YouTube first spoke about pause ads last year when it started trialing them in select regions. At the time, the company said that when you pause a video, it will shrink, and an ad will appear next to it.
“In Q1, we saw strong traction from the introduction of a pause ads pilot on connected TVs, a new non-interruptive ad format that appears when users pause their organic content,” Schindler noted. He went on to share that YouTube’s pause ads are “driving strong brand lift results” and “are commanding premium pricing from advertisers.”
Schindler didn’t share any timelines for when pause ads will start appearing on YouTube, but we know they’ll first roll out on smart TVs. The nature of these ads, including their duration, skippability, and more is still unclear. We also don’t know if Google plans to introduce these ads on YouTube’s mobile apps.
But usually I’m pausing a video to try to read text that appeared too briefly in the video!
Not anymore, you don’t!
Wait you watch the video? I thought everyone just went there for the ads and emailed YouTube executives to please keep adding more
A fellow Marlboro Coors Lite Ford Chevy SUV pickup banking insurance sportsball enthusiast, I see
Same, I had to ad-block some custom elements on YouTube ages ago because they kept covering the screen with “related videos” whenever I paused to read something.
DF youtube addon is great for that and similar annoyances.
‘Drink verification can peasant’
Google
Wait y’all still see ads on YouTube?
If I can’t block ads on a device, I’m not using YouTube on that particular device.
A major reason we only watch YouTube via a browser on a media center PC.
Normies genuinely turn on their Smart TV, watch start menu ads, open the YouTube app, wait 90 seconds for the shitty cpu to load the web view, scroll through hundreds of Spider-Man Elsa brainwashing videos and thinly disguised ads, open a video, watch 3 minutes of ads, straight into a 3 minute sponsor segment. All before seeing any actual content.
And they see no problem with this at all, the thought that you can make ads go away literally does not even occur to them as a possibility.
Humanity deserves extinction, I’m gonna go release some refrigerant real quick
I know people IRL who get offended whenever I mention that I just block ads. Shit’s insane.
Ikr? I throw some money at creators I care about, but I’m not watching their stupid ads.
Stockholm syndrome is a very scary condition.
God this is so weird. “You have to watch and see ads to support content creators!” The fuck I do.
How are you going to make any money then?
Answer: paywall their fucking site.
I’m paying for Internet access. If they don’t block their site it’s free game.
You can use SmartTube on Android TV, Yattee with this guide on iOS/iPadOS/tvOS or this app on webOS
What is webOS?
OS for LG TVs.
The shambling remnants of Palm, Inc.
The OS that runs on LG TVs
You can block ads on youtube on mobile devices by using firefox in desktop mode with ublock origin.
Fuck youtube. Fuck ads. Fuck useful idiots defending either.
You don’t need to be in desktop mode for ublock origin to work.
Hmm, they may have changed it or I could be misremembering.
Desktop mode also allows you to play a video while your screen is off which is good for listening to music.
Or use revanced or an open source alternative.
Not Firefox on iPhone though
Apple users love having control taken away from them so I never factor them in when giving tech-related advice.
I was always an Android but broke down after the thousandth idiot friend told me I wouldn’t have problems if tried iPhone. Let’s be honest though. Android folks don’t have privacy or are tech savvy either. It’s the ones using graphineOS and the other stripped down android OSs that do
I’m not sure I even own any devices that can’t block YouTube ads. You can do it on anything running android, including Android TV.
If they ever fight this and win, I’ll simply stop using YouTube altogether.
@empireOfLove2 I don’t get it, how can they use the internet without an ad blocker? The first thing that I do is download Firefox + uBlock Origin on any device before of using it.
I honestly don’t know. far too many people are just conditioned or browbeaten into just dealing with the cancer of ads that the modern internet is. feels a lot like it’s a bit of a “frog in boiling water” situation where most people don’t even realize how bad it’s gotten over so many years.
For real, the ads are freaking insane on there nowadays. I couldn’t handle it.
Google says pause ads on YouTube are getting a very positive reaction from advertisers
Bc screw the users and their reactions 😄.
