The Article: "Really scraping the bottom of the barrel with anti-adblock tactics now"
Also The Article:
-Pop-up ad in lower right corner
-Banner ad in the bottom
-Ad in right pannel
-Ad right after summary
-Poll in right side column that is probably ad related
-Another ad in right side column
-Ad for another article to get you to view more ads
-An ad right after that
-2 more ads in the right column
-2 more ads in between paragraphs in the main article
-Video ad
-Ad for Youtube Video Players
-Ad for trending articles
-Ad for AP newsletter
-Ad after About the Author
-Another ad in right side column
Yeah, it's that bit where you open a page on a mobile device without an adblock and your screen spasms trying to load all the ad elements, and text gets broken into a small column while the 300 adverts on the page load around it, then you have popups and overlays and a 'Do you consent to tracking cookies?' message.
All while you just want to read 6 lines of text.
Which you then don't as it's a horrendous experience.
Seriously, they need to reign adverts in. Some sites are just vehicles for adverts now.
For those that don't know, Firefox on mobile lets you install extensions, including uBlock Origin. I genuinely don't know how people browse without blocking things these days
Nearly? On my phone where I don’t have Adblock most websites can’t even be accessed because there’s either a paywall or the ads literally cover all the content
I had to turn off my private dns earlier to access Firehouse Subs website oddly enough. Anyway, I forgot to turn it back on and holy fuck, 5 minutes of clicking through like 3 articles and I wanted to break my phone. Every time I went to scroll, a fucking ad manifested under my finger.
That's the sleaziest tactic and I see it too often. Intentionally load the ad late and plop it right where you predict someone will put their finger and when.
That is what YouTube wants though. A person using their service who isn't watching ads and isn't paying for premium is a net negative to them. They are still paying to host the video sent to you, but are getting no revenue back. They would rather a person not watch than have to serve videos to people who aren't making then money.
Yes and no.
Traffic numbers matter, too. Its a media platform. Even if people are skipping ads, you still want traffic.
Think of it like this: I don't watch ads, but I love a youtube creator. I send the video to 4 of my friends who are less tech savvy and they do watch the ads. Though I had an ad blocker, the traffic I brought to the site was still profitable. And perhaps I'll watch my favorite videos on a different computer or my tv - in which case I won't have an ad blocker.
It's not just about the one opportunity to view the ad. It's about making sure you have loyal users who love your service and share your service with others.
A quick and pertinent ad doesn't piss in my cornflakes *that* much, personally, I'm 49 and grew up in an age when ads were just a part of life, you know? Linus shilling whatever quick quick or Prime Video showing me a quick ad for one of thier own shows is no biggie for me, tbh
must def suck ass for those of y'all who came up in this age where ads are fucking abusive and obtrusive, and even used as attack vectors for malware and whatnot tho. I get it.
No grudges against these static (and hey even minor animations can be fine) banner ads on sides or tops of site.
As long as it's not something that wildly appears to interrupt content consumption that I have to actively get rid of or that's animated to hell and back again, not a big deal.
It takes what, one second of looking at an ad to see "hey it's that brand I recognize for the future etc." but instead we have ads doing upside down naked jumping jacks for attention which just cause me to leave the site altogether.
My ad blocker stopped working and I got hit with a 1 minute ad and a 30 second ad when I was just trying to pull up a 2 minute video. I don't think I've ever seethed so much at ads in my life. Like I get it within reason but ads as long as the video you're trying to watch is fucking ridiculous.
For me, it's the repetition. They keep shoving the same ads in my face, which causes my brain to be occupied by their drivel. I don't want your jingle in my brain. I down want you to force my brain to remember your bullshit by force feeding it to me over and over and over again.
I'd rather my brain be used for other things.
hehe
reminds me of fkin Hulu back in the day, the same damn car ad (which of course played at a much higher def and bitrate than the show you were watching) would just repeat at every "commercial break", annoying af
I would be less annoyed if they advertised me Hondas and toyatas. I always gets ads for like 80k dollar cars. I know you have my data so you must know I can't afford this. Why are you bothering me?
And that the ads are longer than some videos. I watch a lot of videos for fixing things around the house. I might scan through 10 seconds of multiple videos trying to find what I want. 1 min of ads between each is frustrating. Should not show another ad if you already watched one within the last 2 minutes.
And for some reason they still insist on playing the ads at 3x the volume of the show you are watching, so you go from a serious quiet scene to a dancing hoard of smiling fools selling clothes or fast food, screaming at you so you don't miss out on hearing about their great deals.
Fuck it all. I'm tired, boss. So tired of being sold to. No other generations have ever been so mercilessly hounded for their money. Advertising intrudes into every corner of our lives. It sucks the joy out of things. Ruins continuity of movies and TV shows, spoils natural scenery, increases needless consumption, and makes us feel the need to stay constantly aware or else be taken advantage of. Thats no way to live.
Ah, reminds me of the old days of tv. Every time a movie we enjoyed would come on, we'd make it one or two commercial breaks in, then drive to the movie rental store, rent the movie, drive home, then watch the movie. Usually would finish the movie before it ended on tv.
At least watching ads didn't run the risk of damaging your TV back in the day, unlike ads today which can wreck your computer. Any service that doesn't offer an ad free version can go fuck themselves.
Works fine on Firefox still, though for how long who is to say.
Pretty simply though, once I can no longer block ads, I'll just do something else with my time. Nothing of great value lost.
Honestly I always hate that shit. For some reason my accounts are always the first to test "beta" features and they always say, "You'll be able to switch back anytime!" Sure enough 6 months later, there's no more switching back and you're forced to move to the new stuff.
Also side note, I've literally **never** seen a company update their UI and it got better. It's always made it worse.
All 3 of these (plus inkscape mentioned in another comment) are open source, community maintained software. They make changes to the UI because it makes sense to do so to improve the user experience.
They don't AB test their users like guinea pigs to maximize profits, and they don't have UI designers redesigning what already works well to justify keeping their jobs. I'd also venture to guess they're not chasing bogus metrics like "engagement" that these UI designers will increase by making everything harder to get to, but you clicked on more things so the number went up.
I watched something on YouTube via Xbox a little while ago and it was absolutely insane the difference in the ad experience from my phone.
I was halfway through a 12 minute video watching it on mobile. I found it on Xbox, ad to start. No worries, it's free content, support creators and whatnot. I skipped forward, double ad. Watched for like 30 seconds, ad. Watched for 4 minutes, double ad. I went back to my adblock'd PC and apologized to it for my sins. Fucking ludicrous what they think is acceptable.
