> Also we might try to promote different tiers of Disney+ itself within the app so to the extent you see that as an ad, that’s an exception to ‘ad-free’”
Yes I see that as an ad. Do you not? Does anyone not? And if I'm on the highest paying ad free plan, what are they promoting to me?
I strongly agree, and it frustrates me when people and companies claim that advertising their own products "doesn't count." I cancelled my YouTube Premium plan because of ads. These are all the ads they permit on Premium, despite advertising everywhere that Premium removes all ads:
* Ads in YouTube feeds for other google products and services.
* Ads underneath videos for products from the channel owner.
* Sponsorships within videos from the channel owner.
* Advertising overlays (supported IN THE APP BY GOOGLE) for products and services from the channel owner.
* Email advertisements for Google products and services.
* Community post advertisements from channel owners which show up in the YouTube feed.
I contacted support to enquire and they state these are not considered advertising.
I don’t mind the in video sponsors. Some are good (ok map men ones are good), but crucially it’s not really something YouTube could directly block. They could put terms and conditions in place, but you’re driving product placement and it becomes a slippery slope.
Howver recently I’ve noticed adverts for “membership” for channels, and that is getting me close to picking my youtube habit.
Same with Spotify and advertising concerts, but that seems to have gone away for me after I complained.
Sadly even the bbc does adverts on iPlayer. You used to be able to instantly skip them, but then in a big (internal) fanfare some idiot decided they could make them not skippable and increase some metrics and then get a promotion.
YouTube actually does block sponsor spots in videos if you have Premium. They call it "Skip Ahead" and don't really talk about sponsor spots, but practically speaking it's 9/10 just the "skip sponsor segment" button.
I remember about 10-15 years ago YouTube actually did try to ban sponsor spots in videos, but the backlash from creators was strong enough that they walked that back to "ok well we'll allow sponsor spots but you can't just insert the sponsor's own ad, it's gotta be your ad read and B-roll".
Most of the UI features that YT added over the last few years can be thought of as a way to skip sponsor ads. e.g., thumbnail previews on the seek bar, the little histogram on the seek bar, auto-chapter detection, and playing at 2x when you click and hold on the video.
They make it slightly easier to find the end of a sponsor segment, while still requiring me to manually interact with the video. As an ad blocker I score that either F+ or D-.
that's not blocking though. It's allowing you to skip over the areas people commonly skip in videos where they take the data from everyone. I get them at sponsor slots of course, but also intros often. Because it's not removing it entirely, I would not consider that blocking.
The parent’s characterization is fine. 9/10 times (more in my own experience) it is the functional equivalent of a sponsor blocker. That it technically isn’t that specifically is immaterial, because if it works, that’s because people are skipping the sponsor segments in large enough quantities for it to easily become that.
That said, I don’t think YouTube owes it to Premium subscribers to add a sponsor block. That’s part of the video’s content as it was provided to YouTube, and YouTube never advertised YouTube Premium as something which will block in-video sponsor reads. This is part of how YouTubers make a living & a Premium sub doesn’t replace the money they receive for those the way it does for YouTube’s own ads.
Yes it tends to work one at a time, but some videos have two sponsor segments and it doesn’t work the second time. I assumed it skipped to where people often skip to.
I'm pretty sure that skip ahead is deliberately broken to satisfy advertisers.
Sponsorblock has zero issue jumping to the precise moment after the sponsor vs jump ahead always leaves just enough time to still hear the name of the sponsor.
100%. YouTube makes the skip button appear a few seconds after the start of the sponsored segment, and ends the skip a few seconds before the end of the sponsored segment.
That's their choice, and it's deliberate – it gives enough of a window for advertisers to get their message across, while still selling Premium users the notion that they've 'avoided' the ad.
It’s such a great feature, and I see why YouTube gates it to Premium.
Once you’ve transitioned from an ad-watching customer to a paid one, YouTube actually turns into something that treats your product experience and satisfaction as important.
