YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
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I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Even going so far as believing they have a right to free lemonade...
But it sure seems that you're trying to rationalize your unwillingness to pay for something and it does sound very entitled.
But no one is forcing you to use YouTube, it's just way more accessible for any content creator that can't spend weeks in getting a commercial license for music and such.
But I have good news for you. Many creators have Patreons, that serves video.
I prefer to subscribe and watch on Nebula to support them more... but YouTube has such a good mix of content that isn't on Nebula that I find myself using it as a hub regardless.
In-video promotions are ads. You cannot pay to block them.
I will not pay for content twice or more.
That literally means that unless Google spins off YouTube, you will screw the creators on YouTube.
What do you mean "unrelated"?
For the price of your Spotify subscription, you get an YouTube Music and ad-free YouTube. Seems like a good value prop. I'm a subscriber.
Okay, we've established you don't know what unrelated means.
YouTube with no ads is $12 a month. How can it be more clear?
>I, nor anybody have I talked to want a Youtube Music subscription or yet another podcast app.
I'm sure some of these people happily subscribe to Spotify, and can't spot a good deal staring them in the face.
I actually bumped my YT plan to family and put my parents on it. They didn't know about ad free YT, now they don't know how they went without it.
You can still think it's a good deal though.
It could maybe even be considered anti-competitive to bundle Youtube and Youtube Music as the only option.
See the Vid.me rise and fall illustrates this perfectly. Their closing letter to users even says in so many words "Ya'll don't want to pay, so how can we stay open?"
It's easy to wonder why. The status quo at the time had been that user-submitted video content (YouTube) is free. It was only free because Alphabet had their losses from YouTube subsidized by their profits from Google. Maybe not for all, but for many this is an anti-trust issue.
Also, using money from one business to keep another business alive is not a monopolistic practice. Plenty of tech companies have had the technical and monetary firepower to run a youtube competitor. But you just have to read a few threads on the internet from anytime in the last decade talking about youtube and monetization to see why no one wanted to jump in. This thread included.
Sorry but this take is pretty wild to me. I can understand that there is a paid option but YouTube is free today given that I can currently watch a video after watching a couple ads without paying any money.
> Also, using money from one business to keep another business alive is not a monopolistic practice.
I'm not sure this is true in theory but, regardless, to each their own. This practice of keeping competitors down by subsidizing business losses with profits from another business, only to try to change the status quo for their customers, seems pretty shitty from where I'm standing.
It's been a long time since youtube was free.
Watching ads is what covers the cost of watching a video. It's no secret that running a site like youtube is extremely expensive.
> No one else wants to run a lemonade stand because they can see customers do not want to pay for lemondade.
Of course nobody wanted to pay with ad view time because youtube didn't require that. In practice, one could watch a youtube video without watching any ads and the practice was allowed because it kept competitors down.
> Watching ads is what covers the cost of watching a video. It's no secret that running a site like youtube is extremely expensive.
This is exactly correct, and it's why this practice was so effective. Nobody wants to pay with their time and youtube didn't force them. Why is someone going to go to Vid.me where they will be disallowed from blocking ads? The only reason it wasn't necessary for youtube to show the ads is that they had their losses subsidized by google's profits.
Going back to what you initially wrote:
> No one else wants to run a lemonade stand because they can see customers do not want to pay for lemondade.
Because there was a lemonade stand backed by the profits of one of the most profitable companies in history handing out free lemonade, no questions asked. Yeah, nobody else wanted to pay for something that was free in practice, even in the context of time spent watching an ad.
It's not free. You payment is that you watch the ads.
Others are just so much worse or charge for storage on the creator side... but they don't have ads.
Today you can consume a lot of creator video content straight in platforms like Patreon... but you have to actually pony up some cash for that.
who all got lemonade delivered for free by a million lemonade aficionados who wanted to share their lemonade with the world, for which YouTube showed the lemonade drinkers ads while pickpocketing all the documents in their wallet and copying them, also throwing buckets of lemonade in the trash because it wasn't the officially approved taste of lemonade, some other lemonade claimed there was a hint of taste that "copied" theirs, or for no stated reason at all, just dumped it, sorry, "terms and conditions", which.. we'll never tell you.
Let's add another step before this:
Understand that people are visiting the store because the soda is free in practice and allow the practice to continue until other stores don't see any business because they can't afford to offer free soda.
Then they complain about other convenience stores being put out of business.
If we're going to start calling people entitled, my eyes are still on Google.
My point is that people who were never intent on paying businesses for their services never cared about the sustainability of those businesses in the first place and are just using it to rationalize their anger. This sort of moral consistency matters with civil law where good and bad aren't trivially obvious.
Society collectively agrees that it's good for supermarkets to offer loss leader rotisserie chickens. An argument can be made that it's anticompetitive because it basically put Boston Market out of business, but I wouldn't be as receptive if that came from someone who was caught stealing supermarket rotisserie chickens.
On top of that, the pricing feels high for most people, and no one trusts Google to not jerk them around, killing a product or changing pricing.
With giving youtube for free for long, to reduce the possibilities of other platforms, and then charging, when your library is "unbeatable"
It isn't the library. Youtube's trove of videos will age fast if there was any meaningful alternative. What prevents any competitor is youtube's legal backing. They have already fought the RIAA/MPAA and the content rules of hundreds of jurisdictions. Youtube has deals, understandings, in place that allow youtube to keep going. But if anyone else tries to setup a similar video service, at scale, those hard-fought deals will not apply. Those past enemies of youtube are now its tame watchdogs ready to unleash themselves on anyone who else attempting to enter the market.
Youtube only exists because google was ok with not making any money from it for years.
Giving money to Google for programmatic ads ≠ funding creators. Most creators are small and don’t make any real money from YT anymore, and every year fewer and fewer are willing to endure the infinite mystery box of YT moderation and contentID policy.
And paying for it will result in most of my money going to Google and asshats like xQc even though I'd never willingly watch one of his videos and barely know who he is.
And I've watched the algorithm wreck some youtube channels that I used to enjoy as the creators chase after revenue.
(Not to mention that the ads that Google shows are fucking awful)
55% of the subscription goes to the channels you watch [1]. This money is divided based on your watch time [1]. If you don't watch a channel, none of your subscription pays for that channel.
