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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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I'm at a loss for words. Surely, YouTube trying to Adwall would be the stupidest thing in social media history. Surely, Musk changing Twitter's name would be the stupidest thing. No, Steve Huffman has somehow managed to surpass the old masters. "We can survive without people being able to find our website VIA SEARCH RESULTS"! YOU. STUPID. MOTHERFUCKER.
The YouTube ad-blocker ban isn't stupid at all.
Something isn't a bad business decision just because you don't like it. That's now how business works.
"I won't watch videos at all if I can't view them without watching ads or paying money."
....Yeah. That's the idea. From a business perspective people who don't pay or view ads are leeches they're perfectly happy to burn off.
If you view people as purely advertising receptacles then this business move is logical. But if you view people as agents that can build their own alternatives or advertise your services then this would seem to be a dumb business move.
If you view people who actively cost you money while bringing nothing to your business as assets you're bad at business.
If 100% of people who used adblockers decided to stop using YouTube entirely over this, the only result would be YouTube saving money. Video hosting is simply too expensive for anyone to make a website where anyone can host and view for free without ads.
Well that's the contention. Your example starts and ends with people leaving YouTube. If YouTube is the limit of consideration then yes, no value exists outside YouTube and this is a silly argument.
People will find alternatives. You can't stop people witj adblockers from using YouTube by blocking adblockers - no more than you can stop piracy. People just build better, more resilient ways to bypass things. This decision has good understanding of business but not psychology.
The only real way is to make it more convenient to use YouTube with ads, so no one goes for adblockers anyway.
They absolutely can, and I suspect the day is coming soon when they do.
Instead of simply putting ad breaks in the video, they'll be able to splice in a few ads to the video and re-render it to include ads each time someone clicks on the video.
But but everything on the internet should be free! /s
most people dont take issue with the fact that there is ads but with how intrusive they are.
Idk browsing Lemmy often makes me think that many of these people expect software devs to literally work for free.
And it costs nothing to host YouTube don't youj know. We should have a foss version and get ride of it.
I don't think polel realize how much bandwidth and storage YouTube uses.
It's called PeerTube. It's getting more content, but anything that isn't completely wacked out is poorly produced and there doesn't seem to be any sort of decent search to find the rare interesting content.
I caught the sarcasm, and don't disagree. Just saying that a FOSS version does exist.
And how inappropriate some of them are and the sheer number of them
YouTube is perfectly happy if people who block ads go away. Do you really think your traffic is beneficial to them if you don't watch ads?
I mean, I hate it too, but it's obviously not a bad business decision.
I've seen people make the argument that no matter what you do if they successfully break adblockers, Google stands to make a profit, but it could actually hurt advertisers.
Obviously, if you stop watching, then that's less overhead for them, and if you pay for premium, then that's literal money in their wallet. But if you start watching ads, Google can leverage more money from advertisers for the increased views. But people who use adblockers are unlikely to click ads, so advertisers pay more for their ads to be shown to people who weren't going to click on them anyway.
Ironically, it's in both our interest and advertisers to stop Google from breaking adblockers.
Someone that youtube blocks now is a customer for youtubes now/eventual competitor. You might say they're low quality since they won't pay or view ads, but they still share and maybe upload content.
The point being they would rather purge the userbase than give them reason to not use adblock by being more selective with their ads.
That would be Facebook no longer requiring a college email address.
No I'm pretty sure that was a sound business decision.