Comment by labrador
Comment by labrador 2 days ago
I'd gladly pay for YouTube without ads if I trusted that it would remain ad free, but the track record from various companies on this is not good.
Comment by labrador 2 days ago
I'd gladly pay for YouTube without ads if I trusted that it would remain ad free, but the track record from various companies on this is not good.
I paid premium a few months, then they added shorts and there was no way to block them, so I installed a blocker and stopped paying for it.
I've been paying for YouTube premium for probably 2 years now. Never had any inserted ads. Only the "this video is sponsored by" stuff, which you can just skip over.
I can't possibly go back to non-Premium YouTube, and if they mess around with Premium I'll probably be moving on from YouTube.
Paying to avoid ads just makes your attention even more valuable to them. Always block them unconditionally and without any payment.
Ads are a violation of the sanctity of our minds. They are not entitled to our attention. It's not currency to pay for services with.
Or rather, don't use YouTube without paying.
Youtube isn't free, and unlike a simple blog, requires tons of infrastructure and content creation. None of that is free, and people wanting that to be free is why we're in adscape hell.
Edit: I'd love for a competitor to youtube, but there isn't. Rumble isn't a real competitor, and none of my favorite channels place their content there either.
I wish there was a youtube alternative that was more of a federation, but every attempt I've seen of federations have been mess.
> Youtube isn't free
Then charge for it like the other streaming services. If they send me ads, I'll block and delete them, manually or automatically, and I won't lose a second of sleep over it.
> requires tons of infrastructure and content creation
Not our problem. It's up to the so called innovators to come up with a working business model. If they can't, they should go bankrupt.
That’s quite a stretch. I loathe ads as much as anyone else here, but I don’t consider being exposed to them as violating the sanctity of my mind (is my mind even sacrosanct, such that it could be violated?) it’s just something I don’t like.
And yes, attention is absolutely a currency that can be used to pay for things. Like any other voluntary transaction, no one is entitled to my attention unless we both voluntarily agree to it.
That implies voluntarily paying attention to adverts, as an informal contractual obligation. You aren't allowed on Youtube any more because you haven't been allowing the adverts to influence you enough. You can't look away or think about something else, that's cheating on the deal.
> I don’t consider being exposed to them as violating the sanctity of my mind
I do. I think it's a form of mind rape. You're trying to read something and suddenly you've got corporations inserting their brands and jingles and taglines into your mind without your consent. That's unacceptable.
> attention is absolutely a currency that can be used to pay for things
No. Attention is a cognitive function. It has none of the properties of currency.
These corporations are sending you stuff for free. They are hoping you will pay attention to the ads. At no point did they charge you any money. You are not obligated to make their advertising campaigns a success.
They are taking a risk. They are assuming you will pay attention. We are entirely within our rights to deny them their payoff. They sent you stuff for free with noise and garbage attached. You can trash the garbage and filter out the noise. They have only themselves to blame.
Advertisements have been proven countless times to be a form of psychological manipulation, and a very potent one that works very well. After all, if it didn't work we wouldn't be seeing ads crop up literally every-fucking-where, including these days even in our very own night sky in the form of drone lightshows. The ad companies have huge teams of mental health experts in order to maximize the reach & impact of their advertisements on the general populace.
Ads are so powerful that they've even managed to twist the truth about plenty of horrific shit happening to the point of affecting the health and safety of real people, sometimes literally on a global scale. Chiquita bananas, De Beers, Nestle, Oil & Gas companies, and must I remind you of Tobacco companies (and surprise surprise, the same people who were doing the ads for Big Tobacco are the ones doing ad campaigns for O&G companies now)? There have been SO MANY examples from all these companies of using advertisements to trick and manipulate people & politicians, oftentimes just straight up lying, like the Tobacco companies lying about the adverse health effects despite knowing for decades what the adverse health effects were, Or Oil & Gas companies lying about climate change via comprehensive astroturfing & advertisement campaigns [1].
This all barely scratches the surface, too, especially these days where you have platforms like Google and Meta enabling genocides, mass political interference and pushing things like crypto scams, gambling ads and other similarly heinous and harmful shit to the entire internet.
The TL;DR of all of this is that yes, advertisements absolutely are psychological warfare. They have been and continue to be used for absolutely vile and heinous activities, and the advertisers employ huge teams of people to ensure that their mass influence machine runs smoothly, overtaking everyone's minds slowly but surely with nothing but pure lies fabricated solely to sell people products they absolutely do not, and will never need.
