- YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
- Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
- Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
Make your platform so bad in the interest of shareholders so no one wants to use your platform anymore. It’s a story as old as capitalism.
If they kept the ads to 10-15 seconds at the start of a video and didn’t interrupt my videos for them, I would never use an adblock on Youtube (i’ll even give them an allowance for one 10 second ad interruption for every hour in the case of super long videos). But for as long as they keep trying to squeeze every goddamn penny out of me that they can, I will fight back and do everything in my power to prevent them from being allowed even a single ad impression off me.
I’m not unreasonable, but I refuse to accept unreasonable offers.
Ads suck, but the type of ad is what is sucking the most. All I’m getting are ads for get rich quick schemes. You never see big name brands advertise on youtube anymore.
I hope one day we will find a method to finance websites operating costs without ads. Meanwhile I will be using blockers and hope someone else’s does the ad clicking.
It’s my little internet piracy you could say, if I am already doing it with every movie and tv show and most games it would be out of character. I am obsessed about saving money and so if I can get away with it I will do almost anything.
Same with the health insurance I have 1/5 of the real cost for full package because of various gray area tax optimisations. Then double dipping on real estate rent+appreciation. Most efficient used car purchase. 25 year old fridge and washing machine because new ones break down too fast and can’t be repaired. Manual renovation between tenants to save on labour cost. Lack of addictions. Relatively cheap hobbies. 4 milion in assets.I’d be willing to pay for their service if it didn’t entail creating an account and letting me get tracked even further.
I don’t know what the solution is, but ads isn’t, a Google account isn’t, but piracy isn’t either.
I’ll never understand the entitlement of these companies when it comes to ads. You send the content freely to my computer along with BS ads. It’s my computer. I’ll display what I want using programs I want.
If you want me to pay for that content with $ or by watching ads - then put up a hard paywall and stop sending the content for free. You can’t get uppity and complain about ad blockers - it doesn’t make any sense…
The real problem is your content sucks and nobody is willing to pay for it. And that’s your problem - not mine.
Here’s some free apples. There’s a newspaper ad stuffed in there as well. Oh you ate the apples without reading the newspaper? Foul ball! /facepalm
“Your content sucks… And I can’t stop watching it. I also got herpes by watching too much brain rot”
That’s a weird way to look at it, obviously you’re watching the content.
I’d rather see it like this:
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Free tier with ads
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Subscription without ads (and better quality)
You are currently on the free tier. Yes, you can block ads (just like you can pirate movies), but that’s not the deal you were offered. I’m using an ad blocker myself, but I can understand the corporate side too.
They absolutely could add a hard paywall, but why should they if there are plenty of users who want to watch for free by paying with ads?
No, I’m on the “you’re freely posting content to the internet - some of which I want to consume(videos), others not so much (ads)” plan. I never asked them to post anything, never entered a contract, etc.
If they lock the content up, and stop freely posting it, then fine, I’ll stop consuming and go elsewhere. If I can’t live without the content, then I can decide to pay up. It’s their content - they can do whatever they want with it. But they can’t get mad at ad blockers if they put their stuff out there for free.
Totally fine by me! But by your logic you can’t get mad at them if they block you from watching due to using an ad blocker. Which brings us back to square one?
Agree 100%. IF they figure it out - which they won’t for more than a day or two. They know the only real solution is to lock their content up and protect it, but they don’t, and then they get bent out of shape. The companies get weird about it - not the users.
I still hold the opinion that they could absolutely block you out. I use uBlock Origin and there was actually a time where I got blocked/warnings every day. Even with upgrading my plugin / refreshing all block lists.
At some point I finally gave in and grabbed YouTube Premium, not because of the ads (I’d rather stop watching than watch with ads), but because I needed their music service (Used Amazon Music before, the app sucked. Music quality was the highest out there though. Also cancelled Prime for a double whammy).
For example the moment an ad gets triggered they could just refuse to send you video data. And if the ad is an unskipable 15 seconds, block playback for 15 seconds. Done. Even if you block this, you get 15 seconds of nothing and will soon be pissed off enough to either start watching ads, buy Premium or leave (no longer costing them bandwidth).
You may be right, but I can’t imagine how they’d actually pull it off. The internet as a medium just doesn’t work that way - there’s always going to be a flag or a call for me to go pull ad data from somewhere else, and someone somewhere will write code that ignores that command.
Great for them if they figure it out, but the medium doesn’t work in their favor. They want the frog to be an elephant, and when it proves to be a poor elephant they cry to the govt. to fix it with laws and dmca takedowns and whatnot. That’s just a waste of taxpayer money, and annoys people on the medium.
Just the way I described, I’m a software developer, it would be easy as hell.
