It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust.
I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Even going so far as believing they have a right to free lemonade...
I feel like you're right about initial value proposition, but it doesn't seem odd to me at all. There are other things about treating youtube as netflix/hbo/hulu:
- I can't upload random video to the netflix, and I have a certain expectation regarding content there
- 99% of videos on youtube are not something I would pay for or expected to be paid for uploading
- I can pay for youtube subscription and would still get a lot of advertisement, because I dared to turn SponsorBlock off. Creators have a very good reason to use this type of ads, and youtube have all responsibility of not providing solutions for this.
- I can pay for HBO max and watch Sopranos. On youtube I can pay and content of interest could be deleted next second
- I have no idea if my favourite creator was demonetised for DMCA spam by youtube, but I certainly know they are not treated as equal partners in this business in many ways.
- Ultimately I pay for content, and subscription guarantees some kind of investment from the platform in acquiring or producing it. Not true for youtube.
edit: not saying one should not pay for youtube, but these points are for comparing youtube with established paid platforms. I believe youtube could offer very interesting and fair subscription schemes and conditions in principle.
I love how there's a perfect counter to every single point you posted. It seems like some people just want to hate.
> - I can't upload random video to the netflix, and I have a certain expectation regarding content there
That's a bug, not a feature. You're basically restricted to the tastes of Netflix's buyers.
> - 99% of videos on youtube are not something I would pay for or expected to be paid for uploading
Then you're watching the wrong videos. Most of the videos that I and my friends watch are high quality, entertaining, and informative. Their creators usually have Patreons making five figures monthly.
> - I can pay for youtube subscription and would still get a lot of advertisement, because I dared to turn SponsorBlock off. Creators have a very good reason to use this type of ads, and youtube have all responsibility of not providing solutions for this.
You can easily skip these, not sure what the issue is here.
> - I can pay for HBO max and watch Sopranos. On youtube I can pay and content of interest could be deleted next second
Guessing you started streaming only recently, since Netflix/Hulu/HBO all change their inventory frequently due to licensing. It wasn't long ago that you could watch Sopranos on Amazon.
> - I have no idea if my favourite creator was demonetised for DMCA spam by youtube, but I certainly know they are not treated as equal partners in this business in many ways.
This isn't a problem with YouTube, it's a problem with the US legal system.
> - Ultimately I pay for content, and subscription guarantees some kind of investment from the platform in acquiring or producing it. Not true for youtube.
This is your best one, YouTube has created tons of wealth for creators and has cut out tons of the usual Hollywood intermediaries. Additionally, there has never been a greater investment made on storing and distributing video like the one Google made on YouTube.
Re-read the sentence you're replying to. "99% of videos on youtube", not "99% of videos I watch".
>You can easily skip these, not sure what the issue is here.
You can also ad-block. The issue is that even paying for YouTube isn't enough to not see any ads on YouTube.
>Additionally, there has never been a greater investment made on storing and distributing video like the one Google made on YouTube.
YouTube merely provides the logistical support. It's not a production company. That is, it doesn't seek out talent to produce content for it. This is the difference the GP is highlighting.
> "99% of videos on youtube", not "99% of videos I watch".
And in the context, this is even less sensible. 99% of content on Netflix is what "you" don't watch. So there's literally no difference on that point for YT and Netflix.
> The issue is that even paying for YouTube isn't enough to not see any ads on YouTube.
Native ads are skippable and are already providing revenue for the creator - skipping them doesn't affect creator's income. Ad-block screws over the creators. There's a difference...
> YouTube merely provides the logistical support.
Have you ever worked at a production company? Because providing legal, logistical and marketing support is also what production companies do - that is what YouTube provides to creators. If you apply the same logic, then Universal Media Group isn't a production company - because they also primarily provide those functions.
Not to mention that YouTube has produced, may even still produce, original content.
>99% of content on Netflix is what "you" don't watch.
"I don't watch this" and "I would never watch this under any circumstance" are different.
>Have you ever worked at a production company? Because providing legal, logistical and marketing support is also what production companies do - that is what YouTube provides to creators. If you apply the same logic, then Universal Media Group isn't a production company - because they also primarily provide those functions.
What you're saying is that production companies provide logistics, and YouTube provides logistics, therefore YouTube is a production company. Socrates is a man, and I am a man, therefore I am Socrates.
>Not to mention that YouTube has produced, may even still produce, original content.
Sure. But the vast majority of the content that drives traffic to YouTube is not produced by them.
> "I don't watch this" and "I would never watch this under any circumstance" are different.
OK. How is this even relevant. Both YouTube and Netflix have easily over 90% of content that "I would never watch under any circumstance"(which is already a false statement on your part).
> What you're saying is that production companies provide logistics
Way to ignore literally everything else I wrote.
> But the vast majority of the content that drives traffic to YouTube is not produced by them.
Same goes for Netflix
When you move the goalpost, make sure that where you move it supports your argument.
No hate, I simply can understand why paying for youtube feels different from paying for netflix. These are not some bulletprof arguments why nobody should pay money, it's just why I personally can feel it's different than paid content provider/producer.
>You're basically restricted to the tastes of Netflix's buyers.
Same as going to the cinema. I don't expect to see 5 minutes of figuring out camera settings and 2 hours of black screen. I completely miss how it's not a feature. At the same time I support variety and experiments with a content of any kind, it's just not that.
>You can easily skip these, not sure what the issue is here.
No issue. I use sponsorblock as I mentioned, so no manual intervention required. Why do I have to do it though.
>all change their inventory frequently due to licensing. It wasn't long ago that you could watch Sopranos on Amazon.
Did you know they announced removal of Sopranos beforehand? You could make an informed decision given a warning.
>it's a problem with the US legal system.
No it's not. But thank you for a perfect counter.
>YouTube has created tons of wealth for creators and has cut out tons of the usual Hollywood intermediaries.
Fair enough, there is some service being provided by youtube. They basically made all the content on platform possible.
>Additionally, there has never been a greater investment made on storing and distributing video like the one Google made on YouTube.
You can feel whatever you want, your rationalizations are wrong though.
And if someone uses false rationalizations to use ad-blockers, while claiming to support the content creators - I can only sense hypocrisy and entitlement.
It's a repeat of the long ago years when piracy and torrents were more popular. And people pretended that stealing movies was somehow ethical.
People will always justify a way to steal, when they can get away with it.
- they could simply not watch YouTube if the content is "99% not worth watching"
- they could pay to watch the content
- they could pay the creator on their patreons, and watch there
Be comfortable stealing and saying that it's stealing. Or pay with your ads / money. The hypocrisy is stealing and claiming that YouTube should somehow provide a service for free.
I think the DMCA issue is a problem with both the US legal system and YouTube. A big part of it is the fact that YouTube makes it way too easy for supposed rightsholders to automatically DMCA any videos they want, and don't provide a reasonable process for clearing false claims. Their own system for detecting things like copyrighted music also makes no attempt to account for fair use, treating even a 5 second snippet of a popular song as if it was the whole thing.
> This is your best one, YouTube has created tons of wealth for creators and has cut out tons of the usual Hollywood intermediaries. Additionally, there has never been a greater investment made on storing and distributing video like the one Google made on YouTube.
Patently not true. Most of the big YT channels these days have sponsors or controlling orgs. Often own wholely or partly by the big dogs.
Plenty of others like that, e.g. Take 5 Media Group , Wake Up , and INNOCEAN, etc.
There are certainly individual contributors, but if you think most of the big channels aren't 100% owned and operated you're being played.
And in their defense, there is just a lot of dross on YT; allowing anyone to upload anything means 90% of it is crap. Netflix's buyers may have a specific set of tastes, but I don't have to sort through reams of poorly edited memes & reaction videos.
> 99% of videos on youtube are not something I would pay for or expected to be paid for uploading
Then you just use the ad-supported version, which seems to be what suits you.
> On youtube I can pay and content of interest could be deleted next second
Which online video platform doesn't suffer from that?
Sopranos is a core HBO product. YouTube does have YouTube's core content. Non core products get removed off MAX(HBO's new name) all the time. There's literally "Leaving Soon" section in my MAX app.
I was never notified in advance before Netflix removed The Office UK or People Just Do Nothing? I was in the middle of both of these shows when they were removed.
They don't seem, to as far as I can tell. I have uBlock origin and Sponsorblock on and now that I've caved for Premium I haven't seen any kind of nagging from YT.
Google destroying goodwill with a low-effort rent seeking agenda, after years of effort to extinguish real competiton.
Giving money to Google for programmatic ads ≠ funding creators. Most creators are small and don’t make any real money from YT anymore, and every year fewer and fewer are willing to endure the infinite mystery box of YT moderation and contentID policy.
Yeah, if it wasn't run by Google, I'd be more likely to pay for it.
And paying for it will result in most of my money going to Google and asshats like xQc even though I'd never willingly watch one of his videos and barely know who he is.
And I've watched the algorithm wreck some youtube channels that I used to enjoy as the creators chase after revenue.
(Not to mention that the ads that Google shows are fucking awful)
> And paying for it will result in most of my money going to Google and asshats like xQc even though I'd never willingly watch one of his videos and barely know who he is.
