They just escalated the arms race between ad and ad blocker. All this could have been avoided if they actually did something about the scam ads.
Not scam ads, intrusive ads. A decade ago i read cracked and the only ads were non intrusive sidebar ads or a banner at the top. They didn’t play music, they didn’t interrupt what i was doing, they just existed. Google, being the near complete monopoly it is, could easily force the standard to return to that and many people would never even go looking for adblockers.
I was using that as an umbrella term though I should have specified both scam ads and intrusive ads that are a vector for malware.
No, it could not have been avoided. I don’t watch ads. Ads don’t need to be “scam ads” for me to not watch them. I just don’t. Full stop.
It could’ve been. You and me probably would’ve blocked ads regardless of their content for various reasons, but I’d imagine that Google wouldn’t have reached this critical mass prompting this scheme if their ads were properly vetted.
The technologically literate capable of installing ad blockers are the minority, and those who’d do it out of principle are a smaller subset of those
Bingo
So, how will content creators be reimbursed for the long hours they put into creating YouTube videos? There are honest people out there who made content creation their job. I say that to express I’m not talking about content farms, clickbait creators or “Mr. Beast” types - those are all media companies, although they also have bills to pay.
Did you get a premium account?
I’ve seen people who make money from YouTube, and I’ve no interest in seeing them continue to get paid. If somebody actually makes something worth paying for, they can take their shit to Netflix or whoever. They aren’t going to pay some manchild to yell at videogames all day.
I have seen plenty of people who make excellent content and who I’d consider to be decent human beings. I also used to believe that YouTube was a cesspool hosting only crap, and I think it was via some new hobbies that I discovered the decent offerings.
That by the way is why I explicitly mentioned channels and personalities I’d like to exclude from my claim that creators that should receive financial support to be able to keep creating content.
I think the unskippable and autoplaying ads are the point for me where I start actively finding ways to avoid ads. Anything that tries to force itself in front of my eyes or eclipses the actual content is kind of a no go.
It’s not that Youtube creators don’t deserve to be compensated (many if whom provide content to YT for free just to share, let’s remember) it’s that Google needs to find less obnoxious means of serving ads.
I’d be really curious to see the actual numbers of how much Google gets in revenue from YT and how much actually goes to paying creators. I’m betting the ratio is not what as slim as they make it sound.
I really don’t care, most YouTubers I watch use Patreon and Twitch subscriptions for the bulk of their finances, think they buy candy with the pennies YouTube sends them.
I occasionally buy merch from them, that’s my support.
No. They make money if they find a sponsor. I also skip over those sponsors’ ads but the sponsors don’t know that or they accept a certain fraction of people not watching their ads. I just don’t watch ads. If, in the future, that means I cannot watch my favourite tubers’ content, well too bad, I’ll watch some ad-free netflix series or read a book or whatever. But one thing is certain: I’ll rather light my dick on fire than watching ads. I even joined a class action lawsuit against amazon because they want to make me watch ads without my consent.
But if you’re paying for Netflix, why wouldn’t you simply pay for a premium account that doesn’t show you the ads? Is the content from your favorite YouTubers really that bad in comparison? I’ll admit, for me, it’s absolutely the opposite.
I am subscribed to amazon prime, mainly because of the benefits I have regarding shopping. I might cancel that subscription however. I am really annoyed right now because they changed their return policy and they try to force ads on me while at the same time reporting their modt profitable quarter.
Content creators should move to a platform that isn’t pushing far-right radicalization to kids watching video game streamers if they’d like me to pay for a premium account.
Should you then in turn also not consume content on YouTube at all? If so, great, you’re basically not affected by this discussion at all.
As for the topic itself: YouTube definitely has its share of problems, e. g. ElsaGate, unskippable ads in front of emergency medical advice, automated copyright strikes that are incredibly easy to abuse etc., but all those things are completely off topic.
I use an adblocker, but I watch sponsored segments from the creator, we know they earn money from those and they are often relevant to the channel
Patreon, sponsorships, and Nebula
Patreon, Nebula, ko-fi, etc.
How does the hosting provider for the actual content benefit from the Patreon accounts of the creators?
