4mo ago

YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers

www.howtogeek.com /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.

463 comments

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.
- 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.
  
  If they didn’t have to support the web, and various legacy platforms, the could lock it all down with drm more easily.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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?
  
  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.
  
  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
  
  People watch an ad for the privilege of watching a movie/show/game trailer all the time.
- 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.
  
  It’s the only consumer product they haven’t canceled.
- All corporate IT jobs are depressing, because working in a corporation isn’t something that a thinking person is equipped to do.
- and it's potentially an existential threat.
- Drying tears with dollar bills .gif
- 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.
  
  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".

The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I'd rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.
- legit, if youtube ever beats ublock origin, i'll just stop watching youtube
  
  Its an all out assault on half your senses without an adblocker. Literal torture.
  
  Yt-dlp download script + text file with fav channel urls + jellyfin.
  No bullshit, saves bandwidth.
  Also look into invidious.
  
  YouTube had beaten ublock origin for a while so I resolved to using invidious.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  You‘re part of the problem then. It only got so shitty in the first place so they could trap people in the Premium subscription that will get increasingly more expensive and less useful.
- That‘s where Youtube Premium comes into play for many fools who don‘t really know about adblockers. Google‘s goal isn‘t to destroy the website, but to turn it into a much more profitable Netflix subscription based on user generated content. Sadly the enshittification of the biggest video platform will continue because enough people are willing to pay a lot for it. The site will not improve until there are mainstream alternatives that actually take revenue off Youtube.
- 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!
- Same.
  I came across someone who uploaded a 90 minute video as an ad as well.
  
  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!
- 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.
  
  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?
- You could pay for YouTube Premium
  
  I'm just glad someone is thinking of the shareholders
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  Google makes enough money evading taxes already. Not gonna help them make more.
  
  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.
  
  Fuck that though

Once upon a time Google used few and non-intrusive ads. The ads were soo well-placed and relevant, that they almost seemed like a service to the user, rather than being forced upon you. Some of us even added exceptions for Google ads in our ad blockers, so we would not miss out.
I miss those days.
- That was almost a decade ago or even before. I remember adockers recommending white listing search engines or recommending to disable non-instrusive ads to support websites.
- There are some ads that I'm fine with, but they have to be clearly an ad, and related to the content on the site, not based on my previous interactions, nor using tricks to disguise ads as part of the content.
  On documentation pages: sure just have a thing related to CS courses, on pirating and streaming sites advertise VPNs, on horny sites advertise horny stuff, and casinos and sports advertise gambling and sports betting. But DON'T make the ad look like a section in the documentation, like another download button, like another horny video on the site, like another casino game or segment of the sports analysis. If I want to explore the ad I will, stop trying to trick me else I will try to block and avoid you entirely! If I figure out that are you spending more effort trying to trick me the less interested I will be in the product you offer.
  
  disguise ads
  While the intentions behind this are mostly evil nowadays, there's also the design aspect to be considered.
  Imagine a nice, modern and minimal UI, and suddenly some flashy colorful element in the feed. it just hurts a designers feeling.
- I forgot where I heard this::: If there are fewer, more relevant ads, Google and YouTube should be able to make more money with fewer ads.
  The advertisers though want more ads even though they are less affective. As it forces the cost per ad down.
  It is totally backwards…. ¯(ツ)_/¯
- Then google got greedy and ruined it's own ad service. Imagine google would've stopped at this early point. A single, non flashing banner ad would generate as much as 5 multiple second video ads do now. But ads got used more and more inflationary, to the point where we are now.
- Meanwhile these days every time I happen to use Youtube without an adblocker I get the same car insurance ads that I've gotten for the last 4 years.
- The ads are so obnoxious and frequent. It just kills it for me.
  I know the reply I'm gonna get...
- Then they killed the competition and there was nobody left to stop them doing to you with ads what the farmer does with geese to make foie gras.
- I unblock ads on AVForums. And honestly, the ads are either really well targeted (because I'm probably going to buy that amplifier eventually), or random ebay stuff.
  If they started serving up the generic "reduce belly fat in 2 seconds with this simple trick" with some AI generated picture, I'd re-evaluate very quicly.
- I don't know of any day where I unblocked ads and felt good cause they were targeted directly at me

