YouTube is cracking down on consumers' favorite loophole
thestreet.com
thestreet.com
YouTube and the people making videos on YouTube are ad supported. If you don't want to pay, it seems awfully entitled to then complain that you can't get unlimited ad-free content, regardless of whether that's been possible historically.
When I'm on TikTok, I get ads and yet... they feel completely unobtrusive. I also find myself actually watching ads on TikTok - they're relatable, fit into my interests, etc.. It's interesting too that a real effort at putting together a great looking ad is made.
For example... I will see low-end ADs on TikTok re: vitamins. Not interested but... wow! They are fantastically made (AI generated: both visuals and audio).
In contrast, when I'm on Youtube, the ads are obnoxious and have little to do with my interests. They may be political, they may be related to big pharma pushing pills that I have no interest in. There is little effort at even producing anything entertaining.
Also, if I click on a 2 minute video, I start off with a couple of ads and I might even see an ad in the middle. I might also see the creator start off with a sponsor AD at the start or at some point in the middle.
One site takes the user experience into consideration (TikTok). The other (YT) is a warzone.
I can no longer access the original article (they blocked my VPN...) but I recall reading it was a laughable $14 a month. I'm laughing all the way to the alternatives...
> I recall reading it was a laughable $14 a month. I'm laughing all the way to the alternatives...
I spend less on YouTube than I spend on two trips to Starbucks. YouTube premium costs less than unlimited Kagi searches. The cost per hour of utility (in addition to supporting the creators you're consuming the content from) overwhelmingly pays for itself in single digits of hours.
Netflix is also a premium streaming service, with premium content. YouTube is not.
Oops... sorry if my tone was overly aggressively. I'm usually careful about that.
I have always gotten ads from YT (whether I opt in or not). Google is extremely aggressively at harvesting data too. The entire ecosystem is the wild west of privacy violations.
Google itself is literally known for that - it's their entire business model:-)
On the Desktop, it gets better with my choice of browsers and a couple of ad-blockers (uBlock and Sponsorblock). On Android, they remain extremely annoying.
As for TikTok... the constant warnings from Main Stream Media have me concerned. So I use a dedicated tablet. No contacts, Fake name, devoid of much except the TikTok app, 3rd-party browser and built-in apps.
I am certain that even on this dedicated throwaway tablet, Google knows it's me and is (aggressively) collecting data. It's what they do:-)
But there is no limit to greed so people add them anyway, only way youtube could stop that would be to ban such segments and remove videos with them from the platform.
What if adblockers contribute to a video going viral? Or even sharing a video with family/friends who may not have an adblocker installed? What if I'm a content creator who uses adblock and now I share my content elsewhere? What if I'm a content creator primarily funded by Patreon and many of my viewers were adblock users and I move to another platform to retain my patrons and now YouTube loses money on all my subscribers who weren't adblockers? What if enough people are exiled that the go to place to watch new videos is no longer YouTube but Vimeo or another competitor? Social media sites rely pretty heavily on network effects and if enough users leave (Myspace, Digg) a competitor will fill the space (Facebook, Reddit).
The gamble here is that more people will subscribe than people who will leave. Which is likely true but it could have knock on effects.
If you downloaded the videos and torrented/streamed them to other users, then the analogy would be more comparable.
Think of it more like a loss leader. Costco sells hotdogs at a loss because it brings in more than what it costs them.
I'm sure Google/YouTube has crunched the data and came to the conclusion that it isn't worth it anymore but I also don't think data can even give a complete picture. Data can't predict how many people will leave vs subscribe when all is said and done. Results from limited rollouts are not guaranteed to follow in a full rollout.
So not only are you directly costing YouTube money, but by tweeting it, you getting thousands of people to also cost YouTube money, thus magnifying your negative impact by many orders of magnitude.
That sort of asymmetry is why giant companies can't stamp out piracy as well.
In my opinion, what they are looking for is not to cut down the costs but to increase the revenue. Either by more people watching ads or by more people using their paid service.
There are other costs such as music licensing, moderation and paying content creators.
Plus hosting your own videos is pretty cheap nowadays.
Exactly. Decades ago, I remember *paying* for my first cable subscription. I was shocked at the number of commercials (ads) I was bombarded with. It only got worse... higher cable fees, more ads.
They can't have it both ways. I cut the cord many years ago (pre-streaming), never looked back.
I am not trying to be combative, it is a question in my mind, Why serve anything to users not participating in the economics that keeps the servers on?
For what it's worth, I know of only one creator that actually uses that over Patreon.
