YouTube puts third-party clients on notice: Show ads or get blocked
YouTube puts third-party clients on notice: Show ads or get blocked
Google would really like it if everyone just paid for YouTube Premium instead.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/
Let's pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.
The "bad" year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)
5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they've more than doubled profits.
Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they "need" the money.
It's funny how this comes after Chrome's switch to Manifest V3, which makes ad blocking not possible on Chrome and was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers. Now that Chrome users can't block ads on the first-party site, they're going after third-party clients. Such coincidental timing.
Are they going to officially allow third party apps at all? The stock app is terrible, and not just because of excessive, unskippable advertising and bizarre restrictions around background play. When you search for anything, at least half of the results are completely unrelated to what you searched for in an attempt to increase user engagement metrics. It keeps trying to get you to watch shorts in its bad TikTok clone. Sometimes it recommends unrelated shorts with disturbing thumbnails in the middle of your search results. It keeps autodetecting that the video quality should be 360p on a connection easily capable of 4k, and resetting back to 360p at the start of every new video. The UI for live streams puts things on top of other things that are more important.
Please download and archive your favorite channels and videos!
Host them yourself to watch them locally.
Especially do this for educational material, share it wide and far!
We are entering a very dark age of techno-dystopia, we need to fight it with everything we have. Pirate, seed, screen-record, download, archive, share, never give up.
Not again ... Well, let's wait a week or so for the clients to fix that.
The problem with YouTube Premium is the pricing tiers are completely out of touch with what people are willing to pay and what services they're willing to pay for.
Let me compare to Discovery+. For $9 a month, loads of shows that ran on TV for decades can be streamed at 1080p (or whatever resolution they were available in), on up to four devices at the same time. They still have some original shows that they spend money to make. This service does not have ads.
Let's also compare to Nebula, which like Discovery+ also has original content funded by the platform. Every content creator there is also an invited owner of the platform, so their cost structure is a bit different, but they still have to sustain the costs of running a streaming platform while compensating the creators of said content for views. Nebula is a microscopic $5 a month per user with no ads.
YouTube is a platform with entirely user-generated content (costs YT nothing except bandwidth) that is already supported at the free tier with a gratuitous amount of ads. This service has been available completely free with ad support for nearly two decades. The lowest "premium" tier they offer is $14 a month for one person to stream ad-free, at a better 1080p bitrate, be able to download videos or watch them in the background in the official app, pay creators for every view, and have a music streaming app thrown in for good measure. The only other tier is all the same stuff in a $22 monthly family plan for six users, but they all have to be in the same "household" or you're technically breaking TOS, so in practice it's often more like $22 for three people, and heaven forbid any of you travel for work.
Two of the "premium" features should be free anyway. You can't watch a video without downloading it at least once, so the bandwidth cost is the same. If you download it and play it more than once, that actually saves YouTube bandwidth, and therefore cost. Any video that's played more than once is probably going to be played a lot more than once, so this would add up, especially if the app downloads the ad spots ahead of time. Background play doesn't cost them any bandwidth at all and is a trivial feature to implement, so it's put behind a paywall as an artificial restriction for no other reason than to annoy users for not paying. Both of these are anti-features; to charge for them is anti-consumer. They engender spite in users, making them less willing to pay for Premium and more determined to find alternatives.
Instead of trying to figure out what people are actually willing to pay for, which is the expected behavior of a market actor, Google continues to behave like a monopoly that can dictate terms to its users. This is why people refuse to pay for Premium. If they made the anti-features free, and introduced a Premium tier that is $7 a month to one user for nothing more than better bitrate streaming with no ads, people would sign up in droves. There could be a $9 tier for streaming boxes like Roku or Chromecast that offers Premium service for any account viewed from that one specific device, without having to sign up each individual account for premium, which satisfies another niche. The $14 tier could remain for those who also want music streaming (an extra $7 is still much cheaper than Spotify premium), and the $22 tier could still be a significant value proposition for actual families.
