YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust.<p>I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Even going so far as believing they have a right to free lemonade...

Youtube has been a fantastic demonstration of how valuable it can be to enable democratized, low-barrier-to-entry content publishing. Think of how much treasure there is on the service, with millions upon millions of hours of educational, informative, or archival content, all published and viewable for free, with incredible reliability and availability. Of course this is also fantastically expensive to build and maintain; I believe that we have been fortunate that Google&#x27;s ad business was willing to subsidize it for us for so long with so little required in return. Unfortunately it appears that possibly the screws are getting turned, and there is less appetite for the subsidy.<p>In a better, more utopian timeline I imagine an equivalent service supported by taxpayers or nonprofit means. Just how the 1900s gave us the public library system, imagine if the 2000s give us a video platform without for-profit encumbrances - what a world it would be!

Google and Cloudflare pretty much rules at least 98% of the internet. If they don&#x27;t want you to see something, then you won&#x27;t see it.<p>Welcome to this brave new world. Though to be fair, it didn&#x27;t start now. But in the past years people were cheering for the random blocks and removals.<p>The article seems to concentrate on adblockers mostly, but it is even more interesting which news, topics and conversations (etc) reach you, and which ones are not. Google wanting you to see ads isn&#x27;t too surprising. Google not wanting you to see reporting not fitting their agenda (even if you watch all ads coming with it) is much more <i>interesting</i>.

It&#x27;s amazing to me how Google is allowed to control every side of the market with no real repercussions.<p>I don&#x27;t want to be the cynic who says Google has been paying lots of money to &quot;the right people&quot; in order to keep the status quo, but.. Google has been paying lots of money..<p>That might be a moderate huge win for Firefox.. until someone at Google makes a phone call to Mozilla&#x27;s offices.<p>Worst case scenario it helps me consume less YT videos which would be a huge win for me.

The ads on Youtube have really become unbearable though.<p>I tried to watch a podcast on my tablet, while I was preparing dinner using bluetooth headphones and couldn&#x27;t readily skip ads or fast forward the video. I was subjected to at least 3 youtube ads and maybe an equal amount of ads from the youtuber themselves it was absurd.<p>Even if I were to pay for an add-free youtube experience, it only culls half the ads in that case!

I feel like Google shot themselves in the foot a long time ago on this front. This is all based on my experience, I sometimes follow along with some cooking YT videos to try new things, for awhile the ads were not that bad usually a couple 5-15s ads at the beginning and maybe some in the middle for a longer video. I would say a few years back they totally killed that for me because multiple times I would get hour long ads advertising the first episode of some show coming out, sure I could skip it but as I was actively cooking this meant I had to wash my hands to click the skip ads button which made for an extremely frustrating experience. The worst part is clicking skip ads didn&#x27;t seem to exempt me from seeing hour long ads later in the video. Needless to say between that and getting 4+ ad blocks in a 5 minute video pushed me to just block ads on devices I can and not watch videos on devices I can&#x27;t.<p>For me what all of this is going to do is change how I consume videos. Not all content creators do this but I would much rather use YouTube with ads as a sample of the content you&#x27;re creating and then pay you some percentage of the money I would use to pay for YT Premium for access to your videos outside of YouTube.

One good thing that has come out of this is that I have reduced my time on YouTube to nearly zero in the past two weeks.

I think it would be better if they made the video author choose the ad points in their video rather than having it happen automatically. Maybe it gets bypassed if you move forward in the video or whatever. But its the ad just fires off in the middle of sentence or something that is crazy annoying.

I think sadly there are no good solutions here. YouTube did a very very good job of hosting videos for everyone, and for a long long time didn&#x27;t care about adblock or ytdl. All that might be fine if relatively few people used it (hence ytdl type tools were cli only and not some flashy GUI). But the usage of adblockers is rising (for all the good reasons, modern web with ads is horrible), so YouTube needs to do this at some point. They can&#x27;t wait till adblocker usage is &gt;50% since then it would be near impossible. YouTube premium exists, and is very good value. And hosting videos is really expensive, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;3&#x2F;15&#x2F;22979126&#x2F;vimeo-patreon-creators-price-increase" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;3&#x2F;15&#x2F;22979126&#x2F;vimeo-patreon-cr...</a>.<p>Sadly what might happen in the end in the far future is youtube usable only with a login and with some kind of a subscription&#x2F;one off transfer or ads. Some kind of netflix type solution, which is worse for everyone but hard to complain about.

