YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

You lose on long run. In few years, you will pay more and still watch ads while YT will no longer be free. (let me remind you of video streaming services)

Managers want their rewards that are tied to earnings and stockholders want to earn more.

And once they both get their money, the next year reward will be tied to even more earnings. And stockholders will want to earn more.

I’ll switch to Nebula if that ever happens.

Content creators have no loyalty to YouTube and will share their content elsewhere when YouTube annoys their paying fans.

There is no if. This is how corporate greed works.

What will happen is, that content creators will spread to different providers, that also have managers and stockholders/owners.

Look what Netflix was like and how many various payable video streaming providers you have now. More than you are prepared to pay for content.

In few years, you will be torrenting content that today you watch for free.

And only because people decided to pay, showing the world that there is money to be made in YT model.

I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years. The value I get is vastly greater than Netflix or any other streaming service. But if they ever start putting ads in the paid subscriptions (like many streaming services now with their basic tier) I’ll jump ship.

Yep, you were a test project. Will people pay for free content or punish them by leaving the platform. And will they start to pay if you increase number of ads. Now they moved to next stage.

Anyway, not there yet. Frog is boiled slowly, slow enough that people dont notice until it is to late.

First they need to kill ad blockers tier. Then you increase number of ads to unbearable (they are already doing that) and get as much people as possible to paid content. Also market must be ripe enough, so there will be no more ships to jump. Then you will get ads, different tiers to pay, segmentation of content etc.

Yes, businesses want money. The point is that YouTube has no leverage on creators. they have to play nice because the barrier to entry is nil as competitors already exist in Twitch, Dailymotion, Nebula, Vimeo, Dropout, etc.

None of that helps you if you want it to be free, but for those of us willing to pay, we can happily ally with creators if YouTube gets shitty.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s a good deal now and I’m happy to take it. None of that matters if you are comparing it to piracy… obviously.

We will see how prepared you will be to pay, where each of creators you watch will be on different network and you will have to pay for each network $10/month, while you watch 20 creators.

Again, this is nothing new. It already happened with video streaming, where Youtube now is Netflix then.

Exactly, it's the enshittification trajectory as explained by Cory Doctorow. Without laws and regulations that stop companies from doing that, it's inevitable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Examples

So what's your alternative if I don't want ads (content is not free to make), want the creators to be paid, and paying for premium is tempting YouTube to abuse pricing? (or so you say)

This already happened with Dropout.tv when college humor left YouTube.

Yes, it ain’t perfect. The alternative is the creator literally stop making videos. YouTube is already not serving ads for demonetized videos. People doing it for the love of filmmaking can already do it for free.

Number of video streaming services who have removed their ad free tiers: zero.

I hear you, but I can only live in the now and not whatifs. I refuse to watch ads and will pay to avoid them. If a service I use makes that impossible, then I’ll no longer use the service.

And there is more content in the world right now than any single person will ever be able to consume. I have zero concerns about dropping a service.

No, the alternative is that you DONT pay. That you deliberately not do what is the easiest move(1) and on top of that even feel special for doing it. That you suffer a short time for better next. That you fight them with technical means. That you vote with your wallet, squeeze your teeth hard and show them you just wont pay and they will lose ad watcher if they show more ads.

And now you will tell, that people are not disciplined enough for that, that majority wont pass the marshmallow(2) experiment? That some Mike Judge movie was actually documentary?

Yes, I know.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_trap , A common trick is to provide victims with a simple solution to a problem, for example, leaving only one door open in an otherwise secure building, luring them straight toward the firing mechanism

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

> I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years.

I struggle to see the difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.

It's the same shitty recommendation algorithm. It's the same "you will watch shorts or else". It's the same nerfed unusable search. It's the same "we randomly decided that your bandwidth isn't enough, here's a 480p version of the video you're currently watching".

How do creators get paid under your rubric?

They already get 55% of revenues at YouTube which is basically the highest percentage in any creator industry. How do we pay creators under your rubric and allow them to be discovered?

"vote with your wallet" is like trickle down economics, it's like if only everyone used paper straws we could prevent climate catastrophy. Split up FANGM should be the bare minimum.

