YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads
YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads
“We’ve since widely rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers.”
Anyone else remember when new technology used to be fun and exciting instead of miserable?
Long gone are the days when I used be excited to read update notes for new features... Now I just hope they don't god damn force an update on me.
Somewhere along the line, maybe the early to mid 2000's they stopped making products "for" the end-user and flipped it around so the end-user (their data) is now the product, and the customers are governments, corporations, and share holders.
Because those shareholders (billionaires) and corporations drained the consumers of all of their money and now they're the most profitable demographic to market to.
shareholders
If 0.000…01% shareholders count:
Guessing a lotta us have a few bucks in index funds… suppose that ain’t cool, gotta find a principled fund.
The most principled funds must only invest in like three companies cuz every corp has some problem.
That's part of the reason why new community oriented projects are way more interesting to me now than most software. There are some outliers in the space who still have dedicated people in their craft rather than for money but it is fewer and farther between.
Absolutely. Although, this is just making old technology worse because web 3.0 and AI aren't performing to corpo expectations.
That's what happens when you aren't the (sole) paying customer.
Soon: when you pause a video, it starts playing a video ad with audio, to make sure no silence time gets wasted from your speakers.
And your speakers are on subscription plans that charge you for every second that they play noise. Better upgrade to the next tier if you want to listen to anything else!
Imagine if they pulled that on the idle timeout pause screen too...
God I hope my adbock holds up......
If it doesn't goodbye Youtube. I love the creators, but hate you as a platform.
Yeah, uBlock Origin not working would take me from liking YouTube a fair bit to making it unusable.
- I use Proton but keep legacy Gmail accounts around to ensure I still have access to accounts I may have forgotten about or people I knew a long time ago sending a stray email. The only other usage is logging into YouTube.
- I use a Captcha solver extension.
- I use uBlock Origin to block all their ads.
- I don't use their DNS.
- I use DDG over their search engine and Firefox over their browser.
- I don't use Google Drive or their office suite (I think the latter is abysmal to use tbf).
- I use DeepL over Translate.
- I use NewPipe for YouTube on mobile and have a subscription to Nebula.
- I no longer use Google Maps, opting for OSM instead.
- I still use Android and unfortunately can't unlock the bootloader but have degoogled as far as I know how, including never even registering a Google account with it (F-Droid + Aurora Store).
YouTube is far and away the biggest means by which I interact with Google, and that falls off a cliff if I'm forced to interact with a mess of their ridiculously shitty ads every time I have to use it. uBO has likely saved hundreds of hours of watching ads over my lifetime (and probably thousands of dollars from not being subconsciously influenced by ads), and I'm not paying a subscription fee to such an unethical company to get rid of the ads. This would bring me from YouTube as a timewaster to YouTube only as strictly necessary. Even though I don't support them directly through ads, I do support them by supporting creators I like monetarily, by sharing links and maintaining the network effect, and by giving them plenty of metadata by interacting with their service. If they do this, they ensure that I continue to monetarily support competitors like Nebula and permanently lose a grip they've had on me since I was a kid.
That's what we need tbh. If people get fed up and leave then eventually creators will too
If it doesn't I will make something that records the entire f****** stream and removes the commercials out of it the old fashioned way If I have to. Not my first rodeo.
Like way to kill your platform for anything educational where you want to pause to look at a graph.
What if you paused so you could see something? You're not allowed to read that text in the background because ads
Great point. I already find this to be a problem with the recommendations that pop up when paused, and the end-video elements they throw over everything despite having that turned off everywhere I can find it. It's all so dumb. Just so damn dumb.
They’ll likely do what other platforms have done and let you X out the ad til you unpause
This already happened. People looking up CPR instructions because a loved one is dying, only to be met with three unskippable ads.
Goodbye Meemaw.
Yeah, that may be so, but priorities man. Priorities! Think of our profits man! In this harsh economy, ever ad counts! We're only controlling 90% of the internet while we strive for 100%. That's 10% short. 10%! We only had a revenue of 305 billion in 2023 which is not nearly enough to cut down on ads. Billionaire lives matter man! Come on, everybody, say it all together: Make millionaires billionaires again! Billionaires first! Meemaws don't consume enough anyway. Screw her. By the way, want some penis enlargement pills?
