Experimental Youtube "feature" detects and blocks some users of ad blocking browser extensions on Youtube

[Taf the Ghost]

 

 

Oddly timely and on point, haha.

[GOTSpectrum]

I truly believe if Google/Youtube want to get a large number of premium subs they need to either do one or a number of these, 

 

1. Make a cheaper level that does not include music

 

2. Need to have a catalogue of professional content made BY them 

 

3. Need to license at least a couple of popular hit shows(I'm talking breaking bad level of hit-ness) and have them free to view for premium subs

 

4. If they wish to keep the same price they need to add further incentives, maybe cloud storage, maybe a VPN(not that I would trust it), Maybe credit on their other services...

 

5. Massively improve the music offering to make it "better" than Spotify/other music streaming services

 

I don't blame them for clamping down on ad-blockers tbh, they gotta make money somehow. The truth is what they have been doing since the beginning is just not feasible forever. 

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, GOTSpectrum said:

I truly believe if Google/Youtube want to get a large number of premium subs they need to either do one or a number of these, 

I definitely feel like at least some of these should be upgrades to higher tiers if they are features at all.

1 hour ago, GOTSpectrum said:

1. Make a cheaper level that does not include music

I do agree with this. Right now it's $12.99 CAD/mo (or $10.83/mo if you sign up for an annual plan). If they offered a tier that was more or less exactly like Premium right now but without the music tier, and price it at say, $8.99 CAD/mo (say around $7/mo with an annual plan), I think it would be a lot more popular.

1 hour ago, GOTSpectrum said:

2. Need to have a catalogue of professional content made BY them 

They tried that with YouTube Red. It really just wasn't that popular. If this is a must for some users, it should be in a higher, more expensive tier than the basic Premium tier we're talking about.

 

I would have no problem if the "regular" Premium tier included this.

1 hour ago, GOTSpectrum said:

3. Need to license at least a couple of popular hit shows(I'm talking breaking bad level of hit-ness) and have them free to view for premium subs

To me, this would absolutely need to be in a higher "Ultimate" Premium tier, and not in the lower tiers. Adding the expense of either funding or licensing a Breaking Bad level show is just going to make YouTube more expensive to operate. I have no problem with YouTube offering TV shows as a catalogue, but honestly that should be it's own separate thing.

 

A "YouTube TV" add-on or subscription (This could either be tied to Premium as an option, or it's own product that you can get without Premium), and then in this case, they should license a large catalogue of whatever good shows they can get their hands on, Netflix style.

1 hour ago, GOTSpectrum said:

4. If they wish to keep the same price they need to add further incentives, maybe cloud storage, maybe a VPN(not that I would trust it), Maybe credit on their other services...

The current price makes total sense if you use the Music portion of the subscription. As long as they added a non-music tier of Premium that's cheaper, I think there's no problem with the price on the current tier.

1 hour ago, GOTSpectrum said:

5. Massively improve the music offering to make it "better" than Spotify/other music streaming services

I don't use YT Music, so I can't really say how it compares to the rest. Is it really that much worse? As long as they make it at least equal to their competitors, I'd say that's good enough.

 

YT Music by itself is $10.99 CAD/mo. I checked Spotify and Tidal, and both of their entry level Premium plans are the exact same price per month. 

[Neroon]

I don't think YT Music is that much worse. Afaik they have less to offer in terms of podcasts, but music wise it's fairly the same. On top of that YT Music can use audio from YT videos, which is useful for a ton of stuff, like concerts that never had an 'official' release, but also music that never got released on Spotify.

There is 1 band I used to listen to all the time, their music got removed from Spotify due to controversy, YT music also doesn't have it, but I can listen to them through YT video uploads.

 

Honestly if they had a proper version for my Android Headunit, I would pay up, especially since I became a student again recently for the next 4 years, so I can get it for a cheaper price, 7 euros a month, which is very fair.

However right now hacked version of Spotify and Revanced just works better, and with the latter I definitely mean better. I would not want to go without sponsorblock.

[Isuck Assimov]

anyone not using an adblocker on youtube fell for cheap propaganda by people who want to maximize their profit while minimizing the amount of labor they have to invest.

using an adblocker is every citizens duty, lest you absolutely want to live in a world where a handful of megacorporations hold more power than elected governments.

[GOTSpectrum]

19 minutes ago, Neroon said:

I don't think YT Music is that much worse. Afaik they have less to offer in terms of podcasts, but music wise it's fairly the same. On top of that YT Music can use audio from YT videos, which is useful for a ton of stuff, like concerts that never had an 'official' release, but also music that never got released on Spotify.

