Haven’t seen these but my solution would be just don’t watch the video. These ads may be unskippable but they aren’t un-watch-something-else-able.
Yet
Riiiiight, someday we’ll be riding bikes to generate electricity and our full-wall TVs will penalize us for not looking at ads. But hey, at least we’ll be in decent shape, so there’s that.
That will be a good thing - you need to spend much time on these bikes to burn off the calories from all the verification cans you are forced to consume.
Using Youtube without Revanced or uBlock is like using a phone without a case.
Eh, using a phone w/o a case is reasonable. I’d liken it more to watching live TV. Why do that in the era of streaming services when you can (well, could) avoid ads and watch exactly what you want instead of whatever slop the network decides you should watch?
Youtube when I use Ublock Origin on my Thinkpad and ReVanced on my Pixel:
Grayjay is my new hotness
Any reason for thinkpad and pixel?
Probably to let us know mobile and PC variants.
He’s rightfully displaying his dominance
I either watch YouTube without ads or don’t watch at all. We need a new platform for videos.
The problem is hosting (storage, network) is expensive.
IIRC some platforms (feddit.org, catbox.moe) pays $1000 per month, and that’s mostly just static images.
Videos is much more than that. Who pays for that?
I have a hunch Linus at LTT could float his own storage for whatever stuff he wants to host. The same way you and me have to pay for our own online storage.
Yeah, that would mean everybody pays for hosting videos themselves. The question is: is that a viable strategy / are users willing to put up with that.
are users willing to put up with that.
No. People are used to stuff being free.
We’ve launched a global effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience.
By drastically increasing the rates every 6 months. Raising it past the prices of actual production streaming services. And paying the people making the content less and less money, until they have to put their own ads and their own content.
No problem with ads with https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ Or youtube revanced :)
Hour long ads? How come I’ve never experienced these?
Oh wait, i used ReVanced hahahaha 🤣
While the company stops short of directly saying as much, it sure feels like the preposterously long ads we’re seeing here are an example of one tool in Google’s arsenal for effectively disabling YouTube playback for violators of the site’s ToS.
I don’t get it. When my adblocker works, I don’t get to see this shit. Only if it fails I’llbe confronted with hour-long ads, so the incentive to find a better blocker is even higher?
They are trying hard to block all known adblockers. And if they ever do, this will become a serious problem.
Arms races are rarely won by anyone.
They are won by arms dealers.
In this case though the arms dealers make the arms for free so I’m kind of okay with it
There are arms dealers on both sides. Anti-adblockers also require development, and I doubt anyone does that for free.
True.
It won’t, I’ll just go do something else with my free time…
So they effectively blocked the video then?
No, they just set the bar for watching it too high for my liking.
While their statement is entirely correct, they’re still wrong. YouTube is basically unusable without an ad blocker. Multiple 10 to 15 second long unskippable ads before the video even starts, and unless you watch videos all the way through you end up watching as much ad as you do content. It is damn near impossible to hop around between videos trying to find the one you want because of the pre-roll ads on every vid. On the other hand, with an ad block enabled YouTube is actually quite nice. The engagement algorithm is fucking trash of course but if you know what you’re looking for and you go directly to it it’s pretty good.
Do you habitually not watch videos all the way through, or am I misunderstanding your comment?
No judgement, you obviously should consume media in the manner you find most enjoyable, but once I start and enjoy a video - YouTube or otherwise - I tend to get invested and want to watch as much as is available.
When I’m ‘watching a video’ I watch it all the way thru. However often I’m looking for something specific, like how to do something, and a lot more tutorials are now in video form than written (which I don’t love but whatever). In that situation I’m usually looking for a specific piece of information which often requires scrubbing around in multiple videos. Same thing if I’m doing research on a product, while I might watch a review will the way through I’m more often looking for some specific things like video of the interface or does it have some specific setting or can I set it up without needing a phone app or cloud account. That requires scrubbing around in multiple videos to see bits of the setup UI. Unusable if each video has an ad
a lot more tutorials are now in video form than written (which I don’t love but whatever)
You’re not alone in that, and it seems neither am I
There are at least three of us!
And my axe!
Fair enough. Thanks for the answer!
If you’re looking for tutorials or other immediately applicable information, you’ve often got to skip a LOT of bullshit before even determining if this video is relevant to you.
