- 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.
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Imagine being on the YouTube ad team…that has to be the most depressing team in tech history. Your whole existence revolves around peddling ads before people can watch the ads they want.
At least you can tell your boss “I’m working on it!”, sit on your ass, and every 6 months add one more little UI or formula change which “finally stops adblockers” but is defeated within 3 days.
Yeah I don’t believe they really put their hearts in it. If they truly wanted to force you into watching ads, they’d manage. Their team is just not that interested.
Their team is probably using adBlockers more than the rest of us. They understand the depth of the surveillance baked into those ads.
And because they have to test the ads.
I’m sure they make enough money to not care. Being in the part of the company that brings in the dough is generally a pretty good position to be in as well.
It’s the only consumer product they haven’t canceled.
Gmail would like a word
All corporate IT jobs are depressing, because working in a corporation isn’t something that a thinking person is equipped to do.
Your whole existence revolves around peddling ads before people can watch the ads they want.
Ah, what. Who wants or likes to watch ads at all?
People watch an ad for the privilege of watching a movie/show/game trailer all the time.
I have no problem watching a ad for a video but when I have to watch an ad just to see if I am interested in watching the video is where I draw the line. Forced ads before the video starts is the worst. Give me a min or two before forcing an ad. If I am looking for help for a particular issue I don’t want to watch ads after ad while trying to gauge the video.
I get what you’re saying but I’ve reached a point in my life where I really don’t give a shit and there is absolutely no way I’m watching ads. I’m also not paying google for anything they offer.
Yea…I’m old enough to remember when that was the content that paid for the platform. Putting an ad on top of that is fucking soulless vampic greed.
Welcome to the new Google. It’s rent seeking all the way down.
I’ve clicked in to see a movie trailer, which is basically an ad, and had to watch an ad before I could watch the ad
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A lot of creators have just turned into corporate shills. I stopped watching ETA Prime’s channel about tech reviews because it was becoming pretty clear that mostly everything he got was paid for by the company. Also, most creators are putting their own ads into their content.
I don’t follow those creators!
The best part of YouTube is the small creators who are just making videos as a hobby. Once they get so big they start shilling products they wouldn’t use themselves I drop them like a hot potato. For the most part that doesn’t happen though because I prefer niche topics and creators that don’t have “sellout” personalities.
Welcome to Youtube. It’s ads all the way down. Unless:
Firefox browser, Ublock Origin extension, Sponsorblock extension
Save 40% of your viewing time for actual content and send tips through creator’s Paypal or whatever.
SmartTube for Android TV is a must as well
I hope nobody lets them know that Firefox on Linux has never shown ads for any of their content.
Don’t worry. Linux is only 4% of the total computer market. They aren’t bothered with you because Linux isn’t worth it.
That’s fine, we’re happy to keep the better choice to ourselves. 😆
Oh well, sucks to be us! /s
YouTube is just on demand TV with extra steps these days. I’ve stopped watching videos, I have an LLM transcribe and summarize for me now. 99% of the content of a 10-15 minute video can be summarized into 1 or 2 pages and read in under 2 minutes.
I think I need this, finally a real use for ‘ai’.
The amount of how to videos you have to watch through, when all you want is one little piece of info you should be able to search or scan for has been a problem since before the internet figured out how to increase clicks by making a web page in to slides.
Can you link me a how-to video on how to get startedt and send me a summary from your working setup?
I have an LLM transcribe and summarize for me now.
Only a matter of time before LLMs start injecting their own ads into these responses.
Nah, local LLMs are easily in the range of transcribe/summarize. I bet you could do that nicely with llama 8B without even needing a gpu.
Cant wait to have these
Local and open source
By that point I’m pretty sure we’ll have an effective compact model that can run locally and transcribe downloaded videos on reasonable hardware. Or you can just sic a paid model like chatgpt on the task. The corporate Internet is entirely focused on subscription service models now, unless you run the model yourself on local hardware you’re going to end up paying someone somewhere a service fee.
I know right… Why should content creators be able to make money from content. Am I right?
You’re joking, but you’re right.
Once the content has been created, the near-zero marginal cost of online distribution makes the concept of charging for copies wholly untenable.
The furry community figured this out years ago, our creators work on commission or paid subscription through Patreon or one of its ilk. They (mostly) don’t care where you freely share their work because they already got paid.
The knives are out for Patreon. Apple is looking to carve a big chunk out of that revenue. Google and Amazon (owner of Twitch) will not be far behind. Believe me, Google and Twitch are very unhappy that creators skip the platform monetization methods and just tell viewers to go to Patreon to bypass the heavy commissions.
