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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.
RangerJosie ,

Good.

Youtube is a wonderful thing. It’s a wealth of knowledge and resources unlike anything this world has ever seen.

And it’s ran by one of the worst, most predatory corps on the planet.

corsicanguppy ,

it’s ran

it’s run

BlackDragon ,

it’s ren

LinyosT ,

Ron*

nokturne213 ,

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/04/34/4d/04344d273334cdabf87b5f52129f555a.gif

RangerJosie ,

Danke. Mein Reichleiter.

Zink ,

Perfectly put. The product is great and I love how it democratizes “being on TV” and lets some people make a living doing their own thing.

But I do not like where YouTube’s cut of that ad/sub money goes, and the enshittification pushed into it.

Unfortunately, YouTube is not unique in that regard. It’s a sucky fact of life that just about any complex product you spend money on will benefit a collection of rich sociopaths skimming as much as possible from the incomes of the people actually making the thing. Gotta vote with your wallet where you can, and vote the traditional way for the systemic issues.

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.

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.

0x0 ,

potential account suspension.

What account?

WhyJiffie ,

But to be serious, this might be at actual risk to those who are logged in. They were locking out users of their whole google accounts for less, including their emails and the uploaded files to drive.

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.

JustARaccoon ,

Until they start properly filtering ads they accept they get auto disabled in my side. No weird crypto or porn ads for me, thanks.

towerful ,

Even the shitty mobile ads of “someone watching prerecorded gameplay and commenting it”.
How obvious can you be?! “Oh wow, these 2 different people playing EXACTLY the same and saying almost the same thing”.
That’s not an ad.
Never mind that the gameplay in the ad is an extremely minor part of the game. The rest is some sort of city-builder with mtx shortcuts.

It’s just whaling

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.

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.

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.

Desistance ,
@Desistance@lemmy.world avatar

Good.

SuperSpaceFan ,

Who could have foreseen this? s/

SirEDCaLot ,

This battle was lost before it started. Sad thing is, if they weren’t so goddamn obnoxious with the ads it wouldn’t even need to be a battle. As it stands, YouTube without ad blocker is damn near unwatchable.

nobleshift ,
@nobleshift@lemmy.world avatar

Just like the rest of the internet …

0x0 ,

I remember when google search had one text-based ad. Bearable.

CileTheSane ,
@CileTheSane@lemmy.ca avatar

The guy who decided to start the battle increased ad revenue for a week so he got his bonus, that’s all that matters.
“I’ll glady tank YouTube’s revenue tomorrow for an extra dollar today.”

800XL ,

That’s just executives in general. And on the wayout they’ll leech a golden parachute.

01189998819991197253 ,
@01189998819991197253@infosec.pub avatar

Dangit. Now I want a burger…

mechoman444 ,

Absolutely! Everything on YouTube is somehow predicated to getting you exposed to some kind of advertising. Absolutely everything!

They’ve min maxed it so hard that without the various plugins that I use in Firefox YouTube would be almost completely unusable.

MrSoup , (edited )

They successfully broke almost every Piped instance.

jj4211 ,

I used to just watch YouTube at default, taking the ads as they felt like.

Now, no thanks. If I have to watch as many ads for as long as they mandate, I’ll just watch other things.

MonkderVierte ,

and warning users of potential account suspension.

What account?

UnderpantsWeevil ,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators

What always got me about accounts like Mr. Beast is how they never made the jump to a direct subscription service for their content. Some of the more popular Patreon accounts rarely if ever bubble up to the top of the YouTube algorithm. Yet they are clearly popular enough to bring in millions as independent artists. Meanwhile, the folks that dominate the YouTube charts are inevitably the ones that the algorithm force-feeds you in every “Recommended” feed.

It’s almost as though YouTube needs quality content providers more than the quality providers need the ads. Almost as though the real beneficiaries of the YouTube ad-supported model are generating endless largely unappealing filler content.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

potential account suspension

You don’t even need an account to use YouTube lol

daddy32 ,

Remember when videos had to be at least 10 minutes long, so more ads could be added to the play time? Now they don’t give a fuck.

Impromptu2599 ,

Now you get a 10 minute ad for a 2 minute video

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