Recently, YouTube has begun a hard crack down on ad-blockers1, which are browser plugins designed to remove ads from web pages, including those showing on videos on YouTube. According to reports, if you use an ad-blocker, YouTube will show you a page saying you need to disable the ad-blocker in order to view the video.
Pardon my lack of journalism, but I wouldn't know, personally, since I don't use an ad-blocker. Although I'm tech-savvy and exactly the sort of person who would have an ad-blocker installed, I avoid using them in principle. My reasoning is very simple: I think using an ad-blocker is cheating.
If you don't like ads, you're normal. Nobody likes ads. If you don't want to see ads, you can pay for YouTube premium for an ad-free YouTube experience. There have been cases where a website offers an ad-free subscription that later starts showing ads. Well, if that happens to YouTube, you can just stop paying. For now, it offers ad-free browsing, it works.
If you don't like ads and you don't want to pay for premium because you think Google is evil or something, my advice is to stop using it. Nobody is forcing you to use YouTube. If you don't want to play by their rules, just don't join the game.
YouTube allows anyone on the Internet to upload a video, for free, and they host it pretty much forever. Here's a video from 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw. That was 18 years ago and it's still on YouTube. There may be problems with YouTube, but it works. It does deliver a video hosting and streaming service globally. It's not a scam. It's a business. It deserves revenue in order to continue operating.
If you think it has problems, well, every large website—be it Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.—has problems. You can't be a large website without problems. That is to say we won't EVER get a YouTube replacement that solves its problems. If you think you're contributing to YouTube's death by not giving them revenue, so that a better website will replace it one day, please stop dreaming. Any video website that becomes as large as YouTube will end up with the same problems it has. It's not reasonable to be against YouTube just because it sucks, since you can not have a website like YouTube that doesn't suck. Not a real website, anyway. Your dream fantasy website that has free content and no ads but the creators still get paid somehow doesn't really count.
The reason I think ad-blockers are cheating is a very simple. The website has costs. It needs revenue. Its business model is a contract—not a real, legal contract, an implicit contract—where you, the audience, offers the eyeballs for the ads, and they offer you free video hosting and content made by other users. When you use an ad-blocker, you're saying you don't like the terms, you don't like the rules, and you want to offer nothing and still take what the other party offers. Do you see how this sounds? It's obviously not fair, but it gets worse than that.
For the record, some people claim that since the web pages technically run on their own computers, they should be allowed to customize them, including whether the ads are shown or not. I think this is nonsense. You don't see me going to a store, grabbing a product I didn't pay for, and then when the judge asks me what I was thinking, I claim: "in my defense, your honor, the laws of physics didn't prevent from taking that product, therefore it can't be illegal." That's just not how this works. It isn't how any of this works. The fact it runs on your computer isn't a feature, it's a limitation of the technology because it's web-based. If they could do it without running inside your computer, they would have. Just like the fact you can copy-paste a copyrighted image doesn't actually give you copyright of it. I do believe it's fair to customize the look of the page if you want, if you want to change the colors, fonts, etc., specially for accessibility reasons, but the ads are part of the business model of the service, it's part of the contract. Just because it's all the same code doesn't mean it's all the same thing.
If you aren't the customer, you are the product. The website is selling your eyeballs to the companies making the ads. When you use an ad-blocker, you stop being a product they can sell. This means there's pretty much no reason for the website to let you use it, because at that point you're just costing them money without ever making them a cent. YouTube isn't a charity, it's a business. You aren't entitled to YouTube. They aren't under any obligations to show you videos without getting paid.
Since you still cost them money, but their revenue doesn't go up with you, that cost is passed onto the other "products." Just like a normal business, when they have a product that sells badly, they need the other products to make more money to break even. This means, in theory, that if 50% of the internet used an ad-blocker, websites would have to show the other 50% that doesn't use ad-blockers 200% the ads in order to show the same amount of ads as they would if nobody used ad-blockers.
