YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them
forbes.com
forbes.com
I somewhat understand Google's stance on this, as it's a service that should be allowed to make money even on people who don't want to make money. They don't really have such a way to opt out of pretty much any other service of theirs that has monetization.
But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
This isn't a 'Netflix raising their subscription cost' scenario, where users can just cancel their subscription and sign up for a different service. It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
So in that respect, it's kind of a shitty move by Google.
It's kind of business as usual for Google. Why would anyone expect them to be kind and generous suddenly when they have consistently for years pulled the rug out underneath previosly-free services. (or killed them off completely https://killedbygoogle.com/ )
gmail subscriptions are next, just wait and see.
1/ if you're paying with money, you won't have to pay with personal information
2/ if you're paying with personal information, you wont later have to pay some other way as well
Monopolies (or near monopolies) like to double-dip. A good example of this is net-neutrality. You already pay to be a customer of your ISP, and for your ISP to provide you with Internet access. Your ISP stands to profit even more if they can charge the rest of the Internet for supplying that access to you.
It is quite easy to migrate:
1. get a new mail account 2. forward everything from your gmail account 3. sort everything GMail into a separate folder in your new account 4. slowly change email addresses in accounts and let people know your new address.
I think after a year I had 99% of accounts migrated, and can only remember one or two that I moved after that.
It’s a good way to declutter accounts as well and was made a bit easier because I use a password manager.
Also with private emails, if someone contacts me after 5 years, they likely know someone I know and can get my contact Info via them or social media.
Take the opportunity to migrate to a domain you own, because then you are provider independent.
If I need to access accounts from a different machine I use termux and manually type it in.
I'm not worried about it being a single point of failure (Data loss wise), as I have the password store backed up in multiple places. Security wise, I'm trading out my brain as a single point of failure for pass being a single point of failure. I trust pass more.
Wanted to look into other password managers, preferably open source, but at the time Enpass had the best syncing options combined with a good enough user interface that’s suitable for less tech folks.
Edit: I mainly use all the things on my devices, and don’t try to use things from untrusted devices. The only use cases with untrusted are:
- copy shop -> Sending the file via share drop
- PC of a Family member -> manually typing password from phone.
It’s awesome for filtering and sorting emails though.
Report them under GDPR?
Also, it's useful for have i been pwned. One of my few accounts which uses a grouped address is in today's data dump, and it wasn't clear what account it was, because of the grouping.
It's especially good for apartment searches and job hunting. Companies that try to link buyer and seller are naturally spammy, so you create a new one for each contact. Then when you find one, you delete the others.
It's also makes it dead easy to filter all that information into folders, so you have a neat record of all your interactions with the various companies you're dealing with.
Most importantly: once you find a job / landlord / whatever, you really want a reliable line of communication. This way, your address with them never changes, but all the spam goes into the bit bucket.
Still, it mostly works. I've got 383 aliases, plus 93 disabled aliases.
Most email providers will let you create aliases, but aliases are an upsell for business plans. Tutanota lets you get more aliases, but they charge you, not kidding, 5 euros a month for 100 aliases. 10 GB of extra storage costs 2.5 euros.
Some of them advertise using address+alias@domain, but that's basically useless.
Fastmail is pretty decent with 600 aliases. That's a definite maybe.
The only one I've found with unlimited aliases is TheXYZ, and they've been around a while.
1. Set up incoming E-mail forwarding from mydomain.org to Gmail. Exim will do this, probably all popular mail packages support forwarding well.
2. Start sending E-mail (from Gmail's interface) as me@mydomain.org, and tell your friends to use that one.
2.5. (optional) Get your local mail client to work with Gmail's IMAP and SMTP.
3. Take a deep breath and change that MX record.
4. Block out one or two evenings, pour yourself some Scotch, and go through each and every online account you have, changing your E-mail address. A password manager helps with this because it's also the definitive list of every online account you have. While you're at it, you might want to use me+company@mydomain.com so you can tell which E-mails come from which company, and know who is selling your E-mail address around.
5. Wait until people switch over and the vast majority of your E-mail is going to me@mydomain.org instead of your Gmail address. For me this took a year or so.
6. In the mean time set up locally hosted E-mail at mydomain.org. In my case I use exim4+dovecot+spamassassin. Don't forget to set up SPF and DKIM correctly.
7. Pick a time in your life when you don't expect to be getting urgent or important E-mail, like you're not buying a house or applying for jobs. Take a deep breath, and apply the exim config that changes you from forwarding to self-hosting.
8. Ask all your friends to send you some test E-mails, preferably from different providers. Make sure you can at least deliver mail from gmail, yahoo, comcast, verizon, etc. Send mails to them and make sure they're being delivered.
9. Assuming no problems in 7, pat yourself on the back for being part of the solution rather than the problem.
10. Periodically keep your eye out for trouble. Audit your logs every so often to make sure you're not having trouble sending or receiving. I had to change my IPv6 at one point because comcast decided mine belonged to a spammer, but other than that it's been smooth sailing.
11. Decide whether or not to keep your Gmail account. I kept mine, but it pretty much only gets spam now. Maybe once or twice a year I get a legit one there from someone I forgot to tell I changed my address. I keep an eye on my Gmail to find out when there are hot singles in my area or that there's a new sure fire diet pill that sheds fat instantly.
If there’s one thing I want an antitrust investigation to focus on, it’s the gradual monopoly that Google/Microsoft/etc have inadvertently built over “clean” IP addresses. It’s now practically impossible for independents and small businesses to run their own mail servers.
I’m not blaming Google/etc for it, but it is a situation that requires a fix.
I’m was never as invested in gmail as a lot of people, but it was my primary email for many years.
It was still a pain to switch, especially since i started fresh (no email / contact transfers). Now they have better tools to transfer email but after some thought, i wanted to start over with everything.
It did feel really good once it was done. It forced me to evaluate what was important vs what wasn’t, and it got me pretty organized.
Not for everyone but its doable. My guess is it took 6 months for me. I do have my gmail account yet just in case but its been a few years since anything important showed up there. I mainly keep it for youtube anyway.
But search is the thing that is essentially free advertising space for them. So it's likely to stay free...
Why I didn't do it myself, pure laziness, but starting to charge would be a kick in the right direction.
I've been on fast mail for 10 years or so. I'm happy.
I can't speak for search as I've probably only searched a couple of times but I found what I was looking for so it's probably fine?
With GMail I got no spam in my inbox ever (but still lots of junk email from merchants and political campaigns).
With FastMail, I'm getting maybe 1 spam per week that doesn't get filtered properly. (And it's always from the same domain so far so at some point I'll set up a rule.
For search - I am not a power user and only search plain strings without ever clicking on "advanced" to filter on specific attributes. But every search I've run in FM has so far returned what I was looking for.
> Which other free email provider are you considering?
I think you're talking past each other?
I'm already paying Vimeo for a low-budget data plan, and I only continue to use YouTube as my main platform because of the extra exposure.
I would be willing to pay YouTube to opt out of adsAre people going to need to stipulate in their will to delete all uploaded content to stop crap like this?
What if a backblaze or other backup service just decided it the copyright on all uploaded files after 1 month of non payment and started selling people’s home movies as stock footage?
This is like when you put into a contract "Party A may withdraw from this contract at any point" and then you withdraw at some point. That's playing by the rules.
If you want to make changes to your assets after you die, write a will and hire an executor.
The living aren't obligated to negotiate with the dead.
If your alive you fight such things by suing the company, but the dead don’t make such choices.
YouTube is not obligated to host and serve content for free forever.
As many other big tech companies they have a very strong position in the market (edging into monopoly / duopoly territory), which essentially prevent competitors with different business plans to be successful.
To me this sounds like the market is broken and warrants a critical investigation.
That seems worse? All these videos that I uploaded become inaccessible just because I'm not around to approve monetization?
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
If they can coordinate their efforts of course. It is a big if.
[0] standard.tv
The content is great, though.
So just having content from multiple copyright holders doesn't necessarily stop ads from playing. However, that policy also says "If one of the assets claiming a video has missing ownership information, the default policy action is Track (owner missing)." which "Allows video to be viewable on YouTube and tracks viewership, but does not serve ads against it."[1]
An alternative might just be to add some content at the end of the video which is not advertiser-friendly, which would demonetise the video while not annoying the viewers too much.
> It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
To me this sounds like a description of YouTube's business model — one that works for other services too, because people go along with it.
So this seems... unsurprising to me. I'm genuinely curious to know what YouTube users were expecting instead. I get the impression some people see this as a breach of trust, but to me it seems like the obvious thing YouTube would do.
That just comes off as entitled. Youtube is providing free bandwidth, hosting, and advertising for his patreon.
It would certainly reduce the amount of junk uploaded to the internet.
It's easier to demand YT to host the content for free.
Personally, I don't consider it a valid point.
It only costs so much to share some data because of massive centralization by the likes of Google and ISPs, and can only be sustained because of t sustained because these "subsidies" from large players. It's not technically hard to distribute some videos efficiently, but the market is less than 1/10000.
Maybe in 5 years it will be near impossible to host a web site without being DDOS-ed, but I won't praise Cloudflare for their now-possibly-not-free service, I will blame them along side ISPs.
These were the prices before YouTube really became big and were still the prices after they became big.
I've worked in video streamin industry in years and I haven't seen YouTube be the fault of the high costs. It mostly comes from the fact that videos are large, they need a lot of CPU power to convert and need a lot of bandwidth to transmit to clients.
As for CPU, storage - I don't think 10+ different formats at extreme compression are a hard requirement.
Youtube ads are good, as people will have incentive to use peertube and similar.
¹ You need some seeds, but they don't need Tbps pipes.
And a willingness to steal...
It's illegal and if everyone did it, movies would not exist.
If everyone that wouldn't have paid pirates a movie then nothing bad happens and people enjoy things.
Arguing one of those facts while ignoring the other one is a mark of a bad argument.
You can't just assume that people that don't use your service would be paying customers if a specific alternative wasn't there.
For a video viewed a million times, it would cost a creator $6545 (.018 x 20/55 x 1,000,000) to keep the video ad free. I can't imagine anyone willing to pay that much to keep their videos ad-free.
Youtube has been promoting that you can do that since 2008 - https://techcrunch.com/2008/03/12/youtube-the-platform/ - so maybe "entitled" isn't the word. It's expected because the capability has been promoted.
However, in the same article you'll note this little tidbit:
In general if a video is uploaded to YouTube, in some cases we serve ads into that on YouTube.com. When people embed those we reserve rights to serve ads in the future.
The article you posted doesn't mention that YouTube is promoting ad-free hosting that the creator doesn't have to pay for.
The article from 2008 doesn't mention that butterflys might be appearing across the video randomly either. How is what they didn't specifically say (or imply) relevant? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
I thought the messages from that far back was interesting, which hedged toward this eventual practice.
I must have misunderstood.
“Free” means he doesn’t need to pay for hosting, and he doesn’t.
