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Comment by eqvinox | Hacker News Reader

This is of course bringing up the discussion on the "morality" of Adblocking. I'd like to point out something that I don't think is getting enough attention.

There was a point in the past where video platforms were competing, and by no means was it clear that YouTube would end up dominating this area to the point of being close to a monopoly.

When YouTube won that race, they won it with a given set of parameters, including the kind and amount of ads they show. Society at large has, at that point in the past, basically decided that YouTube's offering is the best, and given this market domineering position.

YouTube is increasingly moving away from the parameters of this implicit agreement, in minor ways at first, more now. Had they "competed" in the video platform race with current policies, maybe everyone'd be using Vimeo now.

And here's the crux. YouTube can only do this because their old policies allowed them to establish this domineering position, and by doing so are breaking the implicit "deal" that actually allowed them to get into this position.

To me, there's currently no alternative to going onto YouTube. And no, I won't pay for YouTube Premium — because that wasn't part of the deal either. The platform won the race as a free platform. So, until Google can figure out how to serve a reasonable amount of safe ads — adblocker it is.

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This reminds me of the concept of predatory pricing which is when a business lowers their prices to below cost in order to drive out all its competitors and create a monopoly. https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

I do wonder if it could be argued (maybe even in the current monopoly case against google) whether youtube engaged in predatory or below-cost pricing in order to drive out all of its competitors, establish a monopoly, and now use that monopoly in order to "raise prices" i.e. increase the amount of ads on its service in order to maximize its profit margins.

Although this does seem to be the business plan of basically every startup out there. Get VC funding, run at a loss and burn through money but gain a monopoly market share, and once you've done that you can raise your prices and have a profit margin that far exceeds what should be normal.

They did. They ran at a huge deficit for a very long time while expanding.

But this seems to be the play book for all VC funded web apps. Facebook and MySpace did the same. In fact, you can argue that moving towards profitability too soon and too fast is what killed MySpace. But that argument only works if you are willing to see the growth phase as something other than predatory pricing.

I think your comment is a sobering input to the whole startup discussion.

Agreed. Bruce Schneier allocated a chapter in his last book, .A hacker's mind':

"Venture capital itself is not a hack. The hack is when unprofitable companies use VC funding to ignore the dynamics of the market economy. We don’t want some central planner to decide which businesses should remain operational and which should close down. But this is exactly what happens when venture capital firms become involved. The injection of VC money means that companies don’t need to compete with each other in the traditional manner, or worry about the normal laws of supply and demand. They can do what would normally be crazy things—give away their products, pay extravagant salaries, sustain enormous financial losses, provide a service that actually harms people—because of that external funding source. It’s basically central planning by elite investors, something that would be called communism if the government did it."

Hah, I'd given some thought to malinvestment in capitalism but never quite connected it to malinvestment under central planning.

It feels about right... it's almost the same thing. Except there are multiple competing "central authorities" with money, so the ones who fuck up do get burned a lot harder than they would if they were part of the very big government.

That's more or less the opposite of communism.

It's not really. Communism is just the super monopoly on everything by one firm (plus a bunch of kooky religious like beliefs). This subset of VC funding uses is basically abusing external funding to gain market dominance so that one can abuse your customers with product changes that make the product more profitable for you. It's very equivalent to how an oligopolist/monopolist enters new markets using money from the rest of the business to undercut everyone in the new market and push them out. It's bad for society, just like communism.

This doesn't mean there's no place for VC funding, there's lots of legitimate uses for it (i.e. handling mismatched cost/revenue flows from expansion where there are a lot of upfront costs and cash flows come over the following years). Just that it's usually more profitable to be a monopolist/oligopolist and so that has been where the money has been flowing, at great detriment to society.

In every single example up to the parent comment, the end result is a market inequlabrium.

Left unchanged, the market can have new entrants that undercut the major player. In this case, any new video playform that has fewer ads could steal market share from youtube. Rumble has entered the market to do just that.

Network effects do make this challenging, but that is for the market to decide. The more creators that dual upload and then see number shifts over to a YouTube competitor, the better,as it will force YouTube back into competition.

