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Favorite ad blocking setup?
(alien.top)
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this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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TL;DR: If you find value in a service, be ready to pay for it. Either in time or dollars. If you say it's not worth it, you probably won't spend enough time there to care about an AD anyway.
Novel concept: if I consume a significant amount of content from a platform (> ~10 hours a month, and the ADs detract from my experience in a noticeable way, I pay to remove the ADs from that platform.
This group should at least know why as well. Hardware costs money. Power costs money. Cooling costs money. We optimize our labs to run as cheaply as possible, but expect content to be delivered to us freely. Some of you spend more keeping a Plex server operating per month for fewer hours of consumed content than you'd pay YouTube for the same viewing hours.
I've ran an AD blocker a total of 3 days in my life like 6 years ago. The amount of sites that stopped working or became broken was nowhere near the inconvenience of just ignoring the ad in the side bar. I've had 0 issues with drive-by malware, 0 issues with not knowing what link to click. It's odd, staying off the sketchy parts of the Internet seems to lead to a pretty unintrusive Internet experience.
I pay for a YouTube premium family plan and because Google actively incentivizes it, 4 of my friends get it for free as well. I would have gotten the family plan anyway because two individual subs is more than one family, and 6 people get to benefit from it.
I hope the advertisers win. The Internet isn't sustainable long term without a path to profitability. Things become ephemeral, unstable, unusable, and uninteresting if no one cares about making it. How many new creators have you found with interesting content on PeerTube? How many of you are ready to maintain a BBS/forum software in perpetuity because you have an engaged audience? Or there's one popular thread that gets thousands of views per month for some unknown reason?
I don't want ADs to win because I like them. I want them to win because in a world where everyone expects things to be free, someone has to pay. If they don't, the Internet gets more fragmented, and less interesting. Maybe one day that won't be a problem, but at present, platforms serve a role as an aggregator. Somewhere to reliably land and find something that fits your interests. I'm not likely to have as enriching of an experience on natively Lemmy, or in the fediverse, or on PeerTube/Vimeo/Floatplane, etc. because they don't have the content or reach. I might reach them through an offshoot of where I normally spend my time online, but never directly.
That's not possible. Your friends have to pay or watch ads themselves.
If it were possible for some people to pay and others not to pay, then YouTube would have survived for over a decade, including periods of profitability, even though some people blocked ads. Oh wait...
It's definitely not because YouTube has 2 billion viewers and expanded to all regions of the world, and there only real way to increase revenue is to squeeze the existing customers.
Sounds like I do have to remove them. I've had the family plan since it was Google Play Music, and at that time it was permitted/quazi-encourage to make a family plan, a family and friends plan. It doesn't change the economics vastly for any of us, but you've made me re-read the terms for a service. A family plan still ends up cheaper than two individual plans, and that was the basis for it in the first place.
To your other point, Alphabet/Google is profitable overall. YouTube is not, and never has been. If it was, they'd be on the quarterly earnings calls bragging it up and trying to pump the shit out of it. That doesn't happen. The sudden surge of all the AD supported platforms trying to find any cash they can isn't 100% because they're just greedy. It's because they aren't sustainable how they operate now. That compounded with the fact that borrowing money is expensive again, they actually need to have positive revenue to survive.
While I don't like Elon or Twitter, the public dumpster fire it is gave us a bit of a look at how much money these platforms bleed. Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, et al. don't make money, they bleed it, but cheap borrowing rates made it easy to keep them afloat on the promise they'd make money eventually. We just reached the point where eventually needs to be now for them to survive.