the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video. Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?
TOS is not an agreement, it's a notice, an assertion from the provider that mandates absolutely nothing from you.
TOS is like me putting a sign up at the end of my driveway saying if you approach my home, you owe me $10. If you pull up to my house, I demand the $10, and you don't pay me, I cannot forcibly take $10 from you, nor can I call the cops or sue over the $10.
You never agreed to anything and certainly not in any legally binding format.
Notices are not contracts and TOS notices are notices.
> the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video
I never made that agreement. And if some software on my computer somehow gets YouTube to deliver me the content anyway, that's not my fault. In my view, it's a cat and mouse game, they can do whatever they want to try to stop me, and vice versa. If they win, I won't complain; but if I do, so be it.
> I never made that agreement
By clicking on the video you did. It is in their terms of service.
How is you purposefully trying to block ads not your fault? Whose fault is it that you installed an Adblock? If you went to a grocery store and told the clerk you already paid and they let you leave would that not be your fault either?
No, you didn't make that agreement.
TOS is a NOTICE, not a contract.
There's zero agreement happening when you visit a website.
Assuming you didn't do something actually illegal while using their service, without a contract the most they can do is ban you from the service, or try to.
Terms of service aren't legally binding. Theft is of course illegal.
I've never said they should, they are free to implement any anti-ad-block for all I care. I just pointed out their lack of honesty about the source of the problem, they should say they are actively blocking the extension rather than the extension is malfunctioning.
I never agreed to that. Shrinkwrap contracts don’t count. Also, if they don’t want to serve me the video without ads, they’re welcome to do that.
> Also, if they don’t want to serve me the video without ads, they’re welcome to do that.
That’s what they are actually trying to do lol.
Are they really trying? They have vast resources and engineering talent. I doubt they are sincerely trying and failing to implement something that radio and broadcast television have managed to do for the better part of a century.
I’m happy to make the agreement I need to so I can access the thing I like, then turn around and violate those terms when it benefits me. Why should I feel a sense of personal obligation towards google?
You're not even making an agreement. You're reading a notice, if that. In most cases it's entirely moot legally and only really useful as a policy tool for the provider to hang its "we're blocking you" authority on.
Having said that, I 100% agree. If Google allows for non-logged in users, it's a public website and we can consume it however we like, until Google decides to try to block us. That's what it's doing now, trying to block users from consuming the content however they like, a core feature of the public web. Fortunately, blocking us is very very hard for sites not behind a login. If they want not-logged in use, they either go to war with my tech, favored by platform, or they let it slide.
Now, Google owns Chrome, so they can also go to war in the browser and standards bodies as well. But for now, the web is open and accessible and that means, wiht the right technology (Firefox plus uBlock Origin for me) you can watch all those video ad-free and there's nothing Google can do to stop you.
How are you making an agreement? You can’t say “I’ll watch this video in exchange for X minutes of ads” because YouTube will never tell you how many minutes they’re going to show you, and because they have zero interest in committing to some number of minutes of ads. It’s constantly getting worse, and this process will continue until it kills the service.
It won't kill the service. The media executives who run YouTube are well aware of how advertising volume affects viewership so they'll titrate up or down as needed to maximize profit.
But don't worry, something else will eventually kill YouTube. Most likely they'll miss some sort of disruptive innovation. Like maybe in 30 years everyone will have content beamed directly into their neutral implants and only a few old people will still watch online videos.
The agreement is you watch the ads YouTube serves you. Why would that agreement have to include the amount of ads served? If you are unhappy with their business model you can always pay for premium or stop using it. Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
I think you need to read about contract law before continuing to double down. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Common_law_contracts is as good a place as any to start). A notice you put up on a website does not form a contract.
There is no agreement. TOS is a notice not a contract. It's not stealing because it's public content, publicly accessible to anyone with the technology to do so.
If Google wants to make YouTube a service with actually binding contracts and not TOS notices no one reads or respects, it can put the whole thing behind a login and end un-authed public web traffic. They're free to do that but they won't because they know that would kill the site dead, and quickly so.
That’s not an agreement, that’s just YouTube doing whatever they want. Which they can—but then—I can just do whatever I want, too. You don’t need to imagine some sort of covenant being involved.
> Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
I don’t even do that, I just watch it as-is. I just don’t need to imagine that YouTube and I have agreed to anything.
> Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?
I've held the position that, if YT wants to, they can block me from their platform for using an adblocker, and I would have no moral ground to stand on.
However, that isn't what they do. They try to circumvent it. They try to make it technically impossible. They try to mislead users into thinking their extensions are malicious.
It certainly has to be better than getting an ad that fills no need of mine. I can't say I noticed any slow loading times on youtube though that might be because the last clip I watched was probably a month ago. Only search for diy fixes on problems I have, rest online attention goes to fediverse nowadays.
turns out you rather stare at an empty plate than being served shit
> On Firefox this is easily resolvable - you can use a HTML filter to filter out the script tag from the source HTML before the page even starts being parsed. But that relies on extension APIs that Chromium doesn’t support.
I'm shocked
Youtube pushing ads in this way has convinced several non-technical friends who couldn't care less about their browser-choice to switch to Firefox with uBlock origin. Blocking ads in Chrome became such a hustle and is basically not working for Google's own services. Recommending people how don't care to not use chrome in the past was basically hopeless and now I have seen some switch basically from their own. Which I don't want to interpret too much into, but gives a little hope.
The second Chrome drops uBlock Origin (as part of their "Manifest V3 without blocking Web Request" plan), I'm off to an alternative browser. Enough is enough.
Do it now? I use Firefox on all devices, it's completely fine.
I agree, but I do need to keep a chromium browser around for the odd times that: my webcam decides to flicker uncontrollably during a meeting, a website just happens to put JS that runs terribly on Firefox in the hot path and it slows to a crawl, or a new feature is being demonstrated with Chrome only support.
Beats ads, as far as I'm concerned, but I can't help but feel like your average user wouldn't agree.
I worked for Mozilla for 25 years and kept other browsers around the whole time. There's nothing wrong with having other browsers, and nothing technical that prevents it, so do that :D
I can't think of a time I didn't have more than one browser, even in 1995 when I made Netscape my default, I kept Cello around for some things. More browsers are better than fewer, not only for the industry, but for individuals too.
I used to keep a Chrome-based browser installed "just in case." But for about the last 5 years I've simply refused to have it on my machine. It's not needed.
Seconded. Been on Firefox for years and greatly prefer my experience on Firefox both on desktop and mobile (Android) compared to any other browser.
I use PWAs a lot and Firefox dropped support
Didn't this already happen? It just seems like it was only progressively rolled out to Chrome browsers. My work PC was hit with this about a month ago, and now I get ads there...
I’ve heard this threats for 8 years.
“If they press their shoe on me even further, then I’m leaving!”
Firefox been free and there for you for decades, yet you still use this spyware crap from an Ad company. Disgusting.
On the upside, if they do, it might obviate the need for YouTube's anti adblocker measures because of the small market share of non-chromium browsers
Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute?
We often rationalize using ad blockers because ads can be intrusive or annoying. But let’s asking ourselves: Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?
This isn’t a moral judgment. I genuinely want to understand the reasoning.
Back when I started using Google Adsense, they had a 3 ad per page rule. You could be banned if you went above that limit. Today you can easily find web pages with 10, 15 or even more ad spots... one after each paragraph, sidebar, full page "popup", etc.
On YouTube, we went from a banner on the video to a few seconds of a video before to multiple ads before the video to multiple ad pauses even on relatively short videos (under 10 minutes). Add to that the sponsored sections of the video itself, which are added by the content creator, and other ads (stores, tickets, etc) that sometimes YouTube adds under the video even if you pay for premium.
Google Search pages used to have one or two ads at the top, with a different background colour than search results. Now sometimes I have to scroll down to see organic content, because sponsored content fills my screen.
I don't think I'm entitled to have access to all this for free, but we went too far... and so I use an adblocker on all my devices.
You're asking the question in a way that's unreflective of how people think. They can do it and want to do it and would need a reason to not do it. So the question is, what would make someone feel like they were ethically compelled to watch an advertisement? It sounds impossible to me, maybe someone with a very unique perspective could chime in about themselves.
Here's an attempt at a double-negative answer: you can't be ethically compelled into an unethical contract, and since advertisements are manipulative, voyeuristic and seek to take advantage of the limitations of human attentional control, it's a priori impossible for watching an ad or downloading a tracker to ever be ethically compulsory.
Why isn’t simply avoiding YouTube considered a viable solution?
“Why isn’t simply avoiding de facto standard video delivery platform isn’t simply an option?”
Stop playing dumb
Taking this in a more tangential, but similar thought. The copyright holder does not own the copyrights of the ad. Different copyrights.
There's a very simple answer.
You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
You are not obligated to watch ads. You are opting to watch them in exchange for the free content, then skipping out on a commitment you volunteered for while still taking the free content.
The "unethical contact" argument is bullshit, because you made a choice but didn't live up to it. Instead of either paying or not watching, you watched anyway.
>You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
Thee provider made the content public on the Web. That means I can view it under any terms I chose until they find a way to exclude me without excluding all the attention that being on the public Web gives them.
There are not 2 options as you claim. There are infinite options to the user here. Google may prefer you engage in only one of two ways, but they have no legal ground to require that with content on the public Web.
>I can view it under any terms I chose until they find a way to exclude me without excluding all the attention that being on the public Web gives them.
This is the unsung argument everyone forgets! It goes to the very start of why someone might register a domain name and set up a website on the... World Wide Web... for people to visit with their User Agent software, ask for some HTML and get some HTML back. "HOW DARE YOU NOT DO A RANDOM SOCIALLY DEFINED THING AFTER ASKING FOR OUR HTML (AND OTHERS' MP4S)?"
This is a pedantic response to a reasonable suggestion. It is not reasonable to complain about a product or service you are not paying for.
The pedantry comes not from someone using their User Agent however they want to use it. It comes from a company trying to (with receipts and lawsuits to prove it) LITERALLY redefine the World Wide Web into their own money making machine, and punish anyone who rocks their boat. They can cry "legal argument" all they want. At the end of the day, they're trying to force pedantry on their users. The only problem is most of the public has bought it Hook, Line and Sinker.
> have no legal ground
That's moving the goalposts of the conversation.
No it's not. It's shining a light on where the real WWW goalposts are and always have been.
The terms of the contract are the terms encoded in the HTTP protocol. They are:
- I, as the user, (or my user agent on behalf of me) ask for a resource.
- YT, as the provider, (or the server on your behalf) decide whether to send that resource to me.
- If you do, I'll use or not use it in accordance with my user agent configuration.
I asked for the video, and YT chose to send it to me. I'm not going to lose sleep over the morality of using the web as it was intended to be used.
> The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
You're wrong in both parts.
1. There is no way to pay to only remove all ads. YT premium bundles some music nonsense and also doesn't remove ads added by creators.
2. "Watching" isn't part of the contract, only "injected ads" are. Do you read every billboard in exchange for the benefit of better roads financed with ad revenue?
The music nonsense is bundled because YouTube is full of music videos and music in the backgrounds of videos and they have to pay the record labels to play the music in. They have "YouTube Premium Lite" that doesn't include music, but then you get ads on videos that have music in them.
This makes no sense, it's not hard to filter out music videos, and music in regular videos wouldn't cost the same as the whole music premium, also Lite isn't just about music:
> Ads however may appear on ... Shorts, and when you search or browse.
So again, you can't pay just to replace ads. (By the way, there is another huge difference - premium is a subscription, so not tied to ad time replaced)
YouTube music is nice, though.
All the best to you, I hope you enjoy watching your ads. :-)
I actually pay, rather than watch the ads, but a large part of that was also dumping Spotify and using the YouTube music app instead for listening in the car.
> The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
Wrong. The content provider explicitly states “ad-free”, yet I still see ads from content creators themselves.
Do the less fortunate not deserve to have access to culture and information without being subjected to the psychological abuse that is advertising?
If they can't afford a YouTube subscription, they're not going to be buying anything that would be advertised anyway.