We really need a good YouTube competitor. This is beyond ridiculous at this point.
Also, The new ball-bearing guillotine is getting rave reviews from guillotine operators!
For all you know the victims rate it positively as well but they don’t submit feedback
Bonus clip of Lisa trying to grow a penis.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Google has great customer service, your just not the customer.
I don’t know anything about Odysee, but Rumble is a shithole.
Rumble is a shithole.
Why?
I’ve not really used it except for the SLS because it’s streamed exclusively there. No major issues except one time long videos (sls streams can last 6 hours) would take a lifetime to load.
Both seem/are single point of failure choices. I like a fediverse YouTube alternative.
Good luck getting a lot of people with a absolute shit ton of spare bandwidth and storage space
Peertube is an attempt at solving this.
You make content you’ve watched available to others wanting to watch it.
The basic idea being that everyone provides a similar amount of upstream bandwidth as the amount they consume.
Ofc content creators and some servers will provide a lot more to cover any shortfall.
Two issues:
-
Most people have asymmetric connections, can download faster than upload.
-
It’s cheaper to provide bandwidth to a datacenter connected to the backbone than it is to someone’s house.
Like, from a purely-financial standpoint, if one wants to pay for access with bandwidth and storage, it’d make more sense to have a structure where people somehow contribute to running PeerTube instances in datacenters, as you get more bang for your buck.
It’s been tried, somewhat.
BitTorrent uses tit-for-tat high-priority bandwidth resource provision. Some BitTorrent trackers have (or had; I haven’t looked recently) a longer-lived, albeit crude, credit system for maintaining ratios.
Mojo Nation, which is what Bram Cohen did before BitTorrent, had a longer-lived credit-tracking system.
But the larger problem there is that they were basically exploiting a quirk in ISP billing. ISPs normally have flat-rate billing – you can use as much bandwidth as you want, and only pay a flat rate. ISPs just average out costs across users. Light users subsidize heavier users. But…that creates a misincentive for people to figure out how to monetize, even if it’s very inefficient, their bandwidth, and saturate it constantly, which basically makes light users pay for things above-and-beyond the heavy users’ regular bandwidth. It’s economically inefficient, leans on the fact that the billing system has that subsidy built into it. Like, it’s not the system that you’d want if everyone were doing it, as you’d want to have content in datacenters, one way or another.
I do kind of wonder how practical it would be for it to be the norm for people to have some kind of VPS of their own. That’d let them do some things that aren’t really economical or practical today, and provide some more-privacy-friendly options for one person to provide services (well, privacy-friendly as long as you trust your VPS provider).
-
There are some reasonably priced and free PeerTube servers for hosting content.
Well here we are sharing textual communication on fedi. It’s only a slight stretch. Like maybe I will share space by “liking” a video. Or maybe you have to explicitly click a “serve” or “seed” button. It’s not pie in the sky and it would eliminate all ads and other shit videos…you like a video ? Ok share it or download it if you want.
Well here we are sharing textual communication on fedi.
Text takes less storage space and bandwidth then videos.
Just to add, image hosting for lemmy servers is also an issue already. Afaik they aren’t federated because even the occasional image will significantly increase the amount of storage required on instances.
Okay 👍
I like a fediverse YouTube alternative.
That’s PeerTube. The problem is that hosting video is a lot more expensive than hosting text, so finding the funds to pay for hosting is a lot harder than with Mastodon or the Threadiverse.
Also, some content creators on YouTube are there because they want to be paid by YouTube.
YouTube makes you watch ads as part of the “come up with the funds” solution.
The problem is that hosting video is a lot more expensive than hosting text,
Which is why there aren’t any effective competitors to youtube.
Several have tried to directly compete, and they ran out of money.
In addition to the costs of the infrastructure, there are other issues.
In order to get to the scale where youtube would even care, you would need to have a lot of content that viewers want to watch. And to attract enough good video creators to post exclusively on your platform, you need a way for them to earn some money from their effort.
Yes, Odysee and Vimeo exist, but they’re pretty niche, and each has major limitations.
