[dghughes]

It's tiring having a finger waved at you for blocking advertisements. When we all know that our data of who we are and our actions is just as valuable as the ads we are forced to watch.

The Internet has become an ad machine that throws a tantrum if anyone dares to block advertising or tracking (of yourself).

YouTube was meant for sharing videos but now "influencers", many channel owners, and YouTube itself balk at any attempt to block ads. The actual content of videos is now secondary to the ads which were heavily ramped-up recently with mid-roll ads. YouTube should create 100% advertisement videos and see how popular that is.

[kmnc]

The most disturbing thing is how many people have become ad apologists now. We gave up the fight, we lost. Massively successful channels now bait people into watching in video ads and people actually defend this practice. Many people I know actually find these things smart and clever. Most people actually defend ads now.

[sergeykish]

Are you talking about ads in video stream? They are static and usually have some connection to content, like instruments advertisement on music channel. And they would be easy to skip as long as youtube-dl works.

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/edl-mpv.r...

[reader_mode]

You can pay for YouTube premium and get rid of ads. If you spend a non trivial amount of time on YouTube it's well worth it, especially the family account.

Don't want to be the product ? Pay for your services then - the money has to come from somewhere.

[BiteCode_dev]

Oh, but I'm OK with paying.

I paid for netflix, lastpass and zoom. I still pay for dynalist, audible or for having my own email address.

However, I'm not OK with having a logged in google account that accumulates everything I do into their DB and AI while I use their services.

Even when you pay, they still milk your private life.

And they have proved time after time they cannot be trusted with it.

[cromwellian]

Netflix also accumulates all of your watching habits and feeds it into AI while using their services.

[BiteCode_dev]

Netflix doesn't have an ubiquitous search engine, analytic scripts on half the web sites in the world, Android, gmail, maps, youtube, and so on.

Netflix business is not to accumulate data on you and resell it, or to display ads.

Netflix was not part of the PRISM program.

Netflix is not Google.

[baxtr]

Is that a bad thing if it helps you to find great new content?

[enkid]

Except most of what you "discover" is actually more of the same. That why we have so much divisiveness in our society, people are unknowingly in echo chambers so deep they don't know anything else exists.

[judge2020]

It's just not a great argument against YouTube since "accumulates everything I do into their DB and AI" is something both services do in the name of better recommendations.

[Aunche]

You can disable the the tracking on your account if you want with or without Youtube premium.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6139018?co=GENIE....

[BiteCode_dev]

I'm not going to trust google with that after a decade of terrible track record.

I don't believe one second there is a way to opt out of Google tracking you. At best, you can lower the settings on how much it displays the informations it has on you.

[Aunche]

I personally don't think that Google spend money to store your data if they aren't actively using it, though I can understand the sentiment. That said, you might as well switch it off if privacy is something you care about.

[mdifrgechd]

I think part of the tension is that advertising (and other data harvesting) attempts to monetize content that has virtually zero value for a lot of people: take any of the articles on a typical HN front page - right now the top two are "Booting from a vinyl record" and "Exotic programming ideas". These sound interesting (and are already somewhat well targeted to me as a HN reader), but the content is still worth almost nothing to me if I have to sign up for something or watch an ad to view it. Now apply the same reasoning to most web content that I value even less, like random medium articles or Forbes techcrunch or something that are pretty much designed just to get people to click on them. Most internet content that we are considering here is just there to get you to look at ads, and so ironically not worth "paying" for in any way for most people.

So ad blocking puts the user in a funny position. It let's them continue to look at things they don't value much. And I think content creaters looking for views probably would rather complain about ad blockers than give users an ultimatum that could result in them just going somewhere else.

[reader_mode]

Most (all ?) youtube vides fall in to virtually zero value category - but youtube as a platform is worth 15 bucks a month to me.

I must admit I would only subscribe to a written publication if I get a printed copy occasionally, but anyway like youtube I don't find individual peaces of content worth it I might find the publication valuable.

I don't see myself paying for blog article access ever - if you write outside of some publication it should either be self-promotion, exercise, or a labor of love and desire for exposure - attempting to monetise that sucks with advertising or without it - don't write those kinds of things.

I feel the same about OSS projects.

A way to invert this is to do a lot of good content consistently so you become a consistent source of valuable material - then it could fit Patreon model but I must admit I've haven't encountered someone I would sponsor like this yet. I will think about it more in the future.

[dghughes]

I don't mind seeing an ad I grew up in the TV generation commercials are nothing. An ad at the start of a YouTube video is fine but it's become endless ads to the point of ruining the content. And often it's the same damn ad over and over and over.

[throwaway_pdp09]

Word. People won't pay so ads happen.

[kmnc]

Bullshit. I pay to go to the movies, I am advertised to. Why do you think online services will maintain this “pay is for ad fee”?

