Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don't get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.
Then on Oct 1, they threw up a "You're using an Ad Blocker" overlay on videos. I'd use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn't have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.
Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.
Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.
Now all I see is this.
Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.
I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can't view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.
I use it between half an hour and two hours every day. And I can afford it. So this is what I do. It’s worth far more than Netflix to me.
Don't forget that a large chunk of that money also goes to the creators. It's significantly more than they get from showing you an ad.
I’ll consider myself an “honorary Patreon supporter” with zero perks LOL
Yep, well, I guess we can celebrate this change then, because it won’t affect us, but it will make that free lunch a little harder to get. Though from these comments it doesn’t sound like much harder. I don’t know why YT can’t solve this by fully baking the ad content into the streams. There are even some community driven products out there that amass ad start/end times so that sponsor plugs can be skipped. But YT could make even that toothless with a little randomization.
Yep. An arms race.
Congratulations. Your low standards is what helps make youtube more profitable than it already is.