There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers

  • YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
  • Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
  • Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
chemicalwonka ,
@chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Worse part of the problem is knowing what part of the ad profit YouTube uses to pay MrBeast and his stupid content.

Angry_Autist ,

There isn’t a big streamer that doesn’t strike me as a creepy tryhard.

SaharaMaleikuhm ,

I’d rather not watch YouTube videos at all than videos with ads.

polle ,

Smarttube stopped working some weeks ago for a day. I tried watching YouTube with ads, the experience was so fucking insane to me. Like multiple, non skipable ads before the video starts + more ads during the video. It just was unwatchable. Its just unusable.

WeebLife ,

Try grayjay

Vathsade ,

Newpipe still works (Google may break it, but the app is usually updated in a couple days and it works again)

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

Here’s my current lineup.

Newpipe Freetube Greyjay Tubular Brave

They get through all those, I’m just going to surf peertube or odysee

Angry_Autist ,

I don’t mind one or two of their old 5 second ads, but anything beyond that is unacceptable especially on a 2 min vid.

echodot ,

Despite all of their machinations my strategy of simply ignoring literally everything they say and continuing doing the same old same old appears to be flummoxing them.

I’ve literally not done anything and have never experienced any inconvenience. Are we sure they’re doing anything at all?

sem ,

Same, I think they must be AB testing and I don’t get assigned into the shitty group

tempest ,

They are definitely AB testing things like rejecting ad blockers.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I definitely got really awful, unplayably spotty playback that seemed linked to adblock usage. Then I saw an article about it and confirmed I wasn’t going crazy, and that day it stopped happening, so it felt like I was going crazy all over again. It’s like the moment they realised it was going to become a problem and they weren’t as sneaky as they thought, they turned it off. I haven’t had an issue since then.

smeenz ,

I had the same experience with shitty playback buffering every few seconds on popular videos that should be cached on a nearby cdn, and then saw lots of articles about it and then boom a week later everything was back to normal

dumbass ,
@dumbass@leminal.space avatar

I thought I was getting that blank screen long pause before videos, turns out my phone cable was damaged, fixed it and YouTube’s back to normal.

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Wait, how would a phone cable cause a symptom like that…?

dumbass ,
@dumbass@leminal.space avatar

I’m guessing some of the wires being broken caused congestion or sonething, I dont know why it did it, I just know once I fixed the cable it was fine.

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Was the video signal going through it? Otherwise, sounds more like a coincidence.

Fades ,

100% coincidence

smeenz ,

Maybe they’re using the phone line for their Internet ? Vsdl etc…

mightyfoolish ,

Your phone could have been switching power profiles incorrectly due to your phone rapidly switching between charging and not charging (and perhaps with a low power state depending on battery level).

@ripcord Just my guess.

Fades ,

And this phone cable damage only impacted youtube lol

Angry_Autist ,

MBAs are taught they can shape human behavior with decades disproven assumptions.

It’s fallout like this that shows their hand.

“Oh, the customers don’t like it? Fine we do it twice as hard” is fucking Pavlovian training and the executives behind the initiative should be sealed in an underground vault knee deep in hungry roaches.

azl ,

I pay for Nebula and try to watch as much as I can there. The content is more “pleasant department store” and less “Mexican public market”.

I do watch YouTube regularly when channel-surfing, but if I ever see an ad (which happens only on mobile devices), I close it immediately and do something else. It’s not that I don’t think I should be able to watch everything for $0, but YouTube ads are so jarring, random, irrelevant and just make me sick. They literally ruin whatever I was watching and make me sad to exist.

It can be exhausting to wade through the absolute meat market of click bait titles and thumbnails to find something that not only looks interesting but won’t abuse me with infomercial-form audio/visuals.

YouTube enables and promotes the “content creators” who abuse human psychology to accumulate views, likes, subscriptions, etc. The best thing that could happen is they continue to be exposed as the drug dealer they are.

Chip_Rat ,

So I paid for nebula, but it seems totally vacant. I’m not mad, I’m happy to spend the money supporting small creators/any independent endeavour, but am I missing something??