Let's be honest here, ads are trying to get you to buy things, but "psychological abuse" is a pretty extreme hyperbole, especially for people already in such tight poverty. They've got enough going on that someone trying to get them to buy shitty knives or switch their car insurance isn't going to be impactful.
> Let's be honest here, ads are trying to get you to buy things
The issue is that those are not the only ads Youtube is showing to people. You can basically upload any video and make it an ad. Sometimes Youtube's moderation fails and some nasty stuff slips through the cracks:
> In the latest incident, a Redditor describes how their young nephew was exposed to an explicit ad while watching a Fortnite stream by the well-known YouTuber Loserfruit.
> “My 7yr nephew was watching Loserfruit (Fortnite streamer) and then came up to me asking what Loserfruit is doing because this ad started playing,” the concerned uncle shared.
Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-explicit-ads-proble...
Hell, they'll show weight loss ads to people with eating disorders - and this one might just be intentional rather than a failure of Youtube's moderation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckeatingdisorders/comments/18gx1v... (Just one example but it's not hard to find more)
"Psychological abuse" is very much not hyperbole in the worst case scenarios. And as an extra bonus, Youtube promotes scam ads as well:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39117360
This seems to be a very big problem for YouTube:
I wonder what proportion of those 5.5 billion inappropriate ads were removed only after people watched and reported them.Have you tried watching YouTube in the west without Adblock or YouTube premium?
Psychological abuse doesn’t even begin to describe experience.
> ads are trying to get you to buy things
Are they? The last time I made the mistake of watching youtube without an ad blocker I got served US right-wing propaganda. I live in Spain, always have, and Google knows enough about me to know I'd despise that content.
this is ridiculous.
The provider is welcome to serve ads, and i am welcome to not watch them. When there are Ads on TV and I get up to go to the kitchen, am i skipping out on a commitment? Am I now a freeloader? Should the TV have a camera to make sure I watch all the ads like a good little boy?
People have been fastforwarding/skipping ads for decades. this is nothing new.
There's a difference between letting an ad play and you simply ignoring it, and using technical means from preventing that ad playing at all.
Principally - the latter actually affects the compensation given to the creator of whatever video you're watching. The former does not.
Then it seems that blocking ads is the more honest thing to do! Otherwise the company placing the ad would be unfairly paying money for a service not actually delivered. This also makes the market more efficient, as blocking ads is a clear signal their products aren't desired.
Except TV and YouTube can offer similar, but not necessarily same, purpose.
TV, speaking of cable, is exclusively for entertainment. YouTube is used for pretty much everything these days. Imagine being in a panic, looking for a video how perform CPR, and getting 30 seconds unskippable ad.
Technically, the provider only really cares that the ads played, not that you were paying attention to them.
Unlike DVR for TVs, you are not welcome to skip playing them entirely. They've been pretty clear that skipping them via the use of ad blockers is a violation of the terms of service.
> Technically, the provider only really cares that the ads played, not that you were paying attention to them.
Advertisers do care about them. It's just that they don't have a way to track/measure it.
And if they could find a way to make you pay attention you’d better believe they’d do it in a heartbeat
When Apple first launched face ID, there was talk (I can't remember where) of developers being excited about the possibility of tracking where their users were looking.
So if ad blocking extensions could make YouTube think you watched the ad, then they’d be fine?
Ironically, they'd try to get you ... or someone... anyone! on fraud. Can you imagine the same argument made in the example of getting up and going to the kitchen?
> Your honor, they agreed to our terms and conditions which stipulate you MUST stay in the recliner facing forward the whole time. By getting up to <do something important and not waste their life watching ads>, they've defrauded our advertisers! We demand to be repaid in the form of 43 lazyboy hours per year.
Very simple. I don't self flagellate because it hurts and I don't like it. And there's no need for me to self flagellate. So why would I? In exactly the same way, there's no need for me to watch stupid ads. I've had ad blockers ever since they came into existence. There is no incentive for me to disable them. When I need to, I actually pay for content on Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Apple, etc. It's not a money issue.
I haven't done that with Youtube because 1) I don't need to, 2) Google is pretty bad about paying content creators properly (they prefer keeping the money for themselves) and 3) I feel no guilt whatsoever about not sponsoring trillion dollar companies by exposing myself to the pain of watching their shitty ads.
Luckily for Google, most people aren't smart enough to figure out ad blockers. Which is why they are making lots of money with Youtube and why they are a trillion dollar company. Good for them; no need to feel sorry for them.
Luckily for me, Google seems pretty conflicted about fixing this properly because they are making so much money with the way things are. If they lock down Youtube properly (not that hard technically), users and content creators might move elsewhere. They can't afford to. So good for me.
It's that simple. There is no moral dilemma here.
> Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?
With how user-hostile and anti-competitive Google is behaving, this is like asking why soldiers feel entitled to shoot at the enemy. Keep giving them money, keep watching their ads that they sell on rigged auctions [1], and eventually the only way to access the web will be with locked-against-the-user browsers [2], and everything will be surveilled (though it nearly already is - Google never asks itself why it should feel entitled to follow users around the web, or in real-life, despite opt-outs [3], and you'll find support for any alternative OSes mysteriously withering due to secret anti-competitive contracts between Google and manufacturers [4]). I know this isn't the reasoning people use, but that is what the outcome will be.
As for ads - it has always been hard, nearly impossible to block them, and few people did. Just like you can't block a billboard next to the freeway, you can't block a jpeg that's served as part of the webpage you're visiting, as it's programmatically indistinguishable from native content.
What people actually block are not ads, but a hybrid half-ad-half-surveillance entity, that's called an "ad" by historical accident.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/11/25/google-is-three-t...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
[3] https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20200311172517/https://www.proto...
Just want to point out, adding on to OP, that creators on youtube get 55% of revenue.
I get that Google has infinite money and infinite evil. But how convenient you also get to skip out on paying the majority expense, which goes to the creator...
And yes virtuous commentor, I know you are one of the 1.5% that convert to a patreon supporter. Now ask everyone else why they get to eat for free (while endlessly complaining that the restaurant sucks).
Creators choose to host their content on platform that puts it on the public Web where ads are easily blocked. If creators have an issue, it is with Google, not my ad blocker.
I don't owe creators anything; I have no agreements with them. Google is the one with creator contracts.
Google may owe creators something, but I certainly don't and I'm not going to adopt Google's burden on that.
Honestly the kind of video out there made solely to make money aren’t what I’m looking after, I wouldn’t mind if they all went away.
YouTube has always been the guy showing how to replace a 97 Honda civic oil filter in an unedited 5 minutes video and 240p, or the one sharing their passion. You know, the genuinely interesting stuff.
People create for free. The content that is created in order to earn revenue suffers because of it.
There’s no morality one way or the other. Google couldn’t care less about me; I have no personal connection with anyone there. They’ll treat me as poorly as the law allows (and then some) if it increases their bottom line. By the same measure, I’ll do as much as I can get away with to remove the bad aspects of their service. If we lived in a system where I was using a service made by a person I knew and could talk to, then maybe there’d be more obligations to the exchange, but in this impersonal setup I feel no such obligation.
I've harped on this before: the problem is that the ads if they are fraudulent or harmful in other ways and the companies making money when presenting deserve get their shit blocked. Especially if they can target ads to vulnerable people. These are huge profitable companies that moderate the content they profit of but as soon as someone pays them they turn the blind eye.
Ads are a litmus test for how much a service values its users and the ecosystem it’s built upon. When premium cable first replaced broadcast television it had no ads in lieu of a subscription cost. Now you pay a subscription and get ads. The same is true for streaming services which switched to ad supported subscriptions. Let’s look at YouTube; in the early years ads were few and far between, then came mid roll ads, then end roll ads, then multiple ads in a row. Now YouTubers started doing their own ad reads, baked into the video. We’re in a growth oriented era, so companies and individuals will take more and more, as much as they can to keep the numbers going up. What they’re taking is your time; a very precious commodity in my opinion.
Why do I Adblock? Because a line must be drawn or else this marketing growth engine will consume everything. I mean literally without any consumer pushback this attention extraction engine will continue expanding until every moment of digital consumption is monetized. It’s already destroyed too much of the internet.
> Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute?
In this situation, the ads are contributing barely anything to the content creation, and storage and distribution drop in price every year while youtube increases the amount of ads and decreases the video quality. So people get upset and block everything. That's part out of being fed up, and that's part out of having no way to make the ads become less bad in a non-block way.
Perhaps one justification for blocking ads is protecting users from personal information harvesting, tracking, and malware delivered through advertising networks. Aside from that, I can't think of a justification.
I actually think it would be good if there were filter lists that whitelisted ads that were not harmful to users in those ways, but that sounds difficult/impossible to fairly maintain, and I doubt anyone else wants it.
Some websites will stop me from accessing content because I use an ad blocker. I think that’s fair play, and take my attention somewhere else. I don’t hide that I use adblocker, and it’s easy enough to identify.
It’s my GET request. I can do what I want with it.
If Google want to force ads, they can put them in the video stream. If not, then they’re trying to have it both ways.
Great analogy. Its the same reason why I grab stuff off of supermarkets and walk out. If they really cared about it, they'll invest in better technology to stop me. Suckers.
How much is a media service worth? How much does it cost to produce? Can I pay a reasonable fee to the right people?
Most websites do not offer reasonable payment options. They'd earn fractions of a cent from the ads they'd show me, but the cheapest subscriptions they offer are several dollars.
On YouTube, the value of the service is provided by creators, but too little of the subscription is going towards the creators. To make matters worse, Google seems to pull every string they can to make creators as miserable as possible. Their actions are a detriment to the service, and not worth supporting. An 80/20 revenue split would seem much more reasonable.
Advertising is predatory by design. It is my moral duty not only to resist advertising, but to do everything I can to make it as ineffective as possible.
> Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute?
Shall we do the same to open source?
“Watch this ad for 30 seconds before checking out a branch! Git commit, oops: RAID SHADOW LEGENDS”
This is the same situation as with the media industry, e.g. music and movies and piracy. Studies have shown that people who pirate wouldn't buy the product even if they had the opportunity (i.e. is if they had the money or if it was easy to buy). So I guess the content is not good enough.
Once you have something, you don’t want to let it go. Even if it’s not morally justifiable.
Otherwise wealth would be much more equally spread across northern and Southern hemisphere.
Personally I hate advertisement, i will do everything I can to disable it but I know that at this point I’m almost pirating. There is no shame in that, internet is the Wild West : Google and their AI crawling bots aren’t better than me, they leech contents other made, other host, to build their ai and then makes money on top of it.
Because the paid plan isn't anonymous and you have no guarantee that they won't sell your history to advertisers, even if you don't see ads.
Perhaps you also have to show your YouTube history when you enter the US.
For the same reason I had all the ads cut out of my newspaper before I read it back in the day - i don't want to see them.
It's my browser, my copy of the website, and I'll have my user agent do whatever I want.
I pay for YouTube Premium, but I don’t share your moral opposition to ad-blocking. It’s not entitlement, because the service is totally free to stop serving me the videos.
Because I control my computer, and if I don't want to see ads, I have the right to automatically filter them out on my side. (Yes, yes, and Google has the right to block me from accessing their servers.)
I don't feel entitled to it. I don't like the company Google
ARE YOU OVER 40 AND THE ONLY AI YOU KNOW IS CHATGPT?
The burden of proof is on the ads to justify why they should be watched, given that the ads themselves provide zero value to the viewer.
YouTube ads in particular are a cesspit of scams. I don't want to watch ads for things like Scientology.
Huh? You're on their website to watch videos. And it costs them money to send you those bits. And they offer two ways for you to compensate. Watch ads, or pay premium.
What is so difficult for you to understand this business relationship?
It's Google. The relationship is not consensual but adversarial. Google attempts to get free things from me. I attempt to get free things from Google.
It's like asking a lawyer why does he defend an obviously guilty client? Because it's adversarial system, his job is to protect his client, not to worry about the other side. The other side is trying to maximize their advantage too. Google has defined my relationship with it in such terms through its behavior.
If YouTube were still an independent operator I would be more amenable to your argument.
