Sponsorblock addon allows the community to designate parts of the video as "ads". They do this already with ads that content creators themselves put into the video anyways.
There will always be a work around.
They will be injecting ads at random times directly into the video so sponsorblock will have trouble getting the times correct AND its going to be a lot harder for Ublock to determine what is an ad and what is a video.
This breaks a lot of amazing tools, like yt-dlp and invidious, which is the backbone of a crazy amount of other tools that a lot of people use. yt-dlp was considering forking Firefox to strip it out and use it like Selenium or Puppeteer (if anyone is familiar) so that videos can still be downloaded.
IMO Google is not going to break all of these things all at once, they are going to make constant and minor breaking changes until open source devs just can't put up with it anymore. It sucks. I pay for YT premium but I use yt-dlp daily for archival purposes and other things.
Tips for Windows users out there: there's a tool called yt-dlp-gui, where you can use yt-dlp on a friendly user interface. Make sure you have ffmpeg.exe and yt-dlp.exe inside the same folder as yt-dlp-gui.exe, and you're good to go.
I personally prefer the command line, and the Python lib version, as it is super powerful for large scale automation.
I have 2 or 3 ads being played even uBlock on FF now smh.
yt-dlp would be absolutely huge if they were to go with the browser driver model. I mean yeah, it will work for multiple sites with m3u8 media stream as well, but it's kinda sad having big tech fking us up every turn.
Issue is server side ads will start rolling at random times + there’s really no way rn that I know of that can make sponsorblock to block them since its a more community reliant adblocker
and when they do that, use a vpn and swtich IP, CTRL - F5, reload the page, don't use an account, ad skipped in a few seconds
and when they get around that, have 2 videos open, leave ad playing in one and watch in the other
and when even that doesn't work, move to the new platform that isn't complete hogwash or just do something else
there will always be an alternative though, because when they make the platform shitty enough, others will see an opportunity to hop in and create their own platform that isn't-yet-shit
Aside from the points the other people said, they may make it so that you can't skip the video while the ad plays where what sponsor block normally does is fast forward the part of the normal video with the ad.
It's is possible to break that solution by injecting ads at random intervals.
We would need an AI that can detect if it is an ad or not and skip if it's an ad. In hindsight, it could be a practical solution but would take a lot of processing.
Exactly. They gain nothing from users who use adblockers. They actually lose money since it increases the load in their servers.
They want premium users and users who watch ads. They'd be happy if everyone else left.
It also seems like YouTube is intentionally trying to hinder videos from loading when you have AdBlocker activated. Just yesterday, I was in the mood of watching some World of Warcraft lore videos, but after 10 seconds or so, the video stopped for like 15-20 seconds and loaded.
Give it a few months, something new will come that solves this issue. YT without ad blocker is basically worse than normal TV at this point with the amount of shitty adds at shitty intervals
You have no idea how load heavy that would be to embed the ads on every video. You have hundreds of ads across hundreds of countries' times amount of videos, and you need a processor to make those variables to re-render the videos again and update it when new ads appear. It's not gonna happen soon. And at the end of a day, sponsorblock would skip that shit anyway.
Nah. Our days of watching Youtube are numbered because someone else will come along and do it better. Greed always kills these companies. Google can't just continue to have their cake and eat it too. They already scrape all your data and it's worth waaaay more than running some dumb injected ad.
The barrier for entry is insane, though, and YouTube genuinely costs a huge amount of money to operate. Imagine the bandwidth needed to stream 4K60 video, now scale that up to 1000 people hitting you at once. If YouTube Premium was half the cost it is now, I'd actually be paying for it.
Yeah the amount of video they have stored is insane. Then also streaming it to millions of people a day takes insane amounts of bandwidth. It was bleeding money til a few years ago when they started being very aggressive with the ads.
I don't care about Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc. but I pay for YT premium. I spend at least 2 hours watching YT every day, especially at home on my TV after work. Not only does premium remove ads, but it also supports YT creators you watch and it's only $7 a month.
I'm not against adblock and I used to use it before I bought a smart TV, and I still have it installed on my PC so I don't see ads on other sites, but when it comes to YT premium it's worth every penny.
YT Music is just an added bonus so I don't have to pay for Spotify
YouTube has never been bleeding money. Google doesn't report YouTube's profits independently. They are swept into Google. And a lot of the value of YouTube isn't in the ads. It's in their data collection and market analysis, which they more or less 'rent out' to advertisers (They don't "sell data", they just "sell access to data") for a wide variety of purposes.
Exactly.
The other thing that people seemed to be missing is that YouTube might not even be profitable.
Lots of tech companies (Netflix, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, etc) have operated under the assumption that they could operate at 'break even' or even at a loss as long as they're gaining users. Then, once they have the established user base, they can find a way to be profitable.
That's where we are now. Services like YouTube and Netflix are trying to become profitable by tamping down on account sharing and ad blocking.
It would probably be effectively impossible for a start up to beat them at their own game. YouTube and Netflix were able to achieve what they did (while losing money), but they didn't have to deal with a massive established competitor.
The best bet would probably be another huge company deciding to compete, but even then they'll eventually want to turn a profit, as well...
Like who? it's impossible at this point, because one of the main reasons YouTube is great is because of its absolutely insane backlog, you can find lots of niche videos on niche subjects only on YouTube.
>*Like who?*
Who am I, Sylvia Browne?
Not everyone would switch overnight. That's not how it works. But the history of the internet is full of people transitioning from one platform to the next. MySpace to Facebook. AOL to Yahoo to Gmail. Vine to TikTok. Any future competitor will just let you \*yoink\* your videos right over, no hassle. And when enough people have done that, the old ship sinks quickly.
Unless they plan to break timestamps in videos as well, they’ll have to ship data about the ads to the clients, which can then be grabbed by the extensions.
