- cross-posted to:
- news
- cross-posted to:
- news
“because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership”
not like Youtube rewards creators for viewership either (and then lying to the advertisers as well)
I think YouTubers make fractional pennies from Ads, and mostly only if its fully watched and sometimes clicked to go to the website. So if you get a 15 second ad, and skip to the content, you didn’t give the creators any money.
Also, shout out to those ads being horrible. My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign, that had body horror. 15 year old me didn’t want to smoke, nor wanted to after, but it was so disturbing that I learned how to avoid them.
Not even going into the disturbing or weird ads. One time I got an ad for a “Ching Chong Fing Fong shirt company” as a way of mocking Chinese people because their government sucks. Another time, I got a full 12 hour video by a Vietnamese couple just grilling in their backyard. No subtitles, not even sure if they were aware they enabled their videos to do that, or didn’t fully understand the process of uploading videos.
Anytime I see actual ads on the internet, not just YouTube, it just makes me go “I am perfectly justified in not seeing these weird ads.” I don’t give them any money no matter what I do, so why not have my eyes saved from bright flashing colors and scam artists?
If I recall correctly, ever since videos could be called up as ads you can just pay for any video to be an ad, as long as it’s on YouTube, and it doesn’t have to be yours. I don’t know if this has changed, but an essays channel figured out that that’s the fastests way someone could target a competitor’s channel. Paying to have someone else’s video as an ad tanks that video ad revenue and discoverability instantly. Ad views count as views to the video and skipping an ad counts as a skip on the video which signals the algorithm to think that nobody wants or likes to see that video. Do it to enough new videos and you can entirely kill a previously profitable channel in a couple of months.
TheSpiffingBrit did video on that.
My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign
Those ads made me want to take up smoking out of spite.
Ouch. Cutting off the nose to spite the face.
That was the purpose. You see, Big Tobacco actually sponsors the anti-smoking campaigns, which does give them some creative input. They tell the writers to make them as annoying as possible.
They started messing with me on YT. When Piped began giving me errors last week, YT suddenly started behaving, but nagging me to try YT again. Google is truly evil, and dasterdly to boot .
If it hadn’t been for ublock origin, I’d not be on YT this long
They could probably retain users simply by running ads every 10 minutes, rather than every 3 minutes.
Oh but they don’t care about anything but short form content. If they could ditch supporting long form content today they would.
Nah they want lots of short form and also like 10 hour long videos that can play 200 ads in it that you forget is on in the background. They want tiktok and broadcast TV.
They really just want to show you ads.
The cold, hard steel of the sword of truth.
Such a fantastic series :) (the books, not any of the garbage adaptations)
This reply makes me so happy. The books are always better.
Money/s is the more used metric. Retention is secondary or even tertiary to money/s. Behold the algorithm, great and terrible, sheathed in robes of black and grasping sickle white.
Ah, but you’re one layer off. Projected/potential money/s (in the next 1-2 quarters mainly) is what is truly king.
It doesn’t have to be a good idea, it can be a terrible one - but good sounding words in the board room are what matter
“Hey, so we’ve decided to see if we can run 10 unskippable ads back to back. Simultaneously, we’ve launched a war on ad blockers. This time it will surely work because we found out you can ignore your customers - Elon Musk has shown us the way, he only lost bots with all his innovation. We expect people to get over it in 3 months and estimate we’ll lose 4 users. Between 10x more ads and half our users off ad blockers, we project 20x ad revenue next quarter!”
-Words of a future CEO, probably
At this point id rather see youtube die than watch ads
I was watching a long video on chromecast today and I had ads every three minutes or so. That’s a two hours video. The amount of ads is disgusting.
YouTube is unwatchable without an ad blocker.
My kid would watch his videos with ads and I offered to set him up with an alternative with no ads. He said no, I like the ads. I said ok then. That was two years ago. Last week he was losing his shit because of all the ads that made it unwatchable. I set him up with the ad free alternative and I get thanked every day for it.
