YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers

https://9to5google.com/2025/09/16/youtube-lower-view-counts-ad-blockers/

by iamflimflam1 • 10 months ago

422 779 10 months ago

https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375

Are views also decreasing on channels without ads enabled? Is it possible that some endpoint that needs to be hit to register a view is being blocked by privacy-related (not ad-related) lists that adblockers use?

If the answer to both is no, maybe Google's intentionally punishing creators whose viewers use adblockers. But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?

pimlottc• 10 months ago

I agree, this seems more like a policy decision to turn creators into anti-adblocker advocates than a technical problem registering views accurately.

lotsofpulp2• 10 months ago

Why would most creators be pro ad blocking in the first place? Don’t most of them want to earn money via advertising?

jordanb• 10 months ago

I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization. This is why the creators all do sponsorships now. But they force creators to monetize to get reach (if the video isn't monetized it won't be recommended, even to subscribers).

My guess is that yeah, now they're going after people's sponsorship revenue by under-reporting views if their monetized content is being viewed by people with adblockers.

bluSCALE44• 10 months ago

Regarding recommendations. I recently disabled history and recommendations and the subscribed tab has everything I’d expect. No more surprises and no more political garbage.

izacus5• 10 months ago

I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization.

Do you have any article about that? How much did the monetization drop for?

s1mplicissimus• 10 months ago

My current theory is that this whole "mystery around viewcounts" thing is fabricated by google. From a PR viewpoint it's much better to just imply that adblockers are bad, so in case of backlash they can go "Idk why the community is going ham about this, we didn't even say directly you shouldn't adblock, you people are kwuaazy"

Macha5• 10 months ago

Honestly I'm willing to bet that the contacts/account managers at Google genuinely didn't know that easyprivacy had added their view tracking to the blocklist, and reached out to some people internally who's job is implementing youtube and not anti-adblock features who correctly said they didn't change anything, and would have no reason to know that easyprivacy had changed anything.

Then the AMs just issue vague statements to the youtubers as it feels more like saving face than admitting they have no idea

ge96• 10 months ago

Is it possible not to have ads? It seems like YouTube puts them in there regardless, unless once your channel is monetizable you can choose to not show ads.

rwmj• 10 months ago

Uploaders can disable mid-roll adverts, ie ones that appear in the middle of the content.

vintermann• 10 months ago

But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?

Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing" but they know it won't work if people see them as the source of the message. They want video makers to internalize their message, do what the boss wants on their own initiative, so Google only want to drop hints.

thewebguyd• 10 months ago

Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing"

Ah yes, the good old "don't copy that floppy" argument.

The advertising industry brought this upon themselves. The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker. Between malicious ads, drive-by-downloads, content shifting, and other dark patterns, websites are now more ads than content.

It's like in the days of streaming (when it was still good and not enshitified) reducing piracy rates - companies can get me to disable my ad blocker if they start becoming good citizens actually make their site or service usable without it.

Get rid of the invasive tracking, dark patterns, un-dismissable modals, etc. Stop jamming your content so full of ads and SEO spam and maybe I wouldn't need an ad blocker as much.

yard20103• 10 months ago

You wouldn't steal a car.

Well I definitely would if I could torrent it. Facebook would have too.

NewsaHackO3• 10 months ago

100%. They are trying to get YouTube a exclusion from the list, or make the list the non-default. I already know the next step is that the "community" is going to fork the list, and the forked list is going to be heavily advertised on YouTube channel as a way to support the channel.

squigz• 10 months ago

Is there any hard, reliable data on how much money is "lost" by users with ad blockers? Some of the measures Google has taken with regards to ad blockers seem wholly disproportionate to my own impression of how common they really are.

jdiff3• 10 months ago

If this is what they're doing, then it would seem to be negligible. The channels I've heard talking about this don't seem to be taking home any less money despite tanking viewcounts. Earnings are constant, but the numbers supporting those earnings have shuffled around unpredictably. When it's your income, you really don't like things to be shuffling around without warning.

MarkusQ3• 10 months ago

If you don't like random/inexplicable changes in your income, you probably shouldn't have youtube involved.

Arcuru• 10 months ago

I think you're not understanding. The claim is that view counts are down but revenue is not because people using ad-block previously did not contribute to revenue but did contribute to view count, and now they are not counted as either. So view counts are down and creators are getting the same ad money because they already earned no money from the adblocking people.

When channels are claiming their view count is dropping 30% but still earning the same amount of money, that would indicate that they are losing out on 30% of their potential revenue because of ad blockers.

Workaccount221• 10 months ago

The views didn't count in the first place, that's why the money stayed the same.

Creators can now though, knowing how much they make per view on avg, and slot in the avg number of view that were missing, work out how much they are missing out on due to ad-blocking.

For large creators, it's likely in the tens of thousands of dollars per video assuming most are seeing the same ~20-25% drop.

Eventually the "morally pure" internet will need to reconcile it's habit of not compensating creators.

fishgoesblub• 10 months ago

I have no actual hard stats to back this up sadly, but from what I've read ad rates are the same, but the views are down. Presumably because everyone who is using an AdBlock isn't counted as a view, and they obviously don't watch ads so the rates are the same.

tene80i• 10 months ago

It will be a low percentage, but a low percentage at youtube's scale is still a vast amount of money and worth going after.

suby2• 10 months ago

Well, if the recent drop in views was due to adblockers, we now have some data about what percent of viewers block ads. There would have to be an effort to collect this data, and the view discrepncy is probably going to differ by genre of video (eg, tech youtubers probably experienced a greater dip), but this should roughly tell us how much is lost to adblockers.

Creators have stated that while their viewcount is down their ad revenue is not - but a lower viewcount still presumably hurts youtubers for in video sponsorships, and if some genres of video have a higher portion of users with blockers, that probably hurts that entire genre in the algorithm. It sounds like viewcounts are returning back to normal though.

tcfhgj2• 10 months ago

but this should roughly tell us how much is lost to adblockers.

not really, because watching videos without ad blockers would be quite painful

bee_rider2• 10 months ago

I wonder if they want to occasionally agitate against ad blocking just to keep the pressure on.

If I were Google I wouldn’t be that worried about, like, Firefox users with ad blocking addons, or pihole users. But I’d be a bit worried that Apple might take a harder stance against ads, in their browser.

SoftTalker6• 10 months ago

If Apple were to include an ad blocker by default in Safari it would be the greatest thing they've done for users in the past 5 years. Their privacy/anti-tracking stuff is good but it's largely invisible to the end user. People would never want to go back to the raw internet once they experience it without ads.

motrm• 10 months ago

Jeff Geerling has been sleuthing into this lately too - my biggest takeaway is that it's only viewer counts that are suffering, he's not seen revenue drop which is key. Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/digging-deeper-youtub...

happytoexplain• 10 months ago

You're saying that YouTube implemented a change that significantly reduces creators' viewer counts but won't affect their revenue, and they haven't told creators? "Here, have a heart attack"?

a_shovel• 10 months ago

nobody's ever accused youtube of being too transparent with creators

kllrnohj3• 10 months ago

YouTube didn't change anything. The ad blockers recently started blocking the metric call for whatever reason.

Ajedi32• 10 months ago

I'm guessing the viewers who now suddenly aren't being counted were already not contributing to revenue because they block ads.

shadowgovt3• 10 months ago

They impact individual channel revenue because so many channels have gone to sponsored ads, which automatic ad-blockers can't block (yet (1) ). The calibre of sponsor a channel can attract is impacted by the reported views from YouTube.

(1) Hey, imagine I had a plugin that monitored the behavior of several viewers of each video and could collate where most people skipped a big chunk of video, then, oh I don't know, offered a feature where if lots of people skip one chunk, it'll automatically skip it for you when you're playing the video....

themafia5• 10 months ago

I pay for youtube. Payments from my views should come from my subscription payment. Ad blocking should be irrelevant in my case.

pilaf• 10 months ago

Many youtubers have sponsorships though, and their viewership stats come into play when negotiating with potential sponsors.

I guess if everyone was hit equally across the board then those sponsors will eventually adjust to the new metrics, but I assume some genres have more tech-savvy audiences which are more likely to use ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how evenly distributed this penalty falls.

tehwebguy2• 10 months ago

The automated “Skip Ahead” button (which I use daily) is already hostile to sponsorships. I would not be at all surprised to see them hitting sponsors on multiple fronts.

secondcoming• 10 months ago

Surely YT know if a video has sponsored content and so can refuse to play the video - or even not suggest it - if the user is using adblockers?

themafia5• 10 months ago

It's wild to me that advertisers are willing to use first party metrics. In any other media business you'd have a certified third party ratings agency to give "audience size" metrics some legitimacy.

Youtube has no incentive to accurately report this data and no apparent accreditation in their methodology.

dogleash• 10 months ago

Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)

Except viewer counts are a factor for baked in ads. In this case, all the sleuthing and videos about the change are the probably the only thing that will alleviate/lessen the seemingly-worse ad rate negotiation position youtubers with less viewers suddenly find themselves in.

bluGill3• 10 months ago

Those buying baked in ads just need to find other ways to verify value. This is nothing new, no large company buys ads without checking how they really work (though many small companies would). There is someone who checks all those "how did you hear about us" responses asked at checkout - they want to know if the ad really provided value. Sure the TV stations tracked and reported ratings, but that is only one of the signs ad buyers look at, and it is one they only trust because they check and so would catch if it is manipulated.

The ad business is far older than the internet and there is a lot of old knowledge that apples directly to the internet. Those buying backed in ads should be aware of and tracking such efforts.

geerlingguy4• 10 months ago

Two concerns I have in the long-term:

1. It seems views from Premium users who use adblock might also not get counted—and I'm not sure if the revenue from a Premium view in that circumstance would be counted or not (more research needed).

2. YouTube's recommendation engine weights views heavily in the system, which means channels with a more technical, traditional desktop viewing audience (probably a substantial portion of HN users) will be most impacted, and will not be able to grow an audience to help fund projects, yadda yadda.

YouTube creators with younger, mobile, less FOSS-y, and less tech-savvy audiences are therefore rewarded with more views/mindshare.

I know some here are like "go get a REAL job, influencers are scum", but I think that discounts the helpful work of many tech creators. Not only in direct contributions to open source projects, but also in being a voice to balance out the paid 'product showcase' style videos for many tech products that come to market.