Odysee has a tiny audience, and they “pay” in their own crypto, which is very hard to convert into actual money that you can buy food with.
And Vimeo has some odd rules about what they want on their site. And creators have to pay to upload at any useful scale. Plus their search and suggestion system is almost useless.
It might be possible to compete in an area where YouTube (presently) has content restrictions. I assume that YouTube doesn’t allow outright porn, and that that’s how PornTube and friends can exist.
Dangerous business to enter, though, because if one day YouTube decides to enter the market (or decides to create a differently-branded service that shares infrastructure) that does do porn, I assume that that’s gonna put those smaller competitors in danger of getting wiped out. An investor in such a venture is at risk of losing their investment then.
Those content restrictions aren’t because youtube itself has any moral objections, it’s a combination of what the law allows (see COPA related fines changing content rules) and what (most) big budget advertisers are willing to appear beside.
The previous "adpocalypse"s have shaped a large portion of youtube’s content policies.
Any other platform hoping to take market share from youtube will have to deal with the same pressures if they expect to pay their bills once the VC money runs out.
That’s PeerTube.
Yup.
Odysee is blockchain-based. So there’s that.
Yes, that’s not the same.
I know.
Meh. Blockchain just has such a stink to it these days.
Odysee uses the LBRY network which is a decentralised content hosting network, which is pretty great really.
LBRY happens to use blockchain tech but lets not talk about that.
Never heard of rumble. Looks interesting
That’s definitely something I want to see when I pause YouTube to take a phone call or whatever.
Shit like this is why they stopped making new Black Mirror episodes
It was supposed to be a warning, not a manual.
I still get chills thinking about that guy who gets blocked from communicating with ANYONE AT ALL EVER! Especially as companies like Reddit go ban-happy on a power trip and Youtube destroys channels with bullshit content strikes.
I can’t wait til YouTube fucks around and finds out.
I got hobbies that are way more fun than ads.
I’m addicted to their shit because it provides a constant stream of dopamine. You fuck that up with ads, I will break the addiction. Seamlessly. It won’t even be difficult to do if going back kicks me in the balls with ads. I’m gone. My guitar is right here. My home server is right here. My GitHub profile could use some TLC. I got a long Todo list.
Do it. Go full enshitification.
I’m actually kind of excited for it.
This was me with Reddit, my worst days were 8 hours a day. Now I spent 30 mins per day at most on Lemmy.
Yeah, my first reaction to seeing the API changes on Reddit was actually more of a glee/relief response than upset/disappointed. It meant that its grip on me was going to be over once those changes went through. I was worried the protests might get them to back down because I hated it there but always knew that the easy dopamine was just an app away.
Now I’m here though. I don’t hate it here, at least not yet, but I haven’t freed up the time like I was hoping to.
While I share your sentiment, they’ve got a backdoor for exactly that scenario: Youtube Premium. We are addicted to the algorithm and a lot of us are willing to pay good money for their stream of dopamine. Of course Google will eventually mess up there too, but it could easily give them another decade of intense money milking.
lol I’m not paying for shit.
Neither do I, but that’s hardly the point. The house of cards you’re describing is reinforced with concrete steel. Unless you’re a creator with a massive audience, Youtube does not need you.
That’s some Yahoo logic. Even giants stumble and fall.
I’d pay for a premium service if it meant that YouTube couldn’t profile me. I don’t really want to pay for it just so that they can reliably link financial data to the profile they build on me.
I pay for the family bundle for YT Music. The ad free YT is just a bonus.
I pay for it. It gets rid of the ads when I need a video of how to do XYZ thing. It lets me watch channels that I care about without interruptions. The main thing for me though is when a friend or family member sends me a YouTube video, I don’t have to watch ads.
It’s weird to me that folks are so hostile towards paying for things they use on the Internet. I mean, I get that venture capital fueled a seemingly endless “free lunch” of new services with small amounts of advertising… but it had to end at some point. It costs a lot of money to run a “YouTube.”
