Same with Google’s ads in general. For a long time they were whitelisted by default on just about every adblock list out there because they were so unobtrusive it didn’t make sense to bother blocking them, especially when you compared them to the other ads that were common at the time. They were also generally relevant ads, so people actually did click on them and use them since it actually related to the thing they were searching for.
They’re obviously more profitable now, but you have to wonder by how much and if they’d be a more trusted company today (and what’s that worth monetarily) if they hadn’t gone down this race to the bottom.
ETA: Part of what I mean is that now they create things like Stadia and most people didn’t even bother trying it because they knew it’d hit the Google Graveyard in a few years. Had Google been a more trusted company, people may have been willing to give it a try and they could possibly have printed money since by all accounts the service was actually pretty good.
Instead I’m putting great energy to get away from Google, along with a lot of other people
We are an insignificant amount. Most people likely don’t even know how to change the default search engine on their phones.
Most people don’t even know what a search engine is by that term. They just know they type things into search boxes and click things that come up. Greater majority of phone users don’t even use the browser, it’s just endless apps
Sometimes few people raise much voices. Those who bother and search for new engine are early adapters of technology, spends money on new gadgets and such. Those are who ads are after, not my grandmother.
I would think they’re infinitely more likely to click an add.
Shit I hate ads that much, if I see one for a product I might actually want I’ll still search it manually. It’s ingrained in me to avoid ads on the internet and to shut them out as much as possible irl where imo they’re even more an eyesore.
Edit: to add, I do agree with the sentiment, but just not in this instance. With protesting as an example where it can apply.
That’s fair. It’s unfortunate.
To do that effectively, you’d have to make a popular movement for popular big name YouTubers to move away from YouTube and to some other site. Very hard.
I tried Stadia. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I played Cyberpunk mainly and didn’t have 90% of the problems that other players had. It was very enjoyable.
I likely wouldn’t sign up for another similar service simply because now I have a library on my Steam Deck (purchased with the Stadia refund) and that’s how I’m used to playing at this point. But it sure was a nice service while it lasted. I thought they were selling it to someone but I guess it didn’t end up happening.
You’re right, and now I’m dreading having to change my email address again after nearly 20 years. This one lasted a lot longer than the Hotmail account.
The thing is, “trust” is hard to put on a balance sheet, and is also hard to make a KPI (Key Performance Indicators are a google innovation to help execs and c-suites feel better about the fact that the don’t do much real work) around, since it’s not really quantifiable in a traditional sense.
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I, personally, don’t see that happening, but I can easily imagine them making it a TOS violation to use adblock and then killing your account if you continue to do so :-/
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Losing access to personalized YT would suck, but losing decades of emails would suck even more (when I initially got GMail, I imported all my old emails in … I guess I should probably look at making a backup periodically, like I used to). I share your sentiment that I fear what these companies are going to do next in the pursuit of more money they can burn and/or give to shareholders as they continue to tank their reputations.
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I’m a software engineer at AWS and work on video content delivery for services like Netflix. The idea that one single ad could cover the cost of delivering a video that’s been replicated in multiple servers, multiple regions, multiple countries throughout the world is pretty hilarious. No matter how much money you think YouTube is making I can almost guarantee it’s not enough. There is a reason there is no significant competition in this space, it makes no money.
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no significant competition? Is that a joke?
For the type of service they are (hosting random one-off videos and series that anyone can load and optionally kicking back a portion to the content creators) - who are they competing against? If you go on the street and ask random people to name 3 streaming services that do that, you’ll likely get YouTube, “ummm”, and “I dunno”
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If you think it’s sustainable you can create a new service yourself, no one is stopping you. I’ve done cost estimations for projects with 1M+ customers and the margins are so tight we’ve killed at least a dozen services despite pouring months or years of effort into their designs and prototypes. It’s easy for you to complain about freebies from your couch but the reality is that if someone could make a better service than YouTube, they already would have. “Spare is your tears” lol.
Question that pertains to general hosting at those scales. In your opinion what costs more, distributing a piece of content that will get 1M views, or 1000 pieces of content that will get 1000 each? I know the math wont add up, but I dont know where the cost bottleneck is. Is hosting something even though it isnt used or that viral spike in views that kills attempts to make a smaller service like this?
