I admit to being a bit of a YT addict, but this would be the end of watching YT for me. Whenever I watch YT on the Android app, I'm absolutely appalled at the frequency, duration, and low-quality of the ads. Often, a 30s-1 min video will have up to 20 seconds of unskippable ads. Ads frequently interrupt the content, and they are especially bad for videos that aren't 'demonitized' due to controversial content.
I've actually just closed the Android app instead of waiting to watch the video. Whatever dopamine kick I had from an intriguing thumbnail/title is lost well before the ad can finish.
Maybe I shouldn't complain. It's like how making smoking more difficult actually did result in lower rates of smoking.
I mean if you're deriving that much value without actually paying the platform through one of their methods, ads, you should probably consider their other method, premium for $13.
It's only a matter of time before adds are embedded directly into the video stream. Then addbock will have to recognize when an add is being played and maybe mute/blackout the video. If lots of people use that kind of addblock (I'm not sure they will), it will lead to an arms race making content and adds blend and mix until there is a continuum from content through product placement to adds.
Content creators already get paid for littering their content with adds. Right now, these portions are usually easy to notice and sponsoring is usually disclosed (except product placement). However, it's not a given this keeps being the case.
I expect the fact that addblock ever worked on YouTube and just skipped adds will seem crazy to people in a decade.
That arms race has been here for a few years already. Sponsorblock is a crowdsourced extension that uses community highlights of good and bad parts of a video to auto skip through it. Really useful for cutting through the sponsorships and other useless fluff.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
> It's only a matter of time before adds are embedded directly into the video stream.
The DVR was such a consumer friendly device. I haven't had to watch a commercial on cable in forever.
The endgame of streaming was always going to be loss of control of the video stream, unskippable ads.
Are all technological advances from now on destined to originate from or be acquired by the same tech giants and inevitably used against us after an introductory period of usefulness?
I've been very happy with YT premium until recently I've found myself misclicking and being trapped in the Shorts, swiping left does not always guarantee exiting from shorts, sometimes it doesn't work.
I've seen enough dark arts and its patterns. This time I find myself shortlisting the creators I watch frequently and find other places I can subscribe to, like CuriousityStream, Nebula, Patron(1$/mo), or even Spotify.
After all I only have two reasons to subscribe to YT Premium:
- remove the increasing seconds unskippable ads that r*ping my attention
- support the creators
Certainly I can enjoy the same content elsewhere without shorts .
Ad revenue seems to be down hard all over the place - several of the podcasts I listen to are basically begging on air for advertising with some ad spots replaced with "this episode sponsored by our patrons" type segments.
AI is gonna murder ad growth in the mid term. Bots don’t click on ads and GPt4 level reasoning will make it hard to hide ads and continue to stay compliant with California / European regulation
Shitty gradient descent was enough to take over the world already.
But you need to get of the copium that is hallucinations because that is a very short term issue with unlimited context window, embedding storage and the ability to use tools.
They're testing the waters to see what they can get away with. Last year they ran a trial where 4K playback was completely locked behind Premium for some users, which they walked back due to backlash, but they wanted to do it.
Likewise they want to break adblockers, and they are probably easily capable of doing so, but they're trying to triangulate exactly how much backlash they'll get before committing to it.
I don't think there is anything wrong with blocking ad blockers, backlash is just cause people feel entitled to consume content for free without paying their fair share to creators be it adsense or premium account share.
I've actually just closed the Android app instead of waiting to watch the video. Whatever dopamine kick I had from an intriguing thumbnail/title is lost well before the ad can finish.
Maybe I shouldn't complain. It's like how making smoking more difficult actually did result in lower rates of smoking.