YouTubes and Ad-Blocker

In reply to RevRico :

YouTube gets their money to pay for storage and continuing business from ads and premium. Creators supplement their income via sponsorship, patreon, and whatever else they can scrape by with. No cut of that returns to the video hosting platform.

When the platform isn't profitable, Google has a responsibility to it's shareholders to make it (more) profitable. The best way to kill a free service is to make it unsustainable to continue for free. Right now they're doing that by fighting ad blockers and pushing premium. Twitch does it by taking a 50ish% cut of paid channel subscribers and a 100% cut of ads. Hell even patreon and Only fans take a cut of subscription money. If you kill the content delivery platform, you drive off the creator or at best make it more expensive and harder to find them

RevRico said:

And a giant berkeley you to whatever douchecanoe decided to make the setup 2 unskippable ads, video start, sponsorship bullE36 M3, 2 more unskippable ads, start of actual video content, then more ads every 90 seconds with more buried sponsorship speals in between.  Whoever did that can die in a chemical fire. 

I've never experienced anything like that and I watch close to an hour of YT videos every morning on my indoor trainer.  An ad or two at the beginning.   Any ads in the middle are rare enough that they don't really register.

Do content providers have a say?  Like "I'll take more ads in return for more compensation."  

mfennell said:

RevRico said:

And a giant berkeley you to whatever douchecanoe decided to make the setup 2 unskippable ads, video start, sponsorship bullE36 M3, 2 more unskippable ads, start of actual video content, then more ads every 90 seconds with more buried sponsorship speals in between.  Whoever did that can die in a chemical fire. 

I've never experienced anything like that and I watch close to an hour of YT videos every morning on my indoor trainer.  An ad or two at the beginning.   Any ads in the middle are rare enough that they don't really register.

Do content providers have a say?  Like "I'll take more ads in return for more compensation."  

It's been getting worse and worse this past 7 days. I dunno if its platform wide, or only because I'm watching on my smart tv, but if it keeps up, I'm just going to be blocking the domain at my router and going with any of the other video providers out there. 

The episode of Bertcast I watched yesterday was the end of yesterday's YouTube for me. 97 minute video took over 120 minutes to get through because of unskippable ads, and 5 minutes of sponsorship reads. 

Sometimes the creators can pick where the ads go and that really shows you who the E36 M3stains are versus the people just trying to be seen. I've blocked a lot of channels because they drop ads every minute. 

In reply to TheTallOne17 :

If the ads were not so very intrusive, then I would be more willing to let them happen.  I let them happen for GRM because of how they are presented, the lack of horrible intrusiveness, and thier applicabillty.  Just like the magazine ads.

Many google based ads are incredibly intrusive- they slow down service a lot, play super loud, are horribly inappropriate many times, etc.  I've asked other boards I participate in to police the ads they present better, and they did nothing- so I block the ads.

If google forces ads without the customer (webpages, I mean) being able to filter them, then the system is quite broken in favor of google.

And a quick google search shows that they are hardly struggling for money, as they are considerably more profitable than the big 3.  

Alphabet needs to be more responsible in the ads they present.  Until that happens, they have to deal with people blocking ads.  They have a better choice to be more profitable.  They choose to not take it. 

In reply to alfadriver :

And one does NOT INTERRUPT RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER TO PLAY A BERKING AD FOR AN URGICARE IN TEXAS

An interesting side effect for me- if they are going to force me to sit through ads, I'm going to be considerably more selective on what I watch.  Which has decreased already because the suggested videos have gotten a lot worse.

With only one platform having effective ad blocking, the end result is that I'll be seeing less ads than I was before I had one computer blocking them.  I wonder if it's similar to others.

Youtube ads, and other platform's ads, have led me to deleting them off of my phone. I just don't watch the stuff anymore. Shouldn't have watched it in the first place. Waste of time. 

So thanks youtube for implementing the ads. They've been the catalyst to make a change to improve my life.

If they were reasonable about ads, I wouldn't mind.  A half hour video? Couple of ads at the beginning, one in the middle, and one towards the end, just like traditional TV.  In contrast,  I got 7 berking ads on a 30 second video. I once counted 215 blocked ads in what amounted to 70 minutes of viewing. I'd also be more inclined to accept ads if YouTube didn't take 45% of every dollar generated by creators.

Do you folks upload videos to YouTube as well as watch them? I have a channel to which I upload videos that are marked public but really don't find their way into the public domain.....by that I mean no one watches them except maybe a couple friends of mine. My views are in the tens of times.... but I wonder if that means anything?

Point being, (at the risk of screwing myself royally) I see no ads on You Tube - ever. I do get those little pop in ads at the ends of the video for the next one, which are annoying. 

I do have Ad Block Plus on my Edge browser.

FWIW: I was talking with someone the other day and they mentioned the same problem. Here is a copy and paste:  "

So part of the reason some folks aren't seeing it yet with uBlock or ABP is likely because they're rolling it out in different areas at different times. 

