• @RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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    483 months ago

    One solution to that problem is to close YouTube on your device and do something else with your time.

  • @endofline@lemmy.ca
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    353 months ago

    They force paying customers ( yt music premium & yt premium ) to disable ad blockers, too. Why? If I accordingly to the contract shouldn’t get any ads why they would need to punish for blocking ads which shouldn’t exist :-)?

    • @BradleyUffner@lemmy.world
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      13 months ago

      They don’t. I use ad blockers and pay for a premium subscription. Everything works fine without disabling the blockers.

      • @endofline@lemmy.ca
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        13 months ago

        They do very often, not every time but they do. I faced it several times so I did finish my subscriptions (both youtube music and youtube premium)

    • sunzu2
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      273 months ago

      You aint getting the ads but they still need you to load the trackers mate.

      It is for your own safety, taker your pants off, boy

  • snooggums
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    2733 months ago

    While the company stops short of directly saying as much, it sure feels like the preposterously long ads we’re seeing here are an example of one tool in Google’s arsenal for effectively disabling YouTube playback for violators of the site’s ToS.

    That makes no sense at all. It isn’t like skipping ads results in a black screen for the length of the ad.

    People with adblockers aren’t going to see hour long ads or black screens when they don’t see ads in the first place.

    • teft
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      1513 months ago

      It’s hilarious that they think it would matter to anyone with an ad blocker. I haven’t seen an ad for years on youtube. Hell I haven’t even seen promotions in videos for a few months now that I found a sponsor segment blocker.

      • Jo Miran
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        413 months ago

        All that does is make YouTube money while costing money to the advertisers.

        • @tburkhol@lemmy.world
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          203 months ago

          How long do you think those advertisers will stay when it turns out they’ve paid $1M in advertising with no change in sales?

          • Jo Miran
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            3 months ago

            I hear what you are saying but the truth is that they will stay, just so they aren’t missing, regardless of ROI. Case in point is Xitter. The numbers clearly state that the level of engagement and sales conversion from Xitter ads is pitiful, especially when compared to Bluesky, yet advertisers still hang in there…just in case.

            • @Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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              143 months ago

              That’s because at a certain point ads become less about direct sales, and more about brand recognition. This is why Coke has a massive advertising budget. You know what Coke is. You’re either going to buy a Coke or you’re not. But by advertising as heavily as they do, they’re reminding you that they exist.

              That’s why their heaviest advertising season is Christmas. Some of the advertisements don’t even show their product. Some do, but some just show Santa flying his sleigh with cheery christmas music. Then their Coke logo gets spelled out in the stars as he passes by.

              It’s just so you assosiate their brand with good emotions. But it requires an almost constant barrage of ads, and it’s direct sales are impossible to measure.

          • @Grimy@lemmy.world
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            103 months ago

            The advertising team will just blame it on something else. They have the numbers showing their ads are being watched, everything else is conjecture.

      • @x00z@lemmy.world
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        373 months ago

        I think Google doesn’t care about that at all.

        They most likely pay peanuts compared to you for “bandwidth” (which for them is more of an electricity cost and trough-output allocation than a specific numeric value like consumers and smaller companies have). You also cache the video on your own device making the multiple tab thing useless if you don’t know what you’re doing. And Google can also just block you when they attack their servers, move traffic around, and so much more advanced stuff that protects their infrastructure.

        tl;dr: Trying to boycott Google by trying to waste their resources is useless.

          • @TehWorld@lemmy.world
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            73 months ago

            200gig was surpassed what, 8 years ago? They have super active load balancing based on your region. You could purchase a Fiber gigabit line and only watch videos 24/7/365 and nobody at YouTube would ever notice.

          • @x00z@lemmy.world
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            43 months ago

            As I said it’s 100 times more advanced than that.

            They can switch IPs, datacenters, regions, whatever they want. They even have access to BGP routing.

            They also use some custom switches according to Wikipedia:

            The private side of the network is a secret, but a recent disclosure from Google[90] indicate that they use custom built high-radix switch-routers (with a capacity of 128 × 10 Gigabit Ethernet port) for the wide area network. Running no less than two routers per datacenter (for redundancy) we can conclude that the Google network scales in the terabit per second range (with two fully loaded routers the bi-sectional bandwidth amount to 1,280 Gbit/s).

  • katy ✨
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    53 months ago

    Using Youtube without Revanced or uBlock is like using a phone without a case.

    • @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      43 months ago

      Eh, using a phone w/o a case is reasonable. I’d liken it more to watching live TV. Why do that in the era of streaming services when you can (well, could) avoid ads and watch exactly what you want instead of whatever slop the network decides you should watch?

  • @MehBlah@lemmy.world
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    233 months ago

    There’s a chance ad blockers are eating up the ‘Skip’ button while also failing to block the ad.

    A CHANCE?

    • @NudeNewt@lemm.ee
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      163 months ago

      Only trash adblockers like Adblock Plus and Adguard have that “chance”. uBlock Origin the goat fr frf

  • @Nelots@lemm.ee
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    273 months ago

    I haven’t read the article, but surely this is an accident? I have almost no faith left in our capitalistic society, but surely even Youtube understands that nobody is going to watch an hour long ad, right?