YouTube is an addiction for me and this crackdown has been very helpful for me to break the addiction. Youtube has gotten worse since the algorithm went from rewarding short content to rewarding long content so there has been a flood of mediocre content - at least it&#x27;s not facebook. Eventually I&#x27;ll set up an auto-download system for the few shows I already like and am already a patreon for.

YouTube may have peaked as <i>the</i> outstanding source of impressively high quality content on a very wide range of topics about 3-5 weeks ago; possibly with Horses&#x27; guide on surviving in a desert island. It&#x27;s still so, so good.<p>---<p>I remember a film of Salvador Dali talking to a cheering crowd and saying in full dictator voice &quot;... in the future... toilet bowls will be made of gold...&quot; (roaring crowd). That&#x27;s what&#x27;s happened to the internet at large.

i was a YouTube Premium subscriber ever since i was grandfathered in with the closure of Play Music up until last month. every single new feature worsened my experience until i couldn&#x27;t take it anymore and cancelled. i gave feedback with every new feature and trial but i never got a reply and things just kept getting worse and worse. the worst offenders:<p>* forcing Music content in my YouTube feeds -- i use YouTube solely for videos and Music for music. even so, i would say around 1&#x2F;2 of the items on my YouTube feed are music and useless playlists. you cannot turn this off<p>* forcing Shorts down my throat -- i&#x27;m sure their numbers shows huge engagement numbers with Shorts but it&#x27;s the exact opposite kind of content i use YouTube for. i watch longer-form videos, not short form clips. they show up in my feed, in my search results, and i&#x27;m pretty sure one time i was A&#x2F;B&#x27;d into the app launching into Shorts by default. you cannot turn this off<p>* Search is abysmally bad -- for each query, it will return 2 or 3 videos maybe possibly related to all synonyms of all the words in my query OR&#x27;d together, followed by unrelated Shorts, followed by completely unrelated videos i&#x27;ve already watched, followed by completely unrelated videos with inappropriate clickbait thumbnails, and on and on and on. you cannot turn this off<p>* did i mention they were forcing Shorts down my throat? because the straw that broke the camel&#x27;s back was when they informed me that they were introducing Music Shorts. as if the playlistification of music listening turning music into muzak weren&#x27;t bad enough, now we have Shorts which incentivize yet another race-to-the-bottom for music. i understand my music listening preferences do not match those of the masses, but there&#x27;s no way i can turn it off.<p>for those reason and plenty more i don&#x27;t feel like typing out, google can lick my asshole. adblock forever.

I&#x27;m fine with them blocking adblockers now that they offer a no-ad paid tier. I think it&#x27;s likely healthy for consumers to know they have to pay one way or another.<p>What I&#x27;m really curious about though is whether competitors can do the same - can a YouTube rival today launch with anti-adblockers and a paid tier and compete? This might be a barrier to entry that&#x27;s too high for your day to day consumers, especially for a new platform. I&#x27;m not sure what the solution is here (aside from kickstarting with VC funded free tiers and pivoting later once users are hooked, which feels bad), but I hope at the very least that the general population adjusts to this &quot;ad or paid&quot; future that we seem to be heading in.

Google could go further. The next step is listening on the microphone to make sure the audio from the ad is coming out. Then using the user&#x27;s camera to pause an ad if the user isn&#x27;t looking at it.

Living in Russia does have its benefits — since YouTube premium isn&#x27;t available, and no ads are shown to Russian users anyway, I only watch this unfold from afar without experiencing it first-hand.

Honestly this wouldn&#x27;t be an issue if youtube&#x27;s ads weren&#x27;t such a completely offensive and miserable experience.<p>When they first started pushing ad-free subscriptions to youtube I first noticed the ads got EXTREMELY aggressive and over time seem to not really have got better, only worse. Skip around the video too much? Ad. Skip too many in a row? Congrats, now you have a long-form unskippable ad. I haven&#x27;t been bothered to measure it but you can&#x27;t really watch much more than a minute of youtube without being served obnoxious ads. The user experience is terrible and it felt so much that I was being harassed into buying a subscription that I resolved to never do so. Adblockers are a logical response to such hostile behavior towards users.

Ironically the first thing I see on this article about adblocker is a pop up

Hey why everyone thinks it&#x27;s legitimate to pay for content?<p>So if you are poor, access to content should be denied to you?<p>Most of the people on the internet are poor accessing youtube with $40 smartphones.<p>They cannot pay premium, why send them ads? What&#x27;s the point? Make them waste their precious time and bandwidth?

Has anyone here successfully used a CDN + self-hosted videos &amp; players to avoid YouTube? Thoughts?

