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YouTube tests disabling videos for people using ad blockers
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Okay, but I dont want to pay any of them.
I realize that this is a catch22, but this is where we are at. I really only want to view footage from creators that are willing to give it to me for free without ads. Youtube provided a technical infrastructure for that for about two decades, and it looks like they can't anymore. Fine, but it has clearly been proven that we as a society can make this happen, and I will patiently wait for it to be a thing again. Or I will find something else. But I am not paying a monthly subscription.
Honestly, if I could pay 800 dollars for lifetime access to YouTube, I probably would. Weird right? Thats like 8 years of YouTube premium all at once. YouTube might even shut down in 8 years. But whatever, its not my job to figure these things out and honestly I'm unbothered by it. At the end of the day, I am confident that intwrnet based media will emerge stronger from this.
At the end of the day it is about honesty - are you a small creator reading an ad because that is how you support your business, or are you a large faceless corporation giving me free shit so that I will unknowingly be bound by a EULA that is designed to be impossible to understand, all for the purpose of trying to extract money from me later? Ill take the former, every time.
Nothing has changed though. YouTube has been funding their infrastructure via ads for that last decade. Those of us who didn't watch with ad block always had to watch more ads to help offset those who blocked ads.
As ad blockers have become more widespread, it had meant that YouTube has been needing to show more ads to everyone else, it was only a matter of time before they needed to do something about those blocking ads.
You always were breaking their EULA by blocking ads, and they aren't changing any rules, you can still watch these same videos for free. And if you leave it really doesn't matter to them because you were only costing them money.
It's not like this is a negotiation. I'm a healthy adult that chooses what to do with my computing hardware. I am perfectly fine not going to youtube if I don't like it anymore. Eventually, if everyone feels the same way, youtube will become irrelevant to advertisers because there is no one to serve ads to. We are watching this happen with Cable TV.
Like I said above, I listen to a lot of ad reads, so I am not un-impressionable to advertisers. But even if I can't block the ads, if I switch to a new tab and mute the video during the read, that isn't much better for advertisers. They want those impressions. The backstop is that ultimately, you have to provide some value for people to want to be there and agree to listen to ads. Youtube is chipping away at that core value right now, and it will hurt them in the long run, but that is their business.
Also, on the subject of EULAs, there will have to be a reckoning about them. It has been consistently proven that we are agreeing to more TOS terms than we can possibly read, so the idea that they are morally enforceable is very suspect. At the end of the day, you can't just steal value from people, there is no free lunch for these companies that are trying to chisel out profits. Eventually, they will become replaced with a more sustainable system, I have a lot of faith in this.