And companies belief, that this spending was worth it an people spend much more than that on their products.
This is from Q4 when ad spending doubles in the run up to Christmas. Q1 would probably earn half as much.
Plus it was an election year so loads of money from campaign ads, too.
It’s a scam:
- Add ads
- People ignore the ads
- Companies still pay for the ads
- Profit! 🤑
- Let people pay for no ads
- Profit!! 🤑🤑
- Content adds product placement
- Companies pay for product placement
- Profit!!! 🤑🤑🤑
- Make ads more obnoxious
- People use more advanced ad blockers
- Companies still pay extra for new ads
- Profit!!! 🤑🤑🤑🤑
…etc
In what sense is this a scam?
At every step they get someone to pay for less than what they promise: advertisers pay for more than their effective reach, consumers get more ads than what they pay to remove, content creators get paid a fraction of less than what they generate.
I’m not sure Google can be blamed for people using ad blockers - but from that perspective actively preventing ad blockers would be the “right” thing to do. Unless you want them to ban creators securing in video sponsor deals, I’m not sure what you want Google to do here or how that’s a scam. YouTube premium removes Google’s ads, I don’t think it claims to do anything else. Do Google make claims about creators getting paid everything they generate? Was anyone under that impression? The platform does need to be paid for and the revenue generated through some content creators is subsidising others.
YouTube isn’t perfect by any stretch, I don’t enjoy ads any more than anyone else, but calling it a scam just seems very far removed from reality.
i hope nebula stays nice and clean
That’s absolutely unbelievable to me. I block ads on everything. I just can’t handle it. For the few ad-based services that I pay for, I mute it for every commercial. Seriously, I just can’t handle it.
But… clearly tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of people do watch them… which makes a massively lucrative business. I’ll just never understand it.
When I need something, I look it up and get it. If i don’t need something, I don’t want to hear about it in any way, shape, or form.
Ugh.
10 billion. 😖
Most people using a smartphone use the default YouTube app. And that app does not have any ability to block ads. Most people don’t know they can block ads or even if they did, they don’t know how.
I’ve heard of enough people wanting ads too. And people complaining that they want them back after they were blocked.
It gets harder and harder to have any faith in humanity these days.
Yep. It’s becoming more and more common for folks to know that they can do it, but it certainly isn’t ubiquitous. It wasn’t that long ago when I caught my partner listening to music on YouTube with all the ads and I blew their mind away by installing NewPipe. They just had no idea.
This is kind of a sticky situation for me. While I’m pretty tech savvy, my partner is not. I’d love to have them use NewPipe. But as a NewPipe user myself, it has been very buggy lately due to YouTube changing things. I understand why it’s buggy but they would not and I think it would be more annoying than helpful.
I’ve had no problems with ReVanced. It’s a little complicated to set up so I wouldn’t blame a non-techy for not doing it, but if you can set it up for them, it works great. And it has the huge bonus of being able to connect to your YouTube account to let you do things like comment and add to playlists, to work well when switching between desktop and mobile.
Yeah… I do not understand how people can cope with all those ads on YouTube. I really don’t get it… It drives me crazy !
Even on radio or TV. When I see/hear one single ad, I’m out !
I only listen to public radio stations in my country, because they only run adds every hour.
I seem to have a visceral reaction to advertisements. It’s very physical.
My pet peeve about ads everywhere now is on Android.
Your Android phone doesn’t come with a voice recorder? Download one, with ads every time you record.
You want a different calculator? Ads!
Flashlight app? Ads!
Notepad? Ads!
And people just apparently accept ads in nearly every app, even the most basic ones.
I don’t remember the Sound Recorder, or Notepad having ads. But because people are now used to ads everywhere, it’s certainly coming as MS is trying to jam ads in everywhere possible in Windows too, now.
I’m so grateful for Linux. The apps I get through apt-get don’t make me watch ads. Unfortunately even if based on Linux, the Android world is so infuriatingly crammed with ads.
I wish I could find a “phone” or portable device in that format, with an OS that works like “true” Linux.
Use f-droid. The apps may not always be as polished (hell, some play store apps look like they came out of 2005), but you can filter apps by anti-features such as ads, tracking, permissions, etc.
As for what you’ve mentioned:
The fossify repo of apps is privacy friendly, no ads, etc.
Fossify Voice Recorder (Record anything with this Open-source and Ad-free recorder) https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fossify.voicerecorder/
Uh, may I introduce you to F-droid, the FOSS “appstore”.
Edit: adding a link and also the community:
Fortunately, you can block all those ads on Android. Check out Tracker Control: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.fdroid
or just use DNS servers from Mullvad, no additional app required https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls#android
You can also just set your private DNS to something like
dns.adguard.comand block almost all ads in every app, no installs requiredI’m personally using
p2.freedns.controld.comfor anyone looking for an alternative.I actually use adblock.dns.mullvad.net, I just recommend adguard for beginners as it seems more stable (though I’ve not had a stability issue with mullvad for years)
Always good to have options. People need to find whatever works for them.
