YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users (404media.co) 212
An anonymous reader shares a report: Firefox users across the internet say that they are encountering an "artificial" five-second load time when they try to watch YouTube videos that exists on Firefox, but not Chrome. Google, meanwhile, told 404 Media that this is all part of its larger effort against ad blockers, and that it doesn't have anything to do with Firefox at all. [...] Mozilla, which makes Firefox, told 404 Media that it does not believe this is a Firefox-specific issue. Enough people have posted about it, however, that it is clearly happening for some users and not others.
In a statement to 404 Media, Google did not provide specifics but also did not deny implementing an artificial wait time. "To support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube, we've launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience, the spokesperson said. "Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
In a statement to 404 Media, Google did not provide specifics but also did not deny implementing an artificial wait time. "To support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube, we've launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience, the spokesperson said. "Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
5 seconds (Score:5, Funny)
Just enough time for me to grab and eat the Cheeto I dropped on the floor without getting cooties.
Re:5 seconds (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually I've been noticing it with grayjay (YES, YOU NEED TO CHECK IT OUT!) and I blamed it on anything from being on the wrong WiFi, local WiFi bandwidth being exhausted by some rsync, or the meager uplink being congested - but neither were extreme so I just shrugged.
In short, you will get it with NewPipe or anything else.
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curious.
can i download the youtube m p 4 file from smart tube
Re:5 seconds (Score:4, Informative)
There is plenty of software out there for downloading local copies of Youtube videos. For the Linux command line I use youtube-dl.
By the way, yt-dlp is a fork that almost everyone considers better than youtube-dl. Basically, it has more features (like optionally using cookies from your browser) and accepts more patches. Though if you want a more pared down program that is updated less frequently, stick with the original. It's like Debian versus Ubuntu.
Re:5 seconds (Score:5, Insightful)
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They don't care if you watch it, listen to it, or click on it. They just want to guarantee they own the moments of your life to play it. That's how they get their money in their shell game.
The security risks from their potentially compromised ads or ad servers is an entirely different matter, and one they won't even admit to, but it's also the actual main one.
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Of course enough people do this and the advertisers see less return from their ad $$$ then they are going to demand cheaper ad costs or just stop running the ads alltogether.
This will happen eventually. Advertisers run ads because they work. They run a good ad campaign and they see revenues go up. Otherwise why would they collectively pay billions of dollars just to annoy people?
What Google fails to realize (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd much rather wait five seconds watching nothing than having ads.
Listen, Google. Pally. Friend. Mate.... You ain't gonna win this one.
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I'd much rather wait five seconds watching nothing than having ads.
Listen, Google. Pally. Friend. Mate.... You ain't gonna win this one.
I think I experienced this a few times. I assumed the pause was the player waiting for a blocked ad to play. What this tells me is Firefox is successfully blocking ads while Chrome is not.
Personally I hope they're keep metrics of how many ads play muted and/or the skip button gets mashed in less than a second. For that matter, can someone write an extension which automatically mutes ads, smashes the "Skip" button as soon as it's enabled, and unmutes once the real content starts?
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That sounds like Fadblock [github.com].
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Personally I hope they're keep metrics of how many ads play muted and/or the skip button gets mashed in less than a second.
Credible evidence suggests that most online ads play in hidden browsers inside mobile malware and in device farms harvesting referral fees, and these ads are never seen by any human, even for a microsecond.
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It's been reported that changing the agent string avoids the delay, so I think a different answer is needed.
Personally, it doesn't affect me, since I stopped visiting there entirely once they declared that those with ad blockers were no longer welcome. I accept their right to refuse to serve those who wish to protect themselves.
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I'd much rather wait five seconds watching nothing than having ads.
Listen, Google. Pally. Friend. Mate.... You ain't gonna win this one.
The greedy assholes that eventually take over and destroy everything do not realize that....
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I'd much rather wait five seconds watching nothing than having ads.
Listen, Google. Pally. Friend. Mate.... You ain't gonna win this one.
The greedy assholes that eventually take over and destroy everything do not realize that....
I'm okay with the ads, but not the quantity. That bandwidth, hosting and opertaional aspect needs to be paid somehow
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I just don't get why more of the content producers don't go the Patreon route for those of us that abhor ads.
