It’s surprising how many people in the comments don’t want adverts, don’t want sponsorship AND don’t want to pay anything for content.
How about we compare with something actually worth comparing for? For example switching channels when there's the ad break, or turning the sound off, etc.
When I download something, I'm not "stealing it". When I block an ad, I'm not stealing either. I didn't remove 10$ from Google's bank account that was there before.
That said, I appreciate it when content creators provide alternative ways to support them. I support dozens of creators with monthly donations and I occasionally buy merchandise when they're selling something I'm interested in. Just don't waste my time with ads.
Content available freely online is much different, as there is no price and at best the hope is that the consumer sees an ad or sponsorship and that the content creator has accurate analytics as to how many saw the ads.
Your analogy would be more akin to someone stealing access to paywalled content somehow. In that case a price was put on the content and someone took if anyway, much like shoplifting.
The price is ads or paying for a paid service like YouTube premium.
So you're still stealing, you just convince yourself it's ok, and that's fine.
My only point there was that shoplifting and ad blocking are very different things. Stores don't make their products freely available to anyone willing to walk past enough ads along the way.
Are you stealing?
The aircon have a cost. Cold fresh air cost electricity that costs money.
The price is to buy stuff from the shopping centre, that gives money to the stores that pay a rent price for the local that pays for the aircon bill.
This is precisely why we cannot compare copying to stealing.
Bit of context: grew up in Sudan, with embargo and us sanction (also Cuba and Iran and lately Syria), there was not even a possibility to pay for these subscriptions, torrent and modded apps were the viable options (also economical factors).
Another benefits to that: while I was in Sudan, I didn't even have to use so many ad blocks, major ads providers (Google and fb) blocked Sudan and that was absolutely great!
I don't mind paying to services, but it should definitely factor in economical status per each country
When I can pay creators directly with anonymous microtransactions, I will.
Are you guys sure you understand business and economics? So much entitlement among corporations. The money doesn't belong to them.
My (at the time) 2 year old daughter actually cried the first time she saw an ad on the YouTube app.
The first are ones not related to making money in any way, someone doing their thing "for fun" or similar.
The second are ones where it might be someone's "day job" but the money isn't coming in through youtube ads. For example, a band putting their songs online for essentially free because money comes from fans going to concerts, buying CDs, or merchandise. Having the videos available essentially for free means that more people can discover the music and maybe become paying fans. Or a cook who's brought out their own book showing some of the recipes online hoping that people will buy the book. Or a martial arts school putting videos of some training or contests online hoping among other things that people will join up for real.
The third are the "content creator" ones where the author's whole business is the videos themselves and the ads are their primary revenue stream. It's not that there aren't some really good offerings in this space - there are - but if the choice is Youtube with the full ads/tracking/targeting soup or not at all, my life will carry on without this category.
YouTube wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't "free".
I do pay for my internet connection and bandwidth. But obviously I found the best possible deal.
There is the busking model and I do choose to contribute a small amount to a small number of creators that I can tell put a lot of cash and effort into their uploads. But YouTube premium would cost more than all of those and I'd be paying into a monopoly, paying for MrBeast and other worthless crap and no longer paying the aforementioned creators.
People forget Gopher was around before WWW and wanted to charge for commercial entities. If they'd not done that then the outcome of the internet would have been different (imho)
https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/vms/networking/gopher/gopher-so...
We need to cut middlemen out of the problem. 'creators' and 'influencers' and shit should find ways to make money from their fans directly.
Patreon, Flattr, gittip, etc are ways to achieve this.
Companies have no more right to communication than the rest of us, and they don't deserve any social or legal protection for the time and attention they waste in society daily from their incessant marketing.
If you walk past a busker on the street without dropping a coin in the hat, are you "stealing from creators"?
In the former hypothetical, this is clearly absurd. You didn't ask for the concert, you didn't even attend, so of course you were not obliged to pay for it.
This would be like Netflix telling you you are "stealing from creators" by not watching their shows.
In the latter hypothetical, you did not ask for the performance but you heard it nonetheless. You may have even enjoyed it. The busker has costs that you did not meet like food, clothes and equipment costs. How could you not support that?
If Netflix follows the "private concert" model, YouTube very clearly follows the busker model. If it wasn't in public, most of these creators would be like me playing the concert in my home: nobody would attend. They need to be in public.
You can't be in public and force the public to pay.
Also, let's start a competing service. How to pay for... Bandwidth alone? Forget about talented engineers or anything else.
Maybe it's a strong word but choking the revenue stream but still getting the fruits of it - there's another word for it.
One way to choke the revenue stream would be not to watch at all.
I don't pay for YouTube but it's the most useful web property. Arguably alongside Wikipedia.
Once you remove ads and the ability to track and target people, peer to peer works. Add anonymous microtransactions to creators and you end up with LBRY.
Ads do nothing but waste the viewer's time and piss them off. Sponsorships are fine, but what moral or ethical right does ANY business have to force any terms on visitors?
Sure, use whatever technical means you want to control your site, but it's not a moral failing of others that a business can't put together a healthy and mutually beneficial business model.
It turns out modern tech businesses are just shit. I wouldn't buy basically anything on offer in this market due to the total obliteration of trust in the market.
You literally cannot trust a Western or US tech company to not try dragging a net over everything you do to gleam some psych data to manipulate.
The best way to get my money is offering a solid product to me that you cannot take away after the fact with cheap parlor tricks like DRM.
It's not shocking, it's not surprising, it's pretty rational to do that if you think about it for 2 seconds. This is a solved topic, I really don't understand why people keep bringing this up.
If you are mad about people skipping your boring sponsorship segments — paywall your stuff already or stop complaining. Or better yet, find non-intrusive ways to monetize your content instead of relying on same old methods that became unsustainable years ago.
LBRY has the right idea with microtransactions.