1y ago

Youtube Adblock Reckoning as a service problem?

At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what.

And to be clear, I am not trying to equate Adblocking to video piracy. To me, the fact that I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn't constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube. I would also never click on an ad purposefully, no matter what it is for.

With all that being said, I am a hopeless cause and I don't think that anything will convince me to buy YouTube premium, but I also used to think that about MP3s.

My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil's advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the "service problem" of "YouTube piracy"? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?

This is an old article but this is Gabe Newell describing video game piracy as a service problem and why he believes that in case anyone is unfamiliar with it.

73 comments

It may be too late to turn this ship around, but there are a few things that, at least for me, would make YouTube ads less of a problem:
Vet all the ads. Do not allow links to malware sites, scams, or low-quality merchandise and services to be on the platform.
Make the ads less annoying. Don't stick them into weird spots on a video.
Stop tracking me and trying to display targeted ads. I value my privacy, and like OP, I am never going to click an ad.
- they make too much money off of each of these for google to consider doing any of them, other than maybe improving insertion algorithms so placement is in 'better' spots.. but 'better' for you and the viewing experience and 'better' for them and click-thru rates are likely different outcomes.
  
  too much money
  That's the rub. There's a LOT of money on the table.

I think its ad model problem as it's only "sustainable" through shitty practices that lead to ad blocking. Most people who get adblock do it because they're just tired of ads and it should be this way. Small fair ads are fine with almost everyone but greedy assholes would never give in for that - it has to be in your face, unvetted spam.
- This, I don't mind ads besides my content, I despise ads replacing the content, multiple times, with the same ad I already saw.
  I don't mind paying for no ads, but not at those prices.
  
  I tend to agree. Especially with midroll ads. And I also see YouTube Red/Premium/Plus as too expensive especially compared to free.
  I wonder if it cost $1-$3 per month instead of $14 if they wouldn't get so many more subscribers that they would still end up making more money.
  Of course they would still be incentivized to slowly raise prices over time but I could be talked into $2 a lot quicker than $15.

They had me as a paying customer when the Premium Light tier was a thing and just offered ad free viewing at a reasonable price. Then they got rid of that plan at the very same time they rolled out this mission to beat ad blocking plugins. That's bad faith right there. My choice now is to get a plan at at least 50% more a month with added extra crap I didn't ask for and would never use (music, etc).
So I'm not their customer anymore.
These companies clearly won't be satisfied and I'm sure a ton of their customers will just keep forking over more and more money for worse and worse service, but I'm done. I'm pulling up stakes on all streaming video platforms. Good luck to them I guess.
- I was about to buy premium when the upped their prices. I would have paid for it if my wallet wasn't downstairs. The next day the jacked the prices or announced it(can't remember). It turned me off of paying for it.
  I watch a lot of YouTube. But it's not worth $14+/mo and who knows if they'll increase it on a whim.
  I installed ublockorigin and haven't looked back.
  I'd pay $5/mo for ad free YouTube at this point. No more. Adblocking is more convenient. I have no problem watching the sponsor blocks for the channels I watch. I typically enjoy them because they are relevant to my interests.
- It looks like you paid around $7.50 USD for the lite tier. At the current rate of ads per 5 minute video (where each video under 8 minutes has only one ad spot), you'd have to watch approximately 213.5 5 minute videos for YouTube to make the same amount in ad spots that they do with your subscription. I honestly think Google did away with this tier either because some percentage users were exceeding that amount of views per month, or because of greed (I'm inclined to believe both). I assume they thought that they could increase the price by doing away with that tier and forcing those users to buy the next more expensive tier because those users had become accustomed to adfree viewing and given the hellscape described by other users using the ad supporter tier, they are probably right that it did goad some users to buy the regular premium tier at $10.99 (USD). now they are raising that price to $13.99 (USD) to further that income vs ad-clicks. I think that is specific because they know there is a limit to the number of ads people will watch/what can be shoehorned into a given videos especially with the popularity of apps like Tik Tok and the short form video (similar to Vines and YouTube shorts) where adding more than one ad just doesn't work and content creators would obviously leave the platform for.
  Given all of that, I can't blame you or others like you for leaving. I do think using a different front end like new pipe is a good idea. I also think using adblock origin is a good alternative. I feel the way you do about pretty much all streaming services at this point. But since I have been on the paid tier of premium at a grandfathered in $8 a month for more than a decade I'm kind of already invested and will continue to pay for the services I use.
  Just figured maybe others could make a more informed decision if they knew the context.