Youtube is tanking their own platform.
This is why I pay for YT Premium. No way in hell am I watching ads, but I do want to be able to use the platform, and the money has to come from somewhere. So far it’s been pretty good value, although SponsorBlock is of course still required.
I would like to pay for YT Premium, but I think the service is bad. The product is good, and the service is bad.
If I say I don’t want to see this video, I don’t want to see this fucking video again, youtube. I said don’t recommend this channel, and you said I won’t see it again, but I just refreshed, and there it is. I am not dutch, I don’t speak dutch, I’ve never even been to the Netherlands. I shouldn’t be seeing videos in dutch.
Routinely, I have to go through my home page and try to train the algorithm but I’ve just given up. I got an extension now that just permanently removes channels and videos I don’t want to see.
The thing is… the product is the videos, and youtube doesn’t do the videos. Youtube does the service, and the service is bad. I understand that the ads pay the youtubers but the truth is I don’t care. That pay is trash, and if they want my premium money, youtubers should unionize and force youtube to improve the service.
Edit: I watch the youtuber’s sponsor spot and I buy merch.
Hell YEAH they should unionize!!! YouTube has m effectively NO system in place for recourse when their shitty system fucks up and decides to nuke someone’s channel - Such as, when “supporting subject a” is against YouTube policy, a channel may make a video criticizing others who support “subject a”, YouTube’s stupid algorithm will punish them FOR AGREEING WITH YOUTUBE and never actually manually review their shit when it fucks up. A union can grab YouTube by the nuts and FORCE THEM TO LISTEN and that is painfully needed. Unions force power structures to listen to democracy and I like democracy. MORE UNIONS! the people DOING the fucking work need to be heard!
Yes - AND I like that being a premium subscriber compensates creators I watch EVEN WHEN they are otherwise “demonetized” - like, if they cover news and the news contains upsetting information, YouTube will reduce their ad exposure. But my views still award them as much credit as ever, and count for, like, dozens of ad-supported views under normal circumstances.
Nope bankrupt youtube and rebuild from the ashes
I haven’t seen an anti adblocker popup on youtube for a couple months now, I though they gave up. It looks like the uBlock developers and block list maintainers are just doing an excellent job staying ahead of whatever youtube is doing.
Revanced update fixed it on their end about two weeks ago also.
Bless the Revanced guys. They made my mobile youtube binge watches as smooth as my desktop firefox + ublock setup.
Personally, I don’t think a service is in the wrong for trying to protect against ad block, especially when their revenue comes from ads. However I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with adblockers continuing to innovate to circumvent that. I’m rooting for Ublock Origin lol
they also fucked themselves over with the ad skill issues they’ve had over the years. Advertisers now find it to be more worthwhile to advertise directly with creators, though that also means they make a lot more money, so.
They kinda dug their own grave, to be honest.
What made me and I imagine a large chunk of other people convert to revanced/similar apps is the super aggressive advertising, it’s impossible to use youtube when you get a double ad before and after every 5 second video and get 30 second midrolls every like 3 minutes. You can’t skip through a video to find the part you want to see because you’ll just get an ad. It’s extremely infuriating and time-consuming, it used to be where I was willing to deal with it but they fucked it up. Now I can never go back to ad-riddled YouTube, even if it has a “reasonable” amount of advertising (I am now in the belief that no amount of advertising is reasonable anymore though).
Yup. I was willing to watch one or two short ads before I watch a video, but the mid rolls and unskippable 30+second ads just made me say “well that’s enough of that”. Now I haven’t seen a YouTube ad in a long time.
Exactly. They lost their minds and went too far. Now I’ll never go back either.
Yes. Same. I was OK with banner ads. I was OK with intro ads. Started to get pissed off and annoyed at mid way ads, double ads, and unskippable ads. This is my nightmare. I hate this world and ads are a part of my pyramid of hell.
Aaand now we have also sponsorblock to barely ever see ads in videos
oopsies.
