When watching videos yesterday, one Redditor encountered a popup informing them that “Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”. The message offered a button to “Allow YouTube ads” in the person’s ad blocking software and went on to explain that ads make the service free for billions of users and that YouTube Premium offers an ad-free experience. It even provided a button to easily sign up for a YouTube Premium membership.
This was always going to happen.
Ah the ongoing cat and mouse game between ads and ad-blockers. What’s surprising is that youtube has stayed out of it for this long. Frankly the game isn’t going to stop just because youtube says so. but they have a very powerful ace in the hole that no one else does: google controls chrome. There’s ongoing concern over google using their browser position to cripple adblockers and impose restrictions on 3rd party ad blocking.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-still-plans-to-cripple-ad-blocking-in-chrome-but-enterprises-will-be-exempt/
These plans have been delayed, but google’s intention of blocking 3rd party adblocking algorithms is clear and I believe it’s only a matter of time before they do what they said they were going to do.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/chrome-delays-plan-to-limit-ad-blockers-new-timeline-coming-in-march/
Mozilla hasn’t announced any such plans for it’s browser, and it could make firefox the best browser for adblocking in the future, at least assuming it remains a viable browser.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268254/market-share-of-internet-browsers-worldwide-since-2009/
Their 3% market share concerns me, but maybe less effective adblocking in chrome could drive some chrome users back to firefox…? Probably not though.
The best youtube can do to block adblockers, at least in browsers that google does not control like firefox, would be to check that the client is actually downloading all of the ads as though it were showing all the ads. The adblocking software could still hide them client side, but server side youtube would get the same requests whether the ads were shown or not. This has the unfortunate side effect of forcing adblock users to share the bandwidth inefficiencies and interruptions of ads, but at least the users wouldn’t actually have to watch them.
Google pays a lot of money to Mozilla/Firefox, so it will be interesting to see if Firefox can be pushed to move/block in some sense. Especially with Firefox’s less big market share. And if they gain a lot because of allowing the ad-blocker.
Wouldn’t surprise me with the new era of AI competition between Google and Microsoft (and thus threatening Google’s ad-revenue in a big way). If that will influence their decision.
That begs the question /why/ Google gives so much money to Mozilla. Maybe they don’t want to appear as a monopolist and divert critical users to a contained space. Maybe they will allow Firefox users to use ad blockers (3% user base, mostly technical users who don’t want to play along) while the other 97% will enjoy ads…
I actually watch a lot of youtube. Very interested to see how much less I’m willing to watch with ads. Honestly, it’s probably a good thing as I can waste less time in youtube.
This sort of nonsense is why I don’t watch YouTube on anything but my desktop PC with Firefox and I already sometimes bypass Firefox and just “play” the in-progress yt-dlp download I’m making for archival purposes since YouTube is such a hog on my 2012 CPU.
Hell, I’ve been procrastinating two of my favourite podcasts (Skeptoid and It’s (Probably) Not Aliens) for two months now because SponsorBlock (either as a Firefox extension or via yt-dlp’s support for it) has spoiled me so much that I just keep finding excuses not to go back to multi-tasking with one hand hovering over my global hotkeys for the audio player to make sure I don’t hear any sponsor segments.
Given that I’ve always had a policy that, if I can’t archive something, I don’t watch it, and that I actually maintain a blacklist of people/companies who managed to get through my ad-blocking enough that I know their names, I’m certainly not going to make an exception to my “never reward a company for annoying me” policy for Google.
(Hell, I’m actually reminded of an old blog post which makes an interesting argument that forcing people who want to use ad-blockers to watch the ads under protest could be considered defrauding the advertiser, given the likely effect on the viewer’s opinion of the brand.)
On Android I ditched the official YouTube app years ago because the ads were intolerable in many ways. I happened to discover the YouTube Go alternative so I used it for a few years until Google killed it. Then I briefly tried going back to the main app but its quality had deteriorated even further.
Now I only use Firefox to watch YouTube — both on the desktop and phone. Obviously I’m blocking ads and I’d rather stop wasting my time on crap videos than waste even more time with ads.
I don’t think Google will start bullying ad-blocking users quite yet, though, they are merely testing the waters. However, it will be extremely interesting to see how well the dictator of ads can fight adblockers or whether it even has a chance…
sj87,
Yeah, it’s becoming ruined like cable tv.
Adblockers are implicitly detectable as long as they work by blocking the ads from being downloaded at all. But should an arms race take place, it could push adblockers towards stealth operation whereby they become impossible to detect from the server. Stealth adblocking, if it ever comes to it, would download the ads, they just wouldn’t get displayed.