Personally I delight in blocking all youtube ads. I won't stop if I have a choice.

Using ublock origin and sponsorblock is the right thing to do. I will never allow ads for as long as I live. And I will never pay/buy YouTube premium since I can get all the features for free through modded versions of apps/browser extensions.
- Yep. They use and sell your data whether you block ads or not. So they’re still making money off of those of us who block ads. I don’t owe them anything lmao. It’s sad seeing so many people in other threads defending YouTube/Google while they’re increasing the price of premium and locking shit like background play and higher bitrates behind a paywall all while selling out data. Nah fuck em
  
  I agree, fuck em

I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn't constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube
Now that's a nice feature! The adblocker that drains your bladder, automatically 😂
- Shut up and take my money
- Comcast is currently working on that right now only it pees for you so you can stay and watch the commercials.

In podcasts, where I can't block ads effectively, I will instantly skip any canned ads and even avoid podcasts that have too many canned ads. On the other hand, when podcast hosts do their own ad reads, it doesn't bother me too much. In the best cases, they are funny enough that I feel like I'm missing out with the ad-free premium feeds (I subscribe to some podcast Patreons).
I also don't really mind sponsored segments from YouTube hosts, though it's highly dependent on the content. Most of the channels I follow have ad reads that are reasonably well aligned with the content and tone. In some cases, they are actually useful. I still run SponsorBlock, but I do often read through the video descriptions of my favorite channels to see what they're hocking.
There is no imaginable scenario where I would tolerate hypercheerful actors talking about insurance or cars. Get outta town.
- I'm surprised there isn't a SponsorBlock equivalent for podcasts yet. I mean, I'm sure it works if I watch a video podcast on YouTube, but I'd prefer a hook in Pocket Casts or something.
  
  The dynamic insertion of arbitrary-length ads into podcast files at download time makes SponsorBlock tricky (probably not impossible?) in podcasts that also have non-dynamic sponsor reads.
  If someone chapters a podcast, noting an ad (dynamically inserted) for an online casino at 4:33-4:54 and a sponsor break read by the host (baked in to the original file) at 10:12-11:43, those times are mostly invalidated when someone else downloads the file and hears an ad for a business credit card at 4:33-5:21. Now the sponsor break section is going to cut the actual content early and come back before the read is over.
  Multiply that problem by 3-4, depending on the episode, and you can start to see the issue.
  This is a similar problem to that of Twitch. They bake the ad into the main video stream, meaning you can't block it without also blocking the content. If YouTube ever does it, it's game over; but I have a feeling they can't for some technical or scaling reason, or they would've done so first.

Just wait until YT makes high res video options premium only. :)
Edit: I adblock, because fuck ads. But I also use yt less than ever before. I used to use it for entertainment, but nowadays I only use it when I specifically search for something.
- but 4k is already locked behind a paywall
  
  Oh, I had no idea. :/
  
  4K is still accessible to me, but a higher bitrate version of 1080p does get paywalled. I wonder if they just turned down the existing 1080p's bitrate and are now trying to sell the solution to a problem that they've created.
- Oh my god no. That will be the end for me, for sure

I'm expecting someone smart at Google to figure out how to encode ads as part of the video file as it is delivered, making it literally undifferentiatable in the data we receive, and then there's no way around it. They'll make millions in ads and billions licensing it out.
- The sponsorskip extension already has the functionality to get around something like this.
  
