Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.
Then on Oct 1, they threw up a “You’re using an Ad Blocker” overlay on videos. I’d use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn’t have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.
Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.
Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.
Now all I see is this.
Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.
I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can’t view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.
Where do you read that Youtube is operating at a loss? The last article I can find mentioning that is from something like 10 years ago.
In the last few years they have split Youtube income out of the overall income and it’s not like they aren’t making money with it - roughly $7B in the last report I can find.
Let’s not forget that the strategy of operating at a loss is arguably anticompetitive and monopolistic - not every company has the luxury of doing that, making it extremely difficult to compete against them. Seems pretty clear, with the incessant ads, that they’ve accomplished the first step in that and are rounding the corner to extracting capital from their users now. So they’re not exactly a benevolent actor in this either.