what i’m reading from these comments: we will do anything, including leaving youtube, but for sure we will not be either watching ads or paying for content.
I can appreciate your point, but there's a broad history of paid services introducing ads, ads getting longer and more abrasive, content people having paid for being disappeared at the whim of the network, algorithms dictating how people are introduced to content or pushed to keep using an app, etc. I don't have much trust that many services do the right thing for subscribers.
A few services I pay for (Spotify, Xero, etc) seem to lock a user in and then push up pricing while adding functionality I have no need for.
Not to mention the split of content across an increasing number of networks. Having to juggle 5-8 paid streaming services, to watch a few 90s films that feel like they should be on all of them, seems rough to me.
I don't see how any of that is an excuse not to pay for youtube. If there is no ad-free version and no alternative products then I get blocking ads, I do too. But when I'm given an option to pay to remove ads, I generally pay.
For websites that give me a popup saying disable adblock or no content, I immediately hit the back button and let them rot in no-view hell.
I'm kind of torn. On one hand, I agree that if you use a service, paying for it so it can continue to be enjoyed by all makes sense. On the other, I'm not sure there's a tech company fighting against my interests as a regular person harder than Google is, and I don't really want to give them money out of principle. Maybe there's some hyperbole in that last sentence but hopefully my point is made at least.
Depending on your age you've either been paying for the service that is youtube with your data and content for your entire life or for at least as long as Youtube has existed. Please don't waste any time feeling bad about Google not getting what they're owed. Trust me, at this point they owe you.
The story is a bit different when it comes to the creators themselves who would get money from those ads. They offer their videos for free, and you have no obligation to support them monetarily, but if there is a youtuber whose content you really want to support there is probably some means already to pay them directly without giving anything to Google.
There's zero reason to think that people who are unwilling to sit through ads are also unwilling to pay for content. Many people pay content creators directly. They send donations. They buy merch. They even pay for useless shit like emojis just to show their support publicly.
People simply want to choose which creators they support, when, and how, which is entirely their right
Perhaps Google should reassess its business strategy and start monetizing creators, not users. It is literally not our responsibility to develop sound business strategy for billion dollar corpos. They can hire McKinsey for that.
Should that be their right? If somebody is watching a ton of Vincent's videos, but chooses to send donations to Clara that he watches much less, is that fair?
Vincent and Clara's videos are offered for free and there is zero obligation for anyone to pay either of them anything whether it be money, time, attention, or engagement.
If someone who spends less of their time watching Clara's videos chooses to support Clara because they value her content more than Vincent's, or because they feel like Clara needs the money more than Vincent does, or for any other reason that's entirely up to them.
Similarly, it doesn't matter how many of my comments here on HN you read, you don't owe me upvotes, or responses, or donations although I might certainly appreciate them
And, likewise, Youtube is free to send the bytes to only the people they want. If they don't want to serve video data to people who use adblocks, it's their right.
You are then free to try to work around it, the same way Youtube is trying to work around your adblocker.
I'd agree with that, although that doesn't make both activities equivalent either.
Google is being increasingly obnoxious and user-hostile in an effort to get people to pay Google money to stop harassing them and wasting their time by delaying and interrupting the free content they requested with repeated attempts at manipulation, while the people who block ads are just trying to avoid Google's unwanted (and at times harmful) behavior.
Google's bandwidth and storage for the valuable content the public produces and provides to Google for free are more than paid for by the personal data they take from us and use against us at every opportunity. Google has the trillions to prove it. Some subset of youtube viewers depriving them of just one opportunity to exploit our personal information isn't going to hurt them one bit.
Right, equating views or view time with the value something brings is another thing wrong with ad-based funding. There's a lot of media that I am happy to watch as long as it is free but would also be happy to replace with other activities if it was not. Meanwhile there are other creators that I am freely choosing to pay just to see them keep creating.
I think the current YT Premium model is more fair, creators get paid more the more you watch them. I'm glad it works like this instead of pandering to donations. Anywhere I've looked, I've seen the donations model been a complete failure. Usually I am the only person or one of less than 10 that donates to an OSS project with thousands and thousands of users. People just don't donate to things that are important and useful to them. Likewise with YouTube, nobody will donate to well-made instructional videos or original news reporting, but they will donate to e-girls or gamers because they want to feel associated with those people. So I'm glad that creators are not forced to depend on donations.
> I think the current YT Premium model is more fair
I don't think it is entirely fair to invent problems for people and then demand payment from them to stop getting in their way. That said, I don't object to Google providing people with the option of giving their money to Google either, I just don't think they need the strong arm tactics.
> Likewise with YouTube, nobody will donate to well-made instructional videos or original news reporting
There are countless examples to prove you wrong. Many people on youtube doing original news reporting and providing instructional videos get donations and many earn their living entirely from money they made on youtube (either from those people who choose to donate their money directly, or those who pay Google for Premium, or those who choose to allow themselves to be subjected to ads).
After running the platform at a loss over over a decade until their competitors evaporated. And then refusing to sell the solution to the invented problems without bundling it with an unrelated service in another market they want a foothold in...you know, just anticompetitive behavior.
> There are countless examples to prove you wrong.
I think there are many more examples proving me right. In my estimate, about 1 in 750 to 1 in 1000 subscribers will donate to a video creator. That's "nobody". If you look at your favourite channels and compare numbers of subscribers with numbers of Patreon sponsors, I think you will see similar numbers.
