Technology

What happened to the idea of small, non-intrusive banner ads? Of course it's not realistic to expect those on YouTube and they bring much less revenue compared to in-your-face video interstitials per impression, but I'm much more likely to whitelist those.

Good, fuck those greedy bastards. yt-dlp + mpv with sponsorblock FTW, bonus points for stopping using a YouTube account altogether and using RSS feeds for your subscriptions instead.

I will never submit.

I went the route of accepting their 2-month trial of Premium, and immediately disabled it from continuing after the 2 months. Hopefully that's enough time to come up with an acceptable solution that works the way I want it to. Honestly, if Premium was like $5/month, they'd get my money. But for almost triple that? Fuck no, never happening.

So the article.claims that Youtube's plan backfired because uninstall rates on some AD blockers increased and a percentage of those users cited "YouTube" as the reason.

I don't know if it's just me but that's a massive stretch. I would like to hear numbers from YouTube themselves before jumping to any conclusions. These companies operate on scale and usually have enough data to back these decisions. Can it go wrong, sure. Has it already backfired. Not sure.

Firefox with ublock / Libretube / Libretube with Sponsorblock / Newpipe / Piped website if not on mobile.

EDIT: I currently use Firefox with uBlock on desktop and Libretube with Sponsorblock (integrated) on android.

My ad blocker was working so well I didn't even realize I had it installed and blocking ads on YouTube. I don't mind watching a few ads as long as it doesn't get out of hand.

I just wonder how much of Chome's browser share Google is willing to lose over this.

I quit YouTube because the ads were overwhelming, and quality content is so rare.

I'm guessing this isn't what YouTube had in mind when they started this campaign.

To quote The Joker, "It'll be funny if it weren't so pathetic...oh, what the heck, I'll laugh anyways!" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I didn't have ublock installed on my machines. I'd removed it a year ago because it was breaking sites and my pihole does a pretty good job, but I kept getting pop ups from sites about "turning off my adblocker". I didn't have an adblocker running. I was using vanilla firefox. I got so irritated, I looked up how to get rid of those messages and everything pointed me to ublock.

So, shout out to thinkgeek for reminding me what its like to browse the web without a ton of ads. If it wasn't for your annoying popup about my non-existent adblocker, I would never have installed an adblocker.

Oh, and I hadn't realized how awful youtube became over the last year or so with the ads. I was just dealing with it like an asshole. When I put ublock back on, my enjoyment of youtube shot up!

I was considering paying for premium too because I want to normalize paying for content and supporting things I like on the web. But I was struggling with the decision because usually you either pay with your data or pay with money. In this case I know I'd be doing both since Google will gladly take my money and also hoover up my data. Then they jacked the rates up to $14 a month...and now I have ublock installed again.

Its still a problem with the apps on my phone and appletv's though. If they made it $4.99/mo I'd probably fork it over but $14 is more than my other streaming services and they create their own content. Youtube just hosts content.

Edit: how-to geek not thinkgeek. I think they went out of business.

i have yet to see a single anti-adblock pop-up on youtube lmao

I really like freetube on desktop, since I have liked the move towards less dependency on accounts. And freetube let's me have a custom feed without needing an account.

And I love the built in sponsorblock and channel blocking feature too.

On windows, Firefox + uBlock Origin. On Mac and iOS, Safari + Adguard.