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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 didn’t 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. It’s amazing how quickly people want to point fingers at YouTube for something they weren’t involved in.

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

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

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

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

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 that‘s 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Aren’t 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. It’s a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched, not how much money YouTube made off of it. They’re pretending people care about their internal metrics, when people really do not. Maybe the creator, but again, they’re probably also just interested in eyeball counts.

It’s dumb in almost every direction I can imagine. The only one that makes sense is if you’re simply at war with adblockers and you’re 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 it’s not like youtube couldn’t technically track the views even with adblockers if they wanted. The video is still being streamed after all, you don’t need the client to call another endpoint to know whether it’s 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 it’s 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 “ad session”, 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, it’s 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.

It’s 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 it’s 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, it’s nice to have. That’s 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.

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.

>lying is bad

So turn off your ad blocker so you don’t lie about your views.

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.

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 don’t like are that it’s tied to my centralized google identity, and that YouTube doesn’t 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.

It's for sponsors too so yes a total view count is important since creators use views to negotiate deals. I have adblock[0], but I still watch sponsor spots.

0: I just side step this entirely these days by paying for premium.

Why should sponsor care sent viewers who block their advertising?

I’ve been a premium member for about 15 years.

Ad blockers and Premium don’t block embedded sponsorships in the videos themselves, which are a common way for creators to monetize their videos.

Premium absolutely does, via YouTube's new "Jump Forward" feature.

Some do. With crowd funded submissions on where the placement starts and ends.

There's a new skip method for premium members (which I have) where you can skip commonly skipped sections as recorded by other users.

For example- if a video has a section about their sponsor from 3:30 to 4:10 and I press the right seek button twice around 3:30 the jump will be to 4:10. It also displays an alert that it's using the feature.

sponsorblock does

Why are view counts displayed prominently in the UI then? Every suggested video shows it's view count as a sort of social proof.

This is a bit too blunt a look at it. YouTube exists as an ecosystem with increasing competition. View and subscriber counts are their core incentive and feedback systems they have with the actual producers that make their whole ecosystem work. Without those there's no real reason for people to put videos there.

This as an open and celebrated system drives producers to advertise for YouTube via the almost-compulsory every-video mention of liking and subscribing and forwarding videos to friends.

Youtube is well aware of this, hence things like the iconic long running physical play button trophy delivery system.

I'd also say more broadly that making such sweeping claims for YouTube as a collective entity not caring at all about viewers is too reductive. It's more defensible and relatable to claim that, though there may be many people working for YouTube because they deeply care about a mission of democratizing multimedia publishing, the incentives and structures around it being a PBC often lead to decisions which drown out that care from corporate heads who are more profit than mission driven.

If I understand well, my view is not counted as a YouTube Premium subscriber. I’m not sure that anybody is happy with that. Also there is zero good reason to have a separate API for this. Even Google knows this, because Google Analytics has an adblocker proof solution for at least a decade.

It's counted as a view, and beyond that, in general the content creator gets a higher payout from Premium viewers than from ad viewing users.

I'd worry that if this is really caused by an adblocker, it's possible YT uses these same view counting mechanism that's being blocked to increment their Premium views, meaning Premium subscribers who don't explicitly turn their blocker off on YouTube could be being undercounted. If so that should be fixed, for Premium viewership, as that's not really fair to anyone.

> View counts are for monetization

Agree, however view counts, i.e. metrics tracked by YT, or by sponsors,creators in fancy dashboards isn't the view counter we are shown and nobody is questioning how those are implemented. The View Counter means very specific UI component in YT interface shown to regular users.

> view counter isn't for you

Disagree,

View counter is a important decision making input along with the thumbnail, title and duration of the video on if a user will click on the video to watch them.

It is in effect an advertisement for the video.

If that wasn't the case, then YouTube wouldn't be showing them in every list view and next to every thumbnail. When the numbers no longer represent what the users think they represent I would say it is not far from false advertising.

A fair amount of people on here and I have both YT Premium and also use some adblocker, should our views be counted or not according to this point of view? .

I'm so glad other people here pay for premium because on Tiktok and Reddit a common joke is how few people pay for YT.

My Verizon cell phone plan offers it at a slightly discounted $10 a month. For a completely ad free (ads from Youtube) experience it's well worth it considering how many car and tech videos I watch.

It also offers a higher bitrate 1080p option on some videos which is a cherry on top.

Yeah it's absurd to me how much people bitch about YouTube advertising and don't pay. To me, either you don't watch enough YouTube for the complaints to be warranted, or you do watch a lot, and you're just torturing yourself to save $15 and blaming YouTube for your choice. It's like complaining about a Quarter Pounder "not coming with cheese" and constantly trying to steal cheese, when you could just pay the dollar and get cheese every time.

>You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source

How are these two statements not contradictions?

Rephrase it as "Youtube doesn't care about you, just about putting ads in front of your face" and it's not a contradiction. As long as you don't get irritated enough to go away and stop using Youtube entirely, they don't care about improving your viewing experience.

Another way to phrase it is the classic line "If you're not paying for it, you aren't the customer, you're the product."

Especially in terms of baked in ads from the creator, whose terms are based on views, separate from YouTube revenue.

> It’s a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched

That's emphatically not what people "people want". People want to get paid. And creators get paid based on views.

So... per the upthread point, paying people based on views that actually generate revenue seems fairer and more optimal, no? If YouTube can't make money from your content, why do you expect them to pay you for it?

> That's emphatically not what people "people want". People want to get paid. And creators get paid based on views.

That's nonsense, as a viewer of YouTube videos I do not expect to her paid for this.

I guess it'd be nice if I were paid for watching YouTube, so maybe you have a point after all! :-)

That's deliberately misinterpreting. The overwhelming criticism of this view count regression kerfuffle was centered around creators and the lost revenue: YouTube was pervasively accused of cooking numbers to stiff their creators.

No one anywhere was arguing from the perspective of a viewer. Until it turned out that the regression was due to an adblocker change. Now suddenly creators don't matter and it's really the viewer's visibility into view counts that is the important element.

And that seems... insincere.

Why would anyone just watching videos on YouTube care how many people have seen the video? You enjoy it or you don’t, how many other people have seen it doesn’t change the viewing experience at all.

The only people who would care are YT themselves, the creator, other creators, and advertisers.

I don’t know why they even publicly display the view count.

> Why would anyone just watching videos on YouTube care how many people have seen the video?

For the same reason online shops show "Most popular" items and ads say "trusted by X people worldwide". People on average apparently like feeling being part of a bigger crowd. If that doesn't make sense to you, you're probably in the minority (which by that logic shouldn't bother you).

It's social proof, specially before you start watching. And after watching it's still interesting in a "huh this trailer got 5M views, didn't know so many people were interested in it" way

Number of views and views to likes ratio are both signals of value.

Likes to dislikes is an even better signal. Shame on YouTube for removing that.

You can actually use a browser extension to show it still. The dislike count is still available, just not shown.

I've heard that it's not actual dislike count, but extrapolated data contributed from people who installed the extensions. But I've also heard that some channels have compared it to their actual dislike count and it only differs little.

The comment you replied to explained that nothing was changed on the YouTube side. This was an adblocker choosing to start block a non-ads, non-tracking, samesite API call that had probably been in place for like a decade.

So it's quite amazing that even with that context you still managed to hijack that into a discussion about the merits of what Google did with this "balanced approach" bait. This isn't a balanced approach! It's not an approach at all!

It is the ad blocker willfully choosing to break totally normal and benign site functionality. Google had no agency in this, and doesn't have much recourse.

The comments that really get me are the ones putting the onus onto Youtube to refactor their view approach to "just" count it from the backend. Rhymes with consumers asking gamedevs to add multiplayer to games.

EasyList is the ad blocking list.

EasyPrivacy is tracker blocking list.

The culprit was in EasyPrivacy (tracker) list, not EasyList (ad blocking).

There is no balancing happening here. YouTube needs to make an API call to attribute a view to a video, and easylist started blocking that API call. YouTube was perfectly happy a month ago to count views for users that were blocking ads, and presumably remains happy to do so.

The only thing that changed is easylist blocked the API.

The do not need an API call, obviously they know that the video is being watched, because it's being streamed.

YouTube serves videos from CDNs, many of which it does not own.

I missed the part where that's our problem.

Metrics from the CDN will be wildly inaccurate. Also downloading a video isn’t the same as watching it.

> The only thing that changed is easylist blocked the API.

Wonder if there's a good reason they started blocking that API?

You can still have in-video sponsor spots, in fact, most of the creators have them. Viewership is an important metric to those sponsors.

Use the SponsorBlock extension to autoskip in-video ads.

This looks like an additional incentive to channel owners to somehow convince their audience against the ad blocker use. Makes sense, better than trying to win an unwinnable arms race against the blocker maintainers.

But this is not Google's doing? Adblockers are not sending requests to increment the view count, so yt doesn't increment the view count.

I'd argue use the adblocker, but if you want to ensure views are counted, add an exception for the URL in question, for example [1].

[1] https://github.com/Scrxtchy/ReturnYoutubeView

I hope by admitting defeat and shifting the blame for the numbers to creators, they also stop this ridiculous fight with adblockers. I'm sure they could allocate the investments in this elsewhere.

Jeff Geerling has been sleuthing into this lately too - my biggest takeaway is that it's only viewer counts that are suffering, he's not seen revenue drop which is key. Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/digging-deeper-youtub...

Many youtubers have sponsorships though, and their viewership stats come into play when negotiating with potential sponsors.

I guess if everyone was hit equally across the board then those sponsors will eventually adjust to the new metrics, but I assume some genres have more tech-savvy audiences which are more likely to use ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how evenly distributed this penalty falls.

It's wild to me that advertisers are willing to use first party metrics. In any other media business you'd have a certified third party ratings agency to give "audience size" metrics some legitimacy.

Youtube has no incentive to accurately report this data and no apparent accreditation in their methodology.

Google in general have been resistant to letting anyone see how effective their ads truly are - and most studies that get close tend to show extremely questionable efficacy results.

If Google shows everyone how ineffective ads actually are, they’d crumble.

This is very much not true: Google has a bunch of options for measuring ad effectiveness, and when I was there (until three years ago) it was very hard to get advertisers to use them.

The two main options advertisers have are:

* Brand Lift Studies: split audience into treatment and control, use surveys on a small fraction of participants to measure impact

* Conversion Lift: again split audience into treatment and control, compare downstream actions like purchases ("conversions")

These both work on YouTube IIRC.

I am not surprised google has many tools to tell you how great google is doing at using google's data for you.

Anyways, I was mostly referring to sales at physical locations; I assume it's pretty viable to build a system to figure out if someone who previously bought a lot of shein is now buying a lot of temu.

If Google didn't want people to see "ineffective ads actually are" why would they build and push Brand Lift Studies and Conversion Lift?

Offline purchases are harder, of course, but pretty sure you can still do this: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9994849

>It's wild to me that advertisers are willing to use first party metrics.

I agree, and find it even wilder that first party metrics from Meta and Google are trusted by most major advertisers (including ad agencies). I'm talking about six-seven figure budgets spent without any third party validation.

I've seen some studies on click fraud[0], but when advertisers are effectively choosing from a duopoly that has limited incentives not to lie in their metrics, I find it strange that there are no popular, widespread and accessible independent validation tools.

0 – https://www.mdpi.com/2073-431X/10/12/164

There's a whole industry of independent validation tools - DoubleVerify, IAS, Human, etc.

I feel like it's more "second party" in this case. The first party is the creator, and the tracker/keeper of the view counts is Google. Google certainly isn't a disinterested, certified third party, but they're also not a creator who might make up inflated numbers to get a more lucrative sponsorship.

Advertisers have 2 options for who to place ads with: Google and Facebook. When you have a monopoly, the customer has to take what it can get. Facebook has overstated its views and clicks for years to charge advertisers more, and faced no consequences for doing so.

This is largely true because this is where the largest volume of traffic comes from; however, it's not exclusive to these two by any means. There are some pretty big Supply Side Platforms and aggregators out there for advertisers to use. This comes into play a lot more often on podcasts and streaming audio, in particular, consider the fleet of Amazon Alexa devices out there.

Many of the advertisers that sell on these platforms are quite familiar with buying ads directly from "old school" media companies. So they have the competence and familiarity to be put off by the metrics but are apparently not in a position to force Google and Facebook to match standards used in other contexts.

Click campaigns/conversions and user codes are more important than pure impressions.

To me the wild thing is that this ad revenue model could ever have been profitable in the first place.

The automated “Skip Ahead” button (which I use daily) is already hostile to sponsorships. I would not be at all surprised to see them hitting sponsors on multiple fronts.

Google is not getting a cut of that sponsorship money. They don't care if it wrecks your deal. They want your ONLY source of income to be Youtube. If you're fully beholden to Youtube, there will be no escape, no way for you to leave and take your viewership with you.

Remember how Youtube used to be a nice cage with lots of air holes and fun toys to occupy you? Light ad enforcement, tools to help you build your viewership etc? People are starting to feel the pinch of those being removed. That cool room is starting to look like what it really is--an industrial cage.

I think it's less ominous than that.

Skip Ahead is only for Premium subscribers. The logic probably being native-ads/sponsorships are in fact ads, and Premium users are paying for an ad-free experience.

It's interesting that I just read an inteview with YouTube CEO (https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-youtube-ceo-n...) who mentioned that YouTube fully intends to start getting a cut out of that sponsorship money ("to align interests better").

> They want your ONLY source of income to be Youtube.

I’m not sure. They want influencers to make profit using their platform, so they want to make them rich. On the viewcount, a skipped sponsor still looks like a view. No sponsor is going to look at the proportion of watching each part of the video, they just care about the view counter.

What Youtube may want, though, is for paying customers to be able to skip ads. “If you pay you should have no ads”.

> What Youtube may want, though, is for paying customers to be able to skip ads. “If you pay you should have no ads”.

It feels rare that I agree with Google on anything these days, but if that is the case... sounds fair.

YouTube doesn't have to defend itself. Read this thread and understand how shitty/entitled it's users are.

Then these adult children go an complain there are no competitors. No shit, you scoff at subscriptions and wear your ad-block like a badge of honor. Who the hell would invest in making a platform for non-paying users?

Truly one of the best updates they've made to the YouTube app on Apple TV (and presumably other tv operating systems) of all time. Just one tap of the remote and we can skip all of the "sponsored by Made In" nonsense.

Edit: I guess this is a YouTube premium feature?

> The automated “Skip Ahead” button (which I use daily) is already hostile to sponsorships

Is it? If I proactively click skip, that means that sponsor is offering something of no use to me. As the sponsor, they successfully make an impression for a second or two anyway. And as a viewer that skip ahead button is much better than pressing right arrow button multiple times

There's a shift in tone of voice or ham-fisted segue that gives it away before they even name the sponsor. I can usually click the button before they even name the sponsor.

The best creators build these ad reads wearing different clothes.

