Comment by snailmailman
2 months ago
Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content. Ads for guns. Ads for viagra knockoffs. Ads for “stock market tips” that use AI generated celebrity impersonations. Ads for “free money the government isn’t telling you about”.
It’s constant and ever-increasing. I stopped watching a 30 minute video recently after the 5th ad break just over 10 minutes in.
On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.
I feel naive saying this, but a certain percentage of the ads on YouTube seem to contravene what would be legal of they were shown on television - in Australia at least.
It feels like standover tactics, showing the worst of the worst unless you pay up.
I should also at least admit that recently,Like the last 12 months, those greasy-type ads are less common, having been replaced with more television-style ads, although they last longer. Still an improvement overall though.
The trick with YouTube on iOS is to delete the app and use the website in Safari instead. There, you can use Wipr 2 or other ad blockers.
Only reason I keep brave browser installed in iOS is to block ads for YouTube vids
Serious question: Why don't you pay for YouTube premium?
Isn't it hypocritical to want YouTube to offer you its content for free? If the content is valuable to you, you should be willing to pay for it. If not, just stop watching YouTube.
It's not only hypocritical, it's nonsensical in this discussion.
It's obvious that if advertising was made illegal, we would need to pay for all those services that we want to use. YouTube premium is the best example of how that would actually work.
> If the content is valuable to you, you should be willing to pay for it
But I do, by supporting those creators through Patreon. Paying for YouTube Premium sounds like a bad deal since I'm not directly supporting the creators for which I go to YouTube in the first place.
The creators you’re paying on Patreon aren’t hosting their own videos though, YouTube is. Hosting videos isn’t cheap, who should cover that cost?
I get that YouTube doesn’t give enough of a percentage of profits to the creator, but the alternative should be a different video hosting platform that does give more profits to creators. Not patreon, which offers nothing in return. (It’s a glorified payment processor and doesn’t actually do any video hosting.)
That there are vanishingly few alternatives to YouTube in terms of actually hosting videos (I know of Vimeo and, I guess nebula? Only because it gets continually pushed on me by creators) maybe tells you that the act of hosting videos at scale is kinda hard to do profitably. Or else there’d be tons of alternative options.
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YouTube Premium dishes out your revenue to creators based on how much you watch. See Linus Tech Tips’ video on their income streams (skip to 4:40): https://youtu.be/GeCP-0nuziE?si=xH5gTvzglaPlQyJ4
Sure, YouTube probably takes more off the top than Patreon. But YouTube also splits it up based on who you’re watching. I probably watch 30+ YouTube channels per week, some of which I find on the explore page and don’t even know the name of. I would never subscribe to 30+ Patreons. I think YouTube Premium is a good compromise.
Maybe its hypocritical. But I have no issues with blocking ads on youtube on my PC, since 95%+ of the ads I see on youtube mobile are blatantly breaking Youtube's own TOS, if not breaking actual laws. I shouldn't be seeing these advertisements anyway if Youtube actually enforced their own policies. But I assume they'd rather advertise scams than miss out on a single empty ad spot.
I'm surprised Youtube hasn't faced any legal consequences for all the scams they allow to advertise on their platform. As far as I could tell, the ad I saw for a gun that was "easy to sneak past security" and "no license required" was up for well over a month, and I'm not convinced Youtube actually took it down. I saved that one, and as far as I can tell, the video ad url is still up, but now requires a sign in to view the video.
Being cheap and also having standards of what you'll watch is not hypocritical.
YouTube is great if you pay for it, which I do. Any time I open it on a device I’m not logged in and get an ad i instant close.
you can also use a VPN when paying to pay significantly less, though ive heard theyve cracked down on that a bit more recently