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YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues
YouTube wants its pound of flesh. Disable your ad blocker or pay for Premium, warns a new message being shown to an unsuspecting test audience, with the barely hidden subtext of "you freeloading scum." Trouble is, its ad blocker detecting mechanism doesn't exactly comply with EU law, say privacy activists. Ask for user permission or taste regulatory boot. All good clean fun.
Only it isn't. It's profoundly depressing. The battleground between ad tech and ad blockers has been around so long that in the internet's time span it's practically medieval. In 2010, Ars Technica started blocking ad blockers; in under a day, the ad blocker blocker was itself blocked by the ad blockers. The editor then wrote an impassioned plea saying that ad blockers were killing online journalism. As the editor ruefully notes, people weren't using blockers because they didn't care about the good sites, it was because so much else of the internet was filled with ad tech horrors.
Nothing much has changed. If your search hit ends up with an "ERROR: Ad blocker detected. Disable it to access this content" then it's browser back button and next hit down, all day, every day. It's like running an app that asks you to disable your firewall; that app is never run again. Please disable my ad blocker? Sure, if you stop pushing turds through my digital letterbox.
The reason YouTube has been dabbling with its own "Unblock Or Eff Off" strategy instead of bringing down the universal banhammer is that it knows how much it will upset the balance of the ecosystem. That it's had to pry deep enough into viewers' browsers to trigger privacy laws shows just how delicate that balance is. It's unstable because it's built on bad ideas.
In that ecosystem of advertisers, content consumers, ad networks, and content distributors, ad blockers aren't the disease, they're the symptom. Trying to neutralize a symptom alone leaves the disease thriving while the host just gets sicker. In this case, the disease isn't cynical freeloading by users, it's the basic dishonesty of online advertising. It promises things to advertisers that it cannot deliver, while blocking better ways of working. It promises revenue to content providers while keeping them teetering on the brink of unviability, while maximizing its own returns. Google has revenues in the hundreds of billions of dollars, while publishers struggle to survive, and users have to wear a metaphorical hazmat suit to stay sane. None of this is healthy.
Only it isn't. It's profoundly depressing. The battleground between ad tech and ad blockers has been around so long that in the internet's time span it's practically medieval. In 2010, Ars Technica started blocking ad blockers; in under a day, the ad blocker blocker was itself blocked by the ad blockers. The editor then wrote an impassioned plea saying that ad blockers were killing online journalism. As the editor ruefully notes, people weren't using blockers because they didn't care about the good sites, it was because so much else of the internet was filled with ad tech horrors.
Nothing much has changed. If your search hit ends up with an "ERROR: Ad blocker detected. Disable it to access this content" then it's browser back button and next hit down, all day, every day. It's like running an app that asks you to disable your firewall; that app is never run again. Please disable my ad blocker? Sure, if you stop pushing turds through my digital letterbox.
The reason YouTube has been dabbling with its own "Unblock Or Eff Off" strategy instead of bringing down the universal banhammer is that it knows how much it will upset the balance of the ecosystem. That it's had to pry deep enough into viewers' browsers to trigger privacy laws shows just how delicate that balance is. It's unstable because it's built on bad ideas.
In that ecosystem of advertisers, content consumers, ad networks, and content distributors, ad blockers aren't the disease, they're the symptom. Trying to neutralize a symptom alone leaves the disease thriving while the host just gets sicker. In this case, the disease isn't cynical freeloading by users, it's the basic dishonesty of online advertising. It promises things to advertisers that it cannot deliver, while blocking better ways of working. It promises revenue to content providers while keeping them teetering on the brink of unviability, while maximizing its own returns. Google has revenues in the hundreds of billions of dollars, while publishers struggle to survive, and users have to wear a metaphorical hazmat suit to stay sane. None of this is healthy.
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7 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Response to 50 Shades Of Blue (Reply #1)
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