YouTube is cracking down on consumers’ favorite loophole - Adblockers::undefined
I can really understand YT wanting to push ads because I know how expensive their servers are and all that, but I just can’t get over how many ads there are. Two ads before the video starts is already pushing it, and having ads in the middle (which can be many times depending on the video) is far too much. If they crack down on adblockers I’ll likely use alternative frontends like piped. No way I’m watching 6+ ads in one sitting.
I think when they were trying to push the YouTube Red streaming shows there were a few times where they put in full episodes of shows as pre-roll ads. They were skippable but an hour long TV show as a pre-roll is just obnoxious.
I’m in the same camp. I was generally fine when it was an occasional skippable pre-roll ad before some videos. But the last time I watched a video without a blocker, there were two unskippable ads at the start plus two more each at the 7 and 14 minute mark of a 20 minute video.
This hour has 22 minutes indeed.
The problem is that there’s no competition. There’s no real YouTube alternative that content creators can post to.
That’s because video hosting platforms aren’t profitable. Anyone that’s trying to do what youtube is doing will either have shortcomings or go bankrupt.
Does some of the payouts need normalising? Some of the bigger content creators make absolutely bank for hardly doing anything with little overheads.
Not just that, but anytime there is an alternative it gets flooded with neo-nazis, grifters, scammers and other garbage that would otherwise be banned on Youtube. But because the platform is small and uprising, or they were designed specifically for that purpose, they look the other way.
And the reality is there never will be anything that can meaningfully compete. Not anymore. Youtube has inertia. It’s not just that content creators get part of the advertising or that Youtube functionally advertises their channels based on related content algorithms. It’s also that youtube has over a decade of historical material. It’s the largest collection of video content in the history of the planet. Ever. By far. The age of “people are going to ditch your service for a competitor’s” is long gone. We are squarely in the age of the solid internet, which is ruled by a handful of very large, very powerful corporations, who do not really have to worry about “new competition,” because the scale of their operations is so vast, so well established as a part of the culture, and so astronomically expensive to maintain that nothing new could ever hope to compete.
