YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers
9to5google.com259 points by iamflimflam1 11 hours ago
259 points by iamflimflam1 11 hours ago
https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375
It seems like this statement from YouTube[1] and this Github issue (referenced by granzymes[2]) have key information being missed by a lot of commenters. From YouTube: > Viewers Using Ad Blockers & Other Content Blocking Tools: Ad blockers and other extensions can impact the accuracy of reported view counts. Channels whose audiences include a higher proportion of users utilizing such tools may see more fluctuations in traffic related to updates to these tools. Quoting granzymes: > According to the GitHub issue, YouTube didn’t change anything. There are two endpoints that can be used to attribute a view. One is called multiple times throughout a video playback and has been in the easylist privacy filter for years. The other is called at the start of a playback, and was just added to the list (the timing lines up with the reports of view drops from tech YouTubers). Source from the GitHub issue for easylist: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme... Thanks for lifting up my comment. It’s amazing how quickly people want to point fingers at YouTube for something they weren’t involved in. Someone even relied to your comment implicitly assuming that YouTube cares about conditioning views on whether a user has an adblocker enabled when what happened is easylist added the view counter API to their privacy list. > point fingers at YouTube for something they weren’t involved in YouTube monetizes based on view count. They also send the data to the client. That client data is in anyway involved, and could be blocked, is YouTube’s design problem. A number of YouTubers have made the claim that their views were affected but not revenue, so it seems like the monetization is based on ad-watching views at least. YouTube immediately pointed fingers at creators by saying that certain audiences are more likely to use ad blockers. :) That's not pointing fingers but an objective fact. Technical audiences are more likely to use adblockers than the general population. If your channel caters to them you will be disproportionately affected. This makes sense in principle, but is not really what this is primarily about. Or at least I'm not aware of such excessive disparities, and haven't heard this being the primary angle. Consider Charlie (penguinz0 / MoistCritikal). Hardly a techtuber. Despite this, he has seen a drop in computer-originating views to the tune of 1.4M (avg, eyeballed) -> 800K (avg, eyeballed): https://youtu.be/8FUJwXeuCGc?t=290 Lots of people use adblockers, sure, even those not terminally online and tech enthusiast. But to have nearly half the (computer-originating) views evaporate? https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users Even from that perspective though, what would be the dominant effect then is the share of computer-originating views compared to other origins, rather than a disparity in adblock use habits for the given audience. It seems pretty likely for well over half for a channel like that to use ad blockers. At this point the "peanut gallery" of the web is essentially just a firehose of misinformation, best avoided. Not two minutes before this I read some comment confidently stating that the last time Apple offered iPhone leather cases was for iPhone 11. Why not just look for sources for factual information instead of avoiding all of it? To be fair it's mental effort that you now have to expend when you didn't before. I stopped reading the news because it just became too tiring. Not saying it's right or wrong. It's just - I understand. I don't think there was ever a time when critical thinking and fact checking wasn't needed. Nobody has the time to do deep dives into everything, but the more important something is to you, or the more likely it is to impact your life the more it's worth investing the time it takes to do a couple web searches. Today CNN says that Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro has skin cancer. Is that true? Damned if I know. Will I spend the time trying to verify that? Nope. The speed and spread of nonsense is accelerating. Within a day the story about youtube view counts spread with hundreds of angry comments about youtube and enshitification. People are getting ragebaited repeatedly on a scale that is new. Not that misinformation in general is new Accurate but I don’t think it’s new. It’s a property of human intelligence called “hallucination” where facts are made up. I don’t know about this leather thing but the participants on non-technical forums like Reddit or HN frequently do this. Seems like a balanced approach, people can watch videos with adblockers but it won't count towards youtube's public facing metrics. Makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched, not how much money YouTube made off of it. They’re pretending people care about their internal metrics, when people really do not. Maybe the creator, but again, they’re probably also just interested in eyeball counts. It’s dumb in almost every direction I can imagine. The only one that makes sense is if you’re simply at war with adblockers and you’re trying to turn the public tide of opinion against them. The view counter isn't for you. It's merely a convenience that you're showed it at all. View counts are for monetization. If a view isn't monetized, why count it? Purely foe vanity? You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source and no other reason. View metrics and monetization are what count, not your subjective experience. YouTube does not care one tiny bit about how much you like the site or interface or what you think of the view counter. Videos are often monetized via sponsor placements in the videos themselves. The creator of the video would like an accurate view count to report to their sponsors. This is completely separate from the YouTube platform ads and monetization which is what the ad blockers are blocking. This is the best counterargument I've seen for why YouTubers might be vexed by this, however I've felt it was pretty fair to expect that adblocked views don't really "count" in the "game" that you can argue YouTube is operating with the "View Count" metric and therefore I don't see much room for anyone to feel indignant or wronged. Imagine a creator whose viewers all watched with ads blocked (and without YT Premium either). That creator is, objectively speaking not partnering with Google in any way, they're just using the platform as a free CDN. So the failure of Google to provide that person with accurate metrics for him to operate his business (that Google isn't a part of) isn't all that offensive. So someone losing visibility to their "views" if it's because of non-monetized views (adblocked ones) seems proportionally fair. There's always self-hosting your videos, but yes, that's expensive. It's a tradeoff the content creator has to make: A cut of your revenue + a ton of content restrictions, in exchange for discoverability + free CDN. I can't reply to your deeper comment but there is a youtube specific extension that blocks ads to sponsor placements by skipping them. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo... Has 2 million users which isn't a ton but just mentioning that it is used and it works well. There is also kind of a built in sponsorblock for YouTube on mobile. If you double tap to skip 5s repeatedly, a button quickly pops up to skip ahead (not explicitly about sponsor segments, but I'm sure this is what it is used for 99% of the time). FYI this is a premium-only feature. It's one that I am very thankful for. I pay a pretty penny for youtube and I don't appreciate "creators" end-running around that to peddle their shitty AG1 supplements or woodworking tools I can't buy in my country. And this ships as a plugin to some unofficial YouTube player. The actual number is far higher. It's for sponsors too so yes a total view count is important since creators use views to negotiate deals. I have adblock[0], but I still watch sponsor spots. 0: I just side step this entirely these days by paying for premium. Why should sponsor care sent viewers who block their advertising? I’ve been a premium member for about 15 years. Ad blockers and Premium don’t block embedded sponsorships in the videos themselves, which are a common way for creators to monetize their videos. Some do. With crowd funded submissions on where the placement starts and ends. There's a new skip method for premium members (which I have) where you can skip commonly skipped sections as recorded by other users. For example- if a video has a section about their sponsor from 3:30 to 4:10 and I press the right seek button twice around 3:30 the jump will be to 4:10. It also displays an alert that it's using the feature. If I understand well, my view is not counted as a YouTube Premium subscriber. I’m not sure that anybody is happy with that. Also there is zero good reason to have a separate API for this. Even Google knows this, because Google Analytics has an adblocker proof solution for at least a decade. It's counted as a view, and beyond that, in general the content creator gets a higher payout from Premium viewers than from ad viewing users. I'd worry that if this is really caused by an adblocker, it's possible YT uses these same view counting mechanism that's being blocked to increment their Premium views, meaning Premium subscribers who don't explicitly turn their blocker off on YouTube could be being undercounted. If so that should be fixed, for Premium viewership, as that's not really fair to anyone. This is a bit too blunt a look at it. YouTube exists as an ecosystem with increasing competition. View and subscriber counts are their core incentive and feedback systems they have with the actual producers that make their whole ecosystem work. Without those there's no real reason for people to put videos there. This as an open and celebrated system drives producers to advertise for YouTube via the almost-compulsory every-video mention of liking and subscribing and forwarding videos to friends. Youtube is well aware of this, hence things like the iconic long running physical play button trophy delivery system. I'd also say more broadly that making such sweeping claims for YouTube as a collective entity not caring at all about viewers is too reductive. It's more defensible and relatable to claim that, though there may be many people working for YouTube because they deeply care about a mission of democratizing multimedia publishing, the incentives and structures around it being a PBC often lead to decisions which drown out that care from corporate heads who are more profit than mission driven. > View counts are for monetization Agree, however view counts, i.e. metrics tracked by YT, or by sponsors,creators in fancy dashboards isn't the view counter we are shown and nobody is questioning how those are implemented. The View Counter means very specific UI component in YT interface shown to regular users. > view counter isn't for you Disagree, View counter is a important decision making input along with the thumbnail, title and duration of the video on if a user will click on the video to watch them. It is in effect an advertisement for the video. If that wasn't the case, then YouTube wouldn't be showing them in every list view and next to every thumbnail. When the numbers no longer represent what the users think they represent I would say it is not far from false advertising. A fair amount of people on here and I have both YT Premium and also use some adblocker, should our views be counted or not according to this point of view? . I'm so glad other people here pay for premium because on Tiktok and Reddit a common joke is how few people pay for YT. My Verizon cell phone plan offers it at a slightly discounted $10 a month. For a completely ad free (ads from Youtube) experience it's well worth it considering how many car and tech videos I watch. It also offers a higher bitrate 1080p option on some videos which is a cherry on top. Yeah it's absurd to me how much people bitch about YouTube advertising and don't pay. To me, either you don't watch enough YouTube for the complaints to be warranted, or you do watch a lot, and you're just torturing yourself to save $15 and blaming YouTube for your choice. It's like complaining about a Quarter Pounder "not coming with cheese" and constantly trying to steal cheese, when you could just pay the dollar and get cheese every time. >You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source How are these two statements not contradictions? Perhaps then you should try to convince EasyList to remove the view counter from their block list? This wasn't a change YouTube made, this was adblockers choosing not to let YouTube track views for privacy purposes. Well it’s not like youtube couldn’t technically track the views even with adblockers if they wanted. The video is still being streamed after all, you don’t need the client to call another endpoint to know whether it’s streaming the video. Google built a system that tracked video views. Users installed a browser extension that intentionally breaks this tracking for privacy reasons. Why should Google do anything? They're not the one that broke it, and these users don't want to be tracked! Because it’s hurting creators, not viewers? Google already doesn't pay out creators for views with blocked ads, no advertiser is going to pay for ads that were never shown. The view counter doesn't matter to that. Perhaps Youtube could enforce tougher blocking of ad blockers to support creators better. I don't know, it's not obvious to me that YouTube should prioritize the creator's desire to track users over the user's desire not to be tracked. Especially in terms of baked in ads from the creator, whose terms are based on views, separate from YouTube revenue. Why does anyone not financially motivated care about how many views a video gets? Use the like function if you want I guess . It makes sense to have the view count only show views that could be useful for ad revenue ... This way you can be honest with advertiser's about roughly how many eyeballs they can expec5 If you claim your counting views while simultaneoudly andvwithout disclosure don't count views of people using an adbkocker even so you could then thagvis deceiving. If it was the case I second waht the above poster hinted at: seems like a strategy to manipulate public discourse by using influencers frustration over where it hurts them (their purse) enhanced by the haunting sensation of loosing control (since they cannot know how and if they are negatively impacted by what - which makes the desire to find the cause of effect/guilty oarty/or a scapegoat) in order to disincentivice adblockers.
