Technology

I feel really bad for smaller creators because they spend so much of their time on the algorithm treadmill just trying to get more views. There's a channel size threshold where you really have to work more than you get out and I see a lot of people getting burned out trying to make a living from yt.

I pay for YouTube Premium. I get a lot of value from it, and streaming video isn’t cheap. I don’t think it’s reasonable for anyone to think they should provide it for free.

I used to whitelist yt on my ad block because a I know portion of it goes to the creators. Then yt took advantage of me by adding more and more intrusive ads. Now I support creators directly whenever I can.

The problem is that user generated content still takes time. Which means money. Also, people don't want vlogs with a drywall background anymore and the number of creators who can get away with simple prop free skits are double digit, at best. So making the videos also cost money.

People make up this fantaasy land where art should be done with no compensation to be pure. Which ignores that the vast majority of art in human history was either made by the independently wealthy or as a "patron" system where... an independently wealthy person paid an artist to make them look good.

And that even extends to the modern day. People get angry about "nepo babies" but... it takes a lot of time and money to refine your music to a meaningful degree. The garage bands that get discovered playing at a local bar are VERY much the exception and almost everyone universally considers their best albums to be the first couple after they got signed by a label and could drill down and refine it.

Youtube and the like are basically the first time that "the everyperson" could make art for a living. Unfortunately... that means they need to get paid. Ads are of very questionable use. Youtube Premium is almost universally praised by any creator who is willing to talk about it. But we need some way of paying those mid tier creators who are popular enough to do it for a living but not popular enough to get 120 bucks a year from their fans to upload MAYBE one video (looking at you Michael Reeves).

Some people said that skipping is blocked during the ad. But if that is the case I am sure either the timestamp is predictable or somewhere on the client side you could find the information about the timestamp.

It might take a lot more effort, but I don't think this will be the end. Google is required by law to label ads as such, giving these tools an opportunity to detect and skip them.

Lol this would mean that every website running a looped video in the bg will now haved ads play. Nice.

Same.

I'm excited for YouTube to end my YouTube addiction lol.

Please, Google. Do it. Dare ya.

Ngl, I'm torn on this because I'm honestly not sure I could stop using YouTube.

I hate ads with a burning passion, though, so we'll see which wolf wins out there.

If i can't get around this using something like SponsorBlock, I feel like I'll probably just set up some kind of pipeline to download videos and remove the ads myself (maybe using AI if it's that bad) and just serve them over Jellyfin or something. Gonna be a pain, though.

As we learned from the reddit app changes, the ending of Netflix account sharing, etc etc the people who will take this action are few enough not to matter. Regretfully.

Nah, it would be very hard. Presumably this only works if they can insert ads on the fly so they can cycle ads based on region and time. Static ads on videos would have been easy to do and easy to bypass.

If you don't know how many ads there are or what they look like or how long they are it becomes very hard to do timeline nonsense to avoid them. It also seems like it'd be expensive to do at the scale Youtube needs it, but maybe they figured it out. That would suck. We'll see, I suppose.

Problem is the ads are not widely rolled out so user timestemps would be off depending if there's an ad OE not

Ads are the worst regardless of where they are. I have never once given a shit about whatever garbage they try to push. I don't give a rats ass about them, their ads or anything they do. Provide a service and thats it. I actively avoid companies that try to shove ads in my face. I basically buy NOTHING anymore because of it and my bank account is SOOOO much better off these days. Constantly saving tons of money because of my fuck you companies attitude.

(I think that's their goal, either ads or no watch)