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.
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.
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.
not really, because watching videos without ad blockers would be quite painful
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.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/digging-deeper-youtub...
(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....
Nah, that'll never work.
Unclear what premium uses to disburse the 55% share that goes to creators; hopefully it's not those ones.
The fact that I have Premium is irrelevant; if YouTube isn't getting the metrics that says I watched a video, then it won't be counted.
Certainly YouTube could change the method they use to count views so it would work in my case, but they probably don't have an incentive to do so.
IIRC it even has lots of options such as enabling you to allow/disallow self-sponsor segments (the creator promoting their own product), "like and subscribe" calls to action, shock-and-awe intros, podcast recaps, and several other segment types.
As the old joke goes:
“Doctor, it hurts when I do this”
“Then don’t do it”
If it's using the same profiling to determine if you're unique, and sending it to the same datacenter that builds the ad profiles, how is the adblocker to know that the endpoint is really only invisibly tallying a view count?
You're acting as if the way Google does it would be the _only_ way to do it. Obviously untrue.
I suppose Man was never meant to know Hacker News User's mind.
To ensure my premium subscription dollars are making it to the creators I've now disabled uBO for the entire youtube domain.
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.
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
Likewise with NordVPN and Raid: Shadowlegends. Never used any of them, don't really intend to, but I do know the name.
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.
Skip Ahead is only for Premium subscribers. The logic probably being native-ads/sponsorships are in fact ads, and Premium users are paying for an ad-free experience.
I’m not sure. They want influencers to make profit using their platform, so they want to make them rich. On the viewcount, a skipped sponsor still looks like a view. No sponsor is going to look at the proportion of watching each part of the video, they just care about the view counter.
What Youtube may want, though, is for paying customers to be able to skip ads. “If you pay you should have no ads”.
It feels rare that I agree with Google on anything these days, but if that is the case... sounds fair.
Then these adult children go an complain there are no competitors. No shit, you scoff at subscriptions and wear your ad-block like a badge of honor. Who the hell would invest in making a platform for non-paying users?
Edit: I guess this is a YouTube premium feature?
Youtube has no incentive to accurately report this data and no apparent accreditation in their methodology.
If Google shows everyone how ineffective ads actually are, they’d crumble.
The two main options advertisers have are:
* Brand Lift Studies: split audience into treatment and control, use surveys on a small fraction of participants to measure impact
* Conversion Lift: again split audience into treatment and control, compare downstream actions like purchases ("conversions")
These both work on YouTube IIRC.
Anyways, I was mostly referring to sales at physical locations; I assume it's pretty viable to build a system to figure out if someone who previously bought a lot of shein is now buying a lot of temu.
Offline purchases are harder, of course, but pretty sure you can still do this: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9994849
(Once I understand your claim I'll be better able to respond: I think "there's effectively no way to be caught" is not true under both of the interpretations I see)
Such as?
I agree, and find it even wilder that first party metrics from Meta and Google are trusted by most major advertisers (including ad agencies). I'm talking about six-seven figure budgets spent without any third party validation.
I've seen some studies on click fraud[0], but when advertisers are effectively choosing from a duopoly that has limited incentives not to lie in their metrics, I find it strange that there are no popular, widespread and accessible independent validation tools.
Many of the advertisers that sell on these platforms are quite familiar with buying ads directly from "old school" media companies. So they have the competence and familiarity to be put off by the metrics but are apparently not in a position to force Google and Facebook to match standards used in other contexts.
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.
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.
Some were paying big money to streamers with 20,000 live viewers. Even though 19000 of those were fake.
The sponsor then sees the ad and did terribly and doesn't sponsor anyone else in the future.
1. It seems views from Premium users who use adblock might also not get counted—and I'm not sure if the revenue from a Premium view in that circumstance would be counted or not (more research needed).
2. YouTube's recommendation engine weights views heavily in the system, which means channels with a more technical, traditional desktop viewing audience (probably a substantial portion of HN users) will be most impacted, and will not be able to grow an audience to help fund projects, yadda yadda.
YouTube creators with younger, mobile, less FOSS-y, and less tech-savvy audiences are therefore rewarded with more views/mindshare.
I know some here are like "go get a REAL job, influencers are scum", but I think that discounts the helpful work of many tech creators. Not only in direct contributions to open source projects, but also in being a voice to balance out the paid 'product showcase' style videos for many tech products that come to market.
In other words: if adblock users disincentivize creators like me from spending time and resources on YouTube, then video content will more quickly settle into the online magazine/news status quo, where 99% of the articles you read are just PR spin. Which you could argue would bring about YouTube's downfall earlier... or would lead us even more quickly to an Idiocracy-style society :D
I'm not saying adblock is bad or wrong or anything—I can't stand the YT ad spam, so I pay for Premium. To each their own. In any case, YouTube shoulders some of the burden, but will be the main entity to profit in any scenario.
This is all completely subjective of course.
Signing up for the creator's patreon or buying merch is the more widely adopted reaction by the those actually enjoying the content.
I run AdGuard (on a Mac). It has a filter log feature.
Poking at the log while playing a video, I do see calls to ttps://{{clusterid?}}.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1758173247&...
However, this call is not being blocked.
I suspect that this is the "keep watching" feature that tracks where I am in various videos (switching from one logged in device to another keeps the same position). Watching the video all the way through, I don't see any requests relating to this getting blocked while on Premium. This feature is also likely more than sufficient data to attribute a view (and monetization of the view).
There was also a call to ttps://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/log_event?alt=json that was not blocked.
I do see some doubleclick.net links being blocked, thought that could be from any number of other pages I've got open.
Going to an incognito session and pulling up the same video (Once Around Trappist 1)...
There's now a call (that has gotten blocked) to ttps://www.youtube.com/api/stats/watchtime...
That call was not something that I saw when logged into premium. This rule is described as "@@||www.youtube.com^$generichide (AdGuard Base filter)"
while true, choosing to base your income on the wellbeing of a company and its ad placement, no matter how well your video does or how good you are at producing videos is absolute insanity to me.
You become a slave to the latest monetization techniques and if you don't adopt them your revenue goes down, and your videos get put in front of fewer people, resulting in less income. This is bizarre to me, and definitely unwanted, because the things you need to do will never stop ramping up. A video used to do better because the thumbnail had a reaction face on it, now it's required just to keep your view count where it normally should be. People got used to that, and now ignore it. But it's still required if you want to get your video in front of people.
Now thumbnails must be rotated out frequently for the first few days of a video's life until the thumbnail which results in the most views is found. Soon people will become immune to this tactic just like they became immune to the reaction faces, and something new will come up to replace it. Except you don't stop with the reaction faces and the thumbnail rotation, you have to keep doing those.
Advertising requires this constant escalation to counter people's ever-increasing ability to ignore advertisements, and this will never stop so long as revenue determines how often a video is placed on the youtube.com homepage for a given viewer. it will never stop until advertisement is no longer a thing at all. a content creator must continually escalate what they are doing in order to stay right where they are in viewership, and even then they are subject to constant drops in revenue because of the whims of Google and advertising partners.
The whole thing is absolutely insane and I can't understand why someone would choose this to be their primary source of income. If people didn't choose to make youtube a career, there would be far fewer ads on youtube, because people would not be fighting so hard for views.
I don't know... To me, it just seems like a textbook move from a Corporate Abuse Playbook. I bet someone at Google is laughing about it right now.
Same with twitter.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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"?
And lately they're starting to get more malicious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaHW24jOYVw
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.
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.
What's your use case?
"How do you start a react application" and going to https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=How+do+you+star... (incognito or private session suggested to avoid search history getting you react application suggestions for the next several months) and watching those videos.
For many people looking for a guide, they've switched to an LLM which gives them a more tailored experience.
Surely "tutorial videos" are only a tiny fraction of YouTube videos? And also, some tutorial videos cannot be replaced by a textual (or even graphical) LLM description, especially if the topic being described is visual in nature and it helps to see the other person doing it.
I might be in some A/B test tho.
Does anyone realize how many missed views this implies??
100% this. They were even threatening him with facing the ire of social media if he didn't reopen the issue.
Whether or not you consider that an issue shrug but it's not directly YT's fault.
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.
And extensions such as SponsorBlock [1], which help user skipping sponsored sections or useless intros in videos.
It would either be trying a revolt or stop youtube.
