r/technology • u/thegravity98ms2 • 20d ago
YouTube is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users Misleading
https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-reportedly-slowing-down-videos-firefox-3387206/1.8k
u/ChristopherKlay 20d ago edited 19d ago
TL;DR
It's not a artificial "fuck non-chrome" users deal, but part of their adblocking attempts. Several browsers that are based on chrome (e.g. Brave) have the exact same issue.
Explanation
Several different devs (as in; people who aren't just looking at console outputs) already took a look at it, including the comments on the multiple topics we had about this on Reddit already and all of them came to the same conclusion that this isn't targeted at FireFox at all.
The comments here break it down nicely.
From what I see here, the code inserts a tiny static video (340 byte 1x1px), styles it like an ad presumably to make adblockers falsely block it, and then sees if the video plays (fires a timeUpdate event).
If the video immediately plays successfully, the function resolves in much less than 5 seconds. The 5 seconds of delay should only occour if an Adblocker is present (or something else is preventing the video from loading/playing).
Details
Since this is getting a bit of visibility, I'll add some details & such here.
- The feature is targeting adblockers, but specific browsers appear to be affected first due to the slow rollout (FireFox, Brave, ..). Spoofing your UA to e.g. Safari should currently resolve the issue.
- The initial implementation was affecting logged in users that aren't using adblockers to begin with, due to (multiple) internal errors on Googles end. This should be resolved over time.
- The final implementation of this aims at delaying video playback for users who block ads, on all platforms/browsers.
- Google is still actively working on this and already made changes to this after the initial wave of Reddit posts and news articles; A lot of infos out there might be outdated/incorrect.
Update
There's now a follow-up article on the topic. TL;DR:
YouTube has clarified and confirmed that users who continue using ad blockers may experience “suboptimal viewing,” regardless of their browser.
This statement comes as a response to user reports that allege that YouTube is intentionally adding a delay on non-Chrome browsers, as the delay allegedly goes away when using Chrome.
Google's statement:
To support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube, we’ve launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience. Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.
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u/Beliriel 20d ago
In essence. Adblockers will scan for this and deal with it. Just a matter of time before a patch comes and the arms race continues.
Lol fuck youtube.133
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u/544C4D4F 20d ago
the problem is that google is paying lots of people to fight this on their end, and on "our" end we have a couple of dudes at ublock that are not being paid and will no doubt wear out and say fuck it at some point.
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u/Sendnudec00kies 20d ago
On the other hand, the guys at UBO hate these types of things so much that they've been working on it for nearly a decade for free and also stipulate you not pay them.
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u/sshwifty 19d ago
Never underestimate a programmer with a grudge.
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u/Tokyo-LCDP 19d ago
That reminds me of a often reposted story here on Reddit about a Programmer applying for a job and after getting it, fixes one little bug, that annoyed him as a user, and hands in his two weeks notice.
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20d ago
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u/jerekhal 19d ago
I wish more people appreciated just how much of the useful software/addons in the world are built due to spite.
When you appreciate how much the sentiment of "How about you go fuck yourself?" can motivate someone other people's actions become much more understandable.
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u/whogivesashirtdotca 19d ago
"How about you go fuck yourself?"
That’s google’s new mission statement, isn’t it? Sure feels like it, looking at my results on recent searches.
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u/tell-me-your-worries 19d ago edited 19d ago
I'm getting more of a "How about you let us fuck you?" vibe.
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u/READMYSHIT 19d ago
Look at every group of people in history oppressed by an invading force, fighting defensively and indefinitely despite being outnumbered and outgunned to the last man. That's spite.
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u/Gryphacus 19d ago
As the saying goes, it's much harder to build a 10ft wall than it is to build an 11ft ladder.
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u/544C4D4F 19d ago
I mean we all know what the end results going to be. google is going to design things so they can inject ads right into the video stream in a way that you wont be able to programmatically detect, and even if you could thats the data you're getting until its over. best you'll be able to do is mute the ads. twitch is doing a pretty decent job winning this battle on a smaller scale.
they absolutely have the ability to win this, they are probably just trying to break enough peoples balls to put a bit hit in the number of users that are eating for free.
