Many youtubers have sponsorships though, and their viewership stats come into play when negotiating with potential sponsors.

I guess if everyone was hit equally across the board then those sponsors will eventually adjust to the new metrics, but I assume some genres have more tech-savvy audiences which are more likely to use ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how evenly distributed this penalty falls.

I'm guessing the viewers who now suddenly aren't being counted were already not contributing to revenue because they block ads.

You're saying that YouTube implemented a change that significantly reduces creators' viewer counts but won't affect their revenue, and they haven't told creators? "Here, have a heart attack"?

My current theory is that this whole "mystery around viewcounts" thing is fabricated by google. From a PR viewpoint it's much better to just imply that adblockers are bad, so in case of backlash they can go "Idk why the community is going ham about this, we didn't even say directly you shouldn't adblock, you people are kwuaazy"

> Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)

Except viewer counts are a factor for baked in ads. In this case, all the sleuthing and videos about the change are the probably the only thing that will alleviate/lessen the seemingly-worse ad rate negotiation position youtubers with less viewers suddenly find themselves in.

> But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?

Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing" but they know it won't work if people see them as the source of the message. They want video makers to internalize their message, do what the boss wants on their own initiative, so Google only want to drop hints.

I agree, this seems more like a policy decision to turn creators into anti-adblocker advocates than a technical problem registering views accurately.

I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization. This is why the creators all do sponsorships now. But they force creators to monetize to get reach (if the video isn't monetized it won't be recommended, even to subscribers).

My guess is that yeah, now they're going after people's sponsorship revenue by under-reporting views if their monetized content is being viewed by people with adblockers.

Those buying baked in ads just need to find other ways to verify value. This is nothing new, no large company buys ads without checking how they really work (though many small companies would). There is someone who checks all those "how did you hear about us" responses asked at checkout - they want to know if the ad really provided value. Sure the TV stations tracked and reported ratings, but that is only one of the signs ad buyers look at, and it is one they only trust because they check and so would catch if it is manipulated.

The ad business is far older than the internet and there is a lot of old knowledge that apples directly to the internet. Those buying backed in ads should be aware of and tracking such efforts.

Why would most creators be pro ad blocking in the first place? Don’t most of them want to earn money via advertising?

> Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing"

Ah yes, the good old "don't copy that floppy" argument.

The advertising industry brought this upon themselves. The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker. Between malicious ads, drive-by-downloads, content shifting, and other dark patterns, websites are now more ads than content.

It's like in the days of streaming (when it was still good and not enshitified) reducing piracy rates - companies can get me to disable my ad blocker if they start becoming good citizens actually make their site or service usable without it.

Get rid of the invasive tracking, dark patterns, un-dismissable modals, etc. Stop jamming your content so full of ads and SEO spam and maybe I wouldn't need an ad blocker as much.

Regarding recommendations. I recently disabled history and recommendations and the subscribed tab has everything I’d expect. No more surprises and no more political garbage.

> I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization.

Do you have any article about that? How much did the monetization drop for?

It's possible that the YTers complaining about this are affected once you bring the algorithm into it.

Might be a problem with Adblock, but also, Firefox just released an update that blocks social networks.

I run a couple different privacy add-ons for various different levels of blocking things, but the Firefox update has seriously broken a lot of stuff

It doesn't really affect YouTube either, it affects creators who rely on view counts to monetize their channels.

Is it possible not to have ads? It seems like YouTube puts them in there regardless, unless once your channel is monetizable you can choose to not show ads.

It seems like a YouTube bug, that they are performing view tracking on the client, when they own the whole server backend and could just as well track them server side (which wouldn't be blockable in the first place)

A lot of people clearly didn’t like Yuki’s response, but he’s entirely right.

Sounds like YT is trying to mobilize creators and influencers against adblocking.

It's a problem for the Creators. Their stats are lower than they should be, which could have negative effects on their business, like YouTubes recommendation-system not working as efficient as it should be. Similar, would they have a weaker selling-point for companies advertising on their channel.

It should be noted that YouTube income is unaffected by this, as Ads are still shown and counted to people without AdBlockers. So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.

This is completely unspoken by most of the youtube channels that are making videos about this. The reason they are worried is not because of the algorithm or vanity. Especially for channels like LTT it is economical. They get the vast majority of their money from getting a lot of views.

The interesting thing here is that since youtube did not change anything, it is actually adblockers successfully making sponsored content less viable. Something youtube has been trying to, at least on premium ([ytp]), where I get a little "Jump ahead" button on all platforms when sponcon is detected (in aggregate people skipping forward, it also does it for intros and similar).

I wonder if it will have a measurable impact on placement in the algorithm for channels like RLM that are seeing the drop. But rely on crowdfunding and youtube ads.

Uploaders can disable mid-roll adverts, ie ones that appear in the middle of the content.

It seems like server-side would suffer from issues due to buffering lookahead and autoplay. A client can request a video that is skipped within seconds, but if buffering causes it to request five minutes worth, the server only sees five minutes were requested, whereas the client can clearly tell how much of that was actually watched.

Morally indefensible. Adblockers are used as a response to Google externalizing/ignoring the cost of proper ad platform curation.

Sounds fair? Both creators and YouTube have the same goal of having people watch ads (or pay not to).

I don't know the data but every YouTube author I follow is basically saying the money they get from YouTube is almost nothing compared to the effort they put into their videos. Almost all of them seem to be going for sponsored ads embedded in the video (so not automatically skippable) or Patreon.

Server-side tracking would be the easiest thing in the world to spoof.

The thumbs downs on Yuki's responses are baffling. It is a privacy filter, improving privacy. There is a strong para-social relationship with many younger internet users, so maybe people really do feel strongly about affecting their favorite youtube star's view count? Or it could be youtube creators who are worried. I can't think of any other reasons a user would be on the side of youtube here.

Right or wrong you don't think it was unduly combative right off the bat? Manners cost nothing.

I don't think YouTube needed to do anything. The change influenced creators' bottom line so they are motivated on their own to mobilize their viewers against this change.

> against adblocking

And extensions such as SponsorBlock [1], which help user skipping sponsored sections or useless intros in videos.

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

This was my exact thought when I read about it. YouTube clearly has a record of what I’ve watched, because it’s in my watch history.

What they are missing is proof I’ve watched the ads - which I haven’t.

Ads are how they get paid until they're big enough for alternative revenue generation.

Eventually the whole system will rebalance. TV ads were shown to people even though you couldn't if any single person was watching or not.

Where does line go? If a future "Adblocker 3000" don't let advertisers capture you eyemovements in realtime 30 times per second, would that be sad?

Seems the ball is with Youtube. They can compensete and pay out more. Or not.

That's a rule defined by YouTube and/or advertisers in their relationship with content creators. By defining that rule, YouTube and/or advertisers have chosen to drag my participation into that relationship. My participation does not belong in their relationship. The only thing I can do to communicate my opinion on the matter is to do precisely what this "bug" entails.

That still isn't an issue for the end-user. It is Youtube's problem to keep their content creators happy and not mine.

Personally I would even prefer anything that allows for a Youtube alternative to do better.

Its not too hard to detect ads in video streams, even old school analog VCR's could do that.

Watching TV shows without adds was one of the selling points of those back in the day.

Some more modern digital ones had near real time features where they would play with a delay of a lets say half an hour and used that time to remove the ads.

If you have stream from Youtube containing ads you can trivially skip ahead.

And Youtube could do nothing about it because random skipping is one of the base features of every video player ever.

Video is not a single stream, but many smaller chunks daisy chained after each other. Reason for this is that you can then change i.e. quality of video and it will seamlessly change - because it will start daisy chaining higher quality chunks and show them in the player.

So what you are describing is already happening, ads are added directly into video stream, problem is that ads need to have access to API, because you don't want to show an ad for menstruation pad to a guy so you also need to know which user is watching and that's what cookies and the whole login is for, so you are effectively hitting a design limitation of the system.

And no, you can't do this ad selection on the server, because for example when you have 10 users behind a NAT how are you going to tell which user is which from the server point of view? So you need to be calling these APIs from the client side.

Then, the ad-adverse users will just use software that downloads the video and reprocesses the file to remove the ads. Ytdlp already does this with SponserBlock integration, and I imagine detecting ads is something AI would be pretty good at.

Of course, you lose the ability to mindlessly browse YT with no ads or get the dopamine hit of clicking an interesting video. I'm sure that's something YT considered if they pushed this option. They don't want you to just watch the few vids from your subscriptions per day and close the app.

I don't think the grunts get to decide. youtube is now governed by the dude who used to run AdSense, and has a mandate to fix revenue losses.

But how many people know how to do that? Almost zero.

So it is up to us tech guys to teach them about the danger it is to open a single web site without protection. Several levels of protection.

Including stop being abused by Windows, switch to Linux. But there is so much more to do, that it is very hard to teach and make people do it.

Everything is created to abuse you, and most of people don't have a single clue about what is going on.

Firefox and ublock origin, or... Just pay for it

When I go incognito for videos it's usually AI Carney getting arrested. The sponsor has a shit name with Wedding somewhere in their name, and when I search the web for the string of the name, I get about 2 hits and they unrelated. It's weird ass shit. Gives me weird foreign influence vibes.

I consider myself a little techy, since I visit this site quite often. But for me YouTube is curing me from my addiction to it by ramping up its ad blocker blockers. I know I have to wait roughly the ad’s runtime looking at a frozen video before the video actually starts playing and it is often enough to let me go do something productive or useful instead. Thanks google :)

Some people I know do not ever change any settings on their computers, they certainly are worst hit by youtube's ads and have given up opening youtube links or close youtube links immediately after because there are 3-4 ads before the video even begins.

I would find it exceptional interesting if youtube moved away from the concept of providing content for free without an expectation for repayment, to a model of selling a service. Selling a services is covered under a very different kind of laws, and where I live, tax law, while giving away content for free with ads has their own little exception carved out for it.

It is similar to how phone companies had to charge 0.1 cent for phones, rather than advertise it as gratis. The law said that companies could not advertise a product as being gratis if they also expect the customer to pay for it in terms of a binding contract with a provider, but they can sell the phone for any amount greater than 0 and have it as a combined sale with a binding contract. Thus companies changed how they sold their product, and also had to inform the customer of the binding terms (and if I recall, expected total cost) in the advertisements.

As one politician put it; You can't put a sale tax on services supported through advertisement since the customer may watch the full add, half the add, or none of it. Since the tax office can't determine how much of an add, if anything, is watched, there is no value in the exchange for which to tax.

Never mention that word, the fewer the people who know about it the better. It's one of my favourite things in my online life xD

YouTube has a BrandConnect program where they facilitate sponsored videos. I'm not sure how many sponsorships are done through that as opposed to third party agents though.

Brave will hit 100 MAU this year. That is a lot of users that will never see ads.

I also see the opposite problem: can one abuse that API to artificial inflate the view count?

It does kinda make sense for once, you probably wouldn't want to just count API calls for views. I heard you need to watch a significant portion of the video before it counts as a view.

What if its both? ;)

This is how it has worked for ages. If you think about it for a bit, I think you'd come up with all kinds of reasons for why this can't be done with just server-side signals.

For example, how do you account for skipping over already fetched parts of the video or rewatching the same section multiple times?

Or for the entire video being cached and researched? For bots downloading the video?

The idea that this is some malicious anti-adblocker time bomb implanted a decade ago is preposterous.

render the video twice -> gotcha, the GPU needs to run TPM code and knows where the buffer will go.

Did we hear anything about people using ad blockers and still having YouTube's watch history enabled reporting that a watched video didn't pop up in the history?

> Why are they dependent on a separate endpoint for the client to send to?

So they can turn video content-creators against those who use ad-blockers. I do not get how is this not obvious.

Yeah. How does the client get trusted and could someone write a view amplifier that reports extra views to YouTube? I would assume it’s already being abused if they trust the client side to report views. If they’re not trusting the client, the ad blocker explanation doesn’t work.

It makes no sense.

SmartTube is way better and free: https://smarttubeapp.github.io/

I would suspect it affects specific channels more than others. Obviously smaller tech channels are probably hit the hardest % wise

One report (https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/) indicated that more than half of Americans use an ad blocker.

The view drop only happened for desktop views.

Firefox on Android supports uBlock Origin.

is it a small niche when the youtube creators can see it in their stats and are panicking?