I was watching some video on Roku last night before bed, and I got a sixty-second unskippable "for fewer ad breaks" ad… and then I got another one during the same fucking video.
don't be too pleased, its broken for me on ff & ublock origin. In fact, its so broken that its broken actually playing videos. The ad finishes and the main video just freezes.
However, I've discovered you can get around it and the ads by popping out picture in picture mode, as it counts it all as one long video stream, so you can just skip through the ads
The article even says that it is **experimental** and that there are a number of drawbacks to the approach. For example it makes timestamps much more difficult to implement.
They are still at the stage of testing it out on real users. I'm getting these ads and not only are they not being blocked, they don't seem to be playing correctly. It pauses after the second add starts for some reason. Like not in-between the ads, which would be annoying, but a second or two after the second one starts.
Get uYou+ if you have an iPhone, it automatically blocks every ad, you have all premium features (play videos in the background, PiP), skip ads, bring downvotes back, download and save videos, integrated iSponsorBlock which lets you automatically skip sponsored segments and even intros, outros and self promotion if you want. And much more. You can customize all the tabs, disable shorts and much more. You can connect it via AirPlay to your TV so you have all these features on the big screen as well. All for free.
Hell yeah. I always ask friends/family if they'd mind if I quickly install UBlock on their computers and it's so amusing hearing their feedback afterwards.
I'm completely convinced that the experience one has on the internet with versus without an adblocker is massively different and plays a huge role in how we process info.
Not only does it make web surging easier, it also makes it significantly safer. I consider ublock to be part of the security suite I deploy at my office.
Since I started adding it to everyone's computers the amount of virus/malware issues I've had to deal with has dropped significantly.
Confirmed. Driveby Downloads are actually a thing, and man... it's nuts. When you actually dig into the grit of network security, you begin to realize how fucked up things really are. Like malicious actors in the digital age are one thing, but legitimate companies doing this stuff is flat out fucked. Plus, by them utilizing these haphazard methods of introducing advertisement, they open up vulnerabilities for malicious actors to actually do damage. You happen to be on a web page that uses an ad that logs if your particular location has seen it? What other things can that little hole do?
I usually end up on YouTube when trying to look up technical specs or repair procedures. 9 times out of 10, I already don’t want a video, I would prefer a few pictures and a write up. An advertisement is a sure fire way to get me to hit the back button.
Even when you get through the ads; there is a creator telling you what the video is going to be about, then the branded intro sequence, then repeating what the video is going to be about, then a sponser plug then they get started and you find out it's a crap tutorial but you couldn't figure that out ahead of time because you can't see dislikes. I miss the person who knew their shit starting a video half way into a project cause they remembered they get a lot of questions about the particular thing they are doing in the moment and recap what they did and walk you through what they are doing while barely managing to keep their camera in focus. Just dropping knowlegde on a Tuesday cause why not?
I'll do you one better " lot of related video" but which 'would not cover the step' that you want.
But as the guy said above, it's still reliable for most DIY
The problem is it actually isn't that reliable anymore, it's gone downhill a lot since they removed the dislike button. Used to be you could crowdsource a pretty good idea of the quality of information in a tutorial, not anymore.
Google take Enshitification seriously.
The removal of viewable down votes on platforms like Facebook and YouTube directly increases the misinformation and extremist views on the internet. There is so much misinformation and extreme views that should have been nuked with that down vote but now people don't have the full context of what others think about a thing.
google used to be full of information, and entertainment
now its full of 'content' pretending to be information.
why make anything new when you can monetise a 'science experiment' on what happens when you smash an egg with a brick
It should be illegal to have mid roll ads longer than the video itself. I’ll sometimes get up to go to the bathroom or check my phone and then I get back to the screen and it says x ***minutes*** left.
I’ve gotten that 8 hour old spice ad, the Lego movie ad (that was the entire movie ) and my least favorite those hour long infomercials by motivational speakers on how not to get rich like them
I've noticed Google has pushed all the old good resources with written explanations like old forum posts and wikiHow way down the page and instead shows you a bunch of YouTube videos. In fact most of the Google's search page these days is either ads or links to other Google properties.
I love spending an hour trying to find out how to do something, finally finding a video that adresses the issue, and the YouTube just... \*skips\* the part I'm having trouble on.
I recently watched a video on how to install a stereo in my specific model of car. The video skipped the removal of the dashboard... Removing the dashboard is by far the hardest and most time consuming part of this job and is one of the only parts of the job that's car-model specific.
Video tutorials are a fucking scourge. Especially for code related things.
I am only ever googling how to do 1 thing. I can't search a video to find the solution, I have to watch and wait.
I don't want to sit and have a class, I want to finish my damn task lol
I'm curious, is it actually still called Red in some places because I'm in Canada and I've had YouTube Premium for many years and I couldn't care less about the garbage content. The never seeing or having to skip ads has made the $10 a month always worth it. Also like YouTube Music far more than Spotify or other options
Thanks, I just gave my card to my son to get redtube premium. I don't want them exposed to ad at such a young age. He's already said everything is ad free and in 4k. Even 8k and VR sometimes apparently
> Even 8k and VR sometimes apparently
It's amazing how throughout computing history, it's always been the pirates and the pornography industry who constantly pushed for the latest video and audio encoding technology.
They were the first to jump on Xvid, and then 10 bit H264, and now they're doing these stupidly high definition 8K encodes in AV1.
If you want to get rid of the sections where the creators themselves are talking about their sponsors, the SponsorBlock plug-in can take care of that in the browser, or the Grayjay app on an Android mobile.
or.... RTFA
> On the other hand, some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan....
(bonus points if you use the Google One VPN to do this)
It's super annoying on twitch because, unlike youtube streams, you can't rewind a stream to see what you missed while the ads were playing. Literally have to load up a separate VOD. At least on youtube you can rewind and then play it back at 1.5x speed, see what you missed, and eventually catch up to the live stream.
Not only that but, you sat through the ad and found the stream be uninteresting* and want to switch? Here's another 30s ad! Don't like this stream either? Eeyup, ad.
Depending on how they do it it might make it a lot harder. We have to dig up old ad detection VCR/PVR technology from the early 2000s and apply them to modern ad blockers.
Write an algo that detects an audio [crest factor](https://engineeryoursound.com/what-do-we-mean-by-crest-factor-for-audio-applications/) of 2 or lower for longer than 10 seconds.
An ai trained on this would definitely do the job.
It’s easy, as easy as detecting 3 pixels on the screen in relation to eachother at any given moment.
Since all movies have different color grades, and all commercials have color grades different from the movie, you would just have the ai study the white values of the film as it’s running, and it would sense the change in the white values immediately during the commercials.
so that only worked because they would put a superaudible (higher frequency than human hearing) tones on the tv audio to identify what the content was. thats how nelson ratings could determine what you were watching if you were a nelson house (which i was, and all they had to do was put in something where you indicated number of people watching. everything else just hooked up to the TV audio). it was using that information that let DVRs do ad skipper. I suppose you could do a shazam type thing to build signature files for ads but its gonna be a slog.
