Google has begun testing a more aggressive approach to users trying to watch videos on the YouTube video platform with ad blockers and without a paid
I will never be subjected to ads and I will never pay for YouTube. Give me a cut of all the money you generate off my data, then we can talk further.
Is user watch data really that valuable?
Then again, the massive amounts of money spent on marketing have always been baffling to me. I don’t think I’ve ever bought something because of an advertisement.
Billions upon billions of dollars and decades of research have been spent on marketing and advertising because it works.
They don’t necessarily want to convince you to buy their product directly. What they want is for you to constantly be reminded of their brand so that when you decide to buy a product, your first thought might be their product. If you’re thirsty and you walk into a store, they want you to think of Coke. If you’re hungry, they want you to think of McDonald’s. Even if you don’t really like it, maybe you don’t buy their product, but you’re thinking of it, so maybe you’ll talk about it and remind someone else of it.
Watch data is valuable because it lets them know how to keep your attention so that you’ll watch more ads. It tells them which ads to associate with you personally, and which videos to put which ads on for maximum effect.
I think the basic idea is that data collection is a form of uncompensated labor. The matter of what it’s worth isn’t the issue, but the fact of it being worth anything to anyone at all, and it being taken from you with little to no choice in the matter. Not to mention bought, sold, traded, etc.
Yes, a lot of it is tied to agreeing to a EULA, but we all know that just about anything we click on or do on our phones and computers is tracked, stored, sold, and used to make money in dozens/hundreds of ways, EULA or not.
I don’t think I’ve ever bought something because of an advertisement.
Side note, this is incredibly difficult to believe, tbh.
Advertising companies gunna advertise, hell or high water. Sometimes it’s easy to forget, but all the major players in tech are just advertising companies. I use a pihole running in my network to deep six all advertising traffic in a way that the website doesn’t know it’s happening.
However, I subscribe to youtube premium for access to youtube music (it’s positively amazing if you love newly released EDM), and as a happy perk, no advertising videos for me.
I feel like Google has been cheeky for a while now in that they are either A) running ads off their own servers, same that show the video itself (so you can’t block the request without also blocking the video) or B) they’re hitting up their own DNS servers (ignoring system DNS settings) using DNS-over-HTTPS which you can’t necessarily block, and which could easily rotate IPs behind a reverse proxy. They could just pass the current IP in a response field from the initial HTTP request for the video and then use that IP to make whatever additional HTTP calls they need for the DNS records for the ad servers, bypassing PiHole or any other local DNS server entirely, since they could just open a connection directly with the IP (both for DNS and for content streams, ads or otherwise)
Because my PiHole (and/or AdGuardHome) seemed to work (or at least disrupt) everything except the YT app.
Now I have YT Premium anyway so it’s a non-issue for me as well. Makes me wonder how many other companies are going to do this and what can be done about it?
I subscribed back when it was Google Music + Youtube RED as a perk. Worth it to me to nix Youtube ads and listen to music all day (also without ads). There will always be a contingent of people that will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make ad-supported stuff not have ads, but in the case of music and YT videos, pay up or watch the ads. If there was a reasonably priced option to subscribe to more than a single newspaper service, I’d be paying for that instead of doing the javascript disablement dance.
100% agree. And I also have YouTube premium previously YouTube red previously YouTube music.
Came for the music, stayed for the ad free experience.
1000% this! I’ve been subscribed since it was called Google music, and you had the option to upload your own library of MP3’s and access them via streaming. When they rolled it into Youtube, it was a happy accident for me. Hell, I haven’t seen ads on youtube in so long, I forgot they even existed!
I gave Youtube music a try but my god, both the shuffle AND loop playlist option (when using playlists) sometimes just doesn’t work on desktop and it has not been fixed for some time… I stopped using spotify because of the bugs but this is somehow even worse
If honestly be fine with ads if they weren’t so damn intrusive.
Same before it was just one or two ads per video but now it’s unbearable
wanna bet?
