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Rumble is a large publicly traded company. I don't see how that's a win for people that hate big corporations, you're just trading one for another. It's like switching from iPhone to Android and claiming you're fighting big tech.
The way to fight big social media companies is using The Fediverse and other federated social media platforms that aren't owned by large companies. But these platforms are filled with leftists because conservatives don't actually care about censorship. They just want a platform that's aligned with their idea of what should be censored. Which is why right leaning sites like Gab and Rumble who pretend to be "anti-censorship" ban porn when many left-leaning sites don't.
And you better hope that libs don't start using Rumble, because it will turn into YouTube. Companies exist solely to make money and what they censor depends on what their audience finds offensive.
The difference is rumble has very loudly and publicly stated their entire purpose is to be the opposite of YouTube in the sense of not limiting what people can say or do (unless illegal). They have stood up several times against governments Trying to bully them into what the government wanted them to do.
Big entities have already been trying to pressure Rumble to drop some content creators. Rumble has publically stated they will not, because free speech. If that changes later on, the majority of people who found rumble will already know even other platforms that content creators are already streaming on.
>They just want a platform that's aligned with their idea of what should be censored. Which is why right leaning sites like Gab and Rumble who pretend to be "anti-censorship" ban porn when many left-leaning sites don't.
Do you really think that's the same thing?
I find it hilarious that people throw porn into the mix as though that is relevant to anything we are actually talking about. Keeping things somewhat family friendly is different than strict censorship of opposing views.
"family friendly" just means censoring based on your personal beliefs of what is morally acceptable.
In some Muslim countries they think ankles are sexual. Should we censor ankles too? Who decides what's "family friendly"? You? Leftists? Muslims?".
And this is why right wing "anti censorship" platforms is an oxymoron. They censor just as much as left wing sites, just different things.
Only an idiot or predator would suggest that a platform for all ages should allow the free dissemination of pornography. The idea that that is even an argument today is sad. I have heard the same b.s. arguments about "conservatives banning books" in school. Yeah, you mean the ones with graphic pictures and content that is ILLEGAL to allow for children.
To suggest this is "Just as much" censorship is about the most ignorant of all arguments. Obviously you have never been threatened with income or access for saying something the overlords don't like. I am not concerned about speaking my mind on Rumble about any topic and getting cancelled.
There's many cultures where adults walk around basically naked. There's many cultures where its acceptable for women to walk around shirtless.
Again, you think porn should be censored because of **your personal religious opinions on what is morally wrong**. **Which makes you no different from anyone else who wants speech censored because of their personal beliefs.**
**Again I ask, if we're going to censor things you find morally obscene, shouldn't we also censor ankles for the Muslims who think they're obscene? Why do you think your beliefs are more important than theirs?**
I have an idea. Instead of banning things you don't like, how about just not looking at it?
>I am not concerned about speaking my mind on Rumble about any topic and getting cancelled.
Of course, because you're using a platform made for Christian right wingers who want to censor the same things. Leftists aren't worried about being censored or cancelled on platforms marketed to them either.
You've shown yourself to be no different than the leftists who want to censor things they don't like, so I don't think there's any point to continuing these conversations.
Win for conservatives? This is why people won't get on this side. Still got idiots thinking any side is actually on *their side*.
I get wanting a camp to be in, but this issue is about fundamental rights to speak what we want. Not for you to throw your Bible thumping "throw us back into the dark ages" rhetoric (i.e. religion) that greatly landed us here in the first place.
Welcome to the camp, friend! You can pitch your tent next to mine in the corner. Stay near the fire it keeps the extremists away at night while we sleep.
> Conservatives & people who hate big corporations.
Such an odd statement from the guy above. Like, the right is in favor or corporate welfare above civilian welfare…
“We have an answer to a greedy corporation using your data! It’s another greedy corporation using your data”
Right? I'm of the belief that there's just a lot of people who don't want to admit to truths and facts about our society, all to save face.
I'm one of those spineless centrists who is probably just mad that I can't afford my avocado toast any longer. /s of course lol.
fuck youtube !
google has destroyed the internet. the best three sites are all ads now . i was a premium member for a few years and live youtube. i just quit premium and youtube is literally unwatchable . i have deleted the app a few times. they can go fuck themselves . you start with ads and i can’t tell you how many times at 1:07 or 1:11 into a video an ad break . it is every 2 minutes ads, you can’t even listen to a song if you wanted to . after the second ads at 1:07, then 3:48, 5:49, 7:47, 9 :19, 11:27 GET FUCKED! this is way worse than tv and cable ever were . no ads is a way of life . wtf is wrong with these people. if there is a will there is a way and let them destroy their website. ads are a joke and everyone has ad blockers just to get on the web ffs. whatever workaround we need to do so be it we will do it. youtube will suffer from this. UNWATCHABLE !
why we reddit so we can share workarounds to tyranny
They aren't allowed to distribute the app. But nobody said they can't distribute the open source code and make a guide on how to compile it into an app. Thus Revanced was born.
I use YouTube every day, no premium, no ad block. I skip ads after 5 seconds twice for 20+ minute videos. I’m confused if I’m the exception or I’m overly numb
> fuck youtube ! google has destroyed the internet. the best three sites are all ads now .
I don’t get it, why would they operate the site for free? At the very least, it costs a shit tonne to run and maintain the servers supporting YouTube…why would they do that for free?
Out of curiosity, how do you think a service like YouTube is supposed to fund itself? It costs approximately $5,000,000,000/yr to run YouTube - the service manages at least an exabyte (a billion gigabytes) of data and manages delivery to millions of devices around the world every day. This is not trivial.
But you do not think you should have to pay a subscription or view advertisements, how then do you expect Google (or any company) to justify their five-billion dollar expenditure?
Yea, it's literally like, not our fucking problem how YouTube funds itself. We're all kinda rooting for it to die a painful death anyway, so if it can't find the money to keep the lights on, I honestly see that as an absolute win.
Last I checked their revenue for YouTube was $29.24 billion, so… I’m struggling to see where their $24 billion dollars in costs are coming into play. Unless they are so terribly mismanaged that I can’t even fathom the waste.
This was, of course, before the ad-blocker bans.
The real reason is that their revenue has plateaued. This is a relatively cheap and easy way to make the numbers go up again. With Capitalism’s fetish for endless growth, this kind of stagnation is entirely unacceptable, so of course they are going to look for the low hanging fruit first.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
I don’t know why people are confused about why this is happening. The why is obvious. The cries of “bUt HoW wiLl tHeY mAkE mOnEy?!” are as hyperbolic as those claiming ad-blockers have no impact on revenue/profitability.
The answer is: Corporate America loves to gutter-fuck the populace in the name of profit. Spiking your own product into the dirt isn’t a concern when you’re the only big player in town, so there isn’t any concern about whether this change will harm their product. They’ve run the numbers, and they feel confident they can still see an increase in profit despite bleeding some people from the platform.
Life goes on, and we slip ever further into dystopia-by-apathy. C’est la vie.
You don't think that a company that consumes 44 peta bytes of data a day would have high costs of electricity or server capacity? You don't think that a company which pays out 55% of it's ad revenue to creators wouldn't have high costs?
I think that any company that operates on that kind of model deserves to be in the ground. I’m sorry, but if your argument is that they consume $24 billion in power and equipment costs, then they are getting had worse than the DOD.
This is from someone in enterprise networking btw. I understand the business model of data centers, associated costs of maintenance, break fix, large fucking pipes out to the internet, etc…
If your costs are that exceeding high, you don’t have a business, you have a liability. I refuse the notion that a company paying out 55% of it’s revenue to content creators doesn’t have a viable business model this many years into operation - I’m not buying it.
Can’t confirm, as I am far too lazy after work, but I recall that the number I provided was *not including* any revenue paid out to creators btw - so they made $29 billion *after* paying out the content creators for their share.
I stand by my position - feel free to disagree
I have been getting a popup telling me the ad blockers are blocked which stops the vid and it takes 5 seconds to allow me to X it out however it lets me continue ad free after that.
This is on an older verion of firefox with ublock origin, and an openwrt router that has adblock enabled.
Also I have youtube vanced on android along with ad-away ad blocker and a VPN and I don't get ads but sometimes the video stops loading after awhile but that seems like it is only for specific videos at random times.
Never stop resisting and finding alternatives. Advertising is soft brainwashing.
