Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Last year I remember something similar happening but it was 100% confirmed to only apply to folks who are ineligible to monetize due to not having enough views or subscribers to be in the partnership program so in that case you were making $0 anyways.

But it's not clear if this new TOS change affects everyone or only folks not eligible for their partnership program.

For example if you're a channel creator who could monetize but chooses to hit no, will YouTube be able to run ads on your videos now? It sounds like a yes based on the TOS wording since it doesn't explicitly mention a type of creator and includes "your" (which is a blanket statement to include everyone).

This sounds like it'll affect me directly. I have 12k subs and I've chosen not to run ads on any of my videos because I'd rather someone watch my videos without interrupt even if that means losing out on ad revenue. But moving forward it sounds like I'll enable ads on my videos because if YouTube is going to potentially run ads on them them I might as well benefit from it too.

As someone most likely affected by this I'm not really upset at YouTube over it. Hosting and streaming video isn't cheap. Sure I'd prefer not to have ads forced upon watchers of my content but at the same time I can't blame Google for wanting to make money off a platform we're all benefiting from. I've learned so much over the years from various YouTube videos and that mostly comes down to having easy access to find high quality videos.

How upset would you be if ads started to appear on a channel that never ran ads? Would you stop watching videos on that channel or do you just run ad blocker anyways?

I have YouTube premium/red/whatever and don't see ads. The natural state of YouTube is unbearable due to the profusion of ads. People watching YouTube either have high tolerance for ads or a method to avoid them.

One very effective method to avoid ads is to pay for the premium service. $10/month for far more content than any other streaming video service. Can not imagine trying to watch YouTube with ads.

Another very effective way is to use an adblocker like uBlock origin.

Personally I feel that the engineers at YouTube are doing a good job for me and I would like to reward them for that.

Not to mention the people that worked to create the videos. Both them and the engineers deserve to eat.

Well, not anymore for the small publishers. Now they’re subsidizing the big publishers.

Unpopular opinion, but one might argue YouTube was a better place when people did videos out of passion and not to become an "influencer" and get money.

That's still the case though. YT is probably the only platform where you can be successful doing very niche without having to sell out or churn out influencer tier content for outreach. The revenue stream is embedded, the audience is huge and channels can be pretty well siloed (as opposed to say, reddit where you can have a niche community either get easily overrun, crossposted etc). Actually the only time I've had "influencer/Drama" type of content was when I chose to watch it, otherwise YouTube is still pretty good at not pushing content you just don't watch at all to your recommendations

(Even though the recommendation system is overall awful and I can't believe an army of engineers have actually been working on it for a decade, but I digress)

Most people don't make (enough) money from YouTube though, and to get to the point where they could, they spend hundreds of hours of their time.

I'd say that's passion and i see nothing wrong with getting rewarded for doing something you like and other people enjoy watching.

> and to get to the point where they could, they spend hundreds of hours of their time

However, this often results in videos that are unnecessary bloated to fulfil the requirements to place more ads, deceptive/misleading titles, or 10-minute-videos about something that could be explained in 30 seconds.

I don't mind ads in content by creators who are getting revenue from it. It maintains many interesting channels.

But ads on content where all the revenue goes to google without a penny being sent to the creator? That's not tolerable.

Do they now? Before Polymer (current YT framework) YT video page weighted somewhere around 50KB (10KB compressed) and was ordinary HTML + 1MB js player (400KB compressed). As soon as HTML part loaded the page was all there.

Now its 600KB (100KB compressed) JSON + additional 8MB desktop_polymer.js (1MB compressed) that needs to be compiled/interpreted before anything starts showing on the page - its all dynamically generated Client side. 1MB js player is on top of that.

> Another very effective way is to use an adblocker like uBlock origin.

How does that work when you’re out on your iPhone and just want to check a video-link someone sent you?

Oh wait. It doesn’t.

In this case, I use the super power of self control, and I wait to be home to watch the video on a bigger and better screen, and without ads.

Firefox is the only browser i know of where you can install adblocker on mobile. Don't know if you can install this on your iPhone but on android it works like a charm.

AdGuard on mobile Safari usually blocks YouTube ads for me.

Works great on Android with Firefox mobile.