Yep, that can work per device or per network. I’m a big fan of Tracker Control because it’s going to work on any network. It’s also highly customizable.
Nice tool, thank you ! However I’m bit confused
If you’re interested in blocking tracking, then best download TrackerControl from here, from F-Droid, or from the IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repository. If you’re interested in analysing tracking and generating factual evidence of it (e.g. for research), then choose the version from Google Play. The analysis results from this version will usually be more accurate.
That’s strange… Why have different versions doing different things?
The short answer is that the Google Play version won’t actually block anything because it breaks their terms of service. So that version just tells you how many trackers and what the trackers are. I still use some of those apps and even respect them (e.g. AP News, AccuWeather), but it completely boggles my mind how they’ve loaded so many trackers into their applications… 🫤
Longer answer: To actually block trackers and ads, you need to use a third party source to download the app so that it’s fully functional. By providing the app that way, they don’t have to abide by Google Plays rules.
The link above is for the F-Droid “app store” version, which is one of the more well-known “stores.” I highly recommend F-Droid. They host free and open source (FOSS) applications. For most everything you use, there is a FOSS alternative which will be ad and tracker free.
Want a simple ad-free calculator, go there. Want to watch YouTube ad free, go there. Want to download an ad free Lemmy client, go there. Etc etc.
Hurrah for high quality FOSS software!
For the few ad-based services that I pay for, I mute it for every commercial. Seriously, I just can’t handle it.
Why would you pay for something with ads?
Because I’m not privileged enough to afford it without.
uBlock Origin + Firefox
What’s wild to me is that after making over 10b in a few months Google still has the gall to want to squash ad blocking. How much more money do they want? To what end?
That helps but still stalls out etc on occasion for me, so I use freetube 90% of the time I want to see something on youtube.
I hope I’m not jinxing myself, but I don’t ever mess with my Ublock Origin settings and I’ve never once had it break or gotten the threatening messages about adblockers on YT. I’m not sure why, but I’m not going to change anything while I’ve got a good thing going.
I’ve never gotten the warnings (yet), mainly just slow loading times or the occasional stallout.
FreeTube + integrated SponsorBlock
It blocks normal ads, plus Sponsored segments and some other segments if you wish to. Its configurable. This addon is also available for Firefox. I do not use Firefox to watch YouTube anymore.
I hadn’t heard of FreeTube, thanks for the recommendation.
It lets you have a local configuration that keep tracks of what videos you watched and allows for custom playlists. Without a Google account. I don’t know if a smartphone app is available, as I only use it on my PC.
Lately, Firefox + uBlock Origin and YouTube on Linux is sometimes horribly slow for me. It uses all the CPU and chokes my computers. Sometimes it’s even difficult to just seek in the video, as it’s so sluggish.
It seems to vary depending on the type of ads. It’s not “random” because a video that has this behavior will always do it, even if I restart FF, while others will be fine.
I thought it was my old computer at first, or that I was out of memory, but the same thing happens on my modern Ryzen.
Although I notice it less and less, so maybe it was a bug with YT + uBlock.
And it’s only on my Linux computers. On Android, FF + uBlock works super well.
Just a shot in the dark here, but do you have ambient mode enabled? (that annoying glow light around the video). I’ve read from various people that it can use an insane amount of cpu on some devices. Disabling it fixed the performance issues they faced.
I have similar issues with YouTube in Firefox on Windows. But I think my aging laptop might just be having trouble loading the script-riddled site more than anything.
On desktop I really like FreeTube, if you’re interested in an alternative. I don’t usually want apps for things that should be websites, but I use YouTube enough (and Google invests so much energy in making youtube.com a miserable experience) that it justifies having a dedicated app for it, in my case.
everyone
youtube has ads?
what ads?
It’s possible to dodge the deluge of ads, of course, by signing up for the YouTube Premium subscription service.
Oh yeah! That’s another way to do it. I forgot.
VPN vacations!
Newpipe, Pipepipe, Tubular, Revanced, a half-decent adblocker…
These still work? I thought youtube nuked them
uBlock on firefox has literally never failed me
It’s a cat and mouse game. Google blocks them, devs find a workaround, Google blocks them…
Revanced still works. If yours stopped working, download the latest patches and make an updated .apk.
What YouTube killed are YouTube instances by limiting the number of request per IP address.
Pipepipe is still working for me, at least. Revanced worked last I checked, it’s just a bitch to update, which is why I switched.
Official piped instances get blocked very quickly, but private, selfhosted instances (eg. piped.30p87.de/api.piped.30p87.de/proxy.piped.30p87.de) work well most of the time
