The day that Youtube makes it impossible to watch videos without their awful intrusive ads is the day that I never use Youtube again.
Youtube ads are 1000x worse than TV commercials because somehow they are not only even louder and more obnoxious, but they also interrupt what you're watching mid-sentence because they have zero intelligence to their placement.
This. Just about the only way they will lose their monopoly on online video hosting is to make the whole thing so fucking annoying and intolerable that people can't be bothered to go there anymore. They're fucking trying, aren't they?
Pretty much this. But I have faith that a way will be found to get around this. Even if they just blank the screen and mute it for however long the "commercial" is would work for me.
Use a different frontend anyways now. There's extensions for Firefox at least that allow you to redirect to anything you want. I personally use freetube, a program that works like YouTube. Another one I can recommend is piped.video, great frontend and works just like YouTube does.
Ultimately, YouTube will probably do what Reddit started doing; charge for access to their API. That would make a lot of these third-party frontends untenable. I love that they're a thing, and I use them myself. But if YouTube is banning people who use adblock, they're likely next.
And that's where you say fuck API and just scrape it all. IIRC something like newpipe on android does not use any API, I also checked piped just now: does not use any of their API.
This. Yet again, it is shown that "piracy" (though the word probably doesn't apply to adblock) is a service problem. If it was one or two brief ads per video, I wouldn't have a problem letting the ads play. But they've ratcheted things up to the point where it is nearly unbearable without an adblock.
its whitelisted... like blacklisted, which is what will happen with youtube if they try this stunt. i just hope someone archived the old content before youtube chokes on pc clown hair,
use one of these terms and see if someone corrects you. anyone who does just outed themselves as a covert SJW and needs to be removed like the cancer they are.
AFAIK Google ran Youtube at a loss for like a decade or more, and only recently is trying to turn it profitable.
When Rockefeller sold oil at a loss to capture markets and drive out competition it was considered unfair monopolistic practice; nowadays most tech companies run at a loss for years and years until they have a stranglehold on their market, and this is normal.
No company should be allowed to run a service that doesn't make money; but of course implementing this rule would cause like 70% of tech companies to be forcefully closed down.
The government stopped doing antitrust enforcement in general. Big tech has lobbyists, so they especially don't get punished, but nobody really does anyways. They should have broken up MS into parallel and competing businesses when they could have. Now MS is less the bad guy, but the precedent that you just issue a restraining order and hope the market sorts it out is established.
I am now getting way more unskippable 15 second ads in the beginning of a video than I am getting skippable ads. And it’s not just one. A lot of times it’s 2 of them. I switched from the mobile app to the browser because of this. No way in hell am I dropping my adblock.
This is my experience with the TV app. It started pairing one unskippable with a skippable, but it's not exact science. Sometimes they're both unskippable, sometimes the first can be skipped. After so long it finally gives you the 5-7 second unskippables alone or in pairs. It's a pretty minor inconvenience, really.
Hopefully the good folks in the uBlock Origin community find a decent work around. If not Youtube is toast the minute an alternative hosting site pops up.
I mean, I'm genuinely surprised it lasted this long with no real effort to combat it. Its incredibly easy to do and breaks their entire business model to pieces.
But, most people who use Youtube as their primary "media background noise" (which is a giant chunk of their market) will immediately move on in this case. So its really them gaining little while pissing off a lot of tenuous customers.
Thanks to data peering agreements, Youtube doesn't actually cost Google a whole lot to run. Thanks to 90% automation for disputes they don't have to hire as many people as you might think, and most of those are the literal cheapest and stupidest on the planet who just follow scripts anyway. Those plaques cost like maybe $10 per. Data storage? Ridiculously cheap these days.
They make a killing from pedowood paying them to promote their digital bullshit in suggestions, from raking 30% off the top in superchats and memberships, selling premium plans after removing useful features and locking them away behind a paywall and, yes, conventional old advertising. They've been profitable for quite a few years. $30 Billion in 2021 was the last number I remember.
This is just a case of "there's money on the table and we're just going to take it because our users will fully accept any ass-ramming we want to do." Same reason Google reneged on their free Workspaces. Same reason they threaten to delete inactive accounts (keeping them around costs nothing, it's the threats that seek to encourage more usage to data mine and use for AI training).
