If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made? Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads?
Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay. They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
First they destroyed the old internet by “forgetting” sites from search and created “platforms”.
Then they abused adnetworks to take the biggest share and control over what users can do or will likely do with their user agents.
Then they degraded every site and product searchability into ads-favored keyword matching.
Then, when people started using their well-setup cardboard box traps to their taste, they demanded to either pay for that or to forcefully watch ads.
I’m not gonna play a reasonable guy here, because it’s not a logical issue. I never wanted or expected to live in an internet like that. Google can go cry in a corner and look miserable.
And everyone should install ublock origin. Think of it as Python 3 or ESM or Democracy. It’s much better, you all just have to figure out new life with it.
I pay for YouTube to support the platform and creators. If you don't pay for a service, you aren't the customer you are the product. Google may need to shut down the free viewership of most YouTube videos unless the creator pays for them to be hosted or the viewers sign up for a subscription. The ad model is clearly failing.
You give money and your personal information to an advertising company. The advertising company then does god knows what with your personal information and gives some of that money to some of the 'creators' that you watch, in a way that isn't transparent to you. Who is getting how much money? Do the 'creators' you value get most of that money, or does it go to some clickbait crap you click on in a moment of weakness? You don't know.
What you should do: starve the advertising company (you shouldn't be donating money to support "the platform" which is a trillion dollar for-profit corporation!) and donate directly to the people who ask for it and deserve it.
Yeah, movie theaters figured that out 30 years or so ago when they realized besides trailers (which okay, are ads of a sort), they could subject viewers who paid for a ticket to 20 minutes of ads for things like M&Ms and Coke before even the trailers begin. It's gotten to the point that you might as well show up 30 minutes after a movie is scheduled to begin as the movie itself won't have started yet.
True, but that has a long history. It used to be even more blatant in fact, with characters commenting on how smooth the taste of Lucky Strike cigarettes were in the 1950s.
I both pay for YouTube Premium (let's call it what it is: a hope that content creators get paid) and also use uBlock Origin religiously. Nothing's stopping people from doing both.
But Youtube DOESN'T support creators unless you are one of the mega-influencers targeting 12 year olds with daily "Wowie zowie" uploads. Ask every medium sized channel how helpful youtube is. Ask any channel with a million subscribers if the changes youtube makes improves their lives or business. Multiple of these groups of channels have banded together to make youtube alternatives explicitly to escape the damn algorithm treadmill.
Youtube doesn't support creators, it milks them dry for content.
> I pay for YouTube to support the platform and creators.
Paying Google to support creators pushes them to play to The Algorithm(tm) - which means they will adapt the presentation of their content to maximise profitability. And thereby stop making the content you're enjoying now.
As such, I think paying Google to support creators is one of the worst ways to support them. Buy their merch, support them directly on Patreon (or similar), or support a site where they ostensibly have more control (eg, Nebula). Don't coax them into a style of creating dictated by Google's algorithms.
Youtube is a great website with Ublock (or premium, I assume). It's borderline unusable without, which is why people are so reluctant to shell out for premium - the ads feel less like a reasonable attempt to monetize, and more like an attempt to push people to premium.
> you all just have to figure out new life with it.
then they'll put the whole site behind a paywall, which could have mixed results. Everyone is focusing on paying the creators, but advertisers are also paying for moderation. voat showed us what an unmoderated reddit is like, and bitchute shows us what unmoderated youtube is like: trying to find DIY birdfeeder videos against the tide of holocaust denial and Podcast #598 of "How the Lizard Illuminati are vaxxing us with every toxic metal on the periodic table but Big Pharma Deep State maintains the elaborate coverup"
> If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made?
I'd argue that _content_ is a fairly gross word that we've all come to use because we're in the industry -- "I need some _content_ around my ads so that we get some impressions". There are plenty of other words that are less marketing associated and more clearly connotative with creatively produced material - article, report, essay, story, paper, proposal, manifesto, gallery, video, photographs, exhibit, website, blog post - even material. _Content_ is efficiently produced filler. As such, yes, in the extreme less _content_ gets made, and in the absence of _content_ there is organically more of the latter category.
