At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what.
And to be clear, I am not trying to equate Adblocking to video piracy. To me, the fact that I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn’t constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube. I would also never click on an ad purposefully, no matter what it is for.
With all that being said, I am a hopeless cause and I don’t think that anything will convince me to buy YouTube premium, but I also used to think that about MP3s.
My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?
At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking.
Lol, no, they aren’t. If they wanted to they could just throw everyone with an adblocker out. The only reason they aren’t doing this right now is not wanting to piss off their users (and some vague EU data privacy laws).
The absolute best you could accomplish against them as a user is hiding the ad, but you’d still have to wait instead of being able to skip.
Besides that: I thought about getting YouTube premium (+ music), but now they’re already jacking the prices further up. So I’ll just keep using uBlock Origin and if that no longer works cut back on my video watching time.
They’ll lose…they already forgot why they beat out yahoo for search.
There’s other platforms salivating at YouTube imploding.
What I meant is that they have the technical capability to lock you out when using an adblocker. They already do in a few countries (you can watch 3 videos then get kicked out). It’s not a technical issue for YouTube.
There’s not a single decent platform out there to replace YouTube. Even Vimeo is tiny and can barely keep up with demand.
And why should someone sink a massive amount of money into infrastructure without a way to make profit? If you try to monetize it from the start you’ll never build a large enough userbase.
They already do in a few countries (you can watch 3 videos then get kicked out)
And people already figured out a way around this. They can only ever kick out adblock users temporarily, not permanently.
Of course they’re going to lose. I’ve been saying they’re going to lose since the first day they started the war. They will always lose and continue to lose. Screw them.
Dunno if YT can be saved, I don’t belive that enshittification is a reversible process
I’m expecting someone smart at Google to figure out how to encode ads as part of the video file as it is delivered, making it literally undifferentiatable in the data we receive, and then there’s no way around it. They’ll make millions in ads and billions licensing it out.
The sponsorskip extension already has the functionality to get around something like this.
Yeah but that’s because the content creator cannot dynamically change the time at which the sponsored part is. For ads, Google could dynamically insert ads at every 1/3rd of videos with a variation ± 1mn, and there’s nothing an extension like sponsorblock could do without triming on the original video’s content.
A solution to that would just be to save a snapshot of a video frame every second or so, then skip segments that don’t match.
Disadvantage of said system for Google would be the fact that if you do that, people can skip ads much faster and they won’t be able to do any tracking of interaction at all. For advertiser’s point of view, that would be just worse version of TV commercial.
encode ads as part of the video file
I suspect that an AI could be trained to be able to recognize ads, or at least the most annoying, ads.
Also, a community driven project, like SponsorBlock, where users identify ads to build up a database could be created.
These are just a couple of ideas to defeat embedded ads, and I’m not a genius programmer by any means. This is just another front in a war that has been going on since at least the 90’s and as long as blocking ads is less annoying than watching them, we’re winning.
That’s how twitch does it.
It’s been very effective at making me watch less twitch, but it does serve the ads no matter the adblocker now
At that point you might just end up with some kind of YouTube ‘piracy’ with Premium subscribers uploading mirrors to Peertube servers or something.
Hell, I’d support it with my home server if someone made a containerized service for it. Just start uploading my subscription feed somewhere for other people.
I’m one of the people grandfathered into YouTube music because I was a Google play music subscriber. At one point YouTube premium was bundled into my service as a perk for being a subscriber. I currently pay $8. I received an email upping that price to $13.99 for premium (YouTube music and YouTube premium). I’ll still pay it. Mostly because I use the product I’m actively paying for and the lack of ads on YouTube is beneficial to me even though I use unlock origin.
I have not got any experience with how ads are implemented on YouTube because I have had my sub since 2011. So I have not experienced the frustration of many other people here who are having ads pushed at them by google on YouTube relentlessly.
That being said, if I’m honest right now the price of YouTube Music vs the price of Spotify is comparable ($10.99) currently so far as I can tell? But once the YouTube premium price ($13.99) increase hits (including YouTube music) Google will have the most expensive streaming service because all the other big music ones are around $10.99.
Amazon has movies, tv, and music bundled in prime and it costs $14.99 a month. Apple One (which is TV and music and some other stuff) is $19.95 a month. Hulu doesn’t include music and it’s no ad tier is $17.99 a month (with no music service). Netflix’s lowest non-ad tier is $15.49 a month (again with no music service).
The removal of the lower paid tier for just no ads was a mistake. Some people are willing to pay a dollar or two to not see ads. Don’t make it difficult for people who want to pay you to pay you. After all, there are people who pay for adblockers and VPN’s.
Lumping “features” and services together under one umbrella premium subscription was a mistake (because people don’t see value in all their services and it’s similar to what cable companies like Comcast do, forcing subscribers to pay for services they don’t use to get a “better price”).
Because I think their anti-adblock antics are simply an effort to push more people to subscribe or watch ads (and only really aimed at people who are suggestible like your mom who only has adblock because you set it up for her), and considering that if you’re a paid subscriber they don’t care if you use adblock or not (so mom wouldn’t even have to figure out how to turn off adblock, she’d just have to enter her credit card info), I don’t know if this is a service problem.
I think it’s a capitalism problem. This company is required to meet and exceed yearly profits on it’s products. Ad aggregation is it’s biggest product by far. A lot of people still seem to think Google sells that data to ad companies. They don’t. They hoard it and make ad companies pay them and in exchange they show targeted ads to people who use their products. As a result (and since this is their biggest money maker), when people use adblockers they are actively circumventing Google’s main revenue stream.
I feel like what we actually need is legal regulations. And the only way to really get those is to lobby for them.
Edit: I looked into it. CPM (Clicks Per Million) payout is 3.5 cents per adview. Google is raising the price of it’s Premium tier to $13.99. To make that same revenue from a single viewer in ad spots that viewer would have to watch about 400 ad spots. This definitely explains why they’re pushing premium so hard. They do actually apparently make more money from premium members so far as I can tell. Especially for casual users (and kids whose account are only allowed to show a limited quantity of specifically vetted ads, meaning that other people in these comments suggesting that Google can vet ads and work within user preferences to not show viewers certain ads are already implemented elsewhere on the platform).