Without advertisements, the internet would only have content worth paying for and content people want to share for reasons other than financial gain. How awful (/s).
That's the thing... people would still make free content, and since there wouldn't be as many shady ways to monetize, it would cut down on low-effort (and AI-generated) garbage. The internet would be such a better place.
We would probably lose some good stuff, or see it moved behind paywalls. That would be a shame, but I think it would be worth it.
I doubt that it would cut down on the amount of low effort garbage. The high effort non-garbage stuff is produced by professionals who have the luxury of spending a full work week's amount of time improving their craft. writers writing free content with no business model can't do that unless they have a trust fund. which, I suppose they're out there, but I doubt the number of those that are writers.
> I doubt that it would cut down on the amount of low effort garbage.
Right now the main search engine everyone uses is run by an ad company. Just getting rid of that conflict of interest would probably help to significantly weed out garbage.
Youtube didn't have ads for years. Yet there was plenty of content people uploaded with no expectation of payment. Just like the early Internet. MIT OCW and Khan Academy also pre-date YT.
As for all the high production value channels out there now, YT doesn't pay their bills, subscriptions, brand deals and merchandise do. YT is like MTV: good for exposure, the real product is sold through other channels.
I'm pretty sure ad revenue for most channels is negligible so they resort to third party sponsorships or platforms like Patreon. The advertisements are there for Google to recoup some of the cost of running YT.
not sure what your point is. let's assume it's true. That still means the ads are paying for YouTube to host the videos. Without that those channels would have to pay for hosting themselves and could not afford to make the content.
Further, most of them would have never even tried if it wasn't free to start
Then, I don't buy your premise. Most of the channels I watch insert ads directly for Brilliant, NordVPN, etc... which means even without YouTube's ads they're still ad driven
> Most of the channels I watch insert ads directly
Those are third party sponsorships done by channel owners, not ads inserted by YT.
> That still means the ads are paying for YouTube to host the videos
Your assertion was related to the channels themselves existing, not YT as a platform. I can agree that the platform probably wouldn't exist without some sort of funding source but that doesn't necessarily need to come from ads.
I don’t know if it’s still true, but at least up until relatively recently, #3 and #4 were the same thing; Nebula paid its creators in YouTube sponsorship. (i.e, if you were a Nebula creator, you got “paid” by Nebula buying sponsorships on your YouTube channel)
