So Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?
Wouldn't surprise me if we now see a new trend of "click like, bell, and suscribe and don't forget to disable your ad blocker!".
Obviously they don't care about these views since they are not generating ad revenue. Youtubers who use view counts for sponsor deals etc do care though.
According to the GitHub issue, YouTube didn’t change anything. There are two endpoints that can be used to attribute a view. One is called multiple times throughout a video playback and has been in the easylist privacy filter for years. The other is called at the start of a playback, and was just added to the list (the timing lines up with the reports of view drops from tech YouTubers).
This is not definitive proof that easylist caused the view drops, but it’s I’ve read the issue and a writeup by a YouTube creator and it seems pretty likely.
That's not quite what the github issue says? There appear to be several potentially contributing changes in the time window, and one of them actually re-enables a previously blocked YouTube analytics endpoint
I find it incredibly difficult to shed any sympathy for youtube "content creators". Youtube was most entertaining, or at least most interesting before anyone was monetizing the platform. Same goes for most of thr rest of the web but I digress
Hell, YouTube even added that feature where it'll autoskip commonly skipped section so it's basically a built in SponsorBlock at this point (no doubt helped powered by those who skip via SponsorBlock). I'm surprised I haven't seen any controversy from people who are having their sponsors pay less because of this.
In my opinion the only sponsorships that actually work are the ones that are integrated into the content.
For example Linus Tech Tips wearing his clothing in his videos and using his screwdriver. For car and/or hardware channels I often see sponsors products being used throughout the video as well, which you can't skip with Sponsor block.
Counter-argument: Youtube's aggressive anti-ads campaign resulted in failed loads, videos that appear stuck, etc. The more techy people would have updated, but others were left with the choice of a buggy experience or dreadfully long ads. Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.
YouTube is one of the worst offenders for scam ads. Even today you sometimes find an ad that talks about some scary health risk and points to some ad that drones on and on for 45 minutes and if you get to the end they try to sign you up for an $80 a month subscription for some worthless supplement.
A deepfake version of Mark Carney keeps trying to get me to sign up for scam crypto exchanges. Clicking the report link does nothing.
With all the money that Google has plowed into AI, they clearly could solve this problem if they want to. The fact that it's still an issue means they don't care, or are happy to take the ad money from the fraudsters.
This specific case is about an unusual high drop of viewers specifically on desktops on a specific date. The assumptions are, that it's just too unusual for the normal drop in that timeframe, so it has to be a bug of some kind. Would it be a normal drop in viewers, it would not be on a specific date, months after the problems with AdBlocks started.
Creators are not reporting any declines in ad revenue that match the drop in view count. Indeed several have reported revenue is the same despite the view count drop. So it's quite unlikely people are fed up with youtube in any meaningful way.
This article is less about view counts dropping due to people abandoning the platform and more about view count spikes and troughs that are a consequence of the measure-countermeasure game of YouTube tweaking its code to account for ad blockers vs. ad blockers tweaking their code to account for YouTube ads.
Ad blockers (especially for complex sites and data streams) are basically like using a chainsaw to remove a mosquito(1); sometimes innocuous or beneficial features get omitted too because they're too "ad-shaped" for the heuristic.
(1) Anyone who thinks I'm under-selling the risks of unblocked ads has never seen the consequence of an unlucky bite from Aedes aegypti.
Jeff Geerling has been sleuthing into this lately too - my biggest takeaway is that it's only viewer counts that are suffering, he's not seen revenue drop which is key. Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)
Many youtubers have sponsorships though, and their viewership stats come into play when negotiating with potential sponsors.
I guess if everyone was hit equally across the board then those sponsors will eventually adjust to the new metrics, but I assume some genres have more tech-savvy audiences which are more likely to use ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how evenly distributed this penalty falls.
The automated “Skip Ahead” button (which I use daily) is already hostile to sponsorships. I would not be at all surprised to see them hitting sponsors on multiple fronts.
> The automated “Skip Ahead” button (which I use daily) is already hostile to sponsorships
Is it? If I proactively click skip, that means that sponsor is offering something of no use to me. As the sponsor, they successfully make an impression for a second or two anyway. And as a viewer that skip ahead button is much better than pressing right arrow button multiple times
Google is not getting a cut of that sponsorship money. They don't care if it wrecks your deal. They want your ONLY source of income to be Youtube. If you're fully beholden to Youtube, there will be no escape, no way for you to leave and take your viewership with you.
Remember how Youtube used to be a nice cage with lots of air holes and fun toys to occupy you? Light ad enforcement, tools to help you build your viewership etc? People are starting to feel the pinch of those being removed. That cool room is starting to look like what it really is--an industrial cage.
Skipping sponsored segments is not necessarily a reflection of hostility. My wife has been subscribed to the Factor meal service for over three years, yet all of my favorite podcasts are constantly hawking it, and I don't particularly feel like sitting through 20 sales pitches a day for something I already purchased. There is unfortunately no way to communicate that information to either the channel owner or the sponsor.
They impact individual channel revenue because so many channels have gone to sponsored ads, which automatic ad-blockers can't block (yet (1) ). The calibre of sponsor a channel can attract is impacted by the reported views from YouTube.
(1) Hey, imagine I had a plugin that monitored the behavior of several viewers of each video and could collate where most people skipped a big chunk of video, then, oh I don't know, offered a feature where if lots of people skip one chunk, it'll automatically skip it for you when you're playing the video....
If only there were some way that money in my pocket went to some of the people related to the things I like to watch. Some sort of premium service where YouTube could pay for a person to come to my house and collect money from me, and them give it to the people making videos, and then we won't have ads?
Except viewer counts are a factor for baked in ads. In this case, all the sleuthing and videos about the change are the probably the only thing that will alleviate/lessen the seemingly-worse ad rate negotiation position youtubers with less viewers suddenly find themselves in.
Those buying baked in ads just need to find other ways to verify value. This is nothing new, no large company buys ads without checking how they really work (though many small companies would). There is someone who checks all those "how did you hear about us" responses asked at checkout - they want to know if the ad really provided value. Sure the TV stations tracked and reported ratings, but that is only one of the signs ad buyers look at, and it is one they only trust because they check and so would catch if it is manipulated.
The ad business is far older than the internet and there is a lot of old knowledge that apples directly to the internet. Those buying backed in ads should be aware of and tracking such efforts.
You're saying that YouTube implemented a change that significantly reduces creators' viewer counts but won't affect their revenue, and they haven't told creators? "Here, have a heart attack"?
I am not sure why this is a bug? Youtube is tracking people, this blocks them tracking people. A side effect of a view not being counted on Youtube, is 100% Youtube's problem, and doesn't effect the user in any way.
It seems like a YouTube bug, that they are performing view tracking on the client, when they own the whole server backend and could just as well track them server side (which wouldn't be blockable in the first place)
It seems like server-side would suffer from issues due to buffering lookahead and autoplay. A client can request a video that is skipped within seconds, but if buffering causes it to request five minutes worth, the server only sees five minutes were requested, whereas the client can clearly tell how much of that was actually watched.
YouTube premium actually has its own version of sponsorblock called skip ahead, it works really well, so they’re not ideologically opposed to skipping sponsored segments
That doesn't just target sponsor segments. It's for stuff commonly skipped. Like annoying parts of videos. Some video game guy I occasionally watching thinks he needs to sing for some reason, very useful for skipping those sections.
Sponsorships are the primary way YouTube creators make money. There aren't many things that could knock YouTube off its near-monopoly market position, but banning sponsorships is definitely one. Creators would revolt.
Creators are already starting to build their own platforms for hosting videos and many of these are quite successful unlike prior iterations from 10 years ago.
I don't think YouTube needed to do anything. The change influenced creators' bottom line so they are motivated on their own to mobilize their viewers against this change.
This actually hints at a way out of the YouTube monopoly. Make creators' business model no longer work on YouTube, by blocking the tracking. Make it so that creators are forced to go to other, paid video platforms, instead of them feeding the YouTube monopoly.
This might temporarily lead to a collapse in video creator business, but in the long run might result in more viable businesses for creators, without them having to push shit onto their viewers. Make videos and enjoy them being seen, or make paid content and have people pay for that, but don't try to shoehorn it into viewing videos that are accessible for anyone running a Youtube search.
The thumbs downs on Yuki's responses are baffling. It is a privacy filter, improving privacy. There is a strong para-social relationship with many younger internet users, so maybe people really do feel strongly about affecting their favorite youtube star's view count? Or it could be youtube creators who are worried. I can't think of any other reasons a user would be on the side of youtube here.
I think, if that was YouTube's goal, they should close their platform tomorrow, and put everything behind a paid login. That would be the honest move. Instead they are trying to sneakily profit from viewers, by sneaking in ads in whatever way possible. They are employing dark pattern after pattern and are extorting "consent". It is entirely reasonable to block their dark patterns and just watch videos without ads. If it bothers them, go ahead, hide everything behind paid access. See how quickly their monopoly will evaporate then.
It's a problem for the Creators. Their stats are lower than they should be, which could have negative effects on their business, like YouTubes recommendation-system not working as efficient as it should be. Similar, would they have a weaker selling-point for companies advertising on their channel.
It should be noted that YouTube income is unaffected by this, as Ads are still shown and counted to people without AdBlockers. So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.
But why would I, as a user of Easy Privacy, care about this? It is protecting my own privacy. Someone trying to get more money on the internet isn't really my concern.
The correct approach is to not use these services. Ad-blocking and using the service just sends the message that you are leeching, not that the service is bad.
No more than going to the bathroom or getting a drink during a TV commercial break is leeching. Watching ads is not and has never been obligatory for the viewer.
It seems to be sending the same message either way, no? Either not watching them or the ad-blocking reducing their count seems to be the same in the end.
If you had a lemonade stand, and I came and drank one, told you it was bad and didn't pay, that's one thing. I'd probably not come back.
If I kept coming everyday, multiple times a day, and never paid "because its bad", it's extremely unlikely that I don't like the lemonade, and extremely likely that I just like that it's free as long as I complain.