This is what I don't get about YouTubers. They created a business with basically only one source of income. This is bad practice in every business book.
I am a freelancer. If I only had one customer my business would be instantly over when they didn't hire me anymore.
YouTubers put too much trust in an untrustworthy business partner.
For many of them, it is youtube or nothing.
Is this really true? I mean, there are hundreds of video hosting sites, is YT really the only way of making any money?
This is like saying that the only way to make your business sustainable is to get a reserved place on NY Times Square... are you really entitled to it?
I am pretty representative for typical user. Typical user turns on yoitube and only things in there exists.
More importantly, they also then decided to scam their source of income by getting money from other sources (e.g. Patreon) and are now acting surprised when their own data host isn't happy about not getting their cut of the revenue.
Reminds of a scam that cinemas attempted in my state - because the distributor wanted a % cut from movie tickets, they sold cheap tickets and then charged rent for 3D glasses required for a movie (e.g. 2EUR for ticket and 12EUR for the glasses). The distributors took their distribution rights because of that at all.
Trying to scam your most important source of revenue is just a really bad business decision.
Many of these content providers disabled the feature effectively making YT operate at a loss to host their video while continuing to use the platform.
I already have shown you other examples of these types of attempts which also didn't fly. You can't sell a TV in Walmart for 0.99$ and then have a hidden checque for 900$ in the box so you avoid giving Walmart their margin for the sale.
(YouTube monetizes directly with its viewers too: https://www.youtube.com/premium )
First they adjusted the cut.
Then came the copyright strike system which stops the creator being paid and diverts all and revenue to the claimant automatically.
Followed by the adpocalypse whe your video will be demonitised for reasons only known to YT for being "advertiser unfriendly" with recourse taking so long you've missed the most profitable time for views (the first few days).
Then came the algorithm changes that decimated discovery which negates the huge benefit of publishing on YT (exposure).
Let's not forget just straight up not showing subscribers your channels videos (Remember to like and subscribe, and smash the notification bell!)
And each time YT reply with "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further"
I can't think why creators would look to monetize their content with external sources.
So some are trying to get away from YouTubes monopoly but many cant.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
A key part of running a business is risk management & mitigation. YouTube has very obviously been an ad-supported video platform for at least a decade. Hoping nothing changes about your little ad-free corner of that platform is not a sound business plan.
It's shitty that Google didn't give a heads up, but anyone whose business is riding on this should definitely have been expecting something like this and had a backup plan. Literally free content hosting is obviously not a thing that will exist for very long. Enjoy it while it lasts, but you know also have a Vimeo account ready to go as well or something like that.
Perhaps their current pricing model is fair, I have no idea. But being the de facto video hosting site gives them tons of power. They have the ability to extract extra value out of their users---much more than a non-monopolized market would allow.
They didn't do it because they had a monopoly, they don't have a monopoly. It was more base than that. They did it because they wanted more money. Which is their right. I'm not complaining, but everyone's putting forth a great deal of high tone reasoning fro something that really is base venality at its root. They want more money. They believe they can get it even though they are not a monopoly. Even though Facebook is bigger. And even though their users will get mad.
The reality is, most of their customers aren't going anywhere. Consider all the times you use Youtube. Trying to find a music video, watching sports highlights, videos from your favourite creators. Can you switch to DailyMotion for all of that now? Are all of your creators posting their videos on Facebook? Even if they are, are the videos as easy to find and discover as they are on Youtube? For content creators, is there anywhere else they can share and expect to find the same kind of audience? Not really.
This is what I'm talking about when I say monopoly. It's true, there's other options. A creator can post their videos on Vimeo and host their own website to monetize, just like someone could have taken a horse and buggy instead of the new railroad. No one is forced to go by train, but doing it the old way is inefficient and expensive. n both cases they won't get the same bang for their buck.
I just become worried when they use their monopoly to extract as much value as possible, far beyond what they need to sustain their profits. I think monopolies are bad in principle, and Youtube is another example, just like Microsoft was, cable companies are, telecom was, railroads were, etc.
But I'm not sure that's clear. There's been a distinct increase in the number of in-video ads (Raycon, Skillshare, ExpressVPN, Squarespace, Curiosity Stream, and so on), which probably corresponds to a distinct decrease in Youtube enabled ads. So with that logic, Youtube is probably making less money from top creators, who have been skipping the middleman entirely. This seems more like a step to retaining existing profits instead of increasing them.
It's more complicated than that. Small time creators or others ineligible for the Youtube "partner program" have no choice but to monetize outside of Youtube. With this change, the only way you as a creator can choose whether ads appear on your video is to make partner.
The scummy thing here is that Youtube has made it harder and harder for creators to become eligible to monetize their channels, and now they're swooping in to take 100% of the ad revenue on those small-time channels.
Not sure how many small creators both can't manage that but can manage external monetization?
Also with 1000 subscribers you dont guarantee 1000 views, just potential views.
I've seen a few YouTubers have a centralized site for signups and support where they host all their content. While the YT revenue is important, they at least have a way to engage their consumers should something terrible happen. This is BCP in a nutshell.
Also, is Hetzner actually unmetered or do they claim they are with an asterisk?
Is there a way to do it with some p2p à la popcorntime?
Then if there was a surge, the peers could absorb some of it.
Does peertube do that?
So you go for a reseller which there are many stellar ones but they'll either utilize a program with the datacenter akin to an reseller affiliate program with them being the 3rd party support or do it all themselves. If they do the reseller affiliate program they cant really offer anything outside of theie markups on the existing offerings by the datacenter. If they do it all themselves then it becomes much more expensive for the upfront costs.
What you want is a VPS and a CDN which provides a better experience and what every streaming platform uses. Not that expensive either!
You can put an html video tag and call it a day, but you'll be missing out on using the best codec for each viewer and bandwidth adaptation and (last I looked, hopefully I'm wrong) usable UI.
Bandwidth is an issue, although I've seen enough high bandwidth, unmetered server offers that I think it might work. Depending on where your viewers are and where you find cheap bandwidth, you might get poor performance just from distance, whereas YouTube and Facebook have CDNs with nodes everywhere.
A seriously crappy PC, poor bandwidth an some noisy old disks is enough to host 5 TB+
other replies mention the client compatibility, quality and bandwidth issues with self hosting but i think this can be reasonably adressed with just going for a common denominator on the self-hosting side (eg. 720p h264)
Similarly there's a reason LTT launched Floatplane. Risk management is important regardless of how big your business is. Even if you're large enough for youtube to assign you an actual person for support.
Also I don't think you can build a community on Twitter anyway. It's just shouting into the void. They could use it for announcements (and do, LTT is on Twitter, too), but little else.
Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, Twitter would be appropriate.
There has been several moral panics incited by the conventional media (TV, newspapers etc) about adverts being displayed alongside edgy content a while back. Several rounds of this eventually brought about a TOS change where they could deem you "not advertiser friendly". This of course ignored that Google does targeted advertising.
Some claim it is "political" however I believe it is simpler than that. It gave youtube an excuse to stop paying people without outright removing them from the platform which saves them a fair bit of money and doesn't quite bring the same outrage from the respective fanbases as outright removing people. In addition to that the people that have been demonetised have ranged from progressives, anarcho-communists, people doing ben-shapiro compilation videos and edgy boys and girls that tend to shitpost. So I don't see anything political about it.
They've also made it harder to be monetised on the platform generally, IIRC you can't be monetised at all and cannot receive super chats if you have less than 1000 subscribers. You also can't put custom thumbnails on your videos which makes it harder for your content to get attention.
Hopefully Goog won't bring down the hammer on cross-posting videos!!
Why not implement an option for creators to share some of that load if they want to opt-out of advertisements on their videos? That way, everyone wins. YouTube gets money for the hosting of video, creators keep content ad-free.
This is definitely a Google push that will change the platform, I think. RoosterTeeth founders have pushed the whole "your content, your site, your store/etc" for a decade at least and though FloatPlane might be a capable rival as it builds more creators I think that is still true. You need to own your own distribution methods even if YT or another site is primarily where your views come from but that takes resources away from creating your primary content. Hard to do for a solo creator.
Anyone who has invested in creating content and thinking that it would be the way it was forever is naive and has learned a lesson. Most 'old timers' would realize (I know I would) that any business situation can change.
Likewise I fully expect Amazon once they have killed off the competition to raise prices on many items. Sure they will have loss leaders and sure they are already doing it. But it's business no expectation that they won't do what is in their best interest. And this is not a 'shareholder' thing it's a business thing. Same thing would happen if it were a small pizza shop that decided to lower prices and drive others out of business. As long as no rules are broken it's not any worse than a sports team doing whatever they can to win the game. They are not 'in the business' of making it good for others to win. (Same with online gaming).
12 years of free video hosting with no ads and a platform for people to discover your videos is quite the deal.
They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.
If you thought you could eat a free lunch forever... Well, I guess this is your rude awakening. But you honestly should have expected it.
The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either. A large number of creators have most of their audiences because of Youtube. And honestly your example of Jim Sterling sounds like a smaller company would have gone out of their way to ban them. He's reaping all the benefits of the platform while giving nothing back.
It's a symbiotic relationship. Without content creators, Youtube is nothing. Without Youtube's massive user base, content creators will reach no one. Meanwhile, Youtube is the one making money over fist (4-5 billion dollars per quarter), so I don't understand why we should feel sorry for their hosting costs.
Without content creators who refuse to allow ads in exchange for free hosting, is it nothing? Probably not, most creators do enjoy making money, and most of the ones putting out content for free, but without ads, will struggle to find a competitor who will indefinitely provide free hosting.
>4-5 billion dollars per quarter
In revenue, not profit. Very, very important distinction.
~~Okay then, 15 billion in profits last year. I'm no businessman but to me that's pretty damn good profits with those revenue numbers.~~
Edit: Alright, Google search failed me. Searching for profits gave me revenue. Sorry about that. Profits are still secret, it seems. But the hosting costs won't eat the lion's share of that, I can assure you.
Well according to this $8.5 billion of that is given to creators. Leaving 6.5 billion for hosting costs, development, and all the management that goes with a platform of that size. About 2.8 billion hours were spent watching youtube in 2019.
This isn't about covering expenses that they couldn't afford otherwise. This is about making enormously rich people even richer.
So you truly believe people should be entitled to free video hosting?
It literally costs money to host content. If you make the platform no money, Youtube has no obligation to keep you around. Just because I pay for my groceries doesn't mean you get yours for free. Just because one person is paying doesn't mean an equal numbers of others don't have to.
Isn't Youtube still not making a profit?
It's entirely possible that YouTube has never been profitable. The costs involved with it are stupendous. It's far more than just bandwidth. Storage and CPU for transcoding, the enormous databases required for Content ID, recommendations, comments and anti-spam, all the private videos you can't even see at all, etc. Then there's software development costs to manage the bandwidth and operations.
just sucks & is such a Lucy pulling out the football move, that YouTube helps everyone & especially the very small folk, rises to meteoric heights/total monolopy, then won't let some small fry newcomers enjoy either an unbelievably modest revenue or give away an ad-free experience to their new watchers.
