Doesn't AdBlock already handle YouTube? I haven't seen an ad before video in quite a while.

I haven't either and was wondering if it was that or Glimmerblocker. If I did see video ads, I'd rather just close the tab than suffer through them.

That is by the way in everyone's best interest, especially the advertisers. Making me watch some ad will only make me dislike your brand.

Well, as you apparently continue to use Youtube, it's not in their best interest.

That's a problem they will need to solve, not I. My problem (ads) is solved by blocking them. I know for a fact that there are ways to monetize content that do work on me, advertising is just not one of them.

To name just one example, Google certainly has the means to implement a micro-payment system where each click on the thumbs up/like button deducts a small amount of money, assigns it to the uploader's account and keeps a percentage of that for their own hosting expenses. Let's call it Google Flattr.

Perhaps more people using ad-blockers would encourage such (in my opinion) positive developments. Until then, I'll enjoy my content without advertisements while you pay for it by getting your time wasted with ads and your brain crammed full of desires to buy shit you don't need.

> That's a problem they will need to solve, not I. My problem (ads) is solved by blocking them.

"People being easy to mug is a problem they will need to solve, not I. My problem (getting money) is solved by mugging them."

If everyone is looking out for their best interest without thinking about the community in general, things won't function very well overall. If everyone has the same opinion as you and blocks all YouTube ads, it might lead to a future where we have no YouTube. Just sayin'.

Not at all the same as mugging people. Better comparison: Free candy.

YouTube is a bowl of free candy sitting in a public place with a big "free candy" sign posted next to it. Each candy has a flyer for some product attached to it. You take the flyer and the candy. You might throw it away later, or not even read it, but you take it. I just pry off the candy and leave the flyer there.

If enough people do that, perhaps we will have a future where there is no free candy. Or no flyers. Or really strong glue so you can't pry them off. Or the stuff on the flyer gets printed in tiny letters on the candy itself.

We will however not end up with a future where there is no candy, because people still want candy, even if it's not free. Just perhaps not as much.

The mugging example was more to illustrate how you need to optimize for society, rather than yourself, in order to keep things working harmoniously.

When it comes to YouTube videos specifically, your analogy is fair, I agree.

The problem with your idea is that Google likely makes waaaaaay more money selling a single banner on YouTube's homepage then they would make in a month or more of thumb-up micro transactions. A simple banner at the top of Youtube can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we're not even talking about the fancy stuff you sometimes see on YouTube.

Until that bubble bursts, I don't think you're going to see ads go away on large sites like YouTube.

Yes, It does.

If you cannot let the ads run you shouldn't watch the video.

I understand that people hate ads, and that having a method to pay for content would be better than ads, but we don't have that micropayment yet, so we're stuck with ads at the moment.

If you hate ads you should refuse to use any site that displays ads, rather than use the site but block the ads.

If any YouTubers are reading: It'd be great if there was someway to provide feedback on ads. Yes, I realise this would be hell for anyone reading the feedback. But when I go to watch a ten minute video and there's a 4 minute ad, or there's an unskippable 30 second ad that has no interest for me, or there's no way to opt out of future ads from a company that has no interest to me ("Please stop showing me ads from Jakamo").

There's a new service looking to do something similar to payments on videos.

Like a pay-as-much-as-you-like subscription https://subbable.com/

If we all refused to watch ads, they'd have to find alternative solutions; we might already have micropayments by now if it weren't for the people who watch ads.

You might have a point if you'd said you refused to watch the content and told them it was because of ads.

How so? You think Google isn't measuring how many people block ads?

Enough people apparently already refuse to watch ads that it would be against Youtube's interest to block people who block the ads. Other sites notice a lot of people block ads too, and put up banners begging for a whitelist. (Does that constitute a type of click fraud when you ask adblock users to enable ads [and click them]?)

Here are some interesting percentages: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-user... I think with these numbers websites like Youtube suspect that if they piss off those of us who block their ads (by blocking our access or degrading the experience in other ways), we'll migrate to a competitor, and the masses will follow.

One idea I had that is on my list of things I'll probably never get around to doing is an ad blocker that pays the ad companies for adverts you don't see on a page.

The thought behind this is that the ad companies already handle micropayments to websites, and there's only a few ad companies - 'all' you need to do is set up an arrangement with them where you take fees from users and distribute to the companies when their ads are blocked (as detected by the tracker). Website owner still gets paid, and ad provider effectively gets paid for being your microtransaction provider. You only have to set up relationships with a few companies, rather than practically every website in the world.

For people like myself who would like to block ads but feel ethically bound not to, this would be a great way around the inflexibility of current models, where I subscribe to a single website or whatever.

As I said, I'll probably never get round to it, but if someone feels like it they're welcome to use the idea.

The ads beside the videos would be OK for me but the pre-roll ads are annoying especially when they change the behavior of the player: I'm used to click on the player to pause the video, but when it's playing an ad then the click opens a webpage instead of pausing the video and sometimes it even freezes Firefox for several seconds. This is what reminds me to turn on AdBlock.

Oh I must have missed that in those T&Cs I signed when I visited their publicly available website...

It's nothing to do with T&Cs, it's to do with not being a leeching asshole.