Hence, Nebula.
That is - political topics aside - the same as getting a YouTube subscription.
I’d still prefer a platform run by content creators, naturally, so I fully support Nebula.
In one case I would be paying the platform in order to support the creator. In the other case, I am paying the creator to support the platform
I love this mentality. This idea that forcing someone who hates ads to watch a bunch of ads somehow magically makes more wealth happen. The whole thing is a bubble desperately trying not to burst by basically forcing more ads in more places where it actually makes very little difference.
I wonder if creators are actually going to get paid any better if YouTube forces more people to watch ads on their channels. My bet is not.
Ad-revenue is literally how content creators get paid. If you’re using an adblocker (like me) then you’re freeriding. They’re not getting any money from us viewing their videos.
Nobody is forcing anyone to watch ads. That’s the alternative available to people who don’t want to pay. The other alternative is premium membership. Which ever you choose makes money for the creators. Blocking ads doesn’t.
I hate ads just as much as the next guy but this mentality of expecting to get content for free is ridiculous. That’s unbelieveably narrow sighted and self-centered thinking. If subscribtion based business model was the norm instead of ads-based then we’d have none of the issues that come with targeted advertising. On the other hand if one thinks google is evil company and don’t want to give them money then stop using their products. Damn hypocrites…
Ad-revenue is literally how content creators get paid
Great. If YouTube removes viewers’ abilities to block ads, resulting in more ads watched, will content creators get an increase in pay?
Again, I doubt it.
I hate ads just as much as the next guy but this mentality of expecting to get content for free is ridiculous. That’s unbelieveably narrow sighted and self-centered thinking
You’ve missed the whole point. Ads exist to encourage people to spend money on products, therefore companies profit from paying for advertisements.
Where does the profit come from if someone who doesn’t deal with ads is forced to watch an ad? Do you think that person is just going to decide to spend money?
Secondly, if a creator adds a 1-2m sequence in their video to talk about a sponsor, no one is tracked, no one knows any better if uninterested viewers skip past it, and it’s usually very relevant to that creator’s target audience. I have zero qualms with such a system, and sometimes it’s actually really entertaining.
Morals or not, this is Google scraping at the bottom of the barrel to invent value where there is VERY little to be had. Data-invasive, targeted advertising is superfluous and needs to die.
Where does the profit come from if someone who doesn’t deal with ads is forced to watch an ad?
The creator gets paid for people watching the ads, not for buying the product. For the most part the point of ads is to increase brand recognition which in turn increases sales. Ads work wether you think they do or not. It’s among the most studied economic fields. There’s a good reason companies spend a ton of money on advertising. More people seeing ads = more sales. I too like to tell myself a story about how I’m immune to ads but I know I’m not.
Data-invasive, targeted advertising is superfluous and needs to die.
I agree. The alternative is paying for the service eg. subscribtion based business model.
Targeted or not - I’m not going to watch ads. If it’s a bad service like Instagram I’m just going to stop using it but in the case of YouTube if they manage to make adblocking sufficiently difficult and inconvenient then I’m going to buy premium. I can’t blame them for wanting to get rid of freeriders. If I was them I would probably want to too. Blocking ads is like piracy; I participate in it but it cannot be morally justified. I’m effectively stealing.
Creators do get paid a share of the ad impressions. Many also are completely open about it and post videos of how well their videos did and how much money they earned from monetized videos, i. e. videos with ads - this is also why you hear many avoiding e. g. swear words, since YT’s auto detection will then flag their video for de-monetization.
But funny enough, that’s not what I said at all. The cost of running YouTube and the cost of the creators must be paid (plus creating an incentive to produce high quality content in the first place). That can be achieved by ads or by offering a subscription.
My original question still stands: if you were to build a video streaming platform tomorrow, what would your model for financing operation and content creation be?
Do adblocked videos prevent creators from having another view registered for a monetized video?
I don’t know how to do a video platform. If I had the time and skill, I’d rather make a FOSS, federated platform for creators/studios to host and finance however they want. Odds are they would never be as egregious as YouTube is being, and I’d be less inclined to skip their ads.