> The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either.
100% a video monopoly. youtube has us, has us all.
Fortunately that’s not entirely true, IIUC — LBRY and BitChute can automatically mirror their channels. Anecdotal accounts say LBRY pays orders of magnitude more per view IIRC, and doesn’t decrease YouTube growth. minutephysics uses it and still has >5 million subscribers on YT. And failing those, it shouldn’t be too hard to youtube-dl a channel and upload it to a Peertube or GNU mediagoblin (here ’s hoping ytdl starts using git the way its creators intended and moves issue tracking to an antifragile mailing list).
Many countries have regulations against non paid work. If google wants to limit monetization for creators but monetize themselves there is something that does not adds up.
If you are not familiar with out google do things, They change terms and conditions and bandwidth allowances quite a lot. thats if they don't move their service to the google grave yard. https://killedbygoogle.com/
A few months ago when YouTube decided to auto-add ads on all videos, my watch time on YouTube decreased by more than 50% since I consume all video content on either my phone or my tablet (where I don't have access to AdBlock), and I find the amount of ads I have to go through to watch a video so annoying that I'd rather not watch it at all.
As a result I spend my free time on Coursera or listening to audiobooks instead and I log in to YouTube once a day to have a quick scroll through the subscriptions page to see if there's anything worth watching. Keeping the amount of ads in mind and the stress they cause me, I am more selective and will often not click on a video that I previously would. And I don't mindlessly binge-watch video for hours on end any longer.
With the new monetisation coming in place, I can see my consumption of YouTube declining even further to the level of Google - use it as a tool, when you really have to and not just for entertainment. And I welcome it! Just thought to share a perspective of a consumer rather than a creator.
On the other hand I do understand YouTube's move. After all, it's their platform and they're not running a charity - people often forget that it's not their birth right to use a company's product or a service without paying for it one way or the other.
> Paying for something not to happen is different than paying for something in return.
The rough metaphor about restaurants, is not an equivalent situation.
---
> you pay the content creators by watching the ads with your time or the subscription
To clarify, you believe that there is an ephemeral currency of attention.
Your attention (which was to be directed at the content creator) can be redirected forcefully, unless you pay in money. I'd be remiss to call it outright extortion, but the parallel is there.
Instead, Youtube is pestering you with ads and asking for payment to stop doing so.
Nowadays I just don't have that time. And the bad guys have evolved from mischievous to felonious (and I have a lot more to lose. I still harp on privacy and security, but now I do it behind a couple of walled gardens. I love that my devices "just work."
I know it's a trade off, and I'm certainly fighting for more regulations of FAANG. And I am supporting the FOSS/open device movement, and look forward to the next phase where those "just work".
The rise of blindingly bright LED billboards in the US feels like all the downsides of a sci-fi dystopian world without any of the upside like self-driving hover cars.
Also more thought is now being given to "visual pollution" where unsightly advertising is bastardising valuable architecture in cities.
Hopefully both initiatives will proliferate alse to other countries. :)
It's the same with sites that require javascript to view: I'm sure the content might be good if I whitelisted it - but most the time it's my cue to realize I'm procrastinating and should get back to creating rather than consuming!
I have some black and white rules set up for myself. The day Whatsapp stops encrypting chats is the day I jump ship. The day Youtube blocks access to those using uBlock, I'll stop going to Youtube. The day old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com stop working, sayonara Reddit.
I've come to realise that a) I just don't derive TOO much value from any of these websites/services, and b) I don't mind paying for value added.
I'd be happy to pay for Youtube. But not 15 dollars a _month_! Youtube is an amateur platform. Charge me maybe 3 dollars a month. 5 if I'm feeling generous. But not 15. And certainly not when it's bundled with Google tracking the living bejeesus out of me.
I deleted Facebook way back when, on the basis that anyone who couldn't be bothered to find me via another route probably didn't care that much for me to begin with. Will happily apply the same principle for Whatsapp. Parents etc. can just call me the old-fashioned way :)
I've always preferred Google Play Music/YouTube Music to Spotify so I'd be paying for it anyways but getting adless YouTube along with it makes it a great value, for me.
I also don't know if I particularly agree with your characterization of YouTube as an amateur outlet nowadays, since there's just SO MUCH MONEY in some of the channels.
Yes, YouTube is an amateur outlet for sure, at least the majority of it, just see how many worthless information and popular advices there is in the platform.
That... is quite steep as compared to India, where the family plan for YT Premium (if I recall correctly) costs Rs. 99/month, approximately $1.33/month. PPP is real :|
I watch more youtube than any other video platform and I am happy to pay the $13/month to be ad free. Is it a sustainable business model? That’s for the bean counters at Alphabet to know. For now, I am content.
If I pay for a service, it my expectation that you provide me a way to opt out of your additional revenue opportunities. To that end, $18/mo for premium is gouging, in my mind. The fact that Youtube is implementing even more ads tells me the service is bleeding customers or cash, maybe both, and Google is handling this by making the barriers HIGHER.
Google has their hooks deep enough into most people - charge $3.99/mo for an ad-free experience and grow the subscriber base.
How much is a cinema ticket these days?
The ad supported web has led to so many people feeling entitled to consume content for free. People have gone so far to feel that the ads themselves are the problem, without realizing that without them, you would have to begin to pay the real cost of the service.
Funny how so many people find watching a single movie (lets say you watch cheap, $8) for two hours acceptable, but unlimited access to billions of hours of content for $10 is unacceptable.
It's been fantastic. Reddit comments decrease rapidly in quality anyway, but I was unable to look away. Now I'm capped - one or two scrolls and I have to go find something more rewarding to do. Thanks reddit!
Major improvement, previously I couldn’t stop reading their bloated articles, now I just glance at a couple of most important facts and carry on.
I'm back on Android now where I can choose default apps and now if a friend sends a link, I click it and read it, then I click over to the homepage, then 20 minutes goes by as I mindlessly scroll. It's a blessing and a curse to be able to use your phone the way you want to, I guess.
Win-win, I guess.
Visiting youtube, I could swear that the recommendations Youtube is trying to shove my way only change after several weeks or sometimes even months, it is always the same 8 videos on top of the front page for very long periods.
It starts to get somewhat relevant after I watch something, but then it looks like their recommendation engine does nothing more than "Recommend to user x the n most popular videos of roughly the same category as the last video user x watched" with a little bit of shuffling 1-3 videos from a larger set between those, sometimes, and that appears to be it.
I've stopped using Chrome, use gmail only for dealing with companies (their spam), rarely watch YouTube anymore, and use DDG for search. It's _very_ noticeable how little targeted advertising I receive anymore. I have developed a whole new appreciation for my DVD and BluRay collection, and now feel compelled to buy up whatever is available while they last. Physical, own-able media is becoming frighteningly scarce.
I think the Google situation is a deliberate result of restructuring under Alphabet, and in terms of business it's wise. Google is about ads. Other companies of theirs will be about other things.
I had Youtube Premium through Google Play Music until Google finally axed GPM. I was so disappointed by how poorly Google handled that process that I cancelled my subscription and lost my YT premium.
Youtube is completely unbearable without premium - I have no idea how non-subscribers tolerate Youtube content. The ads are so intrusive. I would totally pay $5-$10 per month for a Youtube only subscription but I feel like the $18/mo for a family plan is a bit steep.
Personally I wish all these music streaming services could agree on metadata sharing such that I could enable apps like last.fm to review listening history across every service, and offer my listening history and playlists to every service to receive better recommendations. It feels odd that I can listen to the same song from 4-5 different services that I subscribe to legally, yet none of the services has a complete picture of what I like to listen to unless I pick one and use it as often as I can. I had thought that playlist sync would be a way to improve my recommendations, but it seems most services look at listening history rather than playlists. It's also irritating that every company has its own way of doing playback sync between devices, whether it's AirPlay, ChromeCast, Spotify Connect, Alexa, YouTube app, etc. There is no way things should be this fractured and hard to use for music playback and recommendation in the next decade, we need more standards. :)
Now I run my own Plex server on a Raspberry Pi with an external drive and get a better experience than I had before, minus discovery.
One wonders how much further YouTube can take this - it appears they are approaching the optimal point for extracting revenue from videos, so where is their future revenue growth going to come from?
I miss the YouTube of old rather than this commercialized version. To me, Tik Tok seems like more like the original YouTube than YouTube does.
I for one have become so annoyed with the level of ads that I have reduced my consumption of YouTube. To me, it seems like there is a much higher rate of advertising on a per-content-minute basis on YouTube than there is on TV.
The maximally optimal value to the end user waxes and wanes throughout the business cycle, and unfortunately we're in the trough.
It's part of why you can't rely on the market or competitive forces alone, if you think something is an issue of public good, you need regulation.
Let's not pretend they weren't incredibly hostile to watching shows you're paying for already, when you want to and without the ads you paid to avoid, even though they didn't need to even build any infrastructure for it.
Add the rest of their anti-customer policies like bundling channels and it seems clear that their campaign to get rid of all their cable customers simply succeeded.
The timeshifting is the tv stations defense of segmenting their ad market and protecting against local viewer loss that targets ads to markets.
If you in New York watch Denver's version two things happen. New York loses viewers. Denver gains viewers who's local ads are not relevant and those viewers not included when selling ads.
I mean time shifting as in what devices such as TiVo did where they would record your shows for you and allow them to play them back whenever you wanted. For some reason Cable companies really hated this idea, presumably because... ads I guess?
I think that if they simply hadn't fought against people trying to basically turn what they already provided into something more like Netflix, those tools would exist and be built with a cable package as a backend.
They provide all the shows in a datastream that they would otherwise provide via cable, let other people deal with paying for developing devices to make it easier to use, and price it more reasonably so that it can compete with a Netflix. I don't know if they'd be able to, but since they own the pipes and own the FCC it seems more likely than not. But they'd be doing a lot better than they seem to be now, they just priced themselves out of the market once networks realized that people would just download their content for free if it was too inconvenient to watch. Better a little than nothing...
Sure, the cable companies could've theoretically made Netflix streaming before Netflix did - and the broadcast networks kinda-sorta-tried-this with Hulu - but that had nothing to do with their ad load increasing over time. Hulu was way more convenient than watching the same shows on cable even with ads still! But to go all in on a reinvention towards streaming would've been a huge gamble even seeing the streaming train coming right at them.
I find paying for Youtube premium an pretty great value, because it has some of the best content for any hobby I may be into. It doesn't have the pure depth of hard core educational content like udemy/coursera/khan has, but I'm really not able to consume that type of content enough to run out.
Not true. Cable TV started by simply sending a copy of broadcast TV over coaxial cable, giving the user a more reliable signal (better picture and sound) compared to a "rabbit ears" antenna, and access to programs from distant cities beyond the limits of good radio reception. That broadcast TV, of course, was a live signal which contained ads in the signal that could not be removed.
