
YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage  - pagefair
http://blog.pagefair.com/2013/youtube-shoots-google-in-foot/?cmp=81
======
marquis
There's this great small village where everyone makes stuff and buys stuff
from each other: good ecosystem, works well and popular stuff makes more money
than less popular, as expected. Someone comes up with an idea to make money
off the stuff by giving it away for free but putting some ads on it. People
don't mind much: the stuff is free now and the people making popular stuff
make good money from their share of the ads.

What happens next seems to be some kind of bizarre need to make _more_ money.
This is the part I don't really understand. So the people giving away the free
stuff with the ads put more ads, which starts to put the people off watching
it for free. The people getting the free stuff start to try and find ways of
getting the free stuff without the new annoying ads, which makes the people
making the ads want to make more ads and make it criminal to block the ads.
People stop making stuff because they aren't making as much money as in the
hey-day of free-stuff-and-not-too-many-ads and people stop watching stuff and
maybe go outside and watch the sunset (still free) or play card games and
charades (not yet patented) or make their own stuff and put it on FaceGramSnap
(which has ads but not yet so annoying). The people who put ads on the free
stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder
> what went wrong._

greed

~~~
bittercynic
Agreed. Greed.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I work in a sort of purgatory of the broadcast/internet TV space, and with
regards to ads, completely agree.

Broadcasters have gotten accustomed to very high rates for the ads shown on
television. They're trying to get these rates on the web, but advertisers
don't want to pay them (which is crazy, since you can directly measure
response on the web; not as much with broadcast). So they show more ads. A lot
more ads, to try to get to the same revenue level as broadcast television.

During the day, I sometimes feel like I'm watching two dinosaurs fight over a
carcass as the meteorite comes screaming towards the ground.

~~~
001sky
Entitlement. You have to remember that old media is a monopoly biz. That
explains alot about the culture. The people believe they are entitled to be at
a certain level of power/money/presitge in society. Its not surprising they
are masters of political interventions to support their positions. They don't
do product as much as they do monopoly business model, legislated advantage(s)
and regulatory capture. From that position, it's just extraction by contract
terms.

~~~
marquis
>The people believe they are entitled to be at a certain level of power

That's a very good point to make: old school media (broadcast media/print) set
the cultural standards for a society. That's changing: the Internet is
allowing everyone to learn together what they think, or want to think. We know
that anyone losing power will do anything to try and keep it, as they fall
deeper into the well of redundancy. You just helped me realise that broadcast
is going away, but we'll maintain our celebrity/expert hierarchies based on
new media explorations (e.g. XKCD, notch, Colonel Hadfield)

------
cromwellian
Ads are the least bad option. The Web functions best if content is available
without paywalls. The Web is about friction-free use, you click a link, you
are faced with walls. If we went to a micro-transaction based Web, where every
link was behind a payment service, it would destroy crawlability, hamper
sharing, and cast a chilling effect on people's behavior with respect to
consuming content.

The people producing content do need to eat and datacenters cost money too.
You can either turn the entire Web into a giant App Store Mall where you pay
for everything on demand, or we can have a free, open web, where 'curl' works,
but you have to suffer the annoyance of banner ads and profiling (which people
can do anyway with paywalls anyway)

To me, it's a worthwhile tradeoff. I'd rather not see the Web behind a
bazillion freemium pay-me links like we have on native.

The real debate should be over how to make ads less annoying, more relevant,
more pleasant, and let those who don't want to make the tradeoff make a micro-
payment instead to opt-out of ads.

If I could pay $50/year for an ad-free YouTube experience I probably would.

~~~
josu
>If I could pay $50/year for an ad-free YouTube experience I probably would.

When you can install adblock and get the same experience for free I'm not sure
that many people would think that way. And the problem is that for most of the
people that I have installed adblock for don't understand the moral
implications of using it. I've tried to teach them how to deactivate it for
pages they like, but they just didn't care because they didn't see the problem
with having it always on. Most of the regular people around me don't
understand how webpages make their money. They may say advertising, but if you
question them any further all I get is blank stares.

~~~
ljf
People pay for itunes when they can get music for free, people pay for netflix
when they can torrent or stream for free. Some people are happy to pay for
services they like. Some aren't. But I think that you can make a business out
of those that can be happy to pay, if the product is right.

------
ancarda
Websites are expensive and other than charging users money, ads are an easy
way to generate revenue. I like using free services and I'd like to support
the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock.

However, YouTube forced me to. Back when YouTube used a small ad in the top-
right, it was fine. Banner overlays were a bit more annoying, but still
tolerable. Pre-rolls? No way, they stop me from getting to the content I want.

I wish I could switch to Vimeo but there's not a lot of content there.

~~~
VikingCoder
Aren't most pre-rolls 3 seconds before you can watch the video?

And it's funny to me to watch people smugly use AdBlock. All you folks who use
it understand that Google could detect that you AdBlocked, and then refuse to
show the video, right? I mean, you get that, right?

~~~
TillE
> Google could detect that you AdBlocked, and then refuse to show the video

Emphasis on "could". They don't. So what?

It's trivial to make anti-anti-adblock filters, so most sites don't even start
that arms race.

~~~
VikingCoder
Are you logged in to YouTube when you're blocking ads?

