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.
YouTube creators are being paid by a metric, you cannot really influence: CPM (cost per 1000 impressions). Basically, advertisers bid on how much they are willing to pay to show ads on your channel. For advertisers, it of course doesn’t make sense to invest money on channels that have mediocre reach. Google describes your channel with metrics like your country of residency (poorer countries are getting smaller ad bids), type of content (cute animals doing cute stuff is getting paid less than tech or cosmetic videos), daily views and engagement rating (comments, likes, subscriber growth, percentage of video watched), etc. This puts all the pressure on the content creators: you are either huge and then you are getting paid well or you are not and then Google could pay you the full ad revenue for your channel (they take 45% I believe) and it would still be insignificant. You and me having ad block doesn’t change that.
Ad bidding happens realtime though (I briefly worked on software in that sector) if you have ads blocked those calls to ask for bids won’t occur. So having an adblock on reduces the chances of creators getting such ad money
While this is true, the payout itself is laughable for anyone isn’t fully focused on optimizing their videos on monetization. And even those creators are better off with you supporting them directly by either joining their community on YT or donating to the Patreon they got set up. Google gets a cut from you joining their YT-community, but the creator still gets a better payout than they ever would if you only watched the ads. The next logical step for Google is to make linking or mentioning Patreon incompatible with their ToS since the Patreon circumvention is losing them revenue as well.
Also YT is prominently demonetizing videos for the any reason they see fit (and withhold from the creator) and when that happens, the creator gets nothing, but the viewer still sees ads, even tho they do see less ads. It’s an exploitative system that went downhill over many years. The culprits here are not the evil ad block users, but the greedy shareholders expecting infinite growth.