Cable TV also offered the end user a convenient box with a digital channel number display and remote control for changing channels. The user was able to flip among dozens of channels without having to fiddle with the UHF/VHF tuning controls of their TV: they tuned the TV to channel 3 (or whatever) and could just leave it, letting the cable box do the channel selection. Cable TV was a major upgrade to the TV set. In particular to a basic model or old TV with only knobs for channel selection, no remote.
Cable TV did offer premium programs also, requiring a "descrambler". Those channels were collectively called "pay TV"; separate from regular broadcast TV. These channels were satellite channels; the user could have obtained them alternatively by installing a dish, and paying for the descrambling.
1) You can't organize Albums by artist. 2) Your Youtube (video) likes are included in the pool of liked songs in the music app. 3) Artists you are subscribed to in the music app are included in your Youtube (video) subscriptions.
When YTM is better than GPM:
1/ Auto-created playlists, especially after you just search for a song and hit play. On GPM, it would play different covers on the same song (basically all the search results) by default, unless you started a radio, which is a cool concept but was hit and miss in practice. On YTM, it continues with similar songs, and I have liked their selection so far.
2/ The library seems to have increased; I guess they have access to more songs that were YT exclusive for some reason.
3/ While I normally never use video mode on YTM, but once in a while for a cool song, it's nice to be able to seamlessly switch to video and cast to my TV.
On the cons side, I don't like the playlist management and home screen UI (which is what I hated initially), but it's not bothering me much anymore now that I am getting used to it I guess.
Initially, I had planned to just cancel the subscription, but held on because using YouTube with ads was just plain intolerable. I get reminded of this everytime I open a Youtube link on my work account Chrome profile by mistake.
There's a wide open market for a good music streaming company that integrates with your own albums, that is corporately stable enough not to dissipate after "An Incredible Journey Together". All the different services have weird lockins and major gaps, whether it be uploads, mobile app limitations, interop, etc.
Here's a longer list of grievances from users who were forced to migrate from Google Play Music: https://www.reddit.com/r/googleplaymusic/comments/icmwdf/one...
IMO it's a net positive that it has created new business models that's open to anyone with a camera/mobile.
On the other hand, the method employed by YouTube is just akin to its contents. 90% BS.
Youtube kids (with proper video/channel whitelisting) is the main thing my toddlers watch. It has BBC shows (peppa pig), PBS kids, and 2 great kid friendly content crators (Blippi and Steve and Maggie).
Of course there is lots of good "IRL" kids content, but propery setup, Youtube kids is pretty good and fairly priced in my opinion.
Unclear why the attitude. Youtube is a business. It doesn't owe users anything for free regardless of what it did in the past or others have done.
Restaurants? You pay them to dine there. They operate at a profit or try to. And restaurants who offer either (or both) better food or experience get to charge more like any other product or service in life.
Sure google or any business does not exist to provide free things to people.
No, it's like paying the restaurant for the damn food. YouTube hosting all the world's videos forever is not a god given right, nor is being able to watch content people create for free.
I despise ads, absolutely despise them, but gladly pay YouTube the $15/mo to remove them because I know good content needs to be paid for one way or another. There's still a few channels that I like that put in ads during the videos and that's still annoying, but otherwise I never see an ad.
And this is fucking fantastic! Imagine if the web as a whole adopted this. (I know there are efforts including Google's) If I could pay $10/mo to get rid of all ads (explicit and implicit) and have that go towards the creators that I consume content for, then we'd be in a much better place. (imagine if FB just got a cut of that for example, how that would change the dynamics)
I have a patreon which I budget $20/mo to actually pay the creators that I care about. Don't kid yourself into thinking your YT premium money is going anywhere except unboxing videos and Minecraft screaming videos and the like.
"Currently, new revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, most of the revenue will go to creators."
I support some creators via Patreon as well, but honestly that's just more work for me as my interests change and some months I don't consume any of their content.
I imagine the truth is that it is likely something Spotify-like or some variation thereof. I'm still ok with that and YouTube does make it explicit that the majority of my sub goes towards creators. FWIW I suspect there are some reasons that are subtle, bug valid, that Spotify for example distributes subscription fees the way it does, which I agree does seem kinda BS at first blush.
edit: some anecdotal info here saying that creators are indeed paid (handsomly) based on views: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/9agg5f/how_does_yo...
This level of entitlement is just staggering. You can pay for YouTube in two ways; watch adds or pay for add free.
Now, I get that the price for watching adds right now is too high. It simply ruins most content. But your metaphors are still just way out there.
In reality there are now 3 "tiers". - Premium. Pay with money. - Get a free taste. Choose if you want it. - Unwatchable content.
I don't think that is going to work out for YouTube in the long run. But shaming people for being willing to pay for actual loads and loads of quality content is not constructive.
On the other hand, I _am_ glad if this means that random, prudish advertising companies will hold less sway over YouTube at some point in the future, where subscriptions make up a bigger part of the revenue.
The best reason I can think of is becasue of this effect: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
PBS Kids FTW. No ads, no harmful content, and (probably much) less surveillance.
With that, the day they bring adverts into Youtube Premium, is the day I stop paying for it. That would be them going the way of cable companies all in.
Likewise, the day that they start putting ads into YouTube premium is the day I abandon the platform.
Oh, and of course uBlock Origin works fine on proper computers too.
What's the difference from product-driven or subscription-driven tech businesses?
All companies ultimately are responsive to the wants and needs of their paying customers, within the limits of legality and physics. Do not underestimate how important it is that Google’s paying customers are ad buyers, not you.
They had to create a service people want to use in order to be able to put ads on it.
If there is a problem then the problem is Google. I don't think this can be blamed on just the ad-driven profit model.
Imagine your letter carrier started stamping Aunt Agatha's letters with car ads or whatever.
Aunt Agatha's letter is ended by junk mail.
This is particularly relevant for subscription vs. ad companies, because both of these companies have different kinds of “non customers”. For a subscription company non-customers can be induced to convert into customers via sales, advertising, and features. So for these companies non customers are all potential future customers who should be listened to some. For companies like Google they serve an entire different class of customers. As an individual there is literally nothing you can do to become a Google customer; so unless if your complaints interfere with Google’s ability to sell your attention to their actual customers, then they have zero reason to care about your opinion.
Again, how are the incentives any different whether or not the business is funded by advertising?
Just like how Google knows that a user with a complaint isn't necessarily going to stop using their services and looking at their ads, Apple (for example) knows that a user with a complaint isn't necessarily going to stop buying iPhones.
In that sense I don't see why a "customer" who is paying in ad impressions is any less of a "customer" than one who is paying in cash.
Nonsense. People switch to android all the time. Apple’s sales depend wholly on continuing to meet the needs of their customers and providing perceived value. If they fell behind Android in perceived value, or stopped producing what their paying customers want they would lose money. Relatively high switching costs dampens this a bit, but there’s no magic that keeps Apple customers buying apple products.
> I don’t see why a “customer” who is paying in ad impressions is any less of a “customer” than one who is paying in cash.
A “customer” who pays in ad impressions is, quite literally, not a customer. They’re a user, at best. The customer is the person who pays the business for a good or service, which in this case is the ad buyer. Google will try to make you happy insofar as it helps them get more money from their paying customers, but the moment there’s a conflict between between the needs of their users and the needs of their customers, the paying customers will always win.
Put more brutally, your relationship with Google has more in common with a cow’s relationship with Nike than a shoe owner’s relationship with Nike. Your attention is the product, as much as the cow’s leather is. Just as we don’t confuse good animal husbandry with a genuine interest in the cow’s long term well being, don’t confuse Google offering features & products as an interest in your productivity and/or happiness.
So then what's the magic that keeps Google users using Google products if they stop producing what their non-paying, but ad-watching customers want?
If the answer is "anticompetitive practices", I don't deny that at all, but that has nothing to do with advertising as a revenue model. Just look at Microsoft, they have long been the champions of anticompetitive behaviour and yet they didn't really use advertising as a revenue model until recently.
> Google will try to make you happy insofar as it helps them get more money from their paying customers, but the moment there’s a conflict between between the needs of their users and the needs of their customers, the paying customers will always win.
The needs of the users are the needs of the paying customers, that is what I am saying. Without the users there is no opportunity to have paying customers, period.
> your relationship with Google has more in common with a cow’s relationship with Nike than a shoe owner’s relationship with Nike.
No, that is a totally misleading analogy and I think it perfectly demonstrates what is wrong with this argument. Users choose to use Google products in exchange for ad impressions.
Free is one hell of a competitive advantage. And again, Google does enough to keep the customers coming back as much as the rancher does to help the cow grow. The rubber really hits the road when you consider customer's need for say, privacy.
Or, try and get Google to help you out if your account gets locked. Good luck. Now if you're having issues with your ad account, they'll happily hop on the phone to figure it out with you....
> The needs of the users are the needs of the paying customers, that is what I am saying. Without the users there is no opportunity to have paying customers, period.
An overlap in requirements is not the same thing as being the same thing. For a short while, the rancher meets the cows needs too.
> Users choose to use Google products in exchange for ad impressions.
Unclear. Users choose Google products because they're free, it's not obvious if they fully understand the implications of that, or if they see that they have a meaningful choice.
For actual video hosting, assuming ad revenue is not desired, Vimeo seems pretty good.
When, in fact, closing the app is the most reliable way to get YouTube to stop playing. From inadvertent clicks in the Wrong Place on the screen that launch some crap or play some ad, to autoplay, as soon as my content is over, I can't wait to kill the app and make it all stop. It's a hell of a lot easier than finding pause/stop.
I use it a lot for recipes and great to have a corner of the internet totally ad free now.
Most of the valuable youtube creators don't care much about their ad revenue and prefer to curate out of band sponsorships and patreon. And if I wanted to actually support them, I'd invest in them through patreon, not watch an atrocious ad that will likely give them 30% of 5 cents
We still have some humans in the board room who could theoretically switch things off just like the switched them on but its somewhat naive to think their job description allows for it.
This leaves only governments. I could see myself write government automation even while fully aware of the above. If the pay is right, nice coworkers, interesting stack. ~rolls eyes~
No thanks YouTube!
YouTube now throws 4-6 ads in the middle of the videos, often right in the middle of the songs.
Little Donny Trumpet went out on a junket, swatting his golf balls away...
I suspect that the platforms have started to realize that personalized ads aren't better than content relevant ads, because I have several times seen ads on Facebook that were just targeted to people who live in my country and are over the age of 18, ie not targeted at all. Yet Facebook presumably showed me those ads because that is what they thought would make them the most money.
This will also incentive us to find other methods of sharing/consuming. P2P perhaps?
Preroll ads are the worst because quality varies so widely I end up wading through multiple ads for crappy videos.
Is there a good resource for how-tos out there for a fee?