Stealth adblocking also has new consequences from an informational perspective. Today advertisers including youtube know when adblockers are in use, but if things go stealth, they’ll no longer know. Maybe this matters less for pay per click, but for impression based ads, they would have to sell them without knowing if adblockers were used.
I haven’t tested but I would bet that blocking access to content when ads fail to load is not very popular. You know, that failure might be due to the ad server just being down or blocked regionally by an authority. There’s no way to detect a network failure by adblocker from an authentic network failure.
Actually one major reason for me to initially start using an adblocker was that it was always the AD SERVER that was slow to respond and bogged down entire websites. This was back when web browsers sucked at displaying partial webpages when a script file was still loading.
Hiding ads from view should be fairly easy to detect: just check the stylesheets or the HTML structure for changes, although making it harder to work around probably requires solutions tailored for each website separately, which quickly becomes consumes all the profits from having ads in the first place.
sj87,
Yes, that makes sense to me today, but only because ads are typically served from their own dedicated ad servers. This makes it easy to develop blocking policies as well. But as we approach “end game”, they could technically publish the ads and content from the same servers. They could even make it impossible to block using patterns like a regex by allocating ads and content from the same ID pool. This would introduce major new challenges for URL pattern based ad blocking as we know it.
Sure, but a user can fake all of that using client side extensions, and a site like youtube is a huge target for adblocking.
Google’s control on the client side only applies to the chrome browser,. Admittedly that’s a large market-share, but still in other browsers there’s not much they can really do to prevent those determined to use stealth adblocking unless they block everything other than chrome. Someone might even build a special adblocking version of chromium to do it and it would likely pique the interest of people wanting to block ads.
I concede none of this is happening yet, but I’m just thinking along the lines of what could happen if both sides are determined to play this cat and mouse game to the technological conclusion.
No, this is not possible as the ad vendors must be able to audit their clients in case of suspected frauds. It isn’t possible to even verify that any ads were ever served to the user if you don’t distribute that content yourself.
sj87,
Why not? Technically it is possible to serve ads and content from the same server(s). Additionally it is technically possible for the server to track those ads and content regardless of the server.. Even when you are looking at auditing logs, there’s nothing that fundamentally prevents you from doing this from the same set of servers.
Yes I agree. I guess I might be misunderstanding you are getting at. But even if there was a requirement to use a different set of physical servers for ads, this wouldn’t necessarily be apparent on the internet. Large enterprises typically have fast front end gateway servers that take web requests and direct them to the appropriate back end servers such that you can move things around the back end without changing domains/ips/urls on the front end. For example a request to “microsoft.com” could be directed to several special purpose back end servers without web browsers knowing the difference. This could be designed to impede static adblocking lists.
Likewise, but according to articles I read, for most people, what drove them to ad-blocking was the introduction of targeted ads… which makes sense. Creep factor aside, ads are useless in the paradigm of biological signalling theory (i.e. as evidence that the business isn’t a fly-by-night operation) if you can’t trust that they were as expensive and indiscriminate as a peacock’s tail or a buck’s rack. (i.e. “Hey ladies, look how good my genes are! I can survive despite this giant impediment!”)
Targeted advertising has the ad industry in an “all e-mail marketing is spam”-like death spiral where, the better you target, the better you compete in the short term, but the more you doom yourself in the long term.
There really is so much about the world that could be improved by outlawing ad targeting.
I don’t think adblockers do too much to protect your privacy. Ads have nothing to do with privacy breaches really, that’s achieved via tracking cookies etc. that are separate from the ads on your screen.
Besides the big players like Apple, Facebook and Google are able to track their users through how they interact in the web services owned by the same people.
sj87,
I don’t understand why you’d say the two are separate. Ads acts as tracking beacons. Moreover, since most are implemented as javascripts, that opens up privacy and security risks even further than a basic web bug like a “tracking pixel”.
I guess maybe you were talking about 1st party ads? In that case, yeah I’d agree the website owner already has your information. and adblocking first party resources doesn’t provide additional privacy, It’s really the 3rd party ads and trackers that are culprits (think google adsense, google analytics, google captcha, facebook like buttons, etc) that threaten people’s privacy across huge swaths of the internet.
There isn’t quite as much controversy around these companies tracking users of their own services. Personally I am ok with that. But when I’m not even using their services, or when I’ve been forced to use their services through coercion, I say what I do is none of their business and I choose to block their trackers accordingly with no exception for ads.
