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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

I think Youtube's monetization does it... they want to earn cash from their guides.

Is there any money in "Youtube for Articles?"

Yes, but not as much I suspect. Blogs with some ads were the thing, but most people in tech will have an ad blocker or ad blindness, so that's not very effective.

Some people will write a book about a subject, but I suspect that's hit and miss as well.

There’s Patreon, but it really only works for people consistently writing articles (like The Digital Antiquarian/filfre.net which appears often on HN)

OTOH, YouTube now has a fairly high bar for monetization (1000 subs, 4000 public watch hours over last year)

"YouTube for Articles" used to be blogs.

YouTube for tech articles, circa late-1990s, was ZDTV / TechTV.

A format that seems to work well with non-article is {topical content} + {multiple knowledgeable hosts} + {free form talk format with some segments}.

Early-MTV, the Screen Savers, and Car Talk were all essentially this format.

Good background noise to have playing while working. And the host-host, informal interaction makes it playable for longer than a pure just-the-facts source.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=soK1_DaFym0

Medium?

I'd think there's money there, just not sure for whom.

I'm actually surprised they don't introduce unskippable ads into articles to let content producers monetize their articles. Rather than the static ads and paywalls you can have the intro paragraph visible and then a "watch to unlock article" ad. Just like youtube with their 10min requirement, Medium can make requirements like the article needs to be more than 1000 words for 2 ads or something like that. Granted, this would lead to a lot of useless fluff just like SEO has produced and pushing the meat of the content to the very end to get people through the ads. However this happens with video yet it's still popular.

See, I think people will tolerate ad breaks in video much more than e.g. full page takeovers in the middle of reading. They're used to it from cable TV, and there's the option to skip it, and an indication how long it is. And it's consistent because of Youtube's dominating position in the video market, unlike websites where every one would have a different 'takeover' format.

Are youtube ads really unskippable with youtube-dl, VLC, and other similar tools?

Much like DVD ads used to be unskippable, but only for the non-tech-savvy.

> Are youtube ads really unskippable

No. I never see ads on Youtube on my own devices, and that barely requires any effort.

I had to jailbreak my iPhone in order to not see Youtube ads. That qualifies as some (small) effort.

I use youtube.com (desktop version) in Mobile Safari and get adblocking without jailbreak.

I prefer the desktop website because it lets me watch the videos in better quality than the mobile website. m.youtube.com seems to limit the maximum bitrate and/or resolution of the videos. Did anyone else notice that?

I use Lockdown in my iPhone. It reduces the problem for now although I already see YouTube working around it some of the time.

As far as I understand it is a creative hack that use a local VPN server or something to block ads.

Can't you use Firefox with uBlock addon on an iPhone?

No, the iPhone is locked down too much for this to work. Browsers in iOS are basically just skins on Safari/WebKit.

iOS does not allow "real" alternative web browsers with their own rendering and JavaScript engines, so Firefox on iOS is forced to being little more than rebranded Safari.

Firefox on iOS does not support add-ons.

I pay for youtube premium, or red, or whatever it was called, since I was grandfathered in by google music. No ads.

You must be using the app?

Yea, I'm using the app.

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