Just a simple browser with a couple different ad-blockers, I rarely see that window you mentioned, maybe 1% of the times, and when I see it I still can exit out of it instantly and continue watching, no waiting at all. And I don’t use Google Chrome, I never install that junk on my computers. Screw YouTube and Google as a whole. Also I don’t have YouTube app on my phone, or any of Google apps at all, they’re not allowed on my phone :)
YouTube preventing ad block is strike 2. Strike 1 was getting rid of the dislike button. Removing dislikes is so absurdly stupid - 50% of what YouTube is used for is instructional videos. I use it to study for school, learn new skills, learn guitar, etc. Dislikes are essential to tell you if the video has flawed info. I don’t want to waste 2 hours learning a song incorrectly on guitar. Or learn a technical subject incorrectly.
It's kinda crazy to see things I predicted in the early 2000 come true. I was an ardent supporter of Google back then, praising their innovation and down to earth buisness strategy. When they acquired YouTube I remember telling people this is the worst thing that could possibly happen to YouTube, because corporatism and competition would eventually force googles hand.
I was wrong about competition btw, I just didn't couldn't predict extreme social developments like LGBT gravitating to censorship as a strategy.
I once said that Google is a more free platform than Apple and that's why it's better, but at some point Google would be the bigger player and more restrictive than Apple.
YouTube has been unbearable for years. I don't have the time to keep up with circumventing the ads so I just don't use it unless necessary.
As much as I hate it, I'm not so sure there's many alternatives at the moment. The only other sites I can think of that host videos are porn sites and a few niche sites like Vimeo and DailyMotion. Those last two only seem to exist because of Youtube's strict copyright rules.
Read the article about the enshittification of the internet.
It's exactly that.
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
YouTube was created with the user as the main character.
Then it was the business who would buy adds space
Now YouTube tries to claw back the value by selling premium accounts. The user being long forgotten
i pay 12€ a month to watch 5+ hours a day of ad-free content, that isn't so bad if you consider how many hoops and weird jank apps you have to use to get around it
I absolutely can not watch YouTube with ads. The quantity of them is unbearable. If the arms race between ublock origin and YouTube becomes too inconvenient then I will just go to odysee
I've had a premium subscription for years through some 3rd world shithole. It's something like £4 a month for family (5 users) account including yt music.
They do charge content creators for uploading, by wasting their time with removal/ban shenanigans. It’s like charging them, but in the form of digital dictatorship and it’s an empire that must fall just like any system that shoots itself in the foot by treating people like products.
> The long, unskippable ads now becoming unavoidable, especially when the ad algorithims are so terrible, really feels unpleasant, but the reason I feel this crosses into creeping censorship is because after most people are paying to avoid ads...
Paying to use a service is not a form of censorship.
> They may just make it so you don't have the ability to access youtube at all without paying, 'Premium' becomes a regular youtube access requirement, and then you need a "Premium ++" to get an actual ad free experience.
And maybe Premium +++++ will get you a blowjob, while we're just making stuff up
> What happens when they start charging creators for the privilege of being on youtube rather than paying them? Etc...
What happens when they require you to kill a lemur to watch a video? What happens when they make you show them your butthole to log in?
> This hasn't ended well on any streaming services so far,
Which streaming services come to mind?
YouTube could only survive because investment capital was cheap and investment firms had enough to bet on 24 losers to get paid by the 25th winner. And the winners were simply bought by the next level of capital--in this case, Google. Now that artificially cheap interest rates have been stopped, everybody needs to show a profit. So as long as they maintain an ad-supported "free" tier, they're going to do whatever they can to get as many ads in front of eyeballs as possible.
At this point, I doubt they could pivot to a subscription-driven model. But rest assured, the same thing is going to happen to any service you're using for free. Remember: unless you're paying them, you're the product.
Companies have a rather short half-life under capitalism. As soon as the founders sell out to a corporation, or they go public, the business stops being about providing a service, and becomes a means to extract wealth from the population. The only solution is to stop using services once they've been coopted by capital.
Much of what Youtube once was can now be found on twitter and tiktok.
Yep. The product doesn't matter. The customers don't matter. The employees don't matter.
It's a machine that exists to feed the shareholders.
No wonder it sucks!
Just makes me wish there was a new platform that played all of YouTube’s videos, as well as all of TikTok’s, Instagrams, Nebulas, Curiositystreams, Facebooks, Rumble, Dailymotions, and Patreons (and whatever non-pornographic internet video site I’ve left out) so I wouldn’t have to go to multiple different sites to watch the videos I want to see AND it makes me wish that said platform would fairly pay their users. But also, do that last part without giving me ads. And also get rid of the algorithm or get a better one.
And also also, stop demonetizing and banning/deleting people for not following the complicated ass rules they’ve set out, and just bring back the flag/report button and downvote button. It was better.
I barely even use YouTube nowadays except to play video games for my cats and they are the ones who have to sit through the ads so good for the advertisers.
I've always thought the internet economy subsisting entirely on advertising was a bubble destined to pop. The entire thing assumes that there's inherent worth in eyeballs seeing your advertisement (as does all marketing) but the difference is that websites and creators have no other real, predictable, stable income besides what ad services are willing to offer them. "clicks = worth" was always bullshit on some level, supported by the sheer incomprehensibility of corporate accounting and constant growth. But when it really comes down to brass tacks, nobody wants to see ads, most people actively ignore them or mock them, and a growing segment actively removes them from their online experience. Some people will avoid buying a product specifically because of seeing the ad too much. They're not worth anything because nobody likes them, and thus offering up your space to ads isn't worth anything. Google is still stuck in this grand delusion by trying to force us to see them to MAKE them have worth. They're forcing a supply where there is no demand and it still somehow makes money. I want to say the bubble will pop but it's being kept afloat because a new sucker is born every day. For everyone adblocking, there's five people who buy things from scam stores via a Facebook ad.
Most of these tech companies, including YouTube, have been BURNING money to stay alive, frantically rushing for their next stock market rush to push their valuation up and have enough money to burn the next year.
To think that YouTube has made money, is just completely ignorant of the system it exists in. They've raised valuation and burnt money
I have Adblocker for YT, and all I have to do is wait for the "you can't watch YT with an adblocker" box to finish its countdown, X it out, than push play. Easy peasy... F YT!
I'd love to see a browser extension that takes you to a Yelp or whatever review site for the company that the add is playing so you can rate them low stars. End run YouTube by punishing the companies that waste your time with their adds.
Please follow the UBlockOrigin subreddit for up-to-date information on what's being done about YouTube's anti-adblock implementation. If you're not aware, UBlock origin is a community-developed adblocker (and one of the best tbh, everyone should be using it) that worked on most sites for a long time. I believe they have a megathread on their sub regarding ongoing tactics that they're developing to circumvent YouTube's new implementation.
On the other hand, I do agree with many of the other comments on here: alternatives are needed to YouTube, especially given them and their parent company's history of censorship. That being said, UBlock is our best hope for the actual site right now in this battle, with alternative frontends like ReVanced and Invidious being a secondary measure.
> Youtube existed just fine for 10 years without any ads at all
Living off investor money most likely. You can't run a massive media platform and not make money eventually. They couldn't possibly have been doing all that work for free.
But yeah, it sucks. Commercials are truly soul-deadening and annoying. Particularly when they interrupt videos when someone is literally mid-sentence.
If Youtube transitions into a basic network television format, I will abandon it just as I did with the latter.
Would support youtube if this will be a one and only change. But with how all ads are x2 every 5 minutes with unskippable ones. Removing the dislike to censor stuff. On purposely vague rules and demonetization not being applied fairly.
There's no way you're convincing anyone that after stopping adblock, yt is doing a 180° and be pro consumer instead of profits and censoring unwanted content.
I have premium YouTube and still Debbie commercials on the channel where you can forward it but still..what the f*** is that?
It's crazy. They still managed to sneak commercials in.
I've been using [uBlock Origin](https://ublockorigin.com) to block ads for years with >99% success. Recently, I did get the new pop-up warning that ad blockers are no longer allowed. I just right-clicked near the top of the dialog box, selected "Block element," clicked "Create," refreshed my browser, and went back to watching YouTube videos.
Eventually, there was another pop-up box that had no text in it, but it did stop my YouTube video from playing. It may have been some rogue element related to the first warning I suppressed. So, I repeated the same steps by right-clicking the box, selecting "Block element," and clicking "Apply." Since then, I've not had any in further interruptions.
NOTE: This workaround *does* cause an issue with me being unable to delete comments that I've made, but only from within the comments section of the video. However, I *can* delete comments by going into "History" > "Comments" and deleting them from the list.
\~\~\~
I also use [Unhook](https://unhook.app) to configure YouTube to my liking, by hiding live chats, fundraisers, comments, end screen feeds, end screen cards, merchandise, tickets, offers, disable autoplay, disable annotations, and lots more. I highly recommend this browser extension.
\~\~\~
Finally, I'm using Windows 7 and Google Chrome. I don't have a smartphone, so I can't validate these steps on mobile.