@Alfman
Analytics, captchas, social media interaction widgets etc. aren’t ads. They’re exactly the thing I was talking about earlier: Google doesn’t do much with the referer URL from their advertising scripts when they’re already using your private information and your identity when delivering said ads to you.
They already know your identity before supplying the first ad to you. It’s much harder, rather virtually impossible, for pure advertisers to ever deduce your identity based on whatever surfhing habits the ad delivery scripts expose of you.
That’s why I don’t see ads as much of a privacy threats.
sj87,
Are you talking strictly about 1st party ads? Because if not, I’m afraid I still don’t follow your rational for excluding ads from privacy concerns. It doesn’t matter if it’s ads, analytics or social media widgets, etc, all of them are effective ways to track you across the web at least when 3rd party cookies aren’t blocked. Even without cookies statistical techniques might enable tracking to a degree.
tinuiti.com/blog/data-privacy/what-is-a-cookie-and-why-are-third-party-cookies-going-away/
coveryourtracks.eff.org/about
amiunique.org/fp
Like doubleclick? Many of these “pure advertisers” have already been bought out and merged into google.
https://techjury.net/blog/gmail-statistics/
Does this mean 61% of 18-29 year olds want google to track every site they go to with google analytics, ads, captchas, etc? No? Well, that’s a good reason to use adblock to protect privacy.
Even if we assume an ad network can’t identify you by themselves, that’s not the equivalent to not being tracked and not being identifiable. For example law enforcement could confiscate your device and compel companies who’ve been tracking you to release your tracking history.
I guess we might end up disagreeing, which is fine, but I agree with ssokolow: adblocking is justified even on privacy grounds alone.
@Alfman Not to mention anti-malware grounds:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-by-rash-of-malicious-ads-spreading-crypto-ransomware/
I’m using “NewPipe” on Android to watch YouTube. It works quite well but you can’t access your YouTube library and Bookmarks which is a bit annoying.
Gotta love the “I’ll never watch ads” people out there. Where is the bandwidth going to come from? I personally block ad scripts on sites other than YouTube on security grounds (websites are free to host their own ads), and on YouTube for convenience since I do very little watching on the desktop (most of my watching is on a Nexus Player) so I guess my minor bandwidth leeching on the desktop is not that important.
The “I’ll never watch ads” crowd has a skewed view of reality, they probably think the bandwidth required to run a site like YouTube is cheap and that a site like YouTube can exist without ads.
BTW if you want to stop wasting your time on crap videos, you can do it right now, you don’t have to wait for Google to block your adblocker. Because by watching the videos, you confirm they have value.
kurkosdr,
As a counter point, the high bandwidth and operating costs born by a service provider are a byproduct of centralization. Prior to the existence and rise of these centralized services, distributing videos to millions was pretty darn easy and cheap using P2P. Almost anyone with an internet connection could do it. It was so easy and accessible that the commercial publishers had to lawyer up and threaten everyone just to keep the public from distributing their content for free. So I don’t particularly sympathize with youtube’s bandwidth costs. They based their model on an an inefficient method of content distribution…that’s on them. To be honest I kind of think the internet has become worse off because of centralized platforms like youtube. If these centralized platforms failed, it wouldn’t mean the end of internet video but rather a newfound focus on decentralized platform innovation instead, which is alright by me.
IMHO the much bigger issue is what happens to the content creators themselves? I do have sympathy for them and they are dependent on advertising too. The elephant in the room is that P2P networks in the past were generally designed to distribute content for free with no consideration for creator compensation, which is a problem. Would a P2P network that compensated creators through ads be viable? I don’t know and the same adblocking debate would get repeated there. Sponsored videos and endorsements could be a better alternative to injected ads. Today we see some youtubers shifting to sponsors & endorsements into their videos and guess what, these don’t get blocked by adblockers and can feel less intrusive as well. It could be better for creators, advertisers, and even the audience than the ad injections that everyone hates.
TLDR; watching ads to fund youtube shouldn’t be a high priority because P2P can do the job without ads, the real issue is funding the actual creators to create content.
Yeah, right… P2P only works when trying to download the latest movie or popular series episode, trying to download old or rare torrents can take days or even weeks, and it requires a PC running 24/7. And even medium-popularity torrents can easily take two or three times as much time to download as to watch them. Which is OK for content that is apriori presumed to be valuable (aka Hollywood movies or popular series) but not for anything else.
