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It's not a scam per se, just a failed project that hasn't been widely adopted for the reasons I've listed above. And something doesn't become a standard simply due to two dozen advertising providers being on the committee (with little to no influence) when there are literally dozens of thousands of others that don't get to participate.
As I said, my last measurements were made years back, but the numbers have been going up every year in the years prior to it. And yes, for the Codex, for instance, the numbers were already over 50% even then; I wouldn't be surprised if they were over 70% today. The fact that non-casual gamers are generally among the more advanced users is generally accepted as the reason why they block ads at a higher rate than the general population. Installing an ad blocker doesn't present any kind of a challenge to a serious gamer. But it presents less of a challenge with each passing year for other users as well.
You're confusing the shop's business vs. the shop product owners' business. A single website on the internet is akin to a single product in a store. Naturally, some websites are much larger than others and they don't all follow the same business model, but still. You are not coming to any website for its ads, but for the content it provides you. So claiming that the ads are somehow the product is disingenuous, to say the least.
But they certainly are important -- most commercial websites rely on the advertising for their income, subscriptions are usually trailing far behind as a source of income.
YT has enabled dozens if not hundreds of thousands of users to make a living by posting videos on their platform, with quite a few getting rich beyond most people's wildest dreams. I don't see that many of them except the smallest streamers complaining about not getting paid enough. Competing platforms with better terms for content creators certainly are out there vying for the same users, but the fact is that YT has by far the largest general audience which also results in the best payments for the content creators, so it's no wonder that most prefer to post their videos there despite being able to get a better deal on paper elsewhere. There are always two sides to every equation.In the case of Youtube, the website may be maintained by them, but the content is created by the users, who perceive a small share of the revenue. And Youtube is so concerned by the well-being of their users - or at least they became recently - that they try to fight ad blockers. Makes sense.
If that isn't greed, I don't know what is.
YouTube is a business out there to make a profit, same as any other. You can always demonize every business based on your own perception of how much money they should be making and how much is too much, but honestly, unless you have a problem with capitalism in general and are advocating for a change of economic system, you're basically making an emotional argument with little substance.
Well, fundamentally flawed from your POV. I would argue that you are ignoring the fact that nearly all advertising-supported websites and platforms enable you to pay a fee to legitimately disable the ads if they bother you. It's certainly no secret to anyone that most people don't enjoy looking at ads, so nobody is really ignoring that. However, short of offering a supplemental ad-free subscription option, nobody has come up with a better solution that would work equally well for everyone involved and be suitable for every website. You're making it out as if the websites were out there to purposefully annoy or torment users with the ads, but that's honestly not the case.
Realistically, any website that's only paying the expenses with the ads is not really commercial but a non-profit without any benefits that being an actual NPO brings.
The problem with ad blockers is that once people install them, the overwhelming majority will not bother or even know how to set exceptions for any websites that they want to exclude. This is reflected in the ever-growing ad blocking statistics. It's nice that the option is there, certainly, but realistically, the number of people that will make use of it is so low as to be negligible.
And yes, certain advertising does pay per view and not only per click, so sometimes just letting the ads show is already enough.
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- Joined
- Nov 20, 2009
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- 676
I don't have "ads at heart" in any way beyond them being a means to an end, and that is ensuring financial stability of the websites that are primarily funded by advertising.