    • Captain Aggravated
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      63 months ago

      The most mysterious one to me happened in 2015 or so. I was watching Zero Punctuation, and it served me an hour long computer networking lecture as an ad. Like, some Indian guy delivering a power point presentation. I was like, what’s the monetization strategy here, guys? Did this dude pay you to serve his lectures as ads? What?

      • Echo Dot
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        3 months ago

        At one point there was a period of time where YouTube was consistently serving me ads in Arabic, a language that I don’t speak and from a country I have never been to.

        Their algorithm just breaks sometimes.

        Edit: not sure why that was in capitals.

        • @AJ1@lemmy.ca
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          03 months ago

          “THEY ARE ALGORITHM JUST BREAKS SOMETIME”

          is what you just said

        • Captain Aggravated
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          13 months ago

          There was awhile there where my parents were getting ads for Pull-Ups Toddler diapers in Spanish.

          • Echo Dot
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            43 months ago

            I know there was that story about Google knowing about some guy’s daughter being pregnant before she’d actually told him.

            So maybe I’m just really Arabic and haven’t noticed yet.

            • Captain Aggravated
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              53 months ago

              That wasn’t Google, it was Target. Based on the teen’s buying habits, that she suddenly started buying certain vitamins, unscented lotion, that sort of stuff with her loyalty card, their system put two and two together and sent her coupons for maternity and baby products, which is how her father learned he was gonna be a grandpa.

              Google has similar power to know more about you than your friends and family, though.

  • TheObviousSolution
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    113 months ago

    I didn’t have a problem with using YouTube Premium, but Google is doing a lot of shitty practices. The latest is purging Google Maps reviews in collusion with local authorities for private interests. Maybe don’t be part of a shitty monopoly while trying to push this sort of bullshit onto us?

    • Mubelotix
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      3 months ago

      Unhappy with the current Map statu quo? Join OSM contributors with the gamified app Street Complete (also available on fdroid)

    • @Corngood@lemmy.ml
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      33 months ago

      Any suggestions for avoiding Google maps reviews? The best I can think of is looking for threads on local subreddits for e.g. restaurants. Unfortunately there’s not much of a local community on the fediverse yet.

      • TheObviousSolution
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        83 months ago

        It’s a practical monopoly due to how they’ve exploited their Android presence in the mobile market. The only viable alternative is Yelp. The biggest problem is getting people to jump on the same platform and to leave reviews, and Google does this with mobile location tracking, even prompting the user when they think they’ve been remotely near a location at times. Maybe it does need a fediversed alternative, it is quite the unaddressed monopoly.

    • Echo Dot
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      43 months ago

      Right but capitalists understand people don’t actually want to watch ads so they know there’s another limit to how long they can be.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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        13 months ago

        The history of advertising indicates otherwise, as does Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Capitalists will always push the limits, ever seeking to maximize profits.

        However upper management appears to want to hold royal court and subjugate their serves (the worker pool), since the goal of profit maximization set by shareholder primacy contraindicates common practices like micromanagement, over-surveillance of the workforce (keylogging, and prohibition of private use of the internet) and crunching, all which reduce workforce efficiency (by a lot) and yet are typical.

        In the 1980s, when Reagan deregulated children’s programming, a lot of shows that were essentially half-hour-long commercials (say, the entire Transformers franchise) were released and sold a lot of toys. The weird thing is when we oversaturate a generation with commercials, they develop a tolerance to them, and the marketing industry has been losing that battle since the 1950s, when an hour long show would have a thirty-second sponsor spot.

  • @AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Sharing another app suggestion(s) for Android: Tubular [0] or the more up-to-date LastPipeBender [1].

    Both apps differ from NewPipe and its variants by integrating with PeerTube along with YouTube, apart from providing features like SponsorBlock and ReturnYouTubeDislike.

    I have started using PeerTube much more often as my subscriptions from YouTube and PeerTube are now shown together, which makes for a seamless and superior experience altogether.

    [0] https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular [1] https://github.com/MaintainTeam/LastPipeBender

  • FlavoredButtHair
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    713 months ago

    I either watch YouTube without ads or don’t watch at all. We need a new platform for videos.

    • @buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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      Tell you the truth, once upon a time I really didn’t mind the ads. In fact I was quite happy to support the creators that I like with watching the ads that appeared on their videos. But then YouTube started getting smarmy by blocking my suggestions because I didn’t use history on my account. And then there’s the problem of the ads getting longer. At which point I got fed up and downloaded the adblock software to stop seeing this garbage. And then this little war broke out over ads on the platform.

      Quite frankly, so long as the people who make the software to block ads continue to do that kind of work I will continue to download their software and make Google spend boatloads of their own money to try to block the blockers. Because the blockers aren’t going anywhere. Not to mention that the blockers were not quite as popular before Google started this little campaign. And now they have made people so hyper aware of the fact that they can actually go out and find some way to skip these stupid ads that they’ve basically dug their own grave. Broadcast TV spent decades on this failed quest.