People are hostile towards it because Youtube generates enough revenue as is and becomes greedier by the day. People paying for it on top is only making things progressively worse. Free users will only get more and more ads shoved down their throat while premium users experience more and more price hikes. I‘m gonna keep blocking ads the traditional way for as long as I can because I do not see a fair alternative in the long run.
My comment wasn‘t about defending Youtube or anything. The truth is the service can become much worse and still be more profitable so that’s what Youtube is working towards like every other service. Enshittification is at full swing. Google makes more money while creators continue to lose revenue. Things are becoming worse. Just not exactly the way it was described in the previous comment.
I use it all the time but I definitely don’t use the “algorithm”.
This right here. Cut off the dopamine with overly aggressive ads and I’m out. If they ever get it so ad blockers aren’t effective then hopefully we’ll see it die off.
I’ve had this for about a week or 2. Super annoying because you can’t continue the video by pressing the play/pause button, need to “Ok” the video window. Come on Google, you just bricked a button on your OWN OS. Awful.
What OS are you on?
What Browser are you using?
Are you using any ad blockers?
They’re running Android (Google) TV
No browser, likely app based (hence the TV)
You could theoretically run a PiHole, but I don’t believe that works too well on YouTube anymore. Especially considering the tight integration Google utilizes for their ad services with their non-paid services.
Google TV can run the vastly superior Smarttube app, no ads, double the framerate, much better experience.
I think Google just sent out a memo to all apps pulling the YouTube API to start showing ads or they’d slow their services and potentially stop them.
Damn. YouTube is just SO desperate to squeeze every bit of ad revenue they can, wherever they can.
Laughs in UBlock Origin
Also SmartTube
deleted by creator
Revanced :)
There are ways to completely neutralize ublock power: put ads on the same server, as content + randomise div identificators
UPD: by the downvotes I conclude people think I’m from the advertising industry.
I’m not. I know these methods, because I have been struggling with counteracting such ads.Yeah, they could put the ads in the same stream but it would be too costly or inflexible. Ads have to be targeted to the specific market or even user so that would kill their advantage and turn them into generic TV ads.
If you don’t have to reencode but only concatenate the streams it can be done for your request specifically because it’s not meaningfully more expensive than just serving the content
Yandex did that in their products. It’s doable.
Laughs in… Supporting creators by supporting them in other ways than watching ads on their videos, right? Right???
Lol Google is going to die by their own hands
I don’t think they will because the competition is too incompetent. I give you two examples:
I’m a subscriber of Nebula, a paid streaming service where educational YouTubers get a better cut and users don’t get ads. Those creators almost always fail to promote their Nebula uploads. “Hey guys, new video.” And they link to YouTube only. Also they leave their Patreon shout-outs in which is not what I’m paying money for. YouTube with Sponsor Block just is the better experience at this point and I just keep paying for Nebula because I hope it’ll get better and I like its idea.
Second example: I try to watch live streaming on the websites of the broadcaster or so. And more often than not it’s a shit show: I can’t properly pause the streams because they don’t support time shifting and bitrate adjustments are also not as smooth as YouTube.
It’s 2024 and internet video is over two decades old at this point and yet almost nobody else manages to get their shit together. Companies like Netflix have good tech but their business is completely different, so those compete with YouTube at best tangentially.
Also they leave their Patreon shout-outs in which is not what I’m paying money for
No, but it’s what other people have paid for. Usually at the end of a video past it’s actual content, in what’s considered the “credits”, people who helped pay are tradiditionaly part of that.
If it’s elsewhere in the video that fucks with flow then yeah, that’s bad, but the normal process has been in place for longer than either of us has been alive
No, but it’s what other people have paid for.
Which Sponsor Block skips. My point is that the viewing experience is currently better on YouTube despite the enshittification because the competition is worse. The least would be to support chapter marks but this is one area this specific competitor also lacks and no Sponsor Block alternative for Nebula exists. For much shit on YouTube there are workaround like Sponsor Block. For shit on other platforms these don’t exist.