The google shills are out in force in this thread

Just know this, and it becomes somewhat clear in this article.<p>Adblock Plus is a SCAM! Their founder (or key person, not remember) made his money with scam &quot;free SMS (texts)&quot; websites and has a very shady past. They invented their &quot;acceptable ads&quot; that are ENABLED BY DEFAULT, were totally silent about the fact that they basically blackmailed advertisers to let them pay money to get on their whitelist and scam users into this &quot;acceptable ads&quot; scam BY DEFAULT and show them ads.<p>Acceptable ads are the WORST ads, that are the ads that flow with the text, that are not obtrusive and not as annoying and therefore the most effective ads actually for me, I would say.<p>Like they said, Google paid them back in the days to get on their whitelist, they were eventually forced to make their shady backroom deals public and do this shit in the open.<p>DO NOT USE Adblock Plus ever, even if it has a checkbox to block all ads, they operate an adblocker to make money by showing people ads, you can not make this shit up. Most disgusting scam. Use uBlock Origin. Or use Brave, but they are not up to speed with the current YT thing, but their adblocker is written in Rust I think and based&#x2F;inspired by UBO. Would be interesting to know if it also suffers from this &quot;mistake&quot; that unloaded tabs let requests go through while UBO is loading that happens in Chrome but not in Firefox. I guess not as it&#x27;s integrated at the core of the browser.

I pay for YouTube. Although they jacked up price from $9.99 to $17.99 with 0 difference in offering.<p>I know the latest cool post pandemic is to keep on jacking up price until you see churn but that really rubbed me off.<p>It felt very fuck-you-pay-me!<p>Google has a huge monopoly and I’m sure they can double the price without losing much customers since they’re the big game in town.<p>Unfortunately I ended up cancelling Netflix and Disney to make up for it.<p>Perhaps this is the game they’re all playing. I only got a fixed dollars per month to spend on entertainment and each one wants to get it all at the loss of others.

Not really related, but one can always use a VPN with exit node in Russia instead of ad blocker. It still puzzles me what was their motivation to disable ads in Russia after the conflict began.

It&#x27;s their toy and they can pick it up and go home with it (i.e. Google and Youtube). Network TV got so annoyingly ad infested that I gave up on it in 1998 or so, never to return. Others soldiered on with record-and-then-clip solutions (TiVO).<p>Record-and-clip would work with Youtube too. The adblocker &quot;watches&quot; the whole video, ads and all, and then when it has enough buffered up plays back the clipped version to you. Traditionally this would be defeated by wiring the ads into the content so seamlessly that the blocker can&#x27;t find them automatically. But here, Google already has the next thing up their sleave, the WEI thing, whereby they can just deny service altogether that is not an approved, unmodified web browser.<p>My personal tolerance threshold is watching about 30 seconds of preroll ads. But when the midroll ads come in every few minutes, I&#x27;m getting close to the &quot;quit network TV&quot; thing again.<p>Of course back then there was Pay TV, and now there is Youtube subscription. Some will find it worth paying for it, others will just walk away and maybe their lives will be better for it.

The idea of a company forcing me to watch something that I don&#x27;t want to watch, and telling me what software can or cannot run in my own computer goes well beyond 1984 and all those dystopias.

I think everyone should pay for Youtube Premium, there should be no free tiers. And we should ban sponsorship too, a creator should be banned if the content is sponsored. It lowers the quality of the content, the user experience and, worse imo, introduces biasis and conflict of interests. Also mandatoring a paid plan could help get rid of all those scam bots. Also creators could get paid more if everyone was a Premium user.<p>There is no free lunch. At some point you have to pay people for their work. Not paying is slavery. Either pay with your attention span or pay with money to get an adless experience.<p>The Premium plan gives you more features (and a music streaming that would cost you 10$ in and of itself if you were to use another music streaming service).<p>I am glad Youtube takes this issue seriously.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;oOv5l" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;oOv5l</a>

Controls &quot;the Internet&quot;? Rather it shows how many of you are addicted to YouTube and free content

I&#x27;m happy to pay for services and a Ad free YT experience.

At the end of the day people just don’t want to pay: ad blockers, piracy, etc.<p>Of course people will whine when you stop them from getting stuff for free.

&quot;Help us pay for the services we provide or don&#x27;t use them&quot;<p>Why is this a strange message for everyone to digest? Ads pay for the content you watch, or your subscription fee covers it. Getting mad at the ad-blocking avoidance is like getting mad you can&#x27;t walk into Disney Land without a park pass.