[1] https://support.unionforgamers.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600488...
> To determine how much subscription revenue each channel receives, YouTube will aggregate viewing data from Premium users to determine a value based on watch time.
The word "aggregate" there is particularly important.
And:
> The exact amount of money you will receive for each minute of YouTube Premium viewer watch time will always vary based on viewing habits, and there are complex aspects of the distribution algorithm that are not disclosed by YouTube
That's a very long way from 55% of _my_ subscription going out to the channels that _I_ watch. That would have been a simple thing for them to state, and they certainly didn't state anything close to that.
I'm pretty convinced by those statements actually that a good chunk of my subscription would go to xQc and his ilk to keep him on youtube collecting more views since he's more valuable to the platform than anyone that I watch.
Take a look in the mirror. You wrecked those channels. Together with other people who also enjoy those channels but refuse to pay for the entertainment. So creators are forced to seek a wider audience or a more lucrative audience, because the people enjoying their videos also think that they don't deserve to be reimbursed for their work. You're the algorithm.
It is like someone peed into the free lemonade and demands money for it.
People don't want youtube ads, and frankly it's their good right to not have to download, display and watch them if they so choose. What youtube now wants is proof that people have watched ads. This is problematic for 2 reasons. The first is that there is no way to prove you've watched an ad in a way that's not a privacy nightmare and extremely hostile to users. The second is that most people are simply unwilling to watch youtube ads.
I'm not disgusted with the idea of a paid youtube, I'd simply go somewhere else, I'm disgusted by having ads shoved down my throat and that of others.
"Restaurants are making me pay before eating because I usually just dine and ditch. How am I supposed to eat out if I have to pay? They are greedy as fuck, so no way will I give them a cent. But honestly not eating out is also not an option."
Do you hear yourself?
If they want to be paid they should just go paid and see if anyone still wants to share videos on a closed platform, if they don't want to do that why should I need to approve of every single alternative they manage to come up with?
The only issue I have with paid Youtube is privacy. We are talking about Google after all....
I know there are other techniques like fingerprinting but I prefer to use youtube as anonymously as possible and payment+login violates that completely.
- I can't upload random video to the netflix, and I have a certain expectation regarding content there
- 99% of videos on youtube are not something I would pay for or expected to be paid for uploading
- I can pay for youtube subscription and would still get a lot of advertisement, because I dared to turn SponsorBlock off. Creators have a very good reason to use this type of ads, and youtube have all responsibility of not providing solutions for this.
- I can pay for HBO max and watch Sopranos. On youtube I can pay and content of interest could be deleted next second
- I have no idea if my favourite creator was demonetised for DMCA spam by youtube, but I certainly know they are not treated as equal partners in this business in many ways.
- Ultimately I pay for content, and subscription guarantees some kind of investment from the platform in acquiring or producing it. Not true for youtube.
edit: not saying one should not pay for youtube, but these points are for comparing youtube with established paid platforms. I believe youtube could offer very interesting and fair subscription schemes and conditions in principle.
HBO hasn't exactly been great about this either
Pointing the finger at YouTube like it's a unique problem is...
> - I can't upload random video to the netflix, and I have a certain expectation regarding content there
That's a bug, not a feature. You're basically restricted to the tastes of Netflix's buyers.
> - 99% of videos on youtube are not something I would pay for or expected to be paid for uploading
Then you're watching the wrong videos. Most of the videos that I and my friends watch are high quality, entertaining, and informative. Their creators usually have Patreons making five figures monthly.
> - I can pay for youtube subscription and would still get a lot of advertisement, because I dared to turn SponsorBlock off. Creators have a very good reason to use this type of ads, and youtube have all responsibility of not providing solutions for this.
You can easily skip these, not sure what the issue is here.
> - I can pay for HBO max and watch Sopranos. On youtube I can pay and content of interest could be deleted next second
Guessing you started streaming only recently, since Netflix/Hulu/HBO all change their inventory frequently due to licensing. It wasn't long ago that you could watch Sopranos on Amazon.
> - I have no idea if my favourite creator was demonetised for DMCA spam by youtube, but I certainly know they are not treated as equal partners in this business in many ways.
This isn't a problem with YouTube, it's a problem with the US legal system.
> - Ultimately I pay for content, and subscription guarantees some kind of investment from the platform in acquiring or producing it. Not true for youtube.
This is your best one, YouTube has created tons of wealth for creators and has cut out tons of the usual Hollywood intermediaries. Additionally, there has never been a greater investment made on storing and distributing video like the one Google made on YouTube.
Re-read the sentence you're replying to. "99% of videos on youtube", not "99% of videos I watch".
>You can easily skip these, not sure what the issue is here.
You can also ad-block. The issue is that even paying for YouTube isn't enough to not see any ads on YouTube.
>Additionally, there has never been a greater investment made on storing and distributing video like the one Google made on YouTube.
YouTube merely provides the logistical support. It's not a production company. That is, it doesn't seek out talent to produce content for it. This is the difference the GP is highlighting.
And in the context, this is even less sensible. 99% of content on Netflix is what "you" don't watch. So there's literally no difference on that point for YT and Netflix.
> The issue is that even paying for YouTube isn't enough to not see any ads on YouTube.
Native ads are skippable and are already providing revenue for the creator - skipping them doesn't affect creator's income. Ad-block screws over the creators. There's a difference...
> YouTube merely provides the logistical support.
Have you ever worked at a production company? Because providing legal, logistical and marketing support is also what production companies do - that is what YouTube provides to creators. If you apply the same logic, then Universal Media Group isn't a production company - because they also primarily provide those functions.
Not to mention that YouTube has produced, may even still produce, original content.
"I don't watch this" and "I would never watch this under any circumstance" are different.
>Have you ever worked at a production company? Because providing legal, logistical and marketing support is also what production companies do - that is what YouTube provides to creators. If you apply the same logic, then Universal Media Group isn't a production company - because they also primarily provide those functions.
What you're saying is that production companies provide logistics, and YouTube provides logistics, therefore YouTube is a production company. Socrates is a man, and I am a man, therefore I am Socrates.
>Not to mention that YouTube has produced, may even still produce, original content.
Sure. But the vast majority of the content that drives traffic to YouTube is not produced by them.