I am not sure that this example really works. Youtube is happy to give you all the "free lemonade" you want (from videos that aren't really monetizable) but the ones that are, they make onerous to use. I get 20+ ads per day right now from an Internet service that I already use, and get untold ads from products that I would never use. Some of the ads are up to 1 hour in duration. Granted, they mercifully offer a skip button, but it seems to me that the ad is being forced on you, not offered to you. That is the big difference. A funny, engaging ad is not a problem for nearly anyone.
It's your choice to go to youtube and watch the video. No one is forcing that on you. Youtube is a service that is offered. If you don't like youtube or the ads, you can not use the service. Just like no one is forcing you to go to the lemonade stand.
While I agree with you, not every channel is big and some of the smaller ones might rely partially on this in order to get materials/sponsorship in order to be able to have the parts to do some projects they make videos on because it is more a passion project and they might barely break even or even make losses on doing it.
The context that I am thinking about is, for example, a small hobbyist that might rely on the added value for making some odd things, requiring exotic hardware, quantities of materials that could be prohibitively expensive or the lend of access to said hardware might be blocked behind viewership metrics, and there this might make some difference, and I personally enjoy those little odd channels and this is why I, as a viewer, might care about it. But again, I totally see where you are coming from.
For every one hobbyist making some kind of interesting video that they couldn't have made without ad money, there are 1,000 moronic influencers making the same video about the same thing, grasping at ad money or free products to shill. YouTube is 99% dreck now. Hooray for the hobbyist, poor us having to wade through the influencer swamp.
You don't have to care about it. But this is not about privacy, as this API likely does not impact your privacy. YouTube can track what you watch anyway.
And if you watch videos, there is a chance you also enjoy them, so it would be in your own interest to support creators in making more of them. But that's a bit more complicated.
Maybe, but that doesn't matter for this case. This is specifically about the view count, not whether you see the ads. But I've seen this was in the meanwhile merged with another thread, which is about the statement(?) from YouTube.
Because you might have a perfectly selfish stance in the short term, but it turns out that creators not making enough money leads to creators not making content.
Someone you care to watch not making enough money to make the things you like to watch is your concern, because making equivalent content yourself is out of your reach.
* Random clips of homeowners doing some DIY repair
i.e. things that were being done anyway, and someone decided to post it online because it's free and they wanted to be helpful. "Content creators" are already almost never making videos with high value information. The entire idea of "creating content" rather than "sharing information" is a bad framing to start from. When we recognize that "sharing information" is the high-value action, we're better able to see that it not only can be done by someone who isn't a full-time "creator", but may actually be done better by people who aren't devoted to it since their occupation is to be a practitioner of the field they're sharing information about. i.e. they are better informed.
I remember a time where people actually had to pay money to publish their videos (on their own server, using their own storage). And they still did it if they wanted to get something out into the world.
> So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.
Pretty sure this is harmful to youtube as well as it lowers the value (less personalization data) for advertisers. Also the knock-on effect of impacting creators, meaning less investment in creating content.
That being said, I've always hated this business model. It's created so many other problems in our society. Resulting in a shift to authoritarian leadership in many countries.
Aren't many channels funded by the companies they pretend to get sponsorship from? If you look at the OSINT and Natsec adjacent topics there are many who have had the same sponsor for years: ground.news ... many pretend that they are indie content creators when they are just the marketing / growth hacking arm of the sponsor.
> many pretend that they are indie content creators when they are just the marketing / growth hacking arm of the sponsor.
Just curious, but can't they be both?
I don't know those channels. The one I regularly see are very diverse in their partners, and usually the content is unrelated to the promotions. But overall those promotions are negotiated based on viewer counts, and at a certain size, they are more valuable than earnings from ads.
Any credible evidence that they get enough money from the sponsorships to be considered fully funded by them? Or that ground news uses influence over these channels?
I can throw a dart and hit a random podcast that has been sponsored by blue chew for years, but that doesn't mean said podcast is funded by them or bends to their whims.
Why would thet be a conspiracy theory. The public facing guy who is behind Warfronts has 4 other channels that peddle content unrelated to natsec/warfare. If you follow "cappy army" and the drama he went through at "task and purpose" his former employer it becomes pretty clear that there are entire media companies behind what looks like "a single hobbyist content creator expat living in Prague" ...
That's a rule defined by YouTube and/or advertisers in their relationship with content creators. By defining that rule, YouTube and/or advertisers have chosen to drag my participation into that relationship. My participation does not belong in their relationship. The only thing I can do to communicate my opinion on the matter is to do precisely what this "bug" entails.
Oh, really, are you sure? They still charge advertisers the full amount? My understanding was that they're only charged if there is evidence of an "ad impression" which there shouldn't be if the request was blocked
Isn't it likely that Google charges the advertisers for each time an ad is shown? So lower view counts mean lower ad views which means lower revenues for both Google and the content creators. (And, if the advertisers are counting on the views to drive their own business, it could mean lower revenues for them to go with the smaller ad bills.)
Are views also decreasing on channels without ads enabled? Is it possible that some endpoint that needs to be hit to register a view is being blocked by privacy-related (not ad-related) lists that adblockers use?
If the answer to both is no, maybe Google's intentionally punishing creators whose viewers use adblockers. But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?
> But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?
Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing" but they know it won't work if people see them as the source of the message. They want video makers to internalize their message, do what the boss wants on their own initiative, so Google only want to drop hints.
> Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing"
Ah yes, the good old "don't copy that floppy" argument.
The advertising industry brought this upon themselves. The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker. Between malicious ads, drive-by-downloads, content shifting, and other dark patterns, websites are now more ads than content.
It's like in the days of streaming (when it was still good and not enshitified) reducing piracy rates - companies can get me to disable my ad blocker if they start becoming good citizens actually make their site or service usable without it.
Get rid of the invasive tracking, dark patterns, un-dismissable modals, etc. Stop jamming your content so full of ads and SEO spam and maybe I wouldn't need an ad blocker as much.
I bought a new Mac for a secondary computer, particularly for my wife to use, and she was driven crazy by ads in just one hour of browsing on Safari without a proper ad blocker. Adding an ad blocker to Safari required using an Apple account which she doesn't have and I didn't want to use it for mine (never plan on buying NERFed apps from the NERFed mac app store which is 99% spam anyway) so I switched her to Firefox which lets me add an ad blocker without signing in.
I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization. This is why the creators all do sponsorships now. But they force creators to monetize to get reach (if the video isn't monetized it won't be recommended, even to subscribers).
My guess is that yeah, now they're going after people's sponsorship revenue by under-reporting views if their monetized content is being viewed by people with adblockers.
Regarding recommendations. I recently disabled history and recommendations and the subscribed tab has everything I’d expect. No more surprises and no more political garbage.
That’s crazy, when I am logged out I only get political garbage and the most insane braunrot you can imagine.
My recommendations are really good on YouTube, I find a lot of interesting stuff
I don't know the data but every YouTube author I follow is basically saying the money they get from YouTube is almost nothing compared to the effort they put into their videos. Almost all of them seem to be going for sponsored ads embedded in the video (so not automatically skippable) or Patreon.
My current theory is that this whole "mystery around viewcounts" thing is fabricated by google.
From a PR viewpoint it's much better to just imply that adblockers are bad, so in case of backlash they can go "Idk why the community is going ham about this, we didn't even say directly you shouldn't adblock, you people are kwuaazy"
That isn't clear. Some earn money from ads of various forms. Some earn money from patreon like things and the youtube views are loss leaders. Most are not earning enough money from ads to care (generally 0, but sometimes a few bucks).
Even if you earn money from ads, view count is only a proxy at best. Youtube seems to track ads seen not view count (payments from youtube have not changed). Other ads track effectiveness of the ad, and viewcount is only a proxy - if youtube changes the count it means that the constant applied to viewcount in the formula changes but otherwise the payment is the same.
Thus if you get significant money from YouTube adds you care about ad blocking. None of the others need to care (they might, but it could go either way how they feel)
What videos you see on YouTube really varies from one person to another: I have one browser where it shows me predominantly videos with titles like "Why Brand X has lost it's way" or "Why the Y industry is broken" where X could be a fast food chain or a game studio and Y could be housing, video games, private equity, etc.
That kind of creator expresses a lot of negativity towards YouTube, as X is frequently "YouTube" or "Google" and Y is "Big Tech", "Social Media", etc.
Isn’t sponsor revenue ad revenue? And I would expect most creators to be smart enough to realize that the money they get from Youtube will be at least loosely related to the ad revenue Youtube can earn from whatever the creator made.
It is, but it's functionally different because the content creator you are watching is both directly getting that revenue and often doing the testimonial for you. They have an incentive to avoid being annoying about the ad as it reflects bad on them if they go nuts. It's also usually a lot easier to skip. It doesn't capture your video playback and force watching.
The money you get from youtube make things ambiguous. Especially if someone is watching your stream with youtube premium.
Is it possible not to have ads? It seems like YouTube puts them in there regardless, unless once your channel is monetizable you can choose to not show ads.
The fact that a client-side change can impact reported views is wild. Its so wildly the wrong place to track views that it forces me to wonder if its an intentional & malicious decision by Google to mobilize YouTube creators against the idea of viewer privacy.
My recommendations are entirely in line with what I watch. I never need to check channels i like for a new video because they automatically get recommended.
If yours is a sewage firehouse, are you logged in? Or are you sharing your account with family members who watch what you consider "sewage"?
I wonder about this. I'm not discounting your experience, but my YouTube recommendation page is great.
I only see my subscriptions, or things directly related to things I've watched and liked. If I remove a disliked video from my watch history, it "mostly" works to tell YouTube I don't want to see it anymore.
I very seldom see crap I really do not want in my YouTube feed/recommendations. All I see are hobby videos and cartoon clips of things I like.
This is totally unlike Facebook (where random garbage recommendations are the norm) or Reddit (which is hit or miss).
