UPDATE 2 It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!
UPDATE So as new info comes out, I'll be posting it here. It seems as if this Rollout Has Several Parts.
Part 1
You get a popup message over top of your video, blocking the screen:
- This is the first sign. If you see this popup AND are logged into a YouTube account, your account has been selected.
- At this stage you can likely close or block these messages with an adblocker.
Part 2
This message will change, indicating that you have 3 remaining videos to watch without ads.
Will insert photo once one has been found
- At this stage your adblocker will imminently stop working in 3 videos time.
- Personally using Firefox + uBlock Origin and tweaking filters and updates does not even fix it.
Part 3
None of the video loads now, everything looks blank.
- At this stage you must tred new ground to avoid ads. I have posted methods in the comments. If you want to bypass this end page, read down there.
End of Update
YouTube has started rolling out anti-adblock to users inside the United States, which means that they are preparing to roll this out to the entire country. Personally, I have been blocked already. I want to gauge how common this occurrence is.
How are they supposed to run a free service without ads, especially one as expensive to run as a video hosting website?
By making Youtube Premium worth it, both for users and creators. Make it transparent what % of the YP fee is actually going to creators, make that % actually fair, give extra features to YP users, incentivize creators to ask their viewers to collaborate with it if they actually can afford to. Youtube has reached a point where it has become a public utility, to the point that tens of millions of people use it to supplement their education or stay updated on the news. A website increasingly necessary shouldn't force someone without a penny to choose between paying what they can't afford or have their head fried up by ads.
Of course, this idea rooted in civil values is incompatible with an economic actor that sees both creators and consumers as cattle that must be milked as efficiently as possible.
If not ads then what is the free option supposed to look like. I hate ads also, but it's not like it's sustainable to run free without ads.
It looks like Lemmy and PeerTube, where people do the hard work because they care and not to make a profit off of idiots with more money than sense.
Saying it's 'impossible' is objectively false and just shows people you don't understand the world you live in.
Are creators making enough money to get by on PeerTube? The idea is interesting, but I don't see people making enough to do it full time, and I don't see how the streaming quality can be anything as good or reliable compared to something like YouTube by relying on P2P.
What does this mean?
Make a living, pay the bills.
Wikipedia has no ads yet it has a pretty large amount of spare money, and there are plenty of other free to use platforms and projects. Youtube is not Wikipedia, sure, but Wikipedia has no reason to offer Youtube Premium.
Wikipedia mostly displays text, YouTube mostly streams HD video, which one do you think costs more?
I don't care.
Do you care if the service goes down and nobody gets any videos?
As if video streaming will die with one site. One for-profit site, that's not remotely turning a profit. A vestigial organ of an advertising giant, burning money to build dependency and exploit it for control.
BitTorrent used to share more video than Netflix - despite a lack of money, despite a lack of ads, and despite being illegal. Content creators will be fine without this corporate facade.
I don't know what YouTube's market share is, but for videos that are not short TikTok style it's probably like 95%? And they are also in the TikTok short and twitch streaming areas now, so I think it would be a massive blow to video streaming if they went away.
BitTorrent just moves all the costs to the users, and users are typically not wanting to run their own video servers. They might work for tech people who don't mind running servers or already have a server they are running, but you have to think about the regular user that is probably 80% or more of the market. You can't expect to get big off relying on users to be the servers.
How things are now never ever means change is impossible.
BitTorrent did exactly that.
BitTorrent may have been big as in number of files, but as far as users and having content on demand it never got there. I remember waiting for days to get a single movie, not because my Internet was slow, but because the peers were slow.
When it comes to a YouTube replacement I don't think you are going to get big relying on users to be the servers. Nevermind the fact that the nature of how BitTorrent works means no company will allow their content on it legally.
And nothing's changed in all those years. Yeah? P2P technology couldn't get any better than 2004. The fact it was slow sometimes means we're boned forever.
Corporations already have streaming. I don't care if they come along. Their content might be there whether they like it or not.
Consider where we're having this conversation: is big even desirable? Has the dominance of one video platform been good for the internet? I'd say plainly fucking not, if killing ad blockers is even a feasible outcome. When YouTube was its own company there were a dozen competitors of similar size and quality. Google pouring money into one, so it could swallow everything and censor everyone and shove people toward right-wing propaganda, is not exactly ideal.