      • @el_eh_chase@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        I was the exact same way. I could justify watching ads to support the people I watched, but then I learned how little compensation a creator actually gets from one view and decided my time was more valuable. Plus I just got too used to never seeing ads and could never go back.

        This video sums up the sentiment you’re describing nicely.

      • @gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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        73 months ago

        Yeah, me too.

        I liked watching ads 12 years ago, they were a funny interjection/change.

        Nowadays the ads are so extremely obnoxious, it feels as if they’re poisoning my mind. No way i’m even gonna watch them for a second.

      • @rumba@lemmy.zip
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        63 months ago

        Exactly right. Two 15 second ads in between shows two midstream 15 to 30 second ads, I was perfectly fine with watching those ads.

        When they started letting content creators pick the number of ads, and they started letting more than 30 seconds of ads per break, now I have incentive to block them.

        Capitalism dictates that they need to make 20% more every year. They cannot continue to get 20% more ad revenue every year without increasing ads substantially.

        When a handful of companies owns everything and they can no longer buy new companies up to make more money, They can’t make their numbers. All they can do is gut us for the last 20% and then go out of business.

    • Elrecoal19_0
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      3 months ago

      Peertube looks good… but has nearly no content or content creators, which is the reason Google nearly has monopoly with Youtube

      • @moseschrute@lemmy.world
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        193 months ago

        Not a fediverse thing, but I pay $5 a month for nebula. I think it’s worth it to support creators. And I believe the whole “if you’re not paying for something you’re the product”. Though you can still be the product even if you do pay.

          • @Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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            53 months ago

            They have a $30/ year annual subscription (I’m not certain if that’s a purely introductory rate or not). Most of the content is non-exclusive but it’s ad-free and many creators remove the sponsor segments or even include exclusive content on their Nebula version. It seems pretty worthwhile to me

          • @3migo@lemmy.world
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            83 months ago

            I’m also a Nebula subscriber for the same reason stated above. A lot of my favorite creators are on Nebula and either post their videos a week or two early on Nebula, or post extended versions of their videos on Nebula.

            There’s no ads or sponsorship segments, so it makes for a pleasant experience. Admittedly, the Nebula “originals” which are exclusive to Nebula, is a fairly small catalogue. But what is there is high quality.

            The Nebula subscription is worth it for me to support creators and have a better viewing experience… And to see each Jetlag episode a week early.

            • @moseschrute@lemmy.world
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              23 months ago

              Tbh I dont use it enough, but I love that’s it no ads like you said. Also feels good to support creators instead of Google. I’ll check out the originals!

          • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            13 months ago

            There’s definitely good material on it. Was a big fan of “Dracula’s Ex-Girlfriend” short film, for instance.

            But its also got your garden variety YouTube crap.

        • @Katana314@lemmy.world
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          33 months ago

          Is there any competitor like Nebula that’s not solely focused on informational/longform videos? I come from the age when hobbyists made silly memetic animations and shared them around, not even necessarily for profit. I’m sure many of those people consider YouTube to be some level of evil and would enjoy an alternative that’s actually organic.

        • @bss03@infosec.pub
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          13 months ago

          I ended up getting a lifetime subscription, and it’s definitely worth it, but it’s not a replacement for YT entirely.

          Dropout.tv has good comedy videos which is largely lacking from Nebula, but I find it buffers more often for me, which makes it uniquely bad among all the streaming services I’ve used.

          But, I watch plenty of fan compilations / animatics for stuff on YT from my recommendations, and I haven’t found them anywhere else either because they don’t exist or because they don’t get recommended to me. It seems difficult for that kind of stuff to exist without free, easy uploads AND free, easy viewing.

          Finally there are some people that primarily do Twitch that I subscribe to on YT. I’ve tried watching them on Twitch, and I prefer the content after their YT editor has worked their magic.

          • @moseschrute@lemmy.world
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            13 months ago

            Dropout.tv was created by college human right? Idk if their old videos would hold up today, but I remember liking their content. Nice to know they’re still around.

            • @bss03@infosec.pub
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              13 months ago

              Yeah, they even finally rebranded the YT channel last year so it is now Dropout instead of CollegeHumor. They are doing some interesting stuff currently (Gamechanger is almost always good), and all their old sketches and programs are there too.

    • @gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      The problem is hosting (storage, network) is expensive.

      IIRC some platforms (feddit.org, catbox.moe) pays $1000 per month, and that’s mostly just static images.

      Videos is much more than that. Who pays for that?

      • @0x0@infosec.pub
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        33 months ago

        I have a hunch Linus at LTT could float his own storage for whatever stuff he wants to host. The same way you and me have to pay for our own online storage.

        • @Jimmycakes@lemmy.world
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          43 months ago

          Hosting is only half the equation you have to be able to serve it people all around the world at once with no buffering. People have no clue how amazing YouTube is for a free service. Bandwidth costs a fuckload of money too to add to the hosting cost.

          • Boomer Humor Doomergod
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            13 months ago

            PopcornTime might be a good model for a decentralized YouTube system. You could pick a movie and then it would find a torrent and start downloading it.

          • Realitätsverlust
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            23 months ago

            are users willing to put up with that.

            No. People are used to stuff being free.