The brand recognition is worth something. I haven't been in the market for new headphones in a long time, but I still know the name Raycon from the bajillion sponsorships they do.

Likewise with NordVPN and Raid: Shadowlegends. Never used any of them, don't really intend to, but I do know the name.

Skipping sponsored segments is not necessarily a reflection of hostility. My wife has been subscribed to the Factor meal service for over three years, yet all of my favorite podcasts are constantly hawking it, and I don't particularly feel like sitting through 20 sales pitches a day for something I already purchased. There is unfortunately no way to communicate that information to either the channel owner or the sponsor.

I'm always just amazed how damn long they can be. On some channels I watch they are 2 to 3 minutes long every video. It would be madness to sit through that.

in video you can just hit a number to go to the next chunk 1,2,3,4,5 etc. just hit 8 or 9 if you want to see if there is anything of value in a 10 minute video that should have been 30 seconds, but youtube wants 10 minutes

It's actually [0-9] percentage of the video length times 9, more or less

Surely YT know if a video has sponsored content and so can refuse to play the video - or even not suggest it - if the user is using adblockers?

YT would start a revolt among Youtubers if they did this.

I'm guessing the viewers who now suddenly aren't being counted were already not contributing to revenue because they block ads.

I pay for youtube. Payments from my views should come from my subscription payment. Ad blocking should be irrelevant in my case.

It's not in their interest to solve this problem. YouTube is more than happy to pretend you watched nothing and therefore disburse nothing.

To ensure my premium subscription dollars are making it to the creators I've now disabled uBO for the entire youtube domain.

As long as your ad blocker isn't blocking the metrics endpoint YouTube relies on to determine whether you're actually watching a video, the youtuber gets paid. In fact, Youtubers make more revenue from Premium views vs ad supported views.

Mate, you’ve taken the pains to configure your user agent to block tracking of views and then you’re complaining that views aren’t tracked. It’s got a nice well-defined API with a sane default and you’ve decided to override it with something else. That’s fine too, but now you’re complaining that you overrode it?

As the old joke goes:

“Doctor, it hurts when I do this”

“Then don’t do it”

You know full well that almost nobody expects their adblocker to block an *invisible view count incrementer".

How is it youtube's fault that you have an extension breaking the app without your knowledge? This is just more evidence to the case that extensions shouldn't be allowed to tamper with applications.

Why not? They block all the ad attribution companies that are doing this. Is it being first that makes the google one special? Or is youtube somehow more trustworthy than the rest of google?

"Why not?" Because invisibly tallying a view count is completely different than displaying a visible advertisement.

Right, it's the same as asking why you don't expect an adblocker to block you from ordering pizza online - i.e. a stupid question. You expect adblockers to block ads and not block things that aren't ads. A lot of them block pointless analytics stuff but when this is actually an important part of site behaviour, it shouldn't be blocked.

EasyList also blocks tracking. I agree that no one expects their ad blocker to block view counts. But EasyList is advertised as a tracking blocker as well. And true to form, they eventually merged a change to block more tracking. So this guy is upset that his tracking blocker blocked tracking and wants YouTube to find a way to circumvent the tracking blocker? The whole thing sounds bizarre.

To view the video I have to make an HTTP request for it. That request could easily contain my login name. The backend could be built to count views without a javascript callback running in my browser.

You're acting as if the way Google does it would be the _only_ way to do it. Obviously untrue.

The tracking blocker you have installed on your user agent actively attempts to block their view attribution and your solution is that you want them to bypass your tracking blocker's active and affirmative attempt to block their view attribution. You could just not actually block their view attribution if you want your views to be attributed.

I suppose Man was never meant to know Hacker News User's mind.

They impact individual channel revenue because so many channels have gone to sponsored ads, which automatic ad-blockers can't block (yet (1) ). The calibre of sponsor a channel can attract is impacted by the reported views from YouTube.

(1) Hey, imagine I had a plugin that monitored the behavior of several viewers of each video and could collate where most people skipped a big chunk of video, then, oh I don't know, offered a feature where if lots of people skip one chunk, it'll automatically skip it for you when you're playing the video....

You're describing an existing plugin called SponsorBlock.

IIRC it even has lots of options such as enabling you to allow/disallow self-sponsor segments (the creator promoting their own product), "like and subscribe" calls to action, shock-and-awe intros, podcast recaps, and several other segment types.

YouTube has it built in now. We just need auto skip to be built in now

Only for YT Premium users. But since premium views pay creators more it's less of an impact.

If only there were some way that money in my pocket went to some of the people related to the things I like to watch. Some sort of premium service where YouTube could pay for a person to come to my house and collect money from me, and them give it to the people making videos, and then we won't have ads?

Nah, that'll never work.

do we know what happens if you run premium and an ad blocker together? I would hope they would still pay the creator for my views but I'm not sure now

I expect my (Premium) views are no longer counted, because my ad blocker is blocking the API endpoint that counts my views.

The fact that I have Premium is irrelevant; if YouTube isn't getting the metrics that says I watched a video, then it won't be counted.

Certainly YouTube could change the method they use to count views so it would work in my case, but they probably don't have an incentive to do so.

They pay creators more when a person with premium is watching their videos. Ad-blockers have no relevance in this case.

Apparently ad blockers can interfere with key view metrics.

Unclear what premium uses to disburse the 55% share that goes to creators; hopefully it's not those ones.

I don't think it's likely that the ad blocker is interfering, because you need to be logged in to use premium.

I really wish there was a little micro-donation button, using something like the lightning network. I'd smash the crap out of that for good videos. But YouTube would never support it because they wouldn't be able to insert themselves between the creator and consumer.

It already exists: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10878910?hl=en

Wow, so it does. I just checked. Most of my subscriptions apparently do not have it turned on. The one that I found that does have it turned on, it's hidden behind a hamburger menu that's located next to, you guessed it, an AI button. Nice to see Google prioritizing their crappy AI integration over their content creators getting paid.

You can already "super thank" people in the comments

I am being completely honest when I say I had no idea this even existed. As per my other comment, it’s very well hidden.

So... BlockBuster video ?

> Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)

while true, choosing to base your income on the wellbeing of a company and its ad placement, no matter how well your video does or how good you are at producing videos is absolute insanity to me.

You become a slave to the latest monetization techniques and if you don't adopt them your revenue goes down, and your videos get put in front of fewer people, resulting in less income. This is bizarre to me, and definitely unwanted, because the things you need to do will never stop ramping up. A video used to do better because the thumbnail had a reaction face on it, now it's required just to keep your view count where it normally should be. People got used to that, and now ignore it. But it's still required if you want to get your video in front of people.

Now thumbnails must be rotated out frequently for the first few days of a video's life until the thumbnail which results in the most views is found. Soon people will become immune to this tactic just like they became immune to the reaction faces, and something new will come up to replace it. Except you don't stop with the reaction faces and the thumbnail rotation, you have to keep doing those.

Advertising requires this constant escalation to counter people's ever-increasing ability to ignore advertisements, and this will never stop so long as revenue determines how often a video is placed on the youtube.com homepage for a given viewer. it will never stop until advertisement is no longer a thing at all. a content creator must continually escalate what they are doing in order to stay right where they are in viewership, and even then they are subject to constant drops in revenue because of the whims of Google and advertising partners.

The whole thing is absolutely insane and I can't understand why someone would choose this to be their primary source of income. If people didn't choose to make youtube a career, there would be far fewer ads on youtube, because people would not be fighting so hard for views.

Two concerns I have in the long-term:

1. It seems views from Premium users who use adblock might also not get counted—and I'm not sure if the revenue from a Premium view in that circumstance would be counted or not (more research needed).

2. YouTube's recommendation engine weights views heavily in the system, which means channels with a more technical, traditional desktop viewing audience (probably a substantial portion of HN users) will be most impacted, and will not be able to grow an audience to help fund projects, yadda yadda.

YouTube creators with younger, mobile, less FOSS-y, and less tech-savvy audiences are therefore rewarded with more views/mindshare.

I know some here are like "go get a REAL job, influencers are scum", but I think that discounts the helpful work of many tech creators. Not only in direct contributions to open source projects, but also in being a voice to balance out the paid 'product showcase' style videos for many tech products that come to market.

In other words: if adblock users disincentivize creators like me from spending time and resources on YouTube, then video content will more quickly settle into the online magazine/news status quo, where 99% of the articles you read are just PR spin. Which you could argue would bring about YouTube's downfall earlier... or would lead us even more quickly to an Idiocracy-style society :D

I'm not saying adblock is bad or wrong or anything—I can't stand the YT ad spam, so I pay for Premium. To each their own. In any case, YouTube shoulders some of the burden, but will be the main entity to profit in any scenario.

Prior to getting Premium, YouTube was able to detect that I was watching a video (and nag me about premium as a way to get rid of ads). Since getting Premium, I haven't gotten the nag message.

I run AdGuard (on a Mac). It has a filter log feature.

Poking at the log while playing a video, I do see calls to ttps://{{clusterid?}}.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1758173247&...

However, this call is not being blocked.

I suspect that this is the "keep watching" feature that tracks where I am in various videos (switching from one logged in device to another keeps the same position). Watching the video all the way through, I don't see any requests relating to this getting blocked while on Premium. This feature is also likely more than sufficient data to attribute a view (and monetization of the view).

There was also a call to ttps://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/log_event?alt=json that was not blocked.

I do see some doubleclick.net links being blocked, thought that could be from any number of other pages I've got open.

Going to an incognito session and pulling up the same video (Once Around Trappist 1)...

There's now a call (that has gotten blocked) to ttps://www.youtube.com/api/stats/watchtime...

That call was not something that I saw when logged into premium. This rule is described as "@@||www.youtube.com^$generichide (AdGuard Base filter)"

If this leads to lower quality videos, due to change in incentives, for certain segments, then I would consider it a WIN for users. For the portion of users for whom the lower quality is not palatable, they will get their time back to spend on other things in life.

This is all completely subjective of course.

> I know some here are like "go get a REAL job, influencers are scum"

Signing up for the creator's patreon or buying merch is the more widely adopted reaction by the those actually enjoying the content.

Your presumptions are akin to gaslighting and YouTube has successfully pitted the viewers against creators this time. Ad blocking will never stop no matter what creators and monopolists have to say.

I've never suggested people should stop using ad blockers. I use Pi Hole (and pay for Premium).

> Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)

Except viewer counts are a factor for baked in ads. In this case, all the sleuthing and videos about the change are the probably the only thing that will alleviate/lessen the seemingly-worse ad rate negotiation position youtubers with less viewers suddenly find themselves in.

Those buying baked in ads just need to find other ways to verify value. This is nothing new, no large company buys ads without checking how they really work (though many small companies would). There is someone who checks all those "how did you hear about us" responses asked at checkout - they want to know if the ad really provided value. Sure the TV stations tracked and reported ratings, but that is only one of the signs ad buyers look at, and it is one they only trust because they check and so would catch if it is manipulated.

The ad business is far older than the internet and there is a lot of old knowledge that apples directly to the internet. Those buying backed in ads should be aware of and tracking such efforts.

A lot of sponsors have shyed away from YouTube because of the fake views and botting problem.

Some were paying big money to streamers with 20,000 live viewers. Even though 19000 of those were fake.

The sponsor then sees the ad and did terribly and doesn't sponsor anyone else in the future.

That is why big companies calculate returns. That type of fraud predates the internet. you can be sure one of the first newspapers tried it.

You're saying that YouTube implemented a change that significantly reduces creators' viewer counts but won't affect their revenue, and they haven't told creators? "Here, have a heart attack"?

YouTube didn't change anything. The ad blockers recently started blocking the metric call for whatever reason.

[flagged]

It's in the github issue in OP: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme...

nobody's ever accused youtube of being too transparent with creators

YouTube showed me the same phishing ads depicting an AI version of the Canadian Prime Minister.

Why should I not filter ads from a provider who is OK with people stealing from me?

I find it so weird how we just accept the fact that ads can be for fake things and not blame YouTube/Google for those things.

That was also my take when I first saw the FBI advice about using an adblocker. Like, yeah, it's good advice, but also why is no one being prosecuted for acting as an accessory if not accomplice to fraud? They're labeling their product as a search tool and then taking money to funnel users away from the thing they're searching for to scammers instead. Surely they are aware of their pure negligence in vetting business partners if the government is issuing warnings to citizens about their behavior?

Yeah, it's crazy. I have gotten ads on Gmail that are clearly fraud.

On my email! I really think Google should be liable for shit like that.

30% of my YouTube ads are now a large fart sound followed by an AI generated old doctor talking for 15 minutes about some sketchy diet modification

What a great metaphor that is for modern tech innovation.

People in general have stopped trying to hold people accountable and have just accepted defeat.

The UK has an advertising standards agency, but they're completely unable to cope with online ads.

Of course all the "online safety" nonsense does very little for our safety against misleading advertising.

> not blame YouTube/Google for those things

it's because everyone but you have something to gain in that transaction - google got paid ad money, the advertiser presumably got some value in exposure.

Therefore, you, for whom the "harm" has fallen, want to blame someone like google or the advertiser, which google has a form of EULA/TOS to shed all responsibility/liability.

It's just the way the internet is, and the reason for adblocking as a requirement.

Morally, you should filter ads. If ads could be relevant, vetted, non-intrusive, and ancillary to the experience, all actions that are required to be performed by the ad platform Youtube/Google, then you wouldn't have much moral leg to stand on.

Due to YT/G's moral failings to host a sufficiently serviceable platform for their product, your eyes, then your only real recourse outside adblocking is to buy a device and put on a separate network with no reasonably important traffic.

I don't lose one bit of sleep knowing that adblocking prevents Google from externalizing their curation costs onto me.

> If ads could be relevant, vetted, non-intrusive, and ancillary to the experience, all actions that are required to be performed by the ad platform Youtube/Google, then you wouldn't have much moral leg to stand on.

Even if ads were all of those things, ads are psychological manipulation, and I there is no moral imperative that says I have to subject myself to that.

Sure, you could say, "well then instead just don't use YouTube", and I would say... "yeah, maybe, but... I'm a selfish human and want to, and unless YouTube is going to give me a way to exchange something else for a better experience, tough shit on them."

But anyway, they do give me that option, and I pay for Premium, so it's not a problem.

You can block ads. It's never morally wrong. You can look away, it's never morally wrong. Content creators getting paid to include ads is their business model, and no viewer is responsible for a content creators business model. Even in a world were technology allows a creator to get paid more for video evidence of you looking at the ad, you're never in the wrong for looking away. You're never in the wrong for blocking ads.

No, no, no.

Morally you should stop using youtube.

It's incredible how people mental gymnastics there way into a solution that provides themselves all the benefit and pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous.

When you don't like something, you don't use it. It sends a clear message that you don't like the product/service. Using it and not compensating for it (because you actually do like it, just on your terms) is not moral or a good signal in anyway way, shape, or form.

Their business model and their belief that there’s an obligation to view ads when consuming content are not our problem.

