1y ago

Youtube ads finally got me

Looks like its over for me and youtube. Being told I cant watch because of an ad blocker.

Where is everyone moving to and using instead of youtube? I will just move to the same place.

103 comments

ublock origin is still one step ahead of them (at least on firefox) but you may need to go into the extension settings and purge then update all your filter lists. The copy of Invidious I installed on my NAS is even more steps ahead.
- ublock origin is still one step ahead of them (at least on firefox) but you may need to go into the extension settings and purge then update all your filter lists.
  Specific instructions can be found here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/6089078
- The copy of Invidious I installed on my NAS is even more steps ahead.
  I too have an NAS that runs Docker and have been looking for things to run on it. Container++! :D
  
  It's handy. The main downside, since I'm the only person watching videos on the instance, is that my popular tab and subscription tabs are the same videos in a different order. So there's not much of a chance for discovering new channels.
- invidious is the way. You don't need to self host it:
  https://docs.invidious.io/instances/

NewPipe doesn't show ads.
- Just googled this also but similar issue to freetube? Just an app to the same service if I understand correctly?
  
  If the people you watch only upload to YouTube, how would they be available on other services?
  
  Not quite - NewPipe is a YouTube client as well. It's just that it also support PeerTube (a decentralised video hosting solution).
  For YouTube, NewPipe is an ~~anonymous~~ account-free, ad-blocking client. You can import your current YouTube subscriptions using a Google Takeout dump (the NewPipe app gives you instructions) and you can add more channel subs directly in the app.
  The benefits are no YouTube ads, and it's privacy-friendly but with channel subs - you're escaping the algorithm. To get the benefit of subs on YouTube directly, you need to login, which means they're mining your video watching data and using it to target you (and possibly sell that data to others).

ReVanced for youtube. This links to a Lemmy post of how to install. It also has a FAQ page if interested
- Seconded. I'm about 9 months into revanced after vanced got shut down and its virtually identical. 15 min install with easy step by step guides to enjoy the good youtube has to offer without all the shit.
  Also you can add or remove features you like/dislike which is a big benefit.
- Is there something similar for iOS?
  
  I would have no clue. I would imagine if you wanted to do anything like revances on iOS you would need to start with a jailbreak first then maybe a sideload?

Ok, if I remember correctly, YouTube barely generates, but generates nonetheless revenue for Google. There are many ways to make more money without fucking over its users by cutting costs:
downgrade old videos with small watch count to 720p30
make people pay for hosting >1080p60 content
do not allow private/unlisted videos
straight up remove 10h looped videos - they take so much space, but are technically spam - both for bandwidth and storage
And my go-to solution: focus on sponsorships as main source of revenue. They are the only ads I can tolerate and are actually effective from my experience. YouTube can just take a cut from every sponsorship on YouTube video and everyone will be happy.
- Sponsorblock addon is a must for me nowadays

The old business model could not last forever… and even if it could it was not good for anyone.
Think about it
Hosting videos is expensive, someone has to pay for it. It was mostly paid by ads. Ads which many (most people) would block and many people would not ever click even when not blocked. But it still made money… The money come only from ads which 1) where not blocked 2) where at least clicked. The business relied on that.
So YT relied on ads targeting people who did not know how to block ads and people easy to manipulate by the ads (eager to buy whatever they are trying to sell). Probably not the brightest. Or just easy to be taken advantage of. So the incentive would be to promote content for those people. Not good content, not true content, just content that makes ads viewed and clicked.
People using ad-blocks were still affected by those who do not. And whole site was optimized for advertises not viewers or content creators. And that is bad.
I am all in favour of any direct form of payments instead of ads powering the internet. Sites get very little money for each view anyway – so the prices for users should also be quite small.
Unfortunately as long as ads are supposed to be normal part of internet, they may get forced even onto paying customers. We need regulations.
- People were okay with ads, then YouTube started making them obnoxious. Ads every 2 minutes, postroll ads that interfere with autoplay, incredibly long "ads" which mean you need to watch YouTube like a hawk to make sure your 5 minute video hasn't been interrupted by an hour long ad you need to manually skip.
  There's a balance that people need to be happy with a service, and if the service doesn't provide that then people will use things like adblockers to get it themselves. It's the same thing that happened with the first "adpocalypse" that brought about most of the big name adblockers in the first place: people were okay with unobtrusive ads, then advertisers started running popups, overlays, autoplay videos, fake system notifications, on and on and on. The advertising became so disruptive people were unable to use sites without adblockers. And so the cycle repeats.
  YouTube brought this on themselves.
  
