The reason YouTube makes the ads so unbearably obnoxious is they want people to pay for premium. That’s all they’re doing is annoying people until they pay. I’ve been paying for premium since the beginning, I know it’s awful, but at least I have never seen any ads.
Yeah, at least i got both youtube and music, so far it’s worth my money. I’d love to get nebula + a music app but it cost way more.
Tbf the only reason I know that YouTube has paid subscriptions is because of threads like this one, so it doesn’t seem like they’re really pushing their paid service.
Maybe they’re only targeting people who, for some reason, don’t block ads, and that’s why I’m unaware, but they should offer a little more than the things you can get for free already (no ads, downloading) if they want to draw in the adblocker crowd too.
Now people will start to google what’s up with all those ads and end up installing uBlock.
They definitely push it. The mobile app has popups advertising it etc.
I must be out of touch.
I didn’t think I’d need an app to visit YouTube.
Until they pull a Microsoft and start throwing ads into the paid model as well.
Or like all the other streaming platforms that had add but you paid the subscription.
yeah I havent experienced it myself with YouTube, but I have heard some people say they pay for premium and they’ve started getting ads 😡 YouTube is a huge part of my life and I would be livid if this happened and I don’t know what I would do because I don’t know how I could live without YT I would love to say that I would abandon YouTube if they pulled this shit on me, but I just can’t even imagine my life without YouTube. I don’t pay for any other service, no Hulu, no Disney Plus, no HBO blah blah whatever the heck other people are paying for. when I’m craving watching something, I always go to YouTube. And I have several YouTube channels too, so YT is an integral part of my life 😭
Unfortunately, this is becoming increasingly common. Amazon now also shows ads on the Prime streaming service even though you already pay a subscription fee for it.
youtube prem + youtube music family plan with 5 total users at $22.99 is pretty reasonable.
Per year?
Per month.
That’s not good at all.
Yeah, it’s really expensive.
I remember when YouTube was only $9 a month. Something something Pepperidge Farm remembers
And I was grandfathered in at that price even after they raised their prices for everyone else, but then for some reason I got upset and I canceled YouTube but then I couldn’t live without it so I subscribed again and they put me back in at the regular price with all the new people 😡
I had the same deal, my comment is in regard to the family plan, which allocates 5 total accounts. I thought $4.60 per person a month was reasonable for the hd music alone, youtube prem was just a plus, but based on other comments I’m apparently a dipshit. 🤷
No worries they bumped up everyone that had a grandfathered in price after a year or two
Yeah premium makes 15 dollars per month. Ada for an average viewer makes dozens of cents per month.
I use Firefox with ublock origin and I don’t any ads either.
yeah I admire all of you who refuse to use the YouTube app and you watch YouTube through a browser, but in my opinion watching YouTube through a browser is clunky and tedious.
ReVanced, NewPipe, SmartTube. You’re correct that their mobile browser experience sucks.
Same with Google’s ads in general. For a long time they were whitelisted by default on just about every adblock list out there because they were so unobtrusive it didn’t make sense to bother blocking them, especially when you compared them to the other ads that were common at the time. They were also generally relevant ads, so people actually did click on them and use them since it actually related to the thing they were searching for.
They’re obviously more profitable now, but you have to wonder by how much and if they’d be a more trusted company today (and what’s that worth monetarily) if they hadn’t gone down this race to the bottom.
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I, personally, don’t see that happening, but I can easily imagine them making it a TOS violation to use adblock and then killing your account if you continue to do so :-/
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Losing access to personalized YT would suck, but losing decades of emails would suck even more (when I initially got GMail, I imported all my old emails in … I guess I should probably look at making a backup periodically, like I used to). I share your sentiment that I fear what these companies are going to do next in the pursuit of more money they can burn and/or give to shareholders as they continue to tank their reputations.
I tried Stadia. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I played Cyberpunk mainly and didn’t have 90% of the problems that other players had. It was very enjoyable.
I likely wouldn’t sign up for another similar service simply because now I have a library on my Steam Deck (purchased with the Stadia refund) and that’s how I’m used to playing at this point. But it sure was a nice service while it lasted. I thought they were selling it to someone but I guess it didn’t end up happening.
Instead I’m putting great energy to get away from Google, along with a lot of other people
We are an insignificant amount. Most people likely don’t even know how to change the default search engine on their phones.
