caused youtube views count to drop
oh no… anyway
Some people might care about supporting the creators they enjoy by having their view count. If it looks like nobody is watching, then that doesn’t fare well for the creator, even if in reality they have a viewership that’s invisible.
Google know who they’re streaming videos to. They know this from the back-end. They absolutely do not require a script running in the browser to phone home about it in order to count “views”. All the telemetry they need they can get from existing traffic; the additional telemetry supplied by scripts is mostly just for Bad Reasons and it’s morally fine to block it.
Lemme try and feel sorry for my cartoonishly rich tech overlords real quick…
also it seems too convenient for them for this to happen just after they removed ad blockers from chrome…
I’m sure that the number of times I’ve decided “nah I don’t need to see that” after being told an ad blocker violated YouTube’s terms of service has absolutely nothing to do with it either.
Even on a computer without ad blocker (work laptop, chrome browser)
the number of times i say “nah i don’t need to see that” as soon as thes annoying ads comes up before the video…
The decline probably has very little to do with ad blockers.
The decline was very sudden, almost instantaneous, and can be traced back to the exact date a block list, used by most major desktop ad blockers, added the YouTube View Counter API endpoint to their list.
But sure… nothing to do with ad blockers.
Exactly.
If I am forced to see ads, especially intrusive or page filling ones, I will not continue.
I watched lots of YouTube in the past.
When they started inserting ads into the videos (not channel sponsored stuff), the camel started getting weak.
When they started requiring sign-ins or blocking access when using a proxy that was the straw.
I don’t use YouTube anymore.
(shrug) don’t care if it affects views, never should have had them in videos regardless.
Had what in videos?
Ads
Creators are paid based on those views, so that would matter.
I personally wouldn’t care that much if youtube went back to how it was back in the day of people sharing for the sake of sharing instead of it being filled with bunch of aspiring infomercial hosts trying to get the bag.
Have to block so many channels because they monopolize the top search results before I see videos from normal folks just uploading to upload because they thought a video would be helpful.
@kokesh@lemmy.world @Zen_Shinobi@lemmy.world
Creators are paid based on those views if they’re willing to be dependent on them.
There are many, many ways for a content creator to be supported (and a viewer/follower to support them) without relying on Google: Kofi, OpenCollective, even Patreon, to name a few. And there are platforms specifically paid by the viewer, such as Nebula.
It’s worth mentioning: donation is a thing and many do donation-based projects. It can be even a direct bank transfer from a viewer to the bank account of the content creator. I say this as someone who did support content creators and donated to them. In the past, I used to pay for membership for two specific Youtube channels, back when I still used to use Youtube. When I stopped using Youtube, I went from YT membership to direct, bank transfer to both creators behind these channels. I wished they would choose to use some private PeerTube instance/channel (it’s a thing) or even Nebula, but they stubbornly chose to stick to Google’s walled garden, unfortunately leaving me with no choice but to stop watching them both.
The only real alternatives to ads are either paying for the content, or having someone else pay for you. The latter is the case with something like PeerTube - someone else is covering the cost of the server and bandwidth without asking you for payment, and the creator doesn’t get money from you just watching the video.
i really don’t care
rather do without than with ads
Paying to access content makes a lot more sense that hoping someone willingly watches an advert on their own hardware.
An indirect, alternate could be universal basic income - which makes it easier for people to choose less profitable options.
A lot of people either don’t want to pay, or can’t pay (eg people in developing nations with very low income). I agree that UBI would help, but we’re a long way off from that being a standard thing in one country, let alone worldwide.
Those people who can’t pay aren’t really worth anything to advertise to, though.
Just so we’re clear, you’re proposing UBI as a solution to a global website showing ads
To authors of works getting compensated for sharing their efforts. So here it’s a video content on a website, but also any other works on any other protocol.
Right. Turns out UBI is a solution to a lot of things.
Are you aware that more than one country exists?
If it were sensibly prized I would have no issue with paying for YouTube. But seeing as they almost ask for the same as Netflix and co while not producing any content, I decided for the adblocker instead
They do not produce content, but they share 70% of revenue with the creators. You can argue that’s not enough, but it’s definitely more than Netflix et al pay their content creators.
It’s gotten to the point where I have to re-load each YT tab three times before the video ever starts playing - only because I use uBlock.
Still better than watching ads, but it is getting annoying.
It is like they know you’re using adblocks, so instead of trying to force ads down your throat, they try making your experience miserable by breaking their own viewer or whatever. It is absolutely petty of them.
Leave a video sitting there in idle for too long, come back, it plays for 10 seconds then has to reload itself. Sometimes, it doesn’t do this, so it requires a complete refresh.
They can do this bullshit all they want but I am not letting up on blocking ads.
I have a theory that YT deliberately makes you wait the length an ad would have been if you have uBlock Origin installed. Ive just let it “buffer” for 30 seconds or so and it will eventually load the video.