It's not that the price offered for the $14 premium plan isn't reasonable for what it offers - the issue is that what it offers doesn't match the actual needs of many people who use adblockers or third-party clients, on top of insulting users with anti-features. Until YouTube management can be made to understand this, they will continue to screech impotently about ad-blockers while driving users away and leaving potential revenue on the table.
Fuck them. I'd rather donate quadruple the money for premium to my favourite creators directly than give a single penny to this parasitic mega corporation.
The issue is not only the ads, it's the stupid shit it throws you to keep you hooked, it's the stupid shorts that literally no one asked for, it's every stupid little thing that fights for your attention. Basically the app doesn't work for you, it works against you. That's not the case with third party apps, they have you, the user, in mind, not their profits.
See, here is the thing. Most people here like the convenience of streaming via NewPipe, Revanced or Invidious or whatever else. I do too. But as long as I can fetch video info and search videos using Invidious and download URLs/playlists with yt-dlp, I am going to give the middle finger to youtube.
Stay mad, Goolag.
Showing it the middlefinger since >half a year
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/489585-ultimate-youtube-ad-remover-and-detection-bypasser/code
https://openuserjs.org/scripts/Kraust/Youtube_Embed_Redirect
Hey Google, FUCK YOU.
Don't worry, third party clients will rectify the issue.
I personally have no problem with paying for a service. However, if I buy premium to remove the ads, YT has no longer the need to collect my data. But it is Google and they won't stop collecting. That, plus the fact that Google basically has a monopoly with youtube are the reasons I don't buy premium.
I’ve Invidious hosted on my Little Raspberry Pi 4, and using it’s WPA app on every device I got.
Zero ad + Decent UI + Access to highest video quality
That content does not belong to YouTube. And they also do not pay for 99% of it.
YouTube depends on people to use it for it's existence. They also depend on those users to upload content so that YouTube can then treat that content as if it is its own and monetize it.
If I was in such a precarious position I wouldn't go about making the experience crappy for those users that I'm desperately dependent upon.
Some of the youtube channels I watch also have channels on Peertube instances or on Odysee. Both options allow me to follow using RSS. I prefer my views to go to these platforms, so hopefully more content creators see these as viable hosts for their videos.
Peertube is also federated, so you can follow channels from your Mastodon account (and I think Lemmy too). You could also spin up your own instance if you like too.
Well, I really hope that doesn’t affect Vinegar
( Safari extension that replaces YouTube’s horrible video player with the system’s default.
It’s great, it also allows you to force Best Quality, very useful on platforms where YouTube defaults to 480p for no reason like iPadOS )
I can't wait for that platform to implode.
Imagine buying premium to watch videos riddled with ads and sponsors in the video itself.
This format just isn't making any sense for me, they would've implemented something as sponsorblock years ago
If they say like that, it means that's now is allowed to make a third party youtube client with login support?
I'd immediately install an officially sanctioned third party youtube app without shorts and without the algorithmic feed, if all i would need to do is let the phone play ads when i'm doing something else
They can try, but it is unlikley to work for long. So my general reaction is:
Never!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company shut down one of the most popular third-party apps, "YouTube Vanced," in 2022.
Vanced takes the official YouTube Android client and installs a duplicate, alternative version with a bunch of patches.
It also adds features the official app doesn't have, like additional themes and accessibility features, "repeat" and "dislike" buttons, and the ability to turn off addictive "suggestions" that appear all over the app.
Rather than going after the projects, Google says it's going to start disrupting users who are using these apps.
The company continues: "We want to emphasize that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and Ads on YouTube help support creators and let billions of people around the world use the streaming service."
If you remember back to when Google aggressively fought to keep third-party YouTube apps off of Windows Phone, the company seemed to take a similar stance against all third-party YouTube clients, even if they wanted to integrate ads.
The original article contains 344 words, the summary contains 170 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Will they actually be able to block users that watch it without logging in?
This is just ads. They know that people will fight back and found a solution.
They want some to think it's dead.
why would you NOT get youtube premium? it's $22 for 6 users and you get music and ad-free youtube it's honestly the best streaming service
i do think that channel subscriptions should include ad free watching for that channel, similar to twitch subs. so if people want to subscribe to just one channel they can get ad free viewing for that channel