OK. How is this even relevant. Both YouTube and Netflix have easily over 90% of content that "I would never watch under any circumstance"(which is already a false statement on your part).
> What you're saying is that production companies provide logistics
Way to ignore literally everything else I wrote.
> But the vast majority of the content that drives traffic to YouTube is not produced by them.
Same goes for Netflix
When you move the goalpost, make sure that where you move it supports your argument.
>You're basically restricted to the tastes of Netflix's buyers.
Same as going to the cinema. I don't expect to see 5 minutes of figuring out camera settings and 2 hours of black screen. I completely miss how it's not a feature. At the same time I support variety and experiments with a content of any kind, it's just not that.
>You can easily skip these, not sure what the issue is here.
No issue. I use sponsorblock as I mentioned, so no manual intervention required. Why do I have to do it though.
>all change their inventory frequently due to licensing. It wasn't long ago that you could watch Sopranos on Amazon.
Did you know they announced removal of Sopranos beforehand? You could make an informed decision given a warning.
>it's a problem with the US legal system.
No it's not. But thank you for a perfect counter.
>YouTube has created tons of wealth for creators and has cut out tons of the usual Hollywood intermediaries.
Fair enough, there is some service being provided by youtube. They basically made all the content on platform possible.
>Additionally, there has never been a greater investment made on storing and distributing video like the one Google made on YouTube.
This wasn't a charity.
And if someone uses false rationalizations to use ad-blockers, while claiming to support the content creators - I can only sense hypocrisy and entitlement.
People will always justify a way to steal, when they can get away with it.
- they could simply not watch YouTube if the content is "99% not worth watching"
- they could pay to watch the content
- they could pay the creator on their patreons, and watch there
Be comfortable stealing and saying that it's stealing. Or pay with your ads / money. The hypocrisy is stealing and claiming that YouTube should somehow provide a service for free.
Patently not true. Most of the big YT channels these days have sponsors or controlling orgs. Often own wholely or partly by the big dogs.
For example a lot of "gun-tube" channels are owned or work under the Leviathan Group. https://www.leviathangroupllc.com/
Plenty of others like that, e.g. Take 5 Media Group , Wake Up , and INNOCEAN, etc.
There are certainly individual contributors, but if you think most of the big channels aren't 100% owned and operated you're being played.
And in their defense, there is just a lot of dross on YT; allowing anyone to upload anything means 90% of it is crap. Netflix's buyers may have a specific set of tastes, but I don't have to sort through reams of poorly edited memes & reaction videos.
Then you just use the ad-supported version, which seems to be what suits you.
> On youtube I can pay and content of interest could be deleted next second
Which online video platform doesn't suffer from that?
Sopranos is a core HBO product. YouTube does have YouTube's core content. Non core products get removed off MAX(HBO's new name) all the time. There's literally "Leaving Soon" section in my MAX app.
Then don't turn SponsorBlock off? Is Youtube banning that as well? I don't see why they would care.
All of my issues with YouTube they created intentionally. I just recently found a trick that had YouTube play in the background when I switched tabs and I recalled how life was before they created Red and it annoyed me all over again.
Google is the devil of today's tech companies - most of what they do utilizes the outright theft of our data and what they do with it is purely manipulative in nature.
Why do you personally think that you're entitled to consume content from YouTube?
You aren't entitled to a revenue purely because you upload some stuff onto someone else's computer.
If you produced content that had value worth paying for, then people would happily pay it. Perhaps if "getting screwed" upsets you so much, you should move to a paid, subscription-only model where your content will get 100% of the earnings (you feel) it merits.
The majority of ad spend goes directly to content owners.
Some of that is due to my own changing habits, but even more of it comes from the content creators I follow in the gaming space being serially demonetized thanks to overly sensitive advertisers. So even though I'm trying to pay to support the content I watch, my money isn't going to the right creators.
As such, even at the seemingly reasonable $14 every month... it's no longer worth it.
I recognize this doesn't solve your reasons at all, but for anyone facing an un-grandfathering who is simply price-conscious, if you're willing to commit for a year to YT Premium, it's effectively $11.66/mo.
I just squeaked into pre-increase Nest pricing for the final year I'll use it. This has been a big year for 40%+ subscription price increases, Google and otherwise, it seems.
> youtube [...], who directly profit shares with small creators you adore
Citation very much needed :P every report I've seen and insight I've heard is that anyone below the very top echelons earns negligible profit from their YouTube content. A commenter lower in the chain points out that "many of the YouTubers I watch have Patreons earning thousands of dollars", which...sort-of proves the point that YouTube, in isolation, is insufficient.
Probably a combination of misgivings:
1. Google cant keep a product/service alive worth a damn, or ones that do get changed to be piss eventually
2. Paying other content providers for content they provide feels different than paying Youtube for mostly content they carry that was pirated/unlicensed anyway (e.g. full disclosure,I mostly use it to watch jazz and funk bootleg concerts or old 80s music videos or other ephemera YT really had damn all to do with and likely dont monetize for the actual creators worth a damn).
3. Somewhere between the two is the fact that for some licensed materials, you still have the region-constraint. If Yt Premium covered truly global reach, it might be more tantalizing, but as it stands...meh.
It's dryshite ROI.
It's almost like Youtube is a different product and UX!
People obviously think of Youtube as the place where nearly all the important, timely video/streaming content exists in some form or another. Professionally produced content sits right next to town hall meetings with 13 views, or some kid's first remix. People sometimes use it as an extension of their harddrive for random video content. Hell, there's a whole genre of people sitting silently in picture, watching professionally produced content. Plus a genre of obviously fake reactions to content that rando's claim they've never seen before.
It's difficult to unwind a product pitched for decades as a kind of public good video cloud, and re-pitch that as monthly-charge cable television.
"Aren't people fickle?" is a hilarious way to misunderstand the situation. I mean, ok, but that take applies equally to nearly any non-trivial business challenge of any company that has ever existed.
Eventually they made a config change and it began varying the bit-rate instead of just stopping, but it wasn't a great demonstration
Edit: that's all set up now so it'll show me the patreon videos first. And creators are making many times more money off me than they were before. Google is unnecessary!
For one thing, if they are so damn dominant at advertising, why can't they show me a better variety of ads?
Another problem is the jarring nature of ads. They are just IN YOUR FACE all of a sudden, and it's basically rude the way they're presented. Is there not a more "polite" way to go about it?
