YouTube tests server-side ads to make your coveted blocker obsolete

Comments

• blady_blah@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I would rather pay an add-block company a monthly subscription than give it to YouTube in blackmail. This will just be another salvo in a never ending war.

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  • glitchdx@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I used to pay for youtube premium. My logic being that I was using an adblocker anyway, and I wanted the content creators I watched to get some kind of revenue for my watchtime. Youtube stopped taking my money a while back, and I can’t be bothered to figure out why. These days, there’s so little content that I find interesting that I spend more time scrolling than I do actually watching videos. It’s only a matter of time until I just stop regularly going to youtube.

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    • djsaskdja@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I paid for it until they basically doubled the price.

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• buddascrayon@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  All of these issues have reportedly led to an increase in ad block uninstalls, leaving users with the choice of YouTube Premium or sitting still until that “skip ad” button appears.

  Oh yes, I totally believe that people are opting to delete their ad blocker, that works on not just YouTube but the entire internet, simply because YouTube has become obstinate and difficult. Who the fuck wrote this article? And how much are they getting paid by Google? Do they really think we’re going to buy into this bullshit and follow suit?

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  • rozodru@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    it’s total bullshit. For example if you use ublock origin every now and again sure you might get ads that pop up, but AT MOST that lasts for a day, generally it’ll last a couple hours as the team at ublock update their lists to block ads again. There’s no need, literally zero need, to remove it from your extensions. and at worst, like I got yesterday, you’ll just see a black screen that buffers for a bit before the video plays. the ad is still blocked.

    you can also circumvent most of this if you use freetube. OR if you just want music the youtube-dl script on linux. I also ditched spotify for youtube-dl as I can also download entire playlists with it.

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    • 0laura@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      if I understood it correctly UBlock original would be totally unable to block server side ads right now

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• shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  New article title. YouTube tests more ways of making their service shit and driving away users.

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  • Wogi@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I mean, if you’re not paying for it, and they can’t advertise to you, what do they need you for?

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    • Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      To keep claiming they have x billion accounts…

      There’s a big reason why these companies don’t remove the bots and willingly allow them to do whatever. It boosts their numbers to inflate their actual worth.

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    • tabular@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Does YouTube have competition? Your line of inquiry doesn’t mean much if the content is only on YouTube.

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    • eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      at least on my part, what they get from channel memberships (a whopping 30%) I’m sure exceeds the amount in ad revenue they lose from me

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    • Cypher@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I did pay for it but they massively increased the price while the recommendation algorithm was deliberately made worse and they wouldn’t stop pushing short format videos.

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    • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Youtube is google No 1 source of machine learning content. Fuckloads of video, audio and subtitle data they can use to feed and train their systems. Youtube itself doesnt need to make profit, thats just a bonus for them.

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  • IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    YouTube: oh no, the freeloaders costing us money are going away, what will we ever do!?

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• Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I would settle for something that simply turns the screen black and turns audio off whenever ads play. I don’t care if YouTube gets paid for it, I just want to decrease the value of ads and prevent myself from seeing them.

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  • dan@upvote.au ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t care if YouTube gets paid for it

    Legally, YouTube have to detect if ads were blocked and and mark the impression as non-billable.

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    • DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They can only tell that something is blocked because the ad wasn’t loaded from a server. If it’s not loaded, then they can’t count it as “viewed.”

      If the ad is just blacked over, it is still loaded, and they wouldn’t know.

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    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I already put my phone down on my desk and turn the audio down whenever an ad pops up, they can’t tell it isn’t being viewed.

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• elbucho@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I find it fascinating how media companies evolved their usage of ads over time. Used to be that the purpose of showing someone an ad was to get them to buy your product. Now, though, the companies who make the ads are paying to have them put on media networks who use the ads to annoy you into paying for a premium membership so you don’t have to see them. It’s double dipping.

  Not sure how I would feel if I made an ad, and YouTube was saying to their users: “Yeah, you like that fucking ad? Super annoying, isn’t it? If you don’t pay me more money, I’m going to cram that annoying bullshit down your throat every time you want to watch a video. I’m going to put ads at the beginning of videos. I’m going to sprinkle them throughout the middle. Hell, I’m even going to make you watch ads after the video ends! You like that, you little bitch??”

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  • simplejack@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s the evolution of the premium cable model. HBO, Showtime, etc. The upgraded cable tier has ad-free content and exclusives.