[throwaway_pdp09]

So specifically, how should sites support themselves if such as you won't pay?

[mdifrgechd]

If they cant support themselves, they should find something people do want to pay for. The universe doesnt owe the website creators a revenue stream.

[throwaway_pdp09]

The people who are happy to read it do owe them a revenue stream if they want a website to continue.

To be perfectly clear I have no desire to see any ads, and I don't cos I block pretty much every last one (squid) but if there are sites that are worth reading, like from here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25157722 well, author's got to make money for the time they put in.

Advertisers can die in rotting heaps, but they exist because people make them exist. They exist because you want free stuff.

[kmnc]

So the content producers just advertise to you directly, why wouldn’t they? The bigger they get, the more premium viewers, the more sponsors they receive. Eventually YouTube won’t like being cut out gain and boom to YouTube premium now has ads.

[reader_mode]

You mean sponsored videos ? I don't follow channels that push those. If YouTube starts adding ads to premium why would I keep paying ?

[RussianCow]

This doesn't make sense. If you're paying for YouTube, then Google is already making a steady income stream from you; no need for ads.

[hansvm]

But they could potentially make a larger steady income stream if they also had ads. It happened to cable TV, it happened when HTC introduced ads to their tiles or timeline or whatever it was called, ordering food online you'll get spammed when you try to checkout to buy their new promotional item (even if you already have it in your cart), and so on.

If ads aren't a perfect fit then they'll still try to add other revenue models to things you've paid for -- smart TVs selling data about what you watch or which products your conversations are about, car diagnostic products shipping a patch to only work if you start shipping them location data, large companies like Garmin buying up smaller companies and cancelling any lifetime accounts in favor of a subscription model (and vehemently denying that it's a money-grab), needing a Facebook account to use your Oculus, and so on.

If they're able to extract more value from you without excessive negative repercussions then they will, independently of what's "right" or legal.

[RussianCow]

I get that, but an ad-free experience is the main benefit of subscribing to YouTube Premium. If they introduce ads to it, why would anyone pay for it?

[hansvm]

Fair point; I wasn't considering the context.

To try to answer you anyway, they've put a fair bit of engineering effort into making YT mildly painful to use without Premium -- things like not allowing sound to play when the screen is off (and covering your screen in ads for Premium if you wake up the phone to a running YT instance). I'm sure some people pay for Premium to improve that experience.

[ffpip]

They will limit the number of videos you can watch every month.

[ivanche]

If you pay, there is every need for ads - you just showed you have the money and that makes you a worthy target for more advertising/tracking.

[an_opabinia]

> When we all know that our data of who we are and our actions is just as valuable as the ads we are forced to watch.

In a world where Facebook just makes up video impressions and neither they nor Google let you really audit their inventory, it is basically impossible to tell the difference between (1) seasonal effects, (2) data-enabled ad targeting, and (3) income-related effects. In other words, if you show an ad at the right time to a rich person, say by only targeting iPad users shortly after a new Apple product release, which is known from the user agent and does not require behavioral tracking at all, your ad will perform as well as a typical interest-targeted ad but with lower cost.

Which is to say, your data is valuable in the marketing sense that it gets people to spend more on targeted ads, but not necessarily in some secular sense that it actually increases returns. After fundamentals (like what you are selling) and the creative, most of the evidence points to trends in how rich (and poor) people use technology, like iPad users versus entry-level Android users, as being the greatest predictor of an ad's returns.

Ads customers don't really know if user profile information like their browsing behavior improves ROI because it is secularly important for the ad or because it is also correlated with greater income. It is unmeasurable for ad customers, so people claiming that they know are just lying.

At least among the ad tech companies I know, I'm told the user profile data gathering story is very valuable for ad buyers and investors, but fundamentally they do not use any behavioral data in ad targeting because they did not observe an increase in clicks - for their guaranteeably low income user channels.

[bobthepanda]

IIRC isn’t a very standard way of measuring campaign success just using some type of discount code (e.g. use X at mywebsite.com for 10pc off)

[travisporter]

I agree. I used to watch CGP Greys videos, until he had a podcast lamenting ublock and how even though it’s open source, should be blocked. I get it, it’s how you make your crust but there are other revenue sources when you make it big. Nebula seems promising for the science-y youtubers

[tomjen3]

You can subscribe to RSS feeds for any channel you care about.

To watch the videos, you can copy paste the url into VLC. No ads and very little tracking. Best of all no related videos so you won't waste tons of time there.

[agumonkey]

Internet main issue is the fallacy of free access which is quite incompatible with the old economy.

Good old society was a little less duplicit about how it operates. We live in a i-passive-aggresive land.

[renewiltord]

I can't read this as anything but a persecution complex. Relax, install unlock origin, pay for premium services. No one is going out and making adblock users feel bad.