Why, from first principles, should YouTube allow this? Why shouldn’t they go thermonuclear?
I understand ads are annoying - I block as many as I can! - but I’ve never seen someone put together a coherent defense of the practice.
I understand ads are annoying - I block as many as I can! - but I’ve never seen someone put together a coherent defense of the practice.
I don't have a right to ad-free youtube, but I do have every right to try and control what things get sent to and viewed on my computer. If I (and people like me) are abundant enough and succesful enough, then youtube and other services will be forced to abandon an ad-supported model. I'm personally ok with that.
But as long as they are attempting to pursue ad revenue, I'm going to try and avoid those ads, for a host of reasons.
I'm less sure that humanity is incapable of finding another way to foster the creativity and the education/entertainment value the world gets out of youtube. I'd love to see us try and only go back to advertising if that is indeed the only/best way.
Yes ad-supported YT is "free" of direct cash payment, but how much do we (society) "pay" in form of thoughts that we wouldn't have had where it not for an advertiser to force it onto us. I sometimes wonder if advertising is a kind of corruption and will be outlawed / considered inhumane at some point in the future.
Google wants to track me and sell the data and wants me to pay for it, and I'm not willing to be abused that badly.
They're never doing that.
I pay for ad-free Kagi search. I'd pay for an ad-free YT competitor. It would need to be run by someone other than Google though since I'd never trust them if they said they were giving me more privacy.
But there is also TikTok, which is even worse. So yeah, in that way you could be right.
If only we could pay for the things we use, and only that.
That is why almost nobody bothers to do it themselves outside of big tech.
I find it incredible that people accept and support enormous amounts of tax money from workers go to pay for worthless schools, while at the same time they are grinding their teeth at the suggestion that they pay a few dollars for incredibly well made educational videos.
Why does the screeching teacher or professor deserve a high monthly salary, good job security and a good pension, while the person making educational videos that improve people's lives all over the world deserve to have her videos pirated by hackers?
And who are you to decide that YouTube should be for cat videos and not high quality educational and documentary videos? On our family TV we have YouTube subscribed to a lot of documentary and educational channels. Recommendations are consistently of the highest quality. On my FreeTube I have other subscriptions to more immersive quality scientific and crafts videos. There is no other platform where videos like these are published.
Who are you to come and say that these videos shouldn't be on YouTube and that these creators shouldn't get paid from me watching their videos? How does our use infringe on yours?
You might as well say that serious debate or business should not be conducted online, because everybody knows the internet is for porn and Minecraft.
There has been a silent revolution lately on YouTube as to the offering of high quality content. Things aren't how they used to be.
I'm me. I'm the world's leading expert on my own opinion. If you watch enough YouTube, you might become an expert on someone's opinion, but likely not on mine.
Your use doesn't infringe anything. Please check that you've responded to a comment relevant to your defensive take on the situation. My comment, again, is in regards to Khan Academy, a 501c venture.
Residents of third world countries can use it in place of a university education, since they don't have one.
In short, I don't think you're on topic. But, maybe I'm the one that didn't understand.
Does your family use YouTube in place of a university education, but you'd prefer to watch ads than to have donors from wealthier nations pay to remove them for you?
If you answered yes, I'm intrigued. Please continue. If not, you're probably off topic and needlessly defending against a point I'm not making.
> Does your family use YouTube in place of a university education, but you'd prefer to watch ads than to have donors from wealthier nations pay to remove them for you?
No, I pay for YouTube premium for my family. The price is a bargain and creators get paid better for the things we watch. Yes, I 100% use YouTube in place of a university education, because I don't have any interest in getting degrees in astronomy, middle eastern politics, law, archeology etc. Not to mention the knowledge you can educate yourself on with YouTube that isn't available within academia.
yeah, but it’s hard to overstate how much less expensive “free” is than anything else.
I don’t know how you do free video hosting for the entire world without YouTube’s model.
Instead of a "like" people could give a video a pin, and then they'll have their own offline copy as long as they want it, and also help share it.
It's probably not even possible on iOS devices because of the limitations in background processes.
There's a massive design space here if we didn't already have google dumping on the market. Or if we didn't allow media companies (who don't want p2p) to monopolize providing Internet service. And if government subsidies and spectrum licenses came with an ipv6 mandate so we could ditch NAT.