You can still make money on the internet without ads. Ads have in recent history been an easier, higher margin route. If the entire online ad industry fumbles, will we be substantially worse off? I don't think so: the number and size of websites would for sure shrink, but those left would have a much higher signal to noise.
Video as a format seems drastically overused to me. When I go to the internet to find some information, I either get ai generated essays of great length and no substance, or a link to YouTube. I'm not wasting my time watching a video even if it is sped up, just to learn something that could have been cleanly represented as a short document. If more people start using documents instead of videos where they stare at you and speak, I am in favor of this series of events.
Agreed, nothing more annoying than a video where a 10 line web page would suffice. And google - coincidentally, of course - ranks that video much higher than the 10 line webpage.
> You can still make money on the internet without ads.
Now that in and of itself is a fascinating statement that I kind of agree with? What kind of things are you thinking? The only thing I can really think of is trying to get people to pay for physical objects. Or, perhaps, providing a service that can't be copied (i.e. Video tutoring)
Ads? There are ad-blockers. Subscriptions? People will just use archive so that they don't have to pay you. Donations like Pateron? Maybe viable? I don't know exactly how the business models there work.
No, but I also don't expect Google to change, I want their business model to become untenable so better alternatives can get a larger market share. If content creators don't think they get anything out of enabling advertising on YouTube, then they'll stop or move to other platforms which are not based on providing algorithmically generated feeds with interspersed ads based on user profiles. I hate advertising; I think it results in perverse incentives which promotes short-form generic low-effort entertainment. I therefore want to actively steal compute resources from companies whose business model is based on online advertising without giving them ad impressions and pay content creators that I like via other means such as Patreon.
I also just think 99% of advertising is bad taste which makes me mentally exhausted and puts me in a bad mood, so I just want it out of my sight.
Yes, I could pay for YouTube Premium, but that would go against my own interests since I would be financially supporting a platform with perverse incentives for content creators.
> If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made?
I can't speak for anybody else but my content will still get made.
> Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads?
Maybe, maybe not, whose to say what Google will do. Maybe they will value the influence or the goodwill more than the lack of income. Maybe some of the content will be free and other bits will be walled off (effectively this is already the case with youtube music). Maybe there will be less MFY content and that's perfectly ok with me, 99.99% of it is crap anyway. Youtuber isn't a profession I recognize.
> Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay.
And that's ok.
> They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
Unless you're a VERY large and successful YT channel, you aren't making bank on YT itself, it's merch and sponsorships, Patreon and so on that make the money. Monetized Twitch-like feeds are another winner, and again not dependent on YT monetization.
That does not answer the question. There is floatplane and Nebula, but beyond those where will be the content be hosted and will those revenue stream actually cover those hosting/development costs and running the site?
And on other hand if users are paying you something, would they not expect not to have to watch through mediocre sponsorships?
The point is that many successful YouTubers wouldn't be broke if they stopped making ad revenue from YouTube, because they make most of their money elsewhere anyways.
YouTube is incredibly expensive to run which explains why there's such little competition.
Think about it, anyone can host gigs of videos perpetually indexed for free. What percentage of videos have fewer than 100 views?
Google has killed off profitable projects. If you think they'll dump tens of billions every year hosting videos that no one watches, you're kidding yourself.
And what we noticed with paying is that people are very unwilling to pay even a small amount for a service. For instance FB makes around over $50 per user in North America. What percentage of users do you think would pay $50 a year to use Facebook?
I think you missed the point. Google bought youtube because for them bandwidth and storage are cheap (it's CPU that is expensive).
Back in the 90's when bandwidth was expensive we managed to run a free video site without advertising. Since then bandwidth has become orders of magnitude cheaper, and G has economies of scale that no other operator can get close to, they quite literally own the fiber, the endpoints and are present in just about every meet-me room all over the world. Storage costs have dropped even further. So what you think costs Google a couple of bucks to provide per user probably costs them fractions of a cent. And if they dropped the garbage their costs would be even lower.
