It seems like we’ve all lost the plot. We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring. Try browsing for a day on a plain-no-extension browser. If you use other web enhancement tools kill those too. Straight-up internet is cancer, especially on mobile.
It’s impossible to read a 250-word article without being interrupted 5-7 times. Two of those interruptions are likely a full page overlay with give me your email, and are you sure you don’t want to subscribe, just give me your credit card number.
Then there are auto-play videos on the side, some with audio on by default. I mean I came here to read something, so of course we have things flashing and moving and making noise, it’s the most conducive environment for thought, right?
Ad blockers and script blocking are essentially a hazmat suit that allows us to withstand a hostile environment. Remember when we said myspace pages with audio and [marching-ants] borders was a bad UX? At least we didn’t have overlays back then.
Go back to basics and consider what makes a good vs bad internet experience. The reality sounds like someone with a minor case of severe brain damage. I think we’ve just become unashamed of greed as a society. It’s clearly all just about money.
Those annoying customers/users generate content and we have to put up with them so we can monetize it. *Sadly, It’s unclear if I’m talking about youtube, reddit, or nearly any other site.
Le sigh.
We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring.
Not me, sorry. Fuck ads. I’ve been ad-free for like a decade, and I’m not interested in regressing.
Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive? I mean, servers and bandwidth cost money. I’m in the same boat as you where I have run ad blockers, adblocker blockers, no script, privacy enhancers, and anti-fingerprinting since forever ago.
I’d rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data. If there was a balance, this is where I’d say it was reasonable. Since not reality, I’m with you, nuke them all, and just take the content.
The definition of “reasonable ads” and “just a few ads” keeps sliding. I’m old enough to remember the early internet, and that this lie has been told many times.
Just a few acceptable ads always becomes many unacceptable ads, because money.
Just like cable tv!
Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive?
I don’t need propaganda telling me to want to buy shit that I otherwise wouldn’t want to buy, no. I’ll go to other consumers (and, more specifically, people I trust) to determine what things are worth, not entities with a conflict of interest in the matter.
The whole marketing/advertising industry is illegitimate and harmful, and I’m “boycotting” the whole thing until we finish the job of destroying capitalism and it’s no longer needed anyway.
I’d rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data.
The corporations are going to try to mine and sell your data anyway. Why wouldn’t they? You think just because they have a revenue stream through ads that they’ll give up another revenue stream from fucking over your privacy? Then I’ve got this nice bridge to sell you, too…
I think you’re right, I feel like I’m looking for a little good-will among our kind (bleak and probably misguided at best). Sellers and consumers need to coexist in some manner, but what that relationship should be is yet to be defined. For now, we’re in a place that needs change for sure.
I imagine folks wouldn’t have a problem with this if the ads weren’t already so aggressive. Numerous ads before and during the content break it up too much. And if the content is extremely short form, it completely ruins the experience.
The number of ads and their length should be proportional to the length of the video. And any creator doing built-in ads should also not be able to inject a bunch of other ads. Burying content is an easy way to get avoided.
Print media had limits for advertisements, heck, in magazines they were premium real estate for the finest graphic designers to put together incredible imagery to get your attention. This level of care (not necessarily images or what have you) has yet to translate to the web.
Unrelated, online ads seem to go out of their way to insist that there’s nothing to be learned from print ad stacks. Which is a shame, because I’ve personally placed an irregular shape ad in the middle of a broadsheet page and placed stories around it in the manner least like to confuse readers. Guess what the verdict was back then?
Are you saying your threshold for ads and empty foreshadowing hype is somehow under 99%? I sure do love me an ad-blocked, sponsor-blocked video that still somehow manages to waste 10 minutes to learn “no” or “I don’t know, either.”
That’s when the skip to highlight option comes in handy. And if a video doesn’t have it I end up contributing so next person can save time.
It makes the servive inconvenient and annoying to use. I just want to watch the video, not watch a 60s ad that us totally irrelevant to me.
I have had this in my ublock origin filters for quite some time. Seems to do the trick:
!www.youtube.com ##.ytp-ce-elementThat’s funny, I’m testing YouTube alternatives.
The comments in here are interesting to me. Ads and Premium are a way for your favorite content creators to get paid for the content that they produce. I’ve listened to a number of creators talk about the YouTube revenue sharing model and most of them (LTT and Hank Green) says that YouTube is actually really fair with how they share ad revenue and how Premium is actually a good alternative that meets the needs of the platform, users, and creators. And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can’t get to you.
