YouTube is testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking

https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-three-strikes-policy-block-ads-3340340/

by shmde • 3 years ago

62 72 3 years ago

jtode6• 3 years ago

Has nobody learned a thing from Musk's example?

Drunk on a stew of free money and ideological hegemony, these behemoths actually believe they've captured something that cannot be replaced.

I post my videos on peertube now; others will follow if they go down the same path as Twitter and Reddit. I can't wait to see it happen.

I really can't wait for people to realize we can federate AirBnB and Uber too.

The Fed has called in the bill on the last thirty years, and all the little MBAs are about to learn, at [last], what a protocol is.

devwastaken• 3 years ago

Twitter doesn't require the infra YouTube does. YouTube can only exist because of Googles physical infrastructure and it's ad revenue subsidizing youtube. There are no replacements because you require their scale to pull it off.

Shawnj22• 3 years ago

I think YouTube might be the exception to this because of how expensive video hosting is. Mastodon is actually doing a great job funding itself but it and Lemmy/Kbin are all text based protocols. The only other sites even close to YouTube’s scale that served videos anyone could upload used to be maybe adult video sites, but even then that’s not really true anymore because of the (good) new verification policies that exist now to help curb abuse and also the second category is far more profitable per video than YouTube is. Something like 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every second and I’m not sure if donations would easily cover the costs at that scale.

COGlory2• 3 years ago

How much of that video doesn't need to be uploaded to Youtube though? If costs are distributed among hosters and viewers directly, the entire creator-viewer relationship is going to change, and a ton of useless, low quality content is going to disappear.

mindslight• 3 years ago

While I agree with where you're coming from philosophically, I think you've got the dynamic wrong. The popular content creators on Youtube actually like the ads, because ads actually put real money in their pockets. So I don't foresee a mass exodus of Youtube posters due to this.

I think the revolutionary spirit is best thought of solely in terms of the viewing side. I personally just use Youtube in a browser because it works well enough. I know for myself, if I ever see some pop up like this I will start using yt-dlp routinely, and it will push me towards solutions like Newpipe for new video discovery.

hollow-moe• 3 years ago

Ads on youtube became irrelevant long ago, there's a reason for the massive increase of sponsored content. Even small creators relies on them now.

jtode6• 3 years ago

What % of total posters, though, are "popular content creators" who like the ads, and what percent are Susan Soccermom posting her kids recital?

The internet is not a better television.

scarface_749• 3 years ago

If you’re blocking ads and not paying for YouTube Premium, why should Google care if you leave?

ews• 3 years ago

network effects

Gibbon12• 3 years ago

You're not blocking ads, you're blocking google spying on you.

gemanor• 3 years ago

YouTube knows that people who insist to not watch ads/pay premium will find a way to watch it for free, and they don't mind it. They mind of people who got the ad blocker as freeware and watched YouTube without ads when they don't mind getting it. Looking at YouTube numbers and the growing hype of Arc browser and other freeware blockers, make sense of such a not-insisting ad blocker wall.

distances• 3 years ago

This requires that you are logged in to YouTube, doesn't it? I'm not sure how deep in the minority I am, but I use all Google services in private browsing mode if I can get away with it.

CrzyLngPwd• 3 years ago

That's a good point.

I might just designate Edge as my "google" browser :-)

mrastro• 3 years ago

Without logging in some features are restricted. Most notably allowing viewing of videos that might be graphic (e.g. involve sensitive topics) you must prove you're 18+ by logging in.

ProllyInfamous• 3 years ago

...or use one of the MANY download websites which DNGAF about logging in.

abracadaniel• 3 years ago

The cat and mouse game continues. We’ve been in a cycle of YouTube increasing the ads, driving more people to block them. I’m not sure that pushing harder on the audience with the lowest tolerance to ads is the way to go, but I guess we’ll find out. Maybe there’s enough people who will cave and don’t have the technical literacy to find further workarounds. I’ve been saying for a while, that if YouTube really cared, they’d make you login, or otherwise choose not to let you watch and here we are. Seems like the obvious workarounds are VPNs or alternative front ends.

fxtentacle• 3 years ago

I wonder if we could just declare all older and public YouTube videos as cultural heritage and then legally backup them.

conception• 3 years ago

We, the human race, own all media. It’s all our culture. We can do what we want with it. We’ve just been trained to not remember that.

Lornedon• 3 years ago

We, the human race, own all windows. We can just throw stones into them. We've just been trained not to remember that.

rascul• 3 years ago

I would rather not use YouTube than allow ads. I may be the minority, I don't care.

veave• 3 years ago

Same here, Twitch makes you sit through 10 seconds of ads, I just ^W the tab immediately

silisili• 3 years ago

Same.

I was OK when it was just 1 short ad, only sometimes. Then 1 skippable ad.

Like all companies, they just kept pushing and pushing and now I'm pushing back with a zero ads tolerance.