Considerably less than that. So much so that our 1 Gbps uplink was enough for a few thousand streams. But so much more expensive and with such lousy compression ratio that you could to much better today for less. Apples to apples.
Youtube is hilarious, on the one hand they keep forcing autoplayed content on you and then they match that with a popup that inquires if you are still watching the video.
> YouTube is incredibly expensive to run which explains why there's such little competition.
So? That's their problem.
> Google has killed off profitable projects. If you think they'll dump tens of billions every year hosting videos that no one watches, you're kidding yourself.
Can't wait for YouTube to die. Hopefully the replacement will be less centralized and not beholden to a single american company.
> And what we noticed with paying is that people are very unwilling to pay even a small amount for a service.
Most "services" are not worth the effort needed to pay them, the amount doesn't even come into it. This is also a self-created issue. Google et al have trained people to not pay by dumping money into these "free" services to kill the competition. Now they are upset that people don't want to pay them? I can't find a violin tiny enough to express my compassion for them.
> For instance FB makes around over $50 per user in North America. What percentage of users do you think would pay $50 a year to use Facebook?
So? They make $0 off of me. I don't care how much they can or cannot make with ads, that doesn't make ads acceptable.
If we win the war against Ads lots of content won’t get made. But, the content that thrives in an Ad driven world is mostly toxic rage bait. I would argue that losing this content and instead only being left with content that people will actually pay for is a big net win for humanity.
Likely we will never see a world without Ads but I can dream.
There’s no winning a war against ads. There are too many people who can’t or won’t pay for services directly, and there are too many people looking to promote products or viewpoints who’ll keep offering money to anyone with an audience.
What I’d like would be focusing on the downsides: ad networks should have legal restrictions on how they collect and share data, liability for any malware they distribute, and every ad should include the legal identity of the person who paid for them (which the network is required to certify). When sites see ads as free money, they plaster them everywhere. When they have to think about the negative externalities, that becomes a more nuanced decision than “would we like more money?”
We have legal restrictions now.
Companies just figured out that they would show a form with buttons: "Accept All", "Accept essential". And said tracking cookies are now "essential". I don't believe "Accept essential" would not share your data - so, just using as privacy oriented browser as possible is the only solution.
Youtube is full of clickbait, get rich quick and unhealthy influencers (how to work 80 hours a week and buy my book btw). Same with fb/ig.
That’s kind of what I’m saying: we don’t keep our houses at semiconductor fab-levels of clean because it’s not worth the extra effort. I think the same is true of ads for most people: minimize the security risk, set some privacy rules, and don’t make them too obtrusive, and most people are fine with it.
I like how you are thinking. I do wonder if I'd get to see things like, say, Practical Engineering in an ad-free world. He seems to be passionate about it, so maybe?
It's utterly bizarre to me that this people still get this idea that everything would just stop?
Peertube et al exist. Patreon exists. Vimeo, Twitch, Tiktok. On one hand I'm absolutely aware that the TYPE of video content we have would change.
On the other, I'm not at all convinced that the destruction of YouTubes particular monetizing model would be a bad thing. I don't think much of value at all would be lost if people couldn't make money off Youtube the way they do now.
I personally prefer free content made by volunteers and would like the whole web to be ad free. It would be fine for me if Youtube stopped operations and if all "income-oriented" content producers went away. I feel the same about websites. The Internet was fine before it became commercialized. I'm both creating and consuming free content (why not?) but I'm not willing to waste my time on watching ads or anything like that. For other things, I'm willing to pay.
Other people's mileage may differ, of course. It's just a personal preference.
The people that create the content you consume only have so many hours in the day, just like you. They need to pay the rent, buy groceries, get their kids braces, just like the test of us. It seems immoral and unrealistic to expect that for free. Consume it and support them or don't consume it and don't support them but the attitude that you're entitled to it is a little slimy.