Can you elaborate a bit? Why would that make my attention more valuable than other's?
If you are a paying subscriber, you are self-identifying as (likely) a higher net-worth. The problem for ad platforms allowing paid opt-out is that the most valuable users leave the network.
Then they have to go to advertisers and say, “advertise on our network where all the wealthier people are not.” A brand like Tiffany’s or Rolex (both huge advertisers) aren’t going to opt into that.
Because by paying you are demonstrating you have more than enough disposable income to waste on their extortion. You're paying for the privilege of segmenting yourself into the richer echelons of the market. You're basically doing their marketing job for them and paying for the privilege.
At some point some shareholder value maximizing CEO is going to sit down and notice just how much money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to paying customers like you. It's simply a matter of time.
Take a third option. Don't pay them and block their ads. Block their data collection too. It's your computer, you are in control.
You gotta love the mental gymnastics people will go through to convince themselves that not paying and blocking ads is the morally correct thing to do.
If you truly have those beliefs the right moral action is to not use YouTube at all but god forbid you'd have to make any sort of sacrifice.
The point is most people will never pay. That makes the Adblock/anti-adblock war inevitable for them. If you can afford it, you sidestep it. If you can’t or won’t, you don’t. Pretending there is some point where those folks would pay is a little delusional in my view.
I'm not pretending. I know most people won't pay. The point is it doesn't matter.
They're giving their stuff away for free instead of charging money for it. They gambled on the notion that people would "pay" by watching ads. Unfortunately for them, attention is not currency to pay for services with. We will resist their attempts to monetize our cognitive functions. The blocking of advertising is self defense.
They have absolutely nobody but themselves and their own greed to blame. Instead of charging money up front like an honest business, they decided to tap into that juicy mass market by giving away free sfuff. Their thinking goes: if I give them free videos with ads, then they will look at the ads and I will get paid. That's magical thinking. There is no such deal in place. We are not obligated to look at the ads at all. They don't get to cry about their gamble not paying off.
> They have absolutely nobody but themselves and their own greed to blame
They’re one of the most profitable media platforms on the planet. They’ll be fine. Nobody is crying. There are just willing participants—as you say, on both sides—in what I consider a pretty silly battle one can opt out of with a small amount of money.
They're profitable because people look at ads. By blocking their ads, we are reducing the return on investment of their advertising platform, ideally to zero. Extensions such as AdNauseam even push it into negative value territory by increasing costs for no benefit.
Ad blockers are an existential threat to them.
Can't you just stop subscribing when that happens? You aren't signing a 5 year contract.
So if one supermarket sold expired food, we should avoid another supermarket that has not been doing that for 10 years? Google/Youtube doesn't own Netflix. If anything, the reasonable response would be to unsub Netflix and sub its competitors, like, uh, Youtube.
No, if all the big supermarkets sell expired food from time to time to meet profitability expectations, there is no reason to believe one will be so unique as to be able to resist using the same industry standard, especially when it already has a much bigger expired food business
So pay now and stop paying if they introduce ads? It's not like it's a lifetime subscription.
I've been paying for it for a year+ for my girlfriend who was watching more ads than content and we've never seen ads since.
They rolled out the Chrome "kill adblockers" update globally then unleashed the new wave of YouTube "anti-adblock" a month later. While in a literal losing court case thats suggesting Chrome be split out from Google as a whole. They must be so confident nothing can touch them.
Youtube premium has remained adfree as far as I know.
Best to try it out yourself. I can't watch Youtube with Ads ever anymore.
If a 100% Ad-free youtube premium at the current price point ever went away, something would have to change about the ads.
You also give money to the creators you watch by watching ads or watching with YouTube premium.
You also can't block ads on iPhones, which a majority of the developed world uses. My girlfriend has never watched a YouTube video on something other than an Apple device for example.
I'd rather send money to the people I want to support than fund a middleman
> which a majority of the developed world uses
... the USA? It's not a majority in any other country that I'm aware of
I've got a Eurocentric view though, I have e.g. no idea if Singapore or China has a majority of Apple users or where you draw the line on 'developed' (critique on the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Factfulness&oldid...)
>You also can't block ads on iPhones, which a majority of the developed world uses. My girlfriend has never watched a YouTube video on something other than an Apple device for example.
People really live like this... ? Like those who watch movies on their phones lmao.
Also, Brave works on iphone -> m.youtube.com adfree :)
Then again I went years not using conditioner and moisturiser for my skin, only deo... We all need tips from people who know better you know. (Im white.)