The market will solve this.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but this is a complete fantasy that completely ignores the point that was made a couple of comments above. No one is undercutting Google. Period.and that is the point. They have a death grip on the user base.

Just look at Twitter, it completely spit in everyone's faces and even still people cannot get out of its grips on them.

The only platforms that have even remotely survived are platforms that also own an ad network, or some other secondary source of income (like Kick and their Crypto gambling site or Twitch with their ad stock) as a way to shovel users into that fire. The market cannot solve this and has no incentive to do so. Again, it's a complete fantasy that has not once proven true.

> Just look at Twitter, it completely spit in everyone's faces and even still people cannot get out of its grips on them.

People can get out of them. People refuse to get out of them. Likely this is because YouTube and Twitter are still the most efficient platforms regardless of their regressions.

I used to have FB. Now I don't. I used to have Twitter. Now I don't. I used to have Android. Now I have Grapheneos. I used to use gmail. Now I use Fastmail, Mailcow, and shared hosting. I used to have Instagram. Now I don't.

You can decide to not be a user of a service. You can build your own! Or more easily, you can migrate to a competitor.

All of this clamoring for more regulation is nonsense. We have a market that can solve these problems. But markets work by votes. The path is harder if you take the road less traveled.

I didn't even mention regulation. You're circle jerking with yourself with a fantasy idea of the "free market" that doesn't exist in reality. You can't consume your way out of large corporations having market dominance, idk where that insane notion even is born.

You can entirely consume your way out of it, and you can also build your way out of it.

It's not fantasy. This is how markets work; how economies work.

Let's look at something like FB. At one point they were absolutely the social company. But other competitors have entered the market. In some instances, new markets were created, like Tiktok. Those new products took users away from FB. In some instances, the users will never return. This has happened precisely because someone somewhere decided to make something and challenge the existing market.

> I didn't even mention regulation

My bad. I was getting this thread confused with the one about AI regulation.

“You” a market does not make.

People refuse to get out of them is the market. That is the point of their growth and dominance model.

> People refuse to get out of them is the market.

People refuse to get out of them because they are still the most efficient providers. Regardless of the user experience degradation, YouTube still offers the best product. For example, Rumble doesnt let me start looking for ve events from the beginning. YouTube does. Better experience.

My hypothesis: if YouTube only worked on Web Integrity browsers and forced a four hour ad before content was played, people woulf move elsewhere. They havent yet because YT is still the best.

I dont understand how people reach these conclusions - when we opened the conversation with discussions on the abuse of market power.

AND this is tech. The place that "network effects" was coined.

Private VCs using their money to control the economy doesn't really sound much like a "system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs".

Private capitalists controlling the economy is practically the definition of capitalism. And it's bad for society indeed.

Yah, so you are really buying into the kooky religious like beliefs I see. Communism says what you have in quotations above, but it has never, ever worked that way for any serious amount of time. It always devolves into a system where the government owns everything or nearly everything and apportions things base don how it sees fit and that is a monopoly and a monopsony since the government is the sole provider of goods and services and the sole employer. It's a monopoly and it exercises power for the benefit of the bureaucracy that controls said monopoly with lip service to some idealized utopian BS.

That is not the definition of capitalism. The definition of capitalism is a system in which owners of capital control their capital in accord with their interests, which translates into competition because everyone else is also controlling their own capital and labor for their own interests. The natural outcome of this system is monopoly, which does closely resemble all the harms and dead weight loss of communism but, unlike under communism, the government is supposed to be there to stop total control, bust up the monopolies, and restore competition. It did a passable job of this until the Rehnquist supreme court in the 70s and it's time to start back in that pre-rehnquist direction. It's never time for communism.

He's literally complaining about one of the worst "features" of fiat money but attacks Bitcoin in his other publications. Amazing.

_Dumping_, how it was called when I was young, is the main strategy of most startups out there: operate at a loss until they establish themselves (usually as the sole provider of certain services or goods) then start to climb the prices.

It _should_ be illegal, but since it's the current status quo, it won't change anytime soon.