There's also Tubular, a YouTube client and fork of NewPipe with Sponsor Block built-in. If you don't mind installing apks from outside the Play Store: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular
Another example of that is their ridiculous strike system. Look at what happened to Gamersnexus recently.
I pay €14/mo to not have ads on YouTube. It's good they have the skip feature for those sponsor segments, since they're just embedded ads.
Creators still benefit as my view has a higher $. Well... not anymore I suppose with the view attribution endpoint being blocked by my adblock.
What they are missing is proof I’ve watched the ads - which I haven’t.
Turns out that pi-hole was blocking the endpoint that records the watch history! IIRC allowing queries for something like s.youtube.com made my watch history start working.
I agree that they should know w/o all this client based nonsense but :shrug:. They don't, somehow!
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.
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.
Plenty of closed ecosystem streaming services exist and they continue to be niche things where creators who had no audience before YouTube are trying to keep going. I'm not sure how long the likes of Nebula and Floatplane are going to last honestly, because they have fundamental discovery issues in both directions:
The creators need a constant influx of new viewers to replace people growing out of their content, and the viewers need a platform where they can experiment with new content without a big paywall upfront.
This is why enshittification exists.
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.
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 a very naive view to think that serving videos is a zero-cost endeavor because the video isn't consumed.
Products have more than just marginal production costs, especially true for digital ones.
The seating and good screen and audio? No.
The digital file? I don't expect Disney to provide that free of charge, or at all for that matter, but I do believe it should be free. Copyright has gone way too far of one end of the scale, and I'd like to pull it as far as possible to the other side, then hopefully we can meet in the middle in a position we can both respect. The current position taken by Society™ is one I don't respect.
The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes.
Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything.
> We still need mechanisms to pay them for it, the more direct the better.
Patreon is a good option, although I wish we had better ones. It's not like Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%. Anyone who's tried that has discovered that Youtube's payout is some extra pocket change rather than anything you can actually sustain a business with; hence why everybody who's on Youtube and does it as a business also has a Patreon or does sponsorships, or something else, as that's the only way to make ends meet.
> The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes.
I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure.
Youtube pays $5-$15 per 1000 views. Youtube premium gives a 55% cut of the monthly fee to creators. It's split among them based on who you watch and how long you watch them. If you watch one creator only, they will get the full 55% of your subscription cost. Creators readily acknowledge that yt premium viewers are by far the most valuable.
Generally less than 5% of viewers ever donate, and less than 1% ever give more then $5. It's not a viable income method.
I suggest following pitchfork mobs less, they are usually blind with rage and detached from reality, with a few kernels of truth in the middle.
If Youtube was a platform that clearly cared about its creators, than a 55% split would be pretty fair. Youtube doesn't give a shit about most of them, and if they're just going to be a stupid bytepipe to the viewer, a hostile one at that, then them taking 45% is absurd.
> Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything.
Poor wording on my part, because I was typing on my phone. "Everything" refers to everything related to copyright law. Your original comment implied that we should just burn it all down (going "as far as possible to the other side"), and I don't agree with that.
Copyright has been weaponized of course, but there are considerations worth keeping in mind about why it exists in the first place. The intent is to create mechanisms that incentivize creation of art, and allow creatives to distribute said art without other people getting automatic ownership of the fruits of their labor, just by virtue of having the file.
In a world where distribution of media is (relatively) cheap and easy, we need to think more about how we incentivize the creative process, instead of making it a wild west where anyone is allowed to distribute if they have the bits on them. In a world where everyone pirates, very little worth pirating remains.
EDIT: Forgot to respond to the rest.
I agree about patreon, but also:
> Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%.
That's not accurate. Of course if you have a couple hundred subscribers you get nothing from youtube, but neither does a random busker on the subway. Arts are just brutally competitive, and there's way more art being produced than people want to consume.
Youtube's partner programs are quite generous as other people have pointed out in sister comments. In addition, a good chunk of your premium subscription goes directly to the creators you're subscribed to.
> I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure.
This misses my point, but illustrates the weird thought process people go through when assigning value to digital media. When trying to value a desk we're willing to go through the whole shebang: cost of materials, quality of materials, quality of the craftsmanship and how much labour it would have required, the estimated cost of all the manufacturing processes involved, finishing labor costs etc.
But when the conversation is about paying for digital content we only focus on the direct value it provides to us, the consumer. The entire conversation about input value just gets lost.
Now input value is not always perfectly correlated with the output value (it's shaped differently for each customer), but the fact that the conversation simply shifts away as if creators and people building the platforms don't exist outside of the stream of bytes feels disingenuous.
China seems to be doing that just fine when it comes to manufacturing. Everybody who's doing engineering or design work on products are talking to each other to figure out what works and does when making stuff, and nobody cares about keeping secrets about these things, since it isn't properly enforced anyway, and if you keep one secret and sit on it, without going out there to continue improving, you'll be outclassed by everybody else in a month or a year. Meanwhile, American companies are sitting on 80 years of IP and are unwilling to even consider sharing their hoard even if half of it is functionally useless, just because it might have some value.
People are creative by nature. Nowadays they have a whole internet to take inspiration from, but most of it is locked behind bars for no good reason. If we want to incentivise creative work, then copyright is wholly counter-productive in a world where information can freely and rapidly flow. I'd rather see it burn and see what comes from the ashes than let it rot into nothingness.
> That's not accurate. Of course if you have a couple hundred subscribers you get nothing from youtube, but neither does a random busker on the subway. Arts are just brutally competitive, and there's way more art being produced than people want to consume.
Go ask anyone between 100k and 10m subs. I'm not talking about people who have anything less than that.
> Youtube's partner programs are quite generous as other people have pointed out in sister comments. In addition, a good chunk of your premium subscription goes directly to the creators you're subscribed to.
And I'd have to give more money to a platform that's hostile to me as a user. No thanks.
> This misses my point, but illustrates the weird thought process people go through when assigning value to digital media. When trying to value a desk we're willing to go through the whole shebang: cost of materials, quality of materials, quality of the craftsmanship and how much labour it would have required, the estimated cost of all the manufacturing processes involved, finishing labor costs etc.
When if you hollow out a tree to make a boat, it's value goes up. If you then add a hole to it, it's value goes down again. Work or value you put into a product is not directly correlated with the final value on the other side. I couldn't give a shit about how much money a video takes to make. That sounds like a them problem, not a me problem. If you're spending too much money to make something than you can make back on it, then don't do that. Do something else.
Then the lemonade stand guy feels entitled to bitch about it when more and more people start showing up wearing headphones because they don't want to hear his bullshit even though literally nobody came for his abuse, what they came for was just the free lemonade.
The people still show up though because clearly people like the lemonade, they just hate the annoying guy who won't shut up about his rude opinions nobody asked for.
How dare people genuinely believe they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost, when it's got a huge sign that says "FREE LEMONADE"!
Youtube has every right to take down the free lemonade sign and paywall off their service, but they wont because they know they make far more money luring in the people who come for the free videos, sucking up their personal data, and then increasingly abusing them until some number of suckers cave and start paying into their protection racket scheme.
A racket is exactly what youtube premium is too. Never pay someone for protection against the very harms they're causing you. There's nothing to stop them from demanding increasing amounts of protection money whenever they feel like it, which is exactly what Google has done. Repeatedly. Most recently sticking their oldest suckers with a 62% hike in protection fees. (https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1jqzu4g/et_tu_yout...)
Don't encourage or try to justify that kind of shit. Just put on a pair a headphones and enjoy the sweet lemonade Google chooses to offer for "free". Don't forget that even with those headphones, Google is still collecting every scrap of data they can get from you and your device while you're using their service and that they'll happily leverage all of that data against you in any way they can think of, any time they feel it might benefit them. That price is itself high enough, but for me still worth what I'm getting from the content I view.
It's also an optional website/app. No need to get heated, you can use another service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...
Often this means "the way you've implemented ads is terrible enough that I went out of my way to block them" and sometimes it means "any and all ads are terrible and I don't want them"
There's nothing at all wrong with ad blocking. Someone who puts their content on the public internet has zero right to require me to view that content, or to control how much of it I see or how I choose to view it. If I want to block ads, or only watch the last 20 seconds, or watch the whole thing played backwards that's my business. This is equally true for websites where I'm free to decide what to download and how to display it in my browser.
You must be very young if you actually think that. In reality the internet was infinitely better when there was no commercialization at all.
I find plenty of valuable things on the current internet that wouldn't exist without commercialization, the possibility of a career as an individual YouTuber or streamer, for example.