You could have me watch 5 minutes of straight ads, reset every 12 hours, and I'd be OK with that. I'd even be glad to rate each ad along the way. Are they hellbent on interruptions, or do they just want the ads to be seen? I hate the interruption.
Then, you'd get the response to that, which is ads you have to interact with to essentially tell the server you've seen the ad. I've seen this in mobile games already, and it's damn annoying. There's no way I'd want to spend 5 minutes doing that kind of thing.
Instead I built and elaborate and very overenginered hack that pulls RSS feeds from channels and then pulls videos from the feed, before putting them up on a private Trello board where I can organise them. Then I can watch them, order them, etc and optionally tag them for download.
Its unstable, its totally not worth my time, it has serious issues and I had a ton for fun building it.
They bait and switched us.
Youtube killed private video hosting. Reddit killed small thematic php-bb forums.
If people knew that they'd eventually do that, none of these platforms would be as big as they are today.
In a better, more utopian timeline I imagine an equivalent service supported by taxpayers or nonprofit means. Just how the 1900s gave us the public library system, imagine if the 2000s give us a video platform without for-profit encumbrances - what a world it would be!
That would be a major step forward, akin to old Bandcamp.
But that isn't YT's model.
Um well no. They still have appetite to support the business with Ads (and they offer a paid version if you don't like Ads).
The thing they no longer have appetite for is people using Ad blockers.
In that world, the best an adblocker would be able to do is show a blank screen for 30s while it waits for the real video's frames to resume.
Youtube will never monetise tech savvy users and should just stop trying. We only need to be slipperier than the average gazelle and the lions will never catch us.
To achieve this, you’ll need computation, storage, and bandwidth on the scale of YouTube. Do you think whoever offers that service will do so without ads or payment?
Your whole scheme is based on hoping “kind” and knowledgeable volunteers do free labor for you. Good luck.
I for one am tech savvy and am happy to pay $20 for the ad free service. Pretty reasonable trade if you ask me.
Personally I would not pay any amount to Google, as I believe it is unethical to support such a company. Google has a monopoly in several markets, to the point of being an unavoidable part of our lives.
No single company should have that much power. Especially since due to its nature as a for-profit corporation, Google's interests are at odds with yours.
As for myself - most of my subscription price goes to the creators and I'm happy with that.
So we really are back to reinventing cable TV
And, coming up in foundation models right now, it can remake videos to remove ads entirely, making a new video with just the content. Perhaps it'll be a feature of the RTX 6090. I bet the hallucinations will be hilarious.
If they try to use my computer to display ads, I will block them. If they try to detect my blocking, I will stop them.
It's only a matter of time before they fix the "YouTube can detect uBlock Origin" bug.
It's just that uBlock Origin is so useful and trusted that those restrictions should not apply to it. Frankly uBlock Origin should be literally built into browsers just like pop up blockers back in the day. Only thing stopping this is the inherent conflicts of interest. Google being an ad company and Firefox accepting Google money. Brave is the one going in that direction, its ad blocker is built-in.
> Also they just need to start delivering YouTube player as a wasm binary blob.
I eagerly await the day someone smarter than me creates an AI ad blocker capable of filtering ads, brands, anything really from audio and video streams. Imagine watching a sporting event and the AI just kills all those field perimeter ads. Awesome.
People will go on a massive tirade, over GPL violation... then turn around and completely disregard the license terms that content is being delivered to them with.
The irony of it all is that the whole IT community literally relies on strong copyright enforcement, including FOSS community... yet many fail to extend the same courtesy to people making videos.
By the way, we are under exactly zero obligation to watch any advertisements, moral or otherwise. Best they can do is hope we watch them. They're not entitled to our attention.
You're talking about when the content creator puts an ad in their video? What would you have Google do about that?
Correct.
> What would you have Google do about that?
Block them. Just like we do.
On a more serious note, that would be google editorializing the content which I don't want. If a channel is advertising their upcoming tour, or advertising Patreon or Nebula, should google block them too? Do you want google's content policy to prevent users from mentioning or showing any product?
You're free to only watch creators that don't put ads in their videos you know.
Absolutely.
One day someone much smarter than me will create an AI ad blocker that removes that sort of thing in real time.
> On a more serious note, that would be google editorializing the content which I don't want.
Have users collectively catalogue segments of the videos then. Pretty much what Sponsor Block does. I'm sure the highly paid engineers at Google can figure it out.
> If a channel is advertising their upcoming tour, or advertising Patreon or Nebula, should google block them too?
I don't consider those things advertising. I think they're just information. If I'm watching a video from a creator whose work I enjoy, I want to know where to find more stuff.
Getting paid deals from third parties and advertising their products on your video is a completely different matter. I didn't open the video to watch that.
> You're free to only watch creators that don't put ads in their videos you know.
God people repeat this like it's a mantra.
I'm free to do any number of things. Including blocking the segments I don't like and watching only the parts I care about. Why can't people accept that?
Besides, it's not like the videos come with a warning that tells you you're gonna be advertised to. The transition to the ad is abrupt and sudden on purpose so you can't even react.
Ah I got it. We should check with you what you consider an ad or not then inform google’s content policy based on that. That makes sense.
> I'm free to do any number of things.
You’re the one wanting to take that freedom from others.
Hey, if you consider someone's patreon to be advertising, feel free to block all of it. You'll get no opposition from me.
> You’re the one wanting to take that freedom from others.
Not at all. I just defend myself when others try to take away my freedom. It's honestly offensive to me that Google even thinks they can use my computer to show me ads. It's my computer and I decide what is or isn't shown.
What if you have a product placement for jack daniels because the character in your movie is the type of character that will chug jack. Should it be up to Netflix to decide "umm, no, this character now drinks Mack Lanyals" who cares what the film maker made?
However, the alternative isn't watching unsponsored videos, it's using SponsorBlock to block the parts that you don't want (or just skipping ahead).
It's up to the viewer to decide what part of a video they don't want to watch, and there's a reason Netflix has a 'skip intro' button: it's annoying, repetitive, and takes you out of the story the video creator is trying to tell.
You and I may not consider a 5 second ad for jack daniels obnoxious, but some people do, and they should be able to skip ahead, instead of only watching content without these ads like you suggest.