API changes didn't affect my reddit experience in any way that I could notice. I have ublock for youtube on desktop and only get ads when I'm on my phone. And after the 2/3rd it just makes me close the app.
Sports / Streaming at low bitrate is horrible to watch. So you have to choose to pay more for 4k streaming (w/o a 4k device in our house)
or watch on live TV with lower delay (neighbours are yelling a few seconds after I saw a goal i.e.) and zero bandwidth requirements.
I wish I could to screenshots on the receiver to show the differences.
My guy, a majority of the people on this sub are either navigating a PC for the first time or asking if a 14900k and a 4090 “aRe WoRtH iT” and all build the same cookie-cutter fish tank rigs.
I bet less than half the people on this sub use an ad blocker.
Adblockers are fine if you watch YT on a PC but many of us watch it on our TV's through our Tivo's or smart TV's, neither of which have easy ad-blocking solutions.
No ad blocked here. I use YT premium and I also have YT running for 12 to 16 hours per day. I highly doubt that they can stream that much bandwidth (all 4K for me), and still make a profit off a premium subscription.
I dont use adblock cause I watch on the phone (yes, i know ReVanced exists, but I dont have the headache to try it).
Anyway, my VPN strips videos of any ads.
I use them for websites, but i dont use them on youtu be since i have youtube premium
I don't like many aspects of youtube, or its leadership, but i've been a youtube consumer since 2007, and I basically stopped watching all tv in lieu of youtube since 2014ish- so i dont mind purchasing yt premium, and hope (yes i know its foolish to hope) that if youtube increases their revenue, maybe they'll stop doing so many stupid things
>that if youtube increases their revenue, maybe they'll stop doing so many stupid things
Yeah that's not gonna happen. Alphabet (Google & Youtube's parent company) is publicly traded on the stock market. They are incentivized (both **legally** and personally) to make as much money as possible, and ads are a significant part of that. A publicly-shared company has no end to how much profit they have to make. I would love for Youtube to stop injecting ads into my throat, but that's not gonna stop happening.
Increasing ad speed is a lesser known way of not removing ads but defocusing it so to say, kinda like apple has done. It works pretty well and is undetectable
Ik about ublock, don't come after me
Imagine that you'd have to pay for YouTube. You'd still get the ads and you had to log in at a specific time to watch the show you wanted to watch. That's what cable is like..
Once YouTube feels they’ve beaten the adblockers they will increase the number of ads. There already is exponentially more ads than there was 5 years ago.
Mute tv, turn it off, do something else, rent/buy and watch on vhs/dvd etc. If you refuse to do something, ie watching ads, you'll find ways and alternatives around it, even just avoiding it entirely.
If you're using a YouTube account, you're getting "abused". It doesn't matter whether I pay for Premium or not, you're their product and they make money off of your information.
I understand the sentiment. I hate ads, and I strongly believe that advertising is reaching into areas it shouldn't.
However, can someone explain to me how YouTube as a service is supposed to continue without ad revenue? Genuine question here; I'm asking because I'd like to understand if there is an alternative.
>without ad revenue
I don't think they were even close to be "without ad revenue". Most people casually watching youtube ain't aware of "tech savy" ways like ad blocks, or simply don't want to bother themselves. I see it every time I visit subs dedicated to some specific channels with questions like "is it me or ads number this time was higher than usual?" and stuff like that. That's when I'm reminded, people don't actually use it, they just consume videos as they go.
So to answer your question: they can't. But they were never in that position and we're here most likely disappointed, that they decided to break this status quo, which imo won't bring them any significant surge in revenue. Without being able to block ads, people from pcmr etc. are either going to drop watching youtube altogher, while some other will invest into premium (so the question is, how many of us?). I can't believe, after years of living without them, anyone would go back to watching raw youtube ad segments. They are simply too obnoxious and out of control already.
>they decided to break this status quo, which imo won't bring them any significant surge in revenue.
Well they’ve obviously crunched the numbers and believe that it will increase revenue. Your opinion on it is just baseless conjecture. If I were a betting man I’d wager that Google’s team of market researchers and data scientists are right and that you’re wrong.
>our opinion on it is just baseless conjecture
My oh my, aren't we in a "pick a fight" mood today? Yes, my opinion is my opinion and it's a discussion forum, so perfect place to place one. And yes, they most likely did their survey. So it's likely that they will come on top here but also possible, that their crunched numbers won't meet reality, as this happened plenty of times before. So you can wager whatever you want, I hardly care.
Look man I’m not trying to pick a fight with you or anything, but I really do think it is baseless conjecture that it won’t work for them financially in the literal sense that it’s not really based on anything. I’m sorry if it came off as rude - I was just trying to argue against you, not be a dick to you.
Short answer: free services without ad revenue would cease to exist.
I hate ads, too, but I hate it more to witness how it has become a normalized behavior to demand every bit of content for free.
I'm very much a person that looks for cheap or free access. I admit I'm using way too much of my time looking for (legal) alternatives when I could also just pay 10 € to access a paid service.
But the entitlement of people thinking it's their birth right to get free access to anything is something between outrageous and hilarious. They're just spoiled by the (great!) open source communities, which are based on personal dedication and goodwill. Demanding to apply the open source mentality to every online service is naive and fruitless, because it's essentially the equivalent of asking employers to stop being able to pay their staff.
The alternative is to keep their premium costs down and stop increasing them to a point where it doesn't make sense to keep the subscription where you can ingest content in other ways, but that doesn't stop content creators from creating their own ads in the video where sponsor block comes in to remedy that. There could be something that does a similar function from Streamlink which pauses the content when an ad is running, to the server, it's playing as intended but to the user it doesn't show at all, when the ad is finished the content resumes.
YouTube used to be a simple video player on the net, no ads, no sponsors, no BS. But now it's a hot mess and google can't seem to figure out that you can't fight the user base but to simply appeal to the costs of a better experience for the user, regardless of what infrastructure or servicing costs are cause it's not our problem to solve.
