Technology

I think its ad model problem as it's only "sustainable" through shitty practices that lead to ad blocking. Most people who get adblock do it because they're just tired of ads and it should be this way. Small fair ads are fine with almost everyone but greedy assholes would never give in for that - it has to be in your face, unvetted spam.

Personally I delight in blocking all youtube ads. I won't stop if I have a choice.

Using ublock origin and sponsorblock is the right thing to do. I will never allow ads for as long as I live. And I will never pay/buy YouTube premium since I can get all the features for free through modded versions of apps/browser extensions.

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

Now that's a nice feature! The adblocker that drains your bladder, automatically 😂

In podcasts, where I can't block ads effectively, I will instantly skip any canned ads and even avoid podcasts that have too many canned ads. On the other hand, when podcast hosts do their own ad reads, it doesn't bother me too much. In the best cases, they are funny enough that I feel like I'm missing out with the ad-free premium feeds (I subscribe to some podcast Patreons).

I also don't really mind sponsored segments from YouTube hosts, though it's highly dependent on the content. Most of the channels I follow have ad reads that are reasonably well aligned with the content and tone. In some cases, they are actually useful. I still run SponsorBlock, but I do often read through the video descriptions of my favorite channels to see what they're hocking.

There is no imaginable scenario where I would tolerate hypercheerful actors talking about insurance or cars. Get outta town.

Just wait until YT makes high res video options premium only. :)

Edit: I adblock, because fuck ads. But I also use yt less than ever before. I used to use it for entertainment, but nowadays I only use it when I specifically search for something.

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.

They need to stop rapidly changing the terms of the agreement. This is the problem endemic to the platform. It's starting to lose shape because the ads are the problem.

If this was an issue with the quality of content:

ideally creators would get to choose their ad roll spots. This would make it less jarring to the watcher. It's also terrible that you can get ads for something like BP on a video that's basically surmised as "That time BP poisoned a lot of children". (See climate town) l. Also, if the ad revenue split was better, creators wouldn't then have to shoe horn in extra ad spots into the content of their videos.

However, I don't think it's a problem with quality of the content, but the quality of the ads.

I believe Adblocking is not piracy issue to the end user as much as it is protection measure from malicious content. It's up to the user to qualify what is "malicious" or not in the end. Users who use adblock do not have a good relationship with online advertising not because it annoys them, it's because it threatens them. This is less so just a YouTube problem and more of a entirety of Google's business model problem.

Becoming a better ad platform is a tough challenge when advertisers by practice operate in a manipulative bad faith space. We don't trust ads.

Dunno if YT can be saved, I don't belive that enshittification is a reversible process

I get YouTube Premium because I pay for YouTube Music, but I've tried watching ad supported YouTube on a computer I wasn't logged into as I was troubleshooting my main computer. I can tell you that I wouldn't even bother with the ad blockers. If there was something on YouTube that I really wanted to watch, like an old concert or something, I would just download it with JDownloader and add it to my Jellyfin server. If that doesn't work, if just move on. There's a lot more entertainment available for free than I could ever possibly consume in three lifetimes.

I just stopped using YouTube. I can get all my music elsewhere.

TIL: there is a version of AdBlock out there that assists with bathroom trips... More information requested, please and thank you.

FYI your title has a typo. It says "abblock"

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).

Thanks for making this thread, OP! Some really good responses in here that I enjoyed reading! 🙂

If Google is willing to eat the initial cost they can start superimposing ads over streams on the fly, on part of the screen, while the stream is running. You can't skip it because you'd be skipping content. They can use AI to figure out areas of the screen where they won't mess with visual content (eg. avoid slapping it over people's faces) but also make it impossible to ignore (eg. not a bar at the bottom you can simply crop out).

On the bright side these ads would probably be less obnoxious than full screen audio/video ads. If they make them tolerable enough we would see a marked decrease in attempts to fight them (especially since fighting against ads imprinted on the video would be pretty hard).

The nuclear option would be to turn on DRM for the entire platform and make it mandatory to have an account to see any video. It would make ripping streams a lot harder but it would nuke the entire ecosystem of YT clients running on every possible device, which were built on the premise they can freely access non-DRM streams. They can probably upgrade the firmware on their latest Chromecasts and abandon the rest but all TVs and older devices would be screwed. They might still get away with it if they give ample advance warning (couple of years).

Depends also on how they intend to reposition the service. They could steer it towards becoming yet another private streaming service, holding all the YouTube library hostage, Not sure to what extent stream authors would be willing, ready and able to move away, given the almost complete lack of competing platforms.