In a fight between a corporation and a bunch of people very determined to get content for free, history shows the corporation always loses.
It’s not even that people want stuff “for free.”
I mean… well… who doesn’t love free stuff, but really if the legit product is priced fairly and buying it provides some actual useful service and isn’t inconvenient or comes packaged with scummy garbage hindering it, then people will pay for it.
The problem is - that’s not what publicly-traded companies like to do. Valve’s Gabe Newell said it best (paraphrasing) - “Piracy is a problem with a service… not the customer.”
Shitty services or actions businesses take to place a barrier of any kind between customer and the product they seek as a means to lazily extract more money from customers - especially that which is perceived as greedy will make more people seek alternative means of obtaining said product.
Ask people who host Plex servers why they put movies on their server when they already have a Blu-Ray of it.
It’s always “because the disc has un-skippable ads” or “they didn’t include Ben Affleck’s commentary track on it where he shits on Michael Bay for being a goddamn moron,” or “I don’t like seeing 14 different warnings before watching the movie I like” or “I don’t like seeing 10 min of ads every 5 min of watching my favorite show.”
It’s hardly ever “I like being a thief” or “I couldn’t afford it…” and in the case of the latter, they weren’t going to buy it anyway.
I run a plex server because I don’t want to subscribe to 15 different services with 15 different shitty UIs just to watch TV. FF and rewind always works the same on Plex and the pause button is always in the same spot.
Every time I open Netflix or Hulu or Prime I am infuriated that it doesn’t immediately take me to the last show I was watching.
Also I like to watch shows as they originally aired, not with missing episodes that Hulu pulled to keep advertisers happy (It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Community come to mind).
I have totally just purchased a few Anime seasons because I didn’t want to deal with ads when streaming it via Crunchyroll. Considering the speed I watch it at, I’d have had to pay for like 3 months of service to not get ads, or I can buy it and permanently own it for a little more.
I won’t watch things with ads anymore if I can help it.
The only lose on their own terms. That meaning they don’t make quite as much money as they used to. It’s still money hand over fist.
Information tech people say we have introduced new measures and methods to guarantee compliance with our policies. And pirates answer challenge accepted
Ad companies can’t handle the idea that people don’t want to be hit with ads every 5 minutes. “Well, it’s just BAD ads”… no, it’s having my experience constantly interrupted.
It’s both. I dread the coming election year, and it’s why I won’t even THINK of paying for a streaming service that has advertising. I will pay the extra money to avoid them.
I would be okay with it if the amount of ads and their length were reasonable, like one in the beginning and one at the end or something. For a longer video, I wouldn’t even mind one at the midway point.
I didn’t start using adblockers until I was literally inundated and bombarded and sometimes with ads running the length of a movie (no, literally).
It completely ruins the experience. I’m happy to support my creators directly though and I do.
part of the issue, imo, is that creators also put ads in their videos. So you get two pre-roll ads, a sponsor segment, an ad in the middle, and then another sponsor segment. Maybe throw in some product placements as well. And one of those ads might be 1.5 hours long if you don’t manually skip it. I know I’m not the only one who woke up after falling asleep to a video to find themselves 45 minutes into some ad.
After living with ublock and sponsorblock for so long, it’s shocking to watch youtube without them.
I don’t mind the sponsor segments as much, I usually just skip to the end of them, but that’s only because it’s how my creators make actual money, and it’s not every video, and when you have adblock on, then it’s not as annoying.
But yes, you’re right, couple ads with sponsorships and product placements and soon the actual meat of the video is one tenth of the length. So what are we really watching here?
Maybe the general public is more compliant than I am, but my money for YouTube creators goes to them via Patreon. Google not knowing how to break even on a bandwidth- and storage-intensive property it’s owned for more than a decade does not constitute an emergency I need to have any part in paying for.
If very recent history is any guide, this is exactly how you get people searching “YouTube alternatives uBlock.” No one is saying there aren’t enough ads on the site; the increasing malignancy of ads over the years is why people categorically reject whitelisting youtube.com, and “more ads” is not a solution to any user-facing problem.
Yeah, video ads are the popup ads of our days. Just as intrusive. Money corrupts :(
Let them test, I will just use container(so they can’t track my account). And if ad block not working, I will just not watch that video. And eventually move away from YouTube if it’s annoying.