There are ways to block the ad-blocker-blocker with things like NoScript or advanced settings in uBlock, BUT an easier (and kinda funny) workaround is that you can use a VPN to sign up for YouTube premium from another country for much cheaper. I think Argentina was the cheapest last time I checked, but I couldn't get it to work with my VPN (I'm using NordVPN). Ukraine is also very cheap at $2.72 USD per month and it worked perfectly for me.

I just set my VPN to Ukraine and navigated to the page to sign up for premium. It displays the price in Ukrainian money (99 of whatever their currency is which is $2.72) asks for your credit card, and that's it. For me it didn't require any location verification or anything beyond that. Pretty slick lol.

Noticed the anti-ad-blocking popups have been appearing again since yesterday.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

uBlock Orgin got rid of the purge cache and force update on their settings page. People were updating 2,3,4 times a day, sucking bandwidth.  I only had to do it once, 3 weeks ago. I really hope unlock can get me back in, but my PC is borked for now.

I'm running uBlock Origin with Firefox on Ubuntu and I haven't seen an ad yet.

stuart in mn said:

Adblock Plus on Safari has been seamless for me.  However, I've noticed more and more YouTube channels are getting episodes sponsored by various companies, and are embedding ads in their videos or are doing product placement; some kind of green dietary drink, prepared meals delivered a box, and portable power stations seem to be popular sponsors recently.  

YouTube finally caught up with ABP on Safari, and a couple weeks ago I got the warning countdown before I had to either shut it off or sign up for YouTube Premium, or whatever it's called.  They gave a free month of it as an introductory offer so I signed up, I haven't decided for sure if I'll stay on and pay for it.

Been using Ad Speedup extension, and you just zip right thru the ads. Not totally gone, but they play 16x faster. Works for me.

MiniDave said:

Do you folks upload videos to YouTube as well as watch them? I have a channel to which I upload videos that are marked public but really don't find their way into the public domain.....by that I mean no one watches them except maybe a couple friends of mine. My views are in the tens of times.... b

I always look at the number of subscribers for videos that are suggested viewing - YouTube usually recommends bigger channels, but every so often one will come up that has less than 100 subscribers. I sometimes kind of feel like a peeping Tom, but it's kind of fun to see them.

In reply to stuart in mn :

Please don't. They're greedy enough as it is and that's EXACTLY why they're being dicks about ads, so people just pay.

It would be nice if EVERYONE would stop using it for a day or two to actually affect their bottom line, but that'll never happen. 

Whatever happened to vimeo or any of the other alternatives?

MiniDave said:

Do you folks upload videos to YouTube as well as watch them? I have a channel to which I upload videos that are marked public but really don't find their way into the public domain.....by that I mean no one watches them except maybe a couple friends of mine. My views are in the tens of times.... but I wonder if that means anything?

I have 165 posted videos, all marked public. I would say 50% have fewer than 100 views, 45% have fewer than 1000 views, and a few have several 1000 views. I also get zero ads. 

I am running Chrome with uBlock and ABP. I don't know if that helps or not. 

Edit to say, I'm also running HTTPS Everywhere and Disconnect. Again, I have no clue if that helps or not. 

Youtube has taken a serious dive in the last 2 weeks or so for me. Is tarted about a month ago I would see evidence of an add at the beginning of a video, but only a quick black screen with the scrubber bar, then the video would play. No issues. But in the last 2 weeks a video will start and stop at what looks like 120P for about 15 seconds, increase to maybe 240P and freeze for another 10. Then the video would start but be really choppy and crappy quality. Eventually it would play at decent, but not good quality. I was running chrome with ABP.
d'loaded librewolf and all is well.  

Don't get me started on Amazon Prime.

Perspective from the other (paid) side. I've been paying for Premium for about 2 years now and 90% of my watching is from the couch on our Roku, so the ad-block browser stuff is inconvenient when all I want to do is veg on the couch and flip the TV on. Call it part of our anti-cable streaming bill, along with a couple other services.

The one thing I noticed immediately and haven't seen talked about much in this thread is paid promotions within videos. For some naive reason I thought Premium would get rid of those. Sure I can skip them, but it's still extremely annoying when you pay for a service that's supposed to benefit creators, and they turn around and make ads within their videos. Some channels are worse about this than others, and it influences which channels I choose to watch or avoid. 

In reply to maschinenbau :

For the phone Skytube, Newpipe, and Revanced all have adblock and sponsor skip features.

It's an experimental feature for UBO.

I'm not as opposed to those because they're usually one 1 segment, the volume won't usually blow my ears out, and they're generally well integrated. Plus the creator gets paid directly. That said I won't sit through 2 minutes of an ad from most of them. I'll definitely sit through them if they're amusing like Dawid Does Tech Stuff's sponsorships though.

In reply to maschinenbau :

Funny enough, that's where the creators actually get their money. Not from the bullE36 M3 ads every 2 minutes, but from those brief sponsorship blurbs they put in their videos. 

In reply to RevRico :

I don't mind those as much, or at all, because the creators are getting paid directly, and it's one add, so to speak. That's it. Get it over, and on to what I want, instead of what YouTube does,  chopping up a 30 minute video with 7 or 8 commercial breaks.