It’s fascinating how it switches that off for non-paying users. Not a lot of companies’ services do that so obviously and blatantly.
In other words, when YouTube is being watched for free, they have that typical engagement incentive: keep you watching as long as possible, watch as many ads as possible, etc.
When you’re paying? Who cares, skip the content if you want. Use Gemini to summarize it, we don’t care if you watch the video.
That is quite deliberately YouTube’s fault. It only occurs with an ad blocker (VPN is irrelevant here, though it might be rolled out only in some countries), and the “experiencing interruptions?” thingy links to an article basically telling you to disable your ad blocker.
What ads do you see for channel membership? I run a channel and put some of my videos behind a membership gate. I mention the premium videos in some of my free videos but otherwise don't see options in the YouTube UI to actively promote my membership in any other way. Is it putting graphics or something inside the video to tell you to click the membership button?
>* Ads underneath videos for products from the channel owner.
>
>* Sponsorships within videos from the channel owner.
I actually agree this is a bit annoying, but also the alternative is Google banning Youtubers from finding their own advertising partners, which I'm sure people would hate.
I'm sure content creators would hate it because they would make less money. Billions of YouTube users around the world would be very happy.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to the practise, as long as that's clear up front. YouTube advertises Premium as an ad free experience, and in reality it's full of ads.
Do they not have a little sponsor skip thing? Where like if many people skip a segment, itll pop up like hey, wanna skip? I mean, thats about all they can do besides forcing youtubers to disclose exact segment lengths which would concretely hurt them whereas this provides a little sort of breathing room, or just straight up ban them, both of which would dramatically hurt the platform.
I understand they have an opt-out feature now. With positive interaction one can skip one sponsored segment (which works most of the time). The problem is that it's not automated. It required digging one's phone out of their pocket, or reaching for the remote. That's still really annoying. To point: it's still full of ads, even if they have the skip button now.
YouTube could tell content creators not to include sponsorships. The terms are long and onerous. Of course content creators would be upset and they would make less money. Ultimately my issue is that YouTube advertises an ad free experience with Premium and it still has a LOT of ads.
I'm in favour of people making money from their work. Maybe I'm old fashioned that way. IMDB, Duolingo and Wikipedia have encouraged the model of using unpaid labour.
YouTube isn't paying people properly, despite its vast revenues. At least with sponsorship the people themselves make some money.
I'm not saying this is the way to go, but damn do I miss the old internet where passionate people presented information for free, at worst showing an affiliate link for an information-related book.
People need to be able to make a living and when this is taken away, the living expenses don't disappear. Most people can't pay for their electricity or food with voluntary work.
The people who were doing this on the early internet were not trying to make a living off of it, they were just doing it because they enjoyed it and wanted to share what they built with the world. If you could cover your server costs then that was considered a win.
There are plenty of people giving away their labour for free, which makes it harder for people who need to be able to make some money in order to support themselves.
They aren't always making passion projects. They're told unpaid labour is good for their CV/resumé, or that they're helping society (sometimes the case, but sometimes not).
Massive corporations such as Alphabet do have the resources to pay YouTubers, especially given how much tax they avoid in most countries.
YouTube is part of Alphabet, one of the biggest corporations in the world. It can easily afford to pay people. It isn't co-operation, it's a corporation which takes the work of other people and makes lots of money off them, without paying them properly (or at all in many cases). Wikipedia's content is used by LLMs and other such outlets who also profit off unpaid labour.
It is a basic right of people to be able to afford to live. It's easy to work for free when you have family money but you cannot support yourself when you don't.
> I'm in favour of people making money from their work.
That's completely fair. YouTube offers content creators many ways to do this. For example, they can put content behind a paywall. They can ask for donations. They can ask for memberships. Members get all kinds of fun perks. The part I have an issue with is YouTube advertising an ad free experience with Premium and then allowing content creators to fill their videos with ads.
