Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”
blog.prototypr.ioMy favorite "dark pattern" plausibly disguised as a simple bug is that the countdown timer, across multiple platforms I've used YouTube on, doesn't work correctly and very easily will let the ad play for a second or two longer than you intend. It behaves as if it's supposed to count down to 0 one second at a time, but there's a recurring event that is run every second to see if the countdown timer needs to be lowered. However, it's very easy for that event to be ever so slightly delayed or advanced relative to when the timer counts down, and as a result the timer doesn't get decremented correctly. It's very easy to see if you watch the timer carefully; it almost never counts evenly like it should, and it very often skips a beat entirely. (Compare with a simple timer app, which is correctly updating every frame the display renders. This isn't that hard.)
It's very plausibly a bug that a novice dealing with time in a UI would make, and in many other circumstances I'd accept that explanation. But, a bug in such a critical piece of YouTube's functionality, with a root cause I'm pretty sure I've diagnosed just by glancing at it, surviving for years and years across multiple platforms? This isn't a bug. It's policy. At scale, those seconds add up.
Sound like they implemented Vetinari’s clock from Discworld. That’s a waiting room clock that would slow down and speed up the seconds hand (and also the ticks and tocks) but the minute and hour hands would run on time. This was to make the waiting person extra nervous before their meeting with the patrician. He is by far my most favorite characters in the books.
There's also this physical clock mod that runs the mechanism a bit faster before lunchtime, then slows it down again so displayed time eventually lines up with real time: https://hackaday.com/2011/01/18/the-lunchtime-clock-gives-yo...
Yes, on my smart TV app it's so slow and glitchy that the 5-second ad preview often plays for 10+ seconds before the "Skip Ad" button finally appears. Add to that the 5-7 seconds of black screen before the ad starts playing and the 2-3 seconds to resume my video, and it's a major annoyance during workouts and such.
On an old TV I have it can take at least 5 seconds before it starts counting down. I've just assumed it was a badly maintained app. Have 3 smart Tvs and YouTube seems to behave different on all of them. May have to look into it.
A suspicious person would think they're billing by the actual seconds and dividing the total amount of actual seconds by the budgeted seconds in the ad to bump up the ad impressions.
But I'm not that guy.
> But I'm not that guy.
Yep, that was jerf :-P
I've seen it skip a second (e.g. go straight from 3 to 1) roughly as much as I've seen it do the opposite. I don't suspect foul play but I understand why someone would.
I've seen that too. Mostly I suspect foul play just because it's so damned obvious what the problem is, and there's a hack fix that's pretty easy (run the thing that updates the number every .1 seconds instead of every second). Not that the correct fixes are that hard, or that likely to have interactions with other things... on a technical level, anyhow.
If it is incompetence, it's a rather shocking amount of it in a very important part of the app that has a bajillion metrics tied to it. I can't say this is impossible. But I can't call it the most likely outcome.
Note that this particular behavior will never let you stop the ad early. It can only extend the amount of time it will play, by scheduling the thing that finally lets you in only when the current time is greater than or equal to the 5 seconds it is supposed to play. Jumping from 3 to 1 doesn't mean you skipped a second, it means the 3 wasn't moved to 2 at the correct time.
People complain a lot about Youtube ads and how awful they are but as a thought experiment I once tried to imagine the amount of storage and bandwidth Youtube must need everyday to operate.
So after some basic research it looks like they need to add almost 1 petabytes of storage and I couldn't find much info on the bandwidth and servers it uses.
As much as I don't like Google for their shady business practices, I couldn't help but marvel at this feat of engineering. It's mind blowing tbh.
I mean I can still access my video with 10 views I uploaded 8 years ago.. can't do that on my HDD and they have it in 5 formats.
>People complain a lot about Youtube ads and how awful they are but as a thought experiment I once tried to imagine the amount of storage and bandwidth Youtube must need everyday to operate.
There was a post here about how Vimeo is charging people $300+/month for their videos-- and someone did the math to show thats just the hosting/bandwidth costs. For one creator.
Youtube has millions of videos-- Im surprised their costs aren't higher. Im grateful they provide this service for free at all
What costs are you using ? Because cloud costs are definitely outrageous, and definitely not what an at-scale operation like Vimeo or YouTube is paying.
Especially a place like YouTube that is vertically integrated with their cloud provider.
I often feel that the 90's child me would slap me across the face in disgust at how casually I take for granted the age of magic we live in now.
I distinctly remember waiting an appreciable amount of time to download a single Metallica mp3 on dialup as a middle schooler - maybe 20, 25 minutes? for a ~3 minute song - and a 2GB Linux distro took me like 30 seconds a few weeks ago.
I'm simultaneously hopeful for what we'll be doing 20, 30 years from now, but also worried that the rate of progress is slowing (because I am by definition comparing now to the very very early days of the modern internet).
I used to download full video game soundtracks. It would take me all night to download a single album, and I'd have been disconnected from the internet when I woke up in the morning because my ISP wouldn't support a connection length longer than 8 hours.
We couldn't even stream music, let alone stream video.
How long ago are you talking? Realplayer came out in 1995, I was listening to live DJs over my dialup connection in 1996.
I never had a fast or consistent enough dial-up connection to stream audio. I tried multiple times, but it never worked for me. I'd get maybe 15-30 seconds of contiguous sound, and the whole thing would fail.
I did download MP3s though. A 3mb MP3 file would usually take me approximately an hour. And I downloaded ~3,000 this way.
We had a second phone line for dial up internet - I remember spending three weeks downloading a copy of Age of Empires (roughly 250mb), praying it wouldn't be corrupt or a bad file. It downloaded successfully, but to my dismay it was the expansion. Took me another month to get the actual game to download, at least at that point I had the expansion as well :)
Torrents were a blessing. it said completed you at least knew it was OK.
Now a days with everything SSL it’s not really an issue. But I do remember getting bad HTTP/FTP downloads before encryption was a “thing”
This hit me hard a bit ago. I had hiked for an hour or so to the middle of a forest, pulled out my phone and was viewing a crystal clear live stream made by a random person on the other side of the planet, in higher quality than any movie I could have seen as a child, and it was free for both of us and needed no special equipment.
I feel the term “no special equipment” is doing a lot of heavy lifting considering how much special equipment there is in a single smartphone.
"Special" in this case being non-commodity.
> it was free for both of us
Where did you get this free cell phone and data plan?
The obvious implication is "it was at no cost beyond what I was already paying for".
We had books in the pre-internet era warning us of the corporate dystopia we potentially faced. Well, we're here. Massive benefits, but all control by massive multi-trillion dollar megacorps - easily corrupted.
It's like that scene in Spirited Away where Chihiro's parents start "pigging out".
I do wonder whether another approach would be starting to delete old videos with not many clicks unless you pay. This would seem to reduce storage bandwidth but I suppose they still have to support the insane amount of uploads!
Another thing would be if you upload stupid crap that no-one wants to watch, you get banned or sent a nasty letter or something...I don't know, I don't work in customer retention ;-)
>I do wonder whether another approach would be starting to delete old videos with not many clicks unless you pay
You click to view a video like this, but instead receive a message that states, please return in up to 2 hours while we fetch this content from cold storage.
It'll help ensure you don't ever need to retrieve that content, the content is technically still available, but as the host you can start to whittle down online storage needs.
Edit: Or, you can have the viewer pay for the rush to retrieve the content from cold storage with a viewer-pays model
Storage is cheap at scale. Bandwidth isn’t.
But is it at YouTube scale? I just tried it, I can click 10 years old videos with ~10 views and it starts playing after 3 seconds. How does that work? How can you have ever video ever uploaded on hot storage? What kind of storage are they using? Flash is probably too expensive, even if it has higher density than spinning disks by today. So was that video on a spinning disk? Then it also didn't seem to have been some spun down disk, because it should have taken more than three seconds then. It just boggles my mind that every video ever uploaded to YouTube is ready to be accessed instantly. You think anything that hasn't been accessed in a few years should be tugged away on some tape somewhere and needs a minute or two to start playing
google and YouTube generate insane profits. they could show fewer ads and it would not impair the functionality of YouTube
If they're really generating "insane profits", how do I invest in them and get myself a chunk of those "insane profits"?