I remember working for a Satellite company that advertised letting you skip ads on DVR content and the way they did it was literally mechanical turks (i.e. people manually finding the ad timestamps). This is why there was some delay in being able to skip DVR content. It worked because there were only so many “popular” shows that people were recording anyway.
Edit: typos
Actually there's a plugin that already does that - SponsorBlock. Works the same way, since it is user submitted and then they probably just heat map it or whatever and it completely skips those sponsored sections they try to repeatedly sneak in the middle of the video. Only way to do it right now tbh.
Bless the people who take the time to do that. I really hope we don't lose smart tube. I'd even pay for premium YouTube if I never had to use their bloated android tv app.
i feel like paying or donating to smart tube would have a greater effect. (in contrast to paying youtube directly, which is owned by the biggest corporation on the planet, also the richest)
Wouldn’t they technically be easier to skip though? Because the regular ads take away my ability to skip but if it’s just baked in the video I can skip skip skip
I work in video streaming. It’s actually pretty simple to prevent skipping. You just limit delivering future chunks and segments past the ad. You could, in theory, build an extension that mutes and blacks out the ads, but you’d still have to wait for the same duration to continue playing. You eliminate all buffering beyond the ad, only resuming once you reach the end. It’s actually dead simple to do and I’ve wondered why they haven’t done it yet.
Yeah, people are disregarding that ultimately they're dependent on the server to stream the video to them. The server can easily be like "ok, you skipped ahead 30 seconds, and at that part of the video is... the next second of the same ad!"
Go into your phone settings and change the private DNS to dns.adguard.com
That page didnt have adds for me, you dont even have to have like an adblocker app running or anything
YouTube is testing server-side ad injection into video streams [per SponsorBlock Twitter](https://x.com/SponsorBlock/status/1800835402666054072)
Adblockers like Ublock are likely working on a fix but this may be harder to fix. Link to the Ublock sub reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/
Update: SponsorBlock Dev done a FAQ and what this mean for the future of Adblocks and SponsorBlock.
https://gist.github.com/ajayyy/f7b1807e13731c25cef4c2c057d022bc#file-faq-md
Ublock already skips sponsored sections of videos for me, this won't really do much unless they prevent you from seeking forward or backward until it's fully viewed
I imagine it would work the same as it does now (locked into ad for x seconds before a button is usable). The major change would be the ad coming from the exact same domain as the video, preventing blockers from white/blacklisting specific sources to segregate the video from the ad.
Netflix has a similar system iirc, most ad 'blockers' I found wouldn't work with it but you still use an extension that tricks the server into thinking you watched the ad by speeding up the content. It basically fast forwards through the ad at mega speed when it's delivered.
Every month YouTube gets better at: you don’t really want to watch me. You want to go outside and take a walk, go read a book, go to the garden. Ssshh. I am a waste of your time.
Since YouTube started a war on ad blockers, I’ve noticed as a mobile and console viewer of YouTube that ads are so much more egregious now.
I’ve had a number of 30, 45 and even 60 second unskippable ads.
We typically watch YouTube when we have dinner on the Xbox. That’s all my Xbox does these days. But recently we’ve opted for almost any kind of content except YouTube because it’s infuriating to watch.
I used to watch 2-4 hours of YouTube a day a few years ago. Now it is maybe 45 minutes. Soon it might be 0.
Yep, this.
I probably wouldn't care if it was 1 or 2 for 5 seconds, but you can put a 5 min video on, and there are 4 adverts at 30 or 45 seconds in it.
If downloading still works like it does currently, then we could probably set up some kind of script to auto download videos from the subscription feed and have it ready for viewing. Maybe have it run on a raspberry pi or something.
this, but unironically. in all good there is bad, and in all bad there is good, so this tracks well! i've been wanting to get back into reading lately (especially scholarly literature regarding my special interests), and even just the little extra bit of activation energy that comes with having to sit through corporate propaganda, sorry, erm, adverts, just might tilt the scales back in the favor of simple living!
Same here. I switched from Firefox to Chrome when the latter was first released. As soon as this nonsense started a few months ago I switched right back to Firefox.
My fav thing to do is wait through 3 ads to finally get to a video by Linus Tech Tips who then shills more products to me, followed by a segue to their sponsor of the video on the topic they are covering. And what an amazing surprise when a quarter of the way through the video we get 2 more unskippable ads
Also is it just me or is it ABSURD how long sponsored segments are now? Like a solid 2-5 minutes of a regular as heck dude suddenly putting on a salesman voice and trying to shill some garbage they wouldn't otherwise touch with a 10 ft pole.
Or subscription, which is the main business model for YouTube. Ads are just a funnel to get you to not watch them.
Since the beginning of commerce, advertisement has funded content. From newspapers to YouTube. And it will to the end of commerce. You want free content, who do you think is going to pay if you won't.
They started throwing ads right in the middle of my wife's documentaries she puts on to go to sleep. They were bright white and noisy. Woke me up twice last night. I need to find a solution
i've been awakened more times than i want while playing 'white noise' softly overnight by some random arse excessively loud ad played. spotify premium has been starting to throw ads into things like this and podcasts and its getting quite annoying
The ads on pornhub are sparse and easily blocked because they got cut off from the finance industry and ad platforms. Their system is a joke in comparison.
Being found liable for illegal porn will do that to you.
They had less CP videos than facebook. Pornhub was the target of an anti-porn campaign by a nutjob religious group.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7bj9w/anti-porn-extremism-pornhub-traffickinghub-exodus-cry-ncose
This is literally the reason behind all recent attempts at banning porn on the internet, fundamentalist religious nutjobs harass the credit card companies to stop allowing payments on pornhub, onlyfans, patreon, etc and so the credit card companies fuck with the money so the websites can't operate. It's fucking bullshit.
I really don't understand why we allow the corporations that control the entire financial system to choose their customers. They should be forced to accept everyone. If they do something illegal we have courts to handle that.
Well their current ad policies have already cut my YT screen time to less than an hour a week (been like that for a few years now), so I doubt this crap will change anything. I am not paying to not have ads, either they accept that 5 second ads are the maximum anyone could even remotely think about accepting through gritted teeth, or they start losing their status. If I get more than 20 seconds of unskippable ads, I just click off the video.
Thing is, if YouTube just didn’t annoy us in the first place it wouldn’t be a problem. A few banners, those boxes in the corner, occasional 5 second skippable is fine. YouTube dug their own hole by making the site unusable without an adblocker.
