this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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The thing is YouTube just can't be nice about it. It just cannot. In times that it was adblocker resistant, they'd add more and longer and worse ads until they pissed off enough engineers who collectively declared it a crisis and built the many anti-YouTube-ad solutions we have, from alternative YouTube mirrors to the Firefox packages.
We've seen this play out in the tech industry multiple times, and always the public wins thanks, largely to programmers who just get ticked off and spend a weekend on pizza to create a bypass.
The executives at Alphabet know all they have to do is allow concessions to be only mildly annoying and leave them. Five minutes of commercials for fifty minutes of content? That might be fair so long as it's pizza ads and not Jesus ministries telling us how sinful the LGBT+ are or Matt Walsh suggesting we make it illegal for some folk to vote.
But they can't do that. Shareholder Primacy means Alphabet must push for record profits, even if it means enshittifying all their services, including YouTube, and that means a 1/4 ad to content ratio and increasing that until it's intolerable and ad-based profit numbers go down due to failing viewership.
How do you guarantee pizza ads if the jesus ministries are pushing that sweet money around, too?
Hell, no! The world is happier without the ad industry. The Internet was run basically on pure voluntary effort, and it was great. The ads didn't make it viable, it always was.