YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don't turn off your ad-blocker
YouTube has been cracking down on people using ad blockers. Now, a spokesperson says that using ad blockers could lead to "suboptimal viewing."
Sorry Google.
I'm gonna use YouTube ad free or I won't use it.
And I ain't gonna pay for it.
Pretty sure that they are fine with that, they are actively trying to get rid of you.
Not in the slightest. They want to have their cake and eat it, meaning they want you on the platform but using it their way. Why else would they put so much effort into this fools errand of subverting ad blockers?
Ding ding ding. It’s an unpopular opinion, but it’s the harsh truth. This is akin to a super high maintenance Karen going “I’m never going to shop here again” even though she immediately returns everything she purchases. The company isn’t making any profit off of her, (in fact they’re losing money because she demands employees’ attention whenever she’s shopping) so a sensible manager’s response should be “okay, we’re glad to see you go. Please don’t come back.”
YouTube doesn’t want the users who block ads and refuse to pay. Those users are a net drain on the system. Lemmy likes to yell about FOSS, and there is a lot to love about that… But ultimately, the F in FOSS doesn’t really mean “Free”. It means “Free to the end user”. Someone had to devote time and resources to building and hosting that “free” thing. The fact that they’re willing to share their effort is great! But it can’t be the expectation.
As someone who does a lot of freelance work, I’ll say the same thing that I say to clients when they ask me to work for free because of the exposure: Exposure is what people die of when they can’t pay their rent. I’m not saying YouTube is going to go bankrupt because of these users, but the users can’t reasonably expect YouTube to continue to pay for/accommodate them.
Does that mean I should pull all my content?
No.
Im pretty sure they are fine with free riders when they are not too many.
Asking genuinely, if you were in charge of YouTube, and you don't think anyone should pay for YouTube, and you don't think you should run ads, how exactly would you go about paying for the massive amount of engineers and infrastructure needed to keep the lights on?
In 2022, Youtube was getting $14 ARPU for free users (from ads) and $120 ARPU for premium users. With premium users contributing so much more to their bottom line, one would think they would strive to keep those users subscribed, but instead YouTube started raising prices and even stopped honoring the grandfathered price points their long term subscribers (like myself) were at. I would have kept paying for my family subscription indefinitely at that price point - which is still several times higher than the revenue they would get from me as an ad-consuming customer - but they opted to not allow that, so they lost all the revenue they’d been getting from me entirely.
Youtube specific stats are hard to find, but Alphabet is one of the most profitable companies worldwide, with a profit of just under $80 billion in 2022, so your question is honestly irrelevant. The status quo would have been more than enough to keep the lights on. This isn’t about making ends meet; it’s about getting as much profit as they can.
Even so, the person you replied to didn’t say YouTube shouldn’t run ads or charge for a subscription. They were talking about themselves and their willingness to watch ads or subscribe.
And because enough people aren’t like that person or like me, YouTube is going to continue to grow their revenue and their user base - for now, at least.
I don't mind paying for YouTube content. I do mind their data harvesting, however. Figured out that my life isn't diminished at all without Youtube.
You think it costs $30b a year to run YouTube?
There's a middleground between reckless profiteering and not making any money at all. And yet YouTube discontinued their $5 tier. But no, it's the kids who are out of touch.
I’m perfectly fine if commercial platforms like YouTube go out of business. This will create space for smaller platforms run by users as a hobby instead of a business, which I think would lead to a healthier media ecosystem. Additionally, advertising is not a healthy activity for society. Spending resources to manipulate people is not really beneficial to humanity as a whole. If it were up to me, it would be banned.
Not OP, but I personally would like to see a variety of options for how I see ads. Not what ads I see, but how they're delivered. I imagine several less intrusive options and the option to continue ads as they are now. I would need two or three less intrusive options combined to cover my viewing, or I could take only the current annoying interrupting ads on their own.