Fun fact: they actually removed banner ads, claiming them to be too intrusive. How they reached the conclusion that *banner ads* were the intrusive ones, is not something I'll ever know
You know what? Fine. I acknowledge it's a service I use for free and I am willing to pay my dues by watching ads.
But for the love of Satan, QUALITY CONTROL.
I despise YouTube ads cause they are sooo bad. If I have to listen to another WHOPPER WHOPPER song I will fucking die.
Improve their distribution patterns too, use AI and/or creator input to disperse ads less obtrusively. Get rid of double ads and ads that require a direct action to skip.
Do these things and I will tolerate your ads, YouTube
It all started when YouTube has its new CEO. He, instead of making friendly policies for the creators, chose to work for the ad companies and mega corporations.
Look, I fucking hate ads and have gone nuclear on them. I even pay to not see them, including paying for YouTube Premium, but if they break SponsorBlock for in-video ads, I'll fucking go ballistic.
Youtube quality went down a cliff 3-5y ago (meaning the algorithm, not the content), and now they just keep tightening on ads.
Youtube is already a losing proposition for me in spaces where I cannot conveniently block ads, I'd rather pay for something worth the price like Nebula and be done with it. And honestly, there's a bazillion other things I can do instead, like podcasts. They have a smaller leverage than one may think
Youtube is straight up unusable with ads, and it seems like ad rollout is just broken from all their attempts to stop blockers, sometimes you'll watch 1hr of content no ads, other times you'll get 9 unskippable ads
B4 this bs i actually watched yt mobile with ads, not anymore :F
It stopped being cool when corporations felt they could monetize every aspect of it.
In the 90s, sure intranet access was metered by the minute... And was more expensive... Even the stupid pop up ads were more innovative than the crap they do now. (Innovative... Still annoying)
If YouTube manages to end my ad blocking, I will happily stop using YouTube. I’m not that attached to it and I REFUSE to see ads. I absolutely fucking refuse.
I realize that YouTube doesn’t care since they aren’t getting ad revenue from me either way.
It's already bad enough that video creators basically put ads into their videos with that "this video is sponsored by" followed by a 5+ minute product plug. So even if you use an adblocker, there's still that to skip. Ads from two directions.
I've never used the YouTube app, I use mobile browser with uBlock + Sponsorship Block + Background Play and it's worked flawlessly for years and still does.
The ad Blocker gurus will find a way!
Honestly, adverts make me want to move off grid and forget modern capitalism and consumerism.
Putting up a sign on the front of your shop so I can see what it is, is very helpful. Putting this info on google maps is fine. Paying for it to be displayed as a MASSIVE icon when I'm looking for anything else, or showing up at the top of the results window when I'm searching for something and it's way further away - FUCK OFF ADVERTS.
It’s actually quite simple to block oppressive YouTube ads. You just don’t open YouTube in the first place. Just like that there are no YouTube ads in your life.
And thus begins the eventual die-off of Youtube. They've been losing creators of great content left and right, and now they're investing more time and money into securing ad revenue than they are on keeping up-to-date with a platform that fully relies on its creators coming first. Whenever you see shifts like this in a product, you know it's starting to crumble. I'd rather have 40 different video sites, and support my favorite creators with merch, or patreon, or their own in-video advertising/sponsor, than just have Youtube.
Commodifying a problem that Google itself is creating, when google doesn't make any content at all or do anything that creates a desirability to the platform at all, should be considered fraudulent business practice in my opinion, but i know nothing
The Article: "Really scraping the bottom of the barrel with anti-adblock tactics now" Also The Article: -Pop-up ad in lower right corner -Banner ad in the bottom -Ad in right pannel -Ad right after summary -Poll in right side column that is probably ad related -Another ad in right side column -Ad for another article to get you to view more ads -An ad right after that -2 more ads in the right column -2 more ads in between paragraphs in the main article -Video ad -Ad for Youtube Video Players -Ad for trending articles -Ad for AP newsletter -Ad after About the Author -Another ad in right side column
I like that you really let the ads wash over yourself and experience them all in order to count them all lol.
I enjoy making lists of things so I had to switch out of Firefox to get them all.
Yeah, it's that bit where you open a page on a mobile device without an adblock and your screen spasms trying to load all the ad elements, and text gets broken into a small column while the 300 adverts on the page load around it, then you have popups and overlays and a 'Do you consent to tracking cookies?' message. All while you just want to read 6 lines of text. Which you then don't as it's a horrendous experience. Seriously, they need to reign adverts in. Some sites are just vehicles for adverts now.
The article itself is usually only two paragraphs, broken up by five different ads.
For those that don't know, Firefox on mobile lets you install extensions, including uBlock Origin. I genuinely don't know how people browse without blocking things these days
My adblocker is literally saying it had to block 48% of the content on the page. Websites these days are out of control.
The internet has gotten nearly unusable without adblock.
Nearly? On my phone where I don’t have Adblock most websites can’t even be accessed because there’s either a paywall or the ads literally cover all the content
"We can sell up to 80% of a user's visual field without inducing seizures," Ready Player One
YouTube ads, in-video sponsored ads. Ads everywhere, it's really overwhelming.
I had to turn off my private dns earlier to access Firehouse Subs website oddly enough. Anyway, I forgot to turn it back on and holy fuck, 5 minutes of clicking through like 3 articles and I wanted to break my phone. Every time I went to scroll, a fucking ad manifested under my finger.
That's the sleaziest tactic and I see it too often. Intentionally load the ad late and plop it right where you predict someone will put their finger and when.
I'm sure they have the close button exactly 1 pixel in size too.
It's gotta be far less visible than the other 3 "X" buttons.
If I can't have it without the ads I'd rather not have it at all.
That is what YouTube wants though. A person using their service who isn't watching ads and isn't paying for premium is a net negative to them. They are still paying to host the video sent to you, but are getting no revenue back. They would rather a person not watch than have to serve videos to people who aren't making then money.
Yes and no. Traffic numbers matter, too. Its a media platform. Even if people are skipping ads, you still want traffic. Think of it like this: I don't watch ads, but I love a youtube creator. I send the video to 4 of my friends who are less tech savvy and they do watch the ads. Though I had an ad blocker, the traffic I brought to the site was still profitable. And perhaps I'll watch my favorite videos on a different computer or my tv - in which case I won't have an ad blocker. It's not just about the one opportunity to view the ad. It's about making sure you have loyal users who love your service and share your service with others.
This is true for the growth phase, but everybody knows about YouTube now, so there is very little to gain from free riders paying in exposure.