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Most of the content providers I watch offer options on other platforms subscription and exclusive content.
Re:What Google fails to realize (Score:5, Insightful)
Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing
Not viewing ads IS optimal viewing!
Re: What Google fails to realize (Score:3)
They already have won. They positioned multiple ad rolls without a significant hit to the viewer numbers, they forced memberships on everyone as much as possible, now they are straight up picking a fight with adblockers which people been using since a good two decades online now. Not a single platform so far ever dared to even attempt that in such a hostile and aggressive way.
YouTube definitely is a huge monopoly and we now see it throwing its weight around mercilessly. And still the viewer numbers have not
Sub-optimal (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost as if they don't realize that advertisements are inherently a "sub-optimal viewing experience"...
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It's almost as if they don't realize that advertisements are inherently a "sub-optimal viewing experience"...
It's almost as if they pretend they don't realize that giving their competitors product a "sub-optimal viewing experience" is likely to move users to their own product.
Speaking of advertisements! (Score:2, Interesting)
I gotta wonder how much 404 media is paying Biz-X to simulate relevancy. I’ve never heard of them but suddenly they’re half the submissions on .\, name always prominently featured in the brief.
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So is most of the content behind it.
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If you aren't directly generating revenue for them, then... fuck your viewing experience.
I don't mean that directly as a slight to you. I'm trying to convey the impression from their side of the fence, as a decidedly for-profit company.
And Google is in court over being a monopolist (Score:3)
What more evidence is required? $1bn fine in US courts PER DAY, $1.3bn in the EU...
Come on, everyone's allowed a fantasy ;)
Ads are a scourge (Score:5, Insightful)
Google got used more precisely because they reigned in the really intrusive ads of the time, and provided a good browsing experience. No matter how targeted, people do not want ads.
I my opinion, since I am paying for my bandwidth, I can decide what it gets used on, and downloading ads that I don't want to see is not what I want to spend my bandwidth on.
Google is now opening the door to competition, as the next organization that offers fight against advertisers will take huge amounts of the market share in a very short time... just like Google did. I guess the more things change the more they stay the same.
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You can decide to block ads. And Youtube can decide to block you from using their platform if you block ads. It goes both ways. The fact is, Youtube has to make money to continue to exist. If you have some way for them to make similar amounts of money without ads, I am sure they would love to hear it. If they can't make money, it doesn't matter how many people use the service.
Re:Ads are a scourge (Score:5, Interesting)
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The reduced engagement is what I am curious about. I just clear my browser cache when YouTube complains. I haven't logged back in or commented or "liked" since. It is a mixed bag for me; some YouTube communities were fun to follow and comment on. But in the balance most were completely useless blather. I do Patreon for the channels that offer it and a product I value.
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Come on. If it is too annoying people will simply whitelist it and be done. If they want the content. If not, it's easier. Don't go to the site and you don't have to care that it's annoying or shows ads.
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You can decide to block ads. And Youtube can decide to block you from using their platform if you block ads. It goes both ways. The fact is, Youtube has to make money to continue to exist. If you have some way for them to make similar amounts of money without ads, I am sure they would love to hear it. If they can't make money, it doesn't matter how many people use the service.
YouTube's annual advertising revenue increased to $28.8 billion, an increase in revenue of $9 billion from the previous year.[1] YouTube reported revenue of $29.2 billion in 2022.[12]
I don't think they're going to fold any time soon.
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Okay cool, but revenue doesn't paint the whole picture. What matters in this context is net profit, not just total income ("revenue").
Not that I think they're in danger of going under either, mind you - they're effectively a monopoly for free-form user content and the barrier to creating a real competitor is so absurdly high basically nobody is capable of doing so...
=Smidge=
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I want to watch youtube videos and IDGAF if the whole ecosystem collapses and starts over on dailymotion. If anything it’ll be more interesting to get a little variety as the various influencer shitheads figure out how to game a new algorithm.
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You did not read what you replied to. Back when everybody was showing massive flashing banner GIFs over, under, to the left and right and smack in the middle of the "content", Google made a name for itself by showing text-only static ads. How did we end up with 50/50 share of content and the most annoying ads before online video was even a thing? People got fed up with ads and learned to ignore them, so the web sites showed MORE and advertisers made ads more flashy and attention grabbing, because you gotta
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Well - google was showing text based ads back when we were on dial up. I could search something on google quicker faster then waiting for Yahoo to load up.