On second thought, YouTube would just end up turning on all options and stopping playback for anyone who finds the options list.
by being owned by google? treating users with respect and running graceful and non-invasive ads? (maybe still image banner ads only? ratchet up the tension on the advertiser ghouls, not the end users?) having something akin to a patreon? simply eating the cost because it's a public service? (not to mention the public service of draining the bank accounts of VC/investor/silicon valley vampires)
yeah, them needing the money (??) or whatever is one thing, but this arrogant fucking attitude lately is so repugnant. set up a patreon, don't fucking fight against your users like this. it's not exactly real TV or oxygen, it's fucking youtube. it's 90% garbage anyway
That's fine, but that's why Google is doing this. They need people who won't watch ads to stop using it to lower their costs. I mean what business survives with zero income? The question google is asking isn't whether or not some people will stop using it, the question their asking is will enough of them stop for them to generate income.
They need people who won’t watch ads to stop using it to lower their costs.
This assumes that the biggest cost to Youtube is serving the content, not storing the content. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think it's a valid question because if storage is the larger cost, then it doesn't matter how many visitors visit the site, Youtube is still warehousing all that content. By the way, in that scenario, it's actually better for Youtube to keep as many viewers on the site as possible, adblockers or not, because they can use higher viewer numbers to increase the price of the ad space they charge to advertisers.
I mean what business survives with zero income?
Hahahahaha, do they know that using it without the ad blocker is worse than whatever else they're going to do? I'd rather stare at 30 seconds of black screen than a 5 second ad, lmao.
Having a blank screen will make me less angry than seeing a long advertisement. Not to mention, I come from the days of dial up. I can wait a bit until I view the video.
Well actually they can do much more, like for example decreasing quality to lets say 144p
I'm not saying that adblockers will not be able to bypass it, maybe there will be a solution as well, but wanted to say that the blank screen waiting is not their only weapon
They couldn't possibly make the experience worse than it already is without an ad blocker.
No adblock = No youtube
To paraphrase a great philosopher: executives.. uh.. find a way (to make things shittier)
No YouTube. It is YOU that is stuck with ME and I will make YOUR experience worse.
Oh no, how unfortunate. Sadly, we don't have alternative YouTube clients like Invidious or Piped that can be used with LibRedirect to automatically redirect all YouTube links to these alternative front-ends. And unfortunately, you can't use LibreTube or NewPipe on Android, as well as Yattee with this guide on iOS, iPadOS and tvOS or SmartTubeNext on Android TV.
damn this is awesome! this comment here is exactly why i hang out here instead of reddit these days. never see stuff like this there anymore, useful stuff. thank you so much!
Yes, that's such a shame. Thank you for making me aware that we have no such alternatives.
I've seen youtube content on piped I know full well to be 4k video be blurred so badly as to be nearly unwatchable- they honestly decided to spend money to make their content worse as a lever to get you to watch ads or to submit to tracking etc
I have no idea what you're talking about. I use Piped daily and I never experienced such issues.
Can't possibly make it worse than shoving ads from hate groups. On my computer, I use Firefox with adblock, but on my phone and tablet I had been using the YouTube app until a few days ago. Google decided to show me a PragerU ad on mobile, so I decided to switch to Firefox mobile to watch YouTube. And the app either moved or removed the 'don't show this ad' selection.
If you're using android you might want to check out YouTube ReVanced.
Check out Sponsor Block extension, if you aren't using it. It's really cool
Yeah recently starting using this and it's excellent, no more manually trying to skip over yet another nordvpn sponsor monologue
Same I no longer use the YouTube app in my telphone
Newpipe is pretty good, you can get it through the f droid store
Fennec is Firefox for Android and it even supports uBlock, Dark Reader and others.
...and your viewing experience will be far, far worse if you don't use one.
Right? Having an ad blocker means my video gets slowed down by a few seconds, not having an ad blocker means I get to watch a 30 second ad from a local politician telling me about how we need to get rid of fornicators. I think I know my choice lmao
They had a long time to make the ad watching process less painful, or adding actual value to a premium subscription, but they are doing everything to make YouTube worse.
i could maybe start to swallow the actual tech getting worse (just like everything else is lately) but this arrogant, odious attitude they're putting on lately is so obscene and anti-consumer. it's like it's their god-given right to serve us ads and our solemn duty to consume them.
YouTube premium should have built-in sponsorblock. That's one of the ways that free clients are literally better than the paid service, mostly on mobile. Let me change the theme to different colours, let me show/hide the "shorts" and "create" tabs. In general, just give me the features that YouTube revanced has on the official app.