I’ll never understand the entitlement of these companies when it comes to ads. You send the content freely to my computer along with BS ads. It’s my computer. I’ll display what I want using programs I want.
If you want me to pay for that content with $ or by watching ads - then put up a hard paywall and stop sending the content for free. You can’t get uppity and complain about ad blockers - it doesn’t make any sense…
The real problem is your content sucks and nobody is willing to pay for it. And that’s your problem - not mine.
Here’s some free apples. There’s a newspaper ad stuffed in there as well. Oh you ate the apples without reading the newspaper? Foul ball! /facepalm
Edit: never mind the fact that many ads have been served that are downright malicious code…
- I was paying for Google music until they took it away from me and told me it was Youtube Premium and then raised the price twice.
  Not exactly what I'd call a great value proposition.
- That's a weird way to look at it, obviously you're watching the content.
  I'd rather see it like this:
  Free tier with ads
  Subscription without ads (and better quality)
  You are currently on the free tier. Yes, you can block ads (just like you can pirate movies), but that's not the deal you were offered. I'm using an ad blocker myself, but I can understand the corporate side too.
  They absolutely could add a hard paywall, but why should they if there are plenty of users who want to watch for free by paying with ads?
  
  No, I’m on the “you’re freely posting content to the internet - some of which I want to consume(videos), others not so much (ads)” plan. I never asked them to post anything, never entered a contract, etc.
  If they lock the content up, and stop freely posting it, then fine, I’ll stop consuming and go elsewhere. If I can’t live without the content, then I can decide to pay up. It’s their content - they can do whatever they want with it. But they can’t get mad at ad blockers if they put their stuff out there for free.
  
  They definitely couldn't add a hard paywall. It would collapse the system overnight.
  
  They make more money via ads than they ever will with a hard pay wall. The innumerable advertisers paying google/youtube will always pay more than individuals paying for a subscription for no ads.
  That's why people who paid for no ads will eventually end up with ads again, despite paying. They don't care if we pay or not. They want that sweet sweet ad revenue.
  The sad fact of the matter is that we live in an ad based economy. Advertising is more profitable than selling an actual product. Having a platform to sell infinite ad space is a money making machine, plus people making free content for them to lure in more people to watch said ads. It's super fucked up on youtubes part.
  YouTube now exists as a billboard first, content second or third.
  
  And in all tiers: make an additional profit by selling your information without your consent (it has been decided in many courts that burying subtext deeply in forced terms of service isn't consent)
  We are already paying them by letting them harvest our data, ads or not.
  Then they double or triple dip with the scenarios you describe. I am still paying them by being on their site with an ad blocker as they harvest my data and sell it to the highest bidder. Not to mention quadruple dipping with using our info and content without consent to train AI to sell.
  They use the argument "your data/art/photos/videos are freely posted on the internet, so we can use them how we please". If they publish content openly on the internet, then we are free to do with it as we please.
  They can't use the argument but say "no no no, it doesn't apply to things WE put out"
  They are either pirating our content and data constantly or ad-blocking is not pirating.
- "Your content sucks... And I can't stop watching it. I also got herpes by watching too much brain rot"

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.
- 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.
- it's ran
  it's run
  
  it's ren
  
  Danke. Mein Reichsleiter.

i consider unblockable ads to be direct attack on my psyche, trying to worm in and make me think in a way they want. I will never tolerate them and would rather see anything relying on them burn. My mind is my own and no one else has any business influencing me without my permission.
- Agreed. It's a form of cyber terrorism and needs to have an end put to it.
- yup and I've always felt just like this even as a kid, fuck ads
- I agree with that... somewhat. Except they are providing a service.
  The content is not produced by YouTube, but it is made available by YouTube. There's a cost to provide that service and value to the consumer for having videos available to watch.
  I doubt you want to pay for the service, so how is it supposed to work? What pays YouTube's costs so we can all keep watching videos for months and years to come?
  I get that this comes across as someone simping for YouTube. I'm not trying to do that though. I'm just intrigued by this worldview and would like to understand if there is more to it or if you believe YouTube should not be compensated some other way.
  Is it a "Fuck you. I got mine." mentality where people watching ads and paying premium cover the cost for you to use the service for free? Or is there some nuance I've missed?
  