Great time for Patreon to expand more into content delivery.
Patreon is jacked to the tits with vc money and enshittifying at a breakneck speeds. Done expect goods innovations from it in the future
Patreon deserves to die, their cut of the subscription income is extortionate for what amounts to a very limited web hosting platform.
Open-source alternatives like Mirlo or Cloud Patron will take its place, it’s only a matter of time.
Or SubscribeStar or any of the other alternatives.
The same reasons as open source software devs.
Some content creators but not most of them. A lot of open source software advertises too.
and it’s potentially an existential threat.
Even better, you work for one of the wealthiest corporations in the world with virtually unlimited resources at your disposal, and you still get your asses handed to you by a handful of people with laptops.
If they didn’t have to support the web, and various legacy platforms, the could lock it all down with drm more easily.
Hence Google’s proposal to DRM the web
And people’s response has shown its not easy or even working.
in tech*. most people don’t even know or care about it
That’s far less true now that they’re breaking the functionality of tons of adblockers that it was a few years ago.
most normies i know don’t care about it.
i have no idea how they use the internet without them, but here we are.
All the eggs in one basket? Computer nerds would never allow that.
So tell the content creators you like that you don’t like YouTube. While YouTube Premium is the same price as like two coffees a month… Maybe your content creator will help you if you can’t afford it.
Well, to begin with, both the watcher and the creator are clients of the platform. Both sides feel bound to it, even if both dislike it.
Then, YouTube premium is literally 20 machine coffees a month in my first world country. 15 if they’re done by someone. You seem to be speaking “privileged minority”.
I’m sorry… I didn’t realize the reason that there are so many Starbucks in America, like literally caddy corner from one another is because their customer base is the “privileged minority.” I’ll have to remember that line.
In all seriousness, you could argue that ads prey on poor vulnerable people unable to afford YouTube Premium that just want to use it to learn, and that would be a semi-coherent argument.
What you are trying to point is that in the United States of America (and maybe Canada) you people have coffee that’s so expensive that two of them pay for YT premium. You’re only missing out on most of the internet (eg. Not the US).
Starbucks is notoriously expensive and nobody refers to it as coffee round here. Starbucks in my first world country is considered something for hipster digital nomads. You can’t find them outside areas with tourists as everyone else is happy with “regular” coffee that’s literally 10 times cheaper.
Saying that two coffees equate to YouTube premium while using Starbucks as a metric is like saying that a car only costs a watch or two while using a Rolex as the reference watch. If you consider a Rolex to be your reference watch, cool, you’re a privileged minority.
I’d rather not watch YouTube videos at all than videos with ads.
I don’t mind one or two of their old 5 second ads, but anything beyond that is unacceptable especially on a 2 min vid.
Here’s my current lineup.
Newpipe Freetube Greyjay Tubular Brave
They get through all those, I’m just going to surf peertube or odysee
Smarttube stopped working some weeks ago for a day. I tried watching YouTube with ads, the experience was so fucking insane to me. Like multiple, non skipable ads before the video starts + more ads during the video. It just was unwatchable. Its just unusable.
Try grayjay
Newpipe still works (Google may break it, but the app is usually updated in a couple days and it works again)
It just didn’t work for a day. They are really fast in patching. But good to know that newpipe is working also an androidTV.
I used to just watch YouTube at default, taking the ads as they felt like.
Now, no thanks. If I have to watch as many ads for as long as they mandate, I’ll just watch other things.
I’m surprised that Vimeo hasn’t decided to take advantage of the enshittifcation of YouTube. They have been a social video platform for years, and are probably the best placed platform to come close to overtaking YouTube - should they choose to move away from the professional space and embrace the social aspects of video.
I find the whole thing so ugly even as a youtube plus subscriber. How much possibly you could gain here? isn’t youtube already profitable and being run by one of the world’s richest corporations? just let people watch and educate themselves and whatnot.
if i ever get banned from youtube for using ublock origin am prob switching to odysee
No, this can’t be. They took all of our personal information so they could use AI to tailor ads to exactly what we wanted at any given moment.
/s
I mean this genuinely: I would rather YouTube die than be subject to their overlong and hyper targeted ads.
If the ads were untargeted I’d feel less adamant, but as it is now I would sooner give up YouTube entirely.
The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I’d rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.
legit, if youtube ever beats ublock origin, i’ll just stop watching youtube
Its an all put assault on half your senses without an adblocker. Literal torture.
The entire web is like that without an ad blocker these days.
I miss those cheeky gif banners from the 2000s
[With hindsight] The commercial use of the internet should never have been allowed.