Not only monetization but also the whole sorting/ranking algorithms. Youtube is a bit better than Facebook reels and instagram due to the thumbs down button, but some people go out of their way to make nonsensical garbage because viewers will then comment, and there’s no way to tell if a video is good or bad based solely on engagement. Those videos where people have some DIY hack to clean a toilet bowl and they just pour random condiments in the toilet for 3 minutes and cut the video before any conclusion, those types of videos
they don’t have dislikes anymore, god forbid you dont like something.
This is what Louis Rossman said. Youtube is completely in their right to kick people off for blocking ads. At the same time, it’s also not a pissing match that’s worth getting heavily invested in, because ultimately Youtube is going to lose unless they can start coercing people into installing proprietary apps which they already have for mobile devices.
This is what Louis Rossman said. Youtube is completely in their right to kick people off for blocking ads. At the same time, it’s also not a pissing match that’s worth getting heavily invested in, because ultimately Youtube is going to lose unless they can start coercing people into installing proprietary apps which they already have for mobile devices.
One 10-15 sec ad for an 5-10 mins video would be fair. Because if you calculate the ad shown in Cable TV it was similar I would watch them no problem. But NOOO these greedy fckrs want 3-5 ads of >15secs unskipable ads shoved down our throats. They have record profits. In a business if you are in profit then it’s a good thing. But these fcks want to increase profit year by year, not stable profit for the number of users. That want infinite growth and profit from a finite source and they crazy or what? So if anyone says blocking ads on YouTube is piracy, then fck you and those greedy fckrs. They crossed the limit long time ago and they are reaping what they had sowed.
No amount of ads are “fair”
I’m done wasting my life for other people.
Go ahead tho, you do you boo
I’m done wasting my life for other people.
I do enough of that at work as it is. I’ll be fucked if I do it during my downtime, too.
AMEN BROTHA
How do you propose YouTube should pay for infrastructure costs (servers, Internet etc), staff costs (engineers, designers, moderators) and the content creators?
Have a paid service that doesn’t have adverti…
Oh wait…
Google Ads on the webpages of all the webpages on the Internet, similar to their status quo.
I don’t think any of us should be concerned about Google’s cash flow. It’s their job.
Are you saying that the ads shouldn’t be video ads but webpage ads, instead?
It’s their job.
Yeah, exactly why they are enforcing anti-adblock rules…
If this is how Youtube advertised, I wouldn’t block the ads. I refuse to sit through ads when I’m searching through videos and I don’t even know if the video is the one I want to watch. It’s going to take a three minute search into a 10 minute search.
stop paying executives and shareholders. liquidate assets. I don’t care.
They’re publicly traded, they have to. Thats not an excuse mind you, but if you ever like a service and they go public, just understand the end users are no longer the focus.
Being publicly traded does not force companies to become greedy, immoral scum… Stop spreading this piece of misinformation
PS: this goes hand in hand with the “you got to be an asshole to succeed”… You don’t, the problem is that most people can’t find anything else to imitate
It doesn’t force them legally, but it does effectively guide their behavior. There are a lot of things in this world we aren’t legally forced to do, but still have to do to participate in society. It’s not misinformation, it’s just the reality. It’s true that you don’t have to be an asshole to succeed, but it’s also true that you don’t have to go public to succeed either.
Not even… If the entire point was to maximize profit for shareholders, we would see you he obscene compensation packages for C-suite execs or ridiculously luxurious perks for board members, etc
This has just been the excuse to do away with ethics and morals… And repeating this is “the way it has to be” just makes it easier for them
Television shows are 22-24 minutes, because cable TV should show 6-8 minutes of ads every half hour. 30 second ads in blocks of 3 or 4, multiple times per show.
15 seonds ads are almost too short for a trip to the kitchen. I’m not saying they’re good, but if you want to compare to cable TV, you need to remember the dark times.
