I already barely watch YouTube. It’s mostly for music videos. Google can fuck itself to death.
What do you propose Google do instead? Run YouTube at a loss?
Yes. Google bought YouTube. Alphabet is worth $2 trillion. The social control and data mining is value to Google enough.
It’s too late now, but only if they didn’t put so many ads in the first place, less people would be blocking them. They could also make YouTube premium affordable by removing all the features except “no ads”.
Some time ago I would’ve bought YouTube premium, but it had so many features I didn’t want driving up the price that I just didn’t. I instead switched to Firefox and ads were gone again. Good job google, drove me off YouTube premium and Google chrome at the same time.
I mean, yeah. It did so for years.
Yes right. But what does the investor environment look like today? Profit, not users, is what everyone is counting. If Google says “we’re burning cash in all businesses but search, but hey we’re nice”, investors will take their investments to more profitable businesses.
They actually have a pretty huge net profit margin and what basically amounts to a monopoly on advertisement, so even if their ads reached less intended targets it wouldn’t hurt their bottom line much.
Didn’t you know? It’s doesn’t matter that they’re still making billions more than they ever made, numbers have to go higher.
Google is operating at a 24% net profit margin. They don’t need to get their shareholders more money…
Do you actually understand how this works? It’s a beautiful statement and oh so noble, but it just flies against how the world really works.
At some point, maybe not today, but at some point, you’re going to be saving up for your retirement. Your money will be invested; either passively or actively. If active, a fund manager (or maybe even yourself) will be spending time, every single day, wondering how to maximise the invested cash. If passive, you’re letting a WHOLE lot of fund managers make the decisions for you (wisdom of the crowd). Either way, Google better fucking perform or the investors will go elsewhere.
And you’ll be an investor too, asking for Google to do better than anyone else or you’ll take your savings elsewhere.
If investors go elsewhere then they’re trading for a higher risk and return ratio than a massive company with rich history like Google. Plus, it frequently performs large buybacks and offers, and even offered a dividend recently. There is always going to be something attractive to investors, here.
Agreed there is a mix of things Google can do to remain attractive. But at the core, Google has to be a better investment than something else to remain invested into.
One thing I genuinely don’t get: why does a company making this much money need “investors”? (Other than participating in the make-rich-people-richer scheme)
Once you’ve gone public, unless some entity could do an offer to take you private, you have investors (aka owners).
To take Google private would be in the region of 2.5 trillion dollars. Even the Norwegian oil fund would struggle to do that.
Millennials and zoomers are not saving up for retirement, barely able to sustain themselves. They’re also expecting ecological collapse to cause global famine or their own nation to go full Reich, assuming they’re not killed by hurricanes, wildfire or war.
First, individually targeted advertisement should be illegal. Instead of trying to figure out who I am and serving me ads based on that, they should only be able to look at server side facts. What is the video? This is how television and radio ads have worked for ages. You have a video about SomePopBand, you advertise concert tickets. You have a video about bikes, you advertise bike stuff. You don’t know who I am. Suddenly, the motivation for most of the privacy invading, stalking, nonsense is gutted.
Some people would still block those static ads. If they showed some restraint, I think more people would accept them. But that’s a sad joke- no profit driven org is going to show restraint.
Secondly, if they can’t ethically run the business at a profit, the business probably doesn’t deserve to exist. That or it’s a loss leader to get people into the ecosystem.
You do know you can enter into your Google settings and disable all tracking and targeting, right? And you can ask them to delete all information they already hold on you.
Yes. However, it’s an assumption they honor those requests and don’t try to track you anyway.
Plus Google isn’t the only company trying to do individualized targeted advertising.
Youtube doesn’t pay attention to what ads get approved, or where they get served. Ive heard stories of people getting served two hours full amateur movies as ads, Ive heard of people getting soft core porn served as an ad, to actual scams and crypto pitches. It’s like Facebooks new AI enabled algorithm. There is actual danger, considering children and the elderly get sucked in to youtubes black hole?
I watched a couple videos on the Diddy case, and a couple days later my whole feed was filled with the worst conspiracy theories and Christian preachers.