In any case, the fact I can recite an ad from memory shows that I am at least watching some of their ads, notably on mobile.
It takes a lot of time, money, care, education and love to grow human individual. Who would dare to even start considering paying high fees for the honor of receiving some of their time and attention? Why are video provider not paying people to obtain this privilege? No one dare to think they can get that for free, right?
Do I even need justification for not doing what I don't want to (watching ads)?
Back when I listened to Spotify Premium, they would mess around with the shuffle or add a “smart” shuffle to the UI that you can’t opt out of. They would try to insert songs to my playlists where they don’t belong. Gtfo let me listen to my music.
I listen to Spotify Freemium. There’s a special ad that says: “Enjoy the next 30 minutes of ad-free listening”. 2 minutes later I get 2-3 ads back to back.
Enough. Happy Jellyfin user. I’ll buy up my music gradually.
They should follow in the steps of news media and simply block users who use ad blocking.
But they seem hesitant to, probably because that would risk losing the engagement of those users.
I don't, I pay for YouTube premium. I think YouTube deserves money for its service, and it needs money for its employees and infrastructure.
I'd block ads if there wasn't premium (or if premium had ads). YouTube still deserves and needs money, but ads don't "extract" the money from me. At best (and most likely*) every ad shown to me is effectively the advertiser paying YouTube to waste my time. At worst (if I actually buy the product), the ad is effectively me paying the advertiser and getting something useless or harmful. The chance a YouTube ad shows me something beneficial is too small to remotely justify the other ads which waste my time (or if I buy, the Earth's resources or my attention or etc.).
I also block ads on newspapers and other smaller sites, but don't buy their premium. Honestly, I don't think this is fair, although I think it's small in the grand scheme of things. The problem is, I don't feel those sites justify me paying, and I'd be spending well over $100/month if I subscribed to every one; I'd rather not see each site than pay, although currently I do see them without paying which is unfair (showing me ads is wasteful, as explained earlier, so I don't even consider it an alternative). You know what, I'll probably subscribe to a few (maybe AP and Reuters) and every other story I encounter, see if I can find the version on one of those sites.
* "But ads work on you subliminally." I hear and read this a lot, but I really doubt it for invasive ads like YouTube's (also billboards etc. I'm not talking about covert ads or "good" non-invasive ads like Show HN). First, I recognize many of the big advertisers (e.g. those VPNs and sodas) and will never buy their products, so those ads shown to me specifically are wasted. Moreover, I'm particularly methodical when buying things. I always go in with a plan: sometimes it's a simple plan like "buy the second-cheapest with a good description and decent reviews" or "buy what your parents do", but I never buy something because I recognize it. In fact, if something seems familiar I pay extra attention, and if I recognize it was invasively advertised, I become less likely to buy it, because I suspect invasive ads correlate with low value and want to actively dissuade invasive ads in general. "But your parents and the reviewers buy based off ads, and you buy based off them"...OK, show my parents and reviewers the ads, not me.
Ultimately, invasive ads waste my time and annoy me, and I don't see their benefits which justify that. I'd rather pay a small fee than see or hear every invasive ad (like with YouTube premium), and I suspect the advertisers would benefit from that too.
Watching ads just offloads the cost on other people. I would go as far as saying that watching ads is immoral (if you can avoid it), as you are effectively stealing from others.
Blocking ads needs no justification.
Why they think I should waste my finite time, compute and bandwidth on things I don't want needs justification.
Your brain baffles me. I have already decided that i will never ever buy any of the shit in these ads, it would save THEM TIME AND MONEY AND LYING TO THE AD BUYERS to not show me the ads. THEY are doing the immoral thing here to force waste my time for no positive benefits
It's because people are fucking lazy and completely lost in the digital world. Thinking YouTube should somehow be free is absurd and I'm sick of seeing this bullshit on this site in particular where a lot of the people here are actively involved in this kind of thing. Avg salary on this site is probably north of $200k and they're bitching about paying a few bucks a month for YouTube.
There is a category of people for where if they are able to get away with not paying for something than they think it would be foolish not to.
ads are awful on a good day. YOUTUBE ads are 5x worse.
I'm not going to sit there, waste my time, watching the same ads for the 5th time that has no relevance to me. Adblockers make youtube tolerable. If there were no adblockers i genuinely would be unable to use it.
Has nothing to do with a sense of entitlement, they are ads for things I would never purchase. so whats the point then? Why is it OK for people to pay to waste my time just because they paid to? What gives them the right to force me to watch that? Hard no. It's my browser, and I'll do as i damn well please.
I WOULD pay for youtube if it was a good product. But it's not. I'm not going to opine on all the reasons it's not. if/when they make it good i'll pay. That's a them problem.
but there is NO WAY i am going to start accepting ads back into my life. I'll just stop watching youtube.
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> Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?
It's not free when they already track and sell user data to the highest bidder. YouTube is just trying to double-dip at this point. I'd gladly pay for premium if there was a guarantee that my user data would not sold.
> This locks a few global objects by using Object.defineProperty to set them as non-writable, which prevents later code from overwriting them with a Proxy that alters their behaviour. So uBlock Origin can only proxy JSON.stringify if it can run before this locker script does.
This seems like a bug in browsers, or possibly in the spec. Page content and scripts should never be able to restrict what browser extensions can do.
>This seems like a bug in browsers
oh its a Chrome feature! Around 2 years ago Chrome pushed an update that speedup time to load first initial page by delaying Extension initialization. Last page you closed Chrome on will load before uBo, will be able to bypass all filters/block and will be able to detect uBo being loaded.
I don't care when YouTube does a buffer thing because blocking ads for me is about distractions and context switching. My cognitive load is already very high and it's extremely frustrating to have to filter out more garbage.
How is it possible to have a high cognitive load while watching YouTube? Are you watching surgery training videos in the middle of conducting a heart transplant or something?
It's the digital equivalent of being stopped by canvassers on your way to something important.
I am trying to stay as recent with offerings from teams like LangGraph. The rate these frameworks, research, etc. is fast. Either way, if I've set aside some time to focus on a video about X it's very frustrating for me to first disregard a few unrelated Y.
You could just pay the $13/month? Would save the worries about context switching further taxing your already high cognitive load? And I would expect your high cognitive load helps you earn well above $13/month?
Paying for YT doesn't remove the ads.
On the other hand, the golden era of YouTube has passed. You aren't losing out on much if you simply stop using it.
Youtube premium does remove all Google's ads.
Obviously not the ads the content creator has put into the video itself.
There's an add-on called sponsor block, which works remarkably well, that will just skip sponsored ads inside videos.
SponsorBlock is amazing. It tells you how much time you've saved. It adds up quick. I can't say I've met anyone who misses random two minute breaks about weird scam cooking services, etc.
I don't use sponsor block and don't think I've ever seen an ad like that.
I'd like to think some content creators are more scrupulous than others, and I have good enough taste not to watch the unscrupulous ones ;-)
Depends on the Premium tier.
But yes, uBlock and Sponsorblock together do a much better job of removing the ads.
There's also a button to skip commonly skipped sections - basically sponsor skip.
There are no ads when I use YT premium, except for the creators' Hello Fresh type segments. Which perhaps they'd be less incentivized to pursue if people didn't use ad blockers.
It depends on the Premium tier.
You mean just Premium Light? Still has no ads on videos.
Just sponsored shorts and banners when browsing. But we're talking about videos here.
Shorts and music, for now. They'll undoubtedly expand it to all videos eventually.
SponsorBlock will help you to get rid of those!
To be clear, you mean it doesn't remove YouTube-placed ads inside the video? Edit: I'm not talking about the creator's own sponsorships, or the YouTube homepage showing static ads for movies or whatever.
I pay for YouTube premium, it absolutely removes YouTube-placed ads. Creators also get a kickback when premium users watch their videos, as they don’t make money off the YouTube ads anymore.
Ok, that's what I thought too.
I wish it would also remove YouTube's internal advertising. I pay for YouTube Premium, but I can't permanently hide shorts or prevent it from popping up whatever random topic they want me to engage with. Every 30 days or so, I have to click "Show Fewer Shorts" and every week or two, I have to opt out of the topic du jour, and I have to do this separately on every device.
There is too much good content on YouTube to simply stop using it. It is a gold mine of tutorials on niche subjects. I just watched best ways to patch an air mattress, and a video on making theater quality popcorn! (and it was delicious)
I asked kagi’s llm for a recipe on theater quality popcorn (which I do all the time), and it gave the basic recipe (though it suggested butter, when clarified butter is superior in my opinion) with a list of tips. I’ve been having trouble with unpopped kernels (maybe a few dozen per batch), and one of the tips pointed to an excellent tutorial on avoiding unpopped / burnt kernels:
https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/perfect_popcorn/
This took me far less time than watching YouTube videos, since that’s one of 5 references the LLM summary included, and the other 4 are information I didn’t need.
How would you know you won’t get sick? LLM’s scare me with the random stuff. It can be useful in specific cases but I certainly wouldn’t get any recipes that way. I would seriously reconsider friend.
You can 1. pay the $13/mo 2. try to make the adblocker work or 3. not watch YouTube. So far options 2 on desktop and 3 on iPhone have been ok for me.
You’re forgetting: 4. Don’t use an adblocker and watch YouTube.
I’ve been doing #1 for over 5 years and will never do anything different (up to say $50-ish USD a month).
Except they want it both ways. I tried Youtube Premium for a few months. Slowly but surely the ads came back, so back to blocking and not paying I went.
I don't know if this is serious or not but I get zero ads with Youtube Premium even on my phone.
Youtube premium can look very different between places/people. Many with premium still see them. Youtube seems to be testing various markets to see how many ads it takes before people cancel their subscriptions. Also, you have to accept google cookies and such for them to identify you as a subscriber, so many privacy-focused users will see ads regardless of premium subscriptions.
I'd love more info about this, because I've been paying for Youtube premium for years and I haven't seen a single ad.
They have "premium lite" as an option for me (US) which says "most videos ad-free*"
what? I don't see ads unless the creator themselves are doing it, and even then it's two clicks on the right arrow button and we move on
Sponsorblock is a god send. It automates all that
Seriously, it's a great price for a great service.
Giving them money rewards them for pulling a bait and switch where they set the price of hosting plus watching video at free, but are now trying to extort the ecosystem after so many people spent effort uploading. Don't encourage hostile behavior.
What did you want them to do instead, put ads or charge money per view starting in 2005?
Sure, that would have been one honest option. Dumping an artificially free option into the market crowded out other options from being adopted or even developed.
How did you expect them to pay for the cost of the service?
The cost of hosting still seems to be free. Isn’t it the watching that comes with a cost?
I'm more than happy to pay for Youtube Premium to remove ads for all the family and ensure content creators can monetize their work.
I create a different kind of content that Google used to train their AI and offer AI summaries. Those same summaries mean I will soon need to find another way to make rent.
Hah, this so much. For me it's worth the money for the family plan just to not be exposed to ads playing on family members' devices.
Fuck that.
My household uses Newpipe we don't pay for shit.
Stealing from creators shouldn't be celebrated.
It's not stealing from creators. The creators have an agreement with Google not with me. If they feel they have been shorted, they can take it up with Google.
I support a _shitpile_ of creators on Patreon and Kofi and more. I subscribe to Nebula, and I get as much as I can from the creators' own pages on those services.
I'm doing my best to move my viewing off of YouTube, and move the money off of YouTube, in hopes that it eases the creators moving off of YouTube.
But you'll invariably watch from a way way bigger shitpile of creators, so without some more efficient mechanism you won't be able to spread your support properly
Ah, the old "stealing" line.
Out of curiosity, what pays your own salary?
Not the same poster, but: Products and services that someone actually signed a contract to pay for. Google is free to not send me free video if they don't want to, I'm just connecting to their website using my browser.
But the only reason so many creators are exclusively on youtube is the fact that anyone can watch there. Google tolerates my ad blocker to some degree (unlike other sites) because the alternative is losing market share and they know it.
If creators feel cheated, they can ask youtube to stop serving their videos for free for its own interests. I'd like to see the status quo change actually.
Exactly. YouTube wants to have its cake and eat it too. YouTube would not be what it is today if it wasn't public and free at the point of use.