Same. My recommended feed is relatively ok, but I'm fairly ruthless with the "I don't want this" and "Don't recommend this channel" buttons. Meanwhile I've been off Facebook for years in large part because their feed appeared to be unsalvageable.
My recommendations are generally aligned with my interests as derived from my view history, likes, and subscriptions. But more and more of it is AI-generated or videos copied from the original creator and reposted by someone else. I try to use "don't show me videos fron this channel" on those but more and more just appears. I think there must be bots creating new channels and copying/generating content faster than I can block them.
And please, let me opt out of Shorts permanently. I keep telling them I don't want shorts but they always come back. I pay for a Premium account, so they should resepect my wishes on this.
Agreed on Shorts. I don't understand why YT is pushing so hard on those, they are never going to be TikTok and I repeatedly signal I don't want to see them.
On the computer attached to my stereo YouTube shows me almost 100% conservative, boring, safe but good music recommendations -- all things I've liked before, it rarely tries to show me anything new or challenging.
On another browser it shows me mostly videos about stereo equipment.
One yet another it shows me a mix of videos aimed at someone who listens to The Ezra Klein Show. That browser and the previous browser sometimes get a burst of videos about "How Brand X has lost its way" or "Why Y sucks today".
One time on shorts I clicked on a video where an A.I. generated woman transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and then after that it wanted to show me hundreds of A.I. slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into just about anything on the same show with the same music and the same reaction shots.
If you click on a few Wheat Waffles videos you might quickly find your feed is nothing but blackpill incel videos and also videos that apply a blackpill philosophy to life such that not only is dating futile but everything else is futile too.
The conclusion I draw from it is that you can't easily draw conclusions about the experience other people have with recommenders, it's one reason why political ads on social are so problematic, you can tell baldfaced lies to people who are inclined to believe them and skeptical people will never see them and hold anyone to account.
I did an experiment where I really invested in my YouTube suggestions, and you can definitely groom your recommendations, and then they can be pretty good. But then you have an issue where you get into a new hobby or a new interest, and so you watch some videos attributed to that, your recommendations spiral back out of control. So you can do a whole bunch of grooming work, but probably they just go back to being like 80% wrong. I got vaguely interested in the piano, and now 80% of my recommendations are music related, but not actually things I care about, and they've just gone back to being total trash.
They certainly are counting views on the backend also, and I'm sure they know exactly what the cause of the discrepancy (or "drop" as they term it) is.
They probably use a combination of the API and raw server requests due to how easy it would be otherwise to spoof viewership for ad revenue fraud. Would not surprise me anyway.
It does kinda make sense for once, you probably wouldn't want to just count API calls for views. I heard you need to watch a significant portion of the video before it counts as a view.
I realized this when I watched one of my friends music videos to give the extra view (they had less than 100) but the views number didn’t go up because of my ad blocker.
Don't forget to like, subscribe, hype, hit the bell, and turn off your adblocker! Thankfully I think Sponsorblock has a section for those points in the videos.
Morally, you should filter ads. If ads could be relevant, vetted, non-intrusive, and ancillary to the experience, all actions that are required to be performed by the ad platform Youtube/Google, then you wouldn't have much moral leg to stand on.
Due to YT/G's moral failings to host a sufficiently serviceable platform for their product, your eyes, then your only real recourse outside adblocking is to buy a device and put on a separate network with no reasonably important traffic.
I don't lose one bit of sleep knowing that adblocking prevents Google from externalizing their curation costs onto me.
It's incredible how people mental gymnastics there way into a solution that provides themselves all the benefit and pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous.
When you don't like something, you don't use it. It sends a clear message that you don't like the product/service. Using it and not compensating for it (because you actually do like it, just on your terms) is not moral or a good signal in anyway way, shape, or form.
Do you think someone like Louis Rossman, who wants to use Youtube to share his message but doesn't use YT as a business, would rather views or ad money?
I'm seeing abundance channels with generated content - doesn't matter if it's official page, "proxy" services or apps. It's always heartbreaking stories about poor senior women whose lives are hell because of their families or homeless girls who want to eat leftovers from the plates of the rich, or supposed death of celebrities.
Considering I have zero interest in this stuff it seems their algorithm pushes such trash by cross-referencing with the closest thing possible - even by a digital picometer distance.
I get good recommendations. They key is to not getting distracted by videos you don't really want to see in the feed. Its very tempting some times and watching just one video can mess up the feed. Takes a while to get back.
I've found that "Not Interested" does either nothing or sends an engagement signal to show me more of the same. "Don't recommend channel" does seem to work with that channel, at least.
I'm getting videos with under 10 views in my recommendations now. They're AI generated "educational" videos, but sound like interesting documentaries. Considering how many users YouTube had the chances that I could be in the first 10 viewers for a listed video are tiny unless I personally know the creator or the place is absolutely flooded in AI shit and there is O(users/10) of these videos being uploaded regularly.
But are really this many users actively using ad blockers? Presumably, a lot of users are on mobile devices where they are using the native app that doesn't even support this. If we subtract them, then a significant share of users on browser would have to be using EasyList.
It could be the causality runs the other direction; I know that my youtube viewing is way down since they decided that they could decide what software I may/may not run on my computer.
They told me I couldn't run ad blocker/anti-virus software on my computer while watching their videos. So I stopped watching their videos. (Technically, the videos aren't theirs, but belong to the creators. Many of them provide the same (or better) content on other platforms),
Interesting, I thought it was due to absolutely horrible TV UI redesign which now shows exactly 1 and a bit of a video thumbnail on my 77" TV. Who the heck designs that.
Not around the TV right now, but they increased the size of the thumbnails in the first row of "Recommended" content to the point where only one is visible fully. (Not unlike new Netflix UI)
Yesterday I wanted to watch a video of a song which was made originally english. It was auto translating lyrics to german. I just speak some spanish and some english. Couldn't decide if I should be annoyed with it translating to a language I just know a handful of words or should be thankful because it's trying to help me learn more of it.
Maybe views are simply down. I can't be the only one getting tired of the out-of-control sponsored videos. Even if you pay for YT Premium, you get hit with that crap on most of the popular channels.
Anecdotally I am watching less. Not because of sponsorships, but because more and more content is AI-generated slop or copied (stolen) from other channels and reposted.
But we're talking about a substantial viewership drop, across a single platform (only desktop), all simultaneously on a single day. That's clearly not any sort of organic change.
Anecdotal but my usage has been slowly dropping in the past year or two as the experience has gotten worse. First it was the terrible search results and then with shorts plaguing the whole thing.
If you're unfamiliar with the creator dashboard there is a spot reserved for notifications from YouTube. This should have been front and center last week, not buried in a creator help thread. Why wasn’t it? That's open to speculation.
As someone with a small tech channel, I'm glad I was following this. If not, I would have spent the last week swapping out thumbnails and video titles, which seem about as effective as percussive maintenance. But hey, you have to try something.
Well over a decade ago a gentleman by the name of Brian Brushwood said, and I'm paraphrasing, “YouTube is like working for an AI manager that never tells you what it wants but punishes you severely if you get it wrong.”
Pretty sure it's caused by the algorithm not serving the user anymore... Unless I block a channel forever I only get served the same channels over and over or it's an endless reel of ai slop with that dead crappy voice on all kinds of variations...
Yeah, these companies are pushing AI so hard they don't see it's destroying the value they had. I don't want to watch an AI reading Wikipedia, showing stock photography, and I doubt anybody else does, either.
I too have noticed a lot more slop in my feed the last several months, and generally have to explicitly check my subscriptions to be sure I don't miss videos.
And I'm quite deliberate with avoiding ragebait and slop, and I remove stuff from my watch history if I get duped etc.
That said, I have noticed a trend amongst the creators I've subscribed to that the average video length has gone up. This has been a longer term trend, but many who used to do 30-40 min videos now often to 1-1.5 hr videos.
I've heard YouTube punishes people quitting a video midway, so perhaps there's something going on there too. At least for myself I often have to watch these videos over multiple sessions, and chances are there that I just forget and move on.
So perhaps some compounding factors making things worse.
Is there any hard, reliable data on how much money is "lost" by users with ad blockers? Some of the measures Google has taken with regards to ad blockers seem wholly disproportionate to my own impression of how common they really are.
Well, if the recent drop in views was due to adblockers, we now have some data about what percent of viewers block ads. There would have to be an effort to collect this data, and the view discrepncy is probably going to differ by genre of video (eg, tech youtubers probably experienced a greater dip), but this should roughly tell us how much is lost to adblockers.
Creators have stated that while their viewcount is down their ad revenue is not - but a lower viewcount still presumably hurts youtubers for in video sponsorships, and if some genres of video have a higher portion of users with blockers, that probably hurts that entire genre in the algorithm. It sounds like viewcounts are returning back to normal though.
Well, I meant how much is lost financially. Ah, unless you mean that people would watch less videos if they were subjected to ads, which is a great point I didn't consider. You're right, you can't just linearly extrapolate as I suggested due to that.
I have no actual hard stats to back this up sadly, but from what I've read ad rates are the same, but the views are down. Presumably because everyone who is using an AdBlock isn't counted as a view, and they obviously don't watch ads so the rates are the same.
If this is what they're doing, then it would seem to be negligible. The channels I've heard talking about this don't seem to be taking home any less money despite tanking viewcounts. Earnings are constant, but the numbers supporting those earnings have shuffled around unpredictably. When it's your income, you really don't like things to be shuffling around without warning.
The views didn't count in the first place, that's why the money stayed the same.
Creators can now though, knowing how much they make per view on avg, and slot in the avg number of view that were missing, work out how much they are missing out on due to ad-blocking.
For large creators, it's likely in the tens of thousands of dollars per video assuming most are seeing the same ~20-25% drop.
Eventually the "morally pure" internet will need to reconcile it's habit of not compensating creators.
I think you're not understanding. The claim is that view counts are down but revenue is not because people using ad-block previously did not contribute to revenue but did contribute to view count, and now they are not counted as either. So view counts are down and creators are getting the same ad money because they already earned no money from the adblocking people.
