YouTube tests disabling videos for people using ad blockers
Turn off the ad blocker or you’ll be cut off after three videos.
Not paying youtube a cent until they remove all the transphobes and quit blasting people with their shit ass bigoted content. I'll pirate and ad block just to spite them every step of the way. Make your bed with fascists, lay in it.
Remember the time when we used to search for and share funny ads? They could've done that, but no, they chose to make shitty ads that nobody wants to see.
I am 43 and I remember growing up, people in the early days of the internet were calling people in my age group (late genx/early millenial) a generation that will be "impossible to advertise to." For me, it's rang very true. I can't think of a single time I ever saw an ad for anything and it made me want to spend money on a product or service. But I guess that hasn't been the norm, or ads would be dead.
But I guess that hasn’t been the norm, or ads would be dead.
They're alive because of all the tracking data they use now. Targeted ads are significantly more effective than their counterparts.
Early GenXer here. Am the same way. Have always hated ads in any form. Except maybe print ads. Especially in the old days in mags like Electronic Fun & Games or something. Even targeted ads are useless to me. If there's something I'm interested in, I'll search it out and find what I need. I don't need some company scraping my data and telling me what I want. I run a Pihole, use ad blockers and YouTube specific apps to block ads and always will
I dunno, I'm 40 and have definitely bought things because of ads. Highly targeted ones on Instagram have introduced me to a lot of cycling gear I wouldn't have otherwise known about. It seems like most of the youtube ads are pretty bad though
Same age group, a little more aversion to ads. Big ads spenders are at a disadvantage in my selection process.
What absolute wankers! In case anyone's adblock goes south, here are some YouTube alternatives:
This is something I wanted since I have discovered Newpipe. Thank you, it's very nice to have something like this on desktop
PeerTube is awesome. Also its federated with lemmy!
For Android:
Newpipe or Tubular (Newpipe X Sponsorblock fork)
VueTube (still under development, the team is working slow because it's pretty small, they have a few time to spend on it and they need devs, it's a complete FOSS alternative to Vanced, and will have most of its features including optional Google log in with interactions)
If you need to login and have a full YouTube experience: Revancedapp
Relevant Tumblr post
youtube.com##+js(set,yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set,Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set,ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set,Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
Here it is in text format so ya'll don't have to type it out. I haven't verified that it works but by the looks of it it just makes the Adblock sensor report a false negative. [edit, fixed some spacings that sneaked it's way into the filter upon copying it earlier.]
The one thing the Reddit exodus has taught me, is that I'm almost eager for a reason to ditch my social media and either find something new or simply take back that time and do something more fulfilling anyway.
I'm so much happier not being constantly blasted with advertisements, that now when I have to go back on insta or FB for whatever reason, I can't stand more than 30 seconds before I nope back off.
Looking forward to axing YouTube from my life next.
I left FB and Instagram about 3 years ago. At first I felt sad because I was "disconnected" from my large network of hundreds of people I know or have met. The truth was the majority of these "friends" weren't actually participating in my life at all. Those networks for most part were just allowing for some sort of passive consumption of our lives and when I had finally left, it was great. The hour or so I would spend trying to "keep up" with everyone was given back to me and it was refreshing to catch up with friends because we actually get to catch up.
Recently though, I spun up an instance of a private social network just for my family using a web app called HumHub. There's about 20 members and we use it just for our small family. No outsiders, no ads, no spam, just us. It takes me back to a time where social media was simple.
Youtube is a prime example of why monopolies are bad
As much as I dislike ads, "Company wants to make revenue from its product" is not a prime example of why monopolies are bad.
Youtube has done a lot more bad shit than push ads everywhere
Why? Can you elaborate?
If a company has no competition, being a monopoly, it's basically free to do whatever it wants. Youtube controls the video streaming market of the internet. If they choose to not pay content creators, to run 10 ads in a row every 3 minutes, or to ban content creators for saying something their automods think is a bad word, what will you do? Where else will you turn? Odds are there's nothing for you on Vimeo. So you either make do with how Youtube operates, or you don't get to watch cat videos, or video essays on WW2, or playthroughs of Super Mario Sunshine, or what have you.
