If they take my money, I expect 0 advertising and tracking me across the web, which they refuse to do, even if asked nicely. They're still tuning algorithms, training models and llms with my personal data and I don't want to be a part of that.
"I want an option to pay and remove ads". YouTube adds that option. "Well content creators can still insert their own ads". YouTube adds a label on videos with sponsored segments, and lets you skip ahead. "Nope, it's too expensive, and they still track you." YouTube adds option to turn off all tracking and recommendations. "Nope, I don't trust Google, I'm never going to pay".
People are going to find excuses forever rather than just pay $10 or whatever for a service they use for multiple hours every day. The same people who wouldn't think twice about spending that much on two cups of coffee which will last them 5 minutes. This is exactly why we will never have ethical monetization on the internet, and will be stuck with ads and tracking forever.
> I subscribed for YT Premium at one point. I watched one video on a subject and magically started seeing adds for it across the internet.
Disabling watch history and recommendations isn't a premium feature, its just a privacy setting anyone can enable. If you had the same experience after disabling watch history then that would be very interesting.
I assume you also think that Alexa and Google Home are listening to your everyday household conversations and serve you ads based on it? Why do you even use the internet if you are so paranoid of it?
I paid for Premium for years. But with Google backing initiatives like WEI, I feel I can no longer support them. I took the money we were spending on Premium and poured it and more into Patreon.
I suspect you would always find a rationale to not pay. It is my experience that people who say "if they'd only change this one thing I'd pay for it" will never pay for it.
Yup. YouTube Premium is exactly what everyone claimed they wanted, and when they released it (at a price of like one sandwich a month) no one wants to pay. This is a perfect example of why straightforward monetization on the internet will never work, and we will be stuck with ads and tracking forever.
Sure - but YouTube has been around so long that most users started using YouTube many years ago for free and without being absolutely pummeled by ads - being forced to watch 5 ads for a 6 minute video kind of pummeled. I personally don't find enough value in YouTube content to warrant yet another $15+/month subscription, so I don't mind watching a few ads - even though those ads often have no relevance to my needs. However, the level of ad intrusion on the free tier doesn't make me want to pay for YouTube. Rather, I just don't want to use the service at all anymore.
There is a middle ground that Google chooses not to take: reasonable amounts of ethical ads. I don't mind ads that inform people of products. I mind ones that actively seek to harm my life--whether it's by ripping me off or encouraging my use of drugs and alcohol--which is 90% of what I see. But if I (someone who has been alcohol free for over a decade) have to watch 30 seconds of people living a happy and prosperous life drinking whiskey, it's them trying to hurt me.
> There is a middle ground that Google chooses not to take: reasonable amounts of ethical ads.
where can I see an example of this sort of thing, using ads you approve of, that scales to generating tens of billions of USD a year (to cover the costs of running YouTube)?
There's a reasonable way to ask this question without being a child about it. If you want to talk, we can. But I'm not going to engage someone resorting to absurdities like equating "ads I don't approve of" with ones that actively seek to harm their viewers.
I agree, but it shouldn’t be YouTube’s decision, because they can change their mind when the numbers are red or the CEO changes. Your government should establish those limits, so they apply in perpetuity and across all online and broadcast services.
It left a sour taste for many people when they gutted features from the YouTube app to put them behind the paywall. You used to be able to play videos with the screen off. But it is now required to be on to play videos, unless you have premium.
I also don't believe that they make $14/month from that ads that I would have to endure to watch content otherwise. It strongly feels like a premium to not be assaulted with ads to enjoy content.
Agreed. People will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify them expecting a service without offering nothing in return. (I say this as someone who used to live a life on the high seas, but now happily pay for Premium.)
Exactly, I've been stealing magazines from the grocery store for the last 30 years because the magazines have ads in them. It isn't fair to my personal belief and so I can do whatever I want.
Lots of people seem to feel like they are being ripped off that videos still contain sponsored segments when paying for YT Premium. I don't really get it but it seems common on HN.
Maybe because those sponsored segments are literally ads. The whole value proposition of YT Premium was that I pay to remove ads and YT pays the creators I watch so they don't need to do that crap.
YT has nothing to do with them and imo there's no reasonable policy line to draw between the many forms of native advertising with their varying levels of invasiveness, nor should we really want YT to be the arbiter.