And I'd like to see them continue and be actually paid for their efforts in a sustainable way instead of pining for a return to "all content is just passion side projects".
Because absolutely nothing about the current internet stops people from posting passionately as a side project.
I have the rosey glasses too. The reality is that it was just a bunch of edgy kids messing around with no adults in the room.
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.
If "smart" people use ad-block, then all the content gravitates towards those who don't.
* 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.
Or if you want to enjoy some slop, then apparently we'll all get plenty of that if the smart people block malware, so no problem.
Generally speaking, something with wide appeal is going to be trash anyway because most people aren't going to want to (or will be unable to) engage with any given topic at more than a superficial level. e.g. compare Andrew Ng's Coursera MOOC to problem sets you can find from his real class at Stanford. It is obvious that he watered down the information hard for Coursera. Almost every class on those MOOC sites is of the "X for non-X majors" variety at best (and that's for people who are motivated enough to self-learn!), which IMO is why it could never truly be disruptive. The "creators" people are talking about are generally this except even more targeted at mass audiences.
Even for people who are interested in "smart" stuff, 100x more people will watch some 10 minute video of surface level discussion with doodles about algebraic geometry[0] and then move onto another 10 minute video vs. putting in the work to engage with 15+ hours of lectures on the subject from a Fields Medalist[1]. World-class researchers provide graduate level educational materials for free (which is awesome), but they could never succeed as "content creators" because any given video will only get ~1k views after years of being up.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MflpyJwhMhQ
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8yHsr3EFj53j51FG6wCb...
They will do this whether or not people use ad-blockers. We've seen this happen before; someone will claim that they are an ethical ad company and don't do shady things, people allow-list in ad blockers, then they start ramping up.
I remember back in the day where Google was a "good advertiser" because they had simple textual ads and didn't do shady things. IIRC plenty of ad blockers just allow-listed Google at that time. And then they acquired Doubleclick.
As a consumer this does not concern me in the slightest. The big creators who are focusing on revenue are so sterile they are barely watchable at this point.
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 YouTube could track what you watch anyway, they would have no trouble incrementing their view counter. But apparently that's an unsolved problem of computer science, so they were using something ad blockers and privacy extensions could block.
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.
Personally I would even prefer anything that allows for a Youtube alternative to do better.
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.
Examples: Caspian report, Warfronts, Geopolitics decoded, ...
Many of them (the content creator) are even located in the same city.
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.
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.
Every publisher on the internet has been bleating for years about how adblockers negatively impact their business and their ability to provide [some value] to customers.
If your ability to generate value is hitched to surveillance capitalism then that’s a choice, whether you’re a folksy mom and pop YouTube creator or a multinational publisher.
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
In the server-side case I can certainly increase views by fetching the video multiple times, but in the client side case I can hit the analytics endpoint directly just as easily
If you are tech or tech-adjacent content, it can double or triple that.
I don't hold it against anyone. YouTube's ads are horrible, and overstuffed into videos.
I use premium and know not everyone can afford it, but one concern I have is premium views are also not counted if someone still uses the adblocker while logged into YouTube premium. (So you miss out on the view and on that extra bit of premium revenue).
Laughs in NewPipe.
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.
Laughs in SponsorBlock
Reminds me of F1 racing coverage on a free-to-air German TV network being reduced to a letterbox..
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.
I think it’s pretty clear that other forms of sponsorships also drive revenue to advertisers (whatever people may feel about that)
Surely this one given what they wrote.
> which you can't skip
Showing "regular" people solving common recurring issues like, "what clothes should I wear, what tool will simplify this task, what products are effective at a good value, what software/hardware can accomplish the goals I have set" are the only effective advertising for many people.
Sure, with kids you can show them a cool toy that other kids are playing with, inspiring desire.
You can show adults and teens a sexy girl or a hot guy somehow attached to the product so that by association your product is hot or sexy, but those are the low handing fruit and only work on specific demographics.
However, if you can clearly identify your target audience and then put a product that matches that audience in front of them while showing how the product is being used, thats it. Everyone who would purchase that type of product will buy it.
But for the LTT screwdriver or the bamboo labs 3D printers where I see how they can be used I actually consider buying them or have already done so. One factor for this is obviously that they can't be skipped, but the bigger one is that they are obviously more relevant for me as I am already interested in the video's topic and therefore the products used in it.
What's crazy is they've said their 60 seconds of ads per video generate way more revenue per video than Google's minutes of Google Adsense ads. So the real story here is the collapse of Adsense.
The sweet spot is when it feels seamless, but too often creators overdo it and the result is hilariously awkward. Think of someone discussing, say, the dangers of mountain climbing, then suddenly blurting out: “And you know what else is dangerous? An unprotected connection. Which is why you need X VPN!”
Whenever I see something thoroughly being advertised, and especially stealthily advertised, I immediately assume you have a shit product and need to bribe your way to success. Nothing turns me off more from a product than seeing an advertisement for it.
I guess it's the way of the world, but the introduction of heavy monetization has definitely influenced the kind of content YouTube carries.
Content which doesn't get made without sponsorship wouldn't get made even if sponsorships didn't exist.
People want to get rewarded for they work, you know. Do you also want your plumber to work for free?
The same applies to web and blogs; the ability to monetize them by ads (and I do remember the "old web" before it was the case) increased the content but drowned out viewership for the true enthusiasts running things in their spare time, which IMHO were more valuable and I think that regime was better; again, losing 90% or 99% of the content wouldn't be bad in my mind, there still would be more than enough for anyone to ever "consume".
You're missing the point entirely, the content I refer to as more interesting is stuff people made for fun or on principle not because of financial incentive
Imagine if people only commented on hn because they were expecting a paycheck for it
Sure, but then how is this any different from TV? Eg I’ve seen a few videos dramatically overblowing the certainty of life on Mars lately, presumably for views. If I wanted half truths based on lack of context, I could just flip on the news.
> Content which doesn't get made without sponsorship wouldn't get made even if sponsorships didn't exist.
Sponsorships raise the money invested into videos, which raises viewer expectations, suppressing the likelihood these videos would ever be seen. You basically need sponsors for your videos to go anywhere these days because people expect professional editing/lighting/etc. The “I watched a Premier tutorial and filmed on a cellphone” approach won’t cut it anymore.
> People want to get rewarded for they work, you know. Do you also want your plumber to work for free?
I don’t want it to be work, I would prefer it was done by hobbyists. There are tons of thriving hobby communities full of people only getting personal satisfaction.
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.
Turns out YouTube has a lot of analytics.
So that sounds like a 'them' problem, not a 'me' problem. There is no reason for ad tracking to play any role in the process whatsoever.
This goes for any site that sells you an ad-free subscription. No ads but you’re still being profiled.
Google has to do no legwork here to figure out who you are and what videos you are watching. There is no ambiguity. There should be no reason to not count views from Premium subscribers who don't disable their ad-blocker.
I'm sure Google knows this, and has a good reason for this behavior that they are not telling us. I'm not sure what it could be, other than spite.
No reason to ever turn off your ad-blocker even if you do pay and they identify you.
"People should disable their web malware blockers to support creators" makes the insanity of the proposition as clear as it ought to be. "FBI recommends using a web malware blocker" makes the advice as obvious as it ought to be.
To get exact metrics, you should use discount codes that are unique for each channel. Then you will know the exact amount of sales each sponsorship is netting.
Youtube isnt quoted in this article. It's someones speculation
> Viewers Using Ad Blockers & Other Content Blocking Tools: Ad blockers and other extensions can impact the accuracy of reported view counts. Channels whose audiences include a higher proportion of users utilizing such tools may see more fluctuations in traffic related to updates to these tools.
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.
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.
Tracking with javascript.
It changes what they assume to do with my hardware and user agent.
Mine is a common opinion within this community. I won't deny that I was short in my replies but it is hard to know what is over-explaining in this context.
Additionally, it seems that "tracking with javascript" is pretty much exactly the topic of these comments so I'm not sure why I should not have assumed that it would be clear what I meant, especially when my first comment was explicitly about YouTube tracking on the back end.
Using abusive advertising practices and being reasonable about the number of ads shown.
I’m not going to sit through two 15-30 second LOUD ads just to see if a video is actually worth watching.
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.
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.
Not sure about the chainsaw analogy, but I guess Aedes Aegypti is a fair metaphor for the cumulative effect of the tiny daily (hourly?) annoyance of the free-with-ads model.
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.
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.