YouTube is seriously forgetting it's role. I liked it better when it was dbz videos to Linkin Park and looney tunes. We use YouTube to not have a premium service then maybe contribute to the creators we like. We do NOT need yet another "streaming service" bill. They're getting out of hand.
DBZ Music Videos, that takes me back to the 00's.
Man, 144p AMVs were peak internet.
I'm truly surprised there hasn't been a successful YouTube competitor in the last decade or so.
I suspect the problem is that people wouldn't even pay a penny per video to content creators. From what I've seen of other competing video sites, there's a really serious moderation issue stopping them from wide adoption... So many of the competing sites are full of flat earth / anti-vax / pro-fascism content...
I’m truly surprised there hasn’t been a successful YouTube competitor in the last decade or so.
Running a video service the size of YouTube carries astronomical traffic and storage costs. Google is probably one of the only companies in the world that can stem that.
There's smaller video sharing sites, like DailyMotion, but those would probably instantly crash and burn if their userbase were to suddenly grow to the size of YouTube's.
It's because google has effectively unlimited resources and first-adopter advantage combined. The people who originally made youtube in 2005 would have never made money from it, even though the max upload quality was 240p (I remember when 480 on youtube was still considered high quality lol). But they got an audience which is what mattered. When google bought them, they still couldn't make money, but they could prevent ANYONE else making money with a similar product but throwing enough money and creator-focused policy around to make any other platform look just plain stupid. Even today, how much do you think it costs to store and serve the hundreds of thousands of videos uploaded to YT a DAY? Many of them at 4K res or even 4K60hz??? It's a massive undertaking and nobody can afford to build a competitor. And without youtube, the internet would be a much much smaller place.
I expect tik tok to make a long form video tab and compete directly. The way that YouTube made shorts to compete with tik tok.
Time to go to PeerTube. (federated! Bonus)
block scripts with uMatrix. a little finer grained. if they block me, oh well. still won't watch ads
uBlock can do everything that uMatrix can do it just has a different interface, so there’s no need to use the deprecated uMatrix
With ublock theres no issues?
PeerTube's turn now :)
“We want to inform viewers that ad blockers violate YouTube’s Terms of Service, and make it easier for them to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience,” the company said in its email to The Verge.
Wow, thanks, YouTube! I always had such a hard time disabling my ad blocker - I'm so glad you've made it easier for me!
Really, though, I don't see this ending well for YouTube. I'd bet there'll be an ad blocking option that works to bypass this within a week.
It's the sheer patrimony of statements like these that really annoy me. I get that things have costs and they also have to deliver a profit; that's just business. But why can't they just have the guts to openly say that rather than dress it up in all the bullshit
I mean, since we're all here, PeerTube is federated with Lemmy! There are limited numbers of creators on PeerTube right now, but maybe if we can link more videos from there on lemmy and upload some ourselves, we can get the platform into a healthy state. Not that there is nothing there, there is a decent amount uploaded already.
PeerTube won't take off unlike Lemmy did and still does. People won't switch from YouTube to PeerTube because the creators they watch aren't there. Also the YouTube Algorithm is what people make use YouTube in the first place.
Reddit isn't creator based and doesn't necessarily need an Algorithm since the users choose what to see anyways. So the Lemmy experience isn't actually that mich worse than the reddit experience
YT algo is hot garbage, I always have to check the channels of the creators I follow manually. I donate through Patreon and I would be happy to bump up my donations to make it easier for them to move to PeerTube
I'm sure there's a way to get around it, and if there isn't, then I just won't be using YouTube anymore. I survived before it existed. I'm getting tired of these companies' bullshit.
I know how obnoxious ads have become on the internet and I've seen how they have progressively gotten longer and more prevalent on YouTube but I don't really know how to feel about this. Conceptually, they are handling and storing so much video data their operating costs must be astronomical. As far as I know, advertisement is the main way they recoup any of that cost so I can't really blame them for this. Maybe they are just reaching a point where they are just too massive to work.
I would agree with you on this if it weren't for the fact that scam ads are so widespread on Youtube and Google that it's almost like they don't care about their users, only money. If they don't care about their users, why should I care about their bottom line. Also, ads I don't have too much of a problem with, but data collection and surveillance I do, and it's hard to block one without blocking the other.
People will choose the most convenient option. It just so happened that, for a brief period, it was more convenient to go through the hassle of installing an adblockers than to sit through the ads for regular users.