You also have never been required to watch them! I just right arrow a couple of times but if you want it automated you can just use SponsorBlock and feel content that in exchange the creator is getting extra revenue from your Premium subscription.
you want YouTube to interfere with the content of videos even more than they do now? how much assurance do you want that a video doesn't have any sponsorship? a human viewing each video before it goes on to the CDN? affadvit from the poster that they didn't receive money from any VPN company before mentioning a VPN? why are you blaming YouTube for the poor quality content you're choosing to watch, instead of not watching it or blaming the creator?
You understand we are talking about Google Ads right? Of course they are double-dipping; they use your YT premium video info as more fuel for their internet-spanning ad network megalith. They don't need to show you ads in the videos themselves to be double-dipping.
I agree. I want to support YouTube. But it feels like we're having to pay a premium to not get shown ads, not an equivalent price.
I don't agree with you about "most of the web". There are MANY places that will not allow you to pay them to not be bombarded by ads. Even then, to be able to not have to be bombarded with ads everywhere gets rather expensive, and in many cases not possible. I wish there were a simple way to be able to pay content creators (and by extension somehow the platform they are hosting their content on) for just the content.
I know I'm in a VERY privileged position to be able to do so. I support a few creators on Patreon (which doesn't make up for using an ad blocker on YouTube, because YouTube still needs to get paid for hosting and providing the content). But many Patreon subscriptions feel ridiculously expensive for what they provide. I'm happy to send $1 to a creator once a month (in bulk through a single charge, to minimize the $0.25 + 2.#% cost that credit card processor extort), but some of these creators that create some content want $10/month for some of their exclusive content. Which is nearly what a Netflix or other streaming platform would cost, and have a significantly larger catalog of content to consume.
But not in exchange for not tracking you. If you pay, obviously you have to log in and in typical Google fashion have your viewing history tracked, associated with you and stored forever.
You can disable watch history pretty easily. Obviously you have to trust Google but I'd assume they would be breaking several laws in various jurisdictions if they were still storing history longterm after you opted out. Definitely not out of the question but its something.
Anecdotally, the setting was thorough enough for me that it completely broke Youtube Music's recommendation engine. Every single source of recommended content would give the exact same songs in the exact same order no matter how many times I would listen.
> I'd assume they would be breaking several laws in various jurisdictions if they were still storing history after you opted out
Breaking privacy regulation is literally Facebook's business model and they've been very successful at that. It's dumb to think Google isn't doing the same.
I completely agree that you shouldn't trust Google not to break the law, and there's no real way to prove they aren't storing and using that data somehow. They've almost certainly weighed the pros and cons of retaining and using that info and we don't have any clue how that shook out. All we can really do is guess whether or not they think its worth the risk and make our decisions accordingly.
Personally, I think my chance of having my history tracked and abused is lower logged in + history off versus being logged out where I don't have the option and Google can still fingerprint me 17 different ways. There are obviously many more options for the more privacy conscious but that's where I'm at.
No, YouTube is happy to sell me a music streaming subscription I have no intention of ever touching together with the ad-free video streaming subscription I am willing to pay for.
This also makes it completely opaque who gets my money at the end of the month, assuming I only use the video part: Only video creators? Or am I just paying into a global pot that is divided proportionally, i.e. would I end up paying x% for music despite neither wanting nor using that on YouTube?
Imagine Steam making you buy a movie download with every game you purchase, or Amazon requiring you to buy a box of cupcakes with every Kindle book. (Actually Amazon requiring me to pay for a video streaming service for expedited deliveries isn't too far off... Not that I'm too thrilled about that.)
I'm sorry, but those complaints are nonsense. Either the price is worth what you'd get out of it, or it isn't.
My internet provider doesn't tell me the breakdown of infrastructure/profit/uplink costs. My Netflix bill doesn't tell me the breakdown of new content creation, content licensing, video game development/licensing, infrastructure costs, profits, etc. Should I complain about Netflix making a multi-movie contract with Adam Sandler because he happens to not be my taste? You're complaining about a fantasy you invented not existing.
Well, it isn’t worth it for me, and I doubt that the inclusion of music is making the bundle cheaper than video by itself.
The fact that there are other bundle-only deals available in the world, some of which are worth it for me and others which aren’t, has no bearing on the fact that I dislike this particular one, and Google is losing my business as a direct result of their bundling.
> My internet provider doesn't tell me the breakdown of infrastructure/profit/uplink costs.
A more appropriate comparison would be an ISP that also forces a Netflix or cable TV subscription onto you.