On the other hand I’ve known people who sold ads for newspaper and radio and all of them had some sense of ethics.
If you build /anything/ there will be people who dedicate time to learning how to abuse it for profit.
We don't live in Narnia.
> Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others.
So the specific recommendation is that you turn on an ad blocker while performing searches. Why are they so concerned about searches? It's because of a specific form of fraud, where someone purchases an ad pretending to be the business you're searching for, but actually takes you "to a webpage that looks identical to the impersonated business’s official webpage" - that is, a phishing scam.
That's way more limited than the "FBI recommends ad blocker" statement would lead you to believe. From the FBI's point of view, pitching a bullshit supplement in an ad (what you're talking about) is an entirely legitimate business practice, and selling supplements is legal in the US so long as you don't make certain medical claims or imply FDA approval.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221222162340/https://www.ic3.g...
Youtube Rewind 2018 - before they got rid of dislikes, to make ad videos harder to spot - was one of (was the?) most disliked videos in Youtube history
A very far cry from the halcyon days of ~10 years earlier
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 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.
It would make sense too, Youtube wouldn't care to make their videos viewable to a large number of ad-blockers, and ad-revenue would be near steady because ad-blockers were not generating any ad revenue.
The compromise for Google would be to limit ad-blocker users to a reduced quality version to save on bandwidth...
After using Peertube, it would make a lot of sense if pretty much all media assets went the way of decentralisation. It lowers bandwidth, reduces server overhead and increases availability.
Agree to disagree. That's kind of the point of an ad blocker.
If you want to support creators, stop blocking their ads.
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?
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.
For example, how do you account for skipping over already fetched parts of the video or rewatching the same section multiple times?
Or for the entire video being cached and researched? For bots downloading the video?
The idea that this is some malicious anti-adblocker time bomb implanted a decade ago is preposterous.
It makes no sense.
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.
Don't you need more people using it so they can flag the sections?
Yes, I can hide shorts, but I have to do it every 20 days, no way to hide them for good. Unless, ofc, I use extension.
No wonder Google tries to end extension freedom...
Why should I not filter ads from a provider who is OK with people stealing from me?
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.
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.
> 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.
Advertising in general and Google in particular are so immoral that morally you should rip every YouTube video and distribute it freely outside of their platform while actively looking for ways to force them to fundamentally change or close.
The problem is that you feel you have an intrinsic right to the content. Like the content is a public good, and youtube shimmied it's way inbetween so it can shove ads in your face.
But that is not what the deal is. The content is made by creators explicity for youtube, and you are the one making a decision to go to youtube to view privately owned content that you have zero right to.
YT didn't have to build their platform on the web. Nobody forced them to. They could avoid all of these issues by setting up a dedicated client application using a custom protocol with ads already baked into the video stream, for example.
I don't feel like I have an intrinsic right to any content on YT. But I do feel like I have an intrinsic right to use the web the way it's supposed to be used. Which, of course, includes simply ignoring any HTML, CSS, JS or other bits that I don't like. I'm free to send whatever HTTP requests I want to YT, YT is free to respond with whatever they want and I'm free to do whatever I want with their responses. That's just how it is.
If YT doesn't like that... again, nobody is forcing them to use the WWW. They are free to use some locked down technology that better fits their specific needs.
Claiming that I am morally obligated to look at ads on YT is like claiming that I'm morally obligated to look at ads in a print magazine. I hold the magazine in my hands. I flip the pages. I guide my eyes towards the things I want to look at and away from the things I don't want to look at. This is not a surprise to anyone, it's just how reading a magazine works. Same thing with YT ads and the WWW.
You need to extend your logic to everyone, or define who can ad-block and who must watch the ads. It's great you have decided that you don't need to cover the cost incurred serving you a video, can you please tell me the logic we should use to pick who must pick up the tab you left behind? The volunteers who never skip ads?
Surely you have thought your philosophy through.
Businesses that rely in it don't have an innate right to exist. It is ok for some businesses that are viable now to not be in a future, better world. It's ok for some people who are rich now not to be as a result of that.
It's ok for there to be less total content, too. Perhaps that's even desirable when so much is bottom of the barrel stuff (and sometimes 100% a net societal negative) because that's the only way to fund something with a handful of ad views.
Not at all.
I no more claim the right to force someone to serve any given video to me than to force authors to send me copies of their books, musicians to perform for me, etc.
The tl;dr of my position is basically: you don't have to make it free, but you can't pay for it with surveillance capitalism (or at least you can't force anyone to participate when you try to do so).
If you serve data to me over the internet, I have a right to process that data however I want, including ignoring parts of it, and that that cannot be made subject to some contract or deal. Similarly, I can rip the ads out of magazines, skip ads in recordings of TV, etc. etc. and there's nothing the "content creator" can do about it.
Ads are not a deal or an obligation, they're the hope that if you show enough of them it'll be good enough for someone's business that they're willing to pay you for doing so. If you make the ads unbearable or show so many of them that too many people take steps to avoid them, that's your problem.
Make ads acceptable to enough people or find another business model[0].
[0] Not particularly relevant, but I pay for YouTube Premium and plenty of others, both platforms and individual creators. I still aggressively run all possible ad and tracking blockers against every site/platform. It's not about getting free content, it's about avoiding and ideally ending user tracking and targeted ads aka surveillance capitalism.
Everything on my PC is on my terms, and I don't watch ads.
Only when they pay me for the use of my computer equipment and network traffic, do they have any claim to tell me what I must watch on it.
They don't like it, they can feel free to not send me network traffic.
If they really don't want people to watch without ads... surely a tech company of their calibre is capable of blocking content server side, or putting it behind a login.
Forgive me for not feeling morally inadequate compared to a multinational that happily takes ad revenue for toddlers on ipads having their brain fried by endless AI slop that they refuse to moderate.
Also stop leaving your children unattended on brain slop videos. You're basically speaking out of both sides of your mouth.
Today it's that they're not moderating the content and tomorrow it's a complaint of censorship.
When I go to the cinema, that's the cinema's video platform.
In my house, on the equipment that I paid thousands of dollars for and support, using the connection I'm paying for... that's my platform.
>they'll have just as much right to stop serving you videos when you're blocking ads
That's literally what I said they should do. "They don't like it, they can feel free to not send me network traffic."
>stop leaving your children unattended on brain slop videos
I don't have kids. But I have, out of morbid interest, been down the rabbithole of the weird ultra-creepy AI stuff that comes up in their "childrens videos" category.
Some of those creepy AI channels have millions of subscribers.
It's all obviously some kind of weird scam, but google would still be getting ad revenue for it.
If they're going to have a childrens videos category, then obviously they should be moderating it.
For adult stuff yes I would complain of censorship.
It's the same BS as the "I wasn't going to buy it anyway" response to piracy.
People just want their stuff and then add whatever rationalisation on top.
I pay for YT premium because I put my money where my mouth is.
I also simply avoid content that has ads, and have ended up blocking a lot of sources from my news apps because of the ads-to-quality ratio not being worth it. I also don't try to get around paywalls. When I get a pop up that asks me to enable cookies to see the content, or subscribe, I just close the page and don't consume the content because I don't like the terms.
I tip because, even though I think the tipping system is entirely bullshit (and never got tips while working in fancy restaurant kitchens because there was no tip sharing), people deserve to make a living and me stiffing people on their tips is just me being shitty and not some grand revolutionary gesture against the system.
What I don't do is create my own terms on which to still consume the content/services I'm getting.
Also worth noting that absolutely none of this represents some endorsement of that companies like Google, Meta, etc do (in particular in the ads-based world).
I don't like ads, I don't like shitty JS. I don't like being "forced" (by norms) to tip.
I just agree to either paying for something (directly or indirectly), or not using the product.
And, maybe most of all, I don't believe that Google being shitty means I can be shitty. My ethics are mine, and they're not relative.
> No, no, no.
Not an argument
> Morally you should stop using youtube.
Why?
> 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.
I noticed it too, but it's not an argument. I could say something similar e.g.
> It's incredible how corporations mental gymnastics there way into defending their interest that provides themselves all the benefit and pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous.
In either case, it would be nice to read an actual argument.
> When you don't like something, you don't use it.
This is not true, People use stuff they don't like all the time. Should they stop? You may not like to use a bus, but it may be your only means of transportation. You could then argue one should like what he has no alternative to, but I don't see how ones emotional attitude relates to morality.
> It sends a clear message that you don't like the product/service.
