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A Novel Approach to Youtube Ads (9to5google.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Instead of blocking them, this extension speeds them up to x16 and also mutes the ad. Experiencing a 30 second ad in 2 seconds is pretty funny. And it works on Edge and Chrome.

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[–] 109 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Everyone's hating on this approach but I think it's nice that we have other options. I'm sure Ublock is going to come out on top of this cat and mouse game YouTube is playing with them, but if YouTube manages to temporarily disable Ublock I'll look into this solution. Thanks!

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

    Google will give up eventually. They're definitely burning more money than they would gain from winning the battle

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  • [+] 26 points 2 years ago* (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Unfortunately the videos with ads absolutely packed through them are largely due to the creators choosing the settings for extra monetization.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Youtube just made changes that prevent creators from choosing to only allow skippable ads. Now youtube chooses what type of ads to run at the start and end of a video.

    The only choice creators have is to enable or disable mid-roll ads, and where to place them (but the default is to allow youtube to make those choices too)

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

    I do not believe that is the case. Youtube ads are an insanely profitable business. I suspect throwing a couple dozen of FTEs on blocking ad blockers would be <1% of current revenue.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    I don't doubt they make tonnes of revenue from ads however you have to remember how small the share of adblocker users are. So the extra money from fighting the adblock user base is a clear gamble. Especially as those types of users are the ones who are more likely to avoid YouTube completely if they can't bypass ads.

    Someone in Google would have done the research because it's not a simple case of war profit = adblockusers * ad revenue per user

    I strongly believe they'll stop once they hit a certain threshold/target of "reduction of adblock users". They won't go on like this forever.

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

    To be fair, at the current monopolistic state of YouTube, how many people are actually likely to avoid YouTube completely?

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

    If YouTube truly succeeded in forcing 90 seconds of unavoidable ads with no exceptions without paying $20/month then I genuinely think YouTube won't be a monopoly for very long.

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

    Honestly I've tinkerd with the idea of making a genuine ad free YouTube competition. But the industry standard is operating at a loss. No one wants to pay for a YouTube service and no one wants to watch ads. If anyone has any ideas on how a YouTube competitor could stay afloat I'm all ears.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Oh I don't expect it to be free and ad free. Just not as invasive as it is now, the ads are relentless especially when the form factor of videos are usually proportionally quite short.

    Alternatively have a reasonable price for add free. Google is an enormous company which operate as a loss for monopoly and exposure reasons, they've put themselves into this position

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    How can a competitor handle Google dropping ads and/or pricing and run at a loss until the competitor is bought or destroyed outright? Google has too much money and existing infrastructure for someone other than say Amazon to compete with YouTube and god help us if that’s the alternative we get.

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

    How can a new competitor acquire content creators to actually threaten the monopoly? Genuine question.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    They can't. Unless YouTube fucks up big time, nothing will touch it, especially since they are the most "generous" with their payouts to creators. Only if someone steps up with a platform just as good as YouTube (UI, infrastructure) AND pays a bigger share, maybe it will happen. But video streaming is a thankless business so I personally doubt it will happen anytime soon.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    They're definitely burning more money than they would gain from winning the battle

    Maybe at the moment, but I suspect part of the motivation for this is that they are trying to prevent another "adpocalypse" type boycott from their advertisers.

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  • [–] [S] 11 points 2 years ago

    That's why I tried to present it without an anti-google seeming bias. I wanted people to just have the facts and not all the BS in the article. I think it's a good option for people who don't want to block ads so creators they watch benefit.

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