It seems like this statement from YouTube[1] and this Github issue (referenced by granzymes[2]) have key information being missed by a lot of commenters.
From YouTube:
> Viewers Using Ad Blockers & Other Content Blocking Tools: Ad blockers and other extensions can impact the accuracy of reported view counts. Channels whose audiences include a higher proportion of users utilizing such tools may see more fluctuations in traffic related to updates to these tools.
Quoting granzymes:
> According to the GitHub issue, YouTube didnât change anything. There are two endpoints that can be used to attribute a view. One is called multiple times throughout a video playback and has been in the easylist privacy filter for years. The other is called at the start of a playback, and was just added to the list (the timing lines up with the reports of view drops from tech YouTubers).
Thanks for lifting up my comment. Itâs amazing how quickly people want to point fingers at YouTube for something they werenât 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.
> point fingers at YouTube for something they werenât 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 YouTubeâs design problem.
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...
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 thatâs questionable from a security and moral point of view, even for YouTube.
If YouTube stored the entire video in a cache people would yell and scream about that. Oh, Iâve got 2TB of YouTube cache that didnât get cleaned properly, how annoying.
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.
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.
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)
Not for the cheater. Youâd 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just to be clear, YouTube doesnât 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 doesnât get paid for the views, because that traffic generates no revenue for them to share
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?
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.
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.
> 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, ...
> 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 Iâll very seriously reconsider my adblock usage.
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.
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).
Though thatâs a bit of a dick move to use that. I donât have a problem with the author making money, I just donât like the tracking and the politics of youtube. Also those ads are skippable, where yt ones arenât.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Brazilâs former President Jair Bolsonaro has skin cancer. Is that true? Damned if I know. Will I spend the time trying to verify that? Nope.
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 havenât lived through. I donât think news sources are worse today. They were always bad.
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
Iâm not sure about that is thereâs something that couldâve 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.
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.
Makes no sense whatsoever. Itâs a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched, not how much money YouTube made off of it. Theyâre pretending people care about their internal metrics, when people really do not. Maybe the creator, but again, theyâre probably also just interested in eyeball counts.
Itâs dumb in almost every direction I can imagine. The only one that makes sense is if youâre simply at war with adblockers and youâre trying to turn the public tide of opinion against them.
Perhaps then you should try to convince EasyList to remove the view counter from their block list? This wasn't a change YouTube made, this was adblockers choosing not to let YouTube track views for privacy purposes.
Well itâs not like youtube couldnât technically track the views even with adblockers if they wanted. The video is still being streamed after all, you donât need the client to call another endpoint to know whether itâs streaming the video.
Google built a system that tracked video views. Users installed a browser extension that intentionally breaks this tracking for privacy reasons. Why should Google do anything? They're not the one that broke it, and these users don't want to be tracked!
Google already doesn't pay out creators for views with blocked ads, no advertiser is going to pay for ads that were never shown. The view counter doesn't matter to that. Perhaps Youtube could enforce tougher blocking of ad blockers to support creators better.
Why does anyone not financially motivated care about how many views a video gets? Use the like function if you want I guess .
It makes sense to have the view count only show views that could be useful for ad revenue ... This way you can be honest with advertiser's about roughly how many eyeballs they can expec5
If you claim your counting views while simultaneoudly andvwithout disclosure don't count views of people using an adbkocker even so you could then thagvis deceiving. If it was the case I second waht the above poster hinted at: seems like a strategy to manipulate public discourse by using influencers frustration over where it hurts them (their purse) enhanced by the haunting sensation of loosing control (since they cannot know how and if they are negatively impacted by what - which makes the desire to find the cause of effect/guilty oarty/or a scapegoat) in order to disincentivice adblockers.
If the articles assumptions are correct, and it is beyond googles engineering teams to fix that issue (which seems unreasonabke to assume) theb that would be a pretty (and petty) malign and antisocial policy to pursue. (Don't be evil once was a thing for good reason)
What you're ignoring is that this was a change to an ad blocker[0], not a change to the site.
