- 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.
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
Edit: never mind the fact that many ads have been served that are downright malicious code…
“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?
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?
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 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.
And in all tiers: make an additional profit by selling your information without your consent (it has been decided in many courts that burying subtext deeply in forced terms of service isn’t consent)
We are already paying them by letting them harvest our data, ads or not.
Then they double or triple dip with the scenarios you describe. I am still paying them by being on their site with an ad blocker as they harvest my data and sell it to the highest bidder. Not to mention quadruple dipping with using our info and content without consent to train AI to sell.
They use the argument “your data/art/photos/videos are freely posted on the internet, so we can use them how we please”. If they publish content openly on the internet, then we are free to do with it as we please.
They can’t use the argument but say “no no no, it doesn’t apply to things WE put out”
They are either pirating our content and data constantly or ad-blocking is not pirating.
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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.
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.
Repeating: Google, if you’re listening: I’ll never pay for YouTube, no matter how intrusive you make the ads. Enshittification is not encouraging me to pay.
Can’t even rickroll people properly now
Jesus christ i didnt think it was THIS bad. Google really needs that ad revenue lol
Good fucking riddance.
The sooner they realize the enshittification isn’t working, and is only increasing the amount of people participating in the largest global consumer boycott ever, the sooner they’ll actually try to improve the platform, or die resisting.
YouTube has continuously made the experience worse, adding more and more ads to users not using ad blockers, to compensate for those using them. Guess what, genius? People block ads because they suck. Adding more won’t stop people from using ad blockers!
And they have the audacity to try selling YouTube Premium for a whopping $14/mo (nowhere near the actual revenue generated from a user watching ads,) then don’t even provide any real benefit past ad blocking, after they deliberately killed YouTube Originals because it didn’t instantaneously bring in immense profits.
And the content creators I personally know have shown me the amount of money they get from Premium users, and it’s sometimes less than the value of an ad-supported user, even though the Premium user generates more revenue than an ad-supported one.
I would pay for YouTube Premium if it was a reasonable rate, and actually came with exclusive content, similar to Nebula, but it doesn’t.
Instead, YouTube has continued to make the interface more and more bloated, slow, and inefficient, and increased the incentives for low-quality, mass-produced content, all while not paying creators enough to support themselves on YouTube’s own platform.
YouTube can’t see itself as being the cause of its own issues, because it’s blinded by bad ad-driven fiscal policy that has only been a proven failure.
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.
There’s a large war going on behind my uBlock plugin.
Remember when videos had to be at least 10 minutes long, so more ads could be added to the play time? Now they don’t give a fuck.
Now you get a 10 minute ad for a 2 minute video
Good.
Are they? The app I use to view YouTube without ads got taken down and so did the other ones
Pro tip: open YouTube in Chrome, signed into your YouTube account. Allow the algorithm and your subs to continue recommending videos. Find one you wanna see. Copy link address. Paste it into Firefox with adblock, not signed into Google/YouTube. Prosper.
Just watched a YouTube video on my PS5 earlier today while cooking a food and saw for the first time that they will shoot an ad with a “next” button that skips to another ad, and then there’s a “skip” button countdown. Ridiculous. I wouldn’t bother with adblock if the ads were reasonable.
Here’s a free idea, YouTube: build in the ability to add videos to a simple temporary queue and then only put ads in at the very start or very end of videos so they aren’t intrusive.
Presumably the algorithm feed will stagnate or even deteriorate if it sees you ain’t watching what it’s suggesting.
That free idea reduces (potential) ad watch time which reduces money, so there’s no chance they’ll implement it.
If they thought they could get away with serving an ad every 15 seconds, they’d do it.
SmartTube on the shield. Prosper.
Here’s a free idea, YouTube: build in the ability to add videos to a simple temporary queue
You can have that by paying for youtube premium, they want you to sign up.
I’m not tempted to sign up for something if I don’t even know what the features are. Maybe some of their dumbass ads should be for their own fucking product lol. I assumed that it was free from ads, and I think you can download videos and play with your screen off on your phone? Idk, Vanced has been great for me on my phone. And I wouldn’t have bothered to get that set up in the first place if the ads and lack of features weren’t so disruptively intrusive. If they find a way to shut down every way of getting around their overreaching bullshit, I’ll opt to fund a few respectable creators directly rather than pay for the platform.
And I wouldn’t want to bother building a queue in the first place unless it were in order to manage ad breaks. Putting that behind a paywall defeats the purpose of what I’m proposing. You can already build playlists all day long.
The best feature is that it auto-downloads recommended videos, but I hate how finnicky it is, and I hate how it’s capped at 1080p.
If you have Plasma Integration (KDE), you can create a task for sending the link directly to Firefox without copying and pasting. Plasma Integration shows as a context menu item inside chrome, if you use KDE.
Watch time affects your recommendations, so this isn’t a great solution
After watching, click do not recommend and say that it’s because you’ve already watched it. Problem solved.
And now YouTube thinks you hate that video, so your recommendations are less relevant unless you’re willing to do the survey every time.
