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YouTube is Testing Having Two Skippable Ads Back-To-Back (cnet.com)
If you hate having your video binging session on YouTube interrupted by multiple ad breaks, the good news is that things are about to change. CNET: The streaming platform is rolling out a new tweak to its video watching experience, by placing two skippable ads back-to-back, which it says will reduce the number of ad interruptions later in the video -- up to 40 percent less in a session, according to the company's blog post Wednesday.
Ad blocking add-ons are testing blocking back-to-back ads.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'd forgotten it ever did.
Congratulations to Youtube for inventing the commercial break. This will surely be an idea loved by all!
I remember trying to use the YouTube feature of a smart TV for some reason (so no ad blocking) and what I discovered was that YouTube would constantly show me the same fucking unskippable ad for every single video we watched. I think we watched like five different videos before deciding that watching videos via this "feature" was dumb (turns out the built-in smart TV apps tend to be terrible, I know, shocking news) but what I remember most was that every single video was preceded by the exact same ad for some game for a console I don't own.
I'm not 100% anti-ad (I think it's probably possible to do it in such a way that it's not annoying) but god damn do the ad platforms go out of their way to be so annoying that eventually you throw up your hands and just block everything. Not to mention the added security you get by doing so.
The bloated, tumorous mass that is Alphabet is reaching the end of it natural lifecycle.
Like the giant Dinosaurs of the Cretatious, tech companies have grown too massive, too specialized, and too homogeneous, needed ever more massive revenues simple to sustain the bloating overheads. Two ads. Three ads. Ten ads. When you're 3 stories tall and defecate piles larger than most other animals, you're always hungry for more.
But they are more vulnerable than ever to any oncoming "extinction event". In our case, likely a fiscal contraction brought about by some fumbling central bank, or a geo-political disaster brought to us by our genius ruling class.
Or hell, maybe people will just get tired of "high-tech" companies with a hundred thousand "smart guys" who can't seem to produce software or applications that even matches functionality commonplace 15 years ago, and who keep screwing up what we have left that's working, and who all seem to get paid 5 times more than anyone else actually producing something. The bigger Amazon gets, the less surprised I'll become of any sudden acceptance of nationalization among the growing American plebian class.
But I digress. Because let's be honest people. How many of you ever considered Youtube to be something worth paying for?
1. Back to back ads with reduced frequency.
2. Increased ad frequency.
3. Back to back to back ads with reduced ad frequency.
4. Increased frequency of ads.
5. Ads consume at least 6 minutes per half hour and are arranged into added-value blocks called 'commercial breaks'.
Youtube is testing the patience of their users, which is already near its limit.
When you're passing the time in a grocery store waiting for your carpooling roommate to finish her shopping, it's easier to carry a phone than a laptop.
I can only suppose that being forced to watch the first half of a second of an ad before skipping it counts as watching the ad in Youtube's opinion. Being forced to skip two of them doubles their ad-view count.
"I know! We'll just compress the ads into the first half second! We could call them... blip-verts ."
I no longer have to open my eyes and reach for the phone to press skip between videos before sleep. There will be no reason!
Youtube streams the ads on Android so you can't block them with a hosts file or any other blocking software even if you wanted to. Just don't use the official client or use the web version.
Eh I'm just gonna quote myself because I looked and know the answer already.
It's impossible to be a freeloader on the internet. The internet was created for the FREE exchange of information and data. If you and your polluting advertising cronies don't like it, then get the fuck off of my internet, you eternal September scum.
Yes, root your phone and it works. Oh wait, you can't root your phone anymore? Because why would you want to root your phone, right? There's no need to root your phone!
Meanwhile, I enjoy ad free watching youtube on my phone. I can also play youtube in the background too without it having it pause.
I really miss my DVR since cutting the cord. Muting ads is a poor second. I just tried watching the Saints game with my antenna, jeebus farukin christo what kind of idiot watches that many commercials? I didn't make it past the first quarter before finding something more productive to digest my food to.
There's a Canadian Youtuber who goes by the screen name AvE who does product tear downs and reviews. He has a Patreon to get funding and explicitly refuses to do manufacturer donated product reviews because of potential bias. He knows manufacturers sometimes pressure reviewers into going easy on their products. Due to that, he also has an aversion to ad based revenue. He wasn't affected by YouTube "adpocalypse" too much but it did make him even more averse to having ads on his channel.