Google can't force people to watch their ads, unless they hold us down and pry open our eyelids, A Clockwork Orange style. Shit, I shouldn't have given our digital overlords any ideas.
No one’s forcing you to watch any ads, or videos in the first place.
So dramatic with the “I need Television without ads or it’s literally a dystopia” takes
I didn't know that. Good to know, thanks!
If the mental gymnastics helps, awesome. But paying Google is paying Google more than it is supporting creators.
>If the mental gymnastics helps, awesome.
What a smarmy thing to say.
and google takes 45% of premium with 55% going to creators.
feel like you are the one doing mental gymnastics
"Fantastically expensive" is quite the claim.
Google won't tell us, but how much do we think it actually costs to operate it?
Then all the network traffic (a sizable fraction of the entire internet traffic), transcoding & upkeep for all these things. That's only VoD.
Then there's live video which is basically the entire thing above with the additional constraint that there's less room for error and latency.
Some other services tried live video as well, e.g. Netflix or Apple for some keynotes in the past.
For Netflix I recall a few were covered in the media, e.g.: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/16/23685828/netflix-love-is-....
To just receive, transmit and store that in AWS S3, just one day's worth of data is - 317 thousand dollars.
That's literally doing nothing other than transmission and storage. Just that.
We can still watch demonetized channels, google doesnt seem to nag me about those.
Just means my fmovies streams don't get so bogged down with too many simultaneous viewers.
They do.
Welcome to this brave new world. Though to be fair, it didn't start now. But in the past years people were cheering for the random blocks and removals.
The article seems to concentrate on adblockers mostly, but it is even more interesting which news, topics and conversations (etc) reach you, and which ones are not. Google wanting you to see ads isn't too surprising. Google not wanting you to see reporting not fitting their agenda (even if you watch all ads coming with it) is much more interesting.
By contrast, if Google delists something from search results, it becomes much harder to discover - and thus, to be consumed (by the average moderately-motivated customer, not to the dedicated person willing to navigate directly to a domain)
(Do you remember, like 3 or 4 years ago when CF CEO was bragging all over the internet with "oh, today I woke up, and decided to kick off x and y from the internet, lol"? And he really did. It still happens, but without the bragging)
> Do you remember, like 3 or 4 years ago when CF CEO was bragging all over the internet with "oh, today I woke up, and decided to kick off x and y from the internet, lol"?
I do not! And if I did, I would have had a much better idea what you were talking about :)
I don't want to be the cynic who says Google has been paying lots of money to "the right people" in order to keep the status quo, but.. Google has been paying lots of money..
That might be a moderate huge win for Firefox.. until someone at Google makes a phone call to Mozilla's offices.
Worst case scenario it helps me consume less YT videos which would be a huge win for me.
Why are so many people feel entitled to YT videos without ads?
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
But at the same time, Google is not entitled to dictate how my user agent renders a page, locally, on my own computer.
I'd have no problem if google just inject ads directly into the video streams. ( by which time, equally I'm entitled to configure my own video player to skip whichever frames I want )
It's still shitty, but this isn't a thing where you can have your cake and eat it too.
Correct, but as long as they do grant me access to the video feed, I should be free to modify how it is rendered on my end as I wish.
If you want unconditional video streams - Wikimedia is the place for you.
And if they do start putting ads in video streams then I will likely be writing them off for dead just like I did months ago with Reddit. Til then I'll be using the various moles that still haven't been whacked (there's a good few) and not suffering through the experience. If they think they're getting a dime from me with the agenda they push, just because the creators I want to see don't have time to post across the variety of platforms (yet), they can get their heads examined.
Yeah, and as the owners of the computers we are entitled to alter or even delete that code as we see fit. They should pray we do not alter it further.
> provided it's not anything that meets criminal standards for malware
Google spies on us. Pretty much everything Google ships is malware since spyware is malware by definition. I also consider anything that so much as tries to circumvent uBlock Origin to be malware.
> And if they do start putting ads in video streams then I will likely be writing them off for dead just like I did months ago with Reddit.
Same.
None of that entitles you to see my work on your terms, no matter how (insert rant about evil corporate overlords)
Yet here you all are, making any and all excuses for your obvious entitlement.
You work with youtube to deliver a box of files to people's houses free of charge, with the expectation that folks will view every file in the box. Do you think it's reasonable to believe or expect that folks won't throw the annoying ones over their shoulder?
This is as dumb as protesting restaurant servers low hourly wage, by not tipping anything.
I don't disagree with YT attempting to show me ads, but I have control of my computer, and if I can direct my computer not to show them to me, I will.
I simply won't tolerate ads for any reason. I find the experience user hostile. So I'm always going to adopt some path that delivers me content without ads. And in choosing which path to adopt, I will always choose the least costly. Right now that's free. If in the future google successfully blocks in-browser ad blockers, I will either pay for YT premium or a third party service that downloads and delivers the content without ads, whichever is cheaper.
They are creating a reason to black market a free product and I find it hilarious how quickly the market is responding to that demand.
Because I, not you, choose to host them on YouTube and give Google about half of revenue from ads. And now because I chose YouTube - you feel that it's OK for you to screw me...
This is the level of entitlement I will never accept.
See- you made a choice, but we aren't allowed to.
Having an ad doesn't mean we have to watch it, same as with any radio or tv commercial it can be muted or the channel changed until it's over.
youtube wouldn't be the platform it is today if it hadn't begged us all to host videos in the past.
And since when does posting something online just entitle you to money?
People forget the internet existed before people got a share of ad revenue. It used to be for love of the game, now it's all just gimmie $.
My personal solution to this is that I subscribe to a few patreons. I do want creators I appreciate to be paid and get to create more good things. I'm not willing to tolerate annoyance, and I'm not willing to play the cable tv game.
I read an article about how Ticketmaster has a kickback scheme with artists, where artists price their tickets low, ticketmaster charges big fees, and kicks them back to the artists, so ticketmaster is a hired bad guy and the artists looks good.
I get that you might not want to get a CDN for your content, and manage your users' ux yourself. But when you pick youtube to distribute your stuff, you getting dinged when folks circumvent youtube's annoyance engine is just collateral damage, and you're going to have to accept some percentage of folks doing that in exchange for utilizing YT and mentally checking out.