It can work but you need to do some preparation work.

First, choose to go out with a more open platform (if only by a bit) that at least allows you the freedom to install apps which don't necessarily come with a corporate overseer's approval.

Then, install the Youtube Vanced app.

Another solution that seems to be Android-only: YouTube Vanced. Includes AdBlock, SponsorBlock (if enabled in settings), and other Premium features like picture-in-picture and listening to music in the background.

which doesn't work on TV or mobile, of course

Firefox supports uBlock Origin on mobile.

on Android

Will uBlock origin etc block ads on YouTube? My understanding it that videos/ads are served from the same domain. (Update: a quick test suggests this method works.)

That said, either youtube-dl or Invidious [1] will do the trick. The latter can be self-hosted and emulates a more familiar YouTube experience (minus the tracking/recommendations).

---

[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

Yes, uBlock origin blocks preroll and midroll ads on YouTube.

uBlock Origin works amazingly well at blocking Youtube ads. I don't know how, but it does.

I am using "Youtube Vanced" to get rid of the ads and it works very well. I have created a separate account - just in case this account gets banned. NewPipe is another alternative and even supports downloading the video.

I love my YouTube Premium subscription

$10/month for no ads for a platform that just works, always?

Shut up and take my money

Agreed. I just wish their entire account system wasn’t messed up. I can’t get YouTube premium family with my domain account (which I also setup emails for my kids on), so I need to use a second free gmail account for myself and my kids.

I didn't know that. I used to use Google for domain control until they went charged.

Technically, I signed up for Google Play Music way back when it was initially launched, and have since been upgraded to YouTube Red/Premium and have kept it.

I've been using Brave on my phone/tablet for quite some time now.

Unfortunately, in recent several weeks I started to see an occasional ad even in Brave. As for now, these ads are really rare, don't think I get more than a couple a week. But boy are they annoying.

Even in such a mobile browser where all the videos are muted by default, these ads find a way to conveniently unmute themselves and delight your surroundings with loudest and cringiest lines/tunes.

YouTube must be actively making changes to their ads in attempt to bypass ad blockers. However, I still think that Brave is a great option as (based on their forum) ad filters are constantly being worked upon.

PS: I've also tried Firefox Mobile with uBlock Origin addon. As expected, ad blocking works just fine, but page loading times are way slower compared to Brave which is based on Chrome.

It's $12/month. And €12/month (= $15) in Europe.

Youtube Premium is $12/month now, in the US. $18/month for the family plan (up to 5 members).

An even better method is to just install uBlock Origin. It will improve privacy too.

I go a step further and use uBlock Origin to hide all the obnoxious recommendation spam overlays and video thumbnails on the right-hand side of the screen. Except for the one that is on the up-next in auto-play. It's wonderful.

>How upset would you be if ads started to appear on a channel that never ran ads? Would you stop watching videos on that channel or do you just run ad blocker anyways?

I would never be upset, but I may stop watching the channel. One thing I've noticed, at least in a few anecdotal cases, is that the format of a channel often changes when they begin seriously to monetize. This is often not necessarily bad, in any objective sense, but nonetheless changes the character of the channel. If you were in love with the channel before, you might say that the channel has become worse. Others might say that the channel has been improved. Regardless how it lands for you, it seems clear that channels without any pressure to monetize do produce somewhat different content than channels with pressure to monetize.

If interstitial ads (with the profits going to Google) started to appear in the middle of videos I would probably stop using YouTube for everything that requires some concentration to follow. Right now I only subscribe to channels that have ads only at the beginning or the end, but for now that is a choice that creators can make.

This has already started to happen.

The barrier for that recently lowered from 10m to 8m so expect to see more of them.

On the bright side, we'll get shorter videos with less padding and fluff to make the 10 minute mark. I guess that's a small consolation prize.

The blame for that lays with Google as well, since short videos are not present in the most effective discovery channels.

Some creators only use one interstitial ad per monetized videos independent of the length. However if YouTube added more of them to pad their coffers, that would be quite different.

I remember that years ago Bender, the 3D editor, had tutorials on YouTube without ads, but due to the volume of views they were forced to enable adsot sure if that has since changed

They've set up a PeerTube instance and moved their content there: https://video.blender.org/

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