When channels are claiming their view count is dropping 30% but still earning the same amount of money, that would indicate that they are losing out on 30% of their potential revenue because of ad blockers.
YouTube's where the money is. There are very few other places where you can make money like YouTube. Yes, that also means having to deal with their many, many issues, many of which directly threaten that money, but the solution is to work to solve those problems and highlight new ones. YouTube's too big to ignore, and too big to die no matter how many paper cuts and gaping wounds it gives itself.
I wonder if they want to occasionally agitate against ad blocking just to keep the pressure on.
If I were Google I wouldn’t be that worried about, like, Firefox users with ad blocking addons, or pihole users. But I’d be a bit worried that Apple might take a harder stance against ads, in their browser.
If Apple were to include an ad blocker by default in Safari it would be the greatest thing they've done for users in the past 5 years. Their privacy/anti-tracking stuff is good but it's largely invisible to the end user. People would never want to go back to the raw internet once they experience it without ads.
Yeah. And, “privacy” is part of their pitch (it’s just a sales pitch, not a moral philosophy, and I’m aware that they don’t always live up to it). Including a default-on ad blocker would be an extremely user-visible way of emphasizing that pitch.
Am I the only person who is confused by the anger from people who use a free service (like YouTube) or participate in a gig service (like Uber), and get upset when it doesn't go their way? Meaning, they get upset when they cannot make money off services provided by a company. Seems like entitlement to me.
Disagree - the services make money _from_ the users. It's a symbiotic relationship, and I totally understand the frustration. Especially when decisions are opaque and you're left guessing about what 'the platform' is doing.
Lol honestly, not sure how they can be compared. Uber is a shitty proposition in any way and is mostly a way for us to get easy access to cheap labor. Nobody ever got rich driving for Uber.
There's no way you can say the same about YouTube, the value proposition is quite good and it leveled the field in a way traditional media would never do, just think for a moment what's the chance of seeing someone like MrBeast surging as a TV personality.
What's the meaning of this? Is Google trying to make content creators tell their viewers not to use adblockers? I don't think it's easylist's problem here. I don't understand.
It was mostly panic. As in: it didn't apparently affect revenue in any way, but content creators always check view stats/graphs for their own videos to see how well each of them is doing. So sudden drop made YT the main suspect. It didn't help some changes to video visibility for "children" profiles was pushed at same time.
Putting my tinfoil hat on, maybe they knew ad blockers would mess with their new implementation and expected the freak out to mount "creators" against ad blockers?
My bill for access to phone and internet where all data is celular, runs $3000~6000/yr,and includes a domain and email, I refuse to watch any adds ever or pay for anything else that is not property that can be re sold, rented, insured, transfered, or returned cause it's junk, or I dont like it.
I pay my fucking rent, have payed for a long time, and know that there is another way that everything can be configured that sends the "platforms" packing.
The difference is a world where everyone self manages there affairs, does there best, can work and contribute, while living there best lives, or the nasty shit show we have now with a tiny minority attempting to puppet the whole world and everything in it.
>Whatever, there's no problem for user. EP is for user and not for those so called creators or site owners.
It's sad to see how little sympathy there is for people other than oneself and how changes are affecting the larger ecosystem. Especially for a site as critical as YouTube to people's livelihoods.
Though having said that, at the same time I'm not surprised that someone who spends their time modifying sites to remove ads and analytics to make their personal experience better at the expense of everyone else would act this way would have this kind of selfish mindset.
They also do this (or did?). But I guess on mobile this is not working well, because of limited screen estate, and people will obviously not focus much on them.
I'm a heavy AdBlock user, I pay for YT premium, and I paid Nebula for 2 years, also I try to buy some albums on Bandcamp even with YT music subscription. What more they do want?
And I do use referral codes for the content creators I do like. My Amazon referrals do still work.
As a mostly software backend dev I even visualize the JS guy saying "it's solved" when he forgets to tell that the correct choice is to do the counting on the backend, period. Not hacking a crappy JS snippet calling a different host.
I obviously ask for more time to make sure it's reliable.
I literally saw something similar happening around some years ago in a adjacent team I was working.
I want to pay with money, not attention. Both at the same time? Non negotiable.
I don't think they'd be interested in fixing this. I suspect YouTube is trying to create a double bind for users of adblockers by pitting them against creators' incentives. People in the thread were discussing ways of disabling uBO filters to restore view reporting.
The work to do this isn't free. YouTube already has their code working, but they don't expect browsers to be blocking arbitrary requests or injecting their own javascript into the page. These kind of breakage are not free for YouTube to fix and often YouTube is the one taking the reputational hit for their site being broken. It ultimately is antisocial behavior to be breaking other's sites even if technically they can workaround the bugs being added.
Stop what? Showing ads? They have to fund it somehow, there will always be ads. Most users aren't willing to pay for anything on the internet, and unfortunately revenue is required to run anything at scale. You can charge users, show ads, or maybe get funding from Saudis.
So just track you on the back end instead? I don't know what that really changes. If you mean to say just not track you at all and show you untargeted ads, well they are worth less, so they'll have to blast you with more of them.
So Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?
Wouldn't surprise me if we now see a new trend of "click like, bell, and suscribe and don't forget to disable your ad blocker!".
Obviously they don't care about these views since they are not generating ad revenue. Youtubers who use view counts for sponsor deals etc do care though.
According to the GitHub issue, YouTube didn’t change anything. There are two endpoints that can be used to attribute a view. One is called multiple times throughout a video playback and has been in the easylist privacy filter for years. The other is called at the start of a playback, and was just added to the list (the timing lines up with the reports of view drops from tech YouTubers).
This is not definitive proof that easylist caused the view drops, but it’s I’ve read the issue and a writeup by a YouTube creator and it seems pretty likely.
That's not quite what the github issue says? There appear to be several potentially contributing changes in the time window, and one of them actually re-enables a previously blocked YouTube analytics endpoint
The re-enabled endpoint is yet a third endpoint different from the two I mentioned above.
Turns out YouTube has a lot of analytics.
>Youtubers who use view counts for sponsor deals
Laughs in SponsorBlock
I find it incredibly difficult to shed any sympathy for youtube "content creators". Youtube was most entertaining, or at least most interesting before anyone was monetizing the platform. Same goes for most of thr rest of the web but I digress
Hell, YouTube even added that feature where it'll autoskip commonly skipped section so it's basically a built in SponsorBlock at this point (no doubt helped powered by those who skip via SponsorBlock). I'm surprised I haven't seen any controversy from people who are having their sponsors pay less because of this.
Hah, the next move will be picture-in-picture ads (whether the ad or the content will be in the box in the corner depends on the desperation...
Reminds me of F1 racing coverage on a free-to-air German TV network being reduced to a letterbox..
In my opinion the only sponsorships that actually work are the ones that are integrated into the content.
For example Linus Tech Tips wearing his clothing in his videos and using his screwdriver. For car and/or hardware channels I often see sponsors products being used throughout the video as well, which you can't skip with Sponsor block.
YouTube already does this for livestreams.
If all videos are affected by this, then it really should not be hard for these people to adjust their deals with sponsors to compensate.
Counter-argument: Youtube's aggressive anti-ads campaign resulted in failed loads, videos that appear stuck, etc. The more techy people would have updated, but others were left with the choice of a buggy experience or dreadfully long ads. Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.
Plus so many ads are malware, dangerous, or scams that even the FBI says you should use an ad blocker
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/22/fbi-ad-blocker/
YouTube is one of the worst offenders for scam ads. Even today you sometimes find an ad that talks about some scary health risk and points to some ad that drones on and on for 45 minutes and if you get to the end they try to sign you up for an $80 a month subscription for some worthless supplement.
A deepfake version of Mark Carney keeps trying to get me to sign up for scam crypto exchanges. Clicking the report link does nothing.
With all the money that Google has plowed into AI, they clearly could solve this problem if they want to. The fact that it's still an issue means they don't care, or are happy to take the ad money from the fraudsters.
yeah I had a deep fake Kier Starmer tell me about some investment opportunity with guaranteed returns.
I'm seeing the same ad. There's no way that can be legal to broadcast.
100%. I can't count the amount of times I've seen an AI-generated Elon Musk promoting a Tesla coin lol. I've lost count.
> Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.
This specific case is about an unusual high drop of viewers specifically on desktops on a specific date. The assumptions are, that it's just too unusual for the normal drop in that timeframe, so it has to be a bug of some kind. Would it be a normal drop in viewers, it would not be on a specific date, months after the problems with AdBlocks started.
> Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.
Creators are not reporting any declines in ad revenue that match the drop in view count. Indeed several have reported revenue is the same despite the view count drop. So it's quite unlikely people are fed up with youtube in any meaningful way.
This article is less about view counts dropping due to people abandoning the platform and more about view count spikes and troughs that are a consequence of the measure-countermeasure game of YouTube tweaking its code to account for ad blockers vs. ad blockers tweaking their code to account for YouTube ads.
Ad blockers (especially for complex sites and data streams) are basically like using a chainsaw to remove a mosquito(1); sometimes innocuous or beneficial features get omitted too because they're too "ad-shaped" for the heuristic.
(1) Anyone who thinks I'm under-selling the risks of unblocked ads has never seen the consequence of an unlucky bite from Aedes aegypti.
Jeff Geerling has been sleuthing into this lately too - my biggest takeaway is that it's only viewer counts that are suffering, he's not seen revenue drop which is key. Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/digging-deeper-youtub...
Many youtubers have sponsorships though, and their viewership stats come into play when negotiating with potential sponsors.
I guess if everyone was hit equally across the board then those sponsors will eventually adjust to the new metrics, but I assume some genres have more tech-savvy audiences which are more likely to use ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how evenly distributed this penalty falls.
The automated “Skip Ahead” button (which I use daily) is already hostile to sponsorships. I would not be at all surprised to see them hitting sponsors on multiple fronts.