"Hey everybody it’s Mike from Mike’s the guy named Mike, it’s a snowy day out there, I got my coffee, took my dog for a walk, it’s been the morning of a day, and now I’m out here in the garage and I figured I’d make a video about a topic a bunch of you have been asking me about. You guys have been asking me a lot lately “Hey, Mike’s the guy named Mike, could you show us how to properly lick a drill press?” Well let’s find out.
10 second title screen because Mike thinks he’s making TV
“So a lot of you guys have been asking me “Hey, Mike’s the guy named Mike, could you show us the right way to lick a drill press?” Before we get into that, be sure to leave a like, drop a comment below and be sure to subscribe. It’ll really help me out more than you can think…”
19 minutes into a 21 minute video and there hasn’t been a drill press on screen yet.
Three weeks later Mike’s the guy named Mike along with his entire family is killed in a rock slide. The UN declares it an international day of celebration.
What was I talking about?
Holy moly this is spot on 🤣🤣
Brilliant 😄
The way I see it these folks don’t respect my time when pulling off shit like this.
I tried to watch one video from a guy on a specific topic and he opened with an update on his divorce. Coooool.
You need to get sponsor block. Not only does it block all the sponsor segments because they are also ads, that the ad blockers don’t otherwise block, but they also block all of the other annoyances, like instructions to subscribe and intro animations.
yeah that’s really the key to an acceptable youtube experience. after google nuked UBO on chromeOS, sponsorblock is still there to do the heavy lifting. I’ll be switching to a windows machine soon, but for now all I have is my chromebook, which is still functional even without the real UBO-- but I’m sure they’re working on a way to fuck us out of the “lite” version of it and take away extensions like sponsorblock
Can you run Firefox on a Chromebook?
*Either you go with the Android build or you take one more step towards joining the cult of Linux.
technically chrome is is built on Gentoo.
Emotional rollercoaster.
19 minutes into a 21 minute video and there hasn’t been a drill press on screen yet
And that’s intentional. The algorithm rewards them for having people watch more / watch longer, and a 21 min video might have 2 or 3 ad rolls. If someone watches all the way thru, creator gets more money and higher placement in search results.
I like YouTube as a concept but the algorithms are totally enshittifying it.
I remember the early, pre-Google days of Youtube, when it was fail videos, that one particular kind of lyric video, lonelygirl15 and mememolly. It was about the time South park had run that episode where they had all the people who had become internet famous like Tay Zonday and the Star Wars Kid who were sitting around in a waiting room waiting for their “internet money” to make the point that there was no method in place for them to monetize their fame…
If you had asked me then what Youtube would look like in the year 2025 I don’t know what I would have said but I wouldn’t have guessed correctly. I probably would have said it’s not going to last that long. I would not have guessed that fifteen years of Google changing the algorithm, but not letting anyone know what they did or why, so there’s this constant game of trying to design video formats around what the software would promote would twist it into what it is…
Some Alternatives:
- Firefox + Ublock Origin
- Grayjay App
- Grayjay Desktop
- FreeTube
- NewPipe
NewPipe stopped working for me two weeks ago, and it seems like Google won’t allow NewPipe to download Youtube’s content for free anymore. I don’t think Youtube/NewPipe will ever be usable again. I think we have to say goodbye to Youtube.
- LibreTube on Android
Youtube ReVanced is flawless. It’s easy to patch. I host a fdroid repo to push updates just for my family but if you are willing to trust a fellow Lemmy user please proceed
How about this, do a profit sharing agreement with channels. If a channel makes money from YouTube, YouTube gets a cut, and let the channel decide whether to run ads, use sponsor segments, post affiliate links, etc. If they choose to not monetize at all, they pay a monthly fee for hosting.
Hour long unskippable ads? You have to show me that video where this happens
It once happened to me around 8 years ago. I just had to update the page and got a normal ad. Dumb past-me not using unlock Origin
While the company stops short of directly saying as much, it sure feels like the preposterously long ads we’re seeing here are an example of one tool in Google’s arsenal for effectively disabling YouTube playback for violators of the site’s ToS.
That makes no sense at all. It isn’t like skipping ads results in a black screen for the length of the ad.
People with adblockers aren’t going to see hour long ads or black screens when they don’t see ads in the first place.
I’m cool with that. but only because I’ll open 300 tabs all playing the same hour long ad on a remote PC and play them while I sleep.
let them chew through their finite bandwidth when there’s millions of people doing the same thing.
All that does is make YouTube money while costing money to the advertisers.
I think Google doesn’t care about that at all.
