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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

With linear video, there's a hard limit to what user-loyal ad-blocking can achieve with casual in-the-moment browsing: Google can ensure the ad's clock-time duration occurs, before they serve the main video. So, even if you're hiding the video, you're still punished by the wait, as your ad-blocker simulates an ad-watch.

So, next-gen ad-circumvention will probably help users queue vids for later watching, after a fake agent pretends to have watched the ads.

Or, be full-fledged pirate sites that pre-cache all popular videos for ad-free watching.

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This has been my conclusion. I've spent the past few weeks polishing my yt-dlp scripts. Honestly, the experience of being able to watch any video I want offline and buffer-free is way better than the default YouTube experience. Sometimes I miss the comments section, but it is probably better for me that I don't have access to that.

It would be interesting to retrofit ActivityPub post feeds around mirrored YouTube videos.

Grayjay[0] for android does this with their 'Polycentric Id'.

All videos from multiple platforms supported by the app have a special comment section only available through grayjay. Functionality is still pretty limited, but it's refreshing to write a comment and know that it won't be picked up by a bot and shadow-banned/deleted without reason.

0 - https://grayjay.app/

I haven't tried this yet, but it the app's creation process was overseen/managed by Louis Rossmann

Yep, a while back I grabbed yt-dlp and I've been going through my bookmarks and locally archiving useful (or nostalgic) YouTube videos. My 8TB hard drive beats Google's enshittification.

I wonder if there is a market for a youtube downlod only mirror that creators can opt into, for this use case. Concurrent bandwidth requirements could be lower and no need for streaming tech. The service probably couldn't legally download from youtube and re-host, but if you made a desktop app that uploads to YT and the mirror service at the same time and mirrors the YT video ID on the mirror, that could be attractive to users.

All that said, how would such a service sustain itself? Probably ads. So really, same boat, different captain. I don't know.

Would you pay a subscription to be able to download your YT video queue?

> Would you pay a subscription to be able to download your YT video queue?

aka, buy youtube premium?

And get ads served some years later?

So cancel your premium subscription said some years later? At this hypothetical future time you’d be a lot more justified in piracy IMO, but today you don’t have much of a leg to stand on.

...which just got a 40+% price bump. And has zero guarantee that it won't have ads, doesn't remove sponsored segments, and sends a pittance to the actual creators.

It already has ads, promoted videos are still in your feed and still promoted over your own preferences, whether you pay or not. And of course it doesn't stop creators from having sponsored content.

So it already doesn't stop the ads. It just stops pre-roll ads.

Yes, but actually no.

The price has gone up while the Ads have gotten worse. I'll not support that financially. I'd rather just download it and move on.

To be clear, I get the need for ads, but in the past decade it's just gotten downright abusive, so they can keep it.

You build it around torrents and might earn the maintenance costs back with some non-intrusive ads.

If I had a program that would mute the ad and automatically skip it while I am listening with bluetooth headphones in the other room, I wouldn't even mind the short wait! I just can't walk away and listen to youtube on my desktop because of the ads, it's super annoying.

Does anyone know of something for linux/firefox that would do this? Thanks!

> So, even if you're hiding the video, you're still punished by the wait, as your ad-blocker simulates an ad-watch.

This is what happens in the TV app (or at least on my old tv) when the adserver legitimately times out.

The solution (from YouTube’s pov) is of course super simple and we all pray the engineers at Google don’t think about it: inject the ad into the video stream.

Well, the benefit then is that crowdsourced tools can skip directly over portions of the video. I already use an app called sponsor block that skips in video sponsored sections.

Not if it’s randomised. However that would make the video stream harder to cache.

That just moves the battle into identifying the ads when they play and then skipping over them and updating and maintaining the ad-identifier database. And heuristics/ML can probably be used to identify likely unknown ads.

You could probably detect 95% of randomly-inserted ads by just looking at 1. the abrupt change in audio volume and 2. a material change in some visual "fingerprint" of the video scene. If I'm watching Mister Influencer walking around outside talking with their face framed in the middle of the shot, and then all of a sudden, mid-stream, the audio gets 15% louder and the video changes to a meadow to advertise Tide detergent, that can be reliably detected without even ML.

Regardless of the 95% accuracy claim, I think this would cause to many false positives to be usable. Cuts that change visiual content and audio volume exist in original content, too.