01189998819991197253 ,
@01189998819991197253@infosec.pub avatar

it seems totally vacant

OP did say that “the content is more “pleasant department store””. Have you been to a department store lately? They’re pretty vacant lol

Firoaren ,

I’d check out the podcasts - I like It’s Probably Not Aliens

cammoblammo ,

The app isn’t exactly optimised for finding content. There’s a lot on there, but it always takes me a while to figure out which submenu gives me the goodies.

Evrala ,

I’ll be honest, one of the parts I really like about the show Jet Lag is when they reccomend channels to watch at the end of the episode.

Angry_Autist ,

It’s relatively new and has a small userbase. I doubt it will ever get as active as youtube but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Ragnarok314159 ,

It’s always laughable to me that these companies are able to have the meta data on our entire lives and yet show ads for shit we don’t even want.

smeenz ,

Not to mention 50 different variants of the same annoying ad, so that even when you block it, you have to do it 49 more times to actually stop seeing it.

And the problem with the same irrelevant and animated ad repeated 5 times on the same webpage

Andonyx ,

Look at it this way, Google stopped caring about their viewers as anything more than wallets to empty years ago. Now they’re going through the same cycle with advertisers. They don’t care if the ads land, or the targeting works, just that they can convince them to keep buying ad space.

Eventually the ROI will show as not worth it to the advertisers, but by then Pichai and the rest of the C-suite will be pulling the same scam at another company whose investors are more greedy and stupid than saavy.

Because the horrible truth of America now, is that CEOs and their ilk have stopped caring about creating value, or building a sustainable business model with long term revenue. Now they just look at witless investors as wallets to be emptied too.

Lynx ,
@Lynx@jlai.lu avatar

Shit you don’t want yet. That’s the idea of ads, trying to sell you shit you don’t want or need. Why advertise the stuff that you’re already buying?

saplyng ,

Because an animated 5 second ad telling me to buy more dice and horde them like the goblin I am would work on me!

Thorny_Insight ,

Advertisements are for a large part about brand recognization. Even if you’re not going to buy the product, the fact that you remember the brand means the ad has worked.

Angry_Autist ,

There are tons of products I’d impulse buy, old lego sets, spice and hot sauce samplers, custom gaming dice.

I won’t normally go out to shop for them but if they show up as an ad I may click and buy.

But they NEVER advertise anything to me that I like or am interested in. It’s always bullshit

Angry_Autist ,

the thought is “not what you want, what THEY want you to want”.

If your favorite brands and IPs aren’t as profitable as Mypillow and Regressive Fake University ads (well not mypillow anymore thankfully)

That’s the key difference and why nearly every idle auto-play leads to the alt-right within a few hundred views.

Evrala ,

I’m a lesbian, Google has enough data on me to know I’m a lesbian, I live with women, don’t really hang out with men at all. I use a bunch of Google services so I know Google knows this about my living situation.

SO MANY FUCKING ADS FOR MANSCAPED, WHHHYYYYY. I am not the target market for this Google.

I’ve taken to blocking the ads, still more Manscaped. Is it cause blocking = engagement? “Oh wow, she interacted with this ad to block it but ignored the others, what a good ad placement!”

swordgeek ,

Youtube is waging a war against their customers. If they win, they lose; and if they lose they win.

Gsus4 ,

The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I’d rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.

kinsnik ,

legit, if youtube ever beats ublock origin, i’ll just stop watching youtube

unexposedhazard , (edited )

Its an all out assault on half your senses without an adblocker. Literal torture.

seaQueue ,
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

The entire web is like that without an ad blocker these days.

Gsus4 ,

I miss those cheeky gif banners from the 2000s

fasterthancat ,

[With hindsight] The commercial use of the internet should never have been allowed.

Gsus4 ,

I want the internet to be a network of digital libraries…communication, public events and sharing space…personal pages…services…the commercial motive starts from there and eventually consumes the rest :/

fasterthancat ,

I reckon without the rule changes in 1993-94 allowing commercial use that the internet would have turned into a significantly more useful utility with higher quality innovation than the advert laden train wreck that we have now.

Gsus4 ,

Ok, apparently it wasn’t as gradual as I thought, there was a determining moment in 93-94 with Netscape and HTTPS that made secure transactions possible for e-commerce.

ltxrtquq ,

Do online multiplayer video games count as a commercial use? I kind of like those

webghost0101 ,

Yt-dlp download script + text file with fav channel urls + jellyfin.

No bullshit, saves bandwidth.