I block ads on my favourite channel but then support the guy through Patreon every month. I figure he’ll get more revenue form that than the shitty ads

Same with on phone. Pretty much always just close it.

I’d rather just not have yt than deal with their ads with a sprinkling of content on to approach

On your computer? Could you elaborate?

But why would I, as a user of Easy Privacy, care about this? It is protecting my own privacy. Someone trying to get more money on the internet isn't really my concern.

> So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.

Pretty sure this is harmful to youtube as well as it lowers the value (less personalization data) for advertisers. Also the knock-on effect of impacting creators, meaning less investment in creating content.

That being said, I've always hated this business model. It's created so many other problems in our society. Resulting in a shift to authoritarian leadership in many countries.

Aren't many channels funded by the companies they pretend to get sponsorship from? If you look at the OSINT and Natsec adjacent topics there are many who have had the same sponsor for years: ground.news ... many pretend that they are indie content creators when they are just the marketing / growth hacking arm of the sponsor.

Examples: Caspian report, Warfronts, Geopolitics decoded, ...

Many of them (the content creator) are even located in the same city.

Oh, really, are you sure? They still charge advertisers the full amount? My understanding was that they're only charged if there is evidence of an "ad impression" which there shouldn't be if the request was blocked

Isn't it likely that Google charges the advertisers for each time an ad is shown? So lower view counts mean lower ad views which means lower revenues for both Google and the content creators. (And, if the advertisers are counting on the views to drive their own business, it could mean lower revenues for them to go with the smaller ad bills.)

Why do YouTube creators deserve special treatment compared to any other entity whose analytics are impacted by adblockers?

Every publisher on the internet has been bleating for years about how adblockers negatively impact their business and their ability to provide [some value] to customers.

If your ability to generate value is hitched to surveillance capitalism then that’s a choice, whether you’re a folksy mom and pop YouTube creator or a multinational publisher.

> Even if the client would recognise ads somehow

Sponsorblock uses community driven marking of ads edited into the video.

I think you're right, that you wouldn't be able to skip an ad at the beginning of the video - you would need to predict for the user he will want to watch a video to load it earlier in the background to skip the ad, so only skipping ads in middle of the video would be possible.

Don't give them ideas! Also I think that there's a non trivial engineering effort required to inject ads into the video stream as well, for example with bookmarks and so on. Probably they'll do it but as last resort.

There would likely be huge processing overhead for splicing ads into a stream, right?

Thanks for lifting up my comment. It’s amazing how quickly people want to point fingers at YouTube for something they weren’t involved in.

Someone even relied to your comment implicitly assuming that YouTube cares about conditioning views on whether a user has an adblocker enabled when what happened is easylist added the view counter API to their privacy list.

Seems like a balanced approach, people can watch videos with adblockers but it won't count towards youtube's public facing metrics.

Do you think a random Youtube employee makes that decision and can just drop it lower?

I find it so weird how we just accept the fact that ads can be for fake things and not blame YouTube/Google for those things.

Morally, you should filter ads. If ads could be relevant, vetted, non-intrusive, and ancillary to the experience, all actions that are required to be performed by the ad platform Youtube/Google, then you wouldn't have much moral leg to stand on.

Due to YT/G's moral failings to host a sufficiently serviceable platform for their product, your eyes, then your only real recourse outside adblocking is to buy a device and put on a separate network with no reasonably important traffic.

I don't lose one bit of sleep knowing that adblocking prevents Google from externalizing their curation costs onto me.

uMatrix is not maintained. Use NoScript or uBlockOrigin.

About 30% of the ads I see are that crypto scam. I’m sure I’ve seen it over 100 times. There are several variants with different people. I don’t understand how that scam is paying for the massive volume of ad time they’re getting. It must cost a fortune.

I also get tons of French ads and I don’t speak French.

I have ad targeting turned off on my google account. As a result, probably >90% of the ads I see on YouTube are scams, almost-nsfw content, deepfakes, more scams, illegal products, and more scams. I’ve been tempted to take notes and keep track of how many are scams. It’s awful. I cannot remember the last legitimate product I saw an ad for on YouTube.

Yesterday I saw an ad on YouTube that was literally just porn. Very NSFW, not “almost” NSFW like a lot of the ads are. After reporting it, I tried to pull up the ad transparency page for the company running the ad. I was hoping I could somehow report the company itself, in addition to the ad. I had to be logged in to do this. Because when logged out, you can’t see “age restricted” ad campaigns. This completely blew my mind. I didn’t think they allowed nsfw ads, but if they knew enough to age-restrict the ad campaign, maybe they do?

From what I understand, if I turn on targeted ads, I can opt out of ad categories, and maybe google will stop showing me the scams. Instead, I simply use Adblock, and avoid YouTube on iOS as much as possible. The experience is completely unusable with the advertising.

I’m not going to pay for premium to avoid ads that are blatantly violating YouTube’s TOS anyway. At least, I hope they are violating it. “Report” never does anything so they might just allow anything in ads.

Plus so many ads are malware, dangerous, or scams that even the FBI says you should use an ad blocker

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/22/fbi-ad-blocker/

YouTube is one of the worst offenders for scam ads. Even today you sometimes find an ad that talks about some scary health risk and points to some ad that drones on and on for 45 minutes and if you get to the end they try to sign you up for an $80 a month subscription for some worthless supplement.

> Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.

This specific case is about an unusual high drop of viewers specifically on desktops on a specific date. The assumptions are, that it's just too unusual for the normal drop in that timeframe, so it has to be a bug of some kind. Would it be a normal drop in viewers, it would not be on a specific date, months after the problems with AdBlocks started.

> Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.

Creators are not reporting any declines in ad revenue that match the drop in view count. Indeed several have reported revenue is the same despite the view count drop. So it's quite unlikely people are fed up with youtube in any meaningful way.

This article is less about view counts dropping due to people abandoning the platform and more about view count spikes and troughs that are a consequence of the measure-countermeasure game of YouTube tweaking its code to account for ad blockers vs. ad blockers tweaking their code to account for YouTube ads.

Ad blockers (especially for complex sites and data streams) are basically like using a chainsaw to remove a mosquito(1); sometimes innocuous or beneficial features get omitted too because they're too "ad-shaped" for the heuristic.

(1) Anyone who thinks I'm under-selling the risks of unblocked ads has never seen the consequence of an unlucky bite from Aedes aegypti.

"would have updated" what? Their browser?

i've noticed recently youtube added a "most commonly skipped to" marker on their videos which is very useful when watching on my TV which doesn't support sponsorblock to skip sponsored segments

more and more youtube creators seem to be integrating their sponsors in their videos in a way where if you skip it you miss an integral part and i do wonder if this is youtube's way of fighting against being left out, but then again, i don't know shit, just an interesting observation

Now that you mention it, I sure haven't heard one of these annoying ass lines in a while, people really do flag these sections.

>Youtubers who use view counts for sponsor deals

Laughs in SponsorBlock

If all videos are affected by this, then it really should not be hard for these people to adjust their deals with sponsors to compensate.

According to the GitHub issue, YouTube didn’t change anything. There are two endpoints that can be used to attribute a view. One is called multiple times throughout a video playback and has been in the easylist privacy filter for years. The other is called at the start of a playback, and was just added to the list (the timing lines up with the reports of view drops from tech YouTubers).

This is not definitive proof that easylist caused the view drops, but it’s I’ve read the issue and a writeup by a YouTube creator and it seems pretty likely.

> Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?

Youtube isnt quoted in this article. It's someones speculation

View counts is a worthless metric for sponsor deals, as are any other type of metric provided by a third party.

To get exact metrics, you should use discount codes that are unique for each channel. Then you will know the exact amount of sales each sponsorship is netting.

They certainly are counting views on the backend also, and I'm sure they know exactly what the cause of the discrepancy (or "drop" as they term it) is.

How many?

Ad-block views don't help anyone anyway, so I'm not sure why this would matter. If anything it's more accurate.

I realized this when I watched one of my friends music videos to give the extra view (they had less than 100) but the views number didn’t go up because of my ad blocker.

With the risk of sounding like a fanboy.

LTT makes 9.2% of their revenue on In-Video Sponsors and 12.5% on Sponsored Projects (which are like full videos for a sponsor)

I wouldn't call this the vast majority

https://youtu.be/GeCP-0nuziE?si=2ob1AixcwGZwR4VC&t=719

Not sure what the technical challenge here is either. I use an ad blocker and I assumed YouTube already counted my view, since the video can be found in my YouTube history.

Something like ~30% of desktop users use ad-block.

If you are tech or tech-adjacent content, it can double or triple that.

"a lot of users are on mobile devices where they are using the native app that doesn't even support this."

Laughs in NewPipe.

Views support the videos in the algorithm.

Do you think someone like Louis Rossman, who wants to use Youtube to share his message but doesn't use YT as a business, would rather views or ad money?

They told me I couldn't run ad blocker/anti-virus software on my computer while watching their videos. So I stopped watching their videos. (Technically, the videos aren't theirs, but belong to the creators. Many of them provide the same (or better) content on other platforms),

> There is a strong para-social relationship with many younger internet users, so maybe people really do feel strongly about affecting their favorite youtube star's view count?

100% this. They were even threatening him with facing the ire of social media if he didn't reopen the issue.

This actually makes me feel more confident that it's actually blocking tracking and not caving in to vanity needs.

It’s not how I would have responded either, but people are entitled to their own ways of communicating.

They may in fact not know what you watched. I was having an issue with my youtube recommendations becoming generic to the point of irrelevance, when i went and looked at my watch history and it hadn't been updated in MONTHS despite me watching youtube daily.

Turns out that pi-hole was blocking the endpoint that records the watch history! IIRC allowing queries for something like s.youtube.com made my watch history start working.

I agree that they should know w/o all this client based nonsense but :shrug:. They don't, somehow!

This actually hints at a way out of the YouTube monopoly. Make creators' business model no longer work on YouTube, by blocking the tracking. Make it so that creators are forced to go to other, paid video platforms, instead of them feeding the YouTube monopoly.

This might temporarily lead to a collapse in video creator business, but in the long run might result in more viable businesses for creators, without them having to push shit onto their viewers. Make videos and enjoy them being seen, or make paid content and have people pay for that, but don't try to shoehorn it into viewing videos that are accessible for anyone running a Youtube search.

Adblock users already have no value for advertisers.

Why would they charge for an ad which was not shown? This is not about the view count of the ad.

I don't think the parent implies that. Advertising has destroyed a lot of value, YouTube or otherwise. But you can either push the equilibrium in a (imo) productive direction by paying your creators (via subscriptions) or continue to attack the symptom of the problem (ads) while everything shittifies further around you. That's the choice.

I suspect this war on adblockers is also non trivial and the "last resort" would win them this war forever. For a company the size of youtube the effort would be trivial.

The ads are not shown anyway. This is about the video where the ad would be embedded. Those are two different view counts.

> you would need to predict for the user he will want to watch a video to load it earlier in the background to skip the ad

Not sure I understand this. I don't think it's possible even now to load the video in the background, youtube is already smarter than this and it will load a short period of time whenever u seek anywhere, it doesn't just download the whole thing if you pause the video.

And the way I'm suggesting wouldn't be mitigated by sponsorblock since you wouldn't be able to skip it if you want to stream the video. Only way would be to use yt-dlp and remove the ads automatically but I suspect a tiny percentage of users would go to that length to avoid ads

If Dirty Stan spends an hour making guests uncomfortable at your house, some of those guests might come to think of you as a bad host even though Stan's behavior was the issue.

I think it's reasonable to attribute moral responsibility to the entity that owns and has the most control over the platform, even if the technical details aren't quite so simple. Doubly so in this case since YouTube is a profitable business. Given [0], it sounds like this bug with view counts is a direct result of YouTube choosing to start an arms race against users who run ad blockers.

[0]: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme...

People in general have stopped trying to hold people accountable and have just accepted defeat.

No, but feedback goes into the machine in odd ways. This has a 1000x higher factor of being considered and thought of more than any other forum.

> not blame YouTube/Google for those things

it's because everyone but you have something to gain in that transaction - google got paid ad money, the advertiser presumably got some value in exposure.

Therefore, you, for whom the "harm" has fallen, want to blame someone like google or the advertiser, which google has a form of EULA/TOS to shed all responsibility/liability.

It's just the way the internet is, and the reason for adblocking as a requirement.

