People are predicting the demise of YouTube over this… I’m not sure how that follows.
If the ad-blocking subset of the audience boycotts YouTube, you’re doing them a favour; by blocking ads you were consuming resources without generating revenue (this is not a toadying statement of corporate allegiance, it’s a plain fact); your departure improves their profit margin.
If content creators up and leave over this, that might make a difference if there was a global shortage of content creators, but there isn’t. In fact this oversupply of content creators is what has always allowed YouTube to drive creators into vertical niches where they burn brightly, then burn out; there’s always a new crop of hopefuls waiting and eagerly trying for their spot in the limelight. YouTube can easily afford not to care about content creators; doesn’t make it right, but that’s how it is.
If advertising clients leave, that would hurt YouTube, but why would they, over this change that is explicitly serving their interests?
If the non-ad-blocking majority of the audience starts looking elsewhere, that would hurt YouTube, but why will they, if they have already accepted ads as normal? I suppose if the ads get worse than they are at the moment, that might happen.
Changes like this typically roll out across YouTube gradually as they are deployed to various sets of servers across the world; most of the time that’s just an outcome of the reality of deploying software changes to a very large infrastructure composed of many parts; sometimes the effect is deliberate - changes are deployed to a limited set of users to monitor for any unexpected issues that didn’t surface in testing.
uBlock not working for me now either, and YT’s warnings have become a hard stop.
I considered buying premium…I do listen to a lot of YT.
However, it’s mostly just background nonsense while I am doing chores or to help me sleep (hence why I say “listen” and not watch). Given the high asking price of premium they have given me good impetus to try out some podcast and audiobook services.
I’ve tried ublock on Firefox a few times over the past week, and it seems to trigger a runaway cascade of CPU and memory usage, at least on some web pages.
Anyone else seeing this? I don’t think my configuration is unusual in any way…
It seems ok for me. In the screenshot below I am running two separate windows of Firefox, each with four tabs open (eight total, two of which are YouTube, another Amazon Prime video).
It seems a little high but fine. I only have a few extensions running, one of which is uBlock Origin.
Youtube, this is why I use an adblocker.
I’m watching a video from a vlogger whose corgi’s cancer has returned - probably a year at most left. He’s crying. I’m crying He’s showing us the day he gave his dog (Gatsby) … a day to remember before Gatsby is too ill. In the middle of it
Liberty! Liberty! Liiiiiiiiberty!
Some other equally inane ad.
Above @Mangetout suggested this is still within some control of the person posting the video (when ads happen). I assume the poster needs to go to the effort to manage it which some may not (either not knowing or not caring).
I have no experience with it. Just going on what others have said.
At the moment, control over midroll ads comprises:
Ability to turn them off as a default for all uploads (just a checkbox in settings>upload defaults) - very easy
Ability to disable them for a video during or after upload (a similar checkbox on the Video Monetization page for the individual video) - very easy
Ability to specify their placement within the video timeline (in the Editor page for the video) - a little bit tricky
If midrolls are enabled, but their placement is not specified, the YouTube algorithm will try to determine a suitable point in the video, however, the cynical side of me suspects this definition of ‘suitable’ is nothing to do with good placement in a natural breakpoint, and everything to do with placing it where the viewer is most likely to tolerate sitting through an ad to see what happens next.
In my experience the auto-ads (i.e. YouTube just chooses a place for an ad mid-video) are terribly timed and have little to no relation to a natural break for the ad.
If you hover over the time line on a video (most, not all videos, and they have to have been out for at least a day or two), you’ll see a heatmap showing the parts of the video that have been watched/rewatched the most. I’d wager that just before or during one of those spots would be a “good” place, and it wouldn’t require any AI.
I didn’t realize they were placed automatically. I use SponserBlock that hops right over them and I was always surprised that the ad would be midsentence, often even midword. In fact, if you didn’t know my browser was skipping over an ad, it sounds like the creator was trying to edit around something. It never dawned on me that they were placed automatically.
Yeah. The ‘most watched’ graph is one way they could do it pretty mechanically, but also most videos with dialogue get automatic captions generated for them, so an AI placing ads doesn’t need to understand what the video looks like - it could just interpret it as a passage of text.
SponsorBlock is different than YouTube mid-roll ads. SponsorBlock comes up when the person in the video stops and says, “I’ll show you how the pie turns out, but first, let’s talk about this VPN service.” SponsorBlock just automatically skips ahead in the video until the VPN talk is over. The mid-roll ads are when YouTube stops the show you’re watching, often very abruptly, and runs an ad or two before resuming the show.
In one case, sponsored content, the ad is part of the video that was sent to YouTube. In the other case, YouTube ads, the ad is a separate video that YouTube is playing instead of the video you intended to watch.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say this will cause the demise of YouTube. But it can very well backfire.
For one, more people are learning that adblock is a thing. Most people don’t use adblockers. But now adblock is making the news, and it apparently does usually work to block YouTube’s ads. Adblocker installs are at an all-time high–thought most of that is from people installing a new adblocker since their old one isn’t working on YouTube.
It’s also just an incredibly hard battle to win. It has yet to be done, in fact. The closest I’ve ever seen a website get to stopping adblock is Facebook, and the result there is just that you use a special addon just for Facebook. If it’s even possible to win, they have to put a lot of resources into it. Resources they could be using to improve the site. Plus a lot of things they might want to change would cause breakage and more problems. Old devices stop working.
The issue isn’t “if everyone actually has to view ads, then this will kill YouTube.” It’s “the costs of even trying this sort of thing could be higher than any possible benefit.” No one has ever successfully beaten the adblockers before.
And Google’s own bending over backwards to help out adblock developers does not make me think that they plan on using the new API change to prevent adblockers. They’re going out of their way to cultivate a good relationship with them, sponsoring conferences and everything. That definitely makes me feel like this is some executive in YouTube who thought it would be an easy way to get more money, ala Netflix cracking down on password sharing.
The repeated “Adblockers are against YouTube’s terms of service” when it really isn’t–at least, not explicitly–also makes me think that there’s an issue of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing. Why wouldn’t they have actually included such language in the latest terms update?
I just doubt that YouTube is really ready to go all in on this. It really is just repeated penny ante stuff.
Yeah, fair enough. Streisand Effect might do something. I dunno - I tend to think that most YouTube users who don’t have ad blockers probably aren’t going to rush to install them, and probably won’t have much of an appetite for the jiggery-pokery described upthread to make them work consistently on YouTube.
Interesting. I’ve never noticed any issue with an ad blocker and Facebook.
Anyway, is there any way to get an estimate of what percentage of its users YouTube is actually targeting here? I mentioned above that I would have thought the majority of users stream videos through a phone or tablet, both of which are much tougher to adblock. Then, there are some users who stream through a smart TV. Then, there are some users who pay for YouTube+ or whatever. Then, of the users who watch through a computer, the majority probably don’t have ad blockers.
There’s all kinds of overlap in that list, but I have to imagine that the percentage of users who mostly stream through a computer with an ad blocker must be a pretty small minority.
I’m pretty tech savvy, and I stream about 60% of my YouTube content on a computer with a blocker, but even for me, probably 40% is on a phone or a smart TV device with no blocker.