  Nationalize youtube and turn it into a public utility financed by the UN. Create a kind of patreon system that distributes funds to creators similar to how it's done for music collection agencies.
  There are always alternatives, but not until people demand an alternative to constant brainwashing. Right now it's unthinkable because people insist that there cannot be an alternative and therefor the status quo mustn't be endangered.
  At this stage burning it all down would be preferable although that would never happen until we're seen widespread system collapse.
- They can keep going, it just makes want to leave these platforms for good

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?
- Same, I think they must be AB testing and I don't get assigned into the shitty group
  
  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.
  
  They are definitely AB testing things like rejecting ad blockers.
- One time they told me I had 3 days left to enjoy YouTube with my ad blocker, and then I would have to buy premium, or they would just lock me out of the site. I was like "welp, it had a good run, I guess that's it for ol' YouTube."
  But then the 3 days went buy and nothing ever came of it.
  That tactic probably did get them some preemptive subscriptions though, unfortunately.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  Wait, how would a phone cable cause a symptom like that...?
  
  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@lemmy.world Just my guess.
  
  And this phone cable damage only impacted youtube lol

"Should we moderate our ads and get rid of 2 hour long ads, disinformation, porn,scams and fake products?"
"No, no. Thats to much effort. Lets spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to force people to watch our 2 hour long ads, disinformation, porn, scams and fake products. Thats clearly the way forward."
This decision process brought to you by Prager U proceeds into 30 minutes about how slavery was good for the black man and he should be grateful for it
- Woah, youtube ads in the US are so much more interesting. Don't get me wrong, fuck pro slavery propaganda, it's just completely exotic to someone who only saw bank loan and lame product ads (when visiting parents who use official app on their tv)
  
  Its real funny when you see a video get demonitized because they said a no no naughty word in the first like fe wminutes, but the first advertising you see is literally almost completely nude art of women bouncing around screen for the latest scam mobile game.
  Like, Saying Fuck to early in a video is no no bad for the kiddies. but cartoon tiddies 96% uncovered in a 3 minute ads is perfectly okay for the kiddies.

I'd rather not watch YouTube videos at all than videos with ads.
- 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.
  
  Newpipe still works (Google may break it, but the app is usually updated in a couple days and it works again)
  
  Try grayjay
- Here's my current lineup.
  Newpipe Freetube Greyjay Tubular Brave
  They get through all those, I'm just going to surf peertube or odysee
- 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.

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.
- 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.
  Can you expand on this? I don't follow what you mean here
  
  i read it as - the Premium money is mostly going to YouTube HQ, instead of to video makers.
- Those surfshark maps... ugh. No, I'm not searching for ublock origin. Why would I it's been installed since time immemorial. You have to measure install base, not search interest. Leave search interest for celebrity gossip.
- Enshittification actually does work, but only up to a point. Unfortunately, all the corporations have all the subtlety of a Sherman tank, so they always go all in on it.

YouTube is also aggravating customers who use their official apps by increasing the frequency and length of the ads. In just 4-5 months, I've seen YouTube ad lengths on Roku go from 10-15 seconds to 30 seconds, to a minute.
They're trying to recoup lost ad revenue by pissing off the one demographc most likely to sit in front of the TV the longest.
- On rare occasions YouTube will play exceptionally long videos as ads. When YouTube Red came out I got multiple entire hours long shows as ads (as a "free preview!") I'm pretty sure Ive gotten one of the movies they put up for free viewing as an ad before.
  Obviously you can skip after 5 seconds or whatever but they hope to catch someone playing stuff in the background. Probably to increase their crappy view count for those features to sell actual ads later.
- I've noticed this on my TV's YouTube app as well. It went from 15 second I shippable ads, to 2 ads where I need to watch at least one and only then can I skip, to sometimes at least 30 seconds before I can skip. It's worse on the longer video essays that I like watching, where they say "Fewer ad breaks for this long video", but in reality they have the same amount of ads that you need to watch more of to skip. I absolutely fucking hate it :D
- I think they should have included "ad free YouTube" as a perk for their YouTube TV service, which I had for a short while. Instead they wanted you to pay an extra subscription cost for YouTube Premium to get rid of ads.
  The dark pattern game they play with the "skip" options and the increasing amount and random placement of ads is really offputting.

Gotta love when the article saying adblock-blocking doesn't work is itself preceded by a notice to disable your adblocker
- They don't even believe themselves.
- Honestly it makes me appreciate Lemmy more. Like we're all on here enjoying an ad free experience.. it's clearly feasible to do
  
  there are several orders of magnitude difference between text-forums with almost all multimedia content hosted externally, and hosting/streaming video.
  a big Lemmy instance is a manageable cost for a few well-paid people to run out of their own disposable income.
  anything even vaguely approaching YouTube is not.