Get a time machine. Those profits are already baked into the stock price.
Google might. But does YouTube? Should other Google properties subsidize YouTube if it doesn't generate "insane profits" by whatever metric you're using that word?
YouTube is the largest social media site (or at least was a couple of years ago.) Google gets a lot more value than just cash out of it, otherwise they’d have shut it down.
What value does Google get out of YouTube besides the minuscule profit?
The second largest search engine and all the data that entails.
Having complete control over the vast majority of internet video content
There is nothing stopping content producers from hosting their own content on something like S3+CloudFront or the cheaper (than AWS) alternatives.
and yet they are not doing it
And thus you are stuck with crappy public cable access channel style content…
Who gets to decide what is an "insane" profit? You?
Re-read the post. They could afford to run fewer ads. Right now, google is optimizing for profits at the possible cost of user experience, which may hurt google long-term. It's their right to do that, but I think it's a poor idea in the long term.
Given that Alphabet still refuses to release profit numbers for Youtube, right now, no one but Alphabet.
And given the context of this conversation is about ads, dark patterns, and more broadly, privacy, I think it's perfectly reasonable that we have that conversation.
The Market(TM)
Regulators.
And since the US seems to have abrogated those responsibilities they are falling to the EU.
So you want regulators to decide how much of a profit corporations should have for a non essential service like watching videos?
"So you want regulators to decide how much of a profit corporations should have for a non essential service like smoking cigarettes?
Yes I want regulators to dictate how a behemoth corporate entity like Alphabet uses a platform like Youtube in ways that they both unduly profit from and are unacceptably detrimental to society as a whole.
Entities like Alphabet continue to grow and grow and the corrosive effects of their growth need to be checked some how. If you don't advocate for regulation than what mechanisms are you anticipating will mitigate the negative aspects of these kinds of entities?
And the government still allows you to smoke cigarettes. Just like if you don’t want to risk getting cancer by smoking you don’t smoke.
If you don’t like the shit show that is YouTube - don’t use YouTube.
You've certainly made a case for watching ads while uploading video.
This kind of thinking is really disappointing to me. It's the same mindset that caused so many people to migrate to GMail in the first place.
When GMail was introduced, google was offering a gigabyte of storage when most providers were offering a 1/10th or less of that. Many people gladly gave up access to the contents of their email in exchange for something that seemed at the time to be technologically impressive.
As of today a few gigabytes of email storage seems fairly trivial. But we still gave up a lot to enjoy that privilege.
Trust me, in 10 years this impressive amount of data will be less impressive to you.
And all reports are that YouTube is still barely break even…
> And all reports are that YouTube is still barely break even…
A company can often tweak business metrics to give the message that the company wants the world to believe.
So why would a company want to “tweak” metrics showing a business unit that’s over a decade old not making any money?
At least in Germany, there does exist a movement (YouTubers Union) that demands that YouTube should pay more to the creators. YouTube, on the other hand, denies that it makes money. So the question whether YouTube does make money or not is a highly politicized one in the German area.
German Wikipedia on YouTubers Union: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtubers_Union
Website: https://youtubersunion.org/
"I marvel at this feat of engineering, but Google's shady business practices creep me out" is how I would put it.
I’m not seeing the connection you’re making between the admitted marvel of engineering at scale and ads.
more than 500 hours of video content on average is uploaded every minute to the platform [1].
Not sure what standard you are using for 'marvel of engineering' but to me this is truly a marvel of engineering.
[1] https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastruc...
I continue to admit it’s a marvel of engineering. There are many videos uploaded every minute and the fact that they’re able to serve it to so many users continues to blow my mind.
Though I don’t think I have a specific standard, I’d have to think about it. “I’ll Know it When I See It” has historically been my personal standard.
There is no free lunch I think is his point. Also, I think youtube allows you to pay to have an ad free experience
That connection was implied, but not explicit. Just wanted to make sure I was drawing the right inference. I guess my thought would be that there are plenty of ad-free business models that would allow this content without (explicit playing before and during content) ads. It’s also my experience that there are still ads with their paid service, which is why I stopped paying for it. I would happily pay for a YouTube ad-free experience.
Some other user mentioned that there “was no free lunch” but explicit ads before and during videos don’t have to be the payment for said lunch.
You have to pay for it somehow, the adds are probably a fair price.
Well wouldn't it be just recouping cost to run engineering infrastructure and hence ads.
It costs money. Plain and simple.
The ads pay for the marvel.
What do you think a petabyte of storage costs? SSDs currently start at $15k / PB and presumably Google’s pricing at volume is better.
Data transfer is priced by connection and not by bandwidth, so that cost will not scale linearly.
https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&disk_types=e...
Even the Amazon comments know that's a scam (well that and unavailable to actually purchase) and there is a reason the next disk in the list is 5x the price:
> A 2T SSD for $38 sound to good to be true and of course they are a scam, don't buy they don't work
But that's not even the biggest oversight here on storage, these drives also need to be attached to something which will need to be cooled, networked, and powered in a reliable enough way the service continues operating when you have 10s of thousands of these. You'll also need to store more than exactly the amount of data since you can't just lose videos any time there is a failure.
In all it's still going to be dwarfed by encoding and bandwidth costs but that doesn't mean 15k/PB is any less an order of magnitude or two off on storage costs.
I'm really sorry I posted a price I found on a simple Google search. Let's say you're right and SSDs are actually $150/TB. Now our 1 PB is still just $150k. Not even a fraction of revenue worth worrying about.
If the question was "how much would it cost to buy 1 PB worth of consumer grade SSDs" $150k sounds like a great answer. Going on the 1 PB/day Number that's ~$55M/year for some raw disk. Add another order of magnitude for needing more than just a raw disk to store 1 PB/day, as already explained, and that's ~500M/year on storage related costs. If you're hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter because the bandwidth cost (which is not paid per connection btw) would be much larger then sure but it's still unrelated to the cost of a standalone consumer SSD.
That's not what I said. You've done this twice now, and I really wish you would respect the good faith principal others in this community value. I'll leave it at that.
Good faith interpretation requires a stance to build off from but so far you've made direct statements about consumer SSD prices & bandwidth billing without a stance on how it supports your conclusion then been reactionary when it was explained these statements weren't accurate or directly representative of storage costs. Beyond having already added that bandwidth costs will still dwarf storage costs even when storage costs is a large number I'm not sure what other good faith interpretations could have been made. It's not like I only attacked the consumer SSD price in bad faith and left it at that, I followed up with why even a corrected consumer SSD price would not provide an accurate estimate which was ignored to focus only on the SSD price correction.
If there is a further good faith interpretation of what you've said you'd like added to the conversation then please point it out here and lead by example. Only pointing out you think the other person should have better respected the good faith doesn't serve to help anybody understand better, in fact it goes against the principle itself.
As it stands the most solid interpretation I can come up with is still that raw SSD pricing for a consumer, even though higher than listed, can come out low enough to be less than a percentage of revenue for YouTube but this still holds no indication about storage costs actually being that low but I'm always open to stronger interpretations!
Here are a few points you may wish to consider:
- You claimed that the numbers I referenced were based on a clear scam. The resource is in fact the first resource you will find if you google "per tb storage cost".
- You stated that I had made oversights about total cost, something I never referred to.
- You claimed without any reference that the numbers I mentioned were off by multiple orders of magnitude.
- You said I'm "hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter". I made no such statement and don't feel that way at all.
- You said I was wrong about the way peering agreements are priced between ISPs and Google, but offered no other insight other than just saying I'm wrong.
- You just called me reactionary.
Again, I think it would be beneficial if you would respect the people you're interacting with enough to at least have a more constructive discussion.
> You claimed that the numbers I referenced were based on a clear scam. The resource is in fact the first resource you will find if you google "per tb storage cost".
