YouTube will opt-in all existing videos (over 8mins) for mid-roll ads | Hacker News Reader

YouTube will opt-in all existing videos (over 8mins) for mid-roll ads

youtube.com

17 pointstimmytokyo12 comments

I've been working on mainstream media content for broadcast and streaming services heavily for the last 10 years. I figured it was only a matter of time before they did something like this. At some point, the ad dollars and need to be profitable take control.

To be honest, I think this will go over very poorly. Once content becomes inundated with ads, we tend to just move on to something less intrusive. I'm not sure if views will drop, but there's a massive economy at stake here and media is a far more fragile ecosystem than most think.

What ads?

Dont you worry, at some point google will switch to re-encoding every session in real time with hardcoded ads. Even today they dont care about cache-ability and their official player keeps refetching same data every time you decide to rewind more than 5 minutes, +video stream TTL is set to something like 60 minutes last time I checked. Btw Chrome will happily write that data (twice) as cache on your SSD, to never be used by anything ever again!

Excited for TiVo for YouTube

Is it still worth it for people to make videos on YouTube?

Is Google still sharing revenue from the ad money?

Most big channels have external sponsor/affiliate deals. Others,like AvE, instead of 'selling out' go direct patronage route and are pulling comfy >$50K/month thru donations https://graphtreon.com/creator/AvE

YouTube cannot "opt-in". That's not what "opt-in" means.

Ha, I'm responsible for this as I was insisting on scrolling over hundreds of 3-6 min soundbites to find the 1h+ concert I was after, even if Google made it nigh impossible to find in the last couple months. Seriously, we need a new (paid) music download service; Apple Music doesn't carry all the titles I want anymore, and the videos on yt are just consuming bandwidth anyway.

What’s wrong with Spotify?

Spotify and Apple Music have the same issues, sometimes opposite issues. I used Spotify for years, and switched to Apple Music out of curiosity to allow me to have better control of a curated collection of work mixed with all the music I still owned from my younger years. I listen to a far more diverse collection on Apple Music, but it's also far more difficult to discover new things and aimlessly browse. Spotify is slowly building a wall around itself. They have a lot of great original content that you can't get anywhere else. Just thoughts I had so far. That's all.

Nothing I guess. I just thought Spotify is about streaming when I really just want to buy music from artists who are less mainstream.

I don't like that I have to use their web player to listen to music. Also if their licensing deals change, the music that used to be there can disappear. I don't like that and therefore I continue to support bands via Bandcamp, from where I can download FLAC files. Unfortunately not all bands are there and some keep focusing on streaming platforms/YouTube and it's becoming harder and harder to get the music files locally.

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