YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

YouTube spent about a decade and a half running unintrusive banner ads. Until they secured enough of the market that network effects locked content creators and consumers together in a two-sided market where it's hard for either group to leave unilaterally. Then they ramped up the length and intrusiveness of their ads while flouting content regulations on what they're even allowed to advertise.

Why should I reward that by paying them?

Ok, well either pay or don’t use YouTube then if you don’t want ads.

My current thought re: piracy is that I never pirate unless I'd be happy if the company I'm pirating from went out of business.

You can keep bringing up Google, but you're still glossing over the part where you're not paying the people creating the content you're watching.

Seems awfully convenient.

The browser is my agent, and it will do my bidding, not google's. You building your company on something that can be legally circumvented is not my problem.

If enough people do it, monetizing on Youtube becomes untenable for most, driving creators to hopefully healthier platforms who might now stand a chance.

No I'm not blocking the ads, I'm just avoiding YouTube as much as possible and desperate for someone to break their stranglehold.

If I were blocking the ads, I wouldn't be aware of how bad it's gotten.

I give my favorite creators money through the ubiquitous patreons.

So if I don't like Visa and Mastercard, do I also get moral carte blanche to not pay anyone because hey I'm totally urging them to only use merchants that I prefer?

Sounds like awfully convenient motivated reasoning.

That’s how the market works. You avoid paying extra taxes than required right? Even though that denies the government extra funding. The only difference being one has been decided as wrong and the other is fine.

Relying solely on YouTube monetisation is already untenable for many channels. That's why they do sponsorships and Patreon

Are you asking what we should do about this situation?

Split up any and all monopolies, and nationalize what should provide a common good such as payment networks and internet infrastructure.

> The browser is my agent, and it will do my bidding, not google's

I've got bad news for you

Perhaps controversial, but I rather just have ads. Not that I do not think this is a preferable model, but rather, donates cost real money and ads cost nothing except time.

While time is finite and valuable, if I am already on YouTube, then I have already committed to choice of wasting that nebulous amount of time in the first place.

I’d absolutely rather give money. For me there’s a lot less friction in that even if technically it costs time all the same. With a job I have control over how I convert time into money; not so with watching ads.

As much as youtube can waste time, I also feel like I’ve been given genuine value by certain people on the site, so I wouldn’t say it’s simply wasting time.

I watch quite a large array of channels. I am not sure I could feasibly afford to donate a meaningful amount to all them. So then, I am forced into the dilemma of deciding which ones are more worthy than others, and that is not something I am particularly willing to do.

If one's patreon did have perks associated with it, then I would be more inclined to 'donate', as well.

As a Google shareholder, I would love for YT to be spun out.

This is a weird framing

Yes, society has deemed that it’s fine to make use of the avenues that have been explicitly created to reduce your tax burden - that’s why they were created. Society is also relatively fine with using unintended loopholes for the same purpose (although it is a lot more controversial and criticized), because we don’t tend to punish people for breaking laws, rules and regulations that don’t exist. When we end up caring a lot about them, we plug the gaps

The other person was talking about straight up not paying for goods and services that are sold at a given price, which is stealing. The more apt comparison would be to tax evasion (actually breaking the law), which is a crime, widely considered wrong and punished accordingly

I'm very much willing to pay for their content, but not in the way of watching ads during the videos.

If YouTube agreed with this point of view they would put up a paywall, the same way neither Nebula nor Netflix are available for free.

”I can get away with it, therefore it’s OK” is an interesting moral philosophy

Your individual willingness is irrelevant.

There are not enough people with your willingness to make this mechanism work by itself.

So the choice is either to have the content exist, but rely on ads, or not have the content exist. And it's not your choice - it's the content creator's choice.

It's how the world has worked for a very long time, and i dont think that has changed much today.

and that's why people choosing chrome over firefox has that bad news.

Arent Visa and Mastercard defacto global monopolies that have had many controversies in the oast or bowed to outside pressure, refusing to handle payments for many perfectly legal businesses ?