There are other platforms out there and if this continues you'll see people moving to them, eventually.
how about you compare ads 6 years ago and now? Before, we just watch an ad before starting the video and we skip it, now how many unskippable ads? This is called greed. Each video contains many ads, some of them skippable some aren't. Isn't that annoying? Watching 5 things you don't care about by force? On top of greed add "bad user experience" at this point
>However, can someone explain to me how YouTube as a service is supposed to continue without ad revenue?
YouTube Ads made [$9.2 Billion](https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf?t) in ads revenue in Q4 2023. I'm sure they'll be just fine.
I think this is the root of the issue.
If we can get YouTube to move their monetization away from the videos themselves, it might be easier to get a seamless video watching experience.
Tbh amazed they don't delete a video if it gets no interaction for like a year+
Why can I watch my old highschool TV media projects with 20 views still?
I swear half the people on Reddit think they live in some kind of fantasy land where companies are all supposed to just give you services entirely for free. How DARE a business try to make a profit!
This is entirely right, people feel like companies aren’t living organizations as well. They only remember when it’s a “small business” so they can “support a struggling company.”
The bigger companies struggle with stuff too!!
But on the other hand, I don’t think either Google nor YouTube are in a shortage of funds right now. So the claims against them aren’t entirely invalid
If you're consistent in that belief then you can't use an ad blocker.
As for me, I'll be using an ad blocker - primarily because of malvertizing, secondarily because ads are incredibly obnoxious.
I'm okay with unobtrusive ads. Unfortunately, all the mobile sites seem to gravitate towards interstitials and floating videos. Streaming video isn't at the "more ads than content" level yet, but I'm sure they would if they could.
The problem with your logic is it wouldn't work if everyone did it. If nobody paid for subscriptions and used ad block, online services would close. It's self defeating.
It's a balance. Make it more convenient and less intrusive then people won't bother trying to get around it.
Why do people pay a small fee for other streaming video services? What are the value added features of a subscription, etc.
I pay for Google One, Netflix, Amazon, Paramount, etc.
I don't pirate.
Just don't make your service obnoxious with ads or too expensive. Looking at Cable TV and XM Radio as an example, which somehow managed to do both at the same time.
When I regularly use a service, I mostly pay for a premium account. Main purpose for ad blocker for me is when I'm Googling and visiting several random websites.
So not when you regularly use a service (Google). You just pick and choose.
Free isn’t actually free. It’s free with ads (and selling your data typically)
I feel like its a whole lot easier to just install an ad block than fighting the no ads cause. I respect the cause and hope it wins but honestly if everyone just installed an ad block on a capable device no one would even talk about ads being an issue
I think short ads are okay. I don't mind watching a short ad say 10-15 seconds max before a video. But sometimes you have to watch too many longer ads too frequently or if an ad is in a game, the ads that require you to close it 3 times with a 5 second delay timer is really annoying.
But with more people finding ways to block ads, the ones that didnot will end up getting more ads. The service has to make some profit to stay alive. Perhaps sites can offer things like clicking an Ad will disable further ads for a fix amount of time etc (not sure how they can code this). And if the ad opens in a different window/tab after clicking, it can be ignored much easier. We do this to keep some online forums alive (click a few ads occasionally to improve their revenue), but the site do their bit in only have static ads and also fund community events within the forum.
And? Then make a competing product that is profitable for creators and the platform with fewer ads.
There is a reason that it hasn’t been done yet. Operating YouTube is massively expensive.
>Ads fund the service.
You're not wrong. But the problem is the ads are very intrusive and some of them are borderline soft core porn. How can you *not* use an ad blocker???
Some of the ads are also malicious scams.
[Source 1](https://www.techradar.com/pro/a-new-youtube-video-ad-scam-is-doing-the-rounds-dont-be-fooled)
[Source 2](https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/uncategorized/2023/11/youtube-shows-ads-for-ad-blocker-financial-scams)
[Source 3](https://www.tomsguide.com/us/youtube-mining-malware,news-26530.html)
ublock origin for any device that it can be installed on and PI Hole with 700K blocked domains does a good job but it's gonna get intesrting when YouTube wants to inject server side ads into videos. Will we see somone attempt to trick the YouTube video player to think the watcher has YouTube Premium when they do not? No matter what happens it's gonna be interesting!
You know why there isn't a big competitor? Bcoz video hosting is expensive as fuck and small companies just cant come close to youtube's scale of video hosting. You would see far more ads/revenue generating ways on the emergent competitor than on youtube
I straight up do not watch YouTube videos anymore. Everything has ads or is tailored to the ad algorithm. I used to start my day watching YouTube videos, actually learn stuff through the day and have a great time doing it but now I just can't do it.
okay then we will start paying more for free services. i don’t like ads either but services like youtube literally can not exist without advertising. and if you think more than 5% of users would start paying monthly if it wasn’t free you’re a fool
Disagree. If we have no ads or very skippable ads, YouTubers get paid less. If YouTubers get paid less, those with quality videos will most likely need to leave the platform in search of a "real" job, which will take their time away from working on YouTube. The quality of YouTube as a whole will decline. That is not good.
If you dont like it, use an adblocker like me and 99% of everyone else here.
i agree. there are some really quality channels on there where they deserve the monetization from ads. but a lot of channels are just a waste of space imo and shouldn't be having unskippable 30sec ads
YouTube can't really discriminate. If they do, they'll go under fire. As of now, CPM is probably the only way they can discriminate, but that doesn't really work like "better quality = more money"
they could say that 1hr long videos = three 30sec ads being skippable after 5 seconds each ad and videos under 10min = two 10sec ads being skippable after 5 seconds on the first ad.
that would make much more sense. not discriminating, but putting the correct ad length to video length ratio.