> the engineers at Google don’t think about it

It’s an almost certainty that they’ve thought of it. This has been a worry for at least over a decade. So there must be some reason they “can’t” or don’t want to. Such as getting more valuable interaction data otherwise.

I would imagine it would be computationally untenable because it would mean the videos have to be re-encoded every time the ads need to be changed, which would be frequent enough to be very expensive. Plus, I'm not sure if they keep the original videos stored somewhere to re-use as a source to prevent degradation from re-encoding.

i would imagine the video stream is spliced, such that the ad video stream is spliced into an existing pre-encoded video stream, may be between some keyframes or some such.

This is how most livestreams works today - you have separate chunks of video streams that are spliced together.

The only real problem is if the end user can detect (reliably) where a splice _could_ happen, they can just ignore the spliced video. This is what some old twitch adblocking methods did iirc - and just show a blank screen.

But the videos are streamed to the users. So on the backend the could switch source back and forth and feed everything through the same endpoint

Nope. Look up HLS or DASH.

> So there must be some reason they … don’t want to.

…Starting with the fact that it would no longer be user-generated content that provides Google with Section 230 protection.

The toothless section 230... Will they ever get that particular hammer out of its case?

An even "better" solution would be to bake the ads into the video stream at random intervals, to prevent something like SponsorBlock but for ads.

No there isn't any such hard limit. People said the same thing about twitch, and now twitch adblockers use proxies for uninterupted live ad free viewing. It just works.

I doubt that pirate sites that cache video will become popular, as they would have similar cost problems as the original youtube, but without Google's infinite pockets.

that is pretty easily solved with peer to peer

It doesn't scale to anything mainstream these days when the majority of people are on phones and laptops. Battery-powered devices that don't offer much storage nor constantly reliable internet. Smart TVs generally don't have a lot of storage either.

You can't even have it run in the background on iOS because of their background application limitations

A CDN is only expensive because it is inefficient. With bittorrent you can let end users be the infrastructure.

You also let the end users be your uplink speed, your availability, your malware delivery vectors, your customer complaint generators.

BT is not a magic bullet, it's actually pretty shitty in a lot of ways, and if it wasn't giant bandwidth hungry companies like yt and netflix would have been using it 10 years ago, along with every cdn on the planet

Giant companies don't use it because they want full control on their platform.

Neflix is still way more inefficient and resource wasteful than bitorrent but the copyright holders would never agree on not being able to control everything. Letting the user having the video is a taboo in the industry.

And yet, it's the only reason why I don't pay a subscription for film & series but also games.

I know that many don't care about that.

How many times have I re-watched Star Trek TNG? With a subscription based model I would have to pay every time I get the random urge to watch even a single episode.

And that payment isn't cheap either.

In this day and age there's a constant struggle for self reliance (or independence) and avoiding lock in.

> And that payment isn't cheap either.

It's like $6 a month.

I don't like paying for something I don't have control over either, but it's definitely affordable to pay for Paramount+ to satisfy a TNG rewatch every few months or whatever.

Netflix is $6.99 with ads. $15.49 for 1080p. $22.99 for 4K.

Only the 4K option meaningfully competes with torrents.

We were talking about Paramount+ which has all the trek shows, not Netflix.

Look just a few comments up: we were talking about Netflix. Then TNG, then Paramount+. Netflix didn't stop being relevant to the overall discussion.

The comment I replied to specifically mentioned TNG rewatches.

Paramount+ is the service that owns Star Trek.

So no, Netflix and its pricing is entirely irrelevant to my reply and the context it was made in.

You can set up a server or two with fast uplinks as users. That raises the floor for bandwidth and availability just fine.

The problem with content delivery is not the floor: it's the ceiling. A CDN requires much more than a server or two. Bittorrent does not. With bittorrent, you will never hit the ceiling, because every user that enters the room raises that ceiling for the rest.

The only reason that Netflix uses a CDN is copyright. Netflix as a platform fundamentally exists to put DRM between the content creator and the viewer. If the content creators were not interested in wrapping their content in DRM, then they would gladly share it via bittorrent. In fact, Spotify actually started as a P2P network. Once they were big enough, they switched to a CDN so that they could provide the DRM that copyright holders wanted.

The rest of your complaints are about moderation, which are also a feature of copyright. Plenty of people would gladly create trackers and forums that curate content the way you want. They don't, because that's illegal. Copyright took the most basic computing fundamental - copying files - and turned it into a black market. Get rid of copyright, and people will gladly GPG sign their torrents to eliminate the malware vector. Get rid of copyright, and people will gladly share the original raw copy of a file, or a lossy format that was encoded only once (with proof).