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u/InsanitysMuse 19d ago
Nerds with free time are why we even have an internet in the first place. Nerds with spite are just about the last enemy you want to make. No chance I'd bet on YouTube to win this war
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u/zsdr56bh 20d ago
Lol fuck youtube
I have never paid a dime for youtube and I have watched hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of content on their platform.
I cannot bring myself to say fuck youtube for it would make me the whiniest most entitled bitch on the planet. At least with respect to ads. The one thing I will join the chorus is how they handle copyright claims and strike people's videos falsely and with little recourse
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u/unnone 20d ago
The reality is, if we don't fight this war on ads, it will eventually turn into everyone pays or gets 10 minute ads. Then the pay price will ramp to overpriced levels to constantly increase proffits; but everyones stuck (no youtube competitor). Then they'll add ads to the paid users, just like cable. So fuck YouTube.
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u/S_A_N_D_ 20d ago
Just look at streaming services as an example. If no one pushes back, they see that as a sign to keep going further. First came the price increases, then the crackdown on password sharing (something they previously advertised as a feature), then more price increases, and now many are trying to shoehorn ads in even paid tiers.
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u/janas19 20d ago
Just to add context to your correct prediction, this phenomenon corresponds with monopolistic products/services and how much or little competition there is. So the takeaway is if there's a monopolistic product/service in a space with very little competition, then these practices result from that and corporate greed.
In theory the solution would arise from either direction competition or government regulation, but in practice it's difficult to achieve.
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u/S_A_N_D_ 20d ago
I would argue that it also requires a certain amount of greed, and is often associated with publically traded companies.
Steam is a good example of a monopolistic company with little competition. It hasn't however exploited that position as much because it's not beholden to faceless shareholders that care only about extracting more profit, and because the person in charge is satisfied with the billions they've already made that there isn't a need to continually increase profits year after year.
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u/qdp 20d ago
Ugh, Paramount Plus is the worst for that. I pay for ad-free but they still add some promo ads to each video and sometimes I get an ad when I pause.
I found closing and reopening the video stops the ad. And the pause screen goes away for a few months after I file a Help ticket. But I am cancelling after I am done with what I want to watch.
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u/omniuni 20d ago
To be fair, the way copyright is handled is the result of a lawsuit that they fought and lost.
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u/Langsamkoenig 20d ago
The reality is, if we don't fight this war on ads, it will eventually turn into everyone pays or gets 10 minute ads.
No, it will be "everyone pays and gets 10 minutes of ads". Everyone who doesn't pay gets 30 minutes of ads.
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u/geeky_username 20d ago
Exactly.
Amazon Prime has said they're going to start serving ads, even to Prime members.
Hulu and Paramount+ still serve some ads to paying customers
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u/HerrBerg 20d ago
Some? Hulu serves like 5-10 minutes of ads per 23 minute episode.
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u/paradox037 20d ago
The silly thing is that I wouldn't even bother to avoid ads if they weren't all racing to the bottom to be the most disruptive and irritating garbage imaginable. It's not the concept of ads that bothers me. It's the enshittification they seem hellbent on forcing down our throats in the most hamfisted ways they can think of.
I swear, it's like they're all trying to emulate a surprise flash bang to the face. They typically interrupt the program mid sentence, double the volume relative to the program, and are super bright.
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u/water_bottle_goggles 20d ago
They raised the price of YouTube premium twice after they started clamping down on blockers, fuck them
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u/savvymcsavvington 20d ago
People are mostly angry because YouTube won't offer a fair price for premium, we don't want YouTube Music included.
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u/EastObjective9522 20d ago
They'll still run ads on channels that aren't monetized so fuck them. It's basically wage theft
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u/In_TheWired 20d ago
Put it this way. Youtube isn't actually making any of the content you want, and the amount of money they do pay actual creators isn't enough to buy a cardboard box to live under a bridge with. Fuck youtube.