Advertising in general and Google in particular are so immoral that morally you should rip every YouTube video and distribute it freely outside of their platform while actively looking for ways to force them to fundamentally change or close.

Adblock isn’t allowed or disallowed somewhere in the ten commandments or fabric of the universe or whatever. Personally, my outlook would dictate that it’s bad if it causes harm, so prove that harm is done to someone. Even then, if the harm is sufficiently small, I’m alright with doing it for my convenience, e.g. there’s some small risk I hit someone when I drive but I choose to drive even when sometimes I could walk.

OK, but where's an argument?

> No, no, no.

Not an argument

> Morally you should stop using youtube.

Why?

> It's incredible how people mental gymnastics there way into a solution that provides themselves all the benefit and pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous.

I noticed it too, but it's not an argument. I could say something similar e.g.

> It's incredible how corporations mental gymnastics there way into defending their interest that provides themselves all the benefit and pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous.

In either case, it would be nice to read an actual argument.

> When you don't like something, you don't use it.

This is not true, People use stuff they don't like all the time. Should they stop? You may not like to use a bus, but it may be your only means of transportation. You could then argue one should like what he has no alternative to, but I don't see how ones emotional attitude relates to morality.

> It sends a clear message that you don't like the product/service.

Are people morally obliged to send this message? I don't see how this argument relates to morality.

> Using it and not compensating for it (because you actually do like it, just on your terms) is not moral or a good signal in anyway way, shape, or form.

Again, not everyone necessarily likes what he uses, but I can agree, most people use Youtube because they like it, and in particular, people use Youtube with adblocking because they like Youtube without ads. But where is the argument for it being immoral?

You could start with some probably agreeable statement like "Everyone should be paid for his work" and go from there, and then maybe I or someone else could point out some error in the reasoning, but currently your whole post reads as "what you do is immoral because I say so" - there is no proper argument.

> Morally you should stop using youtube

> When you don't like something, you don't use it.

Morality in your approach is absolute, and it represents the best possible outcome.

For all others stuck in the morass, you must navigate the BATNA.

Is it morally wrong to fast forward ads on your TV or mute the volume?

Is it moral to pour out your verification can instead of drinking it?

My PC, my rules.

Everything on my PC is on my terms, and I don't watch ads.

Only when they pay me for the use of my computer equipment and network traffic, do they have any claim to tell me what I must watch on it.

They don't like it, they can feel free to not send me network traffic.

If they really don't want people to watch without ads... surely a tech company of their calibre is capable of blocking content server side, or putting it behind a login.

Forgive me for not feeling morally inadequate compared to a multinational that happily takes ad revenue for toddlers on ipads having their brain fried by endless AI slop that they refuse to moderate.

Their video platform, your rules? Nah mate, you're just being weird now if you think this is a one way street. You can block ads all you want in your computer but they'll have just as much right to stop serving you videos when you're blocking ads.

Also stop leaving your children unattended on brain slop videos. You're basically speaking out of both sides of your mouth.

Today it's that they're not moderating the content and tomorrow it's a complaint of censorship.

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> (because you actually do like it, just on your terms)

It's the same BS as the "I wasn't going to buy it anyway" response to piracy.

People just want their stuff and then add whatever rationalisation on top.

I really, really want to see how you do "consume" content with the random stream of intruding Ads every few minutes. I'm really curious to see people enjoying that. Strangely enough I link all that mentality to another one, vivid example of the same "joy" and only experienced in the US. That's the "tipping" culture - you're expected, oh, rather obliged to give a tip when served. I guess people enjoying Ads are the same enjoying that obligation, too. As for the serious matter of good content creators gaining financial support - you probably noticed that there're "membership" options, many do have side platforms with membership as well... So there're ways that actually work, but no, Alphabet doesn't like that, aren't they?

I guess, first, I'll caveat all this with: I have enough money to buy things.

I pay for YT premium because I put my money where my mouth is.

I also simply avoid content that has ads, and have ended up blocking a lot of sources from my news apps because of the ads-to-quality ratio not being worth it. I also don't try to get around paywalls. When I get a pop up that asks me to enable cookies to see the content, or subscribe, I just close the page and don't consume the content because I don't like the terms.

I tip because, even though I think the tipping system is entirely bullshit (and never got tips while working in fancy restaurant kitchens because there was no tip sharing), people deserve to make a living and me stiffing people on their tips is just me being shitty and not some grand revolutionary gesture against the system.

What I don't do is create my own terms on which to still consume the content/services I'm getting.

Also worth noting that absolutely none of this represents some endorsement of that companies like Google, Meta, etc do (in particular in the ads-based world).

I don't like ads, I don't like shitty JS. I don't like being "forced" (by norms) to tip.

I just agree to either paying for something (directly or indirectly), or not using the product.

And, maybe most of all, I don't believe that Google being shitty means I can be shitty. My ethics are mine, and they're not relative.

About 30% of the ads I see are that crypto scam. I’m sure I’ve seen it over 100 times. There are several variants with different people. I don’t understand how that scam is paying for the massive volume of ad time they’re getting. It must cost a fortune.

I also get tons of French ads and I don’t speak French.

You would think Google having all this amazing AI could moderate their YouTube ads....

But those crypto scams make them money.

Google definitely moderates their ads. It's hard to not see them as an accomplish.

In the last two weeks I already seen three adverts of a terribly made AI Musk trying to sell me crypto.

They're tailored to your habits somehow. It's not like those videos are served to housewives who watch and search for completely different segments of reality. They'll be getting the gutworm RFK lotus seed ads.

I have ad targeting turned off on my google account. As a result, probably >90% of the ads I see on YouTube are scams, almost-nsfw content, deepfakes, more scams, illegal products, and more scams. I’ve been tempted to take notes and keep track of how many are scams. It’s awful. I cannot remember the last legitimate product I saw an ad for on YouTube.

Yesterday I saw an ad on YouTube that was literally just porn. Very NSFW, not “almost” NSFW like a lot of the ads are. After reporting it, I tried to pull up the ad transparency page for the company running the ad. I was hoping I could somehow report the company itself, in addition to the ad. I had to be logged in to do this. Because when logged out, you can’t see “age restricted” ad campaigns. This completely blew my mind. I didn’t think they allowed nsfw ads, but if they knew enough to age-restrict the ad campaign, maybe they do?

From what I understand, if I turn on targeted ads, I can opt out of ad categories, and maybe google will stop showing me the scams. Instead, I simply use Adblock, and avoid YouTube on iOS as much as possible. The experience is completely unusable with the advertising.

I’m not going to pay for premium to avoid ads that are blatantly violating YouTube’s TOS anyway. At least, I hope they are violating it. “Report” never does anything so they might just allow anything in ads.

> violating YouTube’s TOS

google cannot violate their own TOS.

Of course it can. With how one-sided TOS typically is, it is unlikely, I don't see how one could obtain certainty about TOS being absolutely one-sided and not putting any burden on the service provider, therefore TOS, being an agreement between two sides, absolutely can be violated by either of the sides.

When I go incognito for videos it's usually AI Carney getting arrested. The sponsor has a shit name with Wedding somewhere in their name, and when I search the web for the string of the name, I get about 2 hits and they unrelated. It's weird ass shit. Gives me weird foreign influence vibes.

Seems almost incredible that no one is pointing out the YT incentives behind this. YT has a war on two fronts: ad-blockers and in-video sponsors. That is because in-video sponsors don't get YT money, so they want to be in the monetization loop. So, by decreasing the views, sponsors are now less attracted to in-video sponsorships and YT ads look better in comparison.

This is completely unspoken by most of the youtube channels that are making videos about this. The reason they are worried is not because of the algorithm or vanity. Especially for channels like LTT it is economical. They get the vast majority of their money from getting a lot of views.

The interesting thing here is that since youtube did not change anything, it is actually adblockers successfully making sponsored content less viable. Something youtube has been trying to, at least on premium ([ytp]), where I get a little "Jump ahead" button on all platforms when sponcon is detected (in aggregate people skipping forward, it also does it for intros and similar).

I wonder if it will have a measurable impact on placement in the algorithm for channels like RLM that are seeing the drop. But rely on crowdfunding and youtube ads.

With the risk of sounding like a fanboy.

LTT makes 9.2% of their revenue on In-Video Sponsors and 12.5% on Sponsored Projects (which are like full videos for a sponsor)

I wouldn't call this the vast majority

https://youtu.be/GeCP-0nuziE?si=2ob1AixcwGZwR4VC&t=719

If sponsored projects and in-video sponsor spots dried up because of low view count I feel like a +20% loss would be something they would feel on their bottomline?

I suspect their business still requires that revenue.

But my example could be better. Take any moderately sized youtube channel which has a sponsorship in each video. Maybe one of the gaming channels that figured this out? If they lose the sponsorships it would probably not be great for them.

A huge % of that overall revenue figure is their e-commerce business which will be relatively low margin. They are making roughly double in sponsored videos and sponsored projects than with adsense.

It makese sense that some of that sponsor revenue is tied to youtube viewcounts.

I'm still baffled that youtube doesn't simply splice ads in the video stream directly and relying on client insertion through API endpoints which can be blocked. If they did video injection on the backend they wouldn't have any problems with ad blockers, it would literally be impossible to block. Even if the client would recognise ads somehow the server can just decide to serve the video of the ad while ignoring any seeking from the client so at best the client can mute the ad.

Video is not a single stream, but many smaller chunks daisy chained after each other. Reason for this is that you can then change i.e. quality of video and it will seamlessly change - because it will start daisy chaining higher quality chunks and show them in the player.

So what you are describing is already happening, ads are added directly into video stream, problem is that ads need to have access to API, because you don't want to show an ad for menstruation pad to a guy so you also need to know which user is watching and that's what cookies and the whole login is for, so you are effectively hitting a design limitation of the system.

And no, you can't do this ad selection on the server, because for example when you have 10 users behind a NAT how are you going to tell which user is which from the server point of view? So you need to be calling these APIs from the client side.

Then, the ad-adverse users will just use software that downloads the video and reprocesses the file to remove the ads. Ytdlp already does this with SponserBlock integration, and I imagine detecting ads is something AI would be pretty good at.

Of course, you lose the ability to mindlessly browse YT with no ads or get the dopamine hit of clicking an interesting video. I'm sure that's something YT considered if they pushed this option. They don't want you to just watch the few vids from your subscriptions per day and close the app.

> Even if the client would recognise ads somehow

Sponsorblock uses community driven marking of ads edited into the video.

I think you're right, that you wouldn't be able to skip an ad at the beginning of the video - you would need to predict for the user he will want to watch a video to load it earlier in the background to skip the ad, so only skipping ads in middle of the video would be possible.

> you would need to predict for the user he will want to watch a video to load it earlier in the background to skip the ad

Not sure I understand this. I don't think it's possible even now to load the video in the background, youtube is already smarter than this and it will load a short period of time whenever u seek anywhere, it doesn't just download the whole thing if you pause the video.

And the way I'm suggesting wouldn't be mitigated by sponsorblock since you wouldn't be able to skip it if you want to stream the video. Only way would be to use yt-dlp and remove the ads automatically but I suspect a tiny percentage of users would go to that length to avoid ads

Don't give them ideas! Also I think that there's a non trivial engineering effort required to inject ads into the video stream as well, for example with bookmarks and so on. Probably they'll do it but as last resort.

I suspect this war on adblockers is also non trivial and the "last resort" would win them this war forever. For a company the size of youtube the effort would be trivial.

There would likely be huge processing overhead for splicing ads into a stream, right?

No, you can concatenate video segments with basically zero cost if the segments are encoded using the same encoding parameters and afaik youtube already re-encodes user videos.

What's to prevent ad-blockers from just skipping ahead when there's an ad playing?

Don't forget to like, subscribe, hype, hit the bell, and turn off your adblocker! Thankfully I think Sponsorblock has a section for those points in the videos.

Now that you mention it, I sure haven't heard one of these annoying ass lines in a while, people really do flag these sections.

YouTube even has a feature now that if you skip, it will skip over sections that other people skip to. Which in practice does the same thing as sponsorblock, except that you have to press skip ;)

Never mention that word, the fewer the people who know about it the better. It's one of my favourite things in my online life xD

No, I won't turn my ad blocker off. In fact, I go further and use uMatrix to block ALL third party content by default on ALL websites (uBlock in advanced mode can also do this). That's on top of an aggressive DNS-level blacklists targeting ads and trackers.

Some manual adjustment to allow CDN on some websites is needed, but 95% of the cruft is left out. That cruft is usually malware in a broad sense: ads, trackers, embedded Youtube videos that seem benign but allow Google to follow users across the Internet, etc.

But how many people know how to do that? Almost zero.

So it is up to us tech guys to teach them about the danger it is to open a single web site without protection. Several levels of protection.

Including stop being abused by Windows, switch to Linux. But there is so much more to do, that it is very hard to teach and make people do it.

Everything is created to abuse you, and most of people don't have a single clue about what is going on.

uMatrix is not maintained. Use NoScript or uBlockOrigin.

Those are not as good as umatrix unfortunately

Are views also decreasing on channels without ads enabled? Is it possible that some endpoint that needs to be hit to register a view is being blocked by privacy-related (not ad-related) lists that adblockers use?

If the answer to both is no, maybe Google's intentionally punishing creators whose viewers use adblockers. But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?

> But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?

Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing" but they know it won't work if people see them as the source of the message. They want video makers to internalize their message, do what the boss wants on their own initiative, so Google only want to drop hints.

100%. They are trying to get YouTube a exclusion from the list, or make the list the non-default. I already know the next step is that the "community" is going to fork the list, and the forked list is going to be heavily advertised on YouTube channel as a way to support the channel.

> Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing"

Ah yes, the good old "don't copy that floppy" argument.

The advertising industry brought this upon themselves. The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker. Between malicious ads, drive-by-downloads, content shifting, and other dark patterns, websites are now more ads than content.

It's like in the days of streaming (when it was still good and not enshitified) reducing piracy rates - companies can get me to disable my ad blocker if they start becoming good citizens actually make their site or service usable without it.

Get rid of the invasive tracking, dark patterns, un-dismissable modals, etc. Stop jamming your content so full of ads and SEO spam and maybe I wouldn't need an ad blocker as much.

I bought a new Mac for a secondary computer, particularly for my wife to use, and she was driven crazy by ads in just one hour of browsing on Safari without a proper ad blocker. Adding an ad blocker to Safari required using an Apple account which she doesn't have and I didn't want to use it for mine (never plan on buying NERFed apps from the NERFed mac app store which is 99% spam anyway) so I switched her to Firefox which lets me add an ad blocker without signing in.

Make her an account with throwaway everything or switch her to a sane browser, as you did :)

FWIW wBlock is on GitHub and can be used without an Apple account. I’ve found it to be excellent.

>The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker.

Parts of it are good, and parts are bad. The problem with ad blockers is it distorts the signal for bad sites. Why reduce ads if your page views and time on site metrics are good with them?

