Mediastreet
Tag

adblockers

Browsing
In News

YouTube’s war against third party apps is just as ridiculous as its war on adblockers

No Comments
By Dhruv Bhutani

YouTube’s decaying user experience has a more significant role to play in piracy than ad blocking

It’s always the innocent civilian who is the casualty of any war. It would be unfair to say that YouTube’s crusade against third-party apps has quite the gravity of war. However, the fact of the matter is that, once again, it is the customers who are caught in the crossfire of the company’s relentless pursuit to thwart third-party apps. Something’s got to give.

Recently, YouTube stated that it would strengthen its enforcement against apps that help users circumvent ads, circling us right back to YouTube’s other unwinnable war, its war against ad blockers. However, there’s a fallacy in YouTube’s understanding of the issue. Ad-blocking is just one feature offered by third-party YouTube apps and doesn’t necessarily even require another app. These alternative YouTube apps open up a world of quality-of-life additions that YouTube has either decided to remove or wasn’t thoughtful enough to include in the first place. And avid YouTube enthusiasts aren’t about to give up on these incredible features in the face of the company’s threats.

Ad-blocking is just one reason to install a third-party YouTube app

YouTube’s cheapening of the user experience has a larger role to play

Understanding YouTube’s ham-fisted approach against third-party apps requires understanding why people care enough to jump through loopholes to sideload these apps. It would be fairly trivial to point at ads as the singular problem with YouTube. However, that would be trivializing the extent of the issue. Ads have almost always been part and parcel of the YouTube experience. However, there’s a point at which ads become so frequent, so irrelevant, and so relentless that they start hurting the user experience. We’ve been past that point for a while now.

Scour community forums like Reddit, and you’ll spot user complaints about people having to sit through back-to-back ads after watching a single video. The other day, I had to sit through three 30-second long ads, two seemingly unskippable, to watch a minute-long video. That’s ridiculous. YouTube’s sneaky methods of hiding away skip buttons add to the menace.

But that’s not all there is to it. YouTube’s entire user experience has been going downhill for years. Pop open the app, and you’ll be bombarded by utterly unrelated content that has nothing to do with what you’ve been watching. Whatever happened to personalization, YouTube? The issue isn’t recent, either. By all estimates, the tipping point was somewhere around 2016. However, it’s just been getting worse. I don’t see a correlation between stand-up comedy and an account that only follows engineering and history documentaries, but perhaps I’m missing something.

Moreover, those unrelated recommendations have completely taken over my subscriptions. Unless I deep dive into the subscriptions tab, the app won’t show me all the new content that creators I follow have been putting out. There used to be a time when I’d pop into an exciting video and be taken down a rabbit hole of related videos I could binge through the night. That time has gone and has been gone for a while now.

Unfortunately, I wish solid recommendations, or the lack thereof, were the last of my concerns. It’s not, and the mobile app’s degradation has almost put me off watching YouTube on my phone. As I write this piece, my homepage consists of a sponsored ad for a television show in a language I don’t understand. This is followed by a 2 x 4 grid of YouTube Shorts with content unrelated to my subscriptions and watch history. Perhaps there’s a missing connection between Bollywood dance and Czechoslovakia’s Socialist history, but I fail to see it. Stay put because it doesn’t end there. You’ll also find a few more ads and occasionally an entire section dedicated to YouTube Music. Sigh. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise to Google that users are starting to retaliate.

Elsewhere, the app keeps making watching high-quality videos more complicated. My data limit is high enough that I don’t need to micromanage YouTube’s data consumption. If I’ve set it to high-quality playback, I want it to be the case for all the videos I watch. Except, that isn’t the case. Repeatedly, the app swaps out the high-quality stream for a mobile-optimized option.

Third-party apps offer a better YouTube experience than YouTube itself

Sometimes, Less is more

Based on the company’s statements, it’s clear that Google thinks third-party apps exist to remove ads. Sure, that might be the case for a significant number of users. However, these apps also add quality of life additions — A concept that is alien to the company. Dislikes? Who needs them? Right?

Third-party apps let users take control of their feeds. Apps like Revanced let you remove shorts from your home feed, get rid of obtrusive end screen cards, or do things like repeat a particular video — a must-have if you have a go-to focus music track.

Elsewhere, tools like SponsorBlock are a godsend for scrubbing past annoying sponsored segments within a video. This is not content that Google can monetize and should have no issue with. I won’t go into the ethics of supporting a creator you like. My gripes tend to be with creators who agree to partner with unscrupulous companies for a quick buck. But that’s a debate for another day.

