Today I filed a formal complaint against #YouTube with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner for their illegal deployment of #adblock detection technologies.
Under Article 5(3) of 2002/58/EC YouTube are legally obligated to obtain consent before storing or accessing information already stored on an end user's terminal equipment unless it is strictly necessary for the provisions of the requested service.
In 2016 the EU Commission confirmed in writing that adblock detection requires consent.
It’s like they think the only way to make money is to drown us in ads based off the telemetry they scoop up and we’re entitled brats for wanting to have a say in how our data is harvested/used against us.
That’s their business model. Drowning us in ads is literally how they make money. They aren’t a tech company. They’re an ad aggregation company. They collect data via having users use freemium services. They use that data to create anonymized profiles of millions or billions of people. They break those profiles down into subsets. And then they let ad companies buy the ability for Google to target those users with ads based on things they’re likely to buy based on the data that Google has collected. It’s a much more effective way of marketing ads than just playing ad spots on tv or on radio. Better than billboards and magazine spreads etc. That’s literally what Google (and Apple, and Amazon even) do. It’s what Facebook does. It’s what most social media does. Their tech? Just a way to get you to buy into an ecosystem so you continue to feed the profile and the algorithm and see the ads.
I’m sorry but with all do respect I do not need you to lecture me about how big data dovetails with digital marketing or the B2B side of it for google, thanks.
You don’t like the fact that they make money by showing you ads? Take your business somewhere else. You’re the one who agreed to the terms of service.
At the point where you’re using an adblocker I’d say you’re capable of researching other means to avoid ads on any platform where you don’t want them, paid or free. There’s work-arounds for this problem. Multiple of them. Including using another extension to play just the video in a frame by itself where the adblocker still works, using piped or revanced or any of the other services that offer YouTube experiences without ads (floatplane, grayjay etc), or paying for the service.
As it stands the posts I see about solutions get basically no interaction while rage posts like this get thousands of comments and upvotes and bring with them a bunch of random misinformation. I feel like there’s just too many of these posts full stop.
Stop and think for a second. Nothing I said is defending this move towards aggressively combating ad locking. I don’t think YouTube is the good guy in this scenario.
But on the other hand I am tired of people who don’t want solutions they just want to bitch. There’s almost a dozen of these posts on Lemmy alone about YouTube and their draconian new adblock punishing tactics. I don’t care if you’re upset. I care that you’re actively upvoting and sharing solutions for the people who want them.
I gave this person other options besides just “pay for it or quit YouTube”. That was on purpose.
Just for the sake of posterity and in case anyone is actually looking for solutions: using an app to open YouTube in a new frame on Firefox absolutely will work to block ads and leave your adblockers of choice intact with no effect to your ability to watch YouTube or use your Google account if you have one.
In the second quarter of 2023, Google’s revenue amounted to over 74.3 billion U.S. dollars, up from the 69.1 billion U.S. dollars registered in the same quarter a year prior.
But man if we don’t pay for youtube premium how will they survive?
that’s google not youtube though, is it? i think youtube is running at a loss still + in a normal country that shit should have been blasted apart already way too many shit is under google.
I think they have pretty recently finally become profitable thanks to the increased amount of ads. Although you could always make the argument before that the data YouTube provides to Google that allowed their ad and data empire to thrive is invaluable whether YouTube directly profits or not.
I’ll say it again: Google pays 5-year-old “influencers” millions of dollars. They have always harvested your data to provide these free services - selling ads was just icing. They still harvest your data and sell ads and they still make the same money they’ve always made - only now they are insisting that everyone watch ads or pay for it as well. And of course, eventually YouTube will insist that you watch ads and pay for it. This is the equivalent of “network decay” for streaming services. This is unreasonable and while there are exceptions to the rule, most people have the same reaction to what Google is doing here: surprise, and dismay, if not outright anger and disgust.
Yet every single thread about it on the Internet is utterly overflowing with people lecturing us about how we shouldn’t expect something for nothing, as if we aren’t fully aware that this is the most transparent of straw men. These people insist that we are the problem for daring to block ads - and further - that we should be thrilled to pay Google for this content, as they are. And they are! They just can’t get enough of paying Google for YouTube! It’s morally upright, it’s the best experience available and money flows so freely for everyone these days, we should all be so lucky to be able to enjoy paying Google the way they do. And of course it’s all so organic, these comments.
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
Ok, I’ll bite. Let’s assume Youtube follows your advice, and stops showing ads on YouTube. Data collection is the only source of revenue. How does YouTube make money on that data? Be specific please. Who is buying the data, and what is the buyer going to do the data besides show you a targeted ad?
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
Oh hey you put this part in before being downvoted this time lmao. If you think it’s worth googles time to be astroturfing on fucking lemmy, you have a couple screws loose lmfao.
did you just tey to pre-emptively suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is a google paid shill?