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u/gophergun 20d ago
The one thing I will join the chorus is how they handle copyright claims and strike people's videos falsely and with little recourse
Even then, that's more a result of the copyright regime they're operating under with regard to the DMCA. The process sucks, but Congress needs to fix it.
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u/Noname_Maddox 20d ago
Damn before recaptha I was putting timing into web forms to see how quickly they were being submitted to check for bots who would auto fill the form and submit in about a second.
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u/binheap 20d ago
It's wild that this explanation has been posted multiple times across multiple subreddits and the same misunderstanding keeps getting reposted.
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u/ChristopherKlay 20d ago
People jumping from "Google slows down FireFox!" to "Google puts artificial delay on everyone's videos!" (the top comment in this thread) didn't really help tbh.
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u/Excelius 20d ago
Would this means of attempting to detect ad-blockers not also falsely flag browser functions or extensions that attempt to block auto-play of media?
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u/paintboth1234 20d ago edited 20d ago
If the video immediately plays successfully, the function resolves in much less than 5 seconds. The 5 seconds of delay should only occour if an Adblocker is present (or something else is preventing the video from loading/playing).
And that comment is wrong, it happens even when you don't use any extensions.
If your account is affected, you can easily check it. Users who already got the issue can confirm. Only the ones who don't get that issue claim about blocking ads causes delays.
Also, they update the new script now:
https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/af9710b4/jsbin/desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.vflset/desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.js, so don't quote me if they adjust it to run when users use extensions now. When you didn't experience the issue in the past, no way to investigate it again.33
u/ChristopherKlay 20d ago
And that comment is wrong, it happens even when you don't use any extensions.
The comment isn't wrong at all, unless you ignore the last part of it:
(or something else is preventing the video from loading/playing).
Multiple people (myself included) already confirmed that internal server errors produce the same delay that's intended for instances where adblocking is intended for some people who aren't using adblockers to begin with.
The issue isn't limited to adblocker extensions being used by any means, it's affecting Googles adblocker detection in general.
There are instances where the issue doesn't exist (so far only able to replicate this in Brave) until adblockers are used, however.
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u/Negafox 20d ago
For those that didn't read the article, the article writer and their coworkers couldn't reproduce the issue. There is a specific bit of JavaScript that may be the culprit but it's not singling out Firefox.
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u/MannToots 20d ago
Ah this explains what I was seeing last night. When loading up in chrome with ublock on it would kinda hang for what felt like 4 or 5 seconds before loading the page properly.
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u/thesircuddles 20d ago
I had this issue the other day too (Firefox with uBlock), I thought it was some backend weirdness or something. These stupid assholes just can't stop.
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u/NeverDiddled 20d ago
I had this issue on Chrome/uBO a couple weeks ago. When a new video would start, there would be a 5 or so second delay of nothing before it would play. I just assumed it was more anti-adblock shenanigans.
It was very noticeable because YouTube normally loads almost instantly. And it couldn't have been a bandwidth issue, the symptoms did not align with that type of bottleneck. It was clearly an artificial delay.
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u/fractal_magnets 20d ago
If it paused when opening, it was definitely the anti-adblock wrestling with ubo. Happened to a lot of folks.
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u/kitddylies 20d ago
Had it too during the LoL world finals with firefox and ublock.
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u/AlternativeCall4800 20d ago
Idk why but the youtube world stream was so laggy for me,just watched on twitch which was a first because in the past youtube always had the best player for worlds as it allowed to rewind
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u/Anlanga 20d ago
just for WBG to get 0-3 spanked
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u/kitddylies 20d ago
Yeah.. happy for t1, but that series was so one sided.
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u/Dessamba_Redux 20d ago
WBG was playing well for the first handful of minutes in game one. Then there was that ugly disjointed river fight over drag that was kinda int and you could taste the mental diff from there. I knew game 2 was over by 9 mins lmao
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20d ago edited 2d ago
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/I_LICK_PINK_TO_STINK 20d ago
Always have been. It's just the first part of doing evil right is convincing people that you're not doing evil at all.
