In a fight between a corporation and a bunch of people very determined to get content for free, history shows the corporation always loses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I can’t watch YouTube without ads, I won’t watch it at all.
I guess 2023 is the year of enshittification.
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.
I use vinegar on iOS, which exchanges the youtube player with a html5 play, at least in safari. No ads there
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.
If the adds were bareable it would be different, but no.
On the plus side this should really help with my youtube addiction
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.
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.
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.
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
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