55% of the subscription goes to the channels you watch [1]. This money is divided based on your watch time [1]. If you don't watch a channel, none of your subscription pays for that channel.
> To determine how much subscription revenue each channel receives, YouTube will aggregate viewing data from Premium users to determine a value based on watch time.
The word "aggregate" there is particularly important.
And:
> The exact amount of money you will receive for each minute of YouTube Premium viewer watch time will always vary based on viewing habits, and there are complex aspects of the distribution algorithm that are not disclosed by YouTube
That's a very long way from 55% of _my_ subscription going out to the channels that _I_ watch. That would have been a simple thing for them to state, and they certainly didn't state anything close to that.
I'm pretty convinced by those statements actually that a good chunk of my subscription would go to xQc and his ilk to keep him on youtube collecting more views since he's more valuable to the platform than anyone that I watch.
> And I've watched the algorithm wreck some youtube channels that I used to enjoy as the creators chase after revenue.
Take a look in the mirror. You wrecked those channels. Together with other people who also enjoy those channels but refuse to pay for the entertainment. So creators are forced to seek a wider audience or a more lucrative audience, because the people enjoying their videos also think that they don't deserve to be reimbursed for their work. You're the algorithm.
> It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust.
It's almost like Youtube is a different product and UX!
People obviously think of Youtube as the place where nearly all the important, timely video/streaming content exists in some form or another. Professionally produced content sits right next to town hall meetings with 13 views, or some kid's first remix. People sometimes use it as an extension of their harddrive for random video content. Hell, there's a whole genre of people sitting silently in picture, watching professionally produced content. Plus a genre of obviously fake reactions to content that rando's claim they've never seen before.
It's difficult to unwind a product pitched for decades as a kind of public good video cloud, and re-pitch that as monthly-charge cable television.
"Aren't people fickle?" is a hilarious way to misunderstand the situation. I mean, ok, but that take applies equally to nearly any non-trivial business challenge of any company that has ever existed.
Nebula, especially the curiosity stream bundle, just looks like a better and better deal every year. $15/year, most of which goes to the people actually making videos based on your watch time for a better experience than YouTube is totally worth it when google pulls this kind of shit lol
People might be less disgusted with paying for YouTube if their model was "make a good product for end users" instead of "premium is to make the experience less worse by removing the worst part of a bad experience".
This is exactly why I refuse to give Google money voluntarily.
All of my issues with YouTube they created intentionally. I just recently found a trick that had YouTube play in the background when I switched tabs and I recalled how life was before they created Red and it annoyed me all over again.
Google is the devil of today's tech companies - most of what they do utilizes the outright theft of our data and what they do with it is purely manipulative in nature.
So... Why do you use YouTube? Ask your creators to move to something like Patreon and you'll be free. You'll have to pay, but you will not be paying Google.
Why do you personally think that you're entitled to consume content from YouTube?
This is going to sound harsh but maybe your videos just aren't worth that much monetarily?
You aren't entitled to a revenue purely because you upload some stuff onto someone else's computer.
If you produced content that had value worth paying for, then people would happily pay it. Perhaps if "getting screwed" upsets you so much, you should move to a paid, subscription-only model where your content will get 100% of the earnings (you feel) it merits.
Same. I’m still waiting (8+ years now) for their *promised* “better” replacement for subscription collections.[1] Until that day comes (along with all the other features that I used to use but have since been removed (not replaced)), I will not pay for a still not as good as the past subscription service.
This isn't about paying for youtube, this is about ads.
People don't want youtube ads, and frankly it's their good right to not have to download, display and watch them if they so choose. What youtube now wants is proof that people have watched ads. This is problematic for 2 reasons. The first is that there is no way to prove you've watched an ad in a way that's not a privacy nightmare and extremely hostile to users. The second is that most people are simply unwilling to watch youtube ads.
I'm not disgusted with the idea of a paid youtube, I'd simply go somewhere else, I'm disgusted by having ads shoved down my throat and that of others.
Paid youtube is the default. Ads are just an alternative option for people who don't want to pay. Why do you feel so disgusted that they're providing you with an alternative option?
The thing is that this argument only works if you just assume that everything people put on youtube is put there with the expectation that people will pay to see it, rather than just to put it out there in whatever way is most convenient.
If they want to be paid they should just go paid and see if anyone still wants to share videos on a closed platform, if they don't want to do that why should I need to approve of every single alternative they manage to come up with?
It costs Google billions of dollars every year in servers, storage, bandwidth, and electricity just to keep the lights on at YouTube. Just because a video is posted without the uploader expecting people to pay for it, does not mean it can be hosted without any cost to the infrastructure operator.
I’m not the OP but my response is that I will not pay for content twice and it is impossible to get a truly adfree experience on YouTube by paying for premium.
> I'm not disgusted with the idea of a paid youtube, I'd simply go somewhere else, I'm disgusted by having ads shoved down my throat and that of others.
The only issue I have with paid Youtube is privacy. We are talking about Google after all....
I know there are other techniques like fingerprinting but I prefer to use youtube as anonymously as possible and payment+login violates that completely.
"Restaurants are making me pay before eating because I usually just dine and ditch. How am I supposed to eat out if I have to pay? They are greedy as fuck, so no way will I give them a cent. But honestly not eating out is also not an option."
Using bypass-paywalls works so far if you add it to the custom list, and as a bonus, you end up getting in less of an echo chamber because it displays as if you've never logged in. There's also a set up for ublock origin that works that's out on their reddit somewhere, though I can't be asked to go through it, nor use reddit anymore, so you may need to search that up on your own, but it's recent and works.
It isn't the library. Youtube's trove of videos will age fast if there was any meaningful alternative. What prevents any competitor is youtube's legal backing. They have already fought the RIAA/MPAA and the content rules of hundreds of jurisdictions. Youtube has deals, understandings, in place that allow youtube to keep going. But if anyone else tries to setup a similar video service, at scale, those hard-fought deals will not apply. Those past enemies of youtube are now its tame watchdogs ready to unleash themselves on anyone who else attempting to enter the market.
Vid.me did and it failed because no one wants to views ads and no one wants to pay for a subscription. They gained a lot of traction too and were really flying for a bit. But eventually they had to become profitable without showing ads.
Youtube only exists because google was ok with not making any money from it for years.
The lemonade stand put all the other stands out of business ...
who all got lemonade delivered for free by a million lemonade aficionados who wanted to share their lemonade with the world, for which YouTube showed the lemonade drinkers ads while pickpocketing all the documents in their wallet and copying them, also throwing buckets of lemonade in the trash because it wasn't the officially approved taste of lemonade, some other lemonade claimed there was a hint of taste that "copied" theirs, or for no stated reason at all, just dumped it, sorry, "terms and conditions", which.. we'll never tell you.
No one else wants to run a lemonade stand because they can see customers do not want to pay for lemondade.
See the Vid.me rise and fall illustrates this perfectly. Their closing letter to users even says in so many words "Ya'll don't want to pay, so how can we stay open?"
It's easy to wonder why. The status quo at the time had been that user-submitted video content (YouTube) is free. It was only free because Alphabet had their losses from YouTube subsidized by their profits from Google. Maybe not for all, but for many this is an anti-trust issue.
Youtube was not free at the time vid.me came to be.
Also, using money from one business to keep another business alive is not a monopolistic practice. Plenty of tech companies have had the technical and monetary firepower to run a youtube competitor. But you just have to read a few threads on the internet from anytime in the last decade talking about youtube and monetization to see why no one wanted to jump in. This thread included.
> Youtube was not free at the time vid.me came to be.
Sorry but this take is pretty wild to me. I can understand that there is a paid option but YouTube is free today given that I can currently watch a video after watching a couple ads without paying any money.
> Also, using money from one business to keep another business alive is not a monopolistic practice.
I'm not sure this is true in theory but, regardless, to each their own. This practice of keeping competitors down by subsidizing business losses with profits from another business, only to try to change the status quo for their customers, seems pretty shitty from where I'm standing.
I see nothing wrong with subsidizing customer costs per se. The only potential problems arise when this leads to lock-in. You could argue that subsidizing videos helps achieve lock-in via network effects. If we can just figure out a way to regulate away those network effects (forced interop), then there's nothing wrong with the subsidies.
Again, that is a non-obvious conclusion. Many people will consider ad-supported to be free for the sole reason that it doesn't affect the amount in their bank account.
> No one else wants to run a lemonade stand because they can see customers do not want to pay for lemondade.
Of course nobody wanted to pay with ad view time because youtube didn't require that. In practice, one could watch a youtube video without watching any ads and the practice was allowed because it kept competitors down.
> Watching ads is what covers the cost of watching a video. It's no secret that running a site like youtube is extremely expensive.
This is exactly correct, and it's why this practice was so effective. Nobody wants to pay with their time and youtube didn't force them. Why is someone going to go to Vid.me where they will be disallowed from blocking ads? The only reason it wasn't necessary for youtube to show the ads is that they had their losses subsidized by google's profits.
Going back to what you initially wrote:
> No one else wants to run a lemonade stand because they can see customers do not want to pay for lemondade.
Because there was a lemonade stand backed by the profits of one of the most profitable companies in history handing out free lemonade, no questions asked. Yeah, nobody else wanted to pay for something that was free in practice, even in the context of time spent watching an ad.
