YouTube is slowing down for users with ad blockers in new wave
YouTube recently started slowing down its entire site whenever ad blockers are used. A new wave of slowdowns is hitting...
A new wave of slowdowns is hitting users, with the only resolutions being disabling the ad blocker or upgrading to premium.
Or just switching to ublock origin.
Or just switching to newpipe.
Or just switching to freetube.
etc
etc
etc
I have ublock origin on firefox and it's really bad for me currently. This has traditionally been the good combo I believe.
Not just slowing down, but stopping, then restarting after skipping a few seconds that you cannot access no matter what.
For now the best solution I've found is to copy the video url, open potplayer and just hit the paste command and the video runs flawlessly.
So they'll have to close that loophole eventually, which means enshittifying the video streaming protocol for everything that isn't the native web viewer, which will inconvenience more people who were used to something working, leading to another workaround, leading to...
Youtube is gradually accelerating their enshittification. I'm looking forward to when it comes to a real head. Too many serious interested parties rely on it. I don't know if peertube will be the first fallback, but I'm sure it'll get a big bump.
how do those youtube clients work? i thought YouTube was very closed source
AFAIK NewPipe parses the regular YouTube website and only extracts the useful bits.
Some probably use an API of some sort, because SmartTube for Android TV even synchronises your watch history, subscriptions, you login with your google account etc...
Or downloading videos to watch later? Does Plex recognize YouTube videos?
Plex does not recognize them in terms of pulling down metadata but you can still organize them in folders and browse that way. I find the Plex route is a healthier way to engage with video content than platforms that just keep serving you whatever the algorithm thinks will keep you peeled to the screen. It's more intentional and less of a passive consumption kinda thing.
tl;dr: Yes, but probably takes some effort for most content.
Plex will play the files, but metadata is hit or miss. If it's something that's on thetvdb or themoviedb, it can be matched as a series or movie, respectively. With some effort, you could also probably include all the relevant metadata when downloading the videos, then have plex use local metadata, which could cover anything not big enough for the big metadata providers.
I think it's also possible to find plug-ins/scripts that will pull metadata directly from youtube, but I've had bad luck relying on that stuff and then development stopping, so I avoid it these days.
but won't it be hassle to follow that?
YouTube revanced has also been working for me
And still, I’m more likely to stop using YouTube than to stop using an ad blocker.
That's what they want. Get all the users they aren't able to monetize off the platform to lower their costs.
That's a double edged sword though, lose viewers and you lose appeal to advertisers. Lose users and they're going to go somewhere else. That somewhere else will eventually grow and be competition. The bigger it gets, the faster it will grow.
Then I'mma leech HARDER
They used the "You" as in the people, during their growth years to build their platform. Now they are going against the people since they no longer need us.
Way ahead of you. Recently got Nebula, which has dramatically reduced the amount of time I spend on YT. Besides, this way I can help also the people who make the videos. They don’t need to be so dependent on the whimsical and unpredictable nature of the algorithm and the ever changing landscape of what is or isn’t advertiser friendly on the platform.
If YT feels like further cranking up the enshittification dial, I say, bring it on. I’m ready to drop my watch time even lower than it currently is.
Good news: you can have the best of both by watching everything for free through piped video!
I'll never understand why they spend so much effort pushing ads into people's faces that don't want see them and so little making ads more attractive.
A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads. Every Youtuber holding a product into the camera is an ad. And people want to watch that. They want to know what new products are out there. It just has to presented appropriately.
Forced ads with mandatory 5sec isn't making people interested in your product, heck, numerous times I might have been interested in a product, but lost interested since I couldn't rewind the ad or because the ad didn't link to anything that gave me further information. A 15min video from a Youtuber reviewing a product in detail is way more effective than any regular ad I have ever seen, yet there are almost no ads in that style.
Too be honest I was fine with seeing an ad every few videos. But at some point it became unskippable ads before , during and after a video.
Ads got too aggressive, people made adblockers, ads got more aggressive because of lost revenue, almost everyone starts using adblockers.
They did it to themselves, people were content with simple ads on a page, it's once they started interfering with the content and access of it that they became a problem.
What boils my blood the most is how manipulative marketing is. The number of worthless ass jingles I remember from the 90's from companies I've never purchased anything from is ridiculous.
I never had an issue with YT's 1-2 skipable ads at the beginning, or even the banner ad. But they got greedy.