In other words: if adblock users disincentivize creators like me from spending time and resources on YouTube, then video content will more quickly settle into the online magazine/news status quo, where 99% of the articles you read are just PR spin. Which you could argue would bring about YouTube's downfall earlier... or would lead us even more quickly to an Idiocracy-style society :D

I'm not saying adblock is bad or wrong or anything—I can't stand the YT ad spam, so I pay for Premium. To each their own. In any case, YouTube shoulders some of the burden, but will be the main entity to profit in any scenario.

whatarethembits• 10 months ago

If this leads to lower quality videos, due to change in incentives, for certain segments, then I would consider it a WIN for users. For the portion of users for whom the lower quality is not palatable, they will get their time back to spend on other things in life.

This is all completely subjective of course.

makeitdouble• 10 months ago

I know some here are like "go get a REAL job, influencers are scum"

Signing up for the creator's patreon or buying merch is the more widely adopted reaction by the those actually enjoying the content.

shagie3• 10 months ago

Prior to getting Premium, YouTube was able to detect that I was watching a video (and nag me about premium as a way to get rid of ads). Since getting Premium, I haven't gotten the nag message.

I run AdGuard (on a Mac). It has a filter log feature.

Poking at the log while playing a video, I do see calls to ttps://{{clusterid?}}.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1758173247&...

However, this call is not being blocked.

I suspect that this is the "keep watching" feature that tracks where I am in various videos (switching from one logged in device to another keeps the same position). Watching the video all the way through, I don't see any requests relating to this getting blocked while on Premium. This feature is also likely more than sufficient data to attribute a view (and monetization of the view).

There was also a call to ttps://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/log_event?alt=json that was not blocked.

I do see some doubleclick.net links being blocked, thought that could be from any number of other pages I've got open.

Going to an incognito session and pulling up the same video (Once Around Trappist 1)...

There's now a call (that has gotten blocked) to ttps://www.youtube.com/api/stats/watchtime...

That call was not something that I saw when logged into premium. This rule is described as "@@||www.youtube.com^$generichide (AdGuard Base filter)"

navigate8310• 10 months ago

Your presumptions are akin to gaslighting and YouTube has successfully pitted the viewers against creators this time. Ad blocking will never stop no matter what creators and monopolists have to say.

naikrovek4• 10 months ago

Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)

while true, choosing to base your income on the wellbeing of a company and its ad placement, no matter how well your video does or how good you are at producing videos is absolute insanity to me.

You become a slave to the latest monetization techniques and if you don't adopt them your revenue goes down, and your videos get put in front of fewer people, resulting in less income. This is bizarre to me, and definitely unwanted, because the things you need to do will never stop ramping up. A video used to do better because the thumbnail had a reaction face on it, now it's required just to keep your view count where it normally should be. People got used to that, and now ignore it. But it's still required if you want to get your video in front of people.

Now thumbnails must be rotated out frequently for the first few days of a video's life until the thumbnail which results in the most views is found. Soon people will become immune to this tactic just like they became immune to the reaction faces, and something new will come up to replace it. Except you don't stop with the reaction faces and the thumbnail rotation, you have to keep doing those.

Advertising requires this constant escalation to counter people's ever-increasing ability to ignore advertisements, and this will never stop so long as revenue determines how often a video is placed on the youtube.com homepage for a given viewer. it will never stop until advertisement is no longer a thing at all. a content creator must continually escalate what they are doing in order to stay right where they are in viewership, and even then they are subject to constant drops in revenue because of the whims of Google and advertising partners.

The whole thing is absolutely insane and I can't understand why someone would choose this to be their primary source of income. If people didn't choose to make youtube a career, there would be far fewer ads on youtube, because people would not be fighting so hard for views.

drtgh• 10 months ago

Google's browser holds almost the entire market share, and it's a browser that shifted to Manifest V3 to prevent ad blockers from being installed (which now require special effort from users to install and keep it/them working). Do people really believe that the decrease in the number of visits is as significant as Google is trying to make YouTubers believe through their algorithm?

I don't know... To me, it just seems like a textbook move from a Corporate Abuse Playbook. I bet someone at Google is laughing about it right now.

MarkusQ3• 10 months ago

It could be the causality runs the other direction; I know that my youtube viewing is way down since they decided that they could decide what software I may/may not run on my computer.

pndy2• 10 months ago

On your computer? Could you elaborate?

MarkusQ3• 10 months ago

They told me I couldn't run ad blocker/anti-virus software on my computer while watching their videos. So I stopped watching their videos. (Technically, the videos aren't theirs, but belong to the creators. Many of them provide the same (or better) content on other platforms),

mikert89• 10 months ago

I wish their algorithm would show me videos with my actual interests, instead of some kind of repeat material click maximization

smusamashah• 10 months ago

I get good recommendations. They key is to not getting distracted by videos you don't really want to see in the feed. Its very tempting some times and watching just one video can mess up the feed. Takes a while to get back.

Same with twitter.

grues-dinner• 10 months ago

I'm getting videos with under 10 views in my recommendations now. They're AI generated "educational" videos, but sound like interesting documentaries. Considering how many users YouTube had the chances that I could be in the first 10 viewers for a listed video are tiny unless I personally know the creator or the place is absolutely flooded in AI shit and there is O(users/10) of these videos being uploaded regularly.

pndy2• 10 months ago

I'm seeing abundance channels with generated content - doesn't matter if it's official page, "proxy" services or apps. It's always heartbreaking stories about poor senior women whose lives are hell because of their families or homeless girls who want to eat leftovers from the plates of the rich, or supposed death of celebrities.

Considering I have zero interest in this stuff it seems their algorithm pushes such trash by cross-referencing with the closest thing possible - even by a digital picometer distance.

kouteiheika2• 10 months ago

Have you tried clicking on the the dot dropdown menu and selecting "Not interested" or "Don't recomment channel"?

hightrix2• 10 months ago

I've found that "Not Interested" does either nothing or sends an engagement signal to show me more of the same. "Don't recommend channel" does seem to work with that channel, at least.

imglorp• 10 months ago

Could it be the recommendation algorithm is so terrible that people can't even?

Mine is just a sewage firehose so yes, I watch less now, and I use NewPipe on mobile to have a chance to see my subscriptions.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 10 months ago

The trending page is usually so decadent and tasteless that I'm ashamed.

bluSCALE44• 10 months ago

Log out and you’ll be even more ashamed.

qilo• 10 months ago

Trending page[0] is gone for non logged-in users as of couple months now. (No idea if it's still up for logged-in users) As a result my YouTube consumption went down (not complaining).

https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending

the_af6• 10 months ago

I wonder about this. I'm not discounting your experience, but my YouTube recommendation page is great.

I only see my subscriptions, or things directly related to things I've watched and liked. If I remove a disliked video from my watch history, it "mostly" works to tell YouTube I don't want to see it anymore.

I very seldom see crap I really do not want in my YouTube feed/recommendations. All I see are hobby videos and cartoon clips of things I like.

This is totally unlike Facebook (where random garbage recommendations are the norm) or Reddit (which is hit or miss).

SoftTalker6• 10 months ago

My recommendations are generally aligned with my interests as derived from my view history, likes, and subscriptions. But more and more of it is AI-generated or videos copied from the original creator and reposted by someone else. I try to use "don't show me videos fron this channel" on those but more and more just appears. I think there must be bots creating new channels and copying/generating content faster than I can block them.

And please, let me opt out of Shorts permanently. I keep telling them I don't want shorts but they always come back. I pay for a Premium account, so they should resepect my wishes on this.

vorpalhex• 10 months ago

I did an experiment where I really invested in my YouTube suggestions, and you can definitely groom your recommendations, and then they can be pretty good. But then you have an issue where you get into a new hobby or a new interest, and so you watch some videos attributed to that, your recommendations spiral back out of control. So you can do a whole bunch of grooming work, but probably they just go back to being like 80% wrong. I got vaguely interested in the piano, and now 80% of my recommendations are music related, but not actually things I care about, and they've just gone back to being total trash.

PaulHoule7• 10 months ago

On the computer attached to my stereo YouTube shows me almost 100% conservative, boring, safe but good music recommendations -- all things I've liked before, it rarely tries to show me anything new or challenging.

On another browser it shows me mostly videos about stereo equipment.

One yet another it shows me a mix of videos aimed at someone who listens to The Ezra Klein Show. That browser and the previous browser sometimes get a burst of videos about "How Brand X has lost its way" or "Why Y sucks today".

One time on shorts I clicked on a video where an A.I. generated woman transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and then after that it wanted to show me hundreds of A.I. slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into just about anything on the same show with the same music and the same reaction shots.

If you click on a few Wheat Waffles videos you might quickly find your feed is nothing but blackpill incel videos and also videos that apply a blackpill philosophy to life such that not only is dating futile but everything else is futile too.

The conclusion I draw from it is that you can't easily draw conclusions about the experience other people have with recommenders, it's one reason why political ads on social are so problematic, you can tell baldfaced lies to people who are inclined to believe them and skeptical people will never see them and hold anyone to account.

andrewflnr• 10 months ago

Same. My recommended feed is relatively ok, but I'm fairly ruthless with the "I don't want this" and "Don't recommend this channel" buttons. Meanwhile I've been off Facebook for years in large part because their feed appeared to be unsalvageable.

portaouflop2• 10 months ago

As noted above my recommendations are excellent and a source of great joy. I don’t get how other people have such an inverse experience

Measter• 10 months ago

Here's my experience of recommendations right now: videos I've already seen, videos on topics I have no interest in, or a completely empty page.

crazygringo• 10 months ago

It's based on what you watch.

My recommendations are entirely in line with what I watch. I never need to check channels i like for a new video because they automatically get recommended.

If yours is a sewage firehouse, are you logged in? Or are you sharing your account with family members who watch what you consider "sewage"?

Telaneo10• 10 months ago

Mine's still stuck on recommending me culvert uncloging videos after I watched one way back. I switched to Freetube and imported my subscriptions, and that made things much better, since now I can't even accidentally see what my recommended videos would be.

yard20103• 10 months ago

I couldn't stand the shorts nonsense. I don't want to consume this kind of media, why force it down my throat.

aszantu• 10 months ago

Pretty sure it's caused by the algorithm not serving the user anymore... Unless I block a channel forever I only get served the same channels over and over or it's an endless reel of ai slop with that dead crappy voice on all kinds of variations...

jlarocco• 10 months ago

Yeah, these companies are pushing AI so hard they don't see it's destroying the value they had. I don't want to watch an AI reading Wikipedia, showing stock photography, and I doubt anybody else does, either.