Has P2P changed much? I don't think it has really. I use private sites for that stuff now and it's great there, but the public stuff still seems pretty bad IMO.
Well if they don't want their content there, then you have the whole problem if it being illegal. Now you have to convince people to break the law, and go as far as to install a VPN or whatever so your ISP doesn't send you warnings. This isn't a great start for something to replace YouTube.
I think Big is required for a P2P YouTube style thing to work. You need lots of peers to stream content in decent quality. You need people to knowingly break laws and use VPNs. You need people to run their own media servers, you are asking a lot from people, all YouTube is asking you to do is watch some ads or buy premium.
Thing is, even with all their efforts they still can't make it profitable. Not sure if they release the data (doubt). But, YouTube has always been barely profitable or operating on loss. Google bought yt over 15 years ago and haven't figured out how to make money off it and arguably made it worse with their policies and algos.
Part of the problem might be all those people blocking the ads, which I wouldn't be surprised if it's a pretty big chunk of their viewers. No ads means no ad revenue, which means losing money.
Oh no! Is the company that makes 70b per quarter and is buying back 70b of shares to keep making more in trouble of only making 80b per quarter next year and not 100b? Poor babies.
Maybe instead of looking at revenue you should look at profit. Revenue means nothing if your running costs eat it all up.
Also, maybe try to look at YouTube Numbers instead of the whole parent company? The patient company being profitable isn't an excuse for the child company to lose money.
google has “fuck you” amounts of money, the minority of users using firefox mean nothing to them.
If google was having problems funding youtube, believe me, they’d stop paying creators before that would happen, and then the creators would tell us about it.
Do you really think they would stop paying creators before stopping people from bypassing the way both them and creators make money? It doesn't take a business major to see that running a free service without ads is only going to cost them money.
I think (unsure) you misunderstand. Google, and any other company’s, main goal is to make money. To achieve this goal, i’m saying that if google were to lose profits from people using ad blockers, they are more likely to extract profits from their creators than sacrifice their bottom line.
If google can’t adequately monetize their services (by losing the ad-blocking war), they can’t monetize the creators. Google is evil, but so is the economic system that causes inconvenience to be the most effective way to monetize content.
This is why i wholeheartedly support things like Patreon, Ko-Fi, etc. because that directly supports creators and means that they don’t have to completely rely on a company that no longer says “don’t be evil”.
The creators are their product, the adblock users cost everyone money and provide no benefit, why would they punish their product over the users costing them money? The adblock users aren't the bottom line, they are no benefit, and cost both YouTube and the creators in lost revenue.
That's great and all, but YouTube still has bills to pay, they can't just let you use the service free without ads, let you just give money to creators through those other services, and expect to even break even.
That’s if Google loses the ad-blocking war, hence the second paragraph, unless they manage to stuff web environment integrity/similar into their website, or if front ends like Invidious become more popular.
That’s true, but I think Google makes enough money from other things (tracking, other website’s ads) that it wouldn’t hurt them too bad. I think the recent crackdown on ad blocking is less from a large profit drop and rather to send a message to avoid the former from happening. Again though, I could be wrong about that one.
In the end though, I just want to watch and directly support my creators without being forced to waste 15 seconds of my life that I will never get back on a product I never have and never will use.
How does lemmy make money?
Also, hasn't youtube been wildly profitable for years? Profit, by definition is excess. It's what's left over after all business expense have been paid.
If youtube is profitable, why do they need more profit? Oh yeah, they don't.
Sorry this needs to be spelled out for you.
As far as I know YouTube is not that profitable, but it's hard to tell as they don't release all the numbers.
Do you make any excess money? Do you have any money left over after rent, food, etc? If you do, do you need that money? If you don't would you like to make more? Nobody wants to live with no excess money, so why should a business?
Woah dude, you're getting right into my point of projection.
Just because you want to use your excess to get even more excess, you're assuming that everyone else will. Why eschew luxurious so those who have less can have more? You'd never project that lol, cause that's not how you feel.
Have a good day, man. Hope I enlightened you a bit.
Gonna block you now cause I feel you have nothing to offer me. See ya.
So you want to live just making ends meet? Don't care about having a savings account? You would be happy with just enough to get by without any excess? I don't know anybody who would be happy with that.
If you want to run away from the conversation then go ahead. If you do happen to have some money you don't want though, since who needs to make more than what they need just to break even even, right? I'll happily take it off your hands.