Google did not implement a change to stop counting views. An ad blocker intentionally[1] choosing to block the long-standing API calls used for the view statistics. How would you propose Google fix this, when there is an adversarial team in control of what requests many browser may make, and are choosing to use it to break the site?
[0] Or rather, an URL block list used by many ad blockers.
[1] It was almost certainly an honest mistake originally. But when the blocklist authors were informed of the problem and chose to not roll back the change, it became intentional.
Google could improve the way they serve ads. Like, one ad per âad sessionâ, no 5 minute ads that are longer than the video you are trying to watch, etc.
They are trying to increase ad revenue, but by increased Nguyen ads and making it harder to skip them it ironically is causing much worse practices such as ad blocking.
Why are we not counting financial reasons? Yeah, itâs a number both creators and advertisers looking to strike a direct advertising/sponsorship deal can use as an easy point of reference, which cannot readily be modified by the creator.
But to your point, the site is borderline social media nowadays when you consider all the features.
Bragging rights for sure. Many channels are parasocial relationships, and that number matters a lot to both the creator and the viewers.
Itâs also mildly informational. If I see a completely out-of-whack suggestion in my feed, but it has a billion views, suddenly I know why itâs in my feed.
There are probably other reasons. I remember there was ongoing reporting about a race between two channels on YouTube racing to have⌠I dunno, the first video with a billion views or something. The number of video views for Gangnam Style was something everyone was talking about.
Plus, itâs nice to have. Thatâs reason enough imo.
The view counter isn't for you. It's merely a convenience that you're showed it at all. View counts are for monetization. If a view isn't monetized, why count it? Purely foe vanity?
You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source and no other reason. View metrics and monetization are what count, not your subjective experience. YouTube does not care one tiny bit about how much you like the site or interface or what you think of the view counter.
Videos are often monetized via sponsor placements in the videos themselves. The creator of the video would like an accurate view count to report to their sponsors.
This is completely separate from the YouTube platform ads and monetization which is what the ad blockers are blocking.
This is the best counterargument I've seen for why YouTubers might be vexed by this, however I've felt it was pretty fair to expect that adblocked views don't really "count" in the "game" that you can argue YouTube is operating with the "View Count" metric and therefore I don't see much room for anyone to feel indignant or wronged.
Imagine a creator whose viewers all watched with ads blocked (and without YT Premium either). That creator is, objectively speaking not partnering with Google in any way, they're just using the platform as a free CDN. So the failure of Google to provide that person with accurate metrics for him to operate his business (that Google isn't a part of) isn't all that offensive.
So someone losing visibility to their "views" if it's because of non-monetized views (adblocked ones) seems proportionally fair.
There's always self-hosting your videos, but yes, that's expensive. It's a tradeoff the content creator has to make: A cut of your revenue + a ton of content restrictions, in exchange for discoverability + free CDN.
Google provides YouTube to creators because Google derives a benefit from it. If they don't want those "freeloaders" hosting videos without Google getting anything in return, then they can charge for it, or delist them, or delete their videos, or whatever.
But they are getting something in return: a near monopoly in this particular market.
Not providing correct view counts just because some of those viewers use adblockers feels kinda petty.
Not true, most all but the very top creators have stopped relying on Youtube's measly ad revenue and just run sponsored content instead, in which case the actual view count (minus SponsorBlock users anyway) is very relevant to show how much they actually reached.
What Google gets out of it is free content for their platform, which other platforms seem to be only able to dream about, and accurate metrics would be something like the lowest possible bar to provide. But well, turns out you can do just about whatever if you're the defacto monopoly and the experience doesn't matter anymore, not for creators, not for the consumers.
What about adblocked views by YouTube Premium subscribers?
The point is that a view counter should show an accurate and honest count of views, because that's what it's presented as and lying is bad. Why should ad blocking have anything to do with that? Companies should aim to protect their revenue stream by providing a good service, not cripple their service to match the basest vision of their revenue incentives.
