Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.
Then on Oct 1, they threw up a “You’re using an Ad Blocker” overlay on videos. I’d use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn’t have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.
Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.
Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.
Now all I see is this.
Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.
I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can’t view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.
Basically every tech company “operates at a loss” because of overzealous growth and money going to their investors/parent company/shareholders. I’ve never seen a detailed breakdown of any tech company’s financials released publicly, so I doubt there’s any way to prove this one way or another.
They make less money off of you when they can’t serve you ads
Genuinely I’d be interested in seeing a source for this since every metric I’ve seen from third parties is that ad free purchases gives them waaaaaay more money per user compared to the tiny RPU from ads. But maybe Google being its own ad provider changes that
But practically, I don’t really agree/expect that YouTube should serve you content (or even more so, people with aggressive adblockers) without you giving something in return.
Never said I was owed anything by them, just that I have no moral or ethical qualms continuing to use adblock on a giant corporation