Sometimes few people raise much voices. Those who bother and search for new engine are early adapters of technology, spends money on new gadgets and such. Those are who ads are after, not my grandmother.
I would think they’re infinitely more likely to click an add.
Shit I hate ads that much, if I see one for a product I might actually want I’ll still search it manually. It’s ingrained in me to avoid ads on the internet and to shut them out as much as possible irl where imo they’re even more an eyesore.
That’s fair. It’s unfortunate.
Most people don’t even know what a search engine is by that term. They just know they type things into search boxes and click things that come up. Greater majority of phone users don’t even use the browser, it’s just endless apps
To do that effectively, you’d have to make a popular movement for popular big name YouTubers to move away from YouTube and to some other site. Very hard.
You’re right, and now I’m dreading having to change my email address again after nearly 20 years. This one lasted a lot longer than the Hotmail account.
As someone that has used ad blockers for just about as long as I have been able to, I would like to think that this is true. However, I’m not entirely sure that it is. I’ve heard that a surprising percentage of people just don’t even know that ad blockers exist. If that’s the case then they may be very well aware of what is happening. (Using made up numbers for the sake of argument since I don’t have real numbers) Like if only 5% of users use ad blockers and doubling the number of ads they show only brings that to 10% then it is certainly worth it financially. I doubt that if you were to graph that curve it would be linear - there is certainly a point where you inundate users with so many ads that even non-technical people will start learning about ad blockers. Regardless of what the real numbers are, I would be very surprised if they are making decisions this big without at least being aware of what those numbers might be. And if they can make a small amount of money indefinitely but they have evidence to suggest that they can make even more money also indefinitely then the financial motivation is obvious. Not all infinities are the same size.
That’s definitely a good point. I looked it up and found a few places saying it was about 38% of users using adblock on the internet in general: https://techjury.net/blog/ad-blocker-usage-stats/
Although apparently the most adblockers are in Indonesia with over 50%.
So that would suggest that if there is a tipping point where increasing ads backfires, we’re not actually that far away from it, and in some places it may have already happened.
Although the analysis that “if you add 10% to the price and lose 5% of customers then it’s worth it” is definitely true. This is why there’s a bottom to every market where for instance some people can’t afford even the basic necessities and become unhoused.
Adblock is a godsend.
Although I actually use Invidious for most videos these days. The only things Youtube has going for it are a decent autoplay function and a professional maintenance team. Invidious has things like ‘not aggressively selling my preferences to every algorithm under the fucking sun’ and ‘a functioning search bar’ and ‘not actively fighting against adblockers’
I don’t really see too many ads as I use Adblock, but on mobile they seem to creep in more and more ads every year.
I suggest switching mobile browsers: Vivaldi has an integrated adblocker, Firefox can block ads via extension.
Just in case someone doesn’t know.
Capitalists don’t care about making quality products/services.
They care about squeezing more profit out of you as time goes on.
Bad capitalists, yes. The trend of “maximize profit this quarter at the expense of everything else” is a recent (meaning a few decades old) idea.
Once upon a time the boards of publicly traded companies could think long term and sacrifice short term gains without getting fired by shareholders. When a large firm prioritizes long term success efficiency still matters but so do things like building reputation through quality and retaining talent - the things sorely missing from publicly traded firms today.
The commodification of securities has been one of the most ruinous trends in human history.
There are only bad capitalists now, the good ones have been eaten.
Refresh, refresh, refresh…
I accidentally watched a YouTube video on a browser without blocking. It started with an ad. I thought I’d just endure it this time. Then another ad. OK, just this time then. Suddenly, another ad in the middle of the video. I gave up. Who’d have the patience to sit through this?
Then there’s Google’s habit of completely ignoring the browser’s language settings so I have to sit though ads I don’t even understand.
Then there’s Google’s habit of completely ignoring the browser’s language settings so I have to sit though ads I don’t even understand
I used to occasionally watch YouTube on my lunch break when I would go into the office. I loved getting ads in Spanish, the office was in Greenville,SC not a large Spanish native population. I have premium on my account but don’t like signing in personal account on work machines.
Ad blocker?
What I think is so unfair is that if I actually sit through one ad I don’t get rewarded and fast forwarded to the video, no. I’ll get a second ad that, if I am lucky, I can skip after 5 additional seconds. Or it’s an unskippable one. That’s not fair. I could have skipped the first one but I gave you that, I gave you that time of my life, now give me something back!