I’d rather watch nothing than an ad trying to sell me something.
Still better tbh
I am fine if it means I don’t have to watch some scam ass ad.
I think this is true, and I still prefer it to an ad. Even if it’s longer than the ad would have been.
My despise to ads is so big that if someday ads are completely unavoidable I’ll settle for a system that just blackens the screen and mute the volume for the duration of the ads. It will still be worth it.
I have no problems with ublock on Firefox or Librewolf, unless I try to skip past what the video already loaded, then it’s a dice roll whether it’ll work or not
For me, it works without reloading… After a 15 second load and an insufferably laggy UI despite having no identifiable system bottleneck.
Yeah yt is basically unusable on Firefox with a blocker and it’s 100% by design. Yt even gives a helpful pop-up offering to tell me why it’s running so slow.
I have the same problem, and after you start clicking play, often you can wait it out and the video will eventually play on its own after 10-15 seconds
This mostly happens when you use youtube while being logged into a google account.
I fixed this by using firefox containers + https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switch-container/- logout from google / clear cookies.
- switch to a new “google” container and login to see your subscrpitions
- if a video doesn’t load switch to decontained
also has the nice benefit of not messing up your reccomendations when clicking on random yt-links from other sites
This does not work on phone OSes
I use Grayjay on Android, and it tends to do a good job. I can have subscriptions w/o being logged in to my YT account, and videos load after 5 secs or so every time.
Thank you. You are the best
I switched from Chrome to MS Edge and don’t have that YouTube ad-blocking issue with uBlock anymore. Other than that, MS Edge works exactly like Chrome.
MS Edge is Chrome, with a slight MS reskin.
MS Edge allows extensions that Chrome does not. It still fully supports uBlock Origin.
I did not know that - but surely since it’s based on Chrome, that means they’re going to have to follow suit at some point?
The Chromium browser code is open source.
I thought the changes were to do with manifest v3, and that was part of chromium. I didn’t realise that was added to chrome after the fact.
If the Google war on ad blocking meant the ad blockers accidently blocked something everyone wants its still Google fault.
Everything was fine until Google decided to change how everything works over and over again to get people to watch the awful ads they let on their platform.
Googlees don’t “let” ads on their platform. Ads are the entire reason for the existence of their platform.
They could hire some people to vet the ads.
A company taking responsibility for the ads they serve? That sounds like communism to me!
At least we know one thing that didn’t cause it.
Thanks for that hint on decoding your shitty blackbox google.
Tldr: youtube forced ai into video monitoring and it keeps killing videos it shouldn’t, so instead of saying Ai is bad they’re blaming af blockers because why not lie when there’s no repercussions?
YouTube views are dropping because they are using AI to vet and cull age innappropriate content from minors. the problem is the ai is very bad at its job and marks way too many videos as not advertiser friendly, which effectively kills YouTube promoting that video in feeds. this is the default view for new accounts, so you have to specifically turn off parental controls to see a normal feed. this started happening about 4 months ago. a number of channels I watch have made comments about this, including Redlettermedia
youtube forced ai into video monitoring and it keeps killing videos it shouldn’t
That explains why sometimes the video stops and I get error message. I thought it may have to do with switching the script blockers on or off.
Pinch flat. GitHub. Go.
I don’t understand:
-
What is ‘AI in video monitoring?’
-
The article mentions literally nothing about this, so where did that come from?
the article provides one “official” explanation for views dropping, and i am citing an alternative explanation from the perspective of creators themselves who see the analytical data and the judgments being past on their videos.
Ok, but that’s not a TLDR of the article.
the tldr was for my wordy comment not the article. why would i summarize the article?
Because when you comment, “TLDR” under an article, it’s assumed to be a “TLDR” of the article. It also doesn’t make sense to say TLDR was a summary of your long comment because you didn’t make a long comment to summarize, you just jumped right in with TLDR.
ok i am so sorry i didn’t comment right comment policeman are you going to give me a ticket
get a life
LMAO, whatever salves your literacy’s hurt ego.
-
Source: my ass
This is not at all what happened. Maybe try reading the article next time.
This is hearsay from victims looking for a reason of their suffering.
Not saying I don’t believe that’s what’s happening, but the article mentions nothing about any sort of YouTube AI interference.
Because the AI integration is a recent change unrelated to this data. The commenter is pulling it out of their ass.
If we’re just throwing out theories, I’d propose it was the dramatic increase in ads with a decrease in quality of content being served by the algorithm. The only thing that gets front page access is clickbait.
I don’t use ad blockers, just normal YouTube. One thing I noticed about a month ago is that when I’m watching some silly video a 55 second ad will come on with about three minutes left to view on the video. It’s at that point I usually just back out and look for other videos to watch. My grandson told me it seems odd because YouTube monetization requires the whole video to be viewed before they’ll pay. Does this make sense? I don’t know much about “monetization” I just watch silly videos.