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u/Ok_Kaleidoscope_8261 19d ago
Youtube turned every video under a certain length into animated gifs with sound, made the viewing area on the page as small as reasonably possible (at least on Desktop), glued it to center of the screen and then surrounded it with useless bullshit.
Imagine doing all of that instead of just leaving it alone.
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u/dreamsofaninsomniac 20d ago
I have an older computer so I thought it was just a computer issue, but now that I think about it, it has been happening more frequently than usual for me when I try to play YouTube videos.
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u/FictionVent 20d ago
Hey! YouTube only made $30 Billion dollars this year. They need that extra ad revenue!
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u/woohooguy 20d ago
Same here, with ublock on chrome.
I hope the privacy lawsuit in Europe gets traction.
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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 20d ago
That's been happening to me for the last 5 days or so, kinda figured they were up to something.
Good thing I usually watch long-form videos, so a 5 second delay at the beginning of a video doesn't bother me too much.
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u/Piratedan200 20d ago
Not to mention I'd much prefer 5 seconds of waiting to 30 seconds of unskippable ads...
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u/insomniax20 20d ago
I'd take it over 2 seconds of ads..
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u/imsolowdown 20d ago
Honestly I'd probably take 30 seconds of waiting over 2 seconds of ads, at least I wouldn't have to mess with volume control to avoid getting blasted by stupid ads.
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u/wrgrant 20d ago
I have been seeing this using Opera as well. I figured it was simply failing to load some region encoded ad that shouldn't play for me up here in Canada or something odd like that...
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20d ago edited 19d ago
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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 20d ago
The tricky part is that something like 99.9% of videos uploaded get less than 100 views. There are hundreds and hundreds of hours uploaded every minute. It's hard to store that much content that realistically no one wants or cares about.
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u/CressCrowbits 20d ago
Not to mention moderate it.
You'd need to hire a lot of extremely well paid tech types to come up with the tools to stop it getting full of illegal content. YouTube had years of wild West to work that out.
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u/DisastrousBoio 20d ago
A LOT of the moderation is manual, and a lot of the automatic moderation requires the algorithms to be trained on real abuse videos.
If you want to see what this causes, look up the moderation farms in poorer countries used by Google, Meta, ChatGPT, and other companies that require that service.
Thousands of people in the Global South are being subjected to the most horrible and depraved kinds of content possible for this reason as a full-time job. They end up traumatised for life.
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u/you-are-not-yourself 20d ago
Note that the EU's Digital Services Act, which goes into full effect early next year, effectively forces larger volumes of potentially harmful content to be reviewed by humans
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u/CressCrowbits 20d ago
Yeah I've read articles about the Facebook moderators from a few years back. Wouldn't surprise me if they are just dumping this work on people in less well off countries nowadays.
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u/Krojack76 20d ago edited 20d ago
I think a model where by default you get X amount of storage space for uploaded videos. If you want more space you pay.
In return, if your videos get enough views where ads can pay for your extra storage, then you get extra storage at no cost. You can in short say "I want 20 gigs which would cost me $15/month but my ad revenue goes toward that. Anything made over $15 then goes to me in either account credit or payout."
Really popular people (like Mark Rober for example) with lots of views should easily be able to pay for the storage they use with money left over. People like me who might upload a 200MB video to share with some friends/family could do so then delete the video after a few months freeing up space for new uploads.
The whole setup could also support self hosted storage. For example: LTT could post new videos to the site that are hosted with bandwidth that can support thousands of views at a time. After a year they could move low viewed videos to their own self hosted storage. All videos remain on the main account but when you go to play the video, it's downloaded/streamed from your self hosted setup where ever that might be.
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u/ImJLu 20d ago
The whole setup could also support self hosted storage.
No shot. YT would get all the blame for everything that could go wrong, like downtime, slow loading, etc. The average viewer would attribute the experience to YT rather than just shitty hosting.
This, of course, doesn't take into account global replication, redundancy, load balancing, capacity scaling, etc.