I think that the amount of free services we got in the last decade is the strongest argument IN FAVOR of dumping. They got there through subsidized services, now they want to fleece everyone, let's see how it goes. My guess is that competitors will arise and gain market share. It's happening to Uber down here in Brazil. The prices are getting too high, Brazilians are migrating to other apps, especially InDrive, a russian based app. Capitalism is great.

I strongly believe that, at least for youtube, there are no forthcoming competitors to gain market share. Network effect is too strong, and if even an inkling of that happens the policies that lead to people leaving will be rolled back just enough.

Policies being rolled back are just the market forces adjusting itself in real time. I'm pretty sure the current trend of forcing ads on everyone will not be feasible, and I reaaaaally hope Google keeps pushing people until a peertube-like option can become a reasonable alternative to the current monopoly. I can even see "torrents for YouTube videos" becoming a thing if they keep enshitificating it.

Youtube got to its current position not by lowering prices but instead by Google making sure that Youtube videos are returned at the top of Google search results. Competing video websites don't have this advantage.

YouTube had already beat its competitors before it was sold to Google.

Including Google Video. Google did try the tactic of using their search engine to promote their own video platform, but it was against YouTube and Google only bought them because it didn’t work.

it didnt work because people don't search for videos via google usually. They get the video directly from youtube, or was linked by friends virally.

Plus the early days of google (before youtube acquisition), i dont think their video search was as good as the text search anyway (but i might be misremembering of course...).

Their video search still sucks.

I'd go a lot further than "sucks".

The video results for most of my queries are like 90% SEO garbage without a video even being present on the linked page.

It's abject failure.

> Get VC funding, run at a loss and burn through money but gain a monopoly market share, and once you've done that you can raise your prices

Slightly off topic, but the business plan of most startups seems to be "get VC funding, and exit". What you wrote may be the business plan of VCs.

I don't understand the valuation of many startups these days (even in the hypothetical case where they capture 100% of their potential market one day).

VCs don’t invest because your business has a bright future as a valuable, sustainable operation . Not anymore.

The crypto dynamics have shifted the expectations so far to cheap, quick moment they most VCs, especially the a16z kind are more about “Can I juice this business and it’s metrics enough to sell it to someone to hold the bag”.

Ironically I think the large numbers involved are basically part of that PR game - they act as proof that the business is worth it and attract attention and bagholder interest.

The crypto economy worked like that too - the NFT wash trading, the signal metrics used to sell the idea that there is value where there is none.

Probably something something wework too.

> The crypto dynamics have shifted the expectations so far to cheap, quick moment they most VCs, especially the a16z kind are more about “Can I juice this business and it’s metrics enough to sell it to someone to hold the bag”.

This strategy existed long before "crypto"

And crypto is just tulips 2.0.

> Get VC funding, run at a loss and burn through money but gain a monopoly market share, and once you've done that you can raise your prices

Google, YouTube's owner, isn't a VC. YouTube was its best when it was burning VCs' cash.

My perspective: Google is not an agent directed by morality when they interact with me, therefore I don’t allocate any morality when interacting with them. It’s a power relationship not a moral relationship.

I do feel bad for the creators, but I would rather donate to their Patreons than buy YT premium.

> I do feel bad for the creators, but I would rather donate to their Patreons than buy YT premium.

I ended up subscribing to both Nebula and Dropout.tv, especially after noticing that a good portion of my favourite YT channels are in fact on Nebula. Sadly, this is primarly larger ones, and I do feel bad about smaller creators being kinda stuck on YT… especially when it's the odd one-time well-made video that really doesn't warrant e.g. Patreon.

But yeah, the real moral quandry is with the creators. They're more or less under the same monopoly pressure; in most cases you just can't ignore the YT audience :(

Totally agree this is the real problem.

Where do creators go if not YouTube!? Ideally they could self host videos which could be expensive AND not bring any revenue, neither do they are they discoverable - this is where the internet is broken these days.

And maybe this is where micro transactions would have a proper use case, i.e. if you had a browser extension where you add $5 and then you can dish out 1ct or 10ct for some content...