The UK has an advertising standards agency, but they're completely unable to cope with online ads.

Of course all the "online safety" nonsense does very little for our safety against misleading advertising.

You can block ads. It's never morally wrong. You can look away, it's never morally wrong. Content creators getting paid to include ads is their business model, and no viewer is responsible for a content creators business model. Even in a world were technology allows a creator to get paid more for video evidence of you looking at the ad, you're never in the wrong for looking away. You're never in the wrong for blocking ads.

> If ads could be relevant, vetted, non-intrusive, and ancillary to the experience, all actions that are required to be performed by the ad platform Youtube/Google, then you wouldn't have much moral leg to stand on.

Even if ads were all of those things, ads are psychological manipulation, and I there is no moral imperative that says I have to subject myself to that.

Sure, you could say, "well then instead just don't use YouTube", and I would say... "yeah, maybe, but... I'm a selfish human and want to, and unless YouTube is going to give me a way to exchange something else for a better experience, tough shit on them."

But anyway, they do give me that option, and I pay for Premium, so it's not a problem.

Those are not as good as umatrix unfortunately

Picking sides is silly. Just don't use YouTube, or pay for it with money or ad time and data.

How is it any easier to spoof than client-side tracking?

In the server-side case I can certainly increase views by fetching the video multiple times, but in the client side case I can hit the analytics endpoint directly just as easily

It was YT that changed the ad delivery mechanism to prevent view counting, not adblockers.

YouTube premium actually has its own version of sponsorblock called skip ahead, it works really well, so they’re not ideologically opposed to skipping sponsored segments

You don't have to care about it. But this is not about privacy, as this API likely does not impact your privacy. YouTube can track what you watch anyway.

And if you watch videos, there is a chance you also enjoy them, so it would be in your own interest to support creators in making more of them. But that's a bit more complicated.

While I agree with you, not every channel is big and some of the smaller ones might rely partially on this in order to get materials/sponsorship in order to be able to have the parts to do some projects they make videos on because it is more a passion project and they might barely break even or even make losses on doing it.

The context that I am thinking about is, for example, a small hobbyist that might rely on the added value for making some odd things, requiring exotic hardware, quantities of materials that could be prohibitively expensive or the lend of access to said hardware might be blocked behind viewership metrics, and there this might make some difference, and I personally enjoy those little odd channels and this is why I, as a viewer, might care about it. But again, I totally see where you are coming from.

Because you might have a perfectly selfish stance in the short term, but it turns out that creators not making enough money leads to creators not making content.

Someone you care to watch not making enough money to make the things you like to watch is your concern, because making equivalent content yourself is out of your reach.

The correct approach is to not use these services. Ad-blocking and using the service just sends the message that you are leeching, not that the service is bad.

> many pretend that they are indie content creators when they are just the marketing / growth hacking arm of the sponsor.

Just curious, but can't they be both?

I don't know those channels. The one I regularly see are very diverse in their partners, and usually the content is unrelated to the promotions. But overall those promotions are negotiated based on viewer counts, and at a certain size, they are more valuable than earnings from ads.

Any credible evidence that they get enough money from the sponsorships to be considered fully funded by them? Or that ground news uses influence over these channels?

I can throw a dart and hit a random podcast that has been sponsored by blue chew for years, but that doesn't mean said podcast is funded by them or bends to their whims.

IMO your comment is pure conspiracy theory.

> point fingers at YouTube for something they weren’t involved in

YouTube monetizes based on view count. They also send the data to the client. That client data is in anyway involved, and could be blocked, is YouTube’s design problem.

No, you can concatenate video segments with basically zero cost if the segments are encoded using the same encoding parameters and afaik youtube already re-encodes user videos.

At this point the "peanut gallery" of the web is essentially just a firehose of misinformation, best avoided. Not two minutes before this I read some comment confidently stating that the last time Apple offered iPhone leather cases was for iPhone 11.

YouTube immediately pointed fingers at creators by saying that certain audiences are more likely to use ad blockers.

:)

Makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched, not how much money YouTube made off of it. They’re pretending people care about their internal metrics, when people really do not. Maybe the creator, but again, they’re probably also just interested in eyeball counts.

It’s dumb in almost every direction I can imagine. The only one that makes sense is if you’re simply at war with adblockers and you’re trying to turn the public tide of opinion against them.

There is no balancing happening here. YouTube needs to make an API call to attribute a view to a video, and easylist started blocking that API call. YouTube was perfectly happy a month ago to count views for users that were blocking ads, and presumably remains happy to do so.

The only thing that changed is easylist blocked the API.

The comment you replied to explained that nothing was changed on the YouTube side. This was an adblocker choosing to start block a non-ads, non-tracking, samesite API call that had probably been in place for like a decade.

So it's quite amazing that even with that context you still managed to hijack that into a discussion about the merits of what Google did with this "balanced approach" bait. This isn't a balanced approach! It's not an approach at all!

It is the ad blocker willfully choosing to break totally normal and benign site functionality. Google had no agency in this, and doesn't have much recourse.

This looks like an additional incentive to channel owners to somehow convince their audience against the ad blocker use. Makes sense, better than trying to win an unwinnable arms race against the blocker maintainers.

You can still have in-video sponsor spots, in fact, most of the creators have them. Viewership is an important metric to those sponsors.

That was also my take when I first saw the FBI advice about using an adblocker. Like, yeah, it's good advice, but also why is no one being prosecuted for acting as an accessory if not accomplice to fraud? They're labeling their product as a search tool and then taking money to funnel users away from the thing they're searching for to scammers instead. Surely they are aware of their pure negligence in vetting business partners if the government is issuing warnings to citizens about their behavior?

30% of my YouTube ads are now a large fart sound followed by an AI generated old doctor talking for 15 minutes about some sketchy diet modification

No, no, no.

Morally you should stop using youtube.

It's incredible how people mental gymnastics there way into a solution that provides themselves all the benefit and pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous.

When you don't like something, you don't use it. It sends a clear message that you don't like the product/service. Using it and not compensating for it (because you actually do like it, just on your terms) is not moral or a good signal in anyway way, shape, or form.

I imagine watch history view tracking and view count view tracking and possibly even ad impression view tracking are three disconnected systems. Google is still going to update your history view even if it thinks you're a bot so you don't know you're being filtered out for example. The data to power that UI can also be partitioned by user while the ad and view count data needs to be aggregated performantly across large numbers of users in different slices. On the other hand your watch history doesn't keep multiple entries if you watch the same video multiple times in a day (say a music video on loop) but does want to charge for each ad impression seperately.

If sponsored projects and in-video sponsor spots dried up because of low view count I feel like a +20% loss would be something they would feel on their bottomline?

I suspect their business still requires that revenue.

But my example could be better. Take any moderately sized youtube channel which has a sponsorship in each video. Maybe one of the gaming channels that figured this out? If they lose the sponsorships it would probably not be great for them.

A huge % of that overall revenue figure is their e-commerce business which will be relatively low margin. They are making roughly double in sponsored videos and sponsored projects than with adsense.

It makese sense that some of that sponsor revenue is tied to youtube viewcounts.

Laughs in patched YT.

How do you know they're marked as a view on the video?

Rossman has a separate business to support him.

40-50% of desktop users on my channel, heh.

I don't hold it against anyone. YouTube's ads are horrible, and overstuffed into videos.

I use premium and know not everyone can afford it, but one concern I have is premium views are also not counted if someone still uses the adblocker while logged into YouTube premium. (So you miss out on the view and on that extra bit of premium revenue).

I think, if that was YouTube's goal, they should close their platform tomorrow, and put everything behind a paid login. That would be the honest move. Instead they are trying to sneakily profit from viewers, by sneaking in ads in whatever way possible. They are employing dark pattern after pattern and are extorting "consent". It is entirely reasonable to block their dark patterns and just watch videos without ads. If it bothers them, go ahead, hide everything behind paid access. See how quickly their monopoly will evaporate then.

I’d rather actively hurt their business model, thanks

I'll use it and I'll not pay.

Bot detection systems all work client side. What browser are you using, what cookies do you have, how is your mouse moving, how much time are you taking between clicks, how many captchas have you solved. All this and more is collected and passed to the server, which can then determine if the view was valid or not. Plus you can do this multiple times during a watch session rather than just in the beginning when the video is requested. If the adblocker is blocking this data then the server has nothing to go on.

It was an easylist change (so adblockers) that caused the issue: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/2d39de407dc96904...

Whether or not you consider that an issue shrug but it's not directly YT's fault.

That doesn't just target sponsor segments. It's for stuff commonly skipped. Like annoying parts of videos. Some video game guy I occasionally watching thinks he needs to sing for some reason, very useful for skipping those sections.

Yes, I discovered this recently and it's nice. I presume they are not opposed to it because it's not costing them any lost revenue.

I guess it makes sense, they have no financial incentive to keep people from skipping sponsors, they don't make YouTube any money

That's a feature that learns commonly skipped over sections, ads or otherwise.

Plus it works on mobile and TVs.

You would think Google having all this amazing AI could moderate their YouTube ads....

But those crypto scams make them money.

It was mostly panic. As in: it didn't apparently affect revenue in any way, but content creators always check view stats/graphs for their own videos to see how well each of them is doing. So sudden drop made YT the main suspect. It didn't help some changes to video visibility for "children" profiles was pushed at same time.

How big are the channels? As far as I follow, the revenue numbers creators get from Ads aren't ignorable at all.

Presumably Louis wants to reach as many people as possible and would like to know how many people he's reaching though.

I’m surprised they allow ads (sponsor segments) they get no cut from at all.

Where ? Like I have sponsor block on a desktop but on my pixel I don't have it and would like to have the option. Have the yt premium but don't see the option to skip sponsors.

Yes, they really dgaf about the creators.

Another example of that is their ridiculous strike system. Look at what happened to Gamersnexus recently.

I've got Youtube premium and have never noticed that popping up. Is this platform or browser dependent? Is it only on some videos?

100%. I can't count the amount of times I've seen an AI-generated Elon Musk promoting a Tesla coin lol. I've lost count.

I see it as part of the same general package. The censoring for any reason at all (including real time, via AI, in the comments, which were already! ruined by Google+ integration going back years)

Youtube Rewind 2018 - before they got rid of dislikes, to make ad videos harder to spot - was one of (was the?) most disliked videos in Youtube history

A very far cry from the halcyon days of ~10 years earlier

The people using ad-blockers were not watching ads, so it would not make a difference to revenue streams. If anything, profit would go up because Youtube server capacity is not being used as much by ad-block users.

There is middle-ground: anti- ad-blocker changes cause a large number of ad-blockers to fail entirely.

It would make sense too, Youtube wouldn't care to make their videos viewable to a large number of ad-blockers, and ad-revenue would be near steady because ad-blockers were not generating any ad revenue.

For quite a few people, they would have had to manually pull in an updated ad-blocker change. This would be the case if they run the source release, or have disabled updates.

Have you looked at https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV ?

YouTube even has a feature now that if you skip, it will skip over sections that other people skip to. Which in practice does the same thing as sponsorblock, except that you have to press skip ;)

I believe the metrics are before the sponsorship is made, like a company will only sponsor a creator if that creator has more than a number of views

They probably use a combination of the API and raw server requests due to how easy it would be otherwise to spoof viewership for ad revenue fraud. Would not surprise me anyway.

YouTube is quoted in the article.

> Viewers Using Ad Blockers & Other Content Blocking Tools: Ad blockers and other extensions can impact the accuracy of reported view counts. Channels whose audiences include a higher proportion of users utilizing such tools may see more fluctuations in traffic related to updates to these tools.

For every one hobbyist making some kind of interesting video that they couldn't have made without ad money, there are 1,000 moronic influencers making the same video about the same thing, grasping at ad money or free products to shill. YouTube is 99% dreck now. Hooray for the hobbyist, poor us having to wade through the influencer swamp.

Requests that have no benefit for the user need to be blocked on that premise alone. Do your tracking whatever nonsense on your own computing, thanks very much.

I remember a time where people actually had to pay money to publish their videos (on their own server, using their own storage). And they still did it if they wanted to get something out into the world.

> creators not making enough money leads to creators not making content.

As a consumer this does not concern me in the slightest. The big creators who are focusing on revenue are so sterile they are barely watchable at this point.

Correct by what metric? Why do I care if I send the message that I'm leeching?