In looking at my filter log (I use AdGuard on a Mac), I do not see the API calls associated with YouTube getting blocked. In particular, the "cross device continuity" (Continue Watching) feature provides the data sufficient for monetization of the channel view.
When I looked at the same video while in incognito (and signed out), I could see some requests originating getting blocked that were not at all present during my watch of the video under premium.
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For YouTube, what is a "view?" If a chunk is downloaded, is that a view? If the next chunk is downloaded, is that two views? How do you verify that it's not the person who watched the first chunk?
YouTube doesn't appear to be counting views based on chunks downloaded as there are lots of ways to download chunks. Even doing things like scrubbing the video back 5 minutes would produce incorrect chunk download counts.
From this it appears that YouTube is counting views based on an API call from the page that identifies you (arguably through privacy issues) so that you downloading 1 chunk or 10 chunks only counts as one view. That API call appears to now be blocked.
Counting chunks downloaded would arguably be even less truthful or accurate than counting API calls.
There is also kind of a built in sponsorblock for YouTube on mobile. If you double tap to skip 5s repeatedly, a button quickly pops up to skip ahead (not explicitly about sponsor segments, but I'm sure this is what it is used for 99% of the time).
FYI this is a premium-only feature. It's one that I am very thankful for. I pay a pretty penny for youtube and I don't appreciate "creators" end-running around that to peddle their shitty AG1 supplements or woodworking tools I can't buy in my country.
People who install ad blockers are perhaps not good recipients of in-video sponsor placements. So maybe not counting them as viewers is at least honest to the sponsor?
With something like YouTube there are so many different parties involved. Sponsor, creator, Google, advertiser, consumer. Clearly the system could be optimized for any of them, or it can present some balances that naturally make one or more of the groups unhappy. Clearly it's easy to criticize the system if it's not optimized to your perspective of it.
It's very unpopular to say it, (cue downvotes) but on the whole I think Google mostly gets it right. Advertisers have a channel to reach consumers [3]. Creators have a way to earn income [1], consumers watch for free [2], Google makes money (and provides infrastructure).
[1] sponsorships are allowed, although none of that revenue flows to Google, which I think is fairly tolerant of Google.
[2] Google has an option to turn off ads with YT Premium.
[3] Ad blockers serve consumers, but hurt the whole system. I get that they're very popular here, but they are effectively a tax on Google, and now on creators. A more ethical approach IMO (and ethics are both personal and subjective) is to pay for YT Premium if you'd prefer to suppress ads. Then you are "paying your way" not free-loading.
I subscribe to Premium for this reason, and am mostly content with my subscription. Two aspects I donât like are that itâs tied to my centralized google identity, and that YouTube doesnât have enough competition.
> A more ethical approach IMO (and ethics are both personal and subjective) is to pay for YT Premium if you'd prefer to suppress ads.
Labeling people who use ad blockers as unethical is hypocritical, to say the least.
The supremely unethical behavior is coming from companies who decide to use advertising as their business model, and the entire adtech industry that powers it. They lie, cheat, steal, and exploit user data in perpetuity, yet users are supposed to feel guilty for trying to block all of this hostility? Give me a break.
> consumers watch for free
They don't watch for "free". They pay with their data and attention, which is worth much more than any reasonable price Google could charge for the service. This discrepancy is so large, in fact, that all ad-supported web platforms should be paying users for using their service.
Choosing to pay for YT Premium simply makes the experience more bearable by removing the annoyance of being constantly bombarded with ads, but all the shady data extraction, profiling, tracking, and manipulation still happens behind the scenes, across all Google products, and beyond.
The fact society has accepted a business model that introduces a hostile middleman in all of their business transactions, and that we've been brainwashed into calling this "free", is deeply disturbing. Not least because the same machinery is also used to serve us propaganda and manipulate us not just into buying things, but into thinking and acting in ways that benefit the agenda of whoever has the will and a negligible amount of resources to run an ad campaign. And yet we wonder why society is crumbling around us. It's some perverse version of Stockholm syndrome.