It's the competitors which can't afford to get off the ground. No peering (no one is going to say no to Google and risk the ire of their customers, but they'll say no to Random Nazi-filled Competitor, as least how leftists see them). No scale for automation. No hollywood money. No sportsball money. No one will open their wallets on weird sites. And no conventional advertising on, again, Random Nazi-filled Competitor.
Youtube may be cheap for Google since they have their own data storage and server hosting, but to compete with it a company would have to buy/use cloud services like Azure. Those services (I think) would be prohibitively expensive for a site that lets anyone upload anything.
I've worked for companies that host regular websites that are relatively low impact (hugely low compared to something like Youtube) and the cloud service costs were really expensive still. I think to create a competitor to Youtube you'd need to set up your own server architecture which is no small feat. Consider that you'd need redundancies and probably want at least 2 locations with the space and ability to host a massive site having gigabytes (if not terabytes) of data uploaded every month.
It seems as though Google poured money into Youtube for about a decade and only turned it profitable recently; which is ridiculously unfair when it comes to competition. No one else (other than huge companies like Microsoft/Amazon/Apple) can afford to do that.
Basically I made this comment to say I disagree that Youtube doesn't cost much to run; even for Google I'm sure it is really expensive to host tons of data and constantly stream it everywhere for free.
Newpipe is a phone app that plays youtube videos without ads. You can import your subscription list from YT (without signing in to a google account). And videos can be downloaded through Newpipe as well.
Edit: Newpipe sucks, actually. Don't use it, and definitely don't tell anyone about it.
Considering Google just broke their own terms of service when it came to eighty per cent of their advertising that will require refunds should they have to adhere to contract law and advertisers demand it, they are potentially on the hook for billions of dollars. Their only option at that point would be to fully paywall the service. Which would then bring their eyes onto free competitions such as Rumble and Odysee and platforms which use the platform and its content for revenue such as Patreon and SubscribeStar.
First thought upon seeing this was "who the hell uses the word 'allowlisted,' I thought it was 'whitelisted.'" Then I realized they are insane people that think the words whitelist and blacklist are racist.
Youtube is a loss leader for alphabet (supposedly) and the more they can count costs the better. It's one of the greatest tools for info harvesting that alphabet has.
The only way I would allow a business to show me ads is if they are extremely short and simple. I literally skip, one way or another, every single ad in every content medium I use. I read digital magazines with the 'text-only function so I see no graphics, adblocking on my browser, don't use any mobile apps for video or music, I download podcasts after they are completed and listen later so I can skip the ads the hosts manually read, and I download music and listen on my own media players. I fucking hate ads.
That said, if the advertising industry would change the way to do business, I could see giving in to 'see' ads. They would have to be about 5 seconds long, at the longest. There would only be 2 ads, maximum, in any advertising 'block', and no more than 3 'blocks' per show. Tell me the product name and what it does, and who sells it. That is all. If you can't do that in 5 seconds, I don't fucking care about it. If I wanna know more, I will visit their website.
The day that Youtube makes it impossible to watch videos without their awful intrusive ads is the day that I never use Youtube again.
Youtube ads are 1000x worse than TV commercials because somehow they are not only even louder and more obnoxious, but they also interrupt what you're watching mid-sentence because they have zero intelligence to their placement.
This. Just about the only way they will lose their monopoly on online video hosting is to make the whole thing so fucking annoying and intolerable that people can't be bothered to go there anymore. They're fucking trying, aren't they?
Rumble has better ad placement because they are placed non-intrusively.
Pretty much this. But I have faith that a way will be found to get around this. Even if they just blank the screen and mute it for however long the "commercial" is would work for me.
Use a different frontend anyways now. There's extensions for Firefox at least that allow you to redirect to anything you want. I personally use freetube, a program that works like YouTube. Another one I can recommend is piped.video, great frontend and works just like YouTube does.
Ultimately, YouTube will probably do what Reddit started doing; charge for access to their API. That would make a lot of these third-party frontends untenable. I love that they're a thing, and I use them myself. But if YouTube is banning people who use adblock, they're likely next.
And that's where you say fuck API and just scrape it all. IIRC something like newpipe on android does not use any API, I also checked piped just now: does not use any of their API.