Ad blocking and using the service only sends the message that the service with ads is bad, but the service without ads is acceptable.

Often this means "the way you've implemented ads is terrible enough that I went out of my way to block them" and sometimes it means "any and all ads are terrible and I don't want them"

There's nothing at all wrong with ad blocking. Someone who puts their content on the public internet has zero right to require me to view that content, or to control how much of it I see or how I choose to view it. If I want to block ads, or only watch the last 20 seconds, or watch the whole thing played backwards that's my business. This is equally true for websites where I'm free to decide what to download and how to display it in my browser.

Why would thet be a conspiracy theory. The public facing guy who is behind Warfronts has 4 other channels that peddle content unrelated to natsec/warfare. If you follow "cappy army" and the drama he went through at "task and purpose" his former employer it becomes pretty clear that there are entire media companies behind what looks like "a single hobbyist content creator expat living in Prague" ...

Absolutely can be both. And often they make it clear: like cappello army does. But then there are the more shady ones where it's less transparent

Worse than that, YouTube relies on client data for view counting while also actively creating an incentive for ad blockers to disrupt client data because of their anti-ad blocker measures.

This reminds me that I think it was the Invidious project that had a disclaimer saying they could not prevent YouTube from counting your view. Well, I guess they probably could after all, and probably did, depending on which method was used to fetch the video.

What's to prevent ad-blockers from just skipping ahead when there's an ad playing?

Especially in terms of baked in ads from the creator, whose terms are based on views, separate from YouTube revenue.

> The only thing that changed is easylist blocked the API.

Wonder if there's a good reason they started blocking that API?

EasyList is the ad blocking list.

EasyPrivacy is tracker blocking list.

The culprit was in EasyPrivacy (tracker) list, not EasyList (ad blocking).

I'd argue use the adblocker, but if you want to ensure views are counted, add an exception for the URL in question, for example [1].

[1] https://github.com/Scrxtchy/ReturnYoutubeView

But this is not Google's doing? Adblockers are not sending requests to increment the view count, so yt doesn't increment the view count.

The comments that really get me are the ones putting the onus onto Youtube to refactor their view approach to "just" count it from the backend. Rhymes with consumers asking gamedevs to add multiplayer to games.

View count is used to guide to price embedded sponsors, so in the short term matters while things get recalibrated.

Because Google still can't count that low, amirite?!

A deepfake version of Mark Carney keeps trying to get me to sign up for scam crypto exchanges. Clicking the report link does nothing.

With all the money that Google has plowed into AI, they clearly could solve this problem if they want to. The fact that it's still an issue means they don't care, or are happy to take the ad money from the fraudsters.

> violating YouTube’s TOS

google cannot violate their own TOS.

I endorse the view that everyone should use an ad blocker, but for what it's worth I keep seeing this techcrunch article and the original advice offered by the FBI [1] is actually much more limited.

> Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others.

So the specific recommendation is that you turn on an ad blocker while performing searches. Why are they so concerned about searches? It's because of a specific form of fraud, where someone purchases an ad pretending to be the business you're searching for, but actually takes you "to a webpage that looks identical to the impersonated business’s official webpage" - that is, a phishing scam.

That's way more limited than the "FBI recommends ad blocker" statement would lead you to believe. From the FBI's point of view, pitching a bullshit supplement in an ad (what you're talking about) is an entirely legitimate business practice, and selling supplements is legal in the US so long as you don't make certain medical claims or imply FDA approval.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221222162340/https://www.ic3.g...

This is the last thread I would ever have expected to see those little striped monsters mentioned.

Not sure about the chainsaw analogy, but I guess Aedes Aegypti is a fair metaphor for the cumulative effect of the tiny daily (hourly?) annoyance of the free-with-ads model.

Hell, YouTube even added that feature where it'll autoskip commonly skipped section so it's basically a built in SponsorBlock at this point (no doubt helped powered by those who skip via SponsorBlock). I'm surprised I haven't seen any controversy from people who are having their sponsors pay less because of this.

That's not quite what the github issue says? There appear to be several potentially contributing changes in the time window, and one of them actually re-enables a previously blocked YouTube analytics endpoint

I find it incredibly difficult to shed any sympathy for youtube "content creators". Youtube was most entertaining, or at least most interesting before anyone was monetizing the platform. Same goes for most of thr rest of the web but I digress

If views aren't being counted, it will still hurt their revenue from YouTube Premium subcribers. Premium views pay out a lot more than ad revenue from "free" views so that can hurt a lot.

Only YouTube can tell, that's the fun part.

afairc sub-100 views are not counted in realtime anyway.

If i am correct, YouTube is trying to say "If you don't watch the ads, you are harming the poor, small content creators!"

It's worse than creators not making content, they move their content to be lower rung click bait garbage to maximize ad-views.

If "smart" people use ad-block, then all the content gravitates towards those who don't.

It seems to be sending the same message either way, no? Either not watching them or the ad-blocking reducing their count seems to be the same in the end.

No more than going to the bathroom or getting a drink during a TV commercial break is leeching. Watching ads is not and has never been obligatory for the viewer.

YouTube and every other site on the internet can trivially block all users with an ad blocker but choose not to. Why is that?

The ability to block any network request I want is an essential feature of the general computer and I will promptly abandon any service which tries to impinge upon my security as well as my freedom to use what I own in the way I wish, to obstruct that. Now sure, they could perform some kind of tracking that doesn't generate additional network requests. But they know how the open Web works and the tradeoffs even if they may not like it, so I would guess their architecture is deliberate.

I don't understand what point you are trying to make, but I am honestly surprised if they monetize based on view count and not based on advertisement view and click counts.

A number of YouTubers have made the claim that their views were affected but not revenue, so it seems like the monetization is based on ad-watching views at least.

Should a video watched with ads blocked earn money?

Accurate but I don’t think it’s new. It’s a property of human intelligence called “hallucination” where facts are made up.

I don’t know about this leather thing but the participants on non-technical forums like Reddit or HN frequently do this.

That's not pointing fingers but an objective fact. Technical audiences are more likely to use adblockers than the general population. If your channel caters to them you will be disproportionately affected.

Perhaps then you should try to convince EasyList to remove the view counter from their block list? This wasn't a change YouTube made, this was adblockers choosing not to let YouTube track views for privacy purposes.

Why does anyone not financially motivated care about how many views a video gets? Use the like function if you want I guess .

It makes sense to have the view count only show views that could be useful for ad revenue ... This way you can be honest with advertiser's about roughly how many eyeballs they can expec5

The view counter isn't for you. It's merely a convenience that you're showed it at all. View counts are for monetization. If a view isn't monetized, why count it? Purely foe vanity?

You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source and no other reason. View metrics and monetization are what count, not your subjective experience. YouTube does not care one tiny bit about how much you like the site or interface or what you think of the view counter.

Why would anyone just watching videos on YouTube care how many people have seen the video? You enjoy it or you don’t, how many other people have seen it doesn’t change the viewing experience at all.

The only people who would care are YT themselves, the creator, other creators, and advertisers.

I don’t know why they even publicly display the view count.

Why not just look for sources for factual information instead of avoiding all of it?

> It’s a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched

That's emphatically not what people "people want". People want to get paid. And creators get paid based on views.

So... per the upthread point, paying people based on views that actually generate revenue seems fairer and more optimal, no? If YouTube can't make money from your content, why do you expect them to pay you for it?

The do not need an API call, obviously they know that the video is being watched, because it's being streamed.

I suspect his desire for people to block ads ranks higher than his desire for statistics.

The interesting question is how/if this impacts the recommendation engine. If it does impact recommendations, then that will directly penalize channels with more adblock users.

Why would they not allow them?

I didn't check all of them... I wanna say they range from ~200 to ~500K subscribers? No idea if that's big or not. For comparison, the official Warhammer channel has ~900K subscribers, which I assume is decent.

The argument I've heard repeatedly from them is that the time and effort involved in making a YouTube video that gets enough hits (which means lots of experimentation) is disproportionate compared to the meager return of investment; that for money reasons it's best to get sponsorships.

(I'm not a YouTube author myself, I wouldn't know what's a decent size).

There's a famous mod for the YouTube app called Re-Vanced. It adds support for SponsorBlock, removes Shorts, etc.

If you double tap to skip 10 seconds during an ad read, it should appear as a button in the bottom right. It does not pop up proactively. It's algorithmically-based on which parts of the video get skipped most often by viewers.

Might just be the channels you're viewing. This video should have a "Jump ahead" appear around 0:19: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs5PfanIkC0&t=1s

Firefox for Android supports desktop extensions, including Sponsor Block and uBlock Origin.

There's also Tubular, a YouTube client and fork of NewPipe with Sponsor Block built-in. If you don't mind installing apks from outside the Play Store: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular

On the TV app, if you hit the forward button it instantly skips over the entire "commonly skipped section".

It isn't automatic for me unless I try to skip a sponsored segment myself, then it will kick in and skip me to the end of that segment with a popup above the scroll bar saying they did so.

Use the SponsorBlock extension to autoskip in-video ads.

I hope by admitting defeat and shifting the blame for the numbers to creators, they also stop this ridiculous fight with adblockers. I'm sure they could allocate the investments in this elsewhere.

What a great metaphor that is for modern tech innovation.

Yeah, it's crazy. I have gotten ads on Gmail that are clearly fraud.

On my email! I really think Google should be liable for shit like that.

Their business model and their belief that there’s an obligation to view ads when consuming content are not our problem.

Advertising in general and Google in particular are so immoral that morally you should rip every YouTube video and distribute it freely outside of their platform while actively looking for ways to force them to fundamentally change or close.

Adblock isn’t allowed or disallowed somewhere in the ten commandments or fabric of the universe or whatever. Personally, my outlook would dictate that it’s bad if it causes harm, so prove that harm is done to someone. Even then, if the harm is sufficiently small, I’m alright with doing it for my convenience, e.g. there’s some small risk I hit someone when I drive but I choose to drive even when sometimes I could walk.

Is it morally wrong to fast forward ads on your TV or mute the volume?

> Morally you should stop using youtube

> When you don't like something, you don't use it.

Morality in your approach is absolute, and it represents the best possible outcome.

For all others stuck in the morass, you must navigate the BATNA.

Is it moral to pour out your verification can instead of drinking it?

OK, but where's an argument?

> No, no, no.

Not an argument

> Morally you should stop using youtube.

Why?

> It's incredible how people mental gymnastics there way into a solution that provides themselves all the benefit and pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous.

I noticed it too, but it's not an argument. I could say something similar e.g.

> It's incredible how corporations mental gymnastics there way into defending their interest that provides themselves all the benefit and pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous.

In either case, it would be nice to read an actual argument.

> When you don't like something, you don't use it.

This is not true, People use stuff they don't like all the time. Should they stop? You may not like to use a bus, but it may be your only means of transportation. You could then argue one should like what he has no alternative to, but I don't see how ones emotional attitude relates to morality.

> It sends a clear message that you don't like the product/service.

Are people morally obliged to send this message? I don't see how this argument relates to morality.

> Using it and not compensating for it (because you actually do like it, just on your terms) is not moral or a good signal in anyway way, shape, or form.

Again, not everyone necessarily likes what he uses, but I can agree, most people use Youtube because they like it, and in particular, people use Youtube with adblocking because they like Youtube without ads. But where is the argument for it being immoral?

You could start with some probably agreeable statement like "Everyone should be paid for his work" and go from there, and then maybe I or someone else could point out some error in the reasoning, but currently your whole post reads as "what you do is immoral because I say so" - there is no proper argument.

Of course it can. With how one-sided TOS typically is, it is unlikely, I don't see how one could obtain certainty about TOS being absolutely one-sided and not putting any burden on the service provider, therefore TOS, being an agreement between two sides, absolutely can be violated by either of the sides.

I think searches are just a common entry point to the internet at large. People search then they have some mistaken trust those links are legit.

And like the mosquito, ads can sometimes give you viruses!

I believe it is only a premium feature, and premium user views pay substantially more than sponsors or ads.

And because only YouTube knows this, they can tell us anything they want.

Maybe, but that doesn't matter for this case. This is specifically about the view count, not whether you see the ads. But I've seen this was in the meanwhile merged with another thread, which is about the statement(?) from YouTube.

When I watched it without the ad blocker the views went up by one. I feel like it's a lot more realtime now because I swear I see the view counter updating as I'm watching some videos.