It’s not really a single ad though, right? It’s a single ad per view. I realize that each view costs money, but at some point you’re just paying for bandwidth, after paying the upfront replication costs right? Assuming replication is an upfront cost, I might be misunderstanding there. If that’s true though, then surely there’s a breakpoint where ads start making money. Though I suppose if that breakpoint is like a million views, your point basically still stands.
You’re forgetting amortization. You can’t copy a video file to a drive and expect it to last forever. It requires energy to run and the drivers break down over time. Google is one of the largest consumers of HDDs and SSDs in the world. Plus you need to pay engineers who maintain the whole thing, pay the finance team to make orders, etc. And then you have to have recycling and logistics. I bet they dispose of the whole truck loads of old drives every day, you can’t put that many in your recycling bin and call it a day.
Genuine question.
How is been running for almost 20 years, most of them with very few ads?
I doubt they had been just sinking money for the kind of their hearts.
I do not know how much it cost to run a service like YouTube. Or how much money they make by ads or other ways. But they have been running for long enough to be a successful business.
And it’s just the latest few years when they are pushing these aggressive techniques.
How is been running for almost 20 years, most of them with very few ads?
Investor money, then Google money. Video streaming requires fuckloads of storage and is a HUGE bandwidth hog, especially if people want to watch stuff at 1080p or higher resolutions. Youtube is a money pit, but it’s a major and nearly untouchable internet power, especially given its size and reach.
And it’s just the latest few years when they are pushing these aggressive techniques.
The “easy money” from loans with very low interest rates has dried up, also Google being Google.
There’s also the cost to transcode the video and audio streams into different formats so they don’t have to do it on demand whenever someone watches a video. That’s a lot of compute cost plus they have to store all of those additional transcodes which is more storage cost.
I know that for many years in the 2000s and early 2010s- what many consider to be the golden age of Youtube- they were losing money. That’s what I think a lot or people don’t get when they claim “enshittification”- the services they are complaining about are unsustainable in their current form. That’s what it takes to establish a digital product- grow your base first while bleeding money, then figure out a way to monetize it later. As capital tightens up, the clock is running out for brands like Netflix, Discord, Youtube etc to start making money. That’s the part that sucks as a consumer but idk what else YouTube can do if it wants to be profitable. They offer a premium version for people that don’t want to watch ads.
I feel like I would need to see their accounting books to fully believe that narrative.
The lack of accounting transparency makes all a tale of “trust me I need this money to make this work”.
Sounds like the public library system should host the peoples videos as a service, not for profit.
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Idk about your system, but mine is currently facing a massive budget cut
Yep. Hence why we need to remake the internet.
Good luck with that :thumbsup:
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I refused to use adblock for years. Not because I thought Youtube needed MORE money, but because I did realize that a business ultimately only continues operating as long as the business model is sustainable. I endured, through occasional ads, ads at the bottom, then through ads every time a video was watched, then ads in the middle of videos, and even two ads before every video.
But three unskippable ads was where I drew the fucking line. Now I use adblock for Youtube and Youtube only.
I like to watch video game speedruns. I especially enjoy the really long, challenging ones. Watching a 2 hour video on YouTube without an ad block is basically impossible at this point.
That’s nice of you, but it appears that the ad-supported business model doesn’t work. It just results in enshittification and surveillance.
“We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that it can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.”
No one will ever pay for services like YouTube. Thus ads is the only way.
Plenty of people pay for cable and streaming services lol, what are you on about?
YouTube has a paid subscription which is ad free and with additional features. How many of you here, who complain about ads, use YouTube Premium? Mmm?
A friend of mine pays for it, yes.
“A friend of a friend”. Cool story. So far it’s just one person here who pays to get rid of ads. And 1.45k upvotes for the post.
No, a friend. Not a friend of a friend. And I’m sure many folks here she’ll out the extra few bucks on stuff like Hulu to get the ad free version. Not sure what the hell you’re on about.
Youtube is my main source of entertainment. I will pay for premium no problem. And yes, I totally hate ads. A music service for free with it that has a comment section so I can discuss the music with my peers. Also, it’s insane the amount of data YouTube has to serve.