> YouTube isn't paying people properly
I hope we can both agree that the solution to this is YouTube paying people properly, and not allowing content creators to shit all over viewers. That's pitting the little guys against each other while Google laughs all the way to the bank.
>I hope we can both agree that the solution to this is YouTube paying people properly
The solution is proper competition to google. Because Youtube is pretty much the one true monopoly out there. But as we all know, video hosting alone is very,very, very expensive. It really is something you need to be a billion dollar company to do, and Youtube wasn't profitable until like... 2 years ago?
So I tolerate the user ad reads as the best compromise because nothing else would work. I don't think Youtube is a model where Google is being greedy so much as practical. At least not in how it monetizes creators (there's plenty of hostile means they do to creators as is, but the monetary structure seems fine).
There are alternative streaming platforms, but many of them have become associated with certain political viewpoints.
There is also a very limited range of content on Odyssee, Bitchute and all the rest. If you want to find music tutorials for example, you're unlikely to.
You have to put in a disproportionate amount of work to get anything back. Almost no one makes money off a single video, but instead you make a string of videos and get a following. (The cases of a single video making money are few and far between.)
You don't get hourly pay for it, it's vaguely commission based and you do all your own promotion. They can demonetise you at a whim and refuse to pay you (I've seen this happen to craft channels and other content that wasn't remotely controversial.)
> To be clear, I'm not opposed to the practise, as long as that's clear up front. YouTube advertises Premium as an ad free experience, and in reality it's full of ads.
I think it's clear. I don't want YouTube going in and editing movies and creator videos removing any form of advertising. Maybe you want them deleting that content. But the average person realizes what Premium means by no ads. Being obtuse or willfully ignorant isn't reasonable.
no it wouldn't, such things are straight up illegal in most places? You have to clearly disclose ads + have clear distinction between ad content and rest of content. A bunch of youtubers have gotten in trouble for this?
I worked on Prime during the rollout of Prime Video and shortly after (maybe a year or so) pre-roll for other Prime Video content was inserted. I brought it up in a meeting with our org (but the Amazon Video team wasn’t present) and one of our business guys shrugged it off as not interrupting content, blah, blah, blah. I said the agreement was ad-free content, not uninterrupted content. The conversation stopped and nothing was done.
I worked on backend subscription management and the implementation of benefits. The team that business guy worked on was the group eventually at the center of the predatory subscription issue (I can’t say whether they were still around when that happened or not).
Pro tip. Ublock origin gets you that mostly ad-free experience you were hoping for. Donate the money you save from the YouTube premium sub to ublock origin instead.
uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock is the only way YouTube is even remotely watchable these days. Even still, it's not really worth it. I frequently find it better to spend my time doing anything else.
Oh absolutely - we banned “casual” YouTube use at home 5 years ago and we don’t regret it one bit. Still use it when looking up a concrete video on a specific topic or when a web page directs me to a tutorial or something there, but don’t use it for regular “entertainment” (I’m bored, let’s hit YouTube).
Some people can’t seem to live without YouTube though.
Sure! On Android TV, SmartTubeNext is fantastic. Installation instructions are in the GitHub repo. For Apple TV the best option I have found is MuTube. It's basically a YouTube repack without ads and with SponsorBlock. The catch is that it requires sideloading or an Apple developer account. Sideloadly etc can automatically refresh certificates while on wifi, but I ended up purchasing a dev account because it works for all the Apple devices in my home. Which leads me to the iPhone. There are many YouTube sideloads. I use uYouEnhanced. As above, you can use Sideloadly or sign the app yourself. An LLM or coding harness can walk you through the process (or do it for you). With an Apple dev account, signed apps last for a year, so I don't need to worry about refreshing the certs.
SmartTubeNext automatically updates itself, but the Apple TV and iPhone apps don't. Surprisingly, it has not been an issue. They keep working fine without updates for the year. I just update once a year when I refresh the certs.