Because if so I would like to know where I can apply for my payment from Google.
I think any reasonable person knows by now that if you don’t “pay for a product you sre the product”, everyone knows youtube collects data and sells it and your eyes to advertisers that’s their business model, guess what those servers youtube runs on? aren’t free, as you yourself said, content creators aren’t free, the engineers working on YouTube aren’t free, so your suggestion is that despite this, youtube should still be free and ad/data collection free.
well do tell me, how long do you think youtube will last with your business model?
And one of them immediately down voted you. I wonder why they’re here on Lemmy instead of continuing to support Reddit?
They clearly like to be bottoms to corpos.
I honestly don’t really care if people adblock or not but I think people need to acknowledge that adblock is essentially piracy. That doesn’t make it inherently bad or good but it has the same impacts as piracy at the end of the day. It’s a useful tool to use when companies start to get unreasonable but especially in the case of YouTube it impacts the amount of money the people who make the content earn.
Another thing: footage provided em by content creators trains their LLM and it’s poorly paid, everybody seems to have a Patreon these days, every creator that wouldn’t be there if there was no money to be made (via said method and those live donations). So the apparent loss of money is more than compensated by the data usefulness. Then ads came. And they were few and it was fine. Then ads became insufferable. My presence there already guarantees creators output content that Google exploits for their AI. What else do I have to pay?
Let’s say I provide them with useful data with what I watch then. They know my age cos I log in and all my other info from Google services. That’s prolly why unblocked ads on the phone or tablet are always on point.
I don’t think it’s piracy exactly but I fully realize there would not be a huge video site like YouTube without ads or limiting it to paid subscribers.
So many corporate bootlickers here, damn.
It’s like they think the only way to make money is to drown us in ads based off the telemetry they scoop up and we’re entitled brats for wanting to have a say in how our data is harvested/used against us.
That’s their business model. Drowning us in ads is literally how they make money. They aren’t a tech company. They’re an ad aggregation company. They collect data via having users use freemium services. They use that data to create anonymized profiles of millions or billions of people. They break those profiles down into subsets. And then they let ad companies buy the ability for Google to target those users with ads based on things they’re likely to buy based on the data that Google has collected. It’s a much more effective way of marketing ads than just playing ad spots on tv or on radio. Better than billboards and magazine spreads etc. That’s literally what Google (and Apple, and Amazon even) do. It’s what Facebook does. It’s what most social media does. Their tech? Just a way to get you to buy into an ecosystem so you continue to feed the profile and the algorithm and see the ads.
I’m sorry but with all do respect I do not need you to lecture me about how big data dovetails with digital marketing or the B2B side of it for google, thanks.
You don’t like the fact that they make money by showing you ads? Take your business somewhere else. You’re the one who agreed to the terms of service.
At the point where you’re using an adblocker I’d say you’re capable of researching other means to avoid ads on any platform where you don’t want them, paid or free. There’s work-arounds for this problem. Multiple of them. Including using another extension to play just the video in a frame by itself where the adblocker still works, using piped or revanced or any of the other services that offer YouTube experiences without ads (floatplane, grayjay etc), or paying for the service.
As it stands the posts I see about solutions get basically no interaction while rage posts like this get thousands of comments and upvotes and bring with them a bunch of random misinformation. I feel like there’s just too many of these posts full stop.
YouTube has been profitable for years before they implemented these anti-adblock measures.
Where do their profits come from?
Stop and think for a second. Nothing I said is defending this move towards aggressively combating ad locking. I don’t think YouTube is the good guy in this scenario.
But on the other hand I am tired of people who don’t want solutions they just want to bitch. There’s almost a dozen of these posts on Lemmy alone about YouTube and their draconian new adblock punishing tactics. I don’t care if you’re upset. I care that you’re actively upvoting and sharing solutions for the people who want them.
I gave this person other options besides just “pay for it or quit YouTube”. That was on purpose.
Good day.
The rubes who don’t use adblockers and those who subscribe.
The point is that YouTube was profitable before implementing these anti-adblocking measures.
Anyways man, have a good day. Gonna block you now.
Just for the sake of posterity and in case anyone is actually looking for solutions: using an app to open YouTube in a new frame on Firefox absolutely will work to block ads and leave your adblockers of choice intact with no effect to your ability to watch YouTube or use your Google account if you have one.
The person above me didn’t read or didn’t understand. YouTube makes most of their profit from displaying ads and this is the business model that made them profitable. Trying to slide around the question so you can feel good about yourself is garbage. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21121370/youtube-advertising-revenue-creators-demonetization-earnings-google
https://lemmy.world/post/7113206 https://lemmy.world/post/7108200 https://lemmy.ml/post/6779163 https://iusearchlinux.fyi/post/1660371 https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/6385210 https://lemmy.world/post/6766273 https://lemm.ee/post/11383162 https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/6089078 https://jemmy.jeena.net/post/217455 https://lemmy.world/post/6255013
I mean, no matter what, you do have a say. You can just not use YouTube. Pretty easy, actually.
