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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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").
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.
> 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”.
> 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 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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'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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How crazy that people would 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 more money luring in people coming for the free videos and then abusing them or convincing a certain number of suckers to pay them in their racket scheme. A racket is exactly what it is too. Never pay someone for protection against the very harms they're causing you. There's nothing to stop them from increasing the demand for protection money whenever they feel like it, which is exactly what youtube has done.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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" ...
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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
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…
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.
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),
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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?
It seems politically inconceivable to discuss advertisement network security, ethics, consolidation, negligence, etc etc. I cannot more strongly recommend running an ad blocker.
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.
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.
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?
>Whatever, there's no problem for user. EP is for user and not for those so called creators or site owners.
It's sad to see how little sympathy there is for people other than oneself and how changes are affecting the larger ecosystem. Especially for a site as critical as YouTube to people's livelihoods.
Though having said that, at the same time I'm not surprised that someone who spends their time modifying sites to remove ads and analytics to make their personal experience better at the expense of everyone else would act this way would have this kind of selfish mindset.
How much do you think advertisers would be willing to pay for ads on the side, relative to what they're currently paying? You can see how people wouldn't be willing to pay the same amount for that, right?
They also do this (or did?). But I guess on mobile this is not working well, because of limited screen estate, and people will obviously not focus much on them.
I'm a heavy AdBlock user, I pay for YT premium, and I paid Nebula for 2 years, also I try to buy some albums on Bandcamp even with YT music subscription. What more they do want?
And I do use referral codes for the content creators I do like. My Amazon referrals do still work.
As a mostly software backend dev I even visualize the JS guy saying "it's solved" when he forgets to tell that the correct choice is to do the counting on the backend, period. Not hacking a crappy JS snippet calling a different host.
I obviously ask for more time to make sure it's reliable.
I literally saw something similar happening around some years ago in a adjacent team I was working.
I want to pay with money, not attention. Both at the same time? Non negotiable.
I don't think they'd be interested in fixing this. I suspect YouTube is trying to create a double bind for users of adblockers by pitting them against creators' incentives. People in the thread were discussing ways of disabling uBO filters to restore view reporting.
The work to do this isn't free. YouTube already has their code working, but they don't expect browsers to be blocking arbitrary requests or injecting their own javascript into the page. These kind of breakage are not free for YouTube to fix and often YouTube is the one taking the reputational hit for their site being broken. It ultimately is antisocial behavior to be breaking other's sites even if technically they can workaround the bugs being added.
Stop what? Showing ads? They have to fund it somehow, there will always be ads. Most users aren't willing to pay for anything on the internet, and unfortunately revenue is required to run anything at scale. You can charge users, show ads, or maybe get funding from Saudis.
So just track you on the back end instead? I don't know what that really changes. If you mean to say just not track you at all and show you untargeted ads, well they are worth less, so they'll have to blast you with more of them.
Why be cryptic and weird when you can just plainly say whatever it is that you actually mean? Communicate clearly, nobody knows what the f you're on about.
Mine is a common opinion within this community. I won't deny that I was short in my replies but it is hard to know what is over-explaining in this context.
Additionally, it seems that "tracking with javascript" is pretty much exactly the topic of these comments so I'm not sure why I should not have assumed that it would be clear what I meant, especially when my first comment was explicitly about YouTube tracking on the back end.
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.
Trending page[0] is gone for non logged-in users as of couple months now. (No idea if it's still up for logged-in users) As a result my YouTube consumption went down (not complaining).
I wonder about this. I'm not discounting your experience, but my YouTube recommendation page is great.
I only see my subscriptions, or things directly related to things I've watched and liked. If I remove a disliked video from my watch history, it "mostly" works to tell YouTube I don't want to see it anymore.
I very seldom see crap I really do not want in my YouTube feed/recommendations. All I see are hobby videos and cartoon clips of things I like.
This is totally unlike Facebook (where random garbage recommendations are the norm) or Reddit (which is hit or miss).
My recommendations are generally aligned with my interests as derived from my view history, likes, and subscriptions. But more and more of it is AI-generated or videos copied from the original creator and reposted by someone else. I try to use "don't show me videos fron this channel" on those but more and more just appears. I think there must be bots creating new channels and copying/generating content faster than I can block them.
And please, let me opt out of Shorts permanently. I keep telling them I don't want shorts but they always come back. I pay for a Premium account, so they should resepect my wishes on this.
Agreed on Shorts. I don't understand why YT is pushing so hard on those, they are never going to be TikTok and I repeatedly signal I don't want to see them.
