The ad wars heat up

As I mentioned in yesterday's link round-up, YouTube is threatening to block viewers who use ad-blockers.  I don't know what the time frame is for this to be applied universally -- it's been in the works for at least a month now -- but the impact is going to be huge, one way or another, because of how many people use YouTube as their main platform for internet video.  It's not a monopoly, but it's close.

The reason it's such an issue is that YouTube, like so many sites these days, is so horribly clogged up with intrusive and disruptive ads that without an ad-blocker it's intolerable.  You sometimes get two or even three ads at the beginning of the video, ads which may or may not be skippable -- and if they are, you usually need to wait a certain number of seconds before you can skip.  Ads interrupt videos at completely random times while they're playing, cutting off a speaker in mid-sentence or breaking into a piece of music.  Then there are those small rectangular ads that appear at the bottom of the video, clashing with its color scheme and/or blocking your view of subtitles, and you have to click the X to get rid of them.  It's a constant distraction that ruins the experience.  Even ignoring the malware issues discussed by Penguinz0 in the video above, the sheer irritation factor, for me, makes watching YouTube with no ad-blocker unthinkable.

It is, of course, true that some of the money from ads goes to video creators, so some claim that ad-blockers reduce their income.  I'm not so sure.  Given how bad the ads are, I think that if ad-blockers were no longer usable, most of the people who now use them would just quit watching those videos, so revenue wouldn't increase very much.  What those creators would see is a substantial drop in the number of views, hurting their efforts to get their message out.  Also, many YouTube channels that are really worth watching are "demonetized", meaning that YouTube is punishing them for "violating community standards" (having opinions the management doesn't like) by cutting off the ad revenues for their videos.  Those channels don't lose anything if you're using an ad-blocker.

Many YouTubers have some other means of making money -- a Patreon account or donation accounts on PayPal and suchlike.  That's actually a better way to support them.  They probably don't make a lot of money from the ads (unless they have an unusually large audience), especially since so many people use ad-blockers now.

In the comments threads both for the video above and for the Yahoo News post I linked to, I could find only one comment that wasn't vehemently hostile to YouTube ads and to the anti-ad-blocker policy.  Here's a video which is somewhat supportive of YouTube's position -- whether or not you watch it, check out the comments below it.  Again, every single one is strongly against being forced to watch ads.

So it's very likely that technological work-arounds for this problem will appear soon -- presumably in the form of ad-blockers upgrading their services to make them undetectable by YouTube.  This will likely lead to an "arms race" as YouTube keeps upgrading its detection and the ad-blockers upgrade their defenses to counter that.  But it will mean that YouTube, like Reddit and Twitter these days, is in a state of war against its user base.  That won't end well.

Obviously YouTube does need to make money somehow.  I don't know what the answer is for that, and I'm not inclined to worry about it -- they no doubt have people who are paid hefty salaries to deal with such questions.  But ad revenue isn't a realistic solution.  YouTube itself took that option off the table when it made the ads so intolerably intrusive and numerous and annoying that ad-blockers became a necessity.  There's no way back from that.

But more broadly, almost everything that's turning the internet to shit these days stems from efforts to monetize it.  Some faceless corporation or airhead billionaire buys a platform with a vibrant community and immediately bans NSFW content and disapproved political and social opinions, because advertisers don't like those things, thus suffocating creativity and free expression and driving away part of the community.  Ads become more and more numerous and intrusive in an effort to maximize revenue, until the site gets so clogged up with them that the experience is ruined.  Fees appear for things that used to be free, creating a divide between those who can afford them and those who can't, and requiring those who do pay to log in, an irritating nuisance that didn't previously exist.

AO3 is such a stand-out bastion against all that because it was created by and for fans of the type of content it showcases (fan fiction), and steadfastly resists corporate control and the toxic influence of money.  Yes, it occasionally holds fundraisers to cover the expenses of running such a large operation (it has its own servers, an expensive but quite necessary measure, since using some big company's servers would risk being pressured by that company to change its policies), but these are the same in spirit as the Patreon accounts or donate buttons seen on ordinary people's blogs and YouTube channels.  It's not the same as becoming a mere cash-generating utensil for people who have no clue about its real value.

It may be that internet culture will always have a nomadic quality, like animals who migrate in herds to avoid predators.  As a platform grows and develops a thriving culture, it eventually gets prominent enough that some big-money interest decides to buy it and convert it into a cash cow, or the existing management decides to do so.  As ads and censorship and fees proliferate and ruin the community, its members migrate elsewhere, to some newer platform not yet large enough to be a target, and the old platform shrivels away.  Eventually the cycle repeats with the new platform.  It happened with MySpace and LiveJournal, it happened (to a lesser extent) with Tumblr, and it's happening with Twitter and possibly Reddit right now.  It may be about to happen with YouTube.  Fan-owned, determinedly independent platforms like AO3 may be the only permanent refuges.  But they're rare, and it's hard to imagine such a thing being built on the scale needed to replace, say, YouTube.

The grey men in grey suits who rule the world of corporations and big money, and the colorful and creative cultures that thrive on the freer platforms of the internet, are so antithetical to each other that they cannot coexist in the same space.  The very touch of the former is death to the latter.  The battle to save the internet is, ultimately, a battle to thwart monetization.