That and the large ad networks even on sites like YouTube and Facebook literally are advertising scams. Every time I browse shorts on either I get ads that are obvious scams of the “There’s a new $6400 monthly health credit see if you qualify.” variety. On one of Meta’s apps I got an ad that was for male enhancement that was straight up clips of uncensored hardcore porn. Not just nudity but full on PIV sex. If they can’t even do the work to properly screen their ads they can get fucked, I’m blocking all of it that I can.

Non disruptive ads were meant to advertise.

Slightly annoying ads were meant to be seen more, since people just ignored banners by default.

Hidden ads (like an ad in an article which you really could tell it was an ad) were meant to increase the image of a company.

Disruptive ads like in YouTube or Spotify aren’t meant for advertising. They don’t really care about the advertising money, they want to force you to buy premium. The more annoying the ad is the higher the chances you pay 20€ a month for them to go away.

Yeah, the pre-ads (unstoppable) and the massively increased loading times of the basic Youtube page makes it impossible to successfully Rickroll people

And you see digital tv providers trying to implement fast forward blockers without chasing away their customers too much

That argument was in fact made when VCRs first came out. I don’t remember how exactly it played out but in the end the courts here in the US said that VCRs were fine.

The agreement isn’t that you watch the ad, but that you allow the ad to play on your device. That’s it. Whether or not you see it or hear it doesn’t matter; the “cost” for this type of content is a few moment of your device’s time, not your attention.

deleted by creator

When YouTube Red first dropped they were putting hour-long pilot episodes of their shows as pre-roll ads. Now I notice ads on shorts are full of obvious scams related to “new monthly health credits”. Still better than getting an ad on Facebook reels that was uncensored hardcore porn.

Google: You’re pirating our content!

Us: Yeah, so what?

My god… are you… me? Same exact shit. Created my YT account 14 years ago. Made some vids… some got some views… eventually I got a few dollars deposited like for 3 years. Probably totaled the same $100 you mentioned then boom. Shut down.

I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network.

You must MITM all traffic and do some magic with stripping/injecting JavaScript then? Because every time I’ve tried with pihole, its just threads and threads of people saying its not possible with DNS blocking because the ads are served from the video servers.

Yeah I wasn’t using an Adblock on YouTube when this all started. Then the ads got so intrusive it was seriously hindering content. These days I don’t watch much YouTube, but it’s with Adblock

I mean, the argument falls short when YT (or LTT) spew literal garbage.

The fact that you don’t like the product doesn’t really change that their expected transaction is “watch an ad to receive it”. Every argument against the idea of not watching the ads being piracy seems to be, essentially, either “the product isn’t good” or “the price is too high”, neither of which is relevant to the fact that they’ve put a “price” on it and you’re skipping the part where you “pay”.

Quality of the videos is irrelevant. Intrusiveness of the ads is irrelevant. The ads are the price, the videos are the product. You’re getting the videos without seeing the ads.

I agree that the “price” is too high, the ads are awful, and the videos are frequently bad. I will continue to block those ads as long as I am able, but I’m not going to delude myself into thinking that I’m not skipping out on the cheque, as it were, when I do so.

I might have a hint of sympathy if it wasn’t a dumpster fire of decaying babies.

Literally no one is asking you to have any sympathy. Why get so defensive when it’s pointed out that skipping ads is skipping on your side of the transaction when using an ad supported service?

Fuck YouTube acting as a sleezy middle-man

A sleezy middleman that happens to foot the YT infrastructure bill.

Cool, let’s body shame people.

I don’t see how that’s relevant. If you want to engage in the paid YouTube subscription, go for it, it’s an entirely different thing though.

My computer requests from YouTube’s server a video, the server gives me a stream of data - I didn’t steal it, I didn’t hack it, the server provided me this because it wanted to - and this stream contains an ad and a video. What I do with this stream is only my concern, you can’t force me to watch the ad. That would be like walking in the street and somebody says you’re unethical because you didn’t look at an outdoor advertisement banner, and that you will be forced to either pay a fee or look at the ad.

Fuck that victim-blaming nonsense. The entire reason ad blockers were invented in the first place were because ads in the 90s and early 2000s were somehow even worse than they are now. You would click on a website, and pop-up ads would literally open new windows under your mouse cursor and immediately load an ad that opened another pop-up ad, and then another, and another, until you had 30 windows open and 29 of them were pop-up ads, all of them hoping to trick you into clicking on them to take you to a website laden with more and more pop-up ads. Banner ads would use bright, flashing, two-tone colors (that were likely seizure-inducing, so have fun epileptics!) to demand your attention while taking up most of your relatively tiny, low-resolution screen.

The worst offenders were the Flash-based ads. On top of all the other dirty tricks that regular ads did, they would do things like disguising themselves as games to trick you into clicking them. (“Punch the monkey and win a prize!” The prize was malware.) They would play sound and video–which were the equivalent of a jump scare back then, because of how rare audio/video was on the Internet in that day. They would exploit the poor security of Flash to try and download malware to your PC without you even interacting with them. And all this while hogging your limited dialup connection (or DSL if you were lucky), and dragging your PC to a crawl with horrible optimization. When Apple refused to support Flash on iOS way back in the day, it was a backdoor ad blocker because of how ubiquitous Flash was for advertising content at the time.

The point of all this is that advertisers have always abused the Internet, practically from day one. Firefox first became popular because it was the first browser to introduce a pop-up blocker, which was another backdoor ad blocker. Half the reason why Google became the company it did is because it started out as a deliberate break from the abuses of everyone else and gave a simple, clean interface with to-the-point, unobtrusive, text-based advertisements.