The more people use ad-blockers the worse the ads will get. Imagine you use an ad-blocker because of websites with bad ads, with tons of adds, video ads, auto-playing ads with sound, sticky ads, and so on. But you don't see any of it, because of the ad-blocker. Then you visit a website with good ads, non-intrusive, small, in a corner. But you don't see it either, because you're blocking all the ads. Considering this, if you say that you WOULDN'T use an ad-blocker if ads weren't so bad, you're either lying or making a huge mistake, because you don't know how the ads look like if you're blocking them, so if the ads of a website improved, you wouldn't know it to turn the ad-blocker off, so, from the website's perspective, there's no reason in improving the ads if they can't change the ad-blockers' minds anyway. They have only the motivation to make ads worse to extract more money from the people who do see ads.
I don't like where this is going. I think it's a destructive feedback loop. I think it will end up too many small websites dying because they couldn't make enough money off ads to pay for their hosting costs. But, awkwardly, the same people against ads also hate the idea of a handful of websites controlling most of the internet. I can only imagine they are working against their own goals inadvertently because the alternative is much more shameful.
For me, it seems there's a class of tech-savvy users that block ads, and non-tech-savvy users who don't know about ad-blocking. And tech-savvy users have made ad-blocking part of their culture. In their minds, a status symbol of sort. Ad-blocking separates lowly non-techies from real computer users. Only idiots see ads, not me, I'm smart, I have an ad-blocker plugin installed in my web browser. I use Firefox. This isn't just snobby, this is a freeloader being snobby.
You want to use YouTube, the content hosted on their servers which contribute to their electricity bills, but you don't want to make YouTube money, but YouTube still needs money to operate, so you let other, less tech-savvy people finance YouTube for you, so that you can use it for free, while thinking they are less smart than you for wasting their time with the ads that you manage to avoid with your technological kung-fu.
You literally depend on these idiots to have YouTube! You aren't being smart for not seeings ads, you're just being a leech! Am I the only one who notices this contradiction here?
Are people really that entitled when it comes to free content? Are they just delusional? Do they think the dream fantasy world where you have free content without ads and creators make money can exist in real life? Or do they think creators don't deserve money? And are these the same people who complain when Wikipedia shows them an intrusive donation banner? If any of this is true, then I'm not seeing a lot of reasons to be on their side, to be honest.
Nobody likes ads. Ads are unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant, and intrusive, except for when they aren't. When it's a product you don't care about, it's a bad ad, but if it's a product you were thinking about buying in that exact moment, then it's an interesting ad that came at the perfect time. The reasons ads suck is because they're trying to find the people who want to buy the product among all the people who do not. If you wanted to buy a new thing every time you saw an ad, you would have some sort of psychological problem. It's normal for ads to be irrelevant. That's how they are.
People who claim to be concerned about privacy said they didn't like ad companies building a profile about them to serve them more relevant ads. These people probably use ad-blockers. The point was the invasion of privacy was worth it if it made ads better. For people who use ad-blockers, they wouldn't see a difference, so there was no upside. What I want to say is: it's hard to talk about how the ad industry should work with people who wish for the ad industry to be gone completely. They are in a way extremists: there is no compromise, there's just what they want.
Just like there's no compromise with someone who wants content to be completely free with no intrusions. Whether we're talking about ad-supported YouTube videos, paid AAA games, music streaming, pay-walled articles, or even sites that ask for donations, there is no compromise. They won't take anything but just the content they want, completely for free, with nothing "irrelevant" tacked on it. And if they can, they will use their technological savvy to get what they want, for free, without giving anything in exchange, and they will feel smug about it.
Please do not be one of these people. If you don't like YouTube's terms, don't use YouTube. Don't like Google, pay for Kagi. Don't like pay-walled articles, stop reading the news. Don't like the price point of an AAA game, don't play AAA games. If you don't think it's worth it, ignore it, avoid it, don't just take it and feel smug about it.
References
- YouTube is getting serious about blocking ad blockers, accessed 2023-11-22. ↩︎
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