Frustrated YouTube viewers seek explanation for hour-long unskippable ads (Update: Statement)
YouTube ads are getting more frustrating, with some users reporting unskippable ads that are nearly an hour long. Are ad blockers to blame?
While the company stops short of directly saying as much, it sure feels like the preposterously long ads we’re seeing here are an example of one tool in Google’s arsenal for effectively disabling YouTube playback for violators of the site’s ToS.
That makes no sense at all. It isn't like skipping ads results in a black screen for the length of the ad.
People with adblockers aren't going to see hour long ads or black screens when they don't see ads in the first place.
deleted by creator
I think Google doesn't care about that at all.
They most likely pay peanuts compared to you for "bandwidth" (which for them is more of an electricity cost and trough-output allocation than a specific numeric value like consumers and smaller companies have). You also cache the video on your own device making the multiple tab thing useless if you don't know what you're doing. And Google can also just block you when they attack their servers, move traffic around, and so much more advanced stuff that protects their infrastructure.
tl;dr: Trying to boycott Google by trying to waste their resources is useless.
The YouTube owner explains that normal non-skippable in-stream ads are limited to just 15 seconds in length.
This is bullshit. I don't use an ad-blocker and often get a full minute of ad. And an extra minute if I happen to pause the stream for like 30 seconds and come back to it.
This is bullshit. I don't use an ad-blocker
You should be kinder to yourself.
I consider the internet unusable without an ad blocker, ESPECIALLY youtube. I can't imagine life without it. It would be like camping without a tent, I guess I could get by but it can really suck depending on where you go.
Not using a real ad blocker (read: PiHole or UBlockOrigin, fuck AdBlockPlus) is a serious security threat this day in age. Do yourself a favor and get that set up ASAP.
Using the internet without an ad blocker is like fucking every sex worker in Vegas without a condom.
Practice safe internet.
This message has not been sponsored by Firefox or uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger or Decentral Eyes, but if they want to throw some money my way I would accept.
You're pretty much asking for it by not using an ad blocker. Want it to stop? Boycott the ads.
What?! You are forced to watch an ad if you pause it for too long?!
Jfc i hate this gods damned timeline
This is bullshit. I don’t use an ad-blocker.
You're right. It IS bullshit that you don't use an adblocker. It's kind of like saying "This is bullshit! I don't use oven mitts as I take hot metal trays out of the oven! Why am I the only one getting burned???"
You’re misunderstanding. They are calling out the claim of 15 seconds explicitly, they aren’t necessarily complaining about the ads.
Don’t hand wave their statement by arguing against something they aren’t talking about.
Watch Youtube on the Brave Browser and you'll get zero ads.
Are ad blockers to blame?
Why do you make me hit you?
No no no.....don't hit them. That leaves a mark. Instead, hold them down, and tickle them for an hour.
Then if they try to go to the police, and say "they tickled me!" the cops will just laugh. And, no marks.
The only reason adblockers would be to blame would be because Google wanted to make up for lost revenue, similar to the myth of high end department stores having high prices because they expect their customers to shoplift.
While their statement is entirely correct, they're still wrong. YouTube is basically unusable without an ad blocker. Multiple 10 to 15 second long unskippable ads before the video even starts, and unless you watch videos all the way through you end up watching as much ad as you do content. It is damn near impossible to hop around between videos trying to find the one you want because of the pre-roll ads on every vid. On the other hand, with an ad block enabled YouTube is actually quite nice. The engagement algorithm is fucking trash of course but if you know what you're looking for and you go directly to it it's pretty good.
Do you habitually not watch videos all the way through, or am I misunderstanding your comment?
No judgement, you obviously should consume media in the manner you find most enjoyable, but once I start and enjoy a video - YouTube or otherwise - I tend to get invested and want to watch as much as is available.
If you're looking for tutorials or other immediately applicable information, you've often got to skip a LOT of bullshit before even determining if this video is relevant to you.