I'm still in favour of a fixed subscription one pays for a service like YouTube in the range of €5/month, with 95% of the proceeds going to creators. If you do nothing, the money will be doled out equally based on some set of fair (and frequently scrutinized) parameters. If the subscriber wants to, they can allocate a portion of this fee to specific creators, and also remove it from creators the you do not want to support (this might help with clickbait and empty fluff created to work well with specific searches).

It won't happen of course.

I recently had ads show up before videos on YouTube (audio only, so uBlock Origin was blocking part of it), and the only thing I felt was disgust and a mental note never to buy insurance from InShared (a Dutch insurance company) simply for repeating the same stupid jingle for each video.

Nebula was created by a few creator, trying to solve this problem.

I have no idea how well it worked out - I am still contented with the ad-filled YouTube

No it actually wasn’t. Nebula isn’t sustainable. It’s co financed by curiositystream.

Do you know if Rumble is sustainable? Just curious

No way in hell, it's currently just a vanity project financed by untrustworthy billionaires (the main financier is literally a snitch for the FBI https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-fbi-informant-ch...).

Thx.. Almost didn't want to know. One step closer to wearing a tin hat now

Ps. Now I am curious why you are getting downvoted. Are people here in favor of this type of thing? I wouldn't be surprised either at this point

haha, you think the fact that Peter Thiel talks to the FBI is the worst thing about Peter Thiel? :)

I signed up for nebula too, but it's clear that nebula is not a competitive platform. Nebula does the basics, it has channels and it shows videos, that part is great.

Youtube is great because of the wide availability of videos, recommendations and (maybe not great because of this) the comments.

I know the comments are not that well liked, but it means the videos are not in a vacuum. They are in a social context. And comments are pretty good, maybe because negative ones are heavily suppressed, that's at least what it looks like.

Nebula feels empty because of those missing parts. It doesn't draw you in to new channels. I don't like half the recommendations youtube gives, but some of them I do.

This doesn't actually bother me. I find video recommendations on social media and via other channels I follow. I think the big downside here is that without any sort of free tier less people recommend Nebula channels because most people can't watch the content. Most often it is a YouTube recommendation that I then see is on Nebula.

I think in an ideal world the recommendation engine and video host would be separated. You could be recommended videos on all platforms (including single-creator websites).

Grayjay does that but it is currently limited to a few platforms

This is the right response that's all too often missing from these threads.

If you want "free-market" you should deal with its basic premise that consumer pays as little as they can and seller tries to milk the consumer as much as they can. That's quite literally how it's supposed to work.

I'm very much in favor of bringing some morality to the economic system, but it shouldn't be one sided.

The issue is that the content (format/pacing/etc.) is made to show ads which pretty much makes 'premium' a weird thing.

Morally, I consider ads to be outright evil, especially the modern day cancer we call advertisement where they track every singular molecule of your existence. As soon as these scumbags stop hiring psychologists and other similar professionals to make the most addicting and psychologically impactful advertisements possible, then maybe I'll consider them less than pure evil.

I still have uBlock turned off on a few sites, though that list is becoming vanishingly smaller. 4Chan, funnily enough, has the best ads, where it's just old school banner ads on the top of the page and the very bottom of the page. No click hijacking, no embedded ads made to mimic organic content, no fucking audio and flashing lights ads. The only type of targeting those ads have is that the general audience that goes on 4Chan is into anime and Japan, both of which I don't care about. If the internet still had these kind of ads, I think adblockers would be much less of a "problem", but since 99% of them are invasive garbage, whoever is pushing them and whoever argues it's "immoral" to block them can go fuck themselves.

a counter take from me, as someone who uses adblocks everywhere possible but used to work for facebook ads department:

ads aren't inherently bad, irregardless of much data do they track. What really bad is how this ads is targeted and how much ads is delivered. I would LOVE to see relevant to my interested and situation ads. I like fpv drones and often see interested ads on instagram and led to a purchase. The problem after that I can't just edit the vector of my interests for ads targeting and keep bombarded with something not relevant to my situation anymore, and boy so much of it I see.