Anyone is free to do something in private and ticket people for it. I'm doing a concert tonight in my home, it's 100 credits for a ticket, hope you'll come! I can't guarantee anyone will come, but I can guarantee anyone who comes will pay.
There are platforms like Floatplane that use this model.
Then there's the busking model. You do it in public. You can't guarantee anyone pays, but they'll definitely come, and some will probably pay.
YouTube wants both. It wants to be the place where people busk (like the public square) but also force advertising on you. You can't have it both ways. Either go private or accept that this is public and I will do what I want with my browser.
I love the concert/busking framing, I'm definitely using that from now on.
I'm sure that's pure curiosity and not trying to make a point in a roundabout way...
I find it hard to discern whether your post is sarcasm. Assuming it’s not, I’m surprised that someone is so cheerfully and voluntarily paying an extra fiat to the virtual landowner.
Have you ever made a video before? It's actually quite a lot of work, especially if it's any good. Hours upon hours of time.
Video hosting is expensive. Making videos is expensive. You're not noble for stealing from Youtube or its creators.
It's not stealing. It's using. I have no obligation under any legal framework to use their content the way they wish I would. Trust me, or pay a lawyer to learn the same truth at considerably more cost.
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.
Injecting the ads directly would make them skippable. Unskippable ads are inherently detectable (because the unskippability has to be communicated to the client-side player controls), so there’s no easy way out.
Twitch seems to have won the war against adblockers by injecting directly into the video stream. It’s been months now and I still see ads. I assume it isn’t as easy as you say to skip them otherwise uBlock would have done it already.
For livestreaming it's easier because you can't skip forward anyway
It has to be a cost thing. HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.
I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.
It would break all the time stamps as well, unless you had fixed length ads. Sponsorblock already skips ads embedded in videos, so I don't think this would make ads much harder to block.
True, it would be sorta impossible to make timestamps work without sending the length of the ad section, so you could easily skip it programmatically.
Agree, it has to do with cost, considering the sheer number of videos they have. Plus, oftentimes the ad won't be relevant after a week or two, in which case they can't re-encode again.
> HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.
Not really. They'll just need to recode for you that one minute with the ad. The rest of the video can stay the same.
If they're doing it smartly, they can even avoid full recompression and just splice in the ad.
They don't want to boil the frog too quickly. Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream. As the post mentions:
Yep. It's been pretty funny actually both here but especially on r/youtube.
Pretty much since YouTube started cracking down on adblockers, r/youtube top post Every. Single. Day. is usually someone complaining that they just got hit with "adblock detected" and comments split between "Yeah it sucks, hit me last month" and "Huh, uBlock Origin works fine for me. I must be super smart. YouTube can't defeat me"
> Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream
We've all seen what they're doing with AI-generated video, and we know their market and political power. Eventually they'll be remaking the video so the person or animal or rock or tree on the screen is giving AI-generated product testimonials.
There exists crowdsourced adblocking based on timestamps (SponsorBlock, Tubular). Soon we will have realtime on-device content-aware AI adblocking. They will ever win.
Once we get content-aware AI adblocking, every video and podcast will turn into a product placement.
I use content aware ad blocking to remove inserted and native ads from podcasts. The next level adblocking will be rewriting content that is overly commercial.
Any info on how you do that?
I imagine you can do it by AI-transcribing the podcast while preserving timestamp metadata for each symbol. Use LLM to identify undesirable segments (ask it to output json or something) and then cut them out from the audio with ffmpeg.
Then you would need to set up a server that would do all this and serve as a 'mirror' to your podcasts without the ads.
You almost exactly described my process: podcast-dl > whisper > Gemini > ffmpeg > ftp > cheap web host
If you've gone through that much effort, you might as well turn it into a subscription service. It would be resource intensive, but some people would gladly pay through their nose to rid their podcasts of ads.
I actually found a project which does almost exactly what you've described:
https://github.com/jdrbc/podly_pure_podcasts
LLM ad blockers as content processors are next.
got any links to set this up?
It’s already a race to the bottom, blocking tech improves and so does marketing. The latter will pump out as much as you’re scientifically proven to accept before switching off.
They are already doing product placement everywhere..'
Few shows are relentless about it.
In the future, everything will be like that vapid chicken wing podcast (the one where they bring on an interesting, talented person and then waste half an hour interviewing her about sriracha)
So Ira Glass will be narrating This American Life while simultaneously reviewing different varieties of Doritos, etc.
...or the producers of The Rest is History will add the Planters Peanut Man as a third host
...or Marques Brownlee will review every product in relation to how well it works with Bose headphones
Even though I hate advertising I think Hot Ones is one of the few efforts to do a good job with this.
1. Interviewing a guest while they are eating insanely spicy food is an extremely novel idea and the guest's reactions and answers end up being really interesting and unexpected as a result. It humanizes famous people in a way I've never seen before because you can't just bluff your way through it.
2. The hot sauce vendors are often small companies or indie makers (at least they used to be). This is way different than reviewing 11 bags of Superman Transformers 3D Doritos Walmart Product Placement for the next blockbuster.
3. Hot sauce is interesting! Nearly every culture on every continent has hot sauce. They are made from a huge variety of interesting and unusual ingredients but are also simple and can be made at home. Hot sauce hasn't been explored in this way in popular culture.
> Few shows are relentless about it.
My favorite relentless one is Tracker (Amazon Prime), who spend approximately 30% of screen time dedicated to showing off a GMC pickup and Airstream, but the most egregious was one dialog line:
> As Colter enters and gives them hugs, Velma remembers that they got a gift for him. Reenie hands him the gift - very conspicuously packaged in an Amazon box with its trademark logo and blue tape - and says, "I've gotta say, next-day delivery is pretty sweet. Thank you, Amazon Prime!"
that is not what they do on hot ones. sean is an intelligent interviewer and their team goes above and beyond to find interesting lore in people’s past to showcase. guests are routinely impressed.
If a person enjoys a show that is also a brand of hot sauce, it's not for me to say they shouldn't. It's just not my thing; I have too many hangups.
No, the future will not be like that.
I've seen the future, and it kills 99.99% of germs, bacteria and viruses...
...it powers through tough grease and grime
...with no harsh smells!
The future is Fantastik®.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble but ad blockers are on borrowed time.
This is like saying I was able to sneak into a concert. Sure, but at some point the restrictions are gonna come down hard.
All I ask is that I can pay the creator directly for content without any middle-man. Anything less will be routed around.
It's not like sneaking into a concert. It's like attending a free concert at a mall and wearing a mask so the cameras can't read your lips. Or covering your phone screen with your hand when you show a friend a private photo of a special moment.
> It's like attending a free concert at a mall
Who pays for the electricity, upkeep, security and airconditioning of the mall? Who pays for the sound stage, the technicians, the lighting of the mall?
The band decided to perform at the mall, because they like the facilities there. They always had a choice to perform at their house ("own website"), but they chose the mall ("YouTube") and as long as YouTube is hosting their videos, YouTube deserves to be compensated.
That is between the band and the mall. The public didn't sign up for anything.
Nobody can stop you from putting a black screen over the ad, or a scenic nature video.
There will always be a cat and mouse chase, regardless of technology advancements.
It's not analogous to sneaking into a concert. YouTube is open and public, always has been. It would not be YouTube if it wasn't.
One could splice ads out of the video on the client just as easily as they splice them in, assuming you can detect them (which could be done via crowdsourced databases a la sponsorblock).
They can splice the video just for you at a random location.
Sure, and I can use "technology" to identify those splices, and fix them in various ways that work for me because I control the client (unlike Chrome users) and that gives me the power to make the web behave how I want it to, if I'm willing to put in the effort (or someone else does it for me.)
I think it’s only a matter of time before it’s reality.
They own the hosting website, if they want to show their user ads, they will find a way, even if it takes a few year.
YouTube is currently running an A/B test for server-side insertion according to what some other people have posted. I'm not getting SSAI ads so I can't really know much about them though.
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.
How does Twitch do it? They're super aggressive and even using third party clients that do a good job and not displaying ads, you still get an occasional "commercial break" screen where they're not serving you the content, or the ad, just a "let's all go to the lobby" screen.
Twitch puts the ads directly in the HLS stream, but as seperate segments from the content (a HLS stream is made of many small video files, on twitch they're about 2s long). They're trivial to recognize and filter out (they're actually explicitly tagged as ad segments) but it still won't serve you the actual stream you were trying to watch - the ad segments override it. The best you can do is just block until the first non-ad segment arrives.
Those clients could be doing a better job - when twitch starts playing an ad on the main stream, they also provide a secondary stream that shows the actual content.
i believe that secondary stream is used for picture in picture so its lower quality, like 480p or something
Maybe; I don't know anything about it. I will note that that belief could easily develop, true or not, if twitch streams start out in low resolution and increase as you buffer them.
A third-party client has room to make a dramatic improvement on the twitch experience by not dropping audio while you make the switch from the ad stream to the content stream.
I've also wondered about this for a long time. It seems like there must be something difficult about it, but I can't even guess. Otherwise it seems like they would be, no?
I suspect the difficulty is due to a fear of it turning away too many users, not necessarily a technical one.
Turning them to where? Doubt it. Those are low value users anyway.
If the value was low they wouldn't be squeezing it.
They are working on it. Web YT player no longer fetches separate video and audio streams from the server, it requests them pre bundled and receives a single server side muxed stream.
The creators themselves will include sponsor segments in their videos, but some users go a step further and use sponsorblock to automatically skip through.
If they had balls they'd force the user to be logged in.
Creators will never accept it.
Creators will take what they're given. They have no leverage.
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.
Account Switcher > Turn on Incognito. (Not the chrome incognito, but YouTube incognito)
IIRC i stopped using this because it takes way too long to toggle on/off and another crucial mistake they make is that YouTube acts like its chrome incognito where you want full privacy and an anonymous browsing experience, I do not want that, I still want to be able to see my own history like my last few search bar queries, I just dont want NEW entries added when in incognito mode. essentially i want read only mode
You can easily and quickly turn off watch on mobile. Don't remember if it's a hassle in the browser.
IME this turns off the premium benefits, stupidly
Oh that's weird
I would love something like what Spotify has - private listening. In the meantime, I just go into the YouTube history and remove anything that I don't want to pollute my recommendations. Turning off search history entirely also is good.
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.
Just delete it from watch history when your done, is what I do.
I just have a different tab with the history page open to pause / resume history you don't even need to refresh the page you use to play videos
YES. I've been wanting this for years. I want a switch that signals to the analytic/algorithm system that I am consuming this content either...
A) sincerely, trustfully, optimistically, etc.
...or...
B) critically, skeptically, experimentally, observationally, etc.
I'd be happy to pay for premium if it actually removed all ads from the platform. I wish they forced creators to declare which segments of a video are ads for their sponsors and then removed or skipped them for premium users. Basically built-in Sponsorblock except not crowd-sourced.
Alternatively, many creators already upload ad-free versions to their Patreon or other paywalled platforms, they could upload those to YouTube as well to be shown to premium users if YT allowed for it and forced them to.
Alas I'm not willing to pay 13€ a month for just slightly fewer ads.
I don't think YouTube should get further into the dangerous spiral of chaperoning the content of videos. If there are too many sponsored segments in a video, take it up with the creator or stop watching that channel.
I'd love an option to be able to filter out all videos from my feed that have sponsored segments. For me, I find the best content is the underground stuff made by folks who don't have a clear profit motive.
This is a feature that could probably be added to sponsorblock. They have the data already.
Yes, this is the change that would most improve YT for me.
yeah I think the free market can figure ad load out. creators who go overboard on sponsored segments will get less views, less engagement. there's a natural equilibrium.
In many countries ad sections have to be clearly marked for another reason the "free market" hasn't solved: disguised advertising. I wish the US got with the times.
They actually do have this but it's only on the mobile app. Most videos if you tap to skip forward an auto skip button shows up.