Imagine if you walk into a 7/11 and just fill your bottle with soda for free without paying. They eventually decide that too many people were doing this, so they decide to place their soda machine behind the counter, so you're required to pay. Then you complain that they're putting all the other convenience stores out of business because they used to give you soda for free. This is how entitled you sound.
> they decide to place their soda machine behind the counter, so you're required to pay
Let's add another step before this:
Understand that people are visiting the store because the soda is free in practice and allow the practice to continue until other stores don't see any business because they can't afford to offer free soda.
Now we move the soda machine behind the counter because we don't like that people are getting free soda.
Then they complain about other convenience stores being put out of business.
If we're going to start calling people entitled, my eyes are still on Google.
This is a stretch. Youtube might have done something anticompetitive but I doubt allowing adblockers was one of them.
My point is that people who were never intent on paying businesses for their services never cared about the sustainability of those businesses in the first place and are just using it to rationalize their anger. This sort of moral consistency matters with civil law where good and bad aren't trivially obvious.
Society collectively agrees that it's good for supermarkets to offer loss leader rotisserie chickens. An argument can be made that it's anticompetitive because it basically put Boston Market out of business, but I wouldn't be as receptive if that came from someone who was caught stealing supermarket rotisserie chickens.
I've been paying for premium for years now - at least 6 years. I think the problem for me now, and why I'm canceling it shortly, is their push to raise the price by 40% in the coming months. The value for that new price is just not there.
Some of that is due to my own changing habits, but even more of it comes from the content creators I follow in the gaming space being serially demonetized thanks to overly sensitive advertisers. So even though I'm trying to pay to support the content I watch, my money isn't going to the right creators.
As such, even at the seemingly reasonable $14 every month... it's no longer worth it.
Is the 40% increase region-specific? I'm a YT Premium subscriber and they just had a price increase in the US three months ago ($120 to $140 yearly, similarly billed monthly).
I recognize this doesn't solve your reasons at all, but for anyone facing an un-grandfathering who is simply price-conscious, if you're willing to commit for a year to YT Premium, it's effectively $11.66/mo.
I just squeaked into pre-increase Nest pricing for the final year I'll use it. This has been a big year for 40%+ subscription price increases, Google and otherwise, it seems.
You’re right in that people are more reluctant to pay for something they’ve had for free for so long. I also think YouTube is pushing this pretty late in the game. People already have $15 subscriptions to multiple services at this point. The $15 YouTube subscription feels expensive to me on top of the ones I already own. I wish it was like $6 for no ads especially since I don’t care for the bundled music service.
Alongside the distaste of the bait-and-switch, I suggest that there's a perception among most folks that what is primarily being paid for is the content, not the services (hosting, transmission, recommendations, etc.). In that sense, paying for Netflix "feels" less bad because, in some sense, Netflix "owns" the content in its catalog for which you are buying access - whatever you may feel about the rights or wrongs of copyright law, it is undeniably a practical fact. By contrast, it feels less accurate (though is, in fact, still just as legally accurate) to say that YouTube "owns" the content uploaded to it - the content feels more personal, and YouTube is merely the conveyance mechanism. Part of the negative reaction might be due to this perception of being asked to pay for a support mechanism rather than for what you actually care about - the content.
> youtube [...], who directly profit shares with small creators you adore
Citation very much needed :P every report I've seen and insight I've heard is that anyone below the very top echelons earns negligible profit from their YouTube content. A commenter lower in the chain points out that "many of the YouTubers I watch have Patreons earning thousands of dollars", which...sort-of proves the point that YouTube, in isolation, is insufficient.
Well, I don’t subscribe to any services like Netflix, et al. I do use YouTube, for watching some videos around my hobbies, like woodworking, but they aren’t important enough to me to pay for. I could easily live without them. The ads have become onerous enough that watching a video is painful now. It became bearable with an ad blocker, but I’m prepared to not use YouTube anymore.
Ads are not necessarily the problem. It's the way they're delivered.
For one thing, if they are so damn dominant at advertising, why can't they show me a better variety of ads?
Another problem is the jarring nature of ads. They are just IN YOUR FACE all of a sudden, and it's basically rude the way they're presented. Is there not a more "polite" way to go about it?
You could have me watch 5 minutes of straight ads, reset every 12 hours, and I'd be OK with that. I'd even be glad to rate each ad along the way. Are they hellbent on interruptions, or do they just want the ads to be seen? I hate the interruption.
The reason they don't do 5 minutes of straight ads every 12 hours is because you'd get people that just walk away, switch to another tab and mute Youtube for 5 minutes, or any number of other things that would end up with juiced ad statistics with no corresponding real benefit to the advertiser.
Then, you'd get the response to that, which is ads you have to interact with to essentially tell the server you've seen the ad. I've seen this in mobile games already, and it's damn annoying. There's no way I'd want to spend 5 minutes doing that kind of thing.
I would question that "readily" statement now that most people can't afford netflix and hulu and hbo and etc. anymore because everyone's priced their plans to the point where a cable subscription is starting to look attractive again. The same goes for youtube: I would gladly pay however much my ad impressions are actually worth to not see them, but I would be VERY surprised if they amounted to more than a Canadian dollar a month, so the idea of paying 150 Canadian dollars a year just doesn't make any sense.
Google is immorally trying to control the web, is a significant difference. I pay creators through patreon or their tip jars, and it's rather more than they'd make from me paying Google.
If you don’t want to support Google, you need to stop using YouTube even with an ad blocker. Your activity still counts in the usage stats and choosing to watch there tells the creators of the videos you watch that they have to stay on YouTube because it’s where their audience is.
I don't really care if they stay on YT or not. If I like them, they get paid through patreon either way. (And I'm not sure how I could convince them their audience is elsewhere through any action of mine. It would take a pretty serious concerted effort.)
Now that you mention it... [checks] The app I use does have patreon as a source! Thanks!
Edit: that's all set up now so it'll show me the patreon videos first. And creators are making many times more money off me than they were before. Google is unnecessary!
Apples to oranges (live vs not), but last Sunday (the very expensive) NFL Sunday Ticket via YouTube TV had terrible buffering problems for about the first half of every 1pm game
Eventually they made a config change and it began varying the bit-rate instead of just stopping, but it wasn't a great demonstration
Incidentally, it's teh other way round for me. I find the contents of Netflix etc. utter crap and won't pay for it. However, there are some extremely valuable tech channels on YT that I appreciate a lot and I support individual creators. But YouTube/Alphabet? I have zero sympathy for these folks, two decades of small malicious steps did their work.
But I don't pay for any of that now, and never have (Amazon video aside, which comes with Prime, a service invaluable to my wife). If YouTube's ad blocking finally comes for me, then I will cease to use YouTube.
I don't know that I would put Netflix and youtube in the same category, but regardless I now don't want to pay Google for youtube just to spite them.
Instead I built and elaborate and very overenginered hack that pulls RSS feeds from channels and then pulls videos from the feed, before putting them up on a private Trello board where I can organise them. Then I can watch them, order them, etc and optionally tag them for download.
Its unstable, its totally not worth my time, it has serious issues and I had a ton for fun building it.
YouTube does not provide the same value as it used to and therefore paying for it seems only to block ads. These days I rarely find new content creators and content creators are probably struggling even more. The recommendation algorithm is totally biased towards some screwed sterotypes and clicking I do not want to watch this content creator's video never helps. Some ads are so offensive/dangerous you do have to use an ad blocker just to protect your mental health.
It is like someone peed into the free lemonade and demands money for it.
Because it wasn't the deal when they were consolidating the all online video content into themselves. And then once they've gotten "too big to fail", the greed rolled in.
They bait and switched us.
Youtube killed private video hosting.
Reddit killed small thematic php-bb forums.
If people knew that they'd eventually do that, none of these platforms would be as big as they are today.
Is it at all surprising? Free content replaces all kinds of free time, not only quality kind. So when it goes non-free there’s enough people who say “nah not worth it” in different accents. Personally if I was forced by youtube to do what they want, I’d probably just watch it much less (with ads, only required content) and spend time in a similar or less useless activity.
Trying to get customers to pay for something they have been readily getting for free is a difficult proposition. Ask Vice News. This is the problem. YouTube was “free” for a long time and now it needs to turn a profit. Ads was the easy way to do that. Subs is the only way to sustain it.
Not really. What pisses me off is they still have a free tier backed by an advertising+surveillance business model. They should charge everyone for access, stop advertising and stop tracking us.
"but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust."
Probably a combination of misgivings:
1. Google cant keep a product/service alive worth a damn, or ones that do get changed to be piss eventually
2. Paying other content providers for content they provide feels different than paying Youtube for mostly content they carry that was pirated/unlicensed anyway (e.g. full disclosure,I mostly use it to watch jazz and funk bootleg concerts or old 80s music videos or other ephemera YT really had damn all to do with and likely dont monetize for the actual creators worth a damn).
3. Somewhere between the two is the fact that for some licensed materials, you still have the region-constraint. If Yt Premium covered truly global reach, it might be more tantalizing, but as it stands...meh.
Well, you can't pay for Youtube. You can pay for a bundle of some mostly unrelated products that's named Youtube Premium, or you can live with an insanely degraded product experience on Youtube, but you can't pay for Youtube.