The midrolls and the unskipable ads was the trigger point for me.
I was fine with even having a couple very short unskippable ads every other video. Now it is all of them with one in the middle of videos longer than 5 minutes. And then of course the content creator has to put in an ad because YouTube does not pay shit for views.
A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads
That’s what grinds my gears. I understand ads pay bills, but showing multiple ads before a trailer for a video game or movie is excessive.
There is potentially a world in which you want to see ads because ads themselves do technically provide a service. You do want to know about things you care about and would want to buy… you just don’t want it obnoxiously shoved into your face all of the time in psychologically manipulative ways.
Look at the way ads used to look "back in the day", with details about the product, its features, and reasons you would actually want to buy it. New tractor model, this many HP, pulls 4 bottom plow, burns this much diesel per hour, buy now and grow more corn.
However it turned out that it worked better just to try to trick people into buying a product that they didn't need, and that's how we got the ads we have today.
Yeah the last ad I remember seeing was for a movie, that actually looked interesting. But rather than tell me the name in the first 10 or 20 seconds they wanted me to watch to the end before revealing. So I skipped straight out of that.
They used to have a popup that told you the movie title and they took that away, so now they get a skip. If I am actually interested, I just google the actor I recognize.
Like for real, you have all the money in the world and you know what I like and don't, so why don't tailor the ads to not annoy the fuck out of me?
A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads. Every Youtuber holding a product into the camera is an ad. And people want to watch that. They want to know what new products are out there. It just has to presented appropriately.
I doubt so - Sponsorblock exists. I guess some don't mind it because it supports the creators they like directly.
I don't mean the sponsor segments, but the rest of the video. LTT, MKBHD and all the other tech channels, every movie and game reviewer and a lot of other stuff is all ads. Every single channel that is focused on showing you a new product is effectively an ad. And people watch it because they are interesting in seeing what new or interesting products are out there. There is no aversion to ads, there is an aversion to bad and annoying ads.
I'll never understand why they spend so much effort pushing ads into people's faces
money
Also, disappointingly, most people don't care about the ad all that much.
A 15min video from a Youtuber reviewing a product in detail is way more effective than any regular ad I have ever seen, yet there are almost no ads in that style.
True. But probably that money does not go to Google but to the Youtuber directly, so for Google this is still a cost.
Because that has been tried so many times over the decades.
The good sites put effort in to curate their ads and make sure they are things their audiences would enjoy. Lots of webcomics STILL have blog posts about doing this. Same with one of the more popular "steam deck" websites.
The problem is that this doesn't work. Because people don't permitlist those sites. They just block everything for the exact same reasons "I pirate it and if I like it I'll buy it" was always a blatant lie for the vast majority of people (and no, I don't care who consider themselves exceptions to that).
So when curated and "good" ads have almost zero benefit over shitty and obnoxious ones? The focus stops being "let's serve good ads and trust our users to have our backs" and more "What can we do to actually get ANY ad revenue out of this so that we can keep the lights on?"
Because that has been tried so many times over the decades.
When? "Will it Blend?" is about the only time I can think of when a company went in an alternative direction and turned their ads into entertainment and was quite successful at that. How many products do even have as little as an official unboxing video? Stuff like the SteamDeck teardown is what I would love every company doing for all their product. But it's super rare. Why limit your ads to 30sec fake nonsense when you could have 15min of talking about your product in detail?
They just block everything for the exact same reasons
There wouldn't be a need or even the ability to block anything if it wouldn't be forced on the user. If Youtube had a "show me a random ad" button, I'd click it. I don't hate ads. I hate bad ads that are forced in my face when I don't need them. I have plenty of downtime where I wouldn't mind seeing what new products are around. Gameify that stuff. Make it interesting. Make it explorable. Make it interactive. You have million dollar budget, mountains of collected data and random garbage forced into the users face is the best you can come up with?
“What can we do to actually get ANY ad revenue out of this so that we can keep the lights on?”
You are forgetting that there is an advertiser in all this. People that care about getting clicks on ads will have no problem tricking users into accidentally clicking on ads. But why are the advertisers themselves ok with that? If I want to advertise a product I'd not be interested in paying for accidental clicks users were tricked into, I'd be interested in finding users that are interested in the product I want to sell. And I really don't see current ads doing that very well. They might be better than literally nothing, but I really don't see them being better than all the potential ways to make better ads.