Meanwhile on YouTube, no matter how unpopular a video is, it’s always immediately available, and this allows small channels to grow into big channels without an upfront investment from the uploader. Nothing like that has existed before.
kurkosdr,
I don’t deny that’s the case today, but that’s because centralized services have monopolized legal content distribution rights and many of the illegal sharers have been forced to move away from public networks to private underground ones. The degradation you are talking about is real, but it has less to do with P2P as a technology and more to do with social behaviors and manipulation around it. The unauthorized use of P2P makes it legally fraught, with sharers getting take down notices and ISPs disconnecting customers for repeat offenses. I don’t deny any of these social problems that create barriers to adoption, but my point is that technologically speaking, P2P scalability makes it well suited for the problem and with official industry resources going into P2P instead of centralized services we’d actually see more P2P innovation that could make it work even better.
The legal problems notwithstanding, I find it so ironic that today some of the illegal private plex networks have more content than netflix, hulu, apple+, etc. Again this points to social, economic, and legal challenges being a bigger hurdle than technical ones.
I am genuinely confident that we would have more advanced low latency P2P services today if industry had gone in that direction instead. Even a fraction of the countless billions spent on building out centralized providers would have gone further with P2P. The growth of centralized services was (and is) a very expensive inefficient process. But it was done that for their benefit, for their part consumers were happy to embrace P2P before the studios became punitive about it.
Alfman, As much as I want to say it would never work, Peer tube exists. I haven’t used it but people smarter than I have looked into the problem and think they have a solution. So I’d need to dig deeper than my casual understanding of P2P networks to really refute that it wouldn’t work. Payment is another issue I think would be hard to do correctly.
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
@Alfman @Bill Shooter of Bul
If those P2P YouTube alternatives worked reliably enough, they would be widely used because they could be run with minimal advertising. Problem is, they don’t work reliably enough, because most people don’t keep their PCs running 24/7 as servers and don’t fill entire hard drives’ worth of archived free-to-view videos (unless the videos in question are pirated from pay-to-view, in which case they are subject to takedown and hence scarce).
Which means that whether a given video will stream on those peer tube sites is uncertain, which kind of sucks. Most people here don’t know YouTube’s main audience: YouTube’s main audience is not the person who will see a tutorial video once a day and that’s it, but the people who use it as a personalised TV channel, and for that to work, videos have to start streaming immediately so people can watch them as if they were watching TV. I personally would be mad if a wanted to see a bunch of videos back-to-back after work and they didn’t start playing immediately. And even that one tutorial video per day I mentioned above has to start streaming in a reasonable time for the service to be usable, which with P2P is not certain.
kurkosdr,
Obviously I believe P2P is reliable, but there’s a lot that has to happen for a P2P network to become viable for the masses. I see a four way chicken and egg problem between platforms, content producers, advertisers, and users. All of these have to come together simultaneously to create critical mass. A P2P client that doesn’t have content isn’t going to attract users. A P2P client that doesn’t have advertisers isn’t going to attract content producers. A P2P client that doesn’t have users isn’t going to attract advertisers. A P2P client that isn’t supported by the hardware in people’s homes isn’t going to attract users. Etc.
Here’s the thing, there are clearly major stumbling blocks relating to achieving critical mass. And prior to having critical mass, there will be gaps in content, platform support, sponsors, etc. However assuming we could somehow reach critical mass, I assert the P2P network itself wouldn’t be a barrier.
Many people already leave their DVRs on 24/7, but regardless with P2P as more people start demanding a resource, the faster that resource replicates, which is exactly as it should be. P2P is very effective here. As with torrents, the originals should still be kept up though so they don’t disappear in periods of ultra low demand & supply.
I agree the legal takedowns are killing P2P seeders today. that needs a solution, ideally by having more legitimate content producers on P2P.
I think with a bit of innovation P2P could succeed in tackling the latency problem. Both by optimizing the network stack, but also through the use of smart subscriptions that already know the content you’re interested in watching.
No, they have them on standby, and with the increased electricity prices and energy efficiency mandates, whatever DVRs don’t will soon.
For example, my Nexus Player pretends to be always on, but it actually goes on standby.
This is what you people don’t understand: Even if you want to ignore that seeding reduces your upload speed which means worse-quality video calls, you have the problem that seeding consumes electricity. Nobody wants that to seed someone else’s content. It’s the reason people went mad when Microsoft wanted to use their internet connections to seed Windows Updates.
