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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

It is superficially sad, but as you point out the 2nd order effects are really positive. Google has really done us all a favor by being actually more authentic: they're saying "We're an Advertising company ." (the period is said out loud). They are a tech company insofar as it serves their ad business. They're not a general tech company, and they have no interests or pursuits in anything else unless it is to develop new lines of ad revenue.

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.

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YouTube premium gets rid of all the ads, unless creators have embedded them in the video. There is lots of good content for toddlers on YouTube, but it is unwatchable with ads. I watch more myself now all the ads are gone, plus you get youtube music, not as good as spotify but good enough.

Agreed.

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.

FYI, YouTube Music received almost every feature of Google Play Music except the app design. An in-depth review of the two can be found over here: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/10/24/google-play-music-t...

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. :)

Youtube Music's handling of my uploaded music is really poor compared to GPM (sectioned off from everything else), so that alone was enough to make me dump my subscription when GPM was shut down.

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.

I actually prefer the way YTM segments my uploads from the general catalog, as it gives me some possibly unfounded confidence in the idea that I'm going to be listening to the edition I expect, and not something like a 20th anniversary re-release with 15 extra tracks. GPM has this really bad problem where their treatment of my uploads was seriously broken and I would see, just as one example, multiple copies of every track on one album. I don't see this since the YTM conversion.

Exactly, I'd pay for Youtube Premium if it didn't come bundled with a music subscription, and the price reflected that.

Cable TV started as paid ad-free TV also. It now has so many ads that it is almost unwatchable at times.

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.

YouTube will push the needle to the extent Cable did and a new platform will be born. It's the circle of technology. Then the next video platform will feel like the YouTube of ~8 years ago.

The maximally optimal value to the end user waxes and wanes throughout the business cycle, and unfortunately we're in the trough.

It's also key to note that had Cable NOT pushed ads as far as they had, they still would have been disrupted. It was a rational decision, since revenue today is often worth more than in the uncertain-for-so-many-reasons future.

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.

If they didn't show ads I doubt they would have cared as much about time shifting and ad skipping would never have been relevant. Sure would have helped them avoid collapsing.

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.

Those time shifting shows appear on broadcast tv across the nation in different time zones. They are not cable channels but broadcast channels appearing in cable. A tv antenia will pick them up.

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.

Sorry, there must be some overlapping terminology.

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...

And none of that would've prevented Netflix from being a more convenient option that let you watch on many more devices, etc. Especially because the early hook here for Netflix streaming wasn't "watch the stuff currently on cable" it was "watch back catalog stuff that isn't anywhere else right now." So that would still get Netflix in the door, and then once they start doing first-run content, game over in the same way. Nobody would want to buy and set up Tivos or Slingboxes and LAN setups and all just to turn their existing cable subscription into a Netflix subscription when they could just buy the streaming subscription separately.

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'm honestly not sure we're in the trough. The value of Youtube is pretty tightly correlated to the amount of content on Youtube. While you could argue that the signal to noise ratio is worse, it's very hard to argue that there isn't significantly more 'good' (however you define it) content on youtube that makes it more valuable.

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.

The way I see it, YouTube is already being disrupted by platforms like Tik Tok

> Cable TV started as paid ad-free TV also.

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.

How is the mobile experience for YT Music? Looking at switching, I imagine they have the desktop experience down. I love Spotify, but I can't imagine a worse experience outside of their mobile app. The web player was nice but fails to load music two-three times per listening session (to be fair, they are usually 5-8hrs), the desktop application is slow, clunky, and will regularly not play music I have downloaded.

There are three deal breakers for me.

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.

I hated it initially, but am fine with it now.

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.

+1 on that last issue. I don't understand why Google doesn't include ad-free YouTube as part of a perk for using Google Workspace. Also I wish I could tell Chrome to open some links in other profiles at all times, and only those links, kind of like Firefox might do. Actually, come to think of it, I probably use Chrome too much and should try alternatives instead.

YouTube Music is so bad I shut down my use of Google for music, unplugged my Google home devices, and migrated to Alexa. Amazon Music is worse than Google Music, but better than YouTube Music.

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.

Truly painful. On iOS it regularly fails to keep playing the next song in a playlist, which is pretty much unforgivable for a music app.

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...

I can't believe that you actually decided to be held hostage by google and pay them to remove content that they would otherwise only put in front of you if you were looking. Its like paying a restaurant not to harass you and then going to it when you could just go to the restaurant next door without the protection fee. There is also a lot of good content for toddlers IRL.

One could argue that all good content for toddlers is IRL and none of the content on yt.

Most content is unbearable with Ads so I pay as I do every other entertainment service that I want to spend my time watching. With YouTube most of the revenue (55%) go to the creator which I'm also happy to support.