I really wish government would just come in already and shatter google into a million pieces with the anti-monopoly hammer already.
Google is far worse than AT&T ever was when it was shattered into the baby bells.
Just gotta learn from AT&T to not let them re-congeal back together like somekind of fucked up liquid metal terminator 20+ years down the line.
Frankly, I'd stop using YouTube entirely before I'd start using it without an adblocker. At least there are no signs of it slowing down for me, yet.
Watching YouTube load slowly is better than watching ads.
Exactly! I started surfin' da information highway in the 90's. I remember watching an image unveil itself slowly as a morning sunrise.
"We'll make our service worse, that'll show them!"
Ok google, good luck with that.
Unless you inform those customers with some kind of UI that they're being throttled because of ad-block how does Google expect them to uninstall it?
I genuinely believe they are trying to push adblock users off the platform completely
At this point I'm convinced they're trying to drive people away to shrink the overhead on bandwidth and servers, but it doesn't work like that. Not after you got them hooked on videos of cats after years of a steady drip of memes.
I will download videos then. I refuse to not use an adblocker on the modern internet.
It would be really cool to be able to download YouTube videos withour the sponsorship segments, I wonder if there is a way to do his already?
yt-dlp has a command-line option to download videos while using sponsor block.
undefined
yt-dlp https://youtube... --sponsorblock-remove all
Like the ads surrounding the video and breaking the video up or the spots in the video where the creator hawks their latest wares?
If I see one more PCBWay ad...
I swore I've seen a FOSS project that did that. An ad segment detector basically
My worry with all this is that they might say fuck it and put DRM for all YouTube videos which would block attempts to download the videos. Not make it impossible as seen with streaming services but not as trivial as now....
Google's plan is to DRM the web
Well the good news is Widevine is very expensive, and doesn't work. It's not as simple as right click / save target as, but Widevine decryption is why you can torrent any of the shows/movies on those streaming services.
Everytime someone requests a video on those services, the service pays a fee to Widevine. $0.50 USD per request for the first 30k requests/month. How much you think Google is willing to pay someone for you to watch cat videos for free?
I wish we can fast forward to the part where Youtube completely destroys itself and a new platform takes its place so we can enjoy it for 10 years before the enshittification cycle restarts again.
The problem is that only conglomerates can eat the cost of running such a platform. Ads will be the end of free interne, that's for sure.
I'm not so sure – YouTube is much larger than you might think. It's not the video platform you grew up with anymore. No one in this world can match the backlog and content density/diversity of YouTube, not even all streaming services combined. People complaining that YouTube is dying because a few YouTubers "retire" from their main gig or that it's not the same anymore don't understand how YouTube works. They might not comprehend that the time of their "bubble" has come to an end. When this happens, there are already five new bubbles/niches that are even bigger, and you might not have heard of them, but they are more successful than their "predecessor." The old bubble is still there to consume in the backlog. Someday in the future, AI will have a field day with the data accumulated via YouTube.
It is transforming, for sure, but I don't think it will destroy itself completely. In a sense, you can say it will destroy whatever view you had of YouTube as a platform because it is not what it once was.
To my knowledge, YouTube will hit the billion-user milestone this year (Netflix currently at ~250 million paid users). If we look at other data trends from streaming services, it suggests that YouTube will grow more over the coming years. I don't know how anyone can match YouTube as a whole. In certain niches, sure, but as a whole, it would be like fighting windmills. There's a reason no one tries to tackle YouTube as a platform and only goes for certain niches.
And if it would be federated, there would be no cycle.
So I have YouTube premium but also have ad-blocker, for the first time yesterday I was noticing absolutely abysmal speeds on YouTube and I suspect this is why. I thought my computer was starting to shit the bed initially it was so brutal.
I have YouTube premium
Wow, so you pay them and they still screw you? Glad that’s a product I’ll never buy then!
Anecdotally at best. I know it's not what you want to hear, but you're making a conclusion based on something one person said.
I was wondering if this was coming. I don't use YouTube in-browser much if at all, so I don't see this. But I am not surprised. The fact that they're slowing down people who pay for premium is kind of an act of war. It shouldn't be a thing, and the fact that it's happening at all is a misstep on Google's part. Not that the whole slowing down people who use ad blockers isn't. But this will detrimentally affect adoption of premium subscribers which I thought was the last thing they'd want. Because they obviously don't make enough off ad revenue to support the platform. That's part of why they push premium so hard. They need more premium subscribers. This is idiocy.