But man if we don’t pay for youtube premium how will they survive?
Revenue isn’t profit?
that’s google not youtube though, is it? i think youtube is running at a loss still + in a normal country that shit should have been blasted apart already way too many shit is under google.
I think they have pretty recently finally become profitable thanks to the increased amount of ads. Although you could always make the argument before that the data YouTube provides to Google that allowed their ad and data empire to thrive is invaluable whether YouTube directly profits or not.
why would it be invaluable? I am guessing it’s valuable amd is valued at a very close estimate at least.
Invaluable
adjective
beyond calculable or appraisable value; of inestimable worth; priceless:
the richest country in the world is a normal country regardless of your xenophobia
I’ll say it again: Google pays 5-year-old “influencers” millions of dollars. They have always harvested your data to provide these free services - selling ads was just icing. They still harvest your data and sell ads and they still make the same money they’ve always made - only now they are insisting that everyone watch ads or pay for it as well. And of course, eventually YouTube will insist that you watch ads and pay for it. This is the equivalent of “network decay” for streaming services. This is unreasonable and while there are exceptions to the rule, most people have the same reaction to what Google is doing here: surprise, and dismay, if not outright anger and disgust.
Yet every single thread about it on the Internet is utterly overflowing with people lecturing us about how we shouldn’t expect something for nothing, as if we aren’t fully aware that this is the most transparent of straw men. These people insist that we are the problem for daring to block ads - and further - that we should be thrilled to pay Google for this content, as they are. And they are! They just can’t get enough of paying Google for YouTube! It’s morally upright, it’s the best experience available and money flows so freely for everyone these days, we should all be so lucky to be able to enjoy paying Google the way they do. And of course it’s all so organic, these comments.
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
Ok, I’ll bite. Let’s assume Youtube follows your advice, and stops showing ads on YouTube. Data collection is the only source of revenue. How does YouTube make money on that data? Be specific please. Who is buying the data, and what is the buyer going to do the data besides show you a targeted ad?
Oh hey you put this part in before being downvoted this time lmao. If you think it’s worth googles time to be astroturfing on fucking lemmy, you have a couple screws loose lmfao.
did you just tey to pre-emptively suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is a google paid shill?
Because if so I would like to know where I can apply for my payment from Google.
I think any reasonable person knows by now that if you don’t “pay for a product you sre the product”, everyone knows youtube collects data and sells it and your eyes to advertisers that’s their business model, guess what those servers youtube runs on? aren’t free, as you yourself said, content creators aren’t free, the engineers working on YouTube aren’t free, so your suggestion is that despite this, youtube should still be free and ad/data collection free.
well do tell me, how long do you think youtube will last with your business model?
deleted by creator
I’ve blocked maybe eight people in thirty minutes who are implicitly demanding that corporations create the law.
And one of them immediately down voted you. I wonder why they’re here on Lemmy instead of continuing to support Reddit? They clearly like to be bottoms to corpos.
We must trust our corporate overlords who will use AI to guide us in their right direction.
Everyone I don’t agree with == bootlicker 🙄
I honestly don’t really care if people adblock or not but I think people need to acknowledge that adblock is essentially piracy. That doesn’t make it inherently bad or good but it has the same impacts as piracy at the end of the day. It’s a useful tool to use when companies start to get unreasonable but especially in the case of YouTube it impacts the amount of money the people who make the content earn.
But piracy has no impact at all. Pirates never wanted to buy your stuff.
Honestly, there is plenty of stuff I’d pay for but I pirate if it’s difficult to access.
I don’t know, I probably would have paid for at least half the things I pirate if I had to (especially books).
that only applies to p2p torrents where there aren’t infrastructure costs, youtube has infrastructure costs.
grabbing a torrent from the net and downloading it doesn’t cost anyone anything, it’s all volunteers providing their bandwidth for it.
youtube’s bandwidth isn’t free.
Another thing: footage provided em by content creators trains their LLM and it’s poorly paid, everybody seems to have a Patreon these days, every creator that wouldn’t be there if there was no money to be made (via said method and those live donations). So the apparent loss of money is more than compensated by the data usefulness. Then ads came. And they were few and it was fine. Then ads became insufferable. My presence there already guarantees creators output content that Google exploits for their AI. What else do I have to pay?
Let’s say I provide them with useful data with what I watch then. They know my age cos I log in and all my other info from Google services. That’s prolly why unblocked ads on the phone or tablet are always on point.
I don’t think it’s piracy exactly but I fully realize there would not be a huge video site like YouTube without ads or limiting it to paid subscribers.