YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

It’s not so much that I don’t want to see ads - nobody does, but very very often the ad breaks the vibe of what I am watching and it displeases me to the point I will invest my soul and energy to block ads. Some real-life examples:

- watching a video about coding where the creator has a monotonic, calm voice that keeps me engaged, and VS Code in dark mode which is easy on my eyes in my dark room at 2am, then suddenly comes an ad with bright lights, incredibly high sound and a high-energy backtrack.

- watching a meditation video, the exact same ad appears.

You get the idea.

At the very least, please ensure the ad is in the same volume as the original video. That alone wouldn’t be too hard. In addition, please at least try to match the background overall brightness or color, and the vibe. All this would create value because people would actually watch much more ads.

- music mixes, good lord - three minutes into some great mix and suddenly I'm hearing from Uber Eats yet again

I want to support the creators, but thank goodness for yt-dlp

I'm very skeptical about this statement.

There is a simple way to stop watching ads: pay for premium. It's 100% effective and works right now.

What you are saying is that you want Google to make your ad experience better because you don't want to pay money to use their service.

You somehow use it enough for ads to bother you but not enough to pay for it.

This paradoxal type of user is too common and makes no sense to me.

For now. With the ever increasing number of "premium" services that promised no ads, but slowly start introducing them, it is just a matter of time before YouTube does the same.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/8SDKRkZ.png

Requires getting out a credit card. Even simpler is an ad blocker.

As for the ethics of ad blocking, I'll consider unblocking ads when Google stops with the unethical (think Tai Lopez) and downright malicious ads (deepfakes of Elon suggesting to invest in crap like "Quantum AI"), and only then will I reconsider removing the blocker and maybe even paying.

Put simply, ad blockers provide a safer browsing experience.

I'm perfectly happy paying for two $5 coffees a month that I hardly remember consuming, just because I was perched and a bit tired while on a walk in the city. I pay $25 for a more comfy seat for a 3 hour flight. I pay $15 for a single movie ticket, and another $15 for $3 worth of snacks. I pay $30 for a 30 minute cutting of my hair. I pay $20 for a 3 minute slingshot at the fair. I pay $30 for a 20min taxi.

Yet I refuse to pay $14 for Youtube that I use 30 hours a month, because with adblockers I don't have to. And if Youtube makes adblocking awful enough, I simply will pay. As annoying as youtube ads are, I'd never think to complain about them because it has an easy solution.

It's not enough of course.

Anyway, ads being annoying and disruptive is the point, they want to sell premium subscriptions because a steady $10 a month on a subscription often forgotten about for years is more valuable and profitable to them than showing ads. (I presume)

It may be effective at not showing you ads on YouTube specifically, but then you’re helping Google build a more accurate profile on you (from your watch habits) to exploit further. Personally, I’m not comfortable with that because Google has proven time and again that it cannot be trusted.

I would pay for Nebula.tv if it had a few other specific creators.

Thus trying to reintroduce ads to the premium users will remove the only reason I’m paying for it in the first place.

I am not claiming that Google is the only company doing that; it is not. But there is a reason that bait and switch is illegal in most places. My 2c.

Google wants you to watch ads OR pay for a subscription, but it doesn't necessarily care which; they make money off you either way.

The reason Youtube offers a premium tier at all is to cater to the minority market of time-poor money-rich users who would rather pay than watch ads, which is just a smart move to broaden their audience and diversify their revenue streams. But it's not the primary way Youtube makes money and likely never will be.

I haven't watched YouTube since.

Humans don’t value things as a binary decision between it either being worth it as free or equal to the cost it’s being sold at. Everyone has a price point for a service they think is fair, for which they’ll start seeking alternatives when exceeded. This is how markets work.

Time spent does not correlate with cost-independent value. This is doubly true with social media platforms.

Using a $20 CPM [1] (Cost Per Mille, the money advertisers pay per 1000 views), $12 turns out to be 12/20 * 1000 / 30 = 20 ads per day. I would argue that the average youtube premium user watches less than that.

And I would argue that youtube really knows the numbers, and google would not lose money. Don't forget they've turned evil ;)

[1] source is the most recent Big Time video

Actually I suspect the logical operator here is `AND`. In fact, this is largely what holds me back from paying for any Youtube subscription; frankly I don’t trust them to show me zero ads ever regardless of what fee I pay. So I will keep playing the cat-and-mouse game as long as it lasts.

If they ever start doing that, you could stop paying. But not paying now for the hypothetical possibility that they may start serving you ads in the future sounds more like an excuse.

YouTube is the most creator friendly social media platform that exists now. Creators choose when to include ads and receive a large amount of the revenue.

Google clearly has the AI know-how to label when videos are important medical videos. They could skip ads and skip forced sign-in, but they don't care enough. There was a viral tweet once about somebody's grandma choking on a fishbone where YouTube responded telling them to buy YouTube Premium, so they're probably aware, but don't care enough. And they're implementing more measures like the forced sign-in for scraping prevention that happen to disproportionately affect public networks at restaurants and hotels. That's negligence.

Why's it so unreasonable?

Every premium subscription Youtube accepts reduces the value of its ad-supported audience, not just in an absolute sense (i.e. this user won't watch ads anymore), but in the sense that it lowers the CPM advertisers are willing to pay for the remaining “cheapskates”. The premium subscription price has to account for that, which is why the price should be significantly higher than the average ad revenue per user.

I get that as a premium subscriber you still see in-stream sponsored content, but that's because the creator wants that, not Google. I think Google would rather have those sponsored messages be run as regular Youtube ads instead, so they can take their 45% (?) cut of the ad revenue while letting premium subscribers skip them.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2475463?hl=en "YouTube may also place ads on videos in channels not in the YouTube Partner Program."

If you become eligible and join the YouTube partner program I believe there may be a toggle then, but for non partners it's completely up to YouTube.

And the forced sign-in of course never was controllable by creators.