Proof? Aren't there classes of videos non monetized on youtube? When I just google search for cpr and find the american red cross I quickly found written instructions as well as a youtube video that doesn't appear to have any ads. Isn't the problem that some video creators intentionally create videos for CPR in hopes of monetizing?
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/83733719?hl=en
This means as a creator that’s not in YPP [Youtube Partner Program], you may see ads on some of your videos. Since you’re not currently in YPP, you won’t receive a share of the revenue from these ads, though you’ll still have the opportunity to apply for YPP as you normally would once you meet the eligibility requirements.
Not defending YouTube here, but CPR is so time sensitive that if they were looking up instructions, she was a goner anyway.
And good people argue how adblock and sponssrblock are fair game for your shitty company practices
It's excellent that alternatives and ad blockers do exist but we need regulatory action to hold companies accountable for things that are designed to worsen user experience to pressure people into paying. It's also a serious accessibility issue, to increasingly have everything be bright and loud and motion filled and unpausable all the time. This trend goes beyond YouTube and it sucks, we need to regulate this nonsense.
It's pretty stupid to introduce ads on the pause screen. Usually I would pause something because I am either:
A) Being interrupted and need to focus on something else like a phone call or a family member talking to me, and wouldn't be paying attention to the screen anyways.
B) Need to leave to go somewhere else like the fridge for a snack and wouldn't be paying attention to the screen anyways.
Or
C) Just want to take a break and want to do something else which involves opening another window or program and wouldn't be paying attention to the window with YouTube open.
In every scenario where I pause YouTube and add playing would not provide any value to the entity paying YouTube to play the ad.
And in every scenario, if an ad began playing when I pause youtube it would cause me to mute my sound and/or turn off my monitor and just cause me to get super annoyed at YouTube or at whatever product is being advertised and how to never buy it ever.
governments will not do anything that upsets the big companies like Google. Adblockers are are only defence against Google and others.
Actually, good news, they have! Google just lost its search monopoly trial with the US government, and they seem to be about to lose their advertising monopoly trial too. The US FTC also just released a report (not a legal action) concluding that all the big companies have abused data collection and recommended that the government do something to make those practices unprofitable for companies. I know the EU has also been doing some significant stuff, both against apple specifically and big gatekeeper companies generally. You can certainly argue it's not enough, and I would agree with you - but it's given me some optimism that more action and real enforcement might be in the near future in many countries.
What a weird downslope of a take that will obviously result in authoritarian government power expansion and futher censorship.
Just stop using it and support alternatives that dont do it. Have some self control.
Name a single viable alternative to YouTube at this point in time. Alternative frontends don't count, since they still rely on YouTube to work. None of the creators I watch upload anywhere else.
People always say shit like this as if people don't have a multitude of different life circumstances that affect and coerce how they interact with technology. That's just how capitalism works. It's not a matter of willpower. Privacy Bootstraps Theory is unhelpful. Being able to completely opt out of entrenched tech monopolies is a privilege. It's great that you can do that, not everybody can.
Regulating capitalism = authoritarianism. What a weird take. Regulating capitalism =/= abolishing capitalism, this I can understand. But your take... wow.
Do you think regulations are just blanket authoritarian actions. Sometimes we need government intervention to ensure and protect people's rights.
🤡
Are they so dumb They don't realize that when we pause a video we are likely not watching or even near our fucking phone or screen at that time?
They do, they're probably just hoping the advertisers don't and keep paying for more ad space.
They don’t care. If the advertisers pay for that spot then they make money! This has been the story with TV ads for decades.
They do, and they don't care. The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they'll get to play you more ads and cash out more. When/if they implement pause ads advertisers will have an even bigger case against against yt inflating ad watch time to make more money. Facebook has this issue as well.
The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they'll get to play you more ads and cash out more.
You might be misremembering / misinterpreting a little there. This behavior is not intentional, it's just a side effect of how the algorithm currently works. Showing you longer videos doesn't equate to showing you more ads. On the contrary, if you get loads of short videos you'll have way more opportunities to see pre-roll ads, but with longer videos, you're just to just the mid-roll spots in that video. So YouTube doesn't really have an incentive to make it work like that, it's just accidental.