That is actually ideal
I had to tailor my do not recommend and not interested in this subject clicks until I was left with the one advertiser that I’m actually interested in, and that’s basically low voltage communication mux devices…
That feature still works for you? I used to be able to skip ads on the ad by blocking them. Now the ad just finishes playing AND pops up again during the next ad break.
I was already blocking ads since long ago, so what really bugs me now is the heavily degraded and incredibly off-putting search results these days. (Fixed that godawful UI change right away too, and I’m just not over having to use an outside search engine for accurate results.)
Just started my Kagi trial, and it has been such a breath of fresh air. Will almost certainly subscribe as soon as the trial is up. Remember, if the service is free, you’re the product.
if the service is free, you’re the product
That’s nor universally true. SearXNG (https://searx.space/) is free and legit. ProtonVPN has a free tier and is legit. Just to name two examples.
Who cares about a privately owned platform? It was never ours.
Spending time there was always going to be a waste of time. Every business wants to grow like a cancer to consume us all. The next service that you use will want the same if you use another private platform.
You should consider using something that is open source and self hosted. Peertube right? Anyone got other recommendations?
Until the content I want is on another platform, I don’t really have a choice of what platform to go to. Of course, I can also just go outside which YouTube has made more and more appealing by the week, but telling people “just use Peertube” isn’t a solution when the content they want to see simply doesn’t exist there
I refused to use adblock for years. Not because I thought Youtube needed MORE money, but because I did realize that a business ultimately only continues operating as long as the business model is sustainable. I endured, through occasional ads, ads at the bottom, then through ads every time a video was watched, then ads in the middle of videos, and even two ads before every video.
But three unskippable ads was where I drew the fucking line. Now I use adblock for Youtube and Youtube only.
I appreciate this point of view but I refuse to have my limited time and energy wasted as a form of “payment”. Ads degrade the user experience of everything they touch and corporations don’t limit their ad use to “continue operations”, they push it as far as possible to suck as much money out of the product as they can.
The only “TV” I watch is hockey and it’s depressing watching the product get degraded year after year as they continue to shove as much advertising down our throats as possible in order to make more money. Fuck ads.
I like to watch video game speedruns. I especially enjoy the really long, challenging ones. Watching a 2 hour video on YouTube without an ad block is basically impossible at this point.
Similar story here, except I just stopped using YouTube.
Lemmy’s piping bots help with that.Wow, grandstanding over adblockers
That’s nice of you, but it appears that the ad-supported business model doesn’t work. It just results in enshittification and surveillance.
“We cannot have a society in which, if two people seem to communicate, the only way that it can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.”
No one will ever pay for services like YouTube. Thus ads is the only way.
Plenty of people pay for cable and streaming services lol, what are you on about?
YouTube has a paid subscription which is ad free and with additional features. How many of you here, who complain about ads, use YouTube Premium? Mmm?
A friend of mine pays for it, yes.
“A friend of a friend”. Cool story. So far it’s just one person here who pays to get rid of ads. And 1.45k upvotes for the post.
No, a friend. Not a friend of a friend. And I’m sure many folks here she’ll out the extra few bucks on stuff like Hulu to get the ad free version. Not sure what the hell you’re on about.
My father in law uses the built in YouTube app on the TV. There were 3 ads that played. The first one was 15 minutes. The second one was also around 15 minutes. The third one was an hour. One fucking hour for a 5 minutes video.
It always makes me mad when somebody put a playlist on YouTube and out of nowhere a bad song starts playing because it’s an ad.
That, and the absolute curbstomping of creativity through their copyright enforcement methods has gutted the core of a once great service. We are simply watching this thing shamble on to find a place to die: like a heart-shot elk bounding off into the bushes
That’s an unexpectedly poetic and melancholic way of portraying some lamentable decisions.
I have a lot of appreciation for writing, and do a lot of it myself (for reports).
like a heart-shot elk bounding off into the bushes
This person has some stories, I bet! 😅
I would even be ok with more than one add for longer videos. Like every 20 minutes they want to put a short commercial in? That’d still be fine for a free video I like enough to watch more than 20 minutes of. But no
I was fine with giving them 5 seconds of attention in exchange for a video. Then they added more and more, and moved the skip button SOMETIMES. It’s straight up disrespectful.
I also HATE that if you miss the skip button on the first of multiple ads, they disable the skip button for another number of seconds.
I was okay with giving the recovering alcoholic just a small drink but this, I can’t abide.
