I can also heartily recommend the 'unhook' browser extension, it takes care of all of those upsells and feeds.
If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made? Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads?
Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay. They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
Then they abused adnetworks to take the biggest share and control over what users can do or will likely do with their user agents.
Then they degraded every site and product searchability into ads-favored keyword matching.
Then, when people started using their well-setup cardboard box traps to their taste, they demanded to either pay for that or to forcefully watch ads.
I’m not gonna play a reasonable guy here, because it’s not a logical issue. I never wanted or expected to live in an internet like that. Google can go cry in a corner and look miserable.
And everyone should install ublock origin. Think of it as Python 3 or ESM or Democracy. It’s much better, you all just have to figure out new life with it.
What you should do: starve the advertising company (you shouldn't be donating money to support "the platform" which is a trillion dollar for-profit corporation!) and donate directly to the people who ask for it and deserve it.
Who didn't want to eat Reese's pieces, drink a Pepsi free or tab, or buy a Toyota or pair of Nikes.
Youtube doesn't support creators, it milks them dry for content.
Paying Google to support creators pushes them to play to The Algorithm(tm) - which means they will adapt the presentation of their content to maximise profitability. And thereby stop making the content you're enjoying now.
As such, I think paying Google to support creators is one of the worst ways to support them. Buy their merch, support them directly on Patreon (or similar), or support a site where they ostensibly have more control (eg, Nebula). Don't coax them into a style of creating dictated by Google's algorithms.
Is there a way to build a recommendation engine with a distributed system? Or a search engine?
then they'll put the whole site behind a paywall, which could have mixed results. Everyone is focusing on paying the creators, but advertisers are also paying for moderation. voat showed us what an unmoderated reddit is like, and bitchute shows us what unmoderated youtube is like: trying to find DIY birdfeeder videos against the tide of holocaust denial and Podcast #598 of "How the Lizard Illuminati are vaxxing us with every toxic metal on the periodic table but Big Pharma Deep State maintains the elaborate coverup"
Have you actually read any YouTube comments lately? YouTube doesn't have any moderation at all.
I'd argue that _content_ is a fairly gross word that we've all come to use because we're in the industry -- "I need some _content_ around my ads so that we get some impressions". There are plenty of other words that are less marketing associated and more clearly connotative with creatively produced material - article, report, essay, story, paper, proposal, manifesto, gallery, video, photographs, exhibit, website, blog post - even material. _Content_ is efficiently produced filler. As such, yes, in the extreme less _content_ gets made, and in the absence of _content_ there is organically more of the latter category.
You can still make money on the internet without ads. Ads have in recent history been an easier, higher margin route. If the entire online ad industry fumbles, will we be substantially worse off? I don't think so: the number and size of websites would for sure shrink, but those left would have a much higher signal to noise.
Now that in and of itself is a fascinating statement that I kind of agree with? What kind of things are you thinking? The only thing I can really think of is trying to get people to pay for physical objects. Or, perhaps, providing a service that can't be copied (i.e. Video tutoring)
Ads? There are ad-blockers. Subscriptions? People will just use archive so that they don't have to pay you. Donations like Pateron? Maybe viable? I don't know exactly how the business models there work.
I also just think 99% of advertising is bad taste which makes me mentally exhausted and puts me in a bad mood, so I just want it out of my sight.
Yes, I could pay for YouTube Premium, but that would go against my own interests since I would be financially supporting a platform with perverse incentives for content creators.
I can't speak for anybody else but my content will still get made.
> Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads?
Maybe, maybe not, whose to say what Google will do. Maybe they will value the influence or the goodwill more than the lack of income. Maybe some of the content will be free and other bits will be walled off (effectively this is already the case with youtube music). Maybe there will be less MFY content and that's perfectly ok with me, 99.99% of it is crap anyway. Youtuber isn't a profession I recognize.
> Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay.
And that's ok.
> They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
Yes, or you pay and you still get ads...
How will your content get served? If you say you'll just pay to serve it, I think that's a fine answer.
And on other hand if users are paying you something, would they not expect not to have to watch through mediocre sponsorships?
Which means they would continue making content
Think about it, anyone can host gigs of videos perpetually indexed for free. What percentage of videos have fewer than 100 views?
Google has killed off profitable projects. If you think they'll dump tens of billions every year hosting videos that no one watches, you're kidding yourself.