Without Ad block when you hit a garbage site you backout and go somewhere else, maybe even blacklist it so you don't end up there in the future. Then their metrics start looking as bad as their site and they shape up or go under.

You wouldn't steal a car.

Well I definitely would if I could torrent it. Facebook would have too.

I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization. This is why the creators all do sponsorships now. But they force creators to monetize to get reach (if the video isn't monetized it won't be recommended, even to subscribers).

My guess is that yeah, now they're going after people's sponsorship revenue by under-reporting views if their monetized content is being viewed by people with adblockers.

Regarding recommendations. I recently disabled history and recommendations and the subscribed tab has everything I’d expect. No more surprises and no more political garbage.

That’s crazy, when I am logged out I only get political garbage and the most insane braunrot you can imagine. My recommendations are really good on YouTube, I find a lot of interesting stuff

You must fight the urge to click on controversial topics. If you mentally subscribe to any fringe idea, the algo immediately feeds you echo chamber / bubble content. It's crazy.

Ye if you watch some woodworking bench videos YT spams them at you.

I guess that is what PCA gives you. Lunatic videos is some distinct component too.

I usually open videos of any topic I don't want in my recommendations in a private window.

> I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization.

Do you have any article about that? How much did the monetization drop for?

I don't know the data but every YouTube author I follow is basically saying the money they get from YouTube is almost nothing compared to the effort they put into their videos. Almost all of them seem to be going for sponsored ads embedded in the video (so not automatically skippable) or Patreon.

How big are the channels? As far as I follow, the revenue numbers creators get from Ads aren't ignorable at all.

I didn't check all of them... I wanna say they range from ~200 to ~500K subscribers? No idea if that's big or not. For comparison, the official Warhammer channel has ~900K subscribers, which I assume is decent.

The argument I've heard repeatedly from them is that the time and effort involved in making a YouTube video that gets enough hits (which means lots of experimentation) is disproportionate compared to the meager return of investment; that for money reasons it's best to get sponsorships.

(I'm not a YouTube author myself, I wouldn't know what's a decent size).

My current theory is that this whole "mystery around viewcounts" thing is fabricated by google. From a PR viewpoint it's much better to just imply that adblockers are bad, so in case of backlash they can go "Idk why the community is going ham about this, we didn't even say directly you shouldn't adblock, you people are kwuaazy"

Honestly I'm willing to bet that the contacts/account managers at Google genuinely didn't know that easyprivacy had added their view tracking to the blocklist, and reached out to some people internally who's job is implementing youtube and not anti-adblock features who correctly said they didn't change anything, and would have no reason to know that easyprivacy had changed anything.

Then the AMs just issue vague statements to the youtubers as it feels more like saving face than admitting they have no idea

I agree, this seems more like a policy decision to turn creators into anti-adblocker advocates than a technical problem registering views accurately.

Why would most creators be pro ad blocking in the first place? Don’t most of them want to earn money via advertising?

That isn't clear. Some earn money from ads of various forms. Some earn money from patreon like things and the youtube views are loss leaders. Most are not earning enough money from ads to care (generally 0, but sometimes a few bucks).

Even if you earn money from ads, view count is only a proxy at best. Youtube seems to track ads seen not view count (payments from youtube have not changed). Other ads track effectiveness of the ad, and viewcount is only a proxy - if youtube changes the count it means that the constant applied to viewcount in the formula changes but otherwise the payment is the same.

Thus if you get significant money from YouTube adds you care about ad blocking. None of the others need to care (they might, but it could go either way how they feel)

What videos you see on YouTube really varies from one person to another: I have one browser where it shows me predominantly videos with titles like "Why Brand X has lost it's way" or "Why the Y industry is broken" where X could be a fast food chain or a game studio and Y could be housing, video games, private equity, etc.

That kind of creator expresses a lot of negativity towards YouTube, as X is frequently "YouTube" or "Google" and Y is "Big Tech", "Social Media", etc.

Pro and expressly anti are not the only positions. Some were indifferent because their income from YouTube ads was much less than their income from sponsorships or subscriptions. But view counts affect sponsorship income. Some said blocking ads hurt them but they couldn't blame people when ads included scams. And so on.

Because most creators use the internet and have experienced the internet with ads.

I imagine most don't think about ads seriously, they think about youtube and sponsor revenue.

Isn’t sponsor revenue ad revenue? And I would expect most creators to be smart enough to realize that the money they get from Youtube will be at least loosely related to the ad revenue Youtube can earn from whatever the creator made.

> Isn’t sponsor revenue ad revenue?

It is, but it's functionally different because the content creator you are watching is both directly getting that revenue and often doing the testimonial for you. They have an incentive to avoid being annoying about the ad as it reflects bad on them if they go nuts. It's also usually a lot easier to skip. It doesn't capture your video playback and force watching.

The money you get from youtube make things ambiguous. Especially if someone is watching your stream with youtube premium.

Is it possible not to have ads? It seems like YouTube puts them in there regardless, unless once your channel is monetizable you can choose to not show ads.

Uploaders can disable mid-roll adverts, ie ones that appear in the middle of the content.

Oh how incredibly convenient.

Plus, making ad blocking a channel owner's problem is kind of genius.

I am not sure why this is a bug? Youtube is tracking people, this blocks them tracking people. A side effect of a view not being counted on Youtube, is 100% Youtube's problem, and doesn't effect the user in any way.

Sounds like YT is trying to mobilize creators and influencers against adblocking.

> against adblocking

And extensions such as SponsorBlock [1], which help user skipping sponsored sections or useless intros in videos.

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

YouTube premium actually has its own version of sponsorblock called skip ahead, it works really well, so they’re not ideologically opposed to skipping sponsored segments

I guess it makes sense, they have no financial incentive to keep people from skipping sponsors, they don't make YouTube any money

That doesn't just target sponsor segments. It's for stuff commonly skipped. Like annoying parts of videos. Some video game guy I occasionally watching thinks he needs to sing for some reason, very useful for skipping those sections.

I’m surprised they allow ads (sponsor segments) they get no cut from at all.

Sponsorships are the primary way YouTube creators make money. There aren't many things that could knock YouTube off its near-monopoly market position, but banning sponsorships is definitely one. Creators would revolt.

They pretty surely would not.

Creators are already starting to build their own platforms for hosting videos and many of these are quite successful unlike prior iterations from 10 years ago.

Do you have some examples? I am still a bit sore from my adventures as a creator on Viddler and Dailymotion.

I would point to platforms like Curiosity Stream and Nebula, which are creator driven. Though I would not exactly call them Youtube replacements, as they are more just platforms designed for supporting specific creators more directly (akin to Patreon). These platforms are often advertised as in-video sponsorships, so going back to the original point, I do think creators would be very vocal if such ads were banned.

Kick is one that's been poaching big names lately. I've also seen people starting to stream on X and Rumble.

They wouldn't have a choice, your average big youtube channel earns 95% of their revenue from sponsorship.

It would either be trying a revolt or stop youtube.

Why would they not allow them?

Yes, I discovered this recently and it's nice. I presume they are not opposed to it because it's not costing them any lost revenue.

Where ? Like I have sponsor block on a desktop but on my pixel I don't have it and would like to have the option. Have the yt premium but don't see the option to skip sponsors.

There's a famous mod for the YouTube app called Re-Vanced. It adds support for SponsorBlock, removes Shorts, etc.

If you double tap to skip 10 seconds during an ad read, it should appear as a button in the bottom right. It does not pop up proactively. It's algorithmically-based on which parts of the video get skipped most often by viewers.

Firefox for Android supports desktop extensions, including Sponsor Block and uBlock Origin.

There's also Tubular, a YouTube client and fork of NewPipe with Sponsor Block built-in. If you don't mind installing apks from outside the Play Store: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular

That's a feature that learns commonly skipped over sections, ads or otherwise.

I've got Youtube premium and have never noticed that popping up. Is this platform or browser dependent? Is it only on some videos?

It isn't automatic for me unless I try to skip a sponsored segment myself, then it will kick in and skip me to the end of that segment with a popup above the scroll bar saying they did so.

Might just be the channels you're viewing. This video should have a "Jump ahead" appear around 0:19: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs5PfanIkC0&t=1s

On the TV app, if you hit the forward button it instantly skips over the entire "commonly skipped section".

Yes, they really dgaf about the creators.

Another example of that is their ridiculous strike system. Look at what happened to Gamersnexus recently.

How is this in a way related to that or not gaf about creators?

I pay €14/mo to not have ads on YouTube. It's good they have the skip feature for those sponsor segments, since they're just embedded ads.

Creators still benefit as my view has a higher $. Well... not anymore I suppose with the view attribution endpoint being blocked by my adblock.

Creators get way more money out of their in-video sponsors than from youtube ads.

Plus it works on mobile and TVs.

I don't think YouTube needed to do anything. The change influenced creators' bottom line so they are motivated on their own to mobilize their viewers against this change.

It was YT that changed the ad delivery mechanism to prevent view counting, not adblockers.

It was an easylist change (so adblockers) that caused the issue: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/2d39de407dc96904...

Whether or not you consider that an issue shrug but it's not directly YT's fault.

This was my exact thought when I read about it. YouTube clearly has a record of what I’ve watched, because it’s in my watch history.

What they are missing is proof I’ve watched the ads - which I haven’t.

They may in fact not know what you watched. I was having an issue with my youtube recommendations becoming generic to the point of irrelevance, when i went and looked at my watch history and it hadn't been updated in MONTHS despite me watching youtube daily.

Turns out that pi-hole was blocking the endpoint that records the watch history! IIRC allowing queries for something like s.youtube.com made my watch history start working.

I agree that they should know w/o all this client based nonsense but :shrug:. They don't, somehow!

Morally indefensible. Adblockers are used as a response to Google externalizing/ignoring the cost of proper ad platform curation.

Ads are how they get paid until they're big enough for alternative revenue generation.

This actually hints at a way out of the YouTube monopoly. Make creators' business model no longer work on YouTube, by blocking the tracking. Make it so that creators are forced to go to other, paid video platforms, instead of them feeding the YouTube monopoly.

This might temporarily lead to a collapse in video creator business, but in the long run might result in more viable businesses for creators, without them having to push shit onto their viewers. Make videos and enjoy them being seen, or make paid content and have people pay for that, but don't try to shoehorn it into viewing videos that are accessible for anyone running a Youtube search.

Sounds fair? Both creators and YouTube have the same goal of having people watch ads (or pay not to).

It seems like a YouTube bug, that they are performing view tracking on the client, when they own the whole server backend and could just as well track them server side (which wouldn't be blockable in the first place)

It seems like server-side would suffer from issues due to buffering lookahead and autoplay. A client can request a video that is skipped within seconds, but if buffering causes it to request five minutes worth, the server only sees five minutes were requested, whereas the client can clearly tell how much of that was actually watched.

Server-side tracking would be the easiest thing in the world to spoof.

How is it any easier to spoof than client-side tracking?

In the server-side case I can certainly increase views by fetching the video multiple times, but in the client side case I can hit the analytics endpoint directly just as easily

Bot detection systems all work client side. What browser are you using, what cookies do you have, how is your mouse moving, how much time are you taking between clicks, how many captchas have you solved. All this and more is collected and passed to the server, which can then determine if the view was valid or not. Plus you can do this multiple times during a watch session rather than just in the beginning when the video is requested. If the adblocker is blocking this data then the server has nothing to go on.

It's a problem for the Creators. Their stats are lower than they should be, which could have negative effects on their business, like YouTubes recommendation-system not working as efficient as it should be. Similar, would they have a weaker selling-point for companies advertising on their channel.

It should be noted that YouTube income is unaffected by this, as Ads are still shown and counted to people without AdBlockers. So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.

But why would I, as a user of Easy Privacy, care about this? It is protecting my own privacy. Someone trying to get more money on the internet isn't really my concern.

While I agree with you, not every channel is big and some of the smaller ones might rely partially on this in order to get materials/sponsorship in order to be able to have the parts to do some projects they make videos on because it is more a passion project and they might barely break even or even make losses on doing it.

The context that I am thinking about is, for example, a small hobbyist that might rely on the added value for making some odd things, requiring exotic hardware, quantities of materials that could be prohibitively expensive or the lend of access to said hardware might be blocked behind viewership metrics, and there this might make some difference, and I personally enjoy those little odd channels and this is why I, as a viewer, might care about it. But again, I totally see where you are coming from.

For every one hobbyist making some kind of interesting video that they couldn't have made without ad money, there are 1,000 moronic influencers making the same video about the same thing, grasping at ad money or free products to shill. YouTube is 99% dreck now. Hooray for the hobbyist, poor us having to wade through the influencer swamp.

You don't have to care about it. But this is not about privacy, as this API likely does not impact your privacy. YouTube can track what you watch anyway.

And if you watch videos, there is a chance you also enjoy them, so it would be in your own interest to support creators in making more of them. But that's a bit more complicated.

If i am correct, YouTube is trying to say "If you don't watch the ads, you are harming the poor, small content creators!"

Maybe, but that doesn't matter for this case. This is specifically about the view count, not whether you see the ads. But I've seen this was in the meanwhile merged with another thread, which is about the statement(?) from YouTube.

Requests that have no benefit for the user need to be blocked on that premise alone. Do your tracking whatever nonsense on your own computing, thanks very much.

The correct approach is to not use these services. Ad-blocking and using the service just sends the message that you are leeching, not that the service is bad.

Ad blocking and using the service only sends the message that the service with ads is bad, but the service without ads is acceptable.

Often this means "the way you've implemented ads is terrible enough that I went out of my way to block them" and sometimes it means "any and all ads are terrible and I don't want them"

There's nothing at all wrong with ad blocking. Someone who puts their content on the public internet has zero right to require me to view that content, or to control how much of it I see or how I choose to view it. If I want to block ads, or only watch the last 20 seconds, or watch the whole thing played backwards that's my business. This is equally true for websites where I'm free to decide what to download and how to display it in my browser.

No more than going to the bathroom or getting a drink during a TV commercial break is leeching. Watching ads is not and has never been obligatory for the viewer.

You are free to go to the bathroom or get a drink when a youtube ad is playing.

I'm also free to automatically skip ads on both TV and youtube.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...

And also free to block it. What was your point again?

Correct by what metric? Why do I care if I send the message that I'm leeching?

It seems to be sending the same message either way, no? Either not watching them or the ad-blocking reducing their count seems to be the same in the end.

If you had a lemonade stand, and I came and drank one, told you it was bad and didn't pay, that's one thing. I'd probably not come back.

If I kept coming everyday, multiple times a day, and never paid "because its bad", it's extremely unlikely that I don't like the lemonade, and extremely likely that I just like that it's free as long as I complain.