"Ad free" meaning we do not insert ads seems like a reasonable standard to me. The alternative of policing creator content is kind of untenable since it destroys the economics for the creators and there's so much grey area.
It helps but I understand that it's not automatic. Is that correct? If so it significantly undermines the functionality. SponesorBlock automatically removes ads. Meaning I don't have to scramble to open my phone or find the remote every time I don't want to hear/see an ad. That opt-out UX likely means most people ultimately watch the sponsored content.
It could be that this is a phased approach so as not to anger their creators too much.
For me personally it is as easy as pressing one button on the remote. But I don't put on videos in the background very often.
Worth noting is that there are thousands of high quality YouTube channels without any sponsored content. So those are effectively completely ad free with Premium.
I mean, the stuff that's in the video is not really under Google's control.
Are you suggesting that the burden should be on channel owners to upload variations of their videos that don't include sponsor blocks? That's a bit onerous. My commercial agreement is with YouTube, not with the video creator.
If you don't like ads from creators, don't watch those channels?
YT Premium does provide the "skip ahead" functionality that almost always jumps over sponsor blocks.
I will say I've been a YT Premium subscriber for years and I've never seen any ads for other Google services in my feed, and I don't get advert emails either.
> I mean, the stuff that's in the video is not really under Google's control.
It is completely within Google's control. They have a hundred pages of terms of services, dictating everything the content creators may and may not do and say, down to individual words, symbols, and opinions. If Google wanted to, they could tell content creators to stop adding sponsorships. I understand you'd make less money.
> If you don't like ads from creators, don't watch those channels?
I stopped paying YouTube and I use SponsorBlock now. You're not entitled to my time or attention or money.
The problem is ultimately that Google advertises an ad free experience, which it's not. I'd be willing to pay for an ad free experience.
> You're not entitled to my time or attention or money.
Ahhh but you're entitled to someone else's hard work in producing the content you watch, and god forbid they'd be entitled to compensation for that work.. Got it..
> Are you suggesting that the burden should be on channel owners to upload variations of their videos that don't include sponsor blocks?
No, just mark the sponsored segments, so YouTube can skip over (like SponsorBlock does). And they already pay more per view from Premium users vs ad-supported ones, so it just makes sense to skip ads in the video as well.
That being said, I think paying creators directly is more sustainable in the long term.
I'd pay $20 / month for a Youtube subscription with no ads or sponsored content. Unfortunately even with sideloading on iOS there's no alternative live youtube vanced.
That's like complaining you purchased netflix subscriptiomn without ads and saw a product placement ad in a movie. I guess you want netflix to not show the movie, start cutting up the movie or ask that the movie be remade without any products.
YouTube sponsor segments are not subtle “place a Coke can facing the camera” integrations. They are dedicated ad segments with scripted (typically by the advertiser) promotions, often entirely unrelated to the video or channel.
To the end user they are indistinguishable from other video ads on the platform except the ad read is often (not always) done by the creator.
I don’t have hard data on the ratio but it’s not uncommon for a 10 minute video to have 1-2 minutes of full-interrupt ad segments embedded in the video.
I’ve been a paying customer of Dropbox’s consumer plan for over a decade. Each time I visit their website I am greeted with a full page modal ad asking me to upgrade to a different plan I have no use for.
I’ve dismissed it every time. I don’t mind being shown that ad once. But it bothers me that they don’t care enough about my experience using their product to provide a “never show this again” option.
Or just use some metrics to know that if I dismiss it 50 times then maybe I’m not interested.