And what we noticed with paying is that people are very unwilling to pay even a small amount for a service. For instance FB makes around over $50 per user in North America. What percentage of users do you think would pay $50 a year to use Facebook?
So explain to me why Google will continue footing the bill when more and more people prevent them to run ads on the site.
Back in the 90's when bandwidth was expensive we managed to run a free video site without advertising. Since then bandwidth has become orders of magnitude cheaper, and G has economies of scale that no other operator can get close to, they quite literally own the fiber, the endpoints and are present in just about every meet-me room all over the world. Storage costs have dropped even further. So what you think costs Google a couple of bucks to provide per user probably costs them fractions of a cent. And if they dropped the garbage their costs would be even lower.
That seems way too high. There's something like half a trillion hours watched per year. Does it really cost almost $0.10 for an hour of video?
So? That's their problem.
> Google has killed off profitable projects. If you think they'll dump tens of billions every year hosting videos that no one watches, you're kidding yourself.
Can't wait for YouTube to die. Hopefully the replacement will be less centralized and not beholden to a single american company.
> And what we noticed with paying is that people are very unwilling to pay even a small amount for a service.
Most "services" are not worth the effort needed to pay them, the amount doesn't even come into it. This is also a self-created issue. Google et al have trained people to not pay by dumping money into these "free" services to kill the competition. Now they are upset that people don't want to pay them? I can't find a violin tiny enough to express my compassion for them.
> For instance FB makes around over $50 per user in North America. What percentage of users do you think would pay $50 a year to use Facebook?
So? They make $0 off of me. I don't care how much they can or cannot make with ads, that doesn't make ads acceptable.
If we win the war against Ads lots of content won’t get made. But, the content that thrives in an Ad driven world is mostly toxic rage bait. I would argue that losing this content and instead only being left with content that people will actually pay for is a big net win for humanity.
Likely we will never see a world without Ads but I can dream.
What I’d like would be focusing on the downsides: ad networks should have legal restrictions on how they collect and share data, liability for any malware they distribute, and every ad should include the legal identity of the person who paid for them (which the network is required to certify). When sites see ads as free money, they plaster them everywhere. When they have to think about the negative externalities, that becomes a more nuanced decision than “would we like more money?”
Youtube is full of clickbait, get rich quick and unhealthy influencers (how to work 80 hours a week and buy my book btw). Same with fb/ig.
Maybe we have just too much content now.
The fight may not be winnable, but if you give up on the pushing back, things will get worse much faster.
Liability for malware distribution was something I haven’t seen proposed before but totally makes sense.
Peertube et al exist. Patreon exists. Vimeo, Twitch, Tiktok. On one hand I'm absolutely aware that the TYPE of video content we have would change.
On the other, I'm not at all convinced that the destruction of YouTubes particular monetizing model would be a bad thing. I don't think much of value at all would be lost if people couldn't make money off Youtube the way they do now.
Other people's mileage may differ, of course. It's just a personal preference.
Discover better ways to support people who do useful work. Or rather, re-discover them since they are older than ads.
YouTube is an amazing platform. It has allowed people to make videos about things they want and allowed people interested in that content to find it. Allowing people to pay (in various ways) for what they want means that other people can step up and provide that service instead of doing something else.
A good heuristic for when financial transactions are “gross” is if you are dealing with strangers or not. If you call your spouse from work and ask them to make and bring you a sandwich for lunch we would be horrified if they said it’ll cost you $20. On the other hand, no one should feel offended if you get charged when you call up a stranger to do the same thing.
There are different incentives at work in different spheres of life. Society depends on strangers doing things for other strangers. Google the Fatal Conceit to get the full picture. Bottom line is that there is nothing “gross” either for paying for something you want from a stranger or of them being paid for something they did for you.
You seem to think that YouTube is "every human exchange". I'm going to let that speak for itself.
People can freely decide whether they want to sell the content they've created or give it away for free. If it's the former, they should sell it, and if it's the latter, they should give it away for free. They just cannot and ought not rely on business models that restrict how people display information on their devices that has been sent to them voluntarily. As I said in the beginning, I have no quirks with Youtube going subscription-only.
Furthermore, I have precious few moments on this earth, I have no desire to have to spend them watching propaganda from corps (and sometimes just unfiltered political propaganda).
But most of all, ads are a privacy and security risk like no other. They follow you across the internet for ages, sell your data to the highest bidder (sometimes that bidder is the feds) and are the foremost distribution network for malware.
Sorry, I rather YouTube go away than have to agree to the above.