I appreciate this point of view but I refuse to have my limited time and energy wasted as a form of “payment”. Ads degrade the user experience of everything they touch and corporations don’t limit their ad use to “continue operations”, they push it as far as possible to suck as much money out of the product as they can.
The only “TV” I watch is hockey and it’s depressing watching the product get degraded year after year as they continue to shove as much advertising down our throats as possible in order to make more money. Fuck ads.
Similar story here, except I just stopped using YouTube.
Lemmy’s piping bots help with that.Wow, grandstanding over adblockers
I was fine with giving them 5 seconds of attention in exchange for a video. Then they added more and more, and moved the skip button SOMETIMES. It’s straight up disrespectful.
I also HATE that if you miss the skip button on the first of multiple ads, they disable the skip button for another number of seconds.
I was okay with giving the recovering alcoholic just a small drink but this, I can’t abide.
Capitalists don’t care about making quality products/services.
They care about squeezing more profit out of you as time goes on.
I’m not here to defend the soulless multi-million dollar corporation, but we don’t actually know how much money it costs for youtube to stay up. The scale they are operating on is immense, I wouldn’t be surprised, if they were still making a loss with 10 midroll ads.
They almost certainly are running at a loss. Same as Twitch, their parent companies are generally okay with it, because they also serve as pretty solid tech demos for other services they offer (YouTube runs on Google Cloud Platform, Twitch runs on Amazon Web Services), and that pays off indirectly.
Moreover, their parent companies can use them as free advertising. Google about to launch a new phone? Guess what you’re gonna see ads for!
I think the term for this is “loss leader”
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So they could either be making money in ways they are not proud of, or there is nothing to be (not) proud of in the first place.
Number of ads does not necessarily scale linearly to amount of income. If the ads alienate viewers, then they become worth less. I know I personally watch less when they started sometimes subjecting me to 30 seconds of unskippable ads to watch a 90 second video. Recently, I hit “skip ad” and it took me to another ad, which made me less likely. The other day whole watching a video someone told me to watch, I paused to look at some text. After a few moments it started rolling an ad while I was trying to read the text. The more this happens, the less likely I am to watch. Wild be interesting to know statistics on viewership versus more obnoxious ad behavior, but there’s likely at least some decline in per ad avenue versus number of ads crammed in the face of viewers.
It’s a fair point. The honest answer might be that with current technology there is simply no way to make Youtube profitable. If Google can’t pull this off I don’t think anyone can. In which case we will see a slow, but profitable death for Youtube as they make increasingly user-hostile moves, like raising prices, increasing ads, and eventually becoming increasing aggressive about deleting rarely watched videos. This will kill their user base over time of course, but they are still sitting on a massive treasure trove of content. The one thing in their favor is that storing and transmitting data gets cheaper every year. Maybe that’s what they’re holding out for.
Youtubes video platform’s annual ad revenues amounted to 31.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2023.
Costs are $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.
Take off creators fees and you are still in the black.
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I accidentally watched a YouTube video on a browser without blocking. It started with an ad. I thought I’d just endure it this time. Then another ad. OK, just this time then. Suddenly, another ad in the middle of the video. I gave up. Who’d have the patience to sit through this?
Then there’s Google’s habit of completely ignoring the browser’s language settings so I have to sit though ads I don’t even understand.
Then there’s Google’s habit of completely ignoring the browser’s language settings so I have to sit though ads I don’t even understand
I used to occasionally watch YouTube on my lunch break when I would go into the office. I loved getting ads in Spanish, the office was in Greenville,SC not a large Spanish native population. I have premium on my account but don’t like signing in personal account on work machines.
Ad blocker?
That is actually ideal
I had to tailor my do not recommend and not interested in this subject clicks until I was left with the one advertiser that I’m actually interested in, and that’s basically low voltage communication mux devices…
That feature still works for you? I used to be able to skip ads on the ad by blocking them. Now the ad just finishes playing AND pops up again during the next ad break.
What I think is so unfair is that if I actually sit through one ad I don’t get rewarded and fast forwarded to the video, no. I’ll get a second ad that, if I am lucky, I can skip after 5 additional seconds. Or it’s an unskippable one. That’s not fair. I could have skipped the first one but I gave you that, I gave you that time of my life, now give me something back!
