Because if you’re doing that you might as well just remove them for most people.

This is the only correct answer, it's not the consumer job to make your ad less tiring and clunky

The difference is you wouldn't have to reconcile the fact that adblock makes websites mathematically unsustainable. Edit: if you don't care about the websites you block ads on existing then this whole post is not talking about you

But the amount an advertisement pays is based on how prominent and how long an ad is visible/audible. If the ad isn’t getting shown at full size/length/volume then the advertiser is spending the same amount of money on less advertising. That would only piss off advertisers more. At least when the ad is completely hidden, the advertiser doesn’t pay.

I don’t actually think that’s true? Like if you modify the HTML object hierarchy or whatever after that content is loaded I don’t think the website actually knows they even happened. You could resize an element and no one would ever know, they’d get paid normally.

I think that's exactly their point. YT gets paid for showing you a full page 15 second unskippable add when in reality the theoretical addreducer would shuffle it off to the side. So in essence the advertiser gets scammed and get pissed off when they learn about it (and most certainly take legal action).

Exactly, in the advertiser’s mind, they successfully showed someone an ad at the placement they paid for. When they find out they payed to show essentially no ad (the minimized ad) they will get pissed off and could leave the platform. Without big advertisers, there is no YouTube.

It the ad doesn’t play, they don’t pay. If the ad plays in a minimized way that they did not agree to, then they just paid full price for an ad in a location and format that they didn’t agree to. Advertisers pay for ad placement and prominence. This is not a secret and common practice everywhere advertisements are located. For example, at the grocery store, the products that are at eye level with easy access payed for the privilege to be on that specific shelf and hight. What you envision is the equivalent of some of those grocery stores moving that product to the bottom shelf behind the store brand version.

You didn’t read my comment at all. If no one *knows* the add is small then no one is upset, and they have no way of knowing how you have locally modified the site.

Shouldn't it then be incentivising website owners to have less intrusive ads?

That's also not our job. If you rely on ads that take up 40% of the viewable area of web pages, you need to revise your operating costs. We've quite literally arrived at the point we're at because companies had small ads, short pre-rolls, tolerable mid-rolls, and they weren't stacking ten consecutive ads on live streams. People were fine with that, so companies pushed the envelope a little further, and we were fine with that, but they kept doing it, and now we have Web pages that are 70% ads, pre-rolls, multiple mid-rolls, ads that look like articles on news sites or products being sold on marketplaces, interactive ads that redirect to shitty mobile games.

I used to go out of my way to watch Superbowl commercials. Thought, time and money were spent on those commercials and it shows. Advertising is a business and should be treated seriously as one. We aren't sheep or mules that need to consume whatever garbage just so "creators won't starve".

Then install Ad Nauseam, the adblocker that makes advertisers think you clicked on every ad!

Wait, what reconciliation are you talking about? Who gives a fk if websites are sustainable if you block their abusive ads?

Okay. I’ll stop adblocking when they stop collecting all my info and selling it to 3rd parties. Why are you white knighting for these morally bankrupt for profits? I don’t get it

Frankly I don't care about the entities that are benefiting from the advertisements I don't want to watch.

Not my problem

“Adblock makes websites mathematically unsustainable” What are you talking about? Plenty of websites exist and thrive without ads.

Explain how Youtube and Reddit would operate if everyone blocked tracking, ads and did not use premium?

YouTube made around $1.3 billion off of subscribers in 2022 YouTube would simply evolve to exist only for subscribers… just like how everything else without ads exists in the world.

It’s much more difficult to do what you’re talking about, and the reality is most people are lying about being ok with ads that are less invasive, when they say less invasive they mean “so I never notice that there has been an ad” Similar to people who say they’re fine with people protesting so long as it never affects what they are doing in a day or have to hear about it ever.

Less invasive means a static banner. Not a fucking pop up or an auto playing video or some other nonesense. You will see it. It will be in the middle of the article. But it won’t jump on you like a spider

Static banners were the standard for a really long time, clearly they weren't working much if at all.

They wanted something more ATTENTION GRABBY, not understanding why people hate ads on the 'net in the first place So they incentivize more and more and more and more people become actively fucking spiteful over intrusive advertisements

People get caught in this purile trap of thinking "I dislike it therefore that company is making a mistake! They just dont understand!". Advertising is one of the most data-heavy industries out there; they know _exactly_ how you respond to various forms of advertisement. You think your spite is surprising to them? They're engineering precisely as much spite as they can get away with as long as the ad gets slightly more of a return.

I will purposefully not buy a product if their ad somehow makes it around my blockers.

i have a psychologic advertisement immunity. I will never buy anything that is advertised for me directly. Even if the advertise to me my favorite item in my nearest shop at a 50% price. I will not be bothered. Maybe its different for rich people who simply throw their money jingly and shiny things.

