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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

I hate YouTube ads and do my best to block them where I can, but let’s not forget that YouTube is serving a billion hours of video a day, which costs.

If you don’t want ads to appear on your videos, you can host the videos on your own website and pay for the data or use another video service. Neither are likely to give the streaming performance or audience you’d get with YouTube.

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Alternatively you host your videos on both your own Peertube site as well as Youtube and direct Youtube-visitors to either Peertube, Invidious [2] or - if they're using Android - NewPipe. If they are command-line savvy they can use youtube-dl or one of the mediaplayers which make use of its functionality (mpv, VLC, smplayer etc). In other words there are many ways to both have your cake and eat it here. Self-hosted Peertube with Youtube as CDN and discovery network gives you the best of both worlds. If Google ever decides your videos don't fit the desired narrative you won't be left out in the cold. By self-hosting you also avoid being branded -ist or -phobe just because you happen to use some alternative video platform (Odysee etc) which also hosts content made by others.

[1] https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube

[2] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

[3] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

If only NewPipe had access to Google's recommendation engine (or its dataset). That's the only reason why I'm on youtube.com a lot.

Hm, I actually see this as an advantage of these alternative frontends since there is far less incentive to be pulled down some rabbit hole. Without recommendations and autoplay the thing just plays the video you point it at and stops without trying to entice you to stay just a bit longer [1].

[1] ...cue audio from that ancient C64 game: Another visitor, stay a while, stay FOREVER... https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Impossible_Mission

In the past I would agree, but anymore all of the recommendations are things I watched a couple of years ago. I'm not getting turned on to new, relevant content but refed stuff I 'liked'.

If you tap a video in Newpipe then swipe left/right on the bottom area of the screen you get comments, description and related videos - is that what you want?

Is Invidious anything other than a YouTube proxy?

Is there Invidious-native content?

(Mind: the proxy feature is quite usfeul. It's also ... limited and limiting.)

No, it is only a proxy. For native content Peertube is a good option, I've been running it for a few years without any real problems, starting out on a machine with a Pentium E2220 and 2GB of RAM (video transcoding was... slow... but once transcoded it worked fine), later moving to less anaemic hardware.

Invidious is useful for more than just filtering out ads, it actually makes Youtube content useable on older hardware - like the Thinkpad T42p I'm using right now - where the "official" interface and player are close to useless. When configured correctly - i.e. when videos are proxied through the server - it keeps your video viewing habits out of Google's hands. It makes it possible to follow channels without Google knowing about it. It can not help against censorship, when Google removes content it can no longer be accessed through Invidious. I've used Peertube to mirror Youtube channels which have had videos removed which does help against censorship - run a cron job to monitor a channel for changes and mirror new videos to Peertube. All of this can be done anonymously - I do not even have a Google or Youtube account.

Thanks, that largely reflects my own experience.

The now-largely-unusable (thanks to API key limitations) mps-youtube command-line utility still remains the most useful interface to YouTube I've ever used:

- Runs without any browser at all.

- From a console.

- Without video, if you so specify.

- Enables full search, can be limited to music, includes both content and account search. That is, you can search for content matching terms, or for a username / account matching a term. Also playlists IIRC.

- Can play based on a given account's videos / postings.

- Individual items can be saved to a queue. Those may be ephemeral (session-only), or saved to disk.

- Content can be downloaded if preferred.

- No YouTube account required, no play history on YouTube.

YouTube apparently did all they could to kill this, and largely succeeded. I'd used it fairly extensively for my own preferred use of the site: finding lectures (and occasionally book-readings or similar content), and queuing up playlists or downloading archives of those. Works on absolutely minimal hardware.

They've also dramatically increased the proportion and intrusiveness of those ads over the last year, taking advantage of a near-monopoly position and a captive audience.

I would also argue that part of the reason for the escalation of ads is spread of ad blocking. They have fewer users they can monetize, so they have to monetize those users more.

Do you know the percentage of users that use ad blocking on YT?

No idea, but I know it's a self defeating cycle. I started blocking ads because they were getting annoying, I'm sure many other do the same.

What monopoly?

I could buy the search monopoly position, but not video.

If anything, YouTube is even more of a monopoly than Google, because while other search engines can index the same internet and show similar results, YouTube competitors don't have the creators behind them to create content for them, and the creators don't want to create content for these platforms since they don't have the users.

