After Amazon said there’d be more ads recently, yep, more ads tonight. Done with it. My living room is not a marketing platform. It’s finally time to go back to the convenience and ease of piracy.
The new model is based around pirating Clarkson’s Farm and donating to farmers. That’s the point anyway. No need to bring Jeff into it.
People upload whole MasterChef seasons on Youtube. Legit
Ad revenue is like Crack to corporations. Once they get a taste for it, it’s all downhill from there.
Mostly because it’s the easiest money they’ll ever make and it’s more profitable than subscription models. Gotta see those numbers go up at all costs.
That just makes sense though? The legit sites have to pay for, fund, or in some way support the content which does cost money. The piracy sites obviously don’t have that cost so they don’t need as much income.
The piracy sites also pay a lot less in infra, since they rely on the user to store, seed to others, and serve the content to the local users. All that infra is offloaded to the user.
Sorry, what exactly kind of content are we talking about? You know, the one “legit” sites have to pay for but piracy sites don’t.
Fun fact: a lot of the content you see on big sites are advertorials, this means some company writes a fluff piece about how their lastest product can solve all your problems, and then pays the site to publish it. In print, you even have the option to have the ad use the same layout, fonts, colors etc. as the real content.
This means a portion of a site is not filled by content that had to be bought, but actually brings them money.
Do you think that Amazon gets its content (movies on Prime video) for free? Or do you think that piracy sites pay for their content (stolen movies on torrent sites)?
Edit: To answer you more directly, YouTube pays creators a cut of the ad revenue, and Amazon/Netflix pay the movie/show creators through licensing deals.
That’s some ground-level hanging fruits - do you know any piracy websites the size of Amazon or Netflix? Sure as hell I do not.
Piracy websites are usually pretty limited in scope. Places like some shady porn repos, pirated games and movies, etc. Of course there are some giants like thepiratebay but even they are nowhere as large as the ones you mentioned.
All of these, especially the big players, have high costs of maintenance and advertising. Just like their “legit” counterparts in size.
That’s normal, it’s the same infrastructure cost then the licensing costs
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It indiscriminately pollutes whatever environment it’s conducted within, and causes secondary harm to non-participants by incentivising hoarding of PII in the cheapest and least secure manner.
It causes genuine harm, I’m visually impaired and I’ve wandered into construction zones because advertising billboards are mounted near and “road work ahead” signs and everything is all just bright and bold.
I don’t know what’s official, everything is competing for my attention but I have very little capacity to dedicate my full attention to a visual sign. The end result is incredibly fatiguing, seeing a bright sign and straining to ensure I read it because it’s colours look important, nope, it’s an ad, that was a waste of energy, oh look another one with the same blurry colours and type setting it’s probably the same ad… Nope that one actually needed my attention, and now I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be and I’m in danger.
I’m also hard of hearing, but fortunately audio adber in the public isn’t as bad, but anyone who’s hearing impaired knows how fatiguing it is to try and filter through noise. It’s the exact same for visual impairment.
Adblock is a cure for migraines.
Amen, I just need IRL adblock now please.
I have legit never bought a single thing because I saw and ad for said product. I don’t know who is out here making these campaigns so profitable
Here’s a really horrifying fact about ads, they don’t expect you to go right out and buy their product. Ads target your subconscious and manipulate your way of thinking. There was a study done by some university and tested by a few people across different fields of study that proved this to be correct. I wish I could remember off the top of my head where this was published. If you do a little browsing you can probably find it and you should because you can’t trust a stranger like me to properly relay the information.
Brand awareness gets you subconsciously
I don’t know, I distrust all YouTube ads content creators slide into their videos, because the products are either useless to me, disappointing in real life like the “fruit smells” rings for water bottles or sketchy with some fear mongering like the VPNs.
Yeah I’m not gonna be paying for NordVPN. They’ve got this much money for ads and when buying 2 years at a time they’re cheaper than, say, Mullvad? Suspicious.
I do like some of the channels’ sponsor segments though. Internet Historian is great, OverSimplified can do pretty good ones. The Map Men are pure gold. But I’ve never bought into anything they’ve shilled at me, nor do I feel like I want to.
I dunno, I don’t just ignore ads, I find them repulsive, like my scam-alarms go off even when I know that it’s probably a legit product. Seriously unless I get a recommendation from an actual person, the brand I’ve never heard of feels safer to me then the brand I saw a cheap ad for on some janky website. Maybe it’s because so much of the stuff I had growing up was knockoff/store brand, so I’ve hardly ever actually experienced anything that I saw an ad for.
ublock origin. I don’t care if some website dies. Whole internet is turning to shit anyways, just let it all burn
I’d love it if we started the internet from scratch again with no search engines, just webrings and link books and geocities pages everywhere
neocities!
We should also bring back the LiveJournal days as well. I was too young to ever really be able to get into that kinda stuff, but I’ve been enjoying writing posts for my 100% fictional company on InsaneJournal, no matter how little, if any, people see it.