Here's the spiffing Brit video on this, which I think you might have gotten this idea from: https://youtu.be/8iOjeb5DTZI
Edit: to be clear, I fully agree that YouTube will do anything to shove ads down our throats no matter how effective they actually are. I'm just saying that this example you've brought is not really that.
Advertising these days is less of a way for websites and services to make free money.
Of course websites and services that serve ads will deny this vehemently because advertisers who become aware of such practices (typically known as click fraud) will cut off those websites from ad revenue very quickly and stop serving ads there.
The idea is to trick the advertising companies into thinking that we are there and we are watching, and we care, so that they will pay money to the website to display ads there.
It's the opposite. If you pause the video you the viewers are almost always looking at the screen. The pause button on a mobile phone or web browser is literally on the player. You are guaranteed to see it immediately after you push the button. You will see it when you un pause. These ads are display banners not video. It only takes a second to see the ad.
Unlike video ads that just auto play, especially when the video player auto plays more videos, there probably is more probability you aren't actually watching, unlike pause ads that require user activity and focus on the screen to push the pause button.
Google probably only spent months researching this and they only have all the tracking and user studies to know what you said. Please ignore the obvious fact that you are looking at the screen when you are pausing or resuming a video, KingJalopy knows better and Google is just dumb. Nobody will see any of these ads and they are adding them in vain.
Don't most YouTubers make more money with their own sponsorships than from YT ads? Can we start the mass migration to PeerTube already?
I don't think Peertube would handle mass migration of Youtube creators, unless each and every one of them set up their own instance.
If I had a million dollars I'd start a company that sets up and manages federated software like Mastodon and Peertube.
This has been the case since some time before the Adpocalypse iirc.
YT will likely attempt to play creators and viewers off one another. Similar to how hospitality does so with patrons and staff re: tips. You could see a FUD campaign aimed at anyone republishing their work on competitor sites.
odysee can also be a option from peertube as well but odysees privacy policy they sell non pii data according to them if they dont sell user data we will be good
The fuck they are
I'd rather see them on pause screen than interrupting the playback but because we can't have any nice things, interruptions will also only get worse.
I wonder what made their leadership continue to escalate into increasingly bullshit decisions. What happens if I need to pause because I need my PC to be quiet so I can address something and still an ad suddenly starts playing, completely interrupting what I wanted to address in a completely intrusive way? I'll tell you what happens, I'll either find some way to disable that from happening, switch to a service that doesn't do it if I can, or just begin avoiding it all together.
Brilliant planing, YouTube. Whoever has been left as its leadership is a dumbass.
Not to mention it'll push more people towards using Adblockers. And since chrome is cracking down on Adblockers as well, people start using another browser altogether. It seems like Google is self-sabotaging with these kind of decisions.
Whoever has been left as its leadership is a dumbass.
Not in the slightest. More likely their annual bonus depends on boosting revenue right now. So they're incentivised to generate short term increases in revenue but not for longer term. Plus, also, if/when Youtube goes tits up they'll just get a different CEOing job (with "increased revenue by 25% in 2024 on their resume") rinse and repeat.
Money.
Also I imagine the ads will be silent but animated, like a regular website ad but full screen, essentially turning whatever you're watching it on into a giant billboard.
It's just another thing to block I guess.
I should have opened the article, that's a lot less intrusive than what I thought. If this is the extent of it, and frankly considering that Google let's you opt out of personalized tracking when many sites have begun forcing them onto users and forcing me to constantly clear their cookies, that makes me a lot less mad with them.
not if you use ublock origin or newpipe
And SmartTubeNext on Android TV
I use both!
Or LibreTube
OK, I've been dicking around with LibreTube for 4 hours now and I can't figure out how to, or if I need to, create a login, and where exactly I would do that, given the several sources under "instance".
For the sake of fuck, why are so many open source projects gut-wrenchingly awful at providing any beginner user info?
Just gonna say I hate this when other apps do this. I pause cause I need to concentrate on something else. Showing an ad just makes that even harder. Now I have to pause AND close the app.
Just close it straight away...
