YouTube blocks Blender videos worldwide until they agree to enable ads

[LightPathVertex]

A few days ago, all videos on the Blender Foundation YouTube channel were blocked without any explanation.

 

Eventually, several news sites like Tom's Hardware, Fortune and Daily Dot reported on the issue:

Quote

The Blender Foundation, which develops the open source 3D content creation tool “Blender,” also had its videos blocked. Ton Roosendaal, Chairman of the Blender Foundation, said he contacted YouTube about this on Saturday but hasn’t gotten a proper response yet.

 

Following that, YouTube replied that this is a technical issue and will be fixed soon.

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YT support: This is a known issue, our engineers are aware of the problem and working hard to resolve it. At the moment, I'm unable to provide a specific timeline for a solution, however once our engineers have applied the fix, it will be automatically implemented in our systems.

 

However, now it turns out that the block appears to be intentional and YouTube demands ads to be enabled on all videos, as reported on the Blender blog.

Quote

YouTube: I’ve received an update from our experts stating that you need to enable ads for your video. Once you enable, your video will be available in the USA.

 

The Blender Foundation channel isn't the only channel to be affected, another notable example is the MIT OpenCourseWare channel.

 

Personally, I think this is an extremely worrying development for educational videos on YouTube in general. The two channels decided to not enable monetization, and now YouTube apparently went for some intimidation to bring them in line. I'm glad that Blender decided to publish the sent contract instead of just giving in, hopefully the videos will be able to stay ad-free.

[TacoSenpai]

Forced ads on all the vids!  Down the tubes

[Sfekke]

5 minutes ago, LordOTaco said:

Forced ads on all the vids!  Down the tubes

How about .. down the blender ..

[Christophe Corazza]

Headmaster Google, in charge of all things internets.

[Ildiesalot]

It's time for youtube to die. I used to love it 10 years ago, but google's greed has repeatedly brought the platform to new lows.

[Guest]

[Bananasplit_00]

1 minute ago, Densetsu said:

I thought that stuff was gone from their whatever now tho? 

[Techstorm970]

No Blender vids?!  But...I wanted to troubleshoot my Ninja...

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

I thought that stuff was gone from their whatever now tho? 

Yeah, It was removed as the motto a while ago, but still remained in the code of conduct up until May.

[Christophe Corazza]

16 minutes ago, LightPathVertex said:

At the moment, I'm unable to provide a specific timeline for a solution, however once our engineers have applied the fix, it will be automatically implemented in our systems.

 

Translation: "We have altered the deal and kicked them offline until they obey us agree to our terms."

[mynameisjuan]

While it does suck as blender videos are quite popular....

 

I dont get why people complain about shit like this. Its not fucking free to host youtube, even if they have all the money in the world it still cost shit. 

[LightPathVertex]

2 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

While it does suck as blender videos are quite popular....

 

I dont get why people complain about shit like this. Its not fucking free to host youtube, even if they have all the money in the world it still cost shit. 

As far as I know they still display ads in the sidebar, just no ad clips before the video plays.

[Dash Lambda]

2 minutes ago, mynameisjuan said:

While it does suck as Blender videos are quite popular...

I don't get why people complain about shit like this. It's not fucking free to host YouTube, even if they have all the money in the world it still costs shit. 

It's not the actions themselves people get up in arms about, it's the dishonesty.

If Google just updated its policy and said all channels of a certain size must monetize, people would be angry but it wouldn't be that big a deal. Thing is, they didn't do that -They basically shadow-banned the channel(s) and said "We're having technical difficulties... Maybe you should enable ads, that might work..."

[LightPathVertex]

2 hours ago, Dash Lambda said:

"We're having technical difficulties... Maybe you should enable ads, that might work..."

I'd rather put it like "Nice videos you have there. Oops, now they're all blocked. Would be a shame if it stayed that way, right? Here, just sign this conveniently prepared contract and they'll be back online."

[MoonSpot]

Interesting. We can all understand youtube wanting to make money via ads on each and every video, but I have to wonder why the option to disable ads was ever available to uploaders to toggle in the first place. At some point there was someone at youtube that wanted that to be an option for the community.
I've a very hard time seeing this as a "glitch" and though I'd like to simply say I'm skeptical, I'm more inclined to wonder how the people at youtube felt about being ordered to put these channels in the cross-hairs of their sniper-rifles for execution.

[Teddy07]

Do I see it right that youtube is blocking channels because they do not monetize and have many videos online?

 

[Brooksie359]

I feel like YouTube doesn't care at all about the backlash they will get for their dumb practices. I mean they are so big at this point that even if you don't like them they are basically one of the few places to get alot of the content you want. I mean if I didn't want to use YouTube because I don't like them I would have to give up watching some of my favorite content creators. Floatplain is a good alternative for Linus and bitwit but there are alot that would be out of my reach. It is a crappy situation where they are just to big.  

[Misanthrope]

This seems like a very desperate last ditch attempt at squeezing every inch of monetization out of the creators before more overt measures have to be taken.

 

In the future, they will need to cross that line: More content will be sequester to paid subscribers only, probably at first something like this: non-monetized channels are only viewable to youtube premium/red/whatever subscribers.

 

Then they'll reduce search/suggestion results relevant to you and increase paid-only content when you search something to get people to pay.

 

Eventually....they'll just go full Netflix offering people trial periods but requiring people to pay monthly fees. Cheap enough you won't mind at first, hey just 3 bucks per month and everything goes back to normal! Well a year into it maybe 5 bucks...then more original paid for content makes the 9 bucks tier more tempting, and that creeps up to 15 per month and so on and so forth.

 

And before anybody goes there no there's nothing that they can do to stop this: the site is big and unmanageable enough that they're really running out of options to keep it afloat and hope to turn decent profits at some point. They will find ways to get people to pay to view trust me.

[Tech_Dreamer]

Oh YouTube! first politics & then guns & now this, Keep going.

[Dash Lambda]

3 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

-snip-

It's more than that, they're basically the face of the internet for most people. If you want to find something online, you Google it.

I like Gabe Newell's quote; "Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - Because they will catch you."

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter when you are the internet...

[Jito463]

Solution:

Enable ads

Post video showing everyone how to install/enable an adblocker

.....profit?

 

Everyone wins (except for Google, who still won't receive any ad revenue because ads are blocked client side).

[TacoSenpai]

18 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

I feel like YouTube doesn't care at all about the backlash they will get for their dumb practices. I mean they are so big at this point that even if you don't like them they are basically one of the few places to get alot of the content you want. I mean if I didn't want to use YouTube because I don't like them I would have to give up watching some of my favorite content creators. Floatplain is a good alternative for Linus and bitwit but there are alot that would be out of my reach. It is a crappy situation where they are just to big.  

Well yeah why would they when there is no competitor with as much weight as them?  I mean I honestly route for sites like BitChute, Floatplain, and the such because youtube has become utter crap.  Its become near impossible to upload to without some dumb "copyright" claim and to be honest most videos have now just become talking head number 25347 with background as a result. 

[Guest]

I'm not sure on the legality, but I hope YouTube brought the commercial licence 

[Froody129]

I don't suppose the Blender Foundation wants their videos to be found on PornHub  

[Maslofski]

id just enable them, but then add a baked pre roll ad like LTT, always for ublock origin lol