> The automated “Skip Ahead” button (which I use daily) is already hostile to sponsorships
Is it? If I proactively click skip, that means that sponsor is offering something of no use to me. As the sponsor, they successfully make an impression for a second or two anyway. And as a viewer that skip ahead button is much better than pressing right arrow button multiple times
Google is not getting a cut of that sponsorship money. They don't care if it wrecks your deal. They want your ONLY source of income to be Youtube. If you're fully beholden to Youtube, there will be no escape, no way for you to leave and take your viewership with you.
Remember how Youtube used to be a nice cage with lots of air holes and fun toys to occupy you? Light ad enforcement, tools to help you build your viewership etc? People are starting to feel the pinch of those being removed. That cool room is starting to look like what it really is--an industrial cage.
Skipping sponsored segments is not necessarily a reflection of hostility. My wife has been subscribed to the Factor meal service for over three years, yet all of my favorite podcasts are constantly hawking it, and I don't particularly feel like sitting through 20 sales pitches a day for something I already purchased. There is unfortunately no way to communicate that information to either the channel owner or the sponsor.
Surely YT know if a video has sponsored content and so can refuse to play the video - or even not suggest it - if the user is using adblockers?
I'm guessing the viewers who now suddenly aren't being counted were already not contributing to revenue because they block ads.
They impact individual channel revenue because so many channels have gone to sponsored ads, which automatic ad-blockers can't block (yet (1) ). The calibre of sponsor a channel can attract is impacted by the reported views from YouTube.
(1) Hey, imagine I had a plugin that monitored the behavior of several viewers of each video and could collate where most people skipped a big chunk of video, then, oh I don't know, offered a feature where if lots of people skip one chunk, it'll automatically skip it for you when you're playing the video....
If only there were some way that money in my pocket went to some of the people related to the things I like to watch. Some sort of premium service where YouTube could pay for a person to come to my house and collect money from me, and them give it to the people making videos, and then we won't have ads?
Nah, that'll never work.
do we know what happens if you run premium and an ad blocker together? I would hope they would still pay the creator for my views but I'm not sure now
> Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)
Except viewer counts are a factor for baked in ads. In this case, all the sleuthing and videos about the change are the probably the only thing that will alleviate/lessen the seemingly-worse ad rate negotiation position youtubers with less viewers suddenly find themselves in.
Those buying baked in ads just need to find other ways to verify value. This is nothing new, no large company buys ads without checking how they really work (though many small companies would). There is someone who checks all those "how did you hear about us" responses asked at checkout - they want to know if the ad really provided value. Sure the TV stations tracked and reported ratings, but that is only one of the signs ad buyers look at, and it is one they only trust because they check and so would catch if it is manipulated.
The ad business is far older than the internet and there is a lot of old knowledge that apples directly to the internet. Those buying backed in ads should be aware of and tracking such efforts.
You're saying that YouTube implemented a change that significantly reduces creators' viewer counts but won't affect their revenue, and they haven't told creators? "Here, have a heart attack"?
YouTube didn't change anything. The ad blockers recently started blocking the metric call for whatever reason.
nobody's ever accused youtube of being too transparent with creators
I am not sure why this is a bug? Youtube is tracking people, this blocks them tracking people. A side effect of a view not being counted on Youtube, is 100% Youtube's problem, and doesn't effect the user in any way.
It seems like a YouTube bug, that they are performing view tracking on the client, when they own the whole server backend and could just as well track them server side (which wouldn't be blockable in the first place)
It seems like server-side would suffer from issues due to buffering lookahead and autoplay. A client can request a video that is skipped within seconds, but if buffering causes it to request five minutes worth, the server only sees five minutes were requested, whereas the client can clearly tell how much of that was actually watched.
Sounds like YT is trying to mobilize creators and influencers against adblocking.
> against adblocking
And extensions such as SponsorBlock [1], which help user skipping sponsored sections or useless intros in videos.
[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/
YouTube premium actually has its own version of sponsorblock called skip ahead, it works really well, so they’re not ideologically opposed to skipping sponsored segments
Yes, I discovered this recently and it's nice. I presume they are not opposed to it because it's not costing them any lost revenue.
That doesn't just target sponsor segments. It's for stuff commonly skipped. Like annoying parts of videos. Some video game guy I occasionally watching thinks he needs to sing for some reason, very useful for skipping those sections.
I’m surprised they allow ads (sponsor segments) they get no cut from at all.
Sponsorships are the primary way YouTube creators make money. There aren't many things that could knock YouTube off its near-monopoly market position, but banning sponsorships is definitely one. Creators would revolt.
They pretty surely would not.
Creators are already starting to build their own platforms for hosting videos and many of these are quite successful unlike prior iterations from 10 years ago.
Why would they not allow them?
Morally indefensible. Adblockers are used as a response to Google externalizing/ignoring the cost of proper ad platform curation.
I don't think YouTube needed to do anything. The change influenced creators' bottom line so they are motivated on their own to mobilize their viewers against this change.
It was YT that changed the ad delivery mechanism to prevent view counting, not adblockers.
It was an easylist change (so adblockers) that caused the issue: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/2d39de407dc96904...
Whether or not you consider that an issue shrug but it's not directly YT's fault.
This was my exact thought when I read about it. YouTube clearly has a record of what I’ve watched, because it’s in my watch history.
What they are missing is proof I’ve watched the ads - which I haven’t.
Ads are how they get paid until they're big enough for alternative revenue generation.
This actually hints at a way out of the YouTube monopoly. Make creators' business model no longer work on YouTube, by blocking the tracking. Make it so that creators are forced to go to other, paid video platforms, instead of them feeding the YouTube monopoly.
This might temporarily lead to a collapse in video creator business, but in the long run might result in more viable businesses for creators, without them having to push shit onto their viewers. Make videos and enjoy them being seen, or make paid content and have people pay for that, but don't try to shoehorn it into viewing videos that are accessible for anyone running a Youtube search.
Might be a problem with Adblock, but also, Firefox just released an update that blocks social networks.
I run a couple different privacy add-ons for various different levels of blocking things, but the Firefox update has seriously broken a lot of stuff
A lot of people clearly didn’t like Yuki’s response, but he’s entirely right.
The thumbs downs on Yuki's responses are baffling. It is a privacy filter, improving privacy. There is a strong para-social relationship with many younger internet users, so maybe people really do feel strongly about affecting their favorite youtube star's view count? Or it could be youtube creators who are worried. I can't think of any other reasons a user would be on the side of youtube here.
Picking sides is silly. Just don't use YouTube, or pay for it with money or ad time and data.
I think, if that was YouTube's goal, they should close their platform tomorrow, and put everything behind a paid login. That would be the honest move. Instead they are trying to sneakily profit from viewers, by sneaking in ads in whatever way possible. They are employing dark pattern after pattern and are extorting "consent". It is entirely reasonable to block their dark patterns and just watch videos without ads. If it bothers them, go ahead, hide everything behind paid access. See how quickly their monopoly will evaporate then.
I'll use it and I'll not pay.
Right or wrong you don't think it was unduly combative right off the bat? Manners cost nothing.
It’s not how I would have responded either, but people are entitled to their own ways of communicating.
It's a problem for the Creators. Their stats are lower than they should be, which could have negative effects on their business, like YouTubes recommendation-system not working as efficient as it should be. Similar, would they have a weaker selling-point for companies advertising on their channel.
It should be noted that YouTube income is unaffected by this, as Ads are still shown and counted to people without AdBlockers. So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.
But why would I, as a user of Easy Privacy, care about this? It is protecting my own privacy. Someone trying to get more money on the internet isn't really my concern.
The correct approach is to not use these services. Ad-blocking and using the service just sends the message that you are leeching, not that the service is bad.
No more than going to the bathroom or getting a drink during a TV commercial break is leeching. Watching ads is not and has never been obligatory for the viewer.
You are free to go to the bathroom or get a drink when a youtube ad is playing.
Correct by what metric? Why do I care if I send the message that I'm leeching?
It seems to be sending the same message either way, no? Either not watching them or the ad-blocking reducing their count seems to be the same in the end.
If you had a lemonade stand, and I came and drank one, told you it was bad and didn't pay, that's one thing. I'd probably not come back.
If I kept coming everyday, multiple times a day, and never paid "because its bad", it's extremely unlikely that I don't like the lemonade, and extremely likely that I just like that it's free as long as I complain.
I am not sure that this example really works. Youtube is happy to give you all the "free lemonade" you want (from videos that aren't really monetizable) but the ones that are, they make onerous to use. I get 20+ ads per day right now from an Internet service that I already use, and get untold ads from products that I would never use. Some of the ads are up to 1 hour in duration. Granted, they mercifully offer a skip button, but it seems to me that the ad is being forced on you, not offered to you. That is the big difference. A funny, engaging ad is not a problem for nearly anyone.
No, the ad is not being forced on you.
It's your choice to go to youtube and watch the video. No one is forcing that on you. Youtube is a service that is offered. If you don't like youtube or the ads, you can not use the service. Just like no one is forcing you to go to the lemonade stand.
It's not about sending a message. It's about making sure you use a service in the way it's being offered, or not using it at all.
YouTube is free to only serve videos to paying users if they don't like ad blockers. it would destroy the site, but they're technically able to do it.
Well that is not a law, and even bringing it up on a site called "Hacker News" makes me almost think you are making a joke that is going over my head.
While I agree with you, not every channel is big and some of the smaller ones might rely partially on this in order to get materials/sponsorship in order to be able to have the parts to do some projects they make videos on because it is more a passion project and they might barely break even or even make losses on doing it.
The context that I am thinking about is, for example, a small hobbyist that might rely on the added value for making some odd things, requiring exotic hardware, quantities of materials that could be prohibitively expensive or the lend of access to said hardware might be blocked behind viewership metrics, and there this might make some difference, and I personally enjoy those little odd channels and this is why I, as a viewer, might care about it. But again, I totally see where you are coming from.