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    • elbucho@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yup. I’m old enough to remember when the selling point of cable TV was that it was ad-free. Then, of course, they started adding ads. And then they sold us premium channels that didn’t have ads. Now those have ads, too. You just can’t get away from them.

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  • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s been seven years, and this sketch is just getting more and more fitting each day.

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• UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Let’s go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.

  For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.

  For resilience, maybe settle for similar frames. Thinking about anti-abuse, maybe require a minimum number of reports relative to the views (and ofc allow to not skip stuff).

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  • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Due to legal reasons, and to keep advertisers happy, YouTube is forced to display the “Advertisement” mark and a link to the advertisers website. With these, all the required information exists to allow an adblocker to skip any ads embedded in the video stream. No community flagging of ads is required.

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    • dan@upvote.au ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      YouTube is forced to display the “Advertisement” mark

      They’re forced to identify that it’s an ad, but they don’t have to do it in a machine-readable way. There’s many different approaches to show an “Advertisement” or “Sponsored” label that appears to users but thar blockers can’t easily find.

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  • dan@upvote.au ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Let’s go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.

    This would fit in well with SponsorBlock, which already does the same thing for different parts of videos (eg sponsored segments, intro and outro animations, non music segments in music videos, etc).

    I suspect YouTube will find ways around this, like running ads of differing lengths, add random amounts of padding at the start of the video or between ads, etc.

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    • ArchRecord@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It actually already did break sponsorblock for a bit because user submissions would include the wrong timestamps, due to the ads changing the duration of the video.

      This would be hard to implement, but I personally would be happy to donate more to fund the development costs for such features. Adblocking is the largest consumer boycott in history and I won’t let a corporation try to crush it again.

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    • ours@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The challenge is that videos will have a varying amount or type of ads based on the client’s country/demographic and simply on the timing of ad campaigns.

      Not baking-in ads was the advantage of Youtube and other streaming platforms over the likes of traditional TV. That’s why they were client-side in the first place. I wonder how much the extra effort, bandwidth, and processing will cost Youtube to achieve server-side ads. Would be funny if it simply ended up being too expensive for them.

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    • sazey@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Let the games begin.

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  • guemax@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That sounds very much like the idea of SponsorBlock (but might need a bit of refinement to work for different ads of different length). You should definitely check out Piped for watching YouTube videos without any tracking/ads/dark patterns, I am very sure they will do something to remove server-side ads as well (hopefully).

    And if it is just five seconds instead of 15, it would be way better!

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  • SteveTech@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.

    This shouldn’t even be too hard, I doubt YouTube is completely rerendering every video with ads, they’d just insert the ad in before an I frame in the video. So each ad will start with an I frame, and the video will resume on an I frame, meaning just let the user select all the I frames, no fancy cut detection algorithm is needed.

    I have no idea how to do this from JS though.

    Also I mean video I frames, not HTML iframes.

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  • aStonedSanta@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Oh. I like this. Sponsor block but network wide basically xD

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• bokherif@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’ve been a premium user for a while now and the platform has never been shittier than now. I pay for premium but I see integrated ads in videos and nowadays YouTube sneakily includes actual product videos in your home feed as if that’s not an ad. Recommendations have sucked for so long that I don’t remember the last time I watched something good on it. Inclusion of yt music was the thing that kept me on the subscription but shit man

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  • aoer@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    How is this bundling even legal. YouTube ist pretty much a Monopoly and they are using this fact to push YouTube Music. If that’s Not anti competitive behaviour what ist?

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    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      How is this bundling even legal.

      It’s not being prosecuted, so its legal. Everyone’s been properly paid off.

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    • Scrollone@feddit.it ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I think the EU should step in and force Google not to bundle Music.

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  • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Inclusion of yt music was the thing that kept me on the subscription

    Same here. I was struggling to get the ad blockers to work consistently, so I said fuck it and canceled Spotify and subscribed to Youtube. FWIW YT music does a much better job of choosing random music that I like; Spotify just plays the same shit over and over again.

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    • sik0fewl@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I feel like YT music plays the same things over and over again, so good to know that switching to Spotify won’t be any better.

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    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I miss GPM. YouTube music is full of community-made playlist that are actually YouTube video playlists, so you’ll start one up and have all the music video intros, interrupts, and extra sound effects and shit that get thrown in.

      I started a Disney playlist for my nephew in the car, and you could hear all the sound effects from the movie over the actual soundtrack.

