YouTube could be testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking
YouTube could be testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking
A Redditor has discovered a popup menu on YouTube, warning them of a three-strikes policy for blocking ads.
In a fight between a corporation and a bunch of people very determined to get content for free, history shows the corporation always loses.
Information tech people say we have introduced new measures and methods to guarantee compliance with our policies. And pirates answer challenge accepted
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.
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.
Ad companies can't handle the idea that people don't want to be hit with ads every 5 minutes. "Well, it's just BAD ads"... no, it's having my experience constantly interrupted.
I would be okay with it if the amount of ads and their length was reasonable, like one in the beginning and one at the end or something. For a longer video I wouldn't even mind one at the midway point.
I didn't start using adblockers until I was literally inundated and bombarded and sometimes with ads running the length of movie (no, literally).
It completely ruins the experience. I'm happy to support my creators directly though and I do.
part of the issue, imo, is that creators also put ads in their videos. So you get two pre-roll ads, a sponsor segment, an ad in the middle, and then another sponsor segment. Maybe throw in some product placements as well. And one of those ads might be 1.5 hours long if you don't manually skip it. I know I'm not the only one who woke up after falling asleep to a video to find themselves 45 minutes into some ad.
After living with ublock and sponsorblock for so long, it's shocking to watch youtube without them.
It's both. I dread the coming election year, and it's why I won't even THINK of paying for a streaming service that has advertising. I will pay the extra money to avoid them.
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.
If I can't watch YouTube without ads, I won't watch it at all.
Same. I left that shit behind when I ditched TV and there's 0 chance in hell I'm ever going back.
Maybe the general public is more compliant than I am, but my money for YouTube creators goes to them via Patreon. Google not knowing how to break even on a bandwidth- and storage-intensive property it's owned for more than a decade does not constitute an emergency I need to have any part in paying for.
If very recent history is any guide, this is exactly how you get people searching "YouTube alternatives uBlock." No one is saying there aren't enough ads on the site; the increasing malignancy of ads over the years is why people categorically reject whitelisting youtube.com, and "more ads" is not a solution to any user-facing problem.
Yeah, video ads are the popup ads of our days. Just as intrusive. Money corrupts :(
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 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 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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I guess 2023 is the year of enshittification.
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.
Stop showing 3-minute long k-pop music videos. Like, why is that even an ad? Do they think I am suddenly going to start listening to k-pop or something?
Also, stop showing gross medical stuff, like this is a cure for your foot fungus or look how much earwax is in this persons ear. Just the other day there was an ad about not being able to get an erection. I tried to report, it but I could not see where to do it. But it was pretty inappropriate.
I get ads on my iPhone and always skip them, so this will not really affect me, especially since I mostly use freetube on the desktop.
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.
More time for my Plex & Steam libraries.
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...
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.
My senior neighbor watches YouTube a ton and uses it to listen to music on his laptop. His old laptop recently died and I helped him order a new one and put FireFox with the whole works of adguard, ublock origin, sponsorblock, etc. on it for him and its changed his life! He loves not seeing these dumb ads now!
If YouTube starts banning people for blocking ads, it'll finally be the push I need to move to PeerTube.
Peertube just doesn't have the content.
If the adds were bareable it would be different, but no.
On the plus side this should really help with my youtube addiction
Incidentally, I am also implementing a three strikes policy - as in I'll still using your website after seeing this shit three times.
I pray we get a Youtube competitor too, because Google has no incentive to change. We've needed one a while.
Depending on what you're watching, https://nebula.tv/ might be a very good alternative for thought-provoking content.
I'm kicking all my bad habits, Twitter, Reddit and probably now YouTube.
I did sign up for a year of nebula about two weeks ago so it's going to be a soft landing.
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'm sorry for youtube-addicted. On my part, I use it, maybe, twice per year, so I couldn't care less.
I want to abandon the shit platform but its just so nice like in my lunch breaks at work or just after work, whack on some YouTube, and I can watch gaming, I can watch tech, I can watch really niche tech, I can watch people fixing cars, I can watch an Aussie dude fuck around with his nuggets, like these people are genuinely interesting and make genuinely good content, but there's no decentralized or otherwise separate YouTube-like platform they upload to elsewhere.
Sure, Nebula has thought provoking videos, Floatplane has a few, Odysee has a few more but there'll be that niche YouTuber who does videos on vintage Macs that I'm in the mood for, and back onto YouTube I go.
It's scarily difficult to get off it. I want to, and maybe I will if things get so shit it's borderline unusable, but I think Google knows how to boil the frog and unfortunately that's the reality of it all.
I envy you not having YouTube as something you don't use often. YouTube was genuinely at least a decent platform over 10 years ago when I joined it, and I've been hooked on it since, every single shit change they make.
I think I'm lucky enough for being born in the '70s and there were less things to which become addicted. In my case, they were (and still are) books. If you really feel like leaving YT, you may just look for books on topics of interest...
Me using youtube daily, to learn things (I enjoy engineering and educational content) I also use it to sleep with the help of ASMR
Ads during ASMR is going to ruin it, good thing ReVanced exists
It's not just that they fight ad blockers now. I used to use an auto skipper for the ads, since I am technically okay with being served the ads (dedicated browser, deletion of cookies) and I consider 20 seconds before a video bearable.
They changed the skip button now so that my skipper stopped working. Guess what, now I'm using a blocker instead since I cannot be bothered to constantly click on the fricking screen to prevent 30 min ads from playing.
I wonder if this would affect ReVanced. YouTube and google suck so bad. Also I hope people discover ReVanced because of this regardless lol but I still hope its not affected
I use vinegar on iOS, which exchanges the youtube player with a html5 play, at least in safari. No ads there
I'm worried the sucsess Netflix has had forcing people to stop password sharing is emboldening companies to perform policies such as this :(
I don't think I've ever seen so many 429s in my life.
If you just watch videos and don't comment or upload, what's the point of a YouTube account?
Just subscribe to channels using RSS
what's RSS? and I use an account because subscription