Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.
Then on Oct 1, they threw up a “You’re using an Ad Blocker” overlay on videos. I’d use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn’t have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.
Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.
Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.
Now all I see is this.
Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.
I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can’t view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.
Hear me out: Google makes money by selling ads. People who buy from those ads don’t have an adblocker installed. People who are intelligent enough to block ads wouldn’t buy from them anyway. If Google allows it to be too easy to block ads then their model collapses. I’m ok with jumping through a couple hoops to continue to block and Google doesn’t lose anything while I get to still watch the content I like without wasting anyone’s time. It’s to Google’s benefit to serve videos to only people who will actually buy that crap anyway. If Google or anyone wants to sell to me, they simply have to make a great product. If they do, I’ll see it in use for it’s intended purpose and buy it. For example, I didn’t have to watch any ads to buy a Nintendo Switch years ago…
I feel like I’m summoning a roko’s basilisk here, but here we go:
Google should entice people to watch the ads. They should slip in random “free YouTube premium for a month just for you!” ads or quick time events or whatever that you only get when you don’t block ads.
“Thanks for watching the ad! Here’s an extra 10GB of storage, or points to our store, or whatever!”
Giving out free whatever premiums to your gigantic ass ecosystem to some tiny ass percent of your users will EASILY increase eyeballs faaaaaar more than this blocking shit.
That’s a good idea. Another one that may be effective is Google has AI process the video and they drop links in the text below the video based on company $. For example, Cool Shirts Inc. gives ad money to Google for their t-shirts. AI processes all new videos and checks for Cool Shirt Inc shirts. If the video has the shirt in it then this is added in text below the video, “Dig the creator’s shirt? Get it here: link.to.shirt.com/buynow”. Non-intrusive, fairly good targeting and if I do like something in the video I can check there to purchase or look into it more.
I really like this idea. That would be such a step up from the way most ads are done now, and much less annoying.
It would also be pretty effective I would think, because a lot of people use YouTube to learn and watch videos about their hobbies. So by putting ads for the products actually used in the video, it is automatically advertising to the perfect demographic of people who are much more likely to use those products.