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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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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

ThePantser ,
@ThePantser@lemmy.world avatar

I already pay tons yearly for extra storage. YouTube without ads should be included. Also I was a paying customer for ad free back when Google Music was alive. They killed the best service for the shitty YouTube Music. Bring back Google Music and I will subscribe again.

bulwark ,

Same boat dude. That’s how I got YouTube premium. I uploaded like 500 GB of music for Google Music to host it and I could stream my own collection. Now I use Navidrome and my own server.

bstix ,

The ads have reached a breaking point.

If I can’t block them, I’m just not watching the YouTube. I’ll never pay.

It used to be funny to link a relevant YouTube clip, but it’s not funny if you have to sit through half a minute of ads just to see something silly.

It’s also not really a long time streaming service like TV channels or netflix etc., because the homemade content sucks in comparison to an actual documentary that I can also watch without ads on other services.

It’s like Google completely misunderstood the point of the service they initially made. Also following a decade of users attempting to “monitize” their fucking crap, you can be sure that there’s nothing worth watching on YouTube that couldn’t have been better presented in a gif or in text.

Then the player is also fucking up lately. Usually if I go there, I’ll check the written description while the ads play, just to see if the content is worth the wait, but nooo… you can’t even do that anymore, because the app will start reloading between the multiple ads and the screen scrolls around and minimizes the description and comments. They’re literally hiding any information on the clip except the title until you’ve watched the ads.

It’s fucking garbage. Enshittified to death.

Repeating: Google, if you’re listening: I’ll never pay for YouTube, no matter how intrusive you make the ads. Enshittification is not encouraging me to pay.

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