I use uBlock Origin and haven't seen a YouTube ad in 6 years, I cannot imagine trying to watch videos that try to show advertisements in the middle of them, lol. It's why I download all the TV and Movies I watch too. Advertisements are for people who, don't know how to silence them, the lazy, and those got guilted into allowing themselves to be brainwashed.
Bruh, it's no more a multimedia player, it's a advertising screen.
I’m betting these wont work on a Roku Tv huh? Kiddo likes putting music videos for shapes and beats but the constant POLITICAL ads are driving me nuts.
You can try this one https://github.com/iBicha/playlet
Not on my watch.
For that they're waiting on the paperwork to go through with Apple.
"We need to make double the money"
You're joking but infinite growth is the broken basis of our financial system. Shareholder are legally entitled to request growth.
YouTube has cornered the earth market, they have practically no room to grow, the only thing they have left is to increase the revenue per view, so ad stuffing will get worse quarter after quarter. Eventually they'll have to put ads in the ads and play them 5 at a time.
It's like all the sci-fi stories of ads everywhere
So dystopian. The number of novels I've read where Advertisements existing on a screen has become the main source of revenue, what a bizarre science fiction fantasy land that would be...
We are just missing the perpetual ad drones in the sky.
like on porn sites
If only YouTube ads were as unobtrusive as PornHub's.. one five-second-skippable ad before each video is all I've ever seen
Except the ads on porn sites are easier to block than YouTube's intrusive garbage. A simple DNS filter should be enough for most porn ads, whereas YouTube requires more complex blocking techniques.
and some piracy sites too
Is anyone even remotely surprised by this?
They've started serving ads when you skip backwards. Drives me fucking nuts.
I was willing to use the mobile app with ads because the interface is slightly less buggy.
Ad blocking on mobile web it is for me now 👍
Revanced ftw
newpipe
Tubular :)
Had to jump into the 'name your alternative' thread hehe.
Tubular because it includes SponsorBlock.
Tubular feels better, in my opinion.
Hmmm, so what you are saying is that I am just one ad blocker failing away from being productive in life?
I hate it when I go to full screen and one of my (100s of) tabs has a youtube short that thinks "Oh, time to start playing again!"
Now I'll have paused tabs start making noise and I won't be able to find it until the ad is over.
That’s your fault for having 100s of tabs open.
Seriously. What’s wrong with you?
lol, ads
Lol, YouTube
Having a hard enough time just trying to fucking skip back 20 seconds without accidentally tapping on the creators' page.
Just use the arrow keys
accidentally tapping
Sounds like mobile to me
What ads? 😏
And next... after opening the app you will have to watch ad before you can do anything
Come on, this is Google we're talking about. The ads come before opening the app.
True, maybe they do both and then some more when you try to close it.
YouTube is unwatchable. No way I can make it through those ads.
Firefox + ublock origin = no ads
(+) SponsorBlock = chef's kiss
anyone who doesn't already know this doesn't want to be helped
God, they better not be unskippable
I doubt they are video ads. On other streaming services they are just static images with transparent backgrounds displayed on one third of the screen or borders that show up around the paused video. Pause ads aren't new and I'm guessing YouTube is following other streaming services.
The sad thing is that most people won't even give a damn.
🤮
PornHub has been doing this. A little popup comes on screen when you pause the video for the first time.
Yeah and when someone needs to watch a video on CPR in an emergency get ready for a shitstorm if you are forced to watch their long ass ads
Nice. I don’t care.
I stopped watching YouTube years ago.
<golf clap>
YouTube premium, only time I hear ads are when my coworkers crank their shit too loud in the office, or when I have a brand new phone and have forgotten to log in.
Worth every red nickel.
Due to YouTube Music being included in that it's way too expensive for just removing ads. They need to add a tier that's cheaper to just remove ads.
People do nothing but incessantly complain about thing- yet still use thing. News flash folks; You’re never going to win this. YouTube will always be ahead of you on this.
And also.. I’ll never understand this. I use YouTube and don’t give a shit about ads. The moment they start bothering me- I’ll stop using YouTube. It’s that easy. Don’t like it, walk away.
If you hate something so much, yet can’t stop using it- you have an addiction. Ads are not the problem here.
