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YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don't turn off your ad-blocker
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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This assumes that the biggest cost to Youtube is serving the content, not storing the content. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think it's a valid question because if storage is the larger cost, then it doesn't matter how many visitors visit the site, Youtube is still warehousing all that content. By the way, in that scenario, it's actually better for Youtube to keep as many viewers on the site as possible, adblockers or not, because they can use higher viewer numbers to increase the price of the ad space they charge to advertisers.
A business that kills it's competitors by operating at a loss at first, and then jacks up its price once consumers have nowhere else to go.
Yeah, I don't care enough to simp for a company that has enough money to start off with a losing strategy to begin with of burn money to kill competition then is surprised that they can't easily revert back the strategy that "won" them the market dominance in the market dominance in the first place.
And YouTube is one of many services that exist to try and convince people to make a Google account anyways. Without YouTube that's one less reason to make an account with other email providers around and less of a reason for Apple users which is growing in dominance.
How does that actually work when the advertisers know people aren't going to see the ad?
I think for a while, their strategy to ignore adblockers worked just fine. User counts were rising, ad payouts could be and would be cut, ads could be and would be placed in different parts of the video, videos that weren't monetized were getting ads thrown in just to make Youtube/Google/Adsense money. YT was pulling lots of levers to keep the value of advertising on the platform high.
That is, until Adpocalypse. My theory is, after this point, advertisers began to question how many more levers could be pulled until they addressed the elephant in the room, an elephant that was getting larger and larger: the adblockers. Let's be fair to Google (ugh), it would be much much easier to pull all those levers, than to tackle the technical challenge of stopping client-side software from running on their website. Once interest rates rose, and advertiser pressure reached it's current peak, Google started taking anti-adblocker actions: Manifest V3 to kill ublock on Chrome, Youtube's current system, etc.
Actually the other person who tried to disagree with me made a great point for my argument.
Youtube needs content creators and pays them through advertising. If advertising stopped, there would be no content creators.
So regardless of if it's storage or bandwidth, they absolutely need to stop ad block. Otherwise no one will make content for youtube.
I think there's some truth to that, but in my admittedly "outside-looking-in" experience, most full-time content creators have other means of raising money to operate: Patreon, merchandise, Twitch subscriptions, YT Membership, video sponsorships, etc. So I don't think the total loss of advertising would lead to the total loss of content creators. You'd lose some, but others would survive. People like making content even when there's no profit motive at all, it's just less feasible to do it at an industrial scale if you don't have more solid financial banking.
Consider Twitch subscriptions. You pay $5 to a streamer, you never see ads on their stream. No ads doesn't mean no streamer. Likewise, streamer still streams even if you don't subscribe, you just see the ads. As a business model, this is a little neater, tidier, than Google's. On a technical level, it's also better defended against adblockers since ads are injected into the stream, they're not a separate stream you can just block.
Yes they "need" to stop adblock, but for the advertisers, not for the content creators.
What you're saying is true, but misses the point. Yes, larger content creators can get sources of income besides advertising. However, the whole point of youtube is to let anyone big or small get started. Small creators can't get started if they don't have a source of income. So that's where the advertising comes in.
In a sense, twitch builds upon the success of youtube. They took large creators who could get the $5 subscriptions on to their platform. But this only increased the need for youtube to court advertisers.
In a world without advertisers paying content creators, our options would be severely limited. We want small upstarts and cutting off their source of income is a terrible idea.
Unfortunately, our world requires the necessity evil of youtube doing whatever it can to stop ad blocker. No matter how nice it is. And if you as a user are satisficed with the limited content from large creators, as you said, there's always twitch.