There is 1 band I used to listen to all the time, their music got removed from Spotify due to controversy, YT music also doesn't have it, but I can listen to them through YT video uploads.

 

Honestly if they had a proper version for my Android Headunit, I would pay up, especially since I became a student again recently for the next 4 years, so I can get it for a cheaper price, 7 euros a month, which is very fair.

However right now hacked version of Spotify and Revanced just works better, and with the latter I definitely mean better. I would not want to go without sponsorblock.

Their shuffle feature isn't even a real shuffle though... Like it plays the tracks in a random order, but the same random order every time

[GOTSpectrum]

1 minute ago, Isuck Assimov said:

anyone not using an adblocker on youtube fell for cheap propaganda by people who want to maximize their profit while minimizing the amount of labor they have to invest.

using an adblocker is every citizens duty, lest you absolutely want to live in a world where a handful of megacorporations hold more power than elected governments.

You're funny

[Dracarris]

13 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

To me, this would absolutely need to be in a higher "Ultimate" Premium tier, and not in the lower tiers. Adding the expense of either funding or licensing a Breaking Bad level show is just going to make YouTube more expensive to operate. I have no problem with YouTube offering TV shows as a catalogue, but honestly that should be it's own separate thing.

I still don't get why people voluntarily would settle for this. At the current price of YT premium, you can get a Netflix subscription which has a buttload of self-produced shows and content. Youtube merely distributes content that they don't pay a single Cent for.

 

Lets assume YT Music and Spotify are equally valuable. The former costs 14$ a month, the latter 11$. So that makes 3$ difference, and this is exactly what YT Premium should cost IMHO. This is the price I'd pay Google to run a CDN for me, which is essentially what they do.

 

Just for reference, right behind ad-free and offline videos, one of their few value propositions/selling features is freakin background play. Let that sink in. Pay us so we disable a stupid feature in our app that watches if you minimze it and actively pauses the playback.

Ironically, this leads to people playing music videos with the app in foreground in their pocket, which incurs severley higher bandwidth/traffic costs for Google compared to simply giving everyone background play with audio ads. So I even doubt bandwidth/traffic is that much of a cost factor to them.

[Neroon]

1 hour ago, Isuck Assimov said:

anyone not using an adblocker on youtube fell for cheap propaganda by people who want to maximize their profit while minimizing the amount of labor they have to invest.

using an adblocker is every citizens duty, lest you absolutely want to live in a world where a handful of megacorporations hold more power than elected governments.

Look by all means use them, I do. I have adblockers on everything, but saying it's a citizens duty is nonsense. Also let's be real for a moment, if everyone used adblockers, these sites would shutdown. Realistically there has to be a better middle ground. But at the end of the day, Google is a company, a publicly traded one at that, and they are forced to maximize profits.

1 hour ago, GOTSpectrum said:

Their shuffle feature isn't even a real shuffle though... Like it plays the tracks in a random order, but the same random order every time

Ok, sure that's a little less attractive, but it's extremely minor for me. Like I don't use shuffle a lot, and when I do, it's not gonna be an issue with such large playlists, and I assume that when you add songs, the playlists reshuffles.

But yeah, I don't use a lot of my own playlists, I either just play a full album, or I use one of those playlists they put together, I and often change those out, so I wouldn't notice it.

42 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

I still don't get why people voluntarily would settle for this. At the current price of YT premium, you can get a Netflix subscription which has a buttload of self-produced shows and content. Youtube merely distributes content that they don't pay a single Cent for.

Are you actually serious about this argument?

 

Do you think Google just takes up all the profits? Because people do get paid for their content if viewed enough. Sure, Youtube pays per click vs a fixed amount for a fixed period of time that Netflix uses (or if they produce it, they pay an amount for that), but at the end of the day, both companies pay the creators for their content.

 

Seriously how do you think Netflix does things? They either give a large bag of money for the rights of the show for an X amount of time, or they give a large bag of money to produce it, and that's it really. They pay money upfront to stream other peoples created content. Youtube does the same, but pays afterwards.

 

Now there are pros and cons to both.

 

Pros of YT: 

- Free uploading of videos to share with friends, which anyone can do

- So far videos stay uploaded, so it serves as a free online storage

- If you go big, you take a much bigger cut

 

Cons of YT:

- You can create a lot of content, but you don't become successful and you end up with nearly nothing

- You get no support creating the content

- Tons of competition

 

It's a mixed bag, it's that simple. But at the end of the day they offer a service, and some of the money goes to creators, and the other they keep.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

17 minutes ago, Neroon said:

 Also let's be real for a moment, if everyone used adblockers, these sites would shutdown. 