If the articles assumptions are correct, and it is beyond googles engineering teams to fix that issue (which seems unreasonabke to assume) theb that would be a pretty (and petty) malign and antisocial policy to pursue. (Don't be evil once was a thing for good reason) What you're ignoring is that this was a change to an ad blocker[0], not a change to the site. Google did not implement a change to stop counting views. An ad blocker intentionally[1] choosing to block the long-standing API calls used for the view statistics. How would you propose Google fix this, when there is an adversarial team in control of what requests many browser may make, and are choosing to use it to break the site? [0] Or rather, an URL block list used by many ad blockers. [1] It was almost certainly an honest mistake originally. But when the blocklist authors were informed of the problem and chose to not roll back the change, it became intentional. Google could improve the way they serve ads. Like, one ad per “ad session”, no 5 minute ads that are longer than the video you are trying to watch, etc. They are trying to increase ad revenue, but by increased Nguyen ads and making it harder to skip them it ironically is causing much worse practices such as ad blocking. Why are we not counting financial reasons? Yeah, it’s a number both creators and advertisers looking to strike a direct advertising/sponsorship deal can use as an easy point of reference, which cannot readily be modified by the creator. But to your point, the site is borderline social media nowadays when you consider all the features. Bragging rights for sure. Many channels are parasocial relationships, and that number matters a lot to both the creator and the viewers. It’s also mildly informational. If I see a completely out-of-whack suggestion in my feed, but it has a billion views, suddenly I know why it’s in my feed. There are probably other reasons. I remember there was ongoing reporting about a race between two channels on YouTube racing to have… I dunno, the first video with a billion views or something. The number of video views for Gangnam Style was something everyone was talking about. Plus, it’s nice to have. That’s reason enough imo. Why would anyone just watching videos on YouTube care how many people have seen the video? You enjoy it or you don’t, how many other people have seen it doesn’t change the viewing experience at all. The only people who would care are YT themselves, the creator, other creators, and advertisers. I don’t know why they even publicly display the view count. > Why would anyone just watching videos on YouTube care how many people have seen the video? For the same reason online shops show "Most popular" items and ads say "trusted by X people worldwide". People on average apparently like feeling being part of a bigger crowd. If that doesn't make sense to you, you're probably in the minority (which by that logic shouldn't bother you). The comment you replied to explained that nothing was changed on the YouTube side. This was an adblocker choosing to start block a non-ads, non-tracking, samesite API call that had probably been in place for like a decade. So it's quite amazing that even with that context you still managed to hijack that into a discussion about the merits of what Google did with this "balanced approach" bait. This isn't a balanced approach! It's not an approach at all! It is the ad blocker willfully choosing to break totally normal and benign site functionality. Google had no agency in this, and doesn't have much recourse. The comments that really get me are the ones putting the onus onto Youtube to refactor their view approach to "just" count it from the backend. Rhymes with consumers asking gamedevs to add multiplayer to games. There is no balancing happening here. YouTube needs to make an API call to attribute a view to a video, and easylist started blocking that API call. YouTube was perfectly happy a month ago to count views for users that were blocking ads, and presumably remains happy to do so. The only thing that changed is easylist blocked the API. > The only thing that changed is easylist blocked the API. Wonder if there's a good reason they started blocking that API? You can still have in-video sponsor spots, in fact, most of the creators have them. Viewership is an important metric to those sponsors. This looks like an additional incentive to channel owners to somehow convince their audience against the ad blocker use. Makes sense, better than trying to win an unwinnable arms race against the blocker maintainers. But this is not Google's doing? Adblockers are not sending requests to increment the view count, so yt doesn't increment the view count. I'd argue use the adblocker, but if you want to ensure views are counted, add an exception for the URL in question, for example [1]. I hope by admitting defeat and shifting the blame for the numbers to creators, they also stop this ridiculous fight with adblockers. I'm sure they could allocate the investments in this elsewhere. Jeff Geerling has been sleuthing into this lately too - my biggest takeaway is that it's only viewer counts that are suffering, he's not seen revenue drop which is key. Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :) https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/digging-deeper-youtub... Many youtubers have sponsorships though, and their viewership stats come into play when negotiating with potential sponsors. I guess if everyone was hit equally across the board then those sponsors will eventually adjust to the new metrics, but I assume some genres have more tech-savvy audiences which are more likely to use ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how evenly distributed this penalty falls. It's wild to me that advertisers are willing to use first party metrics. In any other media business you'd have a certified third party ratings agency to give "audience size" metrics some legitimacy. Youtube has no incentive to accurately report this data and no apparent accreditation in their methodology. Google in general have been resistant to letting anyone see how effective their ads truly are - and most studies that get close tend to show extremely questionable efficacy results. If Google shows everyone how ineffective ads actually are, they’d crumble. This is very