Smashed Blocked or If Only They'd Stayed Hidden

As Redbeard reported yesterday, Google has finally tired of giving stuff away for free. A few months ago the internet juggernaut began experimenting with ways to stop people opting out of seeing ads while watching amusing cat videos on YouTube. 

Oh, wait... my Dated Reference alert just went off! Apparently it's not the noughties any more. Dang! There it goes again. No-one's said noughties since... well, the noughties.

I never watched cat videos on YouTube. The only reason I know people did is because it constantly turns up as a lame-ass joke in sitcoms and comedy novels. I'm reading a comedy novel right now and it's pretty good but even in 2023 it has at least one reference to funny cat videos. Maybe people really do still watch them.

As an aside (No, really?) I was reading something a while back about how many of those early-days internet phenomena, the viral videos that racked up millions of views for no apparent reason, have vanished without trace, although ironically I now can't find where I read it. 

I do remember, however, that the article gave "Charlie Bit My Finger" as an example without mentioning that the reason that one disappeared from YouTube was that the family who owned it sold it two years ago, as an NFT for three-quarters of a million dollars, and as part of the deal removed it from YouTube.

Despite all that, you can, in fact, still watch Charlie biting what I assume is his brother's finger on YouTube. I just checked. I clicked it off after the first second, once I'd established it does indeed play, because I have never seen the clip and fully intend to keep it that way. If you want to check, you can go find it for yourself. I'm not facilitating such behavior.

Getting back to the point, over the last week or so, Google's anti-freeloader faction ramped up the effort to make sure we all do our share in keeping the wheels spinning on the speeding express train of insanity that is the global advertising industry. Back when I thought I was really cool because I'd read Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, I used to see advertising as both a valid artform and a fascinating social phenomenon but that feels like a very long time ago, now.

As the Parallel Context post I linked succinctly explains, YouTube viewers using Ad Blockers, which would be all of them with the sense they were born with, have been receiving some very aggressive notifications from Google that they'd damn well better stop! Naturally, this being the internet, the hive mind has been fighting back.

It's a fast-moving and ongoing battle. In the last twenty-four hours my YouTube access has gone from warnings (Three strikes and you're out.) to blackout (Can see everything except the actual video I'm trying to watch, which is weirdly useful and in some ways an improvement. Certainly saves time.) to working "normally" with ads running (Making it unwatchable by any sane person, so good work there, advertisers.) to back to the status quo ante as the combined might of reddit and every anti-corporate coder on the planet strives to wrest back control of their own eyeballs.

For the moment, I'm using YouTube like I was last week but I don't expect it to last. I also don't expect free stuff on the internet to last. This is just the start. Not even the start. The middle, maybe. 

The end will be exactly what every sci-fi author ever has been predicting since I was a child, namely a world filled with wall-to-wall, 24/7 advertising, driving an unavoidable, non-optional, hyper-commercialised culture for the consuming classes, defined as all of us except for a miniscule, mega-rich hyper-elite, most of whose names will be unknown to everyone but their vanishingly tiny peer group.

I am not Tobold (Who'd be having a jolly good laugh at my expense right now for all the times I've chided him for not using an Ad Blocker to watch YouTube, if he ever read anyone else's blog, something I've never seen anything to suggest he does.) so I'm not about to turn this into some kind of political statement. I merely mention it to warn that, depending on Google's success or lack thereof in imposing its will in this regard, I may or may not have to alter the format of my music posts. 

It'd be nice to think I could move to linking to Bandcamp or Soundcloud instead but clearly that's going to present its own issues going forward. Still, I'm sure there'll be some workround I can try. I'm certainly not just going to stop sharing new tunes because Google tells me I'm not doing my bit to keep Keith Richards in Chivas Regal.

And of course they haven't done anything of the kind. That's just me being melodramatic, something to which I've always been happily prone. In fact, for the time being, one of the easier ways to avoid having to watch advertisements for things you wouldn't want if they gave them to you is to view the videos you're interested in on other websites, where they've been embedded. Like this one.