Was YouTube ever profitable?
I actually had trouble finding that out (although I only looked for like, 15 minutes). It’s apparently difficult to determine according to some tech websites. I do have this chart that says since 2017 YouTube ad revenue has been 7-11% of Google’s global revenue but I don’t know if that = profit. Decided to meme anyways because I have ads blocked on PC but still see them on my phone.
“I have ads blocked on PC but still see them on my phone.”
If you’re on Android, ReVanced. And if you’re on iOS, well get fucked or something, idk
I just use Firefox with extensions on mobile honestly
Yeah I completely gave up on the app. Firefox with ublock is a blessing, internet in general is basically unusable on mobile without it.
In iOS you can use Yattee and link to an alternative Frontend. Works well for me.
I use adguard on ios, also a vpn btw, and blocks all ads in browser and blocks ads in yt videos in their app. Used yattee for a bit, but tbh I didn’t like the UX, then it stopped working so I switched
Seconded on this one. I use Yattee with Piped as my frontend, with an account as well, and it’s been pretty solid so far.
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didn’t work for piped.video and yewtu.be. which front end are you using?
You just got me free music, I couldn’t afford it anymore so I have to drop it. Thank you
I’ve been using revanced for a year and something happened in the past couple of weeks where it just refuses to work and keeps sayi go there’s no internet connection :( I have uninstalled and reinstalled/patched things as per instructions and nothing.
On ios there’s brave browser and firefox focus.
Hosting a streaming service is incredibly expensive. Especially at the scale of YouTube. I can imagine YouTube is costing far more for Google than Search itself.
My guess is that YouTube has never really been profitable, which is why they’re pushing users to buy Premium.
Youtube has always claimed that it doesn’t turn a profit but I don’t believe them. My reasoning is that if the server costs are more than the revenue today, then they’re going to be worse tomorrow. A gorillian gigabytes of data are uploaded to that thing every nanosecond. A company can’t get exponentially less profitable every second and still survive. And what else is there to prop it up? Google ad results? No way is Youtube not profitable. They’re saying that to avoid tax.
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Given the tech turnover rate at google (the rate at which they kill products) the answer is most probably yes.
That, and the absolute curbstomping of creativity through their copyright enforcement methods has gutted the core of a once great service. We are simply watching this thing shamble on to find a place to die: like a heart-shot elk bounding off into the bushes
That’s an unexpectedly poetic and melancholic way of portraying some lamentable decisions.
I have a lot of appreciation for writing, and do a lot of it myself (for reports).
like a heart-shot elk bounding off into the bushes
This person has some stories, I bet! 😅
Fuck YT, but bad meme. YouTube has never been profitable
I doubt that. Paper losses are not an indicator of profitability.
It’s not hard to look up the earnings
I did. They reported $31.5 Billion in revenue for 2023.
Im not finding any concrete report on their expenses, but I did find some best guesses as speculated by users. This reddit thread from 7 years ago, is estimating about $2 billion in expenses.
Let’s assume that since this was 7 years ago things have gotten drastically more expensive for YouTube, and throw an additional buffer on top of that since we can’t be 100% sure. Let’s pentuple their proposed operating costs, and, hell, let’s also be VERY generous and say that they keep a work force of 5,000 people who each make… Let’s say $120,000/yr?
That would come out to about $10.6 billion/yr in business expenses. Even if you factor in the payments to top earning YouTubers, those only measure in the 10s of millions… Okay… Let’s be reeeeal generous to YouTube here and assume that this guy from r/theydidthemath 7 years ago was WAY off. Let’s assume he was off by half of YouTubers actual expenses. Following our (absolutely ludicrous) estimates of their expenses going up by a factor of 5 and their 5,000 employees averaging out to $120,000/yr salaries; YouTube would still be reporting under $21 billion a year in expenses. That means they are net profit $10 billion a year even with the insanely expensive operating costs we assigned them here.
$10 billion. Let me put that into perspective. 10 million seconds is about 115 days. So 10 million seconds in the past was just about the new Year. 10 billion seconds however was 317 years ago.
