- YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
- Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
- Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I’d rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.
That‘s where Youtube Premium comes into play for many fools who don‘t really know about adblockers. Google‘s goal isn‘t to destroy the website, but to turn it into a much more profitable Netflix subscription based on user generated content. Sadly the enshittification of the biggest video platform will continue because enough people are willing to pay a lot for it. The site will not improve until there are mainstream alternatives that actually take revenue off Youtube.
It’s so bad that I 1) refuse to pay for premium so I don’t enable the behavior and 2) ended up sideloading an alt YouTube app on iOS that just doesn’t display the ads. YouTube hasn’t been able to block that one yet as it spoofs as the original YouTube app. Totally unsanctioned and a pain in the ass to keep the certificate alive but worth it. YouTube is actually enjoyable again. All that because the ads interruptions were constant. If it was every 15 min or so I wouldn’t care, but every 5!? Get the hell out of here!
Same.
I came across someone who uploaded a 90 minute video as an ad as well.
Pro tip, LLMs do an excellent job summarizing YouTube videos now. I’ve never liked YouTube content, the incentives for creators are perverse and discourage conveying accurate information simply in favor of drawing out every video to maximize ad opportunities. About 95% of the content I might have been interested in could have been better conveyed in a 1-2 page blog post and read in 2 minutes instead of stretched out into a 15 minute video. Having a robot summarize that content is so much less irritating.
What do you use for that, fetch the transcript and just feed it to the LLM of your choice? Or are you talking of the actual LLM watching and summarizing?
Google makes enough money evading taxes already. Not gonna help them make more.
I don’t care if you use ad blockers. I get annoyed when people publish articles like… “Google is losing the adblockers war” cause then advertisers are going to start pushing harder for Google to actually prevent adblockers entirely, which they could have done already. Thus far Google, despite issues, does quite a lot of good things… Android is the only open source OS out of Apple & Windows. Android lets you install third party app stores. Chrome (Chromium) is open source… etc.
These users writing this content don’t even develop the apps to block YouTube ads. If you’ve ever explored the APIs by YouTube, then you’d know that Google despite pushing ads for users without blockers, is still rather friendly to third party apps.
It’s only a matter of time until the premium users get ads. Just like Netflix, and cable TV before that. You will inevitably wind up paying to be advertised to.
Netflix has ads now? I thought that was only for their lower tier service? I had to cancel Netflix cause they haven’t came out with two more seasons of Stranger Things yet.
I forgot… where can I get my free data center with petabytes of storage & 300TB/s fiber interconnects?
Is that what they are trying to do? Push crap ads and try to kill adblock to get a little extra user share to pay for yet another subscription?
PS: let me add that I also watch TV and the balance between quality of content and ads and their placement is much better (yes, some countries are worse than others with this). I don’t know what they are doing in youtube ads, but it’s anti-human (not just the ads, but the design too: super slow loading, tricks you into clicking the wrong content). Like they don’t want you to “pay” by watching ads, they want to torture you until you subscribe, go away or get adblock.
I don’t care if you block ads… but to act like Google owes you and that you deserve free content is called entitled.
I’ve had YouTube Premium since the days when it was called YouTube Red, so like a decade. I’ve grown used to not seeing any ads from Google and anytime I watch a video not using my account it’s torture.
Same here. FreeTube for desktop and NewPipe are all you need though if you don’t want to pay and/or have access to music.
As a recent YT premium-tryer, it’s amazing how many ads they put in that aren’t obviously adverts - comparing between non-premium and premium browsing.
Not sure I’ll keep YT premium beyond the free trial, until I find more decent content producers. Even then, it’s skipping those video’s paid promotion segments.
So it’s like paying for a streaming platform to not get ads… But still getting ads
Tubular is newpipe + sponsorblock BTW
I use pipepipe but it’s less stable
legit, if youtube ever beats ublock origin, i’ll just stop watching youtube
Yt-dlp download script + text file with fav channel urls + jellyfin.
No bullshit, saves bandwidth.
Also look into invidious.
Also look into invidious.
And peertube, some content creators also post there, e.g., The Linux Experiment.
They were serving videos with ads spliced in, basically DAI in podcasting industry. I’m not sure how that experiment went, but if that’s how they’d serve the videos, downloaders will have ads embedded as well.
Its an all out assault on half your senses without an adblocker. Literal torture.