"Hey everybody it's Mike from Mike's the guy named Mike, it's a snowy day out there, I got my coffee, took my dog for a walk, it's been the morning of a day, and now I'm out here in the garage and I figured I'd make a video about a topic a bunch of you have been asking me about. You guys have been asking me a lot lately "Hey, Mike's the guy named Mike, could you show us how to properly lick a drill press?" Well let's find out.
10 second title screen because Mike thinks he's making TV
"So a lot of you guys have been asking me "Hey, Mike's the guy named Mike, could you show us the right way to lick a drill press?" Before we get into that, be sure to leave a like, drop a comment below and be sure to subscribe. It'll really help me out more than you can think..."
19 minutes into a 21 minute video and there hasn't been a drill press on screen yet.
Three weeks later Mike's the guy named Mike along with his entire family is killed in a rock slide. The UN declares it an international day of celebration.
What was I talking about?
When I'm 'watching a video' I watch it all the way thru. However often I'm looking for something specific, like how to do something, and a lot more tutorials are now in video form than written (which I don't love but whatever). In that situation I'm usually looking for a specific piece of information which often requires scrubbing around in multiple videos. Same thing if I'm doing research on a product, while I might watch a review will the way through I'm more often looking for some specific things like video of the interface or does it have some specific setting or can I set it up without needing a phone app or cloud account. That requires scrubbing around in multiple videos to see bits of the setup UI. Unusable if each video has an ad
While the company stops short of directly saying as much, it sure feels like the preposterously long ads we’re seeing here are an example of one tool in Google’s arsenal for effectively disabling YouTube playback for violators of the site’s ToS.
I don't get it. When my adblocker works, I don't get to see this shit. Only if it fails I'llbe confronted with hour-long ads, so the incentive to find a better blocker is even higher?
I either watch YouTube without ads or don't watch at all. We need a new platform for videos.
Tell you the truth, once upon a time I really didn't mind the ads. In fact I was quite happy to support the creators that I like with watching the ads that appeared on their videos. But then YouTube started getting smarmy by blocking my suggestions because I didn't use history on my account. And then there's the problem of the ads getting longer. At which point I got fed up and downloaded the adblock software to stop seeing this garbage. And then this little war broke out over ads on the platform.
Quite frankly, so long as the people who make the software to block ads continue to do that kind of work I will continue to download their software and make Google spend boatloads of their own money to try to block the blockers. Because the blockers aren't going anywhere. Not to mention that the blockers were not quite as popular before Google started this little campaign. And now they have made people so hyper aware of the fact that they can actually go out and find some way to skip these stupid ads that they've basically dug their own grave. Broadcast TV spent decades on this failed quest.
I was the exact same way. I could justify watching ads to support the people I watched, but then I learned how little compensation a creator actually gets from one view and decided my time was more valuable. Plus I just got too used to never seeing ads and could never go back.
This video sums up the sentiment you're describing nicely.
Yeah, me too.
I liked watching ads 12 years ago, they were a funny interjection/change.
Nowadays the ads are so extremely obnoxious, it feels as if they're poisoning my mind. No way i'm even gonna watch them for a second.
Exactly right. Two 15 second ads in between shows two midstream 15 to 30 second ads, I was perfectly fine with watching those ads.
When they started letting content creators pick the number of ads, and they started letting more than 30 seconds of ads per break, now I have incentive to block them.
Capitalism dictates that they need to make 20% more every year. They cannot continue to get 20% more ad revenue every year without increasing ads substantially.
When a handful of companies owns everything and they can no longer buy new companies up to make more money, They can't make their numbers. All they can do is gut us for the last 20% and then go out of business.
Peertube looks good... but has nearly no content or content creators, which is the reason Google nearly has monopoly with Youtube
The problem is hosting (storage, network) is expensive.
IIRC some platforms (feddit.org, catbox.moe) pays $1000 per month, and that's mostly just static images.
Videos is much more than that. Who pays for that?
One solution to that problem is to close YouTube on your device and do something else with your time.