If the price was like $5 per month and it gave you no ads and 4K steaming it might be worth it. But at the current pricing it just isn't good value since YouTube doesn't produce content like other streaming services (and creators still have to rely on sponsorships for their livelihood regardless of whether the viewer is a premium subscriber) that justifies paying the higher prices for the service.
Instead their attack on their customers rather than just making the service valuable enough to pay for makes me never want to give them a cent.
I know right? Executives just never seem to get that you actually need to provide value to have people want to sign up for it. Saying that though, there's a lot of dumb consumers out there that just pay for it if needed.
I had the paid service until they jacked up the price for no reason at all. The second they announced the price hike for no reason I cancled my sub and have just been using a third party app to watch it on my phone or ublock on firefox
They should allow premium users to use third party YouTube clients using an API, like Reddit before Spez's war on third party apps.
I remember what the internet was like before we had ad-blockers. I concur with others who have said turning the blocker off would make it even worse. There no fucking way I'm turning off ad-blocking under any conditions. I'd rather just stop using the internet altogether. I can not verbalize how much I hate ads. I stopped watching TV because of ads a long time ago. Never again.
Oh man, I wish I could get a pair of AR-glasses with ad-blocking in real life. No more ads polluting the streets. That would be great.
Pretty sure any AR-glasses from the megacorps will add ads to real life soon enough. Any AR-glasses not from megacorp will be bought out to shut them down. Not like there is functional antitrust.
Hey, how else are they going to make money from that $1500 pair of AR glasses you bought?
I cannot stand ads anymore to the point that when I happen to watch TV stream and ad break come up, I put the TV on mute and go browse Lemmy on my phone.
I'm in the same boat and often wonder what right these billboard companies have to put their messages in my face
Billboards are illegal in several states. It's one of the ways they've kept Hawaii beautiful.
I remember the first time I saw ads on YouTube, I had just set up a new computer and wanted to test everything. So I opened Firefox and loaded a YouTube video. I got a preroll and wondered "wait ad's, on YouTube?" Then I realized I had been using AdBlock for so long I never witnessed the transition from ad free YouTube to YouTube with ads.
These days I use unlock origin, Sponsorblock and revanced. For now it still works but maybe I'll leave YouTube soon :/
Yesterday a site for image translation I was using didn't load the image. so I thought maybe it's the adblock and man that was a horrible experience. How can people Stand all those flashing bullshit.
Wonder how much money they've wasted trying to block the blockers
It's even more weird all that invested time into people who are going to find ways to block them either way, instead of focusing on their userbase that doesn't use them. Seems like they are rummaging through the couch cushions for pennies at this rate.
Considering they can use this knowledge to apply it to the entire Google ecosystem, I'd say they aren't wasting money in learning about new ways to fuck us over.
I watch YouTube content on my tv, and get ads, next to using it on my PC where I block them. Generally I did not mind the ads, since it is part of the business model.
But frankly the experience on the tv is degrading quickly in the last 12 months:
From 2 skippable ads at the start (and end) of a video, I now get 2 longer unskippable ones, but regularly it doubles to 4 and a 5th that is either short or skippable. And if it's still 2 at the start then usually 1-2 mins in I see 2 more long ads ... If I have the gall to rewind or forward the video I get 2 more long ads, usually followed by 2 short ones a minute or two later... Some of that is probably ad-space tagged by the creators, but clearly YT overrules that and places its own ad markers.
Slowly I feel it's leaning towards punishment to watch content on YT, at least on the tv.
On top of that there is the annoying interface that blocks a full 30% of the screen, often blocking the one thing I wanted to look at. Then the ads that always break subtitles of the video, or somehow enforcing subtitles in a language that I can not read.
And don't get me started on the topic-bubble the algorithm captures the user in.
YT should have left it as it was a few years ago, but it is forcing more and more ads, making things unfriendlier for both the viewer and creator, all to squeeze the viewers for more and more revenue.
It's a shame it's all so detrimental to the wealth of knowledge on there.
So if a good and proper alternative is able to stand on its feet I will gladly follow the creators and watch the new stuff on there.
Just buy or build a pc and plug it into the TV screen
It's more customisable than a smart tv and you can even set up something like kodi
These shenanigans have me rapidly transitioning from “I don’t want to see your annoying ads” to “I don’t want you to make any money at all”.