And lately they're starting to get more malicious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaHW24jOYVw

magicalhippo• 10 months ago

I too have noticed a lot more slop in my feed the last several months, and generally have to explicitly check my subscriptions to be sure I don't miss videos.

And I'm quite deliberate with avoiding ragebait and slop, and I remove stuff from my watch history if I get duped etc.

That said, I have noticed a trend amongst the creators I've subscribed to that the average video length has gone up. This has been a longer term trend, but many who used to do 30-40 min videos now often to 1-1.5 hr videos.

I've heard YouTube punishes people quitting a video midway, so perhaps there's something going on there too. At least for myself I often have to watch these videos over multiple sessions, and chances are there that I just forget and move on.

So perhaps some compounding factors making things worse.

bachmeier3• 10 months ago

Maybe views are simply down. I can't be the only one getting tired of the out-of-control sponsored videos. Even if you pay for YT Premium, you get hit with that crap on most of the popular channels.

meatmanek• 10 months ago

And you think everyone simply made the same decision as you on the same exact day?

bachmeier3• 10 months ago

It's possible that the YTers complaining about this are affected once you bring the algorithm into it.

SoftTalker6• 10 months ago

Anecdotally I am watching less. Not because of sponsorships, but because more and more content is AI-generated slop or copied (stolen) from other channels and reposted.

pier252• 10 months ago

Anecdotal but my usage has been slowly dropping in the past year or two as the experience has gotten worse. First it was the terrible search results and then with shorts plaguing the whole thing.

faangguyindia2• 10 months ago

i used to watch lots of videos, but since LLM came into being i find them much faster than watching videos.

Infact, i used to watch videos because they used to be more "targeted" at problem solving when i ran into any issues.

but these days LLM ftw.

the_af6• 10 months ago

How are LLMs an alternative to videos? They are different mediums.

What's your use case?

shagie3• 10 months ago

Not OP (and I don't use it for this case), but I suspect that the instructional "how do you do X" videos that supplanted the "look up the blog post" of even longer ago.

"How do you start a react application" and going to https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=How+do+you+star... (incognito or private session suggested to avoid search history getting you react application suggestions for the next several months) and watching those videos.

For many people looking for a guide, they've switched to an LLM which gives them a more tailored experience.

izacus5• 10 months ago

Interesting, I thought it was due to absolutely horrible TV UI redesign which now shows exactly 1 and a bit of a video thumbnail on my 77" TV. Who the heck designs that.

Insanity3• 10 months ago

Huh, I'm having a hard time interpreting what that looks like. Have a link to a photo you can share anywhere? The "1 and a bit" part is confusing.

izacus5• 10 months ago

Not around the TV right now, but they increased the size of the thumbnails in the first row of "Recommended" content to the point where only one is visible fully. (Not unlike new Netflix UI)

I might be in some A/B test tho.

euLh7SM5HDFY2• 10 months ago

https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/YouTube-TV-Ro... - this is best case scenario, 2 whole thumbnails fit on the screen. And depending on category (selected on left) it might be just one - just imagine it truncated at the place right support bracket is.

driverdan• 10 months ago

Source: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/373195597

SchizoDuckie3• 10 months ago

Go complain to Youtube, where the views should be measured on the backend instead of via an API call.

Does anyone realize how many missed views this implies??

archerx2• 10 months ago

I realized this when I watched one of my friends music videos to give the extra view (they had less than 100) but the views number didn’t go up because of my ad blocker.

SchizoDuckie3• 10 months ago

afairc sub-100 views are not counted in realtime anyway.

esafak• 10 months ago

Because Google still can't count that low, amirite?!

poly2it• 10 months ago

How many?

SchizoDuckie3• 10 months ago

Only YouTube can tell, that's the fun part.

thrance2• 10 months ago

It does kinda make sense for once, you probably wouldn't want to just count API calls for views. I heard you need to watch a significant portion of the video before it counts as a view.

SoftTalker6• 10 months ago

They certainly are counting views on the backend also, and I'm sure they know exactly what the cause of the discrepancy (or "drop" as they term it) is.

giancarlostoro2• 10 months ago

They probably use a combination of the API and raw server requests due to how easy it would be otherwise to spoof viewership for ad revenue fraud. Would not surprise me anyway.

slightwinder9• 10 months ago

I also see the opposite problem: can one abuse that API to artificial inflate the view count?

Workaccount221• 10 months ago

Ad-block views don't help anyone anyway, so I'm not sure why this would matter. If anything it's more accurate.

owisd• 10 months ago

View count is used to guide to price embedded sponsors, so in the short term matters while things get recalibrated.

giancarlostoro2• 10 months ago

What if its both? ;)

ecshafer3• 10 months ago

I am not sure why this is a bug? Youtube is tracking people, this blocks them tracking people. A side effect of a view not being counted on Youtube, is 100% Youtube's problem, and doesn't effect the user in any way.

andrewmcwatters2• 10 months ago

A lot of people clearly didn’t like Yuki’s response, but he’s entirely right.

ecshafer3• 10 months ago

The thumbs downs on Yuki's responses are baffling. It is a privacy filter, improving privacy. There is a strong para-social relationship with many younger internet users, so maybe people really do feel strongly about affecting their favorite youtube star's view count? Or it could be youtube creators who are worried. I can't think of any other reasons a user would be on the side of youtube here.

Bigsy• 10 months ago

Right or wrong you don't think it was unduly combative right off the bat? Manners cost nothing.

cluckindan3• 10 months ago

Sounds like YT is trying to mobilize creators and influencers against adblocking.

avian• 10 months ago

I don't think YouTube needed to do anything. The change influenced creators' bottom line so they are motivated on their own to mobilize their viewers against this change.

mustyoshi• 10 months ago

Ads are how they get paid until they're big enough for alternative revenue generation.

reddalo5• 10 months ago

against adblocking

And extensions such as SponsorBlock [1], which help user skipping sponsored sections or useless intros in videos.

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

marcosscriven• 10 months ago

This was my exact thought when I read about it. YouTube clearly has a record of what I’ve watched, because it’s in my watch history.

What they are missing is proof I’ve watched the ads - which I haven’t.

tomrod3• 10 months ago

Morally indefensible. Adblockers are used as a response to Google externalizing/ignoring the cost of proper ad platform curation.

alkonaut• 10 months ago

Sounds fair? Both creators and YouTube have the same goal of having people watch ads (or pay not to).

slightwinder9• 10 months ago

It's a problem for the Creators. Their stats are lower than they should be, which could have negative effects on their business, like YouTubes recommendation-system not working as efficient as it should be. Similar, would they have a weaker selling-point for companies advertising on their channel.

It should be noted that YouTube income is unaffected by this, as Ads are still shown and counted to people without AdBlockers. So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.

rapind• 10 months ago

So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.

Pretty sure this is harmful to youtube as well as it lowers the value (less personalization data) for advertisers. Also the knock-on effect of impacting creators, meaning less investment in creating content.

That being said, I've always hated this business model. It's created so many other problems in our society. Resulting in a shift to authoritarian leadership in many countries.

ecshafer3• 10 months ago

But why would I, as a user of Easy Privacy, care about this? It is protecting my own privacy. Someone trying to get more money on the internet isn't really my concern.

izzydata• 10 months ago

That still isn't an issue for the end-user. It is Youtube's problem to keep their content creators happy and not mine.

Personally I would even prefer anything that allows for a Youtube alternative to do better.

falcor84• 10 months ago

Oh, really, are you sure? They still charge advertisers the full amount? My understanding was that they're only charged if there is evidence of an "ad impression" which there shouldn't be if the request was blocked

xhkkffbf• 10 months ago

Isn't it likely that Google charges the advertisers for each time an ad is shown? So lower view counts mean lower ad views which means lower revenues for both Google and the content creators. (And, if the advertisers are counting on the views to drive their own business, it could mean lower revenues for them to go with the smaller ad bills.)

actionfromafar• 10 months ago

Eventually the whole system will rebalance. TV ads were shown to people even though you couldn't if any single person was watching or not.

Where does line go? If a future "Adblocker 3000" don't let advertisers capture you eyemovements in realtime 30 times per second, would that be sad?

Seems the ball is with Youtube. They can compensete and pay out more. Or not.

awaythrow9993• 10 months ago

Aren't many channels funded by the companies they pretend to get sponsorship from? If you look at the OSINT and Natsec adjacent topics there are many who have had the same sponsor for years: ground.news ... many pretend that they are indie content creators when they are just the marketing / growth hacking arm of the sponsor.

Examples: Caspian report, Warfronts, Geopolitics decoded, ...

Many of them (the content creator) are even located in the same city.

thomastjeffery• 10 months ago

That's a rule defined by YouTube and/or advertisers in their relationship with content creators. By defining that rule, YouTube and/or advertisers have chosen to drag my participation into that relationship. My participation does not belong in their relationship. The only thing I can do to communicate my opinion on the matter is to do precisely what this "bug" entails.

fleeting900• 10 months ago

Why do YouTube creators deserve special treatment compared to any other entity whose analytics are impacted by adblockers?

Every publisher on the internet has been bleating for years about how adblockers negatively impact their business and their ability to provide [some value] to customers.

If your ability to generate value is hitched to surveillance capitalism then that’s a choice, whether you’re a folksy mom and pop YouTube creator or a multinational publisher.

marklubi• 10 months ago

Might be a problem with Adblock, but also, Firefox just released an update that blocks social networks.