I think this is true, but youtube is also a platform where people can share video content with a big chunk of the internet connected world for zero money. I think that's pretty cool, particularly when I think about all the small accounts I follow whose content just wouldn't be available without youtube (or a similar platform).
Let's not forget that just 20 years ago we didn't even have a free encyclopaedia. I'm assuming, of course, when you talk of a "devastating loss" you mean the educational videos not the brain rotting shite like "Mr Beast" or hours upon hours of gameplay footage.
Many people will make videos without expecting payment. See YouTube, for example.
Then the solution for you is extremely simple: Do not go to youtube.com
Then you won't have to be bothered by any videos that people made with the expectation of being paid.
But what are you doing in a discussion about YouTube? You're free to make as many videos as you please and share them by P2P. YouTube is a partner for video creators for distributing their videos. You are not in that partnership in any way.
YouTube is something different. It's more like Wikipedia to many people.
Believe me when I say if I could avoid YouTube I would. They've made it abundantly clear they don't want people like me. But what choice do I have when the vast majority of stuff is uploaded there? It's like saying "just stop breathing if you don't like air pollution".
I don't care about technicalities. I care about practicalities. YouTube can either be the free public repository of videos or it can be private like Netflix and facilitate payments between consumers and creators. Not both.
If this were about YouTube's costs then they could charge creators for hosting and bandwidth costs. If I set up a website, I pay for it, not you. Why should video be the other way around?
YouTube knows it needs to attract creators by being the free, public platform with one hand, but as soon as it gets that content it uses it to extract money from users with the other.
Any of these things would be good:
* YouTube goes private like Netflix,
* YouTube acts like a video host and charges uploaders for the service like any other web host,
* YouTube accepts they are like Wikipedia and cuts their costs by using technology like P2P and/or make the market absorb the costs by negotiating better peering deals (ie. push the bandwidth costs on to internet subscribers).
But masquerading as the free, public internet video platform then expecting to get paid for it by users who now have no other choice? Forget it.
Paid and ad-supported video has been around for decades, there's nothing strange about it. If you're used to going to the soup kitchen for free meals, few are going to sympathize when you're going to the restaurant of your choice and demand free meals. "But they don't have the salad that I like at the soup kitchen, I have no other choice!". Maybe the restaurant should start charging the chefs for their usage of kitchen equipment so that you can get the free meal of your liking? Maybe it's their fault for letting you in and now they owe you a free meal? They could have been members only like the fancier restaurant on the other side of town.
Ars Technica used to autoplay a video every time you browsed on their website.
I am (was) flabbergasted by the sheer amount of pretentiousness that they thought that was ok...
You're going to have to pay an additional $3/mo for no ads along with your existing $15/mo (Prime), $139/yr (Prime) or $8.99 (Prime Video only) plans.
This doesn't look like subsidizing to me. To me it looks more like "pay us more because we can do whatever we want".
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/entertainment/prime-video-u...
If you frame it in a different context it sounds ridiculous. "Actually we're getting out of the video streaming business and just mailing you postcards that we think look neat. Still charging you the same rate every month, though."
I agree with your statement but I'm not sure how it applies to ads. I hate ads as much as the next person, but blocking them is kind of like using the service and refusing to pay for it.
There are two proper ways to not see ads on Youtube. You can either pay for Youtube premium, or not watch Youtube videos.
There are legitimate reasons to block ads, like preventing tracking. But if you're blocking ads because you think the service you're using isn't worth letting them through, then don't use the service?
Until that happens, I'm forced to assume that the service actually does get enough value from my attention that it's not worth it to them to lose my business (such as it is), and I am certainly not going to voluntarily subject myself to ads that aren't actually essential.
But if Youtube didn't monetize, presumably with the rise of the Youtube star, content creators wouldn't make enough money and would not publish there. So if you think of it from this angle, Youtube needs to go to war with ad blockers simply because their content creator, the users adding value, require them to do so.
I also wonder if the rise of the "this video is sponsored by xyz" segments in people's videos have cause more harm. That ad money that is circumventing Youtube entirely, paid directly to the content producer. So Youtube might be "jealous" of this revenue and wants to encourage its content producers to let them run ads only? because it's easier that way?