If advertisers and Google in particular had stuck to that bargain–clean, unobstrusive, simple advertisements that had no risk of malware and no interruption to user workflow, ad blockers would largely be a thing of the past. Instead, they decided to chase the profit dragon, and modern Google is no better than the very companies it originally replaced.

My guy, that’s why there is DRM. Your screen are loading pixels, because they let you.

When I ping YouTube’s server it provides me with a stream that contains an ad and a video. What I do with that stream is my problem, and if I want to chop it up it’s something I can freely decide.

Your server can send any data it wants, but it can’t decide what I do with it, are you nuts?

Advertisers, Malwares and Ad blockers are all to blame for the current state of the internet.

So the thing that blocks the first two is equally to blame?

I remember the day I started using an Ad blocker. I used to not care at all about ads on sites, “it’s how they make money. I can live with it.” And then I encountered a banner ad that screamed “HELOOOOOOO!” every time my mouse went over it. I couldn’t download an ad blocker fast enough.

Advertisers and Malware are to blame for Ad blockers. Advertisers will get more and more annoying and intrusive until people reach the point that they won’t put up with them anymore. Seeing as the internet is one big bucket and I can’t block some ads, then I will block all ads.

MY hardware and infrastructure was not free either and I and ONLY I get to decide how it is used.

If something allows it then it’s morally justified. You can’t be naked intentionally and ask me to not look at same time.

If I recall correctly, ever since videos could be called up as ads you can just pay for any video to be an ad, as long as it’s on YouTube, and it doesn’t have to be yours. I don’t know if this has changed, but an essays channel figured out that that’s the fastests way someone could target a competitor’s channel. Paying to have someone else’s video as an ad tanks that video ad revenue and discoverability instantly. Ad views count as views to the video and skipping an ad counts as a skip on the video which signals the algorithm to think that nobody wants or likes to see that video. Do it to enough new videos and you can entirely kill a previously profitable channel in a couple of months.

My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign

Those ads made me want to take up smoking out of spite.

If it hadn’t been for ublock origin, I’d not be on YT this long

Oh but they don’t care about anything but short form content. If they could ditch supporting long form content today they would.

Money/s is the more used metric. Retention is secondary or even tertiary to money/s. Behold the algorithm, great and terrible, sheathed in robes of black and grasping sickle white.

My kid would watch his videos with ads and I offered to set him up with an alternative with no ads. He said no, I like the ads. I said ok then. That was two years ago. Last week he was losing his shit because of all the ads that made it unwatchable. I set him up with the ad free alternative and I get thanked every day for it.

Youtube is tanking their own platform.

I would like to pay for YT Premium, but I think the service is bad. The product is good, and the service is bad.

If I say I don’t want to see this video, I don’t want to see this fucking video again, youtube. I said don’t recommend this channel, and you said I won’t see it again, but I just refreshed, and there it is. I am not dutch, I don’t speak dutch, I’ve never even been to the Netherlands. I shouldn’t be seeing videos in dutch.

Routinely, I have to go through my home page and try to train the algorithm but I’ve just given up. I got an extension now that just permanently removes channels and videos I don’t want to see.

The thing is… the product is the videos, and youtube doesn’t do the videos. Youtube does the service, and the service is bad. I understand that the ads pay the youtubers but the truth is I don’t care. That pay is trash, and if they want my premium money, youtubers should unionize and force youtube to improve the service.

Edit: I watch the youtuber’s sponsor spot and I buy merch.

Yes - AND I like that being a premium subscriber compensates creators I watch EVEN WHEN they are otherwise “demonetized” - like, if they cover news and the news contains upsetting information, YouTube will reduce their ad exposure. But my views still award them as much credit as ever, and count for, like, dozens of ad-supported views under normal circumstances.

Nope bankrupt youtube and rebuild from the ashes

Bless the Revanced guys. They made my mobile youtube binge watches as smooth as my desktop firefox + ublock setup.

I’m done wasting my life for other people.

I do enough of that at work as it is. I’ll be fucked if I do it during my downtime, too.

How do you propose YouTube should pay for infrastructure costs (servers, Internet etc), staff costs (engineers, designers, moderators) and the content creators?

Being publicly traded does not force companies to become greedy, immoral scum… Stop spreading this piece of misinformation

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits

PS: this goes hand in hand with the “you got to be an asshole to succeed”… You don’t, the problem is that most people can’t find anything else to imitate

Star Trek TOS episodes (1 hour show) were about 52 minutes long, with 8 minutes for commercials. By the time of TNG, episodes were down to 42 minutes. I regularly see ads every 5-6 minutes on YouTube.

Businesses never understand that it’s THEIR obnoxious, sh*tty advertising that kills something profitable, and when it finally dies, it’s surprised Pikachu faces all around.

Odysee

ewwwwww… 99% far right garbage, zero moderation there last time I took a look.

I’ve never tried that one. Can you share a safe link please? Thanks!

Even if you don’t intend to provide it for free, if it’s possible to, expect it. No different from Walmart complaining about increased theft after replacing cashiers with self checkout - tiny violins.

exactly, it would be trivial to have a whitelist server side and now only ad friendly apps can access the videos. they only still work because it’s worth keeping those viewers in the system for the time being.

If they ever manage to kill it I’ll simply quit YouTube and be better for it.

Just block shorts alltogether, it’s a win win.

That’s intended. Even to premium subs youtube pushes adds which try and promote engagement. Its fucking awful.

Does get me out of the loop sometimes though, so I guess Im thankful for that.

I guess what there really winning is all those non tech-savvy people who currently have an adblocker installed because their friend helped.

Yes, been thinking I’ve just been substituting YT for * TV, and while the consumption can still be customized, it’s still a habit that can be kicked. I bet I’ll get more sleep and productivity.

• Lol autocorrect

Vanced died. If revanced dies we’ll just get rerevanced. Ad infitum.