I really don't know why big ads network didn't move forward with user controlled ads mechanics - because we all humans buy something anyway, it's okay of being aware of the options on the market. It's not okay to mentally torture users with irrelevant, annoying and overwhelming amount of ads.

What is the morality of thinking anyone is allowed to fully control my machine? I guess I'm showing my age, but browsers were _user_ agents, once.

Yeah. The audacity of these corporations. It's offensive that they even think they can dictate what our computers do or don't do.

No one is forcing you to use youtube. I think the situation is more like the opposite, adblockers are trying to gain control of youtube servers in order to obtain the product without paying.

YouTube isn't forced to serve me anything. If they don't want to, sure, they can go ahead. What _is_ served, I will parse however I see fit.

I mean that's exactly what they're doing here... Refusing to serve the video until the ad is watched.

If I can parse whatever they serve such that I can skip it, they are evidently not refusing to serve.

Adblockers run within the browser's space, they don't intrude into any servers by any means whatsoever. Your statement is completely wrong and misguided.

The current implementation sends YouTube false information about whether the ad was run. That absolutely intrudes on the server. Really it's no different from telling a cashier you already paid online or something like that.

I guess we're even then, since they do not respect DNT.

[Edit] can't reply to below, but since I am not violating any law, I don't see how I need to admit to anything. I'll admit to using my user agent as intended.

Hey I've got no qualms about stealing from youtube. I'm just willing to admit that that's what I'm doing.

What current implementation and what false information? What are you talking about? The article literally says the opposite?

Everything is on youtube and alternative sites either die out or don't get anything uploaded onto them. It's effectively a monopoly.

> And no, I won't pay for YouTube Premium — because that wasn't part of the deal either.

There's also the ridiculous fact it is literally impossible to pay to remove the ads without also getting the horrible Youtube Music service.

What makes me really sad is that Google doesn't just not offer a "Music-less Youtube Premium" (due to a lack of attention or whatever) – no: They used to offer that product in some markets and have actively discontinued it.

The EU should look long and hard at that: the market-dominating video platform, owned by the market-dominating search and advertising company, forcing bundled pricing for YouTube in order to leverage the YT monopoly for an edge in the music streaming market.

Sounds anticompetitive as hell, and a government that actually cares about functioning markets should eviscerate them for it.

Just that it does. You only get ads in music videos then.

Heck, it won't even remove all ads. A significant number of creators have sponsor segments, and YT Premium won't get rid of that. Why would I pay the Premium tax to get rid of some of the ads?

the plugin "SponsorBlock for youtube" does a good job of using user submitting skipping of said content, people can even mark certain parts as 'filler' and you can also skip those also.

I really enjoy YTM and see YT Premium as a wonderful perk.

Why does this matter? Can't you just not use it?

Because they're sold together, so if you wanted forgo YouTube Music, you'd assume it'd be cheaper.

I'd be very surprised if it would be considering YouTube already has music where they already pays the copyright holder for. My guess is YouTube music is focused UI on an already offered service and separating it out will likely not make it cheaper, or if it does, it won't be a big difference.

I wonder if there are licensing shenanigans with music that mean they have to be bundled together otherwise you might not be able to watch pure music videos on youtube.

And the platforms that were free and distributed, i.e. torrents became illegal. Youtube started with a ton of illegal stuff (and still contains tons of illegal stuff, but mostly in languages/regions that "don't matter").

Internet speeds are maturing, and maybe it is time to try again a self-hosted or distributed model. The hard part is to put ads in it, because ad-supported is traditionally the best medium for videos. However most video creators are already having sponsorship deals

> still contains tons of illegal stuff

I came across whole episodes of British TV on there this very week that were uploaded 12 years ago. I know they have a strict "no humans involved, ever" system going, but the programme name was in the title and the video was one of those ones inset into a fake background and the audio was original. I find it amazing that no one (or rather nothing) with a ban button has noticed that for so long.

If they actually cared even a microgram and they couldn't even get an intern to do a days' work searching for TV show titles, there'd be enough failed Reddit moderators out there who they could recruit who would gleefully do the job for free. Not that I would want them to - it's bad enough when only bring reactive to often-spurious complaints - but it's such a completely perfect lack of interest that it must be very deliberate.