Star Trek TOS episodes (1 hour show) were about 52 minutes long, with 8 minutes for commercials. By the time of TNG, episodes were down to 42 minutes. I regularly see ads every 5-6 minutes on YouTube.
Businesses never understand that it’s THEIR obnoxious, sh*tty advertising that kills something profitable, and when it finally dies, it’s surprised Pikachu faces all around.
I refuse to use the official youtube app. Its so trash… I use newpipe and its amazing to just have all my favorite videos bookmarked locally in different lists.
If they take that away from me i will just stop using youtube.
Better start preparing for the coming exodus. Try Odysee, Peertube and Nebula and see what works for you. Once the enshittification hits critical mass, you’ll be ready to let go of that sinking ship.
Odysee
ewwwwww… 99% far right garbage, zero moderation there last time I took a look.
Yeah, there’s garbage too, but I don’t subscribe to any of that. Just watch Linux and electronics tinkering videos instead.
Try Tubular, newpipe + sponsor block combo!
I’ve never tried that one. Can you share a safe link please? Thanks!
Great! Thanks so much!
Since the initial push, I have not even had to reset my ublock… stop using Chrome
The web should have had a Terms of Usage from start. Something like
“If you broadcast content on the internet, expect people to download it.”
This. I always say this exact thing.
If you provide content for free, expect people to take it for free.
Even if you don’t intend to provide it for free, if it’s possible to, expect it. No different from Walmart complaining about increased theft after replacing cashiers with self checkout - tiny violins.
Somewhere out there a CEO thought this was a good idea. All it seems to be doing is pushing people to other platforms (the younger gen moving over to tiktok and the older gens moving 3rd party or just offline).
While I agree, the amount of people who’d do this is negligibly small, compared to their total userbase. Obviously a bunch of people use ad blockers, but only a tiny amount of them have modified apps, followed by an even tinier amount of those people with fully custom frontends. For YT it might work out as a net positive, because the annoying blocks and reminders will just pressure people into paying for Premium.
At the end of the day, I could just stop watching youtube entirely, if this trend continues. I have nothing to gain there
I guess what there really winning is all those non tech-savvy people who currently have an adblocker installed because their friend helped.
Yes, been thinking I’ve just been substituting YT for * TV, and while the consumption can still be customized, it’s still a habit that can be kicked. I bet I’ll get more sleep and productivity.
- Lol autocorrect
Several months ago, fresh off the high of following through on my resolution to leave Reddit forever, I made the same decision with YouTube. Once ublock stopped working, I’d try out peer tube, or maybe sail the seas
But ublock never stopped working. I watch more YouTube now than ever before, I got totally addicted as I binged in preparation to leave
At this point, I don’t know if it’d be good for me, or send me in a desperate arms race to get my fix
Good. Let their stranglehold die.
YouTube is bringing its ad blocker fight to mobile. In an update on Monday, YouTube writes that users accessing videos through a third-party ad blocking app may encounter buffering issues or see an error message that reads, “The following content is not available on this app.”
Yea, noticed that last week. Is already fixed again in latest revanced.
-
Delete microG, revanced manager, and YouTube revanced
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Download and install the new gmscore, which replaces microG: https://github.com/ReVanced/GmsCore/releases/tag/v0.3.1.4.240913
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Download and install latest version of Revanced Manager: https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager/releases/tag/v1.20.1
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Download and install YouTube 19.09.37 from APKmirror: https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/youtube/youtube-19-09-37-release/youtube-19-09-37-android-apk-download/
Revanced will never die. Stand against the Goliath.
Vanced died. If revanced dies we’ll just get rerevanced. Ad infitum.
Vanced died because they tried to generate revenue from it and made themselves vulnerable.
Also, unlike Vanced, Revanced doesn’t distribute modded youtube apks themselves.
Oh this? It’s just a binary of assorted diffs and plugins to a yet unspecified target apk. Why yes, I will use the end product for personal, non-commercial use.
Kind of funny if you read it like that, and while it certainly doesn’t make them immortal, it at least may make them last a while longer i hope.