I think this is exactly right, but what's missing from the story is that YouTube created this problem. I'm mostly on educational YouTube, and in that sector creators turned to sponsorships because the alternative was to constantly wonder whether your next video would be demonetized and lose out on all the revenue (while still showing ads on the videos!) Sponsorships are a much more predictable revenue stream.
If YouTube wanted to support creators better, they wouldn't do it by adding more and more ads (to the point where my wife is finally approaching me to ask about ad block), they would do it by actually addressing creator concerns about reliability of their revenue streams.
Demonetized is often a misnomer in this case. The actual term YouTube uses is "limited monetization", which shows the limited ads on the video, and still earns the creator money from those ads. The issue comes from those ads being super cheap because no one wants to put ads on those videos, and therefore the creator makes a fraction of the usual revenue. Found at least 1 post from 3 years ago saying 1% [0]
> they would do it by actually addressing creator concerns about reliability of their revenue streams.
Until users are more willing to pay for YouTube, YouTube will continue to have their own concerns about their revenue streams, which is the same ads. Basically giving the ad companies all the power in this ecosystem. [1]
I've heard plenty of creators advocate for Premium because it is also a more predictable (and profitable) revenue stream and takes the ad companies out of the ecosystem. [2]
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/PartneredYoutube/comments/ipkrxv/co...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/analyst-predicts-the-youtube...
[2] https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/111319895234933188 from just a few hours ago.
> ... addressing creator concerns about reliability of their revenue streams.
Right, exactly. That's the core of the issue. Very insightful.
They may not all be valuable to each individual person, but all together they form the YouTube experience.
I love this sort of mental gymnastics (the passive voice is a nice addition, too).
You know you can win this game quickly by not visiting YouTube again or by paying YouTube $15/month?
But no, it’s much better to exert your “rights” to try and control what gets sent to your computer. Also known as what you requested (since you know that ads are part of YouTube).
You are right, I could choose to just not go to youtube (or any other ad-supported website). Or, I could choose to view whatever portions of a website are made publicly available, in whatever way seems best to me. Just like I don't have to go to youtube, they don't have to make it publicly available. It goes both ways.
> But no, it’s much better to exert your “rights” to try and control what gets sent to your computer.
But no, it's much better to exert your "rights" to try and control what gets run and shown on end-users computers.
> Also known as what you requested
I requested the video, nothing else. I don't care what you think I should or shouldn't know, I'm only trying to access the video and I am only requesting the video. If Youtube doesn't want me messing with the bytes they're sending me, they should not send them to me.
> You know you can win this game quickly by not visiting YouTube again
Yes. You understand perfectly. YT doesn't have to enshittify much further for this to be no loss.
This is effectively a monopoly. It probably doesn't fit any legal definition of a monopoly but it has all the hallmarks of an abusive relationship between a service and a customer base. And therefore you shouldn't feel any guilt of depriving Google of their ad-revenue or their mining of your personal data.
Google's not some poor little startup that bit off more than it could chew and accidentally ended up serving videos to the entire world, they have strategically maneuvered themselves into this position for the money and influence they stand to gain by putting themselves in a position where they have information and control over how information is exchanged between people online.
Best case scenario, frustrated ex-adblock-users will ignore my ads by muting them or looking away, so I'm paying the same price for less value, sometimes as low as zero. Worst case scenario, these users will actively despise my brand and avoid it altogether because they will associate it to their disdain for YouTube ads, so I'm paying for negative value.
That's exactly what I do when something manages to slip past my blocker. I also mute my TV and pick up my phone when ads start playing.
I don't generally hate the brands though. I understand there are some perverse incentives at work in the market which means they have to spend money on advertising or be outcompeted by others who do. I blame the advertising industry itself. There's one exception though: where I live, some businesses are so obnoxious they pay people to drive around playing loud advertisements all over the city and in my neighborhood. Those certainly get my utmost hate. I'd blacklist them forever but I can't even understand what the ads are saying anyway.
This is fraud and immoral, according to some people here...
Then when you're at the store or buying a service, you are more likely to choose a product you are familiar with. Even if you don't consciously acknowledge that familiarity.