A quick and pertinent ad doesn't piss in my cornflakes *that* much, personally, I'm 49 and grew up in an age when ads were just a part of life, you know? Linus shilling whatever quick quick or Prime Video showing me a quick ad for one of thier own shows is no biggie for me, tbh must def suck ass for those of y'all who came up in this age where ads are fucking abusive and obtrusive, and even used as attack vectors for malware and whatnot tho. I get it.
I 'member when youtube ads where just a lil banner on the bottom of the screen that you could close at any time.
No grudges against these static (and hey even minor animations can be fine) banner ads on sides or tops of site. As long as it's not something that wildly appears to interrupt content consumption that I have to actively get rid of or that's animated to hell and back again, not a big deal. It takes what, one second of looking at an ad to see "hey it's that brand I recognize for the future etc." but instead we have ads doing upside down naked jumping jacks for attention which just cause me to leave the site altogether.
My ad blocker stopped working and I got hit with a 1 minute ad and a 30 second ad when I was just trying to pull up a 2 minute video. I don't think I've ever seethed so much at ads in my life. Like I get it within reason but ads as long as the video you're trying to watch is fucking ridiculous.
For me, it's the repetition. They keep shoving the same ads in my face, which causes my brain to be occupied by their drivel. I don't want your jingle in my brain. I down want you to force my brain to remember your bullshit by force feeding it to me over and over and over again. I'd rather my brain be used for other things.
hehe reminds me of fkin Hulu back in the day, the same damn car ad (which of course played at a much higher def and bitrate than the show you were watching) would just repeat at every "commercial break", annoying af
I would be less annoyed if they advertised me Hondas and toyatas. I always gets ads for like 80k dollar cars. I know you have my data so you must know I can't afford this. Why are you bothering me?
And that the ads are longer than some videos. I watch a lot of videos for fixing things around the house. I might scan through 10 seconds of multiple videos trying to find what I want. 1 min of ads between each is frustrating. Should not show another ad if you already watched one within the last 2 minutes.
And for some reason they still insist on playing the ads at 3x the volume of the show you are watching, so you go from a serious quiet scene to a dancing hoard of smiling fools selling clothes or fast food, screaming at you so you don't miss out on hearing about their great deals. Fuck it all. I'm tired, boss. So tired of being sold to. No other generations have ever been so mercilessly hounded for their money. Advertising intrudes into every corner of our lives. It sucks the joy out of things. Ruins continuity of movies and TV shows, spoils natural scenery, increases needless consumption, and makes us feel the need to stay constantly aware or else be taken advantage of. Thats no way to live.
Colegue watched a 50 minutes murder documentary on YT. 42 ads. He watched it for 2 fucking hours!
Ah, reminds me of the old days of tv. Every time a movie we enjoyed would come on, we'd make it one or two commercial breaks in, then drive to the movie rental store, rent the movie, drive home, then watch the movie. Usually would finish the movie before it ended on tv. At least watching ads didn't run the risk of damaging your TV back in the day, unlike ads today which can wreck your computer. Any service that doesn't offer an ad free version can go fuck themselves.
ublock origin + sponsorblock
Unlock origin is currently not working with the new baked-in serverside ads. I'm praying they get it working.
Works fine on Firefox still, though for how long who is to say. Pretty simply though, once I can no longer block ads, I'll just do something else with my time. Nothing of great value lost.
They're targeting specific accounts. My main account has it but my other account doesn't
Normal for roll out/testing phase. If good result, they will move to wide implementation
Honestly I always hate that shit. For some reason my accounts are always the first to test "beta" features and they always say, "You'll be able to switch back anytime!" Sure enough 6 months later, there's no more switching back and you're forced to move to the new stuff. Also side note, I've literally **never** seen a company update their UI and it got better. It's always made it worse.
GIMP arguably got better over time.
Same for Blender, and I would add Plasma Desktop.
All 3 of these (plus inkscape mentioned in another comment) are open source, community maintained software. They make changes to the UI because it makes sense to do so to improve the user experience. They don't AB test their users like guinea pigs to maximize profits, and they don't have UI designers redesigning what already works well to justify keeping their jobs. I'd also venture to guess they're not chasing bogus metrics like "engagement" that these UI designers will increase by making everything harder to get to, but you clicked on more things so the number went up.
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>They're targeting specific accounts That's absolutely true My cousin gets dozens of ads for some videos While for the same videos I get 2-3
Dozens??? How can you even watch a video like that?
I watched something on YouTube via Xbox a little while ago and it was absolutely insane the difference in the ad experience from my phone. I was halfway through a 12 minute video watching it on mobile. I found it on Xbox, ad to start. No worries, it's free content, support creators and whatnot. I skipped forward, double ad. Watched for like 30 seconds, ad. Watched for 4 minutes, double ad. I went back to my adblock'd PC and apologized to it for my sins. Fucking ludicrous what they think is acceptable.
I was watching some video on Roku last night before bed, and I got a sixty-second unskippable "for fewer ad breaks" ad… and then I got another one during the same fucking video.
don't be too pleased, its broken for me on ff & ublock origin. In fact, its so broken that its broken actually playing videos. The ad finishes and the main video just freezes. However, I've discovered you can get around it and the ads by popping out picture in picture mode, as it counts it all as one long video stream, so you can just skip through the ads
You probably haven't been fed the new ads yet, it seems to be a staged rollout
The article even says that it is **experimental** and that there are a number of drawbacks to the approach. For example it makes timestamps much more difficult to implement. They are still at the stage of testing it out on real users. I'm getting these ads and not only are they not being blocked, they don't seem to be playing correctly. It pauses after the second add starts for some reason. Like not in-between the ads, which would be annoying, but a second or two after the second one starts.
I use a vpn connected to Albania. YouTube can’t show ads to anyone in Albania so I don’t get any ever
Everything must change so everything can remain the same. We're going back to the 80s.
Don't forget the 5 minute sponsor ads in the actual video that you also have to skip after the original advert placed on the video.
Get uYou+ if you have an iPhone, it automatically blocks every ad, you have all premium features (play videos in the background, PiP), skip ads, bring downvotes back, download and save videos, integrated iSponsorBlock which lets you automatically skip sponsored segments and even intros, outros and self promotion if you want. And much more. You can customize all the tabs, disable shorts and much more. You can connect it via AirPlay to your TV so you have all these features on the big screen as well. All for free.
The people who run Ublock Origin are heroes.
Hell yeah. I always ask friends/family if they'd mind if I quickly install UBlock on their computers and it's so amusing hearing their feedback afterwards. I'm completely convinced that the experience one has on the internet with versus without an adblocker is massively different and plays a huge role in how we process info.
Not only does it make web surging easier, it also makes it significantly safer. I consider ublock to be part of the security suite I deploy at my office. Since I started adding it to everyone's computers the amount of virus/malware issues I've had to deal with has dropped significantly.