He had them disabled but YouTube forces them to play anyway. they are the same format as his videos and will play regardless of the player being used to view videos or the adblockers used as they come from the same content servers as the CDN serving the video. Adblockers have only served to make YouTube videos even more valuable to advertisers because of that.
On the flip side of that you have Linus Tech Tips. He does do sponsored videos and he also puts his own ads in his videos for the products. So you will get YouTube forced ads at the beginning of his videos, then his sponsor product ad, then review and at the end another ad he made and inserted into the video (his ads are part of the actual video so they stay in the video and play every time it is viewed unlike YouTube ads which cycle through different ads).
It is getting to the point where everything being viewed on YouTube feels like an infomercial and it is majorly offputting. I can usually tolerate up to three ads, after that there is nothing I want to see that is important enough for me to watch another ad. I just leave the site entirely.
Youtube has ads ?
Not on the videos I watch.
Never saw those.
aaaaaaa
This of cause sucks for evryone not having youtube premiu, ( I watch a lot of content from a few creators and want to support them), personaly I nevre see ds on youtube, appart from the times scumbags include sponsor messages in the video it self. If you as me premium is wort it just for ad blocking )I watch a lot on IOS/TvOS so adblocking on youtube does not realy work
If I wanted to watch ads longer than the clips between them, I could have kept my TV.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The main difference being that you don't have to record the movie so you can skip the ad breaks watching it but you can simply block the ads while watching.
Other than that, yes, YouTube becomes more and more like cable TV.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
When using the youtube app for anything I noticed a gradual increase in the occasional ads that cannot be skipped. It's like we're all fucking hamsters and the wheel keeps shrinking ever so slightly to find the "optimum" levels of BS we'll put up with. This sort of forced crap only happens in the app.
Almost any device that can run an "app" can run a browser. I never get this sort of shit with my uBlock Origin.
We are being fed garbage all the time and it's escalating in complexity, timing and stealth. Look at practically any "app" compared to a browser experience from the perspective of being fed ads and I don't see a lot of reason to use dedicated apps.
Youtube's app lacks "usability features" like playing while running a different app in full screen mode. I can put whatever on a browser and it will happily play along. In the app if I switch then it stops. This "feature" is designed to make sure there's a higher likelihood you'll be paying attention & watching ads.
Some of it is a bit crazy if you look at more apps. For instance; youtube is free. The Financial Times is a paid-for service (not cheap). FT have an app that gathers data on you and gives you ads. Is this how you treat a paying customer? WTF? -uninstalled.
Long story short as many of us know - If you can, avoid the app, use a browser and an ad-blocker.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
You develop a better mouse trap, we develop a better mouse... it's not like this would be the first time.
I'd really love me a new challenge, recently it seems they stopped trying. Splicing ads into the stream sure would be something new to tackle, looking forward to it!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Try, just TRY please, to get into the mindset of your user. He browses your videos or, better, he looks at his front page and sees a new video from his favorite YouTuber. Hey, great, the day just got better, a new video from HIM/HER and I get to watch it.
He clicks.
And is greeted by an ad.
Let's ponder for a moment what we have here now. We have someone whose mind is expecting and looking forward to seeing a video that he really, really wants to see. This ad could now be the most on-topic ad you could possibly imagine, it could be for the cure of his incurable brain tumor and he would cuss and curse for as long as he has to watch it before he can skip it. It could be the trailer for his favorite movie franchise that he has been watching religiously since birth. It does not matter.
It is NOT what he wants NOW.
And yes, that's worse than it was on cable. On cable, you knew that at 6:30pm your show starts. You knew that days in advance. Because that's how it always is. Watching an ad before does not change that. Your expectation is not disappointed because there was no immediate "want it now" motivation for you. Seeing a new video being offered IS such a moment. It's surprising (more or less), it's new and exciting and you want it NOW.
Before anyone goes "waaah, entitled crybaby can't wait..." YES. That is how people are. People are looking forward to something and anything standing between them and that something will be pushed out of the way. Especially if it's nothing they give half a fuck about like an ad.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's my network, I'm in charge of which bits land on my network.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
With 50000 entries in your hosts file (why do people keep capitalizing it BTW?) your stub resolver must perform like shit. You're essentially slowing down everything that requires DNS, which these days is practically anything.
