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YouTube is slowing down for users with ad blockers in new wave
(9to5google.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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Too be honest I was fine with seeing an ad every few videos. But at some point it became unskippable ads before , during and after a video.
Ads got too aggressive, people made adblockers, ads got more aggressive because of lost revenue, almost everyone starts using adblockers.
They did it to themselves, people were content with simple ads on a page, it's once they started interfering with the content and access of it that they became a problem.
I never had an issue with YT's 1-2 skipable ads at the beginning, or even the banner ad. But they got greedy.
The midrolls and the unskipable ads was the trigger point for me.
I was fine with even having a couple very short unskippable ads every other video. Now it is all of them with one in the middle of videos longer than 5 minutes. And then of course the content creator has to put in an ad because YouTube does not pay shit for views.
I mean, they didn’t get greedy, as far as everyone knows they are losing a ton of money (at least if you can extrapolate anytbing from the fact that twitch is massively unprofitable)
Pretty sure YouTube has already been declared to be profitable. But frankly I'm pretty suspicious of claims of unprofitability for services being run for over a decade. Why would any for-profit company bankroll them if it wasn't worth it? There has to be some creative accounting going on.
Doubt it, if it was profitable, they would be announcing that to everyone as loud as they could. Besides, if twitch is unprofitable, I doubt that google is in a much better situation
I wouldn't apply Twitch's situation to YouTube, IF it's even true, because YouTube got a much wider reach and more advertising possibilities than gaming and somewhat related audiences.
It doesn't seem to me a given that they'd boast about their success either. Because if they hide the situation the way they do, they can do this, turn to the customers saying "Welp, I guess this much is not enough. Gotta put more ads on it and raise prices 🤷". It's easier to placate the users if they are convinced it is inevitable. I imagine you are considering of what investors might think if products are said to be unprofitable, but overall Google/Alphabet still gets tens of billions in clean profits every year.
Most of all, again, if this is such a money sink that in over a decade they couldn't figure out how to make money of it, why would they still keep at it? Why wouldn't they sell it off or close it? If I assume they are honest about unprofitability, as much as I doubt it, then they must be getting something else from it that is equally valuable as raw money. Maybe it's user data. Maybe it's the social clout of controlling a major media platform. But it has to be worth it to them or they wouldn't be hosting it. It wouldn't make sense.
But personally I just think they are lying about unprofitability, including Twitch. It's just a convenient excuse for layoffs and price hikes. It's not like they are going to show everyone their full balance sheets.
Interest rates have been low enough for long enough that many companies have been running on the "fake it 'til you make it" philosophy forever. Air BnB, Door Dash, Lyft, and countless others have never been profitable. But they survive by constantly taking out loans and collecting new investor money to increase their market share (the infinite growth scheme), hoping that they'll either eventually have enough impetus to monopolize a market and bully it into being profitable, or get bought up by Google and co for a rich payout.
This is how YouTube and Netflix got profitable. They ran at a loss until they were popular enough to turn a profit, and then switched to maximizing that profit. I imagine the same is true for the big social media sites as well. Run at a loss until you have a big enough userbase to attract advertisers. And this is exactly why Tumblr was never profitable and Verizon basically killed it trying to make it profitable. Tumblr's population has always been the groups advertisers like the least - minorities, LGBTQ groups, sex workers, and artists/creatives. So Verizon tried to sanitize it by purging them to make it attractive to advertisers, and consequently killed the userbase that gave it it's potential for ad profits in the process.
I see what you are saying, but Google is still not bleeding money and YouTube has become very well established already. In fact, for years YouTube contributes to Google's primary revenue source: Advertising. Of course, this is why they are opposed to ad blockers, that much makes perfect sense.
But I don't see any indication that it's not making ends meet. And I'm not taking an executive's word as proof, much less one from a whole different company. It's expected that they will say whatever make their actions look good, whether or not it's true.
That was the initially when YouTube was created. Everyone knows that Google has no problem cancelling anything that's not profitable.
If it was profitable, then why did google stop posting the financial statistics for YouTube
to get the benefit of the doubt on unpopular decisions. Same thing with hiding thumbs down counter from videos.
