Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.
Then on Oct 1, they threw up a “You’re using an Ad Blocker” overlay on videos. I’d use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn’t have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.
Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.
Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.
Now all I see is this.
Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.
I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can’t view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.
I just pay for YouTube Premium. It gets me YouTube Music, so for slightly more than the cost of Spotify I get music streaming and ad-free YouTube, and the channels I watch on YouTube get more value out of my streaming than if I watched with ads. And far more than if I watched with an adblocker.
Google Play Music was so much better than YouTube Music, unfortunately, but YouTube Music is still usable.
I understand that everyone hates ads. I hate ads, too. But video streaming and content creation aren’t free. I want to support the platform and support the creators whose content I enjoy, and I don’t want ads. So YouTube Premium seems like the easy option.
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I’ll admit I make good money. I work in software.
But I’ve been paying that since before I was making good money. Again, this is my music streaming platform. I would be paying $10/month to Spotify if I weren’t paying $14/month to YouTube.
(Actually I looked into my subscription while typing this, and I’m still paying the grandfathered price of $9.99/month for YouTube Premium. Pretty sweet, that.)
FYI, that grandfathered price goes away after December
That’s a shame, but the benefits still outweigh the cost in my mind. I hate ads, so what I get out of a YouTube Premium subscription is far more than what I get from Netflix or Max.
(And I realize I can get all of this for free by going around the TOS, but if I have the money I might as well support the service.)
Not really being reasonable. I don’t make much above min wage but buy YT Premium
Its reasonable for a lot of us
AdGuard and Vinegar on safari, uYouPlus from Altstore
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But your “solution” sounds like you don’t contribute at all. Especially none of the content creators gets a dime out of your consumption.
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Vivaldi browser just came out for iOS and has Adblock support. So does Firefox focus. Also, invidious/piped is always an option.
Using AdGuard and Vinegar to use YouTube in Safari, I can’t remember when I last saw an ad. It’s not ideal, but it works well enough.
Ads should be separate from content and not interfere with it. Ad blockers likely wouldn’t be a thing if this were followed. Also, ad networks are a security issue. Host them on your own servers with relationships with advertisers if you must have them.
The way ads are displayed effects how effective they are which in turn effects how valuable they are. More people turning to adblockers reduces the effectiveness of the ads and devalues the advertising method as a whole, more adblockers being used, lower effectiveness. YouTube then has to resort to putting in effort to combat adblockers which itself costs even more, ads have to become more intrusive to retain their value so YouTube can maintain it’s own servers and pay it’s content creators and it becomes an endless cycle of “fuck you I want your service for free and you are trampling my rights for trying to profit off me using your product”. In return all YouTube asks of you to obtain an ad-free video watching session for a month is $4 ($22/month split among 6 users)