- 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.
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.
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.
and it’s potentially an existential threat.
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.
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.
it’s ran
it’s run
Danke. Mein Reichsleiter.
*Reichsleiter
Ty. I knew it looked wrong.
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.
deleted by creator
Patreon and sites like it exist as a hedge against YouTube banning your channel.
I think its more likely that YouTube will shut down and be replaced by nothing. Its existence has never made sense as anything but an act of charity from an organization with tech resources to burn.
Remember that Google bought YouTube only AFTER it was successful for several years. This was also before Google turned evil.
There are a lot of unprofitable startups that get purchased speculatively based on other factors like their user count. The idea being the buyer thinks they can monetize.
This was more like a merger with Google being the larger company. YouTube was already very successful.
“Should we moderate our ads and get rid of 2 hour long ads, disinformation, porn,scams and fake products?”
“No, no. Thats to much effort. Lets spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to force people to watch our 2 hour long ads, disinformation, porn, scams and fake products. Thats clearly the way forward.”
This decision process brought to you by Prager U proceeds into 30 minutes about how slavery was good for the black man and he should be grateful for it
YouTube is also aggravating customers who use their official apps by increasing the frequency and length of the ads. In just 4-5 months, I’ve seen YouTube ad lengths on Roku go from 10-15 seconds to 30 seconds, to a minute.
They’re trying to recoup lost ad revenue by pissing off the one demographc most likely to sit in front of the TV the longest.
On rare occasions YouTube will play exceptionally long videos as ads. When YouTube Red came out I got multiple entire hours long shows as ads (as a “free preview!”) I’m pretty sure Ive gotten one of the movies they put up for free viewing as an ad before.
Obviously you can skip after 5 seconds or whatever but they hope to catch someone playing stuff in the background. Probably to increase their crappy view count for those features to sell actual ads later.
I’ve noticed this on my TV’s YouTube app as well. It went from 15 second I shippable ads, to 2 ads where I need to watch at least one and only then can I skip, to sometimes at least 30 seconds before I can skip. It’s worse on the longer video essays that I like watching, where they say “Fewer ad breaks for this long video”, but in reality they have the same amount of ads that you need to watch more of to skip. I absolutely fucking hate it :D
Fuck em, they’re just greedy fucks that’ll blame us for everything.
Wheres the data to back up this claim? That article is purely opinion
That’s true, would be great to have more evidence.
But I really wish this to be True 🤞
Ads overall take up a good amount of time now. I would rather not use Youtube at all if I have to watch long ads.
I want the statistic on how many Google employees use ad blockers now. It’s basically a necessity.
I’m sure Google employees get Premium for free
They still probably use ad blockers for other sites though. It’s essential on the Internet these days.
The number of malware or otherwise malicious ads is too damn high. There are articles that are so filler they literally have less content than ads, it’s an embarrassment.
Premium doesn’t have downvote count and sponsor skip.
The pirated version of youtube is better than the paid one.
Google should spend time improving their service instead of being assholes.
Dislikes is why I left anyway! XD
I even left ads on for nearly a year until a particularly metally hazardous on pushed me to turn them off, and I haven’t gone back since. On the occasion I use YT outside my ecosystem, it suddenly feels so much worse.
It’s pretty sad how not having the money for it makes it unbearable, while all of them don’t need to experience it, disconnecting them from their practices.
Ads suck, but the type of ad is what is sucking the most. All I’m getting are ads for get rich quick schemes. You never see big name brands advertise on youtube anymore.
I’m mostly getting product ads on YouTube, but they’re so poorly planned and low-effort that they annoy the everloving spit out of me… In all regards, streaming services have officially become at least as bad as cable tv used to be…
They are worse. Unless you’re using an adblocker.
Last time I disabled an ad blocker to try it on desktop, I was getting scammy looking product ads. On my phone if I browse Shorts (revanced doesn’t stop those ads) it’s all straight-up financial/health benefits scams.
But the other night I accidentally opened the 1st party YouTube app on my TV instead of Smart Tube Next and the ads were for big brands. So there’s probably a different level of desirability based on content type and device type at play.
Part of me once wished for a utopia of only getting ads for things I have a reasonable interest in - working to inform me about options to spend my money on a service or product I need. It was based on Steam, which shows ads for games I like. No repeating ads to harass a particular message, no convincing people they need Brand X.
I don’t imagine we’ll ever get close to that.
We do but you have to agree to give up your data and browsing traffic to do so
potential account suspension.
What account?
The worst of all issues to me was any interruption working to help feed people or the destitute immediately has a 5 second skip, while all else has 59, 30, 20, 14 skip. There was no benefit for good externalities, just cost and profit. I was even ok with ads around 5 seconds and that they can even show up before watching a video. Adding the countdown was a nice touch too. It’s when it gets in the way of UI/UX, how you have to suffer through the same commercial over and over, interrupting a video at critical moments, and ending videos with an ad so that you don’t know if the video is ended that it gets awful to use. I would hope someone gets to making it 5 second ads that don’t take away from the experience.
Start 2x30 second ads
During video here’s an ad för my sponsor “braid narrow legends”
Buy my merch on www.mymerch.dog
Outro youtube ads
The ads have become too long. Some of them are 40 seconds long, for a 3 minute video. That’s unacceptable. I have thought about it, and I think the best would have been a single 8 second ad, unskippable. But never more than that. That, I could take. But multiple ads (even if they’re just 5 secs each but you have to be vigilant to press “skip”), or long ads, or interrupting ads, are just too much to accept.
Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn’t play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.
Make your platform so bad in the interest of shareholders so no one wants to use your platform anymore. It’s a story as old as capitalism.
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.