No, making every human exchange a financial transaction is gross. Making that transaction indirect via psychological manipulation using intermediaries is even worse.
Discover better ways to support people who do useful work. Or rather, re-discover them since they are older than ads.
This is nuts. So movies shouldn’t charge either right? Or TV shows. Where is the line between something that you think should be free and what someone needs to be compensated for in order to make it? That line is determined by the creators. The people making money on YouTube do it as a full time gig why shouldn’t they get paid? Clearly if they weren’t they would be forced to do something else instead of video making.
YouTube is an amazing platform. It has allowed people to make videos about things they want and allowed people interested in that content to find it. Allowing people to pay (in various ways) for what they want means that other people can step up and provide that service instead of doing something else.
A good heuristic for when financial transactions are “gross” is if you are dealing with strangers or not. If you call your spouse from work and ask them to make and bring you a sandwich for lunch we would be horrified if they said it’ll cost you $20. On the other hand, no one should feel offended if you get charged when you call up a stranger to do the same thing.
There are different incentives at work in different spheres of life. Society depends on strangers doing things for other strangers. Google the Fatal Conceit to get the full picture. Bottom line is that there is nothing “gross” either for paying for something you want from a stranger or of them being paid for something they did for you.
Huh? Why would it be immoral? I'm producing free content myself, e.g. my open source repositories have permissive licenses like MIT, I run a blog, have put some of my music online, etc. Seriously, chances are almost 100% percent that you are massively benefiting right now from completely free of charge software that some guys developed for free in their spare time (perhaps even decades ago) - how immoral of you!
I'm not the parent and would not say it's immoral but being able to produce content for free is a form of privilege. Not everyone has that luxury. Let's face it we live in a time where engineers make an absurd amount of money for the services they provide.
What are these mental gymnastics? You're practically saying nobody is allowed to make money for their content because you don't. Where is the logic in this?
You misunderstood me entirely. People can sell their content for whatever price they like. For example, I sell my science fiction and fantasy novels although I could give them away for free. I also used to sell shareware in the past and plan to sell commercial, proprietary software in the future.
People can freely decide whether they want to sell the content they've created or give it away for free. If it's the former, they should sell it, and if it's the latter, they should give it away for free. They just cannot and ought not rely on business models that restrict how people display information on their devices that has been sent to them voluntarily. As I said in the beginning, I have no quirks with Youtube going subscription-only.
I pay for Nebula, I pay for Patreon. I cannot find it in me to give Alphabet a red cent of my money. Alphabet's primary goal is to turn the internet into cable and I honestly have no stomach for it.
Furthermore, I have precious few moments on this earth, I have no desire to have to spend them watching propaganda from corps (and sometimes just unfiltered political propaganda).
But most of all, ads are a privacy and security risk like no other. They follow you across the internet for ages, sell your data to the highest bidder (sometimes that bidder is the feds) and are the foremost distribution network for malware.
Sorry, I rather YouTube go away than have to agree to the above.
This reminds me of a business colleague of mine who truly does not understand why anyone would write software and then release it for free. There are many people willing to do that, and many people willing to create content on YouTube for free. We aren’t all driven by the almighty dollar.
Because those companies are just taking the piss. They are like an abusive boyfriend that wants to know what you're up to all the time. They pretend you can pay them off so they won't have to stalk you, but the prices they ask are greatly exaggerated and exist solely to try and fool regulators.
But if you're happy to pay whatever is asked of you, that'll be a 100 dollars thanks
To know whether that is unreasonable or not you'd have to compare it to the cost of providing you that service, taking into account that youtube is just a delivery mechanism and so is infrastructure, not content.
And what is or is not affordable is really dependent on where you live and that kind of money is a very large amount in some places. And especially in those places access to youtube for educational purposes can be quite important.
With all respect, do you have a source for that? I thought Alphabet was losing money hand over fist on YT before they started being so aggressive with the ads.
Let's for the moment assume that you are right, then they shouldn't have bought it in ... 2006, all of 17 years ago. And if they are short of money why are they pushing more and more junk on people? Let's start with switching off autoplay by default, limiting videos to 640x480, and offering creators to pay for the hosting so that their video can be shipped, just like I pay for the hosting of my web servers.