When will ad companies realize their own trickery and greed is what is directly driving ad blockers in the first place?

jorams• 3 years ago

I used to watch YouTube on my TV without adblocker almost every day, but it's now forcing so many ads that my usage has plummeted. There's always at least two for every few minutes of actual video, they're almost all at least 20 seconds long and unskippable.

The few times I do still watch a video I now have a nice (annoying) little ritual: Click and go back and repeat until the first ad is less than 10 seconds, then watch that to the end, then go back and click again which skips the second ad. It's going to play another 2 ads 5 minutes in no matter what, so I might as well.

Gigachad4• 3 years ago

The subscriber count for Premium and the YouTube revenue have been growing exponentially for the last few years. YouTube premium is cheaper and has better content than almost all the other video subscription services.

pawelduda• 3 years ago

And some users will be testing three-strikes policy for yt bullshit

chris378792• 3 years ago

I hopped on the youtube premium train a long time back, just because I mainly used youtube to consume podcasts and the like and it paid my creators better and got me no ads on youtube anywhere. The first time these BS policies hit me, a paying user, I will cancel it and never look back.

scarface_749• 3 years ago

Why would you use YouTube to consume podcasts instead of a purpose built podcast player?

chris378792• 3 years ago

Lots of reasons, chief of which being, I primarily consume them at my desk on my spare monitor, and the ones I follow usually have some visual stuff to check out.

Couple that with being a programmer, and I get a lot of mileage out of youtube.

unloco• 3 years ago

I was a family subscriber for 15 a month. Then they bumped the family plan up to $23 or something like that.

Yea no thanks, we have ad blockers and now use Orion browser to watch on ios mobile.

jkaplowitz2• 3 years ago

The official statement from Google included in the article makes it seem like Google is de facto fine with paid YouTube Premium subscribers using ad blockers, whether or not the legalese officially allows that. That makes sense since they wouldn’t be showing you ads anyway. So I doubt they’ll be targeting you with this new policy.

CryptoBanker• 3 years ago

Adblockers help prevent data collection, which I’m sure YT does have a problem with.

hilbert42• 3 years ago

How are they going to police this?

I watch YouTube across multiple devices without a Google account not to mention NewPipe and other ways that Google doesn't approve of.

aaomidi3• 3 years ago

It’s not hard to end up requiring a Google account.

add-sub-mul-div2• 3 years ago

I have a home toolchain making use of flask, yt-dlp, sponsorblock, plex, and ersatztv and it all works so well. I could not imagine watching youtube in a browser or a crappy roku app.

I just have to hope this war never comes to my small village.

arming9513• 3 years ago

This sounds interesting. I tried something similar with Django. You have a write up on this?

add-sub-mul-div2• 3 years ago

It doesn't take much glue to make them work together. I paste a url into a textbox, flask runs yt-dlp in a subprocess, file saves to an area already defined to be a Plex library for youtube videos. I make playlists or ersatztv schedules as needed in the respective UIs.

villgax• 3 years ago

RIP Brave Browser

YouTube should just stop pretending to be a free video host at this point & instead put everything behind a paywall. So much for the free service until we unicorn with VC/public money.

Would be neat if they terminate Google accounts altogether to actually piss people off

jug• 3 years ago

No way I’d pay just to get rid of ads (and honestly that’s all I’d use Premium for). They’ll still track me and get to my personality from what I watch. So I’d essentially be paying them AND they’d still do that. That’s turning me into the ultimate sucker.

churchill2• 3 years ago

As a free market maximalist, I believe YouTube has the right to show me as many ads as possible; but I reserve the right to close my eyes and not watch them.

An adblocker helps me close my eyes at scale, and so if YouTube wants to interfere with that, that's where we'll have a little issue.

Gigachad4• 3 years ago

Don’t they have the right to stop serving you content?

churchill2• 3 years ago

Yes, they also do and I wholeheartedly support that as well. How many customers are they willing to piss off for their anti-adblock push? That's the question.

gymbeaux• 3 years ago

97% of those surveyed in the article do not plan on paying for YouTube premium as a result ahahaha

2k3jh23j• 3 years ago

Go ahead. We have TikTok and YouTube is only used by old grannies anyway.

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

[dupe]

this was news from late June

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

Plenty of discussion here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535417

nunez• 3 years ago

Not mad at this.

You can pay to remove the ads and retain the same (better, IMO) experience.

YouTube also put the kibosh on 3P clients since forever, so that's not being taken away.

That's the difference between what YT has done and the un-Galaxy-brain dumb crap Reddit and Twitter have pulled.

Gigachad4• 3 years ago

The difference is the default YouTube client is actually good. 3rd party clients only exist to implement paid features for free.

When you pay for YouTube you get a really nice experience with no dark patterns. When you pay for reddit or Twitter you get the exact same dumpster fire.

abenga• 3 years ago

I can't pay for YouTube in my country even if I wanted to.

YouTube is testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking

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