At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what.
And to be clear, I am not trying to equate Adblocking to video piracy. To me, the fact that I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn’t constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube. I would also never click on an ad purposefully, no matter what it is for.
With all that being said, I am a hopeless cause and I don’t think that anything will convince me to buy YouTube premium, but I also used to think that about MP3s.
My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?
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Thanks for making this thread, OP! Some really good responses in here that I enjoyed reading! 🙂
They need to stop rapidly changing the terms of the agreement. This is the problem endemic to the platform. It’s starting to lose shape because the ads are the problem.
If this was an issue with the quality of content:
ideally creators would get to choose their ad roll spots. This would make it less jarring to the watcher. It’s also terrible that you can get ads for something like BP on a video that’s basically surmised as “That time BP poisoned a lot of children”. (See climate town) l. Also, if the ad revenue split was better, creators wouldn’t then have to shoe horn in extra ad spots into the content of their videos.
However, I don’t think it’s a problem with quality of the content, but the quality of the ads.
I believe Adblocking is not piracy issue to the end user as much as it is protection measure from malicious content. It’s up to the user to qualify what is “malicious” or not in the end. Users who use adblock do not have a good relationship with online advertising not because it annoys them, it’s because it threatens them. This is less so just a YouTube problem and more of a entirety of Google’s business model problem.
Becoming a better ad platform is a tough challenge when advertisers by practice operate in a manipulative bad faith space. We don’t trust ads.
I agree. They do operate in bad faith. And not only do they throw ads into every possible crevice but the advertisers themselves may be bad faith actors. It’s easy for a local radio station to decide not to run ads for a shady local business but YouTube doesn’t really seem to have anything in place to vet advertisers or a robust system to report ads for malfeasance.
I’m interested in the framing of advertising as a threat rather than just an annoyance. I think even ads for something like laundry soap being spammed over and over for hours on end can be harmful even without being directly malicious. As someone who has been blocking ads for 10 years, every time I am on someone else’s device the amount of garbage that just gets thrown into your face by default is just atrocious.
My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?
My initial/gut reaction was “obviously relevant ads based on the content I’m watching”, but I don’t care how relevant the ad is when I’ve seen the same Raid Shadow Legend ad across multiple videos I’m gonna try to skip it (or as I did long, long ago: adblock it).
I don’t even know what actual YT ads are now, only the integrated creator ones that they’re personally sponsored by… the hello fresh and world of tanks and manscape and debrand etc., which I’ve started auto-skipping on a channel by channel basis based on very few criteria: the entertainment value/effort they’ve put into the ad (so Drew Gooden is usually always funny and gets a pass, same for channels like Wulff Den or Th3Jez or Critical Role) but certain ones just get manually skipped regardless (no matter how funny you are, I don’t want to sit here and listen to you talk about Manscape for 3 minutes) and how often I end up seeing them (which in these instances, isn’t often because they’re channel specific usually)
So I guess it mainly boils down to relevant ads that aren’t soulless and that I don’t see 3x every other video?
In podcasts, where I can’t block ads effectively, I will instantly skip any canned ads and even avoid podcasts that have too many canned ads. On the other hand, when podcast hosts do their own ad reads, it doesn’t bother me too much. In the best cases, they are funny enough that I feel like I’m missing out with the ad-free premium feeds (I subscribe to some podcast Patreons).
I also don’t really mind sponsored segments from YouTube hosts, though it’s highly dependent on the content. Most of the channels I follow have ad reads that are reasonably well aligned with the content and tone. In some cases, they are actually useful. I still run SponsorBlock, but I do often read through the video descriptions of my favorite channels to see what they’re hocking.
There is no imaginable scenario where I would tolerate hypercheerful actors talking about insurance or cars. Get outta town.
I’m expecting someone smart at Google to figure out how to encode ads as part of the video file as it is delivered, making it literally undifferentiatable in the data we receive, and then there’s no way around it. They’ll make millions in ads and billions licensing it out.
Disadvantage of said system for Google would be the fact that if you do that, people can skip ads much faster and they won’t be able to do any tracking of interaction at all. For advertiser’s point of view, that would be just worse version of TV commercial.
I’m hopeful that reencoding on the fly or even merging preencoded files into a single stream is too expensive because it needs a lot of compute power and invalidates caches .
My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”?