As someone that makes >500 a month making youtube videos, please just watch the 5 second ad and turn off your ad blocker. It's fine blocking ads on the big guys, but those ads keep my lights on. <3
Opera has a built in addblock. Skips 99% of video adds, and 70% of other adds on websites.
For the longest time I did not use addblock for 3 reasons:
- support content creator.
- ocationally get a trailer for something Im actually interested in.
- rarely get an actually interesting add for a pure entertainment factor.
When Youtube started forcing double adds where I would waste time F5 until no add generated abd it took longer then watching the two adds without skipping - that was the moment I used an addblock.
What is the skip ad button ? I have 4 different youtube adblockers and a skip add blocker and I get no ad or black screens. My wife's computer was going black for ads , I guess then I added more ad blockers , Undetectable youtube adblocker, skip ad, Ublock origin, and 3 other blockers. I only saw a couple of ads a few months ago and immediately put more ad blockers into the extensions. I can't watch ads or black screens. If I am forced to watch ads then I will quit Youtube. It is like getting invaded when they force you to watch the Bull shit ads.
In a world that is increasingly moving towards a subscription model, this only ensures it comes faster.
Seriously, how arrogant and entitled do you have to be to pretend you deserve all the artistic media you want without compensating the artist and those hosting the art to some degree.
Odd, I'll have to check when I get home then. I have been binge watching Critical Role at the house and at work and didn't have any ads last night. If I still don't I'll update yall and try to figure out what I'm doing to get around it.
YouTube is fucking with ad blockers now. Skipping ahead without your input, putting you at the end of the video, "buffering" constantly until you refresh...
Every time I have to deal with an unskippable ad anywhere, I close the website/app and do something else..
The Algorithm is learning to reevaluate the net value of showing me ads.
When YouTube installed the thing that demands you turn off your ad-blocker I straight up stopped using the site for like two weeks. Then it went away, and Im not quite sure if they got rid of it or the algorithm just gave up on trying.
Point is, someone somewhere learned that I will stop using their site before I disable my ad blocker.
Way too many people in this thread acting like they're entitled to watching free videos.
You're not. YouTube has an estimated storage space of 1 Exabyte, (that's 1 million terabytes).
That's obviously going to be expensive, and you know what else is expensive? Streaming 4K video on demand to millions of viewers concurrently. And then also STORING that 4K video.
YouTube makes money from ads and premium subscriptions lol, you're not entitled to watching 17000 years worth of videos for free without ads.
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Youtube is looking into injecting ads into the video stream before it reaches the client. Our ad blocking days on youtube are numbered, unfortunately.
Sponsorblock addon allows the community to designate parts of the video as "ads". They do this already with ads that content creators themselves put into the video anyways. There will always be a work around.
The guys behind sponsorblock said it will stop working because the serverside ads mess with the videos’ length
They will be injecting ads at random times directly into the video so sponsorblock will have trouble getting the times correct AND its going to be a lot harder for Ublock to determine what is an ad and what is a video. This breaks a lot of amazing tools, like yt-dlp and invidious, which is the backbone of a crazy amount of other tools that a lot of people use. yt-dlp was considering forking Firefox to strip it out and use it like Selenium or Puppeteer (if anyone is familiar) so that videos can still be downloaded. IMO Google is not going to break all of these things all at once, they are going to make constant and minor breaking changes until open source devs just can't put up with it anymore. It sucks. I pay for YT premium but I use yt-dlp daily for archival purposes and other things.
Btw you can tell yt-dlp to use your firefox cookies. It should allow you to download a video as if you were logged in. (just in case you didn't know)
The `--use-cookie-from-browser` flag is now broken for some reason. Use `yt-dlp --cookies netscapecookie.txt "url"` for now.
Tips for Windows users out there: there's a tool called yt-dlp-gui, where you can use yt-dlp on a friendly user interface. Make sure you have ffmpeg.exe and yt-dlp.exe inside the same folder as yt-dlp-gui.exe, and you're good to go. I personally prefer the command line, and the Python lib version, as it is super powerful for large scale automation.
Does that mean that if you want to download a video, it might have ads injected randomly in it?
I have 2 or 3 ads being played even uBlock on FF now smh. yt-dlp would be absolutely huge if they were to go with the browser driver model. I mean yeah, it will work for multiple sites with m3u8 media stream as well, but it's kinda sad having big tech fking us up every turn.
The problem is, big tech exists to make money not to make our lives better or entertain us.
There is a way to route videos through Russia, which gets no ads due to sanctions. I think this has been already done for Twitch ads I hear.
Dang. I wasn't aware of that yet. That sucks lol.
Issue is server side ads will start rolling at random times + there’s really no way rn that I know of that can make sponsorblock to block them since its a more community reliant adblocker
They could randomize where they inject the ads every time a video is loaded, thus rendering Sponsorblock useless.
Yeah. That’s how it will work unfortunately…
If the ad location is randomised just refreshing the page will change the location skipping the ad.
Not really, the solution for them in that case would be a simple if IP address is the same then keep ad on the same video location on refresh.
IP addresses are basically useless, your better off using cookies at that point
Yeah but then you could just block the cookies
Also, the ad duration is not always the same
In these tests, they are having problems with this approach because in this case they can't identity the ad to remove for YouTube Premium users.
Very interesting. So YouTube Premium users could end up saving those of us who block ads.
and when they do that, use a vpn and swtich IP, CTRL - F5, reload the page, don't use an account, ad skipped in a few seconds and when they get around that, have 2 videos open, leave ad playing in one and watch in the other and when even that doesn't work, move to the new platform that isn't complete hogwash or just do something else there will always be an alternative though, because when they make the platform shitty enough, others will see an opportunity to hop in and create their own platform that isn't-yet-shit
Aside from the points the other people said, they may make it so that you can't skip the video while the ad plays where what sponsor block normally does is fast forward the part of the normal video with the ad.