I run a couple different privacy add-ons for various different levels of blocking things, but the Firefox update has seriously broken a lot of stuff

swiftcoder3• 10 months ago

It seems like a YouTube bug, that they are performing view tracking on the client, when they own the whole server backend and could just as well track them server side (which wouldn't be blockable in the first place)

nonameiguess2• 10 months ago

It seems like server-side would suffer from issues due to buffering lookahead and autoplay. A client can request a video that is skipped within seconds, but if buffering causes it to request five minutes worth, the server only sees five minutes were requested, whereas the client can clearly tell how much of that was actually watched.

paxys7• 10 months ago

Server-side tracking would be the easiest thing in the world to spoof.

paxys7• 10 months ago

It doesn't really affect YouTube either, it affects creators who rely on view counts to monetize their channels.

throw_m239339• 10 months ago

What's the meaning of this? Is Google trying to make content creators tell their viewers not to use adblockers? I don't think it's easylist's problem here. I don't understand.

euLh7SM5HDFY2• 10 months ago

It was mostly panic. As in: it didn't apparently affect revenue in any way, but content creators always check view stats/graphs for their own videos to see how well each of them is doing. So sudden drop made YT the main suspect. It didn't help some changes to video visibility for "children" profiles was pushed at same time.

slaymaker19072• 10 months ago

The interesting question is how/if this impacts the recommendation engine. If it does impact recommendations, then that will directly penalize channels with more adblock users.

this_user• 10 months ago

But are really this many users actively using ad blockers? Presumably, a lot of users are on mobile devices where they are using the native app that doesn't even support this. If we subtract them, then a significant share of users on browser would have to be using EasyList.

charcircuit4• 10 months ago

The view drop only happened for desktop views.

Eji1700• 10 months ago

I would suspect it affects specific channels more than others. Obviously smaller tech channels are probably hit the hardest % wise

Workaccount221• 10 months ago

Something like ~30% of desktop users use ad-block.

If you are tech or tech-adjacent content, it can double or triple that.

geerlingguy4• 10 months ago

40-50% of desktop users on my channel, heh.

I don't hold it against anyone. YouTube's ads are horrible, and overstuffed into videos.

I use premium and know not everyone can afford it, but one concern I have is premium views are also not counted if someone still uses the adblocker while logged into YouTube premium. (So you miss out on the view and on that extra bit of premium revenue).

miyuru• 10 months ago

Firefox on Android supports uBlock Origin.

drnick12• 10 months ago

"a lot of users are on mobile devices where they are using the native app that doesn't even support this."

Laughs in NewPipe.

xandrius3• 10 months ago

Laughs in patched YT.

PeterisP3• 10 months ago

One report (https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/) indicated that more than half of Americans use an ad blocker.

pier252• 10 months ago

So Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?

Wouldn't surprise me if we now see a new trend of "click like, bell, and suscribe and don't forget to disable your ad blocker!".

Obviously they don't care about these views since they are not generating ad revenue. Youtubers who use view counts for sponsor deals etc do care though.

reddalo5• 10 months ago

Youtubers who use view counts for sponsor deals

Laughs in SponsorBlock

jjice• 10 months ago

Hell, YouTube even added that feature where it'll autoskip commonly skipped section so it's basically a built in SponsorBlock at this point (no doubt helped powered by those who skip via SponsorBlock). I'm surprised I haven't seen any controversy from people who are having their sponsors pay less because of this.

stemlord2• 10 months ago

I find it incredibly difficult to shed any sympathy for youtube "content creators". Youtube was most entertaining, or at least most interesting before anyone was monetizing the platform. Same goes for most of thr rest of the web but I digress

granzymes5• 10 months ago

According to the GitHub issue, YouTube didn’t change anything. There are two endpoints that can be used to attribute a view. One is called multiple times throughout a video playback and has been in the easylist privacy filter for years. The other is called at the start of a playback, and was just added to the list (the timing lines up with the reports of view drops from tech YouTubers).

This is not definitive proof that easylist caused the view drops, but it’s I’ve read the issue and a writeup by a YouTube creator and it seems pretty likely.

swiftcoder3• 10 months ago

That's not quite what the github issue says? There appear to be several potentially contributing changes in the time window, and one of them actually re-enables a previously blocked YouTube analytics endpoint

ziml772• 10 months ago

If all videos are affected by this, then it really should not be hard for these people to adjust their deals with sponsors to compensate.

babypuncher• 10 months ago

If views aren't being counted, it will still hurt their revenue from YouTube Premium subcribers. Premium views pay out a lot more than ad revenue from "free" views so that can hurt a lot.

cactusplant7374• 10 months ago

Brave will hit 100 MAU this year. That is a lot of users that will never see ads.

gizmo686• 10 months ago

YouTube has a BrandConnect program where they facilitate sponsored videos. I'm not sure how many sponsorships are done through that as opposed to third party agents though.

carlosjobim3• 10 months ago

View counts is a worthless metric for sponsor deals, as are any other type of metric provided by a third party.

To get exact metrics, you should use discount codes that are unique for each channel. Then you will know the exact amount of sales each sponsorship is netting.

kelvinjps• 10 months ago

I believe the metrics are before the sponsorship is made, like a company will only sponsor a creator if that creator has more than a number of views

dmix• 10 months ago

Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?

Youtube isnt quoted in this article. It's someones speculation

spankalee4• 10 months ago

YouTube is quoted in the article.

Viewers Using Ad Blockers & Other Content Blocking Tools: Ad blockers and other extensions can impact the accuracy of reported view counts. Channels whose audiences include a higher proportion of users utilizing such tools may see more fluctuations in traffic related to updates to these tools.

charcircuit4• 10 months ago

Whatever, there's no problem for user. EP is for user and not for those so called creators or site owners.

It's sad to see how little sympathy there is for people other than oneself and how changes are affecting the larger ecosystem. Especially for a site as critical as YouTube to people's livelihoods.

Though having said that, at the same time I'm not surprised that someone who spends their time modifying sites to remove ads and analytics to make their personal experience better at the expense of everyone else would act this way would have this kind of selfish mindset.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF6• 10 months ago

Youtube could fix it by counting when the video page is loaded from the server.

doright• 10 months ago

I don't think they'd be interested in fixing this. I suspect YouTube is trying to create a double bind for users of adblockers by pitting them against creators' incentives. People in the thread were discussing ways of disabling uBO filters to restore view reporting.

charcircuit4• 10 months ago

The work to do this isn't free. YouTube already has their code working, but they don't expect browsers to be blocking arbitrary requests or injecting their own javascript into the page. These kind of breakage are not free for YouTube to fix and often YouTube is the one taking the reputational hit for their site being broken. It ultimately is antisocial behavior to be breaking other's sites even if technically they can workaround the bugs being added.

cluckindan3• 10 months ago

If only YouTube made ads run on the side instead of trying to emulate television.

I’m not going to sit through two 15-30 second LOUD ads just to see if a video is actually worth watching.

slightwinder9• 10 months ago

They also do this (or did?). But I guess on mobile this is not working well, because of limited screen estate, and people will obviously not focus much on them.

charcircuit4• 10 months ago

I agree that video ad experience on YouTube isn't great, but they do offer a subscription to remove ads at least.

nightpool2• 10 months ago

How much do you think advertisers would be willing to pay for ads on the side, relative to what they're currently paying? You can see how people wouldn't be willing to pay the same amount for that, right?

dang• 10 months ago

(This was a response to https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375 via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45276614, but we merged that thread into this one)

rodrigodlu• 10 months ago

I'm a heavy AdBlock user, I pay for YT premium, and I paid Nebula for 2 years, also I try to buy some albums on Bandcamp even with YT music subscription. What more they do want?

And I do use referral codes for the content creators I do like. My Amazon referrals do still work.

As a mostly software backend dev I even visualize the JS guy saying "it's solved" when he forgets to tell that the correct choice is to do the counting on the backend, period. Not hacking a crappy JS snippet calling a different host.

I obviously ask for more time to make sure it's reliable.

I literally saw something similar happening around some years ago in a adjacent team I was working.

I want to pay with money, not attention. Both at the same time? Non negotiable.

bArray5• 10 months ago

Counter-argument: Youtube's aggressive anti-ads campaign resulted in failed loads, videos that appear stuck, etc. The more techy people would have updated, but others were left with the choice of a buggy experience or dreadfully long ads. Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.

shadowgovt3• 10 months ago

This article is less about view counts dropping due to people abandoning the platform and more about view count spikes and troughs that are a consequence of the measure-countermeasure game of YouTube tweaking its code to account for ad blockers vs. ad blockers tweaking their code to account for YouTube ads.

Ad blockers (especially for complex sites and data streams) are basically like using a chainsaw to remove a mosquito(1); sometimes innocuous or beneficial features get omitted too because they're too "ad-shaped" for the heuristic.

(1) Anyone who thinks I'm under-selling the risks of unblocked ads has never seen the consequence of an unlucky bite from Aedes aegypti.

sebastiennight4• 10 months ago

This is the last thread I would ever have expected to see those little striped monsters mentioned.

Not sure about the chainsaw analogy, but I guess Aedes Aegypti is a fair metaphor for the cumulative effect of the tiny daily (hourly?) annoyance of the free-with-ads model.

PaulHoule7• 10 months ago

Plus so many ads are malware, dangerous, or scams that even the FBI says you should use an ad blocker

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/22/fbi-ad-blocker/

YouTube is one of the worst offenders for scam ads. Even today you sometimes find an ad that talks about some scary health risk and points to some ad that drones on and on for 45 minutes and if you get to the end they try to sign you up for an $80 a month subscription for some worthless supplement.

Sanzig2• 10 months ago

A deepfake version of Mark Carney keeps trying to get me to sign up for scam crypto exchanges. Clicking the report link does nothing.

With all the money that Google has plowed into AI, they clearly could solve this problem if they want to. The fact that it's still an issue means they don't care, or are happy to take the ad money from the fraudsters.

complianceowl• 10 months ago

100%. I can't count the amount of times I've seen an AI-generated Elon Musk promoting a Tesla coin lol. I've lost count.

bscphil• 10 months ago

I endorse the view that everyone should use an ad blocker, but for what it's worth I keep seeing this techcrunch article and the original advice offered by the FBI [1] is actually much more limited.

Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others.

So the specific recommendation is that you turn on an ad blocker while performing searches. Why are they so concerned about searches? It's because of a specific form of fraud, where someone purchases an ad pretending to be the business you're searching for, but actually takes you "to a webpage that looks identical to the impersonated business’s official webpage" - that is, a phishing scam.

