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YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

(iter.ca)
990 points smitop | 7 comments | 20 Jun 25 17:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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mcdeltat ◴[21 Jun 25 01:21 UTC] No.44333721[source]▶
I recently stopped watching youtube altogether and surprisingly haven't been missing it. And I used to watch a LOT (like hours per day) of youtube, mostly quality educational/scientific content. But ultimately you'd be surprised how much you don't need in your life. And side effect is no more ads. If someone sends me an occasional youtube video to watch, I'll take a look, but otherwise no engagement with the platform.

I'd highly recommend everyone try reducing their intake of passive entertainment like youtube and redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.

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stickfigure ◴[21 Jun 25 02:05 UTC] No.44333888[source]▶
Or just pay for it? I have my whole family on my plan. Nobody gets ads. It is a bargain.

You're right, I could probably finish my motorcycle build projects without videos. But why??

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throwawaygmbno ◴[21 Jun 25 04:05 UTC] No.44334406[source]▶
Or just block the ads, let others subsidize it for me until the executive greed eventually turns the product to crap and we collectively move on to the newer options that have filled the gap. Cable used to mostly be ad free as well. Now normal TV shows are 21 minutes with 9 minutes of ads. Older TV show reruns are actually sped up with parts cut out of them. Google created a monopoly by making the product great with unobtrusive ads and now is trying to change the deal. There is absolutely already a plan in place where the number of paying premium users hits some critical number and they "test out" short ads. I am not going to reward them.

I just checked my uBlock stats inside of AdNauseum on my personal laptop. This is a machine I have not used regularly in over 2 years. Being generous I am assuming every ad blocked was static, not animated, had no sound, and required no interaction by me to skip, so just was a one second glance.

I have gotten back 115+ days of my life to do things I actually want to do. 10.34 million ads. From one single machine, in just Firefox. I now have AdGuard on my network and use Tailscale to block ads on all my devices. There is no world where I ever go back to seeing ads that I can block and definitely will not be rewarding them for trying to push ads on what was a great product.

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1. scoofy ◴[21 Jun 25 05:10 UTC] No.44334705{3}[source]▶
Everyone wants to talk about other people being greedy when justifying their own coincidental preference for not giving away money they don’t have to.

Nebula is there, it’s not free either.

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2. tossandthrow ◴[21 Jun 25 05:21 UTC] No.44334740[source]▶
Things at scale are so incredibly cheap if you take out unnatural profits.

This argument doesn't really hold.

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3. scoofy ◴[21 Jun 25 05:34 UTC] No.44334795[source]▶
They split revenues 55/45 with creators. That level of profit sharing is basically unheard of in television, film, books, etc.

Again, yea, there are monopoly concerns, but you’re going to move the goalposts to “anything scalable” being worth stealing from then good luck to you.

I’m not going to pretend I don’t use Adblock, but when sites actually enforce using it, I’m not going to pretend they’re evil for doing it.

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4. PurestGuava ◴[21 Jun 25 06:53 UTC] No.44335195[source]▶
Making any profit at all on a service that hosts and streams 4K video from everyone to everyone over the Internet while also compensating the creators of that video is no mean feat.
5. layer8 ◴[21 Jun 25 07:08 UTC] No.44335309[source]▶
We don’t know that YouTube has become profitable yet.
6. JetSpiegel ◴[21 Jun 25 20:42 UTC] No.44340591{3}[source]▶
They are not responsible for the content, so they are not a publisher, more like the company that prints the newspapers. Imagine if NYT printers charged more if NYT decided to raise the sticker price?

Why not charge creators for the infrastructure cost?

7. tossandthrow ◴[22 Jun 25 18:27 UTC] No.44349137{3}[source]▶
YouTube Premium starts at 14$ which is wildly un-representative of the price it takes to run the site.

You mention revenue sharing - but either you are a publisher and share both revenue and responsibilities with creators, or you are not a publisher.

If we for a moment imagine that they are a publisher, then they better pay their content creators a livable wage - or not sign them - and the content creators better not show ads, as I have already paid them through YouTube.

If we imagine for a second that they are merely a distribution platform, then they better not interfere with what I see with ads, or make a value judgement on my curated feed - ISPs also don't interject ads into your browsing.

I never said that they should not be able to make money. But services like YouTube tries their absolute best to both have the cake on eat it. And that is not fair.