Are people morally obliged to send this message? I don't see how this argument relates to morality.
> 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.
Again, not everyone necessarily likes what he uses, but I can agree, most people use Youtube because they like it, and in particular, people use Youtube with adblocking because they like Youtube without ads. But where is the argument for it being immoral?
You could start with some probably agreeable statement like "Everyone should be paid for his work" and go from there, and then maybe I or someone else could point out some error in the reasoning, but currently your whole post reads as "what you do is immoral because I say so" - there is no proper argument.
It's amazing how you can talk to seemingly intelligent people, and then when you say "Services cost money, and you should either honor your end of the agreement or forgo the service" they somehow get deranged and start with these wordy long dialogues about "well actually it's my computer and I can chose what I want to display on it and, and, and..."
Go read the story of Vid.me, the only serious youtube competitor to come around in a decade. They went bankrupt because it turns out those childish wordy dialogue preachers actually just dont't want to see ads or pay subscriptions. They just want a charity streaming service for their entertainment. Must be such a huge surprise for you to hear that....
Even if ads were all of those things, ads are psychological manipulation, and I there is no moral imperative that says I have to subject myself to that.
Sure, you could say, "well then instead just don't use YouTube", and I would say... "yeah, maybe, but... I'm a selfish human and want to, and unless YouTube is going to give me a way to exchange something else for a better experience, tough shit on them."
But anyway, they do give me that option, and I pay for Premium, so it's not a problem.
On my email! I really think Google should be liable for shit like that.
it's because everyone but you have something to gain in that transaction - google got paid ad money, the advertiser presumably got some value in exposure.
Therefore, you, for whom the "harm" has fallen, want to blame someone like google or the advertiser, which google has a form of EULA/TOS to shed all responsibility/liability.
It's just the way the internet is, and the reason for adblocking as a requirement.
Of course all the "online safety" nonsense does very little for our safety against misleading advertising.
I also get tons of French ads and I don’t speak French.
But those crypto scams make them money.
Yesterday I saw an ad on YouTube that was literally just porn. Very NSFW, not “almost” NSFW like a lot of the ads are. After reporting it, I tried to pull up the ad transparency page for the company running the ad. I was hoping I could somehow report the company itself, in addition to the ad. I had to be logged in to do this. Because when logged out, you can’t see “age restricted” ad campaigns. This completely blew my mind. I didn’t think they allowed nsfw ads, but if they knew enough to age-restrict the ad campaign, maybe they do?
From what I understand, if I turn on targeted ads, I can opt out of ad categories, and maybe google will stop showing me the scams. Instead, I simply use Adblock, and avoid YouTube on iOS as much as possible. The experience is completely unusable with the advertising.
I’m not going to pay for premium to avoid ads that are blatantly violating YouTube’s TOS anyway. At least, I hope they are violating it. “Report” never does anything so they might just allow anything in ads.
google cannot violate their own TOS.
You are fundamentally right about trying to avoid Youtube on your phone in my opinion. But just to not be facing the same ad cancer if you do need to watch a video I would suggest either:
A) Safari uBlock Origin Lite extension B) Orion browser with desktop extensions C) Sideloaded Youtube app
Hope that helps
Sounds about right for Google.
But it's not at all clear to me 100% if this really is an ad blocker problem / there's not any real proof.
Meanwhile I'm getting another add for "stuck poop" and scam health products ...
And what’s up with that “subscribing”, never saw the use for it, yet many (respectful, great) creators beg for it. I almost feel bad for not using the feature. I mean, I’m watching the content, that must count for something?
I happily watch the embedded ad-segments of YouTubers, but not the aggressive scam/slop-ads that YouTube puts before the actual videos thank-you-very-much.
From YouTube:
> Viewers Using Ad Blockers & Other Content Blocking Tools: Ad blockers and other extensions can impact the accuracy of reported view counts. Channels whose audiences include a higher proportion of users utilizing such tools may see more fluctuations in traffic related to updates to these tools.
Quoting granzymes:
> 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).
Source from the GitHub issue for easylist: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme...
It’s dumb in almost every direction I can imagine. The only one that makes sense is if you’re simply at war with adblockers and you’re trying to turn the public tide of opinion against them.
You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source and no other reason. View metrics and monetization are what count, not your subjective experience. YouTube does not care one tiny bit about how much you like the site or interface or what you think of the view counter.
0: I just side step this entirely these days by paying for premium.
I’ve been a premium member for about 15 years.
For example- if a video has a section about their sponsor from 3:30 to 4:10 and I press the right seek button twice around 3:30 the jump will be to 4:10. It also displays an alert that it's using the feature.
This as an open and celebrated system drives producers to advertise for YouTube via the almost-compulsory every-video mention of liking and subscribing and forwarding videos to friends.
Youtube is well aware of this, hence things like the iconic long running physical play button trophy delivery system.
I'd also say more broadly that making such sweeping claims for YouTube as a collective entity not caring at all about viewers is too reductive. It's more defensible and relatable to claim that, though there may be many people working for YouTube because they deeply care about a mission of democratizing multimedia publishing, the incentives and structures around it being a PBC often lead to decisions which drown out that care from corporate heads who are more profit than mission driven.
This is completely separate from the YouTube platform ads and monetization which is what the ad blockers are blocking.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo...
Has 2 million users which isn't a ton but just mentioning that it is used and it works well.
Imagine a creator whose viewers all watched with ads blocked (and without YT Premium either). That creator is, objectively speaking not partnering with Google in any way, they're just using the platform as a free CDN. So the failure of Google to provide that person with accurate metrics for him to operate his business (that Google isn't a part of) isn't all that offensive.
So someone losing visibility to their "views" if it's because of non-monetized views (adblocked ones) seems proportionally fair.
There's always self-hosting your videos, but yes, that's expensive. It's a tradeoff the content creator has to make: A cut of your revenue + a ton of content restrictions, in exchange for discoverability + free CDN.
But they are getting something in return: a near monopoly in this particular market.
Not providing correct view counts just because some of those viewers use adblockers feels kinda petty.
That doesn't really apply because these creators' video views aren't entirely adblocked. Just some portion of the views are. So it would be dumb for Google to punish the creators so harshly.
Also, you're telling me that you think there would be fewer pitchforks out if Google just started deleting and banning channels due to their users' adblocking behavior?
The point is that a view counter should show an accurate and honest count of views, because that's what it's presented as and lying is bad. Why should ad blocking have anything to do with that? Companies should aim to protect their revenue stream by providing a good service, not cripple their service to match the basest vision of their revenue incentives.
So turn off your ad blocker so you don’t lie about your views.
When I looked at the same video while in incognito (and signed out), I could see some requests originating getting blocked that were not at all present during my watch of the video under premium.
---
For YouTube, what is a "view?" If a chunk is downloaded, is that a view? If the next chunk is downloaded, is that two views? How do you verify that it's not the person who watched the first chunk?
YouTube doesn't appear to be counting views based on chunks downloaded as there are lots of ways to download chunks. Even doing things like scrubbing the video back 5 minutes would produce incorrect chunk download counts.
From this it appears that YouTube is counting views based on an API call from the page that identifies you (arguably through privacy issues) so that you downloading 1 chunk or 10 chunks only counts as one view. That API call appears to now be blocked.
Counting chunks downloaded would arguably be even less truthful or accurate than counting API calls.
What Google gets out of it is free content for their platform, which other platforms seem to be only able to dream about, and accurate metrics would be something like the lowest possible bar to provide. But well, turns out you can do just about whatever if you're the defacto monopoly and the experience doesn't matter anymore, not for creators, not for the consumers.
With something like YouTube there are so many different parties involved. Sponsor, creator, Google, advertiser, consumer. Clearly the system could be optimized for any of them, or it can present some balances that naturally make one or more of the groups unhappy. Clearly it's easy to criticize the system if it's not optimized to your perspective of it.
It's very unpopular to say it, (cue downvotes) but on the whole I think Google mostly gets it right. Advertisers have a channel to reach consumers [3]. Creators have a way to earn income [1], consumers watch for free [2], Google makes money (and provides infrastructure).
[1] sponsorships are allowed, although none of that revenue flows to Google, which I think is fairly tolerant of Google.
[2] Google has an option to turn off ads with YT Premium.
[3] Ad blockers serve consumers, but hurt the whole system. I get that they're very popular here, but they are effectively a tax on Google, and now on creators. A more ethical approach IMO (and ethics are both personal and subjective) is to pay for YT Premium if you'd prefer to suppress ads. Then you are "paying your way" not free-loading.