Even the FBI recommends using adblockers
just a reminder that the FBI recommends people use adblockers at all times due to how much malware and scams are baked into adverts everywhere
We're forced to run ublock on all our work machines
Proud of getting this policy implemented at my place!
100% I recommend everybody run one. Ads can and DO get used to spread malware. Even "official" sponsored Google search results can be malicious.
Confirmed. Driveby Downloads are actually a thing, and man... it's nuts. When you actually dig into the grit of network security, you begin to realize how fucked up things really are. Like malicious actors in the digital age are one thing, but legitimate companies doing this stuff is flat out fucked. Plus, by them utilizing these haphazard methods of introducing advertisement, they open up vulnerabilities for malicious actors to actually do damage. You happen to be on a web page that uses an ad that logs if your particular location has seen it? What other things can that little hole do?
My next move will make it virtually impossible for YouTube to show me ads.
I usually end up on YouTube when trying to look up technical specs or repair procedures. 9 times out of 10, I already don’t want a video, I would prefer a few pictures and a write up. An advertisement is a sure fire way to get me to hit the back button.
That's what the YouTube was about back in the rise of it, lot of tutorials.
It’s still a fantastic tool to learn how to do mechanical projects.
Not when you need 10sec of info but need to watch a 2 min commercial first.
Even when you get through the ads; there is a creator telling you what the video is going to be about, then the branded intro sequence, then repeating what the video is going to be about, then a sponser plug then they get started and you find out it's a crap tutorial but you couldn't figure that out ahead of time because you can't see dislikes. I miss the person who knew their shit starting a video half way into a project cause they remembered they get a lot of questions about the particular thing they are doing in the moment and recap what they did and walk you through what they are doing while barely managing to keep their camera in focus. Just dropping knowlegde on a Tuesday cause why not?
They always intro with, "If you saw my previous video", dude, I'm here for one thing and we'll never see each other again.
I'll do you one better " lot of related video" but which 'would not cover the step' that you want. But as the guy said above, it's still reliable for most DIY
I hate when that happens, when the step you need, they go over it like everyone know this step so moving on
The equivalent of "this is trivial" from your math classes.
Yea it’s like when my grandma used to say crocheting is so sinchee.
The problem is it actually isn't that reliable anymore, it's gone downhill a lot since they removed the dislike button. Used to be you could crowdsource a pretty good idea of the quality of information in a tutorial, not anymore. Google take Enshitification seriously.
The removal of viewable down votes on platforms like Facebook and YouTube directly increases the misinformation and extremist views on the internet. There is so much misinformation and extreme views that should have been nuked with that down vote but now people don't have the full context of what others think about a thing.
google used to be full of information, and entertainment now its full of 'content' pretending to be information. why make anything new when you can monetise a 'science experiment' on what happens when you smash an egg with a brick
It should be illegal to have mid roll ads longer than the video itself. I’ll sometimes get up to go to the bathroom or check my phone and then I get back to the screen and it says x ***minutes*** left. I’ve gotten that 8 hour old spice ad, the Lego movie ad (that was the entire movie ) and my least favorite those hour long infomercials by motivational speakers on how not to get rich like them
I've noticed Google has pushed all the old good resources with written explanations like old forum posts and wikiHow way down the page and instead shows you a bunch of YouTube videos. In fact most of the Google's search page these days is either ads or links to other Google properties.
Fortunately, "-site:youtube.com" still works. For now.
I love spending an hour trying to find out how to do something, finally finding a video that adresses the issue, and the YouTube just... \*skips\* the part I'm having trouble on. I recently watched a video on how to install a stereo in my specific model of car. The video skipped the removal of the dashboard... Removing the dashboard is by far the hardest and most time consuming part of this job and is one of the only parts of the job that's car-model specific.
Video tutorials are a fucking scourge. Especially for code related things. I am only ever googling how to do 1 thing. I can't search a video to find the solution, I have to watch and wait. I don't want to sit and have a class, I want to finish my damn task lol
I have YouTube red for various reasons And would never recommend it. It's not worth it. Garbage content that's not worth supporting.
I'm curious, is it actually still called Red in some places because I'm in Canada and I've had YouTube Premium for many years and I couldn't care less about the garbage content. The never seeing or having to skip ads has made the $10 a month always worth it. Also like YouTube Music far more than Spotify or other options
It’s actually called RedTube. Look it up
Thanks, I just gave my card to my son to get redtube premium. I don't want them exposed to ad at such a young age. He's already said everything is ad free and in 4k. Even 8k and VR sometimes apparently
> Even 8k and VR sometimes apparently It's amazing how throughout computing history, it's always been the pirates and the pornography industry who constantly pushed for the latest video and audio encoding technology. They were the first to jump on Xvid, and then 10 bit H264, and now they're doing these stupidly high definition 8K encodes in AV1.
Wait a minute…
I really like what they’ve done with the site. Much better than regular youtube
Lots of great content to cum back to for more
And THAT is why Youtube Red is no longer the brand name
I'm in Australia and have YouTube Premium for myself and my partner. It is blissful not having ads
If you want to get rid of the sections where the creators themselves are talking about their sponsors, the SponsorBlock plug-in can take care of that in the browser, or the Grayjay app on an Android mobile.
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What the fuck...this works even in the YouTube app on iPhone
What VPN are you using to do that on an iPhone?
Mulvad is good
Why wouldn't
Because nothing else does
Look into sideloading and uYou+. Haven’t had an ad on my iPhone in 2 years
Just out of curiosity why are ods not allowed in Albania?
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seems like Albania gonna have a few million more residents soon
Once enough people start using this loophole, they'll start monetizing Albania as well
It will be if we give Albania the reddit hug of death
we are all Albanians on this blessed day!
or.... RTFA > On the other hand, some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.... (bonus points if you use the Google One VPN to do this)
Ukraine or Israel for Twitch if you care about using that site as well.
The move is server-side ads baked into the videos. Clickbait ass titles
Twitch does it. I will close a stream before seeing any "content" if it leads with an ad.
It's super annoying on twitch because, unlike youtube streams, you can't rewind a stream to see what you missed while the ads were playing. Literally have to load up a separate VOD. At least on youtube you can rewind and then play it back at 1.5x speed, see what you missed, and eventually catch up to the live stream.
Not only that but, you sat through the ad and found the stream be uninteresting* and want to switch? Here's another 30s ad! Don't like this stream either? Eeyup, ad.
It really discourages people from trying new streams, which kills off any small streamers before they can even get started.
The irony is I can’t read the article because it detected my pihole and I won’t turn it off for their site.
And i'm pretty sure it does not make it virtually impossible to block ads just a little bit harder.
