It's excellent that alternatives and ad blockers do exist but we need regulatory action to hold companies accountable for things that are designed to worsen user experience to pressure people into paying. It's also a serious accessibility issue, to increasingly have everything be bright and loud and motion filled and unpausable all the time. This trend goes beyond YouTube and it sucks, we need to regulate this nonsense.
Name a single viable alternative to YouTube at this point in time. Alternative frontends don't count, since they still rely on YouTube to work. None of the creators I watch upload anywhere else.
People always say shit like this as if people don't have a multitude of different life circumstances that affect and coerce how they interact with technology. That's just how capitalism works. It's not a matter of willpower. Privacy Bootstraps Theory is unhelpful. Being able to completely opt out of entrenched tech monopolies is a privilege. It's great that you can do that, not everybody can.
I agree, but most Invidious instances are currently broken, Grayjay isn't really FOSS and youtube-dl/yt-dlp aren't really great for watching videos, they're better for archiving them.
I’m betting these wont work on a Roku Tv huh? Kiddo likes putting music videos for shapes and beats but the constant POLITICAL ads are driving me nuts.
You're joking but infinite growth is the broken basis of our financial system. Shareholder are legally entitled to request growth.
YouTube has cornered the earth market, they have practically no room to grow, the only thing they have left is to increase the revenue per view, so add stuffing will get worse quarter after quarter. Eventually they'll have to put ads in the ads and play them 5 at a time.
Yeah, I guarantee you google isn't interested in showing you one or the other. They want the revenue from both. My only question is, if you pause an ad, can you get another ad in your ad?
Except the ads on porn sites are easier to block than YouTube's intrusive garbage. A simple DNS filter should be enough for most porn ads, whereas YouTube requires more complex blocking techniques.
Just gonna say I hate this when other apps do this. I pause cause I need to concentrate on something else. Showing an ad just makes that even harder. Now I have to pause AND close the app.
Yeah, that may be so, but priorities man. Priorities! Think of our profits man! In this harsh economy, ever ad counts! We're only controlling 90% of the internet while we strive for 100%. That's 10% short. 10%! We only had a revenue of 305 billion in 2023 which is not nearly enough to cut down on ads. Billionaire lives matter man! Come on, everybody, say it all together: Make millionaires billionaires again! Billionaires first! Meemaws don't consume enough anyway. Screw her. By the way, want some penis enlargement pills?
Proof? Aren't there classes of videos non monetized on youtube? When I just google search for cpr and find the american red cross I quickly found written instructions as well as a youtube video that doesn't appear to have any ads. Isn't the problem that some video creators intentionally create videos for CPR in hopes of monetizing?
Have you had CPR training? What you stated isn't true. Every second counts. But looking up instructions and seeing a easy video will still help massively.
YT will likely attempt to play creators and viewers off one another. Similar to how hospitality does so with patrons and staff re: tips. You could see a FUD campaign aimed at anyone republishing their work on competitor sites.
odysee can also be a option from peertube as well but odysees privacy policy they sell non pii data according to them if they dont sell user data we will be good
I wonder what made their leadership continue to escalate into increasingly bullshit decisions. What happens if I need to pause because I need my PC to be quiet so I can address something and still an ad suddenly starts playing, completely interrupting what I wanted to address in a completely intrusive way? I'll tell you what happens, I'll either find some way to disable that from happening, switch to a service that doesn't do it if I can, or just begin avoiding it all together.
Brilliant planing, YouTube. Whoever has been left as its leadership is a dumbass.
Not to mention it'll push more people towards using Adblockers. And since chrome is cracking down on Adblockers as well, people start using another browser altogether. It seems like Google is self-sabotaging with these kind of decisions.
Hilarious isn’t it? I stopped using Google search because they fucked it up too bad. I stopped watching YouTube years ago too because they already fucked it up.
Whoever has been left as its leadership is a dumbass.
Not in the slightest. More likely their annual bonus depends on boosting revenue right now. So they're incentivised to generate short term increases in revenue but not for longer term. Plus, also, if/when Youtube goes tits up they'll just get a different CEOing job (with "increased revenue by 25% in 2024 on their resume") rinse and repeat.
Also I imagine the ads will be silent but animated, like a regular website ad but full screen, essentially turning whatever you're watching it on into a giant billboard.
I should have opened the article, that's a lot less intrusive than what I thought. If this is the extent of it, and frankly considering that Google let's you opt out of personalized tracking when many sites have begun forcing them onto users and forcing me to constantly clear their cookies, that makes me a lot less mad with them.
Great point. I already find this to be a problem with the recommendations that pop up when paused, and the end-video elements they throw over everything despite having that turned off everywhere I can find it. It's all so dumb. Just so damn dumb.
Somewhere along the line, maybe the early to mid 2000's they stopped making products "for" the end-user and flipped it around so the end-user (their data) is now the product, and the customers are governments, corporations, and share holders.
Because those shareholders (billionaires) and corporations drained the consumers of all of their money and now they're the most profitable demographic to market to.
That's part of the reason why new community oriented projects are way more interesting to me now than most software. There are some outliers in the space who still have dedicated people in their craft rather than for money but it is fewer and farther between.
And your speakers are on subscription plans that charge you for every second that they play noise. Better upgrade to the next tier if you want to listen to anything else!
Advertising these days is less of a way for websites and services to make free money.
Of course websites and services that serve ads will deny this vehemently because advertisers who become aware of such practices (typically known as click fraud) will cut off those websites from ad revenue very quickly and stop serving ads there.
The idea is to trick the advertising companies into thinking that we are there and we are watching, and we care, so that they will pay money to the website to display ads there.
