Lee Peterson:
The first one is via a VPN. If you already have one or if not you can sign up easily with someone like Nord (the one I use, don’t use a free service!) and simply set your country to Albania. In Albania, Google can’t run ads so you don’t get them. It’s how I use YouTube on the Apple TV.
This is a great tip that I had never heard before. And after testing this with a handful of videos, it appears to do the trick.
➝ Source: ljpuk.net
From the announcement:
Starting today, we’re removing all ads.
We don’t need ads to make money as a platform and we are confident in the development of our own new monetisation programs that will help creators earn a living and at the same time keep Odysee alive.
Ultimately, sacrificing the overall user experience to make a few bucks isn’t worth it to us and nor is it even sustainable for a platform that wishes to make something truly open and creatively free.
It’s not clear to me how they plan to earn enough revenue to keep the service going, but I hope they manage to do so because this sounds dope.
➝ Source: odysee.com
David Heinemeier Hansson:
This isn’t just about one awful ad. I mean, yes, the ad truly is awful. It symbolizes everything everyone has ever hated about digitization. It celebrates a lossy, creative compression for the most flimsy reason: An iPad shedding an irrelevant millimeter or two. It’s destruction of beloved musical instruments is the perfect metaphor for how utterly tone-deaf technologists are capable of being. But the real story is just how little saved up goodwill Apple had in the bank to compensate for the outrage.
That’s because Apple has lost its presumption of good faith over the last five years with an ever-larger group of people, and now we’ve reached a tipping point. A year ago, I’m sure this awful ad would have gotten push back, but I’m also sure we’d heard more “it’s not that big of a deal” and “what Apple really meant to say was…” from the stalwart Apple apologists the company has been able to count on for decades. But it’s awfully quiet on the fan-boy front.
I would say the downfall started more than five years ago. I would look at the 2015 introduction of the butterfly keyboard as the beginning of this era. An era where they would continue to sell these awful keyboards for around five years, failing to resolve the issue through at least two iterations of the product before finally moving back to scissor switches.
There are still bright spots, which is why I continue to buy Apple products. But I’ve never been closer to switching than I am today.
➝ Source: world.hey.com
Manuel Moreale:
Am I scamming YouTube because I block their awful ads? Would I be scamming YouTube if I muted the video and looked at something else while ads were playing? What’s the scam here? Who is getting scammed?
If using an ad blocker is scamming publishers that rely on advertising revenue, then I expect everyone making this argument to have the pop-up blocker feature disabled in their web browser.
➝ Source: manuelmoreale.com
Advertising-based business models don’t work in digital spaces. There are too many incentives to try and abuse the system, which will inevitably break the supply and demand curve.
Some of this can be mitigated with closed systems where there can be a bit more trust between everyone involved. Direct advertiser and publisher relationships, for example, with no ad platform intermediary — but that has its own set of ethical problems.
But the key takeaway is, if you run a business that gets the majority of its revenue from ads, you should have already been thinking of ways to change that.
➝ Source: bloomberg.com
Cindy Harper, writing for Reclaim the Net:
It was clear even when it was first announced in a paper in 2018 that Google’s Manifest V3, a new extension API for Chrome, would present a big problem for developers of extensions designed to block ads, but also trackers and certain types of malware – and for users who want improved privacy and control over their browsing experience.
Manifest V3 was first incorporated into Chrome 88 and released in January 2021. Since early 2022, new extensions using Manifest V2 are no longer accepted in the Chrome Web Store, and the last part of the phasing out of this API, which will break all extensions based on it, is expected to take place by January 2023.
If you use Chrome and want to continue using ad blockers, you should consider switching to another browser. I currently use Brave and although it’s based on Chromium, they already have plans to continue supporting Manifest V2 after Google sunsets it in Chrome.
➝ Source: reclaimthenet.org
Nicolas Vega, writing for the New York Post:
That’s when Google approached Facebook about abandoning header bidding. In exchange, Google allegedly lowered Facebook’s transaction fees to between 5 and 10 percent, well below the 20 percent it charged others.
Facebook was also able to send its bids directly to Google’s ads server, rather than through an exchange, according to the report.
The search giant also kept Facebook abreast of which ad opportunities were the result of bot activity, helping the social network avoid wasting its money on useless impressions. Google denied the same information to other auction participants, the report said.
This is a good example of why splitting up a company like Facebook wouldn’t accomplish anything. We need to stop using their services and make them irrelevant.
➝ Source: nypost.com
Jack Dorsey:
We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought.
The pessimistic take is that Twitter is taking the easy way out. They’re not leaving much money on the table by no longer accepting political ads and it gives them an opportunity to sidestep the whole conversation — dodging any potential heat from ads in the upcoming elections.
But this isn’t something Twitter needed to do. And their reasoning is sound. Good ideas tend to rise to the top and removing the influence of money might help ensure that no one has an unfair advantage in the overall political conversation.
➝ Source: mobile.twitter.com