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.
- Jesus christ i didnt think it was THIS bad. Google really needs that ad revenue lol
- Can't even rickroll people properly now

Who could have foreseen this? s/
- 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.
  
  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."
  
  I remember when google search had one text-based ad. Bearable.
  
  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.

I'll stop using YouTube altogether before I disable my ad blocker. My time is simply more valuable than whatever video I'm watching.

The reason I left Twitch was because the fucking ads were unbearable. I've even taken a screenshot to show people that I wasn't lying when I said I saw that Twitch expected me to sit there and listen to and watch 8 fucking ads. Ads to shit I don't care about other than think of violent thoughts in what I'd love to do to marketers and find a way to advertise that so they get a god damn clue.
In a perfect world, maybe A ad wouldn't be so bad. But this has gotten out of hand and out of control. We shouldn't ever have to sit and watch a string of ads, all varying from 20 seconds to an entire minute and even longer.
And good, I hope YouTube is stupid as fuck enough to be aggressive. Drive more creators out, even hit the successes of the YouTube removed who've long lived on the platform. Because all that they're going to do is affect everyone at the end of the day, all for the sake of profiting for marketers.
- Not that you should return to Twitch but if you ever need to there's this TTV LOL PRO add-on for Firefox/Chromium or you can just use a client such as Streamlink (with GUI and ttv lol support) for desktop or Xtra/Twire for Android with a custom proxy
- I'd have left Twitch if I didn't find it more entertaining than current YouTube. No one should be surprised they're at pre-covid profit levels again because they tried to shovel way too many ads down people's throats.
  Imagine tuning into a random stream and getting greeted by 3 ads before you can understand if you want to stay or check a different one. I've been frustrated enough that I just turn to something else altogether for entertainment.
  There are some decent adblockers like TTV.LOL, which is a simple proxy to a country that doesn't allow ads. But sometimes those solutions don't work either. Ironically I just use Turbo while not paying for YouTube premium, but just as people don't pay for YouTube Premium, I understand not wanting to support Twitch for a variety of reasons.
- In a perfect world we wouldn't have ads.
- There is a twitch ad blocker it works really well
  
  which one?
- The streamers on twitch control how many ads you see. If it’s a huge amount, they opted into that. They get a small cut of the ad revenue
  
  This isn't true for all streamers, just those with partner contracts from Twitch. They are the ones that are required to run ads a certain amount, I think below that they have the option to run ads but aren't required to but also if you don't run any ads Twitch will just start putting in ads on its own. And theres no control from the streamers over ads that show when joining a stream, those are always there and in my opinion are more annoying cause it makes it more annoying to switch between streams.

Wheres the data to back up this claim? That article is purely opinion
- The backup is I havn't seen a single fucking ad for years on Youtube. Using it daily on both desktop and android
  
  I've been using Youtube basically since it exists. There were no ads in the beginning. I've also always been using adblockers. I was surprised when I heard people say they have to wait for ads on youtube. I was like "What? Youtube has ads!?".
  
  I dont want to offend you, but you're a drop in the ocean when compared to the grand total of Youtube users.
  Pretty much everyone I know outside of tech who has ever "showed me a cool video on Youtube real quick" has waited to load ads before showing me their phone.
  If you get outside, touch grass and meet real non tech people pretty much all of them need educating on ad avoidance.
- That's true, would be great to have more evidence.
  But I really wish this to be True 🤞
- There is no data. That article is useless and the title is sensationalized as absolute fuck.

Fuck em, they're just greedy fucks that'll blame us for everything.

If they kept the ads to 10-15 seconds at the start of a video and didn't interrupt my videos for them, I would never use an adblock on Youtube (i'll even give them an allowance for one 10 second ad interruption for every hour in the case of super long videos). But for as long as they keep trying to squeeze every goddamn penny out of me that they can, I will fight back and do everything in my power to prevent them from being allowed even a single ad impression off me.
I'm not unreasonable, but I refuse to accept unreasonable offers.
- that mentality is probably what most ppl started with. however, youtube burnt quite a lot of bridges. i would assume, that many ppl, just like me, wont do the 3 clicks to disable adblock for youtube.
  It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
  
  Fair and I agree. I should have stated it in the past tense because what I really meant is exactly what you stated - that I wouldn't have brought the adblock to Youtube had they not gone nuclear assault in their ad approach and made the choice unreasonable, now I am unwilling to engage with them honestly without ENORMOUS, HERUCLEAN efforts towards rehabilitation on their part.
  Cheers.
- Do they give the creators any control over where the ad breaks are? Seems like they just get thrown in all willy-nilly, too often and in the middle of sentences.
  
