Mashable reports that users ran into a black screen on YouTube, and that it stayed for about 6 seconds before the video began playing. The reports indicate it affected several browsers including Firefox, Edge, Vivaldi.
Some users joked that they would rather see a black screen than an ad. While that’s certainly a better experience, it does waste precious seconds of our time. A simple workaround for the black screen on YouTube is to just refresh the page, hit F5 as soon as the page starts loading. uBlock Origin’s filters were updated with a patch to resolve the problem, the add-on updates its filters automatically. If you are still experiencing the black screen issue, just open the extension’s dashboard and manually update the filters. This tug-of-war is getting annoying, but it appears to me that Google’s efforts are actively promoting the use of ad blockers, instead of attracting new subscribers.
Well, I’d rather see blankness than another ad.
it’s nuts that no one likes ads yet advertising wouldn’t be a billions of dollars industry if they didn’t work
well, as long as the companies buying the ads think they work, we have an industry
i am also immune to ads lol
Until they subtly inject them into other social media platforms, whereupon they’ll trickle into Lemmy like so much piss from an overflowing toilet. Mark my words, we’ll be up to our eyes in piss by 2026.
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Those’ve been fairly common for the last like… 8 years on Reddit. Interestingly, they started as mug and trinket sale ads and have since launched into every facet. Some major marketing firms use that method now, and I blame spammers for that blight.
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Can you think of something you may have bought which you saw an advert for it years ago? Does or doesn’t have to be the first time you became aware of it.
lol i was mostly being facetious, in reply to the number of people in this thread expressing extreme skepticism about whether ads work at all
for myself, i’m sure they have worked and probably do work, but i can tell you that i make every effort to avoid even seeing them, because i fucking hate them. i use ublock origin. i don’t watch tv. i torrent movies. i pay for tidal. that still doesn’t eliminate billboards and other forcibly shoved bullshit into daily life
I have enjoyed the content of creators on YouTube, content that perhaps wouldn’t have come to exist without adverts, but if I could press a magic button to make it so anyone could easily prevent adverts then I would.
A simple reduction in copyright term (say 10 years) would allow authors to be creative with existing works - newbies need not start from scratch. After 10 years users could choose a copyrighted work from who they’d prefer created it, rather than who currently owns the “IP” trading card to for the next ~150 years.
I can’t think of a time I’ve seen an ad and thought, ya that’s exactly what I need in my life.
I think you’re giving companies too much credit. Freakonomics did a series called “Does Advertising Actually Work?” and the tl;dr was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-1-tv-ep-440/
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-2-digital-ep-441/
Beat me to this.
Advertisers tend to be strongly opposed to measuring advertising effectiveness, because if they’re not effective, then they’re out of a job.
What I’ve found is that advertising only works if I already wanted that product. That advertisement doesn’t have to be these huge ad campaigns that they currently do. It could be as simple as showing a still image of a twix bar, and saying “Hey! Go buy a twix!” Yeah, ok.
But if I wasn’t already planning on buying that product? Well that ad time may as well have been some archival footage showing the inside of a 1940s concentration camp in use.
That is to say, both are things that you find offensive to have to be watching, and neither are going to entice you to buy the product.
munches on a twix bar
…what?
The main purpose of ads isn’t to sell you a specific product immediately, their real purpose is to expose you to their brand to make the brand more familiar (and therefore more trustworthy) to you.
For example, recently, I needed a new insurance. So of course I went to the websites of the 5 insurance companies that I knew from advertising and compared their offers. Then I went to a comparison portal, which again I knew from the ads. The best offer was from a brand I didn’t know so I went with the second one which was from a well known brand. I trusted the second offer more, simply because the brand felt more familiar to me.
