While the company stops short of directly saying as much, it sure feels like the preposterously long ads we’re seeing here are an example of one tool in Google’s arsenal for effectively disabling YouTube playback for violators of the site’s ToS.
That makes no sense at all. It isn’t like skipping ads results in a black screen for the length of the ad.
People with adblockers aren’t going to see hour long ads or black screens when they don’t see ads in the first place.
It’s hilarious that they think it would matter to anyone with an ad blocker. I haven’t seen an ad for years on youtube. Hell I haven’t even seen promotions in videos for a few months now that I found a sponsor segment blocker.
All that does is make YouTube money while costing money to the advertisers.
How long do you think those advertisers will stay when it turns out they’ve paid $1M in advertising with no change in sales?
I think Google doesn’t care about that at all.
They most likely pay peanuts compared to you for “bandwidth” (which for them is more of an electricity cost and trough-output allocation than a specific numeric value like consumers and smaller companies have). You also cache the video on your own device making the multiple tab thing useless if you don’t know what you’re doing. And Google can also just block you when they attack their servers, move traffic around, and so much more advanced stuff that protects their infrastructure.
tl;dr: Trying to boycott Google by trying to waste their resources is useless.
I either watch YouTube without ads or don’t watch at all. We need a new platform for videos.
Tell you the truth, once upon a time I really didn’t mind the ads. In fact I was quite happy to support the creators that I like with watching the ads that appeared on their videos. But then YouTube started getting smarmy by blocking my suggestions because I didn’t use history on my account. And then there’s the problem of the ads getting longer. At which point I got fed up and downloaded the adblock software to stop seeing this garbage. And then this little war broke out over ads on the platform.
Quite frankly, so long as the people who make the software to block ads continue to do that kind of work I will continue to download their software and make Google spend boatloads of their own money to try to block the blockers. Because the blockers aren’t going anywhere. Not to mention that the blockers were not quite as popular before Google started this little campaign. And now they have made people so hyper aware of the fact that they can actually go out and find some way to skip these stupid ads that they’ve basically dug their own grave. Broadcast TV spent decades on this failed quest.
I was the exact same way. I could justify watching ads to support the people I watched, but then I learned how little compensation a creator actually gets from one view and decided my time was more valuable. Plus I just got too used to never seeing ads and could never go back.
This video sums up the sentiment you’re describing nicely.
Exactly right. Two 15 second ads in between shows two midstream 15 to 30 second ads, I was perfectly fine with watching those ads.
When they started letting content creators pick the number of ads, and they started letting more than 30 seconds of ads per break, now I have incentive to block them.
Capitalism dictates that they need to make 20% more every year. They cannot continue to get 20% more ad revenue every year without increasing ads substantially.
When a handful of companies owns everything and they can no longer buy new companies up to make more money, They can’t make their numbers. All they can do is gut us for the last 20% and then go out of business.
Peertube looks good… but has nearly no content or content creators, which is the reason Google nearly has monopoly with Youtube
Not a fediverse thing, but I pay $5 a month for nebula. I think it’s worth it to support creators. And I believe the whole “if you’re not paying for something you’re the product”. Though you can still be the product even if you do pay.
Is there any competitor like Nebula that’s not solely focused on informational/longform videos? I come from the age when hobbyists made silly memetic animations and shared them around, not even necessarily for profit. I’m sure many of those people consider YouTube to be some level of evil and would enjoy an alternative that’s actually organic.
I ended up getting a lifetime subscription, and it’s definitely worth it, but it’s not a replacement for YT entirely.
Dropout.tv has good comedy videos which is largely lacking from Nebula, but I find it buffers more often for me, which makes it uniquely bad among all the streaming services I’ve used.
But, I watch plenty of fan compilations / animatics for stuff on YT from my recommendations, and I haven’t found them anywhere else either because they don’t exist or because they don’t get recommended to me. It seems difficult for that kind of stuff to exist without free, easy uploads AND free, easy viewing.
Finally there are some people that primarily do Twitch that I subscribe to on YT. I’ve tried watching them on Twitch, and I prefer the content after their YT editor has worked their magic.
The problem is hosting (storage, network) is expensive.
