You may think you’re looking at Youtube, but Youtube is also looking at you. This should not come as a surprise. They say that if you can’t see what is being sold on a website, the thing being sold is you.
Youtube is selling your eyeballs, so of course they’re interested in what you get up to. They know when and where you looked, for how long, whether you finished an item, whether you watched an ad and if as a result you clicked on it. Behind all this surveillance is the chink of money being counted.
On the whole most of us are quite happy to let this go on in the background. We watch what we want to watch and try not to be manipulated into watching what we don’t want to watch … “You’ll never guess what happened next” and other clickbait avoided.
An important aide to an enjoyable Youtube session is an ad blocker. A good ad blocker will seamlessly remove those ads which interrupt longer pieces and insist on you watching for at least five seconds.
I understand this is a matter of much irritation to Youtube. A constant arms race continues between Youtube boffins trying to produce a blocker-proof ad, and the ad blocker people trying to keep ahead of them.
However using an ad blocker in this way does bring us to an ethical dilemma. People producing Youtube vids often depend on them for an income, in some cases most or all of their income. Part of that income comes from measured traffic on the ads inserted in their material by Youtube.
The possibility that I am blocking some small part of this by avoiding ads is not a problem if the content provider is someone like DAZN, a sportscasting company which throws billions of dollars around in public acquisitions. They do not need my pittance. But thank you for the football coverage.
Still, a lot of Youtube content still emerges from a cottage industry. Minority pursuit videos are often done by two people taking turns filming each other. Obscure hobbies attract dedicated individuals. Sometimes the possibility of being paid by Youtube for what they were doing for nothing comes as a pleasant surprise.
When you are looking at a site like this it is easy to feel guilty. Yes, I am enjoying the video without irritating interruptions, but the person producing it, who has become a famliar and admired figure, is missing out on the money to be earned by seducing my eyeballs.
Discussing this with computer-using friends I find I am not the only one bothered by this. A popular solution is to leave a “like”, whether you liked that particular offering or not. Subscribing is also a boost for a site.
Youtube also measures “engagement”, by which it means the response in messages to the site. So a costless word or two like “Bravo” or “Nice video” will help. This is not just a matter of pleasing Youtube. As a site operator in a small way I can assure you that all responses (other then the rabidly hostile ones) produce a grateful glow.
If you really want to be generous you can sign up for Patreon, which will funnel a donation on your behalf, or “Buy me a coffee” which does the same thing on a more small and casual scale. This may get you a mention and a thanks on your favourite site.
One of my more thoughtful friends has noticed that content providers these days often urge, or even beg, visitors to stay for the end of the video. Apparently Youtube pays more for this. So whenever he opens a video on a site he approves of he keeps it running to the end. If he doesn’t actually want to watch it to the end he opens a new window and leaves the old one running underneath it.
No doubt Youtube would regard this as a dishonest trick. But then Youtube is a bit of a dishonest trick itself. We all know the endless scroll is addictive.
tim's experiment 