This idea that YouTube isn’t profitable is equal parts ridiculous and hilarious. I just sat here for 15 minutes waxing accountant at you, but none of that was even necessary. YouTube is a business (technically it’s Google but you get the point), if it wasn’t profitable, it wouldn’t exist. Period.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you, but that estimate could have been wrong by a factor of 10 easily. The idea of an “average video” being 50MB, for example, is questionable: at typical bitrates of 1080p videos this would amount to about a minute-long video. I don’t think that’s an average video at all. It also doesn’t account for many things, for example the cost of replicating new videos to the CDN.
I also don’t find the idea of YouTube not being profitable ridiculous or hilarious. YouTube definitely wasn’t profitable before monetisation, and Google used to run it for prestige and data collection purposes at a financial loss. They clearly have been trying to make it more profitable, but whether or not they have crossed the break-even point in the past or are still hoping to cross it in the future is not as clear to me as it is to you.
Ads never bothered me on YouTube.
They’re bothering me enough now that I’m going with an android phone after more than a decade on iPhones just so I can get back to YouTube the way it used to be with a decent ad blocker (better than it used to be actually).
I can’t fucking stand it, and again, it didn’t bother me before.
Want to show someone a short clip? Nah. Gotta skip two fucking ads first while you stand there looking stupid and waiting.
I’m fucking done.
The irony of a Google product pissing you off so you switch from iOS to Android
All to get those sweet sweet modified APKs
From very trusty Telegram sources no less!
On a more serious note, f-droid is where I got NewPipe. Also, you don’t need to own a fucking macbook and pay a fucking developer’s license to be able to develop for Android, which is good.
Telegram? F-droid? Just patch the original apk’s locally. Easy
What this commenter won’t tell you is that the patches are only for specific versions of the app, it’s what makes it a pain, can’t just patch the one that phone updates all the time from the store or the app will be quite bugged.
Who cares? You just don’t update it till something breaks. Which is not often. Small price to pay
So pissed at YouTube (Google) you’re switching to Android (…)? Was this their master plan all along?
I’m going to go with a degoogled version of the OS (LineageOS is my current plan).
The only way I’ll back out is if Apple allows an ad blocker that will cover any app I’m using. I’m currently paying for one that only works on Safari and YouTube videos take a thousand years to load up.
Now if a legit version of Firefox makes its way to iPhone in the US with ublock, I’ll be happy with that.
The reason YouTube makes the ads so unbearably obnoxious is they want people to pay for premium. That’s all they’re doing is annoying people until they pay. I’ve been paying for premium since the beginning, I know it’s awful, but at least I have never seen any ads.
Until they pull a Microsoft and start throwing ads into the paid model as well.
Or like all the other streaming platforms that you paid a subscription for to not see ads, but believe it or not you now have ads.
yeah I havent experienced it myself with YouTube, but I have heard some people say they pay for premium and they’ve started getting ads 😡 YouTube is a huge part of my life and I would be livid if this happened and I don’t know what I would do because I don’t know how I could live without YT I would love to say that I would abandon YouTube if they pulled this shit on me, but I just can’t even imagine my life without YouTube. I don’t pay for any other service, no Hulu, no Disney Plus, no HBO blah blah whatever the heck other people are paying for. when I’m craving watching something, I always go to YouTube. And I have several YouTube channels too, so YT is an integral part of my life 😭
Yeah premium makes 15 dollars per month. Ads for an average viewer makes dozens of cents per month.
I use Firefox with ublock origin and I don’t any ads either.
yeah I admire all of you who refuse to use the YouTube app and you watch YouTube through a browser, but in my opinion watching YouTube through a browser is clunky and tedious.
ReVanced, NewPipe, SmartTube. You’re correct that their mobile browser experience sucks.
You realize people watch youtube on computers not just phones right?
I have ad free YouTube on the YouTube app on Android. Just takes modding the app through a simple guide. Only works on Android though, not iOS IIRC. The tool is Revanced.
Also for Android Smart TVs, check out the TV app called SmartTube Next.
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I remember when YouTube was free, and ad-free. I’ve been posting videos to YouTube since 2005. Then a few years later they put a price on it, “Premium” became $9 a month. Something something Pepperidge Farm remembers
And I was grandfathered in at that price even after they raised their prices for everyone else, but then for some reason I got upset and I canceled YouTube but then I couldn’t live without it so I subscribed again and they put me back in at the regular price with all the new people 😡
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No worries they bumped up everyone that had a grandfathered in price after a year or two
aah 😭 sad for everyone
Per year?