I stay a few steps ahead of them. I haven't seen a YouTube ad in months.
Firefox with ublock origin on desktop / laptop
Grayjay mobile app
Smarttube on Android TV (also Flauncher customer launcher so I don't have to see any ads on my TV home screen)
I feel like there is an argument to be made about ads being put into damn near everything. They've become way too prominent in every aspect of daily life. There are so many things you cannot do without having an ad rammed down your throat. Youtube isn't the best example of this, but if you start giving up things that have ads, you will eventually have nothing. The root problem is corporate greed. Line must go up at an ever increasing angle, and shareholders must make maximum profit. How do they accomplish that? Ads. Regulatory bodies must step in before everything we see in a digital spaces (and a lot of real spaces too) becomes covered in advertisements.
Won't be long before we go to the beach to watch the sunset, and there's a floating billboard for mountain Dew covering it up. It's out of control.
So again, no one is going to win this. The only recourse is to stop using YouTube.
That’s it.
That’s how you win. You don’t play. But constantly whining about their practices while continuing to support their platform with visits is not doing the damage you think it’s doing.
They will always be steps ahead of you.
Silliest comment of the week
People do nothing but incessantly complain about thing- yet still use thing.
Go ahead and show the alternative, the alternative that has the content we need.
Before you respond that youtube is an entertainment service, I want to remind you that it isn't, but that it's only a part of it. You won't handwave it away as if we were discussing netflix being enshittified.
I'm not using youtube for listening to music videos and such things, never were. When I end up there it's because of a search result showing a relevrelevant video there, like disassembly of this or that, and such.
News flash folks; You’re never going to win this. YouTube will always be ahead of you on this.
That's objectively false. uBlock Origin devs and filterlist makers are doing a very good job.
Don’t like it, walk away.
That's very similar to saying "don't like your government? don't like it, walk away, found your own".
Yeah, that's not his it works.I bet you would be the first to call those who abandoned youtube as cavemen for not being able to access some video you shared
Apparently a hot take, but I don't have an issue with this, as long as they're picture ads, not videos. An option to hide them temporarily would be good if you're trying to read something. Maybe you'd need to hold a key or something. To me this is much less intrusive than 3 videos ads at the beginning of a video.
All of that said, I pay for premium, as I watch enough YouTube for it to be very very justified. I've probably saved weeks of my time not watching ads, plus it supports creators more than the ads ever do.
You must be young (or without memory). YouTube ads started exactly with picture ads (horizontal banners), but that was not sufficient, and ~12 years later there already are 2 unskipable videos at start, middle and finish (and several at the middle if in a long video). Your ad at the pause may start with pictures even, but videos and later longer videos will follow.
Did I miss some detail? I get the impressions from the comments this is some really poor choice for user experience as people will often pause to check something
But in my experience pause ads are nothing new at all and they start after the device has been idle. What did I miss that makes this different?
It's their private website, they do on it whatever they want. Right, lemmy?
You can run your own federated streaming service that will have no ads and will be free of charge, yeah?
No, commercial services with a dominant position in the market cannot do whatever they want.
Bootlickers wouldn't understand
This market domination is non-discriminatory. It's not like you go to your local car dealerships and they don't sell you any other brand than GM. Everyone on the internet is free to go and use any other service. It's dominant because users are happy with their ads or subscription fees instead of investing their time into using a competing product.
Nobody here wants peertube really.
They want free bandwidth (streaming 4k60), free computation (encoding, optimization), free research (codec development) and free storage (for endless amount of videos). Google sucking is a valid reason to piggyback on Google infrastructure but they seem to feel entitled to Google just letting it happen.
They can try to enshittify all they want, but as long as they keep offering that shit for free it's their own fault really. There will always be a way to remove all the crap once the video images enter my computer.
If it isn't sustainable for them then they should have required sign in and payment long ago instead of operating at a loss just to get all the content in their place. The only ones letting it happen are themselves, we just here for the ride.
I never understood, and never will understand this.
Even when I was a poor teenager and pirated essentially everything I always knew that this content only exists because someone is paying for it.
How do people go around feeling like the best VoD platform to ever exist, available on every device imaginable, optimized for years by best software engineers the world has, should be free, and without ads is beyond me.