Comment by Nextgrid
4 days ago
> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
I disagree. If you were buying every advertised product and falling for every advertised scam then fair enough. But assuming you were ignoring them, there is no issue with offloading the thing you would do anyway to a computer and save everyone the time/bandwidth.
The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you, not the right to a sale. Whether they convert you is up to them, their product, their offering, etc. I think you can never buy a single product from an ad and this is still piracy.
That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is not to get you to buy a coke today, it's to have a positive impression that builds over years. This sort of advertising is very hard to attribute sales to, but a good example of how you don't need to buy a product for seeing the ad to be worth something to the company.
And I have the right to pay someone to watch the ads + videos for me, and then summarize me the video minus ads. Just like I have the right to hand my ad-full newspaper to someone, have them cut out the ads and hand me back the now ad-free one.
If both of those are legal and ethical (I’d be curious what argument someone would make against this), then offloading this work to a machine should be just as ethical.
But in those cases someone is still seeing the ads. It's when no one is seeing the ads that it becomes piracy, in my opinion.
A summary is not the same as the content either, that's a fairly well tested concept (fair use, etc).
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You can rationalize this any way you want, but at the end of the day you're screwing over not a faceless corporation - but the very people who put out videos on YouTube.
It's fine if you're OK with it, but don't pretend that you're not doing that.
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No, piracy is defined as stealing a vendor's exclusivity by making copies and putting them up on a web site. Ad blocking is not the same as making copies and distributing.
You might as well argue that covering your ears during a TV advertisement is piracy. That's a strange definition of the word if I ever saw one.
I think content piracy is generally accepted to not require re-distributing. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if I search "watch free movies online" and find a site streaming bad DVD rips, I fully believe that I am pirating that content against the wishes of the content owner.
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> the right to put an advert in front of you
The advertiser may well think that's what they're buying, but what they're actually getting is the right to send my browser a URL, which they hope I will fetch and view.
I would prefer not to, so I don't.
> The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you
Is this the way YouTube ads work? If I don’t load the ad, is someone paying?
Nobody has the right to put things on my screen that I don't want to see, first of all. Second, I'm never going to "convert", so I'm actually saving them money by blocking their ads, because now the ad will go to someone else who doesn't block it who might buy whatever Temu nonsense is being forced on them.
Edit: oh, I see you work at Google.
You mean DoubleClick. It's clear which business model took over after the merger.
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Also, Youtube pays out more to creators than anyone else on the web, they dwarf Patreon 10x. People who make youtube videos rely on ads to get paid.
They’re welcome not to make videos. But if they make them and lay them out there for free alongside some garbage I have the right to ignore, don’t blame me if I do look at them and ignore the garbage, and since there’s so much of it I eventually get my machine to ignore them, not unlike wearing gloves when dealing with a messy task as to save you the time of scrubbing your hands from dirt/oil/etc.
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This is frankly wrong. All the creators I watch make their money from Patreon and use Youtube basically as a way to advertise Patreon to people.
This was such a problem for Youtube that they flirted with banning linking to Patreon or suggesting viewers go to it. Not because it was taking money from google, but because it was money being paid not to google.
Then Google competed by adding their own form of Patreon built into the system, and creators liked that and embraced it, and recently Youtube abused the membership system to pollute non-member's screens with videos they could not watch without paying, and creators did not want this, but Youtube does not care what creators want.
The people who make most of their money from Youtube ad-rev are the worst the platform has to offer. They are beholden to the algorithm, so they have to put out slop every single day, and make the most aggressive A/B tested clickbait they can manage, and even pay to advertise their video on other channels and videos, and they are all better off on TikTok anyway.
It's things like Five Minute Crafts and their made up videos.
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