Pay for the content you want. Don't pay for the content you don't want. Don't take without paying the content you do want.

Why does anyone think doing content creation over youtube entitles them to money? It's an end in itself; to entertain others.

Save the 'don't be an asshole' moral shaming: ads are not guaranteed income on any medium where people have control, it's as simple as that.

If you're so uncomfortable with people being able to control what their computer or device does, make everyone use a black box to view your content. Or just paywall it.

They spam me. Their links pop up whenever I google something. People direct me to view their videos on youtube.

You expect me to care about and support their business model? I don't give a shit. If someone posts a link to a cat video I'm going to click on it - if the company doesn't want me on their site don't let me on the bloody site.

Don't be a patronising, sanctimonious "asshole".

Relying on your customers's benevolence is not a business model. If Youtube sees a lot of ad blocking, that should be an incentive for them to improve their ad delivery or come up with alternative solutions like micropayments.

The company that I work for suffers from a lot of people adblocking (due to the market we're in) so we offer an exceptionally high value subscription service, for a few dollars a month (between $2 and $5 depending on the payment period) any user can get an advertisement free experience across almost every website that we operate (over 100 websites) and there's a bunch more extra features that premium users gain access to... However I know of so many many users that visit our websites frequently (some that use our websites for hours every day) who use adblock and flat out refuse to pay the few dollars to view our websites without adverts legitimately.

There really is no magic solution, the sort of people that are happy to adblock websites are the sort of people that just don't care. Why aren't adverts a good business model? People get the content with no direct financial cost (that's what they want) and the companies operating the websites get the revenue they need to exist. A lot of people are happy to view adverts if it pays for the content that they consume: I am! I don't block adverts. If a website has advertisements that I don't like I find another website to use, or just go without.

Are shops relying on their customer's benevolence because people pay for the things that they want? There's a direct cost associated with delivering content to users on a website (which is incurred regardless of the advertisements viewed), there's a direct cost associated with delivering a loaf of bread to a customer of a shop, why is it completely unacceptable for someone to steal bread from a shop but the same is okay online? This isn't like media piracy, there is a direct cost associated with delivering content online.

Why should we pay for content? Surely, there's some other model.

One is advertising!

I agree and I bet this website will be shut down soon. YouTube has to make revenue and personally I have no problem "suffering" those ads as long as they're short.

Seems like this kind of scenario is inevitable. There are also browser extensions for skipping, like Magic Actions for YouTube.

Advertising values are constantly being devalued. It would be nice if there was a way to move beyond advertising on the web as the primary business model. Wikipedia is the only top 10 site on the net that does not rely on advertising.

So we're supposed to use this site to skip YouTube ads, and in exchange we're presented with the website's ads. Right.

Least you get your video faster, YouTubes advertising is much more invasive and irritating

In how many other places can you pick and choose the terms of your agreement like we constantly do with online services? It's not really up to us to say, "well your ads are annoying! I still need your service though."

that's a good point

See, my first thought on seeing this URL was that it'd be a site that skipped to the most interesting part of a video first. So many videos on YouTube have comments like "to get to the good part/skip the waffling, go to 00:47" or whatever ;-)

It's known as the Wadsworth Constant. Based on some dude named Wadsworth on reddit[0].

Apparently pressing 3 with the youtube player selected will jump to 30%.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/yxfpC.png

Better yet, add &wadsworth=1 to the query string of any youtube URL :)

Kind of surprised there wasn't a bookmarklet. Here you go:

    javascript:if(/youtube\.com\/watch\?v=([^&]+)/.test(location)){location='http://www.youtubeskip.com/watch?v='+RegExp.$1;}

I didn't realize you could use RegExp.$1 ( .. $n) until just now. Thanks!

You can, but it's highly suggested you don't. First off, it's a deprecated property. Second, RegExp.$1 is the 1st match of the last RegExp ran. No matter where in your page it was ran. Extensions, events, functions, wherever. In this case, it should be safe, but don't ever actually use it on your page.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

I'm not against ads in a general way, but forcing me to see an advertisement before letting me access the content, oh that pisses me off.

Looks like a great service, easier to remember and apply it (just typing 'skip' on the url, awesome).

I used to use the URL http://youtube.com/v/[video id]. Dunno if still works, but it didn't displayed those 5 second ads plus would still play a video that requires login even if you are not.

I see people are asking why build a website. Maybe they want to build a userbase and expand to other skips too(such as hulu skip).

Isn't it against the TOS of youtube ?

Isn't what google does against human rights?

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Huma...

YouTube has ads? I use AdBlock (not AdBlock plus) and I don't see ads before YouTube videos.

Also, when I have seen ads, they are like 15 seconds long, or if they are longer, you're given a "skip" button. Are you seriously that impatient that you can't wait 10 seconds?

ViewTube[1] is a greasemonkey script which allows you to play the HTML5 versions of youtube videos. So this lets you skip ads too

[1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011

Aside from the argument of whether or not to block ads, there are extensions to that, why build a website?

Can this website take a load as big as Youtube's ? I doubt so.

Saw this on Quora and thought it's worth sharing. I've no idea who's behind it.

Surely YouTube's lawyer-sense must be tingling.