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u/geeky_username 20d ago
Everything you said is very true, I just want to add a reminder:
It's not that YouTube doesn't make money. It's that, for Google, it doesn't make enough money.
YouTube generated $29.2 billion revenue in 2022. And while yes, it is likely very expensive to run, I doubt it costs $30 billion. YouTube was absolutely running at a loss years ago, but it has been profitable since 2010
2010: YouTube becomes profitable for the first time.
2012: YouTube generates $4.4 billion in ad revenue.
2014: YouTube generates $6 billion in ad revenue.
2016: YouTube generates $10 billion in ad revenue.
2018: YouTube generates $15.1 billion in ad revenue.
2020: YouTube generates $28.2 billion in ad revenue.
2022: YouTube generates $29.24 billion in ad revenue.
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u/Captain_Midnight 20d ago
That relatively small increase in 2022 probably created a lot of internal alarm bells. I can see why they would respond by scrambling to fight off ad blockers. To be clear, I am not defending them at all. They're fighting dirty, and the Youtube experience without an ad blocker or subscription has become miserable. I'm just saying that I can now see how we all got here: Google is an ad platform, and they have recently experienced problems either with their roster of advertisers or with ad blockers. Maybe both.
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u/RoastmasterBus 20d ago
Makes sense. The big jump between 2018 and 2020 is when I personally thought YouTube was at its best. It had the right amount of ads, that I didn’t feel the need for an adblocker. The algorithm was well tuned and had the right balance of showing me new stuff as well as channels I already subscribed to. They had a good thing going back then but I feel like they’ve been pushing their luck in recent years.
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u/MistaPicklePants 20d ago
2018: YouTube generates $15.1 billion in ad revenue.
2020: YouTube generates $28.2 billion in ad revenue.
2022: YouTube generates $29.24 billion in ad revenue.
Well there's your problem, between 2018-2020 ads doubled, and between 2020-2022, it didn't. Via modern capitalism, it's doing horribly now and must add all methods of monetization to show that big growth again. Because it's never about the raw numbers, it's all about that +% from last year.
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u/ProudEggYolk 20d ago
Via modern capitalism, it's doing horribly now
My insides are consumed with rage when I think about this: regardless of record profits, nothing is ever enough.
All the execs, board, what have you, are making bank, more than they could spend in 100 lifetimes so why not... stop with the crazy greed?
I hate people.
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u/enderandrew42 20d ago
The infrastructure costs have to be high to host, process and play so much video content.
But they also pay out money to content creators on their platform. Mr. Beast got paid $54 million last year for uploading videos. That has to add up.
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u/Dinodietonight 20d ago
55% of ad revenue goes to youtubers.
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u/pmjm 20d ago
Just to be clear, that's 55% of partnered YouTubers. If YouTube shows an ad on a non-partnered video they keep 100% of that revenue.
They also keep 100% of the revenue on search and sidebar ads that aren't shown on a specific video.
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u/Cmdr_Shiara 20d ago
Isn't the partner program open for people above 1000 subscribers or a certain number of views? I can't imagine that's even a percentage of the ad revenue from videos.
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u/NerdyNThick 20d ago
Mr. Beast got paid $54 million last year for uploading videos. That has to add up.
People tend to have a hard time understanding just how much money a billion dollars is.
Lets remove Mr Beasts $54mm from that $29.2b number shall we.. Youtube is only left with a paltry $29.146b of revenue.
How many YouTubers do you think are pulling in mid 8 figures just from youtube?
You're right that it adds up, but it doesn't add up to that much vs their revenue.
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u/FenPhen 20d ago
Also you have to regulate the platform's content. If you don't, you will be blocked by laws, political opponents, and advertisers will flee. The bad behavior of users on YouTube and Twitter and others actually makes it harder for competitors to enter.
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u/SteelJoker 20d ago
And it would have to be largely automated too, I did napkin math on it a while back, but effectively if you wanted a real person to review each Youtube video at least once and more for anything troublesome, you'd end up needing something like 500k employees.
