YouTube

[ffutures]

Anyone else think that YouTube may be cutting their own throat by blocking ad-blockers? I'm not going to be seeing all of the little adverts in the video stream if they don't let me watch the video, which means fewer hits on them, which means less money for YouTube.

Behaviour like this was one of the things that killed PhotoBucket as a useful site - every page had about fifty ads and it was getting impossible to use even before their prices went into orbit. And then they were surprised that they lost most of their customers...

Update 21st Oct -  it turns out that my laptop does have some anti-advert software running that I'd genuinely forgotten about, AdBlock pro. I tried whitelisting YouTube and that fixed things. Not sure why this suddenly changed, my suspicion is that I did previously have YouTube whitelisted but somehow changed the setting or deleted the list.

Comments

[errolwi]

I think Photobucket didn't have a viable business model and tried various things to make it work. Flickr couldn't make 'mainly free/cheap, but enough people will buy stuff to cover it' work either.

[ffutures]

Flickr at their worse were never remotely as bad as Photobucket, who basically took away everything that made the site even slightly useful and then wanted considerably more than Flickr were charging for a pro account to let users have some of it back.

It isn't just money - i've had a Flickr Pro account for several years because the site works really well and it's worth my while to have hosting for more than 1000 pictures.

Getting back to YouTube, it turns out that my laptop does have some anti-advert software running that I'd genuinely forgotten about, AdBlock pro. I tried whitelisting YouTube and that fixed things, apart from huge numbers of adverts below the video. Not sure why this suddenly changed, my suspicion is that I did previously have YouTube whitelisted but somehow changed the setting.

[watervole]

I hardly ever see ads when I'm watching YouTube...
I'm not using an ad-blocker. Maybe I just watch very different stuff to you?

[ffutures]

I have no idea - I haven't changed anything, it just suddenly started giving me warnings then blocked me. I do have some software to stop tracking cookies, it may be that that's giving the problem, but we're heading into areas where i think computer security is more important than watching videos.

[ffutures]

It turns out that my laptop does have some anti-advert software running that I'd genuinely forgotten about, AdBlock pro. I tried whitelisting YouTube and that fixed things, apart from huge numbers of adverts below the video. Not sure why this suddenly changed, my suspicion is that I did previously have YouTube whitelisted but somehow changed the setting.

[teyrnon]

I don't even mind ads. I use script blockers to block third-party scripts, especially those from dodgy sites, which many ad brokers are. I don't understand why YouTube doesn't have a system for inserting ads into a stream that doesn't involve pulling from a dozen different domains.

[ffutures]

it turns out that my laptop does have some anti-advert software running that I'd genuinely forgotten about, AdBlock pro. I tried whitelisting YouTube and that fixed things, apart from huge numbers of adverts below the video. Not sure why this suddenly changed, my suspicion is that I did previously have YouTube whitelisted but somehow changed the setting.

[vicarage]

I've switched to downloading the files to disk using Linux software. A nuisance, but nothing is going to make me watch the ads. You might want to try sites running the Invidious software, which present YouTube content without the ad infrastructure. Eg https://invidious.drgns.space/feed/popular

[ffutures]

Sorry, only just noticed there was another comment here - thanks, that looks very useful.