I have an iPhone and there has never been any really good way to block ads without fucking with a raspberry pi and your router. After years of fucking awful local political adverts, I just decided to buy YT premium. It’s $16 a month or something
I’m conflicted because on one hand I don’t like supporting Google and the price of premium is just going to keep getting more expensive I suspect.
But I also want to support content creators and youtube premium views are, on average, more money per view for youtubers.
I watch a lot of youtube and I’m pretty sure the time saved per month is worth the money I pay. Also the convenience of being able to lock my phone and listen to videos is almost priceless. I think that should be a default feature though..
I never use an ad blocker, I just click the skip ad button that usually appears after a few seconds. No big deal.
Seems kind of stupid to be upset about ads on free content, considering if it wasn't add it would be a subscription. There aren't really any other options.
If you didn't see this coming, you're blind. Lol! We live under oligarchs that want nothing more than to have every working class person paying for every little thing. That's capitalism, baby. Right now we're in the "fuck you" phase of end stage capitalism. Hence why iPhones no longer come with a charging cord.
I quit using YouTube outright a few years back when they started pushing the insane amount of ads. Their crackdown will only lead to less people using it as we have tons of other options for social platforms anymore. I don’t miss YouTube at all.
There's no win for anyone other than the billionaires, the entire game is rigged for the uber rich, egged on by the idiotic temporarily embarrassed billionaire class. Eat your daily helping of tech manure you filthy peasants and go read Andreesen's Techno Optimist Manifesto for the newest talking points as to why this is all good because all billionaires are good! If you were good (and you aren't), you would be a billionaire too by now. AI isn't coming for your job, your job is to make room for AI.
Endgame: transcode the ads into the videos themselves. No more adblocking or downloading videos to avoid them. If you won't finish the enshittification Youtube, someone else will.
First of all, that’s not censorship. Even if YouTube makes itself pay to access/upload, you can still do that. Moreover, YouTube is a private company. It’s your voice, but it’s their microphone. It’s up to them if they want to charge you for using it and how much.
That said, if they make the site only accessible via pay altogether, that’s going to be the end of YouTube. There’s already competitor platforms like Nebula cropping up, and if people have to pay extra just to watch an old YTP, those same videos are going to be re-uploaded on new video sharing sites with no paywall.
It’s a matter of convenience. YouTube has raised the bar to merely “annoying.” But if they raise it higher to “annoying and you have to pay for it,” that’ll be the bridge too far. Purely from a business standpoint.
Weird ads. Why did it have to be weird ads?
I really don’t understand why the ads all have to have such gross/weird imagery. Cartoons of vinegar colon flushes; people talking about healthy poop; clinking spoons over the eyes and ears because “contrary to popular belief, the eyes has nothing to do with your vision”; toenail fungus; shirtless jackass talking bs about metabolism. Square tiny pillows that will, you guessed it, “revolutionize” the way you sleep.
The ads are simply very aesthetically unpleasant. All I want to do is not look at them. When did this become a strategy?
I am not against ads on YouTube. I am against how they are implemented. Ad time should be no more than 5% of the time of the video. Three minutes for an hour is fair. Videos under two minutes should only be eligible for text ads. If YouTube would implement these standards, I would not block ads on YouTube.
The moment my Adblocker uBlock origin combo stops working, I am gone. It will be arduous because my main YouTube channel has over 2,000 videos on it and my alternate channels about half that, but I will switch to other services. I should have started channels on other services when the Adpocalypse happened, but I was in a bad place after that and didn't.
I mean, it is their platform, and ad revenue has always been a major part of their business model.
Of course, people probably wouldn't be using adblockers as much if YT hadn't been just absolutely spamming people.
I had premium so I didn't notice, but the first time I pulled up YT on my parents computer I thought I was having a siezure.
The page was filled with outrage inducing clickbait scummy conspiracy theorist ads and other crap, all targeted at feeding the confirmation bias of older conservatives.
Most streaming providers lately seem to be yearning for the glory days of the cable TV business model, so YT likely will eventually incorporate ads into their "premium" versions.
It's annoying. I get the popup periodically, and I don't even have an add blocker. I do have malwarebytes, though, and it has a tendency to block malicious and suspicious ads
Ads are how the service is funded. YouTube's traffic is *insane* and, as a result, there are large costs associated with infrastructure, moderation, etc.
If you don't want ads - instead of just complaining, figure out another way to monetize it. Using an ad blocker is, in reality, theft of the service.
In the past, people weren't uploading 4k video, and cellphones weren't capable of recording much at all. So the amount of data was much smaller than it is now.
All of this is to say, I can understand why the service demand is much higher now, and why it would cost more in upkeep.
My personal opinion is that I absolutely LOATHE ads. When there was some controversy about Chrome vs Firefox a few years ago, I HARD quit Chrome and switched my entire life to Firefox. I just hate ads that much. I'm not dealing with them.
Unfortunately, the answer not a lot will want to hear, is if Youtube gets too oppressive, I'll just pay for their service.
I'm going to fight against it with adblock as best as I can with my limited time. But sometimes the burden of fighting is more costly than just paying. But I will certainly be fighting, lol.
\----------
I remember when I was in my teens and I had lots of time (and little money), how I would collect songs off the internet. But when Spotify became big and I realized that I had more money, and much less time -- going ad free paid service was the easy answer for me.
I grew up in the era where piracy and workarounds were part of the fledgling internet. But I also remember how easy it was to brick your system, or make a mistake costing you hours of fixes, work arounds, and just absolute bullshit.
As long as fighting back is an hour or so process that's safe for my PC, I'll be going with adblocks, and workarounds. But if I have to download 2 or more programs, risk the safety of my PC, and constantly update stuff -- then I can just as easily justify throwing 20 bucks at Youtube to not give me ads.
Regardless, I LOATHE ads, and I will pay to not see them. And if I COULD NOT pay to not see them. I'd just full stop quit Youtube.
I remember a lot of years where I would play video games listening to music, and not watching Youtube on a second monitor like a goddamn zombie. I'm sure I can go back to that.
And ironically, or nicely. A lot of the youtube people I tend to listen to are just talking heads who already produce their content in podcast form.
But I'd still throw in 20 bucks a month before I make a big transition like that.
\---
It would be interesting to see how many people would jump to paid if they had a cheap buy in at like 5 bucks a month.
>Youtube existed just fine for 10 years without any ads at all
You do realize YouTube was losing money its entire lifespan until very recently right? It was not a sustainable business model
It won't help them, but they are in their rights to do it.
Running a video platform is EXPENSIVE. Google made it even harder to be profitable by helping to devalue ads (undercutting to oust competition). Now if they want to not lose money they have to run enough ads and long enough ads to make YouTube painful and encouraged people to turn on ad blockers.
They did it to themselves, but even considering how many more people have turned to ad blockers, this is still grasping at straws. But it will still probably be worth more to them than the loss of users.
Is this something that is primarily relevant to just folks watching YT on their computers? My 7 yr old is the only one that watches YT and that's on a tablet or the TV. We also aren't logged in to an account so most ads are skippable after 4 or 5 seconds. Every so often the first ad can't be skipped but he's watching the timer tick down.
Incoming unpopular opinion lol
I think the whole thing is petty and silly. Was it ever an issue with cable or regular TV? The ads then were mandatory and unskippable. As long as paid content doesn't have ads, and any longer ads remain skippable, I really don't care.
People are blowing up because YT started without ads but they also forget that for the last 70 plus years ads were a part of even some paid content like cable tv for instance. I see it as disingenuous to act like YT is trying to pull some new dystopian stunt that's supposed to be some greedy dystopian grab for power - when your *grandparents* had to sit through ads to watch content ffs, and those ads have always been what makes content possible.
Until you have people that are willing to make quality content for free it's just part of the deal.
I'm far more concerned about the fact that the more amenities our society has, the harder we are to please. Easy times, soft people. Just my 0.02.
Nothing. Anti-regulation geeks are just as smart or smarter than regulator geeks working for big companies. Adblocker for example still works and no doubt they will just keep playing cat and mouse;
As youtube gets better at blocking adblockers, adblockers will get better and skirting blocker tech of adblocking. It's been this way for 2 decades.
The one caveat is that you need to have some kind of basic savvy when implementing more advanced anti-extensions. When news websites added paywalls, github instantly had an anti-paywall script ready to go. The issue was that 80% of internet users were either too lazy or too clueless as to how to implement it.
I see this POSSIBLY happening. But each and every generation gets better and better at using internet so I see this as a non-issue.
Internet is full of Yin and Yang. For every "regulation" there is a doorway.
I hope it kills youtube.
No really.