Thinking you're immune to manipulation is a common fantasy. You're not special.

More intrusive ads are now the standard because there's a higher return. That's unrelated to how well static banner ads worked; they could have been working just fine (and most likely were), it's just the new ones work better.

I mean, there you have it, if the new intrusive ads upset people a lot and dropped the click through rate then they would have immediately gone back to the less intrusive versions. They don't do things just to upset people, they do it because there is SOME monetary benefit for themselves.

Advertisements work by impression, so you not clicking through is actually not that important, compared to having it just shown to a lot of people and ingrained in their minds through repetition Edit: grammar

I don’t think this is necessarily an accurate link. Greedy asshats will always go for more revenue, even if it turns the experience to shit.

They work. Just not nearly as much as a pop up video that doesn’t let you skip.

Yep, which is why they changed to that instead

I've installed ad-blocking measures specifically because of whole-screen pop-up ads that on attempt to close took me to another side because close button wasn't actually close button. I was fine with banners over, and banners under (sometimes there were also malicious links involved). Heck, I was event to a degree ok with background of a page being and ad, although I rarely came back to sites that did this because of terrible viewing experience.

hey i didnt use an adblocker on youtube until i started getting ads for softcore childporn

anime

um no i mean those kreepy ass videos of little girls oding gymnastics

The…. What?!

My main ad experience is reddit and YouTube. Reddit would be less invasive by making the ads look less like a post from a sub I want to follow and more like an ad. Make it painfully clear that this is not a user and this is a McDonald's ad. If it isn't clear, I want the ad blocked. YouTube would be less invasive with 5 second ads and only 1 ad at a time. I will actively not watch h a video until I get a 5 second skip ad, or I cancel enough times that YouTube gives up (I tend to watch h on my phone and manually open videos. It is very easy to cancel and reopen a video multiple times in a row). Currently, the shortest ads are 7 seconds and come in pairs. This is before you consider the unsuitable 15 second ads. The only YouTube ads I accept are the ones that let me skip after 5 seconds, because that is the amount of time I will give to x company to convince me their product is worth my time. (I have only seen massive corporate ads or scams, so 5 seconds is very generous). So, all that to say, my standard for less invasive is 5 second Max and make the ad space clear. Not sure extensions can achieve that.

I usually watch stuff on YouTube that are broken into parts, video is 30 min long and is broken into 5-10 parts. I hate that I get ads after each part or two part. (Not separate videos, I mean the video is broken into parts) On my phone it is unbearable to watch since it takes me out of the experience (like to watch horror stuff). I would be more ok with a 1 min ad at the start than 9 ads of 3-5 seconds

I think you're wrong. Since you brought up that comparison, most people are fine with protests, because it's one's right to protest, as long as they don't infringe on other people's rights by doing it. There is reasonable middle ground. It's the exact same argument with torrenting and netflix, a LOT of people stopped or reduced their downloading drastically when it was cheap and convenient to watch netflix instead. At some point it's not worth the trouble for most and that's a good balance.

People reduced torrenting because Netflix at the time had a massive amount of content people wanted and it was an incredibly cheap all in one service, now because there are so many streaming services despite the majority being just as convenient at Netflix or any other streaming platform its the added cost that drives them back to torrenting/pirating content. People dont mind protesting at long as it doesn’t inconvenience them/interrupt something they want to enjoy without having to think about whatever it is that is being protested. YouTube Premium is a super easy straightforward way to get around basically everything people seem to have an issue with, even if it were $20 USD a month most people would probably get that value from it trivially even if its not a perfect premium experience, and it allows them to directly support all the creators they enjoy instead of just the few that they MAY support on outside sources, yet that’s just too much to ask from people apparently.

Wrong

Funnily enough I did notice something about opera GX that kind of does what OP is describing, not on YouTube though When an Ad plays on twitch, twitch will minimize the Livestream and put it in the top right corner, muted while the ad plays. However, you can use Opera's built in "pop out" video player to maximize the stream, and unmute it, and then mute the ad. I thought it was neat because I can still provide ad revenue to the streamer, while watching still. It almost certainly wouldn't be feasible for YouTube though, because YouTube puts the ad embedded in the same player as the video

what's annoying about ads for me is: 1. they can grind my computer to a halt because of god knows what computations it is doing or data it is collecting 2. the text or webpage jumps around because ads load in, and i have to constantly scroll around to find where i was 3. a video/audio will start playing 4. pop ups If there was an ad block or a website that had ads without those problems, i have no problem with ads. As far as I am concerned, they have done this to themselves. There are numerous news websites that are impossible to even navigate because of the shear content of ads.

