Apparently, this time it wasn't on Youtube. Rather some users are still using AB/ABP, and there's a bug in those that affects a lot of content, not just Youtube.
I am a premium member but over the last week or so my YouTube videos suddenly started to take an eternity (5-10 seconds) to start playing when they were near instant before. Does YouTube assume I have an ad blocker? I have no Chrome Extensions and no deliberately installed Ad Blockers on Win 11. Going to play around with it tomorrow to see if I can determine what is going on.
I have pihole and premium. I get a lot of buffer stalls too. Started recently. But they're also updating the Android app every couple weeks, so I assumed they are screwing things all up out of incompetence.
This must be some exec's hard focus right now. What a tool.
I haven't had any issues with slow buffering yet, but I have experienced something different: Sometimes the video playback suddenly stops altogether in the middle and throws me out of the video completely. I suspect that an ad is supposed to be played in this particular part of the video. I have to re-start playing the video from the part where it threw me out. Sometimes this happens several times in the same video.
I use the latest Firefox in combination with uBlock Origin (also always up-to-date).
I support the creators by buying merchandise and supporting Kickstarter etc. and others support using Patreon.
With those miniscule amounts Google pays to their creators (except the top 0.01%) I estimate that what I have brought is equal to 100-1000x of what they would have gotten from ads. And I'm no saint at supporting, there's people giving 100x more than me.
YouTube's greedy decisions are pulling me away from YouTube and towards the creator-owned Nebula platform. It's fairly inexpensive, I'm supporting creators and not Google, and there are no ads.
Tldr business did a video on their inckne sources, Nebula views get them much more money per view than YT. However YT is still their main income.
I really hope Nebula picks up more popularity
It's pretty obvious, isn't it? That's why people are trying to use ad block with it, or YouTube alternatives. People definitely still want to use YouTube, I think that's your point? But the relentless number of ads makes it very hard to do, which is their point - they want you to buy premium. If they added any more ads they might as well paywall the whole site.
You think fediverse is representative of the general population? You think the general population is installing an blocking? You realize how much money Google makes right? I've been yelled at for blocking ads because they were braking when people wanted to purchase something.
No, I don't. I do think Google is putting in a shit ton of ads because premium makes more money than ads do, which is represented by creators getting more money from premium users than ad supported users. They want the average person to be overwhelmed by ads and buy premium, which is the same effect as using an ad blocker.
Nobody wants YouTube with ads. That's literally the entire point.
Hmm, that would explain the issues I've been having. The odd thing to me is that there's no feedback provided to let the user know that this is a response to adblock. I assumed that there were just technical problems somewhere.
I don't know a single person who has ever paid for YouTube premium, and would consider anyone who does to be a mark. And I'm certain that, for a variety of reasons, the userbase of this place are very unlikely to use premium.
So no, I don't think I would have heard about that