There are plenty of scams to be found via Googling. You will also find many fake uSD cards for low prices as well, or other products. Google is simply a search engine not an infallible filter for what is or isn't a scam. The facts about the relative pricing should carry far more weight than the position in the search results.
> You stated that I had made oversights about total cost, something I never referred to.
The lack of reference to total cost is itself the oversight being referred to so it could only be problematic if you had referred to it not the other way around.
> You claimed without any reference that the numbers I mentioned were off by multiple orders of magnitude.
I actually referenced the other numbers in your original resource for the first order of magnitude. I explained the reasoning for the second order and I accept opposing reasoning if you disagree but you haven't provided any reasoning only reaction to the idea I'd disagree.
> You said I'm "hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter". I made no such statement and don't feel that way at all.
The quote was actually "If you're hellbent..." not "You are hellbent on".
> You said I was wrong about the way peering agreements are priced between ISPs and Google, but offered no other insight other than just saying I'm wrong.
You made the claim it's based on connections not bandwidth therefore it is your burden to provide some backing why it's true not everyone else's burden to assume it's true until they can prove it's not.
That said it doesn't even require knowing their all of their peering agreements to prove, Internet Protocol (IP) is not session based. BGP peering is done to exchange IP reachability information but it knows nothing of the sessions between those IPs as session information is another level up above the internet in the network stack https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/UD...
.
Again though none of this is providing what the more accurate good faith interpretation should have been. These are simply further reactions to my given interpretation.
> You just called me reactionary.
I have and you've said multiple things to me that could be taken worse than that but it'd be counterproductive to focus on these kinds of minor things when the goal is constructive conversation so I don't feel the desire to end messages with callouts about them
I don't think the $15/TB figure is accurate. The list drives are either unavailable on Amazon, or they are external drives which would be unsuitable for a data center.
I think we're looking at $75/TB on the lower end.
I think the biggest dark pattern is allowing skipable ads to be long. Sometimes over an hour. I spent some time in the hospital not too long ago, and it was physically painful for me to move enough to skip an ad. I would have been fine watching 30-60 second ads without skipping, but they just put infomercials in the middle of the video you're watching. it is outrageous.
I once got one of those Apple events (I think the second-last hardware event) as an ad. Like, the whole 2 hours plus event, as a youtube ad. I still don't know what to make of it and cannot fathom why someone would spend money for that.
My theory is that showing those ads is a bit of a check: "Are you still there or just letting it play unattended to make money for your favorite creator?"
Also annoying when you're doing something else while just listening. Then again there are some videos that are interesting enough for me to watch for a few minutes, but that makes it extra terrible that you can't scrub.
On the flip side I always chuckle when a text-only (with crappy music) ad comes on.
And you never once considered going premium to remove the ads?
Surely someone must have been able to help you out with that if you couldn’t do it yourself?
The answer exists, it’s right there with buttons for clicking given to you by Google, but people here on HN so often seem so entirely blindsided and insist there’s no such thing as ad-free Youtube.
What gives? I just don't get it.
YT Premium only makes the problem worse by still allowing native ads and requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity (for payment processing). You just end up giving more data points to Google to track and don't get rid of all ads.
So you don’t want to see ads and you don’t want to pay not to see ads? What business model should Google use for YouTube?
But you can always use a prepaid debit card.
> So you don’t want to see ads and you don’t want to pay not to see ads?
But even if you do pay, you still see (often longer!) ads because people put sponsor segments in their videos. As far as I can tell, there's no way to skip those, paying or otherwise, except resorting to something like sponsorblock, right?
Youtube ads are to support youtube. Sponsored segments are to support the creator. They are completely separate. If you don't want youtube ads, Youtube provides an alternate payment method. If you don't want sponsored segments, that's up to the creator to provide a way out
> Youtube ads are to support youtube.
They also support the creators, surely, since there's a whole bunch of people I've watched who have no sponsored segments but are making a decent amount of money from the ads.
I'm ok with sponsored segments as the only ads because they are the least offensive ads ATM.
The way to prevent these ads from being blocked is to include them in the video stream itself, possibly by the original author. This has the good side effects of making them easy to skip and, more importantly, unable track users by themselves. The publishing platform can say things like "xx% of users matching rule yyyy fully watched it", but only if watching is non anonymous.
For the app version of YouTube, double-tapping the right-hand side of the video area will jump ahead ten seconds. Not exactly an automated jump but this works well for things like VPN ads in videos.
shrug I just fast-forward them.
Yes, there is - don’t spend time watching their content.
I hate ads with a passion [1]. I pay for the ad free tier of every streaming service I subscribe to. I find YouTube a wasteland of shitty content.
[1] For some reason tech podcasts ads don’t bother me and many of the ones I listen to have chapter markers for their ads.
There’s no business model YouTube could adopt that I would accept because I don’t trust Google. Even as a paying customer, they still extract your data, and probably sell it.
I use adblockers and alternative YouTube clients wherever I can and I don’t care, because I have no choice.
You don’t have any choice but to use YouTube?
Sure, I have a choice.
I can buy YT Premium.
Or I can run adblockers. What portion of video I decide to skip watching on my device and which HTTP calls I make and which I don't is something I can decide and it has nothing to do with ethics or morality IMHO.
Watching a free YouTube video is something like getting a magazine copy for free. There is no moral obligation to look at the ads there, I can just skip those pages and pick and choose articles I want to read, even though I got the copy for free.
If the creators are giving away too many copies for free, they can start selling them instead. Or giving them and asking for voluntary donation. Or they can find another business.
It's not my responsibility to make sure the creator is profitable running their business. That's entirely on them.
Then why complain? I don’t complain about how crappy public access cable tv is (ie YouTube). I just don’t watch crappy public access TV.
I don't complain that I have to use adblock.
I only complain if someone tries to make it an ethical/moral issue, that I use one.
I also understand that was not your point in your comment, I am not trying to strawman you :)
Ad-free youtube doesn't get rid of "paid content" in videos. "paid content" is just ads. So if you pay for youtube premium you get rid of some ads, not all the ads.
That's clearly a different kind of thing though. Sponsored content in videos is just stuff you don't like, but it's still the video you clicked on. Youtube injected ads on top of the video is not the content you clicked on. Youtube premium unambiguously solves the problem that the top-level comment was complaining about (mid-roll ads that can be a half-hour or longer), you're just moving the goal posts.
No, no, no, this is letting YouTube off the hook. The whole reason content creators started doing in-video promotions is because YT kept squeezing them for ad revenue. The top comment is absolutely correct - adfree should be adfree - that is YouTube’s problem to solve, not the customer’s.
Do you have a source for this claim? As far as I know, the cut of the ad revenue going to the creators has not changed since the introduction. It was 55% a decade ago, it's 55% today.
Would you rather Google police content and not allow native ads that the content producer includes?
> Would you rather Google police content and not allow native ads that the content producer includes?
Why not downrank such videos a little bit - just like Google attempts to downrank pages that look like made by content farms?
Since a lot of YouTube creators are very concerned about their ranking, this should decrease the problem of sponsored segments/videos a lot.
So now we want BigTech “to control what people see?”
Why not just not watch content from content creators that make videos that have content that you don’t like?
I'd be fine with it personally, but I think that'd be a really silly way to go about it. They could provide advertiser tools to the content providers that respect premium accounts. Not super hard, but here's the catch, and oooh baby is it a doozy - they have to pay fair rates for advertising. I know that's going to be hard to stomach, but if they do pay fairly, I suspect most content producers would be happier with that arrangement.
I'm not moving anything. If you want to call something ad-free, IMHO it shouldn't have ads.
Google's product here is the hosting and distribution service. If you pay for YT Premium then Google doesn't place any ads in their product. The content of the videos—including any "native" ads inserted by the video creators—isn't up to them.
If they can't deliver ad-free, they should not try to sell me ad-free. They could sell me something that isn't a lie instead.
Google is delivering their service ad-free. It's not their fault you choose to use their ad-free hosting and distribution service to view third-party videos which contain ads.
