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YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I actually do not understand the widespread hostility that people have toward this kind of thing. I watch a lot of content on YouTube, and I don't want to see ads, so I pay for premium. I watch a lot of content on Twitch, and I don't want to see ads, so I pay for turbo. Hosting a major video streaming website isn't cheap. It's not like these things are unreasonably priced. If you hate the ads so much, then why not pay for the service that the platform is offering you, and for the content that creators are providing on it? And if you don't watch often enough for ad-free viewing to be worth a few bucks a month to you, then why get so worked up about having to sit through an ad every now and then?
I can't speak for everyone, but I block ads and don't pay because I hate Google. In addition to their repeated violations of user privacy, they go out of their way to disable OS features unless you pay them. Like disabling background play or PiP with Safari on iOS. Those features use the same open standards as foreground web browsers, so it literally takes extra effort to break them. Effort that could instead be used to fix the numerous problems with their platform, which they don't. I refuse to reward that behaviour.
There is an awkward gap where most services (not just YouTube) don't offer reasonable pricing for consuming small amounts of content. So if you consume a lot of YouTube, the subscription price is justified. If you consume very little YouTube, you can probably suffer through some ads. But if you're somewhere in the middle, there isn't a great option.
YouTube probably makes fractions of a cent off of ads on a single video it shows me, but I can't pay fractions of a cent to watch one video.
I'd consider this to actually be a pretty widespread problem across the internet, where it's frustratingly difficult to buy small amounts of content for a reasonable price. It's either the subscription or nothing for a ton of services.
I hate ads. They are annoying, and waste too much of my time, are irrelevant to me 90% of the time, and often can be malicious.
I would like to watch videos on youtube, but I dont wish to watch videos on youtube if there are ads. Also, ads are not every now and again, they are 2 ads for every video without fail now. 2x 30s ads for a 5 minute video is as bad as cable, I ditched cable and replaced it with youtube.
I just don't think content should be behind a paywall. I want to live in a socialist utopia where content and knowledge is free to share, copyright is a relic of the past, and art and science blossom. Blocking ads takes me 0.0001% closer to that, so I'll take it. I don't want to pay, because I don't want money to exist, it's deeper than experience vs how much it is worth.
If I could download a car I would.
I do think that publicly-owned and publicly-funded alternatives to platforms like YouTube and Twitch could make the internet a far better place. I'd be surprised if, at least here in the EU, where there is an ongoing attempt to actually regulate tech companies, we didn't see this happening sooner or later.
For the time being, though, I know that the creators whose content I enjoy so much couldn't keep doing what they do without compensation, and the YouTube servers their content are hosted on would be taken down if they could not be paid for. So I pay for premium, content enough to know that I'm doing my fair part in keeping the videos I enjoy available and enabling the people who create them to keep creating more, even if the system under which all this occurs is much less than ideal.
To be honest I pay for premium as well, not because of any moral thing, but just because there were ads in tv/mobile and I could not setup adblock easily enough (it was cheaper for my time to actually pay).
But yeah, finding a way to pay creators would be good. I'm from Argentina, and USD are way too pricey, so most patron contribution pages I find are out of my budget. The youtube premium subscription is the equivalent of 1.45USD here, if I could pay double that to "all creators that I see" automatically, I'd do it in a heartbeat, but paying 1usd to each of the hundreds of youtubers I might see a video from once in a while would be crazy.
I hate ads with a passion due to my experiences in the marketing industry and will go out of my way to never watch any. I also don’t want to pay for random internet content, especially not to companies on the stock market. (Though I do use Patreon a bit for some content creators)
Can‘t explain it much more than that. If youtube locks me out due to that, so be it. I don‘t get worked up either, I simply state my opinion on it where I please and if I‘m not wanted I leave. That‘s about it.
Why don't you pay for YouTube premium? This removes all platform ads.
I was happy paying for Premium until they doubled my subscription fee out of the blue.
I was a day one Google Play Music All Access subscriber, supposedly grandfathered in to a lower subscription fee, but all that ended up getting me in the end was "Sorry, but it's your turn to pay up now. We know you were supposed to be grandfathered in so we'll give you a few extra months of your current rate after we bump up the costs for everyone else."
And yet somehow they always get away with it... yar har yar the pirates life for me?