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  • AFC1886VCC@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    On mobile, which is where I primarily use YT, the official app with premium doesn’t even have sponsorblock or dearrow or blocking shorts. It’s genuinely a worse experience than revanced which is free.

    If I was to pay for premium, I’d want the above features at the very least.

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  • Scrollone@feddit.it ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Do you use Android? Stop paying for premium, just install ReVanced and “fix” the official YouTube apk. It also works with YouTube Music.

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    • bokherif@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      No, unfortunately I switched to an iPhone to limit Google’s tracking endeavors. I love Android, but Google has ruined it with constant tracking in my eyes.

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• EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  they cracked down on adblockers, adblockers got better.

  They’re trying to get around adblockers again, adblockers will get better again

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  • TacticsConsort@yiffit.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I will pay for an adblocker before I pay for an ad provider to stop harassing me

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    • ours@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Chad uBlock Plus dev doesn’t even want our money.

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    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If anything, adblock taught me about pi-hole, which brought me into the raspberry pi world.

      And id rather spend money on that.

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    • EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      adguard for windows, which is also available on CrappleComputers and I think it’s also on linux

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  • Swarfega@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m not so sure. Once they are embedded in the video they become hard to block. Twitch is like this now.

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    • RexWrexWrecks@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      And yet there are userscripts you can use to block out twitch ads. I haven’t seen one for months now despite not being a subscriber.

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    • nutt_goblin@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m holding out some hope, since twitch is live but YouTube is pre-buffered, but they could still block loading past the ad on a timer or a key computed from hashing the decoded frames of the ad, idk

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• Etterra@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There are already sponsorship-skipping add-ons. YouTube lost before they began.

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  • elliot_crane@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    IIRC the developer of SponsorBlock was asked about this and seemed very unconcerned.

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• InternetUser2012@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’ll just download the video and skip the shit, idgaf, I’m not watching ads, google can suck it.

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  • SendMePhotos@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Try the app called Seal on FDroid

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• furzegulo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  how i wish there was a good alternative for youtube

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  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Support candidates who want to limit the ability for large tech companies to acquire their competitors. Maybe even those that wish to see their acquisitions rolled back. Maybe even those that wish to see them broken up.

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  • elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    P-Peertube?

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    • roofuskit@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Not a great alternative.

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    • furzegulo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      peertube would be great, if there were more content creators. out of 330 or something channels that i follow on youtube, 4 are on peertube.

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    • marx2k@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’ve tried it. Every server i choose is either slow af, has no videos or the videos just stay at 00:00.

      Not a great experience.

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  • QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Grayjay has been useful for that. I still follow people on YouTube, but if they setup a channel anywhere else I can switch my feed to draw from those sources instead.

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    • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Oh cool! Is there any non-mobile app/service that does something similar?

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  • orcrist@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The alternatives are around now, and we know that many YouTube content creators are exploring other revenue streams, so it’ll be interesting to see how exodus works. Clearly YouTube is going to continue to get worse and some people are going to leave. What’s next? I’m excited.

    It’s always interesting to watch companies implode. Apparently Reddit is blocking non-Google search engines from indexing them, and Twitter wants you to be logged in to view people’s profiles. Those types of moves guarantee that the platform won’t be relevant a decade from now and possibly sooner than that.

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  • guemax@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Piped. It uses SponsorBlock to also skip ads by the creator in the video, I am very sure they will update it to remove ads injected by YouTube as well.

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• downpunxx@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Just got hit with this for the first time, and at first I was like what the fuck is this happening here, I'm running Firefox latest, and UBlock origin latest, never seen this before. Happening for every video, two injected video ads before the video, seem skippable, but i'm not clicking on them. Hope UBlock catches up to this quick, this sucks.

  Attachment: fedia.io ↗

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  • ShunkW@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Mine are getting trapped by pihole. They take 10 seconds to time out and just show a banner ad that won’t automatically go away without hitting the skip button. It’s really frustrating since I liked letting videos auto play as I fall asleep.

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    • downpunxx@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      at least it's not currently spawning an actual video advertisement, so, small blessings, the two injected ads stay static for 10 seconds a piece (makes sense), and if you don't click skip, the first tiers to the second then tiers to the video (was thinking of going pihole but you just confirmed it won't make a difference, if they start injecting autoplay video ads, then it'll be back on my todo list)

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• bitjunkie@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  YouTube tests server-side ads to make your coveted blocker YouTube obsolete

  ftfy

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  • enbyecho@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    But do you have a viable alternative in your back pocket?