Their goals is definitely not to convert everyone. This is just to make using adblockers annoying enough that they can convert a substantial amount of adblock users into Youtube Premium users. They will eventually stop the war and allow the small minority of successful adblockers to continue if they can’t find an easy way to eliminate the most popular extensions entirely.
Their end goal is to make YT Premium more of a standard like it is for other streaming services so people consider it the default way to engage with Youtube and not as an extra service.
I guess it’s harder to do this after 13 years of default “free” content. It’s easier for someone like Spotify to do that because there has always been the option to pay for premium.
I remember in the earlier days of Spotify there were a lot of ways to get half priced service just by finding xyz code or paying $5 for a code on eBay that got you a year of half priced Spotify. I don’t know where those came from or how those existed but it was definitely what finally convinced me to subscribe.
(I’ve since cancelled in favor of buying CDs again but I realize I’m the oddball in that scenario)
TIL: there is a version of AdBlock out there that assists with bathroom trips… More information requested, please and thank you.
If Google is willing to eat the initial cost they can start superimposing ads over streams on the fly, on part of the screen, while the stream is running. You can’t skip it because you’d be skipping content. They can use AI to figure out areas of the screen where they won’t mess with visual content (eg. avoid slapping it over people’s faces) but also make it impossible to ignore (eg. not a bar at the bottom you can simply crop out).
On the bright side these ads would probably be less obnoxious than full screen audio/video ads. If they make them tolerable enough we would see a marked decrease in attempts to fight them (especially since fighting against ads imprinted on the video would be pretty hard).
The nuclear option would be to turn on DRM for the entire platform and make it mandatory to have an account to see any video. It would make ripping streams a lot harder but it would nuke the entire ecosystem of YT clients running on every possible device, which were built on the premise they can freely access non-DRM streams. They can probably upgrade the firmware on their latest Chromecasts and abandon the rest but all TVs and older devices would be screwed. They might still get away with it if they give ample advance warning (couple of years).
Depends also on how they intend to reposition the service. They could steer it towards becoming yet another private streaming service, holding all the YouTube library hostage, Not sure to what extent stream authors would be willing, ready and able to move away, given the almost complete lack of competing platforms.
Just wait until YT makes high res video options premium only. :)
Edit: I adblock, because fuck ads. But I also use yt less than ever before. I used to use it for entertainment, but nowadays I only use it when I specifically search for something.
but 4k is already locked behind a paywall
Oh, I had no idea. :/
Personally I delight in blocking all youtube ads. I won’t stop if I have a choice.
It may be too late to turn this ship around, but there are a few things that, at least for me, would make YouTube ads less of a problem:
- Vet all the ads. Do not allow links to malware sites, scams, or low-quality merchandise and services to be on the platform.
- Make the ads less annoying. Don’t stick them into weird spots on a video.
- Stop tracking me and trying to display targeted ads. I value my privacy, and like OP, I am never going to click an ad.
they make too much money off of each of these for google to consider doing any of them, other than maybe improving insertion algorithms so placement is in ‘better’ spots… but ‘better’ for you and the viewing experience and ‘better’ for them and click-thru rates are likely different outcomes.
too much money
That’s the rub. There’s a LOT of money on the table.
Using ublock origin and sponsorblock is the right thing to do. I will never allow ads for as long as I live. And I will never pay/buy YouTube premium since I can get all the features for free through modded versions of apps/browser extensions.
At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking.
Lol, no, they aren’t. If they wanted to they could just throw everyone with an adblocker out. The only reason they aren’t doing this right now is not wanting to piss off their users (and some vague EU data privacy laws).
The absolute best you could accomplish against them as a user is hiding the ad, but you’d still have to wait instead of being able to skip.
Besides that: I thought about getting YouTube premium (+ music), but now they’re already jacking the prices further up. So I’ll just keep using uBlock Origin and if that no longer works cut back on my video watching time.
I get YouTube Premium because I pay for YouTube Music, but I’ve tried watching ad supported YouTube on a computer I wasn’t logged into as I was troubleshooting my main computer. I can tell you that I wouldn’t even bother with the ad blockers. If there was something on YouTube that I really wanted to watch, like an old concert or something, I would just download it with JDownloader and add it to my Jellyfin server. If that doesn’t work, if just move on. There’s a lot more entertainment available for free than I could ever possibly consume in three lifetimes.
I just stopped using YouTube. I can get all my music elsewhere.