I also hate ads, like a lot, and I do whatever I can to get them off of my screen because I think they are intrusive and we have proof of how they enable tracking across the internet at large. However, for those platforms that I find extreme value in (YouTube being the example here) I see how and why ads/Premium pump value into their system. If your favorite content creator isn’t getting paid for their content, they won’t be able to sustain it long term.
One last thought about video streaming and the content we all love that is hosted by YouTube: if we were to say that we would rather our money go directly to our favorite content creators, we would end up with a very fragmented ecosystem akin to the Streaming Service MESS we are in with TV/Movies. I would LOVE to pay LTT directly through Floatplane, but then where would I be with being able to watch other content creators?
If they would let me just specifically pay for ad-free YouTube at a reasonable price, instead of lumping it in with a bunch of shit I don’t use and am not interested in, I would happily pay.
Remember when ads were short and easy to skip? They’re just getting more annoying now.
I could bear them back then, but now I can tell immediately if I accidentally use the mobile app on my phone vs my phone’s web browser.
I have heard that the ads are getting worse and longer/unskipable. I do wonder how YouTube determines what the ‘balance’ should be. You know they have the usage and engagement statistics to back up the increase. It did get to a point where I said there was no way I could continue to use YouTube as it was; but it was also around the time that I pretty much switched to YouTube for content over Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/TV so Preimum was a no brainer as I could drop 3 or 4 streaming services for YouTube.
My understanding is that as rates have gone way down the last couple of years and it wouldn’t surprise me if Google just has less high quality ads and is dipping into the crappy cheaper ad buys to fill the space.
YSK that Premium pays considerably less to creators than any other form of monetization.
So, if you want to support your favorite creator, literally send them a dollar.
One dollar is more than what that creator will ever make from a single viewer on YouTube.
I would rather not watch Youtube again then be exposed to terrible ads. I accidentally went on Youtube on Chrome and one of the ads was a straight up scam. $7.54 Switch! Like maybe if they had humans vet ads like you used to do maybe I would have less of a problem with it.
Lol I know exactly the company you’re talking about. I like their ads for $1 Lenovo headphones
Yep, got selected for this test and I thought my network went down.
Had to do nearly 30 mins of debugging until I realized it was youtube actively withholding JUST the video. Took some effort but managed to get them to send the videos again after resetting a bunch of things.
I refuse to view ads and will go to the ends of the earth to make that happen.
Paying is most certainly an option, but only when that becomes the ONLY option.
I’ve been using an adblocker since ads starting becoming more intrusive and the internet has progressed so much that it’s become generally unusable without one. I remember when a mobile ad popped up on my phone and it straight up startled me.
deleted by creator
I have an adbocker for twitch, it usually works, sometimes twitch can still shove an ad through, but when twitch does show an ad I just close the stream and do something else
Alternate Player for Twitch still doesn’t let any ads through https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/twitch_5/
my ublock origin works ok for twitch, although i basically only watch replays. maybe its different live
At least with my subscriptions I’ve been noticing an increase in sponsored segments. And you know what? I don’t mind. It’s much less jarring when the “host” is also doing the ad and pretty much just works it into the video. People have to make money, and this old-school approach works for me. Reminds me of ads in old TV/radio shows. And it doesn’t suddenly change the scene and quadruple the volume along with seizure-inducing backgrounds.
We’ve been watching an old TV series called “One Step Beyond.” I actually like the Alcoa ad that runs ahead of the program. It’s written specifically for the program and runs as an introduction. They use “One Step Beyond” as a phrase highlighting their ability to innovate and in contrast to the “One Step Beyond” our normal existence as portrayed by the upcoming episode.
I know I’ll tire of it eventually, but for now I’m enjoying it much the same way I enjoy listening to a piece of music multiple times or rereading a good book.
Yeah I wouldn’t hate this quite so much.
But then the creator gets the ad revenue instead of the platform, and they just can’t have that can they.
One of my fave podcasts is hosted by an intelligent, genuine woman who happens to have a very soothing voice. She covers topics that matter to me, and as a person who has sensory issues, the fact I’ve never found her jarring is rare. I wish I could pay to skip the ad service she uses, because I’m just trying to be calm and peaceful and learn something that’ll improve my life when some prat jumps in and starts yelling at me about a casino or some irrelevant trash.