Google's advertising says "Watch youtube ad-free". It doesn't say "watch youtube ad-free unless the video you're watching embeds ad content as well", heck it doesn't even say "Watch youtube ad-free*".
So whatever they are actually providing, it's not what they are selling.
As I said in several comments now: My opinion is that if you try to sell me ad-free, sell me an actually ad-free product.
edit: it also occurs to me that the recommender and search engine will not mark nor honor my "ad-free" status, nor will the auto-play feature. So if I pay for ad-free and google says "hey watch this video with lots of paid promotion next", wouldn't that just be google pushing more ads on me even if I supposedly pay for "no ads"?
The ads you're complaining about are not Google's ads. When you pay for YT Premium you don't see ads from Google on YouTube. End of story. Other people can still show you ads, even in videos they upload to YouTube. That's between you and the creators of those videos. You are free to watch them or not. But Google is delivering exactly what they promised. If you don't find that the service is worthwhile, just don't subscribe. There's no point complaining about it here.
But I don't mind most of the ads. To be honest, I actually like quite a few of them. It's just the ones that are longer than the content I'm watching that really get to me.
> And you never once considered going premium to remove the ads?
I’m pretty much “no” on paying for a product that encourages clickbait and misinformation. This isn’t a uniform “no Google” thing, I use GCP, but paying for YouTube just seems icky.
If it can’t survive as a business (or become so ad-heavy that it’s a UX nightmare), hey maybe there’ll be new opportunities for others. Vimeo, maybe Twitter, with Musk’s new zeal for making orgs pay for Twitter?
UX nightmares always get competition. Altavista, Experts Exchange, Skype/WebEx… all faced nimbler competitors. I don’t see YouTube being an exception.
The ads are genuinely one of my most frustrating experiences when using the Chromecast with Google TV. And seeing this kind of pattern makes it more likely that I’ll never sign up for premium YouTube (whatever it is called) and just use YouTube less.
Also, I swear they do this - If you click on the try YouTube premium for 14 days, once the 14 days end you are bombarded with extra ads. And ads that are usually not skippable. I also remember getting multiple 60 min ads. I don’t remember any of these ads but I do remember how frustrating my experience with YouTube was and still is. But I’m also the kind of person that is still surprised that advertising works.
If only I could use my raspberry pi to block all YouTube ads at home. My life would be immensely better.
For all the kvetching about ads I see regarding YouTube, most people really could just pay Google and make it go away. I mean, I don’t like paying for things either, but it’s not worth the headache of ad blockers (which aren’t available on every device) and philosophically, I would rather the internet get away from ads everywhere and I’ll help that happen if I can.
It helps that $10 is worth the many hours of use I get every month from YouTube & YouTube Music too.
I am a huge fan of YouTube Premium. Youtube has become the de-facto video platform in our household, having totally displaced traditional shows.
To pay $10 per month to have unlimited content w/o ads is perfect. I don't understand the pushback.
The pushback is because all of the shows I want to watch are still half ads. The content creators insert them, surely they have a rational reason, but I’m not interested in the economics if I pay for ad free I want ad free. I would pay quite a bit more than 10$ for this, but the option just isn’t there.
Then pay for streaming services they have professional content?
Yeah, sure, but doesn’t that prove the point that it’s a waste to pay for YouTube?
I have no problem paying for things. I like paying for things.
Well, I like paying for value to be delivered. I don't like paying for "stop messing with me."
The path from gratis to paid to paid-at-a-higher-tier should be "yeah, I like this, I want more of it, and I'm willing to pay for it". YouTube would have to have a lot fewer dark patterns for me to say "yeah, I want more of this".
Youtube Premium is a quality of life upgrade.
It's amazing what a difference it makes when you don't have to go through the tension of battling ads for every three minute video you'd like to watch.
You're free to consume videos at the speed for which you're thinking of ideas/questions.
I just run an adblocker
Cable tv was originally ad-free because you paid for the content instead. Now you pay and get more ads than network tv instead!
Premium channels were ad-free longer, because you the content producers didn't have to share the fees based on (estimates) of how much the channel was watched.
Lots of ad-free services really mean "no ads except bumpers since you must like ads just not in the middle of the show".
Why would anyone be stupid enough to trust google to keep the "ad free" experience ad free?
> Why would anyone be stupid enough to trust google to keep the "ad free" experience ad free?
One can cancel their YouTube Premium subscription at any time for any reason, including and especially if it is no longer delivering an ad-free experience. In the meantime I'm quite happy paying $10 a month (annual plan) to never see ads.
But videos are crawling with ads from the content creator themselves? So you aren’t getting an ad free experience for that 10$.
Cable TV has never been as free. It was first a method to deliver broadcast channels to areas without a good signal and then you had the “Superstations” like TBS and WGN that also had ads.
The only channels that were ever ad free were the premium channels that are still ad free.
YouTube premium is just too expensive because they bundle it with music and you need a paid account for each user (unlike other ‘streaming/vod’ services).
For a family of two it’s either two times €6.99 or a €17.99 family account. That’s more expensive than Netflix, who besides stream their content also have to produce/lease it.
There are a couple of videos of some really chill music sessions posted by the artists that I used to put on every morning when my daughter was born.
I've seen the same few vids hundreds of times and I know, like I know the sky is blue and water is wet that they had no ads.
Couple years later, my son is born and that morning peace time comes for me to put on a vid or two, next thing I know, a couple of ads bang in the middle of the video. So jarring I can't explain how pissed I was, I got straight to rooting my TV and blocking ads.
The interesting part for me is that a YouTube premium trial Google had pushed on me ended just days prior.
the worst thing about ads in the middle of relaxing music is that they are typically loud and obnoxious, instantly destroying within milliseconds any mood/relaxation benefits accrued over the preceding few hours.
it's as if a frat party suddenly bombs your meditation group, trashes the place in 5 seconds, then leaves
Yep. I don't really see ads much these days, I don't watch live TV or listen to radio because I use Netflix, Prime, Disney and NOW for TV and Spotify for music, so when it happens it really drags me out of whatever peaceful or immersed state I got to.
Once it became possible to force people to pay attention to ads (compared to a newspaper where you can skip ahead and look at what you want) the quality went into the toilet.
It doesn't help that most of the products they advertise are terrible, overpriced or both and even their skipable ads aren't skipable until it has already destroyed the experience of the video you were watching. Premium is not an option because I don't use youtube logged in.
If it wasn't for my adblocker I wouldn't be spending so much time on youtube.
If you are in the USA, I think it is illegal to play ads at a louder volume then the surrounding content. You can file an FCC complaint if you see that.
As far as I'm aware, that only applies to broadcast radio and over-the-air TV, not all media.
I’m not a lawyer but it looks like the law might apply to chromecast as well:
> as such recommended practice concerns the transmission of commercial advertisements by a television broadcast station, cable operator, or other multichannel video programming distributor. [emphasis mine]
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-111publ311/html/PLA...
I think it would be worth it to file a complaint. Or if anybody here on HN has done so already, I would be interested in hearing the response.
EDIT: Looking at the code (which I’m woefully under-qualified at) I see this:
> (13) the term “multichannel video programming distributor” means a person such as, but not limited to, a cable operator, a multichannel multipoint distribution service, a direct broadcast satellite service, or a television receive-only satellite program distributor, who makes available for purchase, by subscribers or customers, multiple channels of video programming;
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/522
I don’t see how a chromecasting a youtube playlist (human curated or autogenerated) over GoogleTV, does not apply to this definition.
The way around this is to use an audio compressor and push the average volume up without exceeding the content's max volume. Then the ad sounds like someone shouting in the content without violating the policy.
A related dark pattern is the purposeful muffling of hearing aid advertisements. They also generally play different audio than what the models are "saying" in order to further confuse their target market and convince them they are more hard of hearing than they really are.
I'm in the UK, but hopefully that information is useful to someone in the US. Thanks!
https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock works on an nvidia Shield via "SmartTube Next" - i don't know if you can install or sideload that on GoogleTV.
There's clients for many other platforms, even traditionally locked down ones like iOS Safari etc.