Here’s another story: there is this big online clothing store. I always hated their ads, they were really annoying, and at that time I didn’t understand why anyone would buy clothes online. So guess where I went, 5 years later, after a disappointing offline shopping tour, in desparate need for new clothes?
i think human psychology is too nebulous and qualitative with way too many factors to definitively “measure” how effective ads are. all they really know is (most of the time) buy ads, revenue goes up.
but there’s a reason your personal data is so coveted by advertisers. if they can parse that you’re an avid hiker from the millions of data points they collect from you (websites visited, geolocation data, other purchases, etc), then they can sell ads for $400 hiking boots specifically for you, that people who never leave their couch and order delivery from hungry howies every day would just ignore
I suspect that’s why Facebook makes so much money, they have a lot of information on you like that.
In a weird way, this is actually quite handy, as you get ads for things that are actually relevant to you.
dude, ads are bullshit. you should never buy anything based on the seller’s ads. and i used to say a good way to research products was go to the niche subreddit, or even amazon reviews, but those are so full of bullshit shills anymore it’s hard to know.
A lot of people don’t mind ads, they even say they don’t see them anymore, that their brain just tunes them out. Then you look at their spending habits and it’s quite clear they are seeing them.
A big part of the population doesn’t mind being constantly manipulated.
The sad thing is: ads dont need to be liked to work. Making enjoyable ads is expensive, making annoying ads that still work is cheaper
That’s because they are psychological warfare. They don’t need to be liked because the goal isn’t to create a positive association with the product, it’s to brainwash people into thinking they need the product
Or sometimes just remind you the product exists. They don’t have to make you like <insert snack here>, but when you see it you end up thinking “man it’s been a while since I’ve had <snack>”. Next then you know, you’re grabbing <snack> at the grocery store because you’ve been thinking about it lately.
That was certainly memorable but also I did not buy any.
best rendition ever
My wife worked for a company that was heavily reliant on generating leads from ads. They had lots of real time monitoring of conversion rates to make sure they were actually making more money than they were spending on the ads. They would have to turn ad channels off all the time because the return on ad spend went negative.
So my conclusion is that ads can be somewhat effective for companies, but if they don’t actively monitor and control the performance of their ads, they’re probably just burning money. A lot of companies seem to advertise because they think that’s the only way to grow.
Was it a niche company/product?
No, the company is publically listed with around 1 Bil market cap.
No one likes being manipulated. I like ads that promote healthy living for example, if they don’t secretly promote any brand or product. They are pretty rare though, almost only in some public health care facilities.
Apparently there are some people that like ads, and a larger amount who may not like them but are willing to tolerate them.
Those of us who will make proactive choices to not engage with advertising are the minority.
My mom (mid 70s) says “Oh I don’t mind the commercials. It gives me a break to go pee.”
And when I say “or you could just get a dvr, and pause for as long as you want, any time you want.”
Her response was “Yeah…but who wants to do all that???”
Um…boomers are weird.
Lemmy users typically vastly overestimate the amount of hassle people are willing to put up with to deal with technology.
It’s why we have so many Linux evangelicals.
Granted I agree with the overall spirit of your reply, I don’t agree with it in terms of hitting the pause button on a remote. She’s had VCRs before. And DVD players. She knows how this works. Hitting the pause button and hitting the play button has to be THE easiest form of technology I can think of.
But for Linux? Yeah. The platform has been around something like 30 years, and STILL only has 4% of the overall userbase, despite the fact that only the rich can afford a Mac, and Windows is so trouble ridden these days, that it’s actively like living in the book 1984. Yet, nobody is switching to Linux, because it’s Linux.
But if you try to point out the problems that average people have with Linux, you get told “Then YOU create your own fork. It’s open source!”
Like, c’mon. I don’t even know how to USE Linux. You think I know how to program???
Because overall, I think Linux COULD BE superior to windows…if it were easy to figure out what the hell I’m doing. I tried to unmute my speakers. On windows, down in the task bar is a speaker icon. Right click it and get some options, or double click it and get a slider bar.
