I mean, I dont actually mind ads… within reason. But over the past few years I have watched less and less youtube content due to the ratio of ads to the actual bloody content I wanted to view.
One recent video about a bloke’s guitar amp was great. The ads not so much. I had to view two lots of 30 second unskippable ads before the 9 minute video would start. The guy starts this amazing guitar solo half way through, only to be cut off by TWO MORE bleeding adverts. The solo continues, the guy shreds it out then the video ends… two more adverts, 30 seconds each no skips (I reloaded the browser in the end which seemed to trigger a 2 minute ad at the start of another video).
Use Piped I hear you cry. Great idea. But how long is that going to last? I am certain that youtube and their parent company are feverishly pushing their engineers to find ways through, around, over and under any tool that stops them making money. The real solution is to tell everyone we know to use other platforms as much as possible and avoid Youtube. Tell every creator we love and respect to diversify where their content goes.
I know people here dont like the politics and trolling that happen on other platforms but thats because they’re insulated. With more exposure those platforms will tackle it. Or quarantine it. The other danger is if we dont diversify our viewing and creator hosting then Alphabet will just hold a monopoly and strangle any other real chance.
It will hurt them a little bit, because it will drive a few people to alternative platforms. However, the majority of their user base is now captive, because they have grown dependent on Alphabet for a number of services. All they have to do is ban a few people from all of Alphabet to set the example, and then 99% of folks will either subscribe or disable their ad blockers. Because getting banned from all of their services would really, really suck for most people who depend on them. Just think of how many non-Alphabet logins would suddenly stop working (either because of federation or gmail dependencies). Not to mention their data saved to the cloud.
Unfortunately, big picture is, they will come out on top. Because of the “embrace, extend, and extinguish” model that they are veterans at. IOW, they know how to royally screw people.
I think our only glimmer of hope is the government continuing to go after monopolies. That’s not much of a hope, though.
It can be like you said or, on the other hand, be the trigger to even more people to seek for alternatives.
While true, fighting with your own clients/source of income is not a very brilliant strategy for a company. People that depend on them for serious reasons can simply decide that the risk is becoming too high and simply seek other solutions. All the SCO saga should have taught something…
Maybe Google can win this battle, but I am not sure about the war. If the data that show that about 42% of the internet users had an AdBlocker installed are true, it remain to be seen how many of them will accept the condition Google set.
At this point is clear that the use of AdBlockers is hurting them in a way or another and while user may find an alternative solution for Google services, Google cannot find an alternative users for its services. In the end Google lose even if they only show a slower grow then predicted.
You are more optimistic than I am, and I hope you are right. I am mildly encouraged by some of the backlash we’re seeing in the news against tech bros.
Nah, maybe I am just older and already seen this happening, and not only in tech.
The problem Google has is that they are on the edge: they need to fight adblockers but they cannot hurt too much the average user while the adblock users already shown that they accept to “go to war”. And I don’t think that Google has more resources than “us”.
There is only so much ops a normal user accept to be able to use a service, they cannot take it too far to become an inconvenient to the average users. This way they simply will lose even the normal user.
A good parallel I do looking at myself is with Amazon, my orders hystory shows that when I started to use it I made much more orders, then in time Amazon got worse: cheap chinese clones, amazon ripoffs, query that shows irrelevant products, more and more difficulties to find the right product even if queried with the correct full name, so I simply switched to other online shops when I need to buy a certain brand product and not a cheap ripoff. So Amazon lost about 80% of my orders.
Same for Youtube: if while fighting against the adblockers they make the service worse even for the “average Joe” they will lose users and relevance.
How well it hurt them? It well probably help them the people it drives away well be the ones who are blocking ads. So by moving to another platform you are saving on Youtubes costs.