Labeling people who use ad blockers as unethical is hypocritical, to say the least.
The supremely unethical behavior is coming from companies who decide to use advertising as their business model, and the entire adtech industry that powers it. They lie, cheat, steal, and exploit user data in perpetuity, yet users are supposed to feel guilty for trying to block all of this hostility? Give me a break.
> consumers watch for free
They don't watch for "free". They pay with their data and attention, which is worth much more than any reasonable price Google could charge for the service. This discrepancy is so large, in fact, that all ad-supported web platforms should be paying users for using their service.
Choosing to pay for YT Premium simply makes the experience more bearable by removing the annoyance of being constantly bombarded with ads, but all the shady data extraction, profiling, tracking, and manipulation still happens behind the scenes, across all Google products, and beyond.
The fact society has accepted a business model that introduces a hostile middleman in all of their business transactions, and that we've been brainwashed into calling this "free", is deeply disturbing. Not least because the same machinery is also used to serve us propaganda and manipulate us not just into buying things, but into thinking and acting in ways that benefit the agenda of whoever has the will and a negligible amount of resources to run an ad campaign. And yet we wonder why society is crumbling around us. It's some perverse version of Stockholm syndrome.
So, no, I will never feel guilty for using ad blockers, and no sane person should. If content creators want my money, they can choose more ethical business models, which are also likely to be less profitable and more difficult to manage. But, hey, that is the price to pay if you care about ethics, and not participating in machinery that exploits your viewers.
If I used an ad blocker you could say I was hypocritical. Since I don't, you can't. You're welcome to disagree on ethics of course, but its not hypocrisy.
>> If content creators want my money, they can choose more ethical business models, which are also likely to be less profitable and more difficult to manage. But, hey, that is the price to pay if you care about ethics, and not participating in machinery that exploits your viewers.
So you want creators to be more ethical, bypassing YT, but in the meantime you'll support Google by watch YT? Which as you point out is tracking you? I'm not sure I follow your argument here...
Agree, however view counts, i.e. metrics tracked by YT, or by sponsors,creators in fancy dashboards isn't the view counter we are shown and nobody is questioning how those are implemented. The View Counter means very specific UI component in YT interface shown to regular users.
> view counter isn't for you
Disagree,
View counter is a important decision making input along with the thumbnail, title and duration of the video on if a user will click on the video to watch them.
It is in effect an advertisement for the video.
If that wasn't the case, then YouTube wouldn't be showing them in every list view and next to every thumbnail. When the numbers no longer represent what the users think they represent I would say it is not far from false advertising.
A fair amount of people on here and I have both YT Premium and also use some adblocker, should our views be counted or not according to this point of view? .
My Verizon cell phone plan offers it at a slightly discounted $10 a month. For a completely ad free (ads from Youtube) experience it's well worth it considering how many car and tech videos I watch.
It also offers a higher bitrate 1080p option on some videos which is a cherry on top.
How are these two statements not contradictions?
Another way to phrase it is the classic line "If you're not paying for it, you aren't the customer, you're the product."
It makes sense to have the view count only show views that could be useful for ad revenue ... This way you can be honest with advertiser's about roughly how many eyeballs they can expec5
Google did not implement a change to stop counting views. An ad blocker intentionally[1] choosing to block the long-standing API calls used for the view statistics. How would you propose Google fix this, when there is an adversarial team in control of what requests many browser may make, and are choosing to use it to break the site?
[0] Or rather, an URL block list used by many ad blockers.
[1] It was almost certainly an honest mistake originally. But when the blocklist authors were informed of the problem and chose to not roll back the change, it became intentional.
They are trying to increase ad revenue, but by increased Nguyen ads and making it harder to skip them it ironically is causing much worse practices such as ad blocking.
But to your point, the site is borderline social media nowadays when you consider all the features.
Bragging rights for sure. Many channels are parasocial relationships, and that number matters a lot to both the creator and the viewers.
It’s also mildly informational. If I see a completely out-of-whack suggestion in my feed, but it has a billion views, suddenly I know why it’s in my feed.
There are probably other reasons. I remember there was ongoing reporting about a race between two channels on YouTube racing to have… I dunno, the first video with a billion views or something. The number of video views for Gangnam Style was something everyone was talking about.
Plus, it’s nice to have. That’s reason enough imo.
The only people who would care are YT themselves, the creator, other creators, and advertisers.
I don’t know why they even publicly display the view count.
For the same reason online shops show "Most popular" items and ads say "trusted by X people worldwide". People on average apparently like feeling being part of a bigger crowd. If that doesn't make sense to you, you're probably in the minority (which by that logic shouldn't bother you).
Imagine the headlines if Google did do something - "YouTube implements advanced user tracking to counter act Privacy and Ad blocker"
That's emphatically not what people "people want". People want to get paid. And creators get paid based on views.
So... per the upthread point, paying people based on views that actually generate revenue seems fairer and more optimal, no? If YouTube can't make money from your content, why do you expect them to pay you for it?
That's nonsense, as a viewer of YouTube videos I do not expect to her paid for this.
I guess it'd be nice if I were paid for watching YouTube, so maybe you have a point after all! :-)
No one anywhere was arguing from the perspective of a viewer. Until it turned out that the regression was due to an adblocker change. Now suddenly creators don't matter and it's really the viewer's visibility into view counts that is the important element.
And that seems... insincere.
So it's quite amazing that even with that context you still managed to hijack that into a discussion about the merits of what Google did with this "balanced approach" bait. This isn't a balanced approach! It's not an approach at all!
It is the ad blocker willfully choosing to break totally normal and benign site functionality. Google had no agency in this, and doesn't have much recourse.
EasyPrivacy is tracker blocking list.
The culprit was in EasyPrivacy (tracker) list, not EasyList (ad blocking).
The only thing that changed is easylist blocked the API.
Wonder if there's a good reason they started blocking that API?
Someone even relied to your comment implicitly assuming that YouTube cares about conditioning views on whether a user has an adblocker enabled when what happened is easylist added the view counter API to their privacy list.
I don’t know about this leather thing but the participants on non-technical forums like Reddit or HN frequently do this.
Coherent stories that are blatantly false are great tools in misinformation and social engineering. [1]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Deception
I stopped reading the news because it just became too tiring.
Not saying it's right or wrong. It's just - I understand.
Today CNN says that Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro has skin cancer. Is that true? Damned if I know. Will I spend the time trying to verify that? Nope.
People are getting ragebaited repeatedly on a scale that is new. Not that misinformation in general is new
:)
Consider Charlie (penguinz0 / MoistCritikal). Hardly a techtuber. Despite this, he has seen a drop in computer-originating views to the tune of 1.4M (avg, eyeballed) -> 800K (avg, eyeballed): https://youtu.be/8FUJwXeuCGc?t=290
Lots of people use adblockers, sure, even those not terminally online and tech enthusiast. But to have nearly half the (computer-originating) views evaporate? https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
Even from that perspective though, what would be the dominant effect then is the share of computer-originating views compared to other origins, rather than a disparity in adblock use habits for the given audience.
Back in the day a gaming forum I was part of revealed that 85% of users were ad-blocking. The forum had a few banner ads.
I wonder on the other side why 50% of users would not take the few minutes to install an ad blocker.
Speaking from a purely personal experience (both before and after that job), the moment you ask me to regularly fix a device for you, I'm going to install uBlock Origin on every major browser you have and finetune it for privacy (aka enable the anti-tracking lists - these days I'd probably also install consent-o-matic to get rid of cookie banners without agreeing to sell all personal data). 99% of the bizarre computer problems people run into is because they clicked on a malicious internet ad and now a ton of PUPs are installed, are probably mining out their personal information or are trying to sell their users on junk subscriptions (this not so entertainingly includes virus scanners, which are almost all perversions of their original selves).
An adblocker is just basic hygiene and allows for the discussion to be on that remaining 1%, which usually is more on boring corporate fuckery from either Apple or Microsoft or the remainder which are the real technical problems people have.
AdBlock is basic hygiene, and I imagine most people have one installed on their desktop these days if they're either barely technically literate or have a family member who is.
Huh? If I take a die and paint a 6 on the sides which previously had 4 and 5 then it is an objective fact that you will be more likely to roll a 6 than a 1 with that die.
YouTube monetizes based on view count. They also send the data to the client. That client data is in anyway involved, and could be blocked, is YouTube’s design problem.
