I normaly just download yt-vids. and/or use invidious as frontend (nobody mentioned it so far.)
even if some instances dont have a download-option, you can always download with right-click directly from the video-window.
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Chrome is the new IE. I mean, the other way round.
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And I stopped deliberately giving Google money once YouTube Music took over from Google Play Music and became so terrible as to be unusable.
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There was a point where this is what my hulu experience was. I preferred waiting with a black screen to watching the ad.
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Being forced to watch Yt ads after years of blocking them is quite a shock.
I am noticing which creators have allowed their videos be mutilated into chunks by all manner of unskippable excrement, rendering them near unwatchable.
I am having to reassess some of my parasocial relationships until these blocking wars are resolved.
Yay for WTYP, no ad breaks in a nearly 2 hr podcast (with slides)
Boo for Adam Savage, I am not sure I find your 45 min workshop videos as absorbing with the constant barrage of ads.
Talk about 1st world problems.
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Do content creators have the option of marking good points for a break? YouTube used to usually hit good spots, but now with the frequency up, it’s chopping in mid-sentence.
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I doubt they’d be allowed to “monetize” a single episode of that podcast if they wanted to. But the key thing is that it is a podcast (with (half-assed) slides), which is very sustainable to fund through subscriptions. All the other podcasts in the Trash Future extended universe are solely Patreon-funded, and not on YouTube at all.
Most YouTube channels are structured in much smaller and more-expensive-per-minute chunks, and would have a hard time building an audience without a platform paying them. For a lot of channels I struggle to sympathise, because if you’re just out to push ads on Google’s behalf, the world doesn’t need that. But there are many intermediate cases – Techmoan, 3 Blue 1 Brown, Boy Boy – where they’ve tried to succeed in YouTube terms while also making a good product in its own right. Not everyone’s here to reinvent the wheel after all.
That said, it’s a shame no one really tries. Someone creates Twitter or YouTube in their bedroom, and three years later we all treat these things as ancient, immutable parts of the landscape.
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I remember quite a few moments as commerce started on the Internet. Credit card companies could have done it, but their per-transaction fees made that impossible. I hoped when PayPal started that they could go around credit card companies. For a while I used them for reoccurring payments (effectively what Patreon does). Lastly, I hoped crypto could have filled that role, but that failed for multiple reasons.
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BoingBoing is the site that made me finally install an ad blocker. For years I’d been doing without, partly from inertia, partly because I’m happy for people to make a buck from my viewing, provided they don’t make their site unbearable.
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I’ve had my subscription for a few years now, but that’s mostly because I moved over from Google Play Music, where all my music lived.
I use both YouTube Premium and YouTube Music on a daily basis, but even then, still use uBlock Origin (FF) for everything else and SponsorBlock for in-video sponsor advertising. I’m still not sure what YouTube Premium offers beyond “no ads”*
It pisses me off that I’m paying YouTube to avoid adverts only for creators to then add them in-stream.
SponsorBlock works perfectly for those shenanigans.
*Beyond various “Afterparties” popping up, that I’ve never clicked on because A: I’ve never heard of the artist, or they’re so poppy I have no interest in them and B: I have precisely zero fucking interest watching this bullshit. WTF even is an afterparty? a bunch of “celebs” and influencers swanning around in a pool of privilege?
You misunderstand corporate think. They will spend more to try and beat the ad blockers than they would ever make in ad revenue, and corporations LOATHE spending money on anything they don’t have to. People simply will not click through, and as the ads become forced and more and more onerous, they will quit the site. There’s no winning when you’re losing the engagement question.
I also believe there’s nothing Youtube could do to insert ads directly into the video stream of a content creator an ad blocking programmer won’t figure out how to block. It would be highly costly for them to do so, even if they developed some sort of automated tools. They have to pull the stream, open it in some software tool, splice in the ad, then resave it and reload it to their site. That may work for a one-time ad squeeze, but if you want to change those ads regularly because X company stopped spending and now Y company is spending on ads, you have to do that on the fly. And on the fly takes big time back end servers and processing power. They’ll spend huge amounts more than they’d ever get server the ads. Not cost effective.
I was already encountering it as of two weeks ago, and I use Firefox and Ublock. I did a quick hunt online and found info on how to update Ublock and its working fine again.
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There have been plenty of competitors. It’s not lack of trying, but overcoming consumer inertia. People just stick to what got big first and it takes a lot of mistreatment (like all this bullshit ad stuff) to get them to shift.
I’ve got a subscription on Nebula these days. A number of my favorite content creators use the site. It costs $5 a month to subscribe. That’s low enough I’m happy to pay it for now to help support those folks directly. I hope more Youtube people I follow will move on over.
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I worked in the video broadcast equipment space for decades, much of that with video encoding and streaming delivery systems. Techniques for serverside Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) became much more sophisticated as the encoding and delivery moved to chunked multibitrate systems like SmoothStreaming and MPEG-DASH.
Last but one company (left there around 2018) had a whole server ecosystem to do targeted ad insertion, for demographics but even down to the individual. Depending on how it’s served up it becomes very difficult for blockers to remove the ads - especially when the edge cache is serving the program material and the ad chunks from the same origin…
But weirdly it seems the streaming companies haven’t gone all in on this hence the ability for some blockers to still work.
Ah well…
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For the value of win that involves me never using it.
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YouTube non-stop for disposing of the stupid ‘are you dead or something? You haven’t clicked for TWENTY MINUTES?!?!?!’ bullshit. Adblockers are still working in the UK (well, mine is any hoo) so I don’t know from that
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Brave is just another rebranded/wrapped Chrome/Chromium, like Edge. Firefox is a better choice imho.
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Popups telling you to disable adblockers are, in essence, just another type of intrusive ad, and are being dealt with appropriately.
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It may well be that, but I switched to it when Firefox became completely unusable for me and the difference in ease of use and configuration was like night and day.
But I hear Firefox has made great strides in recent years, so maybe it’s safe to revisit that.
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Opera’s built in adblock on ubuntu got pegged by YT, I’ve since installed uBlock, and for now it works. Failing that i can just open links in a new private window each time to bypass the adblock ban. Skewers the algorithm i suppose. But at this point i know what i want to watch on YT, very few suggestions are of interest these days…
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