Nobody is immune to advertising - the people who fool themselves into thinking they're immune are less likely to notice its effects.
I'm not talking about people who think they are immune to advertising, I'm talking about people who take active measures to reduce its effect on them—be it technological (adblock), sensory (muting) or psychological (disdain). I would argue that people who think they are immune to advertising are not motivated to do any of these things.
In any case though, I have never seen any data or research that supports that common truism that "nobody is immune to advertising". If anything, it may be true that nobody is immune to some kind of advertising—not to generic advertising per se.
It is well accepted that advertising should be targeted by age, income, culture, educational level demographics. An ad designed for American teenagers probably won't work well on a middle-aged Indian lawyer, and an ad targeted at Indian educated professionals is not well suited for a 20-something Italian mechanic. So how can we assume that an ad that works on a person who makes no conscious effort to block or avoid ads will work just as well on a person who is constantly taking active steps to avoid them?
Someone pulled the wool over your eyes to sell you ads if you believe this. Maybe they even showed you a study they funded.
The most pervasive ads that I get whenever I accidentally go to YouTube without adblock are for Liberty Mutual home insurance, who already refused me as a customer years ago. So yeah, it just serves as a reminder to tell people they suck.
If users would want to make Youtube change its policy, there's a better way: get together and start acting like a click farm. If you click every ad on every page and immediately open the tabs you opened, advertisers will start paying Google for nothing. Something like a subreddit coming together would definitely have a noticeable impact on larger advertisers.
The AdNauseam approach to ad blocking isn't great for the security side of ad blocking, but it'll hit advertisers where it hurts the most: their wallets, and being forced to expand filtering (potentially flagging more users as false positives).
I ran AdNauseam for a while but in combination with a PiHole the result wasn't interesting. Every clicked link ended up blocked by PiHole anyway. Perhaps it's for the best.
I wonder if one could set up an isolated VM that can click these links for you in a Firecracker style 5 second VM isolated from anything important. It could probably run in the cloud, all you'd need to do is forward the GET/POST request the Google Ads redirect causes and let a virtual browser do its thing.
It's for this reason I'll never use it. Some kind of automated headless version of AdNauseam that could be installed on a Raspberry Pi is something I would be more comfortable using.
The devil's advocate argument against your second to last point is that you'd actually be getting higher value from getting an ad on the eyeballs of an adblock user, because your ad is a bigger slice of the total ads they might see in a day. Do you want your ad to be 10% of the total ads somebody sees, or 0.5%?
I have a special reserve of hatred tucked away for advertisers who take up that much of my consciousness. It's top-shelf, cask-conditioned hatred. Rare, excellent stuff.
Let me give it a try then.
As part of part of our cognitive functions, our attention is inalienable. It is ours. It's not theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. It's not currency to pay for services with. They do not get to insert brands and taglines into our minds without our consent. Advertising is mind rape and ad blocking is justified self-defense. I literally don't care how many billions they lose, I will block ads, I will help others block ads and I won't lose even one second of sleep over it. They are not entitled to our attention. Their choices are to charge money up front or to deal with it. If they send us ads, we'll delete them.
Why should you be allowed to take a thing from them without paying for it in some way? Just because you are technically able?
Don't turn this around on us. They're the ones poisoning the well by offering free stuff with implicit strings attached and thereby normalizing "free" services. We're under exactly zero moral obligation to "pay" them by looking at ads. They have absolutely no one else but themselves to blame for their business model and the assumptions they made.
On Youtube, it's convenience and unwillingness to either pay or stop using the service. I don't have a problem being unethical to Google, but I will probably end up paying once my adblocker no longer works on Youtube.
Many people have literally grown up with Youtube, and a large section of them have used ad blockers for most of their lives. They see the adblockblock on Youtube as an attempt to take away a service that's supposed to be (ad) free, because to them, it always has been free. When you see Youtube as the free, unlimited repository of videos that the internet provides you with, forcing minute long ads on Youtube would feel like putting billboards in a national park.
The same is true for many other services. Everyone is mad that Netflix wants its customers to pay. The best stretch I've found is that Netflix tweeted "sharing is caring" once, but sharing accounts within a household has always been allowed.