FYI, several alternative youtube frontend apps are available for "Chromecast with Google TV" (which is just an Android TV device), for instance the opensource Newpipe. (Though this is piracy, and you shouldn't do piracy, because piracy hurts Google and content creators - who will gladly take donations -)
Accessing a publicly-available website using your preferred frontend application (NewPipe) is absolutely NOT piracy. Consider disregarding the future advice of whoever told you this. I believe this is a dangerous and misleading line of thinking.
Fun, I thought my sentence would trigger the pro-ad people, not the other side.
I don't think there is any legal definition of "piracy" (except for ships). My own definition of piracy is "accessing content without paying the official fee". Here "official fee" is the ad. Also, it can be seen as equivalent to DDoS, since you are voluntarily using Google's cloud resources while breaching their EULA.
Personally, when using newpipe, I do feel like I'm stealing unrightfully bandwidth from Google, though the price for that bandwidth is definitely not worth a tenth of the ads Google show me.
For Android TV, there's even the even nicer https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext which integrates SponsorBlock.
That is not piracy.
But you can't "cast" from Newpipe (you'd have cast the phone's screen and play stuff in Newpipe in your phone). Which anyways is what I do when I start getting too many ads (typically I just shutdown the TV and try to time turning it back on so the ad is finishing. it's something of a mini-game).
EDIT: I'm referring to the original chromecast, not the new "Chromecast with Google TV"
If you get some type of streaming box with an open version of Android TV you can just run Newpipe on the box. The most capable one is the Nvidia shield but for just running a YouTube client there are probably cheaper ones you can get off Alibaba or similar.
You can use the regular YouTube app from your phone purely as a remote, and cast from it to SmartTubeNext on your TV.
FWIW I just gave up and bought youtube premium and I never see ads ever again on my chromecast. Unfortunately because the domain ads are served off of is a youtube domain something like a pihole (which I am also running) doesn't help. One idea I had was to run a chromebox instead cause that allows for browser based adblock plugins but paying the monthly fee was easier (for now).
What's the frustration specifically? My experience on Chromecast is that they actually seem to show fewer ads there than on a browser.
Edit: or is maybe the issue here the mere presence of ads versus them being blocked in a browser?
Alternate theory: A large-scale, ongoing A/B test on what gets the perfect balance between watching ads and keeping total view time high.
The multivariate test is trying to increase ad clicks, and the result is a poor UX. That's not exactly an alternate theory.
Is it a dark pattern? That's not the first term I'd use to describe it, but perhaps it falls under "Misdirection" mentioned at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.07032.pdf (page 12).
I don't think it is a 'perfect balance' so much as trying to maximize the number and length of advertisements that people will tolerate at this point in time. The nature of the business model is that some product manager will be tasked with getting the advertisement revenue higher at some point in the future and they will no doubt try to push the envelope. I also feel like 'total view time' is a metric that is in service to advertisements and not the primary goal itself.
>Alternate theory: A large-scale, ongoing A/B test
Except "ongoing A/B test" isn't really a thing. The whole point of A/B is to identify and discard the worse of the two. Especially on google scale and this being applied to everyone you'd expect the data to point one way or the other really fast.
This is just straight up dark pattern.
Ongoing multivariate testing is certainly a thing, especially in high volume e-commerce, and especially on ad company's advertising-related UI. You're correct, winners are chosen and rolled out (to the majority) but then new tests are created against that winner, and that's an oversimplification.
This seems so much more likely
Agreed. Unfortunately when it comes to ads (which I also hate! I have adblockers installed, subscribe to premium services like Youtube premium when it makes sense...) HN commenters take leave of their wits and just start posting conspiracy theories, hysterical criticism, or if you're lucky balanced sensible criticism that nevertheless doesn't make sense in the context of the article and is just an instance of preaching to the choir.
Recently, I've been with people who unlike me don't have youtube premium and I loathe the ads. I'm so happy I pay for premium so I don't have to experience this.
I want to say "subscription is the right answer" but it clearly isn't enough for some people (netflix).
The YouTube subscription just seems excessively expensive. I find it hard to fathom they would generate anywhere near as much revenue from me watching their ads compared to the subscription cost.
So I agree for just YouTube it would be excessive. But they do combo it with youtube music which makes it a slightly better deal. Also personally they have the best family plan since it allows 6 accounts total and doesn't require to be "Under the same roof" like spotify. But I agree I probably wouldn't find the full price outside of the family plan worth it.
Last time I tried YouTube music, it was an underwhelming experience. I expected it to show only official videos, but it showed any random video with music. It substituted Google Play Music, where you could have a curated library and your own uploads, with random music videos.
I think it only show "any random video with music" if you've liked the video and it appears to be a legitimate music video (i.e. without dialog/non-musical noises etc.). I use YtM a lot and the only questionable videos are ones that I've hit like on (beat saber being a prime example - I've learned not to like anything like that, these days).
I can't say that I have experienced the random music videos thing, but I agree it does feel like a bit of a downgrade from Google Play Music. I used the podcast part of Google Play Music a lot, since it put music and podcasts all in the same spot. Now I have had to switch to pocketcasts for that instead.
I found a youtube premium-lite option.
It removes adds, but does not allow background play and a few other perks. But it only costs 6 euros.
I found it a better deal than premium so I downgraded.
This would be great, exactly what I need. But they don't seem to offer it everywhere. I get the message "This offer is not available" when I go to https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite
Looks like YouTube Premium Lite is only available in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...
I honestly would prefer a premium-lite. I don't use YT as an audio source so background tab audio is annoying (even more on mobile - stopping my phone doesn't stop the video). Really want premium-lite for family sub :D
The main reason I don't want to pay is it cannot remove the ads the content creators put in themselves.
I could see paying if it was a totally clean experience but to pay and get rid of part/half of the ads I would see does not seem worth it to me.
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On the topic: Same goes for me, "ad-free" YT is not really ad-free, only a little less "infested".
Ignoring the ethical debate, the "SponsorBlock" browser plugin can help to avoid native advertising inside videos. When in use, sections marked as ads or other filler content are automatically skipped. It is crowdsourced, so you can mark up a video yourself and contribute it, if the ads haven't already been marked by someone else.
You can use sponsorblock to automatically skip a variety of creator-inserted ads and interaction reminders ("please subscribe/like" etc).
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
Even setting aside the explicit ads, there's also the fact that the vast majority of YouTube content has been diluted and corrupted to be a vehicle for YouTube ads.
For example, I read that so many YouTube videos are stretched out to ten minutes because that's the minimum duration to get two ads on your videos.
Yep, but I think it was the minimum for placing midroll ads. Now it's 8 minutes, but the "sightly over 10 minutes" phenomenon is still very much alive!
Why do you just not use ublock origin?
Because it only works on a browser, people also experience youtube on other devices (smart TV, chromecast, App on a non-rooted phone).
NewPipe + Sponsorblock from FDroid and SmartTubeNext for Android TV
I cannot install it on my Smart TV
What is dark about the design pattern? They have an ad-free YT that anyone can pay to subscribe.
Is it considered dark because they want the users to subscribe to paid version?
I think labelling everything “dark pattern” just makes the term lose its meaning and it actually helps the real dark patterns go scot free
I thought that until I got most of the way through the article. It is a long winded explanation that eventually gets to its point that the skip button can appear in various formats making it a tiny bit slower to recognise and use. Without a reasonable explanation to why it needs to change it seems like dark pattern is fair.
Dark patterns are basically brain hacking, hacking someone else's brain to benefit yourself. This looks like some kind of massive A/B test to eke out a small percentage margin on advertising.
I'd give it a few dark points for that but imo advertising itself is the dark lord of dark patterns: not only is it a brain hack, not only has it hacked all the way into social acceptability, but it is the darkness from which so many other dark patterns spawn and spring forth to bring revenue to their master.
> What is dark about the design pattern? They have an ad-free YT that anyone can pay to subscribe.
