Poll of the Day > youtube is just getting absolutely destroyed by the community and the media

(+) Yeah! (+)

pretty sure most people do now, since places are dumping tons of money into trying to prevent them

they didn't really do that when there actually wasn't that many people using them

Looks like about 42% of people use an adblocker in 2023. Previously I remember it being more like 30%.

kind9 posted...

Sucks for them then. Nobody likes ads, and adblockers are a pretty essential part of using the internet. Lucky most people still don't use an adblocker.

more sites need to sell their own merch

The whole "Disable ad block or GTFO" is stupid. Like, if you tell me that, 99 times out of 100 I am going to GTFO, then what are you gaining? You aren't even getting people who will share your content with others who might not have ad blockers. It is literally lose-lose. Either accept that a large amount of people are going to be viewing your site with an ad blocker, or offer a premium service that does more than just disable ads and actually makes people want to use it.

Dikitain posted...

or offer a premium service that does more than just disable ads and actually makes people want to use it.

To be fair you do also get youtube's music service if you subscribe to premium. Everything else you get from premium is already possible with simple browser extensions. I don't like the idea of getting allowance from google to use any browser extension or block whatever I like from displaying in my browser over my internet, but I know if google had their way that's exactly how things would be. Everyone would be using google ISP on their google device with google browser viewing google websites with google ads.

Dikitain posted...

The whole "Disable ad block or GTFO" is stupid. Like, if you tell me that, 99 times out of 100 I am going to GTFO, then what are you gaining? You aren't even getting people who will share your content with others who might not have ad blockers. It is literally lose-lose. Either accept that a large amount of people are going to be viewing your site with an ad blocker, or offer a premium service that does more than just disable ads and actually makes people want to use it.

In the case of something like Youtube where service delivery is such a major part of their costs, they do gain the fact that they're no longer having bandwidth used by someone who isn't paying for it, which isn't nothing. For sites with relatively low bandwidth needs, though, it indeed doesn't make much sense.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

pretty sure most people do now, since places are dumping tons of money into trying to prevent them

they didn't really do that when there actually wasn't that many people using them

Across the economy, we're also hitting a point where a lot of corporations in the entertainment business are trying to recapture the explosive growth they saw during peak Covid so they can keep shareholders happy. This is why so many streaming services are adding ads, or jacking up their prices, or cracking down on account sharing: They want to keep hitting those record-breaking revenue numbers and are grasping at whatever straws they can to do so. I expect cracking down on adblocking is in the same vein in that they're hoping the crackdown will convince enough people to stop blocking to squeeze some more revenue out of them. It's pretty short-sighted, though, since that desperate scrabbling for extra revenue also includes making the ads more intrusive, which is going to prompt more people to block them. When this ultimately fails, I expect layoffs, which are the classic fall-back strategy for pumping financial numbers.

I've been expecting this for a while, really. Sites insist on making ads more intrusive to make up for views lost to adblock, which in turn makes more people want to block them. They're short-term gains that end up costing more in the long run, and the end result is going to be the collapse of ad-funded Internet content.