In their attempts to undercut the competition by shedding money to provide services for free or for cheap, large corporations have cultivated a large audience that expects everything for free with no contribution from their end. Fifteen years of free, almost ad-less service, is a long time, and it changed the culture of the internet.
Ad Blockers are essential painting over the bus stop ad completely, so you don't even have a chance to see it.
I believe people should be allowed to wear the glasses they want.
In that case, if you ride the bus for free, you see the ads or you don't ride the bus.
If AR glasses become common, expect to see ad revenues decline even as ads become more annoying.
Google does not pay TCP/IP..etc designers/operators a portion of theid ad revenue. Why would they feel entitled to the the internet infrastructure they don't pay for?
The problem is that YouTube is not providing free video but rather ad-supported video. If you don’t like that, it’s like seeing someone else’s GPL code: your choice is take it on the terms offered, negotiate other terms, or don’t use it.
So nobody is allowed to start an internet company and make money from it?
Uber is a business using roads that people pay for, should they not make money? Should those drivers not get paid as well?
Please chill up and don't forget the HN guidelines [1]
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
That is not the point of my comment, you misinterpreted the meaning of my comments and then built an assumption that it says that "nobody is allowed to start an internet company and make money from it?"
Which is not what my comments says. I will also not try to engage with a discussion in which side don't discuss in a good faith. Specially coming from a new account created for this purpose only.
Also, I responded to every example you had with clarifying questions that were designed to get you to think about your points and back them up or (hopefully) change them. Reading comprehension is important. Saying things like "that wasn't my point" then not realizing what you implied nor clarifying what your point actually is a prime example of why. You don't have to say something directly to make an implication, which is exactly what you did on multiple points.
Gaslighting me into "not acting in good faith," so you don't have to actually think about the strength of your point (or lack thereof) is however the very thing you claim I'm doing. I just wanted to say that I hope you get more confidence in debate so that you aren't so quick to play the victim when your argument is held to the tiniest bit of scrutiny and try to take some imaginary moral high ground that isn't there.
A better analogy is getting someone else to paint over all the ads in the free ad-supported newspaper before you read it.
It's creepy.
Regarding reciprocation, a lot of platforms offer a free tier and then offer additional features for paid subscribers. There's the principle of reciprocation at play: they give me something for free and that then makes me more likely to pay for additional features. But I'm only willing to pay for features, not to have an annoyance, like ads, removed. The conditions I'd have to agree to feel coerced ... like making an agreement with Darth Vader: "pray YouTube doesn't alter the deal further by now only blocking 50% of ads for a paid subscriber." What do I, as an end user, get out of this other than feeling hostile towards YouTube?
It's my computational device and my internet connection. I think there's a very complex argument to be made but this isn't the forum for it.
My understanding is that content creators see very little or next to none of the ad revenue. The content creators are the reason people are using YouTube. So I prefer to support them through Patreon. Second, I've heard that the vast, vast majority of content creators make next to nothing through YouTube -- these content creators are paying the opportunity cost to "make it big" or simply enjoy making content or using YouTube as a promotional vehicle for other services. I'm not trying to define a moral equivalence of why it's right to directly support content creators but not YouTube (Google is making enough money off me so that I have a clear conscience), but for the price of their ad free service I'd like to see a more equitable distribution.
It's not about the infrastructure cost of YouTube's servers, but the time and effort cost of the people producing the videos. Hackers seem to conveniently always forget about these people.
A pure consumer is not worth anything to YouTube or any other platform if they're not paying or can't be advertised to. They're just a cost with no benefit.
I think the argument for paying content makers (through YouTube) is higher than the argument for paying ISPs. When the cables are laid, they don't cost any time or money except for a little of maintenance. Video creators work constantly to publish their stuff.
I agree that YouTube should distribute revenue more equally among their creators, so that it stops being a casino of people working for scraps trying to make it big (Hollywood anybody?). I think it's OK to support creators through Patreon and such instead of paying for Premium, but it might not be very fair in the end, because people unwittingly will donate to creators making the type of videos they want to be associated with and not the creators making the type of videos they are spending the most time watching.