Am I paying for an ad-free Youtube or a Spotify competitor? I'm not at all confident the money I'd be paying is going to the creators of the videos, or even feature development of the main Youtube platform.
Creators get the income from views, with any copyrighted material licensing subtracted and a cut to YouTube.
But no one is forcing you to use YouTube, it's just way more accessible for any content creator that can't spend weeks in getting a commercial license for music and such.
But I have good news for you. Many creators have Patreons, that serves video.
Several creators I watch have said they get more profit sharing from premium views than ad views. So even though it pains me to give money to Google "just" to make their product not shitty (removing ads and allowing background play, back when I had goog products on my phone), it's also paying content creators more.
I prefer to subscribe and watch on Nebula to support them more... but YouTube has such a good mix of content that isn't on Nebula that I find myself using it as a hub regardless.
You're absolutely right. I use SponsorBlock and uBlock Origin on Youtube and will continue to do so until there is a way to pay to 1) remove all ads and 2) remove all data collection by Google. Until then, I'll continue paying with my data while blocking ads.
No, it means that I'm willing to pay Google for YouTube without Google Ads with either my money or my data. I will not pay with both. It is that simple.
I recently left Spotify because their web app makes my monitors flicker when it gains focus and they inserted ads into podcasts. What am I paying for with Spotify if not ad removal, just like YT?
I actually bumped my YT plan to family and put my parents on it. They didn't know about ad free YT, now they don't know how they went without it.
I happily subscribe to Spotify because it just works better for me. I would subscribe to YT Premium if I could get YT only for like $5-7. I'm not paying $14, or realistically whatever the family plan is up to now, for ad-free YT and an inferior music experience. So YT doesn't get any money from me.
Youtube has been a fantastic demonstration of how valuable it can be to enable democratized, low-barrier-to-entry content publishing. Think of how much treasure there is on the service, with millions upon millions of hours of educational, informative, or archival content, all published and viewable for free, with incredible reliability and availability. Of course this is also fantastically expensive to build and maintain; I believe that we have been fortunate that Google's ad business was willing to subsidize it for us for so long with so little required in return. Unfortunately it appears that possibly the screws are getting turned, and there is less appetite for the subsidy.
In a better, more utopian timeline I imagine an equivalent service supported by taxpayers or nonprofit means. Just how the 1900s gave us the public library system, imagine if the 2000s give us a video platform without for-profit encumbrances - what a world it would be!
I just pay the $15 a month to not get ads. The content is worth way more than that to me. I wish they would stop censoring stuff (like raw news, firearms learning channels, etc). Content warnings over just taking the videos down would be much preferred. That's really my only gripe.
what mental gymnastics? I pay to both avoid ads and support creators more. If i just watched YT with ads they would literally make less, regardless of supporting them directly.
and google takes 45% of premium with 55% going to creators.
> I believe that we have been fortunate that Google's ad business was willing to subsidize it for us for so long with so little required in return. Unfortunately it appears that possibly the screws are getting turned, and there is less appetite for the subsidy.
Um well no. They still have appetite to support the business with Ads (and they offer a paid version if you don't like Ads).
The thing they no longer have appetite for is people using Ad blockers.
Am I breaching Yotube's TOS if I look away and / or mute their ads? No. So what's the difference If I automate that? Plenty of people won't, and they will still make money.
Google can't force people to watch their ads, unless they hold us down and pry open our eyelids, A Clockwork Orange style. Shit, I shouldn't have given our digital overlords any ideas.
Literally this entire thing is about Youtube refusing to send the video to non-premium users who are blocking ads. Do you even know what you're commenting on?
People will go on a massive tirade, over GPL violation... then turn around and completely disregard the license terms that content is being delivered to them with.
The irony of it all is that the whole IT community literally relies on strong copyright enforcement, including FOSS community... yet many fail to extend the same courtesy to people making videos.
"People" does not include me. I advocate for the complete abolishment of copyright. GPL included.
By the way, we are under exactly zero obligation to watch any advertisements, moral or otherwise. Best they can do is hope we watch them. They're not entitled to our attention.
I hate to tell you who is in control of chrome. It wasn’t too long ago that Google announced changes to chrome that ublock origin thought would completely stop it from working. They found a way, but nothing stopping another future change that makes it much harder. Also they just need to start delivering YouTube player as a wasm binary blob.
Funny thing is I'm not even opposed to their ManifestV3 thing. I agree with their browser extension security arguments and think their proposed changes are absolutely a step in the right direction.
It's just that uBlock Origin is so useful and trusted that those restrictions should not apply to it. Frankly uBlock Origin should be literally built into browsers just like pop up blockers back in the day. Only thing stopping this is the inherent conflicts of interest. Google being an ad company and Firefox accepting Google money. Brave is the one going in that direction, its ad blocker is built-in.
> Also they just need to start delivering YouTube player as a wasm binary blob.
I eagerly await the day someone smarter than me creates an AI ad blocker capable of filtering ads, brands, anything really from audio and video streams. Imagine watching a sporting event and the AI just kills all those field perimeter ads. Awesome.
The endgame here is adblockers that spoof ad views and even sometimes clicks rather than just blocking them. This is very very bad for google if they force adblockers to work like that. People will do it.
If YT only live streams content, content caching services will strip out the ads, and play with a delay.
Youtube will never monetise tech savvy users and should just stop trying. We only need to be slipperier than the average gazelle and the lions will never catch us.
> content caching services will strip out the ads, and play with a delay.
To achieve this, you’ll need computation, storage, and bandwidth on the scale of YouTube. Do you think whoever offers that service will do so without ads or payment?
Your whole scheme is based on hoping “kind” and knowledgeable volunteers do free labor for you. Good luck.
I for one am tech savvy and am happy to pay $20 for the ad free service. Pretty reasonable trade if you ask me.
If you play with a delay, then why would you need any more storage than what is required to play a single video?
Personally I would not pay any amount to Google, as I believe it is unethical to support such a company. Google has a monopoly in several markets, to the point of being an unavoidable part of our lives.
No single company should have that much power. Especially since due to its nature as a for-profit corporation, Google's interests are at odds with yours.
I have a great solution in that case - just block all Google's services and don't use them. Just don't complain when more and more IT news publications put up a paywall, because ad revenue isn't enough to pay your salary.
As for myself - most of my subscription price goes to the creators and I'm happy with that.
I don't need massive amounts of compute, storage, or bandwidth to run an app on my PC that "watches" the video and does those things offline, so I can watch the whole thing later without ads.
It already exists for twitch, check out TTV LOL. And you can host your own proxies too. Underestimating the sophistication of adblocking is foolish, people understand well that spending time to save time watching ads is worth it.
Now that I think about it, they could implement timeline skipping support on the server. Select a time, the server alters your personal livestream and can still inject ads at any moment
Right now it will tell you what the ads are. So, if the video is played on a delay, it can remove ads, even baked into the video.
And, coming up in foundation models right now, it can remake videos to remove ads entirely, making a new video with just the content. Perhaps it'll be a feature of the RTX 6090. I bet the hallucinations will be hilarious.
Or, the businesses realize what's going on and they stop buying ads from Google, since nobody sees them anyway, and Google makes less money. Google isn't holding all the cards like they might think, here.
Still has ads hardcoded in videos. Still has Google surveillance capitalism. Still sends other people videos for free which means you're paying for the privilege of segmenting yourself into the upper echelons of the market where the people with disposable income are, driving the value of your attention up and making them want to advertise to you even more.
Netflix should also block movies with product placement. /s
On a more serious note, that would be google editorializing the content which I don't want. If a channel is advertising their upcoming tour, or advertising Patreon or Nebula, should google block them too? Do you want google's content policy to prevent users from mentioning or showing any product?
You're free to only watch creators that don't put ads in their videos you know.
> Netflix should also block movies with product placement.
Absolutely.
One day someone much smarter than me will create an AI ad blocker that removes that sort of thing in real time.
> On a more serious note, that would be google editorializing the content which I don't want.
Have users collectively catalogue segments of the videos then. Pretty much what Sponsor Block does. I'm sure the highly paid engineers at Google can figure it out.
> If a channel is advertising their upcoming tour, or advertising Patreon or Nebula, should google block them too?
I don't consider those things advertising. I think they're just information. If I'm watching a video from a creator whose work I enjoy, I want to know where to find more stuff.
Getting paid deals from third parties and advertising their products on your video is a completely different matter. I didn't open the video to watch that.
> You're free to only watch creators that don't put ads in their videos you know.
God people repeat this like it's a mantra.
I'm free to do any number of things. Including blocking the segments I don't like and watching only the parts I care about. Why can't people accept that?
Besides, it's not like the videos come with a warning that tells you you're gonna be advertised to. The transition to the ad is abrupt and sudden on purpose so you can't even react.
> We should check with you what you consider an ad or not
Hey, if you consider someone's patreon to be advertising, feel free to block all of it. You'll get no opposition from me.
> You’re the one wanting to take that freedom from others.
Not at all. I just defend myself when others try to take away my freedom. It's honestly offensive to me that Google even thinks they can use my computer to show me ads. It's my computer and I decide what is or isn't shown.