For every one hobbyist making some kind of interesting video that they couldn't have made without ad money, there are 1,000 moronic influencers making the same video about the same thing, grasping at ad money or free products to shill. YouTube is 99% dreck now. Hooray for the hobbyist, poor us having to wade through the influencer swamp.
You don't have to care about it. But this is not about privacy, as this API likely does not impact your privacy. YouTube can track what you watch anyway.
And if you watch videos, there is a chance you also enjoy them, so it would be in your own interest to support creators in making more of them. But that's a bit more complicated.
If i am correct, YouTube is trying to say "If you don't watch the ads, you are harming the poor, small content creators!"
Maybe, but that doesn't matter for this case. This is specifically about the view count, not whether you see the ads. But I've seen this was in the meanwhile merged with another thread, which is about the statement(?) from YouTube.
Because you might have a perfectly selfish stance in the short term, but it turns out that creators not making enough money leads to creators not making content.
Someone you care to watch not making enough money to make the things you like to watch is your concern, because making equivalent content yourself is out of your reach.
It's worse than creators not making content, they move their content to be lower rung click bait garbage to maximize ad-views.
If "smart" people use ad-block, then all the content gravitates towards those who don't.
The videos for smart people are things like:
* University lectures
* Conference talks
* Random clips of homeowners doing some DIY repair
i.e. things that were being done anyway, and someone decided to post it online because it's free and they wanted to be helpful. "Content creators" are already almost never making videos with high value information. The entire idea of "creating content" rather than "sharing information" is a bad framing to start from. When we recognize that "sharing information" is the high-value action, we're better able to see that it not only can be done by someone who isn't a full-time "creator", but may actually be done better by people who aren't devoted to it since their occupation is to be a practitioner of the field they're sharing information about. i.e. they are better informed.
I remember a time where people actually had to pay money to publish their videos (on their own server, using their own storage). And they still did it if they wanted to get something out into the world.
> So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.
Pretty sure this is harmful to youtube as well as it lowers the value (less personalization data) for advertisers. Also the knock-on effect of impacting creators, meaning less investment in creating content.
That being said, I've always hated this business model. It's created so many other problems in our society. Resulting in a shift to authoritarian leadership in many countries.
Adblock users already have no value for advertisers.
Aren't many channels funded by the companies they pretend to get sponsorship from? If you look at the OSINT and Natsec adjacent topics there are many who have had the same sponsor for years: ground.news ... many pretend that they are indie content creators when they are just the marketing / growth hacking arm of the sponsor.
Examples: Caspian report, Warfronts, Geopolitics decoded, ...
Many of them (the content creator) are even located in the same city.
> many pretend that they are indie content creators when they are just the marketing / growth hacking arm of the sponsor.
Just curious, but can't they be both?
I don't know those channels. The one I regularly see are very diverse in their partners, and usually the content is unrelated to the promotions. But overall those promotions are negotiated based on viewer counts, and at a certain size, they are more valuable than earnings from ads.
Absolutely can be both. And often they make it clear: like cappello army does. But then there are the more shady ones where it's less transparent
Any credible evidence that they get enough money from the sponsorships to be considered fully funded by them? Or that ground news uses influence over these channels?
I can throw a dart and hit a random podcast that has been sponsored by blue chew for years, but that doesn't mean said podcast is funded by them or bends to their whims.
IMO your comment is pure conspiracy theory.
Why would thet be a conspiracy theory. The public facing guy who is behind Warfronts has 4 other channels that peddle content unrelated to natsec/warfare. If you follow "cappy army" and the drama he went through at "task and purpose" his former employer it becomes pretty clear that there are entire media companies behind what looks like "a single hobbyist content creator expat living in Prague" ...
That's a rule defined by YouTube and/or advertisers in their relationship with content creators. By defining that rule, YouTube and/or advertisers have chosen to drag my participation into that relationship. My participation does not belong in their relationship. The only thing I can do to communicate my opinion on the matter is to do precisely what this "bug" entails.
Eventually the whole system will rebalance. TV ads were shown to people even though you couldn't if any single person was watching or not.
Where does line go? If a future "Adblocker 3000" don't let advertisers capture you eyemovements in realtime 30 times per second, would that be sad?
Seems the ball is with Youtube. They can compensete and pay out more. Or not.
Oh, really, are you sure? They still charge advertisers the full amount? My understanding was that they're only charged if there is evidence of an "ad impression" which there shouldn't be if the request was blocked
Why would they charge for an ad which was not shown? This is not about the view count of the ad.
That still isn't an issue for the end-user. It is Youtube's problem to keep their content creators happy and not mine.
Personally I would even prefer anything that allows for a Youtube alternative to do better.
Isn't it likely that Google charges the advertisers for each time an ad is shown? So lower view counts mean lower ad views which means lower revenues for both Google and the content creators. (And, if the advertisers are counting on the views to drive their own business, it could mean lower revenues for them to go with the smaller ad bills.)
The ads are not shown anyway. This is about the video where the ad would be embedded. Those are two different view counts.
YouTube is history, last time I used it was covid time. Blame AI if you want but time don´t stop for anything. That´s it and that´s all.
Are views also decreasing on channels without ads enabled? Is it possible that some endpoint that needs to be hit to register a view is being blocked by privacy-related (not ad-related) lists that adblockers use?
If the answer to both is no, maybe Google's intentionally punishing creators whose viewers use adblockers. But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?
> But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?
Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing" but they know it won't work if people see them as the source of the message. They want video makers to internalize their message, do what the boss wants on their own initiative, so Google only want to drop hints.
> Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing"
Ah yes, the good old "don't copy that floppy" argument.
The advertising industry brought this upon themselves. The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker. Between malicious ads, drive-by-downloads, content shifting, and other dark patterns, websites are now more ads than content.
It's like in the days of streaming (when it was still good and not enshitified) reducing piracy rates - companies can get me to disable my ad blocker if they start becoming good citizens actually make their site or service usable without it.
Get rid of the invasive tracking, dark patterns, un-dismissable modals, etc. Stop jamming your content so full of ads and SEO spam and maybe I wouldn't need an ad blocker as much.
I bought a new Mac for a secondary computer, particularly for my wife to use, and she was driven crazy by ads in just one hour of browsing on Safari without a proper ad blocker. Adding an ad blocker to Safari required using an Apple account which she doesn't have and I didn't want to use it for mine (never plan on buying NERFed apps from the NERFed mac app store which is 99% spam anyway) so I switched her to Firefox which lets me add an ad blocker without signing in.
You wouldn't steal a car.
Well I definitely would if I could torrent it. Facebook would have too.
I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization. This is why the creators all do sponsorships now. But they force creators to monetize to get reach (if the video isn't monetized it won't be recommended, even to subscribers).
My guess is that yeah, now they're going after people's sponsorship revenue by under-reporting views if their monetized content is being viewed by people with adblockers.
Regarding recommendations. I recently disabled history and recommendations and the subscribed tab has everything I’d expect. No more surprises and no more political garbage.
That’s crazy, when I am logged out I only get political garbage and the most insane braunrot you can imagine. My recommendations are really good on YouTube, I find a lot of interesting stuff
> I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization.
Do you have any article about that? How much did the monetization drop for?
I don't know the data but every YouTube author I follow is basically saying the money they get from YouTube is almost nothing compared to the effort they put into their videos. Almost all of them seem to be going for sponsored ads embedded in the video (so not automatically skippable) or Patreon.
How big are the channels? As far as I follow, the revenue numbers creators get from Ads aren't ignorable at all.
My current theory is that this whole "mystery around viewcounts" thing is fabricated by google. From a PR viewpoint it's much better to just imply that adblockers are bad, so in case of backlash they can go "Idk why the community is going ham about this, we didn't even say directly you shouldn't adblock, you people are kwuaazy"
I agree, this seems more like a policy decision to turn creators into anti-adblocker advocates than a technical problem registering views accurately.
Why would most creators be pro ad blocking in the first place? Don’t most of them want to earn money via advertising?
That isn't clear. Some earn money from ads of various forms. Some earn money from patreon like things and the youtube views are loss leaders. Most are not earning enough money from ads to care (generally 0, but sometimes a few bucks).
Even if you earn money from ads, view count is only a proxy at best. Youtube seems to track ads seen not view count (payments from youtube have not changed). Other ads track effectiveness of the ad, and viewcount is only a proxy - if youtube changes the count it means that the constant applied to viewcount in the formula changes but otherwise the payment is the same.
Thus if you get significant money from YouTube adds you care about ad blocking. None of the others need to care (they might, but it could go either way how they feel)
What videos you see on YouTube really varies from one person to another: I have one browser where it shows me predominantly videos with titles like "Why Brand X has lost it's way" or "Why the Y industry is broken" where X could be a fast food chain or a game studio and Y could be housing, video games, private equity, etc.
That kind of creator expresses a lot of negativity towards YouTube, as X is frequently "YouTube" or "Google" and Y is "Big Tech", "Social Media", etc.
Because most creators use the internet and have experienced the internet with ads.
I imagine most don't think about ads seriously, they think about youtube and sponsor revenue.
Isn’t sponsor revenue ad revenue? And I would expect most creators to be smart enough to realize that the money they get from Youtube will be at least loosely related to the ad revenue Youtube can earn from whatever the creator made.
> Isn’t sponsor revenue ad revenue?
It is, but it's functionally different because the content creator you are watching is both directly getting that revenue and often doing the testimonial for you. They have an incentive to avoid being annoying about the ad as it reflects bad on them if they go nuts. It's also usually a lot easier to skip. It doesn't capture your video playback and force watching.
The money you get from youtube make things ambiguous. Especially if someone is watching your stream with youtube premium.
Is it possible not to have ads? It seems like YouTube puts them in there regardless, unless once your channel is monetizable you can choose to not show ads.
Uploaders can disable mid-roll adverts, ie ones that appear in the middle of the content.
The fact that a client-side change can impact reported views is wild. Its so wildly the wrong place to track views that it forces me to wonder if its an intentional & malicious decision by Google to mobilize YouTube creators against the idea of viewer privacy.