I just subscribe to YouTube Premium. From what I hear, views from Premium viewers are worth more to the creators than ad funded views, and I don’t need to deal with deciding which patreons to back, and spend 10x (or more) trying to pay for each individual.

Vid.me broke the stranglehold back in 2016-2017.

Their story reveals that all these people hating on YouTube are actually just selfish children doing mental gymnastics.

Their savior came, disrupted YouTube pretty deeply, then went bankrupt.

mono, like in monopoly, means single. They would be a duopoly. Which they aren't anyway because there is also amex and discover. So maybe a quadopoly?

Oligopoly, typically.

I'm enjoying this holier-than-thou attitude that seems to pervade a lot of comments, as though following the "rules" is all we need to do and is morally justifiable.

These "rules" weren't voted upon by either creators or consumers. Most of them are arbitrary and capricious. Features implemented by YouTube, like showing where people skip to the most, are also an attempt to cut into sponsorship dollars, was that within the "rules"?

Let me be clear: Following the "rules" under these monopolistic circumstances is the philosophy of cowardice in the face of power and doesn't hold as much intellectual merit as you might think.

That's a needlessly hostile remark. This is part of my point. A content platform is a two-sided market, and you can't unilaterally defect from a Nash equilibrium. Back in 2017, YouTube wasn't running unskippable investment-scam and tobacco ads. They were doing their best to attract content viewers and producers away from competitors by offering a good experience. Once they'd driven the alternatives to the ground and achieved network lock-in, they began twisting the screws, gradually running ever more intrusive and distasteful ads.

Nebula might have a shot at breaking the stranglehold, and I support them, but it remains to be seen if they can do it. A lot of content creators would have to move there, and there's a lot of random stuff (recorded lectures, video instructions, music, etc) that probably never will because it doesn't fit their premium original content model.

If it’s not my choice, then there’s no problem if I block the ads, right?

I feel perfectly able to decide where to allocate money. For instance, one channel has functionally introduced me to modern philosophy and inspired me to start reading a ton. I took a class and read a bunch of books I otherwise wouldn’t have. Another channel makes funny ten minute joke videos once a month. I feel totally okay giving the former way more money; they’ve provided me more value by a long shot.

Vid.me.was loved and celebrated as an escape from YouTube. I'm not sure what makes you think YT wasn't hated in 2017 too, premium had already been out for 2 years and any casual glance at comments from back then make it clear people were not happy.

Nebula has no shot. It has a <1% conversion rate. Creators make almost nothing from it compared to their yt channel.

My point is that the fundamental problem with the Internet and Internet services is the users entitlement to free things. The Internet would be a dramatically better place if it worked for users and not for advertisers. Vid.me was dramatically better, but it died learning that 99% of people in threads like this is full of shit and actually just entitled.

Not as interesting as "And that's 100% ok when the big people operate like that, but very very bad when the little people try to stop them."

Did the person I was replying to say any of that? You’re putting words in both their mouth and mine

I’m receptive to various arguments here that invoke power differentials, pragmatism, even deliberately breaking the terms of a service to help affect change, etc. I’m not necessarily someone who always follows the rules, and even though I do pay for YouTube I don’t view it as a real moral failing to use the free service with an ad blocker turned on

The comment I responded to didn’t have any of that, it just boiled down to “I can do it and they can’t stop me, so they can suck a dick”. Maybe not the end of the world when it’s directed towards Alphabet, but I hope that mindset doesn’t extend to everyone they interact with

Youtube Premium has existed for 10 years and creators get paid from it.

It isn't how the market works, and you absolutely don't take this line of reasoning when paying someone rendering services to you which is why you instead tried to analogize it with taxes.

You only use this argument for Youtube content creators because it's trivial to avoid payment and then backsplain it with unique moral justifications.

Yes. And they get some of your money in almost every transaction. Does that mean you are morally justified to dine out for free now?

> Why should I reward that by paying them?

Do you want to have a great YouTube experience? Paying for it gets you that.