If they want to, they can go 100% paywalled. But I guess people like to conveniently forget that YouTube wants to double-dip.
That’s what grinds my gears. I understand ads pay bills, but showing multiple ads before a trailer for a video game or movie is excessive.
Plus nearly all advertising is insultingly stupid as to appeal to idiots.
Ads are a way to fill people's heads with brand names until nothing remains except for those brands and only those brands feel safe and familiar until it becomes a conditioned reflex to choose those products. And it works.
The Holy Market forbids people would actually choose products based on their own experience and price.
I actively avoid brands with annoying ads.
When unsubscribing from pretty much any service there's usually little text box asking why. Whether or not it's the real reason for leaving, I love citing obnoxious ads as the thing that pushed me out, especially for high-dollar moves like banking or insurance.
I know it'll never accomplish anything, but it feels good. ^_^
Most ads are about brand recognition and not so much about trying to sell a specific product. Even if you think an ad is stupid, if you still can remember the brand then the ad worked.
That generally just makes me remember not to use that product or service because the ad was so annoyingly stupid
No, it didn't as brand recognition is desirable only if positive.
I find it extremely funny that YouTube serving ads also strains the same video infrastructure they're trying to increase revenue on.
There is potentially a world in which you want to see ads because ads themselves do technically provide a service. You do want to know about things you care about and would want to buy… you just don’t want it obnoxiously shoved into your face all of the time in psychologically manipulative ways.
Look at the way ads used to look "back in the day", with details about the product, its features, and reasons you would actually want to buy it. New tractor model, this many HP, pulls 4 bottom plow, burns this much diesel per hour, buy now and grow more corn.
However it turned out that it worked better just to try to trick people into buying a product that they didn't need, and that's how we got the ads we have today.
True, but if corporations don't care to adhere to ethical standards, then the users shouldn't need to either.
Because a significant amount of our economy and daily life is predicated on filling it with superfluous crap. These ads are just a race for crap de jour.
It would also help if I were served ads that even attempt to approach the vicinity of my own interests. That is vanishingly rare.
SoundCloud serves me casino ads and ads in Spanish
I don't gamble and I don't speak Spanish
...yet.
Like for real, you have all the money in the world and you know what I like and don't, so why don't tailor the ads to not annoy the fuck out of me?
"MORE!" - already wealthy people.
But they just get less money from me, because I remove all non organic ads. Would non organic ads be less annoying, they could sell more shit to me.
Paying attention to your needs/desires takes work. They don't want to work, they just want, "MORE!"
Not really, they are clearly spending money and resources to grab my attention and it's not like the work is done by people who are profiting in the end anyway. Than again - I'm rather anti consume to begin with, so maybe people like me are not a valuable market to beginn with, which is fair.
We are the more aware portion of the public.
Take a look at public linear tv for a while during prime time.
Ad breaks every 30min with a cliffhanger in the movie.
Atrocious.
I'd much much much rather watch ads for products that are not the least relevant to me. I'm not going to be an active participant in my own manipulation. I'd rather be annoyed.
Youtube doesnt make money with the youtuber reviewing the product.
They sure are.
Those creators drive the traffic to the page.
Which only has value to the corporation if the people driven there watch ads on said page.
I doubt so - Sponsorblock exists. I guess some don't mind it because it supports the creators they like directly.
Because that has been tried so many times over the decades.
The good sites put effort in to curate their ads and make sure they are things their audiences would enjoy. Lots of webcomics STILL have blog posts about doing this. Same with one of the more popular "steam deck" websites.
The problem is that this doesn't work. Because people don't permitlist those sites. They just block everything for the exact same reasons "I pirate it and if I like it I'll buy it" was always a blatant lie for the vast majority of people (and no, I don't care who consider themselves exceptions to that).
So when curated and "good" ads have almost zero benefit over shitty and obnoxious ones? The focus stops being "let's serve good ads and trust our users to have our backs" and more "What can we do to actually get ANY ad revenue out of this so that we can keep the lights on?"
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
SteamDeck teardown
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
money
Also, disappointingly, most people don't care about the ad all that much.
True. But probably that money does not go to Google but to the Youtuber directly, so for Google this is still a cost.