> It's worse than creators not making content, they move their content to be lower rung click bait garbage to maximize ad-views.

They will do this whether or not people use ad-blockers. We've seen this happen before; someone will claim that they are an ethical ad company and don't do shady things, people allow-list in ad blockers, then they start ramping up.

I remember back in the day where Google was a "good advertiser" because they had simple textual ads and didn't do shady things. IIRC plenty of ad blockers just allow-listed Google at that time. And then they acquired Doubleclick.

> Revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, the majority of the revenue will go to our partners.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276

The re-enabled endpoint is yet a third endpoint different from the two I mentioned above.

Turns out YouTube has a lot of analytics.

> (because you actually do like it, just on your terms)

It's the same BS as the "I wasn't going to buy it anyway" response to piracy.

People just want their stuff and then add whatever rationalisation on top.

Google definitely moderates their ads. It's hard to not see them as an accomplish.

Sponsorships are the primary way YouTube creators make money. There aren't many things that could knock YouTube off its near-monopoly market position, but banning sponsorships is definitely one. Creators would revolt.

How is this in a way related to that or not gaf about creators?

I pay €14/mo to not have ads on YouTube. It's good they have the skip feature for those sponsor segments, since they're just embedded ads.

Creators still benefit as my view has a higher $. Well... not anymore I suppose with the view attribution endpoint being blocked by my adblock.

My PC, my rules.

Everything on my PC is on my terms, and I don't watch ads.

Only when they pay me for the use of my computer equipment and network traffic, do they have any claim to tell me what I must watch on it.

They don't like it, they can feel free to not send me network traffic.

If they really don't want people to watch without ads... surely a tech company of their calibre is capable of blocking content server side, or putting it behind a login.

Forgive me for not feeling morally inadequate compared to a multinational that happily takes ad revenue for toddlers on ipads having their brain fried by endless AI slop that they refuse to moderate.

I'm seeing the same ad. There's no way that can be legal to broadcast.

yeah I had a deep fake Kier Starmer tell me about some investment opportunity with guaranteed returns.

I borrowed the phone of someone who is older to watch a facebook video in the app. In the middle of the video there was a video ad with sound playing, an amber alert for sound and a warning to click the link. The next ad after that one was also a warning that there was a virus and you needed to click the link

Hah, the next move will be picture-in-picture ads (whether the ad or the content will be in the box in the corner depends on the desperation...

Reminds me of F1 racing coverage on a free-to-air German TV network being reduced to a letterbox..

I'll stick with Sponsorblock since Googles motto is "Embrace, Expand, Extinguish"

It would be great to live in a world where everyone could make cool stuff without needing to get paid, but we don't. Monetization is why YouTube gained a community in the first place.

That's bizarre. I watch a lot of great content on YouTube that's possible because those people get paid. I would rather like if YouTube paid them _more_ because the sponsors and patrons of the world prove that not all views are the same. Sadly, a lot of shit content gets lots and lots of views

YT premium subscribers should disable adblockers anyway

I think it was 300.

The videos for smart people are things like:

* University lectures

* Conference talks

* Random clips of homeowners doing some DIY repair

i.e. things that were being done anyway, and someone decided to post it online because it's free and they wanted to be helpful. "Content creators" are already almost never making videos with high value information. The entire idea of "creating content" rather than "sharing information" is a bad framing to start from. When we recognize that "sharing information" is the high-value action, we're better able to see that it not only can be done by someone who isn't a full-time "creator", but may actually be done better by people who aren't devoted to it since their occupation is to be a practitioner of the field they're sharing information about. i.e. they are better informed.

If you had a lemonade stand, and I came and drank one, told you it was bad and didn't pay, that's one thing. I'd probably not come back.

If I kept coming everyday, multiple times a day, and never paid "because its bad", it's extremely unlikely that I don't like the lemonade, and extremely likely that I just like that it's free as long as I complain.

It's not about sending a message. It's about making sure you use a service in the way it's being offered, or not using it at all.

Well they want you to pay obviously, they don't want you to disappear. Setting an expectation that things should be free on the internet is what killed the internet. We all want good things until we have to pay up.

You are free to go to the bathroom or get a drink when a youtube ad is playing.

They could just embed tracking code to the streaming service? As in: count how many times the chunk of video was sent to the clients, rather than relying on the clients to work as THEY intended...

Client-side analytics must end

They also recently introduced age estimation in the US, which a lot of channels reported as the culprit for reduced view number in their videos.

In short, age estimation will restrict videos from viewers, and a creator has almost no way of knowing if a video was age-restricted or not.

Bellular has a video about the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSYLe6Yq4R4

I wouldn't call it hallucination. It would be coherent stories that fit their belief system and allows them to short their brain. [0]

Coherent stories that are blatantly false are great tools in misinformation and social engineering. [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Deception

The entire way this issue was figured out was because it only affected desktop views that weren't monetized to begin with, which the guy in the linked video guessed meant adblockers.

If the monetization weren't limited to ad-watching views, we'd probably still be trying to figure out what happened.

Do people gather on YouTube because it has value, or specifically because they know it's where money is burning?

Why are view counts displayed prominently in the UI then? Every suggested video shows it's view count as a sort of social proof.

This is a bit too blunt a look at it. YouTube exists as an ecosystem with increasing competition. View and subscriber counts are their core incentive and feedback systems they have with the actual producers that make their whole ecosystem work. Without those there's no real reason for people to put videos there.

This as an open and celebrated system drives producers to advertise for YouTube via the almost-compulsory every-video mention of liking and subscribing and forwarding videos to friends.

Youtube is well aware of this, hence things like the iconic long running physical play button trophy delivery system.

I'd also say more broadly that making such sweeping claims for YouTube as a collective entity not caring at all about viewers is too reductive. It's more defensible and relatable to claim that, though there may be many people working for YouTube because they deeply care about a mission of democratizing multimedia publishing, the incentives and structures around it being a PBC often lead to decisions which drown out that care from corporate heads who are more profit than mission driven.

Why are we not counting financial reasons? Yeah, it’s a number both creators and advertisers looking to strike a direct advertising/sponsorship deal can use as an easy point of reference, which cannot readily be modified by the creator.

But to your point, the site is borderline social media nowadays when you consider all the features.

Bragging rights for sure. Many channels are parasocial relationships, and that number matters a lot to both the creator and the viewers.

It’s also mildly informational. If I see a completely out-of-whack suggestion in my feed, but it has a billion views, suddenly I know why it’s in my feed.

There are probably other reasons. I remember there was ongoing reporting about a race between two channels on YouTube racing to have… I dunno, the first video with a billion views or something. The number of video views for Gangnam Style was something everyone was talking about.

Plus, it’s nice to have. That’s reason enough imo.

It's social proof, specially before you start watching. And after watching it's still interesting in a "huh this trailer got 5M views, didn't know so many people were interested in it" way

> Why would anyone just watching videos on YouTube care how many people have seen the video?

For the same reason online shops show "Most popular" items and ads say "trusted by X people worldwide". People on average apparently like feeling being part of a bigger crowd. If that doesn't make sense to you, you're probably in the minority (which by that logic shouldn't bother you).

yes? It's called pay-per-view. Many creators will insert a segment in the video with a sponsor who will pay them based on their reach. These are typically not blocked, since they're inserted into the video before uploading. YouTube inserts random ads on top of that for every view (which can be blocked).

This makes sense in principle, but is not really what this is primarily about. Or at least I'm not aware of such excessive disparities, and haven't heard this being the primary angle.

Consider Charlie (penguinz0 / MoistCritikal). Hardly a techtuber. Despite this, he has seen a drop in computer-originating views to the tune of 1.4M (avg, eyeballed) -> 800K (avg, eyeballed): https://youtu.be/8FUJwXeuCGc?t=290

Lots of people use adblockers, sure, even those not terminally online and tech enthusiast. But to have nearly half the (computer-originating) views evaporate? https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users

Even from that perspective though, what would be the dominant effect then is the share of computer-originating views compared to other origins, rather than a disparity in adblock use habits for the given audience.

Couldn't that affect third party sponsorships, though? Both getting them and reporting numbers to existing ones?

Objective fact and "more likely" do not match well. While what you're saying in general is true, it is worth also saying that "tech" channels expecting their subscribers to not use ad-blockers is a pretty wild expectations. What they need to do to have financial income is to secure some relevant sponsorship as part of their content. Most people are completely fine with that and many tech channel are doing it right, at least those that I care for. Having to rely on Alphabet's injected Ads is a very poor taste which if they insist of keeping, they should not be producing content at all.

Well at least people's primary source of income isn't hidden behind a black box by corporate overlords or anything

Thats the whole damn point of youtube premium

Well it’s not like youtube couldn’t technically track the views even with adblockers if they wanted. The video is still being streamed after all, you don’t need the client to call another endpoint to know whether it’s streaming the video.

Videos are often monetized via sponsor placements in the videos themselves. The creator of the video would like an accurate view count to report to their sponsors.

This is completely separate from the YouTube platform ads and monetization which is what the ad blockers are blocking.

If you claim your counting views while simultaneoudly andvwithout disclosure don't count views of people using an adbkocker even so you could then thagvis deceiving. If it was the case I second waht the above poster hinted at: seems like a strategy to manipulate public discourse by using influencers frustration over where it hurts them (their purse) enhanced by the haunting sensation of loosing control (since they cannot know how and if they are negatively impacted by what - which makes the desire to find the cause of effect/guilty oarty/or a scapegoat) in order to disincentivice adblockers. If the articles assumptions are correct, and it is beyond googles engineering teams to fix that issue (which seems unreasonabke to assume) theb that would be a pretty (and petty) malign and antisocial policy to pursue. (Don't be evil once was a thing for good reason)

It's for sponsors too so yes a total view count is important since creators use views to negotiate deals. I have adblock[0], but I still watch sponsor spots.

0: I just side step this entirely these days by paying for premium.

If I understand well, my view is not counted as a YouTube Premium subscriber. I’m not sure that anybody is happy with that. Also there is zero good reason to have a separate API for this. Even Google knows this, because Google Analytics has an adblocker proof solution for at least a decade.

> View counts are for monetization

Agree, however view counts, i.e. metrics tracked by YT, or by sponsors,creators in fancy dashboards isn't the view counter we are shown and nobody is questioning how those are implemented. The View Counter means very specific UI component in YT interface shown to regular users.

> view counter isn't for you

Disagree,

View counter is a important decision making input along with the thumbnail, title and duration of the video on if a user will click on the video to watch them.

It is in effect an advertisement for the video.

If that wasn't the case, then YouTube wouldn't be showing them in every list view and next to every thumbnail. When the numbers no longer represent what the users think they represent I would say it is not far from false advertising.

A fair amount of people on here and I have both YT Premium and also use some adblocker, should our views be counted or not according to this point of view? .

>You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source

How are these two statements not contradictions?

To be fair it's mental effort that you now have to expend when you didn't before.

I stopped reading the news because it just became too tiring.

Not saying it's right or wrong. It's just - I understand.

Number of views and views to likes ratio are both signals of value.

> That's emphatically not what people "people want". People want to get paid. And creators get paid based on views.

That's nonsense, as a viewer of YouTube videos I do not expect to her paid for this.

I guess it'd be nice if I were paid for watching YouTube, so maybe you have a point after all! :-)

YouTube serves videos from CDNs, many of which it does not own.

Creators get way more money out of their in-video sponsors than from youtube ads.

Their video platform, your rules? Nah mate, you're just being weird now if you think this is a one way street. You can block ads all you want in your computer but they'll have just as much right to stop serving you videos when you're blocking ads.

Also stop leaving your children unattended on brain slop videos. You're basically speaking out of both sides of your mouth.

Today it's that they're not moderating the content and tomorrow it's a complaint of censorship.

The problem is enforcement. Legal or not, it's extremely unlikely that law enforcement will pursue these kinds of scams.

YouTube already does this for livestreams.

In the age of A.I. blocking that kind of content should be easier than shooting fish in a bucket and the false positives should all be things the platform would be better off without.

Then it used to stop at 301 views, while the system was verifying the veracity of the views, or at least, that's what I've been told…

no.

Well that is not a law, and even bringing it up on a site called "Hacker News" makes me almost think you are making a joke that is going over my head.

I'm also free to automatically skip ads on both TV and youtube.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...

But then they’d have to report significantly lower CPM’s to content creators.

