Firefox

18058 readers

141 users here now

A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

485

YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users (www.404media.co)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

101 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Next step will require them to login to watch, they will probably implode at that point. If they are doing all these things to salvage revenue and or bandwidth from 1.64% of users, is it worth the investment? As I see it, if it is, they are not doing well with their business model and it's not like this tweak will get them anywhere; if it's not, they are just wasting time and resources in a Pyrrhic victory.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It seems like yet another example of Google making bad business decisions.

Sometimes, those bad decisions can be traced back to people wanting to "show impact" so that they can get promoted. That's often why they do something ridiculous like launch yet another chat app, which they end up killing a few years later.

In this case, it could be something like that (like someone has an objective to reduce the number of people using ad blockers from X% to Y% and will hit that target no matter how much it fucks things up). Or, it could just be that Google has some kind of weird strategic goal in mind that they're willing to burn many bridges to hit.

What's interesting to me is the role antitrust is playing in this. I'm guessing that a lot of the things they'd like to do are things they feel they can't do because it will get the attention of antitrust regulators. Like, they could just start perma-banning people based on cookies and IP addresses, but people might raise a real stink about that. So, instead, they're going with just trying to annoy people enough that they give up and turn off their ad blockers.