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Comment by tracer4201 | Hacker News Reader

Some of the channels I watch have so many ads that it reminds me of cable. Quite frankly I already have HBO and Netflix. If I also pay for YouTube and maybe even Disney Plus, it feels almost like paying as much as I paid for cable, except I also have to pay for faster internet — so at the end of the day, I’m not sure if I’m really better off as a consumer.

I’ve stopped using YouTube because of the crazy ads. And we tried Hulu but the forced ads were enough to have us immediately cancel the free trial. Thanks but no thanks.

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> I’ve stopped using YouTube because of the crazy ads.

Why not pay for YouTube Premium? At the end of the day, you need to pay in some way to fund the creators making new videos for you to enjoy (+ YouTube for hosting one of the biggest services on the internet).

You still have ads with YT Premium. Most creators place multi-minute ads in their content.

I think you mean sponsored content which is not quite the same as ads/

When you're watching a video and there's a ~1min segment on squarespace...etc, its an ad.

So the content creator has decided to insert their own ad inside their content resulting in a worse user experience (since you seem to be complaining about it). Should Youtube ban in-content third-party ads?

I believe YT makes a cut of this ad rev. It's also much harder for ad blockers to block these kinds of ads.

So why would YT block it?

How would YouTube take a cut of this ad revenue? It's not disclosed anywhere on the YouTube platform.

In case you haven't noticed, most youtube content is marketing something.

Sometimes it feels like the overt ads trivially overcome by adblockers or youtube-dl are there just to be something extremely obnoxious you can circumvent and feel relief from while still consuming marketing that is only made desirable by contrast.

Is this a shot at the ads being the majority of the content these days, or are you just watching kinda shitty channels?

They're quite easy to skip on most content. Some even put a "loading bar" to easily identify when it's going to end.

>I’m not sure if I’m really better off as a consumer.

You can at least watch what you want when you want.

And when you pay there's no ads (hulu has two options, but one is ad-free).

That's the biggest bit - with cable you pay a ton and still have to watch a crazy amount of ads.

I will never pay for a service that includes ads even if you pay.

I notice all the media that says no ads just included it as product placement. Sometimes it’s hidden well enough, but most time it’s a jarring shot of a logo or they talk about the product in a non natural way that takes you out of the story.

I don’t know. I really liked the Boys on Amazon Prime. Except they now release one episode at a time. And Disney did the same thing with the Mandalorian. So yeah - I can’t binge watch new series. Watch anytime is more like a DVR feature.

Netflix has other problems. If there’s one or two seasons of a show, you don’t know if the show had a proper ending or if it was just cancelled.

You have the entire back catalog. Obviously if something hasn't been released yet, then you can't watch it. If you wait until the episodes are released, then you can binge watch it.

That situation is unchanged from cable days.

And the Netflix issue is also unchanged from cable days.

My point is being able to click on something or search it and watch it is most definitely better than flipping channels and dealing with tv schedules and all that crap.

Start the series the day before the last episode? I purposefully didn’t watch game of thrones until like the 4th season.

I personally don't mind not getting the entire season at once. While I do want to binge, I also like the delayed gratification you get from watching a series spread out. Part of the reason I want to binge everything is because there is no new content. It's self defeating insofar that new content becomes old the same day it comes out.

And for a production company, churning through years of work in a day only to start demanding a second season has to be rough. I can't imagine it's helped studios in terms of timelines.

And there's a lot more available stuff to watch now than ever before thanks to the likes of YouTube. I'm into some seriously obscure historical warfare stuff that no one has ever made a proper TV show about, but all it takes is one antique weapons dealer/HEMA practitioner YouTuber who already researches all this stuff anyway and you've got many hours of stuff to watch.

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