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Comment by granzymes | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for lifting up my comment. It’s amazing how quickly people want to point fingers at YouTube for something they weren’t involved in.

Someone even relied to your comment implicitly assuming that YouTube cares about conditioning views on whether a user has an adblocker enabled when what happened is easylist added the view counter API to their privacy list.

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> point fingers at YouTube for something they weren’t involved in

YouTube monetizes based on view count. They also send the data to the client. That client data is in anyway involved, and could be blocked, is YouTube’s design problem.

A number of YouTubers have made the claim that their views were affected but not revenue, so it seems like the monetization is based on ad-watching views at least.

Couldn't that affect third party sponsorships, though? Both getting them and reporting numbers to existing ones?

Presumably, it would affect that, and also long-term channel growth. Which would be dastardly if it were intentional, because it would basically cull the platform of channels who voice support for ad blocking.

I wonder if CTR was affected. Could one of the affected channels could have detected that not adding up? I guess it was probably already blocked for privacy. Maybe I shouldn't be giving them ideas.

Interestingly, anybody can now measure what percentage of any channel's viewers run ad blockers, by using publicly available data on how much their views dropped during this period.

The entire way this issue was figured out was because it only affected desktop views that weren't monetized to begin with, which the guy in the linked video guessed meant adblockers.

If the monetization weren't limited to ad-watching views, we'd probably still be trying to figure out what happened.

Well at least people's primary source of income isn't hidden behind a black box by corporate overlords or anything

For better or worse a gigantic portion of people who make their livelihoods on the internet are fully dependent on closed source platforms. Do you think people who sell things on Shopify or Etsy are any more able to scrutinize the systems they depend on to make a living?

You can sell on Shopify _and_ Etsy and make money on both (as long as you don’t cross Mastercard/Visa).

Turning a profit on video outside YouTube is a far more difficult undertaking.

My point: This problem is far worse when a monopoly is involved.

So what's your suggestion for how YouTube could be doing better here?

Especially in the scenario that (as the top level comment in this thread suggests) YouTube didn't actually make any changes and the reason the views dropped is because EasyList added an entry to their privacy filter. Should YouTube have recognized that they're in a quasi-monopoly position as you suggest, done the research to identify EasyList as the culprit behind the view metric drop, and then released a change to their client to add a new endpoint which isn't blocked by EasyList?

We don't know that the EasyList theory is what's really going on here, but if you're going to tar YouTube/Google over this ordeal, then I think you have some responsibility for suggesting how they could have done better.

YouTube can’t “do better”; the problem is the monopoly (their moat is too damn wide).

Just to be clear, YouTube doesn’t pay users based on view count, it revenue shares based on money generated by ads and subscriptions. Using an ad blocker without premium has always meant the creator doesn’t get paid for the views, because that traffic generates no revenue for them to share

No, but the algorithm puts their content in front of people in part based on how many views it has gotten. Or does whatever the heck the shadowy black box wants it to.

Yes but with the intent that they generate revenue, if ad blocked users had distinct behavior different from ad watching users it was mostly ignored while I was there

They also recently introduced age estimation in the US, which a lot of channels reported as the culprit for reduced view number in their videos.

In short, age estimation will restrict videos from viewers, and a creator has almost no way of knowing if a video was age-restricted or not.

Bellular has a video about the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSYLe6Yq4R4

Should a video watched with ads blocked earn money?

yes? It's called pay-per-view. Many creators will insert a segment in the video with a sponsor who will pay them based on their reach. These are typically not blocked, since they're inserted into the video before uploading. YouTube inserts random ads on top of that for every view (which can be blocked).

Aren’t those segments deals between the creator and the sponsors and nothing to do with Youtube?

yeah, FWIU they are an increasingly popular monetization channel in addition to YT's built-in ad-rev system (which is famously very bad for creators)

*) and conveniently for YT that out-of-band monetization channel - which they don't profit from - is the exact thing that's negatively affected by an overall drop in view counts

Indeed. But they typically are contingent on a certain number of views. If adblockers cause that stat to go down, then you get the opposite of what you are aiming to achieve: the user will see the "message from our sponsor" but their view does bot contribute to providing that sponsor with the data that the youtuber held up their end of the deal. Ends up bring an unpaid ad.

Ok but Youtube shouldn't payout.

Views might be important to get the attention of a potential advertising partner, but once the relationship has started then keeping it going will likely be dependent on much more relevant metrics for the advertiser. And those metrics will usually be tracked on their end, rather than via YouTube. I'm referring to metrics like click-through rate, propensity to order, revenue on advertising spend, etc. Personalized referral URLs and discount codes are what allow the advertisers to connect their tracking and reporting to the originating YouTuber.