I can't remember what video I watched that talked about the unsustainabilty and likely the late stages of an ad revenue driven internet content model, and this situation reeks of that.
I don't know what new paradigm might replace it if this is the case, but the current model feels like it's absolutely failing.
I have premium, uBlock Origin, and Mullvad VPN. In Firefox the other day, the stream was dying every 10-30 seconds. Like it would just stop and give me a spinner. I would have to "Copy URL at current time", open a new tab, and paste it in to get it to go any further. I do have bad internet, but this was nuts. And then I gave up and used Duck, and it played flawlessly in their embedded player.
Good job, Google.
If it happens again, I'll try disabling uBlock Origin on YouTube and see if it improves.
After getting premium I just switched the adblocker off for YouTube. Premium would be far too expensive if it didn't also include YouTube Music :-/
uBlock Origin works on YouTube Music, too.
If you want to throw a few bucks at the people providing you a service, then donate to an ad blocker for helping make the Internet a safer, better, and more user-friendly place. ...not the big fuckers like YouTube who are contributing to the enshitification of the entire web.
Ha! Serves you right
Oh no (continues to watch on freetube) anyway....
Revanced Extended ftw!
Alternative front ends are a god send.
What is freetube? (Sorry for the stupid question)
One of many different "third party frontends" for YouTube which, amongst other things, cut out ads and avoid performance throttling.
Personally I use one called NewPipe, and previously one called LibreTube. There are others too.
One of the few uYou+ users on iOS.
I dusted off an old laptop, put debian on it, put an SSD and now I have my own invidious instance, among other services...
No ads, no throttling, no bullshit. Google is very welcome to suck it. I'd gladly stop using youtube, but there's no competition.
I know it's a pain, but what's to stop us from using download-clis? In theory I could "collect" the urls that are recommended to me from my home page, call the clis, click all the videos to update my recommendations then close the browser.
I know it's a pain, but what's to stop us from using download-clis?
The answer is right there.
Next step is guaranteed to be limiting the number of views without being logged in.
The more stuff they do to shoot themselves in the foot, the sooner something else comes in to replace youtube
I have YouTube premium. It still detects the adblocker. It's infuriating.
There is competition when it comes to technology stack. People just don't want to use alternatives because the amount of content/users is less on others.
Be the pioneer and help others move across.
Care to share any of the recommendations? I don't use YouTube often but would be happy to visit and use an alternative
Thank you for reminding me to get myself an invidious instance set up. It isn't a huge pain or anything, right?
Not really, they have a docker compose file ready to go, and it works without issue.
That's why Invidious exists.
I don't have an ad blocker, I just have the standard strict tracking protection enabled in Firefox. What's more, I pay for YouTube Premium. But still they add a five-second delay every time I visit a web page. It's infuriating.
Might as well just stop paying for premium then if they're going to ding you anyway.
there is no way the 5 second sleep before loading isnt anti competitive, because last i heard, unless they changed it, it only checks for the firefox user agent.
Actually insane that someone would willingly implement that.
Why pay when you can watch it for free without ads through piped video! Pirate everything, live for free!!
Apparently this seems to be mainly affecting Chrome users, lol.
Well, yeah! Google controls Chrome
Yeah but what I find funny is that if people had already jumped from Chrome they probably wouldn't be having problems.
And this is why we use Newpipe
Time and time again we can only conclude: Piracy is justified!
Do people seriously think there's something wrong with doing that?
Don't worry, YouTube, I won't be using your website anymore. But my yt-dl will be ripping max quality videos by the hundreds, just for shits and giggles.
Yarr harr, it's the pirate life for us!
YouTube speed has been shit ever since they stopped actually buffering.
Anything better than listening 3 songs and getting 5 ads.
Stop being trash youtube. Be normal like you once were and i would actually consider a paid subscription IF i get to fully exclude shorts on my side of the platform.
Not at all a solution, but worth mentioning that in a YouTube URL you can replace /shorts/ with /v/ and get the normal player for the same video.
I just want the short form content out of my life, but your tip might help others who dislike the player and not the video's.