This. Yet again, it is shown that "piracy" (though the word probably doesn't apply to adblock) is a service problem. If it was one or two brief ads per video, I wouldn't have a problem letting the ads play. But they've ratcheted things up to the point where it is nearly unbearable without an adblock.
It gets better.
Whenever I fast forward any video on my PS5 it treats it as having watched the video for that time and it shoves 2 ads in my face straight away.
>allowlisted
its whitelisted... like blacklisted, which is what will happen with youtube if they try this stunt. i just hope someone archived the old content before youtube chokes on pc clown hair,
He's pointing out that they're being antiracist by not saying "white".
i know. and im pointing out what they are trying to replace.
this is a great test for your company.
use one of these terms and see if someone corrects you. anyone who does just outed themselves as a covert SJW and needs to be removed like the cancer they are.
I think I'm becoming an allow nationalist.
Fucking lol I was hoping someone else caught that. Fucking incredible.
Monopoly always leads to shit like this.
We need viable competitors so Youtube can get punished by consumers.
Rumble and Odysee are increasingly viable, and would be even more so if more people would stop bitching and just switch.
I think twitter is the only viable alternative but Elon needs to improve the video player.
Let’s not forget- Google allegedly abuses their search monopoly to push users into their youtube business.
It has been illegal for 100+ years to use one monopoly to push users into another of your businesses (Rockefeller did this in 1890s)
AFAIK Google ran Youtube at a loss for like a decade or more, and only recently is trying to turn it profitable.
When Rockefeller sold oil at a loss to capture markets and drive out competition it was considered unfair monopolistic practice; nowadays most tech companies run at a loss for years and years until they have a stranglehold on their market, and this is normal.
No company should be allowed to run a service that doesn't make money; but of course implementing this rule would cause like 70% of tech companies to be forcefully closed down.
The government stopped doing antitrust enforcement in general. Big tech has lobbyists, so they especially don't get punished, but nobody really does anyways. They should have broken up MS into parallel and competing businesses when they could have. Now MS is less the bad guy, but the precedent that you just issue a restraining order and hope the market sorts it out is established.
Comment Reported for: Rule 16 - Identity Attacks
Comment Approved: This is not actually an identity attack, but a criticism of Google.
Damn, and there I thought we moved to win to get away from these bullshit rules.
I am now getting way more unskippable 15 second ads in the beginning of a video than I am getting skippable ads. And it’s not just one. A lot of times it’s 2 of them. I switched from the mobile app to the browser because of this. No way in hell am I dropping my adblock.
This is my experience with the TV app. It started pairing one unskippable with a skippable, but it's not exact science. Sometimes they're both unskippable, sometimes the first can be skipped. After so long it finally gives you the 5-7 second unskippables alone or in pairs. It's a pretty minor inconvenience, really.
Hopefully the good folks in the uBlock Origin community find a decent work around. If not Youtube is toast the minute an alternative hosting site pops up.
"Pops up"? Dude, Rumble is already just as capable as youtube. It just need the content.
I mean, I'm genuinely surprised it lasted this long with no real effort to combat it. Its incredibly easy to do and breaks their entire business model to pieces.
But, most people who use Youtube as their primary "media background noise" (which is a giant chunk of their market) will immediately move on in this case. So its really them gaining little while pissing off a lot of tenuous customers.
Thanks to data peering agreements, Youtube doesn't actually cost Google a whole lot to run. Thanks to 90% automation for disputes they don't have to hire as many people as you might think, and most of those are the literal cheapest and stupidest on the planet who just follow scripts anyway. Those plaques cost like maybe $10 per. Data storage? Ridiculously cheap these days.
They make a killing from pedowood paying them to promote their digital bullshit in suggestions, from raking 30% off the top in superchats and memberships, selling premium plans after removing useful features and locking them away behind a paywall and, yes, conventional old advertising. They've been profitable for quite a few years. $30 Billion in 2021 was the last number I remember.
This is just a case of "there's money on the table and we're just going to take it because our users will fully accept any ass-ramming we want to do." Same reason Google reneged on their free Workspaces. Same reason they threaten to delete inactive accounts (keeping them around costs nothing, it's the threats that seek to encourage more usage to data mine and use for AI training).
It's the competitors which can't afford to get off the ground. No peering (no one is going to say no to Google and risk the ire of their customers, but they'll say no to Random Nazi-filled Competitor, as least how leftists see them). No scale for automation. No hollywood money. No sportsball money. No one will open their wallets on weird sites. And no conventional advertising on, again, Random Nazi-filled Competitor.