The natural next place for people to go to once they can’t block ads on YouTube’s website is to go to services that exploit the API to serve free content (NewPipe, Invidious, youtube-dl, etc.). If that happens at a large scale, YouTube might shut off its API just like Reddit did and we’ll end up in scenario where creators are forced to move to Peertube, and, given how costly hosting is for video streaming, it could be much worse than Reddit->Lemmy+KBin or Twitter->Mastodon. Then again, YouTube has survived enshittiffication for a long time, so we’ll have to wait and see.
The vast majority of people that watch youtube, are most likely not using an ad block and won’t be affected by this at all. Just like the vast majority of reddit users use the official app, and the vast majority of people on twitter stayed.
It will take a lot more than this to make something else the next big thing. Just like lemmy is nowhere near as popular as reddit, mastadon is nowhere near as popular as twitter. Yes those of us technical enough or that care enough will use an ad block or similar, but we are in the minority, and always will be.
According to the latest estimates, the ad blocking user penetration rate in the United States stood at approximately 26 percent in 2020, indicating that roughly 73 million internet users had installed some form of ad blocking software, plugin, or browser on their web-enabled devices that year.
https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/
Sounds like will affect 1/4 of youtube users. I highly doubt google would be doing this if it wasn’t getting in the way of making more money.
The thing is, none of the services you listed use YouTube’s API. They scrape the data directly from the page. YouTube can’t really do much against it. They’re apparently currently trying to shut down Invidious, though I’m not sure how they’re planning to do that considering Invidious is open-source, meaning anyone can develop and host it.
The apps you mentioned are scraping or pretending to be the official app.
The official API doesn’t have public methods to build an alternative third party player .
The only way YouTube can stop those apps (beside blackmailing devs with legal letters) is to shut down both their own website and their own app
They can ban google accounts of people who use those apps though. I can see them doing it.
Guess I’m getting banned then, I will never disable my adblockers, the internet (and Youtube especially) is goddamn unusable without them.
I don’t quite understand how they’re gonna “ban” you if you’re not logged in. Which you can accomplish with an incognito tab. What are they gonna do, block the IP?
What are they gonna do, block the IP?
This is exactly what they will do, yes.
Oh no! I’ll have to restart my router and come back 60 seconds later with another IP! Let them block the poor rando who gets my IP next.
(They won’t do this for exactly that reason)
With carrier grade NATs, they’d block a bunch of people, even subscribers…
Going this hard to fight ad blockers isn’t going to work like YouTube thinks it will. The only thing it’s going to do is force people to find ways to bypass it or just start using a YouTube alternative. If YouTube is serious about wanting people to use ad blockers less, they should have conducted some form of a survey to find out why people use ad blockers on YouTube and then make changes to either find some sort of a middle ground with ad block users or try to incentives users to turn off their ad blocker.
Obviously, they wouldn’t do that because it would require that they listen to their users and everyone knows how much they like to listen to their users before making any kind of decision.
I guess 2023 is the year of enshittification.
The enshittening
If I can’t watch YouTube without ads, I won’t watch it at all.
Stop showing 3-minute long k-pop music videos. Like, why is that even an ad? Do they think I am suddenly going to start listening to k-pop or something?
Also, stop showing gross medical stuff, like this is a cure for your foot fungus or look how much earwax is in this persons ear. Just the other day there was an ad about not being able to get an erection. I tried to report, it but I could not see where to do it. But it was pretty inappropriate.
I get ads on my iPhone and always skip them, so this will not really affect me, especially since I mostly use freetube on the desktop.
There will be a script to block their recognition just as there is a ton of scripts to work about other anti-adblocks. You could always go watch a video in incognito and just dont use your account.
Ultimatively this will lead to less interaction on the platform, their ads are so penetrant that you can’t even watch anything properly anymore, so more people will adblock -> get banned -> not interract anymore
I wonder if this would affect ReVanced. YouTube and google suck so bad. Also I hope people discover ReVanced because of this regardless lol but I still hope its not affected
This just seems like another element an ad blocker could block.
Not if they track this server-side, then you just get banned or can’t open any more videos after 3 videos, and won’t have the message telling you why.
If they want to no longer be the default internet video platform, that’s a quick way to do it.
Ill just stop watching youtube. I already miss quite a bit of the Subs I have as the algo doesn’t show the new vids I have to go and check myself
still works for me with (re)vanced, so far. pirates will hopefully do their thing in the meantime to make sure nobody has to be capitalized on. google should have been broken up years ago…