I don't always click on a YouTube ad, but when I do it's a UI failure because it's an accidental click. How much do you want to bet this crackdown is a distraction from the fact their ad system doesn't perform as well as advertised?
Fuck YouTube
And Google. And Corporations.
Good things come to those who wait (and block ads)
Also I'd rather wait without ads than wait with ads, like what's the point?
If you wait in front of an empty screen it's much more pleasant than being in front of visual and audio spam drilling into your head.
It's of course true that YouTube can't support a website for free, so it would be the correct thing to watch some ads: problems arising are that (A) some ads are malicious (either as misinformation or as viruses or as links to those), (B) they've grown from a reasonable amount to an unreasonable one and often interrupted at the worst possible time)
Been using revanced, sometimes using Iceraven (ff fork) w/ ublock origin on phone, and using librewolf (another ff fork) also w/ ublock origin on desktop. So far never encountered slow down since November 2023.
Is this slow down only on select extension issue? Although when it first happend (late 2023) I was thrown up by sudden yt not loading on my librewolf but it only happend only on single day, afterward it gone.
Trying to use it via Firefox is pointless. I just downloaded the video and pirated. Fuck YouTube.
If you run mpv https://url it will stream it from youtube and play it in mpv, without having to wait for the whole video to download first.
And another win for free and open source software fellas!
I am for sure one of the smaller number of people doing this, but I watch YouTube on my TV using the TV app. As a result I always had to watch ads. I wish I could avoid them. I suppose a could watch from an alternative and then AirPlay it to my TV, but that’s about it.
I bought a chromecast with google TV specifically for this purpose, with it you can download "SmartTube" and watch youtube completely ad-free
If you had an android device you'd be allowed to install an alternative YouTube app.
Same but with my PS5. But I don't think there's any way of getting an ad block on there
You could set up a pihole, pretty sure that blocks youtube ads on tv/console apps.
Just install smart tube
Changing your router DNS to something that blocks ads (or a pihole at home) and you'll never have to watch ads ever again, YouTube or elsewhere
YouTube video ads can't be blocked with just DNS blocking unfortunately, they are served from the same hosts as YouTube videos.
This doesn't work for many types of ads
Of course this is possible but this involves more than just pihole. I'm running this with a combo of adaway + mikrotik router with port based NATing.
People downvoting you are like the angrycry meme about the low to high IQ gauge.
I remember when they first put ads in and people rebelled. Frogs in a pot because it's not like any of you will actually use peertube
People dont use Peertube because that guy over there doesn't use Peertube. Or that other guy. Other that person who makes content. I think you get the picture.
It can rip content though
User-Agent changer fixes this issue completely for me
So does Invidious
I feel its slowing down Smarttube too, because I have to wait a few seconds for the video to start now. I don't know if it's a bug
I've noticed the same. Particularly tonight.
Man, it's wild to see Youtube kill themselves in real time.
They are going to be fine, we said the same thing when Netflix banned password sharing. People who still use YouTube don't care.
Imagine still giving Netflix money after they consistently shit on their customers every single chance they get lol. What a bunch of suckers
Can someone create (or does it already exist?) an app that plays the videos in the background, remove the ads and then let you playback the whole video ad-free? Sort of like you did back in the VHS-days....
On Android, there's Newpipe which doesn't run ads, and Newpipe x Sponsorblock which clips ads out from the video. On desktop there is FreeTube which also has SponsorBlock you can turn on.
You can get this same functionality with Youtube Revanced! Free on android! No Ads! Sponsorblock built in! Background playback! And more!
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp allows you to download them and watch them on your leisure
Last I checked, you can just download a youtube video. There are plenty of websites and some apps for that. No need to play it in the bacground.
I do not care. I only watch 10 channels and these are in my favorites. I do not use the algorithm and thanks to European law the frontpage is deactivated. I also ever watch only one video per day and then do something else, so they can slow down the website as much as they want since I am not scrolling. I click on a channel and on a video, that's it. If it gets too bad I rather not use Youtube anymore, it is not the end of the world.
You tube is a central repository for hundreds of thousands of hours of learning. So while you might know everything is a great equalizer for those who are still learning
I mean this wholeheartedly and by no means do I mean to be rude or snarky. I'm glad that works for you but unfortunately there is a ton of us who have to use it for a huge list of things. I personally use it to learn how to fix or make things because for me I need a video for it. I use a bunch of work arounds and such but eventually this will become a bigger issue. Soon embedded videos will stop working for news websites and such at this rate.