Haven't seen these but my solution would be just don't watch the video. These ads may be unskippable but they aren't un-watch-something-else-able.
Explanation: they weren't using an (functional) ad blocker for some reason.
Some Alternatives:
Youtube ReVanced is flawless. It's easy to patch
I have tried using ReVanced a few times when NewPipe was down, but it never worked for me. Maybe I'll try it again.
Firefox + Ublock Origin
This right here. No longer using chromium-based browsers is a really good start.
Works on Android as well.
Good suggestions but most of the time I can't get any of these apps to work, some commenters here say differently but for me, due to YouTube's policy of "sign in to prove you're not a bot", I end up using a tor browser with cookies denied and sadly all the bullshit yt advertising of course.
NewPipe stopped working for me two weeks ago, and it seems like Google won't allow NewPipe to download Youtube's content for free anymore. I don't think Youtube/NewPipe will ever be usable again. I think we have to say goodbye to Youtube.
Did you update to 0.27.5?
Youtube is like that bully that asks for your lunch money and when you say no, they slam you into a locker.
When you say no again, they start hitting you until you finally give that lunch money.
Once you do, they will show you the others are being abused harder when they demand more money from you.
I would love to contribute to the end of youtube.
To me, the value of youtube and it's music is far below the €18 it costs to get me and my wife ad free. My internet costs roughly that and offers a lot of possibilites, so why should i pay double for a service that supplies about 1 millionth of what the internet itself has to offer, especially considering my wage has barely changed while i watch my rent and groceries triple in cost.
Y'all need to realize there is an end to my money, you can't keep taking.
I'm laughing at their YouTube's response. Obviously someone used a thesaurus to write it and didn't know that "incalcitrant" is not even the word, no major dictionaries list it. It's like using irregardless instead of regardless The word they YouTube wanted is recalcitrant.
And it's very telling that they YouTube used that word because it shows they think they are King.
Recalicitrant:
Stubbornly resistant to authority or control.
Unwilling to obey orders or to do what should be done.
Resisting authority or control; not obedient or compliant.
Edit: I'm laughing at YouTube's response. I thought that was clear by context.. I guess people who didn't read the article didn't get that? Maybe it was paywalled to them?
Words matter, and by using the one they did, YouTube is basically saying that they demand people obey them.
Youtube is like that bully
Except no one is forcing you to face that bully.
You can simply stay away.
Yeah, I don't have much sympathy for this dork. You don't need to watch YouTube.
Most people are lazy and not willing to make their life less comfortable. If they were, a lot of problems in big tech would not even exist. That's why people still buy apple, use WhatsApp and microsoft instead of the free alternatives - because its less comfortable.
They want change, but are unwilling to be a factor in causing that change.
Look, I don't disagree with you. YouTube has many flaws and they've rapidly enshittified to increase monetization. But YouTube is a far more complex operation than your ISP. It took a decade to start making a profit on YouTube.
The amount of hardware behind it is insane. The amount of work behind it is insane. A lot of that work is performed by really expensive software engineers in the US and Europe.
It was never sustainable from the get-go. Not with a single pre-watch ad and no premium tier, anyway. They HAD to add more ads and a premium ad-free tier. Where I disagree with them is the amount of ads and the cost of the premium tier.
The big cloud providers (including Google) have grown so big, they don't use ISPs in the traditional sense to connect their data centers. They run their own subsea cables between continents to improve connectivity. Whether or not you like the companies, they put a LOT of work into keeping you on their platforms. Of course this is for Google Cloud customers, but YouTube basically IS a Google Cloud customer. Just an in-house one.
Well, you see, there's this thing called capitalism...
Right but capitalists understand people don't actually want to watch ads so they know there's another limit to how long they can be.
The history of advertising indicates otherwise, as does Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Capitalists will always push the limits, ever seeking to maximize profits.
However upper management appears to want to hold royal court and subjugate their serves (the worker pool), since the goal of profit maximization set by shareholder primacy contraindicates common practices like micromanagement, over-surveillance of the workforce (keylogging, and prohibition of private use of the internet) and crunching, all which reduce workforce efficiency (by a lot) and yet are typical.