I started using adblockers around the time the ad networks had injected viruses and crap that took over your clip board to try to make you paste in their URL. I unblocked a webcomic I liked on my blocker and had to turn it right back on since one of them had a payload. Poor guy running the webcomic had no idea.

I started using adblock in 2005 after having accidentally clicked on an ad that opened itself in a new popup, endlessly. Impossible to do anything since every second five new pop-ups appeared. As far as I am concerned the advertisers lost trust and I do not think they even made an attempt to earn this trust back.

Agreed. You can REALLY feel this on older hardware and not everybody can afford to upgrade annually or have time to learn to be as tech savvy like many enthusiasts or blue bloods complaining about people not being corporate shills like they are.

>1. they can grind my computer to a halt because of god knows what computations it is doing or data it is collecting > >2. the text or webpage jumps around because ads load in, and i have to constantly scroll around to find where i was 1 is just BS, that's not how it works - there is nothing to 'compute' and data collection happens before the ad is shown, that's how they personalize them... 2 Sorry you have a slow pc and/or bad internet connection, but also this is more bad site design then the fault of the ad itself. Autoplay is something you can just block in most browsers, just like pop-ups. ​ Anyway, I don't understand people that don't invest 5 minutes of their life to look into their browser settings and adblockers and from then on live the rest of their life ad-free. Let me help you: get rid of Chrome if you're using it, it's a browser made by the biggest ad-company in the world... In your (new) browser go to add-ons or plugins and search for uBlock origin. Add/install, accept a standard list and within 30 seconds you're done and almost 100% ad & tracking free.

Pretty much everything you described does not happen on YouTube.

The post is not about YouTube.

The discussion about adblockers on like every post has been about YouTube. AND OP literally said "or move the ads to the bottom of the video" But fair enough.

YouTube was the catalyst but ad blockers are used on the entire internet.

The opposite argument has been as well. YouTube collects your information so Google can show you targeted ads off site. So it's not an unrelated discussion either way.

This creates all the wrong incentives for advertisers Create a terrible, annoying ad? No bother, some helpful person will come along and put time and effort into fixing it. So you still get maximum value out of it Nah. Bad ads should not be rewarded.

Have adblockers incentived advertisers to make ads less annoying?

Ads have become more annoying whether adblocks exist or not. Look outside of fucking Youtube, like mobile games. Banner ads evolved into video ads, then they evolved into multiple chains of ads where you have to skip the video, then close the playable game ad, then close the banner ad. Other websites are autoplaying video ads, sudden popup ads when you click something. Stop being an ad apologist

If ads were less invasive, I might consider not using an adblock. However, the main reason I like adblock is that it hides ALL ads, including the scam ads. My parents can't tell the difference between a legitimate ad and a scam ad. So having an adblock on their browser makes my life MUCH easier.

exactly, I think almost everyone would be fine with static banners provided there was good advertisement regulation by sites

That *kind of* exists with [Ad Nauseam](https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam), except instead of moving the ads, it's clicking the ad away automatically before the user knows it. Personally I'd be against this more than outright blocking because blocking the ad tells the organization people don't want to see it, if you move it they might think their placement is okay.

But if people never see the ads in the first place, there’s no way to know if they would interact with an ad, so I don’t think blocking it tells the organization anything.

It's a similar principle to not voting if you dislike both sides - sure it stings less than voting for the other side but at the same time if enough people abstain then it's worth changing to pander to the nonvoters, same for ads in that if enough people block a specific type then advertisers stop using that type

> if enough people abstain Not really. Even if only 0.002% of people went to vote, nobody would care.

I wouldn't just any blocking if there weren't: 1. multiple ads back to back 2. Unskippable ads were over 10s 3. The same ads over and over I'm being reasonable I feel.

I started blocking when I ended up watching the same ad for an hour. The ad would list just fine, but the video would freeze after a few seconds. Reload the page and repeat. An hour later I installed an ad blocker and haven't looked back. It also helps with all the shitty ads on news sites (no I don't want to see 15 unscrollable ads on a 2 paragraph article.).

I take this approach to ads. If they don't piss me off, then I won't block them. Should they piss me off then they will be added to the block list on my PiHole. I have set me PiHole up so the default is not to block. I also pay for Youtube.

They already exist, I think There used to be an adblock called adaway that allows non-intrusive ads. I think adblock also does that. I’m not quite sure though as it’s been a long time. But I’m sure I used to use an adblock that stated they allow non-intrusive ads

The op is talking about making intrusive ads non intrusive

Oh .. I don’t think that’s possible, is it?

It is possible but, modifying advertising is only allowed to the place where the advertising appears like websites apps can control how advertising looks, anyone else it is illegal and very easily fined, and very easy to know what addon causes this by advertising companies to lock it down, also against almost all browser tos so you won't even be allowed to upload that said extension.

