Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers
Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers
YouTube's dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there's an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
From the article: “In some ways, the current situation has spurred an arms race. YouTube has inadvertently improved ad blockers, as the new knowledge and techniques gained from innovating within the YouTube platform are also applicable to other ad and tracking systems.”
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I wish more publishers and creators could move away from YouTube, and stop relying (indirectly) on YouTube's targeted ads.
There's no silver bullet today, but a mix of alternative platforms (PeerTube, Nebula, Patreon...) and different way to get a revenue (subscription, donations, sponsors and non-targetted ad segments). I believe no alternative solution is feature-complete yet. Hopefully viewers will put some resources on alternatives, not just on AdBlock technologies, and follow creators who move away from YouTube.
The problem is that YouTube will always offer the best terms for initial creators. Hosting is free, the platform will sometimes help advertise you to your likely audience, and it may offer the first way to monetize the channel. A federated system isn't going to provide nearly the same benefits.
YouTube does have the advantage of scale, I wouldn't expect a federated solution to match their condition, but I'm hoping it can become good-enought as an alternative.
PeerTube isn't going to provide a solution, they explicitly state this in their FAQ. But there's no reason why other platform couldn't handle monetization AND federate through AgtivityPub (or its successor). If Nebula or Patreon wanted, they could join the federation and make some videos accessible this way. The one holdout would be video that are only accessible to paid subscribers, they wouldn't make them freely accessible via a federation.
From the PeerTube FAQ:
the uploader can display a support button under the video [..]
We did not go any further, as we refuse to tie our code to a particular content funding method, that might not fit all communities and deter others. It's the reason why we encourage developers to use the PeerTube plugin API to create their own monetization system.
None of the three items I mentioned involved scale. Two of them mentioned cost to host and one mentioned advertising the creators' work.
The CEO of Nebula has explicitly stated he isn't creating a YouTube competitor. Nebula has a paywall which is important to its business model. It could never afford self hosting for free.
Even if PeerTube solves the hosting cost problem, you still have two advantages that a YouTube like system has over a PeerTube like system.
It's interesting that no one is bringing up Vimeo in these discussions but I remember a thing a few years back where they disabled features that would make them a YouTube alternative (private links that you could share with your Patreons only or smth?) and when ask about this they stated that their target market isn't small creators.
Anyway I would really hope that all this would bring people to Peertube like the Twitter implosion did for Mastodon and the Reddit fails for Lemmy but it doesn't seem like it.