And we're just a short hop from ads being "Attention required" with eyeballs tracked. I wonder if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance.
Ads are truly a cancer on human culture, I hope society decides to wage a war on them soon.
More and more platforms will try the « paid subscription with ads » in the coming years.
When a free experience can do better than the premium experience, your product have a problem.
I’m not even sorry about SponsorBlock, creators still get their money, I don’t have to watch the sponsored segment, and advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it. So it’s zero impact on the creator, big impact on my sanity.
Actually per-segment viewership gets tracked by YouTube and displayed in the YouTube creator tools. I wouldn't be surprised if those statistics get used when negotiating deals with sponsors.
So YouTube has no idea that the content was skipped by SponsorBlock? I find that hard to believe.
Ads targeting children would be an international crime if our world was just.
In late 90s and early 2000s, before all Youtube, Facebook and Instagram crap, some passionate people produced content wich was available for free on their web pages.
I don't feel the need for need mass culture and mass entertainment crap, but if I would feel such a need, I would install cable TV and/or pay for it.
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
[1]: https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l40...
This makes sense in my head, if there's an incredibly small cost to watching someone (which would add up if that someone thousands of views) and the experience doesn't revolve constantly around trying making me constantly want to consume something else.
It's easy to forget that in reality it's almost never a case where we "can't find alternatives", it's that they are incompatible with profit seeking.
It's refreshing to see how people are starting to revolt on platforms like Reddit and Twitch. People are done with this stuff. Even if it is only a small percentage of the total amount of users, it allows for new platforms to thrive and grow, while the old platforms slowly decay. I hope this day will come for Youtube as well.
They're doing another promotion for cosmetics too. And it's not even per sandwich, it's per purchase. So to get them all, you have to have 4 separate transactions.
https://www.youtube.com/premium
> Enjoy watching YouTube uninterrupted by ads whenever you sign in - on your mobile device, desktop, or enabled TV.
There are a few big subreddits like r/interestingasfuck that are still closed, but these are more like meme channels than communities. People can just get the same dozen gifs a day from r/damnthatsinteresting, r/whoadude, etc.
If, as is widely (self) reported, many mods and power users interact with reddit via 3rd party apps; we won't see the true impact of the API changes until they're active.
If what the mods say about their tools is in fact true, then:
Next, you're going to see a lot more spam as mods tools are gone and most of America is on a long weekend with a family holiday at the end.
Next, the spammers are going to quickly figure out the mods are asleep/gone and up the crap game even more.
Next, the creeps are going to post more less-than-kosher material, with reporting of it essentially going into unread inboxes by overworked mods.
Next, r/all is going to be, well, boring and gross. All the spam will make you go, huh, that's not very interesting. All the less-than-kosher stuff is going to make you go yuck.
Then, you're going to say to yourself, we'll see how long this lasts. And if it lasts until ~July 8th or so, you'll have found your next reddit fix.
Again, all predicated on what the mods are saying is true.
If anything can hurt Reddit, it's that kind of material. Advertisers really, really don't like controversial content, and are the first to pull out of any service that even smells of controversy or political incorrectness, see what happened to Twitter revenues after the Musk takeover. The Reddit protests would have been far more effective if people started posting (and/or moderators stopped removing) gore, porn and Swastikas everywhere, maybe with a sprinkling of racism and homophobia on top.
Even more important: Alternative platforms had a huge surge in usercount. They don't reach the number of Reddit of course, but rheu don't need to. They are their own thing and many do now have enough users to replace Reddit for most usecases of many users.
I've been having a blast on the Ferdiverse for the last few weeks. I'm also trying out tildes.net and squabbles.io. It's all very refreshing and reminds me of early reddit and old forums.
I'm actually somewhat glad this all happend. I'd have never dicovered all these platforms otherwise. And I'm not alone in that perspective
There is an option.
YouTube premium is still full of ads.
If uBlock doesn’t work anymore, either I’ll use YouTube-flow/yt-dlp, or I’ll stop using YouTube altogether.
I’m ok to pay for services, but paying and still getting ads is my hard limit.
If you're right, then I'm not that far off from cancelling my subscription. But I think you're wrong.
Sadly, very unlikely. I recommend AdBlockers and YouTube app alternatives without ads to basically everyone and the vast majority of people would rather watch ads than deal with installing something even if it'll take a few seconds.
There's enough of us (adblock users) for Google to want to take profit from but not enough to make a dent in YouTube's monopoly even if we all moved to something else.
Yes, I'm sure everyone is fighting for an audience who refuse to pay and block all ads. And of course the audience who do sit through ads or pay are therefore not going to switch and stick with YouTube.
So unless you want to burn money, I really don't see a viable business model there. Unless you think you can take the initial hit to grow a big enough audience and then force ads and paid subscriptions on everyone to make that money back.