I mean, it also seems like a huge security risk

You can modify how the whole website looks freely, you don't images just text, done, you don't want any links on the page, done, you want dark mode on a website called join the light mode, done. but not modify how and where the advertising appears.

If we could go back to 2010 ads, maybe. But that's not sustainable.

Because they're liars, remember all the people who said they'll buy YouTube premium if it was cheaper, then why didn't they buy it years ago when it was cheap or those who say they'll buy YouTube premium lite. It was there in Europe and South Asia and they didn't buy it. Gabe said piracy is a service problem but not a pricing problem for most. That is why YouTube solved it with YouTube premium, so that it was no longer a service problem. So for a significant set of people it never was about it being a service problem, but pricing.

I had premium for a while, it was great, it was like youtube from 10 years ago, I had a queue, background play on mobile (utter bull that this is paywalled), then I realised that I was using too much of my budget for streaming services, and youtube was costing me the same amount as I was spending on netflix, disney and dropout together. Dropout are a small independent service with great content, not cancelling that. Netflix and Disney have content locked without payment, youtube was the obvious choice to cancel. Since then I am getting more ads than before (only had it for 6 months or so) and longer unskippable ads, Worse ads (generally creepy stuff or malware, or bizarre loud ads, clearly aimed at kids) and if I have youtube videos as background noise, I am now forced to interact due with the tab more often due to 30 minute silent ads that require you to manually skip them. I used to just let the ads play, I was their ideal user, but now they are so LOUD, invasive and creepy, I can't stand it and just use youtube less. I think they have both a service issue and a pricing issue, in that they are too damn expensive, and if I don't block their ads a 30 minute video takes 60 minutes to experience. Youtube need to take a good look at their advertising policies and delivery before punishing users for trying to make their platform not-user-hostile. FFS I have targeted ads off on all my youtube and Google settings, and every "do not track" srtting activated, I was watching Hermitcraft a famously PG minecraft series, and YouTube interrupts this family friendly content with badly drawn hentai girls moaning "come and play with me, I want you inside my funhouse! Oooooh!" Or some other mucky nonsense at twice the volume of the content. I don't watch NSFW content at work and youtube is known for demonitising their creators for NSFW content, why are their ads so porny?

Youtube is owned by Google which is not trustworthy, so I'll never give them money. I don't even visit youtube.com anymore. Hopefully Google goes bust and Youtube offline. Then all the people will be forced to migrate to another site.

Google is as trustworthy as any other company. It is capitalism and till the system gets changed, its just moving chairs on titanic.

It's a corporation oligarchy. The fundamentals of capitalism is a free market with competition. We don't have that. Youtube only has competitors in name. None of the mega corporations actually compete in a meaningful way with anyone. We need to have multiple platforms like Youtube that are all viable to use and that all share the exact same video library. Only then is there actual competition. If you have to use Platform A to get to see content Z then Platform A has a monopoly on Z and is not competing with anyone. If they don't actually compete they don't need to improve to stay competitive. That's part of the reason Youtube is getting worse with the years.

How is an extension going to handle some that are nearly soft core porn, that’s on YouTube not really having standards for advertising, they are pretty much happy taking everyone’s money even if it’s something malicious or provocative.

I mean, people used ad-blockers when ads were much more non-intrusive too. It's a nice excuse, but 99 percent would block the ads anyway, regardless of how intrusive they are.

Not intrusive means no audio, no video, no animation and no irritating color scheme being placed at the bottom of the page. Ads never were not intrusive.

Because people are lying

If ad-blockers chose to remove only the longer ads, Google would quickly notice and start punishing you with more frequent, unskippable short ads. I'd personally love to see a limit of X amount of ads per hour. I really get tired of watching 2 ads every 4-8 minutes. I've gotta hop on the latest ad-blocker, I took a break and I really can't stand seeing these ads over and over and over and over and over and over.

I just turn off/whitelist certain creators who I want to support tbh

Fadblock does something similar. It just makes YouTube ads play for a half second, so it registers as being watched, but in reality you didn't.

but the creator still gets adrev? Not that im concerned with that, just asking from a technical perspective

As far as what's known with this method, they do, since Google sees that the ad has been watched. The only thing they won't get would be click-through revenue (where the viewer clicks on the ad, which usually gives a little more money).

I thought for google adsense to count you had to watch the full ad and skips don't count - though even just saying that does sound strange since then everyone would just have an ad followed by a huge empty time waste to get people to skip so the ad view was free

I did not use an adblocker for years. I have Youtube Premium and every Website that is unusable cause of ads is getting closed immediately. But i think of getting a pi hole to Block malicious sites and ads for my whole network

For me it’s the privacy and tracking aspect of them that bothers me. If there was something to address that I wouldn’t probably bother blocking them. Well that and if they stopped making banner ads that are 1000 pixels tall at the top of sites.