I am not sure that this example really works. Youtube is happy to give you all the "free lemonade" you want (from videos that aren't really monetizable) but the ones that are, they make onerous to use. I get 20+ ads per day right now from an Internet service that I already use, and get untold ads from products that I would never use. Some of the ads are up to 1 hour in duration. Granted, they mercifully offer a skip button, but it seems to me that the ad is being forced on you, not offered to you. That is the big difference. A funny, engaging ad is not a problem for nearly anyone.

No, the ad is not being forced on you.

It's your choice to go to youtube and watch the video. No one is forcing that on you. Youtube is a service that is offered. If you don't like youtube or the ads, you can not use the service. Just like no one is forcing you to go to the lemonade stand.

Or he can just use it and block ads :)

It's more like a lemonade stand which advertises a free glass of lemonade to anyone who asks for one, but every time someone comes up and asks for a glass the guy handing out cups gives a long-winded highly insulting sermon about how the person drinking should live their life.

Then the lemonade stand guy feels entitled to bitch about it when more and more people start showing up wearing headphones because they don't want to hear his bullshit even though literally nobody came for his abuse, what they came for was just the free lemonade.

The people still show up though because clearly people like the lemonade, they just hate the annoying guy who won't shut up about his rude opinions nobody asked for.

If you go to the side table of the stand, you can purchase a lemonade, no hassle, no sermon. But people are incredibly opposed to this because they genuinely believe that they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost.

> If you go to the side table of the stand, you can purchase a lemonade, no hassle, no sermon. But people are incredibly opposed to this because they genuinely believe that they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost.

How dare people genuinely believe they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost, when it's got a huge sign that says "FREE LEMONADE"!

Youtube has every right to take down the free lemonade sign and paywall off their service, but they wont because they know they make far more money luring in the people who come for the free videos, sucking up their personal data, and then increasingly abusing them until some number of suckers cave and start paying into their protection racket scheme.

A racket is exactly what youtube premium is too. Never pay someone for protection against the very harms they're causing you. There's nothing to stop them from demanding increasing amounts of protection money whenever they feel like it, which is exactly what Google has done. Repeatedly. Most recently sticking their oldest suckers with a 62% hike in protection fees. (https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1jqzu4g/et_tu_yout...)

Don't encourage or try to justify that kind of shit. Just put on a pair a headphones and enjoy the sweet lemonade Google chooses to offer for "free". Don't forget that even with those headphones, Google is still collecting every scrap of data they can get from you and your device while you're using their service and that they'll happily leverage all of that data against you in any way they can think of, any time they feel it might benefit them. That price is itself high enough, but for me still worth what I'm getting from the content I view.

I don't see where YouTube has a sign saying its free. It's openly ad supported.

It's also an optional website/app. No need to get heated, you can use another service.

If I drink your lemonade, you no longer have it. If I watch your video, you still have it.

The cost to youtube is the overhead. Youtube doesn't even pay for the videos, but the infrastructure, delivery network, and service is very expensive.

It's a very naive view to think that serving videos is a zero-cost endeavor because the video isn't consumed.

If they don't want people to watch without paying, they can put up a paywall.

Ah yes the infinitely reproducible digital content fallacy. If you watch a movie at the cinema, they still have the movie, do you expect that to be free too?

Products have more than just marginal production costs, especially true for digital ones.

> do you expect that to be free too?

The seating and good screen and audio? No.

The digital file? I don't expect Disney to provide that free of charge, or at all for that matter, but I do believe it should be free. Copyright has gone way too far of one end of the scale, and I'd like to pull it as far as possible to the other side, then hopefully we can meet in the middle in a position we can both respect. The current position taken by Society™ is one I don't respect.

I agree copyright goes too far, but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything. Creative content producers still need food to eat. We still need mechanisms to pay them for it, the more direct the better.

The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes.

> but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything.

Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything.

> We still need mechanisms to pay them for it, the more direct the better.

Patreon is a good option, although I wish we had better ones. It's not like Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%. Anyone who's tried that has discovered that Youtube's payout is some extra pocket change rather than anything you can actually sustain a business with; hence why everybody who's on Youtube and does it as a business also has a Patreon or does sponsorships, or something else, as that's the only way to make ends meet.

> The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes.

I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure.

YouTube gives creators 55% of ad revenue once they get over 1k subscribers, it's pretty generous.

> > but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything.

> Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything.

Poor wording on my part, because I was typing on my phone. "Everything" refers to everything related to copyright law. Your original comment implied that we should just burn it all down (going "as far as possible to the other side"), and I don't agree with that.

Copyright has been weaponized of course, but there are considerations worth keeping in mind about why it exists in the first place. The intent is to create mechanisms that incentivize creation of art, and allow creatives to distribute said art without other people getting automatic ownership of the fruits of their labor, just by virtue of having the file.

In a world where distribution of media is (relatively) cheap and easy, we need to think more about how we incentivize the creative process, instead of making it a wild west where anyone is allowed to distribute if they have the bits on them. In a world where everyone pirates, very little worth pirating remains.

EDIT: Forgot to respond to the rest.

I agree about patreon, but also:

> Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%.

That's not accurate. Of course if you have a couple hundred subscribers you get nothing from youtube, but neither does a random busker on the subway. Arts are just brutally competitive, and there's way more art being produced than people want to consume.

Youtube's partner programs are quite generous as other people have pointed out in sister comments. In addition, a good chunk of your premium subscription goes directly to the creators you're subscribed to.

> I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure.

This misses my point, but illustrates the weird thought process people go through when assigning value to digital media. When trying to value a desk we're willing to go through the whole shebang: cost of materials, quality of materials, quality of the craftsmanship and how much labour it would have required, the estimated cost of all the manufacturing processes involved, finishing labor costs etc.

But when the conversation is about paying for digital content we only focus on the direct value it provides to us, the consumer. The entire conversation about input value just gets lost.

Now input value is not always perfectly correlated with the output value (it's shaped differently for each customer), but the fact that the conversation simply shifts away as if creators and people building the platforms don't exist outside of the stream of bytes feels disingenuous.

It's not about sending a message. It's about making sure you use a service in the way it's being offered, or not using it at all.

Well that is not a law, and even bringing it up on a site called "Hacker News" makes me almost think you are making a joke that is going over my head.

YouTube is free to only serve videos to paying users if they don't like ad blockers. it would destroy the site, but they're technically able to do it.

> YouTube is free to only serve videos to paying users if they don't like ad blockers. it would destroy the site, but they're technically able to do it.

This is why enshittification exists.

It would be really tough. I do think YouTube provides a lot of value by making its videos accessible to everyone.

Plenty of closed ecosystem streaming services exist and they continue to be niche things where creators who had no audience before YouTube are trying to keep going. I'm not sure how long the likes of Nebula and Floatplane are going to last honestly, because they have fundamental discovery issues in both directions:

The creators need a constant influx of new viewers to replace people growing out of their content, and the viewers need a platform where they can experiment with new content without a big paywall upfront.

YouTube and every other site on the internet can trivially block all users with an ad blocker but choose not to. Why is that?

Well they want you to pay obviously, they don't want you to disappear. Setting an expectation that things should be free on the internet is what killed the internet. We all want good things until we have to pay up.

> Setting an expectation that things should be free on the internet is what killed the internet

You must be very young if you actually think that. In reality the internet was infinitely better when there was no commercialization at all.

I’d love to go back to a completely non-commercial internet that only contains things people put there with no expectation or possibility of profit.

I may or may not be younger than you, that is of no relevance other than a vague appeal to defer to your experience about it.

I find plenty of valuable things on the current internet that wouldn't exist without commercialization, the possibility of a career as an individual YouTuber or streamer, for example.

And I'd like to see them continue and be actually paid for their efforts in a sustainable way instead of pining for a return to "all content is just passion side projects".

Because absolutely nothing about the current internet stops people from posting passionately as a side project.

The Internet was infinitely more fun but also infinitely less useful.

I have the rosey glasses too. The reality is that it was just a bunch of edgy kids messing around with no adults in the room.

Because you might have a perfectly selfish stance in the short term, but it turns out that creators not making enough money leads to creators not making content.

Someone you care to watch not making enough money to make the things you like to watch is your concern, because making equivalent content yourself is out of your reach.

It's worse than creators not making content, they move their content to be lower rung click bait garbage to maximize ad-views.

If "smart" people use ad-block, then all the content gravitates towards those who don't.

The videos for smart people are things like:

* University lectures

* Conference talks

* Random clips of homeowners doing some DIY repair

i.e. things that were being done anyway, and someone decided to post it online because it's free and they wanted to be helpful. "Content creators" are already almost never making videos with high value information. The entire idea of "creating content" rather than "sharing information" is a bad framing to start from. When we recognize that "sharing information" is the high-value action, we're better able to see that it not only can be done by someone who isn't a full-time "creator", but may actually be done better by people who aren't devoted to it since their occupation is to be a practitioner of the field they're sharing information about. i.e. they are better informed.

Smart people enjoy many different things.

What I listed encompasses many things. You can find lectures on philosophy, biology, anatomy, psychology, physics, Russian literature, religion, history, or whatever topic you're interested in. It's more about depth of information and level of expertise of the presenter vs. "lower rung click bait garbage". Information that demands your full attention for an extended period of time and expects you'll put in effort to engage with it instead of just throwing gimmicks at you to hold a piece of your attention before you click away.

Or if you want to enjoy some slop, then apparently we'll all get plenty of that if the smart people block malware, so no problem.

Generally speaking, something with wide appeal is going to be trash anyway because most people aren't going to want to (or will be unable to) engage with any given topic at more than a superficial level. e.g. compare Andrew Ng's Coursera MOOC to problem sets you can find from his real class at Stanford. It is obvious that he watered down the information hard for Coursera. Almost every class on those MOOC sites is of the "X for non-X majors" variety at best (and that's for people who are motivated enough to self-learn!), which IMO is why it could never truly be disruptive. The "creators" people are talking about are generally this except even more targeted at mass audiences.

Even for people who are interested in "smart" stuff, 100x more people will watch some 10 minute video of surface level discussion with doodles about algebraic geometry[0] and then move onto another 10 minute video vs. putting in the work to engage with 15+ hours of lectures on the subject from a Fields Medalist[1]. World-class researchers provide graduate level educational materials for free (which is awesome), but they could never succeed as "content creators" because any given video will only get ~1k views after years of being up.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MflpyJwhMhQ

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8yHsr3EFj53j51FG6wCb...

> It's worse than creators not making content, they move their content to be lower rung click bait garbage to maximize ad-views.

They will do this whether or not people use ad-blockers. We've seen this happen before; someone will claim that they are an ethical ad company and don't do shady things, people allow-list in ad blockers, then they start ramping up.

I remember back in the day where Google was a "good advertiser" because they had simple textual ads and didn't do shady things. IIRC plenty of ad blockers just allow-listed Google at that time. And then they acquired Doubleclick.

I remember a time where people actually had to pay money to publish their videos (on their own server, using their own storage). And they still did it if they wanted to get something out into the world.

> creators not making enough money leads to creators not making content.

As a consumer this does not concern me in the slightest. The big creators who are focusing on revenue are so sterile they are barely watchable at this point.

> So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.

Pretty sure this is harmful to youtube as well as it lowers the value (less personalization data) for advertisers. Also the knock-on effect of impacting creators, meaning less investment in creating content.

That being said, I've always hated this business model. It's created so many other problems in our society. Resulting in a shift to authoritarian leadership in many countries.

Adblock users already have no value for advertisers.

Aren't many channels funded by the companies they pretend to get sponsorship from? If you look at the OSINT and Natsec adjacent topics there are many who have had the same sponsor for years: ground.news ... many pretend that they are indie content creators when they are just the marketing / growth hacking arm of the sponsor.

Examples: Caspian report, Warfronts, Geopolitics decoded, ...

Many of them (the content creator) are even located in the same city.

> many pretend that they are indie content creators when they are just the marketing / growth hacking arm of the sponsor.

Just curious, but can't they be both?

I don't know those channels. The one I regularly see are very diverse in their partners, and usually the content is unrelated to the promotions. But overall those promotions are negotiated based on viewer counts, and at a certain size, they are more valuable than earnings from ads.

Absolutely can be both. And often they make it clear: like cappello army does. But then there are the more shady ones where it's less transparent

Any credible evidence that they get enough money from the sponsorships to be considered fully funded by them? Or that ground news uses influence over these channels?

I can throw a dart and hit a random podcast that has been sponsored by blue chew for years, but that doesn't mean said podcast is funded by them or bends to their whims.

IMO your comment is pure conspiracy theory.

Why would thet be a conspiracy theory. The public facing guy who is behind Warfronts has 4 other channels that peddle content unrelated to natsec/warfare. If you follow "cappy army" and the drama he went through at "task and purpose" his former employer it becomes pretty clear that there are entire media companies behind what looks like "a single hobbyist content creator expat living in Prague" ...

Eventually the whole system will rebalance. TV ads were shown to people even though you couldn't if any single person was watching or not.

Where does line go? If a future "Adblocker 3000" don't let advertisers capture you eyemovements in realtime 30 times per second, would that be sad?

Seems the ball is with Youtube. They can compensete and pay out more. Or not.

That still isn't an issue for the end-user. It is Youtube's problem to keep their content creators happy and not mine.

Personally I would even prefer anything that allows for a Youtube alternative to do better.

Oh, really, are you sure? They still charge advertisers the full amount? My understanding was that they're only charged if there is evidence of an "ad impression" which there shouldn't be if the request was blocked

Why would they charge for an ad which was not shown? This is not about the view count of the ad.

Why do YouTube creators deserve special treatment compared to any other entity whose analytics are impacted by adblockers?

Every publisher on the internet has been bleating for years about how adblockers negatively impact their business and their ability to provide [some value] to customers.

If your ability to generate value is hitched to surveillance capitalism then that’s a choice, whether you’re a folksy mom and pop YouTube creator or a multinational publisher.

I don't think the parent implies that. Advertising has destroyed a lot of value, YouTube or otherwise. But you can either push the equilibrium in a (imo) productive direction by paying your creators (via subscriptions) or continue to attack the symptom of the problem (ads) while everything shittifies further around you. That's the choice.

That's a rule defined by YouTube and/or advertisers in their relationship with content creators. By defining that rule, YouTube and/or advertisers have chosen to drag my participation into that relationship. My participation does not belong in their relationship. The only thing I can do to communicate my opinion on the matter is to do precisely what this "bug" entails.

Isn't it likely that Google charges the advertisers for each time an ad is shown? So lower view counts mean lower ad views which means lower revenues for both Google and the content creators. (And, if the advertisers are counting on the views to drive their own business, it could mean lower revenues for them to go with the smaller ad bills.)

The ads are not shown anyway. This is about the video where the ad would be embedded. Those are two different view counts.

Might be a problem with Adblock, but also, Firefox just released an update that blocks social networks.

I run a couple different privacy add-ons for various different levels of blocking things, but the Firefox update has seriously broken a lot of stuff

A lot of people clearly didn’t like Yuki’s response, but he’s entirely right.

