I use youtube across different devices with the same account. sometimes, i even use it in multiple browser profiles or apps on the same device (with the account logged in).
the ad reminder got me. it actually stopped serving any youtube video on my laptop. so i made a new profile in firefox, logged in, and it was fine. for a couple days.
so i made a new profile, logged in, and… was foiled. but not to be deterred, i did what any reasonable person would do: i sought out one of the DOZENS of alternative frontends and used youtube’s recommendation algorithm on the main site to pull videos from the alternative frontend.
for one day.
today, on my laptop, with my old profile, never changing logins or browser settings, youtube started working again.
did we win?
did we win?
Just because they paused this offensive, does not mean the war is over.
I believe it was a case of testing the waters. These are some of the questions they were looking to answer
Did the pop up cause those who received it to buy premium?
Did the pop up cause those who received it to turn off add block for that site?
Did the pop up cause those who received it to not use youtube at all?
Did the pop up cause those who received it to move to third party front-ends?
My guess is they are looking at the data now to answer this question: (the only one they care about)
From the data gained, is it likely that going on a full offensive against add-blockers make us more money?
If yes, the offensive will begin.
If no, they will look at other alternatives.
And finally: “Did the popup and the massive media attention to it cause an increase in overall adblocker usage that will do more harm in the long run to Google/Alphabet than they could ever recoup from Youtube whitelisting or Premium sales.”
Yep, good addition and probably the really important one.
Personally I think they are going to find that the people who use add blockers will never view adds on youtube.
They will either find a workaround or stop using it all together.
If the publicity around this action causes more people to move in the direction of using addblockers it could be really counter productive for youtube.
If the publicity around this action causes more people to move in the direction of using addblockers it could be really counter productive for youtube.
That all depends on if the revenue loss from an increase in ablocker use is more than the revenue gain from people either disabling adblockers or purchasing a plan.
Google has the entire internet indexed for their search engine, but still somehow hasn’t heard of the Streisand effect
I’d bet they’re A/B testing to see if it has a major impact on the amount an individual uses the site
I know that the pop up showing for some of my friends made me cancel my premium subscription. Everything else I don’t know. If they stop i will think about getting it back, but newpipe has been working pretty nice. It has the same benefits as premium and I don’t use youtube music. We’ll see, thanks to youtube for making me go looking for alternatives i guess lol.
Out of curiosity, did they have an exit questionnaire or something where anyone doing that can let them know why they cancelled?
Same, I wouldn’t have discovered FreeTube had they not fucked with my user experience. And since I can’t comment/upvote or as far as they know, subscribe to anything they’ve lost all my engagement in addition to all the meta data they were collecting on me. How many seconds did I hover over each element before clicking something google? You don’t fucking know now do you ya!?
Trueee, FreeTube in pc, NewPipe in android and you get the same experience as premium. Even more so, with FreetTube you even get sponsor block that i have no idea with what kind of black programming magic its done but it’s a plus over premium. I sound like an ad but i didn’t know that shit like that existed until I cancelled premium lol.
Does Google have no issues with ad blocking as long as you pay for YouTube premium? I have premium because it’s included with my YouTube music subscription but I still use uBlock Origin in Firefox. I have never seen any requests for me to disable it while on YouTube or any other Google owned service.
I have YouTube Premium and use the included ad-blocker of OperaGX. Never had that pop up and my YouTube runs like it always has.
I think once you pay for Premium they don’t care anymore of you have an ad-blocker running.
They caused you a major inconvinience that is enough for a % of people to turn it off, even temporally. I doubt there would ever be an ideal anti-adblock, or that they even target those who would figure it out, but swing users who can be easily pressured into surrendering. The most popular channels aren’t about tech things after all, and average session\video is probably small enough to bear ads while scrolling shorts for 10-15 minutes per sitting.
