Interesting Links for 28-10-2023

[andrewducker]

1. 0-100Kph in 1 second looks...exciting!

(tags:electricity cars acceleration video impressive )

2. YouTube start blocking people who block its ads

(tags:YouTube advertising adblock )

Comments

[channelpenguin]

1. Cheers for that. Most entertaining!

2. Seems fair enough to me. YT is seemingly still one of the better ways for creators to make money, and a paid version is available (which I have). I should, however, look up the details of how much of the subscription revenue gets through to the creators and how it's divided between them...)

[andrewducker]

I also pay for YouTube. Considering how much the kids and I use it it seems pretty good value for money for me.

[draigwen]

I should probably pay for YouTube but I put up with the ads. I don't like the principle of ad blockers - I'm getting a service for free and ads keep the service going and give income to the creators (my favourite YouTuber gives all the ad revenue to charity).

[simont]

I'd really like to see some talk about ads that tries to address a lot of different perspectives. This kind of rhetoric about "supporting authors" seems so inadequate.

What does it mean to "block" an advert? Certainly if I convince my browser to refrain from even downloading it from the Youtube web server, that counts. OK, what if my browser downloads it but doesn't run it? What if it runs the JS code (I assume there is some), and lets that communicate back to its server whatever "yes, arrived successfully" confirmation it was going to send, but the browser doesn't display the audio or video, and pretends to the JS that it did? What if it displays the ad but I mute the TV (not the browser, so it can't tell I did that) and get up to make a cup of coffee while it plays silently in the wrong room? What if I do see the ad, but would not in a million years buy what it's offering, because it's obviously useless or irrelevant to me or I don't trust the advertiser to genuinely provide what they claim? What if I'm so disgusted by the ad, or driven to distraction by its incessant repetitions, that I outright resolve to avoid that brand, and buy from the competitors instead if I ever do need one of those objects?

Obviously, Youtube's point of view is that they just want their revenue from the advertisers, and don't care whether the advertisers in turn make money from the adverts, as long as they can't point the finger of blame at Youtube when they don't. So from their point of view, in the immediate moment, as long as the advertiser doesn't end up with proof in their web server logs that I blocked the advert, they're happy, and so are the individual video creators who I'm thereby "supporting".

But supposing I respond to this by moving to a blocking model in which I download the advert and then don't display it? I presume Youtube would be happy for the moment. But practically speaking, sooner or later advertisers are going to start figuring it out if a lot of people do that; and morally speaking, if Youtube are spinning not blocking your ads as a moral imperative, then that would seem hypocritical. If they're going to be moral about this, they surely ought by the logic of their own position to be equally against that less detectable form of blocking, and the slippery slope is going to start ruling those out too, eventually wanting you not to even look away from the screen. That seems like far-fetched SF dystopianism (indeed surely there must be no end of examples of exactly that in dystopian SF), but I do remember a few years ago in the real world some TV exec saying that it was wrong to leave the room in TV advert breaks – suggesting that if you wanted to watch a thing lasting longer than your bladder, you were morally or legally obliged to go to the loo during the thing you specifically sat down for so as not to miss a moment of the stuff you didn't want.

And what about the obligations in the other direction? One major reason why adverts are unpleasant is that they're the same. Damn. Ones. Over. And. Over. Again. Perhaps the first time I found out that some particular kind of product was even a thing, it was actually interesting; having decided I have no need for that product in my life, I'm now going to hear about it every half hour for the next year, and someone's telling me it's morally wrong to want to get that constant yammering out of my face. The more advertisers insist on their rights to show me stuff I didn't ask for, the more they should have a corresponding obligation to not make them tedious and infuriating to the point of a mental health hazard. Ditto for any other reason an advert might be deleterious to someone's mental health or just their blood pressure, such as the usual range of social-justice fails.

But instead, everyone always addresses these tiny little corners of the situation, implicitly treating the rest as outside their scope.

[andrewducker]

Twitter and Facebook both let you block a specific advert (or, indeed, advertiser).

I'm not sure about YouTube, as I pay for that and so don't see ads.