That's way more limited than the "FBI recommends ad blocker" statement would lead you to believe. From the FBI's point of view, pitching a bullshit supplement in an ad (what you're talking about) is an entirely legitimate business practice, and selling supplements is legal in the US so long as you don't make certain medical claims or imply FDA approval.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221222162340/https://www.ic3.g...

alex1138• 10 months ago

I see it as part of the same general package. The censoring for any reason at all (including real time, via AI, in the comments, which were already! ruined by Google+ integration going back years)

Youtube Rewind 2018 - before they got rid of dislikes, to make ad videos harder to spot - was one of (was the?) most disliked videos in Youtube history

A very far cry from the halcyon days of ~10 years earlier

kllrnohj3• 10 months ago

Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.

Creators are not reporting any declines in ad revenue that match the drop in view count. Indeed several have reported revenue is the same despite the view count drop. So it's quite unlikely people are fed up with youtube in any meaningful way.

bArray5• 10 months ago

The people using ad-blockers were not watching ads, so it would not make a difference to revenue streams. If anything, profit would go up because Youtube server capacity is not being used as much by ad-block users.

slightwinder9• 10 months ago

Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.

This specific case is about an unusual high drop of viewers specifically on desktops on a specific date. The assumptions are, that it's just too unusual for the normal drop in that timeframe, so it has to be a bug of some kind. Would it be a normal drop in viewers, it would not be on a specific date, months after the problems with AdBlocks started.

bArray5• 10 months ago

There is middle-ground: anti- ad-blocker changes cause a large number of ad-blockers to fail entirely.

It would make sense too, Youtube wouldn't care to make their videos viewable to a large number of ad-blockers, and ad-revenue would be near steady because ad-blockers were not generating any ad revenue.

tantalor6• 10 months ago

"would have updated" what? Their browser?

bArray5• 10 months ago

For quite a few people, they would have had to manually pull in an updated ad-blocker change. This would be the case if they run the source release, or have disabled updates.

aequitas• 10 months ago

I consider myself a little techy, since I visit this site quite often. But for me YouTube is curing me from my addiction to it by ramping up its ad blocker blockers. I know I have to wait roughly the ad’s runtime looking at a frozen video before the video actually starts playing and it is often enough to let me go do something productive or useful instead. Thanks google :)

bArray5• 10 months ago

Yeah exactly, sometimes I just give up entirely. If it's a podcast I might persist, otherwise it's just not worth it.

The compromise for Google would be to limit ad-blocker users to a reduced quality version to save on bandwidth...

After using Peertube, it would make a lot of sense if pretty much all media assets went the way of decentralisation. It lowers bandwidth, reduces server overhead and increases availability.

tap-snap-or-nap• 10 months ago

Some people I know do not ever change any settings on their computers, they certainly are worst hit by youtube's ads and have given up opening youtube links or close youtube links immediately after because there are 3-4 ads before the video even begins.

thrance2• 10 months ago

Putting my tinfoil hat on, maybe they knew ad blockers would mess with their new implementation and expected the freak out to mount "creators" against ad blockers?

not_a_bot_4sho• 10 months ago

I don't want views going down for creators on youtube.

Agree to disagree. That's kind of the point of an ad blocker.

If you want to support creators, stop blocking their ads.

OsrsNeedsf2P2• 10 months ago

Views support the videos in the algorithm.

Do you think someone like Louis Rossman, who wants to use Youtube to share his message but doesn't use YT as a business, would rather views or ad money?

humpty-d6• 10 months ago

Presumably Louis wants to reach as many people as possible and would like to know how many people he's reaching though.

bobsmooth2• 10 months ago

Rossman has a separate business to support him.

bazmattaz• 10 months ago

I block ads on my favourite channel but then support the guy through Patreon every month. I figure he’ll get more revenue form that than the shitty ads

yard20103• 10 months ago

YouTube has ads?

tehwebguy2• 10 months ago

View counts are on borrowed time anyway, I’m sure.

Gualdrapo• 10 months ago

Yesterday I wanted to watch a video of a song which was made originally english. It was auto translating lyrics to german. I just speak some spanish and some english. Couldn't decide if I should be annoyed with it translating to a language I just know a handful of words or should be thankful because it's trying to help me learn more of it.

Venn1• 10 months ago

If you're unfamiliar with the creator dashboard there is a spot reserved for notifications from YouTube. This should have been front and center last week, not buried in a creator help thread. Why wasn’t it? That's open to speculation.

As someone with a small tech channel, I'm glad I was following this. If not, I would have spent the last week swapping out thumbnails and video titles, which seem about as effective as percussive maintenance. But hey, you have to try something.

Well over a decade ago a gentleman by the name of Brian Brushwood said, and I'm paraphrasing, “YouTube is like working for an AI manager that never tells you what it wants but punishes you severely if you get it wrong.”

Welcome to 2025.

ScamSchoolBrian• 10 months ago

Hah! I'm so happy that quote landed with you. I'm starting to do a lot more talking and thinking about how that stuff works, so it's a thrill to see it quoted out in the wild.

paol• 10 months ago

I use uBo which uses easylist, and when I watch youtube videos they are marked as viewed, so this explanation does not seem likely?

OsrsNeedsf2P2• 10 months ago

How do you know they're marked as a view on the video?

827a• 10 months ago

The fact that a client-side change can impact reported views is wild. Its so wildly the wrong place to track views that it forces me to wonder if its an intentional & malicious decision by Google to mobilize YouTube creators against the idea of viewer privacy.

mbirth2• 10 months ago

Did we hear anything about people using ad blockers and still having YouTube's watch history enabled reporting that a watched video didn't pop up in the history?

jsnell3• 10 months ago

This is how it has worked for ages. If you think about it for a bit, I think you'd come up with all kinds of reasons for why this can't be done with just server-side signals.

For example, how do you account for skipping over already fetched parts of the video or rewatching the same section multiple times?

Or for the entire video being cached and researched? For bots downloading the video?

The idea that this is some malicious anti-adblocker time bomb implanted a decade ago is preposterous.

donmcronald2• 10 months ago

Yeah. How does the client get trusted and could someone write a view amplifier that reports extra views to YouTube? I would assume it’s already being abused if they trust the client side to report views. If they’re not trusting the client, the ad blocker explanation doesn’t work.

It makes no sense.

NoSalt2• 10 months ago

Am I the only person who is confused by the anger from people who use a free service (like YouTube) or participate in a gig service (like Uber), and get upset when it doesn't go their way? Meaning, they get upset when they cannot make money off services provided by a company. Seems like entitlement to me.

Insanity3• 10 months ago

Disagree - the services make money _from_ the users. It's a symbiotic relationship, and I totally understand the frustration. Especially when decisions are opaque and you're left guessing about what 'the platform' is doing.

mtrovo• 10 months ago

Lol honestly, not sure how they can be compared. Uber is a shitty proposition in any way and is mostly a way for us to get easy access to cheap labor. Nobody ever got rich driving for Uber.

There's no way you can say the same about YouTube, the value proposition is quite good and it leveled the field in a way traditional media would never do, just think for a moment what's the chance of seeing someone like MrBeast surging as a TV personality.

bobsmooth2• 10 months ago

Yes. People feel entitled to free shit and refuse to pay even with their attention.

brokenmachine7• 10 months ago

Without creators, what videos would youtube be featuring?

NoSalt2• 10 months ago

Maybe the creators should pay a fee if they want people to see their videos.

devinprater• 10 months ago

Don't forget to like, subscribe, hype, hit the bell, and turn off your adblocker! Thankfully I think Sponsorblock has a section for those points in the videos.

xandrius3• 10 months ago

Never mention that word, the fewer the people who know about it the better. It's one of my favourite things in my online life xD

jenadine• 10 months ago

the fewer the people who know about it the better.

Don't you need more people using it so they can flag the sections?

moffkalast3• 10 months ago

Now that you mention it, I sure haven't heard one of these annoying ass lines in a while, people really do flag these sections.

kjuulh• 10 months ago

YouTube even has a feature now that if you skip, it will skip over sections that other people skip to. Which in practice does the same thing as sponsorblock, except that you have to press skip ;)

moolcool• 10 months ago

YouTube showed me the same phishing ads depicting an AI version of the Canadian Prime Minister.

Why should I not filter ads from a provider who is OK with people stealing from me?

tomrod3• 10 months ago

Morally, you should filter ads. If ads could be relevant, vetted, non-intrusive, and ancillary to the experience, all actions that are required to be performed by the ad platform Youtube/Google, then you wouldn't have much moral leg to stand on.

Due to YT/G's moral failings to host a sufficiently serviceable platform for their product, your eyes, then your only real recourse outside adblocking is to buy a device and put on a separate network with no reasonably important traffic.

I don't lose one bit of sleep knowing that adblocking prevents Google from externalizing their curation costs onto me.

Workaccount221• 10 months ago

No, no, no.

Morally you should stop using youtube.

It's incredible how people mental gymnastics there way into a solution that provides themselves all the benefit and pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous.

When you don't like something, you don't use it. It sends a clear message that you don't like the product/service. Using it and not compensating for it (because you actually do like it, just on your terms) is not moral or a good signal in anyway way, shape, or form.

kelnos5• 10 months ago

If ads could be relevant, vetted, non-intrusive, and ancillary to the experience, all actions that are required to be performed by the ad platform Youtube/Google, then you wouldn't have much moral leg to stand on.

Even if ads were all of those things, ads are psychological manipulation, and I there is no moral imperative that says I have to subject myself to that.

Sure, you could say, "well then instead just don't use YouTube", and I would say... "yeah, maybe, but... I'm a selfish human and want to, and unless YouTube is going to give me a way to exchange something else for a better experience, tough shit on them."

But anyway, they do give me that option, and I pay for Premium, so it's not a problem.

lelandbatey• 10 months ago

You can block ads. It's never morally wrong. You can look away, it's never morally wrong. Content creators getting paid to include ads is their business model, and no viewer is responsible for a content creators business model. Even in a world were technology allows a creator to get paid more for video evidence of you looking at the ad, you're never in the wrong for looking away. You're never in the wrong for blocking ads.

zanellato193• 10 months ago

I find it so weird how we just accept the fact that ads can be for fake things and not blame YouTube/Google for those things.

