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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

From the article: "When you get the domain, it will be added to your account but when your website starts to get a lot of traffic, Freenom will remove the domain from your account without notifying you and then put it on sale. You won't be able to get the domain back unless you pay a fee."

Now, where else can that business model be applied? You could let people post videos for free, and when they get enough traffic, ads are added. That might be a successful business.

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The important part of this alleged business model is that the domain goes on sale, which basically forces a serious user to pay whatever the sale price is. Bait-and-switching on “ad free” is not exactly admirable but its tame by comparison.

What are you even talking about?

YouTube has had ads ever since shortly after it launched, and it never did anything like promise it would be ad-free. There's no bait and switch, nor is it anything like Freenom.

If YouTube acted like Freenom, it would wait until your video got popular, then remove it unless you paid YouTube a bunch of money. Which it doesn't do.

So how on earth are you trying to connect Freenom to YouTube...?!

>If YouTube acted like Freenom, it would wait until your video got popular, then remove it unless you paid YouTube a bunch of money.

Sort of like offering a free credit to use Google Compute Cloud, using opaque pricing, then once it gets popular, removing it until you pay Google a lot of money.

Is it true that they will put ads on your video whether you want them or not?

Of course. Why would you expect them to host your video for free when it costs them money?

That is true, take the fast upload/bandwidth/storage for granted. Just thought you could opt out of it somehow maybe if you paid them but not sure how much it would be.

Nope, that's not their business model.

If you want that, that's literally why Vimeo Pro exists -- you pay Vimeo to host your stuff and they won't show ads on it.

Two companies, two business models, consumers (video creators) get to choose the model they like best.

Right I have it, Vimeo paid just sucks no one watches it haha. I guess that's why you put it on a website or something that people already go to.

And a completely different one from what you quoted.

1) On Youtube, you can opt out of ads for your own videos.

2) If you get enough traffic to where you can add the ads, you don't lose access/ownership of the video on your account. Youtube doesn't force you to pay to keep your own videos, either.

I've seen people not read the article when they post a comment, but it seems you didn't even read the part of the article you quoted before making your snarky allusion.

> On Youtube, you can opt out of ads for your own videos.

You can opt out of monetization, but I don't think you can opt out of ads anymore.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/youtube-will-put-ads-on-non-...

We have you now! Muahahahahaha!

This doesn't just put ads on your site. It shuts it down.

Which kills the traffic. So this is a take the money and run scam, not a long-term one.

I don't think the video ad example is particularly unethical, assuming it's disclosed to the video uploader. Or at least it's no more unethical than ad tech is by definition (which is pretty unethical, admittedly).

This domain registration scam is more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_running and https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/, i.e. inferring from the inside information you have as the market maker/platform that the value of something is going up, and using that knowledge to make trades or business decisions that are profitable to you, not something a platform is normally expected to do, and costly to the source of the information, i.e. your customers. These are considered unethical/illegal because the possibility they might happen is not disclosed to the user of the platform.

yoink!

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