YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

> The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us...

You can... just not visit youtube, right?

I'm going to assume thats much more difficult than one would expect.

They're a monopoly benefiting from network effects.

Or just pay for Youtube.... $8/ month gets rid of most of the ads in videos, $15/month to remove ads from music, shorts, and search results.

Harder than it sounds! So much of what we interact with online winds up with YouTube in the dependency chain. Kids' coursework, how-to videos, etc. I could also just pay the $$/month to "solve" this problem, but I need my petty cash more than Google does. I'm confident the brilliant minds there can figure out how to monetize my visit even without the real-time bidding industrial complex burning my CPU cycles.

Download the content offline, make a playlist. You can also archive the content forever. No distractions, its organized however you want. Yes, it does take some effort but it fixes all the problems

I was visiting my kid’s class one day. They were using some YouTube product that seemed oriented at schools, that I’d never seen before. An ad would pop up, and one of the kids (whosever turn it was next?) would run up and tap the skip ad button.

So even if you’re trying to use YouTube for something of value, you’re battling ads. Or at least our kids are.

You can also just not watch TV. And not listen to the radio. And not receive newspapers. All mediums that have advertisements, and those advertisements are regulated to stop the most egregious types (eg. advertising sugary foods at children, tobacco products, hopefully gambling products soon).

Media, on the whole, is a good thing. We know more about the world. We know more about the excesses of the aristocracy. We know more about the violence committed by violent people (and I don't mean local petty crime. Genocide.) Before we can improve these things, we need to know about them. "just don't consume media" is a regression to a time where people knew little outside their local sphere.

Youtube/Google has a monopoly on one part of the modern media landscape and it has to be fixed. Not just put our heads in the sand.

YouTube shows ads that would never be allowed on network television, including tobacco advertisements. They can get away with it because it's hard for regulators to observe.

No. Youtube is a monopoly. For a huge amount pf historical video, they are the only game in town. Regulating the hell out of them -- especially gigantic fines for the insane amount of copyright piracy their business model depends upon -- is LONG overdue.

So long as we're pretending to care about the Youtube TOS, offline downloading without premium is against their TOS. And even then you're only permitted to download and view offline through the YouTube phone app.

> I need my petty cash more than Google does

I appreciate the fact that you brought up the possibility of paying for ad-free content, but frankly I don't buy this. You can either see 100% of the content for free with some mildly annoying ad content mixed in from time to time, or you can pay them a pretty small amount to not see the annoyances.

Google is a for-profit company trying to sell a product that you find valuable. Not everything they do is squeaky-clean, but this offering couldn't be much fairer, really.

I care about their TOS as much as they care about their users

Yes, although the problem is that trying to regulate them out of existence will destroy the archive. Especially if you try to insist on copyright traceability.

Lite is not available everywhere, also those streaming services basically up their price every year, like we're frogs.

I hope there's no ads before educational videos on how to do CPR or perform the Heimlich manoeuvre!

It's incredible to me how YouTube has an uncountable number of "movie clip" and "TV show clip" channels with randomly generated names, to the point that you can watch pretty much any movie end-to-end, but people lose their minds about AI training using books.

I had YouTube Lite for a couple years. They sent me an email saying it was being discontinued in my country. I had always been watching with an Ad Blocker. The main difference now is that they refuse to accept the money I am willing to pay them.

I pay for Premium, and have for several years now. The Lite version is not what anyone wanted. I want no ads on YouTube, without also paying for YouTube Music (which I never use). If $8/month still gets me random ads on some videos, it’s no good. I’m sure their thought was people would turn the normal YouTube app into their music player, but I’m not so sure. Eliminating background play from Lite may solve that well enough. I’d be fine with that as a compromise. I watch a lot of music related content on YouTube that isn’t stuff I’d just listen to in a music app, that I think would get caught my the music filter. On the Apple TV, videos it thinks are music don’t show comments (even when there are comments on the website). I assume all those videos would get ads on the Lite subscription, and there are a lot of them.

I’ve tried cancelling my subscription, thinking it would make me watch less YouTube. I didn’t last 48 hours. The ads were too annoying and I signed back up.

Read up on vid.me, which broke YouTube's "monopoly" back in 2016-2017.

Seriously, go see what happened to them.

Turns out everyone complaining about YouTube, when given the option to jump to a new fresh user focused service, still blocks ads and refuses subscriptions.

This thread, and the hundreds like it, are why people nope the fuck out when considering creating a YT competitor.

YouTube music isn't really a different service rather than a different YouTube app. Under the hood YouTube music is just YouTube with a music player UI. Taking it away wouldn't really lower the cost much.

Well, first you have to log in. And yeah, there are ads even in such videos. :D

That's part of the problem with YouTube Music. I tried to use it, but having music playlists clutter up my video playlists is pretty terrible, among other things.

I find it hard to justify paying for 2 music streaming services, so I cancelled Apple Music, because I'm paying for YouTube Music through Premium. However, I don't like it, so I'm back to manually managing a local music library in Apple's Music app. This is probably a better long-term approach than renting access to a music library on a monthly basis.

But that's my point, YouTube music isn't really a music streaming service, it's just YouTube premium.

The whole "YouTube music free!" is just marketing and a music focused app wrapped on YouTube.

YouTube premium without YouTube music would be pretty much the same cost.

You seem so certain on the betrayal of the content-creators.

> Read up on vid.me, which broke YouTube's "monopoly" back in 2016-2017

Okay, sounds interesting.

> May 21 (Reuters) - Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google has persuaded a federal judge in California to reject a lawsuit from video platform Rumble (RUM.O), opens new tab accusing the technology giant of illegally monopolizing the online video-sharing market.

I see what I expected: that google cheated and got away with it. Where is the betrayal?

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-defeats-rumb...

That may be their internal justification, but due to their marketing, it feels like I’m forced to buy two things, when I only ever wanted one. This is why people have been asking for a YouTube Premium Lite, and what they delivered isn’t what anyone asking really wanted.

Bundling services is another mode of anticompetitive behavior that Google/Youtube use to obscure their pricing.

Can I ask what you mean by "having music playlists clutter up my video playlists? I use YT music (along with my local music library) specifically because it uses YouTube content - which means that all sorts of live / niche / otherwise hard to find music is there. However, my YouTube music playlists are not visible on "regular YouTube".

What people are asking for isn't viable, and people are confused. That's what I am explaining here.

YouTube premium would not be any cheaper without YouTube music. It's a marketing gimmick.

Who is Rumble and what do they have to do with vid.me?

I don't know if you are confused, but Vid.me was a totally different platform than whatever Rumble is...

I made playlists in YouTube Music, and when I went to save videos to playlists on YouTube, it would show everything. Without making some kind of naming convention with prefixes, it was hard to know what was from YouTube Music and what was from YouTube. I just had to remember, which gets harder as the number of playlists increased. This dissuaded me from using more than 1 or 2 playlists, which limited the overall value of the service.

I understand what you’re saying, but the point still stands. YouTube has positioned this as a 2 for 1 value, that people don’t see value in. The optics are bad. It might be technically valid, but that’s irrelevant when it comes to consumer sentiment, especially when YouTube itself framed it this way.