This thread is about Google or Netflix blocking in-video/in-movie ads. It's a freedom to experience a creative expression in the way its creator made it. Should Netflix just never air Barbie or Transformers or LEGO movie because they are basically just one big ad? Should Google or Netflix even be in the business of deciding which part of a movie or an uploaded video is an ad or a sponsorship or monetize-able? matheusmoreira is suggesting they check with him first and he can decide which part should be blocked and which is ok.
What if you have a product placement for jack daniels because the character in your movie is the type of character that will chug jack. Should it be up to Netflix to decide "umm, no, this character now drinks Mack Lanyals" who cares what the film maker made?
My bad, I've misread his post. I don't agree with his idea of having Google block those segments, because as you've made clear, choosing what part of a video counts as an ad is very subjective.
However, the alternative isn't watching unsponsored videos, it's using SponsorBlock to block the parts that you don't want (or just skipping ahead).
It's up to the viewer to decide what part of a video they don't want to watch, and there's a reason Netflix has a 'skip intro' button: it's annoying, repetitive, and takes you out of the story the video creator is trying to tell.
You and I may not consider a 5 second ad for jack daniels obnoxious, but some people do, and they should be able to skip ahead, instead of only watching content without these ads like you suggest.
They were illegal then too. Just not as well enforced. Paying for a VPN is where a lot of people dropped off, and while streaming pirate sites are a thing, most people don't realize that search engines that aren't in the US are a thing, and so them not showing up easily on Google or Bing means they may as well not exist.
Just means my fmovies streams don't get so bogged down with too many simultaneous viewers.
What screws are really being turned though? This content is still available completely free of charge to anyone with an internet connection. You just need to watch a couple of ads if you're not willing to pay.
The problem is you can't just tape the shows and fast forward through the ads etc, or at least that's the direction things are going, it's a very very bad precedent.
How do you suggest creators are paid and infrastructure is maintained in your ideal world? And don't say people will donate because we all know that's BS.
In my ideal world? Taxes mostly I'd guess, the infra to share videos should be considered a public utility, much like libraries. Practically speaking I might be willing to pay google if there was more transparency about how much of my money actually goes to creators vs how much of it goes to google, and especially I would like to be able to chose to watch unmonetized videos only. Happily paying for Nebula and some patreons though.
"I might be willing to pay google if there was more transparency about how much of my money actually goes to creators vs how much of it goes to google"
That would be a major step forward, akin to old Bandcamp.
Google and Cloudflare pretty much rules at least 98% of the internet. If they don't want you to see something, then you won't see it.
Welcome to this brave new world. Though to be fair, it didn't start now. But in the past years people were cheering for the random blocks and removals.
The article seems to concentrate on adblockers mostly, but it is even more interesting which news, topics and conversations (etc) reach you, and which ones are not. Google wanting you to see ads isn't too surprising. Google not wanting you to see reporting not fitting their agenda (even if you watch all ads coming with it) is much more interesting.
How can Cloudflare prevent content from being seen? If they stop providing CDN support for a given service, there are plenty of other CDNs - the content is just as accessible to consumers if provided via a different CDN.
By contrast, if Google delists something from search results, it becomes much harder to discover - and thus, to be consumed (by the average moderately-motivated customer, not to the dedicated person willing to navigate directly to a domain)
Oh, Cloudflare is much more than CDN. Their DNS routing, internet backbone and DDoS protection has much more powerful effect. Most of the internet traffic touches them one way or another (random internet stats say close to 80%). Sure, you can switch CDN, but most of the world will be able to access your site through IP address only, and/or the site will be DDoS'd in a matter of minutes if CF hints that you are the "bad guy du jour".
(Do you remember, like 3 or 4 years ago when CF CEO was bragging all over the internet with "oh, today I woke up, and decided to kick off x and y from the internet, lol"? And he really did. It still happens, but without the bragging)
TIL, thank you! Yup, DNS delisting would be an even greater impact than Google delisting.
> Do you remember, like 3 or 4 years ago when CF CEO was bragging all over the internet with "oh, today I woke up, and decided to kick off x and y from the internet, lol"?
I do not! And if I did, I would have had a much better idea what you were talking about :)
It's amazing to me how Google is allowed to control every side of the market with no real repercussions.
I don't want to be the cynic who says Google has been paying lots of money to "the right people" in order to keep the status quo, but.. Google has been paying lots of money..
That might be a moderate huge win for Firefox.. until someone at Google makes a phone call to Mozilla's offices.
Worst case scenario it helps me consume less YT videos which would be a huge win for me.
I don't disagree with YT attempting to show me ads, but I have control of my computer, and if I can direct my computer not to show them to me, I will.
I simply won't tolerate ads for any reason. I find the experience user hostile. So I'm always going to adopt some path that delivers me content without ads. And in choosing which path to adopt, I will always choose the least costly. Right now that's free. If in the future google successfully blocks in-browser ad blockers, I will either pay for YT premium or a third party service that downloads and delivers the content without ads, whichever is cheaper.
So what you're saying is that I, someone that makes woodworking videos on YouTube, have to accept you getting my videos without compensation.
Because I, not you, choose to host them on YouTube and give Google about half of revenue from ads. And now because I chose YouTube - you feel that it's OK for you to screw me...
This is the level of entitlement I will never accept.
My personal solution to this is that I subscribe to a few patreons. I do want creators I appreciate to be paid and get to create more good things. I'm not willing to tolerate annoyance, and I'm not willing to play the cable tv game.
I read an article about how Ticketmaster has a kickback scheme with artists, where artists price their tickets low, ticketmaster charges big fees, and kicks them back to the artists, so ticketmaster is a hired bad guy and the artists looks good.
I get that you might not want to get a CDN for your content, and manage your users' ux yourself. But when you pick youtube to distribute your stuff, you getting dinged when folks circumvent youtube's annoyance engine is just collateral damage, and you're going to have to accept some percentage of folks doing that in exchange for utilizing YT and mentally checking out.
In addition, I have a very hard time feeling like I'm screwing you when all I'm doing is requesting a webpage, and instructing my browser to render half of the delivered information. If they sold gasoline for $1 off but you had to watch a bunch of ads on their little screen, are you 'screwing' them by sitting in your car while they play?
I don't even feel bad about the hypothetical future where I pay some third party site that scrapes youtube and resells their stuff ad-free for less than a youtube premium subscription, because it puts a practical limit on youtube's ability to inflate the cost. The higher the cost, the more lucrative it is to sell a slightly cheaper alternative. I may pay for YT premium, but I'll always support the existence of a competing black market because of the pressure it exerts.
When it becomes not viable, I suppose I and everyone else will do something else, but for now I sleep well at night.
This is exactly how I feel with the exception of paying for YouTube premium. If I am ever unable to watch stupid videos on YouTube without seeing ads, I won't watch on YouTube.
They are creating a reason to black market a free product and I find it hilarious how quickly the market is responding to that demand.
I think it's reasonable to be frustrated with a free-then-not-so-free bait-and-switch [1]. Ads in YouTube used to be fairly unobtrusive bottom banners or one-off pre-roll spots. But they've gotten longer and more intrusive since. It's understandable for a business to need to make money. But there will absolutely be pushback if they do so by offering something great "for free" then ratcheting up the cost over time. People appreciate honest pricing and setting expectations properly from the get-go, but that goes against the Silicon Valley playbook of growth-at-all-costs-and-monetize-later.
I don't know, people tend to be multidimensional and complex. I'll talk to my therapist.
> Why are so many people feel entitled to YT videos without ads?
I only can talk for myself, but I don't feel entitled. I apply the same level of morality when dealing with these juggernaut companies as they apply it when dealing with me, which is: None.
YouTube with ~20% market share is amazing, YouTube with ~90% market share is a cancer to society.
Either way I don't care about YouTube, Google or any of these people. I DO care they have an insurmountable amount of power over the Internet.
And yes, you are entitled. You've just rationalized it in a way that doesn't cause any cognitive dissonance.
I make woodworking videos on YouTube. The majority of ad revenue hits my account. Just because "you feel" like you're screwing Google, doesn't mean it's true. You're actually screwing people like me.
I'm one. I'm not a giant corporation. Yet people like you like to pretend that blocking ads on YouTube is an FU to the big guy, when it's quite the opposite.(we're talking YouTube ads specifically here)
But at the same time, Google is not entitled to dictate how my user agent renders a page, locally, on my own computer.
I'd have no problem if google just inject ads directly into the video streams. ( by which time, equally I'm entitled to configure my own video player to skip whichever frames I want )
Well, they are entitled to code the page how they'd like, provided it's not anything that meets criminal standards for malware.
And if they do start putting ads in video streams then I will likely be writing them off for dead just like I did months ago with Reddit. Til then I'll be using the various moles that still haven't been whacked (there's a good few) and not suffering through the experience. If they think they're getting a dime from me with the agenda they push, just because the creators I want to see don't have time to post across the variety of platforms (yet), they can get their heads examined.
> they are entitled to code the page how they'd like
Yeah, and as the owners of the computers we are entitled to alter or even delete that code as we see fit. They should pray we do not alter it further.