In the 1980s, when Reagan deregulated children's programming, a lot of shows that were essentially half-hour-long commercials (say, the entire Transformers franchise) were released and sold a lot of toys. The weird thing is when we oversaturate a generation with commercials, they develop a tolerance to them, and the marketing industry has been losing that battle since the 1950s, when an hour long show would have a thirty-second sponsor spot.
I remember when they were like 5 seconds, and I thought that was fair.
They force paying customers ( yt music premium & yt premium ) to disable ad blockers, too. Why? If I accordingly to the contract shouldn't get any ads why they would need to punish for blocking ads which shouldn't exist :-)?
You aint getting the ads but they still need you to load the trackers mate.
It is for your own safety, taker your pants off, boy
I pay for YT premium and use unlock origin + privacy badger and don't see any ads on YT.
They don't. I use ad blockers and pay for a premium subscription. Everything works fine without disabling the blockers.
They do very often, not every time but they do. I faced it several times so I did finish my subscriptions (both youtube music and youtube premium)
We’ve launched a global effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience.
By drastically increasing the rates every 6 months. Raising it past the prices of actual production streaming services. And paying the people making the content less and less money, until they have to put their own ads and their own content.
uBlock Origin works wonders. I haven't seen a YouTube ad since I installed it.
I haven't read the article, but surely this is an accident? I have almost no faith left in our capitalistic society, but surely even Youtube understands that nobody is going to watch an hour long ad, right?
The most mysterious one to me happened in 2015 or so. I was watching Zero Punctuation, and it served me an hour long computer networking lecture as an ad. Like, some Indian guy delivering a power point presentation. I was like, what's the monetization strategy here, guys? Did this dude pay you to serve his lectures as ads? What?
A lot of people leave YouTube running in the background, so they might listen to it.
just make it a subscription service already and see how many people remain...
They did. The subscription service still shows ads.
This is not true.
Do you mean the promoted content done by the youtubers themselves? Because there are no YouTube ads when you use Premum.
And Premium recently came out with a feature that makes it really easy to skip the promotional content.
They have and most users are still around because the alternatives are far too light on content. The creators drive the show, not the users.
You do know you can subscribe already, right?
what I mean is a model where a subscription is required to watch anything. Even that is more graceful than the hacky 1 hour long youtube video solution to their problems.
Can someone donate a large sum to peertube please
No but I'll start making some content for Peertube and contribute a modest amount to the instance I upload to. Fair?
There's a chance ad blockers are eating up the 'Skip' button while also failing to block the ad.
A CHANCE?
Only trash adblockers like Adblock Plus and Adguard have that "chance". uBlock Origin the goat fr frf
I don't think Adguard is trash. It's just not as good as UBO.
Youtube when I use Ublock Origin on my Thinkpad and ReVanced on my Pixel:
Any reason for thinkpad and pixel?
I am wondering the same, mentioning the specific hardware makes very little sense, when it could just be mentioned as Linux/Windows/PC and Android/GrapheneOS/etc.
It would arguably be more informative too for people looking for alternatives for their device platforms.
Grayjay is my new hotness
I didn't have a problem with using YouTube Premium, but Google is doing a lot of shitty practices. The latest is purging Google Maps reviews in collusion with local authorities for private interests. Maybe don't be part of a shitty monopoly while trying to push this sort of bullshit onto us?
Any suggestions for avoiding Google maps reviews? The best I can think of is looking for threads on local subreddits for e.g. restaurants. Unfortunately there's not much of a local community on the fediverse yet.
It's a practical monopoly due to how they've exploited their Android presence in the mobile market. The only viable alternative is Yelp. The biggest problem is getting people to jump on the same platform and to leave reviews, and Google does this with mobile location tracking, even prompting the user when they think they've been remotely near a location at times. Maybe it does need a fediversed alternative, it is quite the unaddressed monopoly.
