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YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/2883134 (!android@lemdro.id)

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[–] 155 points 2 years ago (32 children)

Didn’t know about SponsorBlock until all this started. So many just found out ad blocking is possible.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I only heard about AdNauseum because of this whole debacle. It blocks ads, hasn't temporarily broken (as far as I have seen), and I set it to "click" 80% of all ads it sees.

    I have probably screwed whatever profile they built on me, cost the ad buyers money bc clicks, hurt the conversion rate for purchases to cost google money, and even possibly made money for my favorite creators and sites (depending on how they're paid).

    Though someone lmk if I am misunderstanding something about it.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Holy crap, now that is causing massive damage to advertisers. I didn’t know this existed either. If everyone used it, the entire internet would collapse because most of it is for-profit now, unlike 30 years ago (when I made my first site in notepad).

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  • [–] -5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    The other person's been downvoted pretty heavily so I'll volunteer to accept some.

    Sponsorblock is a shitty tool for extremely selfish people that only hurts small-time content creators. You can't argue about your data privacy, malware, corporate profits, or Google. Sponsorships are literally the least invasive and most direct form of financial support the average person can get for their content without you paying them directly. YouTubers do it because Google is already fucking them over. There's absolutely no higher justification for it beyond annoyance at an extremely minor inconvenience and a sense of entitlement to the work of others.

    You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom's Auto Care if you could. Not every attempt at making money is evil.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom's Auto Care if you could.

    If someone came out and shoved the banner in my face and didn’t let me watch the game until several seconds had elapsed, yes, I’d tear the banner down too. Because it’s unacceptable.

    But no one does that. The banner sits there in the outfield on the wall being unobtrusive and not interrupting the game or the flow of the game. That’s acceptable.

    Make the ads unobtrusive and not interrupt the flow of the video and I don’t care. The problem is YT / YTers don’t do that. That’s why Sponser Block exists.

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  • [+] -70 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (25 children)

    Sponsor block is a different beast. Should we really be doing that to our content creators? No, definitely not. Is it them or the advertising company that suffers?

    Edit: Actually really surprised about this. Couple weeks ago people are sticking up for YT premium prices. Now, you are against helping the creators you watch.

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  • [–] 59 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    If you weren't planning on paying for the product, the creator won't take any hit from you using sponsorblock. In fact, the advertiser won't either. Nobody will be hurt by it, because it was a massive waste of your time to start with.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Fair enough but you can't plan on paying for a product before you have seen what it was.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Well, the blocker doesn't stop me from seeing the ad, it stops me from wasting my time manually skipping the ad. I still don't see how that's going to change my mind about anything.

    Also, if you were thinking of getting anything from a youtube ad: they are almost exclusively bad products. If you need something, just do a tiny bit of research instead of going with the first thing a content creator agreed to shill for.

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  • [–] 30 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Huh, Sponsorblock is basically muting TV ads like in the old days.

    Why should I be forced to watch a sponsor almost always totally unrelated to the content I seek to watch, and that the YouTuber decided to upload?

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  • [+] 22 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago

    Bingo. Buy a VPN for privacy just means, give us your data instead of your ISP.

    Now, a VPN provider may very well be more trustworthy than your ISP! But then again, maybe not... That depends on your circumstances and risk profile.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    He did eventually take one later on, which I can imagine must've been a bit of a painful decision ;-;

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    He declined the first one, because they wanted him to lie.

    He accepted the other, because they were fine with just facts.

    A VPN doesn't protect your privacy. It only helps on websites without working https, which is ridiculously rare these days. Yes, it also hides your IP address, but that is really really irrelevant. If you wanted to stay truly anonymous you'd not log in anywhere and use Tor. The only actual use case is circumventing geo blocking.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    You can also circumvent geo blocking with a proxy, some of them are free, do not send any sensitive info on the free proxies however, not that a paid one is intrinsicaly safer, just like vpns.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    My favorite aspect of sponsorblock is blocking the incredibly repetitive ubiquitous script that every single channel copies of like, subscribe, ring the notification bell.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    This is actually why i don’t like it. Most of my subs do this kinda thing rarely but occasionally. Sponsorblock creates a gap in the video that is more jarring then the 1 second self promotion, wish there was an option to only block self promotions more then 4 seconds long.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I really can't stand requests for likes, subscribes, notification bell at all. I actually hate it more than ads, and have backed out of many a video that didn't happen to have the segment flagged at the beginning.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    You're absolutely right. Sponsorblock directly harms the average people making content, it has nothing to do with Google.

    It's gross and reveals how much of the complaining about ads has absolutely nothing to do with privacy or malware or corporate profiteering or anything like that. These people are just nakedly selfish.

    Wear those downvotes with pride. They mean you have a conscience and feel empathy.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Cheers. I don't think I've ever had such a response to a normal ethical take. We complain about wanting free and open source products but by the looks of it nobody is able to sit through a 20 second sponsor.

    If we had everything on a free open source platform people would still skip the sponsored segment.

    I feel if the sponsor blocks keep up we'll start to see the creators or sponsors combat it in ways we really don't like.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Sponsors don't pay the creator less if you skip the sponsor segment. That's not tracked, at least not in a way that google will share with the creator or anyone else. If that changes someday, sure, you have a point. For now skipping the sponsor segment is as harmless as skipping through the commercials on TV.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    I watch YT about once a week and usually an hour or less. Premium isn’t worth it for that low of use. Sponsors, I skipped, always. I’ve never once purchased from a sponsor. I also skipped subscribe crap manually (I’m not logged in, I can’t).

    SponsorBlock just does it for me, kinda nice. The creator gets paid by viewership so I have helped when I watch.

    Lemmy isn’t seen by 98% of the public so my mentioning it hardly spreads further awareness. What did spread it was YT themselves cracking down. It made news headlines and my own mother asked I come over and install one.

    YT Streisand Effected themselves. They demanded we not use them and got more people using them because of it.

    Now, my mom won’t see Google ads anywhere, not just YT. What a smart move because I know there’s probably a million new UBlock users.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago*

    The content creators get paid the exact same whether I skip the sponsor segment or not. YouTube doesn't track that, or not in a way they share with anyone else at any rate. Sponsors aren't going to pay the content creators less due to skips since they literally cannot see who skips the segment.

    In other words, it doesn't hurt the content creator in the slightest.

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