How can Google/YouTube make any money?

Google/YouTube makes money on ads, but I have Adblock Plus on my Firefox browser, so I don’t see any ads.
1.Why doesn’t everyone use an ad blocker? Do they like the ads?

  1. If everyone did it, wouldn’t Google go broke?

  2. Why doesn’t Google find some way to block people who block their ads.

Am I missing something here?

  1. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t use you tube. I do use google. It is easy to look past the ads, I honestly don’t notice them. (after a quick look, I see that they are usually (always?) the first two links after a search. I always start looking at the third link)

  2. Maybe. By then their self-driving car will be all the rage.

  3. They probably don’t care until their advertisers care enough to make them.

I might add that it is the same with Facebook. I see no ads; when I looked at my wifes page it was like “holy shit, look at that”. I fixed that.

Adblock works for any web pages you visit too. Like pages from newspapers. Saves clutter and bandwidth. Go here for Firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

I use AdBlock and also use Google and I see ads every day. Google has sponsored results (at the top of your search results) and they are not blocked by default by AdBlock. Either AdBlock has a heart or the results can’t be differentiated from organic results in code so they can’t be blocked.

But no doubt those ads alone (sponsored results) bring in a ton of money for Google. Of course not all their income but I’m guessing a lot more than the ads that get blocked on the SDMB.

Also , mobile advertising is huge. You get the YouTube app, you’re not going to be blocking any YouTube ads. And I don’t know about you guys but I’d say about 75% of the web surfing amongst people I know is done one phones and or mobile devices. Very little ad blocking going on there.

  1. A lot of people don’t mind the ads. For some people is like chalkboard and nails, but some people actually like ads informing them of products. Crazy right? I know several people like this.
    2/3. I can’t comment on this, but probably not. Google supposedly gets 96% of its money from ads, but thats companies placing ads not necessarily people viewing ads. I could be wrong about that.
    google could very easily get around adblock, and since many people use chrome and firefox, it wouldn’t be difficult to get it outright removed as an add on for either. Dunno tho.
    It’s worth noting that adblock has allowed certain sponsored ads to pass through the whitelist, so its kind of impossible to remain ad free anyway.

Maybe you use a different ad blocker. I see no ads when I do a Google search, but they appear when I disable my ad blocker.

I don’t surf on a mobile, but apparently it is possible to block ads on the YouTube app. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

Point noted, but these companies only pay for the ads because Google can show them that people are actually viewing at them, right?

Thanks. But to perhaps prove your point (or mine) I doubt I will bother.

Not entirely crazy, actually. Fashion (and lifestyle) magazines have a significant proportion of pages that are ads. A few of Vogue’s September issues, for example, have had as much as 75% their pages composed of ads. I know people (women and men) who read lifestyle magazines to get ideas for their next travel plans and clothing purchases for the year, so the ads in the magazines are just as–if not more–useful to them as the actual publications’ content.

Of course, this is why magazines are so cheap when you subscribe, as opposed to purchasing single issues at the newstand – your subscription dollars don’t pay the bills; it’s the advertisers who pay them (and they pay based on the readership numbers).

Yes, that is the default setting, but you can disable it and go completely ad free.

  1. Some people like the ads, some people, like me, just see past them.

  2. No, they’d change the way ads are displayed to mess with the ad blockers and or block people who use ad blockers.

  3. Because it’s not worth the effort. If it really interfered with revenue they’d find a way.

Google was profitable even before they started serving ads. We all know that you can use Google to search the entire Web, but suppose you’re a business owner, and you want a customized setup you can use to organize your own private business data. Google can do that for you, too… at a price. In a way, the original purpose of the website we all know was as advertising for their enterprise products and services.

I like ads. I study them. Used to do the same thing with junk mail. I made money off it. A lot of people don’t have ad block. Also, as someone mentioned, this only applies to the content network and not the search ads, any way. People with ad-blockers probably still click on the sponsored results.

Approximately 10-15% of visitors use an ad blocker. Higher on tech sites, lower on general entertainment sites.

Ad blocking is even less common on mobile devices, and in countries outside the US/EU.

And I do because I find Google’s ads more annoying. They look too much like regular content. Sure, they say “AD” on them, but that’s easy to overlook after a while.

Plus I think clicking on sponsored content only worsens search. Sponsored content is horrible in that you don’t earn you place by merits but by money. So it means the richest people win, again.

Mega-sites like Google, YouTube, Facebook etc. don’t just make money with banner ads. They accumulate, sort, and sell enormous amounts of aggregate marketing data (mostly anonymous ;)). This data comes from the input of users (search terms, clicked links etc.) If you know anything about the ad business this sort of data, now being collected in nearly real time (even anonymously), is worth its weight in gold. And there’s no way to block it (other than by not using the internet).