In their current form, they should. 

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, GOTSpectrum said:

You're funny

whats funnier is thinking anyone would have any obligations to watch or listen or otherwise consume ads... when there is no such obligation...  if you're whole business model relies on selling people overpriced trash they don't need then maybe its time to rethink that business model.

 

 

[GOTSpectrum]

14 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

whats funnier is thinking anyone would have any obligations to watch or listen or otherwise consume ads... when there is no such obligation...  if you're whole business model relies on selling people overpriced trash they don't need then maybe its time to rethink that business model.

 

 

All it takes is one change of TOS to make it legally enforceable 

[Thaldor]

12 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

They tried that with YouTube Red. It really just wasn't that popular. If this is a must for some users, it should be in a higher, more expensive tier than the basic Premium tier we're talking about.

That was the exact reason why YT Red failed so hard, they took high-profile YT channels, paid them to make more professional content and then locked it behind YT Premium. The thing that failed was that Red was pretty much the only reason back then to get YT Premium and then the channels who were in it low-key said the videos they made would be coming to normal YT at some point (which only probably 1 did).

 

----

 

Personally if it comes to that I either need to start watching the conveniently 14 seconds long ads (because over 15s ads would get the 5s skip button) and multiple of them back-to-back or pay Alphabet, I would just either get yet another HDD and start ripping YT videos to it and watch them there or just stop watching completely. And all that just because I don't think YouTube as it has been and it still is deserves my financial input. They have Alphabet with their datahoarding habits behind them to fund the whole thing and get the data from it, if they want to do shitty ass job, fund it with that.

 

I could rethink my stance if:

1) YouTube started to handle every creator as equal or made it absolutely clear that big and trending creators have different set of rules and benefits.

  - It is not "fine" that smaller creators get their videos deleted in less than couple minutes because automated systems while Logan Paul needed to delete his video after the whole internet screamed at him over dead body and suicide jokes while YouTube did shit nothing.

 

 2) Fix the copyright system so that either the claims are handled before monetization is cut or the AdSense money is actually hold and then given to the one who wins the claim.

  - It's pure bullshit that YT doesn't know how much money demonetized video wouldn't make especially when they still show ads with it. At the point when the CR claim is done YT, especially if it's challenged, should start to keep extra care to store viewing data and all that because that is money.

 

3) Stop burning money on stupid shit and then cry over why they don't have money.

  - The VR YouTube, 16K resolution support and what not are cool technical things that should be developed on their time. But if at the same moment quite significant part of the service is filled with 1080p still images because separating video and audio compression is seemingly impossible, there's probably some "minor" priority problems when it comes to spending development funds. This is a bit older example since YT has defaulted to use Opus (251) with any video resolution from 240p up with only 144p getting Opus (250), there's still some bitrate differences between resolutions but not that bad as they were some years ago when putting that 1080p image really boosted the audio quality.

 

4) Show that they are willing to take steps to make ad funded YT better experience.

  - If ad is over 5s long, it should have the skip button, not the 15s bullshit that has driven every ad to be 14 seconds so none of them can be skipped. The ads should be way better curated, seeing thrice the same ad on single video shouldn't be a thing, even less seeing them back-to-back and of course they are 14 seconds and unskipable.

  - And yes, $1.76 trillion (that's $1,760,000,000,000) valued corporation should make the first step, not me with magnitudes less on my bank account. If they cannot afford the change, how the fuck they think I can? And while this is me going "me me me" the underlying reasoning for me is that I am not taking the first step fixing my bad habits for me to do that I need the far more capable and resourceful party to show that they are willing to fix theirs. I do wrong against them but I am just valuing my experience higher than their financial success, they can choose to value them differently and try to make me change my valuation but that's on them.

 

For me to pay for YouTube:

1) Stop tracking me

[Mark Kaine]

5 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

All it takes is one change of TOS to make it legally enforceable 

that's unlikely the case...

 

but i would love seeing alphabet/ google try tbh

 

ps: think about it, *if* that would be legally enforceable,  what did stop yt in all these years? 

[GOTSpectrum]

Just now, Mark Kaine said:

that's unlikely the case...

 

but i would love seeing alphabet/ google try tbh

You agree to terms of service whenever you use an online platform, you break them you can and often do get banned, simple as that. 

 

If the current method doesn't work, they can, and possibly will step it up. 