So, no, I will never feel guilty for using ad blockers, and no sane person should. If content creators want my money, they can choose more ethical business models, which are also likely to be less profitable and more difficult to manage. But, hey, that is the price to pay if you care about ethics, and not participating in machinery that exploits your viewers.
>> Labeling people who use ad blockers as unethical is hypocritical, to say the least.
If I used an ad blocker you could say I was hypocritical. Since I don't, you can't. You're welcome to disagree on ethics of course, but its not hypocrisy.
>> If content creators want my money, they can choose more ethical business models, which are also likely to be less profitable and more difficult to manage. But, hey, that is the price to pay if you care about ethics, and not participating in machinery that exploits your viewers.
So you want creators to be more ethical, bypassing YT, but in the meantime you'll support Google by watch YT? Which as you point out is tracking you? I'm not sure I follow your argument here...
It seems like this statement from YouTube[1] and this Github issue (referenced by granzymes[2]) have key information being missed by a lot of commenters.
From YouTube:
> Viewers Using Ad Blockers & Other Content Blocking Tools: Ad blockers and other extensions can impact the accuracy of reported view counts. Channels whose audiences include a higher proportion of users utilizing such tools may see more fluctuations in traffic related to updates to these tools.
Quoting granzymes:
> According to the GitHub issue, YouTube didnât change anything. There are two endpoints that can be used to attribute a view. One is called multiple times throughout a video playback and has been in the easylist privacy filter for years. The other is called at the start of a playback, and was just added to the list (the timing lines up with the reports of view drops from tech YouTubers).
Source from the GitHub issue for easylist: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme...
[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/373195597
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277768
Thanks for lifting up my comment. Itâs amazing how quickly people want to point fingers at YouTube for something they werenât 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.
> point fingers at YouTube for something they werenât 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 YouTubeâs design problem.
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
But then theyâd have to report significantly lower CPMâs to content creators.
Lower CPMs, but it would be so easy to game that creators would all have trillions of views.
They already do something like this - some videos have an indicator for how many times a chunk of a video is played.
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
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 thatâs questionable from a security and moral point of view, even for YouTube.
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, Iâve got 2TB of YouTube cache that didnât 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.
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)
Plus that would make cheating on traffic really bandwidth expensive
Not for the cheater. Youâd 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Well at least people's primary source of income isn't hidden behind a black box by corporate overlords or anything
Just to be clear, YouTube doesnât 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 doesnât get paid for the views, because that traffic generates no revenue for them to share
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 donât 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.
Should a video watched with ads blocked earn money?
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.
> 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.
> 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 Iâll very seriously reconsider my adblock usage.
You can use Premium with an ad blocker
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.
Do people gather on YouTube because it has value, or specifically because they know it's where money is burning?
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).
> These are typically not blocked
sponsorblock would like a word with that!
Though thatâs a bit of a dick move to use that. I donât have a problem with the author making money, I just donât like the tracking and the politics of youtube. Also those ads are skippable, where yt ones arenât.
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.
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.
Arenât those segments deals between the creator and the sponsors and nothing to do with Youtube?
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.
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.
Ok but Youtube shouldn't payout.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems pretty likely for well over half for a channel like that to use ad blockers.
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 âobjectiveâ and âbinaryâ
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.
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 Brazilâs former President Jair Bolsonaro has skin cancer. Is that true? Damned if I know. Will I spend the time trying to verify that? Nope.
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 havenât lived through. I donât think news sources are worse today. They were always bad.
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
Nonsense is just a subset of information; the speed of information is absolutely accelerating.
Iâm not sure about that is thereâs something that couldâve 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.
Accurate but I donât think itâs new. Itâs a property of human intelligence called âhallucinationâ where facts are made up.
I donât 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
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...