For now at least, embedded videos do not carry advertising, although how long that will last I wouldn't care to guess. It means a couple of things; firstly, the half-dozen or so of my readers who actually check out some of the videos in my music posts should be able to go on doing it without fear. Well, without fear of seeing any adverts. Might be as well to have at least a little fear of what the videos themselves might contain.

It also means, as I discovered yesterday, that I can simply watch the videos on the sites where I find them (NME, Stereogum, Pitchfork etc.), then right-click to get the YouTube URL, paste it into Blogger (Another Google product.) and voila; embedded, ad-free videos. Add as another data point the fact that Chrome (Google, again.) stocks Ad Blockers in its Web Store and they work on YouTube (I just installed one and it works fine.) and you can see there may be parts of the vast Google corporation that don't exactly talk to each other.

Maybe one day all of this will be smoothed out to the point that Google gets exactly what it wants and the rest of the world has to accept it but despite the company's overwhelming commercial success there's precious little evidence of anything even approximating a coherent, structured plan for global domination. It looks a lot more like a hell of a lot of over-excited technicians rabidly making things that interest them with the aid of the giant Scrooge McDuck money pit they've somehow fallen into, while the handful of responsible adults in the building try to firefight the fallout.

Google famously abandons, forgets about or cancels things all the time. Until recently, YouTube has been one of the parts that they've been largely letting get on with making them money, undisturbed. I can't recall a lot changing there for a while. 

Now there's this, which suggests maybe the flood level from the money hose has started to dip a little but there's also the news that they're on the verge of a deal with the recording industry (Now there's a black hat if ever there was.) to facilitate legal AI voice masking. What with that and the runaway success of AI-assisted search under the Bard brand, I think we can all agree our digital future is in safe hands with Google.

In honor of the obvious need to keep feeding the corporate maw, as you'll have seen I've chosen this week to concentrate solely on already known, successful performers. The YouTube warnings do make a point of stressing how using an Ad Blocker impacts the income of artists and creators. I'd hate to see Mick and the boys go hungry, let alone Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga, who helped them out on that track.

Fortunately and by a lucky happenstance, a great number of well-known musicians who've featured on the blog many times before have chosen to release quality work this week so I haven't needed to compromise my own, impeccable aesthetic standards to comply. Since everyone knows who they all are, not least because I've told you all more than once already, it also means I haven't needed to include my usual explanatory gloss on every video. 

I'm sure if you need any more information, Bard will be happy to fill you in on the details, some of which it will probably make up especially for you. And all free of charge. For now.

I have a large and ever-growing number of tunes by people I'm willing to bet will be new to most of my readers. (Ha! "My readers". That's presumptious, pretentious and proprietorial. Triple threat! Go me!) so don't be too disheartened by the populist, crowd-pleasing nature of this post. Normal service will, no doubt, be resumed soon enough.

It has also occurred to me in the past, when I've been watching YouTube on handheld devices where I hadn't bothered to install an Ad Blocker yet, that maybe YouTube doesn't place many - or any - ads on videos almost no-one watches. This may be the time to test that hypothesis. 

Unfortunately it won't get rid of the often really quite offensive static ads at the top of the Recommends list but those are quite easily ignored or even blocked physically with a Post-It note. The upside of all of this could be a refocusing on genuinely new and obscure music instead of - as I sometimes worry mildly it might have become - a self-satisfied litany of comfort listening. 

See? There's an upside to everything, if you only look hard enough!

 

 

A note on AI Imagery used in this post, which was just the header this time. 

The prompt was "Ad Blockers drinking and laughing. Futuristic." The AI was Dreamshaper XL Alpha2, my current go-to choice at NightCafe. The image was extended to fit the space available using Uncrop because I always forget to change the aspect ratio from 1:1 to 4:3. What Uncrop added were the left and right figures, their speech bubbles and nearly all the text along the bottom.

I did ask Dreamshaper to give me another version of the same prompt, this time using the correct aspect ratio and it produced something that looks more like the Google Security Team celebrating their success in blocking Ad Blockers than the blockers themselves. It's pretty good, though and I'd hate to waste it so as a little treat for everyone who's made it this far, here it is: