I was happy with an ad at the side of the video. Then they started popping up over my video, then they started appearing before my video, then they started appearing throughout my video. Companies shot themselves in the foot with online advertising, banner ads and such weren’t much of a problem, but once ads start disrupting the content we visit a site for, then we look to block them ads. More people blocking ads is less revenue, so they make the ads more aggressive… and the cycle continues.

And on a side note, Linus can fuck off.

By that logic using a VCR to record television and fast-forwarding adverts is piracy.

TBH I’m just so fucking tired of ads overstepping, back in the day there’s be a little banner on the side of a page advertising a truck or whatever, I’m sick of seeing like, enormous length ads.

One day I had a 3 hour minecraft let’s play uploaded as an ad, you think I should have to watch all of that youtube?

And the frequency is getting crazy.

You know what, I actually agree with YouTube’s argument. Ad blocking is piracy. In fact, no, it’s worse than piracy. If I pirate a movie, Disney makes no money, but it costs them nothing at all. If I watch YouTube without an ad blocker, I’m depriving YouTube of its revenue source and I’m costing them money. Morally, ad blocking sits somewhere between piracy and actual theft.

The thing is? I don’t care. I ad block YouTube all the time and feel not a lick of guilt. The reason: Google brought this on themselves. I used to happily pay for YouTube Red. But they have continuously, both before and after that point, been actively hostile to the people actually producing the content they make. Their willingness to bow down to copyright trolls and complete inability to properly apply fair use. They extremely harsh policies on acceptable content, stopping people talking about sex education or mediaeval weaponry being able to reliably makes money.

And the straw that broke this camel’s back was when they changed the requirements to be in the Partner Program, locking out all the smaller creators from ever being able to make money on YouTube. I never considered myself a “creator”, but over the 5 years prior to that I occasionally uploaded stuff I was doing anyway. I had amassed almost $100 over those 5 years. Not an impressive amount, for sure, but having that taken away from me made me feel unwelcome. I don’t think I’ve uploaded anything public since, and I’ve been blocking ads on the site since then.

Even worse, not long after this change, they decided to start showing ads even on videos from non-partnered videos, so you can get ads on my videos even though I don’t see a single cent.

So fuck YouTube. Ad blocking is worse than piracy, and I say good.

I’d agree with that logic if YouTube kept up their end of the bargain and actually vetted their ad buyers. Instead they show ads for fake stimulus scams, fake news, and blatant malware.

I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network. Not using an adblocker is a security risk that is not acceptable for my company. I pay for YouTube premium because it’s in my means and I get value from the subscription but I don’t blame anyone who takes the same approach

TL;DR: my property rights trump Youtube’s business model.

The problem is that there is that ad networks and ad placements are just bad actors in the consumer space. Not only has malware been passed time and time again with ads but also false ads to malware. When that happens suddenly the content creator/website/whatever ‘isn’t responsible’ for it. Then there’s the issue of ads being placed everywhere slowing down websites but even worse, getting in the way with auto play audio and video, videos autoscrolling over the content you’re trying to read or whatever, etc.

As a consumer, I should not and ethically do not need to worry about another’s business model. If the business model fails simply because I don’t allow something that model depends on to traverse my network then it is on them to figure it out. If the ads get in the way of the content, then I just want consume the content anyway.

Some news websites use Ad Admiral or whatever it is called and I haven’t bothered trying to bypass the adblock wall for them. I just simply consume the content elsewhere.

If ads were ever responsibly used or perhaps could be argued that there is compromise where consumers wouldn’t mind, then there’d probably be a lot less ad blocker usage. It’s like anything else. When it takes less effort to install an adblocker to have an OK experience, then ad blockers will be popular.

I was around before ad blockers were very popular and even before pop-up blockers were around. Ads kept getting worse which is why ad blockers became more popular and more sophisticated. The Internet had ads for years before ad blockers were the norm.

I mean, the argument falls short when YT (or LTT) spew literal garbage. I might have a hint of sympathy if it wasn’t a dumpster fire of decaying babies.

The few people I sub do and do yt as a monitory source, I support elsewhere. Fuck YouTube acting as a sleezy middle-man and simultaneously playing the victim.

if a content creator doesnt want people to be able to skip the ads/demonetize the content, then they should post on a platform that makes ads mandatory.

problem is that no one will watch crap on that sort of platform

Linus Short Sebastian is an asshole. I like his channel and even bought a water bottle, but he is an asshole nontheless. His opinions are always 5 years outdated. He used to hate reddit but now liked Reddit. Probably a contrarian too.

Another argument proving that Linus Media Group is a bunch of morons

deleted by creator

The same Linus who can’t be arsed to spend $500 of various people’s time to properly test a product is now telling us what to do?

deleted by creator

I think YouTubers make fractional pennies from Ads, and mostly only if its fully watched and sometimes clicked to go to the website. So if you get a 15 second ad, and skip to the content, you didn’t give the creators any money.

Also, shout out to those ads being horrible. My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign, that had body horror. 15 year old me didn’t want to smoke, nor wanted to after, but it was so disturbing that I learned how to avoid them.

Not even going into the disturbing or weird ads. One time I got an ad for a “Ching Chong Fing Fong shirt company” as a way of mocking Chinese people because their government sucks. Another time, I got a full 12 hour video by a Vietnamese couple just grilling in their backyard. No subtitles, not even sure if they were aware they enabled their videos to do that, or didn’t fully understand the process of uploading videos.

Anytime I see actual ads on the internet, not just YouTube, it just makes me go “I am perfectly justified in not seeing these weird ads.” I don’t give them any money no matter what I do, so why not have my eyes saved from bright flashing colors and scam artists?