Seems like a balanced approach, people can watch videos with adblockers but it won't count towards youtube's public facing metrics.
Makes no sense whatsoever. Itâs a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched, not how much money YouTube made off of it. Theyâre pretending people care about their internal metrics, when people really do not. Maybe the creator, but again, theyâre probably also just interested in eyeball counts.
Itâs dumb in almost every direction I can imagine. The only one that makes sense is if youâre simply at war with adblockers and youâre trying to turn the public tide of opinion against them.
Perhaps then you should try to convince EasyList to remove the view counter from their block list? This wasn't a change YouTube made, this was adblockers choosing not to let YouTube track views for privacy purposes.
Well itâs not like youtube couldnât technically track the views even with adblockers if they wanted. The video is still being streamed after all, you donât need the client to call another endpoint to know whether itâs streaming the video.
Google built a system that tracked video views. Users installed a browser extension that intentionally breaks this tracking for privacy reasons. Why should Google do anything? They're not the one that broke it, and these users don't want to be tracked!
> Why should Google do anything?
Imagine the headlines if Google did do something - "YouTube implements advanced user tracking to counter act Privacy and Ad blocker"
Because itâs hurting creators, not viewers?
I don't know, it's not obvious to me that YouTube should prioritize the creator's desire to track users over the user's desire not to be tracked.
Google already doesn't pay out creators for views with blocked ads, no advertiser is going to pay for ads that were never shown. The view counter doesn't matter to that. Perhaps Youtube could enforce tougher blocking of ad blockers to support creators better.
A view counter from premium member (user without ads) should count.
Viewers are hurting the creators then. If you care so much about the creators, turn off your ad blocker.
Why does anyone not financially motivated care about how many views a video gets? Use the like function if you want I guess .
It makes sense to have the view count only show views that could be useful for ad revenue ... This way you can be honest with advertiser's about roughly how many eyeballs they can expec5
If you claim your counting views while simultaneoudly andvwithout disclosure don't count views of people using an adbkocker even so you could then thagvis deceiving. If it was the case I second waht the above poster hinted at: seems like a strategy to manipulate public discourse by using influencers frustration over where it hurts them (their purse) enhanced by the haunting sensation of loosing control (since they cannot know how and if they are negatively impacted by what - which makes the desire to find the cause of effect/guilty oarty/or a scapegoat) in order to disincentivice adblockers. If the articles assumptions are correct, and it is beyond googles engineering teams to fix that issue (which seems unreasonabke to assume) theb that would be a pretty (and petty) malign and antisocial policy to pursue. (Don't be evil once was a thing for good reason)
What you're ignoring is that this was a change to an ad blocker[0], not a change to the site.
Google did not implement a change to stop counting views. An ad blocker intentionally[1] choosing to block the long-standing API calls used for the view statistics. How would you propose Google fix this, when there is an adversarial team in control of what requests many browser may make, and are choosing to use it to break the site?
[0] Or rather, an URL block list used by many ad blockers.
[1] It was almost certainly an honest mistake originally. But when the blocklist authors were informed of the problem and chose to not roll back the change, it became intentional.
Google could improve the way they serve ads. Like, one ad per âad sessionâ, no 5 minute ads that are longer than the video you are trying to watch, etc.
They are trying to increase ad revenue, but by increased Nguyen ads and making it harder to skip them it ironically is causing much worse practices such as ad blocking.
Why are we not counting financial reasons? Yeah, itâs a number both creators and advertisers looking to strike a direct advertising/sponsorship deal can use as an easy point of reference, which cannot readily be modified by the creator.
But to your point, the site is borderline social media nowadays when you consider all the features.
Bragging rights for sure. Many channels are parasocial relationships, and that number matters a lot to both the creator and the viewers.
Itâs also mildly informational. If I see a completely out-of-whack suggestion in my feed, but it has a billion views, suddenly I know why itâs in my feed.