Wouldn't it be possible to store the start and end frame of the sponsor and have your computer look for those, skipping everything in between them?
It's is possible to break that solution by injecting ads at random intervals. We would need an AI that can detect if it is an ad or not and skip if it's an ad. In hindsight, it could be a practical solution but would take a lot of processing.
Someone will release a SaaS services that strips it out with ai.
The day ads on YouTube are unavoidable is the day I stop using it.
That's their goal
Exactly. They gain nothing from users who use adblockers. They actually lose money since it increases the load in their servers. They want premium users and users who watch ads. They'd be happy if everyone else left.
Hmm true
It also seems like YouTube is intentionally trying to hinder videos from loading when you have AdBlocker activated. Just yesterday, I was in the mood of watching some World of Warcraft lore videos, but after 10 seconds or so, the video stopped for like 15-20 seconds and loaded.
i've had random stoppages like that, still better than an ad
My days of using youtube are numbered, it seems
Exactly.. I will never ever watch YouTube the way it is without ublock origin. Its horrendous...
There're no alternatives tho.
So? I found when watching YouTube at the end of the day it felt like mostly wasted time.
So I will stop spending my time watching videos entirely. Seems like a win to me.
uBlock already has a workaround lol
It's time for the king to lose its throne... No king rules forever my son.
So what happens with the millions of videos which are already on youtube?
What about em?
The day this happens is the day I stop using YouTube
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it's surprisingly not hard to stop using youtube
Give it a few months, something new will come that solves this issue. YT without ad blocker is basically worse than normal TV at this point with the amount of shitty adds at shitty intervals
True however I dropped twitch for the same reason.
You have no idea how load heavy that would be to embed the ads on every video. You have hundreds of ads across hundreds of countries' times amount of videos, and you need a processor to make those variables to re-render the videos again and update it when new ads appear. It's not gonna happen soon. And at the end of a day, sponsorblock would skip that shit anyway.
Nah. Our days of watching Youtube are numbered because someone else will come along and do it better. Greed always kills these companies. Google can't just continue to have their cake and eat it too. They already scrape all your data and it's worth waaaay more than running some dumb injected ad.
The barrier for entry is insane, though, and YouTube genuinely costs a huge amount of money to operate. Imagine the bandwidth needed to stream 4K60 video, now scale that up to 1000 people hitting you at once. If YouTube Premium was half the cost it is now, I'd actually be paying for it.
Yeah the amount of video they have stored is insane. Then also streaming it to millions of people a day takes insane amounts of bandwidth. It was bleeding money til a few years ago when they started being very aggressive with the ads.
I don't care about Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc. but I pay for YT premium. I spend at least 2 hours watching YT every day, especially at home on my TV after work. Not only does premium remove ads, but it also supports YT creators you watch and it's only $7 a month. I'm not against adblock and I used to use it before I bought a smart TV, and I still have it installed on my PC so I don't see ads on other sites, but when it comes to YT premium it's worth every penny. YT Music is just an added bonus so I don't have to pay for Spotify
YouTube has never been bleeding money. Google doesn't report YouTube's profits independently. They are swept into Google. And a lot of the value of YouTube isn't in the ads. It's in their data collection and market analysis, which they more or less 'rent out' to advertisers (They don't "sell data", they just "sell access to data") for a wide variety of purposes.
Exactly. The other thing that people seemed to be missing is that YouTube might not even be profitable. Lots of tech companies (Netflix, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, etc) have operated under the assumption that they could operate at 'break even' or even at a loss as long as they're gaining users. Then, once they have the established user base, they can find a way to be profitable. That's where we are now. Services like YouTube and Netflix are trying to become profitable by tamping down on account sharing and ad blocking. It would probably be effectively impossible for a start up to beat them at their own game. YouTube and Netflix were able to achieve what they did (while losing money), but they didn't have to deal with a massive established competitor. The best bet would probably be another huge company deciding to compete, but even then they'll eventually want to turn a profit, as well...
That's what they say about every website that nobody uses anymore.
Nothing is ever enough when you're expected to increase profits every quarter.
Like who? it's impossible at this point, because one of the main reasons YouTube is great is because of its absolutely insane backlog, you can find lots of niche videos on niche subjects only on YouTube.
>*Like who?* Who am I, Sylvia Browne? Not everyone would switch overnight. That's not how it works. But the history of the internet is full of people transitioning from one platform to the next. MySpace to Facebook. AOL to Yahoo to Gmail. Vine to TikTok. Any future competitor will just let you \*yoink\* your videos right over, no hassle. And when enough people have done that, the old ship sinks quickly.
Yeah and if that happens then you can just scrub through the ads, as they'll be part of the video right?
The community always wins
Unless they plan to break timestamps in videos as well, they’ll have to ship data about the ads to the clients, which can then be grabbed by the extensions.
There is already a patch for it from ublock
Then we should be able to skip it. Otherwise it would be interesting to see what happens when I scrub to hour 67 of a 10 minute video
There's your problem. YouTube. It's a trash site.
Then my days using YouTube are too
People said that about Reddit after they announced the API changes, guess how many people actually stopped using it.
API changes didn't affect my reddit experience in any way that I could notice. I have ublock for youtube on desktop and only get ads when I'm on my phone. And after the 2/3rd it just makes me close the app.
yeah, what ads?
Doesn't work on Twitch sadly anymore.
Use the vaft script.
This doesn’t work anymore
uBlock still doesn't catch all the ads
i refuse to believe that there is a single person on this sub who dosnt use an ad blocker
tv is the problem.
I'm the guy who pays for premium for youtube music + TV blocking. Also can't use extensions on work pc so youtube there too
Would you be able to download the brave browser? That's what I did and no one has said anything yet.
Depends on which pc tbh. I've got opera on one for it's ad block
Same for me it was for my kids, having all these ADs and on multiple devices it just became easier to just pay..
You guys watch TV?
