Google know who they’re streaming videos to. They know this from the back-end. They absolutely do not require a script running in the browser to phone home about it in order to count “views”. All the telemetry they need they can get from existing traffic; the additional telemetry supplied by scripts is mostly just for Bad Reasons and it’s morally fine to block it.
At least we know one thing that didn’t cause it.
Thanks for that hint on decoding your shitty blackbox google.
Tldr: youtube forced ai into video monitoring and it keeps killing videos it shouldn’t, so instead of saying Ai is bad they’re blaming af blockers because why not lie when there’s no repercussions?
YouTube views are dropping because they are using AI to vet and cull age innappropriate content from minors. the problem is the ai is very bad at its job and marks way too many videos as not advertiser friendly, which effectively kills YouTube promoting that video in feeds. this is the default view for new accounts, so you have to specifically turn off parental controls to see a normal feed. this started happening about 4 months ago. a number of channels I watch have made comments about this, including Redlettermedia
youtube forced ai into video monitoring and it keeps killing videos it shouldn’t
That explains why sometimes the video stops and I get error message. I thought it may have to do with switching the script blockers on or off.
Pinch flat. GitHub. Go.
I don’t understand:
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What is ‘AI in video monitoring?’
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The article mentions literally nothing about this, so where did that come from?
the article provides one “official” explanation for views dropping, and i am citing an alternative explanation from the perspective of creators themselves who see the analytical data and the judgments being past on their videos.
Ok, but that’s not a TLDR of the article.
the tldr was for my wordy comment not the article. why would i summarize the article?
Because when you comment, “TLDR” under an article, it’s assumed to be a “TLDR” of the article. It also doesn’t make sense to say TLDR was a summary of your long comment because you didn’t make a long comment to summarize, you just jumped right in with TLDR.
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Not saying I don’t believe that’s what’s happening, but the article mentions nothing about any sort of YouTube AI interference.
Because the AI integration is a recent change unrelated to this data. The commenter is pulling it out of their ass.
If we’re just throwing out theories, I’d propose it was the dramatic increase in ads with a decrease in quality of content being served by the algorithm. The only thing that gets front page access is clickbait.
Source: my ass
This is not at all what happened. Maybe try reading the article next time.
Blocking ads for decades everywhere, life is sooo goood without that cancer.
P.S. The only place were ads should appear are “yellow pages” thing, for example messenger channels just for that, where you intentionally join to look for local deals, discounts, contractors etc, especially to support local economy and not some megacorp. And ofc current google spying is not helping, block the ads, block trackers, it ruins the “steal the data” model.
frustrated by ads that feel irrelevant
What?
Do they think we have a friend-or-foe system that only shoots down advertisements from adversaries?
An ad is an ad, and should be terminated on sight.
I used to prefer personalized ads over the insanity that was 90-00s “random” ads experience. But, since ads became a risk vector, I agree with a block by default approach, and I’ll find alternate ways to support sites I visit frequently rather than allowlist ads.
I’m sure that the number of times I’ve decided “nah I don’t need to see that” after being told an ad blocker violated YouTube’s terms of service has absolutely nothing to do with it either.
Even on a computer without ad blocker (work laptop, chrome browser)
the number of times i say “nah i don’t need to see that” as soon as thes annoying ads comes up before the video…
The decline probably has very little to do with ad blockers.
The decline was very sudden, almost instantaneous, and can be traced back to the exact date a block list, used by most major desktop ad blockers, added the YouTube View Counter API endpoint to their list.
But sure… nothing to do with ad blockers.
Exactly.
If I am forced to see ads, especially intrusive or page filling ones, I will not continue.
I watched lots of YouTube in the past.
When they started inserting ads into the videos (not channel sponsored stuff), the camel started getting weak.
When they started requiring sign-ins or blocking access when using a proxy that was the straw.
I don’t use YouTube anymore.
Didn’t age verification - also recently implemented - cause youtube views to drop?
Here’s a case of it very well explained.
It was the first thing most people assumed was the culprit, as it silently enabled Restricted Mode, but since the biggest difference came from Computer views, despite the age verification happening on all platforms, that is strong evidence against that having any impact
Not to mention most didn’t see a corresponding drop in revenue from views.
