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Comment by 2muchcoffeeman | Hacker News Reader

I don’t necessarily think ad funded content is bad. But YouTube seems to do it the worst. 2 ads at the start, sometimes they can’t be skipped. Ads in between at weird places. Now there are 2 ads at the end too.

Spotify is ok. Ads. Bunch of uninterrupted songs. Ads. Like radio. Many Anime streaming services are similar. Ads bookend the content.

YouTube could have spent time curating good content and building a platform worth a damn. Instead the vast vast majority is trash. There are really only a handful of content creators that make anything good. And it seems like more and more of them have patreons or their own sponsorships. I again don’t mind these. But I have direct ways of paying the creators. And if they moved somewhere else I’d follow them.

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Would you consider paying for YouTube and Spotify instead? Both are available ad-free.

I can easily afford that but I never want to pay a single penny to Google/Alphabet Inc. More of an ideological thing than economical, probably many have different reasons here instead of not being able to afford it.

Also, "then don't use" is not an option either as almost all the content out there is uploaded to YouTube, so it isn't like same content is available on Vimeo/Facebook etc.

Without trying to sound too puritanical, your stance sounds like a way to avoid paying creators

Nope, seriously. If there were a way to directly pay the good content creators (not talking about $5, Patreon etc, but having a microtransaction everytime I watch a nice video like 0.05 each which does sum up to something similar aggregated) I'd love to.

If you pay a company built around ad revenue to remove ads in one particular product, you now have a big flag “has money and willing to pay” on your profile.

No ads on that product, sure, but very much not coincidentally you cannot opt out of all ads across Alphabet, and the flag is a very strong signal for elsewhere you will be shown ads (even if it’s not made directly available to advertisers in targeting settings).

Google had the whole 'you can outbid advertisers if you want' feature but killed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

You know the content creators themselves can decide where they want to have ads? Also Youtube has even skippable ads, Spotify doesn't, but somehow Spotify does it better?

Your points are highly subjective dear sir.

I didn’t know the creators themselves are setting the ads.

Yes, I would take quality content with unskippable ads that bookend what I want to watch or listen to, vs what appears to be random sometimes. Or just companies sponsoring the creators. I suppose I’m used to the old TV and radio model.

YouTube as it stands just recommends garbage. And everything has garbage click bait titles. The fact that the quality is so poor doesn’t make me want to pay for anything.

That is not completely true. There are many who are not deciding on what ads are shown and have no control over it.

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