That's not a small startup, that's a small city.
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u/Dinodietonight 20d ago
At 500k people, it would be bigger than 29 countries. It would also represent a nearly 400% increase in google employees from 135k to 635k.
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u/vawlk 20d ago
i doubt this was intentional. Youtube knows we can all see the code. You have to dig deeper to figure out what the c() and a.resolve() functions do. setting a timeout for a function is not really abnormal.
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u/CAP_NET_ADMIN 20d ago
This piece of code is not singling out Firefox, you can get it on Chrome and it will work in the same way.
It's a bug.
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u/Schnoofles 20d ago
It's not a bug either, it's 100% intentional. It's an adblocker detection scheme. It tries to load a hidden "video" that is formatted in code to look like an ad. Naive adblockers will detect and prevent it from playing, which also prevents the player from setting a flag that is interpreted as "ad was not blocked". If it is blocked then it waits the 5 seconds for a timeout, causing the delay. If it had played correctly then the browser would immediately move on and you wouldn't notice any significant delay.
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u/Glum-Objective3328 20d ago
If this is the case, then this is completely independent of Firefox , no? Is there any real legal issue if that's true?
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u/tehlemmings 20d ago
No, there's no legal issue with this. The entire thing is just more ragebait.
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u/paintboth1234 20d ago
This happens even when you don't use any extensions. Nothing related to blocking ads -> delay.
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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In 20d ago
If it had played correctly then the browser would immediately move on and you wouldn't notice any significant delay.
You would have an unskippable 10 second ad instead.
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u/MrHyperion_ 20d ago
Massive doubt, they can detect you skipping ads way easier than adding extra stuff like this. Every time adblocker blocks video ad they know.
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20d ago
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u/xevizero 20d ago
Yeah good luck with that. My entire livelihood depends on my gmail. What's the alternative. Just make a new email and jump into the arms of another soulless corporation? Sure.
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u/Why_Cant_Theists_Win 20d ago
Seriously, we are actually starting to see the real grip these corporations have on our lives. There is just about no where we can turn to for a service that operates out of necessity instead of desire for profit and data hoarding.
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u/Erus00 20d ago
It wouldn't even be as much of a issue if there weren't so many predatory ads that they seemingly support.
I had to turn off one of my adblockers because youtube keeps dinging me and then I get the scam center popups telling me I have a virus. The whole thing is bullshit.
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u/jazekers 20d ago
I've reported the most obvious scam ads, where they impersonate Elon Musk and the BBC and they almost always respond that it is all legit.
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u/blolfighter 20d ago
"We have investigated the ad in question and have determined that we were paid for it in full. No further action was deemed necessary."
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u/kittenmittens1018 20d ago
You can’t go anywhere without Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple or Microsoft having their hands in the internet cookie jar.
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u/EvilMaran 20d ago
We could "nationalize" these services like Google, Youtube, Facebook etc. but on a world level, make them non profit, and classify these things as "this needs to exist so it gets paid by everyones taxes", based on hours used/watched per country or something.
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u/Why_Cant_Theists_Win 20d ago
I was going to say the same exact thing but couldn't find a way to without using buzz words that'd trigger people
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u/timuch 20d ago
Proton is a good alternative
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u/xevizero 20d ago
Sure, for email. Good luck getting rid of your youtube account, using your Android phone without a Google account, getting all your notes off Google Keep, switching your Pixel phone to some other brand that also runs Android (so..switch to Apple I guess? Like that's any better).
We won't solve this with individual action. We need uproar, then regulation. As with EVERY time a corporation fucks over people, the answer is not the free market, it's just making it illegal for them to fuck us over. WE are the government, the people, that's how it was supposed to be before corporations took that from us too. Which is also why it's popular for right wing people to claim government intervention is bad, it's in their interest to further let this situation degenerate.
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u/Langsamkoenig 20d ago
There are Android distros that don't have google services and apps built in. So you don't have to switch to Apple.
Also I never used google keep. I think I just started keeping notes before that even was a thing. There are so many note apps in the Playstore (that you don't have to use, but I do because I don't care enough).