Individually, no. But each view not generating ad revenue does still generate streaming costs. If no one would pay Google to host their ads on YT, I doubt they’d keep the platform online.
Now don’t get me wrong, the threshold at which Google decides that the ratio of adblocked to regular viewers is exceeding their business model is most likely based on corporate greed, and the recent crackdowns on ad blocking are due to the same reason. I think they’re doing fine and there is no need for the recent initiative - but it would be equally dishonest claiming running a platform the size and outreach of YouTube could be done without large investments, one way or the other.
Individually, no. But each view not generating ad revenue does still generate streaming costs. If no one would pay Google to host their ads on YT, I doubt they’d keep the platform online.
Well this kind of renders the whole “if you don’t watch the ads, content creators can’y get paid” morality approach meaningless, don’t you think?
Where is the money supposed to come from? Companies pay Google to put up ads expecting a return on the investment. If Google starts forcing people who inherently avoid advertisements to watch advertisements, what value is that actually supposed generate for either of Google’s customers? I’d just walk away from the screen like I do with regular television.
To be honest, I don’t think I would mind ad supported YouTube. For me, it’s the obvious scam ads that Google makes it really hard and obtuse to report that made me block them indiscriminately.
If it was regulated like TV commercials are, I don’t think I would’ve minded too much. Twitch has basically no scam ads in my experience, I just get a lot of gaming-related advertising which makes sense for a gaming-centric streaming site. Quality over quantity (at least by advertising standards, lol.)
Of course, this is just YouTube and Twitch. The rest of the Internet is pretty fucking awful and they’ll need to clean up how advertising is handled before people even think about giving up their adblockers. Yeah, ads are annoying, but people gotta eat.
I could agree with you if there weren’t SO. DAMN. MANY. youtube ads.
When I find myself in a rare circumstance where ads on youtube are not blocked for me, I literally cannot believe how bad it is.
Most content creators don’t make money from ads. Google keeps on changing the rules to be able to monitize or keep monitizing their own videos. Google has put ads on videos when the creator did not reach the requirements to make money on ads.
This is why creators have sponsorahips, affliate links, their own merch, Patreon, or OnlyFans. They also use Youtube more as an ad platform for their other social media accounts like Instagram and Tiktok. Depending on the content some creators get paid more on Tiktok.
Yeah, if you listen to any content creator talk about sponsorship revenues it basically eclipses all other form of revenue for them.
I think it was Pokimane who got tired of people donating money and then being assholes if she wasn’t basically gushing over them for hours, so she just went “You know what, I don’t actually need your Twitch dontations.” and just turned them off.
Content creators make thousands of dollars per sponsorship deal minimum if they have a decent amount of viewers. Bigger creators like Ludwig get millions for some deals (Redbull gives him a crapload of money for product placement, for example).
The examples you cited are not individuals. Both Pokimane and Ludwig are basically media companies at this point in time.
And yes, the amount of money you get from YouTube is a lot less, although I’m being told major YouTubers have direct platform deals. But that’s not the issue:
In order to even get those lucrative sponsorships, you need the reach of a major platform in order to build an audience - that’s not happening without e. g. YouTube.
Yeah, but content creators haven’t deplatformed off YouTube. The closest might be streaming services like Nebula, but even those have subscriptions.
YouTube pays little to content creators for hosting the content, but they also pay for hosting the content. I can’t think of a case where content creators would pay to host their videos for others to watch for free without ads or a subscription.
What’s most valuable to Google is the user data. Google is still able to get a lot of user data even if blockers are on. Ads are really just a way to get even more data. If you click an ad 10 times and buy something just 1 time, that information is more valuable than the ability to put ads in front of you.
What good is user data if you don’t use it for advertising?
I said one was more valuable. That doesn’t mean they don’t go well together.
Anyway you can use data to nudge users. For example, Google can change search result orders. They can promote one company/research/ideology/party to the top and demote others.
Finding out where certain people are important for law enforcement or press.
Stores give out free wifi to track your MAC address and see where you go in stores. They sell this data, use it to track theives, or use it for better product placement.
