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 likely 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.
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 have had this in my ublock origin filters for quite some time. Seems to do the trick:
!www.youtube.com ##.ytp-ce-elementDoesn’t work anymore. Youtube now replaces the whole video player with the following message:
Ad blockers violate YouTube’s Terms of Service
- It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback is blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled.
- Ads allow YouTube to be used by billions worldwide.
- You can go ad-free with YouTube Premium, and creators can still get paid from your subscription.
Hopefully they aren’t successful like Twitch was at killing adblockers. I stopped watching twitch after they broke them. The web just wants you to pay for a million subscriptions nowadays. Meanwhile those subscriptions continue to climb in price.
Update: Vaft script for Ublock Origin works for me now from TwitchAdSolutions
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
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
It’s funny when your first sentence is taken literally. You would rather stop watching YouTube and then, be exposed to terrible ads.
it’s “than”, not “then”. To know which one to use, prononce it like if it rhymes with “ban” - instead of “hen” - in your head, you’ll know which one is correct
That’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?
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.
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.
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.
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 being used to spread malware/viruses (not sure if this happens on YouTube at all but I would rather be safe then sorry)
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?
YouTube is going to have a lot of trouble enforcing this. Lots and lots of people out there are going to be immediately at work finding ways around this limitation.
We’ll make some plugin that downloads the ad and tells Google it was “totally watched and stuff”.
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.
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?
This will lead to an increase of ad-blocker-blocker-blocker development.
The adblocking arms race escalates further!
yo dawg I heard you like blockers
It’s just natural evolution.
The big issue for me is the content to ad ratio is completely out of whack.
and I’m testing Youtube Revanced on my phone for unlimited ad-free background play for nothing!
God the ads are awful. If they start blocking apps like Vanced and Browsers like brave, i will make a PiHole. And they can never block it.
Unfortunately this is a question that comes up very often in the Pi-Hole community where the answer is always: no, a Pi-Hole cannot block YouTube ads.
This is because a pihole blocks at the DNS level and YouTube serves their ads from the YouTube.com domain. Block that and you lose full access to the site.
They recommend running either uBlock Origin alongside it and/or use apps such as newpipe for android and freetube for desktop.
That said, I will always recommend setting up a Pi-Hole if you’re able to as the benefits of blocking trackers and ads from the entire network (which includes your cellphones, smart TVs, printers, IP cameras, etcetera) is definitely a good thing. Once set up it is 99% a “set it and forget it” kind of setup.
I think a pi hole dosen’t work for youtube ads.
Piholes rely on blocking DNS requests to ad servers, but on youtube the servers that host the videos and the servers that host the ads are the same thing.
While a Pi-hole would work in theory, Ads are just wrapped youtube videos as they come from the same servers. It would be a need of pinpointing each video individually.
My take is that we need uBlock to have a functionality to send data to people’s Pi-Hole on a page by page basis.
When you do, please post a write up in diy so I can build one too 🥰
If you wanna start right now, heres a link to an LTT video on the process https://youtu.be/KBXTnrD_Zs4.
I also just read in some replies above that it doesn’t block youtube ads so be warned.
I tried watching an hour long video yesterday on YouTube. So many ads. So today I shall sort out a rip of the video I think so I can watch stuff uninterrupted.
I download a lot of videos when I watch on desktop. This gets rid of ads. It also preserves them, since videos can get taken down for very esoteric reasons.