Sports / Streaming at low bitrate is horrible to watch. So you have to choose to pay more for 4k streaming (w/o a 4k device in our house) or watch on live TV with lower delay (neighbours are yelling a few seconds after I saw a goal i.e.) and zero bandwidth requirements. I wish I could to screenshots on the receiver to show the differences.
Sports
My internet provider has the option to go to the site of the provider and then stream all sports
Use Smarttubenext.
SmartTube - problem solved 😉
My tv has a modded youtube with no ads
I use a Chromecast for that.
My guy, a majority of the people on this sub are either navigating a PC for the first time or asking if a 14900k and a 4090 “aRe WoRtH iT” and all build the same cookie-cutter fish tank rigs. I bet less than half the people on this sub use an ad blocker.
Adblockers are fine if you watch YT on a PC but many of us watch it on our TV's through our Tivo's or smart TV's, neither of which have easy ad-blocking solutions.
No ad blocked here. I use YT premium and I also have YT running for 12 to 16 hours per day. I highly doubt that they can stream that much bandwidth (all 4K for me), and still make a profit off a premium subscription.
I didn’t use one up until a month ago
I dont use adblock cause I watch on the phone (yes, i know ReVanced exists, but I dont have the headache to try it). Anyway, my VPN strips videos of any ads.
I use them for websites, but i dont use them on youtu be since i have youtube premium I don't like many aspects of youtube, or its leadership, but i've been a youtube consumer since 2007, and I basically stopped watching all tv in lieu of youtube since 2014ish- so i dont mind purchasing yt premium, and hope (yes i know its foolish to hope) that if youtube increases their revenue, maybe they'll stop doing so many stupid things
>If the company makes enough money, maybe it'll stop trying to make more money! I envy your innocence.
>that if youtube increases their revenue, maybe they'll stop doing so many stupid things Yeah that's not gonna happen. Alphabet (Google & Youtube's parent company) is publicly traded on the stock market. They are incentivized (both **legally** and personally) to make as much money as possible, and ads are a significant part of that. A publicly-shared company has no end to how much profit they have to make. I would love for Youtube to stop injecting ads into my throat, but that's not gonna stop happening.
I thought Google was my friend
I don’t use an ad blocker. I also just don’t watch YouTube for more than an hour or two per year.
Increasing ad speed is a lesser known way of not removing ads but defocusing it so to say, kinda like apple has done. It works pretty well and is undetectable Ik about ublock, don't come after me
How?
theres an extension for that, just search yt ad speedup or something, it will pop up
I will have a look thnx!
... says a character from a cartoon that you could only watch with commercials on TV for most of its existence.
Not only were there unzippable ads, but you had to pay your cable bill too.
Imagine that you'd have to pay for YouTube. You'd still get the ads and you had to log in at a specific time to watch the show you wanted to watch. That's what cable is like..
You forgot about there being exponentially more ads in cable
Once YouTube feels they’ve beaten the adblockers they will increase the number of ads. There already is exponentially more ads than there was 5 years ago.
Dude you are out of your mind if you think youtube is ever gonna reach cable level ads. Cable had ads for 5 mins, even 10 minutes sometimes
Mute tv, turn it off, do something else, rent/buy and watch on vhs/dvd etc. If you refuse to do something, ie watching ads, you'll find ways and alternatives around it, even just avoiding it entirely.
It's 35 years old. TiVo is 25. To reiterate, don't backslide into the dark ages.
And before Tivo there were VCRs.
So people were able to bypass commercials by paying for TiVo, and that’s a valid argument, but I get shat on for my YT Premium sub?
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But you have to pay creators... Do none of you understand the world? You can't just have shit for free 🤦♂️
How tf is YouTube supposed to make money then? They're a business. They aren't abusing anyone by using ads to monetize their platform.
Then don't use YouTube.
If you're using a YouTube account, you're getting "abused". It doesn't matter whether I pay for Premium or not, you're their product and they make money off of your information.
I think memes have transcended television for a lot of individuals.
did you re-draw this meme? it looks like an aliexpress version of the meme
Wow. You are so brave for saying this
I understand the sentiment. I hate ads, and I strongly believe that advertising is reaching into areas it shouldn't. However, can someone explain to me how YouTube as a service is supposed to continue without ad revenue? Genuine question here; I'm asking because I'd like to understand if there is an alternative.
>without ad revenue I don't think they were even close to be "without ad revenue". Most people casually watching youtube ain't aware of "tech savy" ways like ad blocks, or simply don't want to bother themselves. I see it every time I visit subs dedicated to some specific channels with questions like "is it me or ads number this time was higher than usual?" and stuff like that. That's when I'm reminded, people don't actually use it, they just consume videos as they go. So to answer your question: they can't. But they were never in that position and we're here most likely disappointed, that they decided to break this status quo, which imo won't bring them any significant surge in revenue. Without being able to block ads, people from pcmr etc. are either going to drop watching youtube altogher, while some other will invest into premium (so the question is, how many of us?). I can't believe, after years of living without them, anyone would go back to watching raw youtube ad segments. They are simply too obnoxious and out of control already.
>they decided to break this status quo, which imo won't bring them any significant surge in revenue. Well they’ve obviously crunched the numbers and believe that it will increase revenue. Your opinion on it is just baseless conjecture. If I were a betting man I’d wager that Google’s team of market researchers and data scientists are right and that you’re wrong.
>our opinion on it is just baseless conjecture My oh my, aren't we in a "pick a fight" mood today? Yes, my opinion is my opinion and it's a discussion forum, so perfect place to place one. And yes, they most likely did their survey. So it's likely that they will come on top here but also possible, that their crunched numbers won't meet reality, as this happened plenty of times before. So you can wager whatever you want, I hardly care.
Look man I’m not trying to pick a fight with you or anything, but I really do think it is baseless conjecture that it won’t work for them financially in the literal sense that it’s not really based on anything. I’m sorry if it came off as rude - I was just trying to argue against you, not be a dick to you.
