YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos.
  • neia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    0·
    2 years ago

    I’d be much happier to pay if I could ensure I don’t get personalized recommendations and I could use it with yt-dlp. I can probably opt out of personalized recommendations, but I haven’t checked yet because I don’t use youtube through its main interface much.

  • Square Singer@feddit.deEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    If they really block adblockers, I will subscribe. To Nebula. It’s got everything I want, adfree (including sponsored segments), extra content and is cheaper. And the content creators get a bigger share of the money.

  • Mewio@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I wouldn’t mind ads if,

    1. They didn’t repeat the same 3 ads every few minutes on high ad videos (No It, I will not take it >:c)
    2. Moderated and removed obvious scam ads
    3. Remove ads that are disgusting or clearly inappropriate (I have seen some stuff that could be categorized as porn in youtube ads and no I do not allow them to feed me ads based on my interests)
    4. If ads were still not being actively being used to spread malware/viruses (not sure if this happens on YouTube at all but I would rather be safe then sorry)
    • loops@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      The largest issue for me is that I’ve never watched an ad and thought “I need that”. It’s just a huge waste of time that I find disrespectful and distasteful.

      That being said I haven’t watched and ad in years. A bit less then a decade now, actually.

      • nhgeek@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Advertising clearly does work on the whole or who would companies spend so much gold on it? Advertising shits in your head. It subtly influences consumers and advertisers have become quite sophisticated about it. There is a glut of advertising space available now so we see awful and ineffective ads but be assured a lot of the bigger players know what they are doing. This is why I block all ads. Well for that reason plus they are annoying as hell.

      • mrcory@beehaw.orgEnglish
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        2 years ago

        To be fair, even though ads didn’t make you want to buy anything, the tax write-off was the same.

      • mobyduck648@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        To be fair the aim of ads generally isn’t to make you go ‘oh now I’ll go and buy that’, it’s more about unconsciously planting the idea that $product exists so when you actually do want to buy something you buy that brand. It’s why ‘show me as many as you like, ads don’t work on me’ is complete rubbish and the only real solution is blocking them entirely and laws that restrict where and when they may be shown.

        A particularly egregious example of psychologically manipulative advertising would be ‘Joe Camel’ who was nominally just a fun mascot but in reality existed to advertise cigarettes to children so they’d buy Camels when they were old enough. Given the prevalence of really awful advertising in the present day Big Tech really does deserve the increasing comparisons with Big Tobacco I think.

    • raphael@lemmy.mira.pmEnglish
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      2 years ago

      And it would be nice if ads would not be played with an insane volume. Every time one sneaks by my uBlock it blasts my ears out.

    • ursakhiin@beehaw.orgEnglish
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      2 years ago

      I was late to the vanced game because I was very willing to put up with the ads for a long while. But yeah, the number of commercial breaks in a 10 minute video became insane.

      • mariom@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        This, and this is why few years ago I didn’t care about yt ads on my TV. I had like 3-4 ads, 15 sec each for an hour of content, ads only between videos, not in the middle.

        However, suddenly there was 3-4 ads before each video, and many times the ads started to be longer than videos.It feels like they are trying to push me into subscribing to paid YouTube by making the free version unusable without an adblock. And now they are even trying to make me disable my adblock?

    • nackmack@plesiosaur.net
      0·
      2 years ago

      @Mewio @talos This, and
      - do not show me ads for praegeru / hey you’re queer, you should stop being queer

      which was absolutely a thing that was happening to me before I was blocking ads on yt

  • mog77a@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Yep, got selected for this test and I thought my network went down.

    Had to do nearly 30 mins of debugging until I realized it was youtube actively withholding JUST the video. Took some effort but managed to get them to send the videos again after resetting a bunch of things.

    I refuse to view ads and will go to the ends of the earth to make that happen.

    Paying is most certainly an option, but only when that becomes the ONLY option.

    I’ve been using an adblocker since ads starting becoming more intrusive and the internet has progressed so much that it’s become generally unusable without one. I remember when a mobile ad popped up on my phone and it straight up startled me.

  • nottheengineer@feddit.deEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Seems fair enough, I’ve personally been freeloading for a while. Youtube is irreplacable, so there’s not much we can do.

    • naeap@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      didn’t know about piped, thanks for the recommendation!

      anything to know about before setting it up?
      like some pitfalls or hiccups?

  • Grizzzlay@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I imagine folks wouldn’t have a problem with this if the ads weren’t already so aggressive. Numerous ads before and during the content break it up too much. And if the content is extremely short form, it completely ruins the experience.

    The number of ads and their length should be proportional to the length of the video. And any creator doing built-in ads should also not be able to inject a bunch of other ads. Burying content is an easy way to get avoided.

    Print media had limits for advertisements, heck, in magazines they were premium real estate for the finest graphic designers to put together incredible imagery to get your attention. This level of care (not necessarily images or what have you) has yet to translate to the web.

    • lixus98@beehaw.orgEnglish
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      2 years ago

      It makes the servive inconvenient and annoying to use. I just want to watch the video, not watch a 60s ad that us totally irrelevant to me.

    • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.orgEnglish
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      2 years ago

      Are you saying your threshold for ads and empty foreshadowing hype is somehow under 99%? I sure do love me an ad-blocked, sponsor-blocked video that still somehow manages to waste 10 minutes to learn “no” or “I don’t know, either.”

      • GhostMagician@beehaw.orgEnglish
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        2 years ago

        That’s when the skip to highlight option comes in handy. And if a video doesn’t have it I end up contributing so next person can save time.

    • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.orgEnglish
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      2 years ago

      Unrelated, online ads seem to go out of their way to insist that there’s nothing to be learned from print ad stacks. Which is a shame, because I’ve personally placed an irregular shape ad in the middle of a broadsheet page and placed stories around it in the manner least like to confuse readers. Guess what the verdict was back then?