Google could announce, "Hey, everyone who has ad-blocked over the last year
violated our Terms of Use, and so we're deleting their accounts."

Or they could just shut down YouTube, because it's impossible to earn revenue
off of people who aren't even willing to watch an ad before they feel entitled
to watch a video.

------
a3n
I didn't realize adblock would block pre-rolls. That damn web development
company with the animated little guy and the tiles of site examples has really
gotten annoying.

Installed adblock a few minutes ago.

Bliss.

~~~
DanBC
YOU'VE BEEN CODING LIKE A BEAST AND NOW IT'S [skip]

It's weird that there's no mechanism for me to veto ads. I have no use for
that service, which makes the ad even more annoying to me. A while ago Crucial
RAM were showing a really irritating ad.

Normally I don't skip ads, but there have started being more ads that I hate
and need to skip.

And it's weird to get a 4 minute pre-roll ad on a 9 minute youtube video.

------
toastedzergling
Youtube wasn't the breaking point for me, twitch.tv was. Granted, the
streamers themselves do have control over this, I found it utterly annoying to
see the same 1 or 2 ads played over and over in my face. Once I had ABP
installed, the whole internet suddenly became faster to load too. The only
annoying thing is, some websites that have those annoying ads that scroll
across the webpage will now result in a dead-iframe blocking its content.
Fortunately, I know how to right click, inspect element, navigate to the
iframe container, and delete it, which, takes about 5 seconds.

~~~
freehunter
Not just faster, but more secure as well. I couldn't tell you how many malware
outbreaks I see at work because of a rogue advertisement on a popular site.
Adblock keeps these from getting the best of your users. We did a pilot group
with some folks who commonly use their work computers without the benefit of
our corporate proxy or firewall (these are the users most at risk of
advertising-based malware) by having them install Adblock. The results were
pretty drastic, even if it wasn't a statistically significant sample size.

------
danielweber
I like how reddit discussion threads is now proof of how everyone feels.

~~~
JTon
Ha! Good catch. As a redditor, I sometimes fall into the same trap. Because,
you know, who doesn't browse reddit? /s

------
pit
Let's also not forget youtube-dl: [http://rg3.github.io/youtube-
dl/](http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

~~~
lakwn
And Youtube Viewer:
[https://code.google.com/p/trizen/](https://code.google.com/p/trizen/)

~~~
okasaki
You can play videos with youtube-dl:

    
    
        mplayer -really-quiet -cache 3000 $(youtube-dl -f 18 -g $(xclip -o))

------
bzelip
Here's a related and interesting article [1] titled 'Unraveling Google’s
Product Strategy' from the author of a post that is linked to on the HN front
page (Ode to Little Data)[2].

The author in this related article is really showing the total commitment to
ads by google. I find it very unsettling.

[1][http://katsenblog.com/post/58721533658/unraveling-googles-
pr...](http://katsenblog.com/post/58721533658/unraveling-googles-product-
strategy)
[2][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6782205](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6782205)

------
rmckayfleming
A fair size chunk of the pre roll ads I see also don't show anything
interesting in the first five seconds. They have some sort of banner and just
as the five seconds are up the ad content actually starts.

------
adamb_
Reminds me of "Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?"[1]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6382188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6382188)

------
gabriel34
This bit caught my eyes: "while paying AdBlock Plus to whitelist their other
Adwords ads" So, adblock sells the ability to display ads to it's users? Isn't
that just plain wrong?

------
wnevets
When will advertisers realize shorter and more direct ads work best on the
web?

When Hulu was in beta they only had 5 second ads and I still remember some of
them after all of these years simply because I had no reason to direct my
attention away from them. Now when Im forced to watch a 30 second ad I just
change the tab and check my email or whatever.

~~~
pierlux
Also, repeating the same ad over and over is pretty annoying. If you binge
watch a series on Hulu Plus, you'll get the same ad at least twice per
episode, for every 24 min episode. I can recite some of them by heart, with
the same intonation.

------
sp332
Why are the screenshots in this article taken from klout.com instead of
twitter or facebook or wherever they were actually posted?

~~~
jaytaylor
It looks like he may just have my klout chrome or Firefox extension installed,
which adds klout scores to twitter. He may also be using a 3rd party client
with a klout integration.

~~~
pagefair
Correct, just the Klout chrome extension adding scores to Twitter =)

------
criley2
I don't know about y'all, but on Chrome right now, no ad-blocker works on
Youtube anymore. The adblocking works on every other site, even other video
sites. But Youtube pre-rolls continue to play no matter what extension or
filters I use (and making sure that "acceptable ads" are off).

Anyone else experiencing this?

~~~
shawabawa3
I'm using adblock plus with easylist and fanboys list, and "allow non-
obtrusive advertising" off. Works for me

------
byjove
It's an evidence free nonsense article, but to answer that quoted tweet:
YouTube for Schools doesn't contain ads
[http://www.youtube.com/schools](http://www.youtube.com/schools)

~~~
kurtbingham
What evidence are you expecting? It's an opinion piece that merely connects a
few dots. Google paid adblock plus, that's a fact. Did you see the Reddit
article? Half of the comments were citing YouTube as a major reason for
installing adblock.