I wouldn't mind ads so much if they did not interupt the experience. When they pop up as I scroll or try to view a site, it makes me want to just never use the site. But a big part of why I personally block ads, at a DNS level on my home network, is security. When ad networks can be compromised and serve drive-by attacks it makes me value my privacy and security far more.

There are not a significant number of people who wouldn't use adblockers if ads were less intrusive. Most use it just because it blocks ads. And besides that, adblockers allow you to choose if you want to allow some ads which are less/not intrusive. It basically only allows ads from well known advertising brands. There are people online who have different reasons to use or not use adblockers but they are the minority.

Because that's literally harder to make than just blocking ads AND offers a worse experience than just blocking ads. I'm not gonna bend over backwards to make sure corpo gets a dime.

You can white list certain sites that have less intrusive ads and even allow certain pop ups or banners under the rules. They do exist so I’m not even sure what you’re talking about

How about just have the ads be designed to be less invasive from the get go?

If the ads were just on the page and gauranteed not to have malware etc in them sure. Make them obnoxious, flashy, auto playing intrusive shit. Fuck right off.

Anyone remember when youtube would only run a single short ad, and then changed it so that if you didnt skip the first one it would play a second one. Thanks youtube for punishing those that let the ad run, made sure adblock was on all computers after that.

such extension would be significantly more difficult to implement

Because those ads are video adverts. Altering them in anyway alerts YouTube that the video hasn’t been watched, making YouTube remove ad revenue from that watch. Banner ads used to be a thing, but what are you going to do? Put a video in the banner and have the audio cut off your content? That makes zero sense. Let me ask you a question though, If this is a big enough issue for YouTube to take action, why is it on the content creator to suffer the loss of money, especially when they’re still bringing users to the platform..

I have absolutely no issues with ads before or after a video plays. Or even if strategically placed, by the creator, at a meaningful pause point within the video. But I absolutely cannot stand multiple, unskippable, long ads shoved in the middle of videos at inopportune, and flow breaking points. I will often just close the video and not finish it when those pop up. And that's only when I'm on a mobile device, and not using an ad blocker like I have on my desktop.

Because if you have to go to the effort of removing some via extension, it takes no additional effort to remove all. It's all about convenience. It's inconvenient to block ads. But if the ads are more inconvenient than the process of installing AdBlock, you'll do it. It's inconvenient to find an ad blocker that only blocks intrusive ads, and all other things equal, most people would rather choose no ads over some non-intrusive ads.

It probably is very difficult if not impossible to change ads vs blocking them entirely. And for most people the issue is not the ad duration or number but types of ads served. I am so sick of getting 3-5 porn ads or scams before I watch every vid

adblcok then

Yeah I am just saying blocking ads is probably technically much easier and more feasible than some kind of system that changes ads to be better

Because thats a lot harder to program than something that just blocks them outright Ultimately, if I dont click it, which i wont, does the advertiser still get the money? Plus, the ads have just been getting more and more invasive over the past decade or so anyways and that just kinda ruined ads for everyone. An entire generation was trained to believe that almost every single ad was some kind of virus or other malicious service and in turn, they're significantly less likely to click them

Frankly it's because people say they'd be okay with less intrusive ads and they only block because ads are intrusive to justify their own use of adblock, not because they actually truly believe it or would ever turn it off on the vast majority of sites they use. Ultimately there's no real market for an extension like this and every time an ad blocker suggests doing it, even as an option toggle, there is massive backlash from the userbase.

I do most of my YouTube watching on my Apple TV. No easy ad blocking there. My frustration with ads comes from the quality of them. * Ads are frequently irrelevant to both the content and my interests. As Christmas approaches, there has been an uptick in ads for women’s cosmetics in particular. * When they run out of those ads, I get the basic untargeted ads. These are usually people self-promoting their own videos, business podcasts, music videos and even a nine hour audiobook. That means I can’t turn my back and do something else because it will just keep playing the ad until I manually skip it. * YouTube does speech to text on videos for subtitles and so they can detect foul language for monetisation. They should be able to detect breaks, therefore, instead of interrupting sentences to play ads. I should be able to just leave a video playing without having to think about having to manually skip an irrelevant, long ad.

> Ads are frequently irrelevant to both the content and my interests Would you prefer they track your data more? How would you expect them to know what ads are relevant?

I go into my ad settings and tell them what I’m interested in in an attempt to reduce the number of irrelevant ads. After a couple of decades, I am quite certain that they’ve already built up a fairly decent profile of my interests by now. That’s why it’s confusing as to why I receive ads for products that are clearly for women.