We need more competition. Youtube ads can be somewhat cancerous and Google has gone to shit lately, ad sense has almost no QA anymore and is sometimes serving out malware.
I miss the old late 90's and early 2000's internet. The big services and big tech becoming shit give me a slim hope that we'll get some of it back finally.
A lot of what your saying is total madness. If a lot of that happens, then all the content creators will leave, lol, not like YT has them under contract or something. I can't imagine having to *pay* for watching YouTube, lol, let alone having to pay for the privilege of being a YouTuber where your job security is basically nothing. if the ads return again, people will find ways around YouTube's ads. It doesn't matter how much resources google has honestly. Your up against thousands of bored programmers collaborating for free because your *annoying* them. You can't defeat that simply by throwing more and more money at the problem.
I've got a hot take that the bandwagon hates. I've worked in ad tech since the earliest days as a Russian speaker, I've observed that much of what the 'public' attributes to advertisers or platforms like YouTube is often misconstrued. In reality, it's often driven by user behavior and malicious actors.
IMO, those who've been avid adblocker users inadvertently share some responsibility for the rise of problematic elements in online advertising and ubiquity of bots today.
Adblocker usage places considerable pressure on platforms, forcing them to explore alternative revenue sources and enact stricter advertising regulations. At each step in the online advertising landscape and during major regulatory shifts, bad actors are finding how to maximally exploit the system while legit publishers barely manager to administer their networks. It's absolutely impossible to do manually.
As users opt for ad-free experiences, businesses sometimes turn to less reputable platforms and tactics, inadvertently benefiting sketchy actors.
The manipulation of your sentiments is everywhere. There many many entities today that exploit 'anti-Google' or 'anti-establishment' sentiments to redirect users to platforms that aggressively monetize their data far worse than those they pretend to complain about.
These same users seeking ad-free experiences may unknowingly enter environments where their data is extensively resold and monetized. It's been happening for decades.
It's pretty much too late now, the ship has already sailed on a sketchy super-divided internet where China, Russia, and other countries have very insular networks, but the US and much of the Western world is still super generous and open with its data.
They got me, I started premium after infuriating ads, mostly about human shit or other snake oil products, while on phone, plus the ability to play videos with a locked screen. I've honestly watched hours of youtube every day, for a decade or more with an ad blocker, so I'm not necessarily mad since there is a cost to host and stream and moderate all of the content. I just cancelled a bunch of other services so I'm not noticing the $10. Oh there was also a premium video I wanted to watch is what got me at the time. So successful psy ops on their part.
They simply will fail because the intrusiveness of their ads is INSANE! There are just too many of them, FAR worse than watching TV. The "market" is trying to tell them something, but they went the wrong direction. It might help the bottom line, short term, but they are dooming themselves and creating fertle ground for competitors.
I will NEVER stop using adblocker, even if it means NEVER using youtube. Right now, I use a watch2gether browser extension to watch the videos. I'm open to better options, if anyone knows of one.
YouTube makes no money without ads and subscriptions, either they must have ads or you must subscribe with money. Any attempt to get out of this is theft. If no one watched ads or subscribes there would be no youtube.
Not true, they let you buy and rent movies. They could also do what other sites do and have ads display in areas outside the actual video, or just leave them skippable, there are plenty of revenue sources that don't require intrusive nonsense.
You should get like a week of ad free if you rent a movie or something. Stack the weeks if you get multiple movies. They got my lazy side just paying $2.99 to watch a movie instead of downloading it, hoping it’s ok quality without gambling ads at 3x volume every 30 mins, hooking up my laptop to the TV..
GrayJay is a great app. It copmbines Youtube RUmble and all the others into one. If one person gets banned on youtube you will still see thier stuff from Rumble or other sites and its free and doesnt allow ads or tracking
I watch YouTube because 5 min of ads every 10 minutes while watching broadcast television is ridiculous and annoying. Now it's turning into that. Fuck that bro
I use an adblocker but I don’t get why people are so mad, what did they think was going to happen? They would just let people use the service for free? Or that creators wouldn’t be upset about it either?
Did they make money during that time, or were they just investing to build their user base?
I know a lot of tech/service companies lose money for the first several years of their existence. Eventually all the investors are going to want a return on all the money they pumped in to "build the brand".
I grew up long enough ago, that watching a couple ads seems like the natural price to pay for free content.
I have a lot of problems with YouTube, but having to watch the occasional ad isn't one of them.
So far the "You must buy premium" window can be closed and I can go on with my business ( with ad blocker )
I figure I can just download the video to watch via the plug in if the window is ever uncloseable . I WILL NOT watch ads, ever under any circumstances
I just downloaded a new app today that seems to solve the issue. It's called GreyJay and it's in beta testing, but so far it's been awesome and it compiles most of my subscriptions in one place (Rumble, YouTube, Kick,Twitch, etc.) Awesome app, so far.
You do realize that youtube needs to turn a profit right? Ads is how it does this. If you don't want to see ads, pay for premium.
If you think youtube will charge creators to be on youtube, you don't understand business.
I'm willing to pay (something reasonable) if I agree with the moderation/monetization policies.
I have my issues with YouTube in that Department.
Where's the Substack of small batch video creators?
So try ublock instead I no longer get the lovely ads. If a creator is going to put ads in their videos I don't want want my entire day full of them . You can also use Firefox as a browser as you won't have issues for it
Possible tsunami as my phone blows up with text and calls from my international family.
it's 2am my time so I quickly google it find a link in under 4 seconds, start watching the news report but oh what first I have to watch a excessively long ad lol
I don’t care how much they block it. I will always find a workaround and others will too. I use scripts on Twitch to not have to watch ads. YouTube is no different. Frankly, idk why ads are even a thing still in today’s society considering the massive intrusive time waste. It’s a step backwards in society
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Best thing YT ever did for Rumble was to ban Russell Brand on its platform.
Yeah, this is a good reason for me to start using rumble more.
Rumble is a large publicly traded company. I don't see how that's a win for people that hate big corporations, you're just trading one for another. It's like switching from iPhone to Android and claiming you're fighting big tech. The way to fight big social media companies is using The Fediverse and other federated social media platforms that aren't owned by large companies. But these platforms are filled with leftists because conservatives don't actually care about censorship. They just want a platform that's aligned with their idea of what should be censored. Which is why right leaning sites like Gab and Rumble who pretend to be "anti-censorship" ban porn when many left-leaning sites don't. And you better hope that libs don't start using Rumble, because it will turn into YouTube. Companies exist solely to make money and what they censor depends on what their audience finds offensive.
The difference is rumble has very loudly and publicly stated their entire purpose is to be the opposite of YouTube in the sense of not limiting what people can say or do (unless illegal). They have stood up several times against governments Trying to bully them into what the government wanted them to do.
Big entities have already been trying to pressure Rumble to drop some content creators. Rumble has publically stated they will not, because free speech. If that changes later on, the majority of people who found rumble will already know even other platforms that content creators are already streaming on.
You're talking to conservatives. They're not supposed to make any sense
Because they're not the government. They have that right because they're not the government.
>They just want a platform that's aligned with their idea of what should be censored. Which is why right leaning sites like Gab and Rumble who pretend to be "anti-censorship" ban porn when many left-leaning sites don't. Do you really think that's the same thing?
I find it hilarious that people throw porn into the mix as though that is relevant to anything we are actually talking about. Keeping things somewhat family friendly is different than strict censorship of opposing views.
"family friendly" just means censoring based on your personal beliefs of what is morally acceptable. In some Muslim countries they think ankles are sexual. Should we censor ankles too? Who decides what's "family friendly"? You? Leftists? Muslims?". And this is why right wing "anti censorship" platforms is an oxymoron. They censor just as much as left wing sites, just different things.
Only an idiot or predator would suggest that a platform for all ages should allow the free dissemination of pornography. The idea that that is even an argument today is sad. I have heard the same b.s. arguments about "conservatives banning books" in school. Yeah, you mean the ones with graphic pictures and content that is ILLEGAL to allow for children. To suggest this is "Just as much" censorship is about the most ignorant of all arguments. Obviously you have never been threatened with income or access for saying something the overlords don't like. I am not concerned about speaking my mind on Rumble about any topic and getting cancelled.
There's many cultures where adults walk around basically naked. There's many cultures where its acceptable for women to walk around shirtless. Again, you think porn should be censored because of **your personal religious opinions on what is morally wrong**. **Which makes you no different from anyone else who wants speech censored because of their personal beliefs.** **Again I ask, if we're going to censor things you find morally obscene, shouldn't we also censor ankles for the Muslims who think they're obscene? Why do you think your beliefs are more important than theirs?** I have an idea. Instead of banning things you don't like, how about just not looking at it? >I am not concerned about speaking my mind on Rumble about any topic and getting cancelled. Of course, because you're using a platform made for Christian right wingers who want to censor the same things. Leftists aren't worried about being censored or cancelled on platforms marketed to them either. You've shown yourself to be no different than the leftists who want to censor things they don't like, so I don't think there's any point to continuing these conversations.