  This is my problem with YouTube’s ads. If it was a 5-15 second video ad at the beginning/between videos, plus a banner ad or ads on the side/page, that could be sufferable. But constantly interrupting videos at random points for long ass ads does not mesh well with a short-video platform.
  And I also enjoy reminding people whenever I get the chance that the FBI recommends using an adblocker for security/safety reasons: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221
- I wouldn't mind paying a little bit of money every month to get YouTube ad free. However, it costs €12 a month. That's a lot of money if you only care about getting rid of ads. I personally don't need the other features (downloading videos, background play and YouTube music). If they added a 5 to 7 euro a month tier through which you could get rid of ads then that would be much more interesting to me. Now I just feel like I should keep looking for ways around their pop up shenanigans.
  
  That's really expensive, I pay around €7 for the family plan and I live in the EU.
- lol, every one of these threads has a highly upvoted corporate shill comment.
  And it's virtually guaranteed that this comment will be replied to in a paternalistic, condescending manner by a for-real-actual-lemmy-user who is only spouting Google's talking points because they realize how hard and expensive it is to host a video website you guys.
  YouTube pays five-year-old "influencers" millions of dollars. Obviously this is because it is losing money which is your fault for using an adblocker. 🙄
  
  I'm not sure the comment calling for regulation is a corporate shill. It's a pretty level-headed look at things imo, because the truth is YT cannot afford to operate for free. We live in a system that just doesn't allow that, for better or worse. Unfortunately, the way we went about funding things on the internet (outside of ridiculous amounts of capital flowing to startups for years, which doesn't really apply to YT/Google) was ads, and they have gotten wildly out of hand. This is on top of an insane amount of data harvesting. We have to face the reality that any major, data-heavy platform like YT is going to need significant revenue.
  We need a solution to either lower the cost of (opening things up for individuals to host), or more efficiently fund, services we like if they're going to stick around in the current state of the world. Even if we say "google can eat the cost" we're still putting all our faith in the goodwill of an entity that is designed to do the opposite of what we're asking. That's begging for issues.
  Peer-to-peer stuff is the best solution I've seen, or self-hosting. I'm far from an expert, but from what I understand the tech just isnt there yet for it to become the norm. All that data has to go somewhere, and storage is prohibitively expensive at a certain point.
- Hosting videos is expensive, someone has to pay for it.
  That's what Bittorrent is for.
  https://joinpeertube.org/
  
  Also old fag would remember when we also exchanged amateur content on bittorrent, stuff like the Metallica and Britney spears mashup or fun video but capitalists took it off (well, let's be honest it was mostly for piracy and porn)
- I'd be in favor of direct payments too if any of the money actually made it to the content creators I watch. As it it most of their videos wind up demonitized so I'm not going to pay youtube just so youtube can pay copyright trolls. If they started pushing back against the people/companies filing false copyright claims then I would be willing to pay. But we all know that won't happen.
  
  Not to mention cases where they demonetize a video/channel and still run ads on it 🙄
  Apparently the content isn't advertiser-friendly enough to pay the creators, but it IS advertiser friendly enough to advertise on.

Update your ad blocker, you only get that when it's out of date

Libretube. Get v0.19 or higher, youtube just screwed around with its code and broke v0.18. I love how it works with sponsor block to even skip those "this video is brought to you by xyz incorporated, be sure to Yada Yada Yada..." segments.
- Get v0.19 or higher
  Thanks for that. For some reason I thought it notified on updates automatically like NewPipe does, and I was still on v0.16.1. Oops.

I don't understand this. And not saying it to stir up hate, or troll. This came up for me, I closed the pop-up, and watched the video with no ads. It only added a single click to the whole thing. And they've since gone away for me. Don't know why they stopped, though they have.
- I think the term is A-B testing. When a company wants to see what effect a change will have, they don't force it on everyone at once, just on a certain number of people (A), and then see what happens compared to the rest (B).
  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/A-Btestingexample.png
  This is why you'll always get people saying, "Huh, I haven't seen that. It's not doing it for me on [browser]." They're in the (B) group...for now.
  The data the company wants is to know if, do the test people like the change (or are at least willing to tolerate it)? Or do they spend less time on the site? If so, how much? If the results are within their predictions, they'll expand the testing until everyone is in (A).
  There can also be A-B-C-D-etc testing, where some people who get the blocking windows would be able to close it, and some wouldn't. How many of each ended up disabling their adblock?
  This also helps to "boil the frog", where they can slowly get people used to the idea that this is happening, rather than having a whole wave of surprised outrage at once.
- I believe Google is "testing" it right now, so for some people it's been slowly escalating to where they were allowed 3 videos before it stopped them from watching anymore videos with the ad blocker enabled.
- Pop up is with 10 seconds timer here. Ain't nobody got time for that!
  Piped/invidious/newpipe/freetube it is.
- Same for me.
- I just manually blocked the pout with ublock
- First, well I've been able to get ublock origin to just block the pop-up itself, YouTube now has some scroll event override that locks you to the top of the page. You can't view the comments or recommended anymore... Not that any value is lost there but still.
  Second, the pop-up triggers a "three strike" system where they won't let you close the pop-up until you disable ublock. That may be easy enough to defeat today, but if YouTube has already gone to these lengths to force you to watch ads, they may eventually stop loading videos altogether until you do.