I'm already there, and I'm applying this thinking to every site - including the one hosting this article.
Same, I view the whole internet through uBlock and a pihole, so my value as an “impression” is virtually zero.
I’m not against for-profit websites making some money (and I run my own website, which generates a whopping $0), but Google has jumped the shark with their sketchy malware bullshit, and I’m starting to root for that organization to die.
Switched to duckduckgo purely because I wanted to stop giving Google money via searching
I mean... it definitely will if you turn off your ad blocker.
Yeah, I've been on YouTube with ads and if it weren't for the Skip Ads button I could not tolerate it. Try to watch a 10 minute video and it starts with a 3 minute ad. How is that remotely reasonable?
I guarantee it's a worse experience with ads.
They still don't get it.
"Might get worse without turning of my ad-blocker" still beats "is definitely worse without ad-blocker".
I'm taking my chances.
Well, it'll also make my viewing experience worse if I do so...
It's been years since I've used YouTube without Revanced, SponsorBlock, and uBlock Origin. The vanilla experience when I see it on other people's devices horrifies me every single time.
I'd rather pay the creators directly on their Patreon then allow Google to pester me with ads.
@TangledHyphae @technology
Then, use a program that is a different YouTube Front End.
On Android phones, you can download NewPipe or LibreTube from the F-Droid store. These will allow you to subscribe to channels and to watch without ads.
You can use Invidious instances or you can setup your own to watch through a website.
Invidious Instances: https://docs.invidious.io/instances
Invidious GitHub Code: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
Because YouTube does not pay most creators enough to live on, please support your favorite YouTubers using Patreon, Locals, or wherever.
Oh no are there going to try to block the ad blockers but then the ad blockers block the ad blockers blockers? When will it end? They can keep on trying to make it worse but people will just keep figuring out how to bypass it.
Rawdogging YouTube today is a similar experience to what I had with a free trial of Hulu several years ago. The ads were so frequent and so lengthy that I cancelled several days before the trial was even over. I swear I was getting six minutes of ads for every two minutes of content.
There's a point where the greed makes the product unusable.
I watch a lot of Tubi on my TV, and I find the ads there tolerable. They don't just flood you with them. I'm totally ok with sitting through their ad breaks in exchange for a free watching experience.
(I don't know if Hulu has gotten better or worse. The experience was so god awful that I've never even slightly entertained the thought of trying it again)
Funny you brought up Tubi.
I was using it the other day and I remarked "this isnt bad, it's kinda like cable TV before it went to shit with ads"
At present, it's a pretty solid service. I'm old, so I don't need to watch all the latest shows. Tubi has plenty to keep me occupied.
For now
Until they enshittify too
Twitch is the same. I don't block ads on Twitch because it's usually just a minute per half an hour to 45min of video. It's even better if the streamer initiates the ad breaks manually, like when they stand up to stretch/walk around, because then I don't even miss anything. That's reasonable and fair, although they do have pre-roll ads and those obviously suck.
Okay now I feel a little bad for blocking ads on twitch if their ads are reasonable. Maybe I should consider adding it as an exclusion?
And at least for now with Tubi, the ads come from a separate domain that you can block and only get a blank screen for the ad break.
I can’t believe the amount of bootlickers in this thread trying to justify google’s blatant attempts at capitalising on the monopoly it has aggressively acquired. Fuck Google. Fuck YouTube. Fuck advertising. Fuck sundar pichai and his shitty ideas about how to ‘make money’. Aww no boo fucking Hoo has the mega-corp decided it can’t run this huge monopoly at a loss anymore after literally years of doing just fucking that? Who the fuck cares? Eat shit and go bust I literally do not give a flying fuck and I hope they go fucking bankrupt if only for their obviously anti-competitive and clearly fucking incompetent business practices. Fuck off. All advertising is theft of time. Eat shit.
But they're a billion dollar company, we have to think about their bottom line...
Isn't a blocked ad better than an ignored one for an advertiser? They don't have to pay for the blocked one. Google, of course, doesn't care if an ad is seen, only that they got paid by advertisers to show it.
And I warn Google that it would have to first find and suck my cock real good for me to consider allowing it to do that.
Luckly they're pretty good at searching for obscure stuff that nobody's seen in a while.