In fact, my ISP offers both TV+internet bundles and internet only. If they would only offer the former, I’d switch to the competition unless it was somehow the same price as an internet-only competitor.
A huge part of the problem we have with it is the constant tracking and data gathering. Paying them isn't going to stop tracking. Hell, if you stay signed in (and give them a credit card to link to your account!) they're just going to track you even more.
Oh yeah, great idea! Let's pay YouTube/Google, so I can view "a note from todays sponsor" about VPN providers, PCB manufacturing services or some game item gambling site faster/more often.
Ah, so you'd prefer that YouTube had draconian rules about the content of videos, forbidding anyone from mentioning anything they have a commercial involvement with?
Sounds very reasonable and easy to enforce and uncontroversial, good point.
If you're unhappy with the content of videos then complain to the people that made the video? Or don't watch it?
I'd very much like if gambling sites were not promoted to minors and there would be honesty about VPN providers and their talking points about anonimity and security, yes.
so...you want youtube to interfere with the content of videos even more than it does now? and require each video to be approved by a human before posting?
that seems like a completely different and unrelated service to what YouTube does.
Well, it's up to YouTube to decide what to do, but they shouldn't tell me it's "ad-free" if the only change is that I only see one set of gambling ads and not two.
They don't know what they want - we have some of the highest-paid people in the world here on HN who think content should just appear out of thin air for free. I'm so sick of this mindset that everybody else should work for free while I get paid a fortune for my work.
Also, I can skip through a video that's doing a "word from their sponsor." I can't skip through I YouTube ad - YouTube determines how much I'm going to watch before I skip through.
Absolutely, I pay for YouTube premium and I think it's the best of all my streaming services. Ad Blocking, in this case, just reads like stealing cable.
Funny you mention this. With cable, I used to be able to skip ads with my PVR (MythTV). And that's entirely my right to do so, nobody can strip it from me. My TV, my rules.
Same thing with the web. My computer, my rules.
But google of course is unhappy about it, and will try to frustrate as many users as it can until they can push their "web integrity" crap down users' throats.
Isn't modern cable quite expensive, and not a direct comparison to ad-supported Youtube? Web suggests the average bill in the US exceeds $200 a month. I saw the streaming cable providers are up to $70/mo; they have gotten more expensive as they bundle more channels. I'm not sure if that's their choice or whether it's part of the bundling practices the cable providers do in negotiations (edit to correct: I meant content providers... though it's sometimes the same company)
Technical curiosity: Can you still roll your own DVR? I know Plex has some functionality there, and CableCARDs are/were a thing but cable providers were trying to put an end to those. And I saw DRM for over-the-air is coming down the pipe with ATSC 3.0
same here,glad to get a family plan,it is valuable for the most part, it provides a service,thus you can be charged,you are not forced to use YouTube either,seems common sense to me
yes it is not 100% tracking free, so are most if not all Internet services, all bad but YouTube does not stand out
Not for $20 dollars/month. I’ve already watched less and less YouTube because of the ads. It was worse than old school TV in the end. I realized: There’s tons of other great content out there. I don’t need YouTube at all. For the few videos I still watch, I would never pay $240/year. For me this price is not competitive to other offerings online. Not even close.
I just got an email that my YouTube Premium family membership is going from $AU18/mo up to AU$33/month - that's a ridiculous hike and I won't be paying that when it kicks in April next year.
No, they don't. I have been using YT Premium for years and never seen a third party ad of the type I assume you're alluding to.
It is true they don't seem to even attempt to prevent video creators from adding ads within the video itself (explicit or implicit product endorsements especially). These ads aren't as objectionable because the incentive is there for the video creator to ensure the ad doesn't drive you away from the video, and often they try their best to make the ad entertaining in the same way their video is. This would be impractical for YT to enforce since the line is blurry between ad and content, so I don't get too grumpy about it, but I would love to pay an additional amount of money to be totally free of the ads.
I just avoid any creator that is spamming their videos with sponsors. For example I have zero problem with how Gamers Nexus does their sponsor bits and it's just not worth trying to block them.
Not really. YouTube can simply say "you must tell us when the sponsored ad starts and stops", and skip over those. Creators who don't do that can face demonitization and having their videos removed from the recommender for premium users.
They have all sorts of rules that content creators must follow or it hurts the creator's bottom line - I don't see how this would be different.
Is YouTube gonna compensate the creators for that lost in Revenue, drastically increase the price of premium or just force them to leave YouTube? Adam Ragusea has a good break down [1] of how making money with YouTube works and your plan ruins the economics of being a creator.