  Yeah but that's because the content creator cannot dynamically change the time at which the sponsored part is. For ads, Google could dynamically insert ads at every 1/3rd of videos with a variation +- 1mn, and there's nothing an extension like sponsorblock could do without triming on the original video's content.
- Disadvantage of said system for Google would be the fact that if you do that, people can skip ads much faster and they won't be able to do any tracking of interaction at all. For advertiser's point of view, that would be just worse version of TV commercial.
  
  You could do banner ads, shrink the video, randomly add a banner to top/bottom and a 2nd left/right. If you skip the ads, you skip the content too.
- And TiVo already has the tech to skip ads in recorded media. I only point this out to show that it is possible to do context based filtering and skip to timestamps. Smart programmers will find a way, and the war continues.
- That’s how twitch does it.
  It’s been very effective at making me watch less twitch, but it does serve the ads no matter the adblocker now
  
  TTV LOL seems to be working for me, at least when I last watched Twitch a few days ago.
  I also use a modded app on Android and s0und on Android TV and neither have ever failed me.
- I'm hopeful that reencoding on the fly or even merging preencoded files into a single stream is too expensive because it needs a lot of compute power and invalidates caches .
- encode ads as part of the video file
  I suspect that an AI could be trained to be able to recognize ads, or at least the most annoying, ads.
  Also, a community driven project, like SponsorBlock, where users identify ads to build up a database could be created.
  These are just a couple of ideas to defeat embedded ads, and I'm not a genius programmer by any means. This is just another front in a war that has been going on since at least the 90's and as long as blocking ads is less annoying than watching them, we're winning.
- At that point you might just end up with some kind of YouTube 'piracy' with Premium subscribers uploading mirrors to Peertube servers or something.
  Hell, I'd support it with my home server if someone made a containerized service for it. Just start uploading my subscription feed somewhere for other people.
- This already happens in audio podcasts, it's annoying as hell

My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”?
Their goals is definitely not to convert everyone. This is just to make using adblockers annoying enough that they can convert a substantial amount of adblock users into Youtube Premium users. They will eventually stop the war and allow the small minority of successful adblockers to continue if they can't find an easy way to eliminate the most popular extensions entirely.
Their end goal is to make YT Premium more of a standard like it is for other streaming services so people consider it the default way to engage with Youtube and not as an extra service.
- I guess it's harder to do this after 13 years of default "free" content. It's easier for someone like Spotify to do that because there has always been the option to pay for premium.
  I remember in the earlier days of Spotify there were a lot of ways to get half priced service just by finding xyz code or paying $5 for a code on eBay that got you a year of half priced Spotify. I don't know where those came from or how those existed but it was definitely what finally convinced me to subscribe.
  (I've since cancelled in favor of buying CDs again but I realize I'm the oddball in that scenario)

Dunno if YT can be saved, I don't belive that enshittification is a reversible process

They need to stop rapidly changing the terms of the agreement. This is the problem endemic to the platform. It's starting to lose shape because the ads are the problem.
If this was an issue with the quality of content:
ideally creators would get to choose their ad roll spots. This would make it less jarring to the watcher. It's also terrible that you can get ads for something like BP on a video that's basically surmised as "That time BP poisoned a lot of children". (See climate town) l. Also, if the ad revenue split was better, creators wouldn't then have to shoe horn in extra ad spots into the content of their videos.
However, I don't think it's a problem with quality of the content, but the quality of the ads.
I believe Adblocking is not piracy issue to the end user as much as it is protection measure from malicious content. It's up to the user to qualify what is "malicious" or not in the end. Users who use adblock do not have a good relationship with online advertising not because it annoys them, it's because it threatens them. This is less so just a YouTube problem and more of a entirety of Google's business model problem.
Becoming a better ad platform is a tough challenge when advertisers by practice operate in a manipulative bad faith space. We don't trust ads.
- Yea, that's not true...I use ad block because ads are annoying as fuck.
- I agree. They do operate in bad faith. And not only do they throw ads into every possible crevice but the advertisers themselves may be bad faith actors. It's easy for a local radio station to decide not to run ads for a shady local business but YouTube doesn't really seem to have anything in place to vet advertisers or a robust system to report ads for malfeasance.
  I'm interested in the framing of advertising as a threat rather than just an annoyance. I think even ads for something like laundry soap being spammed over and over for hours on end can be harmful even without being directly malicious. As someone who has been blocking ads for 10 years, every time I am on someone else's device the amount of garbage that just gets thrown into your face by default is just atrocious.

