Should YouTube be a free service or what?
It's only a semi-ironic question. Perhaps someone has a vision for how it all works out.
Full disclosure: I work on programmatic advertising technologies.
If users blocking ads is enough to make the service unprofitable, the service should switch to a paid model or shut down.
It's an adversarial relationship. The service is within their rights to shove ads down your throat, and you're within your rights to fight back.
(I pay for YouTube Premium)
The amount of effort people spend on these sophist explanations of why they don’t have to pay for the services they use is just amazing.
When I'm given the choice, I only pay companies that I respect. If they successfully block ad blockers, I'll mute the ads and do something else while they're playing.
I'm fine paying for YouTube as soon as it's not in Google's hands. Until then, I'd consider it an ethical wrong for me to pay for it.
Would the advertisers really want to pay for their ads to be shown to people who aren't interested in their products? Every ad view costs them money. (I know, there are also the advertisers who just want to spread their message and aren't selling any products..)
If the ads are actually useful to people, would they still jump through all these hoops to block them?
The ad supported model is only sustainable for the ad company if it is a win for both advertisers AND end users.
"You are not paying for the (premium) service, so we will degrade your service and force you to watch ads so we can pay our bills" is usually a sign that youtube is chasing after short term profits at the detriment of it's own advertisers / end users imo.
I know this is a little too simplistic and I don't have any real answers... but this is how i'm looking at this whole debacle.
I'm way more likely to donate to a channel I like than I am to put up with loud annoying obnoxious ads for things I'm never going to buy anyway if I don't have to.
There's one I like, or at least used to, King's Fine Woodworking, that.. I don't know he clearly has some setting enabled that others don't, that means his channel is plastered in text link ads that just make it look crap, and you have to scroll way down to get to 'Uploads' (vs playlists of old videos you've seen before). Ads cheapen every channel they touch, the more there are the worse it is. 'Creators' are better off focussing on direct monetisation imo. Or sponsored unbiased content, product reviews etc. where it is actually related to the channel. Not like VPNs or backup battery systems are everywhere.
I do understand that means maybe they have to show more to people not blocking them, or start charging, or something. I'm not saying it should be provided free and adless, I'm just saying that doesn't matter, it's not the point, if it's free and can be adless then it will be. It's not my job to make sure it's sustainable by sitting through ads.
Second, Youtube gained outsized winner-take-all popularity by the anticompetitive dumping of hosting and development effort at below the apparent cost. This created a simulation of the early Internet's liberating spirit while killing any competitors that could have been based around sustainable economics (ideally some combination of publisher hosting plus p2p). Blocking ads is continuing the relationship as Youtube created it.
Third, just fuck ads in general. The original post is a fun piece of art, but even seeing those three quick blips in the demo video was still an unneeded mental attack. The less I have to suffer and mentally repel corporate attempts at faking social proof, especially interruptive video/audio ones, the better my life is. If I could get AR glasses that blocked billboards, I would.
My only concern of Youtube somehow going out of business would be losing the back catalog, which I think is better served by independent archiving rather than framing business revenue as some kind of collective responsibility.
Those services are fooling themselves.
Consider television. Is it immoral to mute the TV during a commercial? No. Is it immoral to go get up and get a snack or go to the bathroom during a commercial? No. TV advertisers have absolutely no expectation that TV viewers will watch their ads. So why's it that when it comes to internet advertising all the advertisers suddenly wring their hands and whine and moan about their poor business model? Ads are nonsense, I won't watch them, stop wasting my time with them, and if you want to cover costs for your service, charge me for the privilege to access it. In the meantime, if you're foolishly giving away something for free, I'm going to consume it without remorse.
The entire ad business model is nonsense, and it's not our responsibility as consumers to prop up the companies that have based their fragile fortunes on it.
I believe consumers are in their right, moral or not, to block ads, and Youtube/Google is in their right to disable ad blockers.
I am wondering if someone has a solution because I would really be interested in hearing it.
What is being destroyed by YouTube's current policy that led to this anti adblock attempt, is pushing too far with the ads.
Crap quality and overstuffed.
A 5 second ad on a 4 minute video? Fine.
1:30 ad, one of TWO... on same video?
Fuck. That. Noise.
It's the same segmentation issue as piracy, y'all get hyperfocused on the group that will NEVER play ball, and ruin the experience so much for those that would, that they "swap teams".
Yes. They were loss leader for more than a decade and killed all competition because nobody had coffers deep enough to fight Google. Now because of their dominant position it’s impossible to migrate from it, because of network effect.
So f** them, not my problem. I’m willing to pay for stuff that I enjoy (old videos from 10+ years ago), I’m not going to pay for modern cancer (just open YouTube in incognito tab to understand what I mean).
Google did destroy the competition on the space forcing a monopoly.
So if there was a similar competing service with the same content quality and revenue models, would you subscribe/watch the ads?
Don’t misunderstand me, I do watch YouTube ads on my TV, but I’m pissed that nobody can challenge them anymore.