  They get some control but it depends on the content how exactly it works. I think for normal videos they get a say right from the start where the breaks are. But I know one guy who does YT and he live streams and has to clean up every VOD because they just randomly pepper ads all throughout.
  
  Hopefully somebody who actually makes monetized Youtube videos will join the conversation to answer that one, as I'm not certain. I'm a pretty active Youtube watcher and fairly savvy on the culture, so from what I've gleaned I believe there is some control given to creators but I believe it is somewhat limited. For example if you watch the Sorted channel (a UK-based food channel) with ads on, they seem to pretty consistently happen at small scene transitions, which leads me to believe the Sorted team is doing their part to strategically place them.

potential account suspension.
What account?
- 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.

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.
- 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.
  
  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!"
  
  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?
  
  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.
  
  Not to mention 50 different variants of the same annoying loud video 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
- 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??
  
  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.
  
  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
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  I'd check out the podcasts - I like It's Probably Not Aliens

I want the statistic on how many Google employees use ad blockers now. It's basically a necessity.
- I'm sure Google employees get Premium for free
  
  They still probably use ad blockers for other sites though. It's essential on the Internet these days.
  The number of malware or otherwise malicious ads is too damn high. There are articles that are so filler they literally have less content than ads, it's an embarrassment.
  
  Premium doesn't have downvote count and sponsor skip.
  The pirated version of youtube is better than the paid one.
  Google should spend time improving their service instead of being assholes.
  
  It's pretty sad how not having the money for it makes it unbearable, while all of them don't need to experience it, disconnecting them from their practices.

I've been downloading my subscriptions and loading them into Plex. Plenty of room for improvement in that system, but I get a nostalgic hit of YouTube long ago. Man, it's fallen so far over the years.
Also related, I've hit 2.4TB of internet use for the first time last month doubling my previous record.
- Literally doubling down lmao
- Which downloader do you use?
  
  There are several out there using yt-dlp. Tube archivist, tube sync, etc. They are fairly straightforward to set up in docker if you use that.
  
  Not OP but I use the arr family of services (Sonarr and Radar, though there are more) and NZBGet as my downloader.
- Yeah, that’s a lot. As a comparison: My connected family of 5 hits 1.3TB-1.5TB on a monthly basis. Streaming apps in 4K/Dolby Vision and Atmos, YT, gaming, FaceTiming constantly on 500/500 fiber.

I'm starting to think our entire economy is built upon ads.
Edit: Word missing
- Partially. Our economy is built in selling you stuff you don't need, and ads are a crucial part of making that happen.
  
  Sorta. Ads are just part of the much larger beast of selling things, marketing.
- Starting?

Ads suck, but the type of ad is what is sucking the most. All I'm getting are ads for get rich quick schemes. You never see big name brands advertise on youtube anymore.
- I'm mostly getting product ads on YouTube, but they're so poorly planned and low-effort that they annoy the everloving spit out of me... In all regards, streaming services have officially become at least as bad as cable tv used to be...
  
  They are worse. Unless you're using an adblocker.
- Last time I disabled an ad blocker to try it on desktop, I was getting scammy looking product ads. On my phone if I browse Shorts (revanced doesn't stop those ads) it's all straight-up financial/health benefits scams.
  But the other night I accidentally opened the 1st party YouTube app on my TV instead of Smart Tube Next and the ads were for big brands. So there's probably a different level of desirability based on content type and device type at play.
- Part of me once wished for a utopia of only getting ads for things I have a reasonable interest in - working to inform me about options to spend my money on a service or product I need. It was based on Steam, which shows ads for games I like. No repeating ads to harass a particular message, no convincing people they need Brand X.
  I don’t imagine we’ll ever get close to that.
  
