YouTube ad mountain

I often watch non-premium videos on YouTube, they just run better than the site does, with my bad internet.

Many GB videos have a pile of ads within the first 10-20 minutes, probably 10 ad breaks. Is this a bug, or is it the way you want the videos to be working on YouTube?

@strings19: Youtube recently added midroll ads to like, every single video unless it was marked not to have them. So I'm assuming GB don't realize all the videos got blasted with this evil Youtube decision.

Yeah I would blame YouTube more for this shit, the amount of ads on everything I normally watch on there has exploded.

@strings19: I forgot Youtube has ads cause I have been running ad blockers for so long. If you are on PC and you use Firefox web browser just go to ad-ons and install something like AdGuard. Not sure about other browsers cause I never use them but you can probably do the same thing on them.

Thanks, I had heard about this YouTube change. Hopefully they start to change this setting when uploading, but I know adding even more steps to daily life right now is not easy.

@djredbat: It is generally a dick move to tell people to run ad blockers on sites based around folk who use youtube et al to make money off of ads.

I have Google Play Music, which I suppose will become Youtube music soon. Anyway, that comes with Youtube Red, which means I don't see Youtube ads, except for sponsored ads that are part of the video.

Advertisements on the internet are a cancer. I don't mind them on the principle that those ads are how people make money off of me freely viewing everything, but they've become a serious security and privacy issue. Even if they're not, they're invasive. They jump in front of whatever I'm trying to look at and get in the way of my internet browsing*. Until that's fixed universally, I can't justify turning off adblockers. For what it's worth, I do have Giantbomb Premium as well, and I'm open to paying subscriptions for the sites I visit most.

*I understand that this is the point, but I got so annoyed that I stopped caring about the percentage of a penny that any creator makes off of me.

@peacebrother: @justin258:

And that is kind of how things got this bad. Back in the day it was just static images that we all blocked because 56k. So over time ad companies did more to improve user engagement (animations whether gif or flash because of course flash). More and more blockers led to our current pop under crap and needing to scroll past ads because when such a small percentage of traffic will see them they need to be VERY catchy and VERY unskippable.

if you feel the need to run an adblocker then you do you (I am partial to a pihole with very selective tables to block the malicious stuff but let the mellow things go through). Just maybe don't brag about it and encourage people to run an adblocker on a site that gets a significant percentage of its revenue from ads. Plenty of sites very heavily curate their ads and do everything they can to keep it unobtrusive while making money and, at least in my experience, those tend to be the sites that care about content the most. Buzzfeed has trash ads but Buzzfeed also has trash content so I don't really notice them since I never go to them.

Years ago I remember hearing an author I like comment on this during a panel. Someone brought up their (pretty justified) issues with amazon and said that they refuse to give amazon any money and pirate all the ebooks and are glad that author insists their kindle books have no DRM. Said author (not naming for obvious reasons) responded (paraphrasing) "Uhm. That's nice and I support you sticking it to Amazon. But maybe don't tell me that until after I finish putting my daughter though college"

I run ad blockers on all my devices that actually have the option. That doesn't do much good if you're using the YT app on an Xbox or something, but there's always Pi-Hole for the truly committed.

Most of the creators I care about have Patreons or some sort of subscription model, and I support them directly. If they were relying on their Patrons also watching YT ads, well... sorry. Maybe rethink that.

@gundato: I didn't mean to come off as bragging about it.

Do you have any sources for that bit about companies pushing ads harder and harder because people kept blocking them? Because I'd have a hard time believing that. It's much more likely that advertising got so bad because ad companies push advertising as hard as they can on any platform they can. See: American cable television, where you get a ten minute ad block every five minutes.

@justin258:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-will-the-ad-versus-ad-blocker-arms-race-end/ is a good article on the current state. I can't find a great non-biased/horrible article on how things got this way but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking#Response_from_publishers touches on it a bit with how we are seeing a roll back to having product placement heavily built into the content itself. When Dan talks about how much he loves taco bell and wants budweiser to sponsor him on his stream, that is an ad and it is a very effective one that can't really be blocked. Same with all those social media posts that are just ads in disguise.

And again, it is easy to blame ad companies (and they very much deserve most of it) but even the tv example has to do with making themselves stand out and the reason why WWE still exists is because it is one of the few remaining "live" shows that have good statistics in terms of viewer engagement to ad. We all like to point out that they (and even AEW) have pretty weak ratings. Ad companies see how many folk on reddit posted about that swinger island show or how often people make fun of a snickers commercial and see that those viewers ARE watching the ads.