SilverbeardUnix2• 10 months ago

People in general have stopped trying to hold people accountable and have just accepted defeat.

ndriscoll4• 10 months ago

That was also my take when I first saw the FBI advice about using an adblocker. Like, yeah, it's good advice, but also why is no one being prosecuted for acting as an accessory if not accomplice to fraud? They're labeling their product as a search tool and then taking money to funnel users away from the thing they're searching for to scammers instead. Surely they are aware of their pure negligence in vetting business partners if the government is issuing warnings to citizens about their behavior?

kylehotchkiss• 10 months ago

30% of my YouTube ads are now a large fart sound followed by an AI generated old doctor talking for 15 minutes about some sketchy diet modification

chii3• 10 months ago

not blame YouTube/Google for those things

it's because everyone but you have something to gain in that transaction - google got paid ad money, the advertiser presumably got some value in exposure.

Therefore, you, for whom the "harm" has fallen, want to blame someone like google or the advertiser, which google has a form of EULA/TOS to shed all responsibility/liability.

It's just the way the internet is, and the reason for adblocking as a requirement.

pjc50• 10 months ago

The UK has an advertising standards agency, but they're completely unable to cope with online ads.

Of course all the "online safety" nonsense does very little for our safety against misleading advertising.

donmcronald2• 10 months ago

About 30% of the ads I see are that crypto scam. I’m sure I’ve seen it over 100 times. There are several variants with different people. I don’t understand how that scam is paying for the massive volume of ad time they’re getting. It must cost a fortune.

I also get tons of French ads and I don’t speak French.

ChocolateGod2• 10 months ago

You would think Google having all this amazing AI could moderate their YouTube ads....

But those crypto scams make them money.

snailmailman• 10 months ago

I have ad targeting turned off on my google account. As a result, probably >90% of the ads I see on YouTube are scams, almost-nsfw content, deepfakes, more scams, illegal products, and more scams. I’ve been tempted to take notes and keep track of how many are scams. It’s awful. I cannot remember the last legitimate product I saw an ad for on YouTube.

Yesterday I saw an ad on YouTube that was literally just porn. Very NSFW, not “almost” NSFW like a lot of the ads are. After reporting it, I tried to pull up the ad transparency page for the company running the ad. I was hoping I could somehow report the company itself, in addition to the ad. I had to be logged in to do this. Because when logged out, you can’t see “age restricted” ad campaigns. This completely blew my mind. I didn’t think they allowed nsfw ads, but if they knew enough to age-restrict the ad campaign, maybe they do?

From what I understand, if I turn on targeted ads, I can opt out of ad categories, and maybe google will stop showing me the scams. Instead, I simply use Adblock, and avoid YouTube on iOS as much as possible. The experience is completely unusable with the advertising.

I’m not going to pay for premium to avoid ads that are blatantly violating YouTube’s TOS anyway. At least, I hope they are violating it. “Report” never does anything so they might just allow anything in ads.

chii3• 10 months ago

violating YouTube’s TOS

google cannot violate their own TOS.

StTerryADavis• 10 months ago

Honestly, I get shocked every time how horrible the viewing experience is without an Adblock, both with the amount of ads and how much of it is scams or open propaganda. I will close the tab unless I really have to watch the video.

You are fundamentally right about trying to avoid Youtube on your phone in my opinion. But just to not be facing the same ad cancer if you do need to watch a video I would suggest either:

A) Safari uBlock Origin Lite extension B) Orion browser with desktop extensions C) Sideloaded Youtube app

Hope that helps

k12sosse5• 10 months ago

When I go incognito for videos it's usually AI Carney getting arrested. The sponsor has a shit name with Wedding somewhere in their name, and when I search the web for the string of the name, I get about 2 hits and they unrelated. It's weird ass shit. Gives me weird foreign influence vibes.

wraptile• 10 months ago

I used to disable my adblocker to show support to certain channels or pages but the ads have become so bad I really can't be bothered anymore. Youtube and Meta don't care about ad quality at all and then are surprised that people block ads. I've been reporting one Threads phishing ad for MONTHS and I'm pretty sure it's still there.

mock-possum• 10 months ago

I wonder if YouTube/creators can tell at what point viewers abandon the video - and I wonder if they can tell how many times I’ve opened a video, been greeted with another grating Liberty Mutual ad, and immediately closed the tab.

trilogic• 10 months ago

YouTube is history, last time I used it was covid time. Blame AI if you want but time don´t stop for anything. That´s it and that´s all.

LeicaLatte• 10 months ago

YouTube's messaging is the more frustrating part about all this. Panic might drive more creators toward direct monetization, that might just be the better net outcome.

johnklos• 10 months ago

"Because you're using adblockers, we're going to punish them."

Sounds about right for Google.

mindaslab• 10 months ago

I use Newpipe on my mobile, and Adnauseum + Firefox on my laptop to escape from Youtube Ad's.

stronglikedan• 10 months ago

TechLinked's take is pretty good (as usual): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ5pATTvc2o

duxup• 10 months ago

The difference where they see dramatic PC views dropping and phone and tablets remaining steady and the quote do seem to hint at ad blockers being the cause.

But it's not at all clear to me 100% if this really is an ad blocker problem / there's not any real proof.

Meanwhile I'm getting another add for "stuck poop" and scam health products ...

teekert• 10 months ago

Ah yes because they can’t measure streams with blocked ads.

And what’s up with that “subscribing”, never saw the use for it, yet many (respectful, great) creators beg for it. I almost feel bad for not using the feature. I mean, I’m watching the content, that must count for something?

chatmasta• 10 months ago

Off-topic, but this 9to5google blog is the first I’ve seen “top comment” embedded inline with the blog post. That’s really cool. It’s more like how you’d comment on a google doc rather than threaded conversations appended to the end of it. I’d like to see more exploration of this UX…

georgeofjungle7• 10 months ago

Kinda ironic — the tools meant to block ads end up hurting creators by messing with view counts.

flohofwoe• 10 months ago

I don't think it's a counting issue but that the various experiments that YouTube did recently to block adblockers are causing people with adblockers to leave the page early before the video starts playing, because they are greated with infinite loading spinners, incomplete page loads or in the best case 10 second delays until the video starts.

I happily watch the embedded ad-segments of YouTubers, but not the aggressive scam/slop-ads that YouTube puts before the actual videos thank-you-very-much.

spankalee4• 10 months ago

It seems like this statement from YouTube[1] and this Github issue (referenced by granzymes[2]) have key information being missed by a lot of commenters.

From YouTube:

Viewers Using Ad Blockers & Other Content Blocking Tools: Ad blockers and other extensions can impact the accuracy of reported view counts. Channels whose audiences include a higher proportion of users utilizing such tools may see more fluctuations in traffic related to updates to these tools.

Quoting granzymes:

According to the GitHub issue, YouTube didn’t change anything. There are two endpoints that can be used to attribute a view. One is called multiple times throughout a video playback and has been in the easylist privacy filter for years. The other is called at the start of a playback, and was just added to the list (the timing lines up with the reports of view drops from tech YouTubers).

Source from the GitHub issue for easylist: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme...

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/373195597

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277768

j-bos2• 10 months ago

Seems like a balanced approach, people can watch videos with adblockers but it won't count towards youtube's public facing metrics.

john_moscow• 10 months ago

This looks like an additional incentive to channel owners to somehow convince their audience against the ad blocker use. Makes sense, better than trying to win an unwinnable arms race against the blocker maintainers.

kulahan5• 10 months ago

Makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched, not how much money YouTube made off of it. They’re pretending people care about their internal metrics, when people really do not. Maybe the creator, but again, they’re probably also just interested in eyeball counts.

It’s dumb in almost every direction I can imagine. The only one that makes sense is if you’re simply at war with adblockers and you’re trying to turn the public tide of opinion against them.

CAP_NET_ADMIN• 10 months ago

You can still have in-video sponsor spots, in fact, most of the creators have them. Viewership is an important metric to those sponsors.

jsnell3• 10 months ago

The comment you replied to explained that nothing was changed on the YouTube side. This was an adblocker choosing to start block a non-ads, non-tracking, samesite API call that had probably been in place for like a decade.

So it's quite amazing that even with that context you still managed to hijack that into a discussion about the merits of what Google did with this "balanced approach" bait. This isn't a balanced approach! It's not an approach at all!

It is the ad blocker willfully choosing to break totally normal and benign site functionality. Google had no agency in this, and doesn't have much recourse.

granzymes5• 10 months ago

There is no balancing happening here. YouTube needs to make an API call to attribute a view to a video, and easylist started blocking that API call. YouTube was perfectly happy a month ago to count views for users that were blocking ads, and presumably remains happy to do so.

The only thing that changed is easylist blocked the API.

granzymes5• 10 months ago

Thanks for lifting up my comment. It’s amazing how quickly people want to point fingers at YouTube for something they weren’t involved in.

Someone even relied to your comment implicitly assuming that YouTube cares about conditioning views on whether a user has an adblocker enabled when what happened is easylist added the view counter API to their privacy list.

shimbucktwo• 10 months ago

At this point the "peanut gallery" of the web is essentially just a firehose of misinformation, best avoided. Not two minutes before this I read some comment confidently stating that the last time Apple offered iPhone leather cases was for iPhone 11.

apercu• 10 months ago

YouTube immediately pointed fingers at creators by saying that certain audiences are more likely to use ad blockers.

taurath3• 10 months ago

point fingers at YouTube for something they weren’t involved in

YouTube monetizes based on view count. They also send the data to the client. That client data is in anyway involved, and could be blocked, is YouTube’s design problem.

Intralexical5• 10 months ago

If Dirty Stan spends an hour making guests uncomfortable at your house, some of those guests might come to think of you as a bad host even though Stan's behavior was the issue.

I think it's reasonable to attribute moral responsibility to the entity that owns and has the most control over the platform, even if the technical details aren't quite so simple. Doubly so in this case since YouTube is a profitable business. Given [0], it sounds like this bug with view counts is a direct result of YouTube choosing to start an arms race against users who run ad blockers.

[0] https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme...

jasonlotito• 10 months ago

The latest comment suggests otherwise: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme...

From the comment: The recent YT issues aren't related to Easylist/Easyprivacy.

Edit: To be fair, your comment came before this comment. I'm merely posting the latest update.

bitpush• 10 months ago

Its frustrating to see how HN commenters just jumped onto conclusions without even doing any bit of critical thinking.

The top comment on HN says

So Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?