> These are typically not blocked

sponsorblock would like a word with that!

Though that’s a bit of a dick move to use that. I don’t have a problem with the author making money, I just don’t like the tracking and the politics of youtube. Also those ads are skippable, where yt ones aren’t.

Fortunately, YouTube doesn't tell creators how many of their viewers have SponsorBlock, which means the sponsors have no way to know that either.

It was great business on YouTube's part to make customers feel adblocking is a dick move though.

In a way agree with that, and I don't use sponsorblock because of that, but there's another side too: sponsored segments are a dick move too. Well, probably not all of them, but certainly a lot of them. YouTubers proudly proclaiming they use the sponsored product and they are oh so happy with it is lying, most of the time, plain and simple. And the products that are advertised on YouTube are very often on the shady side of things too.

When I see an embedded ad I will immediately know from the type of product if I should ignore it or intentionally avoid that product because most embedded ads come from the worst of the worst companies. Why would they want me watching their ad if it makes me NOT want to buy their product?

Thats the whole damn point of youtube premium

It was funny how my former boss (also a software engineer) looked when I showed him that you get the same thing by installing an ad blocker ^^

it's not the same thing. it looks the same to you, because you don't give a shit, but it's not the same.

I want ad-free viewing on any youtube client in my house, and I do not want to maintain infrastructure to allow that. The terms of the service indicate that I should pay if I want an ad-free experience, so that's what I do.

Some unknown portion of my subscription fee goes towards the monetization of videos that I watch, which I definitely want to happen. Ad blockers don't pay people in lieu of ads, and youtube premium does.

> it's not the same thing. it looks the same to you, because you don't give a shit, but it's not the same

I give a shit, I just give more of a shit about my personal privacy and my data not being shared with hundreds of anonymous third parties through the advertising auction mechanism than I do about a creator being paid.

Give me ads without RTB and I’ll very seriously reconsider my adblock usage.

You can use Premium with an ad blocker

Apparently if you did that, your views didn't count so creators didn't get anything from your money.

Please tell me how analytics information about what videos you watch is an invasion of your privacy. Google already has the info, they serve it and their servers have logs which get analyzed.

it is impossible to download something from the web without a log line entry being generated, so what privacy are you losing? Please tell me.

Because google links that information to what you do in other places of the internet. I don't care if my church knows my favourite hymn or my sex store knows I buy sex toys, I care if my church knows I buy sex toys.

The RTB auction mechanism fires off personal identifiers as part of the auction mechanism to hundreds of third parties. This is problematic to me because my browsing history is being profiled by random companies I’ve never heard of or consented to process my personal data.

> I want ad-free viewing on any youtube client in my house, and I do not want to maintain infrastructure to allow that.

Firefox + Adblock/uBlock works on mobile, and desktop. If your TV blocks firefox, buy a dongle or mini-pc and use that. And way better for your privacy anyway. And a mini-pc gives you tons more capabilities like emulators etc. You literally buy those intel n100 mini-pcs for like 100 bucks.

If my 70+ years old parents can do that without my help, ... So no, need to maintain a "infrastructure" to blocks ads...

> Some unknown portion of my subscription fee goes towards the monetization of videos that I watch,

> Some unknown portion of my subscription fee goes towards the monetization of videos that I watch, which I definitely want to happen. Ad blockers don't pay people in lieu of ads, and youtube premium does.

You do realize that what Youtube pays out these days is so small amount, that most creators resorted to sponsoring. This is way more profitable for the youtubers involved. The add revenue is more like icing on a cake, not a main source of income.

And ironically, Youtube is one of the best paying platforms for creators. That is saying a lot.

If i remember correctly, for many its barely 1/5 of their actual income. There is a reason why you see those constant creator advertisement for whatever VPS service etc... and merch sales, ... that is where the money is.

Not taking in account the algorithm and its non promoting videos even if your subscribed, the constant DMCA issues where creators lose tons of money on false claims, ...

> Firefox + Adblock/uBlock works on mobile

Only on Android. A large portion of users are not on Android.

Do people gather on YouTube because it has value, or specifically because they know it's where money is burning?

Worse than that, YouTube relies on client data for view counting while also actively creating an incentive for ad blockers to disrupt client data because of their anti-ad blocker measures.