much not true: Google has a bunch of options for measuring ad effectiveness, and when I was there (until three years ago) it was very hard to get advertisers to use them. The two main options advertisers have are: * Brand Lift Studies: split audience into treatment and control, use surveys on a small fraction of participants to measure impact * Conversion Lift: again split audience into treatment and control, compare downstream actions like purchases ("conversions") These both work on YouTube IIRC. I am not surprised google has many tools to tell you how great google is doing at using google's data for you. Anyways, I was mostly referring to sales at physical locations; I assume it's pretty viable to build a system to figure out if someone who previously bought a lot of shein is now buying a lot of temu. If Google didn't want people to see "ineffective ads actually are" why would they build and push Brand Lift Studies and Conversion Lift? Offline purchases are harder, of course, but pretty sure you can still do this: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9994849 Click campaigns/conversions and user codes are more important than pure impressions. >It's wild to me that advertisers are willing to use first party metrics. I agree, and find it even wilder that first party metrics from Meta and Google are trusted by most major advertisers (including ad agencies). I'm talking about six-seven figure budgets spent without any third party validation. I've seen some studies on click fraud[0], but when advertisers are effectively choosing from a duopoly that has limited incentives not to lie in their metrics, I find it strange that there are no popular, widespread and accessible independent validation tools. There's a whole industry of independent validation tools - DoubleVerify, IAS, Human, etc. Advertisers have 2 options for who to place ads with: Google and Facebook. When you have a monopoly, the customer has to take what it can get. Facebook has overstated its views and clicks for years to charge advertisers more, and faced no consequences for doing so. This is largely true because this is where the largest volume of traffic comes from; however, it's not exclusive to these two by any means. There are some pretty big Supply Side Platforms and aggregators out there for advertisers to use. This comes into play a lot more often on podcasts and streaming audio, in particular, consider the fleet of Amazon Alexa devices out there. Many of the advertisers that sell on these platforms are quite familiar with buying ads directly from "old school" media companies. So they have the competence and familiarity to be put off by the metrics but are apparently not in a position to force Google and Facebook to match standards used in other contexts. To me the wild thing is that this ad revenue model could ever have been profitable in the first place. The automated “Skip Ahead” button (which I use daily) is already hostile to sponsorships. I would not be at all surprised to see them hitting sponsors on multiple fronts. Google is not getting a cut of that sponsorship money. They don't care if it wrecks your deal. They want your ONLY source of income to be Youtube. If you're fully beholden to Youtube, there will be no escape, no way for you to leave and take your viewership with you. Remember how Youtube used to be a nice cage with lots of air holes and fun toys to occupy you? Light ad enforcement, tools to help you build your viewership etc? People are starting to feel the pinch of those being removed. That cool room is starting to look like what it really is--an industrial cage. It's interesting that I just read an inteview with YouTube CEO (https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-youtube-ceo-n...) who mentioned that YouTube fully intends to start getting a cut out of that sponsorship money ("to align interests better"). I think it's less ominous than that. Skip Ahead is only for Premium subscribers. The logic probably being native-ads/sponsorships are in fact ads, and Premium users are paying for an ad-free experience. > They want your ONLY source of income to be Youtube. I’m not sure. They want influencers to make profit using their platform, so they want to make them rich. On the viewcount, a skipped sponsor still looks like a view. No sponsor is going to look at the proportion of watching each part of the video, they just care about the view counter. What Youtube may want, though, is for paying customers to be able to skip ads. “If you pay you should have no ads”. Truly one of the best updates they've made to the YouTube app on Apple TV (and presumably other tv operating systems) of all time. Just one tap of the remote and we can skip all of the "sponsored by Made In" nonsense. Edit: I guess this is a YouTube premium feature? > The automated “Skip Ahead” button (which I use daily) is already hostile to sponsorships Is it? If I proactively click skip, that means that sponsor is offering something of no use to me. As the sponsor, they successfully make an impression for a second or two anyway. And as a viewer that skip ahead button is much better than pressing right arrow button multiple times There's a shift in tone of voice or ham-fisted segue that gives it away before they even name the sponsor. I can usually click the button before they even name the sponsor. The brand recognition is worth something. I haven't been in the market for new headphones in a long time, but I still know the name Raycon from the bajillion sponsorships they do. Likewise with NordVPN and Raid: Shadowlegends. Never used any of them, don't really intend to, but I do know the name. Skipping sponsored segments is not necessarily a reflection of hostility. My wife has been subscribed to the Factor meal service for over three years, yet all of my favorite podcasts are constantly hawking it, and I don't particularly feel like sitting through 20 sales pitches a day for something I already purchased. There is unfortunately no way to communicate that information to either the channel owner or the sponsor. I'm always just amazed how damn long they can be. On some channels I watch they are 2 to 3 minutes long every video. It would be madness to sit through that. in video you can just hit a number to go to the next chunk 1,2,3,4,5 etc. just hit 8 or 9 if you want to see