I want the internet to be a network of digital libraries…communication, public events and sharing space…personal pages…services…the commercial motive starts from there and eventually consumes the rest :/
For this to happen, everyone using the internet should know HTML or there has to be a easy to use, MS Word-like web designer. And there should also be easy to use, free web hosting providers (neocities exists).
Owning a website as a non-techie should be normalized and be portrayed as “cool”
I reckon without the rule changes in 1993-94 allowing commercial use that the internet would have turned into a significantly more useful utility with higher quality innovation than the advert laden train wreck that we have now.
Do online multiplayer video games count as a commercial use? I kind of like those
Yt-dlp download script + text file with fav channel urls + jellyfin.
No bullshit, saves bandwidth.
Also look into invidious.
They were serving videos with ads spliced in, basically DAI in podcasting industry. I’m not sure how that experiment went, but if that’s how they’d serve the videos, downloaders will have ads embedded as well.
Yt-dlp supports sponsorblock, i am not worried.
I also dont even need tools for this as my usual style of watching is with my fingers on the arrow keys to skip back and forth
I actually don’t know if/how the ad block people worked around it or if YouTube pulled back. The problem with DAI on podcast and in stream ads is that the ads aren’t always 1:05~1:35, the ad could be longer or shorter, then the next ad won’t necessarily start at the same time, and most definitely won’t end at the same time. So sponsor block won’t know precisely where the ads are, thereby making it much harder for a crowd sourced solution to accurately skip embedded ads. Hopefully they figured out a way, but as mentioned earlier, I don’t know what happened to that experiment.
Put it on a VHS, then use one of those VCRs that removes the ads for you.
Also look into invidious.
And peertube, some content creators also post there, e.g., The Linux Experiment.
I’ve had YouTube Premium since the days when it was called YouTube Red, so like a decade. I’ve grown used to not seeing any ads from Google and anytime I watch a video not using my account it’s torture.
You‘re part of the problem then. It only got so shitty in the first place so they could trap people in the Premium subscription that will get increasingly more expensive and less useful.
Same here. FreeTube for desktop and NewPipe are all you need though if you don’t want to pay and/or have access to music.
Tubular is newpipe + sponsorblock BTW
I use pipepipe but it’s less stable
I haven’t tried that yet. I think Libretube also does SponsorBlock too & have seen it on F-Droid.
As a recent YT premium-tryer, it’s amazing how many ads they put in that aren’t obviously adverts - comparing between non-premium and premium browsing.
Not sure I’ll keep YT premium beyond the free trial, until I find more decent content producers. Even then, it’s skipping those video’s paid promotion segments.
So it’s like paying for a streaming platform to not get ads… But still getting adsI agree… however, that is an issue with the content creators relying on using content promotions. I have noticed when skipping ahead in videos that it usually indicates in the progress bar where the promotion ends. If the content producers utilized other ways to contribute and I liked them enough, then I’d do that. YouTube now has a subscriber only feature that should help with this. There are also extensions that are supposed to block sponsors too. I don’t think YouTube has implemented any functions to make blocking sponsored ads more difficult, especially for paying users… who knows though.
It’s so bad that I 1) refuse to pay for premium so I don’t enable the behavior and 2) ended up sideloading an alt YouTube app on iOS that just doesn’t display the ads. YouTube hasn’t been able to block that one yet as it spoofs as the original YouTube app. Totally unsanctioned and a pain in the ass to keep the certificate alive but worth it. YouTube is actually enjoyable again. All that because the ads interruptions were constant. If it was every 15 min or so I wouldn’t care, but every 5!? Get the hell out of here!
Pro tip, LLMs do an excellent job summarizing YouTube videos now. I’ve never liked YouTube content, the incentives for creators are perverse and discourage conveying accurate information simply in favor of drawing out every video to maximize ad opportunities. About 95% of the content I might have been interested in could have been better conveyed in a 1-2 page blog post and read in 2 minutes instead of stretched out into a 15 minute video. Having a robot summarize that content is so much less irritating.
What do you use for that, fetch the transcript and just feed it to the LLM of your choice? Or are you talking of the actual LLM watching and summarizing?
I’ve always just used chatgpt for both tasks. I’ll ask my SO, she does more of this and she might have better tools to suggest.
Same.
I came across someone who uploaded a 90 minute video as an ad as well.
I remember watching some video, falling asleep for a few hours, then waking up to a livestream of an ad. One of those “skip after 5s” but it was a livestream, so it just kept playing. I couldn’t believe it!
That‘s where Youtube Premium comes into play for many fools who don‘t really know about adblockers. Google‘s goal isn‘t to destroy the website, but to turn it into a much more profitable Netflix subscription based on user generated content. Sadly the enshittification of the biggest video platform will continue because enough people are willing to pay a lot for it. The site will not improve until there are mainstream alternatives that actually take revenue off Youtube.