They adapted as bandwith increased for most people.
I don't like it either, but understand the change.
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Well, good for you, and me, because then you won't mind watching ads for the both of us. I'm not gonna.
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I think you missunderstood me and thought I said I enjoy this change. I dislike it as well
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"Youtube has to make money to continue to exist."
Then Google shouldn't have positioned Youtube as a loss leader all this fucking time.
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You are ignoring the fact that if Youtube chooses to do this, I choose to inform the people I subscribe to on Patreon that if they post stuff to YT, i'm not going to watch it, and therefore will stop subscribing.
If some company other than Google charged some kind of reasonable carriage fee for video content, i'd probably pay it. But not a cent to Google, which is unmitigated evil.
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as the next organization that offers fight against advertisers
What does this mean though? Any video hosting site requires quite a bit of money to operate, if not using advertising to fund it it will need to be financed with subscriptions, something YouTube does in fact offer, a fully ad-free experience so anyone who does not want ad's has the option.
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Exactly - and there are other platforms that offer this already.
Re:Ads are a scourge (Score:5, Informative)
No matter how targeted, people do not want ads.
I didn't mind when the ads were sufficiently targeted. I actually got things advertised, that I (a) wanted and (b) didn't yet know where to get. It also helped that the ads were short enough that it just didn't take too much time.
I didn't mind those and was OK putting up with the other less relevant ads when they were short. It was only when I got multiple ads, with 30 second completely irrelevant, unskippable ads and even ones in the middle that I cracked and installed an adblocker.
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I hate ads and they can never target it sufficiently, at least to me. Probably the things I want to buy companies don't pay to advertise.
Still, I hate ads so much, that if there was no way to skip the ad and I wanted to watch the video, I'd rather record it to a VHS tape first, so I could fast forward though the ad. The YT ads are the worst, TV ads are slightly better, at least they are long enough for me to go do something else and do not interrupt the show randomly (there are planned commercial breaks).
Re:Ads are a scourge (Score:5, Insightful)
Google got used more precisely because they reigned in the really intrusive ads of the time, and provided a good browsing experience. No matter how targeted, people do not want ads.
Turn off adblock today and scammy bullshit ads take up half the google search results. Even after blocking all the ads you're left with these hybrid results where you get a few hits, then a block of people selling what you're looking for, then a block of video results, a few more hits, then results from "discussion forums" which is just reddit and quora. Reddit is sometimes useful for getting a quick opinion on something but that's about it. Bing does this and even duckduckgo to a lesser extent. Internet searches today are utter shit compared to what they were two decades ago.
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Internet searches today are utter shit compared to what they were two decades ago.
Yep.
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Google got used more precisely because they reigned in the really intrusive ads of the time, and provided a good browsing experience.
I guess they have forgotten about that. Those that do not learn from history ...
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YouTube is paying for the bandwidth to send you the video, so following your logic they are within their rights not to send it to you if you refuse to watch the ads.
Personally I'd be willing to pay for YouTube, but there is a problem. The paid experience is worse than the Sponsor Block one, which skips sponsored sections from videos automatically. So even if I pay, I still need alternative apps with Sponsor Block, which block all the pre- and mid-roll ads for free anyway.
It's also very expensive compared to
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The sponsor segments don't bother me as 1) they are not louder than the rest of the video and 2) I can easily fast forward though them. Fuck ads though. If YT figures out how to stop adblockers I am not going to watch it, maybe once in a while I'll record some video to a VHS tape so I can fast forward though the ads.
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Google in turn pays the creators.
If the creators create their own site and host their own videos, I'm sure AmiMoJo would go there directly. He's not exactly the biggest fan of corperations but he realizes there is cost involved.
When I think of having to sign up for Max, Netflix, prime, Disney, etc, I don't enjoy the thought of also doing that for each content creator I watch.
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Google in turn pays the creators.
LOL!
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Yeah, but then doubleclick bought them and put an end to that nonsense.
Coincidence (Score:2)
It's just a convenient coincidence that this change by Google degrades a competitor's browser, but not Google's browser.
Re:Coincidence (Score:5, Informative)
That's not even the half of it—the summary is missing the heart of the story. Changing Firefox's User-Agent string removes the delay.
Re:Coincidence (Score:5, Informative)
...And, to clarify my own remark, the issue is literally an artificial 5-second delay in a javascript file that was added out of pure spite:
setTimeout(function(){c();a.resolve(1)},5E3);
(5E3 = 5000 ms)
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Re:Coincidence (Score:4, Informative)
That's not even the half of it—the summary is missing the heart of the story. Changing Firefox's User-Agent string removes the delay.
No. That hasn't consistently worked, and Chrome users have reported the 5 second delay too. The initial story on The Verge is just as poorly researched as any other on that site. The very source they provided (reddit post) showed very clearly in the comments that there was no consistent link between any User-Agent string and this delay.
And to your other post: Yes it was added out of spite. That is clear, that is what the story is about, and no one is even denying it.
What should YouTube do? (Score:4, Interesting)
Seem's as though everyone dislikes ad's but Youtube does offer a subscription model for a fully ad-free experience which is good because many sites simply do not give that option at all, no way around the ads. If people don't want to pay for that but also don't want to watch advertising what's the third funding option that would please everyone?
To be clear I am not really saying "won't someone please think of poor poor Youtube, they're just starving" but it is a site that costs quite a bit to operate so it needs to be funded.
I suppose it would be great if they could operate on the Wiki model and pure donations but I don't see that happening from both a scale issue (Wikipedia operates off $146M/yr and Youtube costs around $5B/yr) and motivation (seems like an uphill battle to create a Youtube competitor on that model, especially if it actually succeeds)
Is the answer simply less intrusive advertising? I can get along with that but Where that line is is the question I suppose.
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If you abuse your VPN you can get a youtube subscription for only a few dollars a month too.
Re:What should YouTube do? (Score:4, Informative)
Offer a subscription tier that doesnt involve “extras” that Google is pushing in their current subscription tiers.
I dont want to pay for Youtube Music, it has zero value to me, so the current lowest subscription tier is vastly overpriced for me. Just give me a tier that does ad free content for less cost and Id be happy to pay for it.
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I would pay Google maybe $2-3/month max for YouTube access without ads. $14/month is a joke.
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$2-3 is probably too little for the amount of people who subscribe. How about $8-10 with no YT Music?
I think a usage based model could work, would you be alright with being billed at the end of the month based on usage?
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I wouldn't be ok with that. I don't want to have to log in to use their system. Also I don't trust ads that aren't hosted by the site not to be malware.
OTOH, I've stopped using YouTube entirely as per their request. (I.e., "No, I'm not going to turn off my ad blocker for you. I don't trust you.")
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I've stopped using YouTube entirely as per their request
This is the real answer right there, if you don't get the value from Youtube then stop using it so props for not trying to have your cake and eat it too. I am the opposite, I enjoy Youtube so Premium is an easy sell, I feel like i get my moneys worth but I absolutely can see the cost being high.
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For me personally it is the value of the service provided. Most of the stuff is clickbait garbage, stretched needlessly to run long for more ads. I do Patreon for the two creators that offer it and provide value to me, which totals about $16/month. There is one other one that I would give $3-5 to if they offered it. Most of the shit I just cringe having to skim a 15 minute video for what should be a paragraph of text.
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Patreon does give access to the video content on their site though so it effectively replaces Youtube in that case which is a viable alternative if you don't care for Youtube content.
Also, and I am not saying this about you, but a lot of people here don't actually have an account for Youtube in which case, yeah the site is hot garbage because it's showign you the most "popular" things, not the stuff you may actually be interested in. My YT feed and the normal front page could not be farther apart.
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Then your $14 is worth more to you then the ads. Nothing wrong with that.
I just went from the 14 to the 24 plan and added my 5 family members to it. Dropped what I am paying since it's divided into 6 now.
But even at 14, it was worth it to me. I probably spend more time watching tech videos, reviews, and Ryan's pitch meetings then I do on any other media platform - including the one I self host.
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What percentage of YouTube viewers are blocking ads? It's probably insignificant compared to those who do not and those who pay for the ad free experience. These suits can't get it through their heads that I will stop using their platform before I see another ad. Google already jacked up the YouTube premium prices globally after a big push so I have no remorse.
Mark my words what will happen because every other streaming platform is guilty of this. They make people pay to stop seeing ads. Then suits see thei
Re:What should YouTube do? (Score:4, Informative)
What percentage of YouTube viewers are blocking ads? It's probably insignificant compared to those who do not and those who pay for the ad free experience.
It's region specific. Worldwide, roughly 50% - but the numbers I recall (from 2022 I think) were 16% for US and 72% for Western Europe, for example.
Tolerable advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
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...but Youtube does offer a subscription model for a fully ad-free experience...
It does not offer tracker-free experience. By giving Google your payment information you definitively tie your profile to your verified identity. Then your health insurance goes up because you were looking up something health-related.
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I mean sure? But to me the type of person who goes around on the internet specifically avoiding having any type of Google account at all, be it GMail, Youtube, etc. well, sorry you don't get an ad-free Youtube without adblocking and dealing with the pain in the ass of that. This isn't food or actual heath care, everyone has the option not to use the service.
If you are that paranoid about tracking then I don't know how well Tails works with Youtube generally anyways, you are already sacrificing quite a bit
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It's not ad free. It's just free of Google ads, but the in video ones are still there. You need Sponsor Block to have a good YouTube experience.
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Youtube Premium means you can fast forward through sponsor reads in video as well which i tend to do.
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The problem is that yt wants way too much money for their ad-free subscription. There is no way that they are getting that much money from advertisers for my single or double set of eyeballs.
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I can see that,it is the cost of a "regular" streaming service but not everyone will get that value from it (i personally get more from YT Premium than say Netflix) but isn't the thing to do when something is too high prices to not consume it or use an alternative?
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I actually want to see ads that are:
- relevant to my interests
- have good timing when presenting themselves
- able to be found easily if I navigate away on accident
- Don't rape my ears
That's just sensible. Instead, YT delivers ads that:
- hawk some bullshit that insults my intelligence
- interrupts the content's vocal coherency
- you can't replay if you find interesting
- Blast noise at a greater volume than what you were listening to
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I do like that idea and ideally this is the model the entire internet would operate off of rather than advertising but history and business thinking means this is effectively a death sentence for a site at the scale and ubiquity of youtube.
Soo, they want to "punish" me (Score:3)
Do they know what this will do? As soon as I perceive this as "punishment" I will _leave_ and not come back. Do they really want to commit corporate suicide?
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Do they know what this will do? As soon as I perceive this as "punishment" I will _leave_ and not come back. Do they really want to commit corporate suicide?
I mean, if you're neither paying them directly nor watching ads, I don't see how your leaving causes them harm. It's like the people pissed at Netflix for pushing back on password sharing: "If you do this, I'll stop watching the thing I'm not paying for and THEN YOU'LL SEE!"
Yup, they'll see, all right. They'll see... marginally lower bandwidth costs?
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They lose the view count which they use to sell higher rates on ads. I doubt Google ad selling team breaks out the customers that have ad blockers out for their customers.
That said, I trust google did the calculations to determine this is worth it to them - espcecially if the number is around 70% in the EU and 25% in the US as some other users have posted
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I doubt that they care. I stopped visiting YouTube because of their policies, but I doubt that many will. I did it because it seemed, to me, the correct moral choice.
IOW, do what you think is right, but don't expect it to affect a major corporation. Do it because you want to feel good about yourself.
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This isn't new. (Score:2)
This isn't new. I've been experiencing this for a year or more.
Many others, too. Youtube's own helpful little graph on the timeline for any given video shows where people "scrub" to in a given video. This shows a spike near the beginning of videos.
Why a spike near the beginning? People scrubbing back and forth to get rid of the "stoppage."
Ads anywhere are an eye-and-ear-sore. Ads online are a malware vector. Ads cheapen everything and anything on or near them. I see someone covered head-to-toe in adv
Yawn! (Score:2)
My FireTV has a YouTube Delay too.. (Score:2)
Five seconds (Score:2)
Lets pretend to let the baby have its bottle (Score:2)
I'd rather watch Cable TV (Score:2)
The Old Days (Score:2)
In the before times, in the long-long-ago, when there was no Internet (and no computers), we had three television channels to watch. (By the way, it was all like live-streaming: you didn't pick the content. There was an advertised schedule of content, and you just picked your time and selected a channel. All content was either 30 or 60 minutes. Except movies, which were however long the movie was.) This was all FREE and supported by ads, which were before, after, and during the content. The content producer
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Anyway, point is, we had ads in our free content for about 50 years
And we've had VCRs and DVRs for about 45 years. Been skipping ads that long myself.
At least linear TV didn't track you or inject malware into your TV set, although the FCC is working on adding that with ATSC 3.
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It was not fine. Everyone put up with it, because there was no other real choice, but it was not fine.
Even at the time, people correctly complained that the ad block model made certain kinds of shows impossible. Do you think a televised production of Death of a Salesman would have the same emotional impact if it got inte
Net result (Score:3)
Instead of opening a playlist and just watch one video at a time, people will open every single video in the playlist, waste a load of bandwidth of YouTube to preload all the videos so they don't have to wait 5 seconds, without watching 90% of the videos.
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, YouTube. That will certainly not only save you a lot of money but make you a lot of money.
*golfclap*
Hostile content providers (Score:2)
The first time I really noticed a hostile content provider using their popularity was pinterest, where they would show up in google search results but not let you see the content until you signed up or logged in. Now YouTube is taking it so much further, throwing their weight around. It has become a defacto online monopoly and something desperately needs to be done about it. Especially when looking at the recent scandals concerning supposed stars that YouTube themselves has promoted, the unmitigated copyrig
Goodle VS Ad Blockers (Score:2)
I do not frequent (or use, at all) sites that demand I relinquish my ad blocker.
I am not addicted to YouTube, though I do occasionally view stuff there, so I can EASILY stop using it, should their attempts to force the issue become burdensome.
Similarly, I try to avoid using Chrome, because it is well known that they scrape all kinds of info from it, including name/address/IP address/sites visited, etc., etc.
(I am assuming that Chromium is free of such anti-user-oriented malware..., but I mostly use Firefox,
I WOULD pay for it (Score:2)
If they could tolerate views opposite theirs and not penalize them with "the algorithm". I'm sick of people just barely right of center having to self-censor everything they say and use cutesy synonyms or alter the pronunciations of words just to avoid demonetization when talking about current events.
Except it happens to Chrome.. (Score:2)
It took me ages to figure out why YT kept crapping itself on Chrome, no less. Turns out it was the adblocker, as it worked on FF just fine.
Does make me want to change to FF though. The biggest issue I have is that the stuttering etc seemed like just a standard "chrome was updated, broke YT playback AGAIN" issue. I have never seen the "don't use an adblocker" pop-up, so being mildly technical, I spent a LOT of time changing codecs and so on to fix the issue, that wasn't an actual issue.
Guess I will cancel pr
Like a whorehouse dictating... (Score:3)
Advertizing 101 (Score:3)
1. Make it informative, and I'll watch it if I am interested in the subject. If you have a product or service, tell me what it is, why I would need it, How I would use it, Where I can get it, and How much it costs, DON'T show me some lifestyle and imagery crap or some moron characters with stupid uninformative jingoistic dialog.
2. Make it funny/entertaining, and I'll watch it.
3. Make it 45 minutes long (or longer) and about bowels, prostates, "stuck poop", amazing young inventor who "reverse engineered" something got help from other experts, and is now fighting to not get shut down, etc and I'm not watching. My obnoxious scam sensors are exhausted and if you're gonna maximize the annoyance and it's something you KNOW is a scam, I feel no obligation to watch even two seconds.
Advertizers are completely spoiled and we are under ZERO obligation to enable their hyper-obnoxious behaviors. They used to have to place printed ads on billboards (which people were free to not look at), in magazines and newspapers (which people were free to ignore or even rip out and destroy), or audio ads on the radio (which we could tune out, turn down, drown out, or ignore) or video ads on TV (which we could avoid like radio ads). They got ZERO feedback on how many people saw their ads, and no demographics on those people, nor could they hold access to actual content hostage until a person looked. They had to judge the success of their ad campaigns by watching their sales and perhaps hiring consumer surveys. Old-school advertizers were apparently vastly more competent than the current crop of Mad Men.