if there is anything of value in a 10 minute video that should have been 30 seconds, but youtube wants 10 minutes Surely YT know if a video has sponsored content and so can refuse to play the video - or even not suggest it - if the user is using adblockers? I'm guessing the viewers who now suddenly aren't being counted were already not contributing to revenue because they block ads. I pay for youtube. Payments from my views should come from my subscription payment. Ad blocking should be irrelevant in my case. It's not in their interest to solve this problem. YouTube is more than happy to pretend you watched nothing and therefore disburse nothing. To ensure my premium subscription dollars are making it to the creators I've now disabled uBO for the entire youtube domain. As long as your ad blocker isn't blocking the metrics endpoint YouTube relies on to determine whether you're actually watching a video, the youtuber gets paid. In fact, Youtubers make more revenue from Premium views vs ad supported views. Mate, you’ve taken the pains to configure your user agent to block tracking of views and then you’re complaining that views aren’t tracked. It’s got a nice well-defined API with a sane default and you’ve decided to override it with something else. That’s fine too, but now you’re complaining that you overrode it? As the old joke goes: “Doctor, it hurts when I do this” “Then don’t do it” You know full well that almost nobody expects their adblocker to block an *invisible view count incrementer". How is it youtube's fault that you have an extension breaking the app without your knowledge? This is just more evidence to the case that extensions shouldn't be allowed to tamper with applications. Why not? They block all the ad attribution companies that are doing this. Is it being first that makes the google one special? Or is youtube somehow more trustworthy than the rest of google? EasyList also blocks tracking. I agree that no one expects their ad blocker to block view counts. But EasyList is advertised as a tracking blocker as well. And true to form, they eventually merged a change to block more tracking. So this guy is upset that his tracking blocker blocked tracking and wants YouTube to find a way to circumvent the tracking blocker? The whole thing sounds bizarre. They impact individual channel revenue because so many channels have gone to sponsored ads, which automatic ad-blockers can't block (yet (1) ). The calibre of sponsor a channel can attract is impacted by the reported views from YouTube. (1) Hey, imagine I had a plugin that monitored the behavior of several viewers of each video and could collate where most people skipped a big chunk of video, then, oh I don't know, offered a feature where if lots of people skip one chunk, it'll automatically skip it for you when you're playing the video.... You're describing an existing plugin called SponsorBlock. IIRC it even has lots of options such as enabling you to allow/disallow self-sponsor segments (the creator promoting their own product), "like and subscribe" calls to action, shock-and-awe intros, podcast recaps, and several other segment types. YouTube has it built in now. We just need auto skip to be built in now Only for YT Premium users. But since premium views pay creators more it's less of an impact. If only there were some way that money in my pocket went to some of the people related to the things I like to watch. Some sort of premium service where YouTube could pay for a person to come to my house and collect money from me, and them give it to the people making videos, and then we won't have ads? Nah, that'll never work. do we know what happens if you run premium and an ad blocker together? I would hope they would still pay the creator for my views but I'm not sure now They pay creators more when a person with premium is watching their videos. Ad-blockers have no relevance in this case. Apparently ad blockers can interfere with key view metrics. Unclear what premium uses to disburse the 55% share that goes to creators; hopefully it's not those ones. I don't think it's likely that the ad blocker is interfering, because you need to be logged in to use premium. I really wish there was a little micro-donation button, using something like the lightning network. I'd smash the crap out of that for good videos. But YouTube would never support it because they wouldn't be able to insert themselves between the creator and consumer. It already exists: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10878910?hl=en Wow, so it does. I just checked. Most of my subscriptions apparently do not have it turned on. The one that I found that does have it turned on, it's hidden behind a hamburger menu that's located next to, you guessed it, an AI button. Nice to see Google prioritizing their crappy AI integration over their content creators getting paid. You can already "super thank" people in the comments I am being completely honest when I say I had no idea this even existed. As per my other comment, it’s very well hidden. Two concerns I have in the long-term: 1. It seems views from Premium users who use adblock might also not get counted—and I'm not sure if the revenue from a Premium view in that circumstance would be counted or not (more research needed). 2. YouTube's recommendation engine weights views heavily in the system, which means channels with a more technical, traditional desktop viewing audience (probably a substantial portion of HN users) will be most impacted, and will not be able to grow an audience to help fund projects, yadda yadda. YouTube creators with younger, mobile, less FOSS-y, and less tech-savvy audiences are therefore rewarded with more views/mindshare. I know some here are like "go get a REAL job, influencers are scum", but I think that discounts the helpful work of many tech creators. Not only in direct contributions to open source projects, but also in being a voice to balance out the paid 'product showcase' style videos for many tech products that come to market. In other words: if adblock users disincentivize creators like me from spending time and resources on YouTube, then video content will more quickly settle into the online magazine/news status quo, where 99% of the articles you read are just PR spin. Which you could argue would bring about YouTube's downfall earlier... or would lead us even more quickly to an Idiocracy-style society :D I'm not saying adblock is bad or wrong or anything—I can't stand the YT ad spam, so I pay for Premium. To each their own. In any case, YouTube shoulders some of the burden, but will be the main entity to profit in any scenario. Prior to getting Premium, YouTube was able to detect that I was watching a video (and nag me about premium as a way to get rid of ads). Since getting Premium, I haven't gotten the nag message. I run AdGuard (on a Mac). It has a filter log feature. Poking at the log while playing a video, I do see calls to ttps://{{clusterid?