Also look into invidious.

chiisana ,
@chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net avatar

They were serving videos with ads spliced in, basically DAI in podcasting industry. I’m not sure how that experiment went, but if that’s how they’d serve the videos, downloaders will have ads embedded as well.

webghost0101 ,

Yt-dlp supports sponsorblock, i am not worried.

I also dont even need tools for this as my usual style of watching is with my fingers on the arrow keys to skip back and forth

chiisana ,
@chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net avatar

I actually don’t know if/how the ad block people worked around it or if YouTube pulled back. The problem with DAI on podcast and in stream ads is that the ads aren’t always 1:05~1:35, the ad could be longer or shorter, then the next ad won’t necessarily start at the same time, and most definitely won’t end at the same time. So sponsor block won’t know precisely where the ads are, thereby making it much harder for a crowd sourced solution to accurately skip embedded ads. Hopefully they figured out a way, but as mentioned earlier, I don’t know what happened to that experiment.

acetanilide ,

Put it on a VHS, then use one of those VCRs that removes the ads for you.

0x0 ,

Also look into invidious.

And peertube, some content creators also post there, e.g., The Linux Experiment.

pete_the_cat ,

I’ve had YouTube Premium since the days when it was called YouTube Red, so like a decade. I’ve grown used to not seeing any ads from Google and anytime I watch a video not using my account it’s torture.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

Same here. FreeTube for desktop and NewPipe are all you need though if you don’t want to pay and/or have access to music.

Wildly_Utilize ,

Tubular is newpipe + sponsorblock BTW

I use pipepipe but it’s less stable

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

I haven’t tried that yet. I think Libretube also does SponsorBlock too & have seen it on F-Droid.

Wildly_Utilize ,

Ya I think you’re right.

I use pipepipe over tubular because it let’s you change the ugly red YouTube banner to black (enable eye protection)

towerful ,

As a recent YT premium-tryer, it’s amazing how many ads they put in that aren’t obviously adverts - comparing between non-premium and premium browsing.
Not sure I’ll keep YT premium beyond the free trial, until I find more decent content producers. Even then, it’s skipping those video’s paid promotion segments.
So it’s like paying for a streaming platform to not get ads… But still getting ads

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

I agree… however, that is an issue with the content creators relying on using content promotions. I have noticed when skipping ahead in videos that it usually indicates in the progress bar where the promotion ends. If the content producers utilized other ways to contribute and I liked them enough, then I’d do that. YouTube now has a subscriber only feature that should help with this. There are also extensions that are supposed to block sponsors too. I don’t think YouTube has implemented any functions to make blocking sponsored ads more difficult, especially for paying users… who knows though.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

You could pay for YouTube Premium

Gsus4 , (edited )

Is that what they are trying to do? Push crap ads and try to kill adblock to get a little extra user share to pay for yet another subscription?

PS: let me add that I also watch TV and the balance between quality of content and ads and their placement is much better (yes, some countries are worse than others with this). I don’t know what they are doing in youtube ads, but it’s anti-human (not just the ads, but the design too: super slow loading, tricks you into clicking the wrong content). Like they don’t want you to “pay” by watching ads, they want to torture you until you subscribe, go away or get adblock.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t care if you block ads… but to act like Google owes you and that you deserve free content is called entitled.

Gsus4 , (edited )

Google certainly acts like it owes me nothing indeed, that’s why it will never be good enough to pay to watch.

BedSharkPal ,

I’m just glad someone is thinking of the shareholders

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

I forgot… where can I get my free data center with petabytes of storage & 300TB/s fiber interconnects?

BedSharkPal ,

Wait, are we acting like YouTube isn’t profitable now? If I’m going to spend money on videos it’ll be a content creator owner platform like Nebula

towerful ,

I get what you are saying, but the balance is off.
YT premium costs (edit) more than a streaming service per month.
There are no industry leading movies or series released exclusively on YouTube.
YouTubes benefits of premium is “not being delivered ‘skip after 5 seconds’ live streams” as an ad that will play indefinitely (or at least for hours).
Also, streaming services provide much better series discovery. Ie, find a show you like and easily discover the start of that series, then binge watch the entire series in order.
YT premium is basically a “play next” queue, 1080p, and no ads.
It doesn’t (AFAIK) support creators any more. It’s literally just a fee to not-be-inconvenienced, and it’s not great at that

auzy ,

Yep… i actually looked at Subscribing. But… It’s basically mostly amateur hour and the subscription costs a huge amount.

