I would bet real money that YouTube has created very accurate estimates of how many ads they can show each user before they'll reduce their consumption, and automatically adjust the number of ads accordingly.

Thus leaving us all permanently annoyed by the number of ads, but not quite enough to leave.

If you use YouTube regularly and you have some music subscription, I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't just buy YouTube+ or whatever it's called that gives you free streaming music + no ads on YouTube.

I bought it right when it came out just to not have ads on YouTube. Then when you got free streaming music included, it was impossible to turn down.

The plus side is that YouTube music recommendations seem to be quite good.

YouTube Premium is a necessity at this point, specially with kids. Also a better business model.

It is a fantastic service. It is a little concerning Google hasn't touched it since it matured. $17.99 for commercial free YT for a family is a bargain considering how much we use it. I have to think there is a major price increase coming.

That's already substantially more expensive than a 1080p Netflix subscription!

The rates can get grandfathered in, I still pay $14.99 for the family plan (hopefully they don't see this and come after my $3/mo)

Hmm. Grandfathered? I've had YouTube Premium Family plan for years, since it was called YouTube Red, and I think mine recently went up to $19.99

YouTube music is really bad if you're anything beyond a very casual music listener though. The feature set is abysmal.

I share YouTube Premium and Apple Music family subscriptions but if pressed would give up YT Premium before I gave up Apple Music.

Most people are very casual listeners. Like in most of their products, google seems to be targeting the majority.

Also, you're comparing different products in terms of price. YT can offer a "pro" version at an additional premium (though they probably won't... Since they focus on the main use cases)

> I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't just buy YouTube+ or whatever it's called that gives you free streaming music + no ads on YouTube.

For me, it’s because YouTube is clearly going the way of cable TV, and when they finally start showing ads on those fancy paid subscriptions, I’ll have to deal with the hassle of unsubscribing.

I’ll just watch YouTube until it becomes unwatchable, at which point I’ll stop watching.

If a hypothetical Music Streaming services has a perfect score of 10, Spotify would get 7, Apple Music would be 6 or 5.5, and Youtube Music wouldn't even score a 5.

And as usual with Google, they either dont know what they are doing or they dont seems to care about YouTube Music.

I have ublock origin and NewPipe on the phone.

What ads?

Probably. What drove me away more than ads is that I can’t find any good content that is less than 20min long. The “algorithm” feeds me shit that, yes I’m interested in, but is longer than a sitcom! (and drove creators to optimize for longer format,I know) I realize this is by design and blah blah engagement blah blah ad revenue etc. but I yearn for the days of good interesting shit where I could queue up 10 vids and it doesn’t take me a month to burn through it all…. I want an option to tell suggestions to keep it between 3-8min long content!!!

As a person I have silos of interests and ideal content desires.

Sometimes I want to watch long podcasts about war and other times I want 30 second puppy videos and I don’t understand why I can’t have algorithms for both silos without separate accounts.

For a while it was comical because there was some 10 minute magic threshold, and so many videos danced around and around to get to that 10 min mark. I agree through, I HATE it, I've started always trying to find written articles and reviews to shortcut this misery.

TikTok is capitalizing on this too - going to be much easier to digest a ton of tiktok then a ton of long meandering youtube videos.

This is why I love LockPickingLawyer. Generally never more than 3 minutes long. Yet by confining himself to such short videos, he has to maximize the time used.

As a creator it takes a ton of time to do editing on something 15 min vs 2 min. I would much rather created a series of 2 min videos.

This is one of those fun things that you might shoot yourself into the foot by trying to estimate.

Piss a user off once and you may have a much harder chance of bringing them back. Sure, you can use the fact you drove away user X in your model for how much to annoy user Y, but that doesn't un-piss-off user X. Sooner or later, there might be a significant number of users X!

For instance, I've specifically avoided "real TV" cable packages even when I can get them for cheaper than streaming TV because my use case (sports playoffs and such) is on and off, and Comcast et al have successfully trained me that it's extremely unpleasant to cancel wired cable TV, so I'd rather pay more for something less obnoxious.

It's easy to be both "data driven" and foolishly short-sighted.

I just pay to remove them. It's pricey, but there is fabulous stuff on youtube I find no place else, and something for the whole family to boot.

You can remove the ads but not the fluff content that pads the videos to make them longer. How about a subscription for concise and direct content?

YouTube shows you the parts most users skipped: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9314415 (That link is for creators, but the graph overlay is shown to everyone.) I can't imagine a better tool for doing exactly what you're requesting.

This is only available to the creators, isn't it? I don't recall ever seeing this as a viewer on YouTube. I have seen it on some...less savory video sites.

That YouTube link says that it's available to viewers, and I've certainly seen it before. Perhaps there's some A/B testing still going on?

The stuff I watch is repurposed public tv from around the world and doesn’t include that, yet.

I think it's great that they let the content creators decide if they want to include their own ads or not. You can always skip their ads, and some of the better channels have a progress bar for the ad portion.