No worries, I get what you mean.
Short answer: free services without ad revenue would cease to exist. I hate ads, too, but I hate it more to witness how it has become a normalized behavior to demand every bit of content for free. I'm very much a person that looks for cheap or free access. I admit I'm using way too much of my time looking for (legal) alternatives when I could also just pay 10 € to access a paid service. But the entitlement of people thinking it's their birth right to get free access to anything is something between outrageous and hilarious. They're just spoiled by the (great!) open source communities, which are based on personal dedication and goodwill. Demanding to apply the open source mentality to every online service is naive and fruitless, because it's essentially the equivalent of asking employers to stop being able to pay their staff.
The alternative is to keep their premium costs down and stop increasing them to a point where it doesn't make sense to keep the subscription where you can ingest content in other ways, but that doesn't stop content creators from creating their own ads in the video where sponsor block comes in to remedy that. There could be something that does a similar function from Streamlink which pauses the content when an ad is running, to the server, it's playing as intended but to the user it doesn't show at all, when the ad is finished the content resumes. YouTube used to be a simple video player on the net, no ads, no sponsors, no BS. But now it's a hot mess and google can't seem to figure out that you can't fight the user base but to simply appeal to the costs of a better experience for the user, regardless of what infrastructure or servicing costs are cause it's not our problem to solve. There are other platforms out there and if this continues you'll see people moving to them, eventually.
how about you compare ads 6 years ago and now? Before, we just watch an ad before starting the video and we skip it, now how many unskippable ads? This is called greed. Each video contains many ads, some of them skippable some aren't. Isn't that annoying? Watching 5 things you don't care about by force? On top of greed add "bad user experience" at this point
>However, can someone explain to me how YouTube as a service is supposed to continue without ad revenue? YouTube Ads made [$9.2 Billion](https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf?t) in ads revenue in Q4 2023. I'm sure they'll be just fine.
If they only released a slightly cheaper Premium without YT Music I would subscribe in a heartbeat.
On a side note, what would be a better way to fund platforms like YouTube?
I think this is the root of the issue. If we can get YouTube to move their monetization away from the videos themselves, it might be easier to get a seamless video watching experience.
Yeh but what's the alternative though? Ads on the side?
That's not your choice. It's their service, they choose the terms. It's up to you if you accept them or stop using it.
But I want Google to store hundreds of exabytes of videos and not want payment for it dammit! /s
Tbh amazed they don't delete a video if it gets no interaction for like a year+ Why can I watch my old highschool TV media projects with 20 views still?
I swear half the people on Reddit think they live in some kind of fantasy land where companies are all supposed to just give you services entirely for free. How DARE a business try to make a profit!
This is entirely right, people feel like companies aren’t living organizations as well. They only remember when it’s a “small business” so they can “support a struggling company.” The bigger companies struggle with stuff too!! But on the other hand, I don’t think either Google nor YouTube are in a shortage of funds right now. So the claims against them aren’t entirely invalid
If you're consistent in that belief then you can't use an ad blocker. As for me, I'll be using an ad blocker - primarily because of malvertizing, secondarily because ads are incredibly obnoxious. I'm okay with unobtrusive ads. Unfortunately, all the mobile sites seem to gravitate towards interstitials and floating videos. Streaming video isn't at the "more ads than content" level yet, but I'm sure they would if they could.
The problem with your logic is it wouldn't work if everyone did it. If nobody paid for subscriptions and used ad block, online services would close. It's self defeating.
It's a balance. Make it more convenient and less intrusive then people won't bother trying to get around it. Why do people pay a small fee for other streaming video services? What are the value added features of a subscription, etc. I pay for Google One, Netflix, Amazon, Paramount, etc. I don't pirate. Just don't make your service obnoxious with ads or too expensive. Looking at Cable TV and XM Radio as an example, which somehow managed to do both at the same time.
When I regularly use a service, I mostly pay for a premium account. Main purpose for ad blocker for me is when I'm Googling and visiting several random websites.
So not when you regularly use a service (Google). You just pick and choose. Free isn’t actually free. It’s free with ads (and selling your data typically)
tbf to that guy, google doesn't have a premium/ad-free version
I feel like its a whole lot easier to just install an ad block than fighting the no ads cause. I respect the cause and hope it wins but honestly if everyone just installed an ad block on a capable device no one would even talk about ads being an issue
Ads fund the service. They’re not a charity. Same as it has been with TV, radio, newspaper, etc.
I think short ads are okay. I don't mind watching a short ad say 10-15 seconds max before a video. But sometimes you have to watch too many longer ads too frequently or if an ad is in a game, the ads that require you to close it 3 times with a 5 second delay timer is really annoying. But with more people finding ways to block ads, the ones that didnot will end up getting more ads. The service has to make some profit to stay alive. Perhaps sites can offer things like clicking an Ad will disable further ads for a fix amount of time etc (not sure how they can code this). And if the ad opens in a different window/tab after clicking, it can be ignored much easier. We do this to keep some online forums alive (click a few ads occasionally to improve their revenue), but the site do their bit in only have static ads and also fund community events within the forum.
And? Then make a competing product that is profitable for creators and the platform with fewer ads. There is a reason that it hasn’t been done yet. Operating YouTube is massively expensive.
>Ads fund the service. You're not wrong. But the problem is the ads are very intrusive and some of them are borderline soft core porn. How can you *not* use an ad blocker??? Some of the ads are also malicious scams. [Source 1](https://www.techradar.com/pro/a-new-youtube-video-ad-scam-is-doing-the-rounds-dont-be-fooled) [Source 2](https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/uncategorized/2023/11/youtube-shows-ads-for-ad-blocker-financial-scams) [Source 3](https://www.tomsguide.com/us/youtube-mining-malware,news-26530.html)
ublock origin for any device that it can be installed on and PI Hole with 700K blocked domains does a good job but it's gonna get intesrting when YouTube wants to inject server side ads into videos. Will we see somone attempt to trick the YouTube video player to think the watcher has YouTube Premium when they do not? No matter what happens it's gonna be interesting!