The only company that can compete with YouTube is pornhub. People have been begging on their hands and knees for them to enter the hard space. It’s fertile territory, with lots of the kinks worked out. I really hope they spank YouTube in the nuts and give it a go.
with lots of the kinks
😏
I see you caught the one sex reference in their comment
I mean, there’s about 3 to 4 depending on your interpretation.
And no, I don’t appreciate the cursed knowledge of sexual puns on my part, but you know, furries, am I right?
I’ll agree that competition is not as robust.
However, it will be interesting to see how many “non-techy” people discover how easy it is to find content for free without ads.
The competition for youtube is peertube, not another centralized platform.
It just needs content.
The competition for youtube is peertube, not another centralized platform.
I gave two examples. I was not making a statement in favor of centralized platforms.
Also PeerTube tech is leagues behind YouTube tech.
It just needs content.
So replace “Nebula” in my first example with “PeerTube”. Works just the same when video creators post to both and just keep promoting the YouTube one.
What? Nebula is a paid streaming service. It’s also centralized. Peertube is free and decentalized.
They are not the same which is why Peertube is a legitimate successor to youtube and nebula is not.
Unfortunately, the free, decentralized nature of PeerTube actually makes it more difficult to be a legitimate YouTube successor. The main reason: monetization. Most of the big creators people watch on YouTube don’t just do their videos as a hobby, it’s a job where they make their living. Some of the biggest will make enough in stream donations or Patron pledges to not have to worry about ads or sponsorships, but there’s a huge “middle class” of content creators, you could call it, who live video ad check to video ad check with Patreon or stream donations being supplemental to the ad revenue. Drop that ad money, and those creators will have to either figure out how to quickly multiply their income from other sources or there would be an extremely sharp drop in both quantity and quality of videos. Expect a ton of much-beloved channels to die in the process. To be any sort of competitor at all while retaining its free, decentralized nature, you would need to have many, many times more instances than exist now, with a large percentage of them run by entities with enough resources to pay for both server costs of hosting and distributing large amounts of content and the cost to pay and support the creators on those instances who previously lived mainly on ad revenue or who want to monetize themselves on the platform. Centralized platforms for video take away many of these issues, or make them a ton easier to handle. They allow for easily setting up a subscription based service such as Nebula that the creators know they will be able to at least count on being steady. It may or may not be a lot, but it’s something guaranteed without the creators themselves also having to worry about paying out in server costs, which is still more in income than PeerTube can offer. What would a creator prefer, some guaranteed income with only their video production costs as overhead, or no guarantee of income while bearing both production and hosting costs?
EDIT: updated “FreeTube” to “PeerTube”. I absolutely recommend FreeTube, great YouTube client. PeerTube has some potential, but it will never properly compete with YouTube for the reasons I list above. In one word, money.
Yeah, thanks for the catch. That is what I mean. FreeTube is great, I use it on my PC.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
YouTube is unwatchable for me with all these ads. Even without ads, content creators mostly all follow the same generic bullshit format.
It used to be a great resource for visual aids and explanations, now it’s filled with money making schemes and scams and every video has 14 minutes of bullshit and 1 minute of content.
I watch a lot of YouTube, but not without udblock and Sponsorblock. It’s just not enjoyable otherwise. Whenever they do something that makes my stuff not work for like 2 days I just watch something on my home server.
15 minutes videos of some over excited guy overlayed on or overlayed by lots of cutesy/flashy/cartoony pics, interspected by irrelevant/low-brow-humour “I’m so cool” video segments, padded with tons of fluffy talk and with every silly post-production effect conceivable, to make a point that could have been made in 2 minutes.
I barelly every watch Youtube nowadays, especially if I’m looking to actually learn something or for the solution for a specific problem.
Yeah all that stuff.
Everyone is a celebrity.
So they’ll stop injecting ads in the middle of videos at the worst possible times right?
…
So they’ll stop injecting ads… Right?
RIGHT ?
DRINK VERIFICATION CAN
Enshitification
If this comes on top of the current ad-load then it is enshitification. If it replaces mid- or pre-roll ads it might make youtube somewhat usable again, even without adblocking.
Tomorrow YouTube is introducing ads when you think about YouTube.