The unfortunate reality is that, for some people, moving over to TikTok will be more convenient than watching YouTube ads. Our attention span shrinks a little more, and Google takes one step closer to MySpace.
A lot of comments mentioning platforms like Nebula. I feel in this climate we should be continuing to encourage decentralized platforms. As lemmy is to reddit, peertube is to youtube. You can add a support button with links to any payment platforms you want; librapay is a nice one that takes 0% of donations as the platform itself runs on its own donations by a nonprofit.
I've heard nebula is run by the content creators themselves. That in and of itself is a very desirable property for a platform to have.
Google can be counted on to make everything worse at all opportunities.
I pay for premium because I despise ads. I do whatever I can to remove them from my life. They are really playing with fire. Change is in the air rn anyway.
How I want a YT competitor, but I really don't see how anyone can compete with their storage and bandwidth.
If they break Piped and Invidious, I guess I'll have to only watch Nebula content.
Honestly it wouldn't be such a bad thing if more people started using nebula and curiositystream for their content. The quality of content there is fantastic. Floatplane is another weird one out there which benefits users and content providers
The funny thing is that I can't be bothered to install adblockers for mobile YouTube, despite that being 99% of my phone and YouTube usage. Video platforms are expensive AF, and I get it.
But man, that ad experience just keeps degrading. It really wears on me some days, making me seriously consider Premium.
But now that they are going to block adblockers outright? And especially now that they're paywalling the ability to queue videos in a dynamic playlist?? Something built into TV casting and the desktop app for free? Nah, Google can get fucked. It's ReVanced time.
Looks like I might test disabling Youtube from my life then
I actually used to have YT Premium because I'm a strong believer that nothing is free, so you either pay with data or money (on anything slightly commercial, not counting FOSS projects made as hobby or under foundations etc. as things get more complex then. But even then I pay/donate for some stuff in the same way of reasoning).
Yet I cancled the YT Premium subscription. Simply for one reason, privacy. I don't mind paying, but then I don't want just no adds, I also want no tracking. I pay with money, so I don't want to pay with data as well having a whole profile made.
Switched to NewPipe with sponsorblock on phone and TV and FreeTube on PC. Got a redirect extension in FireFox automatically sending YT videos to either Invidious or Pipe.
Would definetely prefer to pay than being tracked...
But i also feel like the time is mature to produce a new type of web where nor ads, nor user payments are required, i think we'll get there some day..
If you have an android phone with a Google account, you're being tracked already.
As I be see it, I'm going to be tracked by everything on the internet whether I like it or not. So in the case of YouTube, I may as well support the creators I watch hours of content from.
You get tracked if you give up and accept the privacy invasions because "the internet is just like that". Get a phone with an unlocked bootloader, remove the stock Android and install GrapheneOS/LineageOS/CalyxOS.
Software doesn’t has to be this way. Humans define their own way and the Fediverse is showing us this.
Between reddit and YT forcing us out, we might have a chance to solving world hunger, less people doom consuming dumb content and actually doing stuff
Lemmy youtube when?
Right now the #1 alternative is Odysee. While Odysee itself is a centralized company its just as open sourced front end for the decentralized LBRY block chain.
As of now Odysee has far more videos, features, and download speeds then any other YouTube alternative.
If you're interested in supporting an alternative I reccomend downloading the "watch on odysee" extension which redirects YouTube videos that areavailible on Odysee, to Odysee. (Firefox) (Chrome)
Odysee is a right wing cesspool with no moderation: https://thelinuxexp.com/Im-leaving-odysee/
There's PeerTube I guess but all the videos are already on YouTube soo...
Considering how big and relevant YouTube is, I don't see it getting replaced by PeerTubr. The alternative at the moment are apps like ViewTube which is a custom front-end for YouTube that removes all the ads and tracking
What?
mpv is not a crime!
I already have enough content to watch between Peertube and Odysee. Youtube is dead to me.
mmh, i wonder if google/youtube is gonna learn anything from reddit. If not i guess we'll see another migrations in the near future.
Youtube is much harder to migrate from. It has a loooot of data. Where else can I upgrade 60 minutes of 4k gopro footage for free?