You know that you can pay the same that you pay for Netflix and have no adds right?

What I don't understand is why do I never get ads for Youtube premium? Why isn't there a "signup to Premium to remove ads" on every page.

To find out about Premium I have to go to my channel-> Purchases and memberships->Read More

> They've also dramatically increased the proportion and intrusiveness of those ads over the last year, taking advantage of a near-monopoly position and a captive audience.

Agreed.

But they didn’t do this until after providing you with the option to pay for ad-free.

If ads bother you that much really, just put up and pay for it. Your problem will be solved across all your machines, devices, phones, tablets and TVs in less than a minute.

Google created this "problem" and they also created a "solution" for it.

A better solution is to move away from YouTube, if at all possible.

The existence of alternatives doesn't mean I need to like either, and they have changed the parameters of the choice in the last year. I don't have to like that, either.

The original submission here is related to solvespace. Why would solvespace want to have a bigger audience for these videos than just the people who visit their site? And why couldn't they meet the streaming needs of that audience just as well as youtube?

If you are trying to reach a larger and larger audience beyond your own abilities to stream, it sounds like you yourself are advertising. So you are annoyed that the advertising firm you use to advertise is using your advertisement to advertise.

Personally I’d miss the discoverability that YouTube provides. Actually I miss it already since they nerfed their algorithm. Maybe we should be building better directories and searches?

I'm guessing your use case is different. Solvespace doesn't need youtube for discoverability of these videos. These are not ad videos. They are tutorials. So why not host them on the same site as you host the software downloads?

Discoverability is good for advertising. It seems odd that people complain about ads on a service they use for advertising.

I mostly watch tutorials. Some of which I search for but many have been suggested and allowed me to discover new hobbies and interests or even just new channels on the same topic with good presenters.

> I hate YouTube ads and do my best to block them where I can, but let’s not forget that YouTube is serving a billion hours of video a day, which costs.

You understand the costs involved to serve billions of hours of video a day yet still block the ads used to help sustain the site?

Why not pay for premium?

What are the costs involved in hosting for a single 10 minute 720p video?

Assuming it's 50MB compressed, about 0.1c per month to store it, 0.4c per view for bandwidth, plus cpu cost to stream it(unsure of how much this costs), plus transcoding costs on upload.(based on gcp storage costs)

Then there's also the non-dollar cost of the access to the very sizeable YouTube audience that google curates.

Comparing the cost of the actual hosting is silly though. Nobody thinks the value of hosting the nyt cooking site comes from the engineering behind the website, it comes from the content stored. The exact same. Thing is true here, the value of your video being on youtube is it being in a storefront.

...and then all the complexity starts. You really want to store many transcodes, and send a transcode appropriate for the combination of device and bandwidth. No point wasting money on bandwidth sending a 4k video to a small smartphone on a dicey mobile connection, after all.

Is the video served from some datacenter in Germany, no matter where the user is? You can cut bandwidth costs and improve latency by caching videos closer to the users, at the cost of handling all of the caching complexity and business arrangements.

If video 6-of-15 in the tutorial series suddenly goes viral, are you on the hook for outlandish bandwidth charges, or does your site hit a quota and just die?

Overall, it's VERY understandable that businesses outsource the complexity of video hosting, based on the engineering complexity alone.

> about 0.1c per month to store it, > 0.4c per view for bandwidth

No. Those estimates are 1 order of magnitude wrong. You wouldnt even pay that much contracting the highest tiers in AWS/Azure/GC , let alone owning the infrastructure.

Those estimates are taken from the gcp pricing page [0] that say $0.02 (or 2c) per GB. Have you a source for your claim that I'm wrong?

[0] https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#price-tables

You are correct, I must have made a dumb mistake in my mental calculations

They don't deserve my subscription, their ads are too annoying and intrusive. Seriously, a 20 minute video can contain 6 midrolls. I recently tried to watch some video about how singapore is the only succesful dictatorship and instead it kept getting interrupted mid-sentence.

At this point I am fully convinced even cable tv has a better signal to noise ratio.

Google could easily figure out how to distribute the bandwidth and storage costs of that were a priority.

Bandwidth and storage is distributed in data centers around the world.

Or you mean using users’ bandwidth and storage to power the service? That might go over less well than you think.

The latter. In the age of patreon people clicking the 'support creator with reseed' box to temporarily donate some spare resources to creators they like is almost a given.

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