This is a bigger problem than it may appear. The business lifecycle is well understood, whereby a company innovates, expands, and then when it has a sufficiently large customer base, it monetises. I.e. it enshitifies its products - making them more expensive over time relative to the value. This process is death by a thousand cuts. A PM might see that having the modal you hate show every time you load the site increases conversion by 3%. That's $1M ARR you just made the company! Wow! You get a bonus and a promotion! The problem is you erode customer sentiment by some undefined unit. Many people think NPS measures this, but it doesn't. That measures how many people love and hate the product. It omits the vast majority of people in the middle. They just add it to the increasing list of annoyances until one day there are so many annoyances that they leave. At that time it's very difficult for the company to understand why the user churned. It wasn't any one thing. It was a concerted effort over years to squeeze every cent out of the user at minimum cost.
> At that time it's very difficult for the company to understand why the user churned. It wasn't any one thing.
It's very easy to know for people inside the company who actually care about the product and for their clients. It is really hard for directors and VP that anything they understand are numbers.
If I say "hey this modal/pop up is making customers angry" they are going to ask how much they care (is there even an unit for that?) and how much revenue is lost. The only way for them to handle a project is creating a goal for next Q and assigning people, when in most cases what you need is actually the opposite.
The problem is not that no one knows how to fix it, the problem is that managers organize around big problems and become useless at improving the small things or details. They become blind. It happened to me 100 times. They do not want things to be fixed unless there's a clear revenue increase, which is stupid.
I get super bent out of shape when Apple TV+ advertises shows before the one I am trying to watch; even sometimes advertising the show that I am trying to watch itself and spoiling things.
I have actually cancelled my subscription because of this.
I've talked to Apple support about this. Their website says...
Apple Originals are always commercial-free.
But you are forced to watch ads for other shows before viewing an Apple original. The support person said that because the ads are before the show you are trying to watch, that the show itself is indeed commercial-free. Language lawyering at its finest.
Yeah, I actually canceled Netflix when they started making it impossible to look at the available shows without seeing previews of each of them. I am trying to leisurely decide what I want to watch, not have 15 different actors scream catchphrases at me.
My journey went from downloading movies and TV shows to paying for Netflix, Apple, and Prime. Then back to torrents to avoid all the trailers and ads and curated feed. It's so peaceful now.
Good for you. It's impressive how many get jerked around but don't do the obvious thing and cancel the damn service. More people should feel outraged and insulted by these shenanigans.
Well, you'd be surprised how annoying it is to be a curmudgeon these days.
You can't even find wired (aux) headphones... So tempering expectations when you finally decide to "go back" to simple things is required.
I like to buy my media rather than pirate (I am a man of means after all) but I can't even buy modern media.. Silo, Ted Lasso, Severance and Slow Horses do not have purchasable releases at all. At least some Prime TV shows have blu-ray releases I suppose.
I grew up with the Disney channel on cable as a kid in the 90s. Disney channel at that time was ad-free except for cross-promotions for other Disney channel shows, most of which I (as a kid who liked the Disney channel) wanted to know more about. I have HBO Now/max/go/whatever and before most shows there’s a skippable promo for HBO stuff. So yeah, I don’t think this is new and Disney+ as it is now is way more ad-free than either of those, so I’m not surprised they are trying to nudge the status quo back to a historical equilibrium; it’s just what these companies do
I’ll always pay more to see fewer ads. My kids see far, far, far fewer ads than I and my peers did growing up watching linear TV in the 90s and I’m going to keep it that way. If Disney+ gets in the way of that I’ll stop paying them and stop using their service, easy as that.
Anyone that doesn't see the obvious play here probably wasn't alive when cable was the "ad free" tv option.
These media companies cannot help themselves. Advert money is very tantalizing and they'll always want to find ways to sneak it in whenever and wherever they can.
> My kids see far, far, far fewer ads than I and my peers did growing up
But now these are targeted ads based on browsing data for ad profiles linked to your IP and devices. IMO just a few of these are far worse than the general run of commercials we used to have on TV. Corporations obviously think so too otherwise we would still have that.
I remember those days, and when Cartoon Network was the same. I didn't mind it then because, like you, I found the promos were a great way to know what was on the channel at different times. Especially in the age before on-screen guides.