I've noticed that the first ad is often unskippable and the second ad will be 5-second skippable for me. I wonder if you exit YouTube when you see the 2nd ad if the ad system will learn to give you less ads?

The problem is that youtube doesn't have effective competition in its niche, so most people don't have anywhere to go (tiktok and tv overlap a bit, but for lots of content types they dont)

Non-video content is also a Youtube competitor in many genres/content types. Usually the ads for it are way less annoying, too!

I think it's heavily weighed by type of device, more than an user. I pretty much never get ads at mobile, but get them all the time on TV - both via app on smart TV, and PS5.

ad fatigue is a feature column, this is just learned directly as part of training watch next and ads serving.

I recently cancelled my Spotify subscription and switched to Youtube Music. Costs a couple $ more each month but has the added benefit of no more ads when I watch videos too!

I haven't seen an ad on YT for years for this very same reason. I'm curious about the breakdown for YT revenues for ads vs subs

It'd be an interesting to look at that, no doubt. Do they publicize that information in their quarterly reports?

YouTube Premium is easily the best value for money of all my subscriptions. Even when I'm in Asia and I get helpful warnings that "ads may appear in this location" I never see any ads.

As a bonus, in theory the creators get a cut, though I have no idea what it is. My clickthrough rate after years of watching YouTube is 0% so this seems like an improvement for them.

Pro tip. For YouTube use FireFox and Ublock Origin to block the adds.

Alternatively, if you want to kill advertisement based culture, Youtube premium costs $12/month. At an hour of watching a day, that's only $0.40/per hour. Bonus: The channels you watch on Youtube make way more from prenium viewers and are less beholden to being advertiser friendly.

Youtube is hoping their premium model becomes as ubiquitous as Amazon Prime. At which point, ads will start appearing in their service. Because there is a captive market. A similar thing happened to cable TV and even Netflix is heading that way. You'll also never escape in-content advertising. Subway and KFC ads appearing in Korean dramas, etc. Content providers are going to maximize their revenue as long as they don't shed subscribers. Once enough people are paying for premium, the danger of inserting ads will vanish. Because everyone has premium and everyone else is inserting ads.

I pay this to get rid of Google's inserted ads, but it's getting hurt by too many in-video sponsorship ads. I would pay for a mode where the content creator gets more money in exchange for automatically skipping their sponsorship ad.

The like/subscribe/become a Patreon is also annoying, but not as bad as actual ads.

Depending on the popularity of the content you consume you can use https://sponsor.ajay.app/ which is a crowdsourced way of skipping the in-video sponsorship ads. I've had it work for some relatively obscure channels and it reliably works for most any popular/large channels as well.

I have a zero-tolerance ad policy. If there isn't a way for me to reliably skip ads I will stop consuming the content. I'm willing to pay but all too often you end up paying for an ad-free experience and eventually ads get re-introduced anyway or the ads take on another form.

Pardon the language but fuck advertisements. If it isn't a dry, boring information-based ad I don't care for it. I have no tolerance for the emotional manipulation and psychological warfare committed by modern advertisements. I'm sick of seeing [attractive people enjoying time spent together while <using/eating/drinking> <product> during a <meal/activity/social gathering>] or [commercial designed to make you laugh or smile so you associate being happy at some level with <product>]. I was sick of those commercials 20 years ago because they're all the same and I'm even more sick of them now that I'm old enough to see how they're designed to be manipulative.

'But they really used and loved that product, they wouldn't do the add otherwise, its in your interest for sure and they are your friend so you should order it 30 days guarantee back...'

I hear you, though i can understand video makers' point of view; they are often at mercy of YT algorithm with no heads up, no recourse. Also quality content is being slowly edge out by attention grabbing mental pollution videos, actively promoted by said YT algorithm. That is one semi stable source of income for them that wont be pull from underneath them.

So I accept those ads as necessary evil. And I support few creators via patron.

Thank you for articulating this so well. I've also had a zero-tolerance ad policy for years now. My partner and I refer to ads as Brain-Pollution.

The only two channels I watch that have in-video sponsorship use the TOC feature and the sponsorship is marked as a different section so it's super easy to skip. I don't want to name them in case that's not allowed, because I enjoy that they provide that feature a lot... specially because one of them is for kinda controversial content and the sponsors are usually not related to the content at all.

Nothing can be said to be certain except death, taxes, and advertising.

YouTube Premium has been a great investment. I watch hours-long concerts without any interruptions now. And I can download the videos, which is another big benefit.

This must cut deeply into their profits. Surely they are getting more than 40c/hour of advertising revenue

> Surely they are getting more than 40c/hour of advertising revenue

Per person? No way.

Turns out about 3.25 billion hours of Youtube is watched per month. That's 9.75bn in a quarter. Youtube's latest quarterly ad revenue was $6.869bn, or approx 70 cents per hour

This is a bit like avoiding plastic straws for environmental reasons. It's not going to change anything.

At some point, everyone who is willing to give money to avoid ads will have done so and then prices will rise and thoughts of an ad-supported cheaper tier will occur. We are seeing this with Netflix right now.