Is it illegal though? Who owns it?

General principle of the internet seems to be people can host what they like till someone who has legal ownership of it tells them to take it down at that point they're expected to take it down and keep it off their service unless added by the owner.

That's what google is sticking to because frankly any other method would be a nightmare.

The old tv episodes might have muddy/unclear ownership and so things continue to coast along until someone exercises their right of ownership.

The TV show was first aired in 2009, and they're still on streaming services so it's hardly an orphan work. Not that I'm agitating for more or stricter enforcement, far from it, but it seems strangely lackadaisical compared to the "walk past a shop playing music and cop a copyright strike" that also happens on the very same platform.

Then again I guess YouTube makes money from ads on these videos being up, so that does explain the sphinx-like impassivity.

My favorite is that cover songs are basically outlawed by default on YouTube, even though they're entirely legal. ContentID can come and slap your channel for melodic similarities...and it's entirely down to the rightsholder whether they "allow" the video and simply take all monetization or if it is taken down and counts as a copyright strike against your channel (eventually leading to termination). And there's no way to know which will happen until you upload.

But the thing is: copyright law specifies that mechanical royalties are compulsory. Artists don't get to stop you from covering songs, as long as your distributor pays the legal n% to their distributor. But even if you pay LANDR or whoever to administer those royalties, so you can release your cover to Spotify and whatever, YouTube will still smack your channel for uploading the cover. At worst, content strike, at best you still lose all monetization.

As it turns out, "sync licenses" (the right to pair music with visual media) are not compulsory and that's what YouTube primarily cares about. Even if it's just a "video" of your album art with the music playing, you can still be arbitrarily penalized on the most popular platform for music discovery, because it's technically video and record labels can do whatever they want within the opaque framework YouTube has created.

yes it s entirely illegal hosting it , as it is copyrighted content, it even says so in the credits. there are tons of tv series from around the world being hosted, and it's not fair use even under the relaxed US laws. The fact that someone has not issued a takedown request doesn't make it legal either.

> Internet speeds are maturing, and maybe it is time to try again a self-hosted or distributed model.

Distributed, maybe.

Self-hosted? Not a chance. Sure, if you just want to share a video with some friends and family, that's fine. But if I reached the popularity of even a moderately successful YouTube channel (Say, 100K subscribers?), even the lucky few with gigabit internet at home could not handle the load.

Wait a minute…

What about a distributed model, but with a distributed ad network which pays people and/or the project?

Would it be enough to cover internet service provider costs of average folks?

I serve about 60TB/mo from my house (100K+ YouTube videos equivalent) and pay $100/mo for internet. So $0.001 per video would cover my ISP costs (not including server and storage infra).

My biggest issue with running a service like this would be the possibility that I'm all of a sudden serving CP from my house because the distributed model doesn't have a good moderation scheme.

Moderation tends to be the bottleneck with distributed services right now. The infrastructure is there.

Classic bait and switch. Google's own search page is a good example of how ads have overrun the search results.

Ad blocker detected please disable to use Search

Don't give them ideas lol

I'm also a heavy user of ad blockers, but there is something to be said in defense of YouTube.

Creators have the final decision on the ads shown. I have a YouTube channel, and I always disable monetization on all my videos, so no ads are ever shown on my channel.

If you see an ad, it's because the creator decided to include one. YouTube is simply the platform that enables this choice.

They are actually removing the ability to control ads in the near future. To my understanding, the only ads creators will have full control over are midroll ads.

They will be improving ads on the platform by removing the creator's control over them.

> optimizing creator revenue and taking the guesswork out of which ad formats to use by removing individual ad controls for pre-roll, post-roll, skippable, and non-skippable ads on newly uploaded videos.

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/233723152/simplify...

From what is written, they plan to reduce the control of where ads are placed, but still allow enabling or disabling them.

Anyway, at present it's possible to disable them if you have reached the monetization requirements on the channel, like 1000 subscribers and some amount of hours viewed.