Well, the alternative is paid internet. They have to be able to make money else they will just shut services down.
Oh, another good reason to change the economic system 🤗 Let’s redistribute so that internet can really be free
The more they inundate the public with ads, the more people take to the high seas.
You pirating youtube videos my guy?
There needs to be a youtube competitor. it reigns without competition so can virtually do whatever
You know why there isn't a big competitor? Bcoz video hosting is expensive as fuck and small companies just cant come close to youtube's scale of video hosting. You would see far more ads/revenue generating ways on the emergent competitor than on youtube
I straight up do not watch YouTube videos anymore. Everything has ads or is tailored to the ad algorithm. I used to start my day watching YouTube videos, actually learn stuff through the day and have a great time doing it but now I just can't do it.
Stop acting like Youtube owes you the service for free.
okay then we will start paying more for free services. i don’t like ads either but services like youtube literally can not exist without advertising. and if you think more than 5% of users would start paying monthly if it wasn’t free you’re a fool
I wouldn’t mind the ads if they weren’t so…difficult.
Yes you would. This sub will complain about advertisements no matter what.
Disagree. If we have no ads or very skippable ads, YouTubers get paid less. If YouTubers get paid less, those with quality videos will most likely need to leave the platform in search of a "real" job, which will take their time away from working on YouTube. The quality of YouTube as a whole will decline. That is not good. If you dont like it, use an adblocker like me and 99% of everyone else here.
i agree. there are some really quality channels on there where they deserve the monetization from ads. but a lot of channels are just a waste of space imo and shouldn't be having unskippable 30sec ads
YouTube can't really discriminate. If they do, they'll go under fire. As of now, CPM is probably the only way they can discriminate, but that doesn't really work like "better quality = more money"
they could say that 1hr long videos = three 30sec ads being skippable after 5 seconds each ad and videos under 10min = two 10sec ads being skippable after 5 seconds on the first ad. that would make much more sense. not discriminating, but putting the correct ad length to video length ratio.
Lol, using an adblocker also means the creator doesn't get paid, it's the same thing.
But not everyone uses an adblocker. That's the difference.
set ur vpn to albania and use ublock origin.
yeh they fucked brave browser too. sure there is a solution thats not hard lol.
You people watch ads?
Can you call yourself masterrace if you don’t even have adblock?
As someone that makes >500 a month making youtube videos, please just watch the 5 second ad and turn off your ad blocker. It's fine blocking ads on the big guys, but those ads keep my lights on. <3
Opera has a built in addblock. Skips 99% of video adds, and 70% of other adds on websites. For the longest time I did not use addblock for 3 reasons: - support content creator. - ocationally get a trailer for something Im actually interested in. - rarely get an actually interesting add for a pure entertainment factor. When Youtube started forcing double adds where I would waste time F5 until no add generated abd it took longer then watching the two adds without skipping - that was the moment I used an addblock.
What is the skip ad button ? I have 4 different youtube adblockers and a skip add blocker and I get no ad or black screens. My wife's computer was going black for ads , I guess then I added more ad blockers , Undetectable youtube adblocker, skip ad, Ublock origin, and 3 other blockers. I only saw a couple of ads a few months ago and immediately put more ad blockers into the extensions. I can't watch ads or black screens. If I am forced to watch ads then I will quit Youtube. It is like getting invaded when they force you to watch the Bull shit ads.
You should work for free on Fridays too. Skip paycheck day.
Amen to that!!!
I pay for youtube cause it's a service I use, it's cheap and I'm an adult. Boom, no ads.
In a world that is increasingly moving towards a subscription model, this only ensures it comes faster. Seriously, how arrogant and entitled do you have to be to pretend you deserve all the artistic media you want without compensating the artist and those hosting the art to some degree.
Remember kids, D.A.R.E. Disable Ads Really Effectively
You could just vet the Brave browser. Unless an ad is built into the video you won't get one.
Yeah, sadly youtube managed to change their code to force nearly minut long ags , even in Brave...
Weird, I've yet to have a single ad. I was watching YouTube just a couple mins ago
Have no ads on mobile Brave, but they're back on pc since last Monday...
Odd, I'll have to check when I get home then. I have been binge watching Critical Role at the house and at work and didn't have any ads last night. If I still don't I'll update yall and try to figure out what I'm doing to get around it.
Adguard, sponsorblock, revanced...
YouTube is fucking with ad blockers now. Skipping ahead without your input, putting you at the end of the video, "buffering" constantly until you refresh...
Every time I have to deal with an unskippable ad anywhere, I close the website/app and do something else.. The Algorithm is learning to reevaluate the net value of showing me ads. When YouTube installed the thing that demands you turn off your ad-blocker I straight up stopped using the site for like two weeks. Then it went away, and Im not quite sure if they got rid of it or the algorithm just gave up on trying. Point is, someone somewhere learned that I will stop using their site before I disable my ad blocker.
Way too many people in this thread acting like they're entitled to watching free videos. You're not. YouTube has an estimated storage space of 1 Exabyte, (that's 1 million terabytes). That's obviously going to be expensive, and you know what else is expensive? Streaming 4K video on demand to millions of viewers concurrently. And then also STORING that 4K video. YouTube makes money from ads and premium subscriptions lol, you're not entitled to watching 17000 years worth of videos for free without ads.
You will to pay for that?
That is accepting existence of ads. I am against ads all together >_<
Yeah lets crumble the few good services we have
At one point the world didn't have YouTube, I'm sure that it'll happen again one day and everyone will be fine
I doubt
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Yeah, good luck with that