There's probably a SEO result already there in the top position for UraniumBlaser cock.
I love how aggressive google is becoming. It drives more and more people into the arms of open source os and firefox
100% true facts. I am basically permanently open source OS and firefox now. (Shoutouts to EndeavorOS, going to wipe this PC clean of ubuntu next.)
Welcome aboard.
Already switched to Firefox for work on linux and I'll switch on my "entertainment" windows install as well soon... just need to find time to do the sync stuff
Good job!
I love my desktop with Gentoo Linux and LibreWolf as my browser (basically Firefox on steroids with massive privacy and security improvements and preinstalled uBlock Origin) as well as GrapheneOS with Mull (the closest thing to LibreWolf on mobile) on my phone.
Nice! Will switch to Graphene too, when I find the time.
Suck my fat hog google
Poor YouTube only brought in 29 billion dollars in revenue for 2022. They are 11% of Googles revenue.
Now granted they are seeing some slowdown in revenue growth, you know shareholders hate that. So maybe they are trying to create some revenue growth again by making more users pay.
Let's not forget the unmentioned income thanks to gathering all that user data.
The real value of Youtube (and social medias in general) is not the raw revenue they generate.
It's being able to be able to predict what will trend in advance to sell ads to anyone, anywhere. Which is proven by their 200+ billions in revenue from ads from all services.
It's extremely likely that in an alternate universe where Google doesn't own YouTube, their profit today is lower than what they currently have.
But like you said, poor YouTube is not making money explicitly on its own so they'll use it to justify any cost increase attempt when they already know what the real money maker is.
Legit curious: How much were their expenses though? 29 billion in revenue is a lot, but if it costs more than that to run, then it's not profitable.
If it costs more than that to run it they are doing something wrong.
I wasn't able to find YouTube expenses or a number for profit, but since they are a public company it should be in their 10-K and Annual Report.
YouTube made my viewing experience worse for the past decade already, and I'm not just talking about the fucking ads, which I don't see either way and never will be, regardless of what they do. If they think this is going to make me want to support them, then they should just drink the bottle of bleach as their next fabulous idea.
Their algorithm certainly made videos worse the moment they started priorizing the promotion of longer videos over shorter ones leading to an increase in incredibly long winded videos that waste everyones time.
Their algorithm is generally just complete garbage. Watch a video from channel X and it throws everything form channel X at you. Watch anything from category Y and it throws any video about category Y at you. It also loves to push "recently uploaded" videos. Meaning some garbage 47 views video of some random idiot uploading some random ass video that might be roughly related to a topic I'm potentially interested in. It also constantly recommends me the videos that I've already seen, so I have to tell YT every fucking time that I already watched the video and don't want to see it again. Or all the garbage clickbait titles & thumbnails that are just the fucking norm apparently. I cold go on an on and on... I watched so much videos in the past and nowadays it's almost nothing. It's all just shit.
i love how they're trying to introduce pReMiUm 1080p which looks slightly less shitty than normal 1080p. what fucking dipshit children do they have thinking of this rancid garbage
"Hey buddy, it would be a damn shame if something happened to your viewer experience. Oh, no, we're your buddies, eheheh. For a small fee, we'll make sure your experience will be safe."
The more Google keeps going down this path as they inevitably always would, the more viscerally I will fight against it.
so little people use adblockers already, the few sheckles they'd get form those willing to turn them off, is that really worth it?
Or is it about power? its about power isnt it
What holds youtube from blocking all videos to addblock users just as other sites do? Are they afraid of pushing youtube down the cliff?
I don't understand why self hosted videos aren't more popular
What holds youtube from blocking all videos to addblock users just as other sites do?
It's a constant game of cat and mouse, an arms race till the end of time. You can't block videos from ad-block users if you can't tell which users are using adblock and which are not.
I don’t understand why self hosted videos aren’t more popular
It's quite complicated technologically, and requires quite a lot of storage space. Viewers only go where the creators go, and the creators have no reason to go to someplace that is more of a pain in the ass to host videos.
And people will fight this even harder.
That enshittification may continue until the ad revenue improves.
(aka never)
Ironically, I cannot read the article because I use an ad blocker.