I’m not very tech savvy, my Adblock sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I’ve been using Firefox with extensions incognito for YouTube or I just avoid the site these days. I really liked it for music videos, since in unwilling to pay Spotify. So far my strategy is working.
Wasn't this confirmed to be an AdBlock (Plus) bug? https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746263759495077919
Does it affect Invidious front-end as well?? I have been noticing that for a while now, but I thought maybe it is because the page doesn't use native yt js code to track video download. the same videos would load battery smooth when accessed through YT.
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i feel like this has been going on for months now no? or maybe it's the fact that my laptop is 11 years old now lol
Never seen the "turn off your adblock prompt" because I never login to Google. Not that hard.
I get YouTube Premium with YouTube Music for $2.60 by using ProtonVPN and connecting to Ukraine. That's all you have to do. Once you're connected to the YouTube premium website it'll display Ukrainian currency which totals to $2.60 USD. You can subscribe to channel memberships in the same manner for $1.60 instead of $5.
I'd say $2.60 is a killer deal for adfree YouTube on everything and a full music streaming service.
because of People like you, the Services in these kinds of Countries gets more expensive for the People that actually live there.
Is this actually true? I just did a search to find any source stating this, but I couldn't find anything.
Doesn't that idea fall apart when you get to the payment method? The payment service knows in which country your bank account or PayPal account is registered that isn't IP dependent right?
Nope. I just used my credit card. Charged $2.60.
I don't understand how anyone can put up with youtube without premium. Every time I visit a friends house I am shocked at the level of bullshit they are ok with. I'd pay a lot more than 10 bucks.
I'd happily pay for premium as I use YouTube religiously. But it's Google so fuck them, they already process my information in order to show me ads and profit off of my data. I think that's payment enough, so I'll just find any free way possible to watch YouTube without ads.
so fuck them, they already process my information in order to show me ads and profit off of my data.
So you don't have any services like Netflix, Hulu, etc? I can guarantee they do the same things in one way or another.
Youtube is my reminder on new browser installs to install Ublock Origin. And I saw this newest effort to block it once. Updated Ublock, restarted the browser and it was gone again.
I don’t understand how anyone can put up with youtube without premium
I was a day 1 subscriber of Google Play Music All Access, which I converted into a family plan when that was available, and was told that the rate I was paying would be grandfathered in. I didn't like the switch to YouTube Music, but it did the job and came with ad-free YouTube, so I was okay with it.
But then they told me that they were changing the $14.99/mo I was paying to $22.99/mo despite being grandfathered in, a more than 50% increase, and I said fuck that. Unsubbed, swapped to Spotify, and never looked back.
Would I pay for just ad-free YouTube? Maybe. But not for almost $300 each year. I'm keeping Spotify, so if Google made a plan for no ads for like ...$1 or $2 per month?, maybe then I'd consider going back.
The end result now though is that I just use YouTube less.
I was/am in the exact same boat, but share the subscription three ways (wife+brother) so the numbers are still somewhat favorable given our music and YouTube usage as a household.
Or just use an adblocker and save the $$
A couple of five second ads doesn't bother me at all.
I'm from a generation that had no pause or fast forward on the TV before the internet. Every fifteen minutes or so you'd have near enough five minutes of ads. YouTube ads are nothing by comparison.
$10 a month isn't a huge amount, but it's $120 saved by the end of the year that I'd rather spend on something else.
I'm from that generation too and as soon as I moved out of my folks' house I never subscribed to cable or watched broadcast TV because that constant onslaught of advertising was offensive and I didn't want it in my home.
I mean I had that too, but fuck ads. All my homies hate ads.
I'm from a country where we barely had ads on TV back in the day, and even now it's nowhere near as bad as on American TV. I've tried watching US channels online and it's feels like nothing but an insult. YouTube is bad enough for me.
Easy: Just use the right browser and adblocker, and you basically have premium, but without the ads they still throw at you.
Yes. You people just cost money. Pay, or find a new service. I'm not so sure what's confusing about this.
Google isn't going to let you use the service for free anymore.
Edit: Reading comprehension seems to be at an all time low. None of this has to do with you liking YouTube or not. Nobody cares if you don't like Google's data farming. It's 100% irrelevant.
