Firefox users are reporting an ‘artificial’ load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it’s part of a plan to make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”
Firefox users are reporting an ‘artificial’ load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it’s part of a plan to make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”
‘Those people’ are still incredibly valuable for YouTube.
They watch content, and interact with creators which increases the health of the community and draws in more viewers - some of whom will watch ads.
They choose to spend their time on YouTube, increasing the chances they share videos, talk about videos, and otherwise increase the cultural mindshare of the platform.
Lastly, by removing themselves from the advertising pool, they boost the engagement rates on the ads themselves. This allows YouTube to charge more to serve ads.
Forcing everyone who currently uses an adblocker to watch ads wouldn’t actually help YouTube make more money, it would just piss off advertisers as they would be paying to showore ads to an unengaged audience that wouldn’t interact with those ads.
In other words (as I agree with you): they don’t generate direct profit for YouTube, but they generate value, or the long-term ability to generate profit.
And a long-term stable business should focus first and foremost on its value, because predatory profiting (i.e. profit obtained in a way that reduces the platform’s value) doesn’t last very long.
You’re relying on a lot of assumptions, which even if true, still doesn’t mean that the math works out in a way that means allowing ad-blocking users makes sense.
Netflix doesn’t need a “healthy community” for people to use the platform. Shows do perfectly fine letting all the talking happen on other social media.
AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all, which with how hard they push premium, definitely isn’t the case.
No, I was explaining how people who do not watch ads are still valuable to YouTube today. It doesn’t matter if they want to move away from serving ads in the future or not, the points above are still valid.
Netflix is actually a great parallel. They need people to watch the shows and buzz about them to draw in more subscribers. YouTube is the same way, they need people sharing videos and funny comments to scrape attention away from other bits of entertainment.
Further, this isn’t a binary outcome. Each time YouTube makes it a little harder to block ads, a slice of people who don’t want to put in the effort will start watching them. It is trivial, on the software side, to fully block a video from playing if the ad is not served. To date, they have not done that, and I sincerely doubt they ever will - because ad-free viewers are still valuable.
Yes, they would prefer if everyone watched ads. But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.
This comment is the equivalent of some guy telling you that you’ll be paid in exposure and that the exposure is going to be worth way more than money in the long run, just trust me bro.