You may want to consider dropping the fugly hack that is hosts file based "blocking" and go for a more sensible approach. Just food for thought.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Shouldn't there be half as many ad breaks? 40% sounds like they're going to run more ads in addition to doubling them up.
It's impossible to be a freeloader on the internet. The internet was created for the FREE exchange of information and data. If you and your polluting advertising cronies don't like it, then get the fuck off of my internet, you eternal September scum.
The internet was created so that the US government could survive a major exchange of nuclear weapons with the USSR.
Everything else is just emergent phenomena.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It's funny, I never see ads on YouTube either, unless I'm using someone else's browser, and I'm not blocking them.
Perhaps YouTube has figured out that it's just not worth showing ads to some people?
Yeah, every time I browse the internet on someone else's computer I realize how much the internet would suck without uBlock origin. Then again, I'd probably spend almost no time on the computer outside work if I weren't using an ad blocker, so I suppose that sword cuts both ways.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My phone isn't rooted, but I still block ads. Sideload vanced from xda to get ad free YouTube, and background play. For the browser you can get ad blocking browsers, or add blockers that use a VPN. Personally I'm using my own VPN which blocks ads with DNS.
I used to root every time, but I got tired of the constant battle, and the big features I needed can now be done without it (ad blocking, and setting the phone to a reasonable resolution)
If he really wants to get Youtube ads to stop showing he needs to spread out to doing gun videos. InRange has never setup for ad revenue sharing (like AvE they wanted to stay impartial) and even went to the point of disabling ads completely when they started removing ad sharing for gun videos.
I used to block ads on my android tablet using x-framework and their youtube adblocker but it seems like about 6 months ago the cat and mouse game finally came to an end. They haven't updated the version for Nougat and I now have to sit through them.
If you want less ads, I recommend uMatrix (successor to http switchboard). Skookum as frig.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
So they just want to show more ads up-front before we get any content. That sounds like it will end well.
I've already unsubbed from several channels that got into the "two minutes of endorsements, begging for likes and subs, and Patreon, but hey, you can just skip it if you don't like it, so it's okay".
And a few have mentioned it. Yes, it is paying for Youtube Premium.
Originally, I signed up to explicitly get rid of the ads. But almost immediately I got offered the Youtube Music app and I love it. And I didn't have to teach it what music I liked because it already knew as I'd been Liking the music videos I love for years. Subtle advantage over other music services: Youtube usually has the music video, too. :)
One thing people are missing regarding YouTube inserting ads in the middle of videos, when they try to compare it to broadcast TV.
When you watched a show on TV, and they were inserting ads in the middle, those shows would be edited with the expectation that there would be commercial breaks, and the layout of the show would account for them. On YouTube, they'll break in with a commercial whenever they feel like it. Doesn't matter if you're watching a musical performance, technical presentation, whatever. The person in the video could be in mid-sentence, mid-phrase, and YT/Google will jump in and say "fuck what you were watching, here's an ad".
You know, for the most part I was willing to tolerate reasonable advertising on YT, because I realize someone has to pay for keeping the servers running. I have some clue of the economics of it. But when they start breaking into the MIDDLE of videos, at illogical and inappropriate places, then it prompts me to find a way to block ALL advertising on YT, even the ones I was willing to tolerate. Fuck 'em.
Not to mention that now they *INSIST* upon placing thumbnails of other videos on TOP of the video even before it's done playing. Seriously? Perhaps there was something at the end of that video we wanted to see. And their jackass thumbnails ruin the viewing experience. When I complained on their so-called "support" forums, some mealy-mouthed GoogleTwit(TM) said "oh, people are supposed to add extra space at the end of the video..." Really? I don't think so. Google would like to pass off the blame to OTHERS for their own bullshit mistakes. No concept of usage cases, no thought that when they *change* their shit code, it breaks things that worked before. They expect people to have to constantly revisit everything just in case Google fucked up yet something ELSE in the interim. Can't even own up to their own fuckups (then again, there are SO many of them, it must be impossible to keep track).
Sad state that the ONLY thing Google seem capable of developing without royally fucking it up is advertising. Everything else they make may turn to shit (or just outright start out as shit from the get-go), but boy can they serve ads.