Hell, we already had that; except it had to be done in the form of private trackers, because just putting everything on a cheap server (to raise the floor) was too much legal liability; so the floor had to be raised by guaranteeing seeders. Now even that is gone, because the best private trackers (like WhatCD) get taken down by governments, and it's nearly impossible to coordinate a replacement in a black market.

This sounds a little too familiar to the "IPFS would work as a video service" argument that was so vehemently annihilated.

Look, I hate copyright and download my own Fair Use archives of many YouTube videos. I'm the last person who would be ideologically opposed to this. Even still, it should not be surprising why ad-subsidized CDNs are popular. YouTube "won" because it's the only platform out of everything listed that works:

- Rights-holders are happy that IP control is monopolized (eg. YouTube movies and music limitations)

- Viewers are happy to get something in return for an ad rather than sorting out an arbitrary seeding ratio

- Creators are happy that the most technical part of their publishing process is figuring out what "Drag and Drop" means

P2P systems like that break, unless you put a CDN in front of them. Once you scale to YouTube-level architecture, P2P doesn't keep scaling except when you control the major peers. At that point, you are so close to building a CDN pipeline that you might as well just do it.

> This sounds a little too familiar to the "IPFS would work as a video service" argument that was so vehemently annihilated.

Where? How? I surely never heard about it being "annihilated".

---

Did you even read my comment? I talked about rights-holders monopolizing content, and I talked about seeding ratios. Those are the problem that is holding back P2P video service, not winning at its competition.

> P2P systems like that break, unless you put a CDN in front of them.

The "CDN in front of them" need only be a server or two! That's not what CDN means at all.

A server or two? How long do you expect random youtube user #3283949382 to seed a video and tie up their outbound bandwidth to help out a multibillion dollar corporation? Most residential uplinks suck, and are a fraction of the downlink's speed, even on gigabit packages. It's annoyingly easy to saturate your uplink and because TCP depends on two way communication, not being able to send ACKs back to a server cripples your download speeds. You honestly expect your average youtube or netflix user to understand p2p, seeding, and have enough network chops to add some QOS to avoid tanking their internet connection? What about hard drive space? What about the fact most internet packages have monthly bandwidth caps? So no, they would need to have enough servers to deliver their videos on a "cold cache" because they could never rely on any user seeding their content for very long, if at all. Can 1 or two servers handle all of youtube's egress if no other peers were online? No.

And we haven't even touched on the philosophical angle where undoubtably there will be users who say something like "I don't want videos about x passing through my systems" or "director so and so is a person I decided to hate I refuse to seed their content" because that would happen sure as the rising tide.

You know that a mass amount of child porn is uploaded to youtube daily right? They have teams of humans who's jobs are to review flagged videos for kiddy porn and remove it from their systems. Do you want child porn seeded from your computers and internet connection? I don't. That's a good way to get your door kicked in by the fbi. How do you delete a file shared with bt or any other p2p protocol? You can't. It's literally impossible to delete a file once seeded out there and I sure as shit am not giving any company the ability to spread child porn using my systems nor am I giving them the ability to delete files from my systems. Do you not see the security nightmare? The legal nightmare?

p2p is great but it's entirely impractical to say it can replace cdns or pops and be as reliable for the businesses serving content, because it's not. And since youtube or netflix can't depend on any consistent performance or be able to do any future forecasting since it is all entirely out of their control, they would never do such a thing. And even if they did, as an end user, I don't want to be a free seed box for any business out there, even if they are giving me ad free viewing as "payment" for hijacking my expensive internet connection, hard drive space, cpu time, and electricity.

The choices are

an unreliable and extremely complicated mess of NICs spread across the globe with unpredictable uptime, unknown security, and slow and/or flaky uplinks, that needs to honor millions of users unique personal believes, privacy concerns, fair system use requests, and opt-outs, which expose them to be distributors of illegal materials while also putting their own user base at risk of criminal prosecution...

tightly controlled, fully owned pipelines of secure systems in datacenters with fast nics connected literally to the backbone of the internet

There is no choice here for any business trying to keep customers happy and make money, sorry.

Which the majority of end users don't want to be. Anyone on a laptop or phone don't want to be draining their battery and eating their bandwidth.

True, but they don't want to be buying Netflix dinner every month either.

End users have not been meaningfully presented the compromise. If they had, they would have more motivation to get mains-powered PCs, or even a seedbox or something.

