In a fight between a corporation and a bunch of people very determined to get content for free, history shows the corporation always loses.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Information tech people say we have introduced new measures and methods to guarantee compliance with our policies. And pirates answer challenge accepted
The only lose on their own terms. That meaning they don't make quite as much money as they used to. It's still money hand over fist.
It's not even that people want stuff "for free."
I mean... well... who doesn't love free stuff, but really if the legit product is priced fairly and buying it provides some actual useful service and isn't inconvenient or comes packaged with scummy garbage hindering it, then people will pay for it.
The problem is - that's not what publicly-traded companies like to do. Valve's Gabe Newell said it best (paraphrasing) - "Piracy is a problem with a service... not the customer."
Shitty services or actions businesses take to place a barrier of any kind between customer and the product they seek as a means to lazily extract more money from customers - especially that which is perceived as greedy will make more people seek alternative means of obtaining said product.
Ask people who host Plex servers why they put movies on their server when they already have a Blu-Ray of it.
It's always "because the disc has un-skippable ads" or "they didn't include Ben Affleck's commentary track on it where he shits on Michael Bay for being a goddamn moron," or "I don't like seeing 14 different warnings before watching the movie I like" or "I don't like seeing 10 min of ads every 5 min of watching my favorite show."
It's hardly ever "I like being a thief" or "I couldn't afford it..." and in the case of the latter, they weren't going to buy it anyway.
I have totally just purchased a few Anime seasons because I didn’t want to deal with ads when streaming it via Crunchyroll. Considering the speed I watch it at, I’d have had to pay for like 3 months of service to not get ads, or I can buy it and permanently own it for a little more.
I won’t watch things with ads anymore if I can help it.
The natural next place for people to go to once they can't block ads on YouTube's website is to go to services that exploit the API to serve free content (NewPipe, Invidious, youtube-dl, etc.). If that happens at a large scale, YouTube might shut off its API just like Reddit did and we'll end up in scenario where creators are forced to move to Peertube, and, given how costly hosting is for video streaming, it could be much worse than Reddit->Lemmy+KBin or Twitter->Mastodon. Then again, YouTube has survived enshittiffication for a long time, so we'll have to wait and see.
The thing is, none of the services you listed use YouTube's API. They scrape the data directly from the page. YouTube can't really do much against it. They're apparently currently trying to shut down Invidious, though I'm not sure how they're planning to do that considering Invidious is open-source, meaning anyone can develop and host it.
My bad you are correct I'm just talking out of my ass
The vast majority of people that watch youtube, are most likely not using an ad block and won't be affected by this at all. Just like the vast majority of reddit users use the official app, and the vast majority of people on twitter stayed.
It will take a lot more than this to make something else the next big thing. Just like lemmy is nowhere near as popular as reddit, mastadon is nowhere near as popular as twitter. Yes those of us technical enough or that care enough will use an ad block or similar, but we are in the minority, and always will be.
According to the latest estimates, the ad blocking user penetration rate in the United States stood at approximately 26 percent in 2020, indicating that roughly 73 million internet users had installed some form of ad blocking software, plugin, or browser on their web-enabled devices that year.
https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/
Sounds like will affect 1/4 of youtube users. I highly doubt google would be doing this if it wasn't getting in the way of making more money.
The apps you mentioned are scraping or pretending to be the official app.
The official API doesn't have public methods to build an alternative third party player .
The only way YouTube can stop those apps (beside blackmailing devs with legal letters) is to shut down both their own website and their own app
They can ban google accounts of people who use those apps though. I can see them doing it.
if we don't watch their ads now because of how intrusive and poor quality they are, where's the logic leap to they get money from us if we can't block their ads? We just move on or get better at blocking, they don't actually get money in this scenario... This is the problem with tech decisions these days, the companies are completely out of touch. You can't use consumers as products and then charge them for it, and make no mistake about it you are the product.
Banksy had it right:
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.
Sounds like a statement I can get behind. I don't know who Banksy is, can you point me in the right direction?
You are about to have a great time.
Every time they make blocking ads harder, more people give up and live with it than those who leave or find a way around it. As much as I wish that wasn't the case, it unfortunately is.
We just move on or get better at blocking
Why serve a user base that won't either pay money to view a video or watch ads that fund it?
Maybe if the subscription cost was just the amount of money they make off the ads...
That tells you the true value of advertising to you. They make more than the take because they are an advertising company who has just built a stupid service to entice people to view the ads and give up their habits. They are undercutting their core business by offering an ad-free sub in the first place, which is why they overcharge for it. They'd rather make some money than none, but they hate that they can't advertise to you.
Guess I'm getting banned then, I will never disable my adblockers, the internet (and Youtube especially) is goddamn unusable without them.