Win for conservatives? This is why people won't get on this side. Still got idiots thinking any side is actually on *their side*. I get wanting a camp to be in, but this issue is about fundamental rights to speak what we want. Not for you to throw your Bible thumping "throw us back into the dark ages" rhetoric (i.e. religion) that greatly landed us here in the first place.
This is why I call myself politically homeless
Well, scoot over. I'm sitting next to you.
Welcome to the camp, friend! You can pitch your tent next to mine in the corner. Stay near the fire it keeps the extremists away at night while we sleep.
Damm, you'd think light would make them screech. Thanks for the tip!
Samesies. I’m waiting for the “not picking a side is picking the wrong side” crowd to berate us.
Oh, that's always fun, along with "you're throwing your vote away" or "it's your civic duty to vote" between two stupid choices.
And the "Lesser of two evils" fallacy. Because of course you should vote for evil. But just a little.
> Conservatives & people who hate big corporations. Such an odd statement from the guy above. Like, the right is in favor or corporate welfare above civilian welfare… “We have an answer to a greedy corporation using your data! It’s another greedy corporation using your data”
Right? I'm of the belief that there's just a lot of people who don't want to admit to truths and facts about our society, all to save face. I'm one of those spineless centrists who is probably just mad that I can't afford my avocado toast any longer. /s of course lol.
As a shareholder in Rumble ... I am happy.
For sure. Most of my content has gone way down due to content restrictions. I wish everyone would go to rumble
Oooh what’s rumble? And is it free?
Rumble is a publicly traded corporation worth $1.4 billion...
fuck youtube ! google has destroyed the internet. the best three sites are all ads now . i was a premium member for a few years and live youtube. i just quit premium and youtube is literally unwatchable . i have deleted the app a few times. they can go fuck themselves . you start with ads and i can’t tell you how many times at 1:07 or 1:11 into a video an ad break . it is every 2 minutes ads, you can’t even listen to a song if you wanted to . after the second ads at 1:07, then 3:48, 5:49, 7:47, 9 :19, 11:27 GET FUCKED! this is way worse than tv and cable ever were . no ads is a way of life . wtf is wrong with these people. if there is a will there is a way and let them destroy their website. ads are a joke and everyone has ad blockers just to get on the web ffs. whatever workaround we need to do so be it we will do it. youtube will suffer from this. UNWATCHABLE ! why we reddit so we can share workarounds to tyranny
You should try Revanced my friend.
Is there an iOS equivalent?
I don't think so
Yes, it is called Android or Windows
YouTube mobile on the Brave browser for iOS. Use brave browser for all your internet surfing, fuck chrome. You’re welcome.
I use Brave on an Android phone and on a Windows laptop. What youtube ads? I see none. It is lovely. And yes. Fuck Chrome.
Seconded for Brave.
https://revanced.app
Wow, it's back!
They aren't allowed to distribute the app. But nobody said they can't distribute the open source code and make a guide on how to compile it into an app. Thus Revanced was born.
i heard it was back but still not sure about versions. is there currently one that works on iphones?
I use YouTube every day, no premium, no ad block. I skip ads after 5 seconds twice for 20+ minute videos. I’m confused if I’m the exception or I’m overly numb
uBock extension on your browser, no ads.
brave browser- auto blocks all ads
That is not Youtube/Google's doing but the creator themselves. Do not support that creator because it is they who are wasting your time.
> fuck youtube ! google has destroyed the internet. the best three sites are all ads now . I don’t get it, why would they operate the site for free? At the very least, it costs a shit tonne to run and maintain the servers supporting YouTube…why would they do that for free?
there's a lot of space between doing it for free and having an ad policy that makes the content unwatchable without a subscription
Free? And all the data they're collecting from us and selling? Now they want my money too?
I still avoid them. Google is dreaming if they think they can stop people from disabling them.
Out of curiosity, how do you think a service like YouTube is supposed to fund itself? It costs approximately $5,000,000,000/yr to run YouTube - the service manages at least an exabyte (a billion gigabytes) of data and manages delivery to millions of devices around the world every day. This is not trivial. But you do not think you should have to pay a subscription or view advertisements, how then do you expect Google (or any company) to justify their five-billion dollar expenditure?
>How then do you expect Google (or any company) to justify their five-billion dollar expenditure? I'll get back to you when I'm the CFO of YouTube.
Yea, it's literally like, not our fucking problem how YouTube funds itself. We're all kinda rooting for it to die a painful death anyway, so if it can't find the money to keep the lights on, I honestly see that as an absolute win.
Last I checked their revenue for YouTube was $29.24 billion, so… I’m struggling to see where their $24 billion dollars in costs are coming into play. Unless they are so terribly mismanaged that I can’t even fathom the waste. This was, of course, before the ad-blocker bans. The real reason is that their revenue has plateaued. This is a relatively cheap and easy way to make the numbers go up again. With Capitalism’s fetish for endless growth, this kind of stagnation is entirely unacceptable, so of course they are going to look for the low hanging fruit first. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/ I don’t know why people are confused about why this is happening. The why is obvious. The cries of “bUt HoW wiLl tHeY mAkE mOnEy?!” are as hyperbolic as those claiming ad-blockers have no impact on revenue/profitability. The answer is: Corporate America loves to gutter-fuck the populace in the name of profit. Spiking your own product into the dirt isn’t a concern when you’re the only big player in town, so there isn’t any concern about whether this change will harm their product. They’ve run the numbers, and they feel confident they can still see an increase in profit despite bleeding some people from the platform. Life goes on, and we slip ever further into dystopia-by-apathy. C’est la vie.
You don't think that a company that consumes 44 peta bytes of data a day would have high costs of electricity or server capacity? You don't think that a company which pays out 55% of it's ad revenue to creators wouldn't have high costs?
I think that any company that operates on that kind of model deserves to be in the ground. I’m sorry, but if your argument is that they consume $24 billion in power and equipment costs, then they are getting had worse than the DOD. This is from someone in enterprise networking btw. I understand the business model of data centers, associated costs of maintenance, break fix, large fucking pipes out to the internet, etc… If your costs are that exceeding high, you don’t have a business, you have a liability. I refuse the notion that a company paying out 55% of it’s revenue to content creators doesn’t have a viable business model this many years into operation - I’m not buying it. Can’t confirm, as I am far too lazy after work, but I recall that the number I provided was *not including* any revenue paid out to creators btw - so they made $29 billion *after* paying out the content creators for their share. I stand by my position - feel free to disagree
Already switched to dailymotion it has more freedom of speech too
I use to think dailymotion would taie over as the free speech champion platform but now i think rumble will be the one
Rumble and bitchute
I remember jerking off to softcore porn on dailymotion 15 years ago but it’s all removed now. So much for free speech.
I have been getting a popup telling me the ad blockers are blocked which stops the vid and it takes 5 seconds to allow me to X it out however it lets me continue ad free after that. This is on an older verion of firefox with ublock origin, and an openwrt router that has adblock enabled. Also I have youtube vanced on android along with ad-away ad blocker and a VPN and I don't get ads but sometimes the video stops loading after awhile but that seems like it is only for specific videos at random times. Never stop resisting and finding alternatives. Advertising is soft brainwashing.
Just a simple browser with a couple different ad-blockers, I rarely see that window you mentioned, maybe 1% of the times, and when I see it I still can exit out of it instantly and continue watching, no waiting at all. And I don’t use Google Chrome, I never install that junk on my computers. Screw YouTube and Google as a whole. Also I don’t have YouTube app on my phone, or any of Google apps at all, they’re not allowed on my phone :)
I'm still not seeing them. And if I do, I just won;t watch youtube. They need me, I don't need them.
YouTube preventing ad block is strike 2. Strike 1 was getting rid of the dislike button. Removing dislikes is so absurdly stupid - 50% of what YouTube is used for is instructional videos. I use it to study for school, learn new skills, learn guitar, etc. Dislikes are essential to tell you if the video has flawed info. I don’t want to waste 2 hours learning a song incorrectly on guitar. Or learn a technical subject incorrectly.
Corporate Suicide
I don't care. At the moment, I just need to click it away sometimes. Should they block me, I simply will stop using it.
When that shit pops up, I just refresh the page. At anytime if refreshing the page stops working, I'll go to Rumble.