Even worse, I don’t believe creators even get revenue until they exceed sufficient subscribers. So most people are actually paying youtube to put benefit from other people’s video’s which they have no involvement in.

stsquad ,

When did this change? AIUI creators got a larger cut of YouTube premium views compared to ad share.

bulwark ,

It’s only a matter of time until the premium users get ads. Just like Netflix, and cable TV before that. You will inevitably wind up paying to be advertised to.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

Netflix has ads now? I thought that was only for their lower tier service? I had to cancel Netflix cause they haven’t came out with two more seasons of Stranger Things yet.

sunzu2 ,

yes for lower paid tiers.

Damage ,

Google makes enough money evading taxes already. Not gonna help them make more.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t care if you use ad blockers. I get annoyed when people publish articles like… “Google is losing the adblockers war” cause then advertisers are going to start pushing harder for Google to actually prevent adblockers entirely, which they could have done already. Thus far Google, despite issues, does quite a lot of good things… Android is the only open source OS out of Apple & Windows. Android lets you install third party app stores. Chrome (Chromium) is open source… etc.

These users writing this content don’t even develop the apps to block YouTube ads. If you’ve ever explored the APIs by YouTube, then you’d know that Google despite pushing ads for users without blockers, is still rather friendly to third party apps.

casmael ,

Fuck that though

narc0tic_bird ,

I’d pay for YouTube Premium Lite if it didn’t state “Note: Ads will still show on music content and outside of videos.” and if that’d make them stop harvesting all my data.

seaQueue ,
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

Pro tip, LLMs do an excellent job summarizing YouTube videos now. I’ve never liked YouTube content, the incentives for creators are perverse and discourage conveying accurate information simply in favor of drawing out every video to maximize ad opportunities. About 95% of the content I might have been interested in could have been better conveyed in a 1-2 page blog post and read in 2 minutes instead of stretched out into a 15 minute video. Having a robot summarize that content is so much less irritating.

Gsus4 ,

What do you use for that, fetch the transcript and just feed it to the LLM of your choice? Or are you talking of the actual LLM watching and summarizing?

seaQueue ,
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve always just used chatgpt for both tasks. I’ll ask my SO, she does more of this and she might have better tools to suggest.

NaoPb ,

Same.

I came across someone who uploaded a 90 minute video as an ad as well.

towerful ,

I remember watching some video, falling asleep for a few hours, then waking up to a livestream of an ad. One of those “skip after 5s” but it was a livestream, so it just kept playing. I couldn’t believe it!

QuarterSwede ,
@QuarterSwede@lemmy.world avatar

It’s so bad that I 1) refuse to pay for premium so I don’t enable the behavior and 2) ended up sideloading an alt YouTube app on iOS that just doesn’t display the ads. YouTube hasn’t been able to block that one yet as it spoofs as the original YouTube app. Totally unsanctioned and a pain in the ass to keep the certificate alive but worth it. YouTube is actually enjoyable again. All that because the ads interruptions were constant. If it was every 15 min or so I wouldn’t care, but every 5!? Get the hell out of here!

copd ,

Wheres the data to back up this claim? That article is purely opinion

MrVilliam ,

Pro tip: open YouTube in Chrome, signed into your YouTube account. Allow the algorithm and your subs to continue recommending videos. Find one you wanna see. Copy link address. Paste it into Firefox with adblock, not signed into Google/YouTube. Prosper.

Just watched a YouTube video on my PS5 earlier today while cooking a food and saw for the first time that they will shoot an ad with a “next” button that skips to another ad, and then there’s a “skip” button countdown. Ridiculous. I wouldn’t bother with adblock if the ads were reasonable.

Here’s a free idea, YouTube: build in the ability to add videos to a simple temporary queue and then only put ads in at the very start or very end of videos so they aren’t intrusive.

palordrolap ,

That free idea reduces (potential) ad watch time which reduces money, so there's no chance they'll implement it.