Besides, uploading content isn't a significant hit on battery life unless you are doing it instead of suspend. Most of your battery is going into your backlight.

If it wasn't illegal to seed copyrighted content, we wouldn't need users to seed all night. We would just set up a few strategic public seedboxes instead.

We don't need a cache site, but to be able to have a shared content addressed storage.

I wish a single technology is developed for this, and then I don't mind if privates sites act as peers, I'd love to be able to share games I downloaded or videos I recently saw locally. It took Steam like 20yr to support sharing on the local network (with Google/Facebook/Netflix with no sharing in sight). I think that's insane and shows that hardware has been improving too fast in some sense.

Isn't this what IPFS promised and sorta delivered?

I'd even like to sell off those games. But the mafia, sorry lobby is too strong, to well smeared.

The bandwidth problem has already been solved by peer to peer file sharing. The only reason this solution is not widely deployed is copyright.

> So, even if you're hiding the video, you're still punished by the wait, as your ad-blocker simulates an ad-watch.

I would gladly accept a pause instead of an ad. I needed to stop using the android TV device because of how many ads they were pushing on 10-minute videos. It was too distracting. It just made me stop using YouTube completely on that device. No content is worth so many ads. Nothing.

Now I am only using the laptop, where some kind of ad blocker still works.

Have you tried SmartTube? https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube

I use it, and while it's less polished than the official YouTube app, the ad blocking definitely works.

Even a black screen for 30 seconds is better than 30 seconds of an ad. It'll be like watching cable where you mute or start channel surfing during commercial breaks.

Youtube will already reinject ad rolls after some time span even if you keep a video paused, so full download of selected videos will probably be the way to go.

The lengths people will go to avoid paying content creators is pretty crazy.

I don't mind watching an ad or two for a reasonable length video. But if I click through to a 5 second video and it has a 15 second ad pre-rolled, I get annoyed. And if your site is annoying enough regularly enough, then I stop caring about whether "making things better for myself" is "in your best interest".

Hulu is a prime example of "too many ads". I just avoid watching videos on Hulu nowadays unless I have no other choice. A 24 minute video with 6 30 second ads (or whatever it is they play) is just annoying.

You can always subscribe.

You meant YouTube Premium? Is there an anonymous payment method?

No matter how many times that platitude is repeated, it doesn't help. Because lots of people won't subscribe. The business model conflicts with normal human psychology. 'Pay us to stop annoying you' causes people to go out of their way to not pay you, because you annoyed them and they are now hostile to you. Not being annoying and upselling to premium features works better if you have premium features people are prepared to pay for.

I think the ad-free content actually is the premium feature most Youtube subscribers are willing to pay for. I know I do. On the other hand I don't think Youtube cares about users that aren't even considering to pay under any circumstances. There's no point in making the service more attractive to users that will only accept free pricing.

My Verizon subscription came with a subscription to the Disney+ package, which includes Hulu. So, as such, I _am_ paying for Hulu. And ads still show up.

I'd not mind having a way to bet against my ads, just like companies showing ads do.

I bet I'm willing to pay more money than what companies showing me ads are paying whenever I see an ad, but I can't really justify the full Youtube price given I watch around 30m a month on average

YouTube itself is not much of a content creator.

Do the actual creators get to choose the ads their content is promoting?

Are the Google ads on YT are the main revenue for creators? What amount does sponsorship play for creator's overall income from hosting on YT?

The length content creators will go to waste peoples' time to extract more ad money is even crazier.

You're right. It's time the government stopped making it compulsory to watch YouTube.

Are we actually paying them? If we were, there would be some kind of payment modal somewhere, right? Or are we paying them in exposure? /s

On a more serious note, it's not like people owe creators to dedicate their eyeballs to Youtube so they can get a share of that ads money. If you want support, there are ways to ask for it and I guess if your content is interesting, people will support you.

https://www.youtube.com/premium

YouTube premium views are significant higher cpm than ads.

Yeah with you until im blasted with political ads. Ads for medication i don’t need. Ads i have seen 100 times. Back to back un skippable ads.

If people don’t want to watch the ads and “content creators” aren’t supported they will have to do something else.

I put content creators in quotes because 97% of you tube is trash content that they all steal from the few people making original things. Most of them should not make any money.

And importantly they deliberately REMOVED the ability to quickly tell if the content is trash or not (up/down numbers)

All to protect the feeling of corporates. Wasnt that done in response to the YouTube rewind and Disney trailers down votes?