This is where VPNs come into play. You can ban me all you want, I'll just come back with a different IP.
I'd much rather sink money into a bunch of VPN providers than disable my adblocker or worse, pay YouTube.
I don't quite understand how they're gonna "ban" you if you're not logged in. Which you can accomplish with an incognito tab. What are they gonna do, block the IP?
What are they gonna do, block the IP?
This is exactly what they will do, yes.
With carrier grade NATs, they'd block a bunch of people, even subscribers...
If I can't watch YouTube without ads, I won't watch it at all.
This just seems like another element an ad blocker could block.
Not if they track this server-side, then you just get banned or can't open any more videos after 3 videos, and won't have the message telling you why.
It definitely depends on how they implement it. If they implement it server-side, it’ll probably work, but what’s stopping you from viewing YouTube signed out? IPs change frequently, cookies can be cleared, etc.
I would say the entire experience of using youtube is having your feed with subscriptions and suggestions. Juggling being logged in in one window to browse around and decide what to watch, get the links, then paste them into another window to watch them while logged out doesn't sound like a good time.
Ads is also a bad time. So probably going to just drop the platform and stop consuming content from all those creators I've been following in some cases for nearly a decade.
I just use freetube. I can subscribe to the channels I want without an account, use sponsor block to block sponsored content, and even use invidious to proxy connections if I want. No ads, not even in-video ads.
There will be a script to block their recognition just as there is a ton of scripts to work about other anti-adblocks. You could always go watch a video in incognito and just dont use your account.
Ultimatively this will lead to less interaction on the platform, their ads are so penetrant that you can't even watch anything properly anymore, so more people will adblock -> get banned -> not interract anymore
Going this hard to fight ad blockers isn't going to work like YouTube thinks it will. The only thing it's going to do is force people to find ways to bypass it or just start using a YouTube alternative. If YouTube is serious about wanting people to use ad blockers less, they should have conducted some form of a survey to find out why people use ad blockers on YouTube and then make changes to either find some sort of a middle ground with ad block users or try to incentives users to turn off their ad blocker.
Obviously, they wouldn't do that because it would require that they listen to their users and everyone knows how much they like to listen to their users before making any kind of decision.
I'd be fine paying Google for YouTube Premium if I could use it without being logged in. I'd take an access key for anonymous ad-free viewing for $20 a month. But Google is never going to offer that because the data-harvesting is the whole point of YouTube to them. Google is a data-slurping company with an advertising division that dabbles in video, search and phones as side hustles.
In any case, if they really do crack down on adblockers, there are always other methods of watching their videos ad-free, and if I really like a creator, I'll subscribe to their Patreon or watch them on Nebula.
Good news to everyone! We've wanted an alternative to YouTube for a long time. Now it looks like Google that next big step in forcing alternative platforms to rise in it's place. I'm an avid user of YouTube, but not a snowball's chance in hell will I buy Premium when they are trying to shove it down my throat like that. That's a very good way to get people to NOT buy something but for some reason companies don't seem to understand.
Gabe Newell said it best: "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." - Piracy was down and streaming subscriptions were up when Netflix first came about due to the ease/convenience of it, but piracy is seeing a return due to the mishandling and misconception of companies about how to gain profit through improved services vs increased pricing/poor performance.
The reason I bring this up is because YouTube, like many companies, thinks they're "solving" the issue of adblocking by force-feeding this kind of bullshit to the masses, but all they're doing is forcing more people to turn to alternatives instead.
Let them test, I will just use container(so they can't track my account). And if ad block not working, I will just not watch that video. And eventually move away from YouTube if it's annoying.
I use vinegar on iOS, which exchanges the youtube player with a html5 play, at least in safari. No ads there
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
still works for me with (re)vanced, so far. pirates will hopefully do their thing in the meantime to make sure nobody has to be capitalized on. google should have been broken up years ago...
I've been using ad blockers since I was on dial-up, I'm not going to stop using them now. If youtube blocks me, I will get my videos elsewhere. There's too much crap on youtube to sift through to find what you're looking for now anyways.
Bad news for me, I use youtube a lot with an adblocker and it's essentially ad-free. It's going to be a bad day for me when they start cracking down. It doesn't surprise me, but it's a bummer.
Not to worried, the cat and mouse game would probably catch up within a few weeks on the blocking side.
I wouldn't be so hopeful, Twitch has pretty much remained unbeaten and the only "ad block" solution I've found still gives a 30 second interruption of the stream, it just doesn't show the ad anymore. It's why I don't use the site anymore, even with Twitch Turbo as an option these days.
I use this one and it works perfectly fine. No interruptions
If the adds were bareable it would be different, but no.
On the plus side this should really help with my youtube addiction