Really? I am not having any issues with uBlock
I’m sure that is the case, however I no longer use chromium browsers due to Google’s behavior and I only use Firefox as a backup. If a site is going to be this egregious to prevent me from reading their content, I am no longer interested in what they have to say.
im confused. I use firefox and ublock and haven't noticed any change in the way youtube works for me.
Video background play fix. Long winded title. Let's me play youtube videos in FF mobile while leaving shitty comments on the fediverae.
How could it get worse?
I have premium... Have had it for many years. The service has really gone downhill a lot in the last few months. Lots of stalls, inadequate buffer, and very low bit rates on my very fast and adequate ISP service.
Youtube drove me away when they started autoplaying misogynistic and alt right nonsense.
Bring it.
Yeah bring it on Google. I didn't thought I could leave Reddit as there is so much content and I thought I always would fall for the sheer quantity of content that Reddit has. I am suprised by myself how easily I accepted Lemmy over Reddit even all these Month later. Maybe I could leave Youtube too and would be okay with another platform that does not provide so much content. And you know how I find out? Not by doing it on my own. But by getting a really good incentive to make this step. If youtube thinks I am gonna bend over and accept hours of ads in my life they are wrong. I will choose the alternative. As soon as they force me to disable adblock, I have all the reasons to pack my coach wagon and go west searching for another life. Maybe it will not be better, but I will certainly be free. And it will be exciting to be part of something new. Bring it on Google. Make me leave you!
Imagine being so cocky that you think pirated YouTube videos can't be a thing.
You can however, almost certainly correctly, predict that most people are not going to care enough to bother pirating YouTube videos, especially given how many people watch YouTube on phones or smart TVs now.
Pirates aren't most people. Piracy finds a way among pirates.
It does happen though. For example, in China, people would reupload YouTube videos to the local video platforms (e.g. bilibili) without permission from the video owners.
I have a separate app just to watch YouTube through which lets me subscribe and all the rest without an account and without ads and it was Uber easy to install.
I think you underestimate how much pirates and the opposition truly hate google and their practices and the lengths they will go to in order to get the content they want.
“Let’s hook Americans on consumerism and turn them into animals, then we can surprise pikachu when said animals eat our faces”
🤷🏻♂️ I just work here
I pay for Youtube premium as a carry-over from Google Music (back when it was called Youtube Red). I let it run because I enjoy the screen off feature when I'm driving. On my desktop uBlock Origin still blocks 340 scripts/trackers even when logged into Premium. They not only want to eye-rape us with ads, but they want to track the fuck out of us across the web.
Youtube can eat shit and post it to 'shorts' before I turn my ad-blocker off.
Hey Google, you gotta remember that you won’t get any ad revenue from people who get fed up with your shit and just stop going to YouTube.
ever since they've been getting so obnoxious and haughty lately i've deleted the app (which is barely worth having without premium; esp with them INTENTIONALLY DISABLING background playback on mobile which is a fucking joke and should literally be against the law) and honestly barely visit anymore. i don't think my quality of life has dropped at all
Literally listening to youtube in the background right now without premium. Firefox mobile ftw.
Video background play fix is the add-on I use.
Fuck 'em.
Do they have a way to cut off FreeTube? I just started using it recently.
Not really, unless they start requiring you to log in before you can watch any content.
In theory they can cut off everything, but it takes some more intrusive behavior on your phone. Essentially they can build a layer required to authenticate your phone as unmodified before allowing it to access any content, using a special api.
I'll just start downloading the YouTube videos I wanna watch. Maybe even have it on my Plex server.
That's what I did for ~6 years before I started using Piped with LibRedirect in my browser and LibreTube on my phone. It's honestly the best YouTube experience I ever had. FreeTube is great if you prefer a desktop app, as well as Yattee with this guide on iOS or SmartTubeNext on Android TV.
Hahahahahahahaha get fucked google
Time to move to NewPipe and ViMusic?
SmartTube is quite nice also.
SmartTube on Android TV is a far better experience than the official Youtube app. I love it!
peertube
don't care suck my balls
How about invest in actually using all the data you have on me to show me ads for products I would actually be interested in? I wouldnt hate ads so much if it wasn't so repetitive and for crap that is useless to me.
That's fine. The more they do stuff like this the less I watch YouTube.
Plenty of other things to watch out there.
Well, looks like I'll just stick to using Invidious.