Next week: Youtube has removed all videos. You will now watch ads only. It’s really no different than what you’re doing now.
Will the ads have ads though?
Will the ads have ads though?
Only when you pause the ad.
It’s ads all the way down
ADCEPTION
Recursion!
My Roku is doing this and has been doing this for quite some time.
Of all the ad delivery schemes cooked up over the past ten years, this one is the least offensive to me.
Like I’ll come back from the bathroom or whatever, and all that registers before I hit play is that some random graphic is covering the screen while on pause. I cannot name a single thing that’s been in any of those ads.
In general, I do wonder how effective this constant onslaught of marketing is. At some point there have got to be diminishing returns, right?
We’re in the era of diminishing returns. There’s so little left to squeeze out of the working class that every extra dollar they want costs more than the last one. They’re running out of options on how to convince us to let go of those dollars.
I agree. But at the same time, if I pause something, I want it to pause and I want the noise to stop.
I think these are image based static ads, not video ads
For now
In this comment, old man yells at cloud:
When the phone rings, I need to be able to press one button to pause my video and stop the sound. Not two. I still have to hunt for my phone (assuming they are different devices) and find the right button on that thing, since I now have five different phones in my house and they all accept calls differently (unless I program them, and since they belong to people who aren’t me, I don’t get to). I’m turning into a goddamn luddite and I love technology, I just am running out of attention span.
Roku is a terrible product. It’s cheap, and they have full control over every part of it and aren’t afraid to exploit it to users’ detriment. Like the recent user agreement changes that bricked TVs until you agreed.
And that’s why my tv doesn’t get the wifi password. I have an external Roku and I barely use it. My TV is connected to my PC and that’s why I don’t see ads on Amazon or tubi
Yes, yes. I’m sure I’ve got several things in my home that are terrible. I’ve cut off streaming and Amazon, have never owned a gaming console or gaming PC, quit reddit, quit Facebook, never had Twitter, Instagram, Tok Tok, used wish, etc. I do not use cash transfer apps. Neither my appliances nor my HVAC connect to the Internet.
But I can’t become a complete Luddite overnight. It’s a series of steps. So until this Roku that I bought about six or seven years ago craps the bed, I will continue using it, mostly with antenna broadcast local stations, but also with some of the free streaming sites like Tubi.
If you would like to come audit the entirety of my existence and personally fund immediate replacement of everything I have that is evil or offensive, I invite your benevolence.
Otherwise, let a guy use an illustrative example while engaging in casual Internet conversation in peace.
How dare you be pragmatic! We demand that you bend to our arbitrary standards at once!
If you ever have to switch, I can vouch for Kodi. I’m using it with the plugins for YouTube, national TV, Arte and my own local media storage. The downside is that those plugins aren’t officially supported tho
You could try a shield instead. It doesn’t push ads that way.
In general, I do wonder how effective this constant onslaught of marketing is. At some point there have got to be diminishing returns, right?
This is what I keep saying, and it is a question that bothers me and riles me up far more than it ever should. Like I and all of my friends and family have just learned to auto tune out ads at this point. We are so constantly drowned in ads everyday that now my brain just automatically filters them out as background noise. The few times one does slip through I completely forget about it 10 seconds later as it is lost in the whirlwind of fast paced chaotic life where I can’t even remember if I ate breakfast that morning. Either that or it slips through because it is obnoxiously intrusive, in which case that product and company go on my shit list.
The only time an ad still works on me is if I am specifically looking for a product. In which case I still tune out 90% of targeted ads cause I know most of them are fake scams anyways. The other 10% I check user reviews from actual people to narrow down what I want.
I’m trained to distrust any ads now and even other posts about products online because everything online is either fake or a scam or both. Or the ads are for big brands that I already know exist and I know not to trust they’re ads as well because they are so constantly in my face. Like I really don’t need an ad to remind me that [major corporation brand] still exists, and I sure as shit ain’t gonna have whatever stupid thing they suggest be my first option.
How tf are ads supposed to work when we are so desensitized to them?