  We do but you have to agree to give up your data and browsing traffic to do so

I was looking at the comment section from the article and the following comment made me laugh loudly, thinking on how bizarre our current world is:

So a platform that is blocking adblockers is delivering an ad piece advertising an adblocker. Ha! That's an ad I'd love to watch 😂

Ads overall take up a good amount of time now. I would rather not use Youtube at all if I have to watch long ads.
- The day adblockers don't work anymore, is the day i will never use youtube again. I have no idea how people do it. I have a friend who uses youtube to listen to music at home. Every time there is a commercial she drops everything and runs to her laptop. It's insane. Sometimes i accidentally click a link and the youtube app opens and i'm reminded that there have to be people who wait to click away these ads, every single time. It would drive me mad.
  
  I just pay for premium. I'd rather pay the $25 a month to never have to see an ad.

The ads have become too long. Some of them are 40 seconds long, for a 3 minute video. That's unacceptable. I have thought about it, and I think the best would have been a single 8 second ad, unskippable. But never more than that. That, I could take. But multiple ads (even if they're just 5 secs each but you have to be vigilant to press "skip"), or long ads, or interrupting ads, are just too much to accept.
- Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn't play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.

I'm surprised that Vimeo hasn't decided to take advantage of the enshittifcation of YouTube. They have been a social video platform for years, and are probably the best placed platform to come close to overtaking YouTube - should they choose to move away from the professional space and embrace the social aspects of video.
- Honestly, Pornhub has the infrastructure to take on Youtube, if they wanted. If they just cloned the site, sans content, and called it Videohub, there would immediately be a real contender in the marketplace.
  
  Pornhub ads don't bother me. They are annoying, and too loud but 4 seconds is like the magic number. And you only watch it once i think.

potential account suspension
You don't even need an account to use YouTube lol

Make your platform so bad in the interest of shareholders so no one wants to use your platform anymore. It's a story as old as capitalism.

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.
- 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

I mean this genuinely: I would rather YouTube die than be subject to their overlong and hyper targeted ads.
If the ads were untargeted I'd feel less adamant, but as it is now I would sooner give up YouTube entirely.
- I don't mind if they used either data I entered or general trends of my watch history to serve me Degree For Men rather than Secret ads. "Data indicates this viewer is a male in his mid-30's, serving this viewer a tampon ad is unlikely to generate sales." I get that.
  It's when I got the same exact ad for a Mission Impossible movie that had that annoying "Ready or not, here I come" song thing in front of every single video for three weeks straight that I downloaded uBlock Origin, stopped using the official app in favor of the website in the browser.
  It's gotten to the point that I associate advertisements with bad products. I've had good functional search engines for most of my life, I've been able to find the products I want and need. The more you feel the need to pay to have your brand shouted at me the shittier I think your product is. Case in point: I've never seen a commercial for Sennheiser headphones but holy SHIT I've seen ads for Raycons.
  
  It’s gotten to the point that I associate advertisements with bad products.
  I wish more marketers understood this. In fact, keeping on topic with Youtube in general, any product I see Youtubers doing sponsored ad reads for is for me is an instant and automatic hard pass for whatever it is. I just automatically assume that product is either crap or a scam. Or both. When I was shopping for headphones, the #1 brand I refused to consider for any price was Raycon. If I'm looking for a new game to pick up, I can guarantee you it will never be Raid: Shadow Legends or War Thunder, no matter how bored I am. If I need a new razor, it absolutely will not be from Manscaped. Etc., etc.
  If I am bombarded incessantly with really insipid ads for a particular product, the only thing it makes automatically come to my mind when shopping for a product in that category is that the one I definitely don't want is that one with the fucking annoying ads. This is obviously completely counterproductive from the advertiser's standpoint, and I have to imagine I'm not the only person in the world who rolls this way.
  The only possibilities I can think of are that advertisers really are dumb enough to oversaturate people's attention to the point that they get turned off from the product entirely but keep soldiering on anyway because it earns a paycheck. Or worse, that it doesn't matter because for every one viewer who gets pissed off and vows to never buy your product, they are outnumbered and offset by a horde of other viewers who are stupid enough to conflate repetition with truth and actually will be enticed to buy whatever it is, insipidity be damned. And the marketers probably know it.
- That's how I feel too. If it were to die, it gives more room for things like peertube to grow from its ashes.
- My ads aren't targeted, at least I don't think they are... I honestly don't notice what they are for most of the time, so that's a failure right there, they're not memorable - but when I do notice, they're for either trump or sports betting, two things which I have negative interest in...
  