It's not only YouTube, it's almost everything on the internet. Then people here complain about diminishing quality of the stuff online... Well, people who make that stuff need to eat. If they can't support themselves with producing quality content, they will do something else and that content will not be made. It will not exist. At least YouTube is a way that enables a lot of high quality content to exist. I know hackers think that these creators should go to hell if they don't accept to create their stuff for free, but I side with the creator in this one.
For me, I look forward to the day when YouTube is completely behind a paywall, so that penny pinchers are left to wallow in the filth to save their precious dollars.
This is also why unhealthy slop food is sold everywhere. Most people will happily destroy their own health and keep buying the cheapest crap so they can pinch their precious penny, instead of spending a little more on quality.
But what I've always wondered is what people want to do with that penny that they've pinched for so long?
If I paid for YouTube Premium then I voluntarily provide even more tracking data to Google. If they offered an ad free tier where you weren't tracked then I would pay for it.
Since Google don't respect people's right to privacy or to watch content ad free I don't pay them and instead use ad blockers locally and pay for a proxy server with ad blocking DNS.
If you don’t want to be tracked, you have to stop using YouTube. Your ad blocker does nothing to prevent tracking - Google can see what you’re doing because it’s their servers. It only helps on other third-party sites.
The problem is, how these things sometimes go is: you are fed up of ads so you start paying them. Then a year or two later you get ads as a paying user too. There’s a long history of paid products doing this. Look at Windows, Smart TVs, etc…
In my case I was fed up with ads and subscribed to the YouTube Premium Lite offering 2 years ago, in September I got an email with:
> Thank you for being one of our first Premium Lite members.
> We’re writing to let you know that after October 25, 2023, we will no longer offer your version of Premium Lite.
And so I refused to be nudged into a more expensive subscription, YT didn't give me any more information why that subscription wasn't being offered so fuck them, I will use ad blockers for as long as they work.
I've been a paying YouTube user since it was called YouTube Red (remember that? lol) in 2014 and they haven't shown any sign of introducing ads. So that's almost a decade, versus your "year or two".
I assume they mean ads for other shows on the same platform(at least Netflix and Prime Video do this), which in my experience not everyone sees as "ads" in that sense(I still do myself).
* Some of these platforms have cheaper tiers that are ad-supported.
* All of these platforms favor algorithmic recommendations (which are ads) over your personal content queue.
* A lot of content on Prime forces you to watch an ad of new Prime content before your show starts.
* Some of these platforms have auto-playing previews that distract you while you are navigating. Sometimes you can disable them, sometimes you can't. Sometimes the setting resets itself. These are ads.
I'd add that if one has (permanent) control of the recommendation and auto playing then they're less like ads and more tools. Especially if they are opt in.
Yes, if you pick the ad supported discount you see ads. Choosing to get a discount is not the same as the original claim that you’d still get ads even if you paid.
YouTube as well, from the end-user perspective. I understand that there is a distinction between sponsor segments and preroll/midroll ads, but at the end of the day it’s all ads and paying for YouTube doesn’t get rid of all the ads.
That’s due to ad blocking: it doesn’t make creators not want to make rent, it just means more ads in the content and things like sponsor products being woven into the content. Worse for everyone but people are going to chase money if their income declines.
> but for sure we will not be either watching ads or paying for content.
The quality and quantity of ads is the problem. Getting blasted with Uber Eats ads all the time (I had a two week streak on my tablet for this crap) without any ability to tell Youtube that, no fuck no I will never eat at Uber Eats and their jingle is annoying the fuck out of me, absolutely sucks. And no I don't want to be interrupted every five minutes with an ad break that completely breaks the flow of the video, and especially not right after coming out of a 2 minute "sponsor" block shilling NordVPN, Athletic fucking Greens, Aura or AirUp.
In contrast, regular TV ads are at least placed in joint blocks that leave you enough time to go to a loo and then have 20-30 minutes of uninterrupted video. Oh, and there also won't be low-quality ads for Evony or whatever other free-to-play whale hunter games on TV either.
i pay for premium. But funny thing, this will not disable the tracking, so I still use the ublock. I've also had problems when visiting my parents in another country and background play was blocked bc yt premium was not available there, even if i was a paying customer. At that time I was using yt in firefox mobile with background play. I also still get sponsored ads and need to use the sponsorblock extension, that does not work for yt mobile app. In other words paying premium solves a small subset of problems and gives a worse experience compared to ppl that use ublock+sponsorblock in the browser
It doesn’t prevent Google from tracking you in any way. The most you could say is that if YouTube is loading third-party ad network it’ll prevent those services from tracking you, but that’s not especially useful when Google can resell your data to the same company.
Watching ads is like going to the bathroom without washing your hands after. It's simply bad hygiene, and future generations will hopefully look back with disgust at how putrid our current society is for allowing our minds to be polluted for thousandths of a penny.
in due time you'll be paying both for content and watch ads, as is the norm now on more and more platforms.
It's an absolute category error to think you can haggle with for profit corporations worth trillions about when they've extracted enough value from you.
You ever hear the one about the missionary who tried to negotiate with the tiger? He told the tiger he could eat most of him, but he had to stop when he got to his head