If they thought they could get away with serving an ad every 15 seconds, they'd do it.

variants ,

what I do is open a containerized tab on firefox so that youtube has no history enabled and doesnt fill the page with obnoxious content then I search for what I went there for then I close the tab so everything is purged. for my subscriptions I use a container on my server that downloads their videos and ads them to my plex server so I can watch them there when I have time to watch stuff its all in one place

TheGalacticVoid ,

Watch time affects your recommendations, so this isn’t a great solution

MrVilliam ,

After watching, click do not recommend and say that it’s because you’ve already watched it. Problem solved.

TheGalacticVoid ,

And now YouTube thinks you hate that video, so your recommendations are less relevant unless you’re willing to do the survey every time.

PhAzE ,

SmartTube on the shield. Prosper.

yamanii ,
@yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

Here’s a free idea, YouTube: build in the ability to add videos to a simple temporary queue

You can have that by paying for youtube premium, they want you to sign up.

MrVilliam ,

I’m not tempted to sign up for something if I don’t even know what the features are. Maybe some of their dumbass ads should be for their own fucking product lol. I assumed that it was free from ads, and I think you can download videos and play with your screen off on your phone? Idk, Vanced has been great for me on my phone. And I wouldn’t have bothered to get that set up in the first place if the ads and lack of features weren’t so disruptively intrusive. If they find a way to shut down every way of getting around their overreaching bullshit, I’ll opt to fund a few respectable creators directly rather than pay for the platform.

And I wouldn’t want to bother building a queue in the first place unless it were in order to manage ad breaks. Putting that behind a paywall defeats the purpose of what I’m proposing. You can already build playlists all day long.

TheGalacticVoid ,

The best feature is that it auto-downloads recommended videos, but I hate how finnicky it is, and I hate how it’s capped at 1080p.

tabular ,
@tabular@lemmy.world avatar

Presumably the algorithm feed will stagnate or even deteriorate if it sees you ain’t watching what it’s suggesting.

dsilverz ,
@dsilverz@thelemmy.club avatar

If you have Plasma Integration (KDE), you can create a task for sending the link directly to Firefox without copying and pasting. Plasma Integration shows as a context menu item inside chrome, if you use KDE.

ArchRecord , (edited )

Good fucking riddance.

The sooner they realize the enshittification isn’t working, and is only increasing the amount of people participating in the largest global consumer boycott ever, the sooner they’ll actually try to improve the platform, or die resisting.

YouTube has continuously made the experience worse, adding more and more ads to users not using ad blockers, to compensate for those using them. Guess what, genius? People block ads because they suck. Adding more won’t stop people from using ad blockers!

And they have the audacity to try selling YouTube Premium for a whopping $14/mo (nowhere near the actual revenue generated from a user watching ads,) then don’t even provide any real benefit past ad blocking, after they deliberately killed YouTube Originals because it didn’t instantaneously bring in immense profits.

And the content creators I personally know have shown me the amount of money they get from Premium users, and it’s sometimes less than the value of an ad-supported user, even though the Premium user generates more revenue than an ad-supported one.

I would pay for YouTube Premium if it was a reasonable rate, and actually came with exclusive content, similar to Nebula, but it doesn’t.

Instead, YouTube has continued to make the interface more and more bloated, slow, and inefficient, and increased the incentives for low-quality, mass-produced content, all while not paying creators enough to support themselves on YouTube’s own platform.

YouTube can’t see itself as being the cause of its own issues, because it’s blinded by bad ad-driven fiscal policy that has only been a proven failure.

TechnologyChef ,

The worst of all issues to me was any interruption working to help feed people or the destitute immediately has a 5 second skip, while all else has 59, 30, 20, 14 skip. There was no benefit for good externalities, just cost and profit. I was even ok with ads around 5 seconds and that they can even show up before watching a video. Adding the countdown was a nice touch too. It’s when it gets in the way of UI/UX, how you have to suffer through the same commercial over and over, interrupting a video at critical moments, and ending videos with an ad so that you don’t know if the video is ended that it gets awful to use. I would hope someone gets to making it 5 second ads that don’t take away from the experience.

HerrBeter ,

Start 2x30 second ads

During video here’s an ad för my sponsor “braid narrow legends”

Buy my merch on www.mymerch.dog

Outro youtube ads

cybersandwich ,

Floatplane is Linus’ smartest decision he’s made. It’s going to be needed.

lemann ,

Platforms like Floatplane, Nebula, Patreon etc make it so easy to support creators outside of YouTube, while also giving creators a larger share of income compared to Adsense.