[Mark Kaine]

1 minute ago, GOTSpectrum said:

You agree to terms of service whenever you use an online platform, you break them you can and often do get banned, simple as that. 

illegal TOS are illegal and non binding 

 

 

1 minute ago, GOTSpectrum said:

If the current method doesn't work, they can, and possibly will step it up

again,  i would love to see them try

[GOTSpectrum]

Just now, Mark Kaine said:

illegal TOS are illegal and non binding 

Much like netflix can block VPNs... They can block adblock...

 

I'm not saying I agree with it, nor am I saying I don't... I'm saying they are a business with one responsibility 

[duncannah]

If anyone's using the Enhancer for YouTube extension, make sure to disable its Block ads feature that triggers the pop-up (let your own ad blocker deal with it)

[Mark Kaine]

24 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

Much like netflix can block VPNs... They can block adblock...

yes, of course they can, but why don't you see that this is entirely different than telling people "you MUST consume ads - by TOS or whatever"

 

 

 

[GOTSpectrum]

3 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

yes, of course they can, but why don't you see that this is entirely different than telling people "you MUST consume ads - by TOS or whatever"

 

 

 

The TOS would not compel you to watch ads, but they could revoke you from using any means to stop the delivery of ads. You don't have to watch, but they have to be delivered kinda deal...

 

 

[dalekphalm]

On 10/19/2023 at 9:00 AM, Dracarris said:

I still don't get why people voluntarily would settle for this. At the current price of YT premium, you can get a Netflix subscription which has a buttload of self-produced shows and content. Youtube merely distributes content that they don't pay a single Cent for.

There's a pretty huge difference between how Netflix and YT operate though. They both have costs, just different ones.

 

Netflix has a fairly static catalogue. Yes they add new shows and moves all the time (usually monthly), but they also remove content too, so their catalogue isn't growing at an exponential rate. This means their data storage costs are predictable and much easier to manage.

 

YT on the other hand lets anyone upload pretty much anything at any time. YouTube on the other hand, apparently has something like 2500 videos uploaded EVERY MINUTE. Every minute, of every day, for the foreseeable future. Based on average video lengths, it's something like 183 hours of video per minute uploaded.

 

YT also does pay creators a cut of the ad revenue and a cut of YT Premium subscriptions, which is ultimately no different from Netflix paying for licensing or paying to produce content from subscription fees.

 

Netflix is also more expensive for the 1080p tier than YT Premium is, which also includes a music streaming service and no caps on quality. If you want the 4K HDR plan, it's nearly 1.5x more expensive for Netflix.

On 10/19/2023 at 9:00 AM, Dracarris said:

Lets assume YT Music and Spotify are equally valuable. The former costs 14$ a month, the latter 11$. So that makes 3$ difference, and this is exactly what YT Premium should cost IMHO. This is the price I'd pay Google to run a CDN for me, which is essentially what they do.

I don't know where you're getting your pricing from, but I looked up Canadian pricing and YT Music is exactly the same price as Spotify Premium, Spotify and Tidal. All three are $10.99 CAD per month.

 

YT Premium is also only $2 more per month than YT Music - so if you're already subscribing to a music streaming service, YT Premium seems like a no brainer.

 

Yes I agree that they should offer a YT Premium tier without the music, for less.

On 10/19/2023 at 9:00 AM, Dracarris said:

Just for reference, right behind ad-free and offline videos, one of their few value propositions/selling features is freakin background play. Let that sink in. Pay us so we disable a stupid feature in our app that watches if you minimze it and actively pauses the playback.

Ironically, this leads to people playing music videos with the app in foreground in their pocket, which incurs severley higher bandwidth/traffic costs for Google compared to simply giving everyone background play with audio ads. So I even doubt bandwidth/traffic is that much of a cost factor to them.

*shrugs*, This is not a feature I particularly care about one way or the other, but I can see how it would be frustrating for some. Background play should be part of the free ad-supported tier, IMO.

[Dracarris]

16 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

I don't know where you're getting your pricing from, but I looked up Canadian pricing and YT Music is exactly the same price as Spotify Premium, Spotify and Tidal. All three are $10.99 CAD per month.

I don't know where you're reading that I was ever talking about a YT Music subscription. I compared the price for YT Premium, which includes YT Music, with the price for other music-only subscriptions to work out the difference, aka the surcharge for the Youtube video premium subscription, aka everything everyone actually cares about that already has Spotify - Just as you did, too. Now, I arrived at 3$ difference, you at 2$.

19 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

YT Premium is also only $2 more per month than YT Music - so if you're already subscribing to a music streaming service, YT Premium seems like a no brainer.