It kinda comes out of the experience. There’s an outstanding Github issue that notes that a specific version of YT Music is broken past a certain version. Most of the patches fail to apply and you just get the minor ones. You can use the version just before with no issues. How can you litigate against lines of code that don’t even work? This is similar to the vulnerability that Yuzu gave up since they offered Patreon-exclusive updates to support a leaked BOTW:TOTK .iso. Easy to prove your intent there.
Didn’t know about the update. Thanks, just did it.
yup, noticed that revanced wasn’t working a week ago.
went into revanced manager, patched the recommended version, installed gmscore, done.
suck it youtube, i’m not paying a subscription to watch low effort vtuber edits.
-
Oh, I definitely have experienced “The following content is not available on this app.” Before, but I thought it was just a thing of my Revanced version outdated because I rarely update it… Which I’m gonna do just now 😁
I hope this doesn’t bring too many issues to Smart Tube, which is where I do 99% of my YT usage (and I have yet to be bothered with any bug).
Never had any outage in SmartTube either, unless they pushed a faulty release (I’m on the beta channel), but even then they have reacted super fast with fixes.
So far I’m using NewPipe x Sponsorblock on my phone - apparently it has been discontinued & archived, but still works just fine as well. Only the comment view is broken since a couple weeks, but I really don’t care about those to begin with.
Nowadays I’m using tubular which is newpipe with sponsor block and youtube dislike incorporated.
Smart Tube in TV and Tubular on phone (plus Grayjay, but but I’m not fond of their UX).
Grayjay
Yeah, it kind of sucks, and the performance on my phone is worse than NewPipe, but I haven’t found anything else that combines feeds from other sources (Odysee, Nebula, etc), so I still use it.
There are also some missing features, like browsing channel playlists.
It has a ways to make it go, for sure. That UX reminds me of WinAmp way back in the day 🤣
WinAmp was awesome! I loved having it as a floating bar to control my music.
But honestly, the UX is mostly okay for me, except the settings, that really needs some cleanup. Also, rotation is completely broken.
WinAmp was awesome! I loved having it as a floating bar to control my music.
Tell me we’re old without saying that we’re old 🤣
And in Grayjay, I the one thing that’s flawless for me is the screen rotation.
100% agree that the menus and settings need a serious overhaul.

Oh good to know, I wasn’t looking for alternatives as long as it still works, but that’s going to be the future then. Thanks!
Did they fuck up revanced again?
Nope, it still works…
In Germany, there is a law that regulates the amount and intervals of advertising for private television broadcasters: 20% or 1/5 per broadcast day may be used for advertising. Programs that are shorter than 30 minutes may have a break, otherwise there must be 20 minutes between commercial breaks - 30 minutes in the evening. Unfortunately, there are still some loopholes.
Children’s programs are not allowed to have commercial breaks.
It’s a shame that this law still doesn’t apply to YouTube.
Makes me miss a time where they couldn’t tell if ads were actually watched or not.
Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.
Kind of like going to the bathroom during commercials.
Then again I wish we had a real alternative to YouTube. (Don’t point me to the fediverse video stuff … that’s not what I mean.) There is no real competition for a place to freely upload videos … or on the other side find all that content. No one wants to scale enough to compete. (Very few probably could considering the amount of new content per minute).
If only there was real competition, then YouTube would have to fight over our attention/usage by lowering ad count.
No competition means worse for all.
Well, YT is literally getting petabytes uploaded to it. Every single day. Thats 1000 terabytes, and thats 1000000 gigabytes.
I bet you haven’t even seen a petabyte of storage in one place (assuming you didn’t go to a data center yourself). How is a small company, or even fediverse, gonna handle that? Thats absolutely insane amount of data and, without moderation or curation, it is not feasible.
It’s a giant waste of space and resources, to be honest. Most videos are seen once, and the rest is mostly spam or bad quality content.