You realize you could watch every ad on every video a creator puts out for a year and generate them less than a coffee, yeah? If you care go give them 5 dollars.
Fuck, an integrated donation/payment thing on YouTube would go so much farther for Google’s profit than ads ever would as well!
No everything has to be for profit in this life.
I’ve no contract with them, I’ve not made any purchases. They post something online for anyone to see.
They are completely free of locking their content behind a paywall, there are plenty of platforms for that.
But I want to make my first statement clear: no every single thing any human being does has to be done just for the sole purpose of getting an economical profit. That would be the death of humanity.
I still remember 90s internet when we had tons of websites with lots of content that was just there because the creators were fans of such content, no further intentions. Barely any ads or monetization whatsoever. The ‘shark’ mentality is killing internet.
Sure. But nobody had to invest multiple hours each day into maintaining their Geocities page - there are only so many animated GIFs you could load over a modem connection anyway. Also, are we really comparing the hosting expenses of fucking YouTube with static 90s fan pages?
People expect edited videos from content creators these days. Even someone filming a hobby in their home shop will get barked at for having bad audio quality, if, this week for once, they forgot to charge the batteries on their wireless Rode lavalier mic.
That’s why so many content creators do have e. g. Patreon. Many of them are providing peeks behind the scenes and create transparency to show how much effort a single video takes, and even individuals often hire someone to do the video edits for them.
If you’re fine watching unedited, 5-10 minute videos that can be churned out with next to no effort, all good. I’m really into 40-90 minute long videos and personally view YouTube as an alternative to obtain the content type I prefer, but I’d rather not sacrifice quality. I also prefer creators who provide a serialized format and upload a video every week - in that way, I guess I’m old fashioned.
This type of content is impossible to make without financial support, which I’ll gladly provide one way or the other. However, how much the average person can afford in terms of monthly subscription fees is certainly limited, so a company offering access to multiple creators for a flat subscription fee is absolutely reasonable.
People expect edited videos from content creators these days.
They do not, look how popular meme compilation are.
Even someone filming a hobby in their home shop will get barked at for having bad audio quality, if, this week for once, they forgot to charge the batteries on their wireless Rode lavalier mic.
Hater will hate, welcome to the internet.
If you’re fine watching unedited, 5-10 minute videos that can be churned out with next to no effort, all good. I’m really into 40-90 minute long videos and personally view YouTube as an alternative to obtain the content type I prefer, but I’d rather not sacrifice quality.
This type of content is impossible to make without financial support,
Also, are we really comparing the hosting expenses of fucking YouTube with static 90s fan pages?
There were much edited 40-90 minute video before there were ad on youtube. There were high quality page long essay on internet before youtube exist. Do not need ad or revenue or money support to get your content.
In 90s people did thing because passion. Now because passion and money. Still can make thing only because passion, never got impossible.
The demise of Youtube begins
I get it, no one likes ads on youtube. But, you realize that they have to pay the people that are producing content as well as pay for the storage space to gold all of this content. Why does everyone think that can just be free?
there is a plugin I bought, it’s community driven where you can tag sections of the video as ad, sponsored, etc, and auto skip it. it’s really nice, was like $5. will post when I find the link, but even if ads are server side, this plugin will skip. someone has to bite the bullet though and tag time stamps unfortunately.
found it, called dearrow, also changed clikcbait thumbnails and titles are editable by community.
What’s the street address of Google again? I’m already homicidally insane, I’ll start by burning them TO THE FUCKING GROUND.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
Grayjay!! 🙌🏻
Sample the color of a specified pixel (or something recognizable in the streaming format) every 30 frames from the original video.
Store collection of pixels in a database and share in a peer to peer network or stored on invidious instances. Because the sample size is small, and the database can be split up by youtube channel, the overall size and traffic should remain low.
When streaming a youtube video, if the plugin detects that the pixel in the video doesn’t match the one in the database, automatically skip until where the pixel matches the data in the database.
That is prone to error, just a pixel can be too small of a sample. I would prefer something with hashes, just a sha1sum every 5 seconds of the current frame. It can be computed while buffering videos and wait until the ad is over to splice the correct region
The problem with (good) hashes is that when you change the input even slightly (maybe a different compression algorithm is used), the hash changes drastically
Yes, that’s why I’m proposing it as opposed to just one pixel to differentiate between ad and video. Youtube videos are already separated in sections, just add some metadata with a hash to every one.