Yea this holy reverence for the glorious Content Creators (praise be their name) is kind of silly. To me, YouTube has always been a place for rando people to upload silly 10 second videos of their cat, to share, without some entitled expectation of "revenue share". I used to upload videos a lot and didn't even consider making a cent from them. We should go back to that kind of YouTube and leave this "Influencers Mass Creating Content For Money" model behind.

I'm on patreon

but also revanced

Paying content creators via YouTube memberships does not remove YouTube ads from their videos.

Paying? I don't remember being charged one goddamned cent.

That’s exactly the point. People are furious about ads on YouTube, but unwilling to take the incredibly obvious step of paying for ad-free YouTube.

They profit enough from our data.

There is no way to pay for adfree YouTube. In stream promotions are ads and it is impossible to pay to block them. Yea, sponsorblock is a great alternative.

Would you prefer Youtube to prevent creators from using sponsored content in their videos? If so, where would you draw the line? Just clear in-video ads? Is it ok to review a product that was provided by the manufacturer for free?

There's a lot of gray area which seems impossible to regulate.

Personally, if a creator serves too much sponsored content I simply wont watch them any longer. Fortunately it's not a problem among my Youtube channel subscriptions.

I don't know a good solution here. At a minimum, I'd like to see youtubers forced to label their videos with an "Ad" label if they are promoting a product.

ikr?

I met YouTube’s threshold for monetization (10k views I think it was), then they changed it to 1000 subs, demonetized me (my video topics are random, one will be an interesting dashcam clip, another about a MacBook Air repair unpublished elsewhere and therefore not really “subscribable”), then a while later, they put ads on it anyway without paying me a penny.

Another rule about some minimum hours of views, but I’m at a loss since I’ll make useful 2 minute videos that skip my life story.

F that.

Meanwhile on Adsense, I started making $2/month, which motivated me to do better and started making $20/month, then $200, and for a while $2000.

Exactly this. What kind of nonsense is this X subscriber and watched hours limit? If it earns you a few bucks that's more than nothing, but creating these artificial limits should be banned outright. Plus their algo needs to be butchered down.

It's trying to encourage consistent content creation. Think of it like employee engagement.

That's why there's so many videos that have nothing to say. If you have no content to create it's better not to add to the noise.

This is why I watch maybe 4 creators total. I have the people I trust and ignore everything else; SNR is far too low.

Now it's also 3 videos in 90 days you have to publish in order to be eligible for monetization. So you can't have passive income at YouTube, you have to create a new video each month.

3000 watched hours or 3 million shorts views lol.

They want only the cream.

But dethroning the king would need an ad delivery solution, which in turn requires an affordable payment solution.

And you would need to keep it civil, because now, if you're in the EU are liable for what people upload. And then, thanks to the DSA, you have to monitor "wrong speak". How is anyone supposed to bring up a competitor with those blockers?

if you charge me $1000 per month rent and suddenly increase it to $1500 per month I will be pissed.

if you charged me $2000 per month rent and kept it the same, I wouldn't mind paying for it.

Youtube started out as free. Now, suddenly they expect me to pay for premium, I will not be happy paying for it.

On the other hand, I have no problem paying $15 per month on Netflix.

Netflix that started at $8, then jumped to $12, then to $14 and is currently at $16? While their catalog has run in the opposite direction?

0$ to 10$ is an infinity percent increase in price, while 14$ to 16$ is not that much.

4K Netflix is $23/mo now. 4K is what you should be comparing it to given that’s what you get with YouTube Premium.

There's a story about this with the Red Cross and doughnuts: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...

Also got posted here a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23104875

The internet was built by a small community of people who wanted information to be free. Now it’s all about profiteering.

I’ll always want info, but will never pay. I have complex psychological models about platforms that selectively curate specific content.

Even Veratasium recently had a video demonetized because he included factual historical information about a suicide.

> Now it’s all about profiteering.

Unfortunately, the people who make content need to eat too.

Demonization only exists because YouTube is beholden to advertisers. If most people subscribed, it wouldn't be a problem.

I can’t help but think that being a full time YouTuber is a major risk.

It’s appealing by nature, and there’s a lot of wonderful content, but there is also a large power imbalance between the creators and the corporation.

I pay many different creators for what they produce. I refuse to watch ads.

I do as well. I find the best way to do this is YT Premium.