I moved to YouTube premium a few years ago, family subscription, to share with up to 5 people. YouTube is my main source of entertainment and the 15 bucks total (or whatever the conversion rate is) is less than 90 minutes of a movie in a cinema, nit even including transportation and snacks. I get my news, tech news/reviews, tutorials, documentaries, inspiration and laughs on there. I watch it while getting ready in the morning, on my lunch break and for a longer while in the evening. I share it with 2 other people so it works out to around 5 bucks a month. And the creators I like get a big portion of that.
Sure, around 60 bucks a year might sound a lot, but it's the only service I pay for (except the 2 bucks a month Disney plus trial until December). As a small bonus YouTube music transformed my Google home devices into a multi-room audio Sonos alternative for under 1/3 of the price.
I still use NewPipe on my phone for downloads for offline use and yt-dlp for content I want to hoard.

Revanced

Actual unpopular opinion: get yt premium. It gives creators the money they would've got for you watching an ad, while giving you an ad free experience, and also includes yt music which might take some adjustments if you're used to Spotify, but then you will also not be supporting Spotify which is probably the worst streaming service in terms of paying artists.
(They're all bad and many people would argue similarly against supporting Google via YouTube, so perhaps it's a moot point, but that's part of how I justify my sub to myself anyways.)
- Lol no. Youtube pays way less then spotify to the artists. Tidal and bandcamp are the only "ok" options.
  
  The few cents a creator gets from your youtube premium subscription is way more than they would ever get from you watching ads, so yes, OP is actually right.
  Just because they're not gonna get a massive cut from your sub doesn't mean it's not the most beneficial solution for everyone.
- Or you could just become a member of their channel. I look at it this way though. If a youtuber I'm watching has lots of subscribers, one more member in that community probably isn't going to make a difference. If a youtuber I'm watching doesn't have the subscriber numbers they deserve, I will become a member. I always choose the highest tiers for them too. And join their patreon and do the same there. If I do that, I will actually listen/watch on patreon then put both YouTube versions in my watch list for when I need background noise and just upvote both videos.
  That way they get all the things I can possibly do for them without giving youtube as much as I give the creators. This is my understanding of how that works though. With premium, if they actually give any of that money to the creators (my heart says no, corporations suck), it would be way less than the channel membership would give them. I don't actually know how much premium costs though.
  Please do correct me if I'm wrong. At the moment I don't have very many people on my memberships. And I know most people these days probably can't afford to do that, but even a $1 or $2 membership to one or a couple of them can make a difference to the ones you really support and who probably need it more than they'd get from premium.
  
  Just out of curiosity.. how much does that add up to, and if you don't mind sharing how much all your subscriptions cost you each month in total?
- get yt premium
  No.
- Instead get Revanced and an adblocker + firefox.
- Even more unpopular opinion: come to terms with the fact that it's not unreasonable for even a large company to want to charge a fee for the service that they provide and that I consume for several hours a week.

If you are visiting YT on mobile, ReVanced has been working perfectly for me on Android. I'm not sure if there is cross-platform support, but there are alternatives to traditional adblockers out there.

I still haven’t encountered this. Use FF with updated uBO filter lists and you should be fine.

Maybe peertube? Its a decentralized and federated video plataform

Lazy answer: Invidious. I often use inv.tux.pizza, but there are a few dozen public instances.

Nobody is leaving YouTube. There's no viable alternative right now because of how expensive hosting video is.

AdNauseum Firefox

Although I still watch YouTube videos (using Freetube on desktop, Newpipe on mobile), I recently joined Nebula.tv + curiosity stream.