YouTube vs. Third-party apps: A cat and mouse game

Third-party apps aren’t going anywhere

YouTube app showing ads

I have little hope that the collective protests of YouTube enthusiasts will change the company’s stance. As video consumption grows multifold year-on-year, Google has a business to run, and ads are its business, not entertainment. It wants you to watch more videos, any videos. Pushing clickbait and conspiracy theories is bound to pique the curiosity of most of us. Similarly, the push to bring podcasts to YouTube is driven by the desire for a consolidated user base to monetize through ads. And it’ll do everything it can to boost engagement over usability. Any additional tap, accidental even, is worth it. It’s pure speculation on my end, but I think it would be fair to say that YouTube’s UX focuses on making the experience annoying enough that users will eventually be compelled to pay for YouTube Premium.

The Android Police team dive into YouTube Premium and whether the benefit of YouTube Music is worth the cost to remove ads

But here’s where YouTube is mistaken — third-party apps aren’t going anywhere. Developers erring on the rebellious side of the internet tend to have a dog-headed approach. The recent example of Nintendo striking down emulators shows that, like the proverbial Hydra, if you chop off one head, another head, or in this case, fork, is bound to pop up. The more Google pushes back, the more developers are bound to double down on their efforts. It might take longer for devs to circumvent some restrictions, but I don’t see any scenario where third-party YouTube apps won’t exist.

YouTube’s monopoly on video streaming guarantees that we haven’t seen the last of this cat-and-mouse game. Google’s “Don’t be evil” days might be behind it, but it would do well to take a step back on pursuing alternative app developers and focus more on improving its core user experience. It only makes it look more evil.

By Dhruv Bhutani

Dhruv Bhutani has been writing about consumer technology since 2008. He brings extensive insights into the Android smartphone landscape, which he translates into features and opinion pieces.

Sourced from Android Police

Read More
By
In News

Apple bans VPN-based adblockers from App Store

No Comments

By

It’s the end of the line for VPN-based adblockers that target ads in third-party apps (although, according to Apple, these apps were always on shaky ground).

The developer behind the popular adblock apps Adblock and Weblock is now finding that Apple is rejecting app updates because they violate the App Store Developer Guidelines.

other words, using VPN or root certificates to remove ads being displayed in apps is not using the “APIs and frameworks for their intended purposes” and are, as such, a no-no.

Apple has been quick to point out though that contrary to earlier reports, is not a change in policy, but instead just a case of Apple enforcing existing policies.

“This is not a new guideline,” Apple said in a statement. “We have never allowed apps on the App Store that are designed to interfere with the performance or capabilities of other apps. We have always supported advertising as one of the many ways that developers can make money with apps.”

That last part makes a lot of sense for Apple, since many of its developers rely on advertising to monetize apps, and app wants to maintain good relationships with developers (even if that means upsetting those in the adblocker business).

It has also been suggested that part of the reason for Apple suddenly removing these VPN-based adblockers is that they interfere with the ads that Apple itself is displaying in iOS 11’s Apple News app.

Apple went on to say that it would be removing any similar apps it comes across that “may have snuck on to the App Store.”

This means that the only adblocking feature available to developers is the Safari Content Blocker, which can only block web ads being displayed in the Safari browser.

It’s unclear where this leaves apps such as Adblock and Weblock.

By

Sourced from ZDNet

Read More
By
In News

From nasty to nice: how adblockers are trying to pivot

No Comments

By

Controversial software was branded enemy of publishers, but adblocker developers are reassessing their relationships.

Adblock Plus, one of the largest desktop adblockers, bought microdonation platform Flattr.
Adblock Plus, one of the largest desktop adblockers, bought microdonation platform Flattr. Photograph: Adblock Plus

Adblocking, for a long time used quietly by tech-savvy desktop surfers, exploded into the public consciousness in 2015 when Apple allowed content blocking on the iPhone.

For a while, it looked like a war was in the offing: adblocker developers argued that ad-supported media on the net was abusing its readers, while publishers argued that blocking ads was tantamount to theft. Both sides experimented with blocks and counter-blocks, culminating in sites simply blocking all users with an adblocker turned on.

But 18 months on, the landscape has changed. Facebook and Google’s share of digital advertising has continued to rocket, even as every other provider has flatlined. Meanwhile, market penetration of adblockers has plateaued (Britain’s IAB estimates 22% of visitors block ads, the same as this time last year). And as well as fighting back technologically, some sites have started appealing to the morality of visitors, pointing out that blocking adverts deprives publishers of revenue, and requesting adblocking readers whitelist their domains.