If you see an ad, close the tab.
Literally the only way they will learn. I really don’t understand how we as a society have accepted ads as a necessary evil. We all hate them, but we all also make them work. It’s horrible.
It kinda is a necessary evil, if you want free content at least. Especially for a website like youtube where you need to host millions of large videos 24/7. That shit ain’t cheap, and even google can’t make money out of thin air. Not that I’m defending youtube or anything, charging $8 a month for premium lite but still giving you ads is insane. Paid services should never have ads.
My problem isn’t with ads, but rather the type of ads used. Like I said a moment ago, I don’t think paid services should ever have ads of any kind. But for free websites, a few side banner ads are fine in my book, while ads in the middle of a page or popup ads or video ads (especially unskippable ones) are a no-go. Essentially anything that doesn’t interrupt what I’m doing is usually something I’m okay with.
Are these “we all” people you talking about are in the same room with us right now? I don’t really think that would apply to all of us.
It’s going to take a big cultural shift to get enough people to pay content creators through subscriptions to compete with ad-driven models.
Eventually YouTube’s hubris will cross the line where enough people will just assume the ads are so bad it’s not worth trying to watch a video. As somebody with technical means and no tolerance for ads I’m astonished more people aren’t there yet.
How much do we need to pay though? Most content creators I see have their patreon around $7 CDN/mo. Add even a couple and you’re now at the cost of a streaming subscription with much more content. I would have no problem paying content creators if the fees were more reasonable, but right now I only subscribe to a couple.
Should a creator’s patreon drop in price to $1 or $2 a month, or should the viewer pay a small fee per view? What new monetization system would make sense where the consumer doesn’t have an unaffordable pile of subscriptions, but the creators still get paid a fair rate for their effort?
Nebula seems pretty cool, it’s basically a bunch of YouTubers mirroring their youtube content and making original videos for a paid streaming service with no ads. That’s one way of doing it
LBRY was an interesting experiment but it ultimately relied on their shitcoin for the financial side.
Yeah. I use Nebula and go out of my way to watch there whenever possible. The app isn’t great, but I still recommend it.
That $7/myth also likely involves 30% platform fee surcharges. If there were more Peertubes and similar federated or community-owned models the fee could lower as more money goes directly to the creators.
If there was an easy solution more people would be doing it already. Just food for thought.
Some creators advertise Nebula, a paid-only service that is co-owned by the creators they host. Ethically and for viewing experience it’s one of the best ways to run such a platform but they will remain limited in size for several reasons.
I’ve been wondering for a while where the point of diminishing returns is. Surely, at some point, ads become aggressive enough to have an adverse effect on advertisers?
Well, this abstract says it’s about 20% effective over not advertising but this is a meta analysis and isn’t focused exclusively on internet ads.
The baked in biases being that the authors are “a German chaired professor of marketing at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany” and his research assistant.
I often wonder how ads of any kind have ever worked, unless it was an ad for something we had already planned on buying.
Repetition brings familiarity and familiarity leads to trust for the vast majority of humans. It is the reason that campaign signs works, why brand names are so valuable, and why popularity tends to increase exponentially when it works.
Most ads are just intended to get you to remember the thing they are selling.
Before their media blitz campaign, Hormel’s Spam was eaten in perhaps 20% of households; after the campaign it was closer to 70%.
Ads do work, if you do them right. People go for what they’ve heard of over what they haven’t.
Ads are super effective. If you have something to buy, but you don’t know much about it, you will tend towards buying the thing that was advertised to you more often than not just because you are more familiar with it over other things. You might not stick with it, but being the first thing someone tries is huge.
I don’t know why my brain said this was memeable, but here we are
i know what im about to do is beyond the pale on lemmy but here it is anyway. for youtube, they have to spend money to host the content and deliver it. you can pay a subscription fee to enable them to do that. they have ads on there for people who expect free shit forever
All these sites monitor engagement, they walk the line between maximum ads and users. If we decrease the users, they’ll decrease the ads to try and keep us.
LOL, nah. If we decrease the users, they’ll increase the ads to try to compensate for declining revenue. They believe they have all the power and don’t give a fuck what we think.
Classic business death spiral. Same thing is happening in electricity providers everywhere. Prices too high, more people go to solar, reduces their demand (revenues), so they increase their prices to compensate… higher prices means more people choose solar, and around it goes.
They’ll just insert bots who’ll comment generic, soulless things to say instead. “OMG This product amazed me!” or “I cannot BELIEVE how nobody discovered this sooner!” all the while artificially inflating numbers.
deleted by creator
*Goolag shooting itself on foot be like.
The dev community is just adapting to shit thrown.
deleted by creator
Youtube has not once on any device or brpwser recognided the most ubiquitous adblocker for me
For many years biggest online threats were criminals and malware. Today the biggest threats are big companies, especially Google. Everyday we have to “fight” against it because it tries to steal all our data and even more.