When even a cursory look would show that if you block stats-aggregation endpoint .. stats go down. Sometimes it is occam's razor.

philjohn• 10 months ago

The question becomes ... why are they relying on client side counting of views? They know how much of a video they've distributed to a given client on the backend after all (YouTube does buffer, but not the whole video).

arccy2• 10 months ago

because distributed CDN means it doesn't necessarily hit a backend?

spankalee4• 10 months ago

YouTube has a crazy CDN. They very well might not be able easily attribute exactly what the client requests to specific accounts.

gregschlom• 10 months ago

Not necessarily. Youtube makes extensive use of third-party CDNs. A lot of the videos aren't coming from their servers at all. I believe that's also why it's so hard for them to embed the ad directly in the video. They instead having to rely on splicing the ads client-side, which makes it possible to block.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not at Youtube and have no idea how things work really. This is just based on some info I read online.

axus• 10 months ago

The computers serving advertisements should also know how much data has been delivered. Alphabet should be able to expect more from a CDN they have a business relationship with, than the people watching YouTube.

nightpool2• 10 months ago

The other commenters point out more prosaic problems with CDN architecture, but a more product-focused answer for this is "because users execute Javascript but bots don't". Using client side counting is an easy way to filter out simple automated traffic.

Also, with segmented MP4 streams, the files on the backend won't necessarily be easy to match up 1:1 with videos. How do you count the views if someone watches a video, and then skips back to watch the middle section a few times, and then doesn't finish it? Because that would show up as (1, 1, 4, 3, 0) in your database for the different files involved. Now imagine doing that for ~500 people on a shared IP address for their high school. And now your minimum threshold for view counting is tied to the size of your MP4 chunks, or range requests. And now you've put this view counting logic into the hot path of serving terabytes of data.

From a product perspective, you can see why "A video view is counted the first time the user presses the play button and watches for at least 30 seconds" is a much more desirable definition, both technically and for stakeholders (video creators, advertisers, etc) to understand.

nomel• 10 months ago

It's a 20 year streaming service, and it's Google. There's a certain expectation I have from that. The fact that it's just an endpoint being hit by the client is...baffling. I don't think it's in the realm of expected possibilities for most of us, being the most naive, and fragile, implementation possible.

The fact that ad revenue didn't change means they do have robust ad tracking, but the view numbers are +/- some unexpected level of fiction.

spankalee4• 10 months ago

The fact that ad revenue didn't change means they do have robust ad tracking

Ad tracking is usually done client-side too, so ad revenue being stable just means that the missing view counts are probably limited to the users who already weren't viewing ads.

whywhywhywhy• 10 months ago

Lengths Google are going to fighting ad blockers when really it's a small niche of people who can't stand to use their platform without one is getting silly and this feels like a tactic to try and push the onus on making people turn them off on their favorite youtubers

arccy2• 10 months ago

is it a small niche when the youtube creators can see it in their stats and are panicking?

th0ma5• 10 months ago

It seems politically inconceivable to discuss advertisement network security, ethics, consolidation, negligence, etc etc. I cannot more strongly recommend running an ad blocker.

dyauspitr• 10 months ago

YouTube finally was able to block me from using ublock (and all the workarounds) a couple of weeks ago. This has finally prompted me to shift from Chrome to Firefox.

drnick12• 10 months ago

No, I won't turn my ad blocker off. In fact, I go further and use uMatrix to block ALL third party content by default on ALL websites (uBlock in advanced mode can also do this). That's on top of an aggressive DNS-level blacklists targeting ads and trackers.

Some manual adjustment to allow CDN on some websites is needed, but 95% of the cruft is left out. That cruft is usually malware in a broad sense: ads, trackers, embedded Youtube videos that seem benign but allow Google to follow users across the Internet, etc.

roscas• 10 months ago

But how many people know how to do that? Almost zero.

So it is up to us tech guys to teach them about the danger it is to open a single web site without protection. Several levels of protection.

Including stop being abused by Windows, switch to Linux. But there is so much more to do, that it is very hard to teach and make people do it.

Everything is created to abuse you, and most of people don't have a single clue about what is going on.

AlgebraFox• 10 months ago

uMatrix is not maintained. Use NoScript or uBlockOrigin.

ranguna• 10 months ago

Those are not as good as umatrix unfortunately

manbash• 10 months ago

Maybe a "view", however YT defines it, is a poor metric? It doesn't show engagement and it's time for YTers to have better means for analytics.

I have an Android TV device, and YT has been so horrible with its constant ads popping up, that I have to put it on MUTE to prevent any further brainrot.

I wonder when they're going to blame me muting my TV and harm their viewership. Or maybe they will just prevent me from being able to mute it.

bl4kers• 10 months ago

SmartTube is way better and free: https://smarttubeapp.github.io/

Curzel• 10 months ago

WAN Show is going to be wild this week

elAhmo• 10 months ago

I have been contacted more than once by close family members because of ads that look like system prompts inside Youtube feeds asking to delete photos, free up space, clear phone from viruses, and this is not even including AI slop and porn stuff.

Blocking ads is the way to go, and I am sure creators will survive this.

everyone• 10 months ago

I'm so sick of tech companies choosing to build something a certain weird way and then in the media blaming something else.

eurekin• 10 months ago

Oh how incredibly convenient.

Plus, making ad blocking a channel owner's problem is kind of genius.

Acrobatic_Road• 10 months ago

Could we test this theory with an unlisted video?

The_President2• 10 months ago

We're ripe for a situation where YouTube subpoenas ISPs MPAA 2.0 style over their users habitually accessing video and audio content streams without paying or validating through their ad chain. Google has every way from Sunday to identify users very accurately and I see it being an option on the table to ban accounts to the name, and potentially seek damages. RIAA did it for MP3s, MPAA for video content; rule of thirds?

Ultimately most sane people see ads as vomitpuke and this will continue to be a contention.

thousand_nights• 10 months ago

i've noticed recently youtube added a "most commonly skipped to" marker on their videos which is very useful when watching on my TV which doesn't support sponsorblock to skip sponsored segments

more and more youtube creators seem to be integrating their sponsors in their videos in a way where if you skip it you miss an integral part and i do wonder if this is youtube's way of fighting against being left out, but then again, i don't know shit, just an interesting observation

drozycki• 10 months ago

Have you looked at https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV ?

belorn• 10 months ago

I would find it exceptional interesting if youtube moved away from the concept of providing content for free without an expectation for repayment, to a model of selling a service. Selling a services is covered under a very different kind of laws, and where I live, tax law, while giving away content for free with ads has their own little exception carved out for it.

It is similar to how phone companies had to charge 0.1 cent for phones, rather than advertise it as gratis. The law said that companies could not advertise a product as being gratis if they also expect the customer to pay for it in terms of a binding contract with a provider, but they can sell the phone for any amount greater than 0 and have it as a combined sale with a binding contract. Thus companies changed how they sold their product, and also had to inform the customer of the binding terms (and if I recall, expected total cost) in the advertisements.

As one politician put it; You can't put a sale tax on services supported through advertisement since the customer may watch the full add, half the add, or none of it. Since the tax office can't determine how much of an add, if anything, is watched, there is no value in the exchange for which to tax.

The_President2• 10 months ago

That angle makes sense, and I wonder how it would combine with the loose interpretation of the DMCA in the context of bypassing ad tech.

brikym• 10 months ago

No problem YouTube. I'd rather give my data to the browser extension which brings back dislikes.

throwmeaway2222• 10 months ago

Great, finally a thread Youtube employees might be looking at.

Ever since the election you guys RAMPED up the ads, please drop it back down. It's becoming unbearable to get a 50 minute podcast AD every 5 minutes of video I watch when I'm shingling a roof and my phone is in the truck. There HAS to be some limits here.

thetrb• 10 months ago

Do you think a random Youtube employee makes that decision and can just drop it lower?

throwmeaway2222• 10 months ago

No, but feedback goes into the machine in odd ways. This has a 1000x higher factor of being considered and thought of more than any other forum.

pluto_modadic2• 10 months ago

I don't think the grunts get to decide. youtube is now governed by the dude who used to run AdSense, and has a mandate to fix revenue losses.

sojournerc• 10 months ago

Firefox and ublock origin, or... Just pay for it

desolate_muffin• 10 months ago

If you use YouTube this much, just get YT Premium maybe? It comes with YT Music, which seems like 70% as good as Spotify to me.

citizenpaul• 10 months ago

Let me guess they are not blaming the terrible ad experience that cause people to use ad blockers?

meinersbur• 10 months ago

From the GitHub issue it becomes clear that blocking happens by the EasyPrivacy blocklist. The blocked URL youtube.com/api/stats/atr is/can also be used for tracking users, this is why some are arguing that it legitimately on that blocklist.

The tracking not malicious. YouTube has a legitimate interest to verify views, e.g. to recommend popular videos to others. If a view counter was increased by just invoking an API, view counts could be manipulated easily. Also see the video [1] from ... 13 years ago ... so it might be slighly outdated. Just slightly.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI

cakealert• 10 months ago

What is the technical challenge behind stealthily blocking ads? Making the backend unaware if ads are actually being seen or not - just fetched.

This may even serve as some accelerationism for invasive web tech where ad middlemen may resort to doing render checks. The invasive practice may with low likelihood advance some web technologies into blocking such measures.

Bilal_io• 10 months ago

Not sure what the technical challenge here is either. I use an ad blocker and I assumed YouTube already counted my view, since the video can be found in my YouTube history.

Macha5• 10 months ago

I imagine watch history view tracking and view count view tracking and possibly even ad impression view tracking are three disconnected systems. Google is still going to update your history view even if it thinks you're a bot so you don't know you're being filtered out for example. The data to power that UI can also be partitioned by user while the ad and view count data needs to be aggregated performantly across large numbers of users in different slices. On the other hand your watch history doesn't keep multiple entries if you watch the same video multiple times in a day (say a music video on loop) but does want to charge for each ad impression seperately.

pluto_modadic2• 10 months ago

render the video twice -> gotcha, the GPU needs to run TPM code and knows where the buffer will go.

tithos• 10 months ago

I’ve been using Brave browser to watch YouTube for years. Haven’t seen one ad in years. I’m probably part of the problem

tracker14• 10 months ago

Heaven forbid Google/Youtube actually count/measure the streaming output themselves. Same goes to CBS/Paramount whose whole service breaks (on some streams) when using a pihole.

officehero• 10 months ago

Hordes of people skipping ads is a reasonable price to pay for market monopoly.

cyberax• 10 months ago

Dear Youtube. Please, just give us an API to get the video data for the _premium_ subscribers.