I trialed YouTube Music recently, potentially willing to hand over my wallet, but the app is unimpressive.
> Now at best you get a black screen while the ad runs and you block it.
Why not skip it? We already have SponsorBlock that works wonderfully. How would this be conceptually different?
Youtube can make it so that it stops serving content for 30 seconds and disable buffering when it's showing a 30s unskippable ad. People without ad block would watch the ad for 30 seconds so no difference for them, people with ad blockers have to wait for 30 seconds. The only way would be to predownload like a DVR and then skip the ads or blank space, which would get annoying fast.
Some people were using proxies and VPNs in some foreign countries that don't have Twitch ads served to bypass, but that's also been blocked now.
So do they just discard the livestream while serving the ad? What if you miss something important because of that? This just feels awful all-around for everyone involved.
To make it a bit better they started showing the stream video without audio as a small thumbnail on top of chat when an ad plays.
To be honest, that's absolutely bonkers. I don't understand why people keep using Twitch if it does this to them.
Yes, it's their data. But it's my computer. I can chose to change the font size, the css attributes, or even javascript functions if I so chose. This entitlement that many corporations display towards human people is like they think you sat down on a computer terminal they own in their physical store. That's not what's happening. If I don't want to execute the code someone else sent me I don't have to. It's ignorant lawyer-think to believe otherwise.
If youtube wants to stop acting like a free video host for non-corporate humans it's certainly going to drive down the traffic. It'd break 15 years of precedent and usage. I don't think they'll do this. Instead they'll just keep pressuring for absurd legal interpretations, threatening the technologically ignorant, and only buy district attorneys to enforce their absurd legal perspectives when someone technical rocks the boat.
That's not happening. They aren't forcing you to do shit. Like do you imagine that they are taking you to court because you aren't watching their ads? No, of course not. They are offering you an agreement, they will send you their data that you wanted only if you'll also watch ads. You are free to decline. I'm general, most of the governments of the world have said it would be illegal for you to find technical workarounds to get their content outside of that agreement, but of course not even that is them forcing you to do anything.
You've always been able to change how the content that was sent is displayed. And browsers literally shipped with HTML editors in them for decades. What do you think night mode is in a browser? Reader mode? Etc. It has always been a thing that browsers changed what they displayed. But now for-profit interests and those who's livelyhood depends on them are trying to re-write history. Mostly so they can force attestation and be sure their spying and ads work.
Don't be part of it.
No, you have ever been able to change what the content owner has sent as changable content. Browsers allow you to change a subset of the content. You can not change how a video playsback. you can not change a gif is rendered etc. If the content owner prefers it can provide you all content as an image as many "document" sites do to even prevent you from selecting the text let alone controling how it's displayed or even if it's displayed.
This is a contract; they provide a content that you either consume or not. Especially Youtube, you have a choice, free with ads or payed without ads. When there was not payment option everyone was screeming "I am ready to pay just turn off the ads". well now you can.
If you don't like either option don't use the site. noone owns you free content with your rules. free content comes with their rules. You can't be cheap and chosy.
I feel the same way about the entitled behavior of Youtube and other corporations. If they don't want videos to be public then put them all behind the W3C approved black box DRM and lose any false pretense of being an open video site. They can't pretend to be open and then throw around their money/legal power to try and tell me my computer is theirs anyway. They don't get to chose what I can do on my computer unless I opt in to it by enabling EME DRM. They're the weird ones doing weird stuff. 99% of the web does not claim it owns my computer and the nature of how EME DRM is implemented in standards compliant browsers reflects that.
My behavior and way of displaying the website is standards compliant and completely legal. Google is the one trying to work around standards and existing regulatory frameworks that already solved this by using threats and disingenuous framing of the issue.
This wouldn't change the value proposition for you personally, but in the US, YT Premium is $139 a year, $11.58 a month (14/mo if paying monthly), and includes YouTube Music. Spotify for comparison is $10.99/mo. Though I know some people prefer other music streaming services, or as in my case just don't use that piece as much.
The YT music app feels like a poorly reskinned YT app. Impossible to get basic album info, song titles are often wrong (live versions not marked, covers appearing to be original, etc.). So many "fan" releases which are often just lower fidelity copies. And search is, ironically, abysmal.
I occasionally watch on a device like an Amazon Fire Stick or an XFinity Flex which does not have an ad blocker, and so I too then have my videos interrupted by ads--but the ads YouTube gives me are mostly 15 seconds, and most of them bring up a "skip ads" button after 5 seconds.
Usually the longer ads also offer the skip button after 5 seconds.