Good time as any to inform about existence of PeerTube instances. And maybe, to think about better use of your time and watch less videos on the internet? This video could've been a blog post and all that jazz :)
I wouldn't be adverse to paying for YT (or similar services) if they took cash payments. But no, you have to get a subscription. Which involves giving Google your personal details, thus giving the world's biggest data hoarder even more data.
Imagine going back in time 20 years. You want to buy a newspaper from a stall. And the vendor tells you to wait and stare at an add for 30 seconds before you can pick up the magazine. The alternative is that you give that vendor a copy of your ID and credit card. It's insane.
Most of these problems would go away if we had "online cash" (please don't start talking about cryptocurrency). Want to watch a video? Watch an add or pay €0.01. Of course all the money-laundering hysteria will prevent that from happening.
Ultimately, terrorism is why we have ads.
I was wondering when buffering was going to be a thing. I’ve been seeing it on YT and figured it’s the Adblock wars getting heated up.
The next step is to scrape the videos, strip the ads, store them on a torrent magnet and serve that instead. Yes it would have to be from a shady RU or CN or NK or IN site. I’m fine with that.
The next step is to auto download all the videos you might want to watch onto your plex server and strip the ads
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If copyright laws were reasonable and limited to what was necessary to serve their stated purpose, I would agree with the critique - that it seems like entitled behaviour. But in a world where copyright terms are 150 years, in my opinion any premise that it serves the public is gone.
I pick up a free, ad supported newspaper, bring it home, cut the ads out of it, then read it. I'm not violating anything.
Consider that it's a monopoly. You can't get 99% of this content anywhere else (not even if it's marked as creative commons¹ or any other free license, publicly funded, etc.) but I don't agree with Google's/Alphabet's practices either. One could:
Option 1: be a hermit and not watch anything on YouTube ever. You can't look up repair guides, fully use a news website that I'm subscribed to that got rid of their self hosted version, watch a subset of public broadcasts that we pay for via taxes, etc. It's not just entertainment / a Netflix replacement
Option 2: give in and enrich this monopolistic tracking company
Option 3: try to pirate the content
I'd feel very different if this were Spotify or an individual artist: I can use three other music services with massively overlapping offerings from different jurisdictions. Or supermarkets, for the same reason. But if it's irreplaceable and gatekept, I can understand both sides here
¹ https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en
I find it frustrating that so many people expect some kind of morality from consumers but not companies. It’s cold, hard business logic to use an adblocker when you have the knowhow and are annoyed enough, just as its cold, hard business logic to fight adblockers up to a point.
I just use yt-dlp (YTDLnis on Android, which has a great UI that makes it quite YouTube-like). Downloading instead of streaming (read: downloading then automatically deleting) is so much better.
1. It's all offline play, so I can use my favorite players like VLC. Also, no buffering (after the initial download, of course).
2. I can do anything I want to the video: make edits, splice ads out, extract audio, generate subtitles or dubs, etc.
3. It saves Google server costs! Well, comparing to streaming the same video from them multiple times with adblock on, at least.
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 ideas?
its creating a problem and selling the solution to that problem. im surprised there isnt more of a distaste for youtube out there for just their overall product... ads aside. One of the better things ive done for myself this past year is remove the right sidebar as well as almost all of the homepage.
my youtube homepage is just that left sidebar, which has dots if a new video for one of the channels i care about uploads. It totally frees me from clickbait thumbnails, and "youtube rabbit holes".
youtube has just been getting slaughtered with horrible trends of mindless content, low effort documentary stuff, all sorts of low effort garbage with high effort thumbnails/titles. it is so nice to just rid myself of all of it.
They created the product before creating the problem
market capture and figure out monetization later :)
like a forest preserve deciding theyd like billboards in the middle of their paths after a few years.
At least on TV I occasionally catch randomly interesting ads... sometimes. On YT, I'm stuck with the same obnoxious commercial from a company whose service I strongly dislike, playing on loop ever since they associated me to some related product category. They think pestering me with more interruptions will win me over, but their analytics are working in reverse. I can't understand why they're so clueless.
Is it actually expensive though? Or does it just feel that way? A movie costs $15, or roughly 13 cents per minute of watch time.
The average daily YouTube watch time is north of 40 minutes per day for adults in the US. That's a penny per minute for YouTube... 11x cheaper than a movie.
It’s a psychological problem. Going from $0 to $1 is a mountain.
Starting a product or service at $30 / month sets expectations up front (no ad supported free tier)
This is an incompatible strategy with venture backed “get all the market share possible by offering services for free to crush competitors so we can have a monopoly to exploit later” mindset
Premium is a good deal if you would have already had Music, and Music is pretty great while also being a good deal. They also have a cheaper 'Premium Lite' these days, though apparently some content still has ads if you use it.
>some content still has ads if you use it
It's for content that use music. As you said of you want ad free music you need the full one.
Youtube Premium is very expensive?
I would pay that 130€ / year if I was alone. I have to be responsible with the money I earn as I have to feed 3 kids and my wife is not working. We also use other different streaming services like netflix, spotify family... adding youtube premium seems not reasonable for me at the moment.
Commenting to share my experience: I ran into and ended up with youtube because it bundles youtube music as well, allowing me to consolidate. I was able to invite my household to the same account.
I also wanted to ensure my views resulted in the creators being paid, it goes without saying that the royalties for streaming are abysmal and is a separate conversation, but it was a contributing factor for me.
In the USA I subscribe to Youtube Premium family. The rate is just $3.00 a month more than Spotify family. For that price you get both the Spotify-equivalent Google-owned service (confusingly called YouTube Music) AND you get ad-free Youtube as a bundle. Basically just $3/month for no ads on Youtube is worth it and much easier to justify for a household on a tight budget.
It might be worth looking into if the pricing differential is similarly minimal where you live.
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
> An unfortunate aspect is that I’m frequently recommended videos which I would have to pay to watch.
That's older than the "membership" concept. They licensed a bunch of television and movies and made them pay-per-view.
Adding something that users don’t like but that makes the company money to those who are unwilling/unable to pay for it seems very reasonable.
In 2025 it's actually not that expensive. CDNs aggressively drive down the cost of streaming video.
A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates.
You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure.
Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,000 bill from your ISP because your content went viral but nowadays their value proposition is more about network effects plus built-in revshare scheme.
Youtube is $14/month. netflix is $17/month. That is VERY expensive, considering that most of Netflix's cost is production. Youtube has almost no production costs. Their users create content.
Maybe if they paid their users more, so they didn't also have to add 'sponsor segments' inside their video's it would make more sense. The bundling music for the same price is the same crap cable and phone companies have been doing for decades, that most people hate. Let me buy just youtube without ads, and keep spotify.
But as it sits right now, $14/month for video's without youtube ads, but still with ads added by the creators themselves (or paid promotion, I guess) is pretty expensive, compared to $17/month for actual movies with no ads at all.
YouTube gives, I think, 55% of revenue (not just profits) to creators, which could be considered similar to production costs making up a majority of expenses.
Just for comparison, Netflix in 2024 spent somewhere between $14B and $17B on content, and made $34B in revenue.
But Netflix doesn't let you upload your own videos and show them to anyone on earth. The businesses are different.
I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music a couple of years ago because of Spotify showing disruptive ads/promotions on the premium plan. YT Premium for Music + Videos is worth it for me, being about 2.5USD more expensive per month than Spotify where I live. But I agree that one should just be able to subscribe to them separately.
You're not wrong, but the amount of content on YouTube (that they need to index, store, and stream) is several orders of magnitude more than what's on Netflix.
And for that matter, the number of active viewers is also significantly higher since there's no paywall. AND they also support live streaming.
$14 is the average cost for a McDonald's trip. It's really not that much.
Assuming your numbers are correct, you’re ignoring all the rest of the infra
while ad blocking has grown in prevalence over the years, for something like youtube I'd figured it was more than counteracted by the shift to mobile / TV (where ad blocking is more complicated)
whatever the merits, this (and google's neutering of extensions in chrome) signals a fundamental attitude shift from ~10 years ago; they're more interested in squeezing margins out of their dominant platforms instead of growth
Firefox mobile has ublock origin
*not on iPhone
Use Orion. It supports FF and Chrome extensions on mobile and desktop
Ublock Origin still does not work on Orion mobile sadly.
Trying to watch a walled garden inside another walled ecosystem. No wonder that works how they want it and you can't simply do what you want
Yeah, it's true. iOS 9 Safari actually had the ability to play YouTube in the background without paying for that, and in iOS 10 they went out of their way to prevent it. And Apple signaled willingness to go along with WEI back when that was on the table.
I've seen several people argue about the quality of ads on YouTube. For me it's not about that. I've been using ad blockers for almost 15 years now. Youtube has been free AND ad free for me for a very long time. I don't want to be interrupted with ads now or ever regardless of their quality.
The point is, I'm making zero excuses about why I don't want to see ads on youtube. It's been that way and I want it to remain that way. No subscriptions and no ads. People watching yt on their phones and TVs will still see ads or pay for premium and they can support the service.
Fake buffering is much better than watching an ad, even if it were longer. Looking at a wait spinner probably is much better for the brain than some attention grabbing ad content.
youtube’s not reacting to adblockers, they’ve been planning for a post openweb model for years. this just lines up with that. killing adblock is one piece. the bigger shift is turning the site from a semiopen platform into something way more locked down limited playback, enforced UI, no 3rd party clients, all of that.
just track what they’ve stopped letting you do. there’s a pattern. they’re tightening every surface they used to ignore. because ig they're done pretending the open parts matter
Even as a uBlock and Firefox user, I get the occasional delay at the start of some videos. My workaround is to click on another random video (which, for some reason starts playing immediately), and then go back to my original video, and that starts playing straight away. No-mo waiting.
AI will kill youtube. You'd be able to watch youtube with like 20 seconds global delay while an AI will silently skip all the ads it finds.
It will be our personal content censor.
If YouTube's ads were like the TV ads of olden days, they might even be marginally tolerable. They're not however.
In my experience, they not only deliberately increase volume to pretty much screech whatever insipid bullshit is being offered at you, but they also can sometimes run for dozens of minutes unless you manually go to your device and press "skip". TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.
I even wonder how anything so fucking hostile and annoying to a YT free user can possibly be effective? Who's actively paying for all this garbage ad placement with such scummy little playback mechanics?
> TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.
Until the CALM Act was passed in 2010, networks actually did increase the volume on advertisements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...
Some did, some of the time. And many of us stopped watching those stations when it really kicked in back in the early 90s.
Didn't know about that, but unsurprising. At least they couldn't extend their length almost indefinitely too, unless you manually skipped.
It was around that time that I stopped watching cable television altogether.
If you want to back down memory lane, search on YouTube for old recordings of network TV ad breaks from the late 90s and early 2000s- they’re just obnoxious.
Yeah, I was reading this and thinking wut, TV sucks. Like half the time watching a show (most likely a rerun) is ads, even if it's a paid cable channel. And even after that 2010 law, pretty sure the ads are louder than the shows. And the ads are even worse nowadays because the ads exclusively target old people, so 90% are drugs or gold-buying scams. Somehow the cable STBs are super laggy nowadays too, like they rewrote the video decoder in Javascript or something, cause it used to be fine.
The only thing I miss at all is being able to leave a TV on and have it keep playing something reasonable, not convince itself that watching a car review means I want to watch a screaming kid trolling in Minecraft followed by the Syrian Civil War.
Live TV apps like Pluto scratch that last itch for me. Can put it on a movie channel or stargate reruns and just leave it alone.
>exclusively target old people, so 90% are drugs or gold-buying scams.
Haha, so then what if i'm young but want some shady gold investments while I look into trying Ambien?
Oh the gold buying ads come by mail, you only sell your gold on TV. I heard they pay even higher than market rate if you order some orbexlitol with it.
I also noticed fake buffering[0], it is disgusting but it seems like they are usually on their adblocker blocking spree for a few weeks and then they give up. Their goal is to annoy you not to unblock adblocker and watch ads but to make you buy YouTube Premium because they would earn more money from subscription than they would from you watching ads.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/v1YSWVM.png
I gave up and wrote a script to scrape the channels I like with yt-dlp into my Plex server.
That's a good idea for channels you know you like.