P2P for free-to-view and creative commons content wasn’t killed because of legal action, it was killed because nobody wants to do it.
kurkosdr,
So IMHO P2P DVRs can do the same.
I do understand the bandwidth dynamics very well actually. I used to have the same problem as you with audio/video calls during uploads and it was bad, if I was on a call with a client and uploading files, the call would suffer significant degradation during the upload. So I absolutely hear what you’re saying. But on close investigation the problem is not uploads using bandwidth, at least not directly, the real problem is actually buffer bloat. As upload traffic fills up router or modem buffers, the voip traffic begins to queue, which ruins the calls. There are highly effective fixes for this: priority queues and traffic shaping, both will work depending on what you have available and you will have pristine real time calls while using your upload bandwidth.
It sounds like you’ve experienced this so I highly recommend you look into buffer bloat because odds are that is the real source of the problem. Once you fix that, you can use your upload bandwidth just fine without interruption to your real time calls. I sympathize with the issue, but it is fixable and in a world that had evolved around P2P services rather than centralized ones, everyone’s routers would have been optimized for uploads decades ago and this wouldn’t be a problem.
To be fair, it was more a matter of permission. People shouldn’t be automatically enrolled into seeding microsoft’s wares. But many people are willing to seed the shows they’re watching and moving traffic off the internet backbone onto local networks instead comes with huge bandwidth and cost savings. It’s hard to say for sure what a pro P2P world would have looked like, but arguably it could have resulted in cheaper internet service for many consumers today.
That’s false. Unless you used outside information, you as a user wouldn’t typically know if a download was permitted by the authors or not. Everything you download could be a gamble “is this a trap?” After news coverage of people getting legal demands for thousands of dollars, and knowing it’s just a click away from happening to you too, it’s really no wonder people got scarred.
Honestly though a P2P network with the backing of a popular studio would have been extremely popular! User interest was never a problem for P2P, but the studios followed the money and got in bed with the centralized providers who have the advertising and revenue stream. Then they actively took down P2P content. I wish they had gone in the other direction, but unfortunately piracy got the better of P2P networks. That’s what killed off content producers coming on board, not the P2P technology, which is good.
Honestly, I could do with less content like Simon Whistler’s stable of channels preying on my poor impulse control and addiction to the empty calories version of documentary content so I can spend more time reading, coding, and playing my gargantuan backlog of GOG.com purchases.
It’s hard enough to stick to my efforts to quit fanfiction.
It’s not as if I haven’t been boycotting TV shows and movies since 2005 to make sure I boycott anything MPAA-made in protest of their “censor the Internet. It’ll improve our bottom line” attitude.
I’m not necessarily against ads of all shapes and sizes but the amount being shoved at us these days equals to abuse already. I’ve never had a problem if e.g. cable channel wants to display ads in between shows when I watch live sports, or even a couple ads here and there during a TV movie.
Part of the problem is that in my home country the amount of ads in cable TV is actually restricted by law. Back when I was a kid it used to allow one ad break for every 15 minutes and also the duration of the break was limited. I’ve stopped watching TV (aside from live sports) since but I heard they loosened the rules a bit about 10 years ago.
Americans are probably beaten into submission by now but the hostile nature of modern advertising permits me to protect myself from the abuse.
@Kurkosdr
Yeah, I wonder if some people think that most of the web is just a non=profit public utility and that all those servers, storage, and bandwidth are apparently donated by the ether for free.
Besides, shouldn’t they be just on a modem browsing the text-only web with their turn of the century Windows Boxes, which is apparently how “real” computing is supposed to be like (according to some of the humble brag narratives)?
I guess most people are unaware of the massive costs involved. They think that because YouTube doesn’t pay for content, running a service like YouTube is cheap.
BTW we already have a humble brag of someone using a command line tool as their preferred way of watching YouTube in this very comment section:
Meanwhile, I use Video DownloadHelper when I want to keep a video (rarely on YouTube, but it works on YouTube too), which has a UI and is very easy to use.
I used to use that. I switched to youtube-dl and then yt-dlp because I’m one of those crazy people whose primary form of interaction with his desktop is Yakuake (F12 to show/hide a tabbed terminal) plus heavily-customized Zsh tab completion.
(eg. It’s much quicker to tab-complete my way to something like “~/incoming/Videos/Educational/Decoding the Unknown” than to navigate to it via a Save As dialog and I don’t have to actually wait to load a bloated YouTube video page to start downloading and playing something I see in the related videos sidebar..)
