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.
One of my favourite youtubers recently quite his job to go full time on his channel. He's been growing his audience and patreon backers and for a long time using the income from those videos to invest in his equipment and the gear he reviews. Eventually he grew the channel enough to go full independent.
It'd be really hard to do that outside of YT's monetisation model tbh. I think most YTbers start of making videos for shits and giggles and any money they get is like passive income. Then they catch a viral video of find and audience and start the consider the channel more seriously, and explore other monetisation models and opportunities. I get the hate towards Google and YT but a lot of the oddballs I love on YT might not have a platform otherwise.
Exactly, there are channels that don't monetize their videos. For some reason everyone is just pissed at YouTube and doesn't consider that the people and/or companies making money off the ads have something to do with it.