}}.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1758173247&... However, this call is not being blocked. I suspect that this is the "keep watching" feature that tracks where I am in various videos (switching from one logged in device to another keeps the same position). Watching the video all the way through, I don't see any requests relating to this getting blocked while on Premium. This feature is also likely more than sufficient data to attribute a view (and monetization of the view). There was also a call to ttps://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/log_event?alt=json that was not blocked. I do see some doubleclick.net links being blocked, thought that could be from any number of other pages I've got open. Going to an incognito session and pulling up the same video (Once Around Trappist 1)... There's now a call (that has gotten blocked) to ttps://www.youtube.com/api/stats/watchtime... That call was not something that I saw when logged into premium. This rule is described as "@@||www.youtube.com^$generichide (AdGuard Base filter)" If this leads to lower quality videos, due to change in incentives, for certain segments, then I would consider it a WIN for users. For the portion of users for whom the lower quality is not palatable, they will get their time back to spend on other things in life. This is all completely subjective of course. > I know some here are like "go get a REAL job, influencers are scum" Signing up for the creator's patreon or buying merch is the more widely adopted reaction by the those actually enjoying the content. > Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :) Except viewer counts are a factor for baked in ads. In this case, all the sleuthing and videos about the change are the probably the only thing that will alleviate/lessen the seemingly-worse ad rate negotiation position youtubers with less viewers suddenly find themselves in. Those buying baked in ads just need to find other ways to verify value. This is nothing new, no large company buys ads without checking how they really work (though many small companies would). There is someone who checks all those "how did you hear about us" responses asked at checkout - they want to know if the ad really provided value. Sure the TV stations tracked and reported ratings, but that is only one of the signs ad buyers look at, and it is one they only trust because they check and so would catch if it is manipulated. The ad business is far older than the internet and there is a lot of old knowledge that apples directly to the internet. Those buying backed in ads should be aware of and tracking such efforts. A lot of sponsors have shyed away from YouTube because of the fake views and botting problem. Some were paying big money to streamers with 20,000 live viewers. Even though 19000 of those were fake. The sponsor then sees the ad and did terribly and doesn't sponsor anyone else in the future. You're saying that YouTube implemented a change that significantly reduces creators' viewer counts but won't affect their revenue, and they haven't told creators? "Here, have a heart attack"? YouTube didn't change anything. The ad blockers recently started blocking the metric call for whatever reason. [flagged] It's in the github issue in OP: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme... From the GitHub issue it becomes clear that blocking happens by the EasyPrivacy blocklist. The blocked URL youtube.com/api/stats/atr is/can also be used for tracking users, this is why some are arguing that it legitimately on that blocklist. The tracking not malicious. YouTube has a legitimate interest to verify views, e.g. to recommend popular videos to others. If a view counter was increased by just invoking an API, view counts could be manipulated easily. Also see the video [1] from ... 13 years ago ... so it might be slighly outdated. Just slightly. YouTube showed me the same phishing ads depicting an AI version of the Canadian Prime Minister. Why should I not filter ads from a provider who is OK with people stealing from me? I find it so weird how we just accept the fact that ads can be for fake things and not blame YouTube/Google for those things. That was also my take when I first saw the FBI advice about using an adblocker. Like, yeah, it's good advice, but also why is no one being prosecuted for acting as an accessory if not accomplice to fraud? They're labeling their product as a search tool and then taking money to funnel users away from the thing they're searching for to scammers instead. Surely they are aware of their pure negligence in vetting business partners if the government is issuing warnings to citizens about their behavior? 30% of my YouTube ads are now a large fart sound followed by an AI generated old doctor talking for 15 minutes about some sketchy diet modification People in general have stopped trying to hold people accountable and have just accepted defeat. About 30% of the ads I see are that crypto scam. I’m sure I’ve seen it over 100 times. There are several variants with different people. I don’t understand how that scam is paying for the massive volume of ad time they’re getting. It must cost a fortune. I also get tons of French ads and I don’t speak French. You would think Google having all this amazing AI could moderate their YouTube ads.... But those crypto scams make them money. Morally, you should filter ads. If ads could be relevant, vetted, non-intrusive, and ancillary to the experience, all actions that are required to be performed by the ad platform Youtube/Google, then you wouldn't have much moral leg to stand on. Due to YT/G's moral failings to host a sufficiently serviceable platform for their product, your