Technology

God the ads are awful. If they start blocking apps like Vanced and Browsers like brave, i will make a PiHole. And they can never block it.

Knowing what I know about the costs of streaming video, I really want to know what the alternative is for a platform that can't just throw money down the drain. To my mind, there are only two options here - people watch ads (within reason, but 2 hour ads aren't resonable), or people pay YouTube (a la Premium).

If you want things for free, the only way to make that happen sustainably is ads right now. Donations simply will not work, especially for something with the costs that video incurs - to say nothing about being able to compensate creators for their time and effort.

Yeah please do, I will just stop using YouTube and that would be a good thing.

I'm in the camp that says you should really pay for premium. It's so worth the money. For every premium user that watches a video the creator gets a pretty good cut. Something like 55%. Blocking ads doesn't really hurt the creator too much. Your mainly just sticking it to Google. But if your someone who watches alot of YouTube consider premium, to help your favorite creators more. Especially you get Music included.

Try YT subscription from Argentina...😎

I'd be much happier to pay if I could ensure I don't get personalized recommendations and I could use it with yt-dlp. I can probably opt out of personalized recommendations, but I haven't checked yet because I don't use youtube through its main interface much.

For folks considering paying for YT, note that you get YT Music Premium bundled in with it. The music premium alone is only $2/mo cheaper than the bundle.

I got it when I bailed on Spotify, and gotta say, the app is a little less polished, but I don't miss Spotify a bit. Just putting it out there if you were looking for a push to get yourself off Spotify or a push to get YT ad-free, there ya go. It works out to $10/mo if you get the annual plan, so same as Spotify Premium, plus yanno, the YouTube benefits. It's a pretty decent deal tbh.

I wonder if this would affect things like Newpipe (android YouTube client replacement with no ads) or even just playing streams via MPV. I assume that stuff is relatively safe since it's grabbing the actual video streams, but I'm sure there is still a way they could block them.

I understand why they're doing this, but if you make a service that was once free, paid (whether with your time, or money), it's not a good look.

Oh gosh, that's unfortunate.

Good thing I've been using NewPipe! I'm reading the post for other alternatives, but feel free to suggest some to me directly, if you'd like.

If I wanted to watch 15 minutes of ads in a 45 minute video, I'd just get cable. I'm happy to watch 1 or 2 ads before a video. That's it. So I use an app that can even remove promotions.