> provided it's not anything that meets criminal standards for malware
Google spies on us. Pretty much everything Google ships is malware since spyware is malware by definition. I also consider anything that so much as tries to circumvent uBlock Origin to be malware.
> And if they do start putting ads in video streams then I will likely be writing them off for dead just like I did months ago with Reddit.
Well... I'm a creator. I choose to post to YouTube with a reasonable expectation that you're either a YouTube Premium subscriber or will produce ad revenue.
None of that entitles you to see my work on your terms, no matter how (insert rant about evil corporate overlords)
Yet here you all are, making any and all excuses for your obvious entitlement.
You should instead have a reasonable expectation that some percentage of people will and some percentage of people won't, because that's the world you live in.
You work with youtube to deliver a box of files to people's houses free of charge, with the expectation that folks will view every file in the box. Do you think it's reasonable to believe or expect that folks won't throw the annoying ones over their shoulder?
> Why are so many people feel entitled to YT videos without ads?
I don't feel entitled to them, but I do feel entitled to control what code is run and what content is shown on systems I own. I don't like watching ads, so as long as I can do it without onerous effort on my part, I will block them. Ultimately, if Youtube doesn't want me messing with the bytes they sent me, they shouldn't send them to me at all.
Nobody is "consuming" any "YouTube videos". I couldn't care less about YouTube. It is just an intermediary to content that I would enjoy if it was published on any other website. More often than not, YouTube gets in the way instead of helping, too: hiding notifications and new publications, exposing my favourite creators to abuse through comments, financially and legally abusing them themselves with crappy copyright practices (e.g. video taken down because someone DMCA'd based on static noise, or video demonetized because it is political or mentions a curse word, etc.), directing my attention away from them by their awful recommendations (recommendations which are horrid in and of themselves and provide even less value as days go by), and so on, and so on...
And then, it is not like paying and ad block are mutually exclusive. I do actually pay for YouTube because I don't want the ads on my living room TV, but I have many devices with many browsers and I don't want to log in on all of those. For example I have a Chromium profile dedicated to shopping, on which I deliberately don't log in to any Google or other services, because, among other reasons, if I did, all my YouTube recommendations would be product reviews. And then, many apps of YouTube are just plain unpleasant, so on my main phone I use NewPipe, despite being logged into YouTube as a paying premium user.
So, just because I don't want to log in on every device and browser combo, and prefer alternative apps, am I supposed to see the ads, which I pay to not see? Just because a website I couldn't care less about needs to make money off the backs of people whose work I like, all the while abusing them deeply and causing them to burn out?
And I am not even beginning about how godawful YouTube ads are. Not a decade ago YouTube was liberally allowing Musical.ly ads in which half naked underage girls were dancing suggestively and getting explicitly objectified on nearly every video. And now _most_ of these ads are scams, disgusting politics, more scams, get rich quick schemes, and other godawful things. At least on TV the ads don't threaten your mental health. Why would I support a business as filthy as this? Just for the privilege of _sometimes_ being spared from it.
> It is just an intermediary to content that I would enjoy if it was published on any other website.
Then go to those other websites.
This argument is akin to saying that I will disregard any FOSS license terms of any code posted to GitHub, because I hate Microsoft.
> And then, it is not like paying and ad block are mutually exclusive.
Content creators get a bigger cut from subscriber views, than from ad-supported views. So you are absolutely shortchanging the people who create content for you on YouTube.
> needs to make money off the backs of people whose work I like
I create videos and I choose YouTube to distribute them. So do many others... It's definitely not your call where to post my or their videos. And spare me the "I'm actually doing this for them", when you're actively trying to stop their ability to earn money through ads.
1. These corporations are so user-hostile, hypocritical, and scummy that I derive a small bit of enjoyment from the pennies I cost them when I pirate their stuff.
2. The overwhelming majority of content on youtube isn't worth paying $15/mo for.
I grew up in the 90s when "Information wants to be free" and "fuck corporations" were still part of the mainstream zeitgeist, and I guess I still carry a bit of that with me today.
Especially with their censorship campaigns underway. How many got demonetized or blocked for suggesting COVID may have been a lab leak, right on up until Jon Stewart said the same thing on Colbert's show? How many had the same situation over vaccines with myocarditis, right on up until (and maybe since even) Pfizer released data about the incidence of it as a side effect? And how many videos have been actively taken down that dare to tell the truth about what's going on in Gaza?
We KNOW Google takes its marching orders from the 3 letter agencies, thanks to Ed Snowden. Why anyone would shed a tear for them losing ad revenue is beyond me. Do I wish the creators would move to Rumble? Yes, and many for whom it is a sensitive matter do, actively. In the meantime though, I'm not going to stop watching; I'll just keep blocking, because no matter how much they want to persist in this little game, they're never going to whack more than 90% of the moles.
I'd never heard of Rumble, so I googled it (how ironic!) and the results page included a sublink of whatever is trending, which was a video called "The Commie Left Is Melting Down (Ep. 2121)"
So yeah, no thanks, I'm not interested in your alt-right echo chamber.
I post my own videos on YouTube, so I'm pretty sure that you're not pirating anything owned by Google when you screw individual creators.
Now tell me how noble you are, when you do everything in your power to reduce income from ads for these "fatcats"(Like the evil ServeTheHome or Stumpy Nubs Woodworking)
Well, the way Google sees it (and other media companies) I'm pirating because I'm not watching ads.
>I post my own videos on YouTube
Me too, or at least I used to several years ago. I don't monetize my videos, though. I'm not a "youtuber", just a guy who posted some videos for il2 sturmovik.
>Now tell me how noble you are
You're pretty high up on that horse there, pal. I never claimed to be noble, I just don't like Google.
> Why are so many people feel entitled to YT videos without ads?
No one's "feeling entitled" to anything. They're the ones who send us free videos. No reason not to accept.
If anyone's "feeling entitled" here it's them. To our attention. We're not actually obligated to look at the noise they sent along with the video. It's that simple.
Too many advertisements are low quality garbage (fraud, scams, soft porn, malware, FOMO, etc.) designed to target susceptible individuals. For those of us with vulnerable family members, it's not worth the anxiety. I don't even trust myself to not fall victim.
Additionally, it's not the user's fault that advertisements have become a security threat, a significant visual nuisance, and now an environmental issue [1].
Probably the bait and switch. Fire up an ad free platform, drum up a viewer and creator base to undermine competitor sites (remember Vimeo?), and once they're all irrelevant or outright gone, start pulling this crap? Yea, people will be annoyed. At least until the content creators get smart, and start posting their content across the various alternatives that have been popping up since YouTube has become a cesspool, such as Rumble, Bitchute, or Odysee.
I don't see a reason to be too upset about this all though; it doesn't take much to still block these ads, and meanwhile, this is going to just help motivate creators to finally do the smart thing and move to the less abusive platforms.
Regarding YouTube specifically: bandwidth is still an issue. It's nontrivial to stand up a service that can provide storage and reliable streaming of video, and the costs impact directly upon the provider. So it's an ecosystem where competition is risky (and if someone succeeds too well, Alphabet can just buy and squash them).
The "call" could be when their deal with Mozilla is up for renewal or just a chat during some private family together. Let's not forget most of these people know each other personally. In SF it's actually a much smaller World than it sometimes seems.
Google has been fighting lawsuits like this for a reasonable long time, they are careful but also confident in their abilities to make them toothless and/or defeat them. As of right now nothing of substance made them not do anything important for them.
The ads on Youtube have really become unbearable though.
I tried to watch a podcast on my tablet, while I was preparing dinner using bluetooth headphones and couldn't readily skip ads or fast forward the video. I was subjected to at least 3 youtube ads and maybe an equal amount of ads from the youtuber themselves it was absurd.
Even if I were to pay for an add-free youtube experience, it only culls half the ads in that case!
I feel like Google shot themselves in the foot a long time ago on this front. This is all based on my experience, I sometimes follow along with some cooking YT videos to try new things, for awhile the ads were not that bad usually a couple 5-15s ads at the beginning and maybe some in the middle for a longer video. I would say a few years back they totally killed that for me because multiple times I would get hour long ads advertising the first episode of some show coming out, sure I could skip it but as I was actively cooking this meant I had to wash my hands to click the skip ads button which made for an extremely frustrating experience. The worst part is clicking skip ads didn't seem to exempt me from seeing hour long ads later in the video. Needless to say between that and getting 4+ ad blocks in a 5 minute video pushed me to just block ads on devices I can and not watch videos on devices I can't.
For me what all of this is going to do is change how I consume videos. Not all content creators do this but I would much rather use YouTube with ads as a sample of the content you're creating and then pay you some percentage of the money I would use to pay for YT Premium for access to your videos outside of YouTube.
Same. I personally end up enjoying those user-hostile changes when they happen because they almost always result in my own time spent on those platforms decreasing.
I've basically left Twitter after recent changes. Reddit is down to a fraction of what used to be a couple years ago (too aggressive on mobile, I just give up reading it).
YouTube was one thing that I used a lot, not always for productive or educational videos. I'll probably just watch a YouTube video from now on when it is really something interesting. Which is good.
Ever since Youtube killed Vanced a few months ago, I've pretty much reduced my time on that web site to NFL Sunday Ticket. If it becomes impossible to watch that without disabling an adblocker, I'll cancel it, save about $450 or so a year and find other ways to watch the Ravens in Philly like I used to do when Sunday Ticket was exclusive to DirecTV.