Agreed to your second paragraph though. Thankfully I'm in the EU and I doubt Google will dare to try this shit here. We also still haven't seen their adblocker tests on Youtube. But you americans should write your representatives, as long as you still have this administration.
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u/Valuable_Associate54 20d ago
I use youtube but I don't have a google account, I just don't post comments and have custom playlists and shit.
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u/Gonokhakus 20d ago
There is a viable alternative for everything you've referred except for Youtube (and even then, there are alternatives, but severely hampered by Google's massive monopoly). You can even install Linux on your phone so you can toss Android in the trash.
While I agree with you that collective action is necessary, it's not just going to be through outrage and social media posting. Active disengagement is also going to play a major role (alongside other measures, ofc).
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u/Bioplasia42 20d ago
Android phone without a Google account
I'm on a "degoogled" android device (/e/OS) and it's fine. Not great, but fine. Only drawback is no paid apps, but that's not something I've had to care about. I'm sure there's ways around that, too.
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u/SpudicusMaximus_008 20d ago
Thats just the timeout itslef. Do you know the criteria for its execution?
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u/Dess_Rosa_King 20d ago
You know, for several years now, ive been slowly migrating from any Google products/services.
This will only accelerate it. But to be honest, most of Google stuff these days has been meh. Wasnt hard to jump to alternatives.
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u/digitalpencil 20d ago
Yeah, i'm seeing this on chrome. I assume it was simply an artefact of the arms race with ublock.
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u/Specific_Property_73 20d ago
Same I'm getting it in chrome. I was expecting to see that as the top comment in the original thread but didn't see it mentioned.
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u/Un111KnoWn 20d ago
was the source of the above article reddit?
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u/JagdCrab 20d ago
Not only it was reddit, it was reddit comment that was debunked within an hour, but reply that was going into more details what code does and how it contradicts claims of original author did not get nearly as much traction because it did not align with blind "Google - Bad!".
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u/consumeshroomz 20d ago
God I hate these clickbait titles. It’s like “yeah we couldn’t reproduce the issue but…. You want to outrage a bunch of people anyway?!”
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u/tehlemmings 20d ago
Not only that, but their only real source was a reddit thread where the issue was already debunked in the comments.
The whole thing is so fucking stupid.
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u/duck2luck 20d ago
Target deployment is a common thing for google. They just implement it for a group and not for the others.
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u/theunquenchedservant 20d ago
I was also unable to produce this issue, and i use firefox exclusively. Some say that ublock origin is already blocking the script, but i turned off, then uninstalled, ublock origin to see if maybe i could get it to do it's thing, along with clearing my browsing data and naturally restarting firefox each time. After clearing my browsing data, of course, there was a slight delay in loading the whole page, but not something that isn't also present on Google Chrome. Usually on a second video click, the video would load right away.
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u/blind3rdeye 20d ago
A lot of people seem to be ok with this because it's apparently part of an anti-adblock system. Google has implemented a privacy-sucking feature into Chrome which helps them detect and prevent adblockers. And now for other browsers, Google is using a performance degrading method.
Both of these things are bad. Some people are arguing that Google is forced to cripple the performance of other browsers, because they don't have the built-in anti-adblock features. But that's bogus. Google created this problem in the first place. They created the tracking-system in Chrome, and they created the artificial need for it in youTube. Google has engineered a situation where ordinary people get a worse deal if they don't do what Google wants them to do. They are trying to leverage their monopoly position of Chrome.
This is exactly the kind of thing that people have been warning about - i.e. website that 'require' a special feature that google invented, so that other browsers get locked out or degraded.
A bit of push-back is required here. Use Firefox.
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u/Nihilistic_Mystics 20d ago
So, recent update; Google is claiming to have abandoned WEI after backlash. I fully expect them to try again later, but they won't make it public ahead of time.
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u/Kep0a 20d ago
Jesus, that explains it. It's been happening all day with Firefox / Ublock Origin. I figured it was another change on Youtube's end to fight the adblocking.
