YouTube Is Coming For Your Adblocker
At some point this year, youtube decided that they were going to start rolling out a warning to it’s viewers whom use a neat little extension called the ad blocker. If you don’t disable it, they could potentially stop video playback on your device. You know, something like uBlock Origin (they call that damn thing a content blocker, not just an ad blocker) which will literally block any and all ads on youtube videos. It’s like finding the golden ticket to life if your life is really boring, because let’s face it ads fucking suck. And I’m being honest here, I hate them, especially on streaming services like hbo and paramount. I don’t like them on youtube either and ublock helps with that as well – but the thing is, ads on youtube are, in my mind, a little different than on streaming services.
Again, I do have ublock installed on my computer and it does block youtube ads like a goddamn champ – but I rarely ever use my computer to consume youtube in the first place. 98% of youtube videos that I watch are on my phone while I’m at work and so I don’t get the luxury of an ad free experience and honestly, that’s alright. At least on mobile, you’re only waiting a max 15 seconds (30 once in a blue moon) on an ad and most of them let you skip it after 5 seconds anyway. Plus, those ads are helping the creator of that content. You know, that content that you love so much and are able to watch anytime for free. I don’t know about you but I really like some of the youtubers and creators that I watch. There is some really dog water ass content out there on youtube, that’s for sure. And the creators of that content aren’t much better – but there are a lot of really solid creators out there and those ads help them out. Hell, depending on the video/youtuber I’ll just let the ad play, especially if I’m just throwing it on in the background.
Don’t get me wrong, this whole adblocker blocker thing is fucking dumb because there is no way that there is enough of us who use ad blockers, for it to be really costing them much comparatively to what they make and what youtube/google is worth. Youtube kind of hid behind the “Creators need to get the money they deserve” stance and while that’s 100% true, youtube gets 45% (at least that’s what I found when I tried looking it up) so they want their share for sure. But come on, those youtubers are doing fucking great so they’re doing even better.
These statistics could be 100 percent false but it’s some quick financial stats on youtube:
- YouTube generated $29.2 billion revenue in 2022, a 1.3% increase year-on-year
- Over 2.7 billion people access YouTube once a month
- YouTube Premium reached 80 million subscribers in 2022
Now that’s just ripped right off of fucking https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
don’t click that link, it’s got like 12 fucking trackers in it. But that’s where I got the information – it could be horseshit. And all of these stats are outdated so I wouldn’t be surprised if their numbers didn’t look at least something similar to that though. Probably even higher. I read from two sources that youtube premium has actually hit 80 million subscribers but one was from 2022 and the other is that link right there – that’s from earlier this year. I’d bet that they’re close to 100 million by now, but regardless. Say it is 80 million subscribers – as of now, oct 17th 2023 – youtube premium is either 14/month or 140 dollars a year. Say everyone paid for a year subscription, which they didn’t. Cause 140 bucks can be a lot of money and people are more apt to have at least 14 bucks on their debit card that they can use. Even at the “discounted” 140 a year that’s like 11200000000 many dollars. Dude just in premium subscribers they make over 11 billion dollars a year. I get it, that’s not all profit but damn. And look at how well youtubers do, especially the controversial ones. If they’re making a shit ton of money, so is youtube. They don’t need to do this whole ban on ad blockers because compared to what they make – there is no way that there is enough of us that even use ad blockers to really make a dent. Most people couldn’t give a flying shit about privacy, security or any of that shit when it comes to using the internet. I just looked up ublock and it’s got 10 million + installs on the Chrome store and another 6 million over on firefox – so not even a quarter of just their paid members. There is supposedly like 2 billion plus active users a month or some crazy shit – many of them watching ads and most definitely not using an ad blocker, so I think it’s dumb. But that’s just me.
I don’t know, I thought about making a video on this but I didn’t think that there was really enough to talk about but now that I’ve written this out, I feel like I probably could. Because there is the whole ad blocker thing, but then there are people out there that bitch about people being able to make a living on youtube – or more specifically they think that having ads on your videos turns you into a corporate cog and it diminishes the art. Then there are the people who only look at youtube as a business, and I mean that’s cool. But that content usually sucks because the videos that are good, are the ones who’s creator actually cares about their content and their audience and just genuinely loves to create shit. And guess what, they’ve got ads on, baby. And I don’t blame a single one of them.