I use Vanced on my phone, but if you're not into hacked binaries, NewPipe is what you want: https://newpipe.schabi.org/
It is pretty clear that Google is attempting to monetize everything down to the spaces between zeros and ones, changing their own rules when it suits them, and won't stop before anything. This is extremely unprofessional; I wouldn't rely on them for anything serious.
Could you share what that amount is? One ad every how many minutes? I ask because I suspect that it depends on the geographic region of the user and other factors, and I’m curious how bad it is in some places.
I am also glad that this move has finally given me the push needed to delete my channel entirely. I don't try to make money off it, I have no interest in Google getting to.
I dunno which mobile platform you are using but I use iOS and if you watch YT via the browser you can block ads with its content blocker and you can even use some JavaScript in an shortcut to re-enable picture in picture (it’s a little more of a hassle, you have to press share then the pip custom shortcut but it works).
A few more consumer perspectives:
Google still does not own the videos. It is still not their content. They will not pay contributors for content.
As someone who has been using the web since 1993 I can assure anyone reading that there would still be widepspread video sharing on the internet even if no company such as YouTube existed that tried to monetise the phenomenon. Consumers pay dearly for internet connectivity and bandwidth, many of them enjoy playing around with the internet for fun and they will use the network for all manner of data sharing, including video, even in the absence of advertisers and their service partners (who are usurping a significant portion of that user-financed bandwidth).
Google may not be running a tax-exempt charity for the benefit of consumers, however they are running a corporate welfare program for over 75,000 people. (Nevermind the amount the corporation pays in tax.) This will change if and when profits start to drop.
With respect to this announcement, it appears Google won't share the proceeds from ad sales unless the YouTube contributor's video meets a certain threshhold of traffic, enough to be in the so-called "Partner Program". Many video contributors will receive nothing despite their viewers having to suffer though pre-roll and other ads interrupting their "user experience". In a way this reminds me of domain name registrars that place ads at domain names that customers fail to renew.
I absolutely agree with this comment though. Changes such as this are evolutionary pressure that may lead us to a better internet, one that is less commercially driven by advertising under the fiction of "free". No matter how large these websites, excuse me, "platforms", have become I still believe the web and the internet are meant to be non-commercial and user-driven. As the network has grown, most users are not corporations.
Add more straw. Break the camel's back. What comes in the aftermath will surely be better.
There's a simple trick to get around this: don't use the YouTube app, use the website youtube.com. Adblockers work for YouTube's website on iOS.
The app is only marginally better than the website, so you won't be missing much.
Honestly, I consider the existence of such things kind of toxic, which is a weirdly extreme view, I admit, so I'm kinda rooting for these types of videos to get pushed out of the results.
When i search for a video on some language/system architecture, it's often difficult to find the official team videos. One good thing to do is to start playing one video after another form the search results. Usually the very first one without a pre-roll Advertisement, is the one you want.
If you're on a network you control, you can do network level ad blocking :-)
I think services are generally bad for consumers. (they can be quite good for businesses, though) If a consumer relies on a service, then they are beholden to any change made in that service. In other words, it's fine to enjoy Youtube, but just know that your enjoyment could be temporary, videos could be lost, and you could be shut out from the service.
We really need stronger consumer advocacy.
An aside- it's really jaded me that with the advent of the internet so many of us had these wonderful dreams of the things we could build and share the world over, and how it would change the world and be this revolutionary force. Well it was, just not for good. Every single good thing gets twisted and perverted in the hunt for the Almighty Profit.
I remember my father complaining when I was young about money being the root of all evil, never be greedy, love your fellow man. But some time around his late 40s he became a republican, tax became theft, people he didn't know personally could fuck right off. This all coincided with his opening his business and got worse as it became more successful.
The man who hated Reagan and Bush and my rich half of my family with a passion became a staunch Trump supporter.
We no longer speak for other reasons but I use it as a reminder of what not to be. It's worked well for me, I'm not an abusive alcoholic, hopefully I wont become a selfish old curmudgeon over money either.
But power corrupts. And honestly, it all sounds so idealistic now. It has become painfully obvious that the companies will not self-regulate. We've got to do something.
Well, if it's your creative output, or public domain content, you are very much in control over what you do with it.
You are not in control over the available channels to distribute content, though, and that's the big challenge.
YouTube was a game changer because it allowed you to upload and share video for free... in an era where bandwidth and storage were prohibitively expensive. Combine that with every digital device having a camera and a mic, and you see how that led to an explosion of audiovisual content over the past 15 years.
However... bandwidth and storage are still prohibitively expensive. If you'd put up an MP4 in HD quality on shared hosting or a VPS, and amassed a couple of tens of thousands of views over several hours, your host would be really quick to either shut you down, and/or invoice you for the bandwidth you used.
Of course, there's no free lunch. Someone needs to pay. Showing ads to viewers is YouTube's strategy to recoup the expenses. Sadly, that diminishes the value of the content and it makes me less and less interested in opening up YouTube and clicking through a couple of short clips.
Personally, I feel that it's up to content creators to pay for the privilege of getting hosted. In that regard, Vimeo's offering is interesting. [1] No advertising and more features depending on your plan.
Of course, doing that will impact your audience. In that regard, Vimeo isn't a social platform like it started, it's now more a B2B video platform, used by professional videographers or businesses who create professional video content.
The last option is paying for YouTube Premium. But do I really want to pay 11.99$ a month for a massive library of relatively short clips of inconsistent quality produced by third parties the majority of whom don't receive a worthwhile reimbursement through monetization? In that regard, YouTube isn't Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime or DisneyPlus because of this huge quality problem.
Finally, the original proposition of YouTube - being able to share video without restrictions - is what made it attractive for both content creators and consumers in the first place. Much like many other outlets that first appeared on the Web in the early 00's and followed that basic principle: offering information for free.
> I think services are generally bad for consumers.
Ultimately, the bigger issue is that hosting content never was free to begin with. Either you set up your own hardware and hook it to the network, or you lease it from someone else in some form (Serverless, VPS, shared hosting,...).
The notion of "posting" content online has completely abstracted that away. The proposition of being able post and share content for "free" is what made billions flock to the Web. Of course, that's entirely unsustainable.
Putting up paywalls everywhere and trying to sell monthly subscriptions does have its limits. Between Spotify, Backblaze, Netflix, VPS hosting, Dropbox, several newspapers,... there are only so many subscriptions that one can conceivable deduct from a monthy paycheck.
In that regard, a reckoning might be due once the limits of these business models are reached.
$ bc -l 365*24
about 8760 hours in a year. so year years worth of videos are uploaded in a hour. I think I'm falling further and further behind.. Much like my music consumptions and reading.
Discounting is fine, it's done everywhere.
It's 'anti competitive' usually only in the context of international trade rules, when government subsidies business units to 'dump' on other countries.
Changing your price over time for whatever reasons you want is generally fine unless you're price fixing or doing some kind of illegal type of price discrimination.
The competitive bit comes in more due to the fact that G runs chrome and search and therefore will favour their own products, that's much worse.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatory-pricing.asp
The amount of narrative promoting here on HN is distressing.
Google does some nice things, some not so much nice things.
Because they adjust their advertising policy doesn't make them either illegal actors or pariahs.
There's no evidence indication that this is 'predatory pricing'.
Again - if there is an issue, it's with their ownership of Search, Mobile towards prioritizing other products.
This.
I work with a small art organization, and we've started to put our artists videos online (we couldn't have an event this year). Youtube makes it easy. but like flickr they put ads in and there is no way to get rid of them. If we could pay for the service we probably would. I'm not sure how much it would be worth though.
YouTube has the advantage of organic traffic and discovery, though.
Nothing stopping you from uploading the video to both services for the best of both worlds.
The alternative would be for you to pay Google their share of money they would've made if they had ads enabled on your channel, which would be proportional to how many views your video gets. It makes sense since these channels have their own in-video ads which they make money from, and Youtube isn't getting a cut of that, it's similar to how app stores don't allow apps to have their own monetization which bypasses theirs.
That being said, having the creator payback Youtube depending on the number of views creates very weird incentives...
If they were harsher, they would've disallowed in-video ads completely and force channels to use Youtube ads.
Original comment:
The wording of this isn't 100% crystal clear but I have a feeling this article might be making this out to be way worse than it is.
I have 10k subs on YouTube and made a decision not to run ads on my channel from the beginning because I care more about the viewing experience than profiting.
Technically I'm in the YouTube Partner Program and I choose not to turn on monetization for my videos. Monetization is basically a checkbox you can turn on and off for each video and then if you enable it, you choose some information about how the ads are shown.
Going by the TOS update's wording, it sounds like if you're in the YPP then your videos will have not have these new ads placed in them if you choose to disable monetization for a video.
It sounds like it's only going to affect channels who have a handful of subs and views, in which case you were making $0 guaranteed anyways because you couldn't turn monetization on due to not being in the YPP. The only difference now is YouTube will make some money off your views which seems reasonable since they are hosting it for free, and realistically it'll be pennies at best if you have a small channel with 15 views per video.
I didn't say that, so you might want to remove your quotes.
The article made it seem like people with 5 million daily views who decided not to monetize their videos would get ads placed into their videos and make $0 with no way to opt-out while YouTube profited from ads in those views. That would be way different (and worse) than what's really happening.
1. "Youtube partner program" can be terminated after 6 months of zero interaction with users, though creator shall reapply.
2. Youtube shall run ads on non YPP videos.
So idea seems to be, takeaway 'ideal creators' money from them to 'Youtube'.
Is it fair to disassociate creator from "YPP/ads share" for 6 month/more dis-engagement?
I have a feeling you're going to start to see certain creators deliberately put advertiser unfriendly content in their videos just to get out of monetization now. Certain videos are already deliberately not monetized because they either are viewer-funded channels (which YouTube very much missed the boat on) or are promotional videos. YouTube should grandfather those channels and videos in as monetization-exempt, because that was "the deal" that people signed on to. Hell, if that's already financially untenable, you should at least still allow YouTube Partners - i.e. the people whose financial incentives are most aligned with monetization anyway - deliberately demonetize their own videos. Because, again, they are your customers and that was the deal they signed on to.
YouTube is a monopoly. This is exactly the type of things monopolies do.
Yes, there are other places to upload videos to watch on demand, but they’re much smaller, less well known, and just more niche.
> "Changing the deal" in a very big way like this makes your customers - the people giving you video content with no up-front expectation of payment - very, very mad.
As the saying goes, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
The creator is not a customer. The viewer is not a customer. The advertiser is the customer.
Yes, you can poison the well and lose users, and thus alienate your customers, but again, YouTube is a monopoly. There aren’t any obviously viable alternatives for long form videos.
There are plenty of alternatives in some sense; stuff like Bitchute exists and allows you to post whatever you want and it works well enough, but the reason I don't go on there is that it seems like a lot of the content is basically just neo-Nazi crap, which of course I don't really want to watch.