In addition, I have a very hard time feeling like I'm screwing you when all I'm doing is requesting a webpage, and instructing my browser to render half of the delivered information. If they sold gasoline for $1 off but you had to watch a bunch of ads on their little screen, are you 'screwing' them by sitting in your car while they play?
I don't even feel bad about the hypothetical future where I pay some third party site that scrapes youtube and resells their stuff ad-free for less than a youtube premium subscription, because it puts a practical limit on youtube's ability to inflate the cost. The higher the cost, the more lucrative it is to sell a slightly cheaper alternative. I may pay for YT premium, but I'll always support the existence of a competing black market because of the pressure it exerts.
When it becomes not viable, I suppose I and everyone else will do something else, but for now I sleep well at night.
Good luck with your videos.
I don't feel entitled to them, but I do feel entitled to control what code is run and what content is shown on systems I own. I don't like watching ads, so as long as I can do it without onerous effort on my part, I will block them. Ultimately, if Youtube doesn't want me messing with the bytes they sent me, they shouldn't send them to me at all.
1. These corporations are so user-hostile, hypocritical, and scummy that I derive a small bit of enjoyment from the pennies I cost them when I pirate their stuff.
2. The overwhelming majority of content on youtube isn't worth paying $15/mo for.
I grew up in the 90s when "Information wants to be free" and "fuck corporations" were still part of the mainstream zeitgeist, and I guess I still carry a bit of that with me today.
We KNOW Google takes its marching orders from the 3 letter agencies, thanks to Ed Snowden. Why anyone would shed a tear for them losing ad revenue is beyond me. Do I wish the creators would move to Rumble? Yes, and many for whom it is a sensitive matter do, actively. In the meantime though, I'm not going to stop watching; I'll just keep blocking, because no matter how much they want to persist in this little game, they're never going to whack more than 90% of the moles.
So yeah, no thanks, I'm not interested in your alt-right echo chamber.
I post my own videos on YouTube, so I'm pretty sure that you're not pirating anything owned by Google when you screw individual creators.
Now tell me how noble you are, when you do everything in your power to reduce income from ads for these "fatcats"(Like the evil ServeTheHome or Stumpy Nubs Woodworking)
Well, the way Google sees it (and other media companies) I'm pirating because I'm not watching ads.
>I post my own videos on YouTube
Me too, or at least I used to several years ago. I don't monetize my videos, though. I'm not a "youtuber", just a guy who posted some videos for il2 sturmovik.
>Now tell me how noble you are
You're pretty high up on that horse there, pal. I never claimed to be noble, I just don't like Google.
I don't know, people tend to be multidimensional and complex. I'll talk to my therapist.
> Why are so many people feel entitled to YT videos without ads?
I only can talk for myself, but I don't feel entitled. I apply the same level of morality when dealing with these juggernaut companies as they apply it when dealing with me, which is: None.
YouTube with ~20% market share is amazing, YouTube with ~90% market share is a cancer to society.
Either way I don't care about YouTube, Google or any of these people. I DO care they have an insurmountable amount of power over the Internet.
And yes, you are entitled. You've just rationalized it in a way that doesn't cause any cognitive dissonance.
I make woodworking videos on YouTube. The majority of ad revenue hits my account. Just because "you feel" like you're screwing Google, doesn't mean it's true. You're actually screwing people like me.
I'm one. I'm not a giant corporation. Yet people like you like to pretend that blocking ads on YouTube is an FU to the big guy, when it's quite the opposite.(we're talking YouTube ads specifically here)
Additionally, it's not the user's fault that advertisements have become a security threat, a significant visual nuisance, and now an environmental issue [1].
[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7080/8/2/18
I'm sceptical that Google has any incentive to improve the situation.
And then, it is not like paying and ad block are mutually exclusive. I do actually pay for YouTube because I don't want the ads on my living room TV, but I have many devices with many browsers and I don't want to log in on all of those. For example I have a Chromium profile dedicated to shopping, on which I deliberately don't log in to any Google or other services, because, among other reasons, if I did, all my YouTube recommendations would be product reviews. And then, many apps of YouTube are just plain unpleasant, so on my main phone I use NewPipe, despite being logged into YouTube as a paying premium user.
So, just because I don't want to log in on every device and browser combo, and prefer alternative apps, am I supposed to see the ads, which I pay to not see? Just because a website I couldn't care less about needs to make money off the backs of people whose work I like, all the while abusing them deeply and causing them to burn out?
And I am not even beginning about how godawful YouTube ads are. Not a decade ago YouTube was liberally allowing Musical.ly ads in which half naked underage girls were dancing suggestively and getting explicitly objectified on nearly every video. And now _most_ of these ads are scams, disgusting politics, more scams, get rich quick schemes, and other godawful things. At least on TV the ads don't threaten your mental health. Why would I support a business as filthy as this? Just for the privilege of _sometimes_ being spared from it.
Then go to those other websites.
This argument is akin to saying that I will disregard any FOSS license terms of any code posted to GitHub, because I hate Microsoft.
> And then, it is not like paying and ad block are mutually exclusive.
Content creators get a bigger cut from subscriber views, than from ad-supported views. So you are absolutely shortchanging the people who create content for you on YouTube.
> needs to make money off the backs of people whose work I like
I create videos and I choose YouTube to distribute them. So do many others... It's definitely not your call where to post my or their videos. And spare me the "I'm actually doing this for them", when you're actively trying to stop their ability to earn money through ads.
I don't see a reason to be too upset about this all though; it doesn't take much to still block these ads, and meanwhile, this is going to just help motivate creators to finally do the smart thing and move to the less abusive platforms.
Because we want to.
> Why are so many people feel entitled to YT videos without ads?
No one's "feeling entitled" to anything. They're the ones who send us free videos. No reason not to accept.
If anyone's "feeling entitled" here it's them. To our attention. We're not actually obligated to look at the noise they sent along with the video. It's that simple.
Google has been fighting lawsuits like this for a reasonable long time, they are careful but also confident in their abilities to make them toothless and/or defeat them. As of right now nothing of substance made them not do anything important for them.
I tried to watch a podcast on my tablet, while I was preparing dinner using bluetooth headphones and couldn't readily skip ads or fast forward the video. I was subjected to at least 3 youtube ads and maybe an equal amount of ads from the youtuber themselves it was absurd.