I agree, and I think its also important to fund the creators making the content we consume. Artists need patrons and YouTube has made that possible and practical on a scale humanity has never seen. That's a valuable thing, and if google wants to get paid for it, I don't begrudge that.
Ads are phycological warfare and must be eradicated with prejudice but asking the audience to chip in a couple bucks a month seems reasonable to me.
I watch like 5 videos a month. No way they're making more than $1, maybe $2, off of advertising to me. Why would I pay them 10x that? Don't be ridiculous.
> Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay.
I don’t think it’ll ever be possible to get everyone to pay, but if it’s easy to pay and priced low enough, paying becomes the easiest option for a lot of people. Why bother pirating music in 2023 when any number of music streaming services are about $10-11/mo?
YouTube Premium bundles YouTube music and costs $19/mo. This is higher than (or on par) a lot of streaming subscriptions.
Another annoyance is that it’s bundled with a music service. Some non-US markets experimented with a cheaper ad-free-YouTube only tier for less than half the price. When that tier of service can be offered, it is very hard to think most of the $19 goes towards storage, bandwidth, and operational overhead.
According to that, $8.55 of your $19 would go to the creators. Presumably the other $10.45 goes for storage, bandwidth, operational overhead, and profit.
> They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
That just means, by definition, that the prices YouTube are trying to charge are too high, doesn't it? What we're seeing is basically a negotiation tactic: you either reduce the price, or we'll keep using ad blockers.
Not to mention, most creators don't really live off YouTube ads, those pay too little for the vast majority of channels as far as I understand. Creators live off their own sponsorships, Patreon etc.
Note, I'm actually someone who thinks YouTube Premium is good value for my money and am already paying for it.
Maybe. I think "too high" is probably subjective to each person.
But, I'm in the camp of "if it's too high, just stop using it". I think this isn't different than most things. If I think the price of electricity is too high, my option isn't to say "well, your price it too high, so I'm going to use electricity for free".
I block ads both because $14/mo is too much for me (I simply don't use YouTube enough to get that much value out of it), I object to ad-funded models (I don't want to watch a few ads instead of pay for Premium), and I strongly object to giving Google money because of their extremely broad portfolio of evil behavior (e.g. the terrible DMCA process - it's actually bad for creators to stay, and I want them to leave!)
I would pay to watch videos using microtransactions on a platform that is not owned by a depraved company. I have no objections to compensating creators for their work in general (unlike a lot of people here, who feel entitled to get everything for free).
> If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made?
I'd be quite fine if the only "content" is funded by patreons (I give £60/month to various patreons) or just people doing it for non-financial reasons.
If content creators leave YouTube for better platforms, and those platforms become even better as a consequence, I count that as a big win. I would love if platforms like Nebula would get a real chance at life. But nebula is only for educational content. I miss the comedy part of YouTube and would gladly pay the same I pay nebula for an extra "comedy tube" subscription of comparable content quality.
I still won't pay because I consider YouTube predatory with their ads. they are not a company focused on providing a service and making a reasonable profit on top. their ad policies are about maximum extraction from the platform, couple with aggressive behavior towards content creators that make the platform. I used to be fine with the ads, but they got greedy and ratcheted it up way to much. now I block them all or don't use the service. yt could have had my ad views, but they demanded too much.
Youtube and friends only have themselves to blame: the tighter they turn the ad screw the more people they push to ad blockers. We went from a single tolerable, skippable 5 seconds ad segment to multiple unskipable very long segments in just a few years.
I say this as someone who pays for YouTube Premium.
Sure and platforms _say_ they will give you an ad free experience if you pay them a monthly fee but they always wind up adding ads once they’ve captured their audience.
So you don’t support them because of what they might do later? That’s insane. Support the platforms you like right now. If they get worse you stop supporting them. “Captured” is such a dramatic term. Nothing stops a person from walking away from a video service.