I watch YouTube videos frequently. Never see an ad. It’s great.

Do you happen to know if they get the same amount per view?

The metaphor doesn't work because I can still pay in cash. A better metaphor would be choosing not to tip the waiter because you don't believe in the custom of tipping

> YouTube channels earn revenue from viewers with YouTube Premium. Throughout this month (August 2018), I earned approximately 55p per 1000 regular views and 94p per 1000 Premium views, so it appears that if 75% of your viewers went Premium, that would actually be beneficial.

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/9agg5f/how_does_yo...

> Per user, creators usually get a LOT more from premium than ads. If I divide my monthly views by my monthly unique viewers, I get about 1.9 cents per viewer.

> The way premium works is, first youtube takes a cut--I believe it's 45%. The remaining amount is divided among all the creators you watch based on how much you watch them. I believe that's based on view time.

> So if the YT premium price is $13.99, the creators get 55% or $7.69. You would have to watch 405 different creators for each one to get 1.9 cents.

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/16c80eb/how_do_you...

That tends to be the approach large companies take, and are championed for it. "It's not their fault the tax code allows them to spend $50m on accountants and lawyers to find a $5b loophole" etc.

I'm the person you were replying to, and I endorse spaceribs' comment.

My computer is my property, it will do what I ask it to just like my refrigerator, my tv, and my paper and pencil. I will remove corporate logos from my belongings, and entirely fail to look at the advertising that comes in my mail box. And if google tries to tell my computer to show me advertising, I am _entirely_ within my rights to tell my computer not to.

Patreon is also getting enshittified, grandfathering rates for the legacy people who give it a network effect, and then jacking them up on new creators to take advantage of their moat.

Janie Crane: An off switch?

Metrocop: She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)#The_B...

I'm also amused that you equate “legally circumvented” with getting away with something.

Considering that is the framework FAANG in its entirety is based on, I find your reaction quite surprising

That’s how google set up this relationship with their users.

“What goes around comes around,” shouldn’t be surprising.”

Sure, if that works better for you.

So you do pay for YouTube Premium then? Or are we not going to hear back from you?

I used to pay Nebula precisely because they had premium original content, however they let in a lot of other creators to widen the (see the tyranny of the marginal user) type of content. I've since canceled my subscription because it's gotten bloated with too much lower quality content.

The whole point of Nebula is NOT to become another YT, it's meant to be curated source of media.

It’s not possible to subscribe to the stuff that you’re interested to?

Not without getting a whole bunch of crap I'm not interested in. I suspect once stablecoins are legit, there will be infrastructure that will make direct payments to content creators possible. It will unlock the mythical dream we all had to only pay for the things you wanted to see.

You can pay for Youtube Premium right now and the ads go away.

For a long time, my criticism was that Youtube Premium is needlessly bundled with Youtube Music, which is redundant for me as a Spotify user and which I refused to pay for accordingly.

Now, in at least a few countries, there's "Youtube Premium Lite", which is basically regular Youtube but without ads. If you live in one of these, in my view that's close to the ideal scenario: Everybody gets to choose between watching ads and paying.

And that's how we'll eventually get mandatory DRM on all Youtube videos.

We're already halfway there with ad blocker blockers anyway; once the sum of "lost revenue due to collateral damage of blocked users on old/non-DRM-supporting browser versions" and "increased revenue due to finally defeating ad blockers" is positive, it'll happen.

Unsurprising. I sort of feel this is just the natural cycle of the company structure, and that we have to hope any enshittifying service eventually gets bad enough to drive a large group to another platform earlier in its lifecycle. I’d support creators on any other platform if they offered to take money on it, but there’s only so much I can do as the person giving the money.

Weird. I'm pretty sure that deciding whether or not to watch ads is entirely my choice.

I used to, but I don't consume enough YouTube videos anymore to make it worthwhile. Give me a top-up plan that I can use to pay for individual videos and I will definitely do it.

But what's with the weirdly aggressive second part of your message?

Stablecoins will never be legit