YouTube is cracking down on consumers’ favorite loophole - Adblockers::undefined
I can really understand YT wanting to push ads because I know how expensive their servers are and all that, but I just can’t get over how many ads there are. Two ads before the video starts is already pushing it, and having ads in the middle (which can be many times depending on the video) is far too much. If they crack down on adblockers I’ll likely use alternative frontends like piped. No way I’m watching 6+ ads in one sitting.
I think when they were trying to push the YouTube Red streaming shows there were a few times where they put in full episodes of shows as pre-roll ads. They were skippable but an hour long TV show as a pre-roll is just obnoxious.
I’m in the same camp. I was generally fine when it was an occasional skippable pre-roll ad before some videos. But the last time I watched a video without a blocker, there were two unskippable ads at the start plus two more each at the 7 and 14 minute mark of a 20 minute video.
This hour has 22 minutes indeed.
The problem is that there’s no competition. There’s no real YouTube alternative that content creators can post to.
That’s because video hosting platforms aren’t profitable. Anyone that’s trying to do what youtube is doing will either have shortcomings or go bankrupt.
Does some of the payouts need normalising? Some of the bigger content creators make absolutely bank for hardly doing anything with little overheads.
Not just that, but anytime there is an alternative it gets flooded with neo-nazis, grifters, scammers and other garbage that would otherwise be banned on Youtube. But because the platform is small and uprising, or they were designed specifically for that purpose, they look the other way.
And the reality is there never will be anything that can meaningfully compete. Not anymore. Youtube has inertia. It’s not just that content creators get part of the advertising or that Youtube functionally advertises their channels based on related content algorithms. It’s also that youtube has over a decade of historical material. It’s the largest collection of video content in the history of the planet. Ever. By far. The age of “people are going to ditch your service for a competitor’s” is long gone. We are squarely in the age of the solid internet, which is ruled by a handful of very large, very powerful corporations, who do not really have to worry about “new competition,” because the scale of their operations is so vast, so well established as a part of the culture, and so astronomically expensive to maintain that nothing new could ever hope to compete.
update your rules, made the popup go away on my ubloick origin <3
addendum: a how to:
- left click ublock origin
- click the three interlocking cogs
- select the filter lists tab at the top
- click purge all caches
- click update now
- refresh your youtube tab you just encoutered the popup in and press f5 or refresh the site otherwise
before i had the popup on each video, after no more.
maybe talk to the author of ublock origin instead, i just commented on how i fixed it on my machines which all sit in europe :D
idk what crazy gunk google-australia is up to that makes it not work for you
if the forcr me to watch ads i will finaly leave that platform
nowhere, starting to think this shit is toxic af
here hoping youtube goes under
Lets hope the enormous mass of human knowledge is at least transferred first.
And what will they have lost?
I mean, I get your point, but why would they care
Users who don’t directly pay for a social service where user content and interaction is the business are still valuable. They share videos around, they comment, they contribute to it being the place where everything is happening. There’s a reason all these tech platform companies spent so long in the honeymoon phase of monopolization. Without the network effect of people on their platform, they have nothing.
They still need a way to overall make profit from their users, but they aren’t losing nothing by losing people who adblock.
Well said! One only needs to look at reddit for a perfect example of what happens when a platform loses it’s primary contributers.
Social media sites live or die on their contributors & users. If they make it too obnoxious even for established people to use the site, they’re going to look for alternatives.
Then the content will start to leave, and the users will follow, and then you’re like, “Sorry, I’ve never heard of Digg”.
As far as I can tell, they aren’t doing a very good job. I’ve seen the notice that an ad blocker is not allowed, and even without upgrading the ad blocker I use I can still just click the close button on the notice and it goes away and I can continue to watch uninterrupted.
If Google does figure out how to prevent people from using ad blockers on YouTube, I think it will help me break my honestly unhealthy habit and reduce the amount I watch, or perhaps even quit entirely, since there are far more ads on YouTube than there were in the past - especially if you also include sponsor ads that are embedded in videos.
I feel like i would hate ad less if they let the creator know when and ad was comming. It would be kind of like TV was; “and I’ll tell you this after the break”. Because those midrolls usually just break a sentence in half!
Well seeing how little tv people watch now I doubt it would be a success. I can’t and will not put up with midroll ads (why I think tv is not seen as much as the past).
It is odd that youtube managed to regress to a state worse then a more or less dead media, but the line has been drawn.