I think that downsizing the scene to like 8x8 pixels (so basically taking the average color of multiple sections of the scene) would mostly work. In order to be undetected, the ad would have to match (at least be close to) the average color of each section, which would be difficult in my opinion: you would need to alter each ad for each video timestamp individually.
Yes, that could be an alternative to computing hashes, I don’t know what option would be less resource intensive
Imagine thinking they can’t detect when you try to skip forward during an ad.
They can’t. They have no clue where you are currently in the video, and even if they did run some client side script, you could easily spoof it.
My gut reaction is that this won’t work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there’s a way to do that there’s a way to detect ads.
Of course, there’s always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they’re used; they’ve done similar before.
YT already scrapped (or broke) setting the start/end timestamps for embedded videos. That hasn’t worked for at least the last few weeks. Embed videos now always start at 0
I embedded a video yesterday with a start timestamp and it worked
Did they change the params or something?
I have YT embed support in Tesseract, and videos with timestamps broke a few weeks ago (they all start at 0 now). I’ve tried both
t=andstart=formats: neither worked.You can still link to the YT video directly with those, though, but I’ve been unable to get embeds to honor them.
‘t=’ works for me, but I’m just right clicking and getting it manually to put in docs.
Hmm. Like a Word doc? Maybe it’s just embeds (with timestamps) on other websites that are broken?
I tried using the embed URLs directly in a browser tab, and those refuse to play at all (they still work embedded, though).
Definitely something that changed in the last few weeks. The test posts I had are from months ago and worked then.
Ya on second thought, I don’t think I’m using embedding in the best way and what I’m saying isn’t really related to that. I’m not actually embedding anything.
I’m prette sure they have to send the metadata to the client where an ad starts and ends. Just to make the ad clickable.
Timestamps can be calculated on the server, but maybe there will be an api endpoint that can be abused to search for the ads.
Feedback across the Firefox and YouTube subreddits highlighted that it could break timestamped video links and chapter markers. However, YouTube knows the length of the ads it would inject, and can offset subsequent timestamps suitably.
The move also adds a layer of unnecessary complexity in saving Premium viewers from these ads. If they are added server-side, the YouTube client would have to auto-skip them for Premium members, but that also means ad segment info will be relayed to the client, opening up a window of opportunity for ad blockers to use the same information meant for Premium subscribers and skip injected ads automatically.
It sounds like there’s a silver lining after all.
The ads won’t be baked in beforehand, they’ll be injected into the stream in real time. Videos are broken into chunks and sent over HTTP, they’ll just put ad chunks in during playback. There is no need to re-encode anything. If you deep link to a timestamp, the video just starts from that timestamp as normal. If you are a Premium user, the server just never injects the ads.
But you are correct that the client needs to be aware that ads are happening, so they can be indicated on screen, and so click-throughs are activated.
This is why Chrome went to Manifest v3 - so you can’t have any code looking for ad signals running on the page to try to counter it.
But you are correct
That’s what the article says, not me! lol
Surely at the server side it knows the premium status or the user it is supplying the video to, so just wouldn’t insert the ads? I don’t see why that would need to be client side.
“Virtually impossible?” I haven’t had ads on YT in over 6 years, and I don’t even use a blocker or alt client.
then i won’t be using it much, if at all.
If the YouTube interface restricts you skipping during certain parts of the video, an ad blocker can detect that and skip over it anyway. Otherwise, I myself will just skip over the ad.
So… whats stopping something like sponsorblock from nixing this potentially bankrupting choice?
Time.
Very little most likely. I was reading some of what the sponsorblock dev had to say about this and the tone seemed to be “meh, there will be a way around this”.
It’s what they always should have done anyway. I’m not so entitled that I think I should get content delivered absolutely free, but I am entitled enough to sandbox and restrict how many discrete domains my browser windows will talk to.
What impossible? There’s sponsorblock. Just add a new category.