You could pay for YouTube Premium
Fuck that though
Google makes enough money evading taxes already. Not gonna help them make more.
I don’t care if you use ad blockers. I get annoyed when people publish articles like… “Google is losing the adblockers war” cause then advertisers are going to start pushing harder for Google to actually prevent adblockers entirely, which they could have done already. Thus far Google, despite issues, does quite a lot of good things… Android is the only open source OS out of Apple & Windows. Android lets you install third party app stores. Chrome (Chromium) is open source… etc.
These users writing this content don’t even develop the apps to block YouTube ads. If you’ve ever explored the APIs by YouTube, then you’d know that Google despite pushing ads for users without blockers, is still rather friendly to third party apps.
Advertisers couldn’t care less about adblockers. Advertisers don’t pay if the ad is blocked.
It’s only a matter of time until the premium users get ads. Just like Netflix, and cable TV before that. You will inevitably wind up paying to be advertised to.
Netflix has ads now? I thought that was only for their lower tier service? I had to cancel Netflix cause they haven’t came out with two more seasons of Stranger Things yet.
yes for lower paid tiers.
Is that what they are trying to do? Push crap ads and try to kill adblock to get a little extra user share to pay for yet another subscription?
I don’t care if you block ads… but to act like Google owes you and that you deserve free content is called entitled.
Google certainly acts like it owes me nothing indeed, that’s why it will never be good enough to pay to watch.
I’d pay for YouTube Premium Lite if it didn’t state “Note: Ads will still show on music content and outside of videos.” and if that’d make them stop harvesting all my data.
I’m just glad someone is thinking of the shareholders
I forgot… where can I get my free data center with petabytes of storage & 300TB/s fiber interconnects?
I get what you are saying, but the balance is off.
YT premium costs (edit) more than a streaming service per month.
There are no industry leading movies or series released exclusively on YouTube.
YouTubes benefits of premium is “not being delivered ‘skip after 5 seconds’ live streams” as an ad that will play indefinitely (or at least for hours).
Also, streaming services provide much better series discovery. Ie, find a show you like and easily discover the start of that series, then binge watch the entire series in order.
YT premium is basically a “play next” queue, 1080p, and no ads.
It doesn’t (AFAIK) support creators any more. It’s literally just a fee to not-be-inconvenienced, and it’s not great at thatYep… i actually looked at Subscribing. But… It’s basically mostly amateur hour and the subscription costs a huge amount.
Even worse, I don’t believe creators even get revenue until they exceed sufficient subscribers. So most people are actually paying youtube to put benefit from other people’s video’s which they have no involvement in.
When did this change? AIUI creators got a larger cut of YouTube premium views compared to ad share.
Not sure if its subscribers or views… But, I tried to monitize one or two of my videos, and it wouldn’t let me because I don’t think I had enough views or something.
Wait, are we acting like YouTube isn’t profitable now? If I’m going to spend money on videos it’ll be a content creator owner platform like Nebula
The reason I left Twitch was because the fucking ads were unbearable. I’ve even taken a screenshot to show people that I wasn’t lying when I said I saw that Twitch expected me to sit there and listen to and watch 8 fucking ads. Ads to shit I don’t care about other than think of violent thoughts in what I’d love to do to marketers and find a way to advertise that so they get a god damn clue.
In a perfect world, maybe A ad wouldn’t be so bad. But this has gotten out of hand and out of control. We shouldn’t ever have to sit and watch a string of ads, all varying from 20 seconds to an entire minute and even longer.
And good, I hope YouTube is stupid as fuck enough to be aggressive. Drive more creators out, even hit the successes of the YouTube whores who’ve long lived on the platform. Because all that they’re going to do is affect everyone at the end of the day, all for the sake of profiting for marketers.
I’d be willing to pay for their service if it didn’t entail creating an account and letting me get tracked even further.
I don’t know what the solution is, but ads isn’t, a Google account isn’t, but piracy isn’t either.
Until they start properly filtering ads they accept they get auto disabled in my side. No weird crypto or porn ads for me, thanks.
Even the shitty mobile ads of “someone watching prerecorded gameplay and commenting it”.
How obvious can you be?! “Oh wow, these 2 different people playing EXACTLY the same and saying almost the same thing”.
That’s not an ad.
Never mind that the gameplay in the ad is an extremely minor part of the game. The rest is some sort of city-builder with mtx shortcuts.It’s just whaling
Meanwhile Odysee goes ads free…
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.