Looks like it worked and it works, without any changes, while the number of views is keeping their earnings to small group that will not increase as there is not infinite number of time to watch the movies. And dont "creators" me. It is about google earning more money for their stockholders and managment collecting their rewards, not about "think of the children".

It is not, but discipline is needed instead consumerism. And every half intelligent marketing guy will make it harder than to just pay. Paper straws you mentioned are just paper straws.

Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.

Most of your suggestions are fiction but tiktok and insta are real competitors to YouTube shorts.

Are they paid now? What are you fixing by paying, if nothing is broken (yet)?

But you don't need to drop a service. You can keep it as good as it is. You just don't reward google predatory tactics by paying, as you are literally making YT worse.

So if I don't pay and I don't want to watch ads then what? I'm not going to jump through mental gymnastics to not pay creators and Google for offering the service. If you truly don't want to reward Google, then don't use anything from Google.

>And dont "creators" me. It is about google earning more money for their stockholders and managment collecting their rewards, not about "think of the children".

Classic consumer-only socialist. You have no model for production except business is bad. If you care about labor then you care about labor getting paid. So far you've demonstrated that you have no model of paying content creators. You would rather they go away then actually pay for their services. You pretend you should be able to get it for free. If you have no model of production, then you have no model.

Yes, it’s mostly just the ads. There are some nice-to-haves like video downloads and background audio on the iOS app. I almost never use search, recommendations, or shorts, but I’m sure you’re right to criticize those features.

Not sure what you mean. I was a test subject? The test still seems to be ongoing after 10 years. I fail to understand how any of these alleged experiments involve me.

Block the adverts, and pay the creators via Patreon. And join Nebula to build other alternatives.

Content creators have loyalty to the magic money tree on the internet, they will shake as many of the trees they can, right down to begging for $1 from every 'fan' to add to the $50,000 they make a month.

> Paper straws you mentioned are just paper straws

No they are the decipline you are talking about, the delusion is, if everyone used paper straws we would save the ecological destruction of the oceans. The structural problems of endless profit maximization machines can not be addressed by appealing to individual action.

> Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.

That depends on the amount of pieces, don't you think?

How did it work until now? Anyway, we both know that care for "creators" is "think of the children" thing, but I will play along: pay them using patreon (or, I have bought this: https://theduranshop.com/the-duran-gold-eagle-premium-t-shir..., triple time overpriced but they deserve it).

For Google, don't worry. You have payed them, with your data, thousand times over. And if you stop providing today, your existing data will be exploitable for years to come.

On top of it, by paying, you create a direct trail from watched video (data) to your account, from there to your credit card and from credit card to physical person. So you are giving them even more data.

Anyway, if Google goes bankrupt, because of you, you can consider yourself a saint.

Someone who has really done something very good for the whole planet and human society.

I will lit a candle each day into your honor.

By this logic you lose in long term no matter what you do.

If you pay premium: they'll add ads to premium too.

If you watch ads: they'll add more ads.

If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video.

If you use another platform: the said platform will need to monetize and you are back to square one.

I’m glad there’s competition for the one part of YouTube that I dislike even more than the ads.

You just described the evolution of every streaming platform out there

Can you download the videos to mp4 or is it some proprietary DRM thing that only plays on YouTube? If not that just sounds like a worse version of yt-dlp

No, it is much simpler. Success of a company is not limited on constant growth of profit but rather of providing to workers and owners a normal life.

And in our case, it is paid in current model (actually even in model with less ads). It doesn't need any growth of profit.

Everything else is pure greed. Now the question opens, are you paying for videos or greed?

Ok, I wanted to avoid it, but since you didnt understand, paper straws are just straw men. They have absolutely nothing with voting with wallet, it is just some lame scenario, comparable at nothing and kicked instead of the real thing.

Or said differently: plastic straws are only a minor part in ocean pollution, while people not voting with their wallet is the main reason for all corporate shenanigans we are experiencing.

And yes, I agree it depends on number of pieces, but I don't put any trust into USA as state, even without Trump, being able to persecute billion $ corporation.

YouTube sucks because it works for advertisers, not users.

If everyone just paid like you pay for anything else in life, YouTube would work for users, and be dramatically better.

Unsurprisingly, the people who consume resources while giving nothing back are the ones making it suck the most.