There’s YouTube Premium… but I don’t think I’m alone in not wanting to give Google a single cent of my hard earned cash

simonced ,

I already have Pixel phones, they can already spy on me. No f’ing way I pay to remove enshitification. Also, they’ll increase the price regularly anyway. If they want ppl to pay, they could just paywall the whole thing, well see who’s left after that lol.

Ilovethebomb ,

I’ve actually looked at these platforms as someone who has taken YouTube semi seriously in the past, and there are two major issues with them.

The first is, they don’t allow just anyone to upload video, you must already be an established creator. Second, there is no free access for viewers, meaning someone isn’t likely to share a link to your video with friends.

YouTube really does have a monopoly.

desertdruid ,

Linus

Let’s hope he doesn’t have access to any critical email account related to that service.

Bakersfield ,

I’m out of the loop. What’s that referencing?

cybersandwich ,

Linus got phished out of his twitter account recently.

Respect where it’s due. He owned it and was transparent so everyone can learn. Apparently he was at a pool party and just about to throw the burgers on the grill when he got an email that said his account was logged into from Turkey or Russia or someplace.

He panicked a bit, because of the last time his YouTube account was hacked he felt like acting quickly was the only thing that help it not be worse. I think he clicked the link in the email and “logged in” and boom. Got em.

Caught him at the right time and place and it all aligned to burn him.

Bakersfield ,

That sucks. Thanks for the info.

Did he end up getting his account back?

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Torvalds?

cybersandwich ,

Sebatianalds

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Van Pelt.

01189998819991197253 ,
@01189998819991197253@infosec.pub avatar

No. Of LTT

chakan2 ,
@chakan2@lemmy.world avatar

Imagine being on the YouTube ad team…that has to be the most depressing team in tech history. Your whole existence revolves around peddling ads before people can watch the ads they want.

bobs_monkey ,

Even better, you work for one of the wealthiest corporations in the world with virtually unlimited resources at your disposal, and you still get your asses handed to you by a handful of people with laptops.

paraphrand ,

If they didn’t have to support the web, and various legacy platforms, the could lock it all down with drm more easily.

Quill7513 ,

Hence Google’s proposal to DRM the web

limerod ,

Your whole existence revolves around peddling ads before people can watch the ads they want.

Ah, what. Who wants or likes to watch ads at all?

conciselyverbose ,

People watch an ad for the privilege of watching a movie/show/game trailer all the time.

ThePantser ,
@ThePantser@lemmy.world avatar

I have no problem watching a ad for a video but when I have to watch an ad just to see if I am interested in watching the video is where I draw the line. Forced ads before the video starts is the worst. Give me a min or two before forcing an ad. If I am looking for help for a particular issue I don’t want to watch ads after ad while trying to gauge the video.

InternetUser2012 ,

I get what you’re saying but I’ve reached a point in my life where I really don’t give a shit and there is absolutely no way I’m watching ads. I’m also not paying google for anything they offer.

chakan2 ,
@chakan2@lemmy.world avatar

Yea…I’m old enough to remember when that was the content that paid for the platform. Putting an ad on top of that is fucking soulless vampic greed.

seaQueue ,
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

Welcome to the new Google. It’s rent seeking all the way down.

pete_the_cat ,

A lot of creators have just turned into corporate shills. I stopped watching ETA Prime’s channel about tech reviews because it was becoming pretty clear that mostly everything he got was paid for by the company. Also, most creators are putting their own ads into their content.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

I know right… Why should content creators be able to make money from content. Am I right?

webghost0101 ,

The same reasons as open source software devs.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

Some content creators but not most of them. A lot of open source software advertises too.

knightly ,
@knightly@pawb.social avatar

You’re joking, but you’re right.

Once the content has been created, the near-zero marginal cost of online distribution makes the concept of charging for copies wholly untenable.

The furry community figured this out years ago, our creators work on commission or paid subscription through Patreon or one of its ilk. They (mostly) don’t care where you freely share their work because they already got paid.

chonglibloodsport ,

The knives are out for Patreon. Apple is looking to carve a big chunk out of that revenue. Google and Amazon (owner of Twitch) will not be far behind. Believe me, Google and Twitch are very unhappy that creators skip the platform monetization methods and just tell viewers to go to Patreon to bypass the heavy commissions.

essteeyou ,

Great time for Patreon to expand more into content delivery.

db0 ,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Patreon is jacked to the tits with vc money and enshittifying at a breakneck speeds. Done expect goods innovations from it in the future

knightly ,
@knightly@pawb.social avatar

Patreon deserves to die, their cut of the subscription income is extortionate for what amounts to a very limited web hosting platform.

