You can get the exact same thing with ad blockers.
Afterall, it might be the case that non ad-based revenue is only viable once you've secured enough ad-based revenue. I hope that isn't the case though.
Youtube also has a subscription similar to Patreon, available only to larger creators and they take 30% off that, according to [2]. While this seems high compared to Patreon it's actually lower than Twitch that takes 50% off subscriptions.
Twitch also offer a bit system that is like a tip, and has a lower percentage.
Another datapoint is OnlyFans, used mostly for porn and takes 60%.
IMO the platforms are very distinct and their offers are fairly different. It's not a fair comparison.
[1] https://digiday.com/future-of-tv/youtube-premium-remains-sma....
[2] https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/21/17484006/channel-subscript....
For instance, see Paypal https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full
> You may not use the PayPal service for activities that:
> ...relate to transactions involving...
> ...certain sexually oriented materials or services...
And yes, I use an ad blocker. You'd be crazy not to.
Personally, I do not disagree that YouTube is worth paying for. But I have reservations because I believe their parent company (Google) already profits tremendously in morally objectionable ways. Thus, I try to avoid giving them my business as much as possible.
Unfortunately, the reality is Google (and YouTube) are practically impossible to compete with in all things data.
To play devil's advocate: you say you use adblocker (I assume you use it on sites other than YouTube) -- but why? Because the modern web is practically unbearable without it? But is there not an implicit contract when you visit a website and consume their bandwidth, that you view the ads? Are you not, in effect, stealing? Sure, advertisers don't have the right to your attention, but don't the content creators have the right to your financial support?
What about all the one-off bicycle/car maintenance videos I watch? Or a cool animation someone linked me? Or that music video from my favorite band?
> What about all the one-off bicycle/car maintenance videos I watch? Or a cool animation someone linked me? Or that music video from my favorite band?
They don't get paid! Unless, you'd like them to. :) I think it makes more sense to use adblock and deliberately give your time or money to the creators whose content you truly value. If it was a one-off video that you derived personal value from, toss them a couple bucks (Paypal, a month of Patreon) or temporarily turn off your adblock and watch a video of theirs.
If they have no outlets for you to directly give them money, it's highly likely that they don't see YouTube as a means to make money.
EDIT: Also, if it's a video from your favorite band -- dude, buy some merch already!
This would be much more reasonable if there were a frictionless way to do it. Nobody is going to take 5 minutes out of their day after each little video to support the content creator. If there was a button I could use to support them built-in to Youtube? Sure!
> If they have no outlets for you to directly give them money, it's highly likely that they don't see YouTube as a means to make money.
Or perhaps they make money from YouTube via ad impressions.
> EDIT: Also, if it's a video from your favorite band -- dude, buy some merch already!
Somehow I knew it'd get picked apart if I used the word "favorite." Obviously I've got plenty of merch! And still I'd like to support them when I listen to their music - even if minusculely.
I didn't know this before today, but apparently there is such a feature called "Applause." Although, I personally have not seen it anywhere, so not sure if it's opt-in for Youtube creators, and perhaps it is not fully rolled out yet. This does seem like it could be a good way to directly express support for Youtubers: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9632365
> Somehow I knew it'd get picked apart if I used the word "favorite." Obviously I've got plenty of merch! And still I'd like to support them when I listen to their music - even if minusculely.
Admittedly, I knew you were just giving an example and I took a cheap shot. :) Couldn't resist.
In the beginning I mostly did it to get rid of iOS YouTube ads. Now I just keep it to support channels as well. Not everyone has a patreon and I don‘t want to pay every channel membership.
The family premium plan is really fairly priced I feel like.
If I have to click a button O(n) times for n people I like, I'm just not going to do it.
"OK, then we'll offer the option to pay a small fee to support the content creators and not have to deal with ads."
"Why would I do that when ad blockers are free?"
Did you see me saying that anywhere? Are you a mind reader?
I go even further and run a VPN with pihole as its DNS server.
Ads are easy to block these days. Why not block for free instead of spraying cash here and there?
To be clear, I don't think using adblock is immortal - just that I personally like it when services offer a subscription that remove ads.
There are lots of life hacks to not spend money. I used to think it was my responsibility to pay, but honestly, if I can get away with it, why would I?
You can also go to their website and buy t-shirts, coffee cups and other merch. If you're a creator and want funds from people who block ads, promote your merch.
> "OK, then we'll offer the option to pay a small fee to support the content creators and not have to deal with ads."
