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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 certainly got an OOM less disposable income than the modal Mottizen, but leaving frugality aside, I expect the marginal impact of my use of adblock to be negligible.
They're simply not common, I've seen various estimates for adoption, and they're all in the low single digits at the highest.I've seen estimates that YouTube adblocking is less than a percent, but a cursory search of the internet tells me overall adblock use is ~25%. I don't trust those figures, it doesn't jive with my personal observations at all, but I retract my initial claim.
I'm not claiming to be an "ethical pirate", but in general, I would never have purchased most of the media I pirate, and thus the impact to the producer is pretty much nil. And there have certainly been products that I've enjoyed to such an extent that I did buy them, even if it's because I decided the ease of having Steam mods or access to multiplayer was worth it, in the case of video games. That seems to me like the claim that piracy is a supply problem, which I partially endorse, because even YouTube premium is inferior to the experience when you have adblock and sponsor block in play.
Besides, Google gets money from me anyway, especially after they removed free storage on Photos.
I think you and @BurdensomeCountTheWhite have misunderstood my point. I don't care if y'all pirate or use adblockers or whatever. (I use adblockers myself, though I don't go out of my way in that particular arms race.) I'm saying a lot of people seem outraged that the people providing content want to make money from it. You can debate the worthiness of any individual creator or platform, and I also agree that I would prefer to give money directly to creators who produce work I like (and I do) rather than Google. The attitude I am addressing, however, is that "it's wrong for them to want to monetize, everything should be freeeeeee!"
People created great content on YouTube before the era when they could make money on it. And, indeed, I think the monetization era has resulted in worse content:
And that's just the creator side. On the hosting side there's an army of programmers hell-bent on increasing engagement and ad revenue at any and all cost, from UI changes (removing the dislike button, making everything huge and eye-catching as opposed to information-dense), heavily prioritizing recent videos, playing very fast and loose with search query matching (it shows you results only faintly related to your query if they're extremely popular, because it calculates that you're more likely to click on it), prioritizing well-known and official channels in search results despite not matching your search query as well as a niche channel.
I'd literally pay to return to the pre-monetization YouTube era. I am so fucking disgusted whenever I have to use YouTube to find something (DIY, tech reviews, some old funny thing I saw and want to look up again, footage of some recent event in the news, etc.) I cannot overstate the despair, revulsion, bitterness, and disdain I harbor about how fucking shit YouTube (and essentially the entire internet, honestly) has become over the last decade or so.
I still don't understand why they removed the dislike button. Isn't it going to help to serve people better content overall, and thus keep them around the platform longer, if people can downvote bad content? The only reason I could see for them removing the dislike button is if people were using it for what Google would consider to be "hateful" or "harassment", which of course Google is likely usually trying to crack down on to promote a general "we're not the bad guy" image that comes from seeming outwardly progressive.
They would never admit it, but it to me it was obvious Youtube removed visible dislikes because of the regular stream of Big Brand(tm) videos getting publicly tanked and the headlines that came with it. Game sequels revealing they were taking directions unasked for, trailers for movies heavy on The Narrative or nakedly vacuous in their creativity, cringey White House videos - all them and more were a subject to a routine phenomenon where the faceless public (or at least an engaged subset) could throw a big ol' pie the faces of institutions both public and private whenever they did something painfully stupid or miscalculated. And the power in that was knowing that when you thought something was bad, you could be sure you were not alone.
Probably only takes some polite requests to Youtube's management to curb that. And like so much else lately, it can be justified under some bullshit about protecting the little guy from hate - even though I don't think I've heard a single creator big or small being supportive of it.
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