Took me 3 days to figure out how to get audio. I should not need to go into terminal and mess around with 30 paragraphs of copy/paste/troubleshoot to figure out why my speakers aren’t getting audio. This is just one example, but I’m sure SOMEONE is going to chime in, and tell me that I’m wrong, and that Linux is the best, and I’m an idiot.
Ok, I’m an idiot. Sure. Guess what. So are 80% of the userbase. Linux has 4% of the userbase. The reason it’s so small is because Linux doesn’t cater to the idiot. You got people a month ago before Biden dropped out of the race who were undecided voters. Its not like either of the choices are some unknown. I would venture to guess that 1 month ago trump and Biden were two of the most well known people on earth. Their policies and what they stand for are and were well documented. There were still undecided voters.
Those are the people Linux needs to cater to. The people who forget how to tie their shoes. The people who don’t have a thought running through their heads, and then get distracted by a butterfly.
I’ve used an Android phone for 10+ years at this point. Android is written in Linux. Android doesn’t have this problem. Any idiot can use Android. I would venture to say that 100% of Android users have no idea what Terminal is. If you asked them to use terminal, they’d say “Terminal? Are you dying?”
So, I see Linux as this potentially great thing…that’s utterly useless because it’s developed by elitists who hold the mentality that if they had to suffer, so should all of you. Problem is, instead of advancing Linux, they’re just holding it back from what should be a much bigger userbase. Just so they can say “Ha ha, I know how to use it. It’s easy for me! Now YOU learn.”
Not taking into account that people like me will still keep using a Windows 7 PC that’s not been updated in about a decade. And I genuinely don’t know if the firewall is even on. Or even how I’d access that.
I like to read a catalog when I’m interested in discovering something I may want. An advert on the internet is like a door-to-door salesperson staring through my window.
This is my impression.
My partner doesn’t care about ads at all. I installed newpipe on her phone but she prefers the yt app, with ads.
Usually in these threads someone starts espousing the virtues of “responsible” or “appropriate” ads.
A common argument is that its the most efficient way to pay for online content. I strongly disagree.
Suffice to say, I think ads are so normalised that most people don’t see them as intrusive.
The problem started when they went from a basic preroll ad, to unskippable and then the large amount of mid-roll ads to push people into buying premium just as they increased the price.
the real problem is that people will complain about it for a minute, then buy it anyway
I legit strongly suspect they don’t work, at least not as well as it’s implied. Like, everyone thinks they work because they used to work really well or something.
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Or they work somewhat, resp. in some cases and the rest is make believe in execeutives, a waste of money. Let’s say 50/50?
6 seconds of black screen VS 11 mins of the epoch times telling me how trans people are the devil?
I’ll take the black screen.
Yeah I know. Youtube tested them on me for only a day and yes of course I would rather see a black screen than an ad. I am not that needy for background noise that I would want to listen to an ad of the millionth MLM scam this month.
This is my book case and I love to read. Don’t mind the lambo, focus on the books!
Thank you for reminding me of this!
It’s wasn’t that long ago that I was in a little lamborghini, and sleeping on bookshelves.
The day adblocks/yt-dlp finally loose to google forever is the day I kiss youtube bye-bye. No youtube premium, no 2 minute long unskippable commerical breaks. I am strong enough to break the addiction and go back to the before-fore times when we bashed rocks together and stacked CDs in towers.
Peertube, odysee, bittorrenting, IPTV. Ill throw my favorite content creators a buck or two on patreon to watch their stuff there if needed. We’ve got options, its a matter of how hot you need to boil the water before the lowest common denominator consumer finally has enough.
Nebula has some of the better creators anyway.
Same. I do enjoy sitting back and skimming trough the sub content every now and then, but I have gotten to a point recently, where I might as well save my time by not watching them. Definitely not watching 10+ sec ads before I can see the video.
It isn’t fair to expect free hosting from platforms where creators are expecting revenue for original content.
Hoping for piracy means you expect someone else to pay.
Google should be pressured into changing their policies so user experience feels less disruptive and provide a healthy monetization
Video hosting is one of those things which can probably never be done profitably. But that’s okay, lots of things can’t be done profitably but still exist.