To offer a counterpoint, if you're trying to protect your privacy, signing into Google to watch Youtube videos is probably not the right way to do it. Google isn't offering any guarantees that Youtube Premium data isn't used exactly the same way that any other data would be. They're still building a profile on you, and your recommendations are still tailored based on that profile.
This is also one of the big issues I have with online newspaper accounts. Part of the reason I'm blocking ads and trackers is because I don't want newspapers to track me either. I don't want somebody to be monitoring what I read. Logging into an account is counterproductive to that goal, so at best I'm going to give them money for an account and then never use it.
I pay for a Youtube Premium account at the moment, precisely because I wanted to signal that I would pay for content. But none of that subscription money is actually going to creators I watch because I never log into it. I'm just throwing money at Google for basically no reason.
Adblocking is a better option than Youtube Premium not just from a UX perspective or monetary perspective, but also if you care about privacy, because it means you can handle all of your account stuff through local RSS feeds and NewPipe on mobile, which is a significant win in the fight to stop Google from putting me into a box.
In the old times, I could just pass at the newsstand while walking to the bakery at the start of my morning, drop a few coins, pick a paper or magazine and its done ... nobody would know what parts of the paper I read, for how log I focus on particular paragraphs, which pictures grab my attention, etc. neither will the newspaper owner know who I am, keep a history of what I am reading or follow me around my other shopping to add information to my profile.
Anonymous micropayments would be a excellent approach here. AFAIK Bitcoin never intended to solve this particular problem, maybe GNU Taler may work here (better yet: it's a payment system using Euros, Dollars, etc. not a wildly-floating new currency/asset).
Even better because you can prevent google from tracking every single video you watch and linking this information into your IRL details through the payment info.
Paying Youtube for privacy is nonsense. You need to send Google more information and log in your account to get rid of the ads and then google will track the videos you watch, link this information to your real life name, CC number, phone, billing address, etc. and then allow advertisers to use this information to push you more ads on other Google services.
Just use a good ad blocker, Firefox Multi-account Containers (forcing YT to only open in a dedicated container) and Cookie AutoDelete (despite the name it handles LocalStorage too). When you close the last Youtube tab, your tracks will be erased and the next one will get a clean one -- but, for sake of mental sanity, never click on any of that trashy first page videos :)
On Android, just use NewPipe.
But how can we be sure that Google is not storing, using, or keeping this information? If disabling tracking has the same (apparent) effect of not letting it grab the information, I prefer the later. At least I can help them to not "accidentally" track me ;-)
This may sound too pessimistic, but I lost all confidence and respect for these companies.
All while being (imo) easier to use and (objectively) less resource intensive than the official Youtube client.
It is possible to build good video clients/services without sacrificing people's privacy. The reason Google's tracking is essential for stuff like video resume is because Google integrated those features into their tracking systems from day one, and now they don't know how to separate them.
Another example here -- if I turn off search & web tracking in my Google account, Google loses the ability to save locations in Google maps on my phone. They never considered that they could just save my locations locally and not send them to the cloud.
Google is being honest when they say they can't do stuff like auto-resume without tracking me, but they're being dishonest when they give the reason they can't do it. It's not because privacy and convenience are so impossible to reconcile, it's because (being charitable) Google engineers and managers don't have the first clue how to build a service that even tries to reconcile those ideas.
The less charitable possibility is that Google deliberately makes their services terrible when privacy options are enabled to reinforce the idea in people's minds that it's impossible to have both privacy and convenience. But while I don't assume the best of Google, I still lean towards blaming incompetence over maliciousness.
Regarding funding Google, I like the discoverability that they provide, and the infrastructure that delivers the content. I continue to delight in the value that I get from the YouTube recommendation algorithm. I have discovered content that I would have likely never found in the past - it expands my horizons.
Of course, YMMV, and you are certainly entitled to make your own choices here. I thought that I'd share my perspective for others who may find it valuable.
> the content creators are losing out by your adblockers, not youtube
Why do I have to financially support content creators without question? Please explain this to me.
Only some. One of my favorite channels isn't sponsored at all, and is ad free.
The only thing people like to complain more then ads is for paywalls, but content creators need to be paid somehow to be able to make a living.
Due to this uncertainty I prefer to support creators I watch via Patreon.
How many Patreon subscriptions do you have? Are those the only videos you watch?
It does break sometimes, though, as Youtube changes their website on purpose to thwart NewPipe and youtube-dl, that both parse the website (which, incidentally, is a great way to spur innovation for a generic website parser).
Another option is ublock origin on Firefox mobile.
[0] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/releases
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe (a bit slower to update there, but I prefer it as I have the f-droid OTA on my phone for automatic updates).