Ask HN: Why there are so many ads on YouTube? Am I crazy or what? Has anyone noticed tons of ads on youtube? Every single dang video even as short as 10 mins has several ads. Can't even jump through the video without seeing several ads. |
Ask HN: Why there are so many ads on YouTube? Am I crazy or what? Has anyone noticed tons of ads on youtube? Every single dang video even as short as 10 mins has several ads. Can't even jump through the video without seeing several ads. |
It’s because you’re too poor to afford YouTube Premium.
I dislike ads, particularly dark patterns, and shocking I pay for youtube premium. An unpopular opinion but can someone please explain how can all this be hosted for free? Or why do some believe they should?
Doing so would allow them to cross reference all their tracking to my personal details, or at least to a fixed id.
Fuck youtube.
HOWEVER. Dove cream soap, your luxury soap. I am sure, Skittles, taste the rainbow, that you will also, Adidas, impossible is nothing, agree, Nike, just do it, that if the ads themselves, Snickers, satisfaction, outnumber the actual content, Tesco, every little helps, that becomes very, Volkwagen, the people's car, frustrating to the point of, Babybel, just pop and eat, madness, is completely, Kleenex, the soft tissue, unnecessary, and just plain greedy, Durex, to our competitors customers, happy father's day.
But yes, the ad quantity has certainly increased tremendously in YouTube compared to a year ago.
SponsorBlock to auto-skip in-video ads.
PiHole for network-wide blocking. Or just add Energized hosts to your router's hosts file, I like Ultimate.
Or set adguard DNS in your router/smartphone/PC.
They really do work.
I use an ad blocker on all of my devices, but when given the opportunity to pay for ads to be removed, I do it. It’s the best way to signal to companies that you don’t want to see ads, but you are still willing to support them.
Not everyone can afford YouTube premium, but if you can, and you hate ads, you should.
It's like $2 a month.
You aren't imagining it.
I was also surprised to find out that many of them are not tested well, and return errors on first or second click.
JS based ad blocking isn't really an option on mobile and DNS based filtering doesnt work
I personally use YouTube Premium for a few years and I like it, never having to watch ads on PC/tablet/TV is really nice.
The world is such a wider place than what you imagine it is.
[1] "anyone making less than mid-six-figures"
Long answer is look how much video content they host. How can expect them to host all that, a lot of it no magnetizable, with out ads?
and might get down voted for this, but the more people block ads, the more ads they have to show to the rest of the people who don't block ads.
We may end up facing the choice to page huge sums to have wide/diverse information access or only have access to a small silo'ed news/entertainment we choose to pay for.
So while we love to hate on ad driven internet, this helps keep a wide access available.
No idea what the right answer is holistically, but "Spend the 40¢ a day to pay for it, Jesus." fails to consider the wider enviroment of where the internet is going.
Edit: However I do marvel at the infrastructure in place to support this, even at scale it can’t be cheap.
Also, if you cast stuff to the TV, you only need a modded version of YouTube on your phone - you don't need to make any changes to the TV.
We ended up uninstalling Pi-Hole and removing it from our network, which was a pain in the neck. I remember that simply removing the blocklists wasn't enough to undo the damage, which is why we had to go with the removal from network route.
I've considered revisiting Pi-Hole in the future, and I'd definitely be more cautious that time around.
'uBlick Origin' is currently the only one AFAIK that is truly open source and not sponsored by any ad network.
While I used to find this true, uBlock Origin seems to no longer block YouTube ads.
OK, because ppl are gonna ask, I checked: I'm not seeing ads in the app on my tablet at home, so its the PiHole cutting ads. Ooops, I'm not seeing ads on my desktop when using my smartphone as a hotspot either (no PiHole), so Firefox + uBO + PB also blocks YT ads.
How? Google made $182 billion in revenue in 2020, of which $41 billion was profit [1] (mostly in ads), and Youtube alone is on track to generate $15 billion of those [2] on an annualized basis (also almost all in ad revenue).
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2020Q4_alphabet_earnings... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
- Intelligence is being able to observe systems [1] and understand how they work. Both Hawking and Machiavelli objectively have this.
- Smartness is being able to use one's understanding of a system [1] to achieve one's own goals. Both Hawking and Machiavelli objectively have this.
- Wisdom is being able to choose the right goals. This is where there is a clear distinction between Hawking and Machiavelli, and since it requires moral judgment to deliberate whom of them chooses "the right goals", this cannot have an objective answer.
By the way, it's easy to see with these systems that existing machines that are supposedly "intelligent" and "smart" are in fact neither.
[1] "System" shall be interpreted in the broadest way possible, i.e. "any network of interconnected actors", e.g. a machine or the financial system or any society of people.
video.currentTime = video.duration
However it uses microG, which has long had an open issue with v2 of Google's Cast API. The issue was recently closed however I don't believe it was solved. However it is still possible to work around this. I ended up writing a quick script on my phone that uses pychromecast to initialize the cast so that it can be passed off to YouTube Vanced.
It's been a while since I've cast anything but are you certain that ads are blocked when casting from an app that blocks ads? In my experience with casting, the video is always streamed directly from the content provider's servers (YouTube) to the cast receiver (smart TV) with ads intact. You would need to mirror your phone's display in order to block ads.
Would really like to implement it on my own PiHole
There isn't really a good, efficient easy way to block YouTube ads with Pi-Hole. It's a constant cat-and-mouse game of finding the appropriate domain regexes and keeping them updated.