I can use my own viewer then, instead of relying on your ever-worsening website.

It's win-win. I keep paying you, you get accurate view counts.

josalhor• 10 months ago

Seems almost incredible that no one is pointing out the YT incentives behind this. YT has a war on two fronts: ad-blockers and in-video sponsors. That is because in-video sponsors don't get YT money, so they want to be in the monetization loop. So, by decreasing the views, sponsors are now less attracted to in-video sponsorships and YT ads look better in comparison.

fishbacon2• 10 months ago

This is completely unspoken by most of the youtube channels that are making videos about this. The reason they are worried is not because of the algorithm or vanity. Especially for channels like LTT it is economical. They get the vast majority of their money from getting a lot of views.

The interesting thing here is that since youtube did not change anything, it is actually adblockers successfully making sponsored content less viable. Something youtube has been trying to, at least on premium ([ytp]), where I get a little "Jump ahead" button on all platforms when sponcon is detected (in aggregate people skipping forward, it also does it for intros and similar).

I wonder if it will have a measurable impact on placement in the algorithm for channels like RLM that are seeing the drop. But rely on crowdfunding and youtube ads.

gempir• 10 months ago

With the risk of sounding like a fanboy.

LTT makes 9.2% of their revenue on In-Video Sponsors and 12.5% on Sponsored Projects (which are like full videos for a sponsor)

I wouldn't call this the vast majority

https://youtu.be/GeCP-0nuziE?si=2ob1AixcwGZwR4VC&t=719

brokenmachine7• 10 months ago

Every now and then I have accessed youtube on a PC with no adblocker.

It's absolutely dire. I mean, ridiculously bad. Unbearable.

If it's that or nothing, it's the easiest of choices.

Havoc• 10 months ago

Same with on phone. Pretty much always just close it.

I’d rather just not have yt than deal with their ads with a sprinkling of content on to approach

gethly• 10 months ago

If it dies, it dies. - Ivan Drago

internet_points• 10 months ago

They're streaming all that data to each client, can't youtube notice that? Why are they dependent on a separate endpoint for the client to send to?

romanovcode2• 10 months ago

Why are they dependent on a separate endpoint for the client to send to?

So they can turn video content-creators against those who use ad-blockers. I do not get how is this not obvious.

jsiepkes• 10 months ago

Google must have thought: "Never let a good crisis go to waste.".

esskay• 10 months ago

I think the funniest thing about this whole mess is Youtubers asking their viewers to unblock it.

Or in LTT's case, consistently banging on about it like it affects their audience - the audience really do not care (nor should they need to), it has no bearing on them.

ik83• 10 months ago

Could the move from Windows 10 EOL to 11 have something to with it? Whemn people run Edge for the first time does it turn on or reccomend the builtin adblocker setting?

Razengan• 10 months ago

The advertisement industry is one of the worst plagues of current human civilization.

Just imagine an individual person doing the things that advertisers do: Constantly follow you around, demand your attention, gaslight you, pester you to give him/her your money, and snoop through your private life so he/she can do those things even more.

Ads condition us to normalize the worst attributes that nobody tolerates on a personal scale.

A constant mental barrage, waste of time, defacement of public space, and often thinly veiling misinformation...

And worst of all, it's an Emperor with no Clothes: Almost nobody goes out to buy a product because of an ad.

In fact, the more frequently someone sees ads for something that they don't already buy on their own anyway, it's more likely to permanently turn them OFF from the product! (Fuck you Grammarly!)

If I don't buy your shit after the first 3-5 times I skipped your shitty ad, I'm not going to buy it. In fact, shoving your ad in my face even more just makes certain that I NEVER buy it.

…

Ads ARE the problem: Everything else is a symptom. Society needs to figure out a better mechanism of promoting products: Empower search systems and stop gimping filters, to let people find exactly what they want. Let people TELL companies what they like instead of spying on people to figure what they want: You can't ever get it right anyway!

ricardo81• 10 months ago

With Google aggressively blocking bots on search, likely due to AI scraping- it wouldn't surprise me that the view counts are also affected by bot detection.

jack_pp7• 10 months ago

I'm still baffled that youtube doesn't simply splice ads in the video stream directly and relying on client insertion through API endpoints which can be blocked. If they did video injection on the backend they wouldn't have any problems with ad blockers, it would literally be impossible to block. Even if the client would recognise ads somehow the server can just decide to serve the video of the ad while ignoring any seeking from the client so at best the client can mute the ad.

callamdelaney2• 10 months ago

There would likely be huge processing overhead for splicing ads into a stream, right?

jack_pp7• 10 months ago

No, you can concatenate video segments with basically zero cost if the segments are encoded using the same encoding parameters and afaik youtube already re-encodes user videos.

Lucasoato• 10 months ago

Don't give them ideas! Also I think that there's a non trivial engineering effort required to inject ads into the video stream as well, for example with bookmarks and so on. Probably they'll do it but as last resort.

jack_pp7• 10 months ago

I suspect this war on adblockers is also non trivial and the "last resort" would win them this war forever. For a company the size of youtube the effort would be trivial.

Etherlord875• 10 months ago

Even if the client would recognise ads somehow

Sponsorblock uses community driven marking of ads edited into the video.

I think you're right, that you wouldn't be able to skip an ad at the beginning of the video - you would need to predict for the user he will want to watch a video to load it earlier in the background to skip the ad, so only skipping ads in middle of the video would be possible.

jack_pp7• 10 months ago

you would need to predict for the user he will want to watch a video to load it earlier in the background to skip the ad

Not sure I understand this. I don't think it's possible even now to load the video in the background, youtube is already smarter than this and it will load a short period of time whenever u seek anywhere, it doesn't just download the whole thing if you pause the video.

And the way I'm suggesting wouldn't be mitigated by sponsorblock since you wouldn't be able to skip it if you want to stream the video. Only way would be to use yt-dlp and remove the ads automatically but I suspect a tiny percentage of users would go to that length to avoid ads

briHass• 10 months ago

Then, the ad-adverse users will just use software that downloads the video and reprocesses the file to remove the ads. Ytdlp already does this with SponserBlock integration, and I imagine detecting ads is something AI would be pretty good at.

Of course, you lose the ability to mindlessly browse YT with no ads or get the dopamine hit of clicking an interesting video. I'm sure that's something YT considered if they pushed this option. They don't want you to just watch the few vids from your subscriptions per day and close the app.

general1465• 10 months ago

Video is not a single stream, but many smaller chunks daisy chained after each other. Reason for this is that you can then change i.e. quality of video and it will seamlessly change - because it will start daisy chaining higher quality chunks and show them in the player.

So what you are describing is already happening, ads are added directly into video stream, problem is that ads need to have access to API, because you don't want to show an ad for menstruation pad to a guy so you also need to know which user is watching and that's what cookies and the whole login is for, so you are effectively hitting a design limitation of the system.

And no, you can't do this ad selection on the server, because for example when you have 10 users behind a NAT how are you going to tell which user is which from the server point of view? So you need to be calling these APIs from the client side.

DoctorOW2• 10 months ago

This is close to being correct, but it isn't. Server side ad insertion is possible, and the tech already exists. See, your browser by default sends cookies to the server with every web request, no JS required. Simply* add the ad videos to the list of chunks.

*By "simply" I mean it's technically possible, I know it's not simple to implement.

jack_pp7• 10 months ago

Video is not a single stream, but many smaller chunks daisy chained after each other. Reason for this is that you can then change i.e. quality of video and it will seamlessly change - because it will start daisy chaining higher quality chunks and show them in the player.

Don't think this is correct, if you're on a slower connection you will see it takes a while when changing stream quality, the video "seamlessly" changes because it's still playing the current quality stream while the new quality stream loads. It would make no sense to send more than one quality at the same time because it would incur higher bandwidth costs and they care a LOT about bandwidth costs. I'm a premium user and even though I have higher quality enabled by default they STILL downgrade and not showing the highest quality possible unless I force it on specific videos.

So what you are describing is already happening, ads are added directly into video stream, problem is that ads need to have access to API, because you don't want to show an ad for menstruation pad to a guy so you also need to know which user is watching and that's what cookies and the whole login is for, so you are effectively hitting a design limitation of the system.

They can do the tracking by user all the same, as long as the user is logged in they know what ads to show on the server already. This is already a problem when the user is using youtube without an account in an incognito window so if the client hacks the tracking side just show them default ads for their region. This is already a solved problem

LordHeini• 10 months ago

Its not too hard to detect ads in video streams, even old school analog VCR's could do that.

Watching TV shows without adds was one of the selling points of those back in the day.

Some more modern digital ones had near real time features where they would play with a delay of a lets say half an hour and used that time to remove the ads.

If you have stream from Youtube containing ads you can trivially skip ahead.

And Youtube could do nothing about it because random skipping is one of the base features of every video player ever.

stackedinserter• 10 months ago

Mark my word, in 10 years pirating youtube videos will be a thing.

QuantumNoodle• 10 months ago

Call me pessimistic, but it is in YouTube's interest to have creators complain and be effected. Then Google and YouTube "solves this problem" with a drastic measure that tries to kill ad blocking content on the platform. The drastic measure will be viewed hostile but they will point to "complaining creators whose monetization is affected". Even Linus Tech Tips mentioned view counts are off but not revenue count.

01jonny01• 10 months ago

A lot of heat here, but there are two separate issues getting conflated:

Attribution mechanism: YouTube's public "view" appears to come from a client endpoint distinct from ad/monetization events. EasyList recently started blocking on of those endpoints that will naturally drop public views from desktop users with blockers, even if the video still streams. That's not a shadow change by YouTube so much as an external filter change.

Metric design: Having one ambiguous "view" counter that's used for everything (social proof, discovery, sponsor decks) guarantees drama when any attribution channel breaks.

If YouTube wants less speculation and paranoia on this issue, the fix isn’t "evade EasyList", but to separate metrics. I think plays should be public and keep monetized views in the Studio.

Source: I've done lots of testing on skipvids.com whilst using ad blockers and I can confirm they can effect view count

YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers

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