YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers
People are installing and uninstalling ad blockers in record high numbers as a result of YouTube's anti-ad blocking efforts.
Combine that with the 83% price increase in Australia!
YouTube can eat shit, they're screwing over even those of us willing to pay, Smarttube here I come!
As plenty of other people have already said, if YouTube Premium went up by a pittance every month (boiling frog price increases) I would probably keep subscribing. The fact that they A) clamped down on AdBlockers and B) increased Premium rates is a major disappointment.
Add to this that Patreon are introducing invasive User Agreements and it is getting more difficult to support Independent content creators.
Platforms like Curiosity Stream are looking more and more appealing to those of us who want interesting content and don’t mind parting with a reasonable amount of cash to support creators.
If it company had clear rules, guidelines, treated creators like humans, I'd be glad to pay for premium too
I tried to watch the Thursday night football recap yesterday and accidentally opened YouTube instead of smarttube. I was shocked. I watched a minute of ads to start and one minute in I had another minute of ads. YouTube was basically unwatchable.
installing better adblockers
or just updating uBlock lol. not sure what YouTubes team was expecting here
Some people use Google Chrome or other Chromium-based browsers that don't support proper ad-blockers because Google deprecated MV2. Firefox and its forks like LibreWolf are the only usable browsers nowadays, they are the only ones that support MV2 and proper ad-blockers like uBlock Origin.
I updated ublock but it didn't stop the ads, so I can see others doing the same. I'm guessing it didn't actually pull the very latest version or the very latest block lists for whatever reason, but others might be less patient than me.
Make sure you have no other adblockers, disable enhanced tracking protection for youtube (shield icon at address bar) and make sure you have no other custom rules set for youtube.
Also you don't need to update all the filters. Just the quick fixes section -> click the clock icon and then update.
Also this all assumes you mean uBlock Origin, not just uBlock.
Use firefox and disable all other adblockers
didn't work for me at first too, but other YouTube specific ad blockers had side effects (videos opened in new tabs would play automatically instead of waiting for you to switch to that tab, etc)
here's what I did:
I think it's meant for people who currently use ABP, uBlock, or one of the other countless bad ones as opposed to the far superior uBlock Origin, or Adnauseam.
It's an assymetric cat-and-mouse game.
YouTube does it for revenue and has to spend money to enhance their anti-adblock system, while there is an army of volunteers online who will gladly defeat these enhancements for free with an impact on a massive scale.
For every tech company with an r&d team fighting this stuff, there's a plethora of programming wizards whose sole purpose in life is to defeat them.
Or worse, they are just using third party clients.
Are there any yt 3rd party that support chromecasting?
That is the only thing keeping me from switching away from the official app.
I was wondering because I have yet to see an adblock warning and I use YouTube daily.
I haven't seen any yet either, but I've been religiously updating my ublock Origin lists and keeping Revanced up to date.
It is a gradual rollout. as many have said. I hadn't seen the Youtube's first warning until today, although people have be talking about it for a few weeks now.
I don't use chrome and use uBlock Origin. So I may never see the initial wave of warnings they've already bypassed.
The rollout already hit me and passed. I use Chrome at work with uBlock mostly because it's mandated and I burnt through all the warnings and videos were starting to not play. I thought that was that, I was too lazy to fix it on my work PC but a day later uBlock updated and it hasn't been an issue since.
Procrastinating wins again, I never took direct action. I don't want to get too hopeful, but I think even Google is going to have more trouble with this than they anticipate
Never would've guessed.
I pay for YouTube premium, but it's a lot of money given they have $0 production cost.
Production, sure. Operational costs, not so much zero. I don't understand how people think video streaming on any scale can be supported without any income. I don't think they're recent pricehike is reasonable, but to think anyone deserves to be able to stream 4k video (albeit low bit rate) without any sort of compensation is beyond me.
I pay for Youtube Premium, because I get a legit way to bypass ads and the creators I watch gets payed more than if I watched ads, but I also use an adblocker pretty much everywhere because they are intrusive and annoying. However I'm not under any illusion that doing so does directly hurt the income of the sites I visit.
I'm completely aware of the financial issues YouTube is facing, but they got themselves into this mess (and most other companies as well, who provide a service for "free"). They make users accustomed to a level of service, build a userbase and ride on investments with the expectation that they'll figure out how to make money when they reach mass adoption.
The fact that youtube premium took years to even conceptualize is a massive failure on their part. Or how 1080p+ video wasn't a paid feature to begin with. Making your users get used to a level of service, then making their experience more miserable and selling a solution to the problem they made does not bode well with people who have been on the platform before "things turned to shit".
It also doesn't help that the first course of action was to increase the amount of ads, increase retainment, "enshifficate" the platform in order to increase the time people spend on the site (=more ad revenue). Now I'm at a point that I can't use YouTube without uBlock, sponsorblock, return youtube dislikes and Revanced (includes the latter two extensions for mobile), turning useless features off (or with the case of dislikes, back on) and stopping the bombardment of ads.