Same. My recommended feed is relatively ok, but I'm fairly ruthless with the "I don't want this" and "Don't recommend this channel" buttons. Meanwhile I've been off Facebook for years in large part because their feed appeared to be unsalvageable.
On the computer attached to my stereo YouTube shows me almost 100% conservative, boring, safe but good music recommendations -- all things I've liked before, it rarely tries to show me anything new or challenging.
On another browser it shows me mostly videos about stereo equipment.
One yet another it shows me a mix of videos aimed at someone who listens to The Ezra Klein Show. That browser and the previous browser sometimes get a burst of videos about "How Brand X has lost its way" or "Why Y sucks today".
One time on shorts I clicked on a video where an A.I. generated woman transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and then after that it wanted to show me hundreds of A.I. slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into just about anything on the same show with the same music and the same reaction shots.
If you click on a few Wheat Waffles videos you might quickly find your feed is nothing but blackpill incel videos and also videos that apply a blackpill philosophy to life such that not only is dating futile but everything else is futile too.
The conclusion I draw from it is that you can't easily draw conclusions about the experience other people have with recommenders, it's one reason why political ads on social are so problematic, you can tell baldfaced lies to people who are inclined to believe them and skeptical people will never see them and hold anyone to account.
I did an experiment where I really invested in my YouTube suggestions, and you can definitely groom your recommendations, and then they can be pretty good. But then you have an issue where you get into a new hobby or a new interest, and so you watch some videos attributed to that, your recommendations spiral back out of control. So you can do a whole bunch of grooming work, but probably they just go back to being like 80% wrong. I got vaguely interested in the piano, and now 80% of my recommendations are music related, but not actually things I care about, and they've just gone back to being total trash.
My bill for access to phone and internet where all data is celular, runs $3000~6000/yr,and includes a domain and email, I refuse to watch any adds ever or pay for anything else that is not property that can be re sold, rented, insured, transfered, or returned cause it's junk, or I dont like it.
I pay my fucking rent, have payed for a long time, and know that there is another way that everything can be configured that sends the "platforms" packing.
The difference is a world where everyone self manages there affairs, does there best, can work and contribute, while living there best lives, or the nasty shit show we have now with a tiny minority attempting to puppet the whole world and everything in it.
Not OP (and I don't use it for this case), but I suspect that the instructional "how do you do X" videos that supplanted the "look up the blog post" of even longer ago.
"How do you start a react application" and going to https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=How+do+you+star... (incognito or private session suggested to avoid search history getting you react application suggestions for the next several months) and watching those videos.
For many people looking for a guide, they've switched to an LLM which gives them a more tailored experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[delayed]
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.
[delayed]
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.
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).
Number of views and views to likes ratio are both signals of value.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
>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
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.
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").
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.
> 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”.
> 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 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
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.
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
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
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 ?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
nobody's ever accused youtube of being too transparent with creators
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'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
Let me guess they are not blaming the terrible ad experience that cause people to use ad blockers?
Oh how incredibly convenient.
Plus, making ad blocking a channel owner's problem is kind of genius.
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.
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?
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.
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?
People in general have stopped trying to hold people accountable and have just accepted defeat.
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
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.
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.
Is it morally wrong to fast forward ads on your TV or mute the volume?
> 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.
No problem YouTube. I'd rather give my data to the browser extension which brings back dislikes.
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 :)
>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.
> 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"
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Why would they not allow them?
I've got Youtube premium and have never noticed that popping up. Is this platform or browser dependent? Is it only on some videos?
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
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.
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.
Morally indefensible. Adblockers are used as a response to Google externalizing/ignoring the cost of proper ad platform curation.
Sounds fair? Both creators and YouTube have the same goal of having people watch ads (or pay not to).
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!
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.
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.
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
It doesn't really affect YouTube either, it affects creators who rely on view counts to monetize their channels.
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'll use it and I'll not pay.
This actually makes me feel more confident that it's actually blocking tracking and not caving in to vanity needs.
> 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.
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'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.
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?
YouTube and every other site on the internet can trivially block all users with an ad blocker but choose not to. Why is that?
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.
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.
How crazy that people would 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 more money luring in people coming for the free videos and then abusing them or convincing a certain number of suckers to pay them in their racket scheme. A racket is exactly what it is too. Never pay someone for protection against the very harms they're causing you. There's nothing to stop them from increasing the demand for protection money whenever they feel like it, which is exactly what youtube has done.
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 :)
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.
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.
Correct by what metric? Why do I care if I send the message that I'm leeching?
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.
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.
> 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" ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
They live in the pages of an economics textbook, blissfully untethered from reality.
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.
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.
An investment opportunity with guaranteed returns is something I would definitely want if it actually existed.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!