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u/rwzephyr 20d ago
Yeah I thought I had a network issue last night so I copied the link from Firefox and slapped it into edge. Worked instantly, back to Firefox and same hang up opening any video.
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u/Yoshi_87 20d ago
Oh if that is true the EU will take Google sideways... lol.
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u/Langsamkoenig 20d ago edited 20d ago
I don't think Google will roll this out in the EU. At which point the EU has no beef or jurisdiction. So the rest of the world is on its own here.
Edit: Hey, I'm just telling you how it is. No point in getting mad at me. The EU won't save you here. If you want this to be illegal you'll have to make it illegal in your country.
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u/Kitonez 20d ago edited 20d ago
I'm in the eu and I've noticed this shit happening, years of using this site and not once have I been staring at loading as long and often as this
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u/lood9phee2Ri 20d ago
Can't confirm on debian build of firefox on linux, but it's google, they may well be A/B testing or whatever and I've been served different code. Or they already fixed it.
anyway, protip: use a youtube downloader to grab anything you're likely to want to watch more than once. Never rely on google continuing to host something you care about.
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u/random-user-420 20d ago
I'm on a debian build of firefox on Linux and it has been happening since yesterday. There's an easy fix though. You can install an user agent switcher firefox extention and click "windows/chrome" and check the "override for domain" box. That way, it only switches it for youtube and not any other site
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u/BamBamVonSlammerson 19d ago
Add this to your uBlock Origins filters list: www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)
Problem solved.
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u/tacotacotacorock 20d ago
Only a matter of time before Google turned into the villain. Corporate life cycle at its finest.
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u/DeltaBuyer 20d ago
Youtube has went to shit. We need an alternative
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u/J5892 20d ago
Good luck finding a company that has billions to sink into infrastructure for a project with only a faint glimmer of hope that it'll be profitable a minimum of 10 years down the line.
The only feasible alternative is decentralized, and good luck doing that without NFT people fucking it up for everyone in various ways.
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u/cdf_sir 20d ago
saw this on twitter. but one nice commenter there explain what really happens there.
in short, its yet another youtube's attempt against adblock.
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u/lolspHD 20d ago
As a firefox user I can absolutely confirm that there has been a massive slowdown for me. I thought something was wrong with my internet but all of the speed tests i've been running show im getting my 600mbps. This is fucking dogshit that a billion dollar company is this fucking greedy.
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u/HackedLuck 20d ago
Capitalism doesn't work, it always ends with a monopoly of a sort and them squeezing the shit out of everyone til things break.
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u/DustyBook_ 20d ago edited 20d ago
Quality modern "journalism" here.
A couple random people who don't actually know what they're talking start spreading nonsense online that easily-fooled chumps eat up without any scrutiny. That's literally the basis of this entire article and accusation. Fucking absurd.
Really speaks to the quality of this sub and the technological knowhow of its users that this article was upvoted at all.
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u/t4-phage 20d ago
Odd, because I was getting frame drops on Opera, so I switched to Firefox and it works perfectly. Pretty sure Opera runs on chromium, too
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u/RottenDew 20d ago
Funny how they’ve gone on their fuck up ad blockers campaign so I think, “Welp, great, guess I gotta watch Liberty Mutual commercials before my videos now.” But no, I get identity thieves making fake celebrity ads about getting $6400 from the government. Thanks, Google!!!!!
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u/Block_Of_Saltiness 20d ago
Thats fine. My adblocker still gains me more than any slowness they can introduce.
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u/SoManyLilBitches 19d ago
Google does shady shit. I’m trying to get off all their services, starting with Gmail.
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u/PostsBadComments 19d ago
Oh so it wasn't my internet connection or pc. I thought i have some issues. What pieces of shit.
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u/manolid 20d ago edited 20d ago
Came across the original post on /r/uBlockOrigin the other day and added the filter. Works, videos loading much quicker.
Edit: the post... https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/17tm9rp/youtube_antiadblock_and_ads_november_12_2023_mega/k9i62zu/