IMO it's a net positive that it has created new business models that's open to anyone with a camera/mobile.

Paying for content instead of being fed ads doesn’t seem unbelievable to me.

On the other hand, the method employed by YouTube is just akin to its contents. 90% BS.

Actually, it's about paying for service received. You pay by ads or you pay by wallet.

I pay $15 / month for the youtube music family plan. That includes ad free youtube and ad free youtube kids.

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.

> decided to be held hostage by google and pay them to remove content that they would otherwise only put in front of you if you were looking. Its like paying a restaurant not to harass you and then going to it when you could just go to the restaurant next door without the protection fee.

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.

> Its like paying a restaurant not to harass you and then going to it when you could just go to the restaurant next door without the protection fee.

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 disagree that it is like it is paying for the food. If I had youtube premium and my entire $10 went to only the creators of the videos I watched using some egalitarian algorithm, then I would be into it. However, it is actually more like Spotify where some portion of my $10 (lets say $7, even though it is probably lower) gets put into a large pool and then distributed among all content creators on the site along with everyone else's premium money.

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.

I don't think Spotify is any different here: money goes to creators/artists in proportion to watch/listen time, no?

Do you have any source on how they distribute payments? All I can find is this blurb which could be read lots of different ways (likely by design):

"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...

> held hostage by google... Its like paying a restaurant not to harass you...

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.

You can't "pay" by watching ads. Watching ads is a harmful and non-productive activity, so it's impossible to be obligated to do it.

If you don't want to watch ads you can always do something else. There's no shortage of things to do, and YouTube need not be high on your list.

Of course I could, but why should I? Ad blockers work fine.

That’s good too: just because they sent you some bit doesn’t mean you are obligated to read (/watch/parse/etc) them.

Paying a fee to disable ads is not new. I've done it so many times before, starting ages ago with Salon.com and continuing on into Patreon-supported podcasts. Why not for YouTube as well?

The best reason I can think of is becasue of this effect: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...

There's no good content for toddlers on youtube. Toddlers shouldn't be watching anything.

Youtube should not be watched by kids, it even has a minimum age of 13 in the TOS. Then what?

PBS Kids FTW. No ads, no harmful content, and (probably much) less surveillance.

Youtube kids does not have the age 13 requirement.

It still has occasional inappropriate or dumb content and surveillance. Also unclear what % of parents bother with yt kids.

Similarly, in Australia ABC kids (live and streaming on iView) has more content than any kid could ever consume in a lifetime.

My understanding, Linus Tech Tips did a breakdown of their revenue, is that Youtube premium subscribers get more money to the creators than ads.

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.

Indeed, I've seen revenue breakdowns from a number of content creators and each of them makes it clear that if you have YouTube premium, when you watch a single video you give the creator approximately 10x the revenue of a single free user who only sees ads.

Likewise, the day that they start putting ads into YouTube premium is the day I abandon the platform.

I recently found this and use it to get and retain all the videos I like (not just from youtube), it's super simple which is exactly why I like it: https://github.com/tomszilagyi/copycat

Vanced YouTube also gets of rid all the ads and doesn't involve giving money to Google.

Oh, and of course uBlock Origin works fine on proper computers too.

> They are a tech company insofar as it serves their [sales] business. They're not a general tech company, and they have no interests or pursuits in anything else unless it is to develop new lines of [sales] revenue.

What's the difference from product-driven or subscription-driven tech businesses?

Who pays.

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.

And why would they not also be responsive to the wants and the needs of the customers who look at the ads, without which the model would not be profitable?

They had to create a service people want to use in order to be able to put ads on it.

They are responsive. They'll push ads at them to the limit of their endurance, then back off a smidgen and call it good.

And isn't that the same story in any business? They'll raise costs to the limit of customers' endurance, or else reduce quality to compensate?

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.

Not a business that is purportedly just a publisher. The channel creators were told they could choose their ad model. That was contradicted by this decision.

Imagine your letter carrier started stamping Aunt Agatha's letters with car ads or whatever.

The USPS is ad supported. They invented spam.

Aunt Agatha's letter is ended by junk mail.

If non customer complaints and responses threaten the ability of the organization to sell to their actual customers, they will respond. Short of that line, the business is not going to be responsive to non-customer complaints.

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.

> unless your complaints interfere with [their bottom line], 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.

> Apple knows that a user with a complaint isn’t necessarily going to stop buying iPhones.

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.

> there’s no magic that keeps Apple customers buying apple products.

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.

> 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?

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.

I use one streaming service, but always buy a CD when I like something. So many times I had no network connection and got stuck without anything to listen to. Streaming service had offline option, but couldn't play anything as it needed to check keys, which makes offline pointless. Sadly not all music is available in physical format.

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