Yeah, the old "We want everything for free, and will complain if you spy on us or show us ads along the way"
Google products have been incorporating a frustrating amount of dark patterns. In gmail for example, if you load one of the smart inbox tabs, it shows the rows of unread emails at the top. Right when you attempt to click on the top row, it rearranges the rows to show a few rows of ads instead (and the ads are fairly indistinguishable from the unread emails) so you end up unintentionally opening an ad.
Now, there’s no good reason for this loading pattern - since they intend to show the ads, they could have allocated a few rows, shown a loading skeleton, and then asynchronously loaded ads and emails in their expected place. Instead they now get a ton of extra ad clicks, but I wonder how happy their advertisers are to pay for these unintended clicks.
Wait, I am curious: you see ads on GMail? I haven’t seen ads in many years. What email client do you use? web app, phone app?
I can't recall seeing ads on the Android app, but there are definitely ads in the web client. The ads must do a very good job of disguising themselves if you haven't noticed them. I have moved most of my email to ProtonMail. So much nicer paying for that from a company that respects me rather than using a free product from a company who has no other purpose than to drive ad revenue.
I also haven't seen an ad on the Gmail web client in years. Maybe because I pay for extra storage through Google One?
Edit: It looks like it doesn't happen in the primary tab and I have all the other tabs disabled which would explain it.
I’ve never seen ads. I believe the difference (and potential explanation as to why GP hasn’t seen any either) is that my account is through google workspace.
The ads are in the android app if you select a "smart" tab, like the Social or Campaigns (and I pay for google one, still get those ads). Fortunately I'm never in those tabs on the mobile client.
Happens in the Android app too, just not in the "Primary" tab. So annoying.
the ads are displayed in the smart inbox tabs; if you have turned this off, you won't see ads
Correct. The smart inbox puts in ads. As in the YouTube example here, it's fairly unpredictable if they appear, and when they do - how they appear.
this surprised me so much I had to read it twice before realising that it's probably because I've used uBlock since I can remember
Well, some of the ad money goes to content creators. Since my wife and I each spend more time on YouTube than we do on any of Disney, Netflicks, Amazon Prime, or Hulu we “splurge” $15/month on Google’s family plan that gets no ads and all the music and music videos we need.
Even though I am a big fan of open distributed media like Mastodon (follow me at @mark_watson@mastodon.social), I like to see quality paid for services. I am looking forward to spending $2/month on Twitter if they require real-people paid accounts to get rid of the bots.
When I found out my kids spend more time on YouTube than any other video platform I paid for YouTube Premium. They're a little older now and are shifting back to other platforms but I don't think we'll cancel our subscription anytime soon given how many complaints I see about their ad delivery.
I'd be a lot more willing to pay for Premium if it were strictly to get rid of ads, without any of the bundled features that don't matter to me (e.g., Music, background playback, etc.). They experimented with it in certain European markets[0], and I'm disappointed that it hasn't made its way to the US.
[0[ https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...
That not really something they inform subscripers about. You also don’t appear to be able to downgrade to the lite subscription. I truly don’t mind paying for ad free YouTube, but it’s not the music service I’d pick if it wasn’t bundled.
I used to pay for the Youtube Premium as well, because the app is literally unusable on an Apple TV and iOS devices without it, the ads are just too much.
Unfortunately, the premium subscription does not work for the in video ads and promotions (shills) which seems to be everywhere now, so I cancelled my subscription, as I can not get the ad-free experience anymore, dropped the idea of using Youtube on devices where I can not install ublock origin.
edit: The idea is that I can not get rid of ads, even with the subscription, so the value of subscription itself is severely diminished.
How does ublock solve the promotions you describe?
Does Ublock also block the in-content ads?
It doesn’t. The point is the in content/in video ads severely decrease value I see in youtube premium.
Sponsorblock?
I find YouTube basically unusable on any device except for my laptop with an adblocker. The ads are so intrusive and cut in at such jarring moments that it's just not worth it. It's not uncommon to have to tolerate several minutes of ads just to watch a sub-10 minute video.
I watch a lot of YouTube on my smart TV even an old Roku but after the changes to the frequency of ads it was unbearable. It was to the point where I would mute the TV and put my hand up to block the ad from my eyes. I would also press back a few times to exit out of the ad and most times if done twice no ad plays.
Ads always cut off the first 5 seconds of the videos, and ads were popping up seconds after the initial two ads, and then ads cut in mid sentence. No thought of the content presented like a TV ad would do just stuff in as many as possible.
Eventually I gave in an paid the $10/moth. YouTube is broken and unwatchable without doing it that way at least on a smart TV or a Roku.
During the pandemic some product person drastically increased the number of ads and began ruining videos with ads in the middle of the videos. Music sets get screwed up and the crappy AI likes to pause jokes right before the punch line and then resume a second or two after.
At this point any video I imagine myself ever watching more than once gets downloaded with yt-dlp and automatically loaded into Plex. I had one negative experience with an artist deleting a popular video years ago, but that short term profit seeking is what pushed me to finally get everything all setup.
Now there are no ads.
>By introducing so many versions of design, it forbids a pattern to be established and recognized by the users.
I dont think the author properly acknowledges just how voracious the human appetite for patterns are. We are absolute machines when it comes to spotting even the hint of a pattern, and few things can prevent us from establishing and identifying them as a function of our basic existence. millions of years of evolution have basically guaranteed that when patterns arise or exist, we are borg-like in our pursuit.
shuffling a few choices of skip is a cheap effort that probably appeased a few C level ad execs. the biggest coffin-nail for ads is of course adblock.
Folks are completing MSc, PhDs, submitting to cutthroat recruitment processes to architect, enable, and implement this level of malicious counterproductive sophistication. Google employees, how do you find motivation to wake up in the morning? Is it >300k USD salary and FIRE before 40? What if they told you to scam your own children for additional bonus?
Your last question isn't even rhetorical. For almost everyone in USA's tech, it's only a matter of compensation. Should we expect anything different when even UC Berkeley's CS program doesn't have a single ethics requirement? (EECS has one, but their CS grad output is way lower)
I wish a tech crash like dot-com would happen already—in my very naive hope that the unscrupulous rat racers whose sole purpose is to perpetuate this infinite loop of SAT-level/IQ-test job recruitment + gamified promotion optimization will leave so they can ruin another industry. This is a terrible thought to have for peers, but after the past decade of nonsensical gatekeeping and unsustainable college major growth, I genuinely feel these people increasingly make everyday work life unbearable.
It’s more like > $600k TC. Not sure about FIRE given a starter house is $2M.
lol you realize you don't have to pay the $2 million at once right. 400k is more than enough to afford a mortgage on a 2 million dollar house. they key is keeping other expenses low.
And how we make sure to always skip ads is
1) use an adblocker
2) use a pihole
3) use sponsorblock
anything short of the first two is literally using a different internet. Marketers and Advertisers would ruin the net if we let them.
I wonder how much this is still contributing to the overall problem. The content is getting views, so advertisers will still pay for ads, the algorithm will promote it more, more people will see the ads.
I think it creates a hierarchy of Internauts, ones that have the technical know-how and/or tools awareness needed to negate all the pollution and ones that don't and must suffer extra to compensate for the former. It's what I meant when I said there was a different Internet out there depending on how adept you are at "customizing" your Internet.
When I see scummy advertising practices, I get so upset that the product being advertised is associated with something bad and frustrating in my mind.
I'm always a little puzzled with how there is so much money in advertising.
PSA, uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock (blocks in-video ads by automatically skipping them via crowdsourced timestamps) exist, as do Vanced for Android (until it dies, could also use NewPipe, a fork with SponsorBlock is available) and SmartTubeNext for Android-based TVs.
I don't think I've seen a YouTube ad in years. uBlock Origin plus SponsorBlock make for a much better watching experience.
Depends what devices you are watching on. e.g. you probably can't block ads on the YouTube app that comes on your TV.
Quote from the article:
> By introducing so many versions of design, it forbids a pattern to be established and recognized by the users. Essentially, the users look at the design, get confused about if there is going to be a “Skip Ad” button or not, get tired of trying to figure it out, and finally pay less attention to it which increases the chance of them ending up watching ads that could have been skipped.