Ah okay. Maybe there is confusion between their YT Music premium and the "video" premium. Some also seem to be saying that sponsored content is what they're referring to.
I have YouTube Premium, and YouTube does not show me ads to serve me the content they host. I also get YT Music, so it is a great value. I am not sure where you have been misinformed.
Content creators negotiate privately with companies and put relevant ads into their content. YouTube does not force content creators to do this and many do not. This has nothing to do with YouTube or YouTube Premium. I like that YouTube does not illegally suppress the right for content creators to negotiate these private contracts.
I'm sort of excited about this. There are great subscription streaming service like Nebula that content producers have been advocating for. Google management is going to boost sales over there as people exit YouTube and we can finally break it's monopoly hold.
I bought a Nebula subscription to support Grady Hillhouse and have been deeply disappointed in it. Virtually everything I have found there can also be found free on YouTube (including Grady's own Practical Construction series, something he didn't make clear when promoting Nebula for the series). And it's full of the same clickbait crap like "7 dumbest animals in the world" and that fucking face YouTubers all make for their thumbnails.
I'm with you. YouTube is a clown car of user-hostile design and clickbait. I'd never heard of Nebula so just had a quick look, design looks OK but the horrendous thumbnails of people pulling stupid faces and debasing themselves for clicks is sadly almost as bad as YouTube. I'm resigned to the fact that dignity is an anachronism in 2023.
I subscribed to Nebula and honestly there hasn't been any content there that has ever kept me coming back. Been subscribed for a year and all the content I want is still only on YouTube.
They're going to have to screw over creators bad enough for creators to move elsewhere before there's any remotely significant change in critical mass
I was hyped when it came out, paid for a subscription for a year and it was unusable. Did not improve in the year, so I just cancelled. Somehow the quality looked worse than the worst 180p. Not 1080p, 180p.
This enforcement has helped me a lot reduce habitual youtube use in moments of boredom. Now when I hit the playback block, it gives me a moment of pause to remember that that watching youtube isn't something I really want to be spending my time doing anyways, so I just close the tab.
Another sign that the gold rush phase of the web is over. It is no longer enough for companies to just increase their active user base and be rewarded with a rising share price. Google gets paid for showing users adds, so if users aren’t looking at the adds, there is no reason to incur the cost of showing them content, and if they stop using the service, so be it.
It’s been 25 years, but it’s nice to see that fundamental economic principles still hold even on the internet. I expect that we will be seeing much more of this in the near future.
> ...users aren't allowed to "modify" the service or "circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content."
Sorry Google, but how my computer operates is not part of your Service.
you have a public profile with your real name, employer, and research interests and you're posting about workarounds to not pay a small subscription fee?
$14 a month _is_ pretty expensive, especially for some users were used to getting for free for many years.
Also, this is _hacker_ news, have we really reqched the point where even something as benign as a link to an alternative youtube frontend is to risque?
You mean hacking isn't synonymous with corporate bootlicking and supporting the hobbyist-turned-professional monetized locking down of cyberspace by advertisers?
Here’s my 2 cents that no one asked for: youtube has been the default video hosting service for a LONG TIME. It’s free to host videos, free to watch videos - it’s what people automatically think of when they think about watching longer videos online.
As a consequence of it’s “default-ness”, there’s a lot of content that isn’t available anywhere else. Sometimes I can’t find a specific lecture, hardware installation video, or - yes - that funny video a friend sent me anywhere else. And it sucks, because I don’t want the tendrils from Google’s evil empire squirming into me like nematodes, but if I want to access that specific piece of content I need to take a big slurp from the cursed chalice.
A big part of me hopes that this ends with more people putting their content somewhere else. Will “somewhere else” be any better? I have no idea. Would a video hosting diaspora even be desirable? Also no idea - it might be a terrible idea that ends with a lot of content being lost forever when a service goes belly up. I just feel like there’s got to be a better way.
on a more on-topic thought, this is a no-win situation for content providers. active reform of the advertisement model in Youtube is long overdue as twelve ads per video and a boilerplate ad from a content sponsor in the actual content is utterly unsustainable.
people are motivated to stop adblock at google by a paycheck. this motivation pales in comparison to the white-hot rage most users experience at the current situation, combined with the open source model of most adblock projects. at best, the current effort from Meta is like pouring gasoline on a bonfire. People will join these projects even if its just to provide rapid debug data.
