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Sooo. What are your plans for surviving the YouTube ad-pocalypse? In case you don't know, YouTube seems to be cracking down on ad-blockers, steadily ramping up their level of restrictiveness over the past 4 or so months, and ramping up even faster the last 3 weeks. Adblock Plus no longer seems to work for me on Chrome, but does work on Firefox. It'll probably be different for everyone as they dial it up for more and more customers, but it'll likely keep getting more restrictive as time goes on.
I'm guessing this has to do with the same tech trend that caused the layoffs this past year. Budgets are tighter, bubbles are popping, and sources of revenue are being more exploited. But I do wonder if this particular one will work out for Google or not.
I for one plan on leaving the platform if I ever am completely unable to make it work without ads. I think there are many others who feel the same way. This may (I hope) make things worse for content creators, especially those who rely on their own sponsorships for revenue, and will drive them towards other less restrictive platforms.
It's not like I think it's immoral or wrong for Google to pull this, but it does bother me. YouTube has been around for so long, it's life a part of my life. It's my TV, it's the way I learn and become better at most things, and for many many people, it's their livelihood. My wife randomly said to me last week as I was teaching myself some drumstick fundamentals (the kind of fundamentals with deep intricacies that you can't see easily, and need an in-depth video to go into), "how did anyone ever learn anything before YouTube?" After having been around for so long, and being so ingrained, it feels weird for YouTube to suddenly switch up how it works. I'm someone who likes to skip around videos and go back and forth a lot. When ads are present on YouTube, I cannot stand how you'll skip to a section of a video, even without having watched much actual content in the video yet, and suddenly have to watch a giant string of ads. Having to watch ads like that will ruin my usage of the platform.
I also wonder if it's technically possible for YouTube to completely crack down on all ad-blockers, but I don't know enough about how their APIs work. But since so much of it it's happening client-side, I think they'd have to control the client to have complete control. This might be why youtube no longer works on Chrome when I have adblock plus, but it still works on Firefox for me.
I hate ads too, but I have noticed that a lot of people who absolutely hate ads and paywalls still expect free content to magically keep being produced for them. I mean, subscriptions or ads, those are really your only choices. People need to get paid, server fees need to be paid, etc. Shit ain't free. It's fair to complain that something is overpriced, but it's not really fair to complain that the content you want has to be monetized somehow.
I've counted on the fact that the average normie will keep watching enough ads that the service will be supported even if it never makes a dime off my attention.
And apparently the average normie's tolerance for ads, even intrusive/obnoxious ones, is way above mine, so I usually don't have the option to just accept a few minimally intrusive ads to toss a few pennies in the coffer. So yes, I end up being the classic case of a free rider.
Which actually leads to a very annoying equilibrium overall, I think. I would be generally happy to pay a premium for a geniune, no-bullshit, "we won't serve you any ads ever" subscription service.
But as we've seen with the history of basically everything else, no matter how much money they make off the subscribers, they can always squeeze a few extra pennies on the margins off if they can serve them ads in addition to taking their subscription money.
So there's constant pressure to find a way to get paying customers to tolerate ads, and thus ads seem to inevitably sneak into the system. And as mentioned before, normies seem extremely tolerant of this, so me, as a subscriber who DOES NOT want ads, am not strongly considered in the equation.
If the Schelling point is serving as many ads as possible, the only way I can possibly express my disagreement is to block ads on principle, it seems like. If they will move over to my preferred equilibrium where everyone is only served exactly as many ads as they're willing to tolerate, I'd change my tune.
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