And also free to block it. What was your point again?

They already do something like this - some videos have an indicator for how many times a chunk of a video is played.

Plus that would make cheating on traffic really bandwidth expensive

It seems pretty likely for well over half for a channel like that to use ad blockers.

Tech adjacent has similar levels of ad blocking as tech. If it's mostly people who internet a lot on a PC in your audience, expect a lot of ad blocking.

Back in the day a gaming forum I was part of revealed that 85% of users were ad-blocking. The forum had a few banner ads.

> Objective fact and "more likely" do not match well.

Huh? If I take a die and paint a 6 on the sides which previously had 4 and 5 then it is an objective fact that you will be more likely to roll a 6 than a 1 with that die.

Presumably, it would affect that, and also long-term channel growth. Which would be dastardly if it were intentional, because it would basically cull the platform of channels who voice support for ad blocking.

I wonder if CTR was affected. Could one of the affected channels could have detected that not adding up? I guess it was probably already blocked for privacy. Maybe I shouldn't be giving them ideas.

Interestingly, anybody can now measure what percentage of any channel's viewers run ad blockers, by using publicly available data on how much their views dropped during this period.

Just to be clear, YouTube doesn’t pay users based on view count, it revenue shares based on money generated by ads and subscriptions. Using an ad blocker without premium has always meant the creator doesn’t get paid for the views, because that traffic generates no revenue for them to share

Rephrase it as "Youtube doesn't care about you, just about putting ads in front of your face" and it's not a contradiction. As long as you don't get irritated enough to go away and stop using Youtube entirely, they don't care about improving your viewing experience.

Another way to phrase it is the classic line "If you're not paying for it, you aren't the customer, you're the product."

In the last two weeks I already seen three adverts of a terribly made AI Musk trying to sell me crypto.

I really, really want to see how you do "consume" content with the random stream of intruding Ads every few minutes. I'm really curious to see people enjoying that. Strangely enough I link all that mentality to another one, vivid example of the same "joy" and only experienced in the US. That's the "tipping" culture - you're expected, oh, rather obliged to give a tip when served. I guess people enjoying Ads are the same enjoying that obligation, too. As for the serious matter of good content creators gaining financial support - you probably noticed that there're "membership" options, many do have side platforms with membership as well... So there're ways that actually work, but no, Alphabet doesn't like that, aren't they?

They pretty surely would not.

Where is the "ads are just a way of telling people about things they might want" crowd? heh.

In my opinion the only sponsorships that actually work are the ones that are integrated into the content.

For example Linus Tech Tips wearing his clothing in his videos and using his screwdriver. For car and/or hardware channels I often see sponsors products being used throughout the video as well, which you can't skip with Sponsor block.

Idiocracy TV

https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uploads/2007/01...

That simply isn’t true. YouTube had a huge community when it was just amateurs sharing videos for the love of the sport. Professional content creators didn’t come along until much later.

It's "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" (assuming you're referring to the phrase from Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... )

Why?

I dislike it because it exposes content creators to similar pressures as traditional TV. There's a lot of content that doesn't get made because that content would be unsponsorable or worse yet would make the creator in general unsponsorable. It's also created some strange and twisted linguistics to appease sponsors or YouTube's algorithm like "unalive" or "PDF file" (as a standin for pedophile).

I guess it's the way of the world, but the introduction of heavy monetization has definitely influenced the kind of content YouTube carries.

It's more like a lemonade stand which advertises a free glass of lemonade to anyone who asks for one, but every time someone comes up and asks for a glass the guy handing out cups gives a long-winded highly insulting sermon about how the person drinking should live their life.

Then the lemonade stand guy feels entitled to bitch about it when more and more people start showing up wearing headphones because they don't want to hear his bullshit even though literally nobody came for his abuse, what they came for was just the free lemonade.

The people still show up though because clearly people like the lemonade, they just hate the annoying guy who won't shut up about his rude opinions nobody asked for.

I am not sure that this example really works. Youtube is happy to give you all the "free lemonade" you want (from videos that aren't really monetizable) but the ones that are, they make onerous to use. I get 20+ ads per day right now from an Internet service that I already use, and get untold ads from products that I would never use. Some of the ads are up to 1 hour in duration. Granted, they mercifully offer a skip button, but it seems to me that the ad is being forced on you, not offered to you. That is the big difference. A funny, engaging ad is not a problem for nearly anyone.

Smart people enjoy many different things.

YouTube is free to only serve videos to paying users if they don't like ad blockers. it would destroy the site, but they're technically able to do it.

If I drink your lemonade, you no longer have it. If I watch your video, you still have it.

> Setting an expectation that things should be free on the internet is what killed the internet

You must be very young if you actually think that. In reality the internet was infinitely better when there was no commercialization at all.

Indeed. It's essentially malware.

At least BonziBuddy sang for me.

This would make replays or scrubbing count as additional views. To fix that, they would need some kind of set to uniquely store all clients, and that‘s questionable from a security and moral point of view, even for YouTube.

> These are typically not blocked

sponsorblock would like a word with that!

> But to have nearly half the (computer-originating) views evaporate?

I wonder on the other side why 50% of users would not take the few minutes to install an ad blocker.

Aren’t those segments deals between the creator and the sponsors and nothing to do with Youtube?

For better or worse a gigantic portion of people who make their livelihoods on the internet are fully dependent on closed source platforms. Do you think people who sell things on Shopify or Etsy are any more able to scrutinize the systems they depend on to make a living?

Google built a system that tracked video views. Users installed a browser extension that intentionally breaks this tracking for privacy reasons. Why should Google do anything? They're not the one that broke it, and these users don't want to be tracked!

It was funny how my former boss (also a software engineer) looked when I showed him that you get the same thing by installing an ad blocker ^^

People who install ad blockers are perhaps not good recipients of in-video sponsor placements. So maybe not counting them as viewers is at least honest to the sponsor?

With something like YouTube there are so many different parties involved. Sponsor, creator, Google, advertiser, consumer. Clearly the system could be optimized for any of them, or it can present some balances that naturally make one or more of the groups unhappy. Clearly it's easy to criticize the system if it's not optimized to your perspective of it.

It's very unpopular to say it, (cue downvotes) but on the whole I think Google mostly gets it right. Advertisers have a channel to reach consumers [3]. Creators have a way to earn income [1], consumers watch for free [2], Google makes money (and provides infrastructure).

[1] sponsorships are allowed, although none of that revenue flows to Google, which I think is fairly tolerant of Google.

[2] Google has an option to turn off ads with YT Premium.

[3] Ad blockers serve consumers, but hurt the whole system. I get that they're very popular here, but they are effectively a tax on Google, and now on creators. A more ethical approach IMO (and ethics are both personal and subjective) is to pay for YT Premium if you'd prefer to suppress ads. Then you are "paying your way" not free-loading.

This is the best counterargument I've seen for why YouTubers might be vexed by this, however I've felt it was pretty fair to expect that adblocked views don't really "count" in the "game" that you can argue YouTube is operating with the "View Count" metric and therefore I don't see much room for anyone to feel indignant or wronged.

Imagine a creator whose viewers all watched with ads blocked (and without YT Premium either). That creator is, objectively speaking not partnering with Google in any way, they're just using the platform as a free CDN. So the failure of Google to provide that person with accurate metrics for him to operate his business (that Google isn't a part of) isn't all that offensive.

So someone losing visibility to their "views" if it's because of non-monetized views (adblocked ones) seems proportionally fair.

There's always self-hosting your videos, but yes, that's expensive. It's a tradeoff the content creator has to make: A cut of your revenue + a ton of content restrictions, in exchange for discoverability + free CDN.

I can't reply to your deeper comment but there is a youtube specific extension that blocks ads to sponsor placements by skipping them.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo...

Has 2 million users which isn't a ton but just mentioning that it is used and it works well.

What you're ignoring is that this was a change to an ad blocker[0], not a change to the site.

Google did not implement a change to stop counting views. An ad blocker intentionally[1] choosing to block the long-standing API calls used for the view statistics. How would you propose Google fix this, when there is an adversarial team in control of what requests many browser may make, and are choosing to use it to break the site?

[0] Or rather, an URL block list used by many ad blockers.

[1] It was almost certainly an honest mistake originally. But when the blocklist authors were informed of the problem and chose to not roll back the change, it became intentional.

It's counted as a view, and beyond that, in general the content creator gets a higher payout from Premium viewers than from ad viewing users.

Why should sponsor care sent viewers who block their advertising?

I’ve been a premium member for about 15 years.

I'm so glad other people here pay for premium because on Tiktok and Reddit a common joke is how few people pay for YT.

My Verizon cell phone plan offers it at a slightly discounted $10 a month. For a completely ad free (ads from Youtube) experience it's well worth it considering how many car and tech videos I watch.

It also offers a higher bitrate 1080p option on some videos which is a cherry on top.

That's deliberately misinterpreting. The overwhelming criticism of this view count regression kerfuffle was centered around creators and the lost revenue: YouTube was pervasively accused of cooking numbers to stiff their creators.

No one anywhere was arguing from the perspective of a viewer. Until it turned out that the regression was due to an adblocker change. Now suddenly creators don't matter and it's really the viewer's visibility into view counts that is the important element.

And that seems... insincere.

I guess, first, I'll caveat all this with: I have enough money to buy things.

I pay for YT premium because I put my money where my mouth is.

I also simply avoid content that has ads, and have ended up blocking a lot of sources from my news apps because of the ads-to-quality ratio not being worth it. I also don't try to get around paywalls. When I get a pop up that asks me to enable cookies to see the content, or subscribe, I just close the page and don't consume the content because I don't like the terms.

I tip because, even though I think the tipping system is entirely bullshit (and never got tips while working in fancy restaurant kitchens because there was no tip sharing), people deserve to make a living and me stiffing people on their tips is just me being shitty and not some grand revolutionary gesture against the system.

What I don't do is create my own terms on which to still consume the content/services I'm getting.

Also worth noting that absolutely none of this represents some endorsement of that companies like Google, Meta, etc do (in particular in the ads-based world).

I don't like ads, I don't like shitty JS. I don't like being "forced" (by norms) to tip.

I just agree to either paying for something (directly or indirectly), or not using the product.

And, maybe most of all, I don't believe that Google being shitty means I can be shitty. My ethics are mine, and they're not relative.

They wouldn't have a choice, your average big youtube channel earns 95% of their revenue from sponsorship.

It would either be trying a revolt or stop youtube.

They're tailored to your habits somehow. It's not like those videos are served to housewives who watch and search for completely different segments of reality. They'll be getting the gutworm RFK lotus seed ads.

An investment opportunity with guaranteed returns is something I would definitely want if it actually existed.

I can make that argument wholeheartedly, not even as a “steelman” when it comes to legitimate advertising but so much of it is criminal, morally if not legally —- and the victim is not just the viewer but also the advertiser which is running ads that are completely mistargeted, that damage their brand, or get fraudulent clicks —- I remember the layout of anandtech always shifting around so you would try to click on a link and just before you did an ad would slide under your finger and ka-Ching! Was it by accident or design.

On the other hand I’ve known people who sold ads for newspaper and radio and all of them had some sense of ethics.

They live in the pages of an economics textbook, blissfully untethered from reality.

Right behind the "regulatory agencies are asleep at the switch" crowd.

If you build /anything/ there will be people who dedicate time to learning how to abuse it for profit.

We don't live in Narnia.

Honestly, LTT does a real good job of their in-content ads as well. 30 seconds at the beginning and end. Them being so short and sweet really makes them more palatable.

What's crazy is they've said their 60 seconds of ads per video generate way more revenue per video than Google's minutes of Google Adsense ads. So the real story here is the collapse of Adsense.

Product placement ads can be the best kind when they’re done well. The catch is they take far more effort to weave naturally into content, and that limits the kinds of sponsorships you can accept.

The sweet spot is when it feels seamless, but too often creators overdo it and the result is hilariously awkward. Think of someone discussing, say, the dangers of mountain climbing, then suddenly blurting out: “And you know what else is dangerous? An unprotected connection. Which is why you need X VPN!”

Likes to dislikes is an even better signal. Shame on YouTube for removing that.

I don't think there was ever a time when critical thinking and fact checking wasn't needed. Nobody has the time to do deep dives into everything, but the more important something is to you, or the more likely it is to impact your life the more it's worth investing the time it takes to do a couple web searches.