Can’t help but think the worry about future ads is simply rationalization for pirating now.
I have a hard time having sympathy for a platform that ruined my suggested videos feed and then proceeds to put two unskippable ads plus a skippable one at the start of videos plus more ads in the middle and end. When uBlock stopped working I actually stuck with chrome and thought I’d give ads a shot knowing that some of the money would go to creators but the ads literally got worse over the course of a few weeks so I’m happily going back to blocking now.
Taking it to the extreme is pointless: the other extreme is that YT is only ads. That doesn't make sense either.
Here is my problem with the ads: the same ads will repeat many times over the course of a video, some ads will blast obnoxiously loud, and there are just way too many ads.
Also when I say too many ads, it's not just YouTube - we are bombarded by ads everywhere now. A few days ago I was watching a 4hr YT stream on my Fire Stick (and don't block ads there) and they were cutting to ads every 5min. Also I sometimes like to listen to music during walks and cutting to an ad in the middle of a 3min song is so ridiculous and obtrusive.
YouTube premium is expensive, especially if you have other streaming services.
This is Google's problem to solve, not ours. When you are "at war" with your customers, then the business needs to stop and think "what am I doing wrong". Under capitalism, it's the buyer that decides what your product or service is worth. YouTube Premium isn't worth $14/mo to me, so yes, I will continue to block ads as much as I can.
Twitch "permanently" won by injecting ads directly on the feed, right now best you can do is sneak swap the small resolution version that stay on the side until they also removed this.
Actually the modern vaft script can completely bypass ads and has seen minimal changes for well over a year. Twitch gave up because most people, even the tech savvy ones, don't know about the solutions anymore.
There’s no need at all to rely on Chrome: If Google wanted to, they could enable DRM for all videos on Youtube today. Almost every desktop and mobile browser supports it.
They’d lose a couple of legacy client apps, but much less traffic than they would if they were to make it Chrome-only.
They could always exempt Youtube Shorts (which are competing with TikTok/Instagram reels etc.) from DRM and only apply it to longer-form content. Shorts don't get ads anyway in my experience (but I almost never use them).
In the sense that Google pays for search engine placement, yes. They also pay Apple for the same thing - I'd hesitate to say that gives them much influence over either Firefox or Safari.
For me the opposite: chrome was making an entrance on account of supporting WebMIDI and I gave them the benefit of the doubt for a bit but this is the bit that did it for me and besides some compatibility testing FF all the way for me.
Google is already receiving plenty of money, if they promoted youtube as a commons they should maintain it as a commons. This bait-and-switch crap has gone more than far enough.
Remember, not all that long ago their mantra was 'we don't care about ad blockers because it is only such a small percentage'. Look now.
I just see it, in the current context of layoff, as them wanting/needing more money and hoping blocker either leave (and stop costing them bandwidth) or switch to YT Premium.
I do believe that the worsening experience on YT could be a win by making platform I want to support such as nebula more attractive. Or that it could backfire with a global adblock adoption making the current ad economy less viable.
I'm just unsure if chrome/YT is not already too entrenched and that people won't use ad blocker or switch.
Google has plenty of money, but it's never enough and so you get this kind of ridiculously hostile activity. I can't even watch my own videos without being bombarded by ads. That wasn't the case when I uploaded it so in my opinion that's bait-and-switch. They can pull these stunts on newly uploaded works with new T&C but to retroactively claim editorial control over the page where the videos appear is just abuse of power. If they were about to go out of business on account of how youtube is such a terrible loss leader it might garner some sympathy but as it is it is just a Google power play and a money grab to me.
Anecdotally, I just made the switch to FF from Chrome. And my only complaint is that Google Earth is practically unusable. Other than that, I love the customization and have no difference from Chrome. Extension support is just as good.
If we annoy Google enough they'll have 3 different adblock detectors available and 2 of them won't ever be loaded on the filterlist maintainers computers :)
I can also heartily recommend the 'unhook' browser extension, it takes care of all of those upsells and feeds.