Your browser requests the video, YouTube decides you have to watch an ad. The ad has 15 seconds unskipable. So the easiest thing they could do is not send you video data for 14 seconds (add a spare second for buffering to not piss off users who do watch ads).
Doesn’t matter if you call some endpoint, load the ad data, whatever. You’re not receiving any video for a while, which would piss people off enough to leave.
They definitely couldn’t add a hard paywall. It would collapse the system overnight.
Collapse what exactly? It would actually reduce strain on their servers and provide a better experience for paying users. Obviously they won’t do it because there’s a ton of users who watch ads (think of the average guy who plays YouTube on their phone or TV, with zero adblocking).
Just the revenue of paid subscribers will not pay the bills of any content creator that actually has employees or spends money creating content.
They won’t do it because all of their content would have no alternative but to disappear.
It would be a huge gamble, but it could pay off. Seriously, how many people are watching YouTube every day? Hours of their favorite content creators.
Imagine a rug pull, YouTube is now a pay only service. No ads, but everyone has to pay $5 a month to access. I’d bet with you that a surprising amount of people would just pay that to continue using it.
How many? Nobody knows, but it would certainly be 30% or higher. Now imagine 30% of users paying just $5 a month how much money that would be.
It can be done, YouTube just doesn’t do it right now as they still earn plenty with ads. If suddenly everyone started to use an ad blocker then things would change very quickly.
Nobody knows, but it would certainly be 30% or higher.
This is an insane pipe dream.
You underestimate how addicted people are to YouTube. There is no alternative to it.
Twitch is streaming focused, the vods absolutely suck. Kick? Same.
What else is there? TikTok? Instagram? Neither of which provide long high quality videos.
After all we are talking about YouTube literally blocking everyone and putting up a banner: $5 a month or you’re out of luck. If someone already happily pays $18 a month for Netflix, what is 5 bucks?
They make more money via ads than they ever will with a hard pay wall. The innumerable advertisers paying google/youtube will always pay more than individuals paying for a subscription for no ads.
That’s why people who paid for no ads will eventually end up with ads again, despite paying. They don’t care if we pay or not. They want that sweet sweet ad revenue.
The sad fact of the matter is that we live in an ad based economy. Advertising is more profitable than selling an actual product. Having a platform to sell infinite ad space is a money making machine, plus people making free content for them to lure in more people to watch said ads. It’s super fucked up on youtubes part.
YouTube now exists as a billboard first, content second or third.
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I was paying for Google music until they took it away from me and told me it was Youtube Premium and then raised the price twice.
Not exactly what I’d call a great value proposition.
Just got a one-minute unskippable ad for the first time yesterday (no way to use adbockers on a PS5). I’d rather not watch at all.
I already pay tons yearly for extra storage. YouTube without ads should be included. Also I was a paying customer for ad free back when Google Music was alive. They killed the best service for the shitty YouTube Music. Bring back Google Music and I will subscribe again.
Same boat dude. That’s how I got YouTube premium. I uploaded like 500 GB of music for Google Music to host it and I could stream my own collection. Now I use Navidrome and my own server.
The ads have reached a breaking point.
If I can’t block them, I’m just not watching the YouTube. I’ll never pay.
It used to be funny to link a relevant YouTube clip, but it’s not funny if you have to sit through half a minute of ads just to see something silly.
It’s also not really a long time streaming service like TV channels or netflix etc., because the homemade content sucks in comparison to an actual documentary that I can also watch without ads on other services.
It’s like Google completely misunderstood the point of the service they initially made. Also following a decade of users attempting to “monitize” their fucking crap, you can be sure that there’s nothing worth watching on YouTube that couldn’t have been better presented in a gif or in text.
Then the player is also fucking up lately. Usually if I go there, I’ll check the written description while the ads play, just to see if the content is worth the wait, but nooo… you can’t even do that anymore, because the app will start reloading between the multiple ads and the screen scrolls around and minimizes the description and comments. They’re literally hiding any information on the clip except the title until you’ve watched the ads.
It’s fucking garbage. Enshittified to death.
Jesus christ i didnt think it was THIS bad. Google really needs that ad revenue lol
There’s no winning a perpetual game of whack-a-mole, especially when having no moles (=viewers) left also means that you lose.
MMW: Google plans to make Chrome a locked down browser for a proprietary web. But this is only the intermediate step before all web services will be accessed via an app. The commercial web and the public web will hard fork and the kids will never know what a “browser” is.
And Sponsorblock. Can’t imagine going back.
I’m surprised that Vimeo hasn’t decided to take advantage of the enshittifcation of YouTube. They have been a social video platform for years, and are probably the best placed platform to come close to overtaking YouTube - should they choose to move away from the professional space and embrace the social aspects of video.
ha ha!! take that!