This reminds me that I think it was the Invidious project that had a disclaimer saying they could not prevent YouTube from counting your view. Well, I guess they probably could after all, and probably did, depending on which method was used to fetch the video.

The ability to block any network request I want is an essential feature of the general computer and I will promptly abandon any service which tries to impinge upon my security as well as my freedom to use what I own in the way I wish, to obstruct that. Now sure, they could perform some kind of tracking that doesn't generate additional network requests. But they know how the open Web works and the tradeoffs even if they may not like it, so I would guess their architecture is deliberate.

They could just embed tracking code to the streaming service? As in: count how many times the chunk of video was sent to the clients, rather than relying on the clients to work as THEY intended...

Client-side analytics must end

Plus that would make cheating on traffic really bandwidth expensive

Not for the cheater. You’d still buy 1m views on some shady site, armies of bots on hacked devices/routers would still pull down the steams at no cost to the bad guys.

This would make replays or scrubbing count as additional views. To fix that, they would need some kind of set to uniquely store all clients, and that‘s questionable from a security and moral point of view, even for YouTube.

What? Replays already do count as additional views. Load a video one day, then load it again the next day. That's two views. There isn't a way to avoid this non-problem.

I'm not sure what you mean by "scrubbing".

Scrubbing is a video editing term for going forwards and backwards over a video to find specific frames and editing them

and YT 'multiple times throughout a video playback' client side endpoint has been tracking this for years reporting every single minute of video you watched, thats what is powering Most Replayed Feature (scroll bar graph showing popular moments in every video)

local cache should handle scrubbing

No such thing for YT videos. Official player will refetch video chunks if you so much as rewind 5 minutes back.

And that is incredibly annoying for the user and a problem Youtube should fix.

If YouTube stored the entire video in a cache people would yell and scream about that. Oh, I’ve got 2TB of YouTube cache that didn’t get cleaned properly, how annoying.

Well Im a liar. Checked just now and it changed since last time I was looking into this.

cache-control private, max-age=11722 (~3 hours) date Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:19:15 GMT expires Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:19:15 GMT

it once again lands in browser cache. I remember a moment when it returned no-cache.

We are back to situation where:

- google doesnt get any info if user with adblocker keeps rewinding in that ~3hour window

- player refetches if you pause for few hours and come back, or decide to rewind 3 hour video to watch again

- your SSD is hammered with gigabytes of useless browser cache writes - might be good idea for Extension overwriting those headers to no-store/max-age=0

I would be surprised if browsers actually cashed the entirety of videos, even if the cash policy allows for it. That does seem like a way to thrash SSD.

They did before switch to no-cache, and I bet they are back at it now. Chrome used to roughly write as much as I watched at ~2-3GB per hour.

Indeed. It's essentially malware.

At least BonziBuddy sang for me.

ah that takes me back, going to the Uni computers and have all them ridden with malware and browser bars so thick you could barely browse the net

but still you could go home and have a reasonable setup, there is no escape from the current "open" interwebs

They already do something like this - some videos have an indicator for how many times a chunk of a video is played.

But then they’d have to report significantly lower CPM’s to content creators.

Lower CPMs, but it would be so easy to game that creators would all have trillions of views.

I don't understand what point you are trying to make, but I am honestly surprised if they monetize based on view count and not based on advertisement view and click counts.

> Revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, the majority of the revenue will go to our partners.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276

YouTube immediately pointed fingers at creators by saying that certain audiences are more likely to use ad blockers.

That's not pointing fingers but an objective fact. Technical audiences are more likely to use adblockers than the general population. If your channel caters to them you will be disproportionately affected.

This makes sense in principle, but is not really what this is primarily about. Or at least I'm not aware of such excessive disparities, and haven't heard this being the primary angle.

Consider Charlie (penguinz0 / MoistCritikal). Hardly a techtuber. Despite this, he has seen a drop in computer-originating views to the tune of 1.4M (avg, eyeballed) -> 800K (avg, eyeballed): https://youtu.be/8FUJwXeuCGc?t=290

Lots of people use adblockers, sure, even those not terminally online and tech enthusiast. But to have nearly half the (computer-originating) views evaporate? https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users

Even from that perspective though, what would be the dominant effect then is the share of computer-originating views compared to other origins, rather than a disparity in adblock use habits for the given audience.

It seems pretty likely for well over half for a channel like that to use ad blockers.

Tech adjacent has similar levels of ad blocking as tech. If it's mostly people who internet a lot on a PC in your audience, expect a lot of ad blocking.