Actually the cost issues wouldn’t be the storage it’s self. Storage is pretty cheap, it’s content delivery networks. YouTube is supported by being owned and run by one of the worlds larges content delivery networks. There’s virtually no latency, videos play immediately.
Having millions (potentially billions in YouTube’s case) of people accessing data at once is an immense challenge and YouTube perfected it pretty early on, that’s part of why there’s no competition.
Content delivery is not cheap, but not hard to do, either. I’d wager storage would be a bigger problem, because it just keeps rising. Sadly, YouTube is the one with money, and the monetization comes from people.
I can speak from experience that content delivery is harder than storage. Companies like YouTube tackle the storage issue by having tiered storage levels. Trending content is stored on SSDs, new and often viewed content is stored on harddrives with a caching system similar to optane and archived storage (essentially old videos that very rarely get views) goes on tape storage. It’s really cool, and it allows massive about of storage in a small space, it’s costs alot to implement but because of the tape storage they essentially have “infinite” (it’s not really infinite of course but it’s a problem for next decade not this decade).
Well break it up “lemmy wise” or more? I mean nobody can replace youtube but it would be possible having your own fishing channel for example. If it gets wildly watched you probably have to figure out some sponsorship for sure.
BTW no I haven’tseen a PB storage, but I did write visualisation and computation software for treating and seing datastructures up to PB size with hdf5.
There’s a tool that does this. It speeds up the ad so it takes only a couple of seconds. The ad is “watched” but muted the whole time so you don’t actually have to deal with it.
Edit: The article isn’t great but the tool is sort of the same as what you mentioned. https://9to5google.com/2023/11/25/youtube-ads-speed-up-workaround/
Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.
I wish adblockers did this, open the ad in a little silenced sandbox window. I don’t see the ad, creator gets their pay
No one wants to scale enough to compete.
I don’t consider scale important from the perspective of making and watching good videos. People get hung up on it when citing barriers to competition with Youtube, and while it’s certainly there, it only matters to Google itself (so it can continue to plausibly lie to its customers about ad impression numbers). In fact YT’s offering was at its creative peak when scale was lacking.
It makes no difference to me whether a knowledgeable hobbyist has 20,000 subs or 250,000. I don’t care about their “content” suitability for advertisers (that creepy term can get nuked). I certainly couldn’t care less whether the algorithm promotes their work, deserving as it may be. This sort of creator operates on the assumption their viewers are intelligent, and is typically savvy enough to route around YT with alternate donation/support mechanisms. These people will continue on any platform. For them, quality is an end in itself rather than a feed-in to a metric. I would rather watch a badly filmed insightful critical appraisal of a new piece of hardware than Canadian/Black Technology Man’s 8K press release rehash full of slick cuts and pointless b-roll.
Scale is the concern of middlemen.
I wonder about this. Youtube is made so that videos has to be long (10 minutes at least, or you won’t get exposure, right?) so we get all those dragged out videos with long summaries.
Also you are supposed to earn money with it, which combined makes videos, IMO, often not very interesting.
Sure, I get it, everyone can’t make videos all day long for free, but isn’t that something that we shouldn’t maybe want?
I prefer a genuine hobbyist making one video a year, than a sponsored person pushing one a day.
Which brings me to hosting and bandwidth needs, youtube needs a lot of that because of its business model, but say Lemmy communities could probably host quality videos without large hassle (especially if small servers wasn’t defederated all the time).
Thoughts?
It’s kinda cute how they are utterly loosing with adblocker crackdown and now they are saying they will even handle their party apps. No company will handle an open source project full of talented people pissed of by ads.
Reddit managed pretty well, let’s be real. The 3rd party app protests were essentially a speed bump that lost a tiny subsection of users that advertisers didn’t want anyways. Everyone else just migrated to the official app or website.
In their defense, advertisers weren’t seeing those same people.
You can still use third party apps, they are just not in the playstore. Just like with YouTube right now

