Even if I were to pay for an add-free youtube experience, it only culls half the ads in that case!
For me what all of this is going to do is change how I consume videos. Not all content creators do this but I would much rather use YouTube with ads as a sample of the content you're creating and then pay you some percentage of the money I would use to pay for YT Premium for access to your videos outside of YouTube.
I've basically left Twitter after recent changes. Reddit is down to a fraction of what used to be a couple years ago (too aggressive on mobile, I just give up reading it).
YouTube was one thing that I used a lot, not always for productive or educational videos. I'll probably just watch a YouTube video from now on when it is really something interesting. Which is good.
Sadly what might happen in the end in the far future is youtube usable only with a login and with some kind of a subscription/one off transfer or ads. Some kind of netflix type solution, which is worse for everyone but hard to complain about.
---
I remember a film of Salvador Dali talking to a cheering crowd and saying in full dictator voice "... in the future... toilet bowls will be made of gold..." (roaring crowd). That's what's happened to the internet at large.
* forcing Music content in my YouTube feeds -- i use YouTube solely for videos and Music for music. even so, i would say around 1/2 of the items on my YouTube feed are music and useless playlists. you cannot turn this off
* forcing Shorts down my throat -- i'm sure their numbers shows huge engagement numbers with Shorts but it's the exact opposite kind of content i use YouTube for. i watch longer-form videos, not short form clips. they show up in my feed, in my search results, and i'm pretty sure one time i was A/B'd into the app launching into Shorts by default. you cannot turn this off
* Search is abysmally bad -- for each query, it will return 2 or 3 videos maybe possibly related to all synonyms of all the words in my query OR'd together, followed by unrelated Shorts, followed by completely unrelated videos i've already watched, followed by completely unrelated videos with inappropriate clickbait thumbnails, and on and on and on. you cannot turn this off
* did i mention they were forcing Shorts down my throat? because the straw that broke the camel's back was when they informed me that they were introducing Music Shorts. as if the playlistification of music listening turning music into muzak weren't bad enough, now we have Shorts which incentivize yet another race-to-the-bottom for music. i understand my music listening preferences do not match those of the masses, but there's no way i can turn it off.
for those reason and plenty more i don't feel like typing out, google can lick my asshole. adblock forever.
What I'm really curious about though is whether competitors can do the same - can a YouTube rival today launch with anti-adblockers and a paid tier and compete? This might be a barrier to entry that's too high for your day to day consumers, especially for a new platform. I'm not sure what the solution is here (aside from kickstarting with VC funded free tiers and pivoting later once users are hooked, which feels bad), but I hope at the very least that the general population adjusts to this "ad or paid" future that we seem to be heading in.
When they first started pushing ad-free subscriptions to youtube I first noticed the ads got EXTREMELY aggressive and over time seem to not really have got better, only worse. Skip around the video too much? Ad. Skip too many in a row? Congrats, now you have a long-form unskippable ad. I haven't been bothered to measure it but you can't really watch much more than a minute of youtube without being served obnoxious ads. The user experience is terrible and it felt so much that I was being harassed into buying a subscription that I resolved to never do so. Adblockers are a logical response to such hostile behavior towards users.
Having said that it's easy to complain about how terrible they are but I don't think the ads sucking is as much an issue as that people just don't like ads... don't want to pay.
I like to leave YT stuff on in the background and it's amazingly disruptive when it's interrupted by 30 minutes of some shitty mumble rap music video/ad, or some obscure London mayoral candidate delivering an 8 minute long speech.
So if you are poor, access to content should be denied to you?
Most of the people on the internet are poor accessing youtube with $40 smartphones.
They cannot pay premium, why send them ads? What's the point? Make them waste their precious time and bandwidth?
Adblock Plus is a SCAM! Their founder (or key person, not remember) made his money with scam "free SMS (texts)" websites and has a very shady past. They invented their "acceptable ads" that are ENABLED BY DEFAULT, were totally silent about the fact that they basically blackmailed advertisers to let them pay money to get on their whitelist and scam users into this "acceptable ads" scam BY DEFAULT and show them ads.
Acceptable ads are the WORST ads, that are the ads that flow with the text, that are not obtrusive and not as annoying and therefore the most effective ads actually for me, I would say.
Like they said, Google paid them back in the days to get on their whitelist, they were eventually forced to make their shady backroom deals public and do this shit in the open.
DO NOT USE Adblock Plus ever, even if it has a checkbox to block all ads, they operate an adblocker to make money by showing people ads, you can not make this shit up. Most disgusting scam. Use uBlock Origin. Or use Brave, but they are not up to speed with the current YT thing, but their adblocker is written in Rust I think and based/inspired by UBO. Would be interesting to know if it also suffers from this "mistake" that unloaded tabs let requests go through while UBO is loading that happens in Chrome but not in Firefox. I guess not as it's integrated at the core of the browser.
I know the latest cool post pandemic is to keep on jacking up price until you see churn but that really rubbed me off.
It felt very fuck-you-pay-me!
Google has a huge monopoly and I’m sure they can double the price without losing much customers since they’re the big game in town.
Unfortunately I ended up cancelling Netflix and Disney to make up for it.
Perhaps this is the game they’re all playing. I only got a fixed dollars per month to spend on entertainment and each one wants to get it all at the loss of others.
Record-and-clip would work with Youtube too. The adblocker "watches" the whole video, ads and all, and then when it has enough buffered up plays back the clipped version to you. Traditionally this would be defeated by wiring the ads into the content so seamlessly that the blocker can't find them automatically. But here, Google already has the next thing up their sleave, the WEI thing, whereby they can just deny service altogether that is not an approved, unmodified web browser.
My personal tolerance threshold is watching about 30 seconds of preroll ads. But when the midroll ads come in every few minutes, I'm getting close to the "quit network TV" thing again.
Of course back then there was Pay TV, and now there is Youtube subscription. Some will find it worth paying for it, others will just walk away and maybe their lives will be better for it.
There is no free lunch. At some point you have to pay people for their work. Not paying is slavery. Either pay with your attention span or pay with money to get an adless experience.
The Premium plan gives you more features (and a music streaming that would cost you 10$ in and of itself if you were to use another music streaming service).
I am glad Youtube takes this issue seriously.
People can use ad blockers, or Google can block them and annoy people.