Ublock does such a good job at blocking the old janky torrent sites, especially compared to the increasingly aggressive and intrusive new shit.
Once ads are allowed into a platform they will ultimately be what destroys it eventually.
Might take a week or a decade. But the lust of that easy ad money will ruin the thing they were put there to fund in the end.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true - maybe it depends on (a) the owners of the platform and/or (b) whether there are sources of funding besides advertising
E.g. here in the UK, the BBC and Channel 4 are both broadcasters owned by the government, and both are funded at least in part by adverts. But I think both of them are relatively healthy and aren’t on the brink of destroying themselves.
I think most of the BBC’s funding comes from the licence fee (British people pay for a TV licence) but they make some money from ads shown to international audiences. Channel 4 is solely funded by adverts I think, but it’s owned by the government and I think they have to abide by certain rules and targets.
In the UK the BBC only has advertisements for its own content, nothing else. As bad as its got since Tony Blair and David Cameron both undermined its independence and quality, at least there are no ad breaks in its shows.
True, they don’t show commercial adverts in the UK, but they do to other countries. People outside the UK can access the BBC website but they’ll see adverts on there, and apparently BBC America (shown in the US) has commercial adverts
And Channel 4 of course does show commercial adverts in the UK, but I think they still make some decent content, and I don’t think they’re on the verge of self-destruction
Maybe the real problem is when an entity is chasing profits, because Channel 4 isn’t a normal for-profit business, since they’re owned by the government, and I think they have to abide by some rules
Well the distinction here is that TV license paying citizens of the UK don’t get the ads.
But then you could look at Channel 4, which does show ads to UK people, but I think Channel 4 is still okay and I don’t think it has been ruined by ads. So maybe a profit motive is what causes enshittification, rather than just ads. I definitely hate ads but maybe ads alone don’t destroy platforms.
You won’t get any disagreement from me on the corrosive effects of advertising.
I do think that Channel 4 used to regularly produce greater content than it can now. But that probably is more to do with advertising revenue being leeched away to online platforms and the growth of its direct competitors.
Interesting, maybe the content has changed, I probably don’t watch enough TV to have noticed. But I think Channel 4 news is pretty good, and I liked their Paralympics coverage.
Panics while using Boost to view this post
laughs in pi-hole blocking in-app ads
Much like the twenty minutes of unskippable ads on commercial DVDs, the media companies and social media will enshittify until the general public turns to piracy.
Essentially, the sooner we all come to terms with piracy being
acceptablenecessary, the sooner they let off on their enshittification efforts.Corporations like google and amazon damage the market and the industry more than “piracy” does
You know I was just thinking this the other day, and they are just as intrusive as the ones that piracy sites have
What ads, on what pirate sites?
I’m talking of ye old days, when you could stream a show or live TV on a pirate site, and the site would be covered with ads with the fake X buttons that would give you malware if you click them
What do you mean as intrusive, none of the piracy sites are trying to work around my adblocker.
Whats a piracy site? Theres zero ads in the search window on qbittorrent…
Where you find the torrents
I don’t. I let my arr apps do it for me.
Hurr durr I don’t so they don’t exist
qittorrent has a search function where you input and save the associated plug-in/address of the torrent site/feed you want and then you can just search within qbittorrent for whatever torrent you are looking for and select whatever you want for download without having to go to an website or another app/protocol.
Yes but does it have Dark Mode?
Gottem
It has custom user-made themes that are dark mode, so it probably has dozens of dark modes.
Using the rather fittingly named Dracula theme. Fantastic darkmode theme for qbittorrent
It does
Yep, gottem… it does not have dark mode… but hold on here…
Do the ads on torrent sites adhere to dark mode standards?
Dark Reader extension turns all websites into dark mode whether they like it or not.
Checkmate!
Do you have anything for the qbittorrent app on a Mac that would make it dark mode? Because last time I used it the app didn’t have a dark mode.
But what about the ads on the website, the site might be dark mode enabled but are the ads?
If you just install Linux on your Mac and have a dark Qt theme set, Qbittorrent will also be dark.
I thought we’d blocked ads already?
Not at all true
Ads you say?
I’ll have to take your word for it…
I feel like most of the kind of people who go out of their way to pirate also go out of their way to avoid ads.
Had this bite me once growing up. Forgot to get an ad block on my friends PC and ended up blasting porn ads on the family PC.
Never raw dog the net like that…
- Download Firefox (or other preferred gecko browser)
- Install uBlock Origin add-on
Really going out of the way to avoid them.
You’d be surprised how many people don’t have the motivation/understanding to do even that.
I mean I set up a Pi-Hole along with U-Block Origin, and I have my Jellyfin NAS running all my shows/movies so that I very seldom see any advertisements ever…
Pi hole is definitely great but I’ll concede that getting that going probably qualifies as ‘going out of the way’. That said, it is worth every penny/second spent configuring.
Absolutely. I simply have a deep seated hatred of ads of all shapes, sizes, and purposes (=
Ads are like tribbles, keep slayin away