I've stopped recommending this (except for in-person to friends) because it's so valuable, and I'm seriously worried about it getting stomped by YouTube.

> while people not voting with their wallet is the main reason for all corporate shenanigans we are experiencing

That's what I'm getting at is wrong. The paper straws are an analogy, if everyone stopped driving cars and lived in the woods we could reduce carbon emissions significantly, therefore the reason we can't stop climate change is people not voting with their wallets. Everything is people not voting with their wallets, it applies to everything, that's why it applies to nothing.

If he had used YouTube premium for a hundred years you would still say the same? Ten years is longer than world war two lasted.

> Noone goes there anymore, it's too crowded.

If you are having troubles understanding, you can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

In theory, yes. In practice, Google's core business is selling ads, not selling access to movies.

But that is exactly the business they are trying to morph YouTube into. If we agree that being exposed to persuasion always has negative value, then ads are bad. Watching ads is the only behavior that causes them to persist. If everyone blocked them, YouTube would go out of business or switch entirely a paid model. If everyone paid, then they switched to a paid model already. The only choice the causes ads to persist and increase is to both refuse to pay, refuse to block, and still watch. So don't do that.

> But that is exactly the business they are trying to morph YouTube into.

They had so much time to do that, yet TFA is about ads getting more aggressive, not less.

What's a "normal life"? And who gets to decide that?

> And in our case, it is paid in current model (actually even in model with less ads). It doesn't need any growth of profit.

Who are you to decide that?

You have no model for how labor gets paid.

> If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video.

Someone will eventually make an AI adblocker that will dynamically update the video with all ads removed or replaced. For example, let's say that I specify to my AI streaming video editor that "detect all bottles and glasses with alcohol and replace their contents with water and their labels with Liquid Death"

Similar technology will be/is already used to e.g. display a Coke can for some markets and a Beer can for other markets, depending on who paid for that market.

Sure I do, by suckers watching ads, like it always was.

The whole thing about Google is that they are not software company (as people like to falsely believe), they are advertising company, financing everything else from ads. Including search, youtube, android, gmail and all other side projects.

And those side projects brings them data, to advertise more efficiently.

Now, seeing a trend to monetize their side toys is just pure greed, they don't really need that.

This is also the reason, why no one can compete with them. As competing with free products is impossible unless you have side financing.

By the way, did you (and everyone else) maybe read this study? https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/leave_my_br... It is very eye opening.

Looks like the planet will. It has already started to sanitize flee infestation called humanity. And, contrary to what it was told to you, planet is fine. Nothing wrong with it. Scratching. And will joyfully survive for millions years to come. We wont.

Your model for paying labor is "Other people should pay, but I shouldn't have to pay." That fails the basic categorical imperative.

It worked until now for, what, 20 years? And it worked very well, check Google stock.

Don't be afraid, they have calculated people not paying into the strategy.

And it wont stop working because you wont pay Google extra money. But it will become worse for most of people, including you, if you set yourself into position of slave and pay, confirming their theory that they can exploit you so much more.

Btw, did you check the link? You should really learn from it.

They already discontinued the premium-only content (YouTube Originals, turned out the audience isn't fit for that).

Or stratify users into creators and viewers and force both strata to pay, where viewer users cannot upload and creators cannot watch (even if they paid).

> difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.

Yeah. That's the difference. That's literally it, the rest is window dressing. You are choosing the monetization strategy: ads or money. If you're not living paycheck-to-paycheck, and you watch a lot of YouTube, paying $13 or whatever is the sensible choice.

Yes, lots of things about the product suck, as you've described. But the content on it is good and the recommendation algorithm is pretty good, at least in its obvious goal of bringing me to new-to-me channels on a regular basis.

> If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video

If they do this then the right arrow becomes your best friend. If it's part of the stream then they have no way of blocking things so you can't skip past them. If they embed some way of notifying the app that it needs to block skipping here or there then that's what adblock would start triggering from. I'm assuming that's why they don't do it now.

Definitely the latter. On the iOS app you choose videos to download, and I believe they only work for 30 days without Internet access. I use yt-dlp for videos I want to archive, but I use the YouTube app downloads for one-off stuff like loading up my iPad before a flight.