Youtube may be cheap for Google since they have their own data storage and server hosting, but to compete with it a company would have to buy/use cloud services like Azure. Those services (I think) would be prohibitively expensive for a site that lets anyone upload anything.
I've worked for companies that host regular websites that are relatively low impact (hugely low compared to something like Youtube) and the cloud service costs were really expensive still. I think to create a competitor to Youtube you'd need to set up your own server architecture which is no small feat. Consider that you'd need redundancies and probably want at least 2 locations with the space and ability to host a massive site having gigabytes (if not terabytes) of data uploaded every month.
It seems as though Google poured money into Youtube for about a decade and only turned it profitable recently; which is ridiculously unfair when it comes to competition. No one else (other than huge companies like Microsoft/Amazon/Apple) can afford to do that.
Basically I made this comment to say I disagree that Youtube doesn't cost much to run; even for Google I'm sure it is really expensive to host tons of data and constantly stream it everywhere for free.
Rumble is currently working on its own cloud: https://www.rumble.cloud/
Newpipe is a phone app that plays youtube videos without ads. You can import your subscription list from YT (without signing in to a google account). And videos can be downloaded through Newpipe as well.
Edit: Newpipe sucks, actually. Don't use it, and definitely don't tell anyone about it.
Please don't make newpipe famous. It's all I have left...
Here's what I tell myself: when Newpipe stops working, I'll finally ~have~ get to figure out how to use youtube-dl.
or just use jdownloader. its verys simple to use fire and forget kinda simple. only problem is captions and the like get saved to a txt file.
ReVanced for Android and uYou+ for iOS also work great. uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock browser extensions for PCs.
Newpipe was really helpful to download on public wifi to watch later.
YT without blocking adds = intrusive ass cancer.
Vanced was started back up and is now called ReVanced and it still works well.
Lawl... indian guy took over. Its getting worse. Gg.
Considering Google just broke their own terms of service when it came to eighty per cent of their advertising that will require refunds should they have to adhere to contract law and advertisers demand it, they are potentially on the hook for billions of dollars. Their only option at that point would be to fully paywall the service. Which would then bring their eyes onto free competitions such as Rumble and Odysee and platforms which use the platform and its content for revenue such as Patreon and SubscribeStar.
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/thebrianmoncada/status/1674070174884831239
Why can ad blockers not be made smarter?
Youtube will never know if you automatically mute the ad or play it with 1% of the size.
The only thing youtube could detect is that you request the video faster than the “click here to skip ad in 5 seconds”
It would be neat if a competitor just declared IP gay, fake, and void, then proceed to import meaningful Youtube content wholesale.
First thought upon seeing this was "who the hell uses the word 'allowlisted,' I thought it was 'whitelisted.'" Then I realized they are insane people that think the words whitelist and blacklist are racist.
Does this happen to brave browser?
Just limit adblocking people to 480p or something.
Oh well, golden opportunity for competitors!
Good.
Youtube is a loss leader for alphabet (supposedly) and the more they can count costs the better. It's one of the greatest tools for info harvesting that alphabet has.
Could probably just use a downloader and watch the raw video file to get around it. Still a bit of a pain though.
They could easily put the ads into the mpeg stream itself.
Then adblock could decode the stream to find the stitching point.
Then Google can turn on DRM so only the signed device driver can access the decrypted video stream.
Basically, download videos now because the ad wars are escalating and it won't be pretty.
The only way I would allow a business to show me ads is if they are extremely short and simple. I literally skip, one way or another, every single ad in every content medium I use. I read digital magazines with the 'text-only function so I see no graphics, adblocking on my browser, don't use any mobile apps for video or music, I download podcasts after they are completed and listen later so I can skip the ads the hosts manually read, and I download music and listen on my own media players. I fucking hate ads.
That said, if the advertising industry would change the way to do business, I could see giving in to 'see' ads. They would have to be about 5 seconds long, at the longest. There would only be 2 ads, maximum, in any advertising 'block', and no more than 3 'blocks' per show. Tell me the product name and what it does, and who sells it. That is all. If you can't do that in 5 seconds, I don't fucking care about it. If I wanna know more, I will visit their website.