Youtube is much harder to migrate from
yeah, i agree, even with alternatives like peertube but since hosting of video data is more expensive it might take longer for reliable instances to appear, but ... the unfriendlier the youtube enviroment becomes, the more likely it will be that people will look for and create alternatives. Guess that at least means there is some hope for the future, even if that might be farther away.
I'm happy paying a Nebula subscription, (another video site started by a group of youtubers, mostly engineering/tech/documentary types) because I know that the creators are getting all my money after reasonable platform costs.
I won't consider paying for YT Premium (or Spotify) until they become a lot more generous to creators, and stop their insane copyright strike algorithm and banned-words audio scanner from demonetising and hiding random videos (Jake Broe, Joe Blogs, Denys Davydov, Ryan McBeth etc are always having to edit and reupload to cut some harmless snippet) and whole channels (Metatron) all the time.
You guys are really getting me into this Nebula thing, I watched videos from there before but I’ll try to use it more instead of YouTube and pay.
If they will actually do that, I'll pay for a subscription. To Nebula.
I actually pay for Nebula already and it has been great so far for me. I use it a lot more than Youtube and you don't need to sift through a bunch of garbage to find something decent to watch. They just need to add more content creators.
I'm thinking about recording my screen monitor while I'm playing some video games and upload the videos both on PeerTube and on YouTube. With a slightly little difference between them: the YouTube version will show messages encouraging the use of adblockers and leading people to PeerTube.
Now I have to find a good software and configuration to record my gameplays on my "potato" computer.
Companies are going out of their way to ignore the fact that "the easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." - Gabe Newell
I consider adblocking to be in the same boat. Piracy/Adblocking only exists because it's not a pricing issue. It's a service issue. By making the free version even more intrusive ON PURPOSE, they're not pushing as many people to buy a subscription as they are pushing people to install adblockers. If YouTube only ever showed a quick 10-15 sec ad at the very beginning of a video, I'd be less inclined to go out of my way to find and install an adblocker (and maybe even eventually just buy a subscription) than if they force feed me back to back, 30-second, unskippable ads.
It's the same with those stupid fucking commercials that run ALL the time and try and be as annoying as possible. If I find your ad to be annoying and frequent and shoved down my throat all the time, I will vehemently and actively go out of my way to AVOID that product, not be more inclined to buy it.
A prediction…
YouTube: Show them this ad. Browser: Sure. OK they watched it. YouTube: Really? That was too fast. It was a three minute ad! Browser: Oh, right. Well they’ve definitely watched it now. YouTube: You sure? Browser: Totally.
I wonder how they will enforce this. If you can just open a private window to bypass it, it won't be very effective. Sure, they could do some fingerprinting, but I imagine avoiding false-positives would be very important, so I doubt they'd get very far with that.
Honestly, the only way I see is implementing a login wall, which I wouldn't put past them. And that's kinda scary. It would render so many links inaccessible to people without a Google account.
Or who knows, maybe they just want to make it more cumbersome and not completely prevent it, to get more people onto YouTube Premium, while the more determined people can continue adblocking because it's not worth fighting a small minority.
This is probably it. Google's in a cashflow crunch given the current economy and so they've been cutting benefits and boosting profits.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention Odysee yet
I signed up to Odysee the other day to upload a video. It was too hard and I gave up.
You need to be confirmed to upload. Their options were:
Nope nope nope. Made an account on Vimeo and uploaded there instead. Everything worked.
Maybe I'm just not the target audience? Bigger barriers to entry might only let the more profitable people pass? Not sure.
Odysee is a right wing cesspool with no moderation and crypto is a complete scam at this point. https://thelinuxexp.com/Im-leaving-odysee/
Scrapers assemble!
How is scraping going to help, not a power user so just a curious question?
The other reply encompassed it really well, but essentially scraping is very very difficult to stop while also keeping YouTube videos publicly accessible (If the video and audio are playing on your computer, there isn't really a foolproof way to stop that from being captured). Whereas using the YouTube API to get videos can be easily stopped by Google.
There are apps like NewPipe that pretend to be a regular browser but show the user an optimized video interface. And no ads of course.
They're in a constant arms race with YouTube to figure out where the actual video and the other stuff (comments, video info, related videos etc.) are on the page, and YouTube keeps moving them around on purpose too.
Is Revanced going to be affected by this?