IIRC some platforms (feddit.org, catbox.moe) pays $1000 per month, and that’s mostly just static images.
Videos is much more than that. Who pays for that?
I have a hunch Linus at LTT could float his own storage for whatever stuff he wants to host. The same way you and me have to pay for our own online storage.
Hosting is only half the equation you have to be able to serve it people all around the world at once with no buffering. People have no clue how amazing YouTube is for a free service. Bandwidth costs a fuckload of money too to add to the hosting cost.
Yeah, that would mean everybody pays for hosting videos themselves. The question is: is that a viable strategy / are users willing to put up with that.
uBlock Origin works wonders. I haven’t seen a YouTube ad since I installed it.
Youtube is like that bully that asks for your lunch money and when you say no, they slam you into a locker.
When you say no again, they start hitting you until you finally give that lunch money.
Once you do, they will show you the others are being abused harder when they demand more money from you.
I would love to contribute to the end of youtube.
To me, the value of youtube and it’s music is far below the €18 it costs to get me and my wife ad free. My internet costs roughly that and offers a lot of possibilites, so why should i pay double for a service that supplies about 1 millionth of what the internet itself has to offer, especially considering my wage has barely changed while i watch my rent and groceries triple in cost.
Y’all need to realize there is an end to my money, you can’t keep taking.
I’m laughing at their YouTube’s response. Obviously someone used a thesaurus to write it and didn’t know that “incalcitrant” is not even the word, no major dictionaries list it. It’s like using irregardless instead of regardless The word they YouTube wanted is recalcitrant.
And it’s very telling that they YouTube used that word because it shows they think they are King.
Recalicitrant:
Stubbornly resistant to authority or control.
Unwilling to obey orders or to do what should be done.
Resisting authority or control; not obedient or compliant.
Edit: I’m laughing at YouTube’s response. I thought that was clear by context… I guess people who didn’t read the article didn’t get that? Maybe it was paywalled to them?
Words matter, and by using the one they did, YouTube is basically saying that they demand people obey them.
I’m laughing at YouTube’s response. I thought that was clear by context… I guess people who didn’t read the article didn’t get that? Maybe it was paywalled to them?
Or why are you telling me to STFU?
Look, I don’t disagree with you. YouTube has many flaws and they’ve rapidly enshittified to increase monetization. But YouTube is a far more complex* operation than your ISP. It took a decade to start making a profit on YouTube.
The amount of hardware behind it is insane. The amount of work behind it is insane. A lot of that work is performed by really expensive software engineers in the US and Europe.
It was never sustainable from the get-go. Not with a single pre-watch ad and no premium tier, anyway. They HAD to add more ads and a premium ad-free tier. Where I disagree with them is the amount of ads and the cost of the premium tier.
*The big cloud providers (including Google) have grown so big, they don’t use ISPs in the traditional sense to connect their data centers. They run their own subsea cables between continents to improve connectivity. Whether or not you like the companies, they put a LOT of work into keeping you on their platforms. Of course this is for Google Cloud customers, but YouTube basically IS a Google Cloud customer. Just an in-house one.
Youtube is like that bully
Except no one is forcing you to face that bully.
You can simply stay away.
It’s either this or cable, cable sucks.
So i’d rather adblock the hell out of them.
Then you’re choosing to use their service without paying, and don’t get to complain.
Most people are lazy and not willing to make their life less comfortable. If they were, a lot of problems in big tech would not even exist. That’s why people still buy apple, use WhatsApp and microsoft instead of the free alternatives - because its less comfortable.
They want change, but are unwilling to be a factor in causing that change.
While the company stops short of directly saying as much, it sure feels like the preposterously long ads we’re seeing here are an example of one tool in Google’s arsenal for effectively disabling YouTube playback for violators of the site’s ToS.
I don’t get it. When my adblocker works, I don’t get to see this shit. Only if it fails I’llbe confronted with hour-long ads, so the incentive to find a better blocker is even higher?
They are trying hard to block all known adblockers. And if they ever do, this will become a serious problem.
This is a war that was fought by broadcast TV and the makers of videotapes, DVDs, and blu-rays. In every case the Corpos failed. So no, this arms race is and will be won by the ad blockers.