Discovery is always going to be an issue, but for those who want to get away from doomscrolling their life away for the algorithm-god, it’s a rather comfy way to enjoy content.
I haven't discovered anything on YT for a looong time, and now I also installed unhook, so I don't even see any recommends.
I gave up and paid for YouTube Premium. Probably a top-3 subscription that I’ll never cancel.
Having sailed the high seas since middle school I suppose it was only natural that I continue to build upon my multi-terabyte horde of movies, archived websites, books, music, and video games to include content from hobbyist HAM radio operators and long-form urban legend documentaries from YT channels.
What new feature of significance has YouTube actually delivered in years?
the topics at the top of the homepage, sorting comments by timestamp, the little card when you click on someone's profile picture with other comments on the same channel (which was only on mobile for a while), they improved auto captioning recently and are toying with dubbing, modern codecs… it's the little things that make it better
I do appreciate the auto captioning and codec fight. shakes fist at patent trolls
Could care less about the social bits. Comments have been filtered better but I will never trust their black box. With Enhanced YouTube extension I remove all of that so I can retain focus apart from the video at hand.
I pay for YouTube premium. Surely everyone here can too. This stuff isn’t free so either deal with ads or pay for premium
This stuff is freely available on the open web and I don't deal with ads or pay for premium because there's zero compelling reason to do so.
If creators have a problem with the revenue loss, their contract is with Google and they should take up those concerns with Google. If Google has a problem with how I consume their public content, they can make it non-public or try to block me in some other way.
I owe neither of those entities anything and until they either make the content non-public or find a way to block me without blocking others they want to see their content, I'll keep on consuming it how I like.
If adblock stopped working I would leave, which is interesting to me as I wonder what I'd do with my new time.
Funny I make YT videos too trying to build an audience, I'd like to not put ads on it but not my choice
I don't understand how people can just accept ads it drives me insane when some random shit starts playing
I already lost money with YT, I bought so many UHD movies on their platform ($20 ea) and they won't stream it in HD unless you're on a supported device or ad-ridden tv
edit: alright, aftrer seeing it's $13 I will get it, I have been converted
"I want free hosting and an audience but I don't want to pay for it"
Yeah I get if that's why I said it
I do pay for it, the time to make the content
Sucks how everything is like that nowadays, IG, Reddit
(have to join a platform to be seen)
You pay to make the content. You would have to "pay" to make the content no matter where you hosted it. You don't pay YouTube to host it. That's a silly argument.
You seem to ignore that you would probably have no audience - or have a significantly smaller audience - were it not for YouTube hosting your content. They are providing you a service, but you seem to think that nobody - not you, not your viewers - should have to trade anything for that service, despite the hosting and streaming of video being one of the most expensive possible tech services in the world (bar perhaps running genAI models.)
I dunno it's just very annoying how a lot of people have memed themselves into this train of thought where the big tech companies aren't actually providing them anything of value, when if they decided to suddenly stop providing their services they would be up a creek without a paddle.
Well, no one pushes YouTube to give free services right? Come on, make us pay for it! See what happens.
YouTube Premium has existed for years now... You're absolutely able to pay for an ad-free experience, and it provides more financial support to creators than ads do
That is a good point. But I usually pay through Patreon. I wonder which one is better, and if I can attribute YT premium to a specific author?
That's different though. Paying through Patreon is directly giving the creators a larger share, but neither party (you or the creator) pays for video hosting service in this transaction.
Your argument only makes sense if you watch the creator's videos exclusively on Patreon (paid by the cut they take from your transaction) or on a platform like Vimeo (paid directly by the creator for hosting). In which case, what Youtube does isn't relevant to you.
YT Premium revenue goes to the same creators you watch otherwise but they get compensated more for your views than they do for any other person's views.
e.g. Linus Tech Tips posted up their share of revenue from AdSense in 2024; YT Premium made up 37% of their revenue despite being 29% of their views.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeCP-0nuziE
Whether that makes a given creator more money versus Patreon depends on how much you watch them, frankly.
The existence of premium is not the same as parent poster’s, “make us pay for it” idea, aka a paywall.
If YouTube and its content actually has value, then presumably a paywall would have no effect of revenues of YouTube or creators. On the other hand if the content is actually nearly worthless, the vast majority of people would find something better to do with their time.
I know which outcome I’d be betting on!
the OP said "make us pay" not "give us the option to pay"
Until they make us pay, put the entire site behind a paywall or similar, I'll keep enjoying their public web content using my clients of choice, some of which modify the content in various ways for various reasons, entirely of my choosing.
> make us pay for it! See what happens
I pay for YouTube and Nebula.
That’s your choice and I respect that.
You can pay for Youtube and you won't get ads.
I thought you still got ads guess I'll find out
I'll compromise, I'll get premium but still have my adblock
you don't get ads from Youtube. the people you watch may still say sponsored stuff.
There are no ads on Premium.
Source: I have Premium and have adblock disabled on YouTube - no ads.
They are, aren't they?
> fake buffering is 80% of the length of the ads
I run Brave on multiple devices and there's now a "glitch" a few seconds after what wouod be the ads, starts. I put up with this because the alternative is to put up with ads that treat viewers like morons with one hand in the mouse and other in the wallet.
Another thing they are sometimes doing is failing to add videos that you watched with ad blocking on to your history.
That means if those videos show up in a search, or on your home page, or in a recommendation they do not have the red bar on the bottom that indicates that you have already watched them.
Mostly stolen from elsewhere:
> ! Remove "This video contains paid content" warning
Why?
Not sure if it's the same one, but I managed to consistently click the "includes paid promotion" banner on video thumbnails so I open a tab with the help page explaining what sponsorships are instead of the video.
> Why?
I didn't write the filter, hence, "Mostly stolen from elsewhere."
Is this something to put in host file? What is this
These are filters for uBlock Origin.
ublock-origin, open dashboard > "my filters" list
perhaps filter rules for uBlock Origin
uBlock filters
So you buy premium - now you don't have ads from YouTube anymore. But now YouTubers such as LinusTechTips and who else not want monthly payments for their exclusive content. Yea, that's not going to work. Now your watchers don't watch your content.
That's a self correcting situation. If LTT sees a huge drop in their views/subscribers, they'll correct the situation.
.. or a competitor (who's a competitor to LTT? GamerNexus? MKBHD?) would take their place.
Please don't associate actual journalists GamersNexus with those hucksters.
Admittedly don't watch LTT because basically the content is the advertisement. Maybe it's changed.
It’s crazy to ram as they did a revenue breakdown recently and the sponser segments was way tinier than I expected - like 10% or in that range. I was annoyed just knowing they shit on their videos just for that tiny profit boost.
Oh just get the screwdriver already, will you?! :)
LTT does have some interesting videos, but yeah, most of their output is full of ads.
Floatplane is doing well according to the WAN show.
Wonder if people will start moving away from the YT frontend to other apps like Grayjay.
If I cant watch Youtube without ads, then I just wont watch it at all.
Perfectly fair. It's not like YouTube is some free open source platform. Infra needs to be paid, creators need to be paid, they have a whole eco-system. Why not just pay for premium if you use it that much?
What's the actual % of people using ad blockers anyways? I feel it cant even be near double digits.
I'd pay for it if youtube was worth it (it's not)
As a young person, I get perfectly normal corporate advertisements on YT, with the very rare porno dating ad. My parents on the other hand, get a never ending stream of the shittiest scams, AI voiceovers of Joe Rogan and Zelensky, dick pills. It's clear their tracking targets elderly users with scams. I would never pay for YT premium.
Curious -- why adblocks like uBlock Origin are not very effective at streaming services like Netflix/Hulu (at least the last time I tried)?
Off topic, but I must praise the simple, no-nonsense, readable design of the linked post, and how it loads instantly. Kudos.
I downloaded some free songs back in the Napster days but now I happily pay for or watch ads for any content that I consume. I have zero interest in ad blockers / other tricks as I want the content creators to get compensated.
I have to wonder whether they are tracking changes in consumer confidence. Subjectively, I have noticed a significant drop in confidence from my peers. I do not know whether my experience generalizes, but if it does, they are playing with fire.
I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too) and am happy with the lack of ads, even though many creators still mix paid sponsors into their videos. It seems the creators are motivated to keep things minimal or they will lose engagement.
What I am not happy with is a lack of control over the homepage and recommendations. I would really like to be able to easily block channels from ever showing up, but you can only sort of do this if you click "don't recommend this channel anymore" from the homepage. But you can't do this if a video shows up recommended from another video. And overall, it just feels like they are spending so much effort trying to get me to watch the next video instead of enjoy the one I am trying to watch.
For my kids, I came up with an ad hoc policy where they can watch from the homepage / recs on weekends but during the week have to stick to a personal playlist they can only add videos to on the weekends. This removes the algorithmically driven addictive nature of YouTube and unsurprisingly they end up moderating their use of Youtube within their alotted screen time much better. It distinguishes between, "I want to watch this" and "I want to pull the slot machine lever." But I would be a lot happier if I could better curate access to content for my kids too. Youtube Kids sucks, it ends up filtering out a bunch of interesting stuff like carpentry and nature content that hasn't been marked "for kids" in favor of videos of kids shopping for toys and stuff.
The "don't show this channel" feature also feels like there is some kind of expiry because I've blocked a few channels multiple times now via that method.
Totally a theory but sometimes YouTube has a button that says roughly "show me something new". I think that may be the source of those channels returning.
Agreed. I've told YT about a thousand times I have zero friggin interest in YouTube Shorts and lo and behold a few weeks later they guiltily try to sneak back into the home page.
> I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too)
I'm curious about a buyer's perspective: would you say this is "tying"? (Seems like an ambiguous word for it but I can see no other translation for koppelverkoop)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
To me it seems like trying to undermine the market for music streaming (which is currently somewhat healthy with a handful of competing services worldwide where you can get access to most artists' work) by abusing the monopoly on videos that people often want a subscription on. The parent corp has so much cash to spare, giving away music for nearly free is worth it to make it extremely difficult to compete in this other market. From an individual's point of view, you're a thief of your own wallet if you don't get this two in one deal (assuming you want both). I'm not sure how to feel about people who buy this
Don't consume YT content on YT. That's the secret.
The number of ads they run reminds me of the good old days where half of the TV show time was commercials.
Are you mostly watching short videos? I mostly watch videos that are 10+ minutes and I've never had YouTube come anywhere near either the number or total length of ads that I saw on cable or that I see on broadcast TV.
When was that? I'm genuinely asking, since I remember the breakdown from when I was recording TV to my computer and editing out the commercials, as 10 minutes of commercials and 20 minutes of TV show.
Absurd but true in a similar way: I get a tiny spark of nostalgia on those occasions where a bit of sponsored promotion pops into part of some podcast i'm listening to as a YT video while I do chores. (Ublock running, so no third party ads at least)
The thing about those idiotic third party ads on YouTube, which is so grotesquely annoying is that, unlike TV ads of old, some of then can literally run for dozens of minutes at auto-increased volume unless you go to your device and skip them at some point. That is some particularly shitty nonsense right there.
It's worse, because at least cable commercials can be skipped.
Cable commercials can be skipped?
Since DVRs, which we've had since 1999.
They can advertise to me all day and I wouldn't buy a thing
The point of most ads isn't to get you to buy things. Most ads just want you to think of the product and be aware it exists. Their objective is to slowly hijack your brain.
If you know what "it gives you wings" or "the happiest place on earth" means, the ads already worked.
Ads are trying to combat obscurity. A brand with bad reputation is far better than a brand nobody's ever heard of.
Yep. And I kinda hate Grammerly now. Whatever it is.
I have every right to try to block YouTube ads and YouTube has every right to try to defeat whatever I do.
Problem is Google also controls what used to be called "user agent".
No they do not have that right. They do not have the right to try to circumvent what I'm telling my browser to do. If they don't like what it's doing, they can block me from the platform.
And they too, to try to stop people using their platform from doing so.
I'm curious, has someone tried the authenticated Youtube Premium API in third-party clients?
I'd love to use Invidious or Peertube to watch the videos, but I also want my subscription money to go to the video creators. Youtube allocates it proportionally to the viewing time.
