Instead of blocking them, this extension speeds them up to x16 and also mutes the ad. Experiencing a 30 second ad in 2 seconds is pretty funny. And it works on Edge and Chrome.
Instead of blocking them, this extension speeds them up to x16 and also mutes the ad. Experiencing a 30 second ad in 2 seconds is pretty funny. And it works on Edge and Chrome.
Everyone’s hating on this approach but I think it’s nice that we have other options. I’m sure Ublock is going to come out on top of this cat and mouse game YouTube is playing with them, but if YouTube manages to temporarily disable Ublock I’ll look into this solution. Thanks!
Google will give up eventually. They’re definitely burning more money than they would gain from winning the battle
They give up on everything else all the time. I wonder if expanding their ad business is the one exception though. They ran out of new users and already pack videos full of ads. Forcing them on people who block them is the only thing left for them to attempt as they seek to continue perpetual growth.
Ads are the very core of Google at this point. They are more likely to give up their search engine and the name Google before they give up their ad business.
Maybe at the moment, but I suspect part of the motivation for this is that they are trying to prevent another “adpocalypse” type boycott from their advertisers.
I do not believe that is the case. Youtube ads are an insanely profitable business. I suspect throwing a couple dozen of FTEs on blocking ad blockers would be <1% of current revenue.
I don’t doubt they make tonnes of revenue from ads however you have to remember how small the share of adblocker users are. So the extra money from fighting the adblock user base is a clear gamble. Especially as those types of users are the ones who are more likely to avoid YouTube completely if they can’t bypass ads.
Someone in Google would have done the research because it’s not a simple case of
war profit = adblockusers * ad revenue per userI strongly believe they’ll stop once they hit a certain threshold/target of “reduction of adblock users”. They won’t go on like this forever.
To be fair, at the current monopolistic state of YouTube, how many people are actually likely to avoid YouTube completely?
If YouTube truly succeeded in forcing 90 seconds of unavoidable ads with no exceptions without paying $20/month then I genuinely think YouTube won’t be a monopoly for very long.
How can a new competitor acquire content creators to actually threaten the monopoly? Genuine question.
They can’t. Unless YouTube fucks up big time, nothing will touch it, especially since they are the most “generous” with their payouts to creators. Only if someone steps up with a platform just as good as YouTube (UI, infrastructure) AND pays a bigger share, maybe it will happen. But video streaming is a thankless business so I personally doubt it will happen anytime soon.