Unhappy with the current Map statu quo? Join OSM contributors with the gamified app Street Complete (also available on fdroid)
No problem with ads with https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ Or youtube revanced :)
Greed.
Hour long unskippable ads? You have to show me that video where this happens
I got the entire bee movie once, but it was skippable.
So did I. And weirdly it kept getting faster and faster.
It once happened to me around 8 years ago. I just had to update the page and got a normal ad. Dumb past-me not using unlock Origin
I came across a few days ago with Pipepipe, which is a Newpipe Hard fork with sponsorblock. It seems that it is better maintained than Newpipe ( Newpipe stops working sometimes ), and has more features. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/InfinityLoop1309.NewPipeEnhanced/
Sharing another app suggestion(s) for Android: Tubular [0] or the more up-to-date LastPipeBender [1].
Both apps differ from NewPipe and its variants by integrating with PeerTube along with YouTube, apart from providing features like SponsorBlock and ReturnYouTubeDislike.
I have started using PeerTube much more often as my subscriptions from YouTube and PeerTube are now shown together, which makes for a seamless and superior experience altogether.
[0] https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular [1] https://github.com/MaintainTeam/LastPipeBender
How about this, do a profit sharing agreement with channels. If a channel makes money from YouTube, YouTube gets a cut, and let the channel decide whether to run ads, use sponsor segments, post affiliate links, etc. If they choose to not monetize at all, they pay a monthly fee for hosting.
Using Youtube without Revanced or uBlock is like using a phone without a case.
Eh, using a phone w/o a case is reasonable. I'd liken it more to watching live TV. Why do that in the era of streaming services when you can (well, could) avoid ads and watch exactly what you want instead of whatever slop the network decides you should watch?
I dropped all my subs and only have youtube premium. I hate ads and I watch a lot of tubes. I don't feel bad about it since they share revenue with creators.
Damn, lemmy is over here upset that you pay for something you like and use frequently.
YouTube creators have said many times they get a lot more from a premium view compared to a regular one.
Same. I feel my family gets more than enough value out of Premium between their video, music, and other services to make the subscription worthwhile.
I felt bad about it so I stopped using YouTube directly/with ads because of being part of Google and too closely tied to politics/current admin. Same with Amazon, Apple, Meta, and X. My wallet is the last voice I have at this point.
If you watch a lot of educational content, nebula shares half of its revenue with creators. Even if they get bought out, half of the proceeds will go to creators.
Same here, though I'm slowing down on watching. My son and I love YouTube music as well, we share tunes regularly and I like the recommendation feed. I use Linux and wish there was a more libre solution, but it seems lemmy doesn't like paying for anything whatsoever.
Ads on YouTube? I don't know what ur talking about. If people are getting ads then as far as I'm concerned that's a skill issue.
Ads in the modern world are an idiot tax. And those of us who don't pay that tax need the idiots to keep paying our tab.
it's a tax on all of us whether you personally see them or not. those ads control the idiots.
I don't use ad blockers ..... I've gone back to my old cable TV habits from the 90s .... use the mute button and take a toilet break, get a drink from the kitchen, check your social media feed, knit a sweater, talk to your spouse .... then unmute and keep watching.
The bonus is that if you happen to miss the restart, you can rewind back to what you missed ... we never had that in the 90s. Sure PVR existed but not everyone had one.
When using youtube, that's a break every 5 minutes. More frequent if the videos are shorter.
I also find that I'm using Youtube less and less and just watch full professionally made programs, documentaries or shows. I'm getting to the point of wondering why I watch a bunch of mindless junk while being interrupted by even more mindless junk advertising for hours on end.
It's weird because I feel like I'm taking back my time to watch all the shows and stuff I wanted to watch in the 90s over cable TV but never had access. If I cut all the stupid time I use to watch junk on Youtube, now I have time to watch all that stuff I wanted to watch a long time ago.
This is what finally pushed me to get an ad blocker for YT. Just pure greed.
Maybe he has frequent toilet needs... 🕳