I wonder if CTR was affected. Could one of the affected channels could have detected that not adding up? I guess it was probably already blocked for privacy. Maybe I shouldn't be giving them ideas.
Interestingly, anybody can now measure what percentage of any channel's viewers run ad blockers, by using publicly available data on how much their views dropped during this period.
If the monetization weren't limited to ad-watching views, we'd probably still be trying to figure out what happened.
Turning a profit on video outside YouTube is a far more difficult undertaking.
My point: This problem is far worse when a monopoly is involved.
Especially in the scenario that (as the top level comment in this thread suggests) YouTube didn't actually make any changes and the reason the views dropped is because EasyList added an entry to their privacy filter. Should YouTube have recognized that they're in a quasi-monopoly position as you suggest, done the research to identify EasyList as the culprit behind the view metric drop, and then released a change to their client to add a new endpoint which isn't blocked by EasyList?
We don't know that the EasyList theory is what's really going on here, but if you're going to tar YouTube/Google over this ordeal, then I think you have some responsibility for suggesting how they could have done better.
In short, age estimation will restrict videos from viewers, and a creator has almost no way of knowing if a video was age-restricted or not.
Bellular has a video about the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSYLe6Yq4R4
*) and conveniently for YT that out-of-band monetization channel - which they don't profit from - is the exact thing that's negatively affected by an overall drop in view counts
sponsorblock would like a word with that!
It was great business on YouTube's part to make customers feel adblocking is a dick move though.
I want ad-free viewing on any youtube client in my house, and I do not want to maintain infrastructure to allow that. The terms of the service indicate that I should pay if I want an ad-free experience, so that's what I do.
Some unknown portion of my subscription fee goes towards the monetization of videos that I watch, which I definitely want to happen. Ad blockers don't pay people in lieu of ads, and youtube premium does.
I give a shit, I just give more of a shit about my personal privacy and my data not being shared with hundreds of anonymous third parties through the advertising auction mechanism than I do about a creator being paid.
Give me ads without RTB and I’ll very seriously reconsider my adblock usage.
it is impossible to download something from the web without a log line entry being generated, so what privacy are you losing? Please tell me.
Firefox + Adblock/uBlock works on mobile, and desktop. If your TV blocks firefox, buy a dongle or mini-pc and use that. And way better for your privacy anyway. And a mini-pc gives you tons more capabilities like emulators etc. You literally buy those intel n100 mini-pcs for like 100 bucks.
If my 70+ years old parents can do that without my help, ... So no, need to maintain a "infrastructure" to blocks ads...
> Some unknown portion of my subscription fee goes towards the monetization of videos that I watch,
> Some unknown portion of my subscription fee goes towards the monetization of videos that I watch, which I definitely want to happen. Ad blockers don't pay people in lieu of ads, and youtube premium does.
You do realize that what Youtube pays out these days is so small amount, that most creators resorted to sponsoring. This is way more profitable for the youtubers involved. The add revenue is more like icing on a cake, not a main source of income.
And ironically, Youtube is one of the best paying platforms for creators. That is saying a lot.
If i remember correctly, for many its barely 1/5 of their actual income. There is a reason why you see those constant creator advertisement for whatever VPS service etc... and merch sales, ... that is where the money is.
Not taking in account the algorithm and its non promoting videos even if your subscribed, the constant DMCA issues where creators lose tons of money on false claims, ...
Only on Android. A large portion of users are not on Android.
This reminds me that I think it was the Invidious project that had a disclaimer saying they could not prevent YouTube from counting your view. Well, I guess they probably could after all, and probably did, depending on which method was used to fetch the video.
Client-side analytics must end
I'm not sure what you mean by "scrubbing".
cache-control private, max-age=11722 (~3 hours) date Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:19:15 GMT expires Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:19:15 GMT
it once again lands in browser cache. I remember a moment when it returned no-cache.
We are back to situation where:
- google doesnt get any info if user with adblocker keeps rewinding in that ~3hour window
- player refetches if you pause for few hours and come back, or decide to rewind 3 hour video to watch again
- your SSD is hammered with gigabytes of useless browser cache writes - might be good idea for Extension overwriting those headers to no-store/max-age=0
At least BonziBuddy sang for me.
but still you could go home and have a reasonable setup, there is no escape from the current "open" interwebs
I think it's reasonable to attribute moral responsibility to the entity that owns and has the most control over the platform, even if the technical details aren't quite so simple. Doubly so in this case since YouTube is a profitable business. Given [0], it sounds like this bug with view counts is a direct result of YouTube choosing to start an arms race against users who run ad blockers.
[0]: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme...
From the comment: The recent YT issues aren't related to Easylist/Easyprivacy.
Edit: To be fair, your comment came before this comment. I'm merely posting the latest update.
The top comment on HN says
> So Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?
When even a cursory look would show that if you block stats-aggregation endpoint .. stats go down. Sometimes it is occam's razor.
Disclaimer: I work at Google but not at Youtube and have no idea how things work really. This is just based on some info I read online.
Also, with segmented MP4 streams, the files on the backend won't necessarily be easy to match up 1:1 with videos. How do you count the views if someone watches a video, and then skips back to watch the middle section a few times, and then doesn't finish it? Because that would show up as (1, 1, 4, 3, 0) in your database for the different files involved. Now imagine doing that for ~500 people on a shared IP address for their high school. And now your minimum threshold for view counting is tied to the size of your MP4 chunks, or range requests. And now you've put this view counting logic into the hot path of serving terabytes of data.
From a product perspective, you can see why "A video view is counted the first time the user presses the play button and watches for at least 30 seconds" is a much more desirable definition, both technically and for stakeholders (video creators, advertisers, etc) to understand.
The fact that ad revenue didn't change means they do have robust ad tracking, but the view numbers are +/- some unexpected level of fiction.
Ad tracking is usually done client-side too, so ad revenue being stable just means that the missing view counts are probably limited to the users who already weren't viewing ads.
Some manual adjustment to allow CDN on some websites is needed, but 95% of the cruft is left out. That cruft is usually malware in a broad sense: ads, trackers, embedded Youtube videos that seem benign but allow Google to follow users across the Internet, etc.
So it is up to us tech guys to teach them about the danger it is to open a single web site without protection. Several levels of protection.
Including stop being abused by Windows, switch to Linux. But there is so much more to do, that it is very hard to teach and make people do it.
Everything is created to abuse you, and most of people don't have a single clue about what is going on.
I have an Android TV device, and YT has been so horrible with its constant ads popping up, that I have to put it on MUTE to prevent any further brainrot.
I wonder when they're going to blame me muting my TV and harm their viewership. Or maybe they will just prevent me from being able to mute it.
Blocking ads is the way to go, and I am sure creators will survive this.
Plus, making ad blocking a channel owner's problem is kind of genius.
Ultimately most sane people see ads as vomitpuke and this will continue to be a contention.
more and more youtube creators seem to be integrating their sponsors in their videos in a way where if you skip it you miss an integral part and i do wonder if this is youtube's way of fighting against being left out, but then again, i don't know shit, just an interesting observation
It is similar to how phone companies had to charge 0.1 cent for phones, rather than advertise it as gratis. The law said that companies could not advertise a product as being gratis if they also expect the customer to pay for it in terms of a binding contract with a provider, but they can sell the phone for any amount greater than 0 and have it as a combined sale with a binding contract. Thus companies changed how they sold their product, and also had to inform the customer of the binding terms (and if I recall, expected total cost) in the advertisements.
As one politician put it; You can't put a sale tax on services supported through advertisement since the customer may watch the full add, half the add, or none of it. Since the tax office can't determine how much of an add, if anything, is watched, there is no value in the exchange for which to tax.
Ever since the election you guys RAMPED up the ads, please drop it back down. It's becoming unbearable to get a 50 minute podcast AD every 5 minutes of video I watch when I'm shingling a roof and my phone is in the truck. There HAS to be some limits here.
The tracking not malicious. YouTube has a legitimate interest to verify views, e.g. to recommend popular videos to others. If a view counter was increased by just invoking an API, view counts could be manipulated easily. Also see the video [1] from ... 13 years ago ... so it might be slighly outdated. Just slightly.
This may even serve as some accelerationism for invasive web tech where ad middlemen may resort to doing render checks. The invasive practice may with low likelihood advance some web technologies into blocking such measures.
I can use my own viewer then, instead of relying on your ever-worsening website.
