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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.
"If he dies, he dies."
I don't really consume news media these days, on account of it being such propagandist shit. Only occasionally encounter it when something is linked in an online politics discussion. I still get annoyed when I see a paywall and, yes, I do feel entitled to read it for free. To speak to the implied bluff calling here that wouldn't I deal with the ads if I had to? Shouldn't I appreciate the hard work that goes into the service? No. I wouldn't be sad at all if all news and journalists died due to lack ad money. It's already effectively dead to me. The world might have a hard time functioning without literally any journalism, but then I don't think that's a real threat right now, nor is it a me problem. There's very few ad supported "services" that I truly could not live without if push came to shove.
Do they though? Again to keep with the news example, I would say a fairly worthless bullshit job is massively oversaturated. Do we really need BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, etc., etc. all reporting on the same news bite thing happening? Yet they all want an individual slice. Maybe there should be a culling and some people don't deserve to be paid. And right now things are holding on due to cattle like normies and people willing to put up with the bullshit because of adblock. I might be willing to throw down some money to fund actual quality (which doesn't exist in journalism) if there were only a handful of real journalists informing the world and my contribution was genuinely needed, but that's not the real status quo.
Youtube, or rather the concept of video sharing/hosting, is one of the few ad supported things I genuinely want around for sure. But on this though I don't think it's as true as you say. Somehow they operated for years off normies without problem. MEGA and other services run without this ad aggression.
I also take issue with the sudden unexamined and selective Marxism that always shows its face in these arguments. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" Money isn't JUST going to pay to server hosting. It's going to Yachts, to DEI officers living in SF, to office yoga sessions. People always make this appeal about resources needing to go to core real labor or machine costs, but it's never the reality of funding. And if that were the true concern there would be more efficient ways to do it without all the dead weight.
Bandwidth is a semi-solved problem. Pirating operates with 0 ad revenue decentralized sharing, or standard ads with shifty websites. I pay for all the basic necessities to make it work (and more) with the my bills already.
Well, to be fair, I think the libertarian response to this would be that without the draw of nice things like yachts, no person would want to become a CEO in the first place. Whomever decided to make Youtube to begin with, it took a large investment with low chance of success, so there has to be significant upside for doing it.
The libertarian response would also be "adblock go brrrr!".
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