this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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This isn't "backfiring" though. People who were already blocking ads are the only ones doing this. If there's even a small portion of people who gave up and just started watching ads/got premium, that means YouTube won. The only way this could really be considered to have backfired is if people were stopping using YouTube entirely, which isn't really happening.
I block ads. I was considering YouTube premium under a friend recommendation that it was good value, to replace my Spotify subscription. That was a few months back. With this crack down and the raise in prices, premium is no longer an option and my friend asked me to explain adblocking, since she is about to cancel her subscription.
A lot of my mother's friends, people in the 70s and 80s, are moving to ad blocking due to this. These people are really hearing about ad blocking for the first time through this. From this being in the news they are not only being told this is a possibility, but names of a number of products that do it. Most of them have slowly begun to use YT for a number of reasons over the past 10 years, and have all hated the ads, but other than buying premium, they assumed getting around ads required some level of technical expertise, or access to an "underground" scene to accomplish it.
A lot of them have been switching browsers, looking up ad blocking tools, and using them. In the past few months most of them went from using YT to look up occasional tutorials and media from their youth that is hard to find now, to using it as frequently as they do other streaming services. I know YT isn't really targeting aging boomers, but if I am seeing this many people, in this demographic, doing this,I can only imagine it's happening elsewhere.
Often times companies going on campaigns like this only bring more attention to the fact that it can be done and is easy to do.
Yeah, I feel like tons of people hearing about this and looking up ad blockers is going to be miles more of a problem for Google than the minority of people using ad block previously. This is a problem Google is unlikely to solve ENTIRELY and it seems that the attention that this has brought to the fact that ad blockers exist is likely bigger than any other gains they've made along the way.
I wouldn't even call that backfiring. If those people were using ad block, how much were they contributing to YT anyway? Watching videos doesn't get Google anything besides server costs unless they manage to sell an ad to that user. You could argue usage statistics help them, but they have no competition to way that against either so even that is moot.