Today CNN says that Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro has skin cancer. Is that true? Damned if I know. Will I spend the time trying to verify that? Nope.

I missed the part where that's our problem.

Creators are already starting to build their own platforms for hosting videos and many of these are quite successful unlike prior iterations from 10 years ago.

What do you mean when you say ”work”? That you personally find them helpful? Or that they’re the only ones that can’t be easily avoided even if the viewer wants to?

I think it’s pretty clear that other forms of sponsorships also drive revenue to advertisers (whatever people may feel about that)

What I've never understood is, aren't people slowly waking up to product placement and sponsored content?

Whenever I see something thoroughly being advertised, and especially stealthily advertised, I immediately assume you have a shit product and need to bribe your way to success. Nothing turns me off more from a product than seeing an advertisement for it.

YouTube stole that user interface, Judge should have sued them.

You can do that today too. Like a channel Airborne Entertainment, strapping a boat motor to a car. Dump engineering, just two dudes doing stupid shit.

Yes, right, thank you

What I listed encompasses many things. You can find lectures on philosophy, biology, anatomy, psychology, physics, Russian literature, religion, history, or whatever topic you're interested in. It's more about depth of information and level of expertise of the presenter vs. "lower rung click bait garbage". Information that demands your full attention for an extended period of time and expects you'll put in effort to engage with it instead of just throwing gimmicks at you to hold a piece of your attention before you click away.

Or if you want to enjoy some slop, then apparently we'll all get plenty of that if the smart people block malware, so no problem.

Generally speaking, something with wide appeal is going to be trash anyway because most people aren't going to want to (or will be unable to) engage with any given topic at more than a superficial level. e.g. compare Andrew Ng's Coursera MOOC to problem sets you can find from his real class at Stanford. It is obvious that he watered down the information hard for Coursera. Almost every class on those MOOC sites is of the "X for non-X majors" variety at best (and that's for people who are motivated enough to self-learn!), which IMO is why it could never truly be disruptive. The "creators" people are talking about are generally this except even more targeted at mass audiences.

Even for people who are interested in "smart" stuff, 100x more people will watch some 10 minute video of surface level discussion with doodles about algebraic geometry[0] and then move onto another 10 minute video vs. putting in the work to engage with 15+ hours of lectures on the subject from a Fields Medalist[1]. World-class researchers provide graduate level educational materials for free (which is awesome), but they could never succeed as "content creators" because any given video will only get ~1k views after years of being up.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MflpyJwhMhQ

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8yHsr3EFj53j51FG6wCb...

It would be really tough. I do think YouTube provides a lot of value by making its videos accessible to everyone.

Plenty of closed ecosystem streaming services exist and they continue to be niche things where creators who had no audience before YouTube are trying to keep going. I'm not sure how long the likes of Nebula and Floatplane are going to last honestly, because they have fundamental discovery issues in both directions:

The creators need a constant influx of new viewers to replace people growing out of their content, and the viewers need a platform where they can experiment with new content without a big paywall upfront.

> YouTube is free to only serve videos to paying users if they don't like ad blockers. it would destroy the site, but they're technically able to do it.

This is why enshittification exists.

I may or may not be younger than you, that is of no relevance other than a vague appeal to defer to your experience about it.

I find plenty of valuable things on the current internet that wouldn't exist without commercialization, the possibility of a career as an individual YouTuber or streamer, for example.

And I'd like to see them continue and be actually paid for their efforts in a sustainable way instead of pining for a return to "all content is just passion side projects".

Because absolutely nothing about the current internet stops people from posting passionately as a side project.

ah that takes me back, going to the Uni computers and have all them ridden with malware and browser bars so thick you could barely browse the net

but still you could go home and have a reasonable setup, there is no escape from the current "open" interwebs

I’d love to go back to a completely non-commercial internet that only contains things people put there with no expectation or possibility of profit.

The Internet was infinitely more fun but also infinitely less useful.

I have the rosey glasses too. The reality is that it was just a bunch of edgy kids messing around with no adults in the room.

Because Chrome/Edge blocked them, and people don't switch browsers unless they are technical.

yeah, FWIU they are an increasingly popular monetization channel in addition to YT's built-in ad-rev system (which is famously very bad for creators)

*) and conveniently for YT that out-of-band monetization channel - which they don't profit from - is the exact thing that's negatively affected by an overall drop in view counts

> Why should Google do anything?

Imagine the headlines if Google did do something - "YouTube implements advanced user tracking to counter act Privacy and Ad blocker"

> A more ethical approach IMO (and ethics are both personal and subjective) is to pay for YT Premium if you'd prefer to suppress ads.

Labeling people who use ad blockers as unethical is hypocritical, to say the least.

The supremely unethical behavior is coming from companies who decide to use advertising as their business model, and the entire adtech industry that powers it. They lie, cheat, steal, and exploit user data in perpetuity, yet users are supposed to feel guilty for trying to block all of this hostility? Give me a break.

> consumers watch for free

They don't watch for "free". They pay with their data and attention, which is worth much more than any reasonable price Google could charge for the service. This discrepancy is so large, in fact, that all ad-supported web platforms should be paying users for using their service.

Choosing to pay for YT Premium simply makes the experience more bearable by removing the annoyance of being constantly bombarded with ads, but all the shady data extraction, profiling, tracking, and manipulation still happens behind the scenes, across all Google products, and beyond.

The fact society has accepted a business model that introduces a hostile middleman in all of their business transactions, and that we've been brainwashed into calling this "free", is deeply disturbing. Not least because the same machinery is also used to serve us propaganda and manipulate us not just into buying things, but into thinking and acting in ways that benefit the agenda of whoever has the will and a negligible amount of resources to run an ad campaign. And yet we wonder why society is crumbling around us. It's some perverse version of Stockholm syndrome.

So, no, I will never feel guilty for using ad blockers, and no sane person should. If content creators want my money, they can choose more ethical business models, which are also likely to be less profitable and more difficult to manage. But, hey, that is the price to pay if you care about ethics, and not participating in machinery that exploits your viewers.

I subscribe to Premium for this reason, and am mostly content with my subscription. Two aspects I don’t like are that it’s tied to my centralized google identity, and that YouTube doesn’t have enough competition.

Not true, most all but the very top creators have stopped relying on Youtube's measly ad revenue and just run sponsored content instead, in which case the actual view count (minus SponsorBlock users anyway) is very relevant to show how much they actually reached.

What Google gets out of it is free content for their platform, which other platforms seem to be only able to dream about, and accurate metrics would be something like the lowest possible bar to provide. But well, turns out you can do just about whatever if you're the defacto monopoly and the experience doesn't matter anymore, not for creators, not for the consumers.

Google provides YouTube to creators because Google derives a benefit from it. If they don't want those "freeloaders" hosting videos without Google getting anything in return, then they can charge for it, or delist them, or delete their videos, or whatever.

But they are getting something in return: a near monopoly in this particular market.

Not providing correct view counts just because some of those viewers use adblockers feels kinda petty.

Google could improve the way they serve ads. Like, one ad per “ad session”, no 5 minute ads that are longer than the video you are trying to watch, etc.

They are trying to increase ad revenue, but by increased Nguyen ads and making it harder to skip them it ironically is causing much worse practices such as ad blocking.

And this ships as a plugin to some unofficial YouTube player. The actual number is far higher.

I'd worry that if this is really caused by an adblocker, it's possible YT uses these same view counting mechanism that's being blocked to increment their Premium views, meaning Premium subscribers who don't explicitly turn their blocker off on YouTube could be being undercounted. If so that should be fixed, for Premium viewership, as that's not really fair to anyone.

Yeah it's absurd to me how much people bitch about YouTube advertising and don't pay. To me, either you don't watch enough YouTube for the complaints to be warranted, or you do watch a lot, and you're just torturing yourself to save $15 and blaming YouTube for your choice. It's like complaining about a Quarter Pounder "not coming with cheese" and constantly trying to steal cheese, when you could just pay the dollar and get cheese every time.

And they stayed because they could get paid for it.

Because YT doesn't serve ads to those users, so there is nothing to block at best, and at worst it screws up view counts.

If you go to the side table of the stand, you can purchase a lemonade, no hassle, no sermon. But people are incredibly opposed to this because they genuinely believe that they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost.

No, the ad is not being forced on you.

It's your choice to go to youtube and watch the video. No one is forcing that on you. Youtube is a service that is offered. If you don't like youtube or the ads, you can not use the service. Just like no one is forcing you to go to the lemonade stand.

You can make content without monetization in mind. But it's like giving your time away.

Content which doesn't get made without sponsorship wouldn't get made even if sponsorships didn't exist.

People want to get rewarded for they work, you know. Do you also want your plumber to work for free?

Ah yes the infinitely reproducible digital content fallacy. If you watch a movie at the cinema, they still have the movie, do you expect that to be free too?

Products have more than just marginal production costs, especially true for digital ones.

The cost to youtube is the overhead. Youtube doesn't even pay for the videos, but the infrastructure, delivery network, and service is very expensive.

It's a very naive view to think that serving videos is a zero-cost endeavor because the video isn't consumed.

What? Replays already do count as additional views. Load a video one day, then load it again the next day. That's two views. There isn't a way to avoid this non-problem.

I'm not sure what you mean by "scrubbing".

local cache should handle scrubbing

Though that’s a bit of a dick move to use that. I don’t have a problem with the author making money, I just don’t like the tracking and the politics of youtube. Also those ads are skippable, where yt ones aren’t.

Indeed. But they typically are contingent on a certain number of views. If adblockers cause that stat to go down, then you get the opposite of what you are aiming to achieve: the user will see the "message from our sponsor" but their view does bot contribute to providing that sponsor with the data that the youtuber held up their end of the deal. Ends up bring an unpaid ad.

You can sell on Shopify _and_ Etsy and make money on both (as long as you don’t cross Mastercard/Visa).

Turning a profit on video outside YouTube is a far more difficult undertaking.

My point: This problem is far worse when a monopoly is involved.

it's not the same thing. it looks the same to you, because you don't give a shit, but it's not the same.

I want ad-free viewing on any youtube client in my house, and I do not want to maintain infrastructure to allow that. The terms of the service indicate that I should pay if I want an ad-free experience, so that's what I do.

Some unknown portion of my subscription fee goes towards the monetization of videos that I watch, which I definitely want to happen. Ad blockers don't pay people in lieu of ads, and youtube premium does.

What about adblocked views by YouTube Premium subscribers?

The point is that a view counter should show an accurate and honest count of views, because that's what it's presented as and lying is bad. Why should ad blocking have anything to do with that? Companies should aim to protect their revenue stream by providing a good service, not cripple their service to match the basest vision of their revenue incentives.

Because it’s hurting creators, not viewers?

There is also kind of a built in sponsorblock for YouTube on mobile. If you double tap to skip 5s repeatedly, a button quickly pops up to skip ahead (not explicitly about sponsor segments, but I'm sure this is what it is used for 99% of the time).

Ad blockers and Premium don’t block embedded sponsorships in the videos themselves, which are a common way for creators to monetize their videos.

I think the idea that newspapers and TV were ever honest is an illusion. I remember my parents and grandparents ranting about the lies published by major newspapers in the 80s and 90s either on topics or people they knew. We tend to forget the bad things in distant past, particularly a past we haven’t lived through. I don’t think news sources are worse today. They were always bad.

Metrics from the CDN will be wildly inaccurate. Also downloading a video isn’t the same as watching it.

I think the two existing replies to this question already answered this mostly, but I would define a "working" sponsorship as one that makes me consider buying it. Sponsorships that are basically just an add I don't even see thanks to SponsorBlock for example. So those are "not working" for me.

But for the LTT screwdriver or the bamboo labs 3D printers where I see how they can be used I actually consider buying them or have already done so. One factor for this is obviously that they can't be skipped, but the bigger one is that they are obviously more relevant for me as I am already interested in the video's topic and therefore the products used in it.

Work as in, "are effective at advertising a product"

Showing "regular" people solving common recurring issues like, "what clothes should I wear, what tool will simplify this task, what products are effective at a good value, what software/hardware can accomplish the goals I have set" are the only effective advertising for many people.

Sure, with kids you can show them a cool toy that other kids are playing with, inspiring desire.

You can show adults and teens a sexy girl or a hot guy somehow attached to the product so that by association your product is hot or sexy, but those are the low handing fruit and only work on specific demographics.