I get an ad-free YouTube experience for $0 with software. Why do you pay for it?
Because I want to actually support content creators. I also want it to be more normalized to pay for things vs having ad supported content.
I don't think you're normalizing ad-supported content when running an ad blocker
As for paying for the content you consume, most of the costs aren't on Google's side. I can understand paying for Youtube as a shortcut to hopefully giving some pennies to each person you watch, though, at least for those with no moral objection to making Google's/Youtube's monopoly in online video stronger
Then subscribe to their Patreon instead of paying YouTube.
I was a bit surprised to find that Patreon also keeps a pretty large commission. But, yeah, at least it's not owned by Google and what else are you going to do when most creators list this as their only option. I'm just confused when there's easy options like sending cash directly to their IBAN or using a nonprofit like Liberapay (they just have their own donation page and, instead of taking a cut, make money that way: https://liberapay.com/Liberapay)
Folks be adopting all sorts of irrational arguments just so they can defend their habits. Do you also prefer having middlemen in other areas such as healthcare and education?
Creators can just as easily pop a Patreon or BuyMeACoffee these days in a few clicks. In fact, most creators constantly admit that Google pays them peanuts for their view counts. But support the leviathan for reasons unknown I guess.
Plus you can block shorts. You can't do that with premium.
I got fed up and stopped paying for premium, now I get no shorts and no ads, it's a win-win.
I pay for YouTube premium for my family and there haven’t been any injected ads at all. Only the ones that the video themselves have in, which are also very annoying.
I can’t speak for the future, but I’ve had this for probably 5 years and I haven’t seen a single ad, only the videos that I’ve asked to see.
Same experience.
The family plan is nice to share with family to reduce how much everyone's exposed to ads.
In-Video sponsorships are a pain, sometimes they are chaptered out enough and can be skipped.
If I could pay for an ad-free google search I probably would. Off the shelf, not doing API calls.
<cough> SponsorBlock (https://sponsor.ajay.app/) <cough>
It works amazingly well provided a video's been out for at least a half hour or so. It also has the option to skip the "like and subscribe" parts too.
I also tried the https://dearrow.ajay.app/ extension to replace clickbait titles, but decided I'd rather know when a channel/video is too clickbait-y so I can block/unsubscribe.
I wish many of these suggestion worked for casting.
Browser extensions don't fix a chromecast skipping ads, for example. It'd have to be written into the casting client, I'd presume.
Don't let everyone responding gaslight you. YouTube Premium is absolutely stuffed with ads[0] (sorry, 'promoted content' / 'sponsorship'). The only probable explanation I have for this is that Google has successfully boiled the frog and people mentally don't even register these things as ads anymore.
And that's not to mention pretty much every single creator stuffing sponsored sections into their videos now. We have Sponsorblock for now, but I imagine Google will try to introduce random offsets at some point which will render Sponsorblock mute. Maybe an AI blocker will rise up in the future?
At any rate, fight fire with fire. Just use every bit of adblocking on desktop, Revanced on Android and hope that Revanced or Youtube++ comes to iOS 3rd party stores at some point.
[0]https://imgur.com/a/3emEhsF
Edit: since people are too lazy to click on the link and instead ram the downvote button in blind rage, image 1 and 4 contain straight up ads, unconnected to creators.
I'm honestly baffled why anyone who objects to ads would still want to use any of the official YouTube clients. Whether or not they show ads to you on YouTube, they still track your every move and use it to improve their profile of you so that they can show you ads on any of their other platforms, sell your data, or whatever other shady business they do behind the scenes to extract value from it.
Adtech cannot be trusted. I refuse to support their empire whether that's financially or with my data and attention.
And that's not to mention pretty much every single creator stuffing sponsored sections into their videos now.
Fortunately I mainly watch the videos which are not made by "creators" looking for $$$ but just people sharing something interesting and useful; the ones which have no annoying intros or outros, "like share and subscribe" drivel, and are often not much more than raw unedited content. They still exist on YouTube.
If you simply add a `-` (en-dash) between the `t` & 2nd `u` in the URL, your viewing experience automatically skips all external ads, without login/premium.
Syntax: www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w
This also works for playlists, and auto-repeats.
edit: is this getting downvoted because it works and people are worried this service might disappear should this bypass become too popular..? Just curious.
I tried paying for YouTube premium then they fucked around by not giving me all the features I paid for when I was visiting another country. There's no winning with these people.