I'm generally in favour of me being the customer, as it makes it marginally more likely that the company will be focussed on people like me rather than advertisers when it comes to making their decisions.

[andrewducker]

Oh, and I assume there are no morals involved.
The issue is that if nobody watches the adverts then the value of them drops to zero, and they are YouTube's main source of income.

[simont]

No morals involved: of course I'm sure you're right that there are no morals involved in the reasoning of the executives, but the messaging looks moral to me:

"Ads on YouTube help support the creators you love and let billions of people around the world use the streaming service"

Translation: if you don't do your bit, look at all those fluffy kittens who will be hurt. That wording is intended as an appeal to morals.

[andrewducker]

Or an appeal to pay up or creators won't be able to create and you won't get any more videos.

[errolwi]

Main source of direct income maybe, but the data about what and how you watch is also of considerable value.

[andrewducker]

Only because it increases the value of the adverts.

[errolwi]

Throughout the Google ad ecosystem, not just YT.

[andrewducker]

Good point!

[bens_dad]

I had the impression that advertisers only pay when the ad is clicked on. If (still) so, as long as your browser isn't clicking on the ad (some spammers attempt to force this) ad-blocking is at least fair to the advertiser.

I suppose that model allows advertisers to make free brand-awareness campaigns, so it probably is no longer used.

[ninetydegrees]

2) What a joke. YT makes billions from ad revenue every year while it has a long of history of demonetizing videos from content creators for obscure reasons, making rules opaque or changing them on a whim (let's not talk about shadow banning) and ignoring appeals for weeks (when you manage to get an answer from a real human being that is), not paying creators their ad revenue for months, and generally screwing content creators over and over. Alphabet has no shame but lots of greed.

[calimac]

2) The whole advertising model is based on the assumption that it's worth the advertisers' money to show these ads, that they will entice enough people to buy their products to outweigh the millions who are instead irritated the hell by them, as it witnessed by the popularity of ad-blockers, and other customs of that nature (e.g. skipping over ads on recorded tv programs).

The assumption strikes me as extremely dubious, but if it were ever realized to be false, the entire economy would collapse, so it can't be questioned.

[andrewducker]

I agree.

I assume that they know how many people click through to their site, and how many of them then go on to buy things. But I'm willing to bet that a lot of them are taking it on trust.

[haggis]

Equally, people believe they are immune to propaganda, including advertising but there is plenty of evidence that they really aren't.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely.

(And also, even if you are there are many many other people who aren't.)

[calimac]

It doesn't matter how susceptible people are to propaganda if they've undertaken strenuous efforts to avoid seeing it in the first place.

[channelpenguin]

Martech is a thing. I've worked a little in the area. There can be immense and hyper nerdy stats analysis of the effectiveness of campaigns, of click through ratios, of one ad Vs another, of different types of targeting... Etc etc. There are an immensity of tools and techniques to support all this.

Nobody competent would, (or should ) "take it on trust". People might, but then their business is bleeding money. Not long term survivable.

Effective and efficient sales and marketing is the only way anyone will make money. It doesn't matter how good your product is if nobody knows about it and nobody buys it.

(This is why the world depresses me and I don't want to run any kind of business or even really do much music any more. Or dream of any kind of life that's not directly swapping my time and skills for money implementing someone else's dreams)

[channelpenguin]

Not just analysis - also experiments!

[elf]

I have not seen the unblockable ads on Youtube. I have not gotten warnings about them. I have no idea if they're rolling it out slowly, or I avoid it by having a very weird account status.

(I'm technically logged in when I look at Youtube but the account is one a friend and I set up when we were planning to do livestreaming. It's not linked to my gmail. It's a shared account of some sort.)

UBlock origin is working fine for me, in Firefox. I don't use Youtube on a phone. I also don't have subscriptions and don't use Youtube's main page to find things - I watch recommended videos or specific things I search for and then close the tab.

My daughter used to subscribe to Youtube to support the creators she liked. And then the creators started yelling at subscribers, because apparently they got subscriber income separate from ad-based income and they believed the ad income was more. And also subscribing didn't work right-- she didn't get notified of her subscriptions uploading new vids, and sometimes didn't even see them when going to their channels; she had to do weird hunt-them-down shenanigans to find the new stuff. So she stopped subscribing.