And I suppose that's kind of the issues; YouTube has become so normalized that it's sort of impossible for alternative video sites to reach a similar scale, and the ones that do pop up inherently start appealing mostly to the fringe groups that aren't safe for YouTube.
Now niche doesn’t necessarily mean “cesspool of hate”, but that is a niche. For a while Vimeo seemed to be the place where I found embeds of art videos, so I attributed that niche to it, but I can’t remember the last time I saw a Vimeo embed. YouTube has sucked all the air out of the room. To underline this point, I hadn’t even heard of Bitchute until now.
My understanding is this is exactly what they're doing. Another poster in these comments reached out to YouTube support who confirmed ads will not be placed on partnered videos who have declined to show ads. The policy is effective for non-partnered videos.
Admittedly this is second hand information.
To be honest I'm surprised so many video's have been hosted without ads while the creators cash in outside of Google.
That has been the service since release, so yes.
Yes, because I am making content for them for free. It is unpaid labor on my part in exchange for free hosting. Now it is unpaid labor that makes them money.
YouTube is a business.
Hosting and serving your content costs them money.
If your content provides no means to recoup those costs, you’re not doing them a favor, they’re doing you a favor.
But you did ask youtube to host for free.
I'm also curious as to how the advertisers and YT channels come up with pricing. The advertisers will have no metrics on how often the ad was skipped over, and maybe it's a coincidence, but the channels seem to keep the in-video ad lengths to integer multiples of 'skip 10 seconds' button presses.
Lots of the advertisements ask you to visit a custom URL or use a discount code which the advertisers can use as lower bound on how effective an advertisement is.
The second is the type in these sponsor ads. They have calls to action and are still interested to a small degree in brand awareness, but it's not the main focus.
All that's to say, the latter type of ads is about how many people follow the link and less so about whether the ad landed on all the eyeballs.
At least that's my layperson's view, devoid of having ever studied advertising.
Heck, I’m surprised and confused that YT hasn’t just required these embedded ads to be separated out into their own video streams, which YT then would embed back into the video seamlessly in the regular case, but would be able to drop out in the YT Premium case. (And could also swap out for other ads at a certain frequency — 30%, say?)
(Edit: my children comments are right)
[a]: This is assuming you know the magic incantation to get ffmpeg to do it
(I even think the DASH segmentation would allow them to this without reencoding the original video, but that's just speculation on my part)
- Stream ad start/end events to the browser, with no duration info
- On sending the start event, lock the user's session such that they can't change their position within the video. lock it server-side, and client-side. Start event will include details of the ad being displayed for any interactivity.
- Unlock the session after the duration of the ad has elapsed, which is only known server-side. Then send the end event to the browser so it can be unlocked client-side.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_mark#Cue_dots_in_televisio...
Indiscriminate measures don't provide helpful information. Support videos that have acceptable ads. Don't support ones that don't. Downvote them, comment, and, most importantly, be willing not to watch them, ever. YouTube can learn, much like a dog, as long as the feedback is clear and swift
To be fair, the ads themselves were interesting, I just didn't have time to watch all of them.
It's a pretty good back around not having a Costco account.
Also, Twitch has been waging a war of sorts against uBlock and others with their forced ads on streams you are not subscribed to. For the most part both youtube and twitch are doing their damn best force ads into all content though for the time being twitch does let subscribers to a channel avoid an ad on that channel
The point is to kill competition so they can settle in and collect rent.
It ends because there is an expectation of continuous growth. Eventually the predatory company starts corrupting the free model to increase revenue incrementally (all the while, internal development costs start to rise with bureaucracy) until the revenue growth is outstripped by development cost or market demand falls to equal/below a measurable amount.
Usually before, but at various times, some smaller startup with funding to stay alive or a novel business model grows with more agile process and lower cost expectations while the old predator tries to flail about (reducing ads or subscription costs) shedding users who invested, all the way down while maintaining all the bloat.
This is what happened to Yahoo, I think.
I never understand HN Crowd complaining about ads on YouTube. It literally costs(1 month sub) less than typing a comment like this for most people on HN (At least in opportunity cost).
Being able to pay for a service without ads is worth it.
Users complaining about a free ad subsidized service come across as unreasonable to me (and maybe a little entitled).
The ads turn the whole watching experience into a remote-searching minigame. I'd much rather have unskippable, but reasonably long ads.
The revenue generation focus and incentive alignment is with paying users not advertisers. If the ads don't make as much money or have a more limited audience that's fine.
Obviously the entirety of Google is structured so this isn't the case, but in products I like better than Google products (Substack, Spotify, Apple) the focus is on paying customers. Ads, if they exist at all, are only on freemium versions of the product.
Spotify = Streaming music $12/month YouTube = Streaming music + learned SolidWorks + learned Blender + learning Spanish + general entertainment of all sorts... $12/month. YouTube is incredible.
- No ads
- Minor usability improvements to the app
- “premium” content
- YouTube Music
The “premium” content is trash and YouTube Music is the worst music app with any significant effort put behind it, in addition to being a significant step down from Google‘s previous offering.
Most people would rather deal with the ads.
I wish Google Contributor could live up to the same promise, but Google killed it and replaced it with a different version. It made you a participant in the bidding process for your own ad views. So unless an advertiser was bidding a crazy amount of money, you would win the bid and an empty ad (or no ad at all) would load instead. Like YouTube Premium, this took advantage of the existing ad payment infrastructure while removing almost all the ads from your pages and videos.
Youtube premium is utter trash due to the way the money is split.
I saw a video with a sponsor, a separate THREE MINUTE ad read for some stupid mobile game AND 2 youtube ads. The video was 10 minutes.
I understand video creators need to make money but at this point i’d rather just have some patreon service where I can subscribe to channels individually for a dollar or two a month.
It seems like the fate of all streaming services is to end up like cable.
And would that really be a bad thing?
Social media sites and content hosting services like YouTube have become like the old book publishers and record labels. They provide a largely fungible middleman service to the creators who generate the real value by creating new material, yet somehow for a long time they've wound up keeping the lion's share of the financial benefits.
It's natural that creators will push back, whether through things like sponsored placements or through other revenue schemes like Patreon. But even if it's just providing storage, distribution and possibly discoverability to the creators, the host service still has bills to pay and needs to make enough revenue somewhere to be a viable business.
The ideal outcome, IMHO, would be to separate the hosting/distribution from the discoverability, have hosting services that charge real money for providing a real service and effectively compete for the best content creators, and have the equivalent of search engines or recommendation systems to help people find the content, whoever is hosting it. The latter could still operate on some sort of ad-based scheme, without interfering with delivery of the main content itself. In short, I'd like to see a return to a more decentralised system, where the content creators are the driving force, and the intermediaries have to provide their fungible services in a competitive market without becoming the de facto controlling entities for the whole system. See also: self-published writing, music, etc.
- One Ad per video that the creator chooses to elect
- Each Ad can be skipped after 5 seconds
- Two Ads now but the first can still be skipped the second cannot
- The first Ad's skip time increased from 5 seconds to 6 seconds
- Videos get Ads regardless of creator consent
I'm noticing a trend, and it sucks for those that like to use YouTube in app form since you're kind of stuck w/o the use of Ad Blockers.
- Videos get 30 second to 3 hour long ads
- Videos have several sets of two ads within the video.
YouTube is useful for big brands with lots of content with high revenue and everyone small is pushing it hard to find a way to be liked and stay relevant to "monetization" practices. At this point if you as creator don't rely on ad-revenue YouTube is not your place.
Which now makes me wonder if YouTube will launch a paid hosting offering sometime in the future that guarantees ad-free viewing.
For example, when I'm interested in a product (synths, videogames, etc) I go directly to YouTube to watch demos and reviews. If it's not there I won't see it.
Will this be my last video hosted on YouTube?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUYrN0o-cfk | Hardneck Garlic Planted For High Yield.
YouTube doesn't give me any network effect anyways (all my views are from external sources), I was just trying to do good in the world.
What tech should I look at for self hosted streaming on Digital Ocean spaces and a CDN? Please give me hints as to what I should do from a self-hosted perspective. I'm going to "DevOps" a solution, using webservers just like I do for many of my web domains. Where do I start, I want to build it from scratch using open source.
ideas?
I already have the domain unturf.com
Looking at that, possibly MediaGoblin could work.
Alternately, something like Jellyfin may work, but that's a little bit of a push.
[0] https://alternativeto.net/software/youtube/?platform=self-ho...
Yeah, how dare they charge for storage, CPU encoding and bandwidth costs!
Anyway, you can deploy nginx with RTMP module on any server and host videos yourself. We did this for many video providers (which then moved on to YT because it turns out hosting costs money), but it's not that hard.
I don't care if they use fancy algorithms for transcoding (CPU cycles) or bandwidth costs, or storage, that was the deal. I ship to them and they host it without ads. I did this for the "promise" of networking effect but this is a lie, the algorithm hates me.
I will foot the bill for my own hosting, f them.
Does this seem like a decent guide?
https://www.nginx.com/blog/video-streaming-for-remote-learni...
You don't need fancy plugins or webservers just to serve adaptive bitrate anymore these days as HLS/Dash provides many benefits of RTMP without the complexity cost. You only need to worry about bandwidth / cdn cost, and the cheapest bandwidth can be bought via hosting providers like hetzner and ovh.
You say to convert to HLS/Dash, does hls.js support both? Pros cons of one other the other? Make sense to do both?
Otherwise it seems busted.
As for the application itself, just use ffmpeg to convert hls/dash and just dump it behind nginx, no need for fancy stuff imo.
Cloudflare stream is also a relatively cheap alternative to host your video if you do a lot of video embedding on your site. I heard that some school networks block it, but other than that it's been working great and I've been using for one of my client to host their private lecture videos.
Vimeo is also a great alternative and relatively cheap too. My only gripes is it's blocked in certain countries, but otherwise it's fine if you don't care to serve visitors from those countries.
In my browsers (including on mobile), I always have adblock enabled but playing the video in the native Youtube app crams so many ads into a video it's ridiculous. They deliver ads on videos as short as 2 minutes long. Move onto the next video after watching an ad + 2 minute video == another ad.
I've stopped using the native app and have now switched to the mobile-browser version now (I use Adguard as an ad-blocker for mobile Safari which blocks YT ads in browser)..
And only after the second or third video I watch am I finally given the "skip" button, and then after a few more videos, it's back to unskippable for a while, etc..
Not to mention the constant push for YT Premium, it's every 3rd or 4th time I launch the app now that I have to tap past a full-screen interstitial asking me to subscribe.
Google is already steadily increasing the amount of ads they are making people sit through on YouTube, and so a move like this just feels like more steps down the same path they've already been on for quite a while.
If i notice a 15 sec ad before the video starts I just restart it and hope for a shorter one.
If there is two ads at the start of the video, you can close the video and relaunch it after the first ad is finished to skip the second one.
If the video has midroll ads you can scroll the video to the end and press restart from the beginning. That will remove the midroll ads.
I guess I’m free to host my own videos...