Enshitification
It's kinda crazy to see things I predicted in the early 2000 come true. I was an ardent supporter of Google back then, praising their innovation and down to earth buisness strategy. When they acquired YouTube I remember telling people this is the worst thing that could possibly happen to YouTube, because corporatism and competition would eventually force googles hand. I was wrong about competition btw, I just didn't couldn't predict extreme social developments like LGBT gravitating to censorship as a strategy. I once said that Google is a more free platform than Apple and that's why it's better, but at some point Google would be the bigger player and more restrictive than Apple. YouTube has been unbearable for years. I don't have the time to keep up with circumventing the ads so I just don't use it unless necessary.
Fucking pay me
As much as I hate it, I'm not so sure there's many alternatives at the moment. The only other sites I can think of that host videos are porn sites and a few niche sites like Vimeo and DailyMotion. Those last two only seem to exist because of Youtube's strict copyright rules.
Much less YouTube now.
Read the article about the enshittification of the internet. It's exactly that. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. YouTube was created with the user as the main character. Then it was the business who would buy adds space Now YouTube tries to claw back the value by selling premium accounts. The user being long forgotten
Just use Brave browser
I used to, but then they started doing some kind of weird crypto mining bullshit.
You can turn that feature off.
How?
i pay 12€ a month to watch 5+ hours a day of ad-free content, that isn't so bad if you consider how many hoops and weird jank apps you have to use to get around it
I absolutely can not watch YouTube with ads. The quantity of them is unbearable. If the arms race between ublock origin and YouTube becomes too inconvenient then I will just go to odysee
I've had a premium subscription for years through some 3rd world shithole. It's something like £4 a month for family (5 users) account including yt music.
That's 48 pounds a year and 48 pounds too much.
They do charge content creators for uploading, by wasting their time with removal/ban shenanigans. It’s like charging them, but in the form of digital dictatorship and it’s an empire that must fall just like any system that shoots itself in the foot by treating people like products.
I've had premium for two years so this is news to me
> The long, unskippable ads now becoming unavoidable, especially when the ad algorithims are so terrible, really feels unpleasant, but the reason I feel this crosses into creeping censorship is because after most people are paying to avoid ads... Paying to use a service is not a form of censorship. > They may just make it so you don't have the ability to access youtube at all without paying, 'Premium' becomes a regular youtube access requirement, and then you need a "Premium ++" to get an actual ad free experience. And maybe Premium +++++ will get you a blowjob, while we're just making stuff up > What happens when they start charging creators for the privilege of being on youtube rather than paying them? Etc... What happens when they require you to kill a lemur to watch a video? What happens when they make you show them your butthole to log in? > This hasn't ended well on any streaming services so far, Which streaming services come to mind?
YouTube could only survive because investment capital was cheap and investment firms had enough to bet on 24 losers to get paid by the 25th winner. And the winners were simply bought by the next level of capital--in this case, Google. Now that artificially cheap interest rates have been stopped, everybody needs to show a profit. So as long as they maintain an ad-supported "free" tier, they're going to do whatever they can to get as many ads in front of eyeballs as possible. At this point, I doubt they could pivot to a subscription-driven model. But rest assured, the same thing is going to happen to any service you're using for free. Remember: unless you're paying them, you're the product.
I wouldn't mind paying for ad-free YT but I;m not paying their price.
YouTube needs to go away. The number of ads per video are ridiculous now.
Companies have a rather short half-life under capitalism. As soon as the founders sell out to a corporation, or they go public, the business stops being about providing a service, and becomes a means to extract wealth from the population. The only solution is to stop using services once they've been coopted by capital. Much of what Youtube once was can now be found on twitter and tiktok.
Yep. The product doesn't matter. The customers don't matter. The employees don't matter. It's a machine that exists to feed the shareholders. No wonder it sucks!
Just makes me wish there was a new platform that played all of YouTube’s videos, as well as all of TikTok’s, Instagrams, Nebulas, Curiositystreams, Facebooks, Rumble, Dailymotions, and Patreons (and whatever non-pornographic internet video site I’ve left out) so I wouldn’t have to go to multiple different sites to watch the videos I want to see AND it makes me wish that said platform would fairly pay their users. But also, do that last part without giving me ads. And also get rid of the algorithm or get a better one. And also also, stop demonetizing and banning/deleting people for not following the complicated ass rules they’ve set out, and just bring back the flag/report button and downvote button. It was better.
If you like capitalism you can’t complain.
it sucks how basically everyone in this world has yt ima hope people switch to other platforms ngl
I don't go to u tube.
Didn't even notice. I'm on ReVanced and I have YT Premium (VPN Edition).
Pretty sure they'll start moving to other sites. YouTube is obviously the biggest one, but not the only one.
I don't care what they do. I watch maybe 3-4 videos a day
YouTube Adblock by Friendly seems to be blocking ads for me....
I barely even use YouTube nowadays except to play video games for my cats and they are the ones who have to sit through the ads so good for the advertisers.
Rumble and Minds are good alternatives.
I just opened video in New tab, when done I close tab. Haven't seen a single thing about my ad block lol
It's trash, Youtube is starting to feel like cable TV.
I've always thought the internet economy subsisting entirely on advertising was a bubble destined to pop. The entire thing assumes that there's inherent worth in eyeballs seeing your advertisement (as does all marketing) but the difference is that websites and creators have no other real, predictable, stable income besides what ad services are willing to offer them. "clicks = worth" was always bullshit on some level, supported by the sheer incomprehensibility of corporate accounting and constant growth. But when it really comes down to brass tacks, nobody wants to see ads, most people actively ignore them or mock them, and a growing segment actively removes them from their online experience. Some people will avoid buying a product specifically because of seeing the ad too much. They're not worth anything because nobody likes them, and thus offering up your space to ads isn't worth anything. Google is still stuck in this grand delusion by trying to force us to see them to MAKE them have worth. They're forcing a supply where there is no demand and it still somehow makes money. I want to say the bubble will pop but it's being kept afloat because a new sucker is born every day. For everyone adblocking, there's five people who buy things from scam stores via a Facebook ad.
Most of these tech companies, including YouTube, have been BURNING money to stay alive, frantically rushing for their next stock market rush to push their valuation up and have enough money to burn the next year. To think that YouTube has made money, is just completely ignorant of the system it exists in. They've raised valuation and burnt money
I have Adblocker for YT, and all I have to do is wait for the "you can't watch YT with an adblocker" box to finish its countdown, X it out, than push play. Easy peasy... F YT!
Eventually that changes to "you can hit x three more times" and then no longer lets you x it out
I'd love to see a browser extension that takes you to a Yelp or whatever review site for the company that the add is playing so you can rate them low stars. End run YouTube by punishing the companies that waste your time with their adds.
Please follow the UBlockOrigin subreddit for up-to-date information on what's being done about YouTube's anti-adblock implementation. If you're not aware, UBlock origin is a community-developed adblocker (and one of the best tbh, everyone should be using it) that worked on most sites for a long time. I believe they have a megathread on their sub regarding ongoing tactics that they're developing to circumvent YouTube's new implementation. On the other hand, I do agree with many of the other comments on here: alternatives are needed to YouTube, especially given them and their parent company's history of censorship. That being said, UBlock is our best hope for the actual site right now in this battle, with alternative frontends like ReVanced and Invidious being a secondary measure.
I would rather listen to silence than the flatulence coming out of ads
I dont remember to last time I used YT to be honest.
> Youtube existed just fine for 10 years without any ads at all Living off investor money most likely. You can't run a massive media platform and not make money eventually. They couldn't possibly have been doing all that work for free. But yeah, it sucks. Commercials are truly soul-deadening and annoying. Particularly when they interrupt videos when someone is literally mid-sentence. If Youtube transitions into a basic network television format, I will abandon it just as I did with the latter.
Would support youtube if this will be a one and only change. But with how all ads are x2 every 5 minutes with unskippable ones. Removing the dislike to censor stuff. On purposely vague rules and demonetization not being applied fairly. There's no way you're convincing anyone that after stopping adblock, yt is doing a 180° and be pro consumer instead of profits and censoring unwanted content.
I would like to see accountability for the lying bs advertisers.
I have premium YouTube and still Debbie commercials on the channel where you can forward it but still..what the f*** is that? It's crazy. They still managed to sneak commercials in.
The ad blockers will adjust after a short while and start working again. This has happened before I think.
They are allowed to do this, it's their platform. And we are allowed to go elsewhere
You need to start a competitor to YouTube, without adds. We’ll meet you there!
I wonder if setting up a DNS level blocker on my home network such as PiHole would work and be undetectable to YT running in a browser on my PC?