Per month.
That’s not good at all.
Yeah, it’s really expensive.
Tbf the only reason I know that YouTube has paid subscriptions is because of threads like this one, so it doesn’t seem like they’re really pushing their paid service.
Maybe they’re only targeting people who, for some reason, don’t block ads, and that’s why I’m unaware, but they should offer a little more than the things you can get for free already (no ads, downloading) if they want to draw in the adblocker crowd too.
Now people will start to google what’s up with all those ads and end up installing uBlock.
They definitely push it. The mobile app has popups advertising it etc.
I must be out of touch.
I didn’t think I’d need an app to visit YouTube.
Yeah, at least i got both youtube and music, so far it’s worth my money. I’d love to get nebula + a music app but it cost way more.
Objectively wrong.
YouTube could not be profitable showing one quick ad per video, especially if it’s longer content.
Im of the firm belief that youtube should make creators pay for storage of their videos.
Free teir for short videos, no monetization, YT places ads. Paid teir for longer form videos and monetization. This would ensure that long form videos should ideally be profitable for creators, or companies uploading their training videos etc pay a nominal fee for their storage.
This is the fairest way to keep youtube in the green.
Yeah it’s very clear to me the top creators make far too much money and I agree that business model bears fruit.
However, the cost of YouTube isn’t the storage, it’s serving views of the videos. That payment scheme you’ve suggested doesn’t scale well with number of views of single videos, that’s why they chose to increase income per view and not per video.
this process will cause most smaller creators to just leave the platform, it’s already super difficult to to get established, this would essentially force them to operate at a loss until they can get a foothold which concidering a lot of the time it can take months to years to get established? I can’t see that system being sustainable either.
I know this is a controversial opinion, but I dont think youtube should be a place where small creators should expect to make money from direct monetization. That model is what brought youtube to the state its in. Selling patron, merch, or driving traffic to their own website for services, yes. Direct monetization of ads on youtube, no.
My father in law uses the built in YouTube app on the TV. There were 3 ads that played. The first one was 15 minutes. The second one was also around 15 minutes. The third one was an hour. One fucking hour for a 5 minutes video.
It always makes me mad when somebody put a playlist on YouTube and out of nowhere a bad song starts playing because it’s an ad.
That’s exactly what he was listening to. I think it was a beetles playlist and out of nowhere an ad. I skipped and the next was another 15. Skip again and it’s an hour.
Yes fucking YouTube. When I skip a video, my intent is to see a longer ad.
Is there a blocker I can use on the android YouTube app? I put videos when I’m doing dishes, and in the last year the ads have gotten so long that if you don’t skip em or can’t (cause you’re hands are wet) they go on for 10 minutes or more. The worst are the ads that end, but don’t leave your screen until you physically press skip.
YouTube revanced gives me ad blocking with sponsor block included
NewPipe
Brave or Vanced or Firefox with uBlock origin
The only reason Brave needs crypto at all is so the CEO can keep donating money against gay marriage without getting caught.
I don’t think the Brave CEO cares about getting caught
He cared when he was ousted from Mozilla for it.
Vanced is dead. Use revanced or revancify(requires terminal).
If you have a rooted phone and Magisk there is a module that essentially turns the stock YouTube app into the Premium version without adds and background play enabled.
Wow really? What’s it called?
Small correction it’s technically an LSposed/Exposed module, but everything I said previously still applies.
Check out “ReVanced” YouTube.
It takes set up and maintenance but it is well worth the effort as you get all YouTube premium features, latest YouTube app updates, and other enhancements.
Direct link to GitHub- https://github.com/ReVanced
EDIT:
Removed the incorrect “.net” Link as mentioned below.
This is not their official website. Never download revanced from anywhere other than their GitHub repository or https://revanced.app
Yea dude so many people go to that .net site i don’t know whether it’s legit. But i search GitHub and open the link provided in the side bar
Thank you! I quickly (and carelessly) searched and pasted the link. Thank you for the correction.