That's not correct. A few years ago YouTube changed their TOS, so they're now allowed to show ads on any content, regardless of settings.

You're mixing up two different things. It's true that YouTube now places ads to small channels that have not reached the monetization requirements.

But after the channel satisfy such requirements, like 1000 subscribers, the creator gets control of the monetization and they can choose.

For any major channel you watch, it's the creator decision that you see ads or not.

My YT account has a total of five personally-recorded videos (from the era where smartphone cameras still sucked) with no music in the background and no monetisation on any of them.

One of the videos was hit with an automated DMCA takedown, one was hit with a "mature content" takedown, and the remaining 3 have ads on them now.

That's not necessarily true. If you are not in the Youtube partner program, Youtube can still monetize your videos and keep the ad money for themselves.

Is it an on-off switch, or a slider for how many and when?

Your can individually toggle pre- mid- and Post-Roll ads. Your can even set suggested spots within the video for the mid-roll ads, but that doesn't really control how many will actually be played.

This applies to videos with no copyrighted content. If you use any excerpts or music that someone else claims, anything might happen to your video regarding ads.

I'm not sure it's a question of what's "fair" or "right" or "legal". We (as a society) need to figure out what incentive we want to impose on the world.

We (through a convoluted, but in the end democratic process that is supposed to represent the will of the people) decided that piracy is illegal not because there is some divine right of authors to get compensated, but because we believe that by making piracy too common we would kill the incentive for the future authors to create.

Similary, we will need to decide on the laws around ad blocking. If we decide to keep it accessable, then the downside is that both the infrastructure work done by Google (or its competitors) and the creative work done by authors will become less profitable and thus the quality will decline. If we don't envision this happening, we should definetly get ad blockers without a second thought.

Even prior to this change, as far back as a decade ago when Youtube (according to Google) was burning money, they still knew there was some perversely wealthy incentive to keep the platform around. Google has shut down far more useful products for far less. That leads me to believe that the value in Youtube goes far beyond ads. Right now it's merely trying to optimize and squeeze as much blood from stone as possible, up until they can measure the tipping point of maximum pain before users spend time on other platforms.

>This is of course bringing up the discussion on the "morality" of Adblocking

No, it does not. There is no discussion to be had.

What still gets me is that even with YT Premium, there are still ads if the content creators decide to embed them as part of the content. Yes, they are skippable, but there are still ads…that I paying, to NOT see. This is also a moral issue. What does the exact definition of “no ads” actually mean to YT and is their definition misleading or purposefully vague?

Unless they qualify their definition with something like “you may still see in-video sponsored content”, ad-free should 100% ad-free, and it is irritating that that (perhaps) through some nuanced definition of “ads” that they allow this. IMO this needs to be investigated by the FCC.

If you look at the advertising literature for Premium, it simply says “Enjoy ad-free videos…” with no asterisk or fine print that has any exclusions. Perhaps there is something deeply buried in one of the “terms and conditions” documents that allows for this, but I haven’t taken the time to look. My point is, YT and the content creators benefit from these ads on a supposed no-ad plan. Imagine if other streaming services like Netflix started doing this.

Like a TV show with ads, but where the TV actors put in their own ads right into the shows dialogue, in addition to the network's commercial breaks.

This happens because Youtube doesn't pay content makers a flat rate, unless they're a whale.

Yeah there are various ways to sneak advertising into content, but that why this is so insidious. Is product placement an “ad”? Is a quick mention of a sponsor an “ad”? Is a “passive” ad such as background graphic or wearing a sponsor’s t-shirt an “ad?”. Where do we draw that line? I think we’ve simply been conditioned to accept that ads are a normal and acceptable part of life, even if you pay not to have them. Remember when cable TV first became available to the public? It was supposed to be, and was at first, ad-free because you paid for it unlike broadcast TV. Now, cable TV is more ads than content in many cases, and those who have it pay dearly because in most markets, the cable companies have an effective monopoly. We have become the dystopian future we predicted and abhorred, but don’t even know it.

Use yt-dlp, no ads or sponsor segments.