Except that people are on Spotify Duo/family plans, so leaving those would incur higher cost for the others. And for several reasons, not everyone wants to leave their favorite music streaming service (existing playlists, available content and so on) just because Google can't offer a sensible video-only Premium subscription. They bundle things together that should not be bundled to make more money, bcs probably only a tiny fraction of YT Premium subscribers actually makes any use of the YT Music part.

21 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

YT also does pay creators a cut of the ad revenue and a cut of YT Premium subscriptions, which is ultimately no different from Netflix paying for licensing or paying to produce content from subscription fees.

True, but never at the same time for a given user:

- For regular users, YT gets x $ of ad revenue and splits it between themselves and the creators

- For Premium users, YT gets y $ of sub fee and splits it between themselves and the creators

 

Now, following the calculation above y is 3$ per Premium user and month. Is x more than 3$ per month, for the average user? Most probably not, as has been pointed out time and time again that ad revenue is rather small.

With their current model and (probably) so few subscribers actually using YT Music, the available y share can be assumed to be around 10$. So by mandatorily bundling the music services that nobody asked for they've effectively increased the cost/revenue for video Premium substantially, and that sneaky strategy pisses me off.

 

So if YT offered a 3$ premium subscription or heck, lets say a 5$ one, they'd probably already make much more money than with the current model since sub-5$ subscriptions are probably a no-brainer for a vast amount of people.

26 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

*shrugs*, This is not a feature I particularly care about one way or the other, but I can see how it would be frustrating for some. Background play should be part of the free ad-supported tier, IMO.

It should not be locked behind any paywall whatsoever. It's the most BS product segmentation imaginable and only increases resource costs for everyone. Google, Carriers/ISPs, and end user.

27 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Netflix is also more expensive for the 1080p tier than YT Premium is, which also includes a music streaming service and no caps on quality. If you want the 4K HDR plan, it's nearly 1.5x more expensive for Netflix.

That's true, and I'd be jolly fine if the 3-5$ tier only included the higher-bitrate 1080p and/or the 1440p quality setting.

 

As for managing/financing the vast amount of data uploaded to YT every minute: Well yeah, that should be sustainable with 0 Premium users. And quite frankly it's not the users task to take care of that.

[CarlBar]

The comparison to TV really isn't a good one. TV ads may be more common in terms of number of adds per minute but there are a lot of caveats to them.

 

1. Ad breaks on TV are pretty predictable in length and are timed to be long enough to allow you to get up and do stuff if you wish during it, many people go grab snacks or drinks or go to the toilet or some other thing during them.

 

2. Many methods of recording allow you to record minus the adds, meaning if you wait till later to watch you can just skip them entirely.

 

3. They're positioned so they don't break up the flow of an ongoing part of the content, they don;t just cut someone off mid sentence for example.

 

4. They're subject to endless standards and rules about what they can include which weeds out many of the add types that pushed people to add blockers in the first place.

 

5. They're often for other content on the same channel which will often be the type of content your interested in, so they can be actively useful.

 

6. They're often of decent quality so that at least while their new they can be fun to watch, and even when they aren't they're not obnoxious. Though cursed adds such as this old one do exist: 

 

 

It's a very different add world and one people are more willing to put up with because despite the greater volume it's less intrusive to the overall viewing experiance, and lacks many of the predatory malicious, or downright harmful adds you can find online. And is thus less annoying to deal with as a result.

[Giganthrax]

On 10/12/2023 at 7:48 AM, wanderingfool2 said:

Guess what, if everyone used ad-block YouTube would not be a thing.  Do you seriously not understand that it's not JUST about the creator.  Video hosting in particular can cost a ton of money, and yes blocking ads DOES harm other users who don't.  42% use ad-block which means in order for the same amount of profits YouTube has to run 42% more ads (or higher paying ones).

Oh come on, 90% of internet users aren't even tech savvy enough not to click on HORNY SINGLES IN YOUR AREA popups, let alone learn how to install adblock. Also, I suspect the majority of youtube views come from people who are watching it on their phones, and those are even less likely to know how to block ads. 

 

Adblock users are always going to be a tiny minority. Youtube never has and never will be seriously threatened by people who use adblocks. This is 1000% just Google being greedy and wanting to appease its shareholders.

[jagdtigger]

On 10/19/2023 at 4:18 PM, Mark Kaine said:

whats funnier is thinking anyone would have any obligations to watch or listen or otherwise consume ads... when there is no such obligation...  if you're whole business model relies on selling people overpriced trash they don't need then maybe its time to rethink that business model.

 

 

Thats rhe gist of it, advertisers falsely think they are paying for actually viewed ads. Whyle in reality paying for ad placement is nothing more than a chance to be seen without guaranties......