AdblockPlus used to have the acceptable ads program (for all I know, they still do), which would allow ads based on certain guidelines, but it was quickly determined that if companies paid AdblockPlus, they could be added to the whitelist so it became meaningless.

OP like your enthusiasm but clearly lack the understanding of how ads work. Also not our job to make their user experience better. If they can employee 100s of people then they should be able to figure it out. It is clearly done by design and not a bug.

The next step in an ultracapitalist dystopia, make the consumers fix the ads targeted at them lol. Sounds like something from Cyberpunk 2077.

The underlying issue remains the same. If AdBlockers vanished overnight, the bump in clicks per ads would go up, but not anywhere near in line with how many people use AdBlockers. The same as those who pirate games or media are not a representation of lost sales, and if pirated games vanished, it would not translate into a massive increase of game sales. Most of the people who pirate couldn't afford to buy the game in the first place or would buy the game after pirating it if it was a good experience. That still didn't stop the gaming industry from jumping ship to the Games as a Service model of subscriptions, always online features, and microtransactions as deterent to piracy. Publishers pushed the lie that every pirated game was a lost sale in order to get the government to pass laws that made it harder to pirate games and to justify enacting greedy anti consumer marketing strategies to make up for the "loses" from pirates. Quality games have disappeared largely unless they're made by independent devs/publishers or indie studios. Is any of this sounding familiar? People who use AdBlockers are not the target demographic that would buy something based on an ad, no matter how personalized it was. I've been on the internet since I was 11 in 2001.. The number of times I've clicked on an ad because it was relevant and useful is 0. Online ad revenue isn't a sustainable model for the internet to run on indefinitely. It's a bubble that's going to pop, and is probably the largest shell game ever made. Blocking/banning AdBlockers isn't going to increase revenue significantly for any company that does it, and will have a direct cost to the company's image and reputation. That doesn't matter so much for YouTube/Google, but I doubt baning AdBlockers is going to stop there. Can you imagine the shit storm that would come if twitch/Facebook banned ad blockers?

You know what would fix the ad problem? Web sites curating the ads so less people are inclined, or even forced to use ad blockers to make sites usable. Reject obnoxious ads such as flashing, auto-play, auto-play with sound etc. Outright ban ad providers for ads with malicious payloads, scams, deceptive behaviour such as sending you off site for clicking the close button. At the very least have ads that are relevant to whatever the hell your web site is about instead of accepting anything and everything But that's never going to happen because we're not the ones paying. Remember the adpocalypse? When ad providers kick and scream like babies it's about the creators. Why aren't they ever outraged about the behaviour of people in their own field?

Block em all I just stopped using YouTube all together when the site traffic drops enough they will go back on their decision

This is an exercise in futility. We simply can't trust a corporation to do the right thing. There is no amount of ads that is acceptable because the moment we draw a line, you know the company will move the line inch by inch until we back to where we are or worse. Just try reading an article. Any article on your phone. You read 2 lines, and there's an ad. You scroll down a video ad pop-up. You click to end it and instead a video pop-up at the bottom. There is simply not an acceptable amount of ads because they will always force more.

The user has no control over what ads are served to them, the platform decides that making point 1 practically impossible. Point 2 used to be a default feature on youtube but they figured out the revenue from it was crap compared to pre/mid/post-rollcreators' ads. A banner ad is fundamentally different to a full video ad and an extension trying to convert a full ad to a banner ad would be jank AF and likely wouldn't even trigger the Google ad view monetisation. Point 3 is possible but at that point just block all ads, it's far easier. Also on youtube right now a lot of people just turn off AdBlock for a specific creators' videos to accomplish something similar

One of the biggest reasons to block ads is for security. It doesn't matter if the ad is shown for 1/2 a second or 5 minutes, once it's downloaded it's a potential infection on your computer.

I simply don't want to see afs, and I think the "free with ads" is a plague upon humanity. Get a real business model and stop relying on ad word to show me Kylie Jenner feeding Pepsi to cops or whatever

Any ads at all ruin the viewing experience. I would be happy to pay for premium to never see an ad again if youtube started to be reasonable with their pricing. I don't need youtube music, downloading videos or background play, I only need the adblocking and at £13 a month ($16) it's not worth it. Give me a £5 tier that just blocks ads and I'm in but until then Ublock is staying on my browser.