The real reason why anyone could never compete with Youtube was (lack of) monetization

That's actually an interesting question in itself. Google also has a domineering (though not monopoly) position in ads. If someone were to try to compete with an ad-funded service… how much of a problem would that be?

Also: part of the problem is the quality of the ads. Could you actually get "better quality" ads for a competitor video platform? Do such ads even exist in sufficient number at this point? (I vaguely remember a significant portion of larger companies reducing their internet ad budgets because they simply weren't seeing good returns…)

There is a very interesting example, but unknown to western readers. It's called Bilibili.

It's the largest video platform in China[0]. However, it keeps losing money since forever, including in last year, and is expected to keep losing more in 2023.

[0]: Youtube is blocked in China and you need a VPN to access it there.

Do realize that viewers are not YouTube's only "customer". They spend a lot of time and energy courting video creators as well, and their monetization program is one of the few that allows even mid-sized creators to record videos for a living.

YouTube's partner program pays relatively little, though. Pretty much all mid-sized creators I follow also have sponsors and/or a Patreon - that's their main source of income.

It's still one of the best on the internet. That said, if you have the viewers to get monetized on YouTube, you probably have the viewers to make even more money off sponsorships/patreons/etc.

I don't see any question on morality of blocking ads. Under no circumstances any living soul may be forced to view any kind of displeasing content. Web is an open protocol, anything accessible on the web with http code 200 is free to download. After downloading, I can alter that content in any way. Simple like that.

If Youtube wants to control their content and users - they should create their own protocols or at least closed network using web protocols, write their own client software and distribute it.

You have essentially laid out the tech company playbook. In so many cases, hyper-growth is subsidized by investors (or another part of a giant business). The product is offered to the public at FAR below cost in order to gain a monopoly-like market share. After they have successfully killed all viable competitors, they ratchet up prices (and/or ad-delivery), decrease spend on customer service, etc. and rake in profits. This is why the “growth mindset” is so ingrained in SV tech culture.

There was a point in the past where various empires were competing, and by no means was it clear that The Roman Empire would end up dominating the world close to being a monopoly.

The Roman Empire is moving away from the parameters of their implicit win, including the kind and amount of victories they score. Had they "competed" in world domination with the current policies, maybe everybody would speak Persian by now.

No, I won't be subject to the Byzantine Empire - because that was not part of the deal either. The empire was build on Rome. So until the Byzantines can figure out how to win _reasonable_ amount of _military victories_ - I won't pay taxes.

Do you realize how shallow your argument sounds ? :)) Of course Youtube is turning the screws now that they have the lock-in. Ethics have nothing to do with it. And they will turn the screws until you either pay up or stop going there all together.

> This is of course bringing up the discussion on the "morality" of Adblocking. I'd like to point out something that I don't think is getting enough attention.

Don't forget the flipside, the "morality" of interfering with a user's freedom to selectively ignore certain content.

Isn't that the whole premise of the SV tech?

Give a dollar(unprofitable and unsustainable service) for a pennies by burning the money of the investors to capture a market then switch to high profit margin business practices and milk out the captured market thereafter.

Sure, it can be framed as spend money when developing a product then make profit of it when released but the winners are determined by keeping alive the developed product longer than everyone else ane when everyone else is gone, then monetise.

People who spent billions of dollars to run YouTube at loss for years were not philanthropists, they rightfully expect to make that money back and make much more on top of it.

Everything you said is right except for the "rightfully".

Why?

Because providing a product/service below cost to drive competitors out of the market followed by using your new monopoly to raise prices is exactly the definition of illegal predatory pricing.

A few Argentinian peso via VPN for Youtube premium seems fine.

> To me, there's currently no alternative to going onto YouTube

Vimeo, Rumble, DailyMotion, Facebook Video and self-hosting all still exist you know. There are plenty of alternatives.

Vimeo changed their model and are focused on paid business users now

Just that energy and such got more costly. Why should YouTube pay extra cause you feel you had an agreement with them on how much ads there are?

> Why should YouTube pay extra cause you feel you had an agreement with them on how much ads there are?

Because I say so with my AdBlock. This is the reason why small guy should have power.

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