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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Funny how people want content but don’t want to support content creators via ads or paying for YouTube Premium.

The internet in a nutshell. Ironically if people weren’t so avoidant of paying for digital content, ads, and the subsequent tracking, would’ve never emerged.

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There was a time before ads on the internet, and there was content there. Great content even. I would love to see what people create when they do it just because they want to, on their own terms and their own time, rather than chasing what will be self-sustainable or profitable.

This still exists in some places. Archive of Our Own is a great example. SCP is another. Wikipedia and StackOverflow too, for this website's audience... Or this website, indeed

Serving content at the scale of the modern internet costs money. Archive of Our Own costs over $200,000 a year to run: https://www.transformativeworks.org/otw-finance-2021-budget-...

StackOverflow definitely has ads as well as an enterprise offering, and Hacker News regularly advertises jobs for YCombinator companies and it itself effectively a giant YCombinator ad.

The best way to support creators actually is to support them directly. Youtube takes half the ad revenue, and ad revenue generally doesn't pay much anyways.

If this were actually true creators would have paywalls.

Fact of the matter is that YouTube and the visibility benefits the average creator tremendously. Only once you’re super popular like joe Rogan are you in a position to do better by yourself.

This is true and creators use the system because it's the best exposure to profit ratio offered at the moment.

One fact does not nullify the other. I'm still allowed to hate ads while I support content creators.

Many creators do a two-tier system where they release some free stuff and offer a paid Patreon or whatever.

It's not any different than game demos.

Creators presumably receive more from YouTube Premium viewers though I haven't seen any specific details on the revenue split. Either way, lets not pretend that any ad block user tips every single YouTuber they view.

No, creators receive much more from sponsoring than from any other sources on YouTube. So ublock has no effect on this source of money. Only the number of views can affect it.

No... per user, YouTube Premium pays out way more than ads do. Overall, yes, of course, ad revenue is a higher contributor, since very few people use YouTube Premium.

Are you talking about YouTube ads or sponsorings ? I'm talking about sponsors that are mentioned in the video by the creator.

I was talking about YouTube ads. You are correct, yes, sponsorships tend to pay more than either YouTube ads or YouTube premium.

For reference, Linus Tech Tips/the rest of their channels get 18% of their revenue from YT AdSense versus 32% from their direct merch sales. That's a pretty big deal since their direct "pay to watch videos" offering on Floatplane is only 4%.

https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486918784401088515?s=2...

>Youtube takes half the ad revenue

Yeah, that's how they pay for the infrastructure. Imagine that.

I pay for YouTube Premium, it is the single best streaming subscription could I pay for (in general, dollar for dollar, etc) and it's not even a close call. As someone who watches a lot of recurring creator content & a few dozen household / automotive DIY videos per week on mobile + desktop + set top box I cannot see myself reentering an ad-supported YouTube or playing the ad blocker game.

However, YouTube content goes through waves, at the moment burnt-in ads are pretty significant in longer form content and fairly annoying to skip through. This might get way worse and it's not the fault of pirates, YouTube policy or as simple as content creator greed (unless they are shilling a scam I suppose). I predict in the coming years we'll start to see some creators making noise about Premium's payouts changing or being unfair, not unlike the ongoing conversation about Spotify and other music services.

I do pay creators - through Patreon or buying music or merch.

I won't be forced to watch ads or use a UI I dislike though.

Didn't the ads model emerge in part because in the early days it was really hard to pay for online services?

That might have been a reason. But ads were a known way of monetization. Long before the internet. And in the early days, before it grew to become its own thing old models were just done in the new medium.

Like newspapers. They had ads. So also had their digital versions. And hey. It was a fad. It would pass. A lot of execs did not take it seriously.

Why invest in a payment system for these few strange people online.

Maybe. If you look at the mobile app industry, which emerged when it was easier to pay for services, you still have a glut of demand for free or $0.99 apps.

What I find more funny is that everyone expects to be paid for their content. 95% of the content out there is not worth paying for.

I dunno what to tell you, except I feel absolutely zero guilt about it.

I did the Patreon thing for a year and a bit. Small time "content creator", kind of a weird scenario - I felt the guy was both struggling financially yet didn't want to do basic things so people could tip him more. Brilliant videos though.

Almost all the content I watch has embedded sponsor ads anyway.

I used to pay for Youtube plus. But I found that most videos still had built-in ads. That irritated me to no end. That's what made me switch to vanced.

This is why if you develop software, you should develop it for Mac. People who own a Mac will actually pay for your software willingly. Example: https://cleanshot.com/

If he made this exclusively for Windows no one would have paid for it. But since he's made it for Mac, he's racked in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

While I generally agree, some software punches through, eg. mIRC. Although there is this super easy-to-find 50% discount page that's been up for at least 9 years now: https://www.mirc.com/register.php?coupon=MIRC-SWV0-MNKL

Is that so, though? I've often read (but sadly cannot reproduce links at this point) that ad revenue is a multiple of subscription revenue - meaning a paying subscriber is worth a lot less than a non-paying-but-ad-watching subscriber.

Maybe if ads were somehow banned and services would only exist on a subscription driven basis, we'd have have more content worth buying and less clickbaity stuff.

> Maybe if ads were somehow banned and services would only exist on a subscription driven basis, we'd have have more content worth buying and less clickbaity stuff.

Why ban ads though? Fundamentally after you encounter a site that has ads once you can simply choose not to go back if the content isn’t good enough to justify seeing the ads, right?

Generally people like the content but don’t want the ads and aren’t willing to pay for subscription. News sites are the best examples of this.

I would gladly pay for YouTube Premium if they didn't bundle it with YouTube Music which I have no plans for using.

I would also gladly pay for YouTube Premium if they used purchase power parity matching. 12$/10€ for a digital content delivery service is not the same for the US, UK or Croatia.

If it cost 5€ monthly for YouTube Premium without YouTube Music, I'd be fine with that.

Exactly. Adblocking is piracy. But hey, HN crowd still want their high SFbay salaries even if they're working in Louisiana.

YT infrastructure costs money, content creation costs money. Everything costs money. You're getting it for free by watching ads. If you don't like it, pay for YT premium.

Blame their drug dealer model. YT could just be premium like Netflix but ofc then the largest group of content providers who don't care about money would move elsewhere.

> Funny how people want content but don’t want to support content creators via ads or paying for YouTube Premium.

I don't support Google.

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