It's win-win. I keep paying you, you get accurate view counts.
The interesting thing here is that since youtube did not change anything, it is actually adblockers successfully making sponsored content less viable. Something youtube has been trying to, at least on premium ([ytp]), where I get a little "Jump ahead" button on all platforms when sponcon is detected (in aggregate people skipping forward, it also does it for intros and similar).
I wonder if it will have a measurable impact on placement in the algorithm for channels like RLM that are seeing the drop. But rely on crowdfunding and youtube ads.
LTT makes 9.2% of their revenue on In-Video Sponsors and 12.5% on Sponsored Projects (which are like full videos for a sponsor)
I wouldn't call this the vast majority
It makese sense that some of that sponsor revenue is tied to youtube viewcounts.
I suspect their business still requires that revenue.
But my example could be better. Take any moderately sized youtube channel which has a sponsorship in each video. Maybe one of the gaming channels that figured this out? If they lose the sponsorships it would probably not be great for them.
It's absolutely dire. I mean, ridiculously bad. Unbearable.
If it's that or nothing, it's the easiest of choices.
I’d rather just not have yt than deal with their ads with a sprinkling of content on to approach
So they can turn video content-creators against those who use ad-blockers. I do not get how is this not obvious.
Or in LTT's case, consistently banging on about it like it affects their audience - the audience really do not care (nor should they need to), it has no bearing on them.
Just imagine an individual person doing the things that advertisers do: Constantly follow you around, demand your attention, gaslight you, pester you to give him/her your money, and snoop through your private life so he/she can do those things even more.
Ads condition us to normalize the worst attributes that nobody tolerates on a personal scale.
A constant mental barrage, waste of time, defacement of public space, and often thinly veiling misinformation...
And worst of all, it's an Emperor with no Clothes: Almost nobody goes out to buy a product because of an ad.
In fact, the more frequently someone sees ads for something that they don't already buy on their own anyway, it's more likely to permanently turn them OFF from the product! (Fuck you Grammarly!)
If I don't buy your shit after the first 3-5 times I skipped your shitty ad, I'm not going to buy it. In fact, shoving your ad in my face even more just makes certain that I NEVER buy it.
…
Ads ARE the problem: Everything else is a symptom. Society needs to figure out a better mechanism of promoting products: Empower search systems and stop gimping filters, to let people find exactly what they want. Let people TELL companies what they like instead of spying on people to figure what they want: You can't ever get it right anyway!
Sponsorblock uses community driven marking of ads edited into the video.
I think you're right, that you wouldn't be able to skip an ad at the beginning of the video - you would need to predict for the user he will want to watch a video to load it earlier in the background to skip the ad, so only skipping ads in middle of the video would be possible.
Not sure I understand this. I don't think it's possible even now to load the video in the background, youtube is already smarter than this and it will load a short period of time whenever u seek anywhere, it doesn't just download the whole thing if you pause the video.
And the way I'm suggesting wouldn't be mitigated by sponsorblock since you wouldn't be able to skip it if you want to stream the video. Only way would be to use yt-dlp and remove the ads automatically but I suspect a tiny percentage of users would go to that length to avoid ads
Imagine that you open the video on one tab, see where the ad IN MIDDLE of the video is (e.g. because of a system like Sponsorblock, other users reported it), click on progress bar to go after the ad, the system is probably smart enough to show the ad anyway - OK, you mute the ad, and open the same video again, and watch it from the beginning. By the time you get to the ad, you can switch to the other tab, where the ad already played.
Of course it wouldn't work if the ad was at the beginning.
Edit: actually, you could make a double buffer, so if you assume the ad takes up to 10 s, the copy of your video can skip 20 first seconds, play, eventually play an ad if it happens first on that copy, continue playing, and as soon as the main video get an add, go back on the copy to the right spot. So in order for this to fail, with just one copy, you need to either get an ad during the first 10 seconds, or the ad has to start exactly (within the lag time of let's say 50-200 ms) at the same time on both copies.
Of course, you lose the ability to mindlessly browse YT with no ads or get the dopamine hit of clicking an interesting video. I'm sure that's something YT considered if they pushed this option. They don't want you to just watch the few vids from your subscriptions per day and close the app.
So what you are describing is already happening, ads are added directly into video stream, problem is that ads need to have access to API, because you don't want to show an ad for menstruation pad to a guy so you also need to know which user is watching and that's what cookies and the whole login is for, so you are effectively hitting a design limitation of the system.
And no, you can't do this ad selection on the server, because for example when you have 10 users behind a NAT how are you going to tell which user is which from the server point of view? So you need to be calling these APIs from the client side.
*By "simply" I mean it's technically possible, I know it's not simple to implement.
Don't think this is correct, if you're on a slower connection you will see it takes a while when changing stream quality, the video "seamlessly" changes because it's still playing the current quality stream while the new quality stream loads. It would make no sense to send more than one quality at the same time because it would incur higher bandwidth costs and they care a LOT about bandwidth costs. I'm a premium user and even though I have higher quality enabled by default they STILL downgrade and not showing the highest quality possible unless I force it on specific videos.
> So what you are describing is already happening, ads are added directly into video stream, problem is that ads need to have access to API, because you don't want to show an ad for menstruation pad to a guy so you also need to know which user is watching and that's what cookies and the whole login is for, so you are effectively hitting a design limitation of the system.
They can do the tracking by user all the same, as long as the user is logged in they know what ads to show on the server already. This is already a problem when the user is using youtube without an account in an incognito window so if the client hacks the tracking side just show them default ads for their region. This is already a solved problem
Watching TV shows without adds was one of the selling points of those back in the day.
Some more modern digital ones had near real time features where they would play with a delay of a lets say half an hour and used that time to remove the ads.
If you have stream from Youtube containing ads you can trivially skip ahead.
And Youtube could do nothing about it because random skipping is one of the base features of every video player ever.
Attribution mechanism: YouTube's public "view" appears to come from a client endpoint distinct from ad/monetization events. EasyList recently started blocking on of those endpoints that will naturally drop public views from desktop users with blockers, even if the video still streams. That's not a shadow change by YouTube so much as an external filter change.
Metric design: Having one ambiguous "view" counter that's used for everything (social proof, discovery, sponsor decks) guarantees drama when any attribution channel breaks.
If YouTube wants less speculation and paranoia on this issue, the fix isn’t "evade EasyList", but to separate metrics. I think plays should be public and keep monetized views in the Studio.
Source: I've done lots of testing on skipvids.com whilst using ad blockers and I can confirm they can effect view count
NotPractical•4mo ago
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?
pimlottc•4mo ago
lotsofpulp•4mo ago
cogman10•4mo ago
I imagine most don't think about ads seriously, they think about youtube and sponsor revenue.
lotsofpulp•4mo ago
cogman10•4mo ago
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.
bluGill•4mo ago
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)
PaulHoule•4mo ago
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.
pseudalopex•4mo ago
jordanb•4mo ago
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.
bluSCALE4•4mo ago
portaouflop•4mo ago
bluSCALE4•4mo ago
coolcoder613•4mo ago
rightbyte•4mo ago
I guess that is what PCA gives you. Lunatic videos is some distinct component too.
izacus•4mo ago
Do you have any article about that? How much did the monetization drop for?
the_af•4mo ago
izacus•4mo ago
the_af•4mo ago
The argument I've heard repeatedly from them is that the time and effort involved in making a YouTube video that gets enough hits (which means lots of experimentation) is disproportionate compared to the meager return of investment; that for money reasons it's best to get sponsorships.
(I'm not a YouTube author myself, I wouldn't know what's a decent size).
s1mplicissimus•4mo ago
Macha•4mo ago
Then the AMs just issue vague statements to the youtubers as it feels more like saving face than admitting they have no idea
ge96•4mo ago
rwmj•4mo ago
vintermann•4mo ago
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.
thewebguyd•4mo ago
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.
PaulHoule•4mo ago
xandrius•4mo ago
voltaireodactyl•4mo ago
stonemetal12•4mo ago
Parts of it are good, and parts are bad. The problem with ad blockers is it distorts the signal for bad sites. Why reduce ads if your page views and time on site metrics are good with them?
Without Ad block when you hit a garbage site you backout and go somewhere else, maybe even blacklist it so you don't end up there in the future. Then their metrics start looking as bad as their site and they shape up or go under.
yard2010•4mo ago
Well I definitely would if I could torrent it. Facebook would have too.
NewsaHackO•4mo ago