The thumbs downs on Yuki's responses are baffling. It is a privacy filter, improving privacy. There is a strong para-social relationship with many younger internet users, so maybe people really do feel strongly about affecting their favorite youtube star's view count? Or it could be youtube creators who are worried. I can't think of any other reasons a user would be on the side of youtube here.

Picking sides is silly. Just don't use YouTube, or pay for it with money or ad time and data.

I think, if that was YouTube's goal, they should close their platform tomorrow, and put everything behind a paid login. That would be the honest move. Instead they are trying to sneakily profit from viewers, by sneaking in ads in whatever way possible. They are employing dark pattern after pattern and are extorting "consent". It is entirely reasonable to block their dark patterns and just watch videos without ads. If it bothers them, go ahead, hide everything behind paid access. See how quickly their monopoly will evaporate then.

I’d rather actively hurt their business model, thanks

I'll use it and I'll not pay.

> There is a strong para-social relationship with many younger internet users, so maybe people really do feel strongly about affecting their favorite youtube star's view count?

100% this. They were even threatening him with facing the ire of social media if he didn't reopen the issue.

This actually makes me feel more confident that it's actually blocking tracking and not caving in to vanity needs.

Right or wrong you don't think it was unduly combative right off the bat? Manners cost nothing.

It’s not how I would have responded either, but people are entitled to their own ways of communicating.

It doesn't really affect YouTube either, it affects creators who rely on view counts to monetize their channels.

Great, finally a thread Youtube employees might be looking at.

Ever since the election you guys RAMPED up the ads, please drop it back down. It's becoming unbearable to get a 50 minute podcast AD every 5 minutes of video I watch when I'm shingling a roof and my phone is in the truck. There HAS to be some limits here.

I don't think the grunts get to decide. youtube is now governed by the dude who used to run AdSense, and has a mandate to fix revenue losses.

Do you think a random Youtube employee makes that decision and can just drop it lower?

No, but feedback goes into the machine in odd ways. This has a 1000x higher factor of being considered and thought of more than any other forum.

Firefox and ublock origin, or... Just pay for it

I think the funniest thing about this whole mess is Youtubers asking their viewers to unblock it.

Or in LTT's case, consistently banging on about it like it affects their audience - the audience really do not care (nor should they need to), it has no bearing on them.

We're ripe for a situation where YouTube subpoenas ISPs MPAA 2.0 style over their users habitually accessing video and audio content streams without paying or validating through their ad chain. Google has every way from Sunday to identify users very accurately and I see it being an option on the table to ban accounts to the name, and potentially seek damages. RIAA did it for MP3s, MPAA for video content; rule of thirds?

Ultimately most sane people see ads as vomitpuke and this will continue to be a contention.

I would find it exceptional interesting if youtube moved away from the concept of providing content for free without an expectation for repayment, to a model of selling a service. Selling a services is covered under a very different kind of laws, and where I live, tax law, while giving away content for free with ads has their own little exception carved out for it.

It is similar to how phone companies had to charge 0.1 cent for phones, rather than advertise it as gratis. The law said that companies could not advertise a product as being gratis if they also expect the customer to pay for it in terms of a binding contract with a provider, but they can sell the phone for any amount greater than 0 and have it as a combined sale with a binding contract. Thus companies changed how they sold their product, and also had to inform the customer of the binding terms (and if I recall, expected total cost) in the advertisements.

As one politician put it; You can't put a sale tax on services supported through advertisement since the customer may watch the full add, half the add, or none of it. Since the tax office can't determine how much of an add, if anything, is watched, there is no value in the exchange for which to tax.

i've noticed recently youtube added a "most commonly skipped to" marker on their videos which is very useful when watching on my TV which doesn't support sponsorblock to skip sponsored segments

more and more youtube creators seem to be integrating their sponsors in their videos in a way where if you skip it you miss an integral part and i do wonder if this is youtube's way of fighting against being left out, but then again, i don't know shit, just an interesting observation

Have you looked at https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV ?

Counter-argument: Youtube's aggressive anti-ads campaign resulted in failed loads, videos that appear stuck, etc. The more techy people would have updated, but others were left with the choice of a buggy experience or dreadfully long ads. Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.

Plus so many ads are malware, dangerous, or scams that even the FBI says you should use an ad blocker

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/22/fbi-ad-blocker/

YouTube is one of the worst offenders for scam ads. Even today you sometimes find an ad that talks about some scary health risk and points to some ad that drones on and on for 45 minutes and if you get to the end they try to sign you up for an $80 a month subscription for some worthless supplement.

A deepfake version of Mark Carney keeps trying to get me to sign up for scam crypto exchanges. Clicking the report link does nothing.

With all the money that Google has plowed into AI, they clearly could solve this problem if they want to. The fact that it's still an issue means they don't care, or are happy to take the ad money from the fraudsters.

I'm seeing the same ad. There's no way that can be legal to broadcast.

The problem is enforcement. Legal or not, it's extremely unlikely that law enforcement will pursue these kinds of scams.

yeah I had a deep fake Kier Starmer tell me about some investment opportunity with guaranteed returns.

Where is the "ads are just a way of telling people about things they might want" crowd? heh.

I can make that argument wholeheartedly, not even as a “steelman” when it comes to legitimate advertising but so much of it is criminal, morally if not legally —- and the victim is not just the viewer but also the advertiser which is running ads that are completely mistargeted, that damage their brand, or get fraudulent clicks —- I remember the layout of anandtech always shifting around so you would try to click on a link and just before you did an ad would slide under your finger and ka-Ching! Was it by accident or design.

On the other hand I’ve known people who sold ads for newspaper and radio and all of them had some sense of ethics.

Right behind the "regulatory agencies are asleep at the switch" crowd.

If you build /anything/ there will be people who dedicate time to learning how to abuse it for profit.

We don't live in Narnia.

An investment opportunity with guaranteed returns is something I would definitely want if it actually existed.

They live in the pages of an economics textbook, blissfully untethered from reality.

I endorse the view that everyone should use an ad blocker, but for what it's worth I keep seeing this techcrunch article and the original advice offered by the FBI [1] is actually much more limited.

> Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others.

So the specific recommendation is that you turn on an ad blocker while performing searches. Why are they so concerned about searches? It's because of a specific form of fraud, where someone purchases an ad pretending to be the business you're searching for, but actually takes you "to a webpage that looks identical to the impersonated business’s official webpage" - that is, a phishing scam.

That's way more limited than the "FBI recommends ad blocker" statement would lead you to believe. From the FBI's point of view, pitching a bullshit supplement in an ad (what you're talking about) is an entirely legitimate business practice, and selling supplements is legal in the US so long as you don't make certain medical claims or imply FDA approval.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221222162340/https://www.ic3.g...

I borrowed the phone of someone who is older to watch a facebook video in the app. In the middle of the video there was a video ad with sound playing, an amber alert for sound and a warning to click the link. The next ad after that one was also a warning that there was a virus and you needed to click the link

In the age of A.I. blocking that kind of content should be easier than shooting fish in a bucket and the false positives should all be things the platform would be better off without.

I think searches are just a common entry point to the internet at large. People search then they have some mistaken trust those links are legit.

I see it as part of the same general package. The censoring for any reason at all (including real time, via AI, in the comments, which were already! ruined by Google+ integration going back years)

Youtube Rewind 2018 - before they got rid of dislikes, to make ad videos harder to spot - was one of (was the?) most disliked videos in Youtube history

A very far cry from the halcyon days of ~10 years earlier

100%. I can't count the amount of times I've seen an AI-generated Elon Musk promoting a Tesla coin lol. I've lost count.

> Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.

This specific case is about an unusual high drop of viewers specifically on desktops on a specific date. The assumptions are, that it's just too unusual for the normal drop in that timeframe, so it has to be a bug of some kind. Would it be a normal drop in viewers, it would not be on a specific date, months after the problems with AdBlocks started.

There is middle-ground: anti- ad-blocker changes cause a large number of ad-blockers to fail entirely.

It would make sense too, Youtube wouldn't care to make their videos viewable to a large number of ad-blockers, and ad-revenue would be near steady because ad-blockers were not generating any ad revenue.

> Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.

Creators are not reporting any declines in ad revenue that match the drop in view count. Indeed several have reported revenue is the same despite the view count drop. So it's quite unlikely people are fed up with youtube in any meaningful way.

The people using ad-blockers were not watching ads, so it would not make a difference to revenue streams. If anything, profit would go up because Youtube server capacity is not being used as much by ad-block users.

Some people I know do not ever change any settings on their computers, they certainly are worst hit by youtube's ads and have given up opening youtube links or close youtube links immediately after because there are 3-4 ads before the video even begins.

I consider myself a little techy, since I visit this site quite often. But for me YouTube is curing me from my addiction to it by ramping up its ad blocker blockers. I know I have to wait roughly the ad’s runtime looking at a frozen video before the video actually starts playing and it is often enough to let me go do something productive or useful instead. Thanks google :)

This article is less about view counts dropping due to people abandoning the platform and more about view count spikes and troughs that are a consequence of the measure-countermeasure game of YouTube tweaking its code to account for ad blockers vs. ad blockers tweaking their code to account for YouTube ads.

Ad blockers (especially for complex sites and data streams) are basically like using a chainsaw to remove a mosquito(1); sometimes innocuous or beneficial features get omitted too because they're too "ad-shaped" for the heuristic.

(1) Anyone who thinks I'm under-selling the risks of unblocked ads has never seen the consequence of an unlucky bite from Aedes aegypti.

This is the last thread I would ever have expected to see those little striped monsters mentioned.

Not sure about the chainsaw analogy, but I guess Aedes Aegypti is a fair metaphor for the cumulative effect of the tiny daily (hourly?) annoyance of the free-with-ads model.

And like the mosquito, ads can sometimes give you viruses!

"would have updated" what? Their browser?

For quite a few people, they would have had to manually pull in an updated ad-blocker change. This would be the case if they run the source release, or have disabled updates.

Let me guess they are not blaming the terrible ad experience that cause people to use ad blockers?

From the GitHub issue it becomes clear that blocking happens by the EasyPrivacy blocklist. The blocked URL youtube.com/api/stats/atr is/can also be used for tracking users, this is why some are arguing that it legitimately on that blocklist.

The tracking not malicious. YouTube has a legitimate interest to verify views, e.g. to recommend popular videos to others. If a view counter was increased by just invoking an API, view counts could be manipulated easily. Also see the video [1] from ... 13 years ago ... so it might be slighly outdated. Just slightly.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI

They're streaming all that data to each client, can't youtube notice that? Why are they dependent on a separate endpoint for the client to send to?

> Why are they dependent on a separate endpoint for the client to send to?

So they can turn video content-creators against those who use ad-blockers. I do not get how is this not obvious.

With Google aggressively blocking bots on search, likely due to AI scraping- it wouldn't surprise me that the view counts are also affected by bot detection.

Go complain to Youtube, where the views should be measured on the backend instead of via an API call.

Does anyone realize how many missed views this implies??

They certainly are counting views on the backend also, and I'm sure they know exactly what the cause of the discrepancy (or "drop" as they term it) is.

They probably use a combination of the API and raw server requests due to how easy it would be otherwise to spoof viewership for ad revenue fraud. Would not surprise me anyway.

I also see the opposite problem: can one abuse that API to artificial inflate the view count?

Ad-block views don't help anyone anyway, so I'm not sure why this would matter. If anything it's more accurate.

View count is used to guide to price embedded sponsors, so in the short term matters while things get recalibrated.

It does kinda make sense for once, you probably wouldn't want to just count API calls for views. I heard you need to watch a significant portion of the video before it counts as a view.

What if its both? ;)

How many?

Only YouTube can tell, that's the fun part.

And because only YouTube knows this, they can tell us anything they want.

[dead]

I realized this when I watched one of my friends music videos to give the extra view (they had less than 100) but the views number didn’t go up because of my ad blocker.

afairc sub-100 views are not counted in realtime anyway.

When I watched it without the ad blocker the views went up by one. I feel like it's a lot more realtime now because I swear I see the view counter updating as I'm watching some videos.

I think it was 300.

Then it used to stop at 301 views, while the system was verifying the veracity of the views, or at least, that's what I've been told…

Because Google still can't count that low, amirite?!

Interesting, I thought it was due to absolutely horrible TV UI redesign which now shows exactly 1 and a bit of a video thumbnail on my 77" TV. Who the heck designs that.

Huh, I'm having a hard time interpreting what that looks like. Have a link to a photo you can share anywhere? The "1 and a bit" part is confusing.

https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/YouTube-TV-Ro... - this is best case scenario, 2 whole thumbnails fit on the screen. And depending on category (selected on left) it might be just one - just imagine it truncated at the place right support bracket is.

Not around the TV right now, but they increased the size of the thumbnails in the first row of "Recommended" content to the point where only one is visible fully. (Not unlike new Netflix UI)

I might be in some A/B test tho.

ahh, that sounds like a poor UI indeed given the screen real-estate.

But are really this many users actively using ad blockers? Presumably, a lot of users are on mobile devices where they are using the native app that doesn't even support this. If we subtract them, then a significant share of users on browser would have to be using EasyList.

Something like ~30% of desktop users use ad-block.

If you are tech or tech-adjacent content, it can double or triple that.

40-50% of desktop users on my channel, heh.

I don't hold it against anyone. YouTube's ads are horrible, and overstuffed into videos.

I use premium and know not everyone can afford it, but one concern I have is premium views are also not counted if someone still uses the adblocker while logged into YouTube premium. (So you miss out on the view and on that extra bit of premium revenue).

One report (https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/) indicated that more than half of Americans use an ad blocker.

I would suspect it affects specific channels more than others. Obviously smaller tech channels are probably hit the hardest % wise

Firefox on Android supports uBlock Origin.

"a lot of users are on mobile devices where they are using the native app that doesn't even support this."

Laughs in NewPipe.

Laughs in patched YT.

The view drop only happened for desktop views.

What is the technical challenge behind stealthily blocking ads? Making the backend unaware if ads are actually being seen or not - just fetched.

This may even serve as some accelerationism for invasive web tech where ad middlemen may resort to doing render checks. The invasive practice may with low likelihood advance some web technologies into blocking such measures.

Not sure what the technical challenge here is either. I use an ad blocker and I assumed YouTube already counted my view, since the video can be found in my YouTube history.

I imagine watch history view tracking and view count view tracking and possibly even ad impression view tracking are three disconnected systems. Google is still going to update your history view even if it thinks you're a bot so you don't know you're being filtered out for example. The data to power that UI can also be partitioned by user while the ad and view count data needs to be aggregated performantly across large numbers of users in different slices. On the other hand your watch history doesn't keep multiple entries if you watch the same video multiple times in a day (say a music video on loop) but does want to charge for each ad impression seperately.

render the video twice -> gotcha, the GPU needs to run TPM code and knows where the buffer will go.

Mark my word, in 10 years pirating youtube videos will be a thing.

