I am not saying you should have to give Google your money, but do you think the people who make content on Youtube deserve to get paid for it? Even if they make money on Patreon or Floatplane, Youtube is not a cheap service to run and you are still using it.
Pay for the stuff you use or don't use it. But you don't get to complain about companies treating you like the product.
A Youtube family plan is a fairly cheap way to access a lot of content. You also get access to Youtube Music which is... fine. That's less than $5 per user per month. If you are already there a few hours a week, it's a steal.
What's funny is that creators and Youtube get much more than 2x the amount of earnings from $5 than from all the ads you were being served. If more people paid, creators would probably resort to fewer of the much, much worse VPN or game ads that get hard-baked right into the vids.
I paid for the family plan of YouTube Premium + Google Play Music up until Google decided they'd rather use the vastly inferior YouTube Music. NewPipe + GreyJay + Ublock Origin + Patreon seems like a reasonable compromise to Google's customer hostility.
I don't love the UI of Youtube Music, but it came with a category killer feature for me: You can now grab tracks from any Youtube video.
If you consider that any track or music video ever uploaded to Youtube is now in their library, available to be thrown in any offline playlist, that's pretty cool. I have a bunch of old Japanese jazz albums that never got US distribution in one playlist. I have a bunch of random vaporwave and remixes in another. And I have another that is ambient noises for sleeping on the road.
I pay for Kagi and Nebula because these services actually give me a good experience for my money.
The last time I tried YouTube Premium, I found out that the iOS app will frequently loose your last viewed video in the background, because I turned off the playback history. I would turn it on, except it is the only way of stopping Google from using your views for, you guessed it, targeted advertising.
This makes sense, because Premium users are more attractive advertising targets. The only way to be truly safe is with an adblocker.
I feel like I'm missing something. "I turned off view history, and now the app isn't keeping any history of the views for me" seems like an odd complaint.
But the actual way to stop Google from using your view for ad targeting is just turn off personalized ads. Or - in the unlikely case you object only to use of YouTube history but not other data - there appears to be a separate control just for that:
I'd be fine with ads in the search result pages, or above, below, or on the sides of the video. The only reason I insist on blocking them is that they keep me from watching the video.
I paid for YouTube premium for a long time (and vocally advocated for others to do the same here on HN). Google enshittified the subscription so badly... increasing the cost significantly while adding unrelated services (like Google Music) and a dozen other things over the past... decade?
The last straw was the most recent price increase for no benefit other than more revenue for Google. I unsubscribed, and mostly stay away from YouTube now. The value isn't worth the cost, whether its paid using with my attention or my dollars.
I am so confused by these Google anti-ad articles.
I run Firefox + ublock origin + decenteraleyes + sponserblock + privacy-badger. I never see ads anywhere.
Since these Google article started coming out, I fear youtube is going to stop working... And yet, through the last few months, I haven't noticed any changes. All videos play instantly and with no ads.
Ad blocking is personal infosec. We've seen malware get delivered by ads, and people getting tracked by ads. This is a losing battle for YouTube.
I suggest that YouTube should work on proving to the users that advertisers are trustworthy. You know, that unlike LiveIntent, an advertiser will allow and acknowledge a complaint, has a contact address, is not arrogant as hell.
To the people saying it's your fault just pay for it. You do know they'll end up putting ads in to the paid versions too right? Why wouldn't they? It's free money for them.
We don't know that. In fact, the product has existed for almost 10 years, and they still haven't added ads.
The obvious reason they haven't added in ads is that the subscription model is more profitable, and the lack of ads is the only reason anyone is actually subscribing. The moment that stops being the case and they start showing ads on videos again, even at a lower frequency, is the moment they burn a $10 billion / year business to the ground.
So I don't think it'll happen. But if it does, so what? I'll just cancel my subscription for the future, and likely stop using YouTube entirely. It won't erase the benefits I had from the subscription until then. Like, they can't make me retroactively watch ads.
Even if you pay for YouTube premium you might still want to have adblocker on simply due to privacy concerns. Tracking is pervasive.
Infrastructure might not be free, but for many, many years these companies built their hegemonic position by pretending it was free. Now they pull the rug under people.
Tell me though, what alternatives there are for people who want to watch long form videos there are? Yes, you have nebula and a couple more; but YouTube is still king. In many cases watchers don't get to choose the platform. So yes, they could simply stop watching. But it's not an ideal situation and all because you don't agree with the way the platform earns money.
I think people should use adblocker. The way these platforms monetise our data is not something most of us chose, and the option to circumvent their practices is out there. It's a cat and mouse game, and we'll see who comes out on top.
> Even if you pay for YouTube premium you might still want to have adblocker on simply due to privacy concerns.
I use adblockers and Youtube Premium. Youtube Premium doesn't care about adblockers.
But that's still not a great argument because Youtube as a first-party is still going to collect all of your data even with adblockers. All you are doing is impacting their ability to make money.