I will consider whitelisting sites from adblock when the host site takes legal responsibility for the contents of the ads they're serving. As long as they react to complaints about "this ad causes migraines" or "this ad has inappropriate/TOS-violating content" or "this ad is full of lies" with "well, ah, sorry; that's the fault of the advertiser; we'll see about blocking that ad maybe" - I'll continue to block them all.

[andrewducker]

Every time I whitelist a site from ads to see what it's like it turns out to be utterly toxic with them visible.

[channelpenguin]

I used to work in server-side ad Tech. Server side ad insertion, (SSAI for short). As used by streaming TV channels. The (targeted) ads are stitched into the stream before you even get it at marker points which are in the "original" base stream. Depending on exact details, it might or might not be obvious in a way that can be naively "spotted" by player software, and hence "blocked". Pause, wind forward can be also disabled during ads, maybe wind back. I'll assume sufficiently trained (actual) AI could detect ads, but it might not be possible to "skip", rather than just blank out for the ad duration. At least not live.


I didn't work (much) in the player end, and I'm struggling to recall how we did our final testing but we could spot the ads in the browser network calls. The ad markers in the source streams are standard (ish) for the 2 main stream types (DASH AND HLS) and you could maybe also catch the change of domain to the ad CDN.

It would probably be trivial, however, to block users who never play the ads, as the statistics of how many ads you start and how far through you get are standard statistics which are recorded.

There's enough developers in the field that finding a few who know how and to what extent it's possible to get round the ads would not be hard (better than I, because I was pretty much just back end). Getting caught would be extremely unpleasant for their career though, so I doubt many would risk it.

(Just like despite that I had unfettered access to a vast array of films and series and full ability to render to a file from them, I never did).

[zz]

1) i need that suction thingy, my car wheel spins just moving off in sport mode :D

2) i used to religiously mute ads on tv, and have had ablock on browsers for as long as it's existed. i think i hate the distraction of ads as much as the content of them. they're always so jarring. and i resent someone demanding i spend money, especially when they're lying to me about how good/unique something is.

twitch started injecting ads into the video stream, so the only automated workaround is to just hide the stream while the ad is playing. and if it decides to play a preroll ad on any channel you open, when all you want to do is see if the stream is something you're interested in, then the result is "guess i'm not watching twitch today"

thankfully ublock's lists are still working for me on youtube. it's always been an arms race, and will continue to be. the adblock side aren't simply going to give up.

[ninetydegrees]

What works for me on Twitch since their ads are very hard to block like you said is using a VPN with an integrated adblocker (this is a paying feature of the one I use but other ones may offer it for free).

[movingfinger]

The in-video ads on YT are too numerous, too long, and too irrelevant. I'm not watching three ads to see a five-minute video (that could have been a one-paragraph blog post, which is another problem) about e.g. how to change the air filter or for one look at a song or trendy item.

[channelpenguin]

"that could have been a one paragraph blog post". Oh my yes. Video is too slow and not appropriate for every use.

Good luck finding that one paragraph these days though - it'll be 10 pages of LLM-generated waffle, with what you maybe want buried far down and probably subject to "hallucinations". (How I hate that word. Lies , bullshit, wrong - all much better)

[yalovetz]

I use custom filters in uBlock Origin to customise the YouTube user interface and block actual YouTube content, not just ads. I filter out upcoming videos and shorts from my subscriptions page. I do this because I get overwhelmed with too much information easily and YouTube doesn't have any inbuilt mechanisms for filtering that stuff. So unless and until they create a user interface that I find manageable, I am going to continue to use an adblocker on their site (and have already found a custom filter that get arounds the new ad-blocker blocks).

[bens_dad]

1. 3.8g - with my fainting history I will need a pressure suit if I am in control.

They must trust the brakes to have a car parked at the end of the track.

I would like to see it do a lap if the circuit, though it might not be fast.
--
100km/h electric cars: how very nineteenth century - though trains seem to have been faster.