It could be the causality runs the other direction; I know that my youtube viewing is way down since they decided that they could decide what software I may/may not run on my computer.

On your computer? Could you elaborate?

They told me I couldn't run ad blocker/anti-virus software on my computer while watching their videos. So I stopped watching their videos. (Technically, the videos aren't theirs, but belong to the creators. Many of them provide the same (or better) content on other platforms),

You adblocker is misconfigured; I haven't seen any ads or anti-adblocker popups in months.

So Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?

Wouldn't surprise me if we now see a new trend of "click like, bell, and suscribe and don't forget to disable your ad blocker!".

Obviously they don't care about these views since they are not generating ad revenue. Youtubers who use view counts for sponsor deals etc do care though.

According to the GitHub issue, YouTube didn’t 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).

This is not definitive proof that easylist caused the view drops, but it’s I’ve read the issue and a writeup by a YouTube creator and it seems pretty likely.

That's not quite what the github issue says? There appear to be several potentially contributing changes in the time window, and one of them actually re-enables a previously blocked YouTube analytics endpoint

The re-enabled endpoint is yet a third endpoint different from the two I mentioned above.

Turns out YouTube has a lot of analytics.

>Youtubers who use view counts for sponsor deals

Laughs in SponsorBlock

Hell, YouTube even added that feature where it'll autoskip commonly skipped section so it's basically a built in SponsorBlock at this point (no doubt helped powered by those who skip via SponsorBlock). I'm surprised I haven't seen any controversy from people who are having their sponsors pay less because of this.

Hah, the next move will be picture-in-picture ads (whether the ad or the content will be in the box in the corner depends on the desperation...

Reminds me of F1 racing coverage on a free-to-air German TV network being reduced to a letterbox..

In my opinion the only sponsorships that actually work are the ones that are integrated into the content.

For example Linus Tech Tips wearing his clothing in his videos and using his screwdriver. For car and/or hardware channels I often see sponsors products being used throughout the video as well, which you can't skip with Sponsor block.

What do you mean when you say ”work”? That you personally find them helpful? Or that they’re the only ones that can’t be easily avoided even if the viewer wants to?

I think it’s pretty clear that other forms of sponsorships also drive revenue to advertisers (whatever people may feel about that)

I think the two existing replies to this question already answered this mostly, but I would define a "working" sponsorship as one that makes me consider buying it. Sponsorships that are basically just an add I don't even see thanks to SponsorBlock for example. So those are "not working" for me.

But for the LTT screwdriver or the bamboo labs 3D printers where I see how they can be used I actually consider buying them or have already done so. One factor for this is obviously that they can't be skipped, but the bigger one is that they are obviously more relevant for me as I am already interested in the video's topic and therefore the products used in it.

Work as in, "are effective at advertising a product"

Showing "regular" people solving common recurring issues like, "what clothes should I wear, what tool will simplify this task, what products are effective at a good value, what software/hardware can accomplish the goals I have set" are the only effective advertising for many people.

Sure, with kids you can show them a cool toy that other kids are playing with, inspiring desire.

You can show adults and teens a sexy girl or a hot guy somehow attached to the product so that by association your product is hot or sexy, but those are the low handing fruit and only work on specific demographics.

However, if you can clearly identify your target audience and then put a product that matches that audience in front of them while showing how the product is being used, thats it. Everyone who would purchase that type of product will buy it.

> Or that they’re the only ones that can’t be easily avoided even if the viewer wants to?

Surely this one given what they wrote.

> which you can't skip

What I've never understood is, aren't people slowly waking up to product placement and sponsored content?

Whenever I see something thoroughly being advertised, and especially stealthily advertised, I immediately assume you have a shit product and need to bribe your way to success. Nothing turns me off more from a product than seeing an advertisement for it.

In theory I agree with you, but apparently most people fall for it.

Honestly, LTT does a real good job of their in-content ads as well. 30 seconds at the beginning and end. Them being so short and sweet really makes them more palatable.

What's crazy is they've said their 60 seconds of ads per video generate way more revenue per video than Google's minutes of Google Adsense ads. So the real story here is the collapse of Adsense.

Product placement ads can be the best kind when they’re done well. The catch is they take far more effort to weave naturally into content, and that limits the kinds of sponsorships you can accept.

The sweet spot is when it feels seamless, but too often creators overdo it and the result is hilariously awkward. Think of someone discussing, say, the dangers of mountain climbing, then suddenly blurting out: “And you know what else is dangerous? An unprotected connection. Which is why you need X VPN!”

Idiocracy TV

https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uploads/2007/01...

YouTube stole that user interface, Judge should have sued them.

YouTube already does this for livestreams.

I believe it is only a premium feature, and premium user views pay substantially more than sponsors or ads.

I'll stick with Sponsorblock since Googles motto is "Embrace, Expand, Extinguish"

It's "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" (assuming you're referring to the phrase from Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... )

Yes, right, thank you

I find it incredibly difficult to shed any sympathy for youtube "content creators". Youtube was most entertaining, or at least most interesting before anyone was monetizing the platform. Same goes for most of thr rest of the web but I digress

That's bizarre. I watch a lot of great content on YouTube that's possible because those people get paid. I would rather like if YouTube paid them _more_ because the sponsors and patrons of the world prove that not all views are the same. Sadly, a lot of shit content gets lots and lots of views

I dislike it because it exposes content creators to similar pressures as traditional TV. There's a lot of content that doesn't get made because that content would be unsponsorable or worse yet would make the creator in general unsponsorable. It's also created some strange and twisted linguistics to appease sponsors or YouTube's algorithm like "unalive" or "PDF file" (as a standin for pedophile).

I guess it's the way of the world, but the introduction of heavy monetization has definitely influenced the kind of content YouTube carries.

You can make content without monetization in mind. But it's like giving your time away.

Content which doesn't get made without sponsorship wouldn't get made even if sponsorships didn't exist.

People want to get rewarded for they work, you know. Do you also want your plumber to work for free?

I'd probably be OK if all the content which doesn't get made without sponsorship wouldn't get made at all, and the people who work as content creators stopped doing so. There is an overabundance of new content, having 10x less content would be perfectly fine, and in pretty much every niche there are amateur enthusiasts who clearly (based on their amount of viewers) are giving their time away, and their content is in many ways preferable and "more real" than the professionals - so I'd be OK if all the professionals stop and these awkward amateur enthusiasts are all that remain.

The same applies to web and blogs; the ability to monetize them by ads (and I do remember the "old web" before it was the case) increased the content but drowned out viewership for the true enthusiasts running things in their spare time, which IMHO were more valuable and I think that regime was better; again, losing 90% or 99% of the content wouldn't be bad in my mind, there still would be more than enough for anyone to ever "consume".

>You can make content without monetization in mind. But it's like giving your time away.

You're missing the point entirely, the content I refer to as more interesting is stuff people made for fun or on principle not because of financial incentive

Imagine if people only commented on hn because they were expecting a paycheck for it

It would be great to live in a world where everyone could make cool stuff without needing to get paid, but we don't. Monetization is why YouTube gained a community in the first place.

That simply isn’t true. YouTube had a huge community when it was just amateurs sharing videos for the love of the sport. Professional content creators didn’t come along until much later.

And they stayed because they could get paid for it.

It can be argued whether it is better to have creators who make it their income to constantly produce content or to have a revolving door of amateurs who cut their teeth on video production in youtube and move on.

You can do that today too. Like a channel Airborne Entertainment, strapping a boat motor to a car. Dump engineering, just two dudes doing stupid shit.

If all videos are affected by this, then it really should not be hard for these people to adjust their deals with sponsors to compensate.

If views aren't being counted, it will still hurt their revenue from YouTube Premium subcribers. Premium views pay out a lot more than ad revenue from "free" views so that can hurt a lot.

YT premium subscribers should disable adblockers anyway

Why?

Because YT doesn't serve ads to those users, so there is nothing to block at best, and at worst it screws up view counts.

I pay for premium. YouTube clearly keeps track of what I'm watching. It's in my history amongst other things. My adblocker is not coming down.

They are serving you that content. They know anyway.

You’re wrong. The tracking code is two pronged: 1 to serve you ads, 2 to track you. By blocking ads while paying for Youtube Premium you block the tracking end as well.

This goes for any site that sells you an ad-free subscription. No ads but you’re still being profiled.

People who pay for YouTube Premium are already tracked by virtue of the fact that they are a logged in user who has a credit card associated with their account.

Google has to do no legwork here to figure out who you are and what videos you are watching. There is no ambiguity. There should be no reason to not count views from Premium subscribers who don't disable their ad-blocker.

I'm sure Google knows this, and has a good reason for this behavior that they are not telling us. I'm not sure what it could be, other than spite.

Yes but I guess the advice is better supported on platforms where your identity is not directly tied.

No reason to ever turn off your ad-blocker even if you do pay and they identify you.

If the point of "ad blocker" is not to "block ads" then maybe it needs rebranding.

Right, they are content blockers with a focus on malware (but also annoyances like cookie banners or whatever you'd like via right-click menu). Adware is a subset of what they block. "Web malware blocker" is probably the most concise while reasonably correct characterization.

"People should disable their web malware blockers to support creators" makes the insanity of the proposition as clear as it ought to be. "FBI recommends using a web malware blocker" makes the advice as obvious as it ought to be.

That makes a lot of sense.

(Shrug) As a Premium user, Google obviously knows what videos I'm watching, given that I'm logged in. Failure to credit the creator accordingly would amount to fraud.

So that sounds like a 'them' problem, not a 'me' problem. There is no reason for ad tracking to play any role in the process whatsoever.

I'm not sure why it seems you have downvotes for saying that. Premium users by their very nature need to be logged in. YouTube has all of the watch stats for logged in users without needing the view to hit an extra analytics endpoint. They can and should just use that.

no.

YouTube has a BrandConnect program where they facilitate sponsored videos. I'm not sure how many sponsorships are done through that as opposed to third party agents though.

> Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?

Youtube isnt quoted in this article. It's someones speculation

YouTube is quoted in the article.

> 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.

View counts is a worthless metric for sponsor deals, as are any other type of metric provided by a third party.

To get exact metrics, you should use discount codes that are unique for each channel. Then you will know the exact amount of sales each sponsorship is netting.

I believe the metrics are before the sponsorship is made, like a company will only sponsor a creator if that creator has more than a number of views

Brave will hit 100 MAU this year. That is a lot of users that will never see ads.

Could the move from Windows 10 EOL to 11 have something to with it? Whemn people run Edge for the first time does it turn on or reccomend the builtin adblocker setting?

The fact that a client-side change can impact reported views is wild. Its so wildly the wrong place to track views that it forces me to wonder if its an intentional & malicious decision by Google to mobilize YouTube creators against the idea of viewer privacy.

This is how it has worked for ages. If you think about it for a bit, I think you'd come up with all kinds of reasons for why this can't be done with just server-side signals.

For example, how do you account for skipping over already fetched parts of the video or rewatching the same section multiple times?

Or for the entire video being cached and researched? For bots downloading the video?

The idea that this is some malicious anti-adblocker time bomb implanted a decade ago is preposterous.

Yeah. How does the client get trusted and could someone write a view amplifier that reports extra views to YouTube? I would assume it’s already being abused if they trust the client side to report views. If they’re not trusting the client, the ad blocker explanation doesn’t work.

It makes no sense.

Did we hear anything about people using ad blockers and still having YouTube's watch history enabled reporting that a watched video didn't pop up in the history?

Google must have thought: "Never let a good crisis go to waste.".

Maybe a "view", however YT defines it, is a poor metric? It doesn't show engagement and it's time for YTers to have better means for analytics.

I have an Android TV device, and YT has been so horrible with its constant ads popping up, that I have to put it on MUTE to prevent any further brainrot.

I wonder when they're going to blame me muting my TV and harm their viewership. Or maybe they will just prevent me from being able to mute it.

SmartTube is way better and free: https://smarttubeapp.github.io/

Source: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/373195597

Hordes of people skipping ads is a reasonable price to pay for market monopoly.

> I don't want views going down for creators on youtube.

Agree to disagree. That's kind of the point of an ad blocker.

If you want to support creators, stop blocking their ads.

Views support the videos in the algorithm.

Do you think someone like Louis Rossman, who wants to use Youtube to share his message but doesn't use YT as a business, would rather views or ad money?

Presumably Louis wants to reach as many people as possible and would like to know how many people he's reaching though.

I suspect his desire for people to block ads ranks higher than his desire for statistics.

Rossman has a separate business to support him.

I block ads on my favourite channel but then support the guy through Patreon every month. I figure he’ll get more revenue form that than the shitty ads

Heaven forbid Google/Youtube actually count/measure the streaming output themselves. Same goes to CBS/Paramount whose whole service breaks (on some streams) when using a pihole.

Yesterday I wanted to watch a video of a song which was made originally english. It was auto translating lyrics to german. I just speak some spanish and some english. Couldn't decide if I should be annoyed with it translating to a language I just know a handful of words or should be thankful because it's trying to help me learn more of it.

Lengths Google are going to fighting ad blockers when really it's a small niche of people who can't stand to use their platform without one is getting silly and this feels like a tactic to try and push the onus on making people turn them off on their favorite youtubers

is it a small niche when the youtube creators can see it in their stats and are panicking?

Off-topic, but this 9to5google blog is the first I’ve seen “top comment” embedded inline with the blog post. That’s really cool. It’s more like how you’d comment on a google doc rather than threaded conversations appended to the end of it. I’d like to see more exploration of this UX…

If you're unfamiliar with the creator dashboard there is a spot reserved for notifications from YouTube. This should have been front and center last week, not buried in a creator help thread. Why wasn’t it? That's open to speculation.

As someone with a small tech channel, I'm glad I was following this. If not, I would have spent the last week swapping out thumbnails and video titles, which seem about as effective as percussive maintenance. But hey, you have to try something.

Well over a decade ago a gentleman by the name of Brian Brushwood said, and I'm paraphrasing, “YouTube is like working for an AI manager that never tells you what it wants but punishes you severely if you get it wrong.”

Welcome to 2025.

I wish their algorithm would show me videos with my actual interests, instead of some kind of repeat material click maximization

I get good recommendations. They key is to not getting distracted by videos you don't really want to see in the feed. Its very tempting some times and watching just one video can mess up the feed. Takes a while to get back.

Same with twitter.

Have you tried clicking on the the dot dropdown menu and selecting "Not interested" or "Don't recomment channel"?

I've found that "Not Interested" does either nothing or sends an engagement signal to show me more of the same. "Don't recommend channel" does seem to work with that channel, at least.

I'm seeing abundance channels with generated content - doesn't matter if it's official page, "proxy" services or apps. It's always heartbreaking stories about poor senior women whose lives are hell because of their families or homeless girls who want to eat leftovers from the plates of the rich, or supposed death of celebrities.

Considering I have zero interest in this stuff it seems their algorithm pushes such trash by cross-referencing with the closest thing possible - even by a digital picometer distance.