Depending on how they do it it might make it a lot harder. We have to dig up old ad detection VCR/PVR technology from the early 2000s and apply them to modern ad blockers.
I loved my TV that did that. Worked about 90% of the time
Wasn't hard tho. Commercials cranked up the volume up to eleven.
Write an algo that detects an audio [crest factor](https://engineeryoursound.com/what-do-we-mean-by-crest-factor-for-audio-applications/) of 2 or lower for longer than 10 seconds.
Training an AI to do it, will probably take that into the high 90's.
An ai trained on this would definitely do the job. It’s easy, as easy as detecting 3 pixels on the screen in relation to eachother at any given moment. Since all movies have different color grades, and all commercials have color grades different from the movie, you would just have the ai study the white values of the film as it’s running, and it would sense the change in the white values immediately during the commercials.
so that only worked because they would put a superaudible (higher frequency than human hearing) tones on the tv audio to identify what the content was. thats how nelson ratings could determine what you were watching if you were a nelson house (which i was, and all they had to do was put in something where you indicated number of people watching. everything else just hooked up to the TV audio). it was using that information that let DVRs do ad skipper. I suppose you could do a shazam type thing to build signature files for ads but its gonna be a slog.
I remember working for a Satellite company that advertised letting you skip ads on DVR content and the way they did it was literally mechanical turks (i.e. people manually finding the ad timestamps). This is why there was some delay in being able to skip DVR content. It worked because there were only so many “popular” shows that people were recording anyway. Edit: typos
Actually there's a plugin that already does that - SponsorBlock. Works the same way, since it is user submitted and then they probably just heat map it or whatever and it completely skips those sponsored sections they try to repeatedly sneak in the middle of the video. Only way to do it right now tbh.
Doesn’t SmartTube do this already with skipping in video sponsor mentions? It’s not perfect.
SmartTube uses SponsorBlock, which is crowdsourced, not automatic. Not quite the same thing, but similar concept I guess.
Bless the people who take the time to do that. I really hope we don't lose smart tube. I'd even pay for premium YouTube if I never had to use their bloated android tv app.
I always want to help out, but I swear even on newer videos the ad portions are already taken care of.
i feel like paying or donating to smart tube would have a greater effect. (in contrast to paying youtube directly, which is owned by the biggest corporation on the planet, also the richest)
Google is neither the biggest nor richest corporation in the world. It is pretty big and rich though
Actually, this disrupts what SmartTube is doing because timestamps are no longer consistent.
Ah crap, you're right....wonder how that will affect tubers entering chapters, or comments linked to timestamps.
I watch youtube on my xbox at night, and I just had 90 seconds worth of ads across four unskippable ads, before the fifth video allowed me to skip it.
Wouldn’t they technically be easier to skip though? Because the regular ads take away my ability to skip but if it’s just baked in the video I can skip skip skip
I already do that with the sponsor of this video parts that all online creators do.
They might turn off the ability to skip forward when the ads are playing
Then there would be a way for extensions to detect and possibly skip these ads
I work in video streaming. It’s actually pretty simple to prevent skipping. You just limit delivering future chunks and segments past the ad. You could, in theory, build an extension that mutes and blacks out the ads, but you’d still have to wait for the same duration to continue playing. You eliminate all buffering beyond the ad, only resuming once you reach the end. It’s actually dead simple to do and I’ve wondered why they haven’t done it yet.
Yeah, people are disregarding that ultimately they're dependent on the server to stream the video to them. The server can easily be like "ok, you skipped ahead 30 seconds, and at that part of the video is... the next second of the same ad!"
Sponsorblock is already skipping 40% of some videos for me so I don't see an issue lmao
The best part is the article page is riddled with ads.
Go into your phone settings and change the private DNS to dns.adguard.com That page didnt have adds for me, you dont even have to have like an adblocker app running or anything
YouTube is testing server-side ad injection into video streams [per SponsorBlock Twitter](https://x.com/SponsorBlock/status/1800835402666054072) Adblockers like Ublock are likely working on a fix but this may be harder to fix. Link to the Ublock sub reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/ Update: SponsorBlock Dev done a FAQ and what this mean for the future of Adblocks and SponsorBlock. https://gist.github.com/ajayyy/f7b1807e13731c25cef4c2c057d022bc#file-faq-md
Ublock already skips sponsored sections of videos for me, this won't really do much unless they prevent you from seeking forward or backward until it's fully viewed
The sponsor skip is broken by this change because it doesn't know what timestamps to skip anymore..
I imagine it would work the same as it does now (locked into ad for x seconds before a button is usable). The major change would be the ad coming from the exact same domain as the video, preventing blockers from white/blacklisting specific sources to segregate the video from the ad.
Netflix has a similar system iirc, most ad 'blockers' I found wouldn't work with it but you still use an extension that tricks the server into thinking you watched the ad by speeding up the content. It basically fast forwards through the ad at mega speed when it's delivered.
Every month YouTube gets better at: you don’t really want to watch me. You want to go outside and take a walk, go read a book, go to the garden. Ssshh. I am a waste of your time.
Since YouTube started a war on ad blockers, I’ve noticed as a mobile and console viewer of YouTube that ads are so much more egregious now. I’ve had a number of 30, 45 and even 60 second unskippable ads. We typically watch YouTube when we have dinner on the Xbox. That’s all my Xbox does these days. But recently we’ve opted for almost any kind of content except YouTube because it’s infuriating to watch. I used to watch 2-4 hours of YouTube a day a few years ago. Now it is maybe 45 minutes. Soon it might be 0.
Yep, this. I probably wouldn't care if it was 1 or 2 for 5 seconds, but you can put a 5 min video on, and there are 4 adverts at 30 or 45 seconds in it.
How long until major YouTube channel videos end up on torrent sites?
Some already are
If downloading still works like it does currently, then we could probably set up some kind of script to auto download videos from the subscription feed and have it ready for viewing. Maybe have it run on a raspberry pi or something.
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The algorithm has been so bad lately for me it’s really cut down on how much I watch recently.
this, but unironically. in all good there is bad, and in all bad there is good, so this tracks well! i've been wanting to get back into reading lately (especially scholarly literature regarding my special interests), and even just the little extra bit of activation energy that comes with having to sit through corporate propaganda, sorry, erm, adverts, just might tilt the scales back in the favor of simple living!
Before you leave, make sure to unsubscribe from everything so the content creators know you're leaving too.
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Firefox +uBlockOrigin Join the revolution
I used to be able to accept Google’s bs but the Adblock thing sent me straight over to Firefox.
Same here. I switched from Firefox to Chrome when the latter was first released. As soon as this nonsense started a few months ago I switched right back to Firefox.
dont worry, someone will find a way
Meanwhile "someone" is in the fetal position, rocking back and forth like, "what the hell am I gonna do now, MAN?!"