Some of the ad breaks contain 2 ads, but if the first one offers the skip button it skips the rest of the first ad and also the second ad.
For me then it is not really making me spend much time on ads.
That raises the question of why am I mostly getting short ads with a skip after 5 seconds, while apparently many others here got long TV-like ad breaks? Do they run different lengths ads on different categories of content, and I just mostly watch the kind that gets short ads?
There are also paid Mastodon instances, and I recommend to use those, if you care about your account.
And I decide what content loads and doesnt. My client is mine. If I run ublock origin or newer, that's on me.
And frankly, this will push me to download and store vids on Jellyfin. Its not THAT hard.
"Pierats will win this."
it seems like they’re collecting behavioral data.
I use Brave browser and followed their suggestion to turn on the "aggressive" setting, but it doesn't get around this.
I believe as they roll out this "feature" to more people you'll get hit by it.
All the complaints about ads are true, they suck, but how is content you enjoy supposed to be created and distributed without money?
Just pay for premium, or use something like PeerTube.
It’s unfortunate, but you need to put your money where your mouth is.
I hate ads too, a lot. I think they should be banned, but in not smart enough to know what can replace those ads for folks who cannot afford premium subscriptions so they can also watch important educational and not so important entertaining content.
From where do you take it that adsense revenue is the most major, most important revenue stream for YouTubers?
Most content creators make their income on sponsorships and their own brands.
Apart from that, it's not like content creators aren't starting their own streaming platforms. See Linus Tech Tips Floatplane for example.
Regarding the distribution of content: Google has been more than happy to carry YouTube's operating cost from their quasi-monopoly on internet ads. In return, users gave them more detailed advertising profiles through the use of YouTube.
I actually don't want to pay for premium. Google already gets my data - why should I pay for the privilege of handing it to them?
Ad data is not worth that much money, especially if you adblock all their ads. Every time you watch a Youtube video, Google loses money, why on earth should they serve their videos to you for free?
I use adblock, but I'm not under the delusion that I'm not freeriding off everybody who's not blocking ads.
Google and facebook, some of the highest-valued companies ever to exist, make most of their money from ads. The ridiculous SV software engineering salaries aren't powered by goodwill, but by a need to compete with the salaries offered by these ad companies. Unity - a company making a game engine - is working on a licensing model where using their ad network gets you favorable rates. That is: the revenue model for a game engine is to include ad revenue from games that use their engine.
If ad data was truly not worth so much, the internet would be better. So. Much. Better.
Were both know ZIRP ended, no need to try and ignore the economic climate just because you’re angry and Google sucks.
I agree this sucks, but it’s not realistic to just ignore the issue until YouTube is shut down due to money loss. I would prefer a different solution, also, but like I said, I’m not going to say I know how.
Please don't try to put words in my mouth. My answer was perfectly clear and easy to understand. You implied that adsense revenue is a major income source for content creators - this simply isn't true.
As for why or why I don't want to pay them for Premium: Premium does not convince me as an offering. Price is too high and there is a distinct lack of features. I will use YouTube until they stop servicing people with AdBlock, then I am going to stop using the platform. (blocking ads isn't illegal in my jurisdiction).
> I agree this sucks, but it’s not realistic to just ignore the issue until YouTube is shut down
I really _really_ don't care about the future of some Silicon Valley conglomerate. But I see nothing negative about YouTube shutting down or taking a blow - it would open up the market for new competitors such as floatplane.
YouTube's MOAT is not with it's service offerings, but with it's content creators. These people will look for alternative providers if they experience a major drop in their audience due to this new monetization.
Source? If it's "simply" not true you should probably have some solid sources to back it up. From the article YT's ad revenue is $7.7B per quarter. They take about 32% and pay out 68%. So they probably pay content creators about $15 billion per quarter, which is $60B annualized. How is that not a major source of revenue for content creators? Discovery or recommendations which is what drives traffic to content creators is non-existent on Floatplane, even LTT is still all over YT. In fact they use YouTube to push Floatplane subs for insider content. If they weren't on YT how would they acquire new Floatplane customers? By paying for ads online? To people who may not even know what LTT or their content is?
You have to subscribe to each individual content creator on Floatpane, you'd be paying far more than the $14/month that YT costs. Just LTT is $5/month to include some exclusives, and $10/month for 4K. YT includes 4K by default with both free and paid. So people who are resisting paying $14/month for all of YT's billions of videos are going to pay $5 to $10 per month for every single channel they watch in a month? No way.
