this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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We've gone full circle
You can at least pay (quite a lot less than a cable subscription) to remove them. It beats paying $80 a month for the great privilege of spending 30% of the time watching ads.
For now, of course.
My Adblocker is free
Your AdBlocker works on YT TV?
Again, for now.
I think the day an adblocker starts charging people is the day that companies will try to sue them into non-existence with lawsuits they know will fail.
Either that or nobody will pay for it because they're used to getting adblockers for free. They'll just move to another one or maybe one that's FOSS.
That doesn't make sense. uBO would just be forked.
Soon you’ll pay AND watch ads. Maybe there will be a free tier with 5 minute ad breaks, and paid tier with 1 minute ad breaks.
I pay for premium and still have to watch all the sponsored crap within the video itself. I block all those channels manually so it's slowly getting better.
Tbh paying a package deal isn't actually the worst thing. I get netflix, sky sports, BT sports, movies, all channels, 1gb broadband and 1 unlimited data SIM. £100 pm.
Yes it's expensive but it's £55 for 1gb broadband anyway. They have a stranglehold over football/soccer that it's hard to get away from. Yes you can pirate the stream but it's not the same.
This has fuck all to do with YT but generally getting packages individually isn't cheaper sometimes.
I got all the sports for €3 from alibaba
Well I should bloody well hope so, considering you also get far less than cable.
YouTube is still mostly amateur or indie content, most of it short-form, and most of it frankly just not very good. There's still stuff on there worth watching, and I know some people really do consume a lot of content on there in the manner of watching TV back in the day, but objectively it really isn't the same thing as professional studio content. I can watch some random guy in Ohio do a 15 minute review of some niche thing I'm interested in as much as anyone can, but there's no way I'd consider that worth the same value as a long form TV series or feature film.
Less? I'd argue YouTube gets you way more than cable
There's a buttload of high quality content
No, full circle would be more and longer ads.
Anyway, I’m a Smart Tube User :)
I certainly prefer fewer and longer ad breaks, over several short ones, but this still sucks.
Why prefer any of it...block em all and tell corporations to pound sand.
Don't negotiate with terrorists.
This will probably pull down votes, but I really do want the discuss this honestly.
I despise ads. I block them on everything that I can. I am fine with anyone and everyone blocking anything they don't want to see.
What I don't understand is why everyone is so upset with YouTube for trying to get people watch ads?
They have to pay for all the infrastructure somehow and I'm sure it isn't cheap. What are they supposed to do?
This isn't rhetorical or argumentive, I'm genuinely asking what the ethical approach to maintaining this infrastructure is.
Personally, I don’t mind the idea of paying YouTube to remove ads. I’m pragmatic enough to understand that you don’t get shit for free, particularly when that shit is using unimaginable amounts of data.
What I object to is that the YT Premium family plan is now more than £20 a month.
For the cost of Disney+ and Apple TV+ I can watch semi-professional video makers talking at a camera for ten minutes. Video makers who aren’t getting paid all that much for what they do. Video makers who also include sponsors reads.
So I fired up the trusty VPN, “flew to Ukraine” and signed up for around £3 a month. Fuck ‘em.
The mad thing is; if there was a £5 a month tier that only removed ads and didn’t include YT Music, I’d sign up to that without question. I watch a good amount of YouTube content on my Apple TV; I’m happy to pay. But I’m not happy to pay what YT are asking.
THANK YOU. I've been saying this for ages. I really wouldn't mind even £8 a month for the no ads since I spend a lot of time on YouTube, but I am in no way paying extra for bells and whistles I don't need. I already have Spotify, I don't want to and nor am I going to pay for an extra music service that I just won't use. I'm on an unlimited data plan for god's sake, I don't care about downloading videos.
It's the progressive intrusion and shady tactics. Going from multiple short ads to fewer longer ads seems like a small step. But from the original of maybe a static banner ad to the multiple full screen pop-ups, moving banners, unclosable ads, and whatever other bullshit they pull, we've come a long fucking way. Add onto that, harvesting data for ads and being incentivized to do so questions security.
It's more a protest to marketing in general trying to face fuck the world for another penny and enshittified products or services gleefully ruining what was once good for a penny.
I can’t recall a time in history before this last 10 hellish years where I’ve been required to watch ads. If CBS had required that I have some sort of pressure plate to make sure my ass was in the seat during the ad breaks they’d be getting hate too. They can serve all the ads they want, I can choose to watch them. They’re violating the 2nd part of it and incurring the hostility that they should. Everything is turning into a timeshare presentation.
I know others have said previously, but for me I hate the amount of tracking and targeting that gets thrown into the ads that try to pull as much personal information from you as possible so they can make every cent from that info. I like to keep my life as private as I can online. YouTube by no means has any respect for that.
Having an ad here and there wouldn’t normally bother me so much if it also wasn’t for the complete lack of filtering YouTube does on what ads are “acceptable”. So many ads have been misleading, contain false information, and are just down right inappropriate. An ad for a product is fine but I really don’t want to listen to another ad with an AI voice telling me to buy a product that is a blatant scam. If they are this strict on making creators follow the YouTube Guidelines, they should make ads follow them too.
I do understand that things aren’t free and I do support the creators I watch with buying merch or through donations, wherever that may be (KoFi, Patreon, etc). I would pay for YouTube premium but it’s just way too much money for the little that I would actually benefit from it. I don’t need or want YouTube Music. I just don’t want to have ads. But for $18.99 a month, no thank you.
TL;DR: Too much tracking and privacy invasive, ads don’t follow YouTube’s own guidelines and too expensive just to simply stop ads.
On top of the tracking within the ads themselves, you also have all of the general usage data that Google sells. They're double-dipping.
Right!? It’s insane how much data they pull from you and just the shear amount of trackers in general
YouTube premium is very expensive for what it is. It should be like $5 a month to be worth the value, for me personally.
I honestly don't see the problem with video ads embedded in the video stream. It seems like it'd be far harder to slip something malicious to the computer in there than banner ads served from somewhere else. It's a system that worked for broadcast TV for decades.
To the extent they offer a paid service with no ads, that also seems ethical to me.
The part where Youtube kind of falls down for me is unlike TV shows where the broadcaster is paying for the content, youtube content is basically free to Youtube. So them collecting money seems unfair and leaves the content creators to do sponsored / ad breaks themselves to pay for the content.