I think it would be better if they made the video author choose the ad points in their video rather than having it happen automatically. Maybe it gets bypassed if you move forward in the video or whatever. But its the ad just fires off in the middle of sentence or something that is crazy annoying.
Do they not do that? I remember watching one or two videogamedunkey videos that included ads and he specifically scripted the video around when they would appear.
I think the creator can do that, so some use it creatively. Otherwise, the algorithm seems to pick the "most rewatched" places, so the most interesting part of the video will be interrupted by an ad, regardless of how jarring it is for the viewer.
I think sadly there are no good solutions here. YouTube did a very very good job of hosting videos for everyone, and for a long long time didn't care about adblock or ytdl. All that might be fine if relatively few people used it (hence ytdl type tools were cli only and not some flashy GUI). But the usage of adblockers is rising (for all the good reasons, modern web with ads is horrible), so YouTube needs to do this at some point. They can't wait till adblocker usage is >50% since then it would be near impossible. YouTube premium exists, and is very good value. And hosting videos is really expensive, e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/15/22979126/vimeo-patreon-cr....
Sadly what might happen in the end in the far future is youtube usable only with a login and with some kind of a subscription/one off transfer or ads. Some kind of netflix type solution, which is worse for everyone but hard to complain about.
YouTube is an addiction for me and this crackdown has been very helpful for me to break the addiction. Youtube has gotten worse since the algorithm went from rewarding short content to rewarding long content so there has been a flood of mediocre content - at least it's not facebook. Eventually I'll set up an auto-download system for the few shows I already like and am already a patreon for.
YouTube may have peaked as the outstanding source of impressively high quality content on a very wide range of topics about 3-5 weeks ago; possibly with Horses' guide on surviving in a desert island. It's still so, so good.
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I remember a film of Salvador Dali talking to a cheering crowd and saying in full dictator voice "... in the future... toilet bowls will be made of gold..." (roaring crowd). That's what's happened to the internet at large.
i was a YouTube Premium subscriber ever since i was grandfathered in with the closure of Play Music up until last month. every single new feature worsened my experience until i couldn't take it anymore and cancelled. i gave feedback with every new feature and trial but i never got a reply and things just kept getting worse and worse. the worst offenders:
* forcing Music content in my YouTube feeds -- i use YouTube solely for videos and Music for music. even so, i would say around 1/2 of the items on my YouTube feed are music and useless playlists. you cannot turn this off
* forcing Shorts down my throat -- i'm sure their numbers shows huge engagement numbers with Shorts but it's the exact opposite kind of content i use YouTube for. i watch longer-form videos, not short form clips. they show up in my feed, in my search results, and i'm pretty sure one time i was A/B'd into the app launching into Shorts by default. you cannot turn this off
* Search is abysmally bad -- for each query, it will return 2 or 3 videos maybe possibly related to all synonyms of all the words in my query OR'd together, followed by unrelated Shorts, followed by completely unrelated videos i've already watched, followed by completely unrelated videos with inappropriate clickbait thumbnails, and on and on and on. you cannot turn this off
* did i mention they were forcing Shorts down my throat? because the straw that broke the camel's back was when they informed me that they were introducing Music Shorts. as if the playlistification of music listening turning music into muzak weren't bad enough, now we have Shorts which incentivize yet another race-to-the-bottom for music. i understand my music listening preferences do not match those of the masses, but there's no way i can turn it off.
for those reason and plenty more i don't feel like typing out, google can lick my asshole. adblock forever.
I'm fine with them blocking adblockers now that they offer a no-ad paid tier. I think it's likely healthy for consumers to know they have to pay one way or another.
What I'm really curious about though is whether competitors can do the same - can a YouTube rival today launch with anti-adblockers and a paid tier and compete? This might be a barrier to entry that's too high for your day to day consumers, especially for a new platform. I'm not sure what the solution is here (aside from kickstarting with VC funded free tiers and pivoting later once users are hooked, which feels bad), but I hope at the very least that the general population adjusts to this "ad or paid" future that we seem to be heading in.
Google could go further. The next step is listening on the microphone to make sure the audio from the ad is coming out. Then using the user's camera to pause an ad if the user isn't looking at it.
Living in Russia does have its benefits — since YouTube premium isn't available, and no ads are shown to Russian users anyway, I only watch this unfold from afar without experiencing it first-hand.
Honestly this wouldn't be an issue if youtube's ads weren't such a completely offensive and miserable experience.
When they first started pushing ad-free subscriptions to youtube I first noticed the ads got EXTREMELY aggressive and over time seem to not really have got better, only worse. Skip around the video too much? Ad. Skip too many in a row? Congrats, now you have a long-form unskippable ad. I haven't been bothered to measure it but you can't really watch much more than a minute of youtube without being served obnoxious ads. The user experience is terrible and it felt so much that I was being harassed into buying a subscription that I resolved to never do so. Adblockers are a logical response to such hostile behavior towards users.
I think the worst part is how poorly curated they are. It's not an advert when your playlist is interrupted by 'ads' that go from several minutes to several hours long, meaning you always have to be aware of when to skip them.
I like to leave YT stuff on in the background and it's amazingly disruptive when it's interrupted by 30 minutes of some shitty mumble rap music video/ad, or some obscure London mayoral candidate delivering an 8 minute long speech.
The ads are terrible. I've gotten a bunch of gross out sorta visual ads... who oked that? Also a bunch of really weird conspiracy theory type products. Like dude a hat that protects me from "brain fuzz" because it has effect on EM or something ... wtf?
Having said that it's easy to complain about how terrible they are but I don't think the ads sucking is as much an issue as that people just don't like ads... don't want to pay.
I have an ad blocker and it didn't stop me, but I got 2/3rds of the way down the page before it stopped me and said I had to join to read the rest. Basically the same sort of tactics that they're complaining about Youtube using.
Just know this, and it becomes somewhat clear in this article.
Adblock Plus is a SCAM! Their founder (or key person, not remember) made his money with scam "free SMS (texts)" websites and has a very shady past. They invented their "acceptable ads" that are ENABLED BY DEFAULT, were totally silent about the fact that they basically blackmailed advertisers to let them pay money to get on their whitelist and scam users into this "acceptable ads" scam BY DEFAULT and show them ads.
Acceptable ads are the WORST ads, that are the ads that flow with the text, that are not obtrusive and not as annoying and therefore the most effective ads actually for me, I would say.
Like they said, Google paid them back in the days to get on their whitelist, they were eventually forced to make their shady backroom deals public and do this shit in the open.
DO NOT USE Adblock Plus ever, even if it has a checkbox to block all ads, they operate an adblocker to make money by showing people ads, you can not make this shit up. Most disgusting scam. Use uBlock Origin. Or use Brave, but they are not up to speed with the current YT thing, but their adblocker is written in Rust I think and based/inspired by UBO. Would be interesting to know if it also suffers from this "mistake" that unloaded tabs let requests go through while UBO is loading that happens in Chrome but not in Firefox. I guess not as it's integrated at the core of the browser.
I pay for YouTube. Although they jacked up price from $9.99 to $17.99 with 0 difference in offering.
I know the latest cool post pandemic is to keep on jacking up price until you see churn but that really rubbed me off.
It felt very fuck-you-pay-me!
Google has a huge monopoly and I’m sure they can double the price without losing much customers since they’re the big game in town.
Unfortunately I ended up cancelling Netflix and Disney to make up for it.
Perhaps this is the game they’re all playing. I only got a fixed dollars per month to spend on entertainment and each one wants to get it all at the loss of others.
Not really related, but one can always use a VPN with exit node in Russia instead of ad blocker. It still puzzles me what was their motivation to disable ads in Russia after the conflict began.
It's their toy and they can pick it up and go home with it (i.e. Google and Youtube). Network TV got so annoyingly ad infested that I gave up on it in 1998 or so, never to return. Others soldiered on with record-and-then-clip solutions (TiVO).
Record-and-clip would work with Youtube too. The adblocker "watches" the whole video, ads and all, and then when it has enough buffered up plays back the clipped version to you. Traditionally this would be defeated by wiring the ads into the content so seamlessly that the blocker can't find them automatically. But here, Google already has the next thing up their sleave, the WEI thing, whereby they can just deny service altogether that is not an approved, unmodified web browser.
My personal tolerance threshold is watching about 30 seconds of preroll ads. But when the midroll ads come in every few minutes, I'm getting close to the "quit network TV" thing again.
Of course back then there was Pay TV, and now there is Youtube subscription. Some will find it worth paying for it, others will just walk away and maybe their lives will be better for it.
I was watching some free Tubi programming (on someone's smart TV) and they seem to do really well with ad placement. More at the beginning and end and the midway ads seem to come at good pause points for a bit longer but less frequent interruptions. I ended up watching quite a bit, taking bathroom breaks or getting drinks the old fashioned way. Their content unlike Netflix isn't the most popular titles which most everyone's already seen, but lesser known but still a curiosity to someone like me.
The idea of a company forcing me to watch something that I don't want to watch, and telling me what software can or cannot run in my own computer goes well beyond 1984 and all those dystopias.