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    • ryan_@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m pretty happy with Nebula. I tried it back when it was still bundled with curiosity stream but now I just subscribe to nebula.

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    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I have a pile of shows on my media tower to watch instead.

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• stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pub ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Watch how quickly I drop your fucking platform lmao. Please give me a reason

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  • ghostface@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Or just one more thing to add to the open seas of piracy. Or start supporting nebula?

    Although this would be the case for piracy, as a better means to support artist, because I pirate my music. I do attend more live music venues which gives more revenue directly to the artist

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  • SparrowRanjitScaur@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Have you considered paying for their ad free service?

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  • DarkCloud@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah they risk making their platform obsolete to many users.

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• Zozano@lemy.lol ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Honestly… How much has Google spent trying to counter people skipping ads?

  Is it less than the amount of potential profit if everyone was forced to watch ads?

  This seems like that situation recently where NYC paid a million dollars to catch people skipping on training tickets, which was less than twenty thousand a year in lost revenue.

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  • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The amount of people who:

    1. currently use an ad blocker to watch YouTube, and
    2. would be willing to watch the ads or pay for premium if their ad blocker stopped working
       Are not statistically significant to YouTube’s viewership or income.

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• A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Have a sneaking suspicion that google is doing the classic spend 100 dollars to save 1 cent type scenario, cause all the money they’ve dumped into this anti-adblock shit? theres no way its less than what they’ve not made from adblockers.

  Especially when all this money could have been spent on improving their ad service so people don’t have to view 2 hour ads, or malware laden bullshit, or just blatant pornographic advertising.

  but why spend money moderating their own service, when they can spend 10x the money trying to force their open septic tank of a service on everyone.

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• RonnyZittledong@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This must consume a tremendous amount of processing to do since they would have to transcode copies for every ad region/campaign and every resolution on demand. I am interested in how they made this financially viable.

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• essteeyou@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’m sure I’ll be downvoted to hell, but I just pay for Premium because I use YouTube all the time, don’t want to see ads, and acknowledge that YouTube is an incredible service/product.

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• FreddyNO@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yea the moment my adblockers don’t work I stop using youtube

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• zbyte64@awful.systems ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I mean I’ll settle for the ad being blacked out and muted while I wait for the content. Or have it play elevator music while I wait.

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• CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’m getting them already, which is a bit annoying, but I still prefer the black screen with an adblocker to the wild mix of commercials that range from MLM schemes and “join my telegram group for totally not financial adive” to flat out hate speech that I’d get without an adblocker. So yeha suck it Youtube.

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• TCGM@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I give it 5 hours from mass release before ad blockers catch up.

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• michaelmrose@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If they make it shitty enough I just wont use it.

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• Facebones@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Imagine what YouTube could be if they spent all this cash on improving their service instead.

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• Honytawk@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Nothing that can’t be blocked by sponsorblock.

  And if that doesn’t work we’ll find something else. Even if we’d have to download the same video multiple times to compare and strip out the differences.

  Google may have plenty of nerds, but the world will always have more.

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• Abnorc@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It was going to happen eventually. It sucks since so much good content is still housed on youtube. The bright side is that I’ll probably read more when uBlock stops working so well.

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• ramble81@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is where AI would come in handy. Start scrubbing the buffer as it’s coming in to identify the difference and jump past it.

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• dinckelman@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I know there’s a significant part of the market that’d just say yeah, fuck it, i’ll pay for Redtube Youtube Red Youtube Premium, but there’s also a significant part of it, where a lot of people would rather just stop watching stuff entirely.

  It’s just like Hulu back in the days. You’d have no choice but to pay for a premium tier, just to have 14 unskippable ads forced down your throat, all in a span of a 19 minute long tv episode. I stopped paying after that month and resorted to piracy.

  Piracy is always a service issue, except now it’s legitimately going to harm individual creators, who have just about everything to lose, rathen that a rotten husk of some corporation, that’s going to print free money, no matter what you do

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• ansiz@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Server side ads sound more expensive for Google to me. I’ll just use some future plugin that blacks out the screen or whatever if it comes to that.

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• lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The moment they fix the search, fix their recommendations, stop wasting money on junk projects like games and allow me to completely disable Shorts, I will resubscribe to YT Premium.

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