They do, and they don't care. The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they'll get to play you more ads and cash out more. When/if they implement pause ads advertisers will have an even bigger case against against yt inflating ad watch time to make more money. Facebook has this issue as well.
The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they'll get to play you more ads and cash out more.
You might be misremembering / misinterpreting a little there. This behavior is not intentional, it's just a side effect of how the algorithm currently works. Showing you longer videos doesn't equate to showing you more ads. On the contrary, if you get loads of short videos you'll have way more opportunities to see pre-roll ads, but with longer videos, you're just to just the mid-roll spots in that video. So YouTube doesn't really have an incentive to make it work like that, it's just accidental.
Here's the spiffing Brit video on this, which I think you might have gotten this idea from: https://youtu.be/8iOjeb5DTZI
Edit: to be clear, I fully agree that YouTube will do anything to shove ads down our throats no matter how effective they actually are. I'm just saying that this example you've brought is not really that.
It's the opposite. If you pause the video you the viewers are almost always looking at the screen. The pause button on a mobile phone or web browser is literally on the player. You are guaranteed to see it immediately after you push the button. You will see it when you un pause. These ads are display banners not video. It only takes a second to see the ad.
Unlike video ads that just auto play, especially when the video player auto plays more videos, there probably is more probability you aren't actually watching, unlike pause ads that require user activity and focus on the screen to push the pause button.
Google probably only spent months researching this and they only have all the tracking and user studies to know what you said. Please ignore the obvious fact that you are looking at the screen when you are pausing or resuming a video, KingJalopy knows better and Google is just dumb. Nobody will see any of these ads and they are adding them in vain.
Yeah, uBlock Origin not working would take me from liking YouTube a fair bit to making it unusable.
I use Proton but keep legacy Gmail accounts around to ensure I still have access to accounts I may have forgotten about or people I knew a long time ago sending a stray email. The only other usage is logging into YouTube.
I use a Captcha solver extension.
I use uBlock Origin to block all their ads.
I don't use their DNS.
I use DDG over their search engine and Firefox over their browser.
I don't use Google Drive or their office suite (I think the latter is abysmal to use tbf).
I use DeepL over Translate.
I use NewPipe for YouTube on mobile and have a subscription to Nebula.
I no longer use Google Maps, opting for OSM instead.
I still use Android and unfortunately can't unlock the bootloader but have degoogled as far as I know how, including never even registering a Google account with it (F-Droid + Aurora Store).
YouTube is far and away the biggest means by which I interact with Google, and that falls off a cliff if I'm forced to interact with a mess of their ridiculously shitty ads every time I have to use it. uBO has likely saved hundreds of hours of watching ads over my lifetime (and probably thousands of dollars from not being subconsciously influenced by ads), and I'm not paying a subscription fee to such an unethical company to get rid of the ads. This would bring me from YouTube as a timewaster to YouTube only as strictly necessary. Even though I don't support them directly through ads, I do support them by supporting creators I like monetarily, by sharing links and maintaining the network effect, and by giving them plenty of metadata by interacting with their service. If they do this, they ensure that I continue to monetarily support competitors like Nebula and permanently lose a grip they've had on me since I was a kid.
If it doesn't I will make something that records the entire f****** stream and removes the commercials out of it the old fashioned way If I have to. Not my first rodeo.
Yt-DLP and it's variation (Seal, YTDLnis, etc.), newpipe and it's variation (Tubular, Newpipe Sponsorblock, etc) already allow you to do this without having to get manual.
Look at the article linked to it. It has a render of a pause ad being a banner that shrinks the video player somewhat, but the paused video is viewable.
I use uBlock Origin and haven't seen a YouTube ad in 6 years, I cannot imagine trying to watch videos that try to show advertisements in the middle of them, lol. It's why I download all the TV and Movies I watch too. Advertisements are for people who, don't know how to silence them, the lazy, and those got guilted into allowing themselves to be brainwashed.
So dystopian. The number of novels I've read where Advertisements existing on a screen has become the main source of revenue, what a bizarre science fiction fantasy land that would be...
This market domination is non-discriminatory. It's not like you go to your local car dealerships and they don't sell you any other brand than GM.
Everyone on the internet is free to go and use any other service. It's dominant because users are happy with their ads or subscription fees instead of investing their time into using a competing product.
They want free bandwidth (streaming 4k60), free computation (encoding, optimization), free research (codec development) and free storage (for endless amount of videos). Google sucking is a valid reason to piggyback on Google infrastructure but they seem to feel entitled to Google just letting it happen.
I never understood, and never will understand this.
Even when I was a poor teenager and pirated essentially everything I always knew that this content only exists because someone is paying for it.
How do people go around feeling like the best VoD platform to ever exist, available on every device imaginable, optimized for years by best software engineers the world has, should be free, and without ads is beyond me.
They can try to enshittify all they want, but as long as they keep offering that shit for free it's their own fault really. There will always be a way to remove all the crap once the video images enter my computer.
If it isn't sustainable for them then they should have required sign in and payment long ago instead of operating at a loss just to get all the content in their place. The only ones letting it happen are themselves, we just here for the ride.
I doubt they are video ads. On other streaming services they are just static images with transparent backgrounds displayed on one third of the screen or borders that show up around the paused video. Pause ads aren't new and I'm guessing YouTube is following other streaming services.
If either of you opened the article, you would know you are correct. There is a picture in the article, the ad is a static banner next to the paused video.
YouTube premium, only time I hear ads are when my coworkers crank their shit too loud in the office, or when I have a brand new phone and have forgotten to log in.
Did I miss some detail?
I get the impressions from the comments this is some really poor choice for user experience as people will often pause to check something
But in my experience pause ads are nothing new at all and they start after the device has been idle. What did I miss that makes this different?