I think everyone should pay for Youtube Premium, there should be no free tiers. And we should ban sponsorship too, a creator should be banned if the content is sponsored. It lowers the quality of the content, the user experience and, worse imo, introduces biasis and conflict of interests. Also mandatoring a paid plan could help get rid of all those scam bots.
Also creators could get paid more if everyone was a Premium user.
There is no free lunch. At some point you have to pay people for their work. Not paying is slavery. Either pay with your attention span or pay with money to get an adless experience.
The Premium plan gives you more features (and a music streaming that would cost you 10$ in and of itself if you were to use another music streaming service).
I'd be totally willing to pay for premium if it also stripped out sponsor spots, patreon begs, etc.
I paid for curiosity stream and nebula this year, and every time I watch a video over on nebula I'm reminded how awesome it is to watch content without sponsor spots or begs. I have UBO and sponsor block installed, but frankly if those stop working I may just mostly give up on youtube entirely.
I agree in that YouTube is definitely worth a subscription.
It has often been deplored that you can't customize the home page enough - but to be fair seeing how they have to please literally the entire world at once - they are doing pretty good. I mean YouTube is really easy and enjoyable to use for me on AppleTV and desktop.
The main issue I have with YouTube is you can't rely on any videos to be there at any time in the future. Videos routinely get taken off and without a service like 'RecoverMy.Video' you wouldn't even know what videos got removed.
In terms of price - I am a bit miffed that my 7 € Premium Lite was forcibly ended by them. Now I see that they added a "student" option for the same price so I guess... sucks for me, but hooray for students.
I think paying 12 € for YouTube is still reasonable.
Come to think of it I haven't really watched streaming on YT yet - I am mostly using Twitch - but it would be cool if they added a free sub in the price - kinda like Amazon Prime - that you can hand over to a streamer on YT.
Now if they could have a gaming focused client kinda like Twitch and get some more traction, my YT sub would definitely feel more valuable. The Twitch client is such a piece of crap on AppleTV now, I have lost all enjoyment using it and I can't wait to move over to some other service.
Same. I keep seeing the discourse recently and it’s all framed as if only two options exist:
People can use ad blockers, or Google can block them and annoy people.
There is a very good third option for people: pay for the (expensive due to bandwidth) service you’re using and you see no ads. And Google won’t block it because it’s encouraged as the solution to this exact issue.
The level of “I should get everything for free with no ads” entitlement is only getting worse.
I get the ads suck and many sites have an unreasonable level of them. But if the only two options are give everything away for free or put everything behind a paywall, the internet as everyone knows it is dead.
Same here. I pay for YT Premium. I never knew this war was waging on. You click a video and it starts playing.
A few days ago someone wanted to show me a video on their iPad. The video was ~10 mins long. We had to watch 2 pre-roll ads, and 2 mid-roll ads. After the second mid-roll ad I asked if this is normal. She said "of course it is, what do you mean?" as if I was living on another planet. But I had been paying for YT Premium for so long I had actually forgotten how bad it was and it seems to have gotten worse.
Although, the price of YT premium just went up again (I think this is the 3rd or 4th price hike in a handful of years. At the new pricepoint I could subscribe to 2-3 streaming services, and YT videos are not worth that in my opinion.
I also have noticed the algorithm and/or content on YouTube has not been as interesting or engaging to me as it once was. There is also a huge push to shorts, which seems to be a loop of the same small collection of creators. So I may consider cancelling my subscription soon and just minimizing my time on YouTube.
So one thing I am curious about -- as someone who pays for YouTube but doesn't use an ad blocker -- is what the experience is for people who do both [since ads are on places besides YouTube].
Do you get blocked from the service you're paying for, or do you not even notice the ongoing war?
I wouldn't mind the ads if the amount were reasonable, which was the case maybe even as recently as a year ago. But having a 30 second ad before a 5 second meme video is beyond ridiculous.
While I don't think the price of premium is too high, I'll never ever actively give Google even a single cent. One forever blocked Google account and too many killed services have burned that bridge for me.
I'm inclined to agree. The whole internet discussion about this topic and even "eshitification" has boiled down to "I want it for free and I don't want to pay."
Meanwhile users are happy to jump to the next free thing starting the whole cycle again, until it wants to get paid for.
The web kinda stinks in ways, but users don't want to pay either... so want ends up being the product?
That's a very slanted and bad faith interpretation of the discussion.
Enshittification is about companies running all other competition out of the market with their free service, then once they've secured their near monopoly, they clamp down with increasingly user hostile changes and act like it's unreasonable that people don't want to pay for the product whose "selling" point was that it was effectively free.
This argument is even more stark when considering that YouTube has just been burning goodwill from everyone and coasting on its weight for many years now.
The success of Patreon style models is also a pretty clear indicator that people are willing to pay for things they like as long as they aren't being dragged through a bait-and-switch.
Enshittification is a term and it gets thrown about like crazy these days / it's losing meaning as quickly as it came about. I'm seeing it all over this story.
The patreon model has a lot of limits that would make it unusable for something like Youtube / creators who don't gather a regular large audience and so on. I think the people who give via a patreon model is a very very small % of the userbase too.
The patreon model works pretty well for creators, far more reliable than YouTube ads since it provides a stable income with the ability for the creator to control expectations.
YouTube ads are not a sustainable source of income, as YouTube can demonetize or allow a copyright claim to steal away the fruits of your labor with no meaningful recourse. On top of that, ad revenue largely relies on a constant stream of uploads which favor the whims the current iteration of the recommendation algorithm.
As for being a means of funding a video host, sure, a patreon style model might not be sustainable, but the point was that people are willing to pay for a service if the payment is earned rather than coerced through bait and switch tactics.
Put differently, at this point I will insist on consuming YouTube without paying for it and without watching ads in any way possible. If a similar service (but paid) were to pop up where the creators I'm interested in were to move to, I'd happily move over, just as I switched to Kagi as soon as I confirmed that it was good enough for my purposes.
> People can use ad blockers, or Google can block them and annoy people.
Thing is, we're still getting ads because AG1, NordVPN, Guardio and similar services/products of questionable nature keep throwing tens of thousands of dollars at youtubers to insert 1-2 minutes of sponsor blocks.
> There is a very good third option for people: pay for the (expensive due to bandwidth) service you’re using and you see no ads.
So you pay, and yet you still pay twice because the data on what you watch ends up in Google's Big Data profiling/targeting infrastructure to determine what kind of ads you'll get shown across the internet.
It's not that hard, I see very few in-line ads on the channels I watch. There are a few channels that do it, but it's a tiny minority of my subscriptions. (Rob Scallon is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but he's worth it :) )
Alphabet profited nearly USD 20 billion last quarter. Not revenue; net profit.
I'm pretty sure they can afford airing less ads per video watched without any damage to their bottomline. So… sorry, but there's a third, better way. The problem is: it doesn't work in a late capitalist environment where Google/Alphabet and all public trade companies operate.
No, we had a nice middle ground for a very long time. I could use ad blockers to block most bullshit across the internet, but YT would still play an ad before a video. I might have to wait 5 seconds to skip an ad before it's finished, and maybe after doing that a couple of times, it would force me to watch a 15-second ad in full before playing the video. Hell, do that enough and you'll have to sit there for 30 seconds next time.
I could live with that. I tolerated it, happily. Right up until last week when YouTube rolled this shit out to me and said, "Nope, fuck your adblocker," and decided to show me nothing entirely.
I met them halfway, I put up with a hybrid approach for years, and they still, in spite of posting net profit, decided that wasn't enough. Nope, fuck that, I'm out - Invidious it is.
>"But if the only two options are give everything away for free or put everything behind a paywall, the internet as everyone knows it is dead."
There's also the third option, saturate the "free" version with an increasing amount of advertisements and make it user-hostile enough to entice people into paying for the "premium" version that is ad-free. Then, create multiple tiers of the premium subscription and only make the most expensive one ad free.
Google created the youtube "moat" by giving away the service for free for 15 years. In that time, an actually good, sustainable, paid video service could have emerged and everybody would be ok with it. Instead we got current Youtube, with its inescrutable algorithmic feed, content restrictions, and demonetization rules, and Google are asking us to pay for that with the argument that nothing else like it exists. Of course it doesn't, it couldn't exist since free Youtube was in the way.
But it hasn't been free for 15 years. There's been ads on YouTube since 2009 (14 years). The narrative you are trying to paint is built on an incorrect premise.
I don’t think that’s true. The Netflix model proved that a good UX is preferable, and now every media org is trying to cash in. Piracy usually gets a boom when said media orgs start optimizing for cash in exchange for UX
"Help us pay for the services we provide or don't use them"
Why is this a strange message for everyone to digest? Ads pay for the content you watch, or your subscription fee covers it. Getting mad at the ad-blocking avoidance is like getting mad you can't walk into Disney Land without a park pass.
> Why is this a strange message for everyone to digest?
Because the services were previously provided for free, and the bait-and-switch feels bad; and because the perception (admittedly inaccurate) is there is no service being provided, that the content is what is paid for (the average consumer has no conception of the costs involved in storage, transmission, recommendation, content auditing, legal compliance, etc.)
I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Even going so far as believing they have a right to free lemonade...