And yet they were perfectly okay with providing the service for free while they were still busy starving off the competition. No tears for Google shall be shed here.
What? They are exactly a billion video and comment streaming platforms.
And I'm not telling you to have years for Google. I'm highlighting that the free ride is over. Pay or use a different service.
Please tell google then, if we allow ads, then dont shoot at us 10 unskippable ads.
1 ad per video < 10 minutes. 2 ads per video > 10 < 20. 4 ads per video > 20 +2 ads per extra 10 minutes
Ads maximum length of 30 seconds. Ads should be monitored for anything illegal or harmfull for the viewer ( Scams, Malicious websites ... )
If google chose to do this instead of every minutes 2 unskippable ads ( or soon 5 ) i would think, there would be less adblock users on youtube. And with that you support more your favorite creator ( if you want to really support him, just give him some bucks on patreon or so ). Or just suggest him to go to any other video hosting website ( like peertube ) then users will have 0 ads and you can get support over donations.
Google is already making millions by profiling its users and stealing their data. All these YT changes are not caused by them losing money, but by them not growing enough to please their (multi-millionaires) investors.
(1) I'm not shedding any tears for a corporation that's big enough to have more money that I'll ever see in ten lifetimes.
(2) I'm not paying for a "Premium" experience to allow them to keep profiling me (and thus gain more money). They are already gaining money off me, they don't need my premium subscription.
(3) You should stop arguing in favour of exploitative big corporations that don't even know you and are probably actively exploiting you in this very moment.
They had premium light which gave you just a no ad experience and nothing else for about $7/mo. Totally reasonable, I was happy to pay it. Then right at the same time they started going nuclear on ad blocking, they killed that plan and forced everyone to move to a plan that costs about 70% more and added a bunch of stuff I didn't ask for and will never use. They had those added services available already prior to that change. If I had wanted them I'd already be subscribing. This was just a greedy cash grab.
They'll just keep jacking the price up and decreasing the quality of service and mining your data and annoying you with ads and algorithmic bullshit just up until they can't anymore and it stops being optimally profitable. A lot of people will just put up with it, but they lost me as a customer.
Is your “you people” targeted at the ones using Adblock?
If so, here’s another approach; If YouTube actually had a decent ‘premium’ without all the unnecessary “features” in it and the price wasn’t so unreasonable high. People might have paid for it.
In my country YouTube Premium costs €12/monthly which is €144/yearly and for what? Unnecessary features and to block advertisements while still having in-video advertisements (sponsors). No thank you.
I will go with uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock.
People love premium. Let's not confuse you and lemmys average user with the general public.
$18 a month for family streaming + music is a bargain.
Also, that's all great that you use tools to get around it. My point is stop removed about it or acting like Google is evil for blocking people who refuse to pay 🤷♂️
Yes. You people just cost money. Pay, or find a new service. I’m not so sure what’s confusing about this.
I already pay, with my data. They stop to harvest data, I pay the service.
Google isn’t going to let you use the service for free anymore.
And I am not going to pay to be the product.
Stop perpetuating this nonsense that YouTube is free. Google is a for profit company. It was never free. You always paid with your data. And even when you subscribe they continue to profit from your data.
Google makes a healthy profit, with or without your subscription money. They just want more. And more. And more. To satisfy the insatiable greed of shareholders.
Hopefully your passion to pay for 'free' services extends to your Lemmy (and other Federated services) instances. Not just monopolies like Google.
I agree with you. Google is a company and so will do as much as they can to provide as little and to profit as much as possible.
if one wants to use their products, they have to play their game. by either paying (with money and or data, regardless if it's overpriced) or "cheating" around that - as we do with literally everything else in the free market system, to many other monopolistic shady companies
what's interesting to see around here is this sense of self entitlement, as if Google owed them anything, and of naivety, as if a company would ever provide a service (which is very costly) for absolutely free. video streaming is not an essential service and didn't exist until very recently
it may come as a shock, but you don't need to use any service such as YouTube to survive and you only do because you want to and find value in it (whether to learn new skills or watch people reacting to cats)
the underlying problem here which all of you are actually mad about is the system where technology and knowledge belongs to giant hoarding dragons instead of the people who made it. that's where we all should be focusing our energy on.
in the meantime, we just keep cheating... and if the cheats fail, we move on to other things
One rational person in a sea of anger.