I don’t use youtube anymore. I’m not paying them for slop content they don’t even produce. I’m not watching slop ads.
I was watching hours every day, and I don’t even miss it. There’s so much content to watch on streaming platforms that I can never run out.
Youtube will not win this battle.
Yep, they need viewers to click the like/subscribe button. They need that so content creators keep on providing content to Google for free in exchange for popularity metrics. Which they need to close sponsorship deals (because Google isn't paying them a whole lot).
So, Google is merely optimizing the ad clicks and impressions here. If they succeed in becoming too obnoxious with their ads, viewers might leave for other platforms, and then content creators would follow. So, fighting ad blocking has diminishing returns and can actually have a negative impact on them. Which is why ad blocking is still effective in 2025 and why Youtube has thrived by being not too effective with their anti ad blocking measures. This is more about selling the notion to advertisers that they are a really good advertising platform than it is about fighting the minority of users who block their ads no matter what. It won't work. But it won't matter as long as advertisers keep on paying for advertising on Youtube.
The irony of their latest efforts is that it is driving away users from Chrome to more effective alternatives (Firefox, Brave, etc.) and it's driving content creators to depend on sponsor ship deals instead of advertising money from Google. The only reason Chrome exists is actually ads. So, more effective counter measures against ad blocking in Chrome could end up hurting their ad revenue. And Google's behavior is actually causing for increasingly stronger calls to break up Google. None of that is good for Google and their advertising revenue.
Before YouTube loses, blocking ads will be criminalized.
Capitalism always wins
I mean most adblocking software is open source and easily acquired, a lot like torrenting software it’d be near impossible to actually enforce anything.
Criminalized where?
Not everyone is American.
Ransomware doesn't have to be illegal in North Korea to convict a North Korean who did it, either in absence or with extradition, in the country where the damage was done
With Alphabet being from a country with extreme capitalism, the comment you're replying to seems applicable no matter where the viewers are (regardless of whether I agree with their viewpoint/outlook). YouTube's owners can choose to block or prosecute whoever doesn't comply with their terms. Not saying that's likely, just that: this isn't a matter of needing to be on the American continent
Edit: perhaps interesting to realise that, conversely, laws in North Korea might make it illegal for Alphabet to have certain terms if they want to serve consumers in their market. (A better example here would be EU with copyright legislation that makes it illegal to sign away your moral rights, for instance.) It works both ways and both could legally prosecute the other at the same time and both win in their area! But with YouTube being able to gatekeep the content here, one has more power than the other..
meanwhile 40m seems to be the new 10:07
videos getting more bloated, recycling the same crap with 90% filler. just like google blog spam.
and tell me how much are your shitty ads worth without anyone to watch them?
YOUTUBE is getting F_CKED!!
Related:
Google is intentionally throttling YouTube, slowing down users with ad blockers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304293
Thinking YouTube should be free is ridiculous. Pay for a subscription or deal with ads. This discussion is so fucking stale.
If they ran less hostile ads, people wouldn't be as hostile to watching their ads. Some of the ads they run are just ridiculous and awful. Ads for scams, soft-core porn ads, just the worst of the worst.
Where are you located? I've never seen any of those.
Pretty much all of my YouTube ads are for TV shows, movies, cars, mobile games, consumer products, and various consumer services. Volkswagen, Dove, TurboTax, etc. All incredibly mainstream.
Maybe you're located in a country or region maintain advertisers avoid?
In Germany, they keep showing me Israeli propaganda ads. Couldn’t imagine a better adblock reminder myself.
Subtle Godwin’s law
I don’t get soft core porn ads but I do scams all the time. Bullshit supplements, pyramid schemes, “buy my program to make money” type things. Otherwise it’s mostly political ads, more legitimate consumer products like dishwasher detergent, gambling, and mobile games. NE USA for reference
Personally, for my own value system, I consider the gambling ads to be as bad as scam ads. I think we'll soon come to see the social harm of gambling ads to be as bad as tobacco ads. We should strive for a culture where people see an ad for addictive services or substances and feel an instinctive, pre-conscious disgust. They are the dirty, disgusting, bloodsucking bedbugs of society.
I agree and feel it is a reflection on social decline. While I don’t think prohibition it the way forward it is unsettling that we tolerate this as a society. Would we tolerate youtube advertising for heroin or even recreational marijuana? We certainly don’t for tobacco and we probably shouldn’t for alcohol.
I work in mental health and I am seeing more people who spend a substantial amount on “parlays”. Many examples downplay or hide the behavior from their social network and the extreme examples spend a significant amount. The advertising is obviously predatory and goes against what we know about control dynamics in addict behavior but we tend to view that as a personal moral failing rather than exploiting basic biology and as a result allow the dealer to ruin countless lives before any action is taken (see Purdue and Teva lawsuits)
I get all the ads you mention but I have also gotten the deepfake crypto scam ads. Youtube doesn't discriminate as long as the check clears.
I'm in America. I only see these scummy ads I talk about, and I assume it's because I'm extremely aggressive about preventing myself from being tracked and profiled. My friends made the horrible mistake of looking into cryptocurrency on Google while signed into their account, so they got targeted by scum crypto ads.
It sounds like you've explicitly opted yourself into the lowest common denominator ads. It's understandable that mainstream companies want to maximize their advertising impact by only targeting the viewers where there is data to suggest the viewers will actually be interested in their products.
I'm honestly not really sure why you're complaining. If you don't want to be tracked or profiled, you're going to get the lowest quality ads. Why do you think higher-quality advertisers should be wasting money trying to reach you, when you are going out of your way to avoid any interest in them?
To be clear, I'm not criticizing what you're doing to avoid tracking, or your stance against it. But I'm questioning why you would then complain about the ads you receive.
I'm not complaining that higher-quality advertisers aren't spending money trying to reach me. I'm saying the fact that the lowest common denominator ads are so hostile is reason enough to completely avoid them.
This might be a controversial take, but I don't want to see soft-core porn ads. I don't want to see scam ads. I don't want to see the worst of the worst. It is not a necessary state of affairs that the lowest common denominator ads are ads that are explicitly attempting to prey upon the least informed, most vulnerable members of society.
The fact that the worst ads are the way that they are is indicative of YouTube's willingness to engage in user-hostile activities.
If they were less willing to engage in hostile ads, there would be less hostility towards their ads.
YouTube's solution is extremely simple: vet ads and don't accept money to run hostile ads.
> is reason enough to completely avoid them.
Right, then avoid them. Either don't use YouTube, or else pay for Premium so you don't see them.
You claim people are hostile to watching YouTube's ads because of their quality. But I don't think so -- I think they're mostly seeing normal ads, not scammy ones. Because they're not taking measures against tracking. Your experience would seem to be very much an outlier.
I simply don't see the ads you're talking about, not even a little bit, so I can't really speak to YouTube's acceptable ads policies. But just so you know -- you can also mark checkboxes in your Google profile around which categories of ads you are and aren't interested in. I actually did that, and got less ads for categories I have zero interest in. That may help your ads experience, and make your ad quality complaints go away, if you're philosophically OK with that, since you're providing data freely rather than through tracking.
No, I'm going to continue watching YouTube while also avoiding their ads. If they want to engage in an adversarial relationship then I will as well. Until there's another competitor in the space that provides the same value, I will just take value from the only game in town. They don't owe me their service, but I also don't owe a bad faith monopolist anything. I do pay for premium, and I also block all of their analytics and ads at the network level.
EDIT: also, I think everyone should block ads. We should snub advertisers and surveillers all of the time. If they want to be hostile towards users, users should be hostile towards them.
Capitalists have had it too good for too long. It's time consumers stop caring about how the poor capitalist will make their dime.
Until the capitalists take the time to respect us, the consumers, we don't owe them anything.
It's time for reciprocity. If they're hostile, we reciprocate. If they're cooperative, we reciprocate.
> I do pay for premium
You pay for Premium?
Then why are you complaining about ads when you don't even see them?
And why are you talking about being hostile to a company when you pay them every month?
I'm even more confused than before.
giving them $13/month is not being hostile to them, it’s being a long term customer. they have exactly the relationship they want with you, minus your adblocking. i too pay for premium, run a pihole and use ubo. i pay for premium because the company sells a quality product at a good price and adfree. sponsor segments is another thing, but solveable. i also use sponsorblock and have a docker setup to autoskip segments on devices connected to my wifi. but out of all streaming services out there, yt actually seems like the least vampiric.
Weird way to blame the victim and not the organization pushing scams on people. I vaguely recall that 20 years ago, Google served things like nonprofit or government PSAs when they didn't know what to serve (or thought you were botting), not financial scams.
Speaking of PSAs, the US federal government issued a PSA a couple years ago recommending use of an ad blocker to avoid becoming a victim of financial scams/fraud (purged now for some reason). Why they don't prosecute the ad companies for being the ones to select and deliver the mark is anyone's guess.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221221123349/https://www.ic3.g...
Victim blaming much?
Maybe they just want you to buy Premium and get rid of ads altogether. I think it's really good value now, especially the family plan, if you use YouTube heavily, like my kids do.
All my ads are local brands, supermarkets, sport stores and delivery apps. Never seen any had ads, they are annoying but nothing abnormal.
I don't get such nasty ads, but the ones I get are extremely repetitive. I see the same 3 ads all the time: one for a car, one for a bank, one for clothes.
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.
I pay for YouTube Premium, but what I am afraid will happen is that once enough users opt to pay for the service, YouTube may pull an Amazon Prime and show ads, and then ask for more money to not see the ads.
Same. But I'll certainly enjoy it while it lasts.
Well, I don't particularly enjoy ads on Reddit, Gmail, and, when I used them, Tiktok, Facebook, etc but I wasn't particularly pissed off by them either. On YT it seems just so in your way and in your face and egregious. It's like every couple minutes there's an other ad. You can't even chromecast videos to your tv to play in the background because you have to constantly babysit it or else it will load up an ad that goes on forever or 10 minutes until you come back to skip it.
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.
They offer a cheaper version that isn't bundled with Youtube Music, but then you get ads on official music uploads since I guess that's how the licensing works out. https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite
Premium Lite has ads, just less. Currently, it's
> Ads however may appear on music content, Shorts, and when you search or browse.
- https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/15968883?hl=en
Not available (anymore) in many 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.
I don't think it's a rationalization. I have two normie friends who were mostly fine seeing ads on the internet, until one night they saw one too many scum ads on YouTube. They asked me to help them install an adblocker. It was specifically the scumminess of these ads that got them to start using adblockers, which by the way the FBI recommends as a matter of course. People should buy YouTube premium for the convenience features it offers, but everyone should be blocking ads for their own safety and sanity. There is no reason to engage in the ad economy. Everyone should be blocking all ads.
Even google can't keep malware ads out of their system. If we say have geek squad remove the malware, its $149.99, all because google wanted to show me a $0.0001 value ad. No thanks.
You underestimate your attention's value by two orders of magnitude. A typical YouTube ad impression cost is about half a cent or so, sometimes several cents. We're talking serious business here!
why would you pay geeksquad to run some programs
Yeah, I find instagram ads not that annoying, and they actually promote things I would buy (I've bought a couple of things over the years through their ads).
Youtube/google ads? Never bought anything, automatically assume they are a scam.
Dang it
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Discord recently started using a fake loading screen if you have an ad blocker enabled. What’s hilarious (and a little infuriating) is that the app is still obviously working under the hood — you can literally see masked text updating in real time when people send you messages. It’s not “loading,” it’s just refusing to render content locally. They’re not even blocking access to the service — they’re just trying to frustrate you into disabling your ad blocker without explicitly saying that’s what they’re doing. Classic dark pattern.
What’s worse is the privacy side. Discord apparently leaves the microphone open even when you’re using push-to-talk. There’s been anecdotal evidence from users monitoring their network traffic that mic input is still active in the background, likely being piped to local buffers or held in memory under the guise of latency reduction. That might sound innocent, but the distinction between “open but not recording” and “recording” is razor thin when the user has explicitly told the app not to listen until a key is pressed. At minimum, it’s a trust violation — at worst, it’s surveillance theater.