eyes, then your only real recourse outside adblocking is to buy a device and put on a separate network with no reasonably important traffic. I don't lose one bit of sleep knowing that adblocking prevents Google from externalizing their curation costs onto me. No, no, no. Morally you should stop using youtube. It's incredible how people mental gymnastics there way into a solution that provides themselves all the benefit and pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous. When you don't like something, you don't use it. It sends a clear message that you don't like the product/service. Using it and not compensating for it (because you actually do like it, just on your terms) is not moral or a good signal in anyway way, shape, or form. > Morally you should stop using youtube > When you don't like something, you don't use it. Morality in your approach is absolute, and it represents the best possible outcome. For all others stuck in the morass, you must navigate the BATNA. Hordes of people skipping ads is a reasonable price to pay for market monopoly. Oh how incredibly convenient. Plus, making ad blocking a channel owner's problem is kind of genius. Are views also decreasing on channels without ads enabled? Is it possible that some endpoint that needs to be hit to register a view is being blocked by privacy-related (not ad-related) lists that adblockers use? If the answer to both is no, maybe Google's intentionally punishing creators whose viewers use adblockers. But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation? > But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation? Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing" but they know it won't work if people see them as the source of the message. They want video makers to internalize their message, do what the boss wants on their own initiative, so Google only want to drop hints. 100%. They are trying to get YouTube a exclusion from the list, or make the list the non-default. I already know the next step is that the "community" is going to fork the list, and the forked list is going to be heavily advertised on YouTube channel as a way to support the channel. > Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing" Ah yes, the good old "don't copy that floppy" argument. The advertising industry brought this upon themselves. The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker. Between malicious ads, drive-by-downloads, content shifting, and other dark patterns, websites are now more ads than content. It's like in the days of streaming (when it was still good and not enshitified) reducing piracy rates - companies can get me to disable my ad blocker if they start becoming good citizens actually make their site or service usable without it. Get rid of the invasive tracking, dark patterns, un-dismissable modals, etc. Stop jamming your content so full of ads and SEO spam and maybe I wouldn't need an ad blocker as much. I bought a new Mac for a secondary computer, particularly for my wife to use, and she was driven crazy by ads in just one hour of browsing on Safari without a proper ad blocker. Adding an ad blocker to Safari required using an Apple account which she doesn't have and I didn't want to use it for mine (never plan on buying NERFed apps from the NERFed mac app store which is 99% spam anyway) so I switched her to Firefox which lets me add an ad blocker without signing in. Make her an account with throwaway everything or switch her to a sane browser, as you did :) >The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker. Parts of it are good, and parts are bad. The problem with ad blockers is it distorts the signal for bad sites. Why reduce ads if your page views and time on site metrics are good with them? Without Ad block when you hit a garbage site you backout and go somewhere else, maybe even blacklist it so you don't end up there in the future. Then their metrics start looking as bad as their site and they shape up or go under. You wouldn't steal a car. Well I definitely would if I could torrent it. Facebook would have too. I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization. This is why the creators all do sponsorships now. But they force creators to monetize to get reach (if the video isn't monetized it won't be recommended, even to subscribers). My guess is that yeah, now they're going after people's sponsorship revenue by under-reporting views if their monetized content is being viewed by people with adblockers. Regarding recommendations. I recently disabled history and recommendations and the subscribed tab has everything I’d expect. No more surprises and no more political garbage. That’s crazy, when I am logged out I only get political garbage and the most insane braunrot you can imagine.
My recommendations are really good on YouTube, I find a lot of interesting stuff You must fight the urge to click on controversial topics. If you mentally subscribe to any fringe idea, the algo immediately feeds you echo chamber / bubble content. It's crazy. I usually open videos of any topic I don't want in my recommendations in a private window. > I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization. Do you have any article about that? How much did the monetization drop for? I don't know the data but every YouTube author I follow is basically saying the money they get from YouTube is almost nothing compared to the effort they put into their videos. Almost all of them seem to be going for sponsored ads embedded in the video (so not automatically skippable) or Patreon. How big are the channels? As far as I follow, the revenue numbers creators get from Ads aren't ignorable at all. I didn't check all of them... I wanna say they range from ~200 to ~500K subscribers? No idea if that's big or not. For comparison, the official Warhammer channel has ~900K subscribers, which I assume is decent. The argument I've heard repeatedly from them is that the time and effort involved in making a YouTube video that gets enough hits (which means lots of experimentation) is disproportionate compared to the meager return of investment; that for money reasons it's best to get sponsorships. (I'm not a YouTube author myself, I wouldn't know what's a decent size). My current theory is that this whole "mystery around viewcounts" thing is fabricated by google.
