Looks like its over for me and youtube. Being told I cant watch because of an ad blocker.
Where is everyone moving to and using instead of youtube? I will just move to the same place.
Looks like its over for me and youtube. Being told I cant watch because of an ad blocker.
Where is everyone moving to and using instead of youtube? I will just move to the same place.
The old business model could not last forever… and even if it could it was not good for anyone.
Think about it
Hosting videos is expensive, someone has to pay for it. It was mostly paid by ads. Ads which many (most people) would block and many people would not ever click even when not blocked. But it still made money… The money come only from ads which 1) where not blocked 2) where at least clicked. The business relied on that.
So YT relied on ads targeting people who did not know how to block ads and people easy to manipulate by the ads (eager to buy whatever they are trying to sell). Probably not the brightest. Or just easy to be taken advantage of. So the incentive would be to promote content for those people. Not good content, not true content, just content that makes ads viewed and clicked.
People using ad-blocks were still affected by those who do not. And whole site was optimized for advertises not viewers or content creators. And that is bad.
I am all in favour of any direct form of payments instead of ads powering the internet. Sites get very little money for each view anyway – so the prices for users should also be quite small.
Unfortunately as long as ads are supposed to be normal part of internet, they may get forced even onto paying customers. We need regulations.
People were okay with ads, then YouTube started making them obnoxious. Ads every 2 minutes, postroll ads that interfere with autoplay, incredibly long “ads” which mean you need to watch YouTube like a hawk to make sure your 5 minute video hasn’t been interrupted by an hour long ad you need to manually skip.
There’s a balance that people need to be happy with a service, and if the service doesn’t provide that then people will use things like adblockers to get it themselves. It’s the same thing that happened with the first “adpocalypse” that brought about most of the big name adblockers in the first place: people were okay with unobtrusive ads, then advertisers started running popups, overlays, autoplay videos, fake system notifications, on and on and on. The advertising became so disruptive people were unable to use sites without adblockers. And so the cycle repeats.
YouTube brought this on themselves.
This is my problem with YouTube’s ads. If it was a 5-15 second video ad at the beginning/between videos, plus a banner ad or ads on the side/page, that could be sufferable. But constantly interrupting videos at random points for long ass ads does not mesh well with a short-video platform.
And I also enjoy reminding people whenever I get the chance that the FBI recommends using an adblocker for security/safety reasons: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221
That’s where I’m at as well. For a long time I didn’t bother with adblocking on my TVs and a few other devices because I could tolerate 1-2 ads before every video and the occasional mid-roll ad on the longer videos. Then they started ramping things up; it was when I got 10 ads on a 6 minute video, 7 of which were the same ad that I’d finally had enough. I’m not going back, they can get bent.