I watch one Youtuber talking about pyramids, YouTube fills my whole suggestions with ancient alien conspiracies.
I watched one cover of a song, I get recommended the same song for weeks.
I watch one reaction video, the whole feed turns into reaction videos within minutes.
It’s a fight against the algorhytm and it isn’t fun. It’s incredible how dumb it is after all these years, and those algprhythms are partly to blame that everyone feels more miserable than they are.
Shut down operations immediately
I sort of spent a decade uploading and streaming to it, started before it was even bought by Google, so I’ve really dug myself a pit at this point.
I get it, no one likes ads on youtube. But, you realize that they have to pay the people that are producing content as well as pay for the storage space to gold all of this content. Why does everyone think that can just be free?
Nobody expects it to be free. But it used to operate with far less intrusive ads. Also, people didn’t use ad blockers until they got worse.
Will someone think off the multi billion dollar company? Anyone? They need to make the bottom line.
If the YouTube interface restricts you skipping during certain parts of the video, an ad blocker can detect that and skip over it anyway. Otherwise, I myself will just skip over the ad.
Or at the very least detect when you can’t skip and mute the tab and put a black box over top of the video.
The demise of Youtube begins
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
Oh well. Youtube is useful as a podcast/streamer host now; no ads with sponsor block/ublock. Once that isn’t the case they (Google) will get network blocked.
No real loss to me. I tend to prefer local download/host for convenience. Most channels are chaff anyway.
100% The only reason I even allow google on the network is for YouTube.
They just escalated the arms race between ad and ad blocker. All this could have been avoided if they actually did something about the scam ads.
I saw someone say Twitch does this, but there are many Twitch ad blockers that work
May I ask which ones? I have ‘‘TTV LOL PRO’’ but it does not always block the ads. It’s 50/50.
I mean, I’ll just continue to not use Youtube…
I will see you on peertube ;)
I really wish this would gain some traction. As it is, there is just not enough content there to compete with YouTube in any reasonable way.
Well the problem here is that youtubers need some type of monetization too for compensation. Idk Peertube can solve this without ads.
This is new to me; are there any decent android apps for it?
PeerTube has a variety of third-party applications for Android, desktop, and a few other platforms.
They’re working on creating an official android app that’s all I know.
Sample the color of a specified pixel (or something recognizable in the streaming format) every 30 frames from the original video.
Store collection of pixels in a database and share in a peer to peer network or stored on invidious instances. Because the sample size is small, and the database can be split up by youtube channel, the overall size and traffic should remain low.
When streaming a youtube video, if the plugin detects that the pixel in the video doesn’t match the one in the database, automatically skip until where the pixel matches the data in the database.
Imagine thinking they can’t detect when you try to skip forward during an ad.
They can’t. They have no clue where you are currently in the video, and even if they did run some client side script, you could easily spoof it.
That is prone to error, just a pixel can be too small of a sample. I would prefer something with hashes, just a sha1sum every 5 seconds of the current frame. It can be computed while buffering videos and wait until the ad is over to splice the correct region
The problem with (good) hashes is that when you change the input even slightly (maybe a different compression algorithm is used), the hash changes drastically
Yes, that’s why I’m proposing it as opposed to just one pixel to differentiate between ad and video. Youtube videos are already separated in sections, just add some metadata with a hash to every one.
I think that downsizing the scene to like 8x8 pixels (so basically taking the average color of multiple sections of the scene) would mostly work. In order to be undetected, the ad would have to match (at least be close to) the average color of each section, which would be difficult in my opinion: you would need to alter each ad for each video timestamp individually.
Yes, that could be an alternative to computing hashes, I don’t know what option would be less resource intensive
So… whats stopping something like sponsorblock from nixing this potentially bankrupting choice?
Time.
Very little most likely. I was reading some of what the sponsorblock dev had to say about this and the tone seemed to be “meh, there will be a way around this”.
My gut reaction is that this won’t work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there’s a way to do that there’s a way to detect ads.
Of course, there’s always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they’re used; they’ve done similar before.