Google is going much further than that, though. Google's Web Environment Integrity spec intends to give website providers control over what executes on your machine. You'd better believe this includes a way to ensure an adblocker isn't present.
I caved in and bought Premium (currently in the free trial month). It greatly enhanced the experience on my phone as well, plus I do most of my learning on youtube, so given how valuable it is for me, I don't mind paying.
While I'm a full-on ad-blocker user and will almost never disable an ad-blocker to use or support any website, I also think it's fine if a service wants to block my access for using one.
I pay for YT Premium because right now it's worth it- it and Twitch (I use Turbo) are both essentially my only video entertainment (instead of paying far more for cable or something- I don't watch regular TV shows or movies anyway).
I would rather a service cease to exist, require a subscription, than view ads. My attention is not for sale to the lowest bidder.
Yes, I understand that some of what survives on the web today is because it has been ad supported- and that it's one way we have democratized / made content available to the masses, including those that can't afford to pay- I just think we'd find another way if ads went away and it's sad that advertising ever was allowed to have the foothold it has today and become the industry it is. Its very existence is repugnant.
Been experiencing intermittent frustration. Just last week, with uBlock origin installed, YouTube was preventing streaming almost every video I attempted to play. This week, have not received the ad blocker notification.
The recommendations I found yesterday when I first got the 3 video warning were to turn off all other adblockers (I also use the Enhancer for YouTube extension which has it's own adblocker that I disabled), go to the uBlock Origin settings and enable the Adguard - Other Annoyances and Adguard - Popup Overlays blocks, purge all caches, and then click Update Now to update the blocklists. It's worked for the time being.
I just tested uBlock Origin and didn't see any warnings (or ads) on youtube.com on Chrome. I was not logged in.
Do only logged in users get the popup warnings? Or maybe uBlock Origin isn't effected yet?
It seems fair game to me that YouTube would block ad blockers. Video hosting is relatively expensive and creators rely on the ad income. Am I missing something from the argument as to why people are aggravated?
I don't know about everybody else but if I can't use an adblocker on Youtube I'll look for content somewhere else. The platform is not vital to me. Most of what I watch is because I'm procrastinating or curious about something. I can live without it.
I already watch enough ads when I watch some Youtube on my TV.
This is like when game companies thought that killing piracy would increase their sales.
I think YouTube doesn't realize the size of the beast they're provoking if they intentionally break downloaders, adblockers, and alternate clients.
If this is a cat and mouse game of technical prowess between hackers and Google engineers to consume content without ads, Google will either lose or use the government to do violence on open source developers.
If that game begins in earnest, then people will fear for the long term existence of YouTube, and it will become self-fulfilling as people mirror content on other sites until the cat-and-mouse game becomes pointless -- investing ever more money into ever smaller returns.
New video sites will gain massive number of users and over-inflate in value if there's a YouTube exodus and the process can begin anew.
> This is like when game companies thought that killing piracy would increase their sales.
how is it like that at all?
YouTube says: hey guys, it costs a bunch of money to host exabytes of video and a video CDN, so we either need to show ads or charge you the price of two pints a month.
what secret third option would you like them to offer?
It's like that because if I had pay to watch Youtube I wouldn't. I'd watch what I want on other platforms even if I had to pay.
Google is already making a lot of money from me and it doesn't stop there. They spy on me. They process every bit of data they can find of me even if I don't want to and I don't see a cent.
I don't see any ads or warnings. Maybe my combination of Brave + custom NextDNS + uBlock + Enhancer for YouTube + DF YouTube will keep working for the forseeable future.
I also use Brave on my Android and wife's iPhone, which has the option to block YT ads.
And I use NewPipe on my Android.
Just in case anyone wants to copy my setup, because it works well.
it really is fascinating to read the comments on posts like this and find out just how many people are massive cheapskates who have spent ages constructing elaborate ethical systems to justify not paying ~two pints a month to get the thing they say they want.
There's currently a bug(?) where YouTube videos displayed as modal/overlays from Google search results will show ads even if you are a YouTube Premium subscriber.
There are multiple versions of it—some that are just a "hey, please turn off your adblo—oh, you're closing the popup, okay :'(" and others that are a full blockage that you can't get past without turning off adblock.
I want a YouTube TV, YouTube Red, and YouTube Music bundle. Bundle and save! Ive held off on YouTube Red because I have YouTube TV and I'm kinda pissed they don't have a bundle.