Could it be the recommendation algorithm is so terrible that people can't even?
Mine is just a sewage firehose so yes, I watch less now, and I use NewPipe on mobile to have a chance to see my subscriptions.
It's based on what you watch.
My recommendations are entirely in line with what I watch. I never need to check channels i like for a new video because they automatically get recommended.
If yours is a sewage firehouse, are you logged in? Or are you sharing your account with family members who watch what you consider "sewage"?
I couldn't stand the shorts nonsense. I don't want to consume this kind of media, why force it down my throat.
The trending page is usually so decadent and tasteless that I'm ashamed.
Log out and you’ll be even more ashamed.
Turn off Watch History and enjoy bliss.
I wonder about this. I'm not discounting your experience, but my YouTube recommendation page is great.
I only see my subscriptions, or things directly related to things I've watched and liked. If I remove a disliked video from my watch history, it "mostly" works to tell YouTube I don't want to see it anymore.
I very seldom see crap I really do not want in my YouTube feed/recommendations. All I see are hobby videos and cartoon clips of things I like.
This is totally unlike Facebook (where random garbage recommendations are the norm) or Reddit (which is hit or miss).
Same. My recommended feed is relatively ok, but I'm fairly ruthless with the "I don't want this" and "Don't recommend this channel" buttons. Meanwhile I've been off Facebook for years in large part because their feed appeared to be unsalvageable.
My recommendations are generally aligned with my interests as derived from my view history, likes, and subscriptions. But more and more of it is AI-generated or videos copied from the original creator and reposted by someone else. I try to use "don't show me videos fron this channel" on those but more and more just appears. I think there must be bots creating new channels and copying/generating content faster than I can block them.
And please, let me opt out of Shorts permanently. I keep telling them I don't want shorts but they always come back. I pay for a Premium account, so they should resepect my wishes on this.
Agreed on Shorts. I don't understand why YT is pushing so hard on those, they are never going to be TikTok and I repeatedly signal I don't want to see them.
On the computer attached to my stereo YouTube shows me almost 100% conservative, boring, safe but good music recommendations -- all things I've liked before, it rarely tries to show me anything new or challenging.
On another browser it shows me mostly videos about stereo equipment.
One yet another it shows me a mix of videos aimed at someone who listens to The Ezra Klein Show. That browser and the previous browser sometimes get a burst of videos about "How Brand X has lost its way" or "Why Y sucks today".
One time on shorts I clicked on a video where an A.I. generated woman transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and then after that it wanted to show me hundreds of A.I. slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into just about anything on the same show with the same music and the same reaction shots.
If you click on a few Wheat Waffles videos you might quickly find your feed is nothing but blackpill incel videos and also videos that apply a blackpill philosophy to life such that not only is dating futile but everything else is futile too.
The conclusion I draw from it is that you can't easily draw conclusions about the experience other people have with recommenders, it's one reason why political ads on social are so problematic, you can tell baldfaced lies to people who are inclined to believe them and skeptical people will never see them and hold anyone to account.
I did an experiment where I really invested in my YouTube suggestions, and you can definitely groom your recommendations, and then they can be pretty good. But then you have an issue where you get into a new hobby or a new interest, and so you watch some videos attributed to that, your recommendations spiral back out of control. So you can do a whole bunch of grooming work, but probably they just go back to being like 80% wrong. I got vaguely interested in the piano, and now 80% of my recommendations are music related, but not actually things I care about, and they've just gone back to being total trash.
As noted above my recommendations are excellent and a source of great joy. I don’t get how other people have such an inverse experience
Go complain to Youtube, where the views should be measured on the backend instead of via an API call.
Does anyone realize how many missed views this implies??
They certainly are counting views on the backend also, and I'm sure they know exactly what the cause of the discrepancy (or "drop" as they term it) is.
They probably use a combination of the API and raw server requests due to how easy it would be otherwise to spoof viewership for ad revenue fraud. Would not surprise me anyway.
I also see the opposite problem: can one abuse that API to artificial inflate the view count?
Ad-block views don't help anyone anyway, so I'm not sure why this would matter. If anything it's more accurate.
What if its both? ;)
It does kinda make sense for once, you probably wouldn't want to just count API calls for views. I heard you need to watch a significant portion of the video before it counts as a view.
How many?
Only YouTube can tell, that's the fun part.
And because only YouTube knows this, they can tell us anything they want.
I realized this when I watched one of my friends music videos to give the extra view (they had less than 100) but the views number didn’t go up because of my ad blocker.
afairc sub-100 views are not counted in realtime anyway.
I think it was 300.
Because Google still can't count that low, amirite?!
Don't forget to like, subscribe, hype, hit the bell, and turn off your adblocker! Thankfully I think Sponsorblock has a section for those points in the videos.
YouTube showed me the same phishing ads depicting an AI version of the Canadian Prime Minister.
Why should I not filter ads from a provider who is OK with people stealing from me?
Morally, you should filter ads. If ads could be relevant, vetted, non-intrusive, and ancillary to the experience, all actions that are required to be performed by the ad platform Youtube/Google, then you wouldn't have much moral leg to stand on.
Due to YT/G's moral failings to host a sufficiently serviceable platform for their product, your eyes, then your only real recourse outside adblocking is to buy a device and put on a separate network with no reasonably important traffic.
I don't lose one bit of sleep knowing that adblocking prevents Google from externalizing their curation costs onto me.
No, no, no.
Morally you should stop using youtube.
It's incredible how people mental gymnastics there way into a solution that provides themselves all the benefit and pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous.
When you don't like something, you don't use it. It sends a clear message that you don't like the product/service. Using it and not compensating for it (because you actually do like it, just on your terms) is not moral or a good signal in anyway way, shape, or form.
> Morally you should stop using youtube
> When you don't like something, you don't use it.
Morality in your approach is absolute, and it represents the best possible outcome.
For all others stuck in the morass, you must navigate the BATNA.
> I don't want views going down for creators on youtube.
Agree to disagree. That's kind of the point of an ad blocker.
If you want to support creators, stop blocking their ads.
Views support the videos in the algorithm.
Do you think someone like Louis Rossman, who wants to use Youtube to share his message but doesn't use YT as a business, would rather views or ad money?
Presumably Louis wants to reach as many people as possible and would like to know how many people he's reaching though.
I wish their algorithm would show me videos with my actual interests, instead of some kind of repeat material click maximization
I'm seeing abundance channels with generated content - doesn't matter if it's official page, "proxy" services or apps. It's always heartbreaking stories about poor senior women whose lives are hell because of their families or homeless girls who want to eat leftovers from the plates of the rich, or supposed death of celebrities.
Considering I have zero interest in this stuff it seems their algorithm pushes such trash by cross-referencing with the closest thing possible - even by a digital picometer distance.
I get good recommendations. They key is to not getting distracted by videos you don't really want to see in the feed. Its very tempting some times and watching just one video can mess up the feed. Takes a while to get back.
Same with twitter.
Have you tried clicking on the the dot dropdown menu and selecting "Not interested" or "Don't recomment channel"?
I've found that "Not Interested" does either nothing or sends an engagement signal to show me more of the same. "Don't recommend channel" does seem to work with that channel, at least.
I'm getting videos with under 10 views in my recommendations now. They're AI generated "educational" videos, but sound like interesting documentaries. Considering how many users YouTube had the chances that I could be in the first 10 viewers for a listed video are tiny unless I personally know the creator or the place is absolutely flooded in AI shit and there is O(users/10) of these videos being uploaded regularly.
But are really this many users actively using ad blockers? Presumably, a lot of users are on mobile devices where they are using the native app that doesn't even support this. If we subtract them, then a significant share of users on browser would have to be using EasyList.
Something like ~30% of desktop users use ad-block.
If you are tech or tech-adjacent content, it can double or triple that.
I would suspect it affects specific channels more than others. Obviously smaller tech channels are probably hit the hardest % wise
Firefox on Android supports uBlock Origin.
The view drop only happened for desktop views.
It could be the causality runs the other direction; I know that my youtube viewing is way down since they decided that they could decide what software I may/may not run on my computer.
On your computer? Could you elaborate?
They told me I couldn't run ad blocker/anti-virus software on my computer while watching their videos. So I stopped watching their videos. (Technically, the videos aren't theirs, but belong to the creators. Many of them provide the same (or better) content on other platforms),
You adblocker is misconfigured; I haven't seen any ads or anti-adblocker popups in months.
Interesting, I thought it was due to absolutely horrible TV UI redesign which now shows exactly 1 and a bit of a video thumbnail on my 77" TV. Who the heck designs that.
Huh, I'm having a hard time interpreting what that looks like. Have a link to a photo you can share anywhere? The "1 and a bit" part is confusing.
Not around the TV right now, but they increased the size of the thumbnails in the first row of "Recommended" content to the point where only one is visible fully. (Not unlike new Netflix UI)
I might be in some A/B test tho.
ahh, that sounds like a poor UI indeed given the screen real-estate.
Yesterday I wanted to watch a video of a song which was made originally english. It was auto translating lyrics to german. I just speak some spanish and some english. Couldn't decide if I should be annoyed with it translating to a language I just know a handful of words or should be thankful because it's trying to help me learn more of it.
Source: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/373195597
Maybe views are simply down. I can't be the only one getting tired of the out-of-control sponsored videos. Even if you pay for YT Premium, you get hit with that crap on most of the popular channels.
And you think everyone simply made the same decision as you on the same exact day?
It's possible that the YTers complaining about this are affected once you bring the algorithm into it.
Anecdotally I am watching less. Not because of sponsorships, but because more and more content is AI-generated slop or copied (stolen) from other channels and reposted.
But we're talking about a substantial viewership drop, across a single platform (only desktop), all simultaneously on a single day. That's clearly not any sort of organic change.
Anecdotal but my usage has been slowly dropping in the past year or two as the experience has gotten worse. First it was the terrible search results and then with shorts plaguing the whole thing.