However, if you can clearly identify your target audience and then put a product that matches that audience in front of them while showing how the product is being used, thats it. Everyone who would purchase that type of product will buy it.

> Or that they’re the only ones that can’t be easily avoided even if the viewer wants to?

Surely this one given what they wrote.

> which you can't skip

In theory I agree with you, but apparently most people fall for it.

The speed and spread of nonsense is accelerating. Within a day the story about youtube view counts spread with hundreds of angry comments about youtube and enshitification.

People are getting ragebaited repeatedly on a scale that is new. Not that misinformation in general is new

You can actually use a browser extension to show it still. The dislike count is still available, just not shown.

Do you have some examples? I am still a bit sore from my adventures as a creator on Viddler and Dailymotion.

It can be argued whether it is better to have creators who make it their income to constantly produce content or to have a revolving door of amateurs who cut their teeth on video production in youtube and move on.

I'd probably be OK if all the content which doesn't get made without sponsorship wouldn't get made at all, and the people who work as content creators stopped doing so. There is an overabundance of new content, having 10x less content would be perfectly fine, and in pretty much every niche there are amateur enthusiasts who clearly (based on their amount of viewers) are giving their time away, and their content is in many ways preferable and "more real" than the professionals - so I'd be OK if all the professionals stop and these awkward amateur enthusiasts are all that remain.

The same applies to web and blogs; the ability to monetize them by ads (and I do remember the "old web" before it was the case) increased the content but drowned out viewership for the true enthusiasts running things in their spare time, which IMHO were more valuable and I think that regime was better; again, losing 90% or 99% of the content wouldn't be bad in my mind, there still would be more than enough for anyone to ever "consume".

>You can make content without monetization in mind. But it's like giving your time away.

You're missing the point entirely, the content I refer to as more interesting is stuff people made for fun or on principle not because of financial incentive

Imagine if people only commented on hn because they were expecting a paycheck for it

If they don't want people to watch without paying, they can put up a paywall.

Ok but Youtube shouldn't payout.

In a way agree with that, and I don't use sponsorblock because of that, but there's another side too: sponsored segments are a dick move too. Well, probably not all of them, but certainly a lot of them. YouTubers proudly proclaiming they use the sponsored product and they are oh so happy with it is lying, most of the time, plain and simple. And the products that are advertised on YouTube are very often on the shady side of things too.

Views might be important to get the attention of a potential advertising partner, but once the relationship has started then keeping it going will likely be dependent on much more relevant metrics for the advertiser. And those metrics will usually be tracked on their end, rather than via YouTube. I'm referring to metrics like click-through rate, propensity to order, revenue on advertising spend, etc. Personalized referral URLs and discount codes are what allow the advertisers to connect their tracking and reporting to the originating YouTuber.

I don't know, it's not obvious to me that YouTube should prioritize the creator's desire to track users over the user's desire not to be tracked.

So what's your suggestion for how YouTube could be doing better here?

Especially in the scenario that (as the top level comment in this thread suggests) YouTube didn't actually make any changes and the reason the views dropped is because EasyList added an entry to their privacy filter. Should YouTube have recognized that they're in a quasi-monopoly position as you suggest, done the research to identify EasyList as the culprit behind the view metric drop, and then released a change to their client to add a new endpoint which isn't blocked by EasyList?

We don't know that the EasyList theory is what's really going on here, but if you're going to tar YouTube/Google over this ordeal, then I think you have some responsibility for suggesting how they could have done better.

>lying is bad

So turn off your ad blocker so you don’t lie about your views.

I pay for premium. YouTube clearly keeps track of what I'm watching. It's in my history amongst other things. My adblocker is not coming down.

You’re wrong. The tracking code is two pronged: 1 to serve you ads, 2 to track you. By blocking ads while paying for Youtube Premium you block the tracking end as well.

This goes for any site that sells you an ad-free subscription. No ads but you’re still being profiled.

> If you go to the side table of the stand, you can purchase a lemonade, no hassle, no sermon. But people are incredibly opposed to this because they genuinely believe that they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost.

How dare people genuinely believe they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost, when it's got a huge sign that says "FREE LEMONADE"!

Youtube has every right to take down the free lemonade sign and paywall off their service, but they wont because they know they make far more money luring in the people who come for the free videos, sucking up their personal data, and then increasingly abusing them until some number of suckers cave and start paying into their protection racket scheme.

A racket is exactly what youtube premium is too. Never pay someone for protection against the very harms they're causing you. There's nothing to stop them from demanding increasing amounts of protection money whenever they feel like it, which is exactly what Google has done. Repeatedly. Most recently sticking their oldest suckers with a 62% hike in protection fees. (https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1jqzu4g/et_tu_yout...)

Don't encourage or try to justify that kind of shit. Just put on a pair a headphones and enjoy the sweet lemonade Google chooses to offer for "free". Don't forget that even with those headphones, Google is still collecting every scrap of data they can get from you and your device while you're using their service and that they'll happily leverage all of that data against you in any way they can think of, any time they feel it might benefit them. That price is itself high enough, but for me still worth what I'm getting from the content I view.

(Shrug) As a Premium user, Google obviously knows what videos I'm watching, given that I'm logged in. Failure to credit the creator accordingly would amount to fraud.

So that sounds like a 'them' problem, not a 'me' problem. There is no reason for ad tracking to play any role in the process whatsoever.

Or he can just use it and block ads :)

> do you expect that to be free too?

The seating and good screen and audio? No.

The digital file? I don't expect Disney to provide that free of charge, or at all for that matter, but I do believe it should be free. Copyright has gone way too far of one end of the scale, and I'd like to pull it as far as possible to the other side, then hopefully we can meet in the middle in a position we can both respect. The current position taken by Society™ is one I don't respect.

Scrubbing is a video editing term for going forwards and backwards over a video to find specific frames and editing them

No such thing for YT videos. Official player will refetch video chunks if you so much as rewind 5 minutes back.

> it's not the same thing. it looks the same to you, because you don't give a shit, but it's not the same

I give a shit, I just give more of a shit about my personal privacy and my data not being shared with hundreds of anonymous third parties through the advertising auction mechanism than I do about a creator being paid.

Give me ads without RTB and I’ll very seriously reconsider my adblock usage.

Viewers are hurting the creators then. If you care so much about the creators, turn off your ad blocker.

Fortunately, YouTube doesn't tell creators how many of their viewers have SponsorBlock, which means the sponsors have no way to know that either.

It was great business on YouTube's part to make customers feel adblocking is a dick move though.

Premium absolutely does, via YouTube's new "Jump Forward" feature.

There's a new skip method for premium members (which I have) where you can skip commonly skipped sections as recorded by other users.

For example- if a video has a section about their sponsor from 3:30 to 4:10 and I press the right seek button twice around 3:30 the jump will be to 4:10. It also displays an alert that it's using the feature.

sponsorblock does

FYI this is a premium-only feature. It's one that I am very thankful for. I pay a pretty penny for youtube and I don't appreciate "creators" end-running around that to peddle their shitty AG1 supplements or woodworking tools I can't buy in my country.

Some do. With crowd funded submissions on where the placement starts and ends.

I've heard that it's not actual dislike count, but extrapolated data contributed from people who installed the extensions. But I've also heard that some channels have compared it to their actual dislike count and it only differs little.

I’m not sure about that is there’s something that could’ve happened in the 60s that is so oddly technical, yet understood by millions of people? that it could be misinterpreted and spread like this: add block users mistaken as bots? It would just sound like gobbledygook to someone in the 1960s.

Google already doesn't pay out creators for views with blocked ads, no advertiser is going to pay for ads that were never shown. The view counter doesn't matter to that. Perhaps Youtube could enforce tougher blocking of ad blockers to support creators better.

I would point to platforms like Curiosity Stream and Nebula, which are creator driven. Though I would not exactly call them Youtube replacements, as they are more just platforms designed for supporting specific creators more directly (akin to Patreon). These platforms are often advertised as in-video sponsorships, so going back to the original point, I do think creators would be very vocal if such ads were banned.

Kick is one that's been poaching big names lately. I've also seen people starting to stream on X and Rumble.

They are serving you that content. They know anyway.

People who pay for YouTube Premium are already tracked by virtue of the fact that they are a logged in user who has a credit card associated with their account.

Google has to do no legwork here to figure out who you are and what videos you are watching. There is no ambiguity. There should be no reason to not count views from Premium subscribers who don't disable their ad-blocker.

I'm sure Google knows this, and has a good reason for this behavior that they are not telling us. I'm not sure what it could be, other than spite.

I don't see where YouTube has a sign saying its free. It's openly ad supported.

It's also an optional website/app. No need to get heated, you can use another service.

I'm not sure why it seems you have downvotes for saying that. Premium users by their very nature need to be logged in. YouTube has all of the watch stats for logged in users without needing the view to hit an extra analytics endpoint. They can and should just use that.

and YT 'multiple times throughout a video playback' client side endpoint has been tracking this for years reporting every single minute of video you watched, thats what is powering Most Replayed Feature (scroll bar graph showing popular moments in every video)

You can use Premium with an ad blocker

And that is incredibly annoying for the user and a problem Youtube should fix.

A view counter from premium member (user without ads) should count.

I agree copyright goes too far, but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything. Creative content producers still need food to eat. We still need mechanisms to pay them for it, the more direct the better.

The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes.

Yes but I guess the advice is better supported on platforms where your identity is not directly tied.

No reason to ever turn off your ad-blocker even if you do pay and they identify you.

> but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything.

Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything.

> We still need mechanisms to pay them for it, the more direct the better.

Patreon is a good option, although I wish we had better ones. It's not like Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%. Anyone who's tried that has discovered that Youtube's payout is some extra pocket change rather than anything you can actually sustain a business with; hence why everybody who's on Youtube and does it as a business also has a Patreon or does sponsorships, or something else, as that's the only way to make ends meet.

> The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes.

I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure.

If the point of "ad blocker" is not to "block ads" then maybe it needs rebranding.

> > but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything.

> Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything.

Poor wording on my part, because I was typing on my phone. "Everything" refers to everything related to copyright law. Your original comment implied that we should just burn it all down (going "as far as possible to the other side"), and I don't agree with that.

Copyright has been weaponized of course, but there are considerations worth keeping in mind about why it exists in the first place. The intent is to create mechanisms that incentivize creation of art, and allow creatives to distribute said art without other people getting automatic ownership of the fruits of their labor, just by virtue of having the file.

In a world where distribution of media is (relatively) cheap and easy, we need to think more about how we incentivize the creative process, instead of making it a wild west where anyone is allowed to distribute if they have the bits on them. In a world where everyone pirates, very little worth pirating remains.

EDIT: Forgot to respond to the rest.

I agree about patreon, but also:

> Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%.

That's not accurate. Of course if you have a couple hundred subscribers you get nothing from youtube, but neither does a random busker on the subway. Arts are just brutally competitive, and there's way more art being produced than people want to consume.

Youtube's partner programs are quite generous as other people have pointed out in sister comments. In addition, a good chunk of your premium subscription goes directly to the creators you're subscribed to.

> I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure.

This misses my point, but illustrates the weird thought process people go through when assigning value to digital media. When trying to value a desk we're willing to go through the whole shebang: cost of materials, quality of materials, quality of the craftsmanship and how much labour it would have required, the estimated cost of all the manufacturing processes involved, finishing labor costs etc.

But when the conversation is about paying for digital content we only focus on the direct value it provides to us, the consumer. The entire conversation about input value just gets lost.

Now input value is not always perfectly correlated with the output value (it's shaped differently for each customer), but the fact that the conversation simply shifts away as if creators and people building the platforms don't exist outside of the stream of bytes feels disingenuous.

YouTube gives creators 55% of ad revenue once they get over 1k subscribers, it's pretty generous.

Right, they are content blockers with a focus on malware (but also annoyances like cookie banners or whatever you'd like via right-click menu). Adware is a subset of what they block. "Web malware blocker" is probably the most concise while reasonably correct characterization.

"People should disable their web malware blockers to support creators" makes the insanity of the proposition as clear as it ought to be. "FBI recommends using a web malware blocker" makes the advice as obvious as it ought to be.

55% of basically nothing is still basically nothing. It's something stupid low like 0.001 cents per ad viewed, all depending on audience. Hence the need to not be reliant on youtube.