It’s barely more work than just clicking “Not interested.” though. Just click “tell us why” and “I’ve already watched this video” and it knows that you didn’t dislike it. Trust me, I’ve been doing this for a while now and it still properly recommends videos. It just cleans up your recommended queue because it knows that you’ve already watched those ones in particular. I’ve watched a lot of music deep dive content this way because the ads stupidly will interrupt at the worst moments and ruin the flow, but that kind of content still shows up on my feed all the time.
what I do is open a containerized tab on firefox so that youtube has no history enabled and doesnt fill the page with obnoxious content then I search for what I went there for then I close the tab so everything is purged. for my subscriptions I use a container on my server that downloads their videos and ads them to my plex server so I can watch them there when I have time to watch stuff its all in one place
potential account suspension
You don’t even need an account to use YouTube lol
The worst of all issues to me was any interruption working to help feed people or the destitute immediately has a 5 second skip, while all else has 59, 30, 20, 14 skip. There was no benefit for good externalities, just cost and profit. I was even ok with ads around 5 seconds and that they can even show up before watching a video. Adding the countdown was a nice touch too. It’s when it gets in the way of UI/UX, how you have to suffer through the same commercial over and over, interrupting a video at critical moments, and ending videos with an ad so that you don’t know if the video is ended that it gets awful to use. I would hope someone gets to making it 5 second ads that don’t take away from the experience.
Good.
Youtube is a wonderful thing. It’s a wealth of knowledge and resources unlike anything this world has ever seen.
And it’s ran by one of the worst, most predatory corps on the planet.
Perfectly put. The product is great and I love how it democratizes “being on TV” and lets some people make a living doing their own thing.
But I do not like where YouTube’s cut of that ad/sub money goes, and the enshittification pushed into it.
Unfortunately, YouTube is not unique in that regard. It’s a sucky fact of life that just about any complex product you spend money on will benefit a collection of rich sociopaths skimming as much as possible from the incomes of the people actually making the thing. Gotta vote with your wallet where you can, and vote the traditional way for the systemic issues.
it’s ran
it’s run
it’s ren
Ron*
Danke. Mein Reichsleiter.
*Reichsleiter
Ty. I knew it looked wrong.
Floatplane is Linus’ smartest decision he’s made. It’s going to be needed.
Sounds like users are trying to end up in the find out phase.
YouTube… “We provide these APIs and make our apps and privacy policies more accessible than most, but we still can’t give everything away for free.”
Users… “Haha scum of the earth we think we’re beating you and that you have no way to stop us from circumventing your ads without paying.”
My dude, white knighting a company that had almost $60 billion in profit in 2022 and $73 billion profit in 2023 isn’t a good look.
My dude… There are 100s of legitimate things about Google to complain about, but you pick the weakest argument and then say I’m white knighting them. YouTube doesn’t owe you cause they made profit… you’ve been able to still bypass their ads for this long, and so now users are complaining that they were able to circumvent something easier in the past?
There are 100s of legitimate things about Google to complain about
But you’re not. You’ve made several comments on this post criticizing the people who 1. want control over their own devices and 2. are sick of ads being forced into every aspect of their lives.
you pick the weakest argument
And I happen to think that a company throwing such an entitled fit over money, when they are making an immoral amount of profit that is increasing YoY, is super relevant when discussing the profitability of one of their services.
YouTube doesn’t owe you cause they made profit
Pretty sure I didn’t say they did.
you’ve been able to still bypass their ads for this long, and so now users are complaining that they were able to circumvent something easier in the past?
People always complain when their convenience is removed from them. Welcome to the human condition.
But you’re not. You’ve made several comments on this post criticizing the people who 1. want control over their own devices and 2. are sick of ads being forced into every aspect of their lives.
They have control over their devices. You’re not making sense and can’t even articulate how they don’t have control. If they want even more control, they can install GrapheneOS or a plethora of third party ROMs that removes all Google services. Apple users can’t even do that. No one is making them use YouTube either. Google allows third party apps that blocks ads. It isn’t like a… “Ha, Google you’re idiots we are smarter than you cause you are too stupid to block ads.” Seriously, what kind of dumb person takes this attitude?
And I happen to think that a company throwing such an entitled fit over money, when they are making an immoral amount of profit that is increasing YoY, is super relevant when discussing the profitability of one of their services.
Dumb users are the ones throwing an entitled fit. Why is making profit immoral? If you want to say, “I’m anti-capitalist and don’t think the world should be about money…” then just say that. It is a much stronger argument and one that should be discussed more, but singling out Google is dumb. In terms of ethics, they are still way better than most companies, including Apple & Microsoft… In what realitydoes it make sense to attack the more ethical companies before going after the least ethical?
YouTube doesn’t owe you cause they made profit
Read your previous comment.
People always complain when their convenience is removed from them. Welcome to the human condition.
Not always. If I go to a coffee shop and they give me a free one out of convenience… I don’t go back and demand they keep giving them to me for free cause they did it once.
Please rewrite this to make sense and we’ll get back to you in 3-5 working days.
Meh, paywalling some videos behind Google+ (or whatever the current iteration is) would’ve been the honest option. But they chose ads and tracking for everything (makes more money), i can understand why people circumvent them.
I can understand why people circumvent them too. I can’t understand why they’d claim… “Hey Google, you suck at blocking ads. You can’t stop us from doing it.”
Seriously, fuck people that do this. Google knows people use third party apps that block ads. They might as well say… we’re not happy not having ads. We want Google to block it entirely so we can be even more pissed off.
My brother in Christ you really think we’re using APIs?
Please consult the image:
"but we still can’t give everything away for free.”
Then why have they positioned youtube to be a public worldwide service freely accessible all these years?
It is the usual tactic of operating at a loss for years, building an unsustainable service and supporting it with revenue from other places. Google was officially declared a monopoly, and youtube is not profitable, so it’s easy to connect the dots and say youtube grew to it’s current dominance unfairly through that monopoly money.
Now they want to enforce their TOS on you, pay up or watch a million ads or leave. Well fuck their TOS, I avoid anything google like the plague, but their unfair position on video sharing makes it hard to avoid youtube particularly. I respond unfairly in turn, by proxying youtube through invidious.
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.