The internet used to be almost entirely run by passionate individuals with no thought towards how they’re going to make any money.
The long-term solution is probably something like inter-connected peertube instances provided by some of the big video creators with lots of patrons, and if someone gets big and starts making patreon money, they can make their own instance and start hosting their own videos.
Crowdfunding is ideal for every problem on Earth. It’s the peaceful future
don’t bother, Lemmings have this weird entitlement that should be able to watch any video anywhere in the world for completely free, no ads and definitely won’t pay for it, because storage and bandwidth don’t cost anything and Google should be glad, they are blessed by their eyeballs.
I can understand, I would feel better watching a black screen than an ad trying to psychologically manipulate you in a personalized way.
I’ll take a black screen over an ad any day of the week. Screw ads.
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if im gonna lose time regardless, i’d rather spend it staring at 6 seconds of black nothingness, than 15 seconds of PragerU talking about how slavery was a boon the black man.
Out of principle, if I can’t block or skip an ad, I’m closing the window. I’d rather not use the service than be force-fed advertising.
I take public transit on the daily, and that’s just about the only place I can’t avoid advertising.
It’s not so bad. You can just treat it as the dimming of the lights/countdown timer you see in theatres, in the lead-in of the film.
They should play some chill classical music to replace whatever ad that’s being blocked
Or better, use FreeTube and NewPipe.
I get a feeling their time will be up soon. I hope I’m wrong.
NewPipe had to update a couple of times in the past month because YouTube made changes that broke the 3rd party playback. First time it took a few days, but so far it seems they’ve been able to keep up with YouTube’s bs.
I worry for a day when YouTube figures out how to make ads an unskippable part of the video itself so that they’re present with or without adblock, while also maintaining the ability to update them as needed.
Even if they fully render them into the video with absolutely no way for an extension to tell where it is something like Sponsorblock where people manually enter time codes could still get around it.
Piped apps have been broken at least 6 - 8 times in the past couple of weeks.
It’s the biggest Google effort I’ve seen to crack down on 3rd party YT clients.
I actually used to pay for YT premium, then they removed my discount AND raised the price to over $12/mo.
Sometimes I do miss my algorithm feed, just not enough to watch YT ads, or pay $12 - 15/mo.
I remember a time when ads weren’t crazy intrusive. They weren’t being shoved into every os and app and website.
There wasn’t 20 of them on every page, and advertisers weren’t trying to harvest my data to the point where they knew every last detail of my personal life.
And I didn’t mind having them in order to have “free” content. But they got greedy and now I’ll block them in every chance I get.
Maybe forcing ads into everything isn’t the answer.
you’re misremembering the time. ad blockers aren’t new and they were invented for a reason. people forget pop up ads could literally cover your entire screen and they were so bad that blocking them was a browser feature. popups are blocked by default even today.
They block pop-up windows but now website designers have discovered they can just do soft pop-ups. The worst websites have at least 3, the cookie wall, the newsletter and some pay wall or offer, often overlapping.
yeah, not my point though. my point is there’s never been a time for unintrusive, respectful ads.
Not to mention that ads are a prime vector for malware and spyware (well, more spyware on top of the ad vendor itself).
I went to my banking account page, where I can make transfers and look at my money. My ad blocker had blocked a GIANT ad in the center of the screen.
I find myself watching less and less youtube. Till is no longer part of my daily routine.
I backed up a few videos that I loved using tubearchivists and move on to other platforms.
I’m into small web and the fediverse now.
I remeber when it was all about the YOU part of tubin’. Real people making real content because they wanted to show it to you.
When they first started getting paid they just made more of that same stuff, heck plenty of reviewers could even be trusted as they made the reviews on their own accord.
It was my go to place for entertainment, information and to help me decide to get brand x or y for the product i need.