But there are a few crucial differences between then and now: The ad spots were there to keep the timetables accurate, which is no longer necessary. They also served as a way to let you know what else was on the channel, which again is no longer necessary because that app opens to a menu of all available programming. And, now this is the important part, back then I wasn't specifically paying for ad-free access.
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is, my Jellyfin server is about to get much more use.
I agree. I noticed recently an ad directly inside of 1Password. I’ve paid for a 1Password subscription since 2013, and have had a family plan for many years. I know the company changed hands several years back after AgileBits sold to VC, but this type of disrespect caused me to cancel my membership. There are plenty of alternatives that haven’t turned their focus to the “Enterprise” and aren’t trying to extract as much money as possible from their paying customers.
What would you say is comparable experience wise to 1Password? I’ve found particularly the 1Password Family plan there’s not really a good alternative of rolling with KeepassX, Bitwarden, etc.
The answer could be nothing and I still respect the choice to speak with your wallet.
Bitwarden, while not quite as polished, works well. If you have your own server at home you can even self-host, which I do. It's an open source server side app called Vaultwarden [https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden] which connects to the Bitwarden app.
I think the iCloud password manager also works pretty well, provided you're using Apple products.
The BBC in the UK makes a great play of having "no ads" but 6Music (their indie music station) has constant cross-promotions interrupting the music, sometimes for jarring TV murder shows. Cross-promotion is just as annoying as ads for insurance, I hate it!
Yeah, those kinds of ads are always aggravating to me because you’re not even making money by showing them to me. They feel like a display of power more than anything else.
One of the most egregious examples of this that's happened to me was with the DVD set of the second or third season of Mad Men. One of the unskippable pre-menu ads was for the next season.
And I didn't know what to say. Either I like the series and I'm going to buy the next season or I don't and I won't.
People turned a blind eye to Apple advertising it's own services in it's products for years. I saw people defend here, on HN. So, while yes, it's advertising, Disney is far from the first to do this.
I'm not saying it's right, only that people who claim to be opposed to ads are accepting of the type of ads we are discussing.
> if I'm on the highest paying ad free plan, what are they promoting to me?
I'm assuming they aren't showing you ads for the plan you are on.
Yes I see those, and adverts for other services (watch this program etc) as adverts.
I don’t see adverts embedded in content as adverts. Be sure I’m watching the World Cup on bbc and see an advert on the players shirt doesn’t mean I want my money back, I’d rather we had no adverts, but it’s not unreasonable.
An add, but no more than catching a glimps of a restaurant long after one has ordered. When standing in a shop it is normal to see prices for other products on offer.
You are implying something false. That he’s suggesting thats not an ad. Hes not suggesting that at all.
What he’s suggesting is that that’s very different from Disney gating or interspersing movies with ads. Which it is. You may disagree with that but you’re strawmanning him.
I may be an outlier but I don't really mind being shown a relatively short ad before watching something. I'm almost never really paying attention yet anyways. Like yes, I'd prefer it not to exist but it doesn't cause me to get into a fit of rage.
But ads in the middle of something I'm watching? Fuck right off with that.
> Now, the popular way to tell this story is "the system is breaking," and I don't think that's right, and the distinction matters. The system isn't breaking. It's stable, at a level of human cost we've collectively decided to put up with.
Reads like an LLM to me. "Load bearing" also used a few paragraphs down.
Indeed, just like those idiots who bought into ozone hole, Y2K, and climate change. People have always said we had problems but somehow humanity is still alive, therefore those problems must have been fake (/s obviously).
Granted I've never worked on marketing campaigns, but I don't see how "our product might commit crimes and expose you to liability and do who knows what else and we're too stupid to stop it" is really a compelling message to potential customers.
As somebody who implements LLM tooling at work, in my experience it makes people a lot more skittish
and demand a lot more in terms of safeguards.
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