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Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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And as a service provider, they can choose to degrade your experience. It goes both ways.
Except they want to send you videos. The power is with you, the viewer. Without you, advertisers will have no reason for buying ads. Google can't collect your data either. Realise that you have this power. Youtube is not like electricity or clean water. We can live without it if push comes to the shove.
To be fair, what they want is to make money off of you, be it through metadata or through advertising. It's just that sending you videos happens to be the model which they use to get the metadata or advertising income.
If they wanted to make money off of me then they should have kept the Pixel Pass as a thing so I'd have a reason to have YT premium
Or make YT premium worth it
But nah, they'd rather ruin the product I was paying for, so now they get nothing. At least then I'm not paying for it to get worse
They don't want to send us videos, they want to serve us ads and annoy us into buying Youtube Premium, which someone using adblocker won't see, or need. From their point of view they would win either way - if they successfully block adblockers it either converts us into ad watchers, premium subscribers, or we fuck off and stop using their bandwidth.
It's funny because I pay for premium and have noticed a worse experience since this was revealed. They don't seem to check if a user has adblock and pays.
They definitely seem to have checks in place for it. I have Family Premium and so far no issues at all.
Edit: to clarify, not a fan of any of this. Just saying it does work for me
Weird. It's not happening to me today. Maybe it was something else.
Well, I don't pay for premium, and I use an adblocker, and I haven't had any problems. Not having a problem doesn't prove anything if they're only targeting a subset of their users...
The article says that this isn't happening for all users, which indicates that they're still experimenting with it and haven't fully rolled it out yet.
I do have the issue when I'm logged out
You have no value to advertisers if they can't serve you ads. By not doing so, they'll also cut down on bandwidth costs, so it's a double positive for them.
When you take your comment to its logical end though your comment makes no sense, as hence there's now no one to watch the videos and earn money from them doing so.
You can't force someone to consume your content, and if you earn money by people consuming your content, then the power is ultimately with them.
Plus, all this discussion, we're assuming that serving ads is the only way that Google can make money off you when watching the videos, which is not true. They can do the same kind of things they do with Gmail and make money from that.
this assumption is only correct if EVERYBODY is using as blockers. They aren't - so it makes sense to cut off the proverbial leeches
That's why I said logical conclusion.
My bet would be the vast majority of people (what you call leeches) would eventually use ad blockers, as people in general usually do not like to watch commercials. (Again, speaking in endgame scenarios, AKA 'logical conclusion').
"Logical conclusion" does not mean that you suddenly add in an unjustified premise of "all people will endure some amount of hassle to use an ad blocker".
I think the best analogy is Netflix's password sharing, which not only didn't hurt them, but actually brought them a lot of subscribers.
No no no, he's right. The logical conclusion of every online argument is a strawman.
You'll have to elaborate. In my eyes, justified or not is a non-sequiteur. The premise is people will want to avoid the commercials, and as Google gets more draconian with commercials more people will attempt to avoid them, either by using adblockers, or by paying the sub fees.
People take the most direct path to avoiding aggravation (as the Netflix case shows, as its easier to just pay the unjustified extra cost than having to cancel their sub and finding another streaming service).
Having to constantly watch a bunch of commercials is way more aggravating that clicking a few buttons once to add an addon to your browser that removes the bigger constant aggravation of commercials.
I'd say that the more accurate version of that premise is that people will exert some limited amount of effort in order to avoid ads (or fees, for that matter), and the challenge for the service provider is to make blocking ads more annoying than simply paying the fee. The real question is how successful Google will actually be at that, and that is admittedly a bit of an open question. That said, we know that there is a limit to how much effort people will put in, because it's not that hard to pirate literally anything, but plenty of people don't bother with piracy because it's a hassle.
It'll be interesting to see how things ultimately shake out. Google is in a bit of a privileged position though, given that they own the service and the browser most people are viewing YouTube. There's also more and more of a shift towards watching it on mobile devices and TVs, where they can control the client environment a lot more tightly. And at the end of the day, it is a solvable problem; beyond that, they don't have to even win the cat and mouse game. They just have to make playing it annoying enough that most people won't bother.
Yep, they can send me 500s if they want to, too
Technically 400s would be more appropriate here. :)
Response codes only matter to good-faith actors
If the service degrades to far due to using ad blockers then I'll just stop watching anything on YouTube. Easy.
Okay then. That was always allowed.
Umm, ok. You were not making them any money before, when you were blocking their ads, why would they care if you left?
Because the big channels will get a significant drop in views which lowers their sponsor pay and willingness to work with them.
I think you're overestimating how many people care enough about this.
Remember when killing password sharing was gonna be the death of Netflix, and then they saw a significant increase in subscriptions and profits?
A possible answer is because the creators that have their own sponsors in their videos want the view even if you don't see the Google ads, so Google on one hand want you to watch their ads while on the other hand cannot afford to really lose you since that would reflects on the creators and then if a creator leave for another platform (a big if, I agree) Google lose all the traffic generated by said creator, both who use an adblocker and who don't use an adblocker.
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