Depends how far they're going to take it. If they'll focus on people with a YouTube account and threaten to block their YouTube/Google account, it's one thing. You'll be able to work around it by using incognito mode (assuming you trust they don't spy on you in incognito mode...) or a browser where you're not logged in, or NewPipe etc.
If they threaten to block people who aren't logged in (by IP and by the fact they already spy on your phone and know your Google account) then it's another thing and nothing will be able to bypass it. They would burn a lot of bridges by doing that and expose themselves to some huge fallout and scrutiny about privacy, but you'd have no choice but to watch ads or not use YouTube.
I'm gonna be honest. I don't see anything wrong with this. I know the majority of us are just coming off some corporate bullshit from reddit, but I don't think it's wrong to not let your very expensive to maintain service be used for free without ads.
I promise that I'm not trying to suck a billionaire's cock when I say that I marvel in awe at YouTube's ability to input and output such astronomical amount of data at any given time, without any complaints.
But this is such a shitty, hostile way to do it. And if you give in and say yes to ads they've already shown where that's going to go, with 10 unskippable ads in a row and 30 second ads.
They could make subscriptions mandatory if they really believe they have a good product, and pass a fat portion of that money to the creators instead.
...except this isn't about the creators, or the users, or the advertisers, it's about Google making more money at the expense of every single other party involved in the platform, and the platform be damned. Textbook late stage enshittification.
YouTube premium revenue is shared with creators based on view time. I don't know what percentage of the subscription cost is shared (I believe I've read 55% is shared but I didn't validate that right now, their help docs say "most" so it's likely over 50%). As I understand it from income breakdown from creators, income from YouTube premium does often surpass Adsense income even when only a small percentage of viewers use YouTube premium.
The larger factor in them doing this is that the value of selling ads has been decreasing substantially the last few years. This means they need to show more ads to make the same money they did before.
This is also part of why every YouTube creator now does their own sponsored ads inside videos, trying to rely only on Adsense isn't viable for them.
YouTube know they have a good product, and lots of people do subscribe to YouTube premium, there is no reason form them to force people onto YouTube premium when lots of people are willing to watch the ads.
While I'm not opposed to paying for YouTube (it is a service after all) the only way to do so would be by being logged in to YouTube with whatever black box algorithmic tracking and curation that entails. There is no "proper" way to anonymously access YouTube without ads.
Nah fuck that they have way too many unskipable 30 second ads for a 15min video. If it was 1 or 2 ads a video sure.
The beginning of the Youtube exodus. People use Youtube for convenience, but what if you have to wait for 2 min to watch your 10 min video?
Exodus where? Most creators are only on YouTube and it's not like there's really an alternative.
Can youtube not try to fuck people over for 5 minutes?
Can insert basically any corporation not try to fuck people over for 5 minutes?
Welcome to capitalism
I’ve already migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, Reddit to Lemmy, looks like I’ll have to test disabling my traffic to YouTube. I control what content reaches my eyes on my devices, not Google. That is a hard line for me.
Might as well go Youtube to PeerTube
Dumb question, but will this also be affecting those on firefox or is this a chromium issue?
To put it bluntly it's a "wait 1-2 weeks for adblockers to update" issue.
Google has money, if they REALLY want they can put developers solely dedicated to the task of breaking youtube for people using adblockers.
This is a very bad sign.
I am constantly on YouTube. I have a stable of creators I follow and watching them has replaced the time I would have spent on other streaming services. It’s how I chill.
So I signed up for YouTube Premium and watch it on my TV with no ads. I have no complaints. I get full HD videos, streamers get paid, YouTube gets paid, and everyone is happy.
If one of your reasons for using YouTube premium is "streamers get paid", you should probably look into things a bit further.
The vast majority of YouTube premium revenue goes towards music publishers who, statistically, don't have any relation to the content you watch, and contribute nothing towards it.
The content you watch likely still has embedded advertising because YouTube has some of the worst, if not the worst, rates paid to people who actually create the videos on their platform (this means there's no such thing as "ad free YouTube" without using an ad blocker, even if you pay for premium)
I mean, that's great and I'm glad you're happy with that but:
They hijack my search results if the video I'm looking for is not in the top 5 to show me more "suggested" videos.