I use uBo which uses easylist, and when I watch youtube videos they are marked as viewed, so this explanation does not seem likely?
How do you know they're marked as a view on the video?
If you're unfamiliar with the creator dashboard there is a spot reserved for notifications from YouTube. This should have been front and center last week, not buried in a creator help thread. Why wasn’t it? That's open to speculation.
As someone with a small tech channel, I'm glad I was following this. If not, I would have spent the last week swapping out thumbnails and video titles, which seem about as effective as percussive maintenance. But hey, you have to try something.
Well over a decade ago a gentleman by the name of Brian Brushwood said, and I'm paraphrasing, “YouTube is like working for an AI manager that never tells you what it wants but punishes you severely if you get it wrong.”
Welcome to 2025.
Pretty sure it's caused by the algorithm not serving the user anymore... Unless I block a channel forever I only get served the same channels over and over or it's an endless reel of ai slop with that dead crappy voice on all kinds of variations...
Yeah, these companies are pushing AI so hard they don't see it's destroying the value they had. I don't want to watch an AI reading Wikipedia, showing stock photography, and I doubt anybody else does, either.
And lately they're starting to get more malicious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaHW24jOYVw
I too have noticed a lot more slop in my feed the last several months, and generally have to explicitly check my subscriptions to be sure I don't miss videos.
And I'm quite deliberate with avoiding ragebait and slop, and I remove stuff from my watch history if I get duped etc.
That said, I have noticed a trend amongst the creators I've subscribed to that the average video length has gone up. This has been a longer term trend, but many who used to do 30-40 min videos now often to 1-1.5 hr videos.
I've heard YouTube punishes people quitting a video midway, so perhaps there's something going on there too. At least for myself I often have to watch these videos over multiple sessions, and chances are there that I just forget and move on.
So perhaps some compounding factors making things worse.
View counts are on borrowed time anyway, I’m sure.
Is there any hard, reliable data on how much money is "lost" by users with ad blockers? Some of the measures Google has taken with regards to ad blockers seem wholly disproportionate to my own impression of how common they really are.
Well, if the recent drop in views was due to adblockers, we now have some data about what percent of viewers block ads. There would have to be an effort to collect this data, and the view discrepncy is probably going to differ by genre of video (eg, tech youtubers probably experienced a greater dip), but this should roughly tell us how much is lost to adblockers.
Creators have stated that while their viewcount is down their ad revenue is not - but a lower viewcount still presumably hurts youtubers for in video sponsorships, and if some genres of video have a higher portion of users with blockers, that probably hurts that entire genre in the algorithm. It sounds like viewcounts are returning back to normal though.
> but this should roughly tell us how much is lost to adblockers.
not really, because watching videos without ad blockers would be quite painful
Well, I meant how much is lost financially. Ah, unless you mean that people would watch less videos if they were subjected to ads, which is a great point I didn't consider. You're right, you can't just linearly extrapolate as I suggested due to that.
I have no actual hard stats to back this up sadly, but from what I've read ad rates are the same, but the views are down. Presumably because everyone who is using an AdBlock isn't counted as a view, and they obviously don't watch ads so the rates are the same.
If this is what they're doing, then it would seem to be negligible. The channels I've heard talking about this don't seem to be taking home any less money despite tanking viewcounts. Earnings are constant, but the numbers supporting those earnings have shuffled around unpredictably. When it's your income, you really don't like things to be shuffling around without warning.
The views didn't count in the first place, that's why the money stayed the same.
Creators can now though, knowing how much they make per view on avg, and slot in the avg number of view that were missing, work out how much they are missing out on due to ad-blocking.
For large creators, it's likely in the tens of thousands of dollars per video assuming most are seeing the same ~20-25% drop.
Eventually the "morally pure" internet will need to reconcile it's habit of not compensating creators.
I think you're not understanding. The claim is that view counts are down but revenue is not because people using ad-block previously did not contribute to revenue but did contribute to view count, and now they are not counted as either. So view counts are down and creators are getting the same ad money because they already earned no money from the adblocking people.
When channels are claiming their view count is dropping 30% but still earning the same amount of money, that would indicate that they are losing out on 30% of their potential revenue because of ad blockers.
If you don't like random/inexplicable changes in your income, you probably shouldn't have youtube involved.
YouTube's where the money is. There are very few other places where you can make money like YouTube. Yes, that also means having to deal with their many, many issues, many of which directly threaten that money, but the solution is to work to solve those problems and highlight new ones. YouTube's too big to ignore, and too big to die no matter how many paper cuts and gaping wounds it gives itself.
I wonder if they want to occasionally agitate against ad blocking just to keep the pressure on.
If I were Google I wouldn’t be that worried about, like, Firefox users with ad blocking addons, or pihole users. But I’d be a bit worried that Apple might take a harder stance against ads, in their browser.
If Apple were to include an ad blocker by default in Safari it would be the greatest thing they've done for users in the past 5 years. Their privacy/anti-tracking stuff is good but it's largely invisible to the end user. People would never want to go back to the raw internet once they experience it without ads.
Yeah. And, “privacy” is part of their pitch (it’s just a sales pitch, not a moral philosophy, and I’m aware that they don’t always live up to it). Including a default-on ad blocker would be an extremely user-visible way of emphasizing that pitch.
It will be a low percentage, but a low percentage at youtube's scale is still a vast amount of money and worth going after.
Am I the only person who is confused by the anger from people who use a free service (like YouTube) or participate in a gig service (like Uber), and get upset when it doesn't go their way? Meaning, they get upset when they cannot make money off services provided by a company. Seems like entitlement to me.
Disagree - the services make money _from_ the users. It's a symbiotic relationship, and I totally understand the frustration. Especially when decisions are opaque and you're left guessing about what 'the platform' is doing.
Lol honestly, not sure how they can be compared. Uber is a shitty proposition in any way and is mostly a way for us to get easy access to cheap labor. Nobody ever got rich driving for Uber.
There's no way you can say the same about YouTube, the value proposition is quite good and it leveled the field in a way traditional media would never do, just think for a moment what's the chance of seeing someone like MrBeast surging as a TV personality.
What's the meaning of this? Is Google trying to make content creators tell their viewers not to use adblockers? I don't think it's easylist's problem here. I don't understand.
It was mostly panic. As in: it didn't apparently affect revenue in any way, but content creators always check view stats/graphs for their own videos to see how well each of them is doing. So sudden drop made YT the main suspect. It didn't help some changes to video visibility for "children" profiles was pushed at same time.
Putting my tinfoil hat on, maybe they knew ad blockers would mess with their new implementation and expected the freak out to mount "creators" against ad blockers?
YouTube has ads?
My bill for access to phone and internet where all data is celular, runs $3000~6000/yr,and includes a domain and email, I refuse to watch any adds ever or pay for anything else that is not property that can be re sold, rented, insured, transfered, or returned cause it's junk, or I dont like it. I pay my fucking rent, have payed for a long time, and know that there is another way that everything can be configured that sends the "platforms" packing. The difference is a world where everyone self manages there affairs, does there best, can work and contribute, while living there best lives, or the nasty shit show we have now with a tiny minority attempting to puppet the whole world and everything in it.
>Whatever, there's no problem for user. EP is for user and not for those so called creators or site owners.
It's sad to see how little sympathy there is for people other than oneself and how changes are affecting the larger ecosystem. Especially for a site as critical as YouTube to people's livelihoods.
Though having said that, at the same time I'm not surprised that someone who spends their time modifying sites to remove ads and analytics to make their personal experience better at the expense of everyone else would act this way would have this kind of selfish mindset.
If only YouTube made ads run on the side instead of trying to emulate television.
I’m not going to sit through two 15-30 second LOUD ads just to see if a video is actually worth watching.
They also do this (or did?). But I guess on mobile this is not working well, because of limited screen estate, and people will obviously not focus much on them.
I agree that video ad experience on YouTube isn't great, but they do offer a subscription to remove ads at least.
I'm a heavy AdBlock user, I pay for YT premium, and I paid Nebula for 2 years, also I try to buy some albums on Bandcamp even with YT music subscription. What more they do want?
And I do use referral codes for the content creators I do like. My Amazon referrals do still work.
As a mostly software backend dev I even visualize the JS guy saying "it's solved" when he forgets to tell that the correct choice is to do the counting on the backend, period. Not hacking a crappy JS snippet calling a different host.
I obviously ask for more time to make sure it's reliable.
I literally saw something similar happening around some years ago in a adjacent team I was working.
I want to pay with money, not attention. Both at the same time? Non negotiable.
Youtube could fix it by counting when the video page is loaded from the server.
I don't think they'd be interested in fixing this. I suspect YouTube is trying to create a double bind for users of adblockers by pitting them against creators' incentives. People in the thread were discussing ways of disabling uBO filters to restore view reporting.
The work to do this isn't free. YouTube already has their code working, but they don't expect browsers to be blocking arbitrary requests or injecting their own javascript into the page. These kind of breakage are not free for YouTube to fix and often YouTube is the one taking the reputational hit for their site being broken. It ultimately is antisocial behavior to be breaking other's sites even if technically they can workaround the bugs being added.
> antisocial behavior
This is hard to take seriously in defense of YouTube. I suppose the most respectful answer is that I'll be willing to stop when they do.
Stop what? Showing ads? They have to fund it somehow, there will always be ads. Most users aren't willing to pay for anything on the internet, and unfortunately revenue is required to run anything at scale. You can charge users, show ads, or maybe get funding from Saudis.
> Stop what?
Tracking with javascript.
So just track you on the back end instead? I don't know what that really changes. If you mean to say just not track you at all and show you untargeted ads, well they are worth less, so they'll have to blast you with more of them.
(This was a response to https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375 via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45276614, but we merged that thread into this one)
i used to watch lots of videos, but since LLM came into being i find them much faster than watching videos.
Infact, i used to watch videos because they used to be more "targeted" at problem solving when i ran into any issues.
but these days LLM ftw.
How are LLMs an alternative to videos? They are different mediums.
What's your use case?