It’s not just publishers who have started to push themselves as the moral option, however. Developers of adblockers have been reassessing their own relationship to publishing, and bringing out products intended to ameliorate for the loss of revenue site owners experience from adblocking.

Recently, Adblock Plus, one of the largest desktop adblockers, made a decisive move into this space, buying microdonation platform Flattr for an undisclosed amount.

First launched in 2010, Flattr’s goal has always been to provide an alternative revenue model to ad-supported media. The service allows site owners to load a digital tip jar on their content, which Flattr users can click to thank creators. Each month, Flattr bills users a recurring amount, which is then split between everyone tipped the month before.

Although its heart was in the right place, Flattr struggled to overcome the network effects inherent in its model: publishers wouldn’t bother supporting it if there weren’t enough readers paying in, and readers wouldn’t pay in if their favourite publishers wouldn’t get a cut.

So a partnership with Adblock Plus made sense, and in May last year the two companies announced they’d be working together to create Flattr Plus, removing the need to click a button to distribute tips and instead automatically funding publishers based on engagement, as an alternative to advertising.

That partnership has been solidified further with the merger between the two companies: Adblock Plus now owns both the carrot and the stick.

Not every publisher’s adverts get blocked by Adblock Plus, though. The controversial “acceptable ads” programme allows companies which think they have unintrusive adverts to apply to be whitelisted. Larger companies pay for the privilege, with Google, Microsoft and Amazon handing over huge sums based on the number of views which would otherwise be blocked. That’s led to allegations that the ads programme constitutes a shakedown of sorts, which Flattr Plus does little to dispel.

Other adblock companies are taking a similar approach to finding a middle way but without the requests for direct payments from publishers. Brave is one of the most notable attempts: it’s whole new browser, founded by former Firefox boss Brendan Eich.

Taking on Google on two fronts at once is a bold move, but Brave hopes to both outcompete Chrome as a browser while also blocking the adverts and tracking scripts that provide Google with the bulk of its revenue. Its pitch to users is the same as many adblockers, particularly mobile ones: by stripping out some content, loading times can be improved by “up to 60%”, privacy can be protected, and the web becomes a more pleasant experience for all.

Like Adblock Plus, Brave wants to help publishers in other ways. Users can pay a certain monthly fee which is distributed using bitcoin to the sites you visit, in proportion to how much you visit them. Unlike Flattr, Brave itself doesn’t know which sites the user visits (a handy advantage for a browser selling itself on privacy). Both services do still open themselves up to criticism from the publishers on whose behalf money is being collected, however; Brave, for instance, doesn’t even tell a site owner that it’s been collecting cash until $100 is in the bank, and is currently only able to actually pay out to those publishers who own the domain name they’re publishing on – cold comfort for YouTube creators, for instance, whose adverts, and ad revenue, is still blocked by the browser.

Perhaps the most interesting move to a more moral adblocking has come from Shine, an adblock company which struck a deal with mobile operator Three in 2016 to introduce adblocking across the entire network. Unlike traditional adblockers, the move would have let adverts be blocked at a network level, rendering it nearly impossible for companies to bypass, and allowing adverts to be blocked even in-app, where most mobile adblockers have no sway.

But in February this year, Shine had a change of heart. The company rebranded as Rainbow, and announced a new goal: fixing advertising at both ends of the industry. It will still sit at the top level, but rather than blocking all adverts, its plan now is to use that privileged access to allow advertisers to more accurately and precisely target users, while letting users ensure that obtrusive, annoying or exploitative adverts don’t make it on to their devices.

Make no mistake: Rainbow will still be blocking some ads for users who opt-in to its service. Ad networks which refuse to work with them, and which break the advertising “bill of rights” that Rainbow enforces, will see the offending ads blocked. But unlike Adblock Plus, the company doesn’t charge behaving advertisers to get through; and unlike Brave, it doesn’t declare the ad-funded internet dead while dealing the killing blow itself.

But someone has to pay the piper. Rainbow’s plan is to take advantage of its position near the networks to build up an unassailable amount of data on how users interact with adverts and advertisers, and sell that on. For users who dislike adverts simply because they’re ugly or obtrusive, it could be perfect. For those who call for privacy from advertising trackers, the cure may be as bad as the disease.

 

By

Sourced from The Guardian

Read More
By