They most likely pay peanuts compared to you for “bandwidth” (which for them is more of an electricity cost and trough-output allocation than a specific numeric value like consumers and smaller companies have). You also cache the video on your own device making the multiple tab thing useless if you don’t know what you’re doing. And Google can also just block you when they attack their servers, move traffic around, and so much more advanced stuff that protects their infrastructure.
tl;dr: Trying to boycott Google by trying to waste their resources is useless.
don’t care about their allotted price per GB. I care about their network throughput. can’t be faster than 200gbps at the switch and having millions of videos streaming simultaneously on top of their already network throughput would likely become an incident for the UX teams.
As I said it’s 100 times more advanced than that.
They can switch IPs, datacenters, regions, whatever they want. They even have access to BGP routing.
They also use some custom switches according to Wikipedia:
The private side of the network is a secret, but a recent disclosure from Google[90] indicate that they use custom built high-radix switch-routers (with a capacity of 128 × 10 Gigabit Ethernet port) for the wide area network. Running no less than two routers per datacenter (for redundancy) we can conclude that the Google network scales in the terabit per second range (with two fully loaded routers the bi-sectional bandwidth amount to 1,280 Gbit/s).
I haven’t read the article, but surely this is an accident? I have almost no faith left in our capitalistic society, but surely even Youtube understands that nobody is going to watch an hour long ad, right?
The most mysterious one to me happened in 2015 or so. I was watching Zero Punctuation, and it served me an hour long computer networking lecture as an ad. Like, some Indian guy delivering a power point presentation. I was like, what’s the monetization strategy here, guys? Did this dude pay you to serve his lectures as ads? What?
At one point there was a period of time where YouTube was consistently serving me ads in Arabic, a language that I don’t speak and from a country I have never been to.
THEY’RE ALGORITHM JUST BREAKS SOMETIME
“THEY ARE ALGORITHM JUST BREAKS SOMETIME”
is what you just said
There was awhile there where my parents were getting ads for Pull-Ups Toddler diapers in Spanish.
I know there was that story about Google knowing about some guy’s daughter being pregnant before she’d actually told him.
So maybe I’m just really Arabic and haven’t noticed yet.
That wasn’t Google, it was Target. Based on the teen’s buying habits, that she suddenly started buying certain vitamins, unscented lotion, that sort of stuff with her loyalty card, their system put two and two together and sent her coupons for maternity and baby products, which is how her father learned he was gonna be a grandpa.
Google has similar power to know more about you than your friends and family, though.
The YouTube owner explains that normal non-skippable in-stream ads are limited to just 15 seconds in length.
This is bullshit. I don’t use an ad-blocker and often get a full minute of ad. And an extra minute if I happen to pause the stream for like 30 seconds and come back to it.
Same. I get the whole range. Usually it’s short but occasionally it’s an hour long.
You’ve been here for two years and haven’t installed a blocker yet? That’s almost impressive
I been on the internet since the 90s. I want to know what people are seeing. A commercial here or there keeps me in the loop about what is being pushed.
1 hour unskippable ads tells me a lot about what is going on, unfortunately.
Why do you need to be in the loop on ads?
I want to know what’s going on in the world.And that includes knowing what advertisers are pushing down our throats.Political ADS ads for products, things like that.How they’re going about it.
I care too much and it’s beginning a problem in my personal life
I don’t have a solution, but definitely find a way to care less. We only have so much time on this rock, so we might as well enjoy it.
There is already too much going on in the world and things trying to claim your attention. There are things we can’t control. Save your energy for that. Turn off web ads, use the uBlock Origin extension in your web browser. Try it for a week as a digital detox. If you really miss the ads you can always go back.
I see where you’re coming from but meanwhile I’m here using crowd sourced addons to even skip embedded video sponsorships.
I wonder how they managed that, I’ve been here about a year and a half and I use Linux now, lol.
I also gave it another try after many years lol
Using the internet without an ad blocker is like fucking every sex worker in Vegas without a condom.
Practice safe internet.
This message has not been sponsored by Firefox or uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger or Decentral Eyes, but if they want to throw some money my way I would accept.
It’s decentral eyes still relevant? I was reading that it use was now discouraged.
Nah, I’ve heard they stopped development. People use LocalCDN as a drop in replacement. However, by itself, it doesn’t change much when it comes to ads and tracking.
Watch Youtube on the Brave Browser and you’ll get zero ads.
Not using a real ad blocker (read: PiHole or UBlockOrigin, fuck AdBlockPlus) is a serious security threat this day in age. Do yourself a favor and get that set up ASAP.
This is bullshit. I don’t use an ad-blocker
You should be kinder to yourself.