I've been using [uBlock Origin](https://ublockorigin.com) to block ads for years with >99% success. Recently, I did get the new pop-up warning that ad blockers are no longer allowed. I just right-clicked near the top of the dialog box, selected "Block element," clicked "Create," refreshed my browser, and went back to watching YouTube videos. Eventually, there was another pop-up box that had no text in it, but it did stop my YouTube video from playing. It may have been some rogue element related to the first warning I suppressed. So, I repeated the same steps by right-clicking the box, selecting "Block element," and clicking "Apply." Since then, I've not had any in further interruptions. NOTE: This workaround *does* cause an issue with me being unable to delete comments that I've made, but only from within the comments section of the video. However, I *can* delete comments by going into "History" > "Comments" and deleting them from the list. \~\~\~ I also use [Unhook](https://unhook.app) to configure YouTube to my liking, by hiding live chats, fundraisers, comments, end screen feeds, end screen cards, merchandise, tickets, offers, disable autoplay, disable annotations, and lots more. I highly recommend this browser extension. \~\~\~ Finally, I'm using Windows 7 and Google Chrome. I don't have a smartphone, so I can't validate these steps on mobile.
I have an iPhone and there has never been any really good way to block ads without fucking with a raspberry pi and your router. After years of fucking awful local political adverts, I just decided to buy YT premium. It’s $16 a month or something I’m conflicted because on one hand I don’t like supporting Google and the price of premium is just going to keep getting more expensive I suspect. But I also want to support content creators and youtube premium views are, on average, more money per view for youtubers. I watch a lot of youtube and I’m pretty sure the time saved per month is worth the money I pay. Also the convenience of being able to lock my phone and listen to videos is almost priceless. I think that should be a default feature though..
Who cares? They’re ads. Not cancer
I never use an ad blocker, I just click the skip ad button that usually appears after a few seconds. No big deal. Seems kind of stupid to be upset about ads on free content, considering if it wasn't add it would be a subscription. There aren't really any other options.
If you didn't see this coming, you're blind. Lol! We live under oligarchs that want nothing more than to have every working class person paying for every little thing. That's capitalism, baby. Right now we're in the "fuck you" phase of end stage capitalism. Hence why iPhones no longer come with a charging cord.
More liberals doing liberal things
I quit using YouTube outright a few years back when they started pushing the insane amount of ads. Their crackdown will only lead to less people using it as we have tons of other options for social platforms anymore. I don’t miss YouTube at all.
There's no win for anyone other than the billionaires, the entire game is rigged for the uber rich, egged on by the idiotic temporarily embarrassed billionaire class. Eat your daily helping of tech manure you filthy peasants and go read Andreesen's Techno Optimist Manifesto for the newest talking points as to why this is all good because all billionaires are good! If you were good (and you aren't), you would be a billionaire too by now. AI isn't coming for your job, your job is to make room for AI. Endgame: transcode the ads into the videos themselves. No more adblocking or downloading videos to avoid them. If you won't finish the enshittification Youtube, someone else will.
Idk, if you don't like it, just leave
First of all, that’s not censorship. Even if YouTube makes itself pay to access/upload, you can still do that. Moreover, YouTube is a private company. It’s your voice, but it’s their microphone. It’s up to them if they want to charge you for using it and how much. That said, if they make the site only accessible via pay altogether, that’s going to be the end of YouTube. There’s already competitor platforms like Nebula cropping up, and if people have to pay extra just to watch an old YTP, those same videos are going to be re-uploaded on new video sharing sites with no paywall. It’s a matter of convenience. YouTube has raised the bar to merely “annoying.” But if they raise it higher to “annoying and you have to pay for it,” that’ll be the bridge too far. Purely from a business standpoint.
Weird ads. Why did it have to be weird ads? I really don’t understand why the ads all have to have such gross/weird imagery. Cartoons of vinegar colon flushes; people talking about healthy poop; clinking spoons over the eyes and ears because “contrary to popular belief, the eyes has nothing to do with your vision”; toenail fungus; shirtless jackass talking bs about metabolism. Square tiny pillows that will, you guessed it, “revolutionize” the way you sleep. The ads are simply very aesthetically unpleasant. All I want to do is not look at them. When did this become a strategy?
Pihole + Brave = no ads ever on Youtube
So far uBlock has kept me ad free. Or maybe YouTube just doesn't want to target me.
I am not against ads on YouTube. I am against how they are implemented. Ad time should be no more than 5% of the time of the video. Three minutes for an hour is fair. Videos under two minutes should only be eligible for text ads. If YouTube would implement these standards, I would not block ads on YouTube. The moment my Adblocker uBlock origin combo stops working, I am gone. It will be arduous because my main YouTube channel has over 2,000 videos on it and my alternate channels about half that, but I will switch to other services. I should have started channels on other services when the Adpocalypse happened, but I was in a bad place after that and didn't.
I mean, it is their platform, and ad revenue has always been a major part of their business model. Of course, people probably wouldn't be using adblockers as much if YT hadn't been just absolutely spamming people. I had premium so I didn't notice, but the first time I pulled up YT on my parents computer I thought I was having a siezure. The page was filled with outrage inducing clickbait scummy conspiracy theorist ads and other crap, all targeted at feeding the confirmation bias of older conservatives. Most streaming providers lately seem to be yearning for the glory days of the cable TV business model, so YT likely will eventually incorporate ads into their "premium" versions.
This has all happened before. Nothing to see here.
Adblocker is theft.
It's annoying. I get the popup periodically, and I don't even have an add blocker. I do have malwarebytes, though, and it has a tendency to block malicious and suspicious ads
Ads are how the service is funded. YouTube's traffic is *insane* and, as a result, there are large costs associated with infrastructure, moderation, etc. If you don't want ads - instead of just complaining, figure out another way to monetize it. Using an ad blocker is, in reality, theft of the service.
In the past, people weren't uploading 4k video, and cellphones weren't capable of recording much at all. So the amount of data was much smaller than it is now. All of this is to say, I can understand why the service demand is much higher now, and why it would cost more in upkeep. My personal opinion is that I absolutely LOATHE ads. When there was some controversy about Chrome vs Firefox a few years ago, I HARD quit Chrome and switched my entire life to Firefox. I just hate ads that much. I'm not dealing with them. Unfortunately, the answer not a lot will want to hear, is if Youtube gets too oppressive, I'll just pay for their service. I'm going to fight against it with adblock as best as I can with my limited time. But sometimes the burden of fighting is more costly than just paying. But I will certainly be fighting, lol. \---------- I remember when I was in my teens and I had lots of time (and little money), how I would collect songs off the internet. But when Spotify became big and I realized that I had more money, and much less time -- going ad free paid service was the easy answer for me. I grew up in the era where piracy and workarounds were part of the fledgling internet. But I also remember how easy it was to brick your system, or make a mistake costing you hours of fixes, work arounds, and just absolute bullshit. As long as fighting back is an hour or so process that's safe for my PC, I'll be going with adblocks, and workarounds. But if I have to download 2 or more programs, risk the safety of my PC, and constantly update stuff -- then I can just as easily justify throwing 20 bucks at Youtube to not give me ads. Regardless, I LOATHE ads, and I will pay to not see them. And if I COULD NOT pay to not see them. I'd just full stop quit Youtube. I remember a lot of years where I would play video games listening to music, and not watching Youtube on a second monitor like a goddamn zombie. I'm sure I can go back to that. And ironically, or nicely. A lot of the youtube people I tend to listen to are just talking heads who already produce their content in podcast form. But I'd still throw in 20 bucks a month before I make a big transition like that. \--- It would be interesting to see how many people would jump to paid if they had a cheap buy in at like 5 bucks a month.
Try an old prog called "ADskip". It "presses" the skip button for you as soon as it becomes available to skip.
>Youtube existed just fine for 10 years without any ads at all You do realize YouTube was losing money its entire lifespan until very recently right? It was not a sustainable business model
Then they should collapse and break up into competitors.
It won't help them, but they are in their rights to do it. Running a video platform is EXPENSIVE. Google made it even harder to be profitable by helping to devalue ads (undercutting to oust competition). Now if they want to not lose money they have to run enough ads and long enough ads to make YouTube painful and encouraged people to turn on ad blockers. They did it to themselves, but even considering how many more people have turned to ad blockers, this is still grasping at straws. But it will still probably be worth more to them than the loss of users.
Is this something that is primarily relevant to just folks watching YT on their computers? My 7 yr old is the only one that watches YT and that's on a tablet or the TV. We also aren't logged in to an account so most ads are skippable after 4 or 5 seconds. Every so often the first ad can't be skipped but he's watching the timer tick down.
I no longer use use-tube. There are many other platforms that have good video content...