My home feed, instead of showing content relevant to my interests that I've expressed using likes and subscriptions, is full of garbage clickbait and videos I already watched 1 time 8 years ago, and the same fucking videos that are already in my subscription feed. It's ridiculous how bad they are at this.
When there is a competing subscription service that solves these problems and works well, I'll be happy to sign up for that. Until then I'll keep using LibreTube and YT can eat a Weiner.
It is way harder to provide an effective platform for content than it is to deliver actual content, especially as effort/content has close to zero effect on vitality/attention/profitability, while the aspects we want in a platform (especially in regards to privacy) are entirely unprofitable. As someone who uses adblock and generally dislikes the corporate aspect of YouTube I at least has to acknowledge that YouTube has to make money somehow, and that in-video sponsors seems like a win-win for everyone involved, especially when you can skip them pretty much effortlessly.
Normally I wouldn't even comment this shit, but as we are (hopefully) part of a shift to actual community driven platforms (fediverse in general), I think we have to aggressively discuss how to monetize these platforms enough so that they don't actively drain the wallets of the people maintaining them, and this is a very relevant aspect of that discussion.
Hopefully not too ranty, extremely inebriated.
YT can eat a Weiner.
I think this is the most important thing in this whole thread
It is way harder to provide an effective platform for content than it is to deliver actual content, especially as effort/content has close to zero effect on vitality/attention/profitability, while the aspects we want in a platform (especially in regards to privacy) are entirely unprofitable. As someone who uses adblock and generally dislikes the corporate aspect of YouTube I at least has to acknowledge that YouTube has to make money somehow, and that in-video sponsors seems like a win-win for everyone involved, especially when you can skip them pretty much effortlessly.
Normally I wouldn't even comment this shit, but as we are (hopefully) part of a shift to actual community driven platforms (fediverse in general), I think we have to aggressively discuss how to monetize these platforms enough that they don't actively drain the wallets of the people maintaining them, and this is a very relevant aspect of that discussion.
Hopefully not too ranty, extremely inebriated.
I'm in the same situation, and I agree. I even got the premium lite plan for 7€ which I find really reasonable with the quality of the content and the amount I watch. I'd rather pay YouTube and content creators than Netflix or Disney anyway.
I'm going to test blocking YouTube for having unskippable ads. :)
I've tried changing to odysee and peertube. I just wished more creators would upload their videos to other platforms and not just YT.
Funny. They can try. I'm not as dependant on their platform as they wish-think. I'll find other ways or other platforms.
Give PeerTube more love.
Nebula is a pretty decent paid platform with a lot of short form YouTube style content on it. Pretty sure its significantly better on privacy policy as well.
Pretty sure its significantly better on privacy policy
Without even reading their privacy policy, this much is pretty obvious. Nebula has a very simple, more traditional business model. You pay them money, they give you product. (Namely, streaming video.) Their business model doesn't include personal data in any way.
Good. Ad-blocking is piracy. Those content creators you are watching are depending on the revenue from ads. Either watch ads or buy premium. Third option? Don't watch youtube.
Nope sorry, Youtube gets punished for bad ad practices. You don't get to pretend that the content creator is the victim of the ad-blocking user when YT controls the platform.
Most people don't have a problem with ads.
People have a problem when the ads are so intrusive and prevalent they get in the way of the actual content. People have a problem with ad networks acting like obsessed stalkers -- building incredibly detailed profiles of them as a person and selling that information to others.
I had no idea people like you actually exist
It's a shame downvotes are turned off.
Maybe an unpopular opinion here… but checking my stats, since buying YouTube premium my account has watched over 50 days worth of ad free video content.
Now whilst I wish more of money went to the creators themselves, I can’t pretend I don’t get value out of the subscription. Especially compared to something like Netflix.
I have 6 subscriptions and YouTube is the last one I’d consider cancelling.
I prefer to do ublock origin/sponsorblock + patreon. Gives the creators a bigger cut and I still don't see ads. I'm currently at $15/mo across all creators but judging by Louis Rossmann's video on lifetime ad revenue per user it doesn't seem hard to offset any loss from ad blocking (iirc he said it was like $1 of ad revenue for your lifetime of watching a creator). So I feel pretty good about giving most of the channels I watch casually $1/mo, especially when patreon's cut is so much smaller than youtube premium's.