This is the standard bait-and-switch. Build a good product, earn user trust, then slowly degrade it with tracking, telemetry, ads, and manipulative UX until it’s barely recognizable. Discord used to be a breath of fresh air compared to Skype or Teamspeak, and now it’s another data-harvesting machine with a gamer paint job. It’s telling that more users are looking into self-hosted options or jumping to alternatives like Matrix or Mumble. Discord doesn’t have ads yet, but all the groundwork is being laid — and people are right to be wary.
YouTube Premium costs about the same as 2 cold brew coffees and is worth the money.
Yeah, I will unabashedly shill for YouTube Premium. It’s cheap, it pays video creators more than ads do, and it includes YouTube Music so you can ditch Spotify.
It's by far the best value of any of the streaming media services.
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.
Whole bean is the same price
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?
People make the videos, and then sometimes youtube pays them for it.
People make videos because there is a platform which makes it incredibly easy to share that video all across the planet without cost to them. And in turn that platform has an enormous base of viewers for that content. To suggest that a world without YouTube (or a similar service) would look the same is ludicrous.
I assume with the same amount of magic as they do at all the other streaming platforms, but they still manage to serve up original content. Hence, as a consumer, this seems like a shoddy deal. You're basically paying for ad-free slop, which by the way like Amazon these days you have to crawl through an entire mountain of because the site barely has any content management features either
We're comparing two different companies here. Netflix et al, are in the business of producing original content (good for them), while YouTube et al are in the business of serving user-generated content.
That's not a bug, but a feature. Its the same difference as a high end restaurant, and a hole in the wall restaurant. Both are serving food, yes, but they are doing business in different categories. You cant go to the second restaurant and be like, the food you served didn't come with a smile like this other restaurant here. They seem to have figured it out, why cant you.
Or similarly, you cant go to the high end restaurant and be like - you charge for water now? Why cant you be like this other hole-in-the-wall restaurant.
the entire point is that in this analogy youtube is quite literally the mega chain self serving restaurant on the most decrepit corner, somehow charging you premium prices despite you having to refill your own water.
They're curating nothing, there's garbage everywhere and you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
> you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
Then dont go to the restaurant if the "hygiene" is not upto your standards? Why do you insist on eating food from that resturant, and insist that it needs to be free?
Netflix costs around double of Youtube Premium for the technical equivalent experience (No ads, UHD playback). It's not like they're charging the same amount for some much better service.
It's interesting to see such different experiences.
To me, YouTube is the gateway to those wonderful hole-in-the-wall places where you get real food made from scratch by people who care. Yeah, there's also a ton of shit. You have to actually make choices, not just take whatever it puts at the top of your recommendations. But the good stuff is there, and it's really good. A gigantic corporation may be intermediating, but the content is real stuff from real people.
Services like Netflix are the soulless mega-chain restaurants serving committee-designed meals that have been focus-grouped and cost-optimized to death.
there are an absurd amount of different takes on it, its pretty crazy. I probably focus too much on the bad content, meant to grab attention. For that reason i have a distaste for youtube because it sorta pushes that type of stuff to the top, which in my mind makes more people make similar cash grab type content.
meanwhile youtube is actively attempting to keep user's viewing as long as possible... netflix probably doesnt really care if you watch for 2 hours a week vs 10 hours a day, they just want the monthly payment.
I might be convinced here, I was under the impression that even after you bought premium you would still see ads
I don’t care what they pay to create content. I care about how much stuff they have that I want to watch. YouTube knocks this out of the park. Netflix fails. I actually have Netflix for free (with some ads) through my cell phone plan and I haven’t used it in a year. I use YouTube daily and the subscription fee is well worth it to remove the ads.
Still has a nefarious algorithm.
And tracking.
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)
I don't necessarily disagree but it's not a Google problem. It's a human problem.
For example: What value does your comment provide the world? Enough value to offset the carbon emissions from transmission/storage/retrieval/display? Personally, I'd answer no. Thus your comment itself is a waste of energy.
Reframing a problem with anything as a human problem is a tautology - why even go out of your way to write?
Only pointing it out because of the irony given the content of your post
Otherwise yeah, don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say
> Reframing a problem with anything as a human problem is a tautology
I respectfully disagree.
> don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say
They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy. I shared my "tautology" to illustrate while OP's point may be largely correct, greed is not unique to Google.
>They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy.
More then that, sure they show you ads, GREAT but they screw your device and environment, this makes them no money , a small fraction of users might buy premium but the rest of the users will waste energy and bdevice life, the developers contribute to killing devices and wasting energy.
That is the user's choice. If a user comes to a bookshop wherein they are allowed to read the books for free but only in the store, they have little right to argue that they should be allowed to take the books home like paying customers because the store's lighting is not to their liking and they want to read in 6000K. They are free to picket outside and claim that the store is ruining people's eyesight, but no one sane will take them seriously.
Furthermore, the appropriate solution to this "problem" would be to stop letting people read anything for free.
Can you guess how much is my comment energy usage compares versus all the devices that run YouTube with the screen on?
What about those electronic devices that will end their life sooner because of that?
My hope is that other people will read my comment, add their own support or feedback and maybe at least one single person will think mroe and had the morals to refuse implementing anti environment and anti user features.
How else would you propose they make money (and satisfy contract obligations)? Because nobody else has figured out a better solution.
it’s funny that you bring up contractual obligations while google ignores the iOS app store rule (contractual obligation) about locking features like PiP behind paywalls.
>How else would you propose they make money (and satisfy contract obligations)? Because nobody else has figured out a better solution.
Do they make money from those millions of devices that run with the screen on? How ? Is some devil paying them for the damage caused to the environment?
For ads it makes sense but not for this shit policy, if they hate the users that they use youtube for free and ads are not enough for them then either put more ads, or find some other methods that do not screw then environment (maybe use the sound of crying babies each 30 seconds if you are not a premium )
For babies crying I just come to the YT premium threads on HN.
What if people just paid for services they use and depend on frequently
I don't want to use it. I only view because others exclusively host content there.
If people hosted video elsewhere, I would gladly never visit youtube again.
Creators are not going to start paying for uploads when they can push their costs to the viewers.
Why do you think the creators you like exclusively host content on YouTube?
That's not difficult to answer, it's because it's free / they get paid.
.. and that's YT's problem? This is like being angry with Apple, because an app developer created only an iOS app and didnt create an Android. What did Apple do wrong if a developer chose to only create an iOS app?
YouTube is the system, you've not heard of "don't hate the player, hate the game"?
If I "blamed" the creators, you'd be telling me it's not their fault, they're just incentivised by the system, they're just playing the game.
But when I "blame" the system, you're telling me the system is not at fault, that it's individual choice to choose a near-monopoly on video discoverability that is propelled by and heavily benefiting from the same company's actual monopoly of search.
Is it "YT's problem?"? No, it's to YT's massive benefit, it's my problem when I have to suffer through adverts.
> YouTube is the system
But isnt YouTube a mere player in the game as well?
Alphabet is the fifth largest company in the world, has earnings higher than most countries' GDP, and is established to have engaged in illegal behavior as a monopolist. It's fair to say they're closer to "the system" than "a player".
Not that this was part of the suit, but the whole practice of giving things away for free and subsidizing them with stalking and ads obviously distorts or completely destroys markets, so yes they can be blamed for doing that. The behavior of these companies is so bad that people in a recent thread were claiming things like chat services (where a single computer can provide service for millions of users) cannot be sustainably run by charging money.
I think viewing YouTube in that manner would be a nihilist point of view.
I can't think of an adjective less suitable for Alphabet/Google/YouTube than "mere".
There's a long tail of people who don't use YouTube frequently but click play on videos embedded on other sites, or on videos linked.
So of course they're never going to pay. That's the problem advertising solves -- infrequent users can be monetized.
YouTube already has an option to pay to avoid ads, for frequent users. And lots of people subscribe to it.
If people were just paid for services that used them and manipulate them with tracking and behaviour profiles
I've always paid for cable without complaining, but the adtech surveillance reality that was innovated by the tech industry makes me less willing to support them.
The only reason people use YouTube is because it has had a de facto monopoly on video distribution for the last 15 years.
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?
Google analytics tracking is embedded in probably millions of non-Google websites, and YouTube videos get embedded in all sorts of pages.
Arent websites voluntarily embedding Google Analytics? They can decide today, if they wanna switch to Plausible, or any of the other analytics providers right?
I still fail to understand how this is a fault of a company? Would you blame Apple if everyone bought iPhones? What should Apple do? Ask people not to buy their phones?
If airtags were used almost solely to nonconsensually and surreptitiously stalk people (i.e. not to track the belongings of the people buying them), yes I think it would be fair to blame Apple. Especially if that were the advertised purpose, as it is with GA.
Google Analytics is a tool that websites use to track users, similar to how a store might use a pen & paper to keep track of phone numbers or names. The store made the decision to buy the pen to track users. Why are you angry with the pen company?
Google Analytics is not going around tracking users. They provide a service that the website you decided to go to (cnn.com, bbc.com) is using. If you have to be angry, be angry with cnn or bbc.
Pens have a purpose other than surveillance, and aren't as capable as machines. A better analogy would be Bluetooth trackers and cameras with machine vision to identify and watch people's movements and eye gaze as they move around the store. And yes, that is creepy and the manufacturers should be criticized for creating it.
Also, client side scripts do not run on the website's property. They are taking advantage of the wide-open security model of web clients (the model they coincidentally get to define because they dump massive amounts of money into giving away a free browser, making competition in the space nearly impossible) to use people's computers for unauthorized purposes. It's a malware payload just like a crypto miner. They should be treated the same way (or more severely) that they would be if they published miners and told web developers to add them to get free money (taking their own cut of course). The operator and the tool creator should both be blamed for shady behavior when the tool is designed and advertised for shady purposes.
> manufacturers should be criticized for creating it.
Manufacturers make things when there's a market. If Google didnt build Google Analytics, someone else would (Maybe Microsoft, or Apple) because the demand exists.
It's the fault of the company because they leverage their illegal monopoly position to do this.
You're operating under this unrealistic assumption that Google is an innocent entity that has not broken the law to get to the position that they are in.
This is false. Google does not play by the rules and as such your assertion that people should in turn play by the rules when interacting with Google is unreasonable.
I dont follow your logic. The website you visit (cnn, bbc) has made the decision to use Google Analytics. They can very well stop using the GA, and nothing would happen.
Imagine all the restaurants in the world used IKEA for their tables & chairs. Can you say OMG IKEA has a monopoly? No sir, IKEA didnt go into the stores and install the tables & chairs, the restuarants did. Will you be angry with IKEA?
I would imagine that those sites use GA because it's the best tool for their needs. It's probably the best tool for their needs because it is both a very well developed tool with superior integration with other parts of their platforms and has a large developer base that is familiar with it. These advantages come from Google's monopolistic practices and the money and resources that it provides them.
I can certainly imagine such a thing but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the situation as IKEA has as far as I'm aware never been ruled to be a monopoly while Google has.[0]
Ultimately my position on this subject comes down to this: Google does things that are hostile to me. They do things that are hostile to you. They do things that are hostile to society writ large. They break the law and violate the social contract. My morals necessitate responding to such an entity with disregard for whatever they're legally entitled to.
I don't like the way that I'm surveilled by Google and I don't like the way that they abuse their monopoly position and lobby the government to make it impossible for me to evade that surveillance.
To bring the conversation back to where it started: I already pay them with my privacy, I pay for the economic harm their monopolistic practices have on society, and I pay for the corrosive effects their lobbying has on the political structure.
I'm not going to be paying them for an ad free Youtube experience.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/05/business/google-loses-antitru...
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"We are working hard to make your life miserable"
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> checks notes
This is obnoxious.
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I've come to rely on a robust method of adblocking YouTube which I believe to be perfectly reliable and impossible for YouTube to circumvent: avoid watching YouTube. Incidentally this method also reliably prevents false buffering.
I’m not gonna buy your stupid hoodie. Stop shaming me into feeling I’m not a man because I don’t have one. Absolute trash.
And the arms race continues.