They’re not interested in working for me for free, and I am not interested in working for them for free. E.g. solving Captchas to train their AI. If they want me to do work for them, then they can give me dental insurance, for starters.
This confirms my suspicion that the ad market is getting tighter and tighter for services like YouTube. Up until now, leeches like me stealing Google’s bandwidth without viewing the ads were tolerated (although I personally see YouTube ads on my Nexus Player where I do most of my watching from), but now that money is tighter, this can no longer be tolerated.
If you think about it, services like YouTube have never experienced a bear market before, because there hasn’t been a bear market globally since 2008 (when the whole “user-generated content” business was still experimental). So, it’s interesting to see how they fare now.
BTW as a Greek person, I’ve seen what a bear market and the resulting massive reduction in ad spend can do to heavily ad-dependent industries, with TV channels in Greece in the early 2010s having to run telemarketing ads on near-prime time hours due to lack of better advertisers and the content taking a huge dive. One channel even went completely bankrupt and one other had to restructure as a much smaller channel. That was out of 8 nationwide privately-owned channels btw, so that was 25% of the market.
YouTube doesn’t have content costs, but my prediction is that Google will have to terminate free 4K and run more ads from lower-quality advertisers per video. The real carnage will be on smaller services like image hosting sites and minor social networking sites which are already not turning a profit.
BTW this is why I think Microsoft’s new strategy of pissing on their loyal OS fanbase to chase Google’s ad-supported model is a folly. Steve Ballmer was right all along: A company that relies on ad revenue for most of its income is a house of cards. Too bad he was a crappy CEO otherwise.
To some extent it’s a chicken and egg situation. If YouTube makes a large part of its audience angry and drives them away, that will then lead to decreased “engagement” in video views and comments and stuff like that. This will inevitably show up in the metrics that Google uses for negotiating with its advertisers, and if the ad mafia sees that less people are interested in their content, then they will want to pay less.
The secondary issue could be that many people block ads on their desktop machines but not on their mobile devices, so even people who actively block ads will occasionally contribute back to the ad revenue. Even me, I tried doing this, using the YouTube app on my phone, but I would basically finish taking a shit well before the first batch of ads is done.
The third reason is obviously stiffling competition. Google has enough money to tolerate people who block ads but their tiny competitors most certainly don’t. So if Google allows people to block ads on YouTube, alternative platforms cannot compete with that as they desperately need the money. This prevents any other service from growing up to properly challenge YouTube.
sj87,
+1 very insightful!
I don’t know if this actually factors into google’s thinking, but it makes sense. Google can weather adblocking (at least to an extent) better than competitors, and this is a very real competitive advantage that wouldn’t exist if there were no adblocking at all.
This is different, yet similar, to the argument made about microsoft benefiting from rampant copyright infringement in some foreign countries – better for them to install hugely discounted or pirated versions of windows than to run another OS giving competitors momentum.
Nah. there has always been a cat-mouse dynamic between content providers and ad blockers.
I think one of the issues has to do with the fact that youtube is now a revenue=stream for many content creators. So youtube is enforcing the means by which their professional content suppliers put food on their table, and thus keep the platform viable. They are the middle man, so they need both content creators as well as eyeballs. So they have to make sure they cater to both.
With this and the Musk activity related to Twitter, you can see it won’t be long before all video content becomes user pays.
End users already can opt for user pays Ad free, but you can see Youtube and Twitter will likely become user pays with Ads a plenty! The irony of all those years of Youtube and Twitter lambasting Amazon’s model, now who is laughing?
But much of the Youtube content is published for free, it barely scratches a dent to gain a royalty, but I bet those minority interest videos still attract just as many ads!
Then Youtube should stop Blocking channels then, Taking ad revenue from them, denying them any adsense profits on their videos because of YT Political stance.
On the contrary YouTube is already forcing channels to be monetized. If a certain content creator opts to not do it, YouTube will then enable it anyway and reap all the profits.
People is awfully lazy and stupid to migrate to better alternatives. In a recent similar case related to Facebook blocking content, I said in a group “…and why don’t you start migrating progressively the content to a saner alternative?” I said progressively, let your followers know about it, promote new ways. The answer was “…but dude, thing is that all is in facebook.” What does ALL mean for you?? Your mommy? People really suck, in general they are not more than a bag of sh*t, people in general don’t deserve the tech possibilities we have today.
Ads on YouTube keep getting worse and worse. On some videos there’s like 2 unskippable 20-30 second ads every 5 minutes, which makes the content unwatchable.