  If you put up any guards at all against data tracking, they get pretty bad pretty quick. They get skewed toward the one or two datapoints that you didn't shore up, so they think "huh, this user must really like phone games because they played doodlejump in 2016 and still has it installed on their phone". Or at least I think. My wife gets ads that are far more on-the-nose than I do, but she doesn't lock down her tracking data at all.
  But I don't even like them trying to match me to ads, I don't want to incentivize their data collection practices.

Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
That is the best part of it! A very welcome change! Basically the first step of becoming an independent creator, and to being able to abandon youtube for any of them.

Worse part of the problem is knowing what part of the ad profit YouTube uses to pay MrBeast and his stupid content.
- There isn't a big streamer that doesn't strike me as a creepy tryhard.

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

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.
- 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.
- Presumably the algorithm feed will stagnate or even deteriorate if it sees you ain't watching what it's suggesting.
- 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.
- 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
- Watch time affects your recommendations, so this isn't a great solution
  
  After watching, click do not recommend and say that it's because you've already watched it. Problem solved.
- SmartTube on the shield. Prosper.
- 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.
  
  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.

if i ever get banned from youtube for using ublock origin am prob switching to odysee
- If I'm getting banned I'll probably circumvent the ban
- My NewPipe app stopped working for a week and it wasn't difficult at all living without YouTube. There's tons of content in the world that can be consumed in its place.
  
  I use NewPipe only despite having a current YouTube Premium subscription because the official app is bonkers. It's hilariously stuffed with useless features that can't be toggled off(games, shorts), half baked stuff like specific video quality can't be chosen for all videos by default( has to be on a per video basis). Oh, and every other time I visit some channel, asking me to join the YouTube's channel for additional perks. You just took money from the user to give them a sub par experience.
  
  true
  
  true

On the one hand I understand they aren't serving billions of hours of video for their own health. Not sure how one can justify the expenditure as a "loss leader". But at the same time, the ad experience is horrendous.
In the last month I have consumed YT on desktop browser, mobile, and regular TV. Guess which is by far the worst experience?
On desktop, you can use an alternate browser or do a reg edit to re-enable manifest v2 plugins (for now) in Chrome, and continue blocking (for now). On mobile you can use alternate apps and frontends.
TV viewing of YT is the worst experience, as there are no native alternative apps and DNS ad blocking doesn't block YT ads. The native YouTube app (on Samsung and LG TVs at least) is horrendous. You get midroll ads sometimes mid-sentence as the content presenter is speaking. Sometimes you get pre-roll ads, disruptive mid roll ads, and then wash it down with a POST-roll ad at the end of the video. Depending on how the content is structured it is disorienting as to whether the video has ended or not.
Say for example its a 30 minute video. I would rather they show 5-7 minutes of predictable ads at the beginning of content, so I can at least have the same experience as broadcast TV, and make an informed decision to get up and use the restroom and feed the pets while the ads roll. Then once the content starts, don't randomly interrupt it.
Imagine the YT model applied to broadcast television. The quarterback drops back to throw a deep pass towards the endzone, and suddenly you find yourself watching an undskippable ad for diarrhea medication, while the football is in the air.
And we wonder why people have ADD.

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

Just got a one-minute unskippable ad for the first time yesterday (no way to use adbockers on a PS5). I'd rather not watch at all.

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.
- 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.

MMW: Google plans to make Chrome a locked down browser for a proprietary web. But this is only the intermediate step before all web services will be accessed via an app. The commercial web and the public web will hard fork and the kids will never know what a "browser" is.

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

Any one else watch the Linux tech tips video (degooglefying) where he tried to claim blocking ads was Piracy.
That pissed me off because blocking ads is honestly just protecting yourself against viruses which appear even on ads on Google etc.
Also who am I depriving of their property by blocking ads, F you linus.

And Sponsorblock. Can't imagine going back.

and warning users of potential account suspension.
What account?

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.

I find the whole thing so ugly even as a youtube plus subscriber. How much possibly you could gain here? isn't youtube already profitable and being run by one of the world's richest corporations? just let people watch and educate themselves and whatnot.

Sadly they killed Piped, and a lot Discord Bots in the Process...
- Free tube still works, android app is kinda buggy though.
- Piped should be able to work if they implement invidious's workaround. Unfortunately devs don't seem to be active anymore :/
- 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.
  
  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.

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.

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