A lot of people are suggesting subscription models on a per site basis and I do that for a few (hi Giant Bomb). But it is not sustainable and still tends to result in "I block all ads but pay for what I want". If that were true you wouldn't need to block ads. Instead what is happening is you are ignoring how often you check out, I dunno, saltybet during the course of a day and don't want to acknowledge you are dicking them over even while you make sure those cute, probably chinese propaganda, pandas at ipanda can get new cameras.

@gundato: Most of the Youtube channels I watch I support in other ways such as Patreon and Streamlabs so they actually are getting more money then they would from ads, I just don't like to be interrupted when I am watching stuff.

Just run an ad blocker?

@djredbat: And that is great for the channels you support

What about the ones you don't? What is the threshold for their content to be worth supporting? Like, I checked out more than a few Tarkov channels when I was trying to get into that game. I similarly watch maybe one warframe related youtuber per week. Neither of those are worth a monthly subscription to me but I justify that with youtube red (for what little that is worth). Without even that there is no point in ever making content for people who aren't part of your subscriber base and the idea of a "new player friendly" guide wouldn't exist because the odds of that new player sticking around and deciding to give you a few bucks a month is near zero.

Yeah, ads suck and some are truly invasive and dangerous. When possible I prefer to spend money on the mediums I like to avoid seeing them. Similarly, I do run blockers for the more problematic ad sources. But I also make it a point to leave general adblockers disabled to support the channels and sites that aren't assholes about their ads. Because completely ignoring them is a great way to destroy small content creators and dick over the people who just haven't met your criteria for being worth the few bucks a month.

Run an adblocker and take the advice of others above.

@gundato: I mean your 100% right and if I was rich I would support everyone, I give a like on all videos and tell friends and other people on social media about there channels and that they should watch and subscribe to their videos so at least its something. And actually most of my friends have no clue that add blockers exist and I don't make it a habit to tell them the only reason I mentioned it here was because I was telling a GB premium member who he or she shouldn't have to watch adds in the first place that there is a way to not see adds. TBH Youtube could just make it so videos won't play if it detects an ad blocker like other sites do for example on CWTV if I wanted to watch something like an episode of the Flash a message pops up saying ad blocker detected please disable to continue watching so there is a way they can do it. One last thing is that I really don't mind having to watch an ad before a video its when they pop up randomly during a video that bugs me.

@justin258: hey random note, I switched over to YouTube music and im digging it. If you have uploaded music on play you might want to switch that over to youtube soon!

@djredbat: @strings19: @development: @colourful_hippie: Hey sorry I didn't get back to this until now. This is indeed a YT issue and isn't just affecting us. In order to strip out the endless ads we have to go in manually and delete most of the midrolls. I try to do this before something has actually gone live but sometimes things go up in the early morning my time or I don't know something is being published mid-day, the ads are there. We haven't found a great solution to this yet but hopefully YT will fix it on their end because it's just a TON of midrolls right now.

I'm non-premium at YT and have been using it to watch a lot of videos that are about 5-10 minutes long. I've long gotten used to the one or two at the beginning and maybe one in the middle, but the two that literally always cut in when the host of the video is saying goodbye at the end is just frustrating, and only a few weeks old. I mean I quit the video immediately because why stay. This is obv their model currently, maybe to incrementally try to convince people to pay for the subscription, I just wonder if their decisions for where to drop them in is not actually leading to more eyes.

I'm not some YouTube shill -- but I would seriously recommend YouTube Premium. It's so great removing all those ads -- and it unlocks a few other mobile features as well. Yes -- you could argue those mobile features should be free -- but I guess I'm a sucker.

Don't get Youtube Premium. Get an ad blocker. Don't support Google and their evil ass ways.

@strings19: I frequently watch on the YouTube for the exact same reason. Add an adblocker to your browser, my dude. Clears those nasty ads right up. Whitelist sites you like, never whitelist youtube.

This is one of those things i only thing about when i'm setting up my pc for the first time, but ublock origin / noscript in firefox, ublock origin for chrome. If you want to use roku, etc, look at pihole, which I need to get off my ass and do. Maybe uMatrix for chrome too, but i like having a generally unfucked with browser for work stuff.

If your a premium user on this site I wouldn't feel bad about using an ad block, I don't use one here since I canceled my membership. I do have privacy badger though from when CBS was running tracking software.