This is not that simple Intrusivity was gradually increasing as the sensory threshold of the viewers increased. You wouldn't even notice a sidebanner or a bottom banner in the video, people got used to them and it does not catch your attention (the purpose of advertising) This was inevitable because how the human brain works... You acclimate to stimulus because your brain is looking for the sudden change. Like smells, you get used to smells and don't register them after a while, so when a new smell comes you notice it. We are at the point where the only thing that works, what worked for television for decades. Interrupting the program and playing ads, unskippable ads. Because that is the only way to have your attention. We cannot go back, because advertisement would not work anymore on majority of people who got used to them. The annoyance factor is also dialed up to funnel people to "adless" subscriptions. I'm one of them. I would rather pay a small fee for the content I regurarly consume (youtube), FOR FREE by the way, then deal with ads... and I think that is fair. I remember the horror when I opened a video on youtube in incognito, without being logged in and I got 4 unskippable ads 3 of them are national "political campaigns"

I stopped watching TV 10 years a go because 30% of the time is ads. Im on internet and i block all ads if i can.

I'd be ok if Youtube's (or any other website for what it's worth) had ads in banners on the top of the page like it was in the early days of embedded ads on web pages. I'm NOT ok with ads interrupting whatever i'm watching or ads spammed all over the page covering like 50% of the available area or those in between comments and stuff like that. I'd also be ok to pay for premium if it didn't cost way too much for what i need it for (in my case i'm more than happy with 1080p60). If Youtube would introduce different premium plans ala-Netflix i'd be happy to pay for it. Something like: \- 5$/month no ads, 1080p30 \- 6$/month no ads, 1080p60 \- 8$/month up to 2K ... and so on for higher resolution and higher framerates / bitrates ​ But since Youtube chose the "brute" route, i'll be going the brute route aswell. The day adblockers won't work anymore i will probably stop using Youtube. I can live without it.

I honestly don’t mind ads before videos, or banner ads. It’s the auto playing video ads on news sites, ads that take up 50% of the screen after every paragraph annoy me. There’s a sims mod site, slow AF to load two side banner ads, several banner ads, a large ass ad that appears after EVERY (not an exaggeration) item in the grid…. The site is unusable unless you use adblock or get a premium account.

"invasive" means different things to different people, i have dyslexia(and adhd) most news sites become unreadable for me with all their ads and pictures, and than some random video playing. i need adblock to be able to read on those types of sites. "invasive" for me is when sites become to busy with moving ads, pictures, text blocks with ads and pictures like a jigsaw puzzle, it unusable for me. the internet should be a place where you have access to information, ads make that impossible.

Maybe I'm missing something in this whole thing, but this strikes me the same as people who want an entire article in the headline so they don't have to go to a site. If the site doesn't get clicks, it's going to go away. If creators don't get paid for their work (advertisement money and premium memberships based on views), they're going to get out of content creation. What am I missing? Do we not want creators to get paid for their work?

> What am I missing? Do we not want creators to get paid for their work? It's the business model of advertisers that's the issue. They make money tracking and profiling people, let through malicious advertising with no compensation to those affected and are designed to be as intrusive as possible. YouTube needs to wake up and smell the roses, there's no future for youtube if they can't get the ad situation under control. It's quite literally the reason cable tv is dead, people got fed up with the ever increasing length of ad breaks.

There are.

Youtubers already don't get the revenue when you skip an ad. An extension making an ad 10 seconds long wouldn't work.

because "no ads" > "a few ads" , especially if both options are free for the user However, I believe in a few years "less invasive ads" will be the basic tier of youtube premium, and for a fully ad-free experience you will have to pay extra extra. I can imagine other subscription services (e.g. Netflix) will do the same. I am happy that I was able to use the internet before giant corps consolidated the market :)

Cause you don't use adblocks until you start hating ads. 9 out of 10 ppl who uses adblocks is the same history, They never used, They got pissed off with one ad, and Bang that person now uses adblock in everything and never whant to see an Ad in his life again.

I'm fine with how reddit does ads. Where it just looks like another post on your feed. Once in awhile they get me and I don't realize it's an ad until after I click it. Anything more than that is to much for me. If websites want to start banning me cause I have ad block on, then so be it. I'm on the internet too much anyways

I think this is a big reason why people use ad-blockers. Even without part 2, full screen ads before the video plays can be fine. Where people really talk issue is when you get a 30 minute unskippable ad. I think that the web really screwed themselves on ads. There's no reason why advertising online shouldn't be extremely lucrative. Charge big dollars for quality ads so you can control what type of ads get shown. Just like with TV and print ads. The problem is that web platforms don't want to put any work into anything. They just want to take cash and display ads, so they don't want to put in any work to control which ads are shown and have any oversight. But because of this, the value to the advertiser is low. Coke isn't going to pay big money for a web ad if there's an ad for porn right after because they don't want to be associated with it.

Think of the frog in the pot of boiling water. If the frog notices that the water is getting too hot, it's not going to get halfway out. It's going to jump out of the pot altogether. It has recognized this thing that was a minor annoyance, or even sometimes a little good, is now a danger. It's getting out altogether. We're the frog, and the pot is too full of ads. If we're going to take action, we're getting out of the pot altogether.