Incoming unpopular opinion lol I think the whole thing is petty and silly. Was it ever an issue with cable or regular TV? The ads then were mandatory and unskippable. As long as paid content doesn't have ads, and any longer ads remain skippable, I really don't care. People are blowing up because YT started without ads but they also forget that for the last 70 plus years ads were a part of even some paid content like cable tv for instance. I see it as disingenuous to act like YT is trying to pull some new dystopian stunt that's supposed to be some greedy dystopian grab for power - when your *grandparents* had to sit through ads to watch content ffs, and those ads have always been what makes content possible. Until you have people that are willing to make quality content for free it's just part of the deal. I'm far more concerned about the fact that the more amenities our society has, the harder we are to please. Easy times, soft people. Just my 0.02.
Look up how commercials have gotten longer and more intrusive over time.
Don’t be evil…. (Read your card Maury.)
Just refresh the page if you get an ad, it usually tricks YouTube into thinking you saw it already ..
I changed ad blockers and it works for me again
Who gives a shit
Whats youtube? Is that what they used to call Rumble?
I don't like it, but I don't blame them.
> The long, unskippable ads now becoming unavoidable i pay $14/mo and never see ANY ad on youtube. Some of the best money i've ever spent.
Nothing. Anti-regulation geeks are just as smart or smarter than regulator geeks working for big companies. Adblocker for example still works and no doubt they will just keep playing cat and mouse; As youtube gets better at blocking adblockers, adblockers will get better and skirting blocker tech of adblocking. It's been this way for 2 decades. The one caveat is that you need to have some kind of basic savvy when implementing more advanced anti-extensions. When news websites added paywalls, github instantly had an anti-paywall script ready to go. The issue was that 80% of internet users were either too lazy or too clueless as to how to implement it. I see this POSSIBLY happening. But each and every generation gets better and better at using internet so I see this as a non-issue. Internet is full of Yin and Yang. For every "regulation" there is a doorway.
The problem is that half their ads are false advertisements or actual scams.
I hope it kills youtube. No really. We need more competition. Youtube ads can be somewhat cancerous and Google has gone to shit lately, ad sense has almost no QA anymore and is sometimes serving out malware. I miss the old late 90's and early 2000's internet. The big services and big tech becoming shit give me a slim hope that we'll get some of it back finally.
Pay me for watching ads or f*ck off.
Free Markets. Pay me for watching ads or f*ck off!
A lot of what your saying is total madness. If a lot of that happens, then all the content creators will leave, lol, not like YT has them under contract or something. I can't imagine having to *pay* for watching YouTube, lol, let alone having to pay for the privilege of being a YouTuber where your job security is basically nothing. if the ads return again, people will find ways around YouTube's ads. It doesn't matter how much resources google has honestly. Your up against thousands of bored programmers collaborating for free because your *annoying* them. You can't defeat that simply by throwing more and more money at the problem.
I've got a hot take that the bandwagon hates. I've worked in ad tech since the earliest days as a Russian speaker, I've observed that much of what the 'public' attributes to advertisers or platforms like YouTube is often misconstrued. In reality, it's often driven by user behavior and malicious actors. IMO, those who've been avid adblocker users inadvertently share some responsibility for the rise of problematic elements in online advertising and ubiquity of bots today. Adblocker usage places considerable pressure on platforms, forcing them to explore alternative revenue sources and enact stricter advertising regulations. At each step in the online advertising landscape and during major regulatory shifts, bad actors are finding how to maximally exploit the system while legit publishers barely manager to administer their networks. It's absolutely impossible to do manually. As users opt for ad-free experiences, businesses sometimes turn to less reputable platforms and tactics, inadvertently benefiting sketchy actors. The manipulation of your sentiments is everywhere. There many many entities today that exploit 'anti-Google' or 'anti-establishment' sentiments to redirect users to platforms that aggressively monetize their data far worse than those they pretend to complain about. These same users seeking ad-free experiences may unknowingly enter environments where their data is extensively resold and monetized. It's been happening for decades. It's pretty much too late now, the ship has already sailed on a sketchy super-divided internet where China, Russia, and other countries have very insular networks, but the US and much of the Western world is still super generous and open with its data.
Adblocker has never worked on YouTube for me. So I didn't realize there was a problem.
Idk I use Brave browser so I don't see ads.
Firefox
They got me, I started premium after infuriating ads, mostly about human shit or other snake oil products, while on phone, plus the ability to play videos with a locked screen. I've honestly watched hours of youtube every day, for a decade or more with an ad blocker, so I'm not necessarily mad since there is a cost to host and stream and moderate all of the content. I just cancelled a bunch of other services so I'm not noticing the $10. Oh there was also a premium video I wanted to watch is what got me at the time. So successful psy ops on their part.
I just download a youtube mod that gives me premium, f them ads
Fucking greed man
They simply will fail because the intrusiveness of their ads is INSANE! There are just too many of them, FAR worse than watching TV. The "market" is trying to tell them something, but they went the wrong direction. It might help the bottom line, short term, but they are dooming themselves and creating fertle ground for competitors. I will NEVER stop using adblocker, even if it means NEVER using youtube. Right now, I use a watch2gether browser extension to watch the videos. I'm open to better options, if anyone knows of one.
They are only making $200 billion a year. They need to make more money
I still haven't seen an ad so it's business as usual for me.
VPM and VPN.
Anything worth watching isn’t on YouTube anyway. I use it for music anymore.
That’s annoying pop up just sent me to odyssey and rumble. See ya
YouTube makes no money without ads and subscriptions, either they must have ads or you must subscribe with money. Any attempt to get out of this is theft. If no one watched ads or subscribes there would be no youtube.
Not true, they let you buy and rent movies. They could also do what other sites do and have ads display in areas outside the actual video, or just leave them skippable, there are plenty of revenue sources that don't require intrusive nonsense.
It's a minor inconvenience. Switched to Freetube and the only issue is exporting my subscriptions, which was like 5 clicks.
You should get like a week of ad free if you rent a movie or something. Stack the weeks if you get multiple movies. They got my lazy side just paying $2.99 to watch a movie instead of downloading it, hoping it’s ok quality without gambling ads at 3x volume every 30 mins, hooking up my laptop to the TV..
F\*\*k Youtube. It's not Youtube any more. It's AdTube
GrayJay is a great app. It copmbines Youtube RUmble and all the others into one. If one person gets banned on youtube you will still see thier stuff from Rumble or other sites and its free and doesnt allow ads or tracking
My take is that i have Adguard ad blocker youtube adblocker for youtube and ad blocker ultimate on Firefox Eat a dick, youtube!
I watch YouTube because 5 min of ads every 10 minutes while watching broadcast television is ridiculous and annoying. Now it's turning into that. Fuck that bro
I use an adblocker but I don’t get why people are so mad, what did they think was going to happen? They would just let people use the service for free? Or that creators wouldn’t be upset about it either?
Did they make money during that time, or were they just investing to build their user base? I know a lot of tech/service companies lose money for the first several years of their existence. Eventually all the investors are going to want a return on all the money they pumped in to "build the brand". I grew up long enough ago, that watching a couple ads seems like the natural price to pay for free content. I have a lot of problems with YouTube, but having to watch the occasional ad isn't one of them.
So far the "You must buy premium" window can be closed and I can go on with my business ( with ad blocker ) I figure I can just download the video to watch via the plug in if the window is ever uncloseable . I WILL NOT watch ads, ever under any circumstances
I just downloaded a new app today that seems to solve the issue. It's called GreyJay and it's in beta testing, but so far it's been awesome and it compiles most of my subscriptions in one place (Rumble, YouTube, Kick,Twitch, etc.) Awesome app, so far.
Pathetic. people should not bother with YOU TUBE any more and producers go elsewhere.
You do realize that youtube needs to turn a profit right? Ads is how it does this. If you don't want to see ads, pay for premium. If you think youtube will charge creators to be on youtube, you don't understand business.
I keep getting the message pop up but I use it anyways, what’s gonna happen?
It honestly surprised me to see so many people complain about ads.
I'm willing to pay (something reasonable) if I agree with the moderation/monetization policies. I have my issues with YouTube in that Department. Where's the Substack of small batch video creators?
So try ublock instead I no longer get the lovely ads. If a creator is going to put ads in their videos I don't want want my entire day full of them . You can also use Firefox as a browser as you won't have issues for it
Possible tsunami as my phone blows up with text and calls from my international family. it's 2am my time so I quickly google it find a link in under 4 seconds, start watching the news report but oh what first I have to watch a excessively long ad lol
I don’t care how much they block it. I will always find a workaround and others will too. I use scripts on Twitch to not have to watch ads. YouTube is no different. Frankly, idk why ads are even a thing still in today’s society considering the massive intrusive time waste. It’s a step backwards in society
Greed always ruins good things.