YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers
YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers
People are installing and uninstalling ad blockers in record high numbers as a result of YouTube's anti-ad blocking efforts.
cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/2883134 (!android@lemdro.id)
These tech companies have underestimated their utility. They are mostly providing mindless time wasters. If you try to charge money or create inconvenience, people will look for something else to do.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere. The VC grow-at-all-costs business model is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t scale when profitability becomes a priority.
Ublock Origin works
Brave is ass
Not everybody is.
That's the thing, even if 95% of users currently using ad blockers block ads anyway or leave the service, YouTube still wins big.
They aren't worried at all about alienating users from which they can't extract ad revenue. Those on the margin that turn off ad blockers or subscribe to a paid plan are the target, not everyone else.
who could have seen this coming
The race is on. Bitch.
I went the route of accepting their 2-month trial of Premium, and immediately disabled it from continuing after the 2 months. Hopefully that's enough time to come up with an acceptable solution that works the way I want it to. Honestly, if Premium was like $5/month, they'd get my money. But for almost triple that? Fuck no, never happening.
So the article.claims that Youtube's plan backfired because uninstall rates on some AD blockers increased and a percentage of those users cited "YouTube" as the reason.
I don't know if it's just me but that's a massive stretch. I would like to hear numbers from YouTube themselves before jumping to any conclusions. These companies operate on scale and usually have enough data to back these decisions. Can it go wrong, sure. Has it already backfired. Not sure.
I'm guessing this isn't what YouTube had in mind when they started this campaign.
To quote The Joker, "It'll be funny if it weren't so pathetic...oh, what the heck, I'll laugh anyways!" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Hah. Eat shit and die youtube.
I didn't have ublock installed on my machines. I'd removed it a year ago because it was breaking sites and my pihole does a pretty good job, but I kept getting pop ups from sites about "turning off my adblocker". I didn't have an adblocker running. I was using vanilla firefox. I got so irritated, I looked up how to get rid of those messages and everything pointed me to ublock.
So, shout out to thinkgeek for reminding me what its like to browse the web without a ton of ads. If it wasn't for your annoying popup about my non-existent adblocker, I would never have installed an adblocker.
Oh, and I hadn't realized how awful youtube became over the last year or so with the ads. I was just dealing with it like an asshole. When I put ublock back on, my enjoyment of youtube shot up!
I was considering paying for premium too because I want to normalize paying for content and supporting things I like on the web. But I was struggling with the decision because usually you either pay with your data or pay with money. In this case I know I'd be doing both since Google will gladly take my money and also hoover up my data. Then they jacked the rates up to $14 a month...and now I have ublock installed again.
Its still a problem with the apps on my phone and appletv's though. If they made it $4.99/mo I'd probably fork it over but $14 is more than my other streaming services and they create their own content. Youtube just hosts content.
Edit: how-to geek not thinkgeek. I think they went out of business.
Seriously just use invidious. Ad-free + doesn't hard consume your resources
Somehow, I'm not even able to see ads on my system. I have firefox with ublock, sync on my three systems macOS, linux and windows. Not a single ad in years. I've tried to disable ublock, just to see the mess, and it still wont play ads. Lol. Anyway, I will stop watching youtube before watching ads. I always watch the sponsor thing tho.
Streisand effect
Yeah you heard them - Firefox.
Idk if others are unaware, but there is a simple way to just google a video and not get ads. That is all i will say.
Lmao
Cry more, google
Controversial take but:
- YouTube are fully within their rights to crack down on adblockers, as they have done in the past. Content delivery is not free, and they are not a charity.
- YouTube provides two ways to "pay" for your content: with ads, or by paying for premium.
- Tech companies have an unhealthy habit of making things free or cheap to gain a userbase, then increasing the price. The biggest problem with this imo is that it sets expectations with users that these things should be free
- I am not going to get into an argument about what price is "fair" or whether Google can "afford it". All I know is that for now, they continue to run YouTube, but nothing stops them from shutting it all down tomorrow if they decide it's not profitable enough.
As for myself personally, I watched YouTube with ads for the last 2 or 3 years, and more recently I decided to start paying for YouTube Premium.
YouTube Premium made sense for me because:
- I was spending more than 3 hours a day on YouTube (in the background or as the thing I'm actively watching.
- I could afford it now that my financial situation had improved
- Creators get significantly more money from YouTube Premium watchers (or so I've heard)
Before all of that, I used to use YouTube Vanced (RIP) and NewPipe, both great though not entirely legit ways of bypassing ads and downloading videos. I still use the latter to archive the really good content I come across.
If you're ok to pay for YouTube, but it's too expensive for the value you get out of it, there are alternative approaches. You can spoof your location and buy YouTube Premium in another country, like Turkey or India, and get it for as low as $2 a month. Google doesn't crack down on this much at the time of writing.
Umm no, NewPipe is not a website. That would be invidious/piped.
Vivaldi's stock built in ad blocking has still been working for me, have yet to see an ad.
but i saw another article saying that adblocker usage dropped by like ... meh i dunno 80% or some awful figure that I didn't want to believe.
i'd rather live in the version of the world where this one is true, that nobody is installing adblockers, but i know better (sometimes) than to simply succumb to confirmation bias...
if youtube were smart though, it'd make ads less shitty, intrusive, and obnoxious.
Technology circumvention and copyright infringement are just about the only power consumers have against the near monopolies and cartel like behavior from the tech/media industry since our government regulators have been neutered.
I am grandfathered into a family Premium plan from the old Youtube Red days. The price is close to doubling come April. In the absence of competition or government intervention to punish anti-compeitive, anti-consumer behaviour I will be relying on ad-blocking and other circumvention measures next year. I am willing to pay a fair price but costs of living have gone up a lot while incomes for regular people are stagnant. The executives running these companies are completely disconnected from reality.
Honestly, Google did this to themselves with not properly vetting the advertisers that they sell space to, and with oversaturation of ads.
If they'd have stopped granting ad space to scammers and malware spreaders, and if they'd have stopped adding advertisements at the line most people find tolerable (which seems to be a single ad between videos... not multiple at a time, and certainly no mid-rolls), they wouldn't have triggered quite the level of ad blocking that they did.
I see this "problem" that they have as being entirely of their own making.