I think Youtube is great, it's where I find a lot of content, I use it a lot and not seeing ads makes a huge difference. Plus, Youtube Music is great value for the price.
- YouTube Music is awful, not a halfway decent product to replace the good Play Music.
- Stopped sending emails for video uploads (I know, I'm weird)
- "Premier" videos started to be shown in the RSS feeds. So now I am notified of stuff I can't even watch yet.
- Half the time videos just play at 360p even though I have never had a second of buffering on my 500Mpbs connection.
I think there were a couple of other things that were bugging me. But when they dropped the email notifications and the RSS feeds were terrible it was the last straw for me.
I would gladly pay if I felt that they were providing a good service and it was getting better.
Weird. I have a 50Mbps connection and get 1080p minimum on everything I watch. I like to use YT Music for discovery but not a full listening experience. Over all, YTP has really improved content discovery for me. Ad free makes it easy to find out which videos are BS.
This is your ISP's fault for having bad peering.
For some reason their detection algorithm is bugged out.
These are platforms selling super polished content from professional production teams. Sure some of the content on YouTube meets that standard but most doesn’t.
I’m not interested in a bundled music service. I use Spotify and don’t wish to switch.
So now all these smaller creators will just start their video with "hey cunts, how you doing today?"
* “Hey kids, here’s how the oil lobby caused climate change and screwed over your generation.” - Bam! No SUV ads.
Between this and not paying creators because of some "glitch", showing ads on videos that the creator cannot get paid for (if that be because they don't have "enough" followers or because they got the yellow checkmark), the bullshit preferential treatment of news agencies I could not care less about, becoming the arbiter of truth with "fact checking", randomly deleting channels, zero customer feedback or recourse with a human - the list goes on.
These days, if I want to watch somebody like EEVBlog I can just go to BitChute or Library. Content creators and users are fed up.
This puts a lot of people in a bad situation. There's no real recourse because the platform has so many users dependent on it, and its not easy to simply yank all of your content and go to another platform. The logistics of doing so are cumbersome and time consuming.
I don't know what the long term solution is, but this just seems very unreasonable. When you're business becomes so reliant on Google, you don't have any alternative but to just take what they do to you as a part of doing business with them.
And if the change shouldn't shock users, then it certainly shouldn't be shocking to Google... In which case maybe they shouldn't have presented it as an option in the first place if they knew they would have to renege on the deal.
This is not surprising at all, but not much you can do about it even if you see it coming, because other people don't see it coming or don't care. What are you gonna do about it as a user - all the creators are on YouTube. And as a creator - all the users are on YouTube. By design.
However. Ads are a blight. Sure, there's something to be said for brand awareness, but if I think back on my ad experience for the last 10 years (which is pretty easy because I haven't seen that many ads in that time) then I can safely say that my conversion rate is approximately zero for video ads. And there's several services/goods that I specifically avoid because their ads offended me.
Youtube thinking that they can fix their financial issues by summoning the ad fairy is just as naive and entitled as people who think that youtube should just be free and ad-less forever.
I'm sure it will work short term. But unless they've really thought out how this transition is going to work as well as how they're going to make sure the ads provide significant value to creators/viewers/advertisers, then I expect a slow decline.
With all of the cloud infrastructure providers out there, it's never been a better time to try launching your own video service. Setup some experimental payment options where the whole thing is paid for by an inventive combination of content creators, viewers, and ads. All tailored by the desires of all three. Want your video to be watched? You can pay to make that happen. Want to watch a video. Same deal. Don't want to pay (on either side). Well we can work out deals with advertisers.
I'm sure youtube can work something out to maintain market dominance. But they have to be paying attention to what they're doing and the announcement makes me wonder if they are.
YouTube has had a strangle hold on video content for over a decade. I'm sure this change will work out short term ... excuse me ... I'm sure this change will make their quarterly earnings look better temporarily.
Long term, however, I expect this direction to provide a foothold for competitors to take a bigger slice of the video hosting pie.
It wasn't done sooner as it was extinguishing all competition first. Its a reason we have a few big tech companies and not much else.
Google is using their vast profits from an unrelated market, tracking-based advertising, in order to subsidize their product in this market, that of video-streaming services. This is a textbook antitrust violation [1].
It is against the law to price a product below your costs in order to kill off your competitors and then jack up the prices later. This is what they have done by making it ad free for years, only to now force ads on everyone and upsell us to premium.
These laws exist to protect you, the consumer, by ensuring there is proper market competition for your goods and services. You should be up in arms about it because Google has illegally destroyed this market. This is why there are no competitors to YouTube.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
(edit: replaced link to "Dumping" with "Predatory pricing" since that's probably a better description of the law being broken)
My guess had been they would start charging for access to Google Maps or "more than 2 turn by turn directions per week" would cost extra or something.
The only business that makes a profit in all of the Alphabet companies is search advertising. Everything else lives off the excess thrown off by search. Which isn't to say that they don't have other large business revenues, just that they don't make any money. Youtube being the poster child. And it consistently skates the line between slight profit and slight loss and never comes close to the margins that Google would need to make it an independent P&L center.
Then, the profits on search ads have been falling, for at least a decade now. Inside Google that was reflected by cutting costs and deleting benefits. Killing projects that weren't profitable and shedding businesses that weren't ever going to be profitable. Then it started showing up by more an more ads on things. The sad truth is that if you are getting less per ad, you can always add additional "inventory" and keep your numbers looking good. The cost has been that search results have suffered.
I worked there 4 years. Got a good look inside the sausage factory as it were, and frankly the huge profitability of search ads in the beginning instilled a culture that literally couldn't see operational efficiency as a thing. I don't think they will be able to shed that culture before it is too late. But what is too late?
Well if you can't find a business to cover the profits that are evaporating from search, you have two choices, cut costs or monetize more. The former makes you not a 'fun place to work' and cuts into recruiting and productivity, the latter cuts into market share as your product is less and less differentiated. Say what you want about Marissa Mayer, she did get that aspect of Google. And if you're old enough to remember Alta Vista, the "premier" web search engine from 1995, you probably watched how. when it lost its edge against Google, it went crazy with advertising to try to pull up from a collision with bankruptcy.
One need only look at two things, the amount of money Google is increasingly paying to people to send search traffic to it, and the growth of "search engines" like Duck Duck Go which use Bing results to populate their SERPs, to see that Google is losing here. Those costs further erode profits and market share.
And when that erosion hits hard enough it becomes self sustaining, like a dam that has a small crack which becomes a torrent.
A number of people I know from the search business, former Googlers, some who are still Googlers, investors, media, and engineers I met while working on building and deploying the Blekko search engine with their founding team, are all following along as well. I don't think one of them thinks Google is "doing well" at this point. Sure lots of people were skeptical back in 2012 when I started saying it, but now pretty much everyone can see the pattern. Tick, tock, tick, tock.
Now don't misunderstand. We would all love for them to pull out of their current trajectory[1], but temper that hope with observations that they are not. I have seen too many "Gorillas" (in the Geoffrey Moore lexicon) go down this path to have any reasonable expectation that they will survive it. If they follow the classical Silicon Valley playbook, they need to finish their masterpiece "Grand Headquarters Vision" so that they leave behind a tomb for others to remember them by. I have some great memories of TGIF meetings at Google which were held in Building 42, which had been the centerpiece of Silicon Graphics view of its rightful place in the world. I tried to tell them to be respectful of the ghosts that walked the halls, but they didn't understand what I was saying.
[1] Well to be honest a couple of them would be happy to see Google die but I'm not one of them.
German State administrators have sent out such fines simply because videos made in Germany (even in English) which have advertising do not carry such additional business information.
These administrators will not know, nor care if you are in the YouTube Partner Program or not. They will simply send out the fines, which could bankrupt a small hobbyist.
This affects me directly, and I would have to remove my hobby channel from YouTube if they go ahead with this.
But I am not a business, I'm a hobbyist. I derive no income from my channel.
By my estimation you would need at least five employees in Germany to run an online business properly, as the law that governs businesses is voluminous and bureaucratic. I could not afford to run a business.
For example, if I were a business in Germany, other YouTubers could sue me simply because I didn't follow packaging or E-waste laws in one of my videos. And that is to say nothing of surprise laws that you couldn't even predict would be laws.
Also, under German law I'd need permission from my existing employer to run a business, which they would not likely give.
I think even services that you pay for (like Netflix) will eventually get there.
I was at my parents house the other day and they watch a lot of cable TV. The amount of commercials was shocking since I'm so used to streaming. I kept thinking "why do we still have to watch commercials if we're paying for the service?".
Then I realized it's only a matter of time before Netflix, Hulu, etc. start doing the same thing. Hopefully I'm wrong.
They have the legal right to do this of course but we don't have to like it and the impact on the market and can choose against them if you believe that their content is not worth commercials and rising prices.
Now they implement a similar measure whose net effect would probably be comparable - i.e. an increased ad revenue.
It is perhaps logical for Google to behave like that, purely from the financial point of view. However, they could have done it a long time ago. It is unclear to me why they believe that the right time to introduce such measures is now.
Maybe they believe that their user base is currently large enough and stable enough that the decreased comfort levels while using YouTube would not motivate a critical portion of them to leave. It remains to be seen whether that is true.
Or, perhaps, their ad revenue growth is slowing [1] and they are trying to compensate for it even by using measures whose long term effects are unclear.
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/60293363?hl=en [1] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/youtube-google-q2-ad-r...
I bet a lot of devops would love a 'reduce user usage by 20% for a week' button.
From looking casually into the community, those channels have a lot of videos with millions and sometimes tens of millions of views. All of that is going to potentially migrate to somewhere else.
I don't watch youtube on my phone anymore. IMHO this is profoundly bad for Google. The last time I bought a phone, having a bigger screen was one of the considerations. I don't remember how much it was, but I spent like $800 on it. Not anymore. My last phone was $350. I use for a lot less stuff. Mostly just texting and discord. So Google has lost out twice- once for just less watching of youtube, but also less mobile device usage, which likely earns Google quite a bit more from that the ads.
Original text: I'm sorry if I seem dismissive, but isn't this the status quo already (like years ago)? I don't necessarily endorse it, but from what I've read on the article and the announcement it seems that it has rewritten the terms to clarify that YouTube/Google can monetise videos outside of YPP programme (and some other changes that are not in scope of the argument), so is this just net zero?
(Also: if a YPP creator has decided to not monetize a video, the video gets less ads which its proceeds goes directly to Google. This has been the status quo at least 2016(?)ish so this might be just to clarify that this indeed happens.)
At present, if you choose not to monetize a video, no ads get shown unless a third part makes a copyright claim on your video.
I'm not quite sure about the situation with ads that show up in the corner of the page - those are unobtrusive enough that I'm used to mentally tuning them out.
Pardon me? I'm pretty sure that there are (occasional) in-video ads for channels not under YPP and explicitly-demonetized YPP videos even before 2020. (and I'm pretty sure that they were in no way claimed by others at all)
No idea if the creators opt in to this “feature” (I bet they don’t; it’s probably either all or nothing with ads), but it definitely exists.