What needs to change is the unsustainable capitalist model that demands ever higher growth and profits.

Also, Google is at the heart of it, paying for yt won't make one iota of change in how they think about ads and data extraction.

Does that block ads that the YouTubers put right in their videos?

As much as i hate ad culture, i also hate the pay-to-make-product-not-suck model. It makes me feel manipulated.

No worries, I bet they will put ads for subscribers too, citing “loss of users” as a reason.

That would be a great way to get me to both stop paying for their service AND start blocking ads. I'd just send $10/month to my preferred creators' Patreons instead, or something. I already put up with their frankly terrible music service because it comes bundled with ad-free YouTube; I'd probably be better off.

I realize I could do this now and it's probably better for the creators overall, but knowing that everyone I watch gets a little something, whether I subscribe to them or not, is nice.

It's almost certain. They will follow the Netflix model. Plan right now is $12/month. It will soon be $15, then $20. Because they care about their price-conscious customers, they will then offer a $12/month subsidized plan with ads. How nice of them to offer us the choice.

also works on chrome and edge chrome with ublock origin.

Chrome/Edge Chromium actively prevent cname uncloaking.

Effectively a nerfed version of ublock origin.

Nevermind the manifest v3 changes being introduced very soon which dramatically limits the capabilities of ublock origin to some limited sub-100k static filters.

For reference I have a block list of 800k filters + dynamic filtering on Firefox.

If you want to have a sane version of the web, switch to Firefox.

Yea it works but I wonder when they will slowly start to deter uBlock because they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars on both Google and YouTube.

In my experience, Youtube ads return on Chrome for a few days every time there's a new Chrome update. Never had that happen with Firefox.

and on safari using the Wipr extension from the Mac app store

oo i need to check this one out is it for ipad also?

Do you need to set that up somehow? I use Firefox and UB Origin, and I get lots of ads.

I'm on Android and have done no extra config other than use Firefox and install ublock add-on. I get nearly zero ads. Plus I think there's an add-on that allows you to continue listening with screen locked.

Make sure to update and enable more of the custom blocklists in uBo if you are still getting ads.

I would refresh your firefox and reinstall the extention.

no it is automatic there is no setup.

Since YouTube removed the downvote count I’ve stopped relying on it for information. It’s now too hard to know if what time watching is legit without it.

It might be misguided but it’s how I feel.

Same for me.

Before I would click a video and check downvotes and comments for issues.

With downvotes gone, I stopped opening videos at all. I just don't trust anymore the platform to not waste my time.

I just dont understand this take. I've never found any utility in the down votes. It never seemed to accurately represent anything let alone the quality of the video.

When what you are looking for mostly is technical content, downvotes are a good indicator.

Stuff like, how to change X in your Y car and then immediately find that the title is misleading. Or solutions to general IT problems. I just don't trust the platform anymore without being able to see red flags.

When I worked at Yahoo at the turn of the century, whenever earnings were too low on our property, we would pump up the number of ads on our pages. It's a very common and might be a good way to see if an ad-based company like Google or Meta is close to missing earnings. And for the record, I noticed the increase in ads as well, at least 2 full ads without ability to skip per viewing.

purely conjecture but i think once you watch a certain amount of youtube per day they purposely pump up the ads for you so that youre incentivized to buy a premium membership.

This is my experience too. I can't escape YouTube ads on my TV's app (shame on me) and I'm at the annoyance breaking point because of the recent increase.

Short term this just means using something other than the TV app. But long term (5-15 years -_- ) I think content is going to be hosted places other than YouTube. Maybe wishful thinking, but right now if I had a YouTube link and a PeerTube link to the same content I'd send my friends to PeerTube instance.

The ads have increased and the number of different ones have decreased; either they have less purchasers for ads for my demographic or something's going weird.

I only need so many ads for "current SAAS desperation".

For me, I think the type of ads have shifted a little bit too. Less German cars and carbonated sugar drinks (big brand ads) and more Home Shopping Channel type ads. And Get Rich Quick While Working From Home-testimonials.

I bet it will be more random ads in the future as restriction are put on targeted advertising and blocking of cookies.

That's what the algorithm thinks you are now

Now you mention it, I’ve noticed the same. It feels like 80% of the ads I see are for HelloFresh, Monday.com, or Grammarly.

Businesses with high long-term customer value and high customer acquisition costs will always dominate these sorts of transactional ad channels.

I've also noticed they've added ads after a video ends, even when autoplay is off. Annoying, but it makes sense to show ads while browsing for the next video to watch.

It pushed me to read more and use NewPipe. If they block NewPipe or youtube-dl I'm done. More time to read. I was fine with a few ads and now it just feels insulting.

VPN to Mexico or Turkey and then login to YouTube and subscribe to premium to remove ads for like $4/mo. Best money you'll ever spend

I haven't watched an ad on YouTube in years. The day they finally block clients like NewPipe will be the last day I watch YouTube.

I no longer click through videos to check them out. Im in and then out for specific content because the ads just keep coming

If you're annoyed, just pay for the premium version without ads.