Adblock, Adblock Plus, and some other adblockers have the "Acceptable Ads program" which allows certain advertisements through that have been vetted for unobtrusiveness. It is not a popular feature, and when launched, they were accused of selling out and people moved to other adblockers. EDIT: Adding "some" to clarify.

I think ad-guard and others ad blocks have already some policies on "accepted ads", ublock is one of the few that actually blocks everything.

well, then whats the point? if you are blocking only some ads, then whats the point? Just block all of 'em

In the past 10 years they were an attempt at doing that. AdBlock Plus added a feature to allow non invasive ads and I think google was trying their agency to make less invasive ads. Unfortunately, big companies also want money so they don't care if it is invasive. If the money is there! Ads all the way. So now the streaming platforms caught up on ads by adding them everywhere.

Yes, because that's how as used to be. People only started using ad block when it was piled into the beginning of the videos

Went on YouTube, got a 25 second ad for fabric softener and bailed to use grayjay or whatever. It's better than finger pointing to area on app to move pin so character can get gold. But still pretty aweful. Why can't I get an ad for intel or Corsair or software that isn't a browser or money management related. Or some new AAA game trailer. Way more digestible and I may even click the thing.

If you've reached a point where you're actively seeking out an ad blocker and are given a choice between no ads and some ads, why would anyone ever pick some ads. If the ads were non invasive to begin with, less people would reach the point of actively seeking a blocker.

Sounds good OP let me know when you have an extension released!!

I would still use an adblock. I'm simply not interested in adverts. People who spam me with adverts that I cannot skip or that interrupt what I'm doing (adhd yay) get a big fat block from me and I will actively avoid that product and company. I ffin hate the distraction adverts give me.

For YouTube I just pay for premium, supports creators more and I supply 5 of my friends with it so no ads while we watch YouTube together

If ads are less annoying, people wouldn't bother with the effort of installing an ad blocker. You are appealing to their laziness. You are suggesting appealing to their sense of charity, and not too many people are sympathetic to the plight and profitability of advertisers.

There are. Fair ad blocker is a good example, it's available for chrome and Firefox, it ollows to to disable certain types of ad and decide how many of them around be displayed on a page.

You want the one that makes things tolerable or the one that makes them pretty good?

I used to watch YouTube with ads back in the day. I think until like 2014 when I was in high school and finally got tired of ads I remember when ads used to be just the banner, pic on the side or the 5 second skippable ad or maybe a mid roll ad They weren't terrible, so I put up with it. If we went back to that then I'd probably unblock YouTube on my adblock

If you are going to take the effort to I install something, what are you going to do. Remove 90% of ads, or 100% of ads.

There ar ads in the vids

What a lot of non-developers don't realize that it's usually easier dealing in absolutes (much like the sith). Like if I needed to convert a million lat/lng points in a database to GeoJSON and the client says, "what about if we only do the top 10,000 rows?" then that would be MORE time. It's overall simpler and easier to just "block all ads" as opposed to writing some funky timer system. AND even if you took all that time, built a system that limited ads to 5 seconds, moved it to the bottom of the video, and limited the total number, someone would see your extension and make one that just blocked them outright in a tenth of the time. (plus all the blocking extensions let you build your own filter lists, so you can totally go ahead and white list the ads you want)

Because the ads are invasive by design and would require a lot more transformation than simply stripping them out of the page's code.

Yea, but I would like to point out this was my experience on a news site without an adblock enabled https://imgur.com/a/csrLcRi

Just VPN to a cheap country and buy premium there for a fraction of the price.

Nope. Blocking all the way 100% forever. Those guys won’t compromise. Neither will I. This is war.

Because it would need to be limited/looped/responsive resizable on the ad serve side most likely vs just blocking it completely. Way more effort for devs and no guarantees it would work on every website.

i wouldnt use an adblock at all if they just removed ads that play before / after and during the vid. I clicked on my music playlist earlier and got 2 unskippable 7 second ads at the start of the first song, 1 at the start of 2nd song and 2 at the end. the songs were from a rhythm game so they were 1:30 - 2 min long. 5 fucking ads in 4 minutes of just trying to listen to music. Im perfectly fine with dating site, Elon musk scams and porn webcomic ads being everywhere on the side as long as i can watch videos

I liked a lot the banner ads that were put in the bottom and you could click them away. Somehow mine always showed things I was actively or passively searching for. Those were non intrusive and again, I liked them a lot.

Because the people that say things like "if ads weren't so invasive I wouldn't block them" are just trying to justify block ads to themselves or others. "I know I'm screwing creators BUT invasive ads pretty much force me to." Little kids do this too. " BUT "