Reminds me of vid.me, who picked up on the intense hatred towards youtube and launched a competing video host that actually got some serious traction. No ads, no subscriptions, just pure good content.
They went bankrupt in a year. Turns out internet consumers are just painfully entitled.
I don't why people say this. They even include their own version of sponsor block, which is generous, because technically sponsor segments aren't even part of youtube, they are purely the creator deciding to make the ad part of their content.
Also, just to put it out there, many creators would likley be able to cut sponsored content if the 40% of viewers not viewing ads paid up. Not every creator is a greedy ruthless overlord, many just want to keep the lights on. Especially in tech/nerdy channels, where ad block use is the highest.
Creators can also stop uploading videos if they are not OK with adblock users viewing them. We would still have more than enough videos to watch if all profit-motivated creators stopped and I'm not sure the average quality would be any worse.
The moat is the leverage to get licensing deals using the size of the existing user base.
You could bootstrap a movie rental business by buying DVDs from a DVD store (then eventually from a DVD distributor, etc.). You cannot bootstrap a movie streaming business by buying streaming rights because nobody will sell them to you. They hardly even sell them to Netflix anymore.
The Internet Archive tried to get around the same issue for ebooks by scanning physical books and renting the scans (and not being a business), and it nearly cost them everything.
>Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.
Google actually experimented with this about a decade ago (I know, I was one of the suckers who paid), but it got canned because why the fuck would you pay google when u-bloc is free?
Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too.
People get wrapped around the axle of ad-subsidized models, the "I pay and still see ads" but they just are confused about a hybrid monetization structure.
At some point the larger internet has to look itself in the mirror and recognize that it's either ads, credit card, or a hybrid of those.
And no, blocking is not an option, it just offloads costs onto honest users.
> Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too.
Youtube premium is not ad-free, you still gets whatever ads are embedded in the actual content.
YT premium comes with their own version of sponsor block, but you manually have to hit the skip button.
But I don't hold youtube accountable for what creators decide to put in their videos. I would grind my axe with the creator instead, it's their video and their choice. Youtube gets no cut from those segments.
As a paid YouTube subscriber, I’ve always wondered if that skip was only for us. It would be kind of bullshit if it was also for ad-based free viewers too as it would imply that google is free to show you ads they make hard to skip but they make it easy to skip embedded promotions and stuff.
Several different “premium” tiers have this issue. Why am I purportedly paying for no ads if i continue to get ads? Whether or not they’re “platform ads” or “embedded” doesn’t matter. I paid for no ads and I’m not getting what I paid for, so why keep paying?
YouTube premium delivers the content you select to consume to you without displaying ads in-platform. If you then use that ad-free platform to consume content that includes ads, that's on you.
Correct, if you choose to seek out content with ads, you will see ads. Would YouTube premium need to block you from viewing that content to meet your bar here?
I know its well meaning, but 14 dollars US a month is not cheap globally. The people who do block are probably not the group google wants to advertise to anyway.
It sort of is. When a property owner has loan against a commercial property, the lender uses the monthly rent to calculate how much they will loan you. The rent number they use is the last paid rent.
So you, the property owner, end up in a situation where if you lower rent to attract a new tenant, the bank will recalculate your loan, potentially ending in a margin call.
Because you are a heavily leveraged house of cards, a rug pull on a few of these loans could cause a cascade liquidating your commercial inventory. Your business is buy a property, take a loan against it, use that loan to buy a property, etc etc.
Therefore it becomes worth it to carry vacant properties, because they are acting as the stilts holding up your money making properties. The vacancy becomes a cost of doing business, and gets factored into the rent of places that are getting leased.
The current location my office is in, was vacant for 12 years before we signed a lease, owned by a big name commercial real estate firm.
Given what seems like a high rate of vacancies in a lot of markets maybe its time for those landlords to be wiped out, the loans defaulted, and the buildings sell to get back to their real valuations.
But no, we can't have wealthy people lose some money or the banks take a loss, that'd be terrible. We'll just continue crushing the middle class and poor with high rent costs and empty properties.
In an ideal situation, cities should be placing pressure on property owners and businesses to lease out vacant space because otherwise they are effectively offloading the negative externalities of empty space to the city and its tax base. If the city isn't going to outright buy vacant property for the sake of development, then it should heavily tax property owners for leaving said property empty or undeveloped.
Just because it may become impossible to detect doesn't mean there's no reason to formally ban it. While many people are dishonest, not 100% of people are. Calling them naive makes no sense, since they didn't announce that they believe they can prevent all AI from making it in forever. You're just name-calling.