I get YouTube Premium because I pay for YouTube Music, but I've tried watching ad supported YouTube on a computer I wasn't logged into as I was troubleshooting my main computer. I can tell you that I wouldn't even bother with the ad blockers. If there was something on YouTube that I really wanted to watch, like an old concert or something, I would just download it with JDownloader and add it to my Jellyfin server. If that doesn't work, if just move on. There's a lot more entertainment available for free than I could ever possibly consume in three lifetimes.
- Yeah similar deal with me. J-Downloader Plex is my go to now. It's pretty great. Can stream the stuff on my phone at the gym super easy.

My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?
My initial/gut reaction was "obviously relevant ads based on the content I'm watching", but I don't care how relevant the ad is when I've seen the same Raid Shadow Legend ad across multiple videos I'm gonna try to skip it (or as I did long, long ago: adblock it).
I don't even know what actual YT ads are now, only the integrated creator ones that they're personally sponsored by... the hello fresh and world of tanks and manscape and debrand etc., which I've started auto-skipping on a channel by channel basis based on very few criteria: the entertainment value/effort they've put into the ad (so Drew Gooden is usually always funny and gets a pass, same for channels like Wulff Den or Th3Jez or Critical Role) but certain ones just get manually skipped regardless (no matter how funny you are, I don't want to sit here and listen to you talk about Manscape for 3 minutes) and how often I end up seeing them (which in these instances, isn't often because they're channel specific usually)
So I guess it mainly boils down to relevant ads that aren't soulless and that I don't see 3x every other video?

I just stopped using YouTube. I can get all my music elsewhere.

TIL: there is a version of AdBlock out there that assists with bathroom trips... More information requested, please and thank you.

FYI your title has a typo. It says "abblock"
- My preferred abblocker is ice cream. 100% effectiveness for me, no abs in sight!
- Fuck abs. All my homies hate abs.
- I hate abs (a big stomach).

I'm one of the people grandfathered into YouTube music because I was a Google play music subscriber. At one point YouTube premium was bundled into my service as a perk for being a subscriber. I currently pay $8. I received an email upping that price to $13.99 for premium (YouTube music and YouTube premium). I'll still pay it. Mostly because I use the product I'm actively paying for and the lack of ads on YouTube is beneficial to me even though I use unlock origin.
I have not got any experience with how ads are implemented on YouTube because I have had my sub since 2011. So I have not experienced the frustration of many other people here who are having ads pushed at them by google on YouTube relentlessly.
That being said, if I'm honest right now the price of YouTube Music vs the price of Spotify is comparable ($10.99) currently so far as I can tell? But once the YouTube premium price ($13.99) increase hits (including YouTube music) Google will have the most expensive streaming service because all the other big music ones are around $10.99.
Amazon has movies, tv, and music bundled in prime and it costs $14.99 a month. Apple One (which is TV and music and some other stuff) is $19.95 a month. Hulu doesn't include music and it's no ad tier is $17.99 a month (with no music service). Netflix's lowest non-ad tier is $15.49 a month (again with no music service).
The removal of the lower paid tier for just no ads was a mistake. Some people are willing to pay a dollar or two to not see ads. Don't make it difficult for people who want to pay you to pay you. After all, there are people who pay for adblockers and VPN's.
Lumping "features" and services together under one umbrella premium subscription was a mistake (because people don't see value in all their services and it's similar to what cable companies like Comcast do, forcing subscribers to pay for services they don't use to get a "better price").
Because I think their anti-adblock antics are simply an effort to push more people to subscribe or watch ads (and only really aimed at people who are suggestible like your mom who only has adblock because you set it up for her), and considering that if you're a paid subscriber they don't care if you use adblock or not (so mom wouldn't even have to figure out how to turn off adblock, she'd just have to enter her credit card info), I don't know if this is a service problem.
I think it's a capitalism problem. This company is required to meet and exceed yearly profits on it's products. Ad aggregation is it's biggest product by far. A lot of people still seem to think Google sells that data to ad companies. They don't. They hoard it and make ad companies pay them and in exchange they show targeted ads to people who use their products. As a result (and since this is their biggest money maker), when people use adblockers they are actively circumventing Google's main revenue stream.
I feel like what we actually need is legal regulations. And the only way to really get those is to lobby for them.
Edit: I looked into it. CPM (Clicks Per Million) payout is 3.5 cents per adview. Google is raising the price of it's Premium tier to $13.99. To make that same revenue from a single viewer in ad spots that viewer would have to watch about 400 ad spots. This definitely explains why they're pushing premium so hard. They do actually apparently make more money from premium members so far as I can tell. Especially for casual users (and kids whose account are only allowed to show a limited quantity of specifically vetted ads, meaning that other people in these comments suggesting that Google can vet ads and work within user preferences to not show viewers certain ads are already implemented elsewhere on the platform).