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.
One report (https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/) indicated that more than half of Americans use an ad blocker.
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).
I would suspect it affects specific channels more than others. Obviously smaller tech channels are probably hit the hardest % wise
"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.
Firefox on Android supports uBlock Origin.
The view drop only happened for desktop views.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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…
Source: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/373195597
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.
> 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.
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
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?
Rossman has a separate business to support him.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
TechLinked's take is pretty good (as usual): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ5pATTvc2o
Could we test this theory with an unlisted video?
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.
WAN Show is going to be wild this week
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.
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.
I use Newpipe on my mobile, and Adnauseum + Firefox on my laptop to escape from Youtube Ad's.
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?
View counts are on borrowed time anyway, I’m sure.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
YouTube is history, last time I used it was covid time. Blame AI if you want but time don´t stop for anything. That´s it and that´s all.
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.
"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 ...
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.
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?
It seems politically inconceivable to discuss advertisement network security, ethics, consolidation, negligence, etc etc. I cannot more strongly recommend running an ad blocker.
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?
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?
>Whatever, there's no problem for user. EP is for user and not for those so called creators or site owners.
It's sad to see how little sympathy there is for people other than oneself and how changes are affecting the larger ecosystem. Especially for a site as critical as YouTube to people's livelihoods.
Though having said that, at the same time I'm not surprised that someone who spends their time modifying sites to remove ads and analytics to make their personal experience better at the expense of everyone else would act this way would have this kind of selfish mindset.
If only YouTube made ads run on the side instead of trying to emulate television.
I’m not going to sit through two 15-30 second LOUD ads just to see if a video is actually worth watching.
How much do you think advertisers would be willing to pay for ads on the side, relative to what they're currently paying? You can see how people wouldn't be willing to pay the same amount for that, right?
They also do this (or did?). But I guess on mobile this is not working well, because of limited screen estate, and people will obviously not focus much on them.
I agree that video ad experience on YouTube isn't great, but they do offer a subscription to remove ads at least.
I'm a heavy AdBlock user, I pay for YT premium, and I paid Nebula for 2 years, also I try to buy some albums on Bandcamp even with YT music subscription. What more they do want?
And I do use referral codes for the content creators I do like. My Amazon referrals do still work.
As a mostly software backend dev I even visualize the JS guy saying "it's solved" when he forgets to tell that the correct choice is to do the counting on the backend, period. Not hacking a crappy JS snippet calling a different host.
I obviously ask for more time to make sure it's reliable.
I literally saw something similar happening around some years ago in a adjacent team I was working.
I want to pay with money, not attention. Both at the same time? Non negotiable.
(This was a response to https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375 via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45276614, but we merged that thread into this one)
Youtube could fix it by counting when the video page is loaded from the server.
I don't think they'd be interested in fixing this. I suspect YouTube is trying to create a double bind for users of adblockers by pitting them against creators' incentives. People in the thread were discussing ways of disabling uBO filters to restore view reporting.
The work to do this isn't free. YouTube already has their code working, but they don't expect browsers to be blocking arbitrary requests or injecting their own javascript into the page. These kind of breakage are not free for YouTube to fix and often YouTube is the one taking the reputational hit for their site being broken. It ultimately is antisocial behavior to be breaking other's sites even if technically they can workaround the bugs being added.
> antisocial behavior
This is hard to take seriously in defense of YouTube. I suppose the most respectful answer is that I'll be willing to stop when they do.
Stop what? Showing ads? They have to fund it somehow, there will always be ads. Most users aren't willing to pay for anything on the internet, and unfortunately revenue is required to run anything at scale. You can charge users, show ads, or maybe get funding from Saudis.
> Stop what? Showing ads?
Using abusive advertising practices and being reasonable about the number of ads shown.
> Stop what?
Tracking with javascript.
So just track you on the back end instead? I don't know what that really changes. If you mean to say just not track you at all and show you untargeted ads, well they are worth less, so they'll have to blast you with more of them.
> I don't know what that really changes.
It changes what they assume to do with my hardware and user agent.
Why be cryptic and weird when you can just plainly say whatever it is that you actually mean? Communicate clearly, nobody knows what the f you're on about.
> cryptic and weird
Mine is a common opinion within this community. I won't deny that I was short in my replies but it is hard to know what is over-explaining in this context.
Additionally, it seems that "tracking with javascript" is pretty much exactly the topic of these comments so I'm not sure why I should not have assumed that it would be clear what I meant, especially when my first comment was explicitly about YouTube tracking on the back end.
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.
The trending page is usually so decadent and tasteless that I'm ashamed.
