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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Same. I keep seeing the discourse recently and it’s all framed as if only two options exist:

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.

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Same here. I pay for YT Premium. I never knew this war was waging on. You click a video and it starts playing.

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.

So one thing I am curious about -- as someone who pays for YouTube but doesn't use an ad blocker -- is what the experience is for people who do both [since ads are on places besides YouTube].

Do you get blocked from the service you're paying for, or do you not even notice the ongoing war?

>At the new pricepoint I could subscribe to 2-3 streaming services

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.

I wouldn't mind the ads if the amount were reasonable, which was the case maybe even as recently as a year ago. But having a 30 second ad before a 5 second meme video is beyond ridiculous.

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 inclined to agree. The whole internet discussion about this topic and even "eshitification" has boiled down to "I want it for free and I don't want to pay."

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?

That's a very slanted and bad faith interpretation of the discussion.

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.

Enshittification is a term and it gets thrown about like crazy these days / it's losing meaning as quickly as it came about. I'm seeing it all over this story.

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.

The patreon model works pretty well for creators, far more reliable than YouTube ads since it provides a stable income with the ability for the creator to control expectations.

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.

> People can use ad blockers, or Google can block them and annoy people.

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.

Then don't watch those YouTubers.

It's hard to avoid them, given the money that the "sponsors" throw out. That shit's everywhere.

It's not that hard, I see very few in-line ads on the channels I watch. There are a few channels that do it, but it's a tiny minority of my subscriptions. (Rob Scallon is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but he's worth it :) )

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Alphabet profited nearly USD 20 billion last quarter. Not revenue; net profit.

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 they can afford

I'm pretty sure you can afford to give away a huge chunk of your earnings, too. Do you? How much earnings are "fair"?

No, we had a nice middle ground for a very long time. I could use ad blockers to block most bullshit across the internet, but YT would still play an ad before a video. I might have to wait 5 seconds to skip an ad before it's finished, and maybe after doing that a couple of times, it would force me to watch a 15-second ad in full before playing the video. Hell, do that enough and you'll have to sit there for 30 seconds next time.

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.

>"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."

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.

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