I think it is fair that a video creator who doesn't ask for donations and didn't make her videos with the aim of making money, also gets paid her fair share if a lot of people are watching and enjoying her videos. That's why premium makes more sense to me than the hassle of donating.
FWIW, I tend to find the opposite. Maybe the people I know are just more vocal about things that make them look good to others.
A pure consumer is not worth anything to YouTube or any other platform if they're not paying or can't be advertised to. They're just a cost with no benefit.
I disagree but I understand what you're getting at. In the case of YouTube, you may be correct (or more correct than me). I'm thinking of platforms like Strava or dating apps where an active user population is part of the attraction to upsell features to paying customers.
I never used youtube without adblock and won't ever use it. I hope they block adblocks so it become so annoying that better options start to appear again.
Other services like Nebula are not a replacement for YouTube in this use case and many use cases. The comment I was replying to wouldn't be asking for better options instead of just using Nebula if it was.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/15/22979126/vimeo-patreon-cr...
YouTube is not the creator/owner of the content. There are even channels that are actively against the advertising business model and that rely on off-platform subscriptions and donations. I.e. the creator still gets value even if no ads show on their videos.
YouTube still shows ads on those channels though. And the more eyeballs and YT subscriptions these channels get, the more YT makes money off them.
Now what percentage of viewers use ad blockers? 5%? 10%?... YT still makes money off the rest. It's not like those are a worrying cost center to YT. Why then go to those extremes to shave the last penny of the last person who really strongly does not want to see the ads (which potentially undermines the advertiser's purpose of making you like their product)?
They might lose significant Chrome market share.
Chrome is also a "free" product. I could reverse your logic and ask why they shouldn't inject their ads into the HTML you downloaded from somewhere, from first principles?
I can see a privacy argument being made by folks who don't want their viewing history associated with one account but also don't want ads. I'm not an expert, but I'm not sure what monetization strategy would appease those folks. Proof of work on crypto mining for each video you want to watch, with any found coins going to Google?
First of all, I absolutely will not have ads in my own home. Ads are bad enough in public, but they will not be in my home. This is completely non-negotiable.
So then, what are my choices? Well there are paid-for services like Netflix, for example. This is a straightforward choice for me: I either pay for it or I don't. Simple.
Then there's the web. The web is essentially a public place. It thrives because it's free at the point of access. Unlike netflix, YouTube put itself on the web. It would not have become anywhere near what it is if it were like Netflix and behind a paywall. They used their "free" and "public" image to make themselves the only place on the internet for videos.
What they want is to have their cake and eat it too: they want to be the dominant public platform, but they want guaranteed revenue like Netflix too.
What I want is just to pay for my bandwidth fairly. If I pay for YouTube (which I must because remember ads are non-negotiable) then I'm not going to pay for any other platform. So YouTube grows as a monopoly. This is not the web.
So you might say, well just stop using YouTube then, but why should I? I don't want to use YouTube. I'm not there because of anything they deliver, I don't care about 4K quality or whatever. I'm there because I want to learn how to put up a shelf. A lot of that videos are posted by people thinking they are doing a public service and sharing knowledge. If YouTube were behind a paywall then they'd post them somewhere else.
So they just need to make up their mind. You want money? Then don't be public. Watch other platforms grow overnight. Watch P2P video sharing grow (which is how it should be). You want to be public and be the only video platform? Then I'll be blocking the ads when I try to access video in the only practical way I can.
Also, if this is about the cost then why not get the uploaders to pay for it? After all, it's their content that's being stored. Again, because if they did that then YouTube would not be the Borg of video content that it is.
What does "going thermonuclear" look like in this context?
Why shouldnt users go thermonuclear if Google tracks you everywhere. Why was Google allowed to buy Double Click and become a giant in ad space?
Ads, paywalls, and all other forms of access-control are a way of obscuring the relationship between programming and programmed, inverting it to me about me wanting to access them instead of them wanting to access me. It’s like that Cartmanland episode of South Park where telling people they can’t come to the park makes everyone want to come to the park.
This is not unique to YouTube or other streaming services, just the newest and most effective in the long line of newspapers, Hollywood, radio, TV, etc, and why all of those previous forms of media are as well-aligned with the US Government as is “““Big Tech”””. Ever gone for a Cultural Victory in Civ?