After thinking about it for a long time I came to the conclusion that I’m OK with ads. They are not so annoying to me and as long as they are not popping out or really interfering forcefully I fine with them being there. As far as I can see ads are the de-facto fuel for a broad part of the content-creation monetization system which I consume heavily (mainly YouTube).
so, I want to configure my set-up so it won’t block all the ads (especially not on YouTube). But, I do think that the amount tracking this days sites have is highly exaggerated and unnecessary (I worked on data-science so I can say that with a bit of confidence). Therefor I do want to block trackers and third-party cookies if possible.
Currently using Firefox both on my Macbook and my Android phone (with Duckduckgo as my search engine).
Is the above possible? Which extensions might be relevant?
Thanks And please don’t kill\cancel me :)
Talking on the YouTube front, a trivially small donation will support them far more than watching ads ever could. Even something as small as $1/year is often far more than they would ever make from you in a year. As far as donations to developers go, it depends entirely on what you feel comfortable with. Most people who work on open source projects are unpaid volunteers, so it isn’t expected that you donate, but if you choose to do so it can be quite helpful to sustaining the project. If many people in the userbase were to make small donations, that would go a long way.
In reality, ads almost entirely benefit exploitative multi-billion dollar companies such as Google and Facebook, so my personal philosophy stands against them. I much prefer donating to people directly to cut out the exploitative middle-man.
I was going to write exactly that. I have a channel with tens of thousands of subs, and a $1 donation from a single user generates more income than multiple ads to that same user. Patreon, or a straight-up donation (of any amount), is so much better than suffering through ads.
Ads kill content, it disrespects users, it steals attention away from what you’ve created, builds frustration and breaks the flow of your content, and they serve only to benefit Google & partners.
But if YouTube doesn’t earn enough how will they be able to maintain the site? Agree that they can earn a little less but for some reason it doesn’t work that way (I’m not aware of a service of such scale which keep profit at minimum) 🤷
YouTube was not profitable for quite some time, just like Reddit and Twitter have been struggling with. They have massively increased their advertising and data collection over a number of years, decreased the cut paid to creators, and become more and more exploitative of user data, so at this point they now account for about 10% of Google/Alphabet’s total yearly profits. While I have not seen an ad in years, I have been told that ads have become unskippable, multiple ads play consecutively, and there are numerous ad breaks throughout the video. The last time I saw an ad in YouTube, everything was skippable and ads were basically only ever at the beginning and end of videos, where creators actively wanted them. Now they are apparently incredibly intrusive and disruptive, and I’m under the impression that content creators can’t even choose when they show up in the video.
YouTube enjoys an almost complete monopoly, and that isn’t going to change anytime in the near future. The infrastructure costs for another company to develop a similar platform would be immense, and getting people to switch from YouTube at this point is practically impossible on both the content creator and viewer side. YouTube massively underpays its creators, and they become more and more anti-consumer and anti-creator every year. It seems they are even moving to ban in-video sponsorships in the near future because they don’t make money off of them.
The only open source alternatives I am aware of that have any amount of scale are PeerTube and Odysee, neither of which come anywhere close to rivaling YouTube. I personally wouldn’t worry about your decision affecting YouTube’s profit margins; very few people even try to block ads, and even fewer use alternative frontends like NewPipe, Invidious, or Piped, so YouTube’s profit margins will be determined by the complacency of the general masses anyway.
If you’d like to get into the ethics discussion of whether or not YouTube should profit, I’d be happy to provide my justification as to why I’d love to see Google/Alphabet as a company die. They exist solely to exploit their userbase for profit, and I don’t believe that to be justifiable. But that conversation is practically irrelevant, as your decision as a single user has no realistic impact on YouTube’s profits anyway.