There is a very good third option for people: pay for the (expensive due to bandwidth) service you’re using and you see no ads. And Google won’t block it because it’s encouraged as the solution to this exact issue.
The level of “I should get everything for free with no ads” entitlement is only getting worse.
I get the ads suck and many sites have an unreasonable level of them. But if the only two options are give everything away for free or put everything behind a paywall, the internet as everyone knows it is dead.
While I don't think the price of premium is too high, I'll never ever actively give Google even a single cent. One forever blocked Google account and too many killed services have burned that bridge for me.
I'm pretty sure they can afford airing less ads per video watched without any damage to their bottomline. So… sorry, but there's a third, better way. The problem is: it doesn't work in a late capitalist environment where Google/Alphabet and all public trade companies operate.
I'm pretty sure you can afford to give away a huge chunk of your earnings, too. Do you? How much earnings are "fair"?
A few days ago someone wanted to show me a video on their iPad. The video was ~10 mins long. We had to watch 2 pre-roll ads, and 2 mid-roll ads. After the second mid-roll ad I asked if this is normal. She said "of course it is, what do you mean?" as if I was living on another planet. But I had been paying for YT Premium for so long I had actually forgotten how bad it was and it seems to have gotten worse.
Although, the price of YT premium just went up again (I think this is the 3rd or 4th price hike in a handful of years. At the new pricepoint I could subscribe to 2-3 streaming services, and YT videos are not worth that in my opinion.
I also have noticed the algorithm and/or content on YouTube has not been as interesting or engaging to me as it once was. There is also a huge push to shorts, which seems to be a loop of the same small collection of creators. So I may consider cancelling my subscription soon and just minimizing my time on YouTube.
Do you get blocked from the service you're paying for, or do you not even notice the ongoing war?
Really? It's half the price of my Netflix sub and $1 more than a Spotify subscription (in Canada).
>There is also a huge push to shorts
Yes, this is annoying.
There's also the third option, saturate the "free" version with an increasing amount of advertisements and make it user-hostile enough to entice people into paying for the "premium" version that is ad-free. Then, create multiple tiers of the premium subscription and only make the most expensive one ad free.
Meanwhile users are happy to jump to the next free thing starting the whole cycle again, until it wants to get paid for.
The web kinda stinks in ways, but users don't want to pay either... so want ends up being the product?
Enshittification is about companies running all other competition out of the market with their free service, then once they've secured their near monopoly, they clamp down with increasingly user hostile changes and act like it's unreasonable that people don't want to pay for the product whose "selling" point was that it was effectively free.
This argument is even more stark when considering that YouTube has just been burning goodwill from everyone and coasting on its weight for many years now.
The success of Patreon style models is also a pretty clear indicator that people are willing to pay for things they like as long as they aren't being dragged through a bait-and-switch.
The patreon model has a lot of limits that would make it unusable for something like Youtube / creators who don't gather a regular large audience and so on. I think the people who give via a patreon model is a very very small % of the userbase too.
YouTube ads are not a sustainable source of income, as YouTube can demonetize or allow a copyright claim to steal away the fruits of your labor with no meaningful recourse. On top of that, ad revenue largely relies on a constant stream of uploads which favor the whims the current iteration of the recommendation algorithm.
As for being a means of funding a video host, sure, a patreon style model might not be sustainable, but the point was that people are willing to pay for a service if the payment is earned rather than coerced through bait and switch tactics.
Put differently, at this point I will insist on consuming YouTube without paying for it and without watching ads in any way possible. If a similar service (but paid) were to pop up where the creators I'm interested in were to move to, I'd happily move over, just as I switched to Kagi as soon as I confirmed that it was good enough for my purposes.
Thing is, we're still getting ads because AG1, NordVPN, Guardio and similar services/products of questionable nature keep throwing tens of thousands of dollars at youtubers to insert 1-2 minutes of sponsor blocks.
> There is a very good third option for people: pay for the (expensive due to bandwidth) service you’re using and you see no ads.
So you pay, and yet you still pay twice because the data on what you watch ends up in Google's Big Data profiling/targeting infrastructure to determine what kind of ads you'll get shown across the internet.
I could live with that. I tolerated it, happily. Right up until last week when YouTube rolled this shit out to me and said, "Nope, fuck your adblocker," and decided to show me nothing entirely.
I met them halfway, I put up with a hybrid approach for years, and they still, in spite of posting net profit, decided that wasn't enough. Nope, fuck that, I'm out - Invidious it is.
I paid for curiosity stream and nebula this year, and every time I watch a video over on nebula I'm reminded how awesome it is to watch content without sponsor spots or begs. I have UBO and sponsor block installed, but frankly if those stop working I may just mostly give up on youtube entirely.
It has often been deplored that you can't customize the home page enough - but to be fair seeing how they have to please literally the entire world at once - they are doing pretty good. I mean YouTube is really easy and enjoyable to use for me on AppleTV and desktop.
The main issue I have with YouTube is you can't rely on any videos to be there at any time in the future. Videos routinely get taken off and without a service like 'RecoverMy.Video' you wouldn't even know what videos got removed.
In terms of price - I am a bit miffed that my 7 € Premium Lite was forcibly ended by them. Now I see that they added a "student" option for the same price so I guess... sucks for me, but hooray for students.
I think paying 12 € for YouTube is still reasonable.
Come to think of it I haven't really watched streaming on YT yet - I am mostly using Twitch - but it would be cool if they added a free sub in the price - kinda like Amazon Prime - that you can hand over to a streamer on YT.
Now if they could have a gaming focused client kinda like Twitch and get some more traction, my YT sub would definitely feel more valuable. The Twitch client is such a piece of crap on AppleTV now, I have lost all enjoyment using it and I can't wait to move over to some other service.
Of course people will whine when you stop them from getting stuff for free.
Why is this a strange message for everyone to digest? Ads pay for the content you watch, or your subscription fee covers it. Getting mad at the ad-blocking avoidance is like getting mad you can't walk into Disney Land without a park pass.
Because the services were previously provided for free, and the bait-and-switch feels bad; and because the perception (admittedly inaccurate) is there is no service being provided, that the content is what is paid for (the average consumer has no conception of the costs involved in storage, transmission, recommendation, content auditing, legal compliance, etc.)