It’s gotten to the point where I have to re-load each YT tab three times before the video ever starts playing - only because I use uBlock.
Still better than watching ads, but it is getting annoying.
For me, it works without reloading… After a 15 second load and an insufferably laggy UI despite having no identifiable system bottleneck.
Yeah yt is basically unusable on Firefox with a blocker and it’s 100% by design. Yt even gives a helpful pop-up offering to tell me why it’s running so slow.
I have a theory that YT deliberately makes you wait the length an ad would have been if you have uBlock Origin installed. Ive just let it “buffer” for 30 seconds or so and it will eventually load the video.
I am fine if it means I don’t have to watch some scam ass ad.
I’d rather watch nothing than an ad trying to sell me something.
Still better tbh
I have no problems with ublock on Firefox or Librewolf, unless I try to skip past what the video already loaded, then it’s a dice roll whether it’ll work or not
It is like they know you’re using adblocks, so instead of trying to force ads down your throat, they try making your experience miserable by breaking their own viewer or whatever. It is absolutely petty of them.
Leave a video sitting there in idle for too long, come back, it plays for 10 seconds then has to reload itself. Sometimes, it doesn’t do this, so it requires a complete refresh.
They can do this bullshit all they want but I am not letting up on blocking ads.
I have the same problem, and after you start clicking play, often you can wait it out and the video will eventually play on its own after 10-15 seconds
This mostly happens when you use youtube while being logged into a google account.
I fixed this by using firefox containers + https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switch-container/- logout from google / clear cookies.
- switch to a new “google” container and login to see your subscrpitions
- if a video doesn’t load switch to decontained
also has the nice benefit of not messing up your reccomendations when clicking on random yt-links from other sites
This does not work on phone OSes
I use Grayjay on Android, and it tends to do a good job. I can have subscriptions w/o being logged in to my YT account, and videos load after 5 secs or so every time.
Thank you. You are the best
I switched from Chrome to MS Edge and don’t have that YouTube ad-blocking issue with uBlock anymore. Other than that, MS Edge works exactly like Chrome.
MS Edge is Chrome, with a slight MS reskin.
If you see an ad, close the tab.
firefox and ublock origin.
Literally the only way they will learn. I really don’t understand how we as a society have accepted ads as a necessary evil. We all hate them, but we all also make them work. It’s horrible.
It kinda is a necessary evil, if you want free content at least. Especially for a website like youtube where you need to host millions of large videos 24/7. That shit ain’t cheap, and even google can’t make money out of thin air. Not that I’m defending youtube or anything, charging $8 a month for premium lite but still giving you ads is insane. Paid services should never have ads.
My problem isn’t with ads, but rather the type of ads used. Like I said a moment ago, I don’t think paid services should ever have ads of any kind. But for free websites, a few side banner ads are fine in my book, while ads in the middle of a page or popup ads or video ads (especially unskippable ones) are a no-go. Essentially anything that doesn’t interrupt what I’m doing is usually something I’m okay with.
It’s going to take a big cultural shift to get enough people to pay content creators through subscriptions to compete with ad-driven models.
Eventually YouTube’s hubris will cross the line where enough people will just assume the ads are so bad it’s not worth trying to watch a video. As somebody with technical means and no tolerance for ads I’m astonished more people aren’t there yet.
How much do we need to pay though? Most content creators I see have their patreon around $7 CDN/mo. Add even a couple and you’re now at the cost of a streaming subscription with much more content. I would have no problem paying content creators if the fees were more reasonable, but right now I only subscribe to a couple.
Should a creator’s patreon drop in price to $1 or $2 a month, or should the viewer pay a small fee per view? What new monetization system would make sense where the consumer doesn’t have an unaffordable pile of subscriptions, but the creators still get paid a fair rate for their effort?
That $7/myth also likely involves 30% platform fee surcharges. If there were more Peertubes and similar federated or community-owned models the fee could lower as more money goes directly to the creators.
If there was an easy solution more people would be doing it already. Just food for thought.