Honestly, this does not match (at least) my usage pattern: I am so annoyed by the ads that I always look for the skip button - sometimes successfully, sometimes in vain.
(by the way: I see strong evidence that Google's (and thus YouTube's) ad network has a lot of difficulties finding ads that are of interest for me - likely because I have quite different interests from the typical citizen; perhaps this is the reasons why YouTube's ads are so annoying for me that I always look for the skip button on YouTube).
I didn't get that amount of variations the OP sees so far, but I've been wondering if the number of ads you get and the distribution of skippable vs unskippable ads is somehow personalized.
At least my subjective impression is that when I go on a youtube binge, over time it will slowly increase the number of ads it shows back-to-back and also increases the amount of nonskippable ads.
I wonder if there is some kind of reinforcement learning going on, which tries to figure out just how many ads I'm willing to tolerate before switching away. (Or employ the good old "boiling frogs" strategy and train me to tolerate more ads over time)
I got no evidence for this at all of course, so just a conspiracy theory for now.
YouTube, like TV and any other technology infested with adds seems to me completely unusable as it is, I don't understand how people are so patient and keep using it.
I use uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and Watch On Odysee extensions to improve it.
use a vpn and new chrome session in some low income country. this will remove most of the ads
but now what many content creators are doing nowadays is making the ads part pf the video itself, so you cannot skip it or block it. The product placement may transition seemingly in such a way as you may be listening to a video about the history of some math concept and suddenly the narrator will start talking about VPNs, and when that happens I just hit the back button. At this point the problem has gotten bad enough that I stopped watching any channels where this may happen, which is many of them now.
SponsorBlock extension is great; it cuts out the ads that are part of the video itself. It uses crowd-sourced tags. It gets nearly all of them; if a video is popular enough for the creator to bother putting ads in it then someone will submit the tags for it.
What's worse is those who do pay for YouTube premium will still get these ads.
Don't forget the "oh, I see you didn't skip the first ad. Let me play a much longer second ad".
I've seen another YT dark pattern lately. I often skip ads with youtube-dl (download the video and watch offline). But sometimes I like to be even more aggressive and skip the whole video, by using ytdl to download the closed caption text (VTT file) so I can read it instead of watching the vid. I have a python script that reformats the .vtt (a messy xml file full of timestamps and other markup) into something like readable text, and that worked pretty well until recently.
Lately I've found that 1) more videos don't have auto transcription, and 2) the vtt files have gotten messed up so that the timestamps are no longer properly interspersed with the text. My script strips them all out except once per minute, so if I find something interesting or confusing in the transcript, I can quickly find that spot in the video and watch it. That doesn't work any more. The hack is still better than nothing but I wonder what YT is up to, messing up a feature like that, which was presumably done for accessibility reasons, so its breakage likely has consequences beyond annoying freeloaders like me.
These patterns are clearly visible and so similar that I don't even behave differently to them. I don't care about any of the variants: I wait until I see Skip Ad and press it as soon as I can. It's not even like it's ever in a different place... unless I'm earnestly interested or have time to kill and want the channel to get paid with my time.
Do these variations only appear on the website version of YouTube? I use an ad-blocker so I haven't noticed this pattern exactly. However, one pattern I've noticed using the mobile app is that in order to disrupt the automatic habit to skip, they seem to randomise whether or not they make any specific ad skippable. It seems some ads are always skippable, some are sometimes skippable and sometimes not and some are never skippable. It doesn't always correlate to how long the ad is either. Overall this seems to result in my actually watching the ad all the way through because it takes too much effort to figure out what kind of ad it is and whether I can press the button at the right time. At least if I do nothing, I know the video I want will play eventually.
Another random one I’ve come across. I can block most YouTube ads with uBlock Origin in the browser. I can also cast my browser tab to an Android TV device. But if I try and cast a tab with YouTube, it will open the app instead of casting the browser, and I can’t block ads in the app.
This article comes across as a bit conspiratorial. I feel like "dark pattern" is on the verge of losing meaning when it's applied in cases like this as opposed to for example: making accept cookies one click and reject multiple clicks (which Google is also guilty of).
I have a special hatred for the ads which stick an additional 5 second outro after their (false) progress timer reaches 0:00
It's lying. Trying to be unpredictable to prevent you from being able to unconsciously skip ads is one thing, but lying is unforgivable.
I would likely pay for youtube premium if the TV app wasn't so absymal.
However, having something that does not allow sorting by 'new' (and constantly recommending videos that are many years old), regularly re-introducing channels that have been marked as 'do not show' along with injecting the popular junk into 'for you' despite me having constantly marked similar as 'not interested'.
There is no way I will pay premium for such a terrible experience, even if it does remove ads. The TV experience - where I consume most content - is fast becoming the biggest reason to never use youtube.
The AppleTV app for YouTube is… fine, but certainly not great. Google, like Facebook, seems to believe in algorithms above anything less. It sort of make sense when you’re relying on showing ads, but it degrades the experience for those who actually pay for the service.
That being said, my YouTube Premium subscription is easily the one I get the most enjoyment from, as compared to Netflix, HBO and similar.
This doesn't sound much like a dark pattern to me. I think they probably have a few variations they use based on the length of the ad, and some agreement with the sponsor, but that's just speculation.
It would be much more evil if sometimes the "see more about this product" button was where the "skip ad" button was, so that users who were reflexively clicking it would get sent to the sponsor.
Has anybody here ever been so confused by these variants that you watched more than an additional 1/4th of a second of the ad?
Twitter doesn't count blocked accounts as ad impressions.
If I see an ad on twitter, I block the account that displayed it. Invariably, there is another ad in the next 3-5 tweets. I can do this 3 or 4 times in a row before I give up looking at the feed because the signal-to-noise ends up being too low when 25% of my feed are ads.
My guess is that after blocking an account, the ad you saw doesn't count as an impression. It's also possible that 25% is normal, but it doesn't seem that way if I scroll and not block accounts.
One point I hate on YouTube are the clickbaits thumbnails and title. I found an extension that uses a random image of the video for the thumbnail and it's much better
Maybe more productive way is to use youtube premium instead of looking dark pattern in youtube ads.
Or is the idea is something similar to if restaurant displayed unlimited buffet ads and some jackass customer decides wasting trays of uneaten food is okay. Anything else is restaurant owner is liar and using dark pattern to lure customers.
Reality: ad blocking without feeling guilty.
And they don't even care.
I don't know the percentage of people using ad blockers but I'm sure it is very, very low. In fact, most users watch YouTube from the app, so no ad blocking.
I just hope they don't make any significant change to their API so I can still use Vanced to listen to music when I'm outside.
>In fact, most users watch YouTube from the app, so no ad blocking.
If many people used ublock on the Web, many would iuse NewPipe to enjoy the same ad free experience on mobile (Android). I don't understand why so we few people care about their attention? Is this just ignorance? Or do they willingly want their desires to be manipulated in order for creators to be paid by platforms? Me I'm just happy to tip the channels I follow and be a proud pirate.
There's a lot of idiots out there for whom installing a browser extension is akin to rocket science. In fact, they may not even be aware of what extensions are.
So this article wasn’t about how the close caption menu more often than not opens and blocks the skip add button
I have no idea why or how it's happening, but whenever I view a Youtube video on my personal computer, it stops after < 1 second and I get skipped right to the content. It's the only device in my home that happens to, and I'm afraid to touch anything, lest I lose that magic power.
They do also appear to work out stuff I’m interested in… there are rare days where I’ll get a stream of promoted Kickstarter projects that actually match my interests… then it goes back to the most generic advertising and I’ll be back to slamming the skip button.
That's why a pay for Youtube Premium. I find it irrealistic to expect to be able to access youtube content without either paying for it or having to watch ads. Nothing is free, ever. Even public education is paid by people's taxes.
My favorite variation is “you can skip in 5 seconds” but the ad itself is 5 seconds long
I'm convinced the countdown timer lingers on the 5 longer than a second, also.