I was watching a long video on chromecast today and I had ads every three minutes or so. That’s a two hours video. The amount of ads is disgusting.

YouTube is unwatchable without an ad blocker.

This is why I pay for YT Premium. No way in hell am I watching ads, but I do want to be able to use the platform, and the money has to come from somewhere. So far it’s been pretty good value, although SponsorBlock is of course still required.

Revanced update fixed it on their end about two weeks ago also.

they also fucked themselves over with the ad skill issues they’ve had over the years. Advertisers now find it to be more worthwhile to advertise directly with creators, though that also means they make a lot more money, so.

They kinda dug their own grave, to be honest.

This is what Louis Rossman said. Youtube is completely in their right to kick people off for blocking ads. At the same time, it’s also not a pissing match that’s worth getting heavily invested in, because ultimately Youtube is going to lose unless they can start coercing people into installing proprietary apps which they already have for mobile devices.

This is what Louis Rossman said. Youtube is completely in their right to kick people off for blocking ads. At the same time, it’s also not a pissing match that’s worth getting heavily invested in, because ultimately Youtube is going to lose unless they can start coercing people into installing proprietary apps which they already have for mobile devices.

Better start preparing for the coming exodus. Try Odysee, Peertube and Nebula and see what works for you. Once the enshittification hits critical mass, you’ll be ready to let go of that sinking ship.

Try Tubular, newpipe + sponsor block combo!

For now

Same with revanced right now.

This. I always say this exact thing.

If you provide content for free, expect people to take it for free.

While I agree, the amount of people who’d do this is negligibly small, compared to their total userbase. Obviously a bunch of people use ad blockers, but only a tiny amount of them have modified apps, followed by an even tinier amount of those people with fully custom frontends. For YT it might work out as a net positive, because the annoying blocks and reminders will just pressure people into paying for Premium.

At the end of the day, I could just stop watching youtube entirely, if this trend continues. I have nothing to gain there

Good. Let their stranglehold die.

Revanced will never die. Stand against the Goliath.

Didn’t know about the update. Thanks, just did it.

yup, noticed that revanced wasn’t working a week ago.

went into revanced manager, patched the recommended version, installed gmscore, done.

suck it youtube, i’m not paying a subscription to watch low effort vtuber edits.

Never had any outage in SmartTube either, unless they pushed a faulty release (I’m on the beta channel), but even then they have reacted super fast with fixes.

So far I’m using NewPipe x Sponsorblock on my phone - apparently it has been discontinued & archived, but still works just fine as well. Only the comment view is broken since a couple weeks, but I really don’t care about those to begin with.

Removed by mod

It’s a shame that this law still doesn’t apply to YouTube

If Germany is anything like Canada and other countries, applying public broadcast laws to YouTube would be a monkey’s paw deal. Sure you might get tighter control over advertising, but youtube would also be forced to do things like show you x% of content made in your country/language, resulting in state mandated control of the content you see online and potentially limiting/warping international audiences for content creators, and potentially other ramifications I’m not considering.

Now if they made a law specifically for youtube and other online video platforms that dealt with advertising in that context, that would be a different story.

There’s a tool that does this. It speeds up the ad so it takes only a couple of seconds. The ad is “watched” but muted the whole time so you don’t actually have to deal with it.

Edit: The article isn’t great but the tool is sort of the same as what you mentioned. https://9to5google.com/2023/11/25/youtube-ads-speed-up-workaround/

Well, YT is literally getting petabytes uploaded to it. Every single day. Thats 1000 terabytes, and thats 1000000 gigabytes.

I bet you haven’t even seen a petabyte of storage in one place (assuming you didn’t go to a data center yourself). How is a small company, or even fediverse, gonna handle that? Thats absolutely insane amount of data and, without moderation or curation, it is not feasible.

It’s a giant waste of space and resources, to be honest. Most videos are seen once, and the rest is mostly spam or bad quality content.

Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.

I wish adblockers did this, open the ad in a little silenced sandbox window. I don’t see the ad, creator gets their pay

No one wants to scale enough to compete.

I don’t consider scale important from the perspective of making and watching good videos. People get hung up on it when citing barriers to competition with Youtube, and while it’s certainly there, it only matters to Google itself (so it can continue to plausibly lie to its customers about ad impression numbers). In fact YT’s offering was at its creative peak when scale was lacking.

It makes no difference to me whether a knowledgeable hobbyist has 20,000 subs or 250,000. I don’t care about their “content” suitability for advertisers (that creepy term can get nuked). I certainly couldn’t care less whether the algorithm promotes their work, deserving as it may be. This sort of creator operates on the assumption their viewers are intelligent, and is typically savvy enough to route around YT with alternate donation/support mechanisms. These people will continue on any platform. For them, quality is an end in itself rather than a feed-in to a metric. I would rather watch a badly filmed insightful critical appraisal of a new piece of hardware than Canadian/Black Technology Man’s 8K press release rehash full of slick cuts and pointless b-roll.

Scale is the concern of middlemen.

I wonder about this. Youtube is made so that videos has to be long (10 minutes at least, or you won’t get exposure, right?) so we get all those dragged out videos with long summaries.

Also you are supposed to earn money with it, which combined makes videos, IMO, often not very interesting.

Sure, I get it, everyone can’t make videos all day long for free, but isn’t that something that we shouldn’t maybe want?

I prefer a genuine hobbyist making one video a year, than a sponsored person pushing one a day.

Which brings me to hosting and bandwidth needs, youtube needs a lot of that because of its business model, but say Lemmy communities could probably host quality videos without large hassle (especially if small servers wasn’t defederated all the time).

Thoughts?