YT already scrapped (or broke) setting the start/end timestamps for embedded videos. That hasn’t worked for at least the last few weeks. Embed videos now always start at 0
I embedded a video yesterday with a start timestamp and it worked
Did they change the params or something?
I have YT embed support in Tesseract, and videos with timestamps broke a few weeks ago (they all start at 0 now). I’ve tried both
t=andstart=formats: neither worked.You can still link to the YT video directly with those, though, but I’ve been unable to get embeds to honor them.
‘t=’ works for me, but I’m just right clicking and getting it manually to put in docs.
Hmm. Like a Word doc? Maybe it’s just embeds (with timestamps) on other websites that are broken?
I tried using the embed URLs directly in a browser tab, and those refuse to play at all (they still work embedded, though).
Definitely something that changed in the last few weeks. The test posts I had are from months ago and worked then.
Ya on second thought, I don’t think I’m using embedding in the best way and what I’m saying isn’t really related to that. I’m not actually embedding anything.
then i won’t be using it much, if at all.
fuck google.
I’ll be curious to see where this ends up going, as I doubt the community will take this lying down.
The few times I’ve had to go without an Ad blocker, I’ve seen just how bad the Ads have gotten - they’re almost the same as regular TV Ad breaks now! … And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
I think this includes YouTube music (at least in my market it does) which makes it fairly good value for money if you already subscribe to a music streaming app.
But you can listen to YouTube music for free too, no?
I think so, but with ads just like the free tier of Spotify.
Does Ublock Origin not work for it anymore? And for phones, there are alternative apps - I use InnerTune.
Oh, bundling. I thought societies were pleased to get rid of cable bundling, why is it coming back?
Because Netflix didn’t dismantle the capitalism machine.
Capitalism can never fully disrupt itself. It’s always cyclical. If bundling eventually made it more money, then it will eventually return. If the response to that is to innovate something that gets around that form of bundling, then that “disrupts” the market, in the short term, only for the market to settle back to bundles.
Because as long as the idea makes more money in a capitalistic society, it will never die.
You’re not paying to not see ads. You’re paying for the content on the platform. You can pay either by watching ads or by paying for premium.
Content creators get nothing from a subscription To YouTube premium.
You’re not paying for the content, you’re paying for and-free access to the content.
They get money from premium views. I believe they get significantly more per premium views than an add view.
This is true, no matter what ElevethHour and their downvote brigade want you to believe.
Content creators get nothing from a subscription To YouTube premium.
This is not true. If you’re a free user they’re getting a share of the ad-revenue. If you’re a premium user they’re getting share of the membership fee. The more videos you watch from a creator the more they earn.
Also. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to run a video hosting platform? Especially at the scale of YouTube. There’s a good reason Lemmy doesn’t have videos.
There’s a good reason Lemmy doesn’t have videos.
peertube exists. it’s activitypub. lemmy is the reddit-like interface to activitypub. but the fediverse definitely has video. it even has live streaming through OwnCast (though i think peertube has livestreaming scheduled to be implemented as well)
edit: hey i just found a movie station!
I’m not informed enough to know how peertube works but running it is not free either. Nor is running a lemmy instance. Lemm.ee for example has a limit even on the size of images you can upload despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.
I don’t care. I don’t wanna watch ads, ever. The point is, YouTube will never be able to stop ad blockers. They can try, and the only ones who get hurt on the content creators.
Edit: and whining, “boo-hoo for the trillion dollar megacorp!” Isn’t going to elicit any sympathies
This is not true, creators get paid for Premium user views.
I am excited. This will break my YouTube addiction.
It’ll only affect me when I need to fix something I’m unfamiliar with, and it’llead creators to using other platforms for that kind of material, and lower the barrier to entry.
I don’t know why Google is shooting themselves in the foot like this. I mean, it’ll be profitable in the short run, yes, but this will almost certainly be devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
Have you looked at the Unhooked extension. You can choose to hide recommended videos, which was a game changer for me.
The day I’m forced to watch YouTube ads is the day I’ll stop using it.