TouchTunes jukeboxes -seem- to use a dark pattern of playing music nobody wants to listen to in order to encourage jukebox purchases. It could also be that the default music is stuff that is less popular.
The very very few times I allow yt video to play (in private nav only), if I ever see an ad I just reload the page until the ad is gone. It works (but I watch like 1 video every 6 month, so YMMV).
Do you own a Macbook with touch bar? Use Safari and skip ads by using the scrubbing feature of the touch bar. No adblock needed, all ads skippable, and they're none the wiser.
Mwua-ha-haaa.
youtube music will often interrupt startup and ask you to signup now with a large button at the bottom. There is small text below it (not even a button) to say "not now". That line of text is wedged in really close to the "close" button.
frankly, also, shutting down an existing app (well liked google play music) and implementing a less functional replacement (for their benefit) should be called the Google Two Step Dark Pattern Shuffle.
What a long winded way of saying “YouTube is AB testing 5 UIs for skipping ads”. There’s zero evidence that this tricks anyone; Just a bunch of hand-waving.
I haven't even noticed the differences. I just wait until the skip button appear, or wait a few seconds before glancing. Who cares about to he text?
This isn't great, but there's no ethical dilemma. Being able to skip an advert at all is a pretty recent luxury.
This is an interesting piece but why is there some sort of redirected url used instead a normal one?
That seems like a dark pattern itself.
I don't really see this as a dark pattern.
Being exposed to an ad is not a dark pattern IMO. And this particular pattern is IMO pretty dang obvious if you use YouTube much at all.
Someone has to pay for YouTube ... someone has to pay for this stuff. If it is ads that's it.
I think the issue involves two parties, the sites who want revenue, and the vast majority of users who want content for free. So yeah here we are on the web where most people want everything free.
Very few people are objecting to the presence of ads, but instead the fact that Google tries to trick you into watching more ads and blame yourself for doing so.
In an alternate universe without this dark pattern, there would still be ads - they would just have a consistent design that allowed you to skip the skippable ones without any thought, or alternatively longer/unskippable ads.
The fact that you can or can't skip ads doesn't imply any "blame" to me.
Ah, then let me explain it to you:
The reason why Google doesn't just take a 15-second ad with a 5-second unskippable section and turn it into a 15-second unskippable ad is because people will get frustrated with Google/YouTube and leave.
The current system causes people to stay, and blame themselves for not skipping the ad - "I'm just being lazy, it's only a few extra seconds."
That is the dark pattern.
I think the complaint here is not exactly about the fact that you can't skip some of the ads, but that by varying the UI a bunch, users don't reliably "catch" all the skippable ads, so they watch more of them or take longer to skip them than would be the case if it was always immediately obvious what you could and couldn't skip.
I find the idea of "varying the UI" to be way far form the ethical ethical dilemma presented.
Did you read the piece? It goes more than just "being exposed to an ad." It's about implementing unpredictable UX around ads.
Yes. I read it. The presence of the ability to skip an ad or not is entirely obvious when you're on YouTube. Sometimes you can't skip an ad, that's not surprising nor dark. It is right in front of you and the result is obvious.
Weird hill to die on...
You still seem to be missing the point OP was making though. The dark pattern isn't that you can't skip the ad.
>The dark pattern isn't that you can't skip the ad.
Help me out then, what is it?
I pay for YouTube, but they still apply dark patterns, namely, they constantly turn auto play back on after a week or so despite me turning it off time and again.
I found recently that 'autoplay' is always on when you start watching videos from a channel, rather than from the home screen.
It seems to treat the channel page as a playlist now, and for playlists it always autoplays.
This doesn't happen to me (browser/iOS), auto play is a setting local to where you enable it. Moving to another new player will always have auto play enabled.
The dark pattern for me is seeing ads.
I've honestly never noticed this. You just wait 5 seconds, see if it says "Skip ad" and then click it. I bet most users don't notice this either and it's probably not especially effective (but still worth it at Google scale).
I can't really blame Google for not wanting people to skip ads. The fact that skippable ads even exist is kind of crazy.
More of a "dimly lit pattern" maybe.
Ublock with Sponsorblock, Invidious, Freetube or Newpie and you're good to go!
You could tell them to 'fuck off' with this extension fuckoff.yt
They'll probably find some way to block this.
In firefox type cs-] then press the right arrow 4-5 times, then alt-tab, then tab until "Skip add" is highlighted and hit space. No need for extra extensions or anything.
Note: this lets you skip unskipable ads too.
If you have Firefox anyway, why not just install uBlock Origin? I don't think I've ever seen a Youtube ad in Firefox.
It doesn't work in private mode.
Why not set it to work in private windows?
What ads?
Speaking of dark patterns, Medium paywalling other people's writing.
Just gonna leave this link to ublock origin here. If nothing else, install it as a small "fuck you" to dark patterns:
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
And I'll leave this here:
This also skips the sponsored parts of the actual videos ("this video is sponsored by skillshadow raid vpn,...")
I wonder if you could build an AI using this datasource to automatically detect sponsored segments. 3.8 million segment submissions is probably enough data.
It's been tried: https://github.com/andrewzlee/NeuralBlock
I think this kind of add-skipping is worse.
It is 'stealing' from the content creators rather than youtube. Besides, these ads are not based on surveillance capitalism but much less invasive old-school methods. Finally, there is much easier recourse against these ads. Don't watch content creators that have annoying adds. There are not many alternatives to youtube, but there are many alternatives to any given channel.
Personally I also believe that in-content ads are much less annoying. I think that is because the content-creator gets to push back on really annoying adds.
Creators are making so much money, we should not suffer poor user experience out of sympathy. Has anyone run the math as to how much these ppl make? Hint: a lot. CPMs are crazy high, in addition to product placement.
IMHO, in-video ads are worse than the usual ads, because they subversive and break the flow. When I'm watching a math video I don't want to hear about how Euler could have used a VPN.
Creators make some money, the better ones make a lot. I think creators are much more deserving of add money from their work as opposed to the platform that is hosting them. Especially because my relationship with the creators is much more voluntary than my relationship with the platform.
If numberphile starts running annoying ads, I can easily stop watching them, or manually skip them.
>"It is 'stealing' from the content creators rather than youtube."
I'm not so sure, from what I understand these creators are typically paid upfront to embed the sponsorship in the video and they are given some promocode or url to present to watchers and that's how these sponsors track engagement. I don't think they check the watch time or the skip rate.
True, skipping in-content ads wont hurt creators pocket directly. But it will indirectly. Less engagement with the ads will eventually hurt their rates. And perhaps even the existence of tools like these could hurt the income of creators in general.
Especially the second is scary. Creators being able to run these ads makes them much more independent from youtube, which I consider quite important.
Which right is higher up on the hierarchy? Content creators' right to serve me adds, or my right to decide what software to run/not run on my general purpose computer. I know what I would answer to that.
You have a right to run all sorts of software that is unpleasant and generally a bad thing. See, for example, people running game cheat software, people running DDoS attacks, or even people sending others rick-rolls or goatsee.
In other words. Just because you have a right to run software that blocks creators apps does not mean it is right (in the sense of right vs wrong) to run that software.
If I can fast-forward a VHS tape (yes, I'm that old), to skip the recorded ads, why not fast-forward the ads in youtube videos?
I see a difference between doing it manually (not at all a problem, and indeed should be a right) and doing it automatically.
Can't go wrong with ad blocking.
How can I adblock on my nvidia shield tv? I hate youtube ads. So much that I switched from iOS to Google Pixel just to be able to install vanced.
This is why I use uBlock Origin. I don't feel guilty if I have to put up with such asshole design. I would much rather have (even non-hideable) text ads in the bottom. Something similar to what they used a long time ago.
Likewise with many Polish entertainment/content aggregator/news websites - there are goddamn ads in the BACKGROUND of the page! Ugh!
Just look at this beauty: https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c0834752/436c59464448525156546b3d_f...
Considering malvertising campaigns still persist, I don't feel bad using an adblocker literally anywhere.
Do you pay creators in some ways?
how did creators make money before the invention of annoying ads?