Youtube premium would still provide me with a worse experience, so why would I switch? They should figure out how to provide people additional value for their money, and shouldn't have accustomed people to a level of service that they 100% knew wouldn't be sustainable.
The big issue I see with YouTube premium (though I'm a paid subscriber) is that the bitrate is still far too low. Vimeo provided much better quality a decade ago for paid users and so do Nebula, Floatplane and all the other competing sites nowadays
I don't understand how people think video streaming on any scale can be supported without any income
The same way Lemmy and the rest of the fediverse manages to stay functioning despite not generating any income other than donations.
Decentralization, open protocols, And many ulturistic tech savy sysadmin voulenteers in a well enough financial position to eat hosting+maintenance cost out of pocket so a social service can be provided for the many.
Peertube is the shining example here, many many many instances exist and many offer unlimited vido upload. Thoe instances work, they are out there, and video streaming from them is acceptable speeds usually. Two instances I've used personally are https://diode.zone and https://spectra.video and they are pretty good IMO
Now that isn't to say peertube is a perfect alternative, federation and decentralized hosting of many instances is its own can of worms. There are probably many Lemmy users who came from the reddit Exodus who still don't know how things work under the hood, nor should they have to. Peertube needs to become more fleshed out with a better user interface. It still works, though.
Just because services cost money to host doesn't necessary mean they need to make a profit to be viable. Only when you try to make a business out of them. The internet allows for individual provide services at cost, as hobbiest or utilitarian endeavors of passion and philosophy.
Most people admittedly dont care about any of that. They want a convinent service without and hassle or bugs on their part, and dont care about much else besides them and their precious entertainment.
The thing about social platforms is that you need users to attract users, its a vicious cycle of popularity. For an alternative service to attract enough users, another popular service needs to screw up royally enough that people start looking and trying alternatives in mass.
Before the reddit exodus Lemmy was mostly home to communist and hard leaning political extremist, people who are rejected by conventional platforms are the first to look for alternatives. Its only when reddit pissed the whole community of people off that Lemmy got enough momentum to attract normal people.
YouTube needs to piss EVERYONE off enough that the most diehard premium subscriber and most of the content creators say FUCK THIS! And they will most likely find peertube or Odessy.
Somehow I just dont see that happening, it feels like at this point people are so addicted to their YouTube that Alphabet could physically print out androids to hunt down every user to fuck them in the ass, and people would still shell out 10/15/30/50$ a month to daddy google.
Damn this got long, sorry.
Tldr: free decentralized video streaming service peertube exist, but currently has no users to attract more users. YouTube needs to fuck up atomically to push enough people to try out alternative services like peertube. Content creators should rely on growing their patreons/donators for money and not meager ad revenue from the streaming service.
I just got an email saying the subscription will go up by 60% in April (I'm on a grandfathered premium plan).
Why do you pay for a free service? To thank them for fucking everyone over?
I've heard others say that many people are uninstalling ad blockers.
I guess its just how you interpret the data
What's often left out is people are uninstalling terrible ad blockers and installing better ones. The terrible ones allow certain ads (from advertisers who pay to get through) or even inject their own ads.
Some disinformative articles are trying to use that to claim that because people are uninstalling [insert bad scammy adblocker name] that people are uninstalling adblockers altogether.
Uninstalling to immediately reinstall, probably.
I had uBlock Origin and I didn't mind paying for YouTube Premium. When I will mind paying for YouTube Premium will be when all of my feed is full of reactionary populist channels, not to avoid paying part of the income that pays some of the people making a career out of streaming on the platform I've been avoiding even watching ads on.
It will be a losing battle for the people not trying to look for alternatives - in the end, Google has control of the backend, they can eventually decide to incorporate ads directly into the streams that are served to people protocol wise and they can decide to forego giving users any warning of when an ad will play and when they will try to force the video into forced reproduction.
That the streams are served in a way where the browser can discern when it should play the ads is more of a courtesy from a legacy architecture that came from a Google that wasn't intent on cracking down on people adblocking, and people may have to revert back to using more specific and resource intensive YouTube adblockers that try to guess when a commercial break is starting and ending directly from the video stream like old school VCRs did: https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-2869,00.html
These days I imagine a database of ads can be built up. Every time a new ad appears, it could well be in the database within a day. Then within 5 or 10 frames, the ad could be detected and the database would know exactly how long to skip forward.
Sponsorblock already works like magic.
And now I use brave which has a built in ad-blocker so I don't have them as my browser anymore either.
"Sorry, we noticed that you are using a browser that isn't Google Approved™. Therefore YouTube won't play any video and also, we deleted your YouTube account."
The worst-case endgame is, you can send the videos, but they'll never reach my eyeballs. Send those frames to /dev/null and store the video stream where I can watch it as often as I like.