Bring back creator vetted ads. At least they’d be (hopefully) more relevant and fit the tone of the media I’m choosing to engage with.
This will lead to an increase of ad-blocker-blocker-blocker development.
yo dawg I heard you like blockers
The adblocking arms race escalates further!
Honestly, I pay for YouTube Premium because I find value in it. The price is reasonable for where I live, and it’s my main source of entertainment. I don’t like watching movies/TV shows that much so YouTube is my jam. So the convenience of being able to download videos, ad-free viewing, picture-in-picture, background playback etc. is totally worth it for me. I know if I dig hard enough and use an Android phone/tablet I can get those features without having to pay, but I don’t like Android and again, the features are worth the small price.
For me, YouTube Premium and Spotify broke piracy because they’re more convenient than pirating.
Same here but YT Music instead of Spotify since Spotify ruined their app. It’s a nice package and I like their recommendation engine better.
My issue with premium is that they took features away from the old youtube app and then resold them as a part of premium.
It’s hard to see the value in premium when half of the features are things they took away from us. It feels like a betrayal, and so i use revanced.
Same for me. Premium is worth it for the ease of use (especially because I watch a lot of YT on my AppleTV). I don’t want to have to worry about making sure all these ad blockers are set up right, and I also am ok with paying since I believe creators get something from that, right?
When I visit a friend and they pull up YT only for it to have three ads or whatever, I die inside. How do those people live?
I wouldn’t mind ads if,
- They didn’t repeat the same 3 ads every few minutes on high ad videos (No It, I will not take it >:c)
- Moderated and removed obvious scam ads
- Remove ads that are disgusting or clearly inappropriate (I have seen some stuff that could be categorized as porn in YouTube ads and no I do not allow them to feed me ads based on my interests)
- If ads were still not being actively used to spread malware/viruses (not sure if this happens on YouTube at all but I would rather be safe then sorry)
[EDIT] Removed a redundant word
The largest issue for me is that I’ve never watched an ad and thought “I need that”. It’s just a huge waste of time that I find disrespectful and distasteful.
That being said I haven’t watched and ad in years. A bit less then a decade now, actually.
Advertising clearly does work on the whole or who would companies spend so much gold on it? Advertising shits in your head. It subtly influences consumers and advertisers have become quite sophisticated about it. There is a glut of advertising space available now so we see awful and ineffective ads but be assured a lot of the bigger players know what they are doing. This is why I block all ads. Well for that reason plus they are annoying as hell.
To be fair the aim of ads generally isn’t to make you go ‘oh now I’ll go and buy that’, it’s more about unconsciously planting the idea that $product exists so when you actually do want to buy something you buy that brand. It’s why ‘show me as many as you like, ads don’t work on me’ is complete rubbish and the only real solution is blocking them entirely on a personal level and on a social level laws that restrict where and when they may be shown.
A particularly egregious example of psychologically manipulative advertising would be ‘Joe Camel’ who was nominally just a fun mascot but in reality existed to advertise cigarettes to children so they’d buy Camels when they were old enough. Given the prevalence of really awful advertising in the present day Big Tech really does deserve the increasing comparisons with Big Tobacco I think.
To be fair, even though ads didn’t make you want to buy anything, the tax write-off was the same.
I was late to the vanced game because I was very willing to put up with the ads for a long while. But yeah, the number of commercial breaks in a 10 minute video became insane.
This, and this is why few years ago I didn’t care about yt ads on my TV. I had like 3-4 ads, 15 sec each for an hour of content, ads only between videos, not in the middle.
However, suddenly there was 3-4 ads before each video, and many times the ads started to be longer than videos.It feels like they are trying to push me into subscribing to paid YouTube by making the free version unusable without an adblock. And now they are even trying to make me disable my adblock?
and I’m testing Youtube Revanced on my phone for unlimited ad-free background play for nothing!
The big issue for me is the content to ad ratio is completely out of whack.
I pay for Prenium. But that’s only because I also use YouTube Music. Otherwise, I wouldn’t pay for it and I would do everything that I can to get rid of the ads. YouTube with ads is just hell now. There are so many of them now, it’s ridiculous.
Don’t get me wrong, I recognise the value that YouTube provides. Most things I watch and listen to are on YouTube. It’s the website I use the most and I’ll be glad to pay for it. I understand that it costs money to run and I want to support the creators that I watch.