Open-source alternatives like Mirlo or Cloud Patron will take its place, it’s only a matter of time.

Cephalotrocity ,

Welcome to Youtube. It’s ads all the way down. Unless:

Firefox browser, Ublock Origin extension, Sponsorblock extension

Save 40% of your viewing time for actual content and send tips through creator’s Paypal or whatever.

seaQueue ,
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

YouTube is just on demand TV with extra steps these days. I’ve stopped watching videos, I have an LLM transcribe and summarize for me now. 99% of the content of a 10-15 minute video can be summarized into 1 or 2 pages and read in under 2 minutes.

UnderpantsWeevil ,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

I have an LLM transcribe and summarize for me now.

Only a matter of time before LLMs start injecting their own ads into these responses.

seaQueue , (edited )
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

By that point I’m pretty sure we’ll have an effective compact model that can run locally and transcribe downloaded videos on reasonable hardware. Or you can just sic a paid model like chatgpt on the task. The corporate Internet is entirely focused on subscription service models now, unless you run the model yourself on local hardware you’re going to end up paying someone somewhere a service fee.

Edit: y’all need to learn about minified models designed to run on edge hardware, they’re a thing and often work shockingly well.

pennomi ,

Nah, local LLMs are easily in the range of transcribe/summarize. I bet you could do that nicely with llama 8B without even needing a gpu.

cheese_greater ,

Cant wait to have these

Gigasser ,

You already can I think? Ollama is something you can install, and then you can set up a webui like sillytavern for roleplays, or some other more fitting ui for whatever you want. Also, Linux is great for projects like these, on windows it’s fucking a pain to set up, Linux it’s easy.

Wildly_Utilize ,

Local and open source

Shdwdrgn ,

I hope nobody lets them know that Firefox on Linux has never shown ads for any of their content.

Lost_My_Mind ,

Don’t worry. Linux is only 4% of the total computer market. They aren’t bothered with you because Linux isn’t worth it.

Shdwdrgn ,

That’s fine, we’re happy to keep the better choice to ourselves. 😆

pete_the_cat ,

SmartTube for Android TV is a must as well

chonglibloodsport ,

I don’t follow those creators!

The best part of YouTube is the small creators who are just making videos as a hobby. Once they get so big they start shilling products they wouldn’t use themselves I drop them like a hot potato. For the most part that doesn’t happen though because I prefer niche topics and creators that don’t have “sellout” personalities.

rand_alpha19 ,
  • Reviews
  • Trailers
  • Reactions
  • Travel vlogs
  • Beginner tutorials

To some extent, these types of videos advertise or promote a product, service, or experience.

bruhbeans ,

I’ve clicked in to see a movie trailer, which is basically an ad, and had to watch an ad before I could watch the ad

vvv ,

and it’s potentially an existential threat.

Rentlar ,

At least you can tell your boss “I’m working on it!”, sit on your ass, and every 6 months add one more little UI or formula change which “finally stops adblockers” but is defeated within 3 days.

Damage ,

Yeah I don’t believe they really put their hearts in it. If they truly wanted to force you into watching ads, they’d manage. Their team is just not that interested.

01189998819991197253 ,
@01189998819991197253@infosec.pub avatar

Their team is probably using adBlockers more than the rest of us. They understand the depth of the surveillance baked into those ads.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

So tell the content creators you like that you don’t like YouTube. While YouTube Premium is the same price as like two coffees a month… Maybe your content creator will help you if you can’t afford it.

claudiop ,

Well, to begin with, both the watcher and the creator are clients of the platform. Both sides feel bound to it, even if both dislike it.

Then, YouTube premium is literally 20 machine coffees a month in my first world country. 15 if they’re done by someone. You seem to be speaking “privileged minority”.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

I’m sorry… I didn’t realize the reason that there are so many Starbucks in America, like literally caddy corner from one another is because their customer base is the “privileged minority.” I’ll have to remember that line.