I'm getting videos with under 10 views in my recommendations now. They're AI generated "educational" videos, but sound like interesting documentaries. Considering how many users YouTube had the chances that I could be in the first 10 viewers for a listed video are tiny unless I personally know the creator or the place is absolutely flooded in AI shit and there is O(users/10) of these videos being uploaded regularly.

I’ve been using Brave browser to watch YouTube for years. Haven’t seen one ad in years. I’m probably part of the problem

TechLinked's take is pretty good (as usual): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ5pATTvc2o

If it dies, it dies. - Ivan Drago

Maybe views are simply down. I can't be the only one getting tired of the out-of-control sponsored videos. Even if you pay for YT Premium, you get hit with that crap on most of the popular channels.

And you think everyone simply made the same decision as you on the same exact day?

It's possible that the YTers complaining about this are affected once you bring the algorithm into it.

Anecdotally I am watching less. Not because of sponsorships, but because more and more content is AI-generated slop or copied (stolen) from other channels and reposted.

But we're talking about a substantial viewership drop, across a single platform (only desktop), all simultaneously on a single day. That's clearly not any sort of organic change.

Everything is driven by the algorithm. You can have big changes on one day and for specific platforms, even if it's something that's been building up gradually, because that might be the day the algorithm adjusted. It's hard to talk about "this caused that to happen" if you don't know what the algorithm is doing.

Anecdotal but my usage has been slowly dropping in the past year or two as the experience has gotten worse. First it was the terrible search results and then with shorts plaguing the whole thing.

No problem YouTube. I'd rather give my data to the browser extension which brings back dislikes.

Every now and then I have accessed youtube on a PC with no adblocker.

It's absolutely dire. I mean, ridiculously bad. Unbearable.

If it's that or nothing, it's the easiest of choices.

Same with on phone. Pretty much always just close it.

I’d rather just not have yt than deal with their ads with a sprinkling of content on to approach

View counts are on borrowed time anyway, I’m sure.

I use uBo which uses easylist, and when I watch youtube videos they are marked as viewed, so this explanation does not seem likely?

How do you know they're marked as a view on the video?

What's the meaning of this? Is Google trying to make content creators tell their viewers not to use adblockers? I don't think it's easylist's problem here. I don't understand.

It was mostly panic. As in: it didn't apparently affect revenue in any way, but content creators always check view stats/graphs for their own videos to see how well each of them is doing. So sudden drop made YT the main suspect. It didn't help some changes to video visibility for "children" profiles was pushed at same time.

The interesting question is how/if this impacts the recommendation engine. If it does impact recommendations, then that will directly penalize channels with more adblock users.

Is there any hard, reliable data on how much money is "lost" by users with ad blockers? Some of the measures Google has taken with regards to ad blockers seem wholly disproportionate to my own impression of how common they really are.

Well, if the recent drop in views was due to adblockers, we now have some data about what percent of viewers block ads. There would have to be an effort to collect this data, and the view discrepncy is probably going to differ by genre of video (eg, tech youtubers probably experienced a greater dip), but this should roughly tell us how much is lost to adblockers.

Creators have stated that while their viewcount is down their ad revenue is not - but a lower viewcount still presumably hurts youtubers for in video sponsorships, and if some genres of video have a higher portion of users with blockers, that probably hurts that entire genre in the algorithm. It sounds like viewcounts are returning back to normal though.

> but this should roughly tell us how much is lost to adblockers.

not really, because watching videos without ad blockers would be quite painful

Well, I meant how much is lost financially. Ah, unless you mean that people would watch less videos if they were subjected to ads, which is a great point I didn't consider. You're right, you can't just linearly extrapolate as I suggested due to that.

I have no actual hard stats to back this up sadly, but from what I've read ad rates are the same, but the views are down. Presumably because everyone who is using an AdBlock isn't counted as a view, and they obviously don't watch ads so the rates are the same.

If this is what they're doing, then it would seem to be negligible. The channels I've heard talking about this don't seem to be taking home any less money despite tanking viewcounts. Earnings are constant, but the numbers supporting those earnings have shuffled around unpredictably. When it's your income, you really don't like things to be shuffling around without warning.

I think you're not understanding. The claim is that view counts are down but revenue is not because people using ad-block previously did not contribute to revenue but did contribute to view count, and now they are not counted as either. So view counts are down and creators are getting the same ad money because they already earned no money from the adblocking people.

When channels are claiming their view count is dropping 30% but still earning the same amount of money, that would indicate that they are losing out on 30% of their potential revenue because of ad blockers.

The views didn't count in the first place, that's why the money stayed the same.

Creators can now though, knowing how much they make per view on avg, and slot in the avg number of view that were missing, work out how much they are missing out on due to ad-blocking.

For large creators, it's likely in the tens of thousands of dollars per video assuming most are seeing the same ~20-25% drop.

Eventually the "morally pure" internet will need to reconcile it's habit of not compensating creators.

Nobody wants to watch ads to generate $4/hr (a good chunk of which Google keeps). The Ad-driven internet needs to understand that my time is worth more than that.

If you don't like random/inexplicable changes in your income, you probably shouldn't have youtube involved.

YouTube's where the money is. There are very few other places where you can make money like YouTube. Yes, that also means having to deal with their many, many issues, many of which directly threaten that money, but the solution is to work to solve those problems and highlight new ones. YouTube's too big to ignore, and too big to die no matter how many paper cuts and gaping wounds it gives itself.

I wonder if they want to occasionally agitate against ad blocking just to keep the pressure on.

If I were Google I wouldn’t be that worried about, like, Firefox users with ad blocking addons, or pihole users. But I’d be a bit worried that Apple might take a harder stance against ads, in their browser.

If Apple were to include an ad blocker by default in Safari it would be the greatest thing they've done for users in the past 5 years. Their privacy/anti-tracking stuff is good but it's largely invisible to the end user. People would never want to go back to the raw internet once they experience it without ads.

Yeah. And, “privacy” is part of their pitch (it’s just a sales pitch, not a moral philosophy, and I’m aware that they don’t always live up to it). Including a default-on ad blocker would be an extremely user-visible way of emphasizing that pitch.

It will be a low percentage, but a low percentage at youtube's scale is still a vast amount of money and worth going after.

I use Newpipe on my mobile, and Adnauseum + Firefox on my laptop to escape from Youtube Ad's.

I wonder if YouTube/creators can tell at what point viewers abandon the video - and I wonder if they can tell how many times I’ve opened a video, been greeted with another grating Liberty Mutual ad, and immediately closed the tab.

I have been contacted more than once by close family members because of ads that look like system prompts inside Youtube feeds asking to delete photos, free up space, clear phone from viruses, and this is not even including AI slop and porn stuff.

Blocking ads is the way to go, and I am sure creators will survive this.

Am I the only person who is confused by the anger from people who use a free service (like YouTube) or participate in a gig service (like Uber), and get upset when it doesn't go their way? Meaning, they get upset when they cannot make money off services provided by a company. Seems like entitlement to me.

Disagree - the services make money _from_ the users. It's a symbiotic relationship, and I totally understand the frustration. Especially when decisions are opaque and you're left guessing about what 'the platform' is doing.

Without creators, what videos would youtube be featuring?

Lol honestly, not sure how they can be compared. Uber is a shitty proposition in any way and is mostly a way for us to get easy access to cheap labor. Nobody ever got rich driving for Uber.

There's no way you can say the same about YouTube, the value proposition is quite good and it leveled the field in a way traditional media would never do, just think for a moment what's the chance of seeing someone like MrBeast surging as a TV personality.

Yes. People feel entitled to free shit and refuse to pay even with their attention.

WAN Show is going to be wild this week

YouTube's messaging is the more frustrating part about all this. Panic might drive more creators toward direct monetization, that might just be the better net outcome.

Pretty sure it's caused by the algorithm not serving the user anymore... Unless I block a channel forever I only get served the same channels over and over or it's an endless reel of ai slop with that dead crappy voice on all kinds of variations...

Yeah, these companies are pushing AI so hard they don't see it's destroying the value they had. I don't want to watch an AI reading Wikipedia, showing stock photography, and I doubt anybody else does, either.

And lately they're starting to get more malicious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaHW24jOYVw

I too have noticed a lot more slop in my feed the last several months, and generally have to explicitly check my subscriptions to be sure I don't miss videos.

And I'm quite deliberate with avoiding ragebait and slop, and I remove stuff from my watch history if I get duped etc.

That said, I have noticed a trend amongst the creators I've subscribed to that the average video length has gone up. This has been a longer term trend, but many who used to do 30-40 min videos now often to 1-1.5 hr videos.

I've heard YouTube punishes people quitting a video midway, so perhaps there's something going on there too. At least for myself I often have to watch these videos over multiple sessions, and chances are there that I just forget and move on.

So perhaps some compounding factors making things worse.

I don't think it's a counting issue but that the various experiments that YouTube did recently to block adblockers are causing people with adblockers to leave the page early before the video starts playing, because they are greated with infinite loading spinners, incomplete page loads or in the best case 10 second delays until the video starts.

I happily watch the embedded ad-segments of YouTubers, but not the aggressive scam/slop-ads that YouTube puts before the actual videos thank-you-very-much.

Kinda ironic — the tools meant to block ads end up hurting creators by messing with view counts.

"Because you're using adblockers, we're going to punish them."

Sounds about right for Google.

The difference where they see dramatic PC views dropping and phone and tablets remaining steady and the quote do seem to hint at ad blockers being the cause.

But it's not at all clear to me 100% if this really is an ad blocker problem / there's not any real proof.

Meanwhile I'm getting another add for "stuck poop" and scam health products ...

Dear Youtube. Please, just give us an API to get the video data for the _premium_ subscribers.

I can use my own viewer then, instead of relying on your ever-worsening website.

It's win-win. I keep paying you, you get accurate view counts.

Ah yes because they can’t measure streams with blocked ads.

And what’s up with that “subscribing”, never saw the use for it, yet many (respectful, great) creators beg for it. I almost feel bad for not using the feature. I mean, I’m watching the content, that must count for something?

Could we test this theory with an unlisted video?

YouTube finally was able to block me from using ublock (and all the workarounds) a couple of weeks ago. This has finally prompted me to shift from Chrome to Firefox.

Its frustrating to see how HN commenters just jumped onto conclusions without even doing any bit of critical thinking.

The top comment on HN says

> So Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?

When even a cursory look would show that if you block stats-aggregation endpoint .. stats go down. Sometimes it is occam's razor.

It's a 20 year streaming service, and it's Google. There's a certain expectation I have from that. The fact that it's just an endpoint being hit by the client is...baffling. I don't think it's in the realm of expected possibilities for most of us, being the most naive, and fragile, implementation possible.

The fact that ad revenue didn't change means they do have robust ad tracking, but the view numbers are +/- some unexpected level of fiction.

> The fact that ad revenue didn't change means they do have robust ad tracking

Ad tracking is usually done client-side too, so ad revenue being stable just means that the missing view counts are probably limited to the users who already weren't viewing ads.

The question becomes ... why are they relying on client side counting of views? They know how much of a video they've distributed to a given client on the backend after all (YouTube does buffer, but not the whole video).

Not necessarily. Youtube makes extensive use of third-party CDNs. A lot of the videos aren't coming from their servers at all. I believe that's also why it's so hard for them to embed the ad directly in the video. They instead having to rely on splicing the ads client-side, which makes it possible to block.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not at Youtube and have no idea how things work really. This is just based on some info I read online.

Yeah they give caching boxes to ISPs as far as I can tell, and videos are served from there if they exist in that cache. About 8-10 years ago, they had an issue with that and they'd serve you the wrong video because your neighbor had watched something and it was in the cache. Literally title of the video wouldn't match what is playing.

And these caching boxes can't talk back to Google?

YouTube has a crazy CDN. They very well might not be able easily attribute exactly what the client requests to specific accounts.

The other commenters point out more prosaic problems with CDN architecture, but a more product-focused answer for this is "because users execute Javascript but bots don't". Using client side counting is an easy way to filter out simple automated traffic.

Also, with segmented MP4 streams, the files on the backend won't necessarily be easy to match up 1:1 with videos. How do you count the views if someone watches a video, and then skips back to watch the middle section a few times, and then doesn't finish it? Because that would show up as (1, 1, 4, 3, 0) in your database for the different files involved. Now imagine doing that for ~500 people on a shared IP address for their high school. And now your minimum threshold for view counting is tied to the size of your MP4 chunks, or range requests. And now you've put this view counting logic into the hot path of serving terabytes of data.

From a product perspective, you can see why "A video view is counted the first time the user presses the play button and watches for at least 30 seconds" is a much more desirable definition, both technically and for stakeholders (video creators, advertisers, etc) to understand.

The computers serving advertisements should also know how much data has been delivered. Alphabet should be able to expect more from a CDN they have a business relationship with, than the people watching YouTube.

because distributed CDN means it doesn't necessarily hit a backend?

It seems politically inconceivable to discuss advertisement network security, ethics, consolidation, negligence, etc etc. I cannot more strongly recommend running an ad blocker.

Putting my tinfoil hat on, maybe they knew ad blockers would mess with their new implementation and expected the freak out to mount "creators" against ad blockers?

The advertisement industry is one of the worst plagues of current human civilization.

Just imagine an individual person doing the things that advertisers do: Constantly follow you around, demand your attention, gaslight you, pester you to give him/her your money, and snoop through your private life so he/she can do those things even more.

Ads condition us to normalize the worst attributes that nobody tolerates on a personal scale.

A constant mental barrage, waste of time, defacement of public space, and often thinly veiling misinformation...

And worst of all, it's an Emperor with no Clothes: Almost nobody goes out to buy a product because of an ad.

In fact, the more frequently someone sees ads for something that they don't already buy on their own anyway, it's more likely to permanently turn them OFF from the product! (Fuck you Grammarly!)

If I don't buy your shit after the first 3-5 times I skipped your shitty ad, I'm not going to buy it. In fact, shoving your ad in my face even more just makes certain that I NEVER buy it.

…

Ads ARE the problem: Everything else is a symptom. Society needs to figure out a better mechanism of promoting products: Empower search systems and stop gimping filters, to let people find exactly what they want. Let people TELL companies what they like instead of spying on people to figure what they want: You can't ever get it right anyway!

YouTube has ads?

Could it be the recommendation algorithm is so terrible that people can't even?

Mine is just a sewage firehose so yes, I watch less now, and I use NewPipe on mobile to have a chance to see my subscriptions.

It's based on what you watch.

My recommendations are entirely in line with what I watch. I never need to check channels i like for a new video because they automatically get recommended.

If yours is a sewage firehouse, are you logged in? Or are you sharing your account with family members who watch what you consider "sewage"?

Mine's still stuck on recommending me culvert uncloging videos after I watched one way back. I switched to Freetube and imported my subscriptions, and that made things much better, since now I can't even accidentally see what my recommended videos would be.

I couldn't stand the shorts nonsense. I don't want to consume this kind of media, why force it down my throat.