Actually it's the other way round.

Content creators only get something if they have more than 1000 subscribers and are currently active.

More than 90% of the content I watch on YouTube has been uploaded years ago, and was provided to YouTube FOR FREE by the "content creator". And back then in exchange you could watch those videos ad-free, too.

Then Google has changed the rules of the game in a dirty way. People who have provided the content during the last 18 years aren't paid, it's Google pocketing the ad revenue.

I am more than willing to pay for Netflix, where original content paid for by the streaming service is provided.

But I am NOT willing to pay $14 to be able to watch a 15 year old 5 minutes clip on YouTube ad-free, that was provided to them free of charge.

I would be willing to pay something to cover their traffic cost. Maybe $3 per month or so.

I agree but also if Google didn't host those old videos, you wouldn't be able to watch them unless you have downloaded them and stored on some long term storage solution.

One could also say that YouTube is part of the cultural heritage of the world, and since Google or rather Alphabet had a money printing machine, this content should be freely available to anyone.

Recently they've pushed annoying in page ads on my Adsense sites, despite them being disabled. Soon I'll have to either add a cookie wall or not have ads served in EMEA & UK.

Alphabet knows that its business model is in danger. Closed off spaces like Facebook or Discord are where people hang out. The forum culture has been condensed into Reddit and a few minor forums. Blogs are all SEO trash with content like the 7 best xyz you never knew existed or "he went out into the garden and then he saw..."

In any case, there are too many ads on YouTube and I'm not paying, especially because they make it hard to download the content off YouTube, actively hindering, slowing yt-dl (I know other solutions exist, cat mouse game). So yeah, they know of the value of that content.

The real question is, why is egress so expensive?

I fully agree to the sentiment that YouTube is part of the cultural heritage of the world.

Frankly, if Google would be taking it down, or start deleting all that old content where copyright ownership is unclear, we would lose one of the biggest archived on video history.

A radical way would be to split YouTube into the "archives" part, run by a non-profit, and the "new videos where content creators are paid" commercial site.

I don't think egress is expensive. After all, with a couple of exceptions they have neutral peerings with pretty much any ISP on this planet. And the ~$30B of revenue should be more than enough to handle storage and traffic cost.

AFAIK Google does not list the actual profits that YouTube makes, but I'd assume it's a very very profitable business - again, if you compare this to Netflix, Disney+ etc, who all have producing original content as the highest cost item on their balance sheets, they must be a pretty nice position.

So anyway, as said: I am willing to pay for original content that YouTube themselves are paying for. But I am not willing to pay for anything that was and is provided for free to them.

> More than 90% of the content I watch on YouTube has been uploaded years ago, and was provided to YouTube FOR FREE by the "content creator".

Unfortunately, I don't think this is a normal usecase. The common default usecase is people are following large content creators and watch fairy modern videos.

Also, you're missing an important point. They are hosted and served for free, as well. While it's not that much cost to host and serve a single video, YT has to host and serve years and years of user generated content. You're paying for the fact that they don't have an aggressive retention policy and videos that old are indexed, stored and served, almost instantly.

Google used to have text ads on the side of search. Relevant ads. I don’t mind those. Give me those and I’ll remove my ad blocker.

I have yt premium, videos have ads//sponsored content. I don’t want to see those. Luckily I can still skip those, but I have no doubt that they’ll make that impossible at a certain point.

I don’t want nordvpn, athletic greens, or whatever is paying the most these days

No one is paying content creators on YouTube, honestly at this point that sentiment is misinformation. Google is the one who has a business relationship with content creators… how and how much they get paid is not our concern.

Honestly, Google should be paying me to get their creators’ content in front of my eyeballs, most of which contains some form of disguised or stealth marketing, or sponsored content, sponsored products, etc.

Google makes their content streams available to watch for free. It’s my own damned right to decide which streams I want to watch. Otherwise they should hide it behind a paywall.

This is without even touching on the topic of how Google exploits and abuses their relationship with content creators (BS copyright system, demonetization, etc), and the fact that the majority of the ads are scams, frauds, political misinformation, etc.

YouTube should offer ad-free videos that have the ad fees paid ahead of time by the account that posted the video. Videos could be made to be ad-free for certain areas, demographics, etc. to maximize viewers as needed.

In this way the video effectively becomes the ad and the viewer doesn't have any interest in blocking it.

you only need to cache long enough for the ads to play, so you can start playing right away, and still download from youtube save bandwidth

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