You used to be able to opt-in to mid-roll ads. A few months ago, YouTube switched it to an opt-out system, helpfully enabling them for all then-existing videos that hadn't opted in:
> Starting in late July, videos that are longer than eight minutes will be eligible for mid-roll ads. As part of this change, mid-roll ads will be turned on for all eligible existing videos and future video uploads, including those videos where you may have previously opted out of mid-roll ads. Videos that already have mid-roll ads turned on will not be impacted.
(As I understand it, there is no way to disable the mid-roll ad on all videos, so you'd have to manually flip it for every single video. How kind of YouTube.)
I do not have definite proof for this, as I said on the top comment it is rather occasional, but I'm pretty sure that this happened to me on these videos (will update as I remember them):
- Tom Scott (which is definitely in YPP in 2018) has a video titled Stories I Can't Tell [1]. At the time I've watched it for the first time, it has a in-video ad at the tail of the video even though he explicitly said that the video is not monetised (and therefore it might be Google getting the money). Notably, he prepares his videos days or weeks in advance so I'm confident he indeed turn off monetisation on this.
- From time-to-time, I have accessed channels for work purposes. One of them is Fisher Scientific [2], which does have ads occasionally despite the fact that it shouldn't have (and obviously they wouldn't have bothered to submit YPP).
- Similarly, YouTube channels using Google Workspace accounts do serve an ad from time-to-time. Again, it is occasional, but from what my child has experienced, it does happen even with educational accounts (they have since moved to using Google Drive, although it is cumbersome since there are no features such as playlists).
I pulled up a private browser session to make sure I was not logged in, and the video was served ad free.
With ads on it’s a nightmare as when searching it takes a number of videos until I find the one I am looking for and each time I have to wait for 30 sec ad.
It’s so time wasting that I stopped using it.
I hope they continue the trend and the Google monster dies from inside.
Of course I’d love YouTube and thus Google’s ad empire to not be so dominant, but to the extent that that is fine, this is fine too.
As a user what really sucks is that despite paying to get rid of ads I still have to put up with the ones creators include within the video itself.
If they do that, that seems perverse. Isn't the purpose of demonetization to prevent showing ads on videos where the videos aren't conducive to showing ads? If they show ads on such videos then that seems to defeat their argument.
youtube-dl it is
Now Youtube is going to put ads on my stuff, and I don't get any money for it, so really the worst of both worlds.
I really wonder how much further they can push this without either driving users to using ad blockers or creators to upload to other platforms.
Unfortunately, I suspect the answer is "pretty long"...
I'm not so sure.
I'm only a casual viewer of YouTube. I don't engage in any of the account-based stuff, just watch the occasional video hosted there. But even in the content I've seen, it's clear that the semi-pro creators -- the kind of people using schemes like Patreon these days, and maybe placements as they get more successful -- are very aware of how they come across.
In particular, they might already be hosting their content on multiple services, particularly those who livestream events of whatever kind, where they might stream on Twitch one day and YT the next. Those who are successful enough to make significant money from their videos are well aware of anything affecting their video quality, audience numbers, and ultimately revenue.
I doubt many of them will have any great loyalty to YT if it becomes too awkward or expensive, and I'm sure many of them already have accounts on other services and the bulk of their followers would know where else to find them if YT shut down their accounts overnight.
It would be cool if creators could pay Youtube to keep their videos online without ads.
I could buy Premium but not at the current price tag, I don't use it that much.
I pay for YouTube premium because it's only 120₹(2$) in my country and I like to spend a lot of time on YouTube, a lot more than Twitch or Netflix or any other streaming app.
As such I am in favour of this move it it means that YouTube will perform better but I am not sure anymore.
So at least, since they are forced to show ads, the ads can be at the right place?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCLFut6pAa8
The ads are everywhere and in everything, and it has basically stopped me from being able to enjoy much of media. But consuming media is a poor use of my time anyway, so it seems like a benefit for me.
YT seems to be increasingly prioritizing being ad delivery network over being a content delivery network.
Some types of ads are really innocuous, some not so much.
If there were only a 4 second ad at the start we'd be fine with it, but it'll be a 'click to skip', there'll be more than one, it will interrupt, the ads will be loud and annoying etc..
Product Managers are always under pressure to increase revenue, but they never want to contemplate the long-run effects of the qualitative reduction in the value of their product.
I understand they want to be _profitable_ by forcing users to pay those $9.99/month, but this aggressive campaign against free users is really really bad.
Someone should tell this guy: https://youtubersunion.org/
In fact this is already one of their demands (more or less):
* Monetize everyone - Bring back monetization for smaller channels.
I think this is now referring to in-video ads.
Honestly, it too too long. Should have been sooner, before other YouTube competitors slided into irrelevance.
"Dumping", anyone?
Since the shape of video content downloads is heavily weighted towards newer releases, backing BT with HTTP seeds looks a lot more viable.
The worst thing is that you have to skip them, so you need to interact with the tv. If the ads were reasonably long that would be fine, but sometimes there are WHOLE EPISODES OF OTHER SHOWS as ads (sometimes as long as 30 mins!). I just want to watch something without searching for the remote all the time.
So idea seems to be, takeaway 'ideal creators' money from them to 'Youtube'.
Is it fair to disassociate creator from "YPP/ads share" for 6 month/more dis-engagement?
Showing ads on content produced by creators who aren't a part of the partners program, means they get to pocket the full ad revenue.
There is already not enough ad money to go around, hence the Adpocalypse a few years back.
Now Google is skimming even more of the cream.
This is a company which deserves to lose, and I, for one, can't wait.
I’ve put up some useful videos on a few technical tasks and was happy with the few dollars/mo/video they were kicking me, but it wasn’t subscribable content; I solved your problem, why would you come back?
No matter how many ads they show him, I'm certain he won't be buying anything because of it.
It looks like we're all getting played for suckers because they still get all of our info while their services are gradually restricted.
But thinking about it I can't remember a single ad. Today more and more people have an ad filter in their head. This means that Google earns a lot of money from ads that have a lot of exposure but almost zero effect.
Is there a way for a content-publisher to pay Google to not show videos on our ads?
This sort of shit is inevitable. Is there a single free web service that's been successful and kept to its core promises way back when?
[tin foil hat on]
Perhaps this is signs of something else going very wrong and they trying the plug the revenue gap. Google Photos size limit last week, More Youtube ads now.
At this going , I wouldn't be surprised if they bring in some tighter limits / pricing plans on GMail too.
I'm thinking of an easy to use tool that would chunk videos and create manifests for DASH, generate a thumbnail, and do whatever else you'd need to do to host streaming videos on your own blog.
You can say bye bye to the thousands of relaxing ASMR and ambiance videos on YouTube.
Thanks NewPipe and youtube-dl for allowing us to watch ad-less videos.
I know that isn't youtube's goal but just watching some neato science videos with my kids ... I got some surprisingly explicit male grooming ads... and some ads that IMO were awfully suggestive.
Kind of funny to me actually
Pretty much confirming predatory pricing. Hence why Google is up on antitrust laws.
Quickly reopen by tapping on the thumbnail, it shan't show ads. If it doesn't work do it 2-4 times
The videos are educational meant for classrooms only content.
You still get ads no matter what?
Time to invest in a a Vimeo account or ugh.. self host.
Is it getting so bad recently?
It's hard to find good information on exactly how _much_ more. I've seen estimates anywhere from 2x (https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/9agg5f/how_does_yo...) to 20x (https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...).
Also, start looking into peertube. While its still long ways from a competing software, its going strong and the more people join it, the better will be the network effect.
Youtube was down for a few hours a couple days ago and thats when I realized that just about every video on the internet is now exclusively hosted on Youtube.
Even visiting the homepage of some sites, they'll have a Youtube "Here's what our product is"-type video that was no longer working.
Peertube already is becoming a good floss competitor software that can be selfhosted. You make the rules, you put advertising if you want.
My reasoning for saying use newpipe with this new rule. Earlier the idea was like you are not watching ads and taking money from creators if only that was 50% of revenue. Now they are not getting nothing so why bother watching obnoxious ads.
Does this new policy change that?
1. The developers of tools like youtube-dl are the good guys, those at Google are the bad guys. There's no other way to put it. If you force all of the creators on your platform into a "partner program" that slaps ads on all of their videos, even if they don't want to, and you take all of their revenue away, knowing that creators won't leave you anyway because you're the biggest player in the market that provides them with access to the widest audience, then you're hurting both creators and consumers for your personal profit, while abusing your dominant position. On top of it, they take away the revenue generated by content created by someone else, just like a century-old music major would do, and when you put things in perspective (small YouTube channel that struggles to make a few hundred bucks per month vs. gargantuan corporation that belongs to the exclusive trillion dollar club) you realize how expectedly and banally greedy evil the former "don't be evil" company has become. And instead of listening to all the cries for changing their business model, Google is simply trying to force the world to swallow their outdated ads-based business model, proving that, after all, they're nothing more than a mediocre ads company, not a tech company that still likes to risk and innovate. In the face of so much evil piracy isn't only a right: it's a civic duty to remind those fuckers that it doesn't matter how many technological restrictions they decide to implement to force us to swallow their ads and how many repos they take down. We've also got brilliant engineers on the other side of the barricade, and we'll ALWAYS find clever ways to bypass their dumb restrictions. It's probably just not the best use of engineering resources on both sides. We'd love to spend our engineering time building things instead of reverse engineering the new authentication flow of YouTube in order to get that damn direct video URL. And Google engineers had better invest their time building a new infrastructure that offers fair payments to creators, instead of finding new ways to make people swallow their ads in spite of our scrapers.
2. Creators need to get the fuck out of YouTube. I know, it's hard because they'd lose access to a huge audience, but if nobody ever wins the initial inertia then things won't change, and the Evil Corp will keep bullying everyone. Platforms like Nebula and Curiosity Stream have proved that people are happy to pay a subscription to access premium ads-free content. And platforms like Vimeo and Twitch also offer access to a wide audience. And more platforms can be experimented too, perhaps based on micro-payments or affordable subscription models in order to both create revenue and offer creators anything more than the spare cash from ads revenue. And at some point we should consider a "video aggregator" that works pretty much like an RSS aggregator, listing videos on multiple platforms (after all, they're nothing more than URLs to mp4 files) to make sure that none of the other video platforms becomes the next YouTube. We need consumers and creators to seriously boycott YouTube and let other platforms build enough momentum. That's the only way to make an evil company that only cares about ads revenue change its mind.
I've come to enable you again
Because an ad softly shouting
Left its seeds while I was watching
And the headache, that was planted in my brain... still remains
Within the sound of content
In restless dreams of unskippable ads I walked alone.
Narrow windows of portrait mode
Neath the halo of dark mode
I turned my brightness to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon ad
That split the night
And touched the sound, of content.