Just sign out and remove all the youtube cookies and the adblockers still work just fine. Sign in when you want to comment or use another browser that is signed in and never watch the video on that browser. Simple solution. Another option is watch the video by right clicking and opening in a "new private window" instead of watching while signed in. That works really well until you want to comment.
- Let's be real, who's commenting on YouTube anymore?

uYou+ on iOS (installed from GitHub using Sideloadly or AltStore) is working great, even skips sponsored segments and allows background playback

Newpipe

I'm self-hosting a Piped server, and it's working great. I was able to import my YT subs from a Google Takeout dump, and I continue to add more channel subs on the Piped server. So far, no YouTube ads, plus it uses SponsorBlock, so I can skip that content too.
For mobile client, LibreTube is working quite well for me. It talks to my Piped instance, so subs (but not watched history, unfortunately) are maintained on the server. I'm still looking for a Piped client for Chromecast GTV to complete the ensemble for me. Right now, I still use my YouTube account with SmartTube Next (which also avoids YT ads and uses SponsorBlock).

https://newpipe.net/

I don't understand why people are just taking it for granted that everyone's watching youtube.
I've watched maybe a video a month on youtube for the last decade. It's a noisy loud messy platform and I don't understand what people enjoy about it.
I watch Netflix a bit and at least the shows there are actual produced shows and not just some bullshit some teenager made up in their spare time. Even if a lot of them are still trash there's a much higher signal:noise ratio than on youtube.
So my solution is: just don't use youtube? And obviously use an ad blocker or piped.video if you do occasionally visit it.
- Many people follow specific channels and only look at content from them, not random bullshit teenager videos that show up in the random/new/trending pages. If you only look at these contents, then yes, you're going to get those bullshit annoying videos.
  It's the same with Reddit, Lemmy, and others, people follow the specific channels they want and avoid the trending/random/new stuff.
  For an example, I follow Digital Foundry channel for their detailed analysis/reviews, The SciShow, Sorted Foods, and so on. I click my subscriptions on youtube and it only shows these high quality content for me. Our family spend hours on these contents. They're not available anywhere else.

Unpopular opinion - The ads aren't that long and content creators deserve to get paid.
I know that doesn't answer your question but I don't think a few seconds of ads is worth leaving a platform over.
- Counteropinion:
  The Ads are too many, disturb the experience a lot and the creators earn more through other means like patreon or merchandise.
  And you acting like 2 unskippable 30 second ads before a 2 minute video is just "a few seconds" shows that you don't watch YouTube a lot.
  
  I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've had to watch a minute worth of ads for two minutes of video
  I watch more YouTube than any other type of media.
  I know I won't convince you though.
- They don't really make much from the YouTube ads though. You might make $2000 if your video hits a million views and chances are that money is going to be split between a crew of people. There is a reason you see all of them having their own does or their own merch or a long list of Patreon subscribers. If you actually want to pay the content creators, buy their stuff or subscribe to them via Patreon.
- I remember when YouTube first came out. It wasn't a "career" there were no content creators. People made and uploaded videos because they wanted to. Then ads appeared on channels that were monetised, they got a cut. This I was fine with. Now non monetised channels have ads everyone has ads

Have you considered paying them? Premium comes with music as well as the extra features in app.
- No.
  
  🤷‍♂️ your loss
- People don't want to solve problems, they want to complain

Use Brave instead of chrome or Firefox or whatever. As of last night it was still good.

I didn't go anywhere. I spend a lot of time on YouTube and enjoy the service immensely. Also, YouTube Music is my main streaming source. And yeah, I pay for both, every month. It's worth it to me. YMMV.
- I'm happy it works for you but unless no tracking/privacy violations is included in their subscription model this will not work for a lot of people here.
  
  Same, privacy concerns are huge for me. Also, there’s no way I’m paying $18.99 a month for it, that’s comically expensive. It’s the same as Netflix’s top tier plan, and at least Netflix has the expense of producing their own content to (attempt) to justify that cost.
- Yeah no way Im paying for youtube. Totally bizarre concept to me.
  
  How so? Servers aren't free. Either you pay in cash or you pay in ads.
  
  You say content creators should not be paid for their work? And Google should provide all those servers and bandwidth for free?
- I started paying for Google music when it started because I didn't like Spotify. Now I've been paying for so long it doesn't make sense to move away. When they implementet YT premium, I was hooked. I haven't seen an ad in years.
  Also, streaming music and video is also way more data intensive, I wouldn't expect the random good Samaritan to pay the server costs for me. Yeah ads suck, but I don't see it as such a crazy thing to pay for not to have. Two decades ago you'd pay for cable and still get ads.
  I don't approve of Google blocking adblockers because I'm sure it doesn't hurt their bottom line that much, but I also don't blame them.
  
  The issue is 10 minutes x 5 ads for a 10 minute video. In what universe is this ok? I was ok with 1short ad at the start of the video but now they also randomly show up. Face it, Google is simply greedy. They know the jig is up and is cashing out as long as possible before it crashes.
- Lol they downvoted you for using your disposable income how you wished.
  This is still Reddit after all.

103 comments