Log out and you’ll be even more ashamed.
Turn off Watch History and enjoy bliss.
Yep! I actually mentioned this as well. I did it recently and though I miss some of the recommendations, I can't say I miss them that much.
Trending page[0] is gone for non logged-in users as of couple months now. (No idea if it's still up for logged-in users) As a result my YouTube consumption went down (not complaining).
https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending
I wonder about this. I'm not discounting your experience, but my YouTube recommendation page is great.
I only see my subscriptions, or things directly related to things I've watched and liked. If I remove a disliked video from my watch history, it "mostly" works to tell YouTube I don't want to see it anymore.
I very seldom see crap I really do not want in my YouTube feed/recommendations. All I see are hobby videos and cartoon clips of things I like.
This is totally unlike Facebook (where random garbage recommendations are the norm) or Reddit (which is hit or miss).
My recommendations are generally aligned with my interests as derived from my view history, likes, and subscriptions. But more and more of it is AI-generated or videos copied from the original creator and reposted by someone else. I try to use "don't show me videos fron this channel" on those but more and more just appears. I think there must be bots creating new channels and copying/generating content faster than I can block them.
And please, let me opt out of Shorts permanently. I keep telling them I don't want shorts but they always come back. I pay for a Premium account, so they should resepect my wishes on this.
Agreed on Shorts. I don't understand why YT is pushing so hard on those, they are never going to be TikTok and I repeatedly signal I don't want to see them.
Same. My recommended feed is relatively ok, but I'm fairly ruthless with the "I don't want this" and "Don't recommend this channel" buttons. Meanwhile I've been off Facebook for years in large part because their feed appeared to be unsalvageable.
On the computer attached to my stereo YouTube shows me almost 100% conservative, boring, safe but good music recommendations -- all things I've liked before, it rarely tries to show me anything new or challenging.
On another browser it shows me mostly videos about stereo equipment.
One yet another it shows me a mix of videos aimed at someone who listens to The Ezra Klein Show. That browser and the previous browser sometimes get a burst of videos about "How Brand X has lost its way" or "Why Y sucks today".
One time on shorts I clicked on a video where an A.I. generated woman transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and then after that it wanted to show me hundreds of A.I. slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into just about anything on the same show with the same music and the same reaction shots.
If you click on a few Wheat Waffles videos you might quickly find your feed is nothing but blackpill incel videos and also videos that apply a blackpill philosophy to life such that not only is dating futile but everything else is futile too.
The conclusion I draw from it is that you can't easily draw conclusions about the experience other people have with recommenders, it's one reason why political ads on social are so problematic, you can tell baldfaced lies to people who are inclined to believe them and skeptical people will never see them and hold anyone to account.
I did an experiment where I really invested in my YouTube suggestions, and you can definitely groom your recommendations, and then they can be pretty good. But then you have an issue where you get into a new hobby or a new interest, and so you watch some videos attributed to that, your recommendations spiral back out of control. So you can do a whole bunch of grooming work, but probably they just go back to being like 80% wrong. I got vaguely interested in the piano, and now 80% of my recommendations are music related, but not actually things I care about, and they've just gone back to being total trash.
As noted above my recommendations are excellent and a source of great joy. I don’t get how other people have such an inverse experience
Here's my experience of recommendations right now: videos I've already seen, videos on topics I have no interest in, or a completely empty page.
I'm so sick of tech companies choosing to build something a certain weird way and then in the media blaming something else.
My bill for access to phone and internet where all data is celular, runs $3000~6000/yr,and includes a domain and email, I refuse to watch any adds ever or pay for anything else that is not property that can be re sold, rented, insured, transfered, or returned cause it's junk, or I dont like it. I pay my fucking rent, have payed for a long time, and know that there is another way that everything can be configured that sends the "platforms" packing. The difference is a world where everyone self manages there affairs, does there best, can work and contribute, while living there best lives, or the nasty shit show we have now with a tiny minority attempting to puppet the whole world and everything in it.
YouTube has ads?
i used to watch lots of videos, but since LLM came into being i find them much faster than watching videos.
Infact, i used to watch videos because they used to be more "targeted" at problem solving when i ran into any issues.
but these days LLM ftw.
How are LLMs an alternative to videos? They are different mediums.
What's your use case?
Not OP (and I don't use it for this case), but I suspect that the instructional "how do you do X" videos that supplanted the "look up the blog post" of even longer ago.
"How do you start a react application" and going to https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=How+do+you+star... (incognito or private session suggested to avoid search history getting you react application suggestions for the next several months) and watching those videos.
For many people looking for a guide, they've switched to an LLM which gives them a more tailored experience.