There are probably other reasons. I remember there was ongoing reporting about a race between two channels on YouTube racing to have⌠I dunno, the first video with a billion views or something. The number of video views for Gangnam Style was something everyone was talking about.
Plus, itâs nice to have. Thatâs reason enough imo.
The view counter isn't for you. It's merely a convenience that you're showed it at all. View counts are for monetization. If a view isn't monetized, why count it? Purely foe vanity?
You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source and no other reason. View metrics and monetization are what count, not your subjective experience. YouTube does not care one tiny bit about how much you like the site or interface or what you think of the view counter.
Videos are often monetized via sponsor placements in the videos themselves. The creator of the video would like an accurate view count to report to their sponsors.
This is completely separate from the YouTube platform ads and monetization which is what the ad blockers are blocking.
This is the best counterargument I've seen for why YouTubers might be vexed by this, however I've felt it was pretty fair to expect that adblocked views don't really "count" in the "game" that you can argue YouTube is operating with the "View Count" metric and therefore I don't see much room for anyone to feel indignant or wronged.
Imagine a creator whose viewers all watched with ads blocked (and without YT Premium either). That creator is, objectively speaking not partnering with Google in any way, they're just using the platform as a free CDN. So the failure of Google to provide that person with accurate metrics for him to operate his business (that Google isn't a part of) isn't all that offensive.
So someone losing visibility to their "views" if it's because of non-monetized views (adblocked ones) seems proportionally fair.
There's always self-hosting your videos, but yes, that's expensive. It's a tradeoff the content creator has to make: A cut of your revenue + a ton of content restrictions, in exchange for discoverability + free CDN.
Google provides YouTube to creators because Google derives a benefit from it. If they don't want those "freeloaders" hosting videos without Google getting anything in return, then they can charge for it, or delist them, or delete their videos, or whatever.
But they are getting something in return: a near monopoly in this particular market.
Not providing correct view counts just because some of those viewers use adblockers feels kinda petty.
Not true, most all but the very top creators have stopped relying on Youtube's measly ad revenue and just run sponsored content instead, in which case the actual view count (minus SponsorBlock users anyway) is very relevant to show how much they actually reached.
What Google gets out of it is free content for their platform, which other platforms seem to be only able to dream about, and accurate metrics would be something like the lowest possible bar to provide. But well, turns out you can do just about whatever if you're the defacto monopoly and the experience doesn't matter anymore, not for creators, not for the consumers.
What about adblocked views by YouTube Premium subscribers?
The point is that a view counter should show an accurate and honest count of views, because that's what it's presented as and lying is bad. Why should ad blocking have anything to do with that? Companies should aim to protect their revenue stream by providing a good service, not cripple their service to match the basest vision of their revenue incentives.
In looking at my filter log (I use AdGuard on a Mac), I do not see the API calls associated with YouTube getting blocked. In particular, the "cross device continuity" (Continue Watching) feature provides the data sufficient for monetization of the channel view.
When I looked at the same video while in incognito (and signed out), I could see some requests originating getting blocked that were not at all present during my watch of the video under premium.
---
For YouTube, what is a "view?" If a chunk is downloaded, is that a view? If the next chunk is downloaded, is that two views? How do you verify that it's not the person who watched the first chunk?
YouTube doesn't appear to be counting views based on chunks downloaded as there are lots of ways to download chunks. Even doing things like scrubbing the video back 5 minutes would produce incorrect chunk download counts.
From this it appears that YouTube is counting views based on an API call from the page that identifies you (arguably through privacy issues) so that you downloading 1 chunk or 10 chunks only counts as one view. That API call appears to now be blocked.
Counting chunks downloaded would arguably be even less truthful or accurate than counting API calls.
>lying is bad
So turn off your ad blocker so you donât lie about your views.
I can't reply to your deeper comment but there is a youtube specific extension that blocks ads to sponsor placements by skipping them.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo...
Has 2 million users which isn't a ton but just mentioning that it is used and it works well.
