You may have read about Google’s increased effort to block or limit adblockers on YouTube. Since adblocking is not a huge issue on mobile, Google’s fight has been mostly against desktop users.
Desktop users, be it on Windows, Linux, or Mac, have several options. They can install content blockers in their browsers to block ads. This is a common option, but far from the only one.
To name a few options:
- Use a DNS-based adblocking solution.
- Use a system-wide solution that blocks ads and other unwanted content, e.g., AdGuard.
Desktop and mobile users have other options at their disposal. Popular options include using YouTube frontends such as Invidious or YouTube third-party apps like NewPipe or SmartTube to watch videos without advertisement.
Google’s fight against adblockers intensifies
Google says that it is fighting the fight for content creators on YouTube. While it is true that content creators earn revenue when users watch ads on YouTube, it is also true that YouTube earns money every time as well.
This means that Google’s increased attack on adblocking serves both purposes. It does not end with it, though.
Any YouTube user who disables the adblocker on YouTube gets to see a lot of ads on the site. This can be quite the frustrating experience, especially if ads are shown in the middle of videos.
Here is a theory: Google makes ads on YouTube particularly obnoxious to sell YouTube Premium.
Clearly, YouTube Premium subscriptions offer advantages over ad-based revenue:
- Subscription revenue is more reliable. It comes in every month, even if a customer does not watch a single second of videos on YouTube.
- Subscription revenue is higher than the revenue that a user’s ad views generate.
- If Google’s main advertising business is torpedoed, subscription revenue will continue.
It is in Google’s best interest therefore to sell subscriptions.
The problem with ads
While advertisement can be annoying, especially if too many ads are pushed, there are other reasons why many Internet users dislike them.
One of the main reasons is that they may be used by criminals and threat actors to attack users. Ads may try to convince users to download malware to their devices, open phishing websites, or buy junk status cryptocurrency.
Ads can be reported, but this reporting does not work too reliable. Scam ads may continue to be available even after they have been reported.
There is also the privacy component. Most ads use some form of tracking to increase the bottom line. While tracking will shift fundamentally once Google eliminates third-party cookies later this year, there will still be tracking.
What is your take on all of this? Do you use YouTube at all?
The problem with a YouTube premium account, as well as with any fixed fee service is that, because indeed the fee remains the same whether you use or not the service, the user may be tempted to adopt a Return On Investment attitude and use the service much more than he would otherwise.
I’d prefer a pay-for-the-time-you-spend policy, which may not even exist.
Concerning YouTube, no Premium, definitely not. YT videos, channels, play-lists (still) handled excellently by ‘Piped’ and ‘Invidious’ working instances, ‘Piped’ being in my experience more reliable on the long term.
It’s not a problem of money, it’s just that I access YouTube videos occasionally together with the fact that I just don’t like the cooker even if he cooks nicely, and the cooker is? Google, darn!
It’s a little bit more than pushing everybody into YouTube Premium. YouTube knows that most people would not sign up for Premium. They just want to weed out less technically savvy people from AdBlockers pool. I installed adblockers to a couple of my techs challenged friends. If it becomes a hassle to change scripts, adblockers and VPN addresses every few days just to keep up with YouTube changes, I will do it on my computer, but probably not on theirs. So out of three people that use AdBlocker regularly right now on YouTube, only one will use it forward. And the situation is probably very similar for a lot of people who installed adblockers on their friends computers.
Google seems to be purposely trying to be annoying in more than just ads. In many Google apps, if you want to change the settings Google doesn’t want you to change, you have to jump through 10 different hoops to get to the setting.
Either they are incompetent or they are purposely trying to get people annoyed so that they fix it for themselves, and then when it is fixed, Google does something to break the fix. In the end, Google will lose. They are just taking the long way to get lost.