YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers

This is not definitive proof that easylist caused the view drops, but it’s I’ve read the issue and a writeup by a YouTube creator and it seems pretty likely.

Laughs in SponsorBlock

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/22/fbi-ad-blocker/

YouTube is one of the worst offenders for scam ads. Even today you sometimes find an ad that talks about some scary health risk and points to some ad that drones on and on for 45 minutes and if you get to the end they try to sign you up for an $80 a month subscription for some worthless supplement.

This specific case is about an unusual high drop of viewers specifically on desktops on a specific date. The assumptions are, that it's just too unusual for the normal drop in that timeframe, so it has to be a bug of some kind. Would it be a normal drop in viewers, it would not be on a specific date, months after the problems with AdBlocks started.

Creators are not reporting any declines in ad revenue that match the drop in view count. Indeed several have reported revenue is the same despite the view count drop. So it's quite unlikely people are fed up with youtube in any meaningful way.

Ad blockers (especially for complex sites and data streams) are basically like using a chainsaw to remove a mosquito(1); sometimes innocuous or beneficial features get omitted too because they're too "ad-shaped" for the heuristic.

(1) Anyone who thinks I'm under-selling the risks of unblocked ads has never seen the consequence of an unlucky bite from Aedes aegypti.

I guess if everyone was hit equally across the board then those sponsors will eventually adjust to the new metrics, but I assume some genres have more tech-savvy audiences which are more likely to use ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how evenly distributed this penalty falls.

Except viewer counts are a factor for baked in ads. In this case, all the sleuthing and videos about the change are the probably the only thing that will alleviate/lessen the seemingly-worse ad rate negotiation position youtubers with less viewers suddenly find themselves in.

I run a couple different privacy add-ons for various different levels of blocking things, but the Firefox update has seriously broken a lot of stuff

It should be noted that YouTube income is unaffected by this, as Ads are still shown and counted to people without AdBlockers. So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.

Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing" but they know it won't work if people see them as the source of the message. They want video makers to internalize their message, do what the boss wants on their own initiative, so Google only want to drop hints.

My guess is that yeah, now they're going after people's sponsorship revenue by under-reporting views if their monetized content is being viewed by people with adblockers.

Due to YT/G's moral failings to host a sufficiently serviceable platform for their product, your eyes, then your only real recourse outside adblocking is to buy a device and put on a separate network with no reasonably important traffic.

I don't lose one bit of sleep knowing that adblocking prevents Google from externalizing their curation costs onto me.

Do you think someone like Louis Rossman, who wants to use Youtube to share his message but doesn't use YT as a business, would rather views or ad money?

My recommendations are entirely in line with what I watch. I never need to check channels i like for a new video because they automatically get recommended.

If yours is a sewage firehouse, are you logged in? Or are you sharing your account with family members who watch what you consider "sewage"?

I only see my subscriptions, or things directly related to things I've watched and liked. If I remove a disliked video from my watch history, it "mostly" works to tell YouTube I don't want to see it anymore.

I very seldom see crap I really do not want in my YouTube feed/recommendations. All I see are hobby videos and cartoon clips of things I like.

This is totally unlike Facebook (where random garbage recommendations are the norm) or Reddit (which is hit or miss).

Considering I have zero interest in this stuff it seems their algorithm pushes such trash by cross-referencing with the closest thing possible - even by a digital picometer distance.

Same with twitter.

If you are tech or tech-adjacent content, it can double or triple that.

And lately they're starting to get more malicious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaHW24jOYVw

And I'm quite deliberate with avoiding ragebait and slop, and I remove stuff from my watch history if I get duped etc.

That said, I have noticed a trend amongst the creators I've subscribed to that the average video length has gone up. This has been a longer term trend, but many who used to do 30-40 min videos now often to 1-1.5 hr videos.

I've heard YouTube punishes people quitting a video midway, so perhaps there's something going on there too. At least for myself I often have to watch these videos over multiple sessions, and chances are there that I just forget and move on.

So perhaps some compounding factors making things worse.

There's no way you can say the same about YouTube, the value proposition is quite good and it leveled the field in a way traditional media would never do, just think for a moment what's the chance of seeing someone like MrBeast surging as a TV personality.

Creators have stated that while their viewcount is down their ad revenue is not - but a lower viewcount still presumably hurts youtubers for in video sponsorships, and if some genres of video have a higher portion of users with blockers, that probably hurts that entire genre in the algorithm. It sounds like viewcounts are returning back to normal though.

If I were Google I wouldn’t be that worried about, like, Firefox users with ad blocking addons, or pihole users. But I’d be a bit worried that Apple might take a harder stance against ads, in their browser.

I’m not going to sit through two 15-30 second LOUD ads just to see if a video is actually worth watching.

And I do use referral codes for the content creators I do like. My Amazon referrals do still work.

As a mostly software backend dev I even visualize the JS guy saying "it's solved" when he forgets to tell that the correct choice is to do the counting on the backend, period. Not hacking a crappy JS snippet calling a different host.

I obviously ask for more time to make sure it's reliable.

I literally saw something similar happening around some years ago in a adjacent team I was working.

I want to pay with money, not attention. Both at the same time? Non negotiable.

What's your use case?