Nebula seems pretty cool, it’s basically a bunch of YouTubers mirroring their youtube content and making original videos for a paid streaming service with no ads. That’s one way of doing it
Yeah. I use Nebula and go out of my way to watch there whenever possible. The app isn’t great, but I still recommend it.
I’ve been wondering for a while where the point of diminishing returns is. Surely, at some point, ads become aggressive enough to have an adverse effect on advertisers?
I often wonder how ads of any kind have ever worked, unless it was an ad for something we had already planned on buying.
Before their media blitz campaign, Hormel’s Spam was eaten in perhaps 20% of households; after the campaign it was closer to 70%.
Ads do work, if you do them right. People go for what they’ve heard of over what they haven’t.
Ads are super effective. If you have something to buy, but you don’t know much about it, you will tend towards buying the thing that was advertised to you more often than not just because you are more familiar with it over other things. You might not stick with it, but being the first thing someone tries is huge.
I don’t know why my brain said this was memeable, but here we are
Repetition brings familiarity and familiarity leads to trust for the vast majority of humans. It is the reason that campaign signs works, why brand names are so valuable, and why popularity tends to increase exponentially when it works.
Most ads are just intended to get you to remember the thing they are selling.
Well, this abstract says it’s about 20% effective over not advertising but this is a meta analysis and isn’t focused exclusively on internet ads.
The baked in biases being that the authors are “a German chaired professor of marketing at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany” and his research assistant.
i know what im about to do is beyond the pale on lemmy but here it is anyway. for youtube, they have to spend money to host the content and deliver it. you can pay a subscription fee to enable them to do that. they have ads on there for people who expect free shit forever
Are these “we all” people you talking about are in the same room with us right now? I don’t really think that would apply to all of us.
All these sites monitor engagement, they walk the line between maximum ads and users. If we decrease the users, they’ll decrease the ads to try and keep us.
LOL, nah. If we decrease the users, they’ll increase the ads to try to compensate for declining revenue. They believe they have all the power and don’t give a fuck what we think.
Classic business death spiral. Same thing is happening in electricity providers everywhere. Prices too high, more people go to solar, reduces their demand (revenues), so they increase their prices to compensate… higher prices means more people choose solar, and around it goes.
They’ll just insert bots who’ll comment generic, soulless things to say instead. “OMG This product amazed me!” or “I cannot BELIEVE how nobody discovered this sooner!” all the while artificially inflating numbers.
caused youtube views count to drop
oh no… anyway
If the Google war on ad blocking meant the ad blockers accidently blocked something everyone wants its still Google fault.
Everything was fine until Google decided to change how everything works over and over again to get people to watch the awful ads they let on their platform.
Googlees don’t “let” ads on their platform. Ads are the entire reason for the existence of their platform.
They could hire some people to vet the ads.
A company taking responsibility for the ads they serve? That sounds like communism to me!
Lemme try and feel sorry for my cartoonishly rich tech overlords real quick…
also it seems too convenient for them for this to happen just after they removed ad blockers from chrome…
Something that I’ve been confused about ever since people have been talking about this, is that there didn’t seem to be a change of views from mobile devices. Like, I know that adblockers are less common on mobile devices because most people either don’t know they are available or aren’t using browsers that have/support (good) adblockers. But, was there really no noticeable change at all?
There was. Some channels even saw most of their decline from mobile/TV viewers.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that wasn’t also related to the adblocker issue, though. How the algorithm reacted to the dramatic change in views could have made waves that saw channels de-recommended or caused it to ignore sections of a viewer’s watch history and thus the recommendations shown to them as well.
With the algorithm everything gets tied together so much that any disruption can have unpredictable effects.
Do you have a reference for that? I haven’t seen any channels that saw noticable decline in non desktop viewership
Inside Games claims a 50% drop in views from July. PC users were 27% of their views then and is now down to 21%, but that alone can’t account for the drastic drop in viewership overall. Video on it here:
The number of ads I had popping up while trying to read that article isn’t discouraging me from using adblockers.
This is actually one of my favorite websites to browse on desktop through my VPN and extreme DNS blocking solution. The console just fills with blocked content and JavaScript errors, it really warms my heart.