Off you don’t want to pay, and don’t want to watch ads, your choice is to not watch YouTube. It’s simple. I wish there was a third option!
I think it would suck for YouTube to shut down, it has a lot of good content and the alternatives are much worse (today at least).
Apart from OP pointing out that that's not what was said: yes.
We have been trained over more than two decades to expect stuff on the internet to be free, bar perhaps the occasional sponsored segment. From punching monkeys to win money, to news, to having music streamed to you, to having videos - including music videos - streamed to you. All for free. The whole bruhaha about privacy? Pffft. You can get what you want nownownowNOW! Without paying!
And you know what? That training was successful.
Music television no longer exists. Newspapers struggle to survive - as does traditional TV broadcasting. Waiting a week between episodes? What is this, the stone age?
So congratulations to Google and other internet juggernauts. We've been trained well. We expect to be able to binge what we want, without having to pay. And without too much ad annoyance. We will no longer pay. Our threshold for crap (ads included) is also miniscule, because that's the other factor luring us away from competition.
So yes: I totally expect Google to serve me what I want, when I want it, without having to pay. Because that's what Google has been training us to expect.
If you can figure out a way to serve petabytes of video every day for basically free, then you'd be rich.
The simple truth is that bandwidth is not free. The numbers are, of course, not public, but Cloudflare published some stuff here https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world... that we can use to guesstimate. Google likely has more peering agreements, but it still costs money.
That's just bandwidth, serving video also costs compute (re-encoding the video in a bunch of resolutions is not free), and running the software to serve the video is also expensive, memory, storage to store said video, and generally just hundreds of datacenters around the world. You can serve a million RPS of static HTML on a crappy server in a closet for a few thousand dollars, but you absolutely cannot do the same for video.
I'm think of everyone serving their videos themselves like people have served text for decades. Do you really think your average HN blog post in video format would amount to "petabytes of video"?
In other words, the technology I'm talking about here is the World Wide Web. That's all.
As for encoding etc, that's dead easy and most people have the hardware at home to handle it.
Bandwidth isn't free; I never said it was, but people already pay for their bandwidth as part of their ISP deal. Why do you expect people to pay twice?
Video in 4k or even 1080 is expensive in bandwidth, your arguments about 20 year old free blogs are dumb.
"Your argument is dumb" is not a valid counter-argument.
I’m not sorry you felt hurt that your ignorance was called out.
What's stopping you from creating a service for free videos if you're so convinced? Or atleast throw together a plan for this so someone else can create it.
I understand having to pay for ad-free content, but there's absolutely no way I'm costing YouTube CA$13/month. If this was the case, they'd have to serve me hundreds to thousands of ads to come anywhere close to breaking even. The margins on this have got to be extremely lucrative. For that price, Amazon Prime provides their users with overnight delivery, something that's both limited and expensive to do - on top of access to many other services. Netflix and other streaming services fund their production teams to make new content, as well as pay to license third-party content. Meanwhile, YouTube just.. removes ads?
I think that they could absolutely get away with a simplified $5/month plan (like what they did with Premium Lite), but instead found that being another one "just another $10 subscription!" company being more profitable.
“Do you already?”
HN: “no… but I could one day”
First, your final paragraph is faulty, five guys (insert overpriced burger joke) is not sufficient for running “YouTube without ads”.
Second, how do people afford that if they have no disposable income? YouTube is unique in that it’s used for a lot of educational purposes; not just in school but people use it to learn how to tie a tie or do woodworking.
Thanks for trying, but there isn’t a two step solution for everything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35892512
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37793375
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35883457
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37782171
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37106802
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37798150
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277079
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37825887
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37866601
It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Ads allow YouTube to be used by billions worldwide. You can go ad-free with YouTube Premium, and creators can still get paid from your subscription.
Been getting this the last 2 days.
They don't even try to say it's because of YouTube Premium smashing success ;)
I suspect as streamers raise prices and people reevaluate their spend a very popular option will be “youtube premium + one other streamer”
Now I have to pay to surrender that data?
This puts a question in my mind: Do we subconsciously remember ads that we ignore more than the ones we pay attention to?
Now that they have the options of having paying content without ads they all come up with the same interpretation, another fake moral banner, that Google is trying to tell them what they run on their device, a very strange interpretation because the message is not saying that, the message is simply saying "you can run adblockers on your device, but then we as content providders will choose to limit your content."
So yes, for some of us at least, it really was about ads.
Nevertheless I believe that we can hate ads personally. It does hurt. But the truth does that sometimes. It's better than not acknowledging it and leads to better outcomes. The ideology gets the light of truth.