Ads are intrusive, and in some cases, overtly harmful [1]; Especially YouTube. YouTube does have stated guidelines about these things (as well as scams, malware-advertisements, etc.), but these aren't effective, as seen in the article; They're just words.
AdBlockPlus (ABP), famously has criteria for "Acceptable Ads" [2], which provide some commonsense criteria for what ads should be acceptable. Some discussion indicates that ABP is blocking many ads on YouTube [3]. QED It is not reasonable to assume Youtube is adhering to this reasonable guideline for ads.
And so, if ads can be harmful, and the platform ignores reasonable steps to address objections to advertising, all we're left with is forcing a behaviour that works for us.
[1]
Profiting from Hate: Platforms’ Ad Placement Problem
Google's been siphoning value out of people's data (the entire North American continent and beyond) through dark patterns for the better part of 2 decades now.
Adblockers are a form of civil protest against that practice.
Maybe infra isn't free, but how much does the average person consume in terms of bandwidth compared to how much value Google gets out of their data?
Proper civil protest would be not to use any site that has google analytics. And when you find one that has that you have to use spam the owning company until they remove it.
> Google's been siphoning value out of people's data (the entire North American continent and beyond) through dark patterns for the better part of 2 decades now.
... but if users start paying for the services they use, they reverse the business incentives. "If the product is free, you are the product"
> how much value Google gets out of their data
The value of your data is in serving you ads. If they don't serve you ads, you have no value to Youtube.
They don't stop the incentive though. e.g. TVs that cost several thousand dollars have ads (and almost certainly tracking) built in now. Cars that cost 10s of thousands of dollars track your location and sell it. The advertising industry is a cancer and should be blocked without a second thought. Especially if you have kids; it is a moral imperative to keep ads away from them.
The reality is flipped: block all ads and tracking from your life and help others to do the same. Then companies like Google/Facebook that dump free services onto the market and make it impossible for ethical companies to exist in the space will have to start charging money.
YouTube has existed for 19 years, and started showing ads within 9 months of the initial launch. The premium service for no ads has existed for 10 years.
There was never any explicit or implicit promise of "everything for free, with no ads", and you using a technical measure to avoid the ads that have been there for almost two decades doesn't create a promise either. Like, if you shoplifted for a week and didn't get caught, do you feel entitled to never pay at the store again?
Comparing my control over my own computer with shoplifting is grotesque.
I hit a Google endpoint and it sends me data. Google has no control over what my browser does with that data, nor should it.
They do have the right to refuse to send me that data if they decide I'm doing something with it they don't like, such as blocking the ads. As arms races go, I like my odds.
The original claim was that there was some kind of a "everything for free without ads" promise and that blocking adblockers was "going back on a promise". The first claim is demonstrably untrue. The second seems pretty inconsistent with your view that they're "free to not send you data".
It seems pretty clear the OP was saying that YouTube had no right to try to prevent adblocking, and that the reason was that since there was a time they didn't prevent adblocking, it created some kind of implicit promise to allow it for ever.
In that context, I think the analogy to shoplifting is pretty fair. I'm not saying that you're a thief. I'm sure you're not. I'm saying that you taking something for no compensation doesn't create an obligation for the target to continue allowing you to do continue taking it for free, forever.
> In that context, I think the analogy to shoplifting is pretty fair.
I don't.
A fair analogy would be that just because a credit union had free donuts and coffee for the first six months it operated, doesn't oblige them to still offer that twenty years later.
Shoplifting is criminal behavior which someone might get away with, when YouTube was (briefly) giving out product without ads, gratis. Nor is it illegal to block ads, nor should it be illegal. Do I agree that it's weird to expect YouTube to still be ad-free just because it briefly was? Yeah, sure.
Not only is ad-blocking not illegal and not immoral, but US the federal government's cyber crime division actively recommends it as a good security practice to avoid being defrauded:
For anyone that considers ads to be a legitimate form of "payment", consider whether you feel the same about a site running a background crypto miner without your explicit consent. If you find the crypto miner worse for some reason (my sense is most people seem to think that'd be wrong), note that the crypto miner is a much more direct form of payment that doesn't also spy on you and does not seek to manipulate you.
Also note that the same company that's running that expensive infrastructure pretty much completely controls the direction of the web, and could overnight make it so that almost everyone's browser has built-in torrent support and allows magnet links as a src for video tags. Or they can choose to have that not be true so that you must distribute media through expensive centralized platforms that only a multi-trillion dollar corporation like them could afford.
Pay for the stuff you use or don't use it. But you don't get to complain about companies treating you like the product.
A Youtube family plan is a fairly cheap way to access a lot of content. You also get access to Youtube Music which is... fine. That's less than $5 per user per month. If you are already there a few hours a week, it's a steal.
What's funny is that creators and Youtube get much more than 2x the amount of earnings from $5 than from all the ads you were being served. If more people paid, creators would probably resort to fewer of the much, much worse VPN or game ads that get hard-baked right into the vids.