YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

Dear YouTube,

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.

Any business model where ads can be paid off has no incentive to make good ads. Ads are meant to be annoying enough so that people prefer paying. Hence the war on ad-blockers.

This is too simplistic. Youtube started as an ad-supported service and today ads still generate the lion share of Youtube's revenue. Youtube ads are some of the most expensive to buy; Google has no incentive to push viewers off the ad-supported tier.

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.

> Google wants you to watch ads OR pay for a subscription

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.

Do they serve you ads today when you have a paid subscription?

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 doesn't, but many video creators do. Not something YouTube has much control on though, for them, that's just content and is served as such. You can use the SponsorBlock extensions to automatically skip these if you want.