In all seriousness, you could argue that ads prey on poor vulnerable people unable to afford YouTube Premium that just want to use it to learn, and that would be a semi-coherent argument.

claudiop ,

What you are trying to point is that in the United States of America (and maybe Canada) you people have coffee that’s so expensive that two of them pay for YT premium. You’re only missing out on most of the internet (eg. Not the US).

Starbucks is notoriously expensive and nobody refers to it as coffee round here. Starbucks in my first world country is considered something for hipster digital nomads. You can’t find them outside areas with tourists as everyone else is happy with “regular” coffee that’s literally 10 times cheaper.

Saying that two coffees equate to YouTube premium while using Starbucks as a metric is like saying that a car only costs a watch or two while using a Rolex as the reference watch. If you consider a Rolex to be your reference watch, cool, you’re a privileged minority.

GissaMittJobb ,

I’m sure they make enough money to not care. Being in the part of the company that brings in the dough is generally a pretty good position to be in as well.

kayos ,

It’s the only consumer product they haven’t canceled.

nobleshift ,
@nobleshift@lemmy.world avatar

YouTube has been a dumpster fire for many many years now and it continues its slide down.

Patreon would not exist had anyone over at YT had focus beyond the next two quarters.

Sooner or later an actual real contender will be created, and you’ll see YT’s knee jerk reactions with a surprised Pikachu meme in full effect.

legion02 ,

Patreon and sites like it exist as a hedge against YouTube banning your channel.

echodot ,

I would love it but I don’t see it.

It costs an enormous amount of money to host video content, doubly so when you need to replicate it across servers. I have never seen another company come close to usurping them.

stoly ,

I agree. We don’t get a new YouTube, we get whatever comes after YouTube—some new modality.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, The problem is, the price on YouTube is so incredibly expensive because we have to pay for a million script kiddies worth of useless videos to be uploaded and permanently stored everyday.

If someone made a competing system where you had to pay a small amount to host a video and then it turned around and paid you once you’ve got enough eyeballs that would be a far more sustainable model and cause people to police their old underperforming content.

Delta_V ,

I think its more likely that YouTube will shut down and be replaced by nothing. Its existence has never made sense as anything but an act of charity from an organization with tech resources to burn.

stoly ,

Remember that Google bought YouTube only AFTER it was successful for several years. This was also before Google turned evil.

jorp ,

There are a lot of unprofitable startups that get purchased speculatively based on other factors like their user count. The idea being the buyer thinks they can monetize.

stoly ,

This was more like a merger with Google being the larger company. YouTube was already very successful.

anthony ,
@anthony@lemmy.cif.su avatar

Sadly they killed Piped, and a lot Discord Bots in the Process…

TheOSINTguy ,

Free tube still works, android app is kinda buggy though.

WhyJiffie ,

Piped should be able to work if they implement invidious’s workaround. Unfortunately devs don’t seem to be active anymore :/

SirMaple__ ,

What features aren’t working in Piped?

I have a selfhosted Piped instance and use it daily without issue in Firefox and LibreTube on Android.

anthony ,
@anthony@lemmy.cif.su avatar

A lot of instances have been getting these “Sign in to confirm your not a not” messages, if to many people use them at the same time. It works after a while again, but only being able to watch Videos sometimes, when the right stars align properly, is to unreliable for most user, me included.

thesmokingman ,

I pay for YouTube Family. I consume a lot of YouTube and I want to support the creators I watch. At its current price point, YouTube Family is reasonable. Several households in my family get ad-free YouTube for what is a reasonably low price point for each household.

If the price goes up much (eg if I were paying the single price of $11 per household), the creators I really enjoy continue to get pushed out or change content because of shitty ad rules, or they pull the whole “must be in the same household” bullshit I would drop it in a heartbeat just like I’ve dropped most streaming providers. Streaming has become cable and YouTube has been shooting itself in the foot by forcibly changing content for advertisers. I come to the platform for content, not advertisers.

WhyJiffie ,

Unfortunately that fee won’t stop google’s endless thirst for data mining and it’s manipulation through “personalized recommendations”, and through ads on any other website and mobile apps.

thesmokingman ,

If you care about that you don’t use YouTube at all or support creators that do. Even using 3rd party apps or services feeds into that. This feels like a serious non sequitur on any thread about any Google product.

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