Anybody have any idea of what percentage of viewers skip watching their target YouTube video when they get an ad in front of it or abandon it when presented with an ad midway through?<p>Seems like anyone who wants their video to get maximum exposure would want to eliminate ads for anyone who's willing to watch it and should be able to buy out the ads on their end.
This is a fairly balanced article, and seemingly well-informed.<p>What I would like to know is who uses an ad blocker and not uBlock, and why? What's the point of using an inferior product if the best one is free and ubiquitous?
YouTube Premium everyone… If you get the family version, 6ppl can watch YT without Ads from the main apps, imho a great deal<p>(I don‘t have any other video subscriptions)
chromium derivatives, such as vivaldi, brave, edge, etc... must have an open source fork on top chromium which removes any manifest v3 enforcement and ensures ad blocking capabilities.
if they will have to do it alone, it would be too great of an effort as I'm sure google with couple v3 code everywhere and make it hard to remove this enforcement alone.<p>they also need to help remove blocking popups like youtubes one which works and act exactly like an ad.<p>I'm sure this could bring more usage to these browsers.
I've moved to vivaldi and never looked back
What's a good youtube alternative? The only thing I found so far was odysee. I'd rather go back to quality videos made by actual humans than money grab spam. Are there some sites where some creators cross post?
I'm not sure if I'm the outlier in this regard, but in my case, I simply stopped watching YouTube. (Good job, Google!)<p>I have been using Piped to watch a few programming related videos, though.
I watch Youtube on Apple TV so ad blockers don’t work. Instead I bought YouTube premium from India via VPN which costed me 1159 INR or 14USD for 12 months. Totally worth the time saved.
The "war" headline makes it sound incendiary.<p>What I read was a fascinating story about how conflicted the whole
space is, and how Google is sponsoring developers to work on
ad-blocking technology, and about how Google concedes that
advertisement is problematic from many sides, privacy, distraction,
inappropriate context....<p>Personally I loathe and detest advertisements, and the entire
advertising industry because "consumerism" is a derelict philosophy.<p>But from a simply practical stance, I use video clips in education, so
yt-dlp ensures I have a reliable offline copy for lectures. Having ads
show up in a lesson or conference would be wholly inappropriate.<p>On the other hand I've read comments from people here who say they
love ads. They say they find them useful, and even that targeted ads
bring value to their lives.<p>If those people are being sincere (and why would they not be?), then
there's obviously a market for advertising. And a need for ad-free
technology too. I'm all for diversity. It's nice that different people
have different tastes and needs.<p>So if YouTube were sincere, and technically capable, we'd simply have
two URLs<p><a href="https://noads.youtube.com/">https://noads.youtube.com/</a> and <a href="https://ads.youtube.com/">https://ads.youtube.com/</a><p>People could choose what they want. Ads or no ads.<p>Instead of that we get "war", which is always a bonfire of wealth, and
psychologically deleterious to all involved.<p>So some thoughts come to mind;<p>Maybe The people who say they "like ads" aren't sincere. They are
either paid mouthpieces for the advertising industry, or they suffer
from "identification" (aka fanboyism) which leads them to make
dishonest comments.<p>Or perhaps YouTube haven't realised how stupid they are being spending
millions on fighting ad-blockers when instead they could just offer an
ad-free channel to those that want it.<p>Or even more silly; nobody has realised that the optimal solution
(economically and politically) is just giving people what they want in
the first place, rather than turning it into a childish battle of
wills.
In my humble opinion, they are buying their tickets to the ad-blocking technology they need.<p>A sure fire way to guarantee this access, is to sponsor said conference.
Considering that Hacker News is a developer-oriented website, I half-expected the responses here to be "pfft, I don't watch Youtube on Youtube anyway, never seen any ads". There are technical solutions to this and I don't mean workarounds like ad blockers. I don't want to sound dismissive or condescending but why are we being held hostage by the likes of Youtube?<p>The code has been cracked. We know that by the existence of utilities like Invidious and youtube-dl yet people still behave as if we are somehow helpless in the face of Big Tech. You guys should be offering solutions but you seem content to just bellyache about it. I am sorry to see that.