If Google is willing to eat the initial cost they can start superimposing ads over streams on the fly, on part of the screen, while the stream is running. You can't skip it because you'd be skipping content. They can use AI to figure out areas of the screen where they won't mess with visual content (eg. avoid slapping it over people's faces) but also make it impossible to ignore (eg. not a bar at the bottom you can simply crop out).
On the bright side these ads would probably be less obnoxious than full screen audio/video ads. If they make them tolerable enough we would see a marked decrease in attempts to fight them (especially since fighting against ads imprinted on the video would be pretty hard).
The nuclear option would be to turn on DRM for the entire platform and make it mandatory to have an account to see any video. It would make ripping streams a lot harder but it would nuke the entire ecosystem of YT clients running on every possible device, which were built on the premise they can freely access non-DRM streams. They can probably upgrade the firmware on their latest Chromecasts and abandon the rest but all TVs and older devices would be screwed. They might still get away with it if they give ample advance warning (couple of years).
Depends also on how they intend to reposition the service. They could steer it towards becoming yet another private streaming service, holding all the YouTube library hostage, Not sure to what extent stream authors would be willing, ready and able to move away, given the almost complete lack of competing platforms.
- I think that's the biggest thing standing in the way personally. There are 6 or 7 Spotify-like services and 10 or 11 Netflix-like services. Some people might lump YouTube in with Netflix but it really isn't since all the content on YouTube is user generated. There's nobody else doing the same thing YouTube is doing at that scale. The closest is Facebook and TikTok but the way they deliver ads seems to be a lot different as well.

Thanks for making this thread, OP! Some really good responses in here that I enjoyed reading! 🙂

Of course they're going to lose. I've been saying they're going to lose since the first day they started the war. They will always lose and continue to lose. Screw them.

At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking.
Lol, no, they aren't. If they wanted to they could just throw everyone with an adblocker out. The only reason they aren't doing this right now is not wanting to piss off their users (and some vague EU data privacy laws).
The absolute best you could accomplish against them as a user is hiding the ad, but you'd still have to wait instead of being able to skip.
Besides that: I thought about getting YouTube premium (+ music), but now they're already jacking the prices further up. So I'll just keep using uBlock Origin and if that no longer works cut back on my video watching time.
- They'll lose...they already forgot why they beat out yahoo for search.
  There's other platforms salivating at YouTube imploding.
  
  No there isn’t
  There hasn’t been a viable alternative to YouTube since the day it was released, and that’s no different today. No platform can handle to volume of data that google does. Google can barely handle that data and they own the datacenters.
  
  What I meant is that they have the technical capability to lock you out when using an adblocker. They already do in a few countries (you can watch 3 videos then get kicked out). It's not a technical issue for YouTube.
  There's not a single decent platform out there to replace YouTube. Even Vimeo is tiny and can barely keep up with demand.
  And why should someone sink a massive amount of money into infrastructure without a way to make profit? If you try to monetize it from the start you'll never build a large enough userbase.

73 comments