From a PR viewpoint it's much better to just imply that adblockers are bad, so in case of backlash they can go "Idk why the community is going ham about this, we didn't even say directly you shouldn't adblock, you people are kwuaazy" I agree, this seems more like a policy decision to turn creators into anti-adblocker advocates than a technical problem registering views accurately. Why would most creators be pro ad blocking in the first place? Don’t most of them want to earn money via advertising? That isn't clear. Some earn money from ads of various forms. Some earn money from patreon like things and the youtube views are loss leaders. Most are not earning enough money from ads to care (generally 0, but sometimes a few bucks). Even if you earn money from ads, view count is only a proxy at best. Youtube seems to track ads seen not view count (payments from youtube have not changed). Other ads track effectiveness of the ad, and viewcount is only a proxy - if youtube changes the count it means that the constant applied to viewcount in the formula changes but otherwise the payment is the same. Thus if you get significant money from YouTube adds you care about ad blocking. None of the others need to care (they might, but it could go either way how they feel) What videos you see on YouTube really varies from one person to another: I have one browser where it shows me predominantly videos with titles like "Why Brand X has lost it's way" or "Why the Y industry is broken" where X could be a fast food chain or a game studio and Y could be housing, video games, private equity, etc. That kind of creator expresses a lot of negativity towards YouTube, as X is frequently "YouTube" or "Google" and Y is "Big Tech", "Social Media", etc. Pro and expressly anti are not the only positions. Some were indifferent because their income from YouTube ads was much less than their income from sponsorships or subscriptions. But view counts affect sponsorship income. Some said blocking ads hurt them but they couldn't blame people when ads included scams. And so on. Because most creators use the internet and have experienced the internet with ads. I imagine most don't think about ads seriously, they think about youtube and sponsor revenue. Isn’t sponsor revenue ad revenue? And I would expect most creators to be smart enough to realize that the money they get from Youtube will be at least loosely related to the ad revenue Youtube can earn from whatever the creator made. > Isn’t sponsor revenue ad revenue? It is, but it's functionally different because the content creator you are watching is both directly getting that revenue and often doing the testimonial for you. They have an incentive to avoid being annoying about the ad as it reflects bad on them if they go nuts. It's also usually a lot easier to skip. It doesn't capture your video playback and force watching. The money you get from youtube make things ambiguous. Especially if someone is watching your stream with youtube premium. Is it possible not to have ads? It seems like YouTube puts them in there regardless, unless once your channel is monetizable you can choose to not show ads. Uploaders can disable mid-roll adverts, ie ones that appear in the middle of the content. I am not sure why this is a bug? Youtube is tracking people, this blocks them tracking people. A side effect of a view not being counted on Youtube, is 100% Youtube's problem, and doesn't effect the user in any way. Sounds like YT is trying to mobilize creators and influencers against adblocking. > against adblocking And extensions such as SponsorBlock [1], which help user skipping sponsored sections or useless intros in videos. YouTube premium actually has its own version of sponsorblock called skip ahead, it works really well, so they’re not ideologically opposed to skipping sponsored segments That's a feature that learns commonly skipped over sections, ads or otherwise. That doesn't just target sponsor segments. It's for stuff commonly skipped. Like annoying parts of videos. Some video game guy I occasionally watching thinks he needs to sing for some reason, very useful for skipping those sections. I guess it makes sense, they have no financial incentive to keep people from skipping sponsors, they don't make YouTube any money Yes, I discovered this recently and it's nice. I presume they are not opposed to it because it's not costing them any lost revenue. Where ? Like I have sponsor block on a desktop but on my pixel I don't have it and would like to have the option. Have the yt premium but don't see the option to skip sponsors. If you double tap to skip 10 seconds during an ad read, it should appear as a button in the bottom right. It does not pop up proactively. It's algorithmically-based on which parts of the video get skipped most often by viewers. Firefox for Android supports desktop extensions, including Sponsor Block and uBlock Origin. There's also Tubular, a YouTube client and fork of NewPipe with Sponsor Block built-in. If you don't mind installing apks from outside the Play Store: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular I’m surprised they allow ads (sponsor segments) they get no cut from at all. Sponsorships are the primary way YouTube creators make money. There aren't many things that could knock YouTube off its near-monopoly market position, but banning sponsorships is definitely one. Creators would revolt. They pretty surely would not. Creators are already starting to build their own platforms for hosting videos and many of these are quite successful unlike prior iterations from 10 years ago. Do you have some examples? I am still a bit sore from my adventures as a creator on Viddler and Dailymotion.
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