Is there any hard, reliable data on how much money is "lost" by users with ad blockers? Some of the measures Google has taken with regards to ad blockers seem wholly disproportionate to my own impression of how common they really are.

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suby 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Well, if the recent drop in views was due to adblockers, we now have some data about what percent of viewers block ads. There would have to be an effort to collect this data, and the view discrepncy is probably going to differ by genre of video (eg, tech youtubers probably experienced a greater dip), but this should roughly tell us how much is lost to adblockers.

Creators have stated that while their viewcount is down their ad revenue is not - but a lower viewcount still presumably hurts youtubers for in video sponsorships, and if some genres of video have a higher portion of users with blockers, that probably hurts that entire genre in the algorithm. It sounds like viewcounts are returning back to normal though.

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tcfhgj 5 days ago | parent [-]

> but this should roughly tell us how much is lost to adblockers.

not really, because watching videos without ad blockers would be quite painful

	▲	suby 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well, I meant how much is lost financially. Ah, unless you mean that people would watch less videos if they were subjected to ads, which is a great point I didn't consider. You're right, you can't just linearly extrapolate as I suggested due to that.

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fishgoesblub 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have no actual hard stats to back this up sadly, but from what I've read ad rates are the same, but the views are down. Presumably because everyone who is using an AdBlock isn't counted as a view, and they obviously don't watch ads so the rates are the same.

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jdiff 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If this is what they're doing, then it would seem to be negligible. The channels I've heard talking about this don't seem to be taking home any less money despite tanking viewcounts. Earnings are constant, but the numbers supporting those earnings have shuffled around unpredictably. When it's your income, you really don't like things to be shuffling around without warning.

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Arcuru 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think you're not understanding. The claim is that view counts are down but revenue is not because people using ad-block previously did not contribute to revenue but did contribute to view count, and now they are not counted as either. So view counts are down and creators are getting the same ad money because they already earned no money from the adblocking people.

When channels are claiming their view count is dropping 30% but still earning the same amount of money, that would indicate that they are losing out on 30% of their potential revenue because of ad blockers.

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Workaccount2 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The views didn't count in the first place, that's why the money stayed the same.

Creators can now though, knowing how much they make per view on avg, and slot in the avg number of view that were missing, work out how much they are missing out on due to ad-blocking.

For large creators, it's likely in the tens of thousands of dollars per video assuming most are seeing the same ~20-25% drop.

Eventually the "morally pure" internet will need to reconcile it's habit of not compensating creators.

	▲	zetanor 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Nobody wants to watch ads to generate $4/hr (a good chunk of which Google keeps). The Ad-driven internet needs to understand that my time is worth more than that.

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MarkusQ 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you don't like random/inexplicable changes in your income, you probably shouldn't have youtube involved.

	▲	jdiff 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		YouTube's where the money is. There are very few other places where you can make money like YouTube. Yes, that also means having to deal with their many, many issues, many of which directly threaten that money, but the solution is to work to solve those problems and highlight new ones. YouTube's too big to ignore, and too big to die no matter how many paper cuts and gaping wounds it gives itself.

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bee_rider 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if they want to occasionally agitate against ad blocking just to keep the pressure on.

If I were Google I wouldn’t be that worried about, like, Firefox users with ad blocking addons, or pihole users. But I’d be a bit worried that Apple might take a harder stance against ads, in their browser.

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SoftTalker 5 days ago | parent [-]

If Apple were to include an ad blocker by default in Safari it would be the greatest thing they've done for users in the past 5 years. Their privacy/anti-tracking stuff is good but it's largely invisible to the end user. People would never want to go back to the raw internet once they experience it without ads.

	▲	bee_rider 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah. And, “privacy” is part of their pitch (it’s just a sales pitch, not a moral philosophy, and I’m aware that they don’t always live up to it). Including a default-on ad blocker would be an extremely user-visible way of emphasizing that pitch.

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tene80i 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It will be a low percentage, but a low percentage at youtube's scale is still a vast amount of money and worth going after.