Nowadays i just have it on as it’s less annoying than cable but nothing is actually interesting anymore. Mature youtubers who have turned into adhd 9yo olds just to try and stay relevant, people messing with annoying sounds effects just because they read it catches the viewers attention…video’s nowadays are an attack on my home space, constantly triggering me with noise or ads just to be annoying. It’s become exhausting to consume content.
Same goes for instagram which i very much liked, it’s on constant mute for me and the only reason i’m still around is because it’s become a habit and titties.
This is what I and many others on these forums have been trying to bring back and spread. People should exchange ideas based on logic and good humour, not money.
Ironically I’m enjoying it for the first time ever at the moment.
We were going away on holidays and would have patchy internet and I needed to make sure my iPad addicted kids has plenty of content for the the road. I decided I was too old and too busy to spend hours stealing YouTube content with shitty apps and just bit the bullet, got a VPN and signed up for a family plan of YouTube plus through Nepal for like $4 / month.
And now without ads and the bullshit I have for the first time found creators that I like, and I put on videos throughout the day. Also because it comes with music I actually use my google speaker for more than just alarms and timers because I refuse to buy Spotify.
The $4 is actually good value. I’m as surprised as the next person.
I’ve seen videos mentioning they have started cancelling plans opened on a different region to save money using VPN software, so be careful how much you rely on it.
If that’s what it comes to then so be it. I’d rather stare at the void than an ad.
Or my ugly mug when the sun is up
there is also peertube which is fedirated
Sadly, too large to die. 99% of content creators willl stick to what the majority use. I’m just using Grayjay (Android) & Invidious (desktop) to watch all my content.
lack of content and engagement are the main issue and Youtube reign top because of that
fuck rumble
yt-dlp is also a great alternative, since you can just stuff it into the backend of something like jellyfin and have it work.
yt-dlp is a frontend.
it’s a backend, the front end would be something like jellyfin, obviously the shitpost here being that this was a topic about frontends, if you want my opinion though, all frontends are dead, and backends are where it’s at. You can even integrate yt-dlp as a backend to something like VLC so that it operates as a real frontend.
not technically a fronted. however, if you use it mainly for downloading YT content, it will run into the same problem as many frontends.
it will, theoretically, but it’s singular backend, and development efforts can be focused on it specifically, rather than something like vanced, which is integrating more heavily with the yt UI itself, whereas yt-dlp doesn’t care at all, and just rips the content spit out.
I would hope most front ends are using yt-dlp as the backend, but i suspect they’re just tacking shit on top of the youtube web ui instead, unfortunately.
How are they supposed to attract new customers when they are already a monopoly?
From the beginning of the article:
…in a bid to get users to switch to YouTube Premium
Which is still ludicrous of them, considering how much you pay for how little it offers
Yep on desktop it offers basically nothing if you have an adblock and on mobile you can get everything you want by patching
Just use the website with Firefox mobile, as blocks.
Which I’ve been saying into the void for a while. Ideally in capitalism demand drives supply. If their demand is lack luster (for people upgrading to premium), rather than trying to cajole people through force into buying their product, they should drop the fucking price. Instead, they want to keep it bundled with music, and thus make it prohibitively expensive, while simultaneously competing in two seperate markets simultaneously. Give the people a video only tier, at a truly reasonable price, and begin (read: continue) to rake in cash. It’s very frustrating.
What’s the endgame here for users?
Do we just want a reasonable subscription price? Something we can genuinely afford?
If youtube doesn’t play ads then they cant remain a service. At least not as it is today. Hosting costs money.
Im not shilling for them, i dont want ads either. And google are a terrible company. But im trying to be realistic.
Do we want cheap subscription?
Or a reduced service that can be maintained without so many ads
Do we just want 5 second skippable ads back?
Im just seeing this fight progressing to the point were youtube becomes subscription only and the ad blocker users have to pay or lose the service they obviously want to access.
I remember the days of tasteful ad banners on the internet. Those are long gone. Now everything has to be an obtrusive unskippable autoplay 30 second ad or cover half the screen.
It is not reasonable to browse the internet without an adblocker anymore, regardless of privacy concerns…
I remember when banners weren’t tasteful and the internet was the wild west
Email spam ads in 1999…
They’re already harvesting my data. The greedy fuckers can fuck right off if they think I’m going to pay a subscription for that. It’s not as if Google isn’t profitable as it is. They just want more, and it will never be enough.
My problem is that paying for premium doesn’t actually remove the ads. YouTube fucked creators so hard that they started running their own sponsorship segments and product placements. So with premium I’m still paying to watch ads.
Well thankfully SponsorBlock still works whether or not you’re a Premium subscriber. There’s also always YouTube ReVanced for mobile (which has SponsorBlock built-in). There’s no reason to ever have to put up with an online ad, no matter the source.
Sure but I’m not gonna pay for something I still have to actively fight with is the point.
That’s not an issue with SponsorBlock because all it does it automatically skip parts of the video you specify. Google isn’t going to war with SponsorBlock, and even if they did, I doubt there’s much they can do, given the nature of how the addon works. So there’s nothing to “actively fight with”. Just set and forget.
Do we just want a reasonable subscription price?
Yay, basically. I paid for premium when I could afford it because I want the platform to keep working and I hate ads.
Premium prices went up without a lot of value for me so I quit paying. Technically premium offers a lot but the core feature that I actually cared about (YouTube without ads) never changed in value. If I had the option of only paying for that, I’d do it. To me, YT is a higher priority than any other streaming service. But they don’t provide a way for me to only pay for the stuff I care about
Me personally? I just want to watch them burn. Google I mean. This is my endgame
I love this
Yeah if we applied modern politics to corporations I think a lot of solid bbq could come out of it.
We need to start to shit on exxon like we shit on republicans
Let creators choose: normal ads or sponsors. Not both. YouTube getting part of the sponsorship deal.
If they choose ads, YouTube goes back to 1 shippable ad after 1 second.
OR
A subscription which is just “no ads”. No YouTube music, not Google drive, no nothing. Just a cheap “no ads” subscription.
That being said, even if option 1 happens, I’m probably not uninstalling ublock. Once YouTube forced me to install it, it’s impossible to use the internet without it. Actions have consequences.
I’d seriously consider a sub that just removed ads if the price is fair. I don’t give a shit about premium, red or whatever it’s called.
Remember when good ads used to be unobtrusive? Return to that.
They were?
There already is a subscription service, it’s called YouTube Red or Premium or something.
Yes, i said that, that one point was more about making it cost less so its affordable.
I’m actually rediscovering YouTube right now. A few years back it seemed like too many attempts were a huge unskippable ad, for a short video. Ads were way too high a percentage. And even when a video was a bit longer, any attempt to scroll was met with more ads, and maybe getting reset to the beginning
This time around, I typically see one ad, skippable after 5 seconds, then another every 15 minutes or so. While I’d rather not have ads, it’s not bad. Even better, content has matured enough in the years since I first tried it, that there’s actually longer stuff worth watching: the percentage of ad time is much lower, so I do get entertainment value rather than just be fed constant ads. I could watch that.
I can’t wait for the day that saying “youtube” makes people say “what’s this? a peertube instance?”.
i can’t wait for the day content is there. I always look there first but too often I can’t find anything close to what I want.
Ditto. I want to use PeerTube, but network effect is a pain.
We probably need a few more years of network and storage improvements to make open video platforms properly viable. Video data is big and bandwidth is expensive, which makes keeping servers running over a certain size difficult.
Ever since YouTube started this nonsense I moved to invidious and haven’t looked back
This nonsense is about one step away from affecting Invidious too.
I tried using invidious but its was super slow and i only ever got 720p max is this fixed?
I have a lot of love for invidious, but I love in fear of yt finding a way to nullify it with some fuckery.
Recently they started blocking ips of VPS providers… so I can’t run an instance on a VPS, it has to be local.