Back in the day a gaming forum I was part of revealed that 85% of users were ad-blocking. The forum had a few banner ads.

> But to have nearly half the (computer-originating) views evaporate?

I wonder on the other side why 50% of users would not take the few minutes to install an ad blocker.

Because Chrome/Edge blocked them, and people don't switch browsers unless they are technical.

While I can't speak to anyone else, back when I did tech support as a job for the elderly, one of our policies was to always install uBlock Origin. Our docs even had warnings to remove ABP and similar stuff because they let ads through.

Speaking from a purely personal experience (both before and after that job), the moment you ask me to regularly fix a device for you, I'm going to install uBlock Origin on every major browser you have and finetune it for privacy (aka enable the anti-tracking lists - these days I'd probably also install consent-o-matic to get rid of cookie banners without agreeing to sell all personal data). 99% of the bizarre computer problems people run into is because they clicked on a malicious internet ad and now a ton of PUPs are installed, are probably mining out their personal information or are trying to sell their users on junk subscriptions (this not so entertainingly includes virus scanners, which are almost all perversions of their original selves).

An adblocker is just basic hygiene and allows for the discussion to be on that remaining 1%, which usually is more on boring corporate fuckery from either Apple or Microsoft or the remainder which are the real technical problems people have.

AdBlock is basic hygiene, and I imagine most people have one installed on their desktop these days if they're either barely technically literate or have a family member who is.

Objective fact and "more likely" do not match well. While what you're saying in general is true, it is worth also saying that "tech" channels expecting their subscribers to not use ad-blockers is a pretty wild expectations. What they need to do to have financial income is to secure some relevant sponsorship as part of their content. Most people are completely fine with that and many tech channel are doing it right, at least those that I care for. Having to rely on Alphabet's injected Ads is a very poor taste which if they insist of keeping, they should not be producing content at all.

> Objective fact and "more likely" do not match well.

Huh? If I take a die and paint a 6 on the sides which previously had 4 and 5 then it is an objective fact that you will be more likely to roll a 6 than a 1 with that die.

I think they are confusing “objective” and “binary”

At this point the "peanut gallery" of the web is essentially just a firehose of misinformation, best avoided. Not two minutes before this I read some comment confidently stating that the last time Apple offered iPhone leather cases was for iPhone 11.

Accurate but I don’t think it’s new. It’s a property of human intelligence called “hallucination” where facts are made up.

I don’t know about this leather thing but the participants on non-technical forums like Reddit or HN frequently do this.

I wouldn't call it hallucination. It would be coherent stories that fit their belief system and allows them to short their brain. [0]

Coherent stories that are blatantly false are great tools in misinformation and social engineering. [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Deception

Why not just look for sources for factual information instead of avoiding all of it?

To be fair it's mental effort that you now have to expend when you didn't before.

I stopped reading the news because it just became too tiring.

Not saying it's right or wrong. It's just - I understand.

I don't think there was ever a time when critical thinking and fact checking wasn't needed. Nobody has the time to do deep dives into everything, but the more important something is to you, or the more likely it is to impact your life the more it's worth investing the time it takes to do a couple web searches.

Today CNN says that Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro has skin cancer. Is that true? Damned if I know. Will I spend the time trying to verify that? Nope.

The speed and spread of nonsense is accelerating. Within a day the story about youtube view counts spread with hundreds of angry comments about youtube and enshitification.

People are getting ragebaited repeatedly on a scale that is new. Not that misinformation in general is new

I’m not sure about that is there’s something that could’ve happened in the 60s that is so oddly technical, yet understood by millions of people? that it could be misinterpreted and spread like this: add block users mistaken as bots? It would just sound like gobbledygook to someone in the 1960s.

Nonsense is just a subset of information; the speed of information is absolutely accelerating.

I think the idea that newspapers and TV were ever honest is an illusion. I remember my parents and grandparents ranting about the lies published by major newspapers in the 80s and 90s either on topics or people they knew. We tend to forget the bad things in distant past, particularly a past we haven’t lived through. I don’t think news sources are worse today. They were always bad.

God forbit someone makes a mistake

If Dirty Stan spends an hour making guests uncomfortable at your house, some of those guests might come to think of you as a bad host even though Stan's behavior was the issue.

I think it's reasonable to attribute moral responsibility to the entity that owns and has the most control over the platform, even if the technical details aren't quite so simple. Doubly so in this case since YouTube is a profitable business. Given [0], it sounds like this bug with view counts is a direct result of YouTube choosing to start an arms race against users who run ad blockers.

[0]: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme...

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