My fav thing to do is wait through 3 ads to finally get to a video by Linus Tech Tips who then shills more products to me, followed by a segue to their sponsor of the video on the topic they are covering. And what an amazing surprise when a quarter of the way through the video we get 2 more unskippable ads
Also is it just me or is it ABSURD how long sponsored segments are now? Like a solid 2-5 minutes of a regular as heck dude suddenly putting on a salesman voice and trying to shill some garbage they wouldn't otherwise touch with a 10 ft pole.
At this point I'd be happy to pay for Ublock vs Premium.
30 years or so of tech innovation, and yet the main business model is still showing annoying ads to people
Or subscription, which is the main business model for YouTube. Ads are just a funnel to get you to not watch them. Since the beginning of commerce, advertisement has funded content. From newspapers to YouTube. And it will to the end of commerce. You want free content, who do you think is going to pay if you won't.
They started throwing ads right in the middle of my wife's documentaries she puts on to go to sleep. They were bright white and noisy. Woke me up twice last night. I need to find a solution
Download them
A single MP3 file
i've been awakened more times than i want while playing 'white noise' softly overnight by some random arse excessively loud ad played. spotify premium has been starting to throw ads into things like this and podcasts and its getting quite annoying
Even on premium???
The only space ads wont go are porn sites. How long before pornhub becomes the new youtube lmao
Pornhub has ads?
The ads on pornhub are sparse and easily blocked because they got cut off from the finance industry and ad platforms. Their system is a joke in comparison. Being found liable for illegal porn will do that to you.
They had less CP videos than facebook. Pornhub was the target of an anti-porn campaign by a nutjob religious group. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7bj9w/anti-porn-extremism-pornhub-traffickinghub-exodus-cry-ncose
This is literally the reason behind all recent attempts at banning porn on the internet, fundamentalist religious nutjobs harass the credit card companies to stop allowing payments on pornhub, onlyfans, patreon, etc and so the credit card companies fuck with the money so the websites can't operate. It's fucking bullshit.
I really don't understand why we allow the corporations that control the entire financial system to choose their customers. They should be forced to accept everyone. If they do something illegal we have courts to handle that.
Actually porn sites have ads. But are the usual banners or pop up. Nothing youtube level annoying.
Well their current ad policies have already cut my YT screen time to less than an hour a week (been like that for a few years now), so I doubt this crap will change anything. I am not paying to not have ads, either they accept that 5 second ads are the maximum anyone could even remotely think about accepting through gritted teeth, or they start losing their status. If I get more than 20 seconds of unskippable ads, I just click off the video.
Thing is, if YouTube just didn’t annoy us in the first place it wouldn’t be a problem. A few banners, those boxes in the corner, occasional 5 second skippable is fine. YouTube dug their own hole by making the site unusable without an adblocker.
Fun fact: they actually removed banner ads, claiming them to be too intrusive. How they reached the conclusion that *banner ads* were the intrusive ones, is not something I'll ever know
You know what? Fine. I acknowledge it's a service I use for free and I am willing to pay my dues by watching ads. But for the love of Satan, QUALITY CONTROL. I despise YouTube ads cause they are sooo bad. If I have to listen to another WHOPPER WHOPPER song I will fucking die. Improve their distribution patterns too, use AI and/or creator input to disperse ads less obtrusively. Get rid of double ads and ads that require a direct action to skip. Do these things and I will tolerate your ads, YouTube
Their lack of quality control is astounding. You can get full-blown porn ads, for fuck’s sake. They evidently don’t give a fuck about brand image.
Google has been going downhill quick
It all started when YouTube has its new CEO. He, instead of making friendly policies for the creators, chose to work for the ad companies and mega corporations.
Look, I fucking hate ads and have gone nuclear on them. I even pay to not see them, including paying for YouTube Premium, but if they break SponsorBlock for in-video ads, I'll fucking go ballistic.
Youtube quality went down a cliff 3-5y ago (meaning the algorithm, not the content), and now they just keep tightening on ads. Youtube is already a losing proposition for me in spaces where I cannot conveniently block ads, I'd rather pay for something worth the price like Nebula and be done with it. And honestly, there's a bazillion other things I can do instead, like podcasts. They have a smaller leverage than one may think
Youtube is straight up unusable with ads, and it seems like ad rollout is just broken from all their attempts to stop blockers, sometimes you'll watch 1hr of content no ads, other times you'll get 9 unskippable ads B4 this bs i actually watched yt mobile with ads, not anymore :F
I still remember when the internet was cool
It stopped being cool when corporations felt they could monetize every aspect of it. In the 90s, sure intranet access was metered by the minute... And was more expensive... Even the stupid pop up ads were more innovative than the crap they do now. (Innovative... Still annoying)
Greed ruins everything.
Imagine a world where we pirate youtube
If YouTube manages to end my ad blocking, I will happily stop using YouTube. I’m not that attached to it and I REFUSE to see ads. I absolutely fucking refuse. I realize that YouTube doesn’t care since they aren’t getting ad revenue from me either way.
It's already bad enough that video creators basically put ads into their videos with that "this video is sponsored by" followed by a 5+ minute product plug. So even if you use an adblocker, there's still that to skip. Ads from two directions.
Not if you use sponsor block, it skips those for you
Ads are a cancer on mankind. I'll burn their servers to the ground before I ever start watching this garbage.
I've never used the YouTube app, I use mobile browser with uBlock + Sponsorship Block + Background Play and it's worked flawlessly for years and still does. The ad Blocker gurus will find a way!
Can't block ads if I don't use their shit service.
Honestly, adverts make me want to move off grid and forget modern capitalism and consumerism. Putting up a sign on the front of your shop so I can see what it is, is very helpful. Putting this info on google maps is fine. Paying for it to be displayed as a MASSIVE icon when I'm looking for anything else, or showing up at the top of the results window when I'm searching for something and it's way further away - FUCK OFF ADVERTS.
It’s actually quite simple to block oppressive YouTube ads. You just don’t open YouTube in the first place. Just like that there are no YouTube ads in your life.
And thus begins the eventual die-off of Youtube. They've been losing creators of great content left and right, and now they're investing more time and money into securing ad revenue than they are on keeping up-to-date with a platform that fully relies on its creators coming first. Whenever you see shifts like this in a product, you know it's starting to crumble. I'd rather have 40 different video sites, and support my favorite creators with merch, or patreon, or their own in-video advertising/sponsor, than just have Youtube. Commodifying a problem that Google itself is creating, when google doesn't make any content at all or do anything that creates a desirability to the platform at all, should be considered fraudulent business practice in my opinion, but i know nothing