HOWEVER.
I refuse to be strong armed into paying for it. Music brings me the value that I want and comparing with other prices, such as Spotify and so on, the actual “YouTube” part of the package just cost me 1€ per month which is one hell of a deal if you ask me.
But if you don’t care for YouTube Music, 11€ a month (worst in the US apparently), just to get rid of ads is… ridiculous. I’d happily pay 5€ a month. It’s not much and for the thing that I use the most? Yeah, I’m willing to! And I know that there is YouTube Prenium Lite. However, it’s not available everywhere and it comes with a giant “fuck you” to the costumer.
You see, YouTube Prenium Lite is YouTube without ads. And that’s it. So, no Background Play (which I use ALL THE TIME), no downloading of videos, none of that. You want that, well, you have to pay full price. Even though these are basic features.
Paying for getting rid of ads is one thing, and maybe accessing special features is one thing. But paying for artificial limitations that are put into place? Absolutely not. And I know the line between what’s a prenium feature and what’s an artifical limit is blurry. But for me it’s basically this: If I can do something for free on desktop, but can’t on mobile without paying. Such as background play.
I am convinced YouTube Prenium would be way more appealing if YouTube weren’t being such dicks about it.
It’s simple:
- Get your prices back to normal (I hear that in the US, prices have been going up for… no reason).
- Roll out YouTube Prenium Lite to everyone and rename it YouTube Prenium. So it has all the features of current Prenium except YouTube Music (put ads and disable background play only on music videos?).
- Make it at like 5 bucks a month.
- Make a variety of plans based around that. So a Prenium Family and also, a Prenium Duo, just like Spotify, for just two people. Reasonably priced.
- And you make a YouTube Prenium Music plan, which includes YouTube Music as well. So on top of all of that, for 11 bucks a month, you now have a really compelling offer because you can go, Hey, for just 5 more bucks a month, you get all of the features of YouTube Prenium AND you get a complete music streaming services.
- Oh and also: STOP DOING THIS SHIT.
Bam. All of the sudden you have compelling options. Some people will say: “Uuuh, jUsT uSe an AdbLocKeR!” and whatever. Those people are not the majority, so many people watch YouTube from their phones and their TVs now, they will be much more inclined to buy it…
…I think.
That last part is important. I recognise I’m just playing armchair business developper here and that I don’t know shit, but still. I’m convinced this could work. The real issue comes down to YouTube being a monopoly and thinking that they can do whatever the hell they want, which… they likely can, due to the position they’re in. It’s an issue but this comment is already long enough and that is another discussion entirely, but basically: Monopolies sucks.
I’m using NewPipe, which gives me music in background and no Ads
that’s enough for meout of interest, what other advantages does a premium account have?
Lack of ads. Background play. Offline viewing. Prenium members are also much more valuable for creators in terms of revenue.
I’m aware of NewPipe. But I don’t like it’s design and I use my YouTube account on multiple devices. I depends on my playlist, like videos, history and recommendations far too much to use NewPipe.
Also, YouTube Music is a proper streaming service with proper algorithm and so on, it’s not just the music videos of YouTube. :)
You should consider Youtube Revanced Extended (Or even just Revanced in general)
I am aware. But like I said. Supporting creators is important to me and I watch YouTube in a lot of places. Including on my TV. A lot. Which Vanced is not a thing on there.
Plus: I use YT Music.
I use an app called 'smart tube next" on my FireTV stick. Im now using re-vanced patched YouTube on my Android.
I would use rif to browse /r/listentothis and open YouTube links of what I wanted to listen to into ~Vanced to cast to my TV. Once a video was cast onto the TV the next link would give me an option to play or put in queue.
Then I could scroll, select, queue, scroll, select, queue, etc.
On Android you can split two apps on your screen, one on top and one on bottom, so I don’t get pulled out of rif when selecting a song.
I know this all sounds complicated, but it’s pretty easy once you understand it.
Anyway, I do this when I’m working around the house. It takes the TV away from me as an option so I don’t get distracted while I’m cleaning.
I wish the queue was available without casting, I know YouTube was experimenting with it as a premium feature. It would probably canalize from YouTube music though.
I never saw that Rossman video before, but it sums up my thoughts on the ‘popular’ media landscapes so well. I’m so proud to be a pirate.