There is also kind of a built in sponsorblock for YouTube on mobile. If you double tap to skip 5s repeatedly, a button quickly pops up to skip ahead (not explicitly about sponsor segments, but I'm sure this is what it is used for 99% of the time).
FYI this is a premium-only feature. It's one that I am very thankful for. I pay a pretty penny for youtube and I don't appreciate "creators" end-running around that to peddle their shitty AG1 supplements or woodworking tools I can't buy in my country.
And this ships as a plugin to some unofficial YouTube player. The actual number is far higher.
People who install ad blockers are perhaps not good recipients of in-video sponsor placements. So maybe not counting them as viewers is at least honest to the sponsor?
With something like YouTube there are so many different parties involved. Sponsor, creator, Google, advertiser, consumer. Clearly the system could be optimized for any of them, or it can present some balances that naturally make one or more of the groups unhappy. Clearly it's easy to criticize the system if it's not optimized to your perspective of it.
It's very unpopular to say it, (cue downvotes) but on the whole I think Google mostly gets it right. Advertisers have a channel to reach consumers [3]. Creators have a way to earn income [1], consumers watch for free [2], Google makes money (and provides infrastructure).
[1] sponsorships are allowed, although none of that revenue flows to Google, which I think is fairly tolerant of Google.
[2] Google has an option to turn off ads with YT Premium.
[3] Ad blockers serve consumers, but hurt the whole system. I get that they're very popular here, but they are effectively a tax on Google, and now on creators. A more ethical approach IMO (and ethics are both personal and subjective) is to pay for YT Premium if you'd prefer to suppress ads. Then you are "paying your way" not free-loading.
I subscribe to Premium for this reason, and am mostly content with my subscription. Two aspects I donât like are that itâs tied to my centralized google identity, and that YouTube doesnât have enough competition.
> A more ethical approach IMO (and ethics are both personal and subjective) is to pay for YT Premium if you'd prefer to suppress ads.
Labeling people who use ad blockers as unethical is hypocritical, to say the least.
The supremely unethical behavior is coming from companies who decide to use advertising as their business model, and the entire adtech industry that powers it. They lie, cheat, steal, and exploit user data in perpetuity, yet users are supposed to feel guilty for trying to block all of this hostility? Give me a break.
> consumers watch for free
They don't watch for "free". They pay with their data and attention, which is worth much more than any reasonable price Google could charge for the service. This discrepancy is so large, in fact, that all ad-supported web platforms should be paying users for using their service.
Choosing to pay for YT Premium simply makes the experience more bearable by removing the annoyance of being constantly bombarded with ads, but all the shady data extraction, profiling, tracking, and manipulation still happens behind the scenes, across all Google products, and beyond.
The fact society has accepted a business model that introduces a hostile middleman in all of their business transactions, and that we've been brainwashed into calling this "free", is deeply disturbing. Not least because the same machinery is also used to serve us propaganda and manipulate us not just into buying things, but into thinking and acting in ways that benefit the agenda of whoever has the will and a negligible amount of resources to run an ad campaign. And yet we wonder why society is crumbling around us. It's some perverse version of Stockholm syndrome.
So, no, I will never feel guilty for using ad blockers, and no sane person should. If content creators want my money, they can choose more ethical business models, which are also likely to be less profitable and more difficult to manage. But, hey, that is the price to pay if you care about ethics, and not participating in machinery that exploits your viewers.
>> Labeling people who use ad blockers as unethical is hypocritical, to say the least.
If I used an ad blocker you could say I was hypocritical. Since I don't, you can't. You're welcome to disagree on ethics of course, but its not hypocrisy.
>> If content creators want my money, they can choose more ethical business models, which are also likely to be less profitable and more difficult to manage. But, hey, that is the price to pay if you care about ethics, and not participating in machinery that exploits your viewers.
So you want creators to be more ethical, bypassing YT, but in the meantime you'll support Google by watch YT? Which as you point out is tracking you? I'm not sure I follow your argument here...