But if you're happy to pay whatever is asked of you, that'll be a 100 dollars thanks
That really doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
And what is or is not affordable is really dependent on where you live and that kind of money is a very large amount in some places. And especially in those places access to youtube for educational purposes can be quite important.
If so it's not just the infrastructure cost which itself is not trivial for a site like youtube.
Their whole position is horribly inconsistent.
Here in South Africa YT Premium Family is R109.99/mo (5.83 USD). By comparison, Netflix is R159/mo. Minimum wage is R25.42/hr.
Ads are phycological warfare and must be eradicated with prejudice but asking the audience to chip in a couple bucks a month seems reasonable to me.
I don’t think it’ll ever be possible to get everyone to pay, but if it’s easy to pay and priced low enough, paying becomes the easiest option for a lot of people. Why bother pirating music in 2023 when any number of music streaming services are about $10-11/mo?
YouTube Premium bundles YouTube music and costs $19/mo. This is higher than (or on par) a lot of streaming subscriptions.
Another annoyance is that it’s bundled with a music service. Some non-US markets experimented with a cheaper ad-free-YouTube only tier for less than half the price. When that tier of service can be offered, it is very hard to think most of the $19 goes towards storage, bandwidth, and operational overhead.
According to that, $8.55 of your $19 would go to the creators. Presumably the other $10.45 goes for storage, bandwidth, operational overhead, and profit.
If centralized hosting of such "content" becomes unsustainable then that's even better.
That just means, by definition, that the prices YouTube are trying to charge are too high, doesn't it? What we're seeing is basically a negotiation tactic: you either reduce the price, or we'll keep using ad blockers.
Not to mention, most creators don't really live off YouTube ads, those pay too little for the vast majority of channels as far as I understand. Creators live off their own sponsorships, Patreon etc.
Note, I'm actually someone who thinks YouTube Premium is good value for my money and am already paying for it.
They simply want the service for free, refuse to pay but are unwilling to come out and say as much, so they use host of justifications to avoid it.
Which is fair.
But, I'm in the camp of "if it's too high, just stop using it". I think this isn't different than most things. If I think the price of electricity is too high, my option isn't to say "well, your price it too high, so I'm going to use electricity for free".
I would pay to watch videos using microtransactions on a platform that is not owned by a depraved company. I have no objections to compensating creators for their work in general (unlike a lot of people here, who feel entitled to get everything for free).
I'd be quite fine if the only "content" is funded by patreons (I give £60/month to various patreons) or just people doing it for non-financial reasons.
I'm old enough to remember that content creators existed before the youtube monetization machine.
I think if there's one thing we can rely on not stopping, it's people's urge to create and share
I say this as someone who pays for YouTube Premium.
If the content is made only because of the ads, is it still content or actually an ad ?
Can’t help but think the worry about future ads is simply rationalization for pirating now.
Here is my problem with the ads: the same ads will repeat many times over the course of a video, some ads will blast obnoxiously loud, and there are just way too many ads.
Also when I say too many ads, it's not just YouTube - we are bombarded by ads everywhere now. A few days ago I was watching a 4hr YT stream on my Fire Stick (and don't block ads there) and they were cutting to ads every 5min. Also I sometimes like to listen to music during walks and cutting to an ad in the middle of a 3min song is so ridiculous and obtrusive.
YouTube premium is expensive, especially if you have other streaming services.
This is Google's problem to solve, not ours. When you are "at war" with your customers, then the business needs to stop and think "what am I doing wrong". Under capitalism, it's the buyer that decides what your product or service is worth. YouTube Premium isn't worth $14/mo to me, so yes, I will continue to block ads as much as I can.
Until Google changes how the web works and all other browsers will align. And they can do that, since they almost own the web trough Chrome.
They’d lose a couple of legacy client apps, but much less traffic than they would if they were to make it Chrome-only.
I don't see the reason to support the company, which dreams to make internet worse.
Don't play the game. It's not a new game. Remember when Linux was "evil commie software"?
Maybe they are making such a fuss because it works and people end up switching to chrome / removing ad block :(.
Would be nice to see recent download graph of firefox or ublock origin so see if there is any impact.
Google is already receiving plenty of money, if they promoted youtube as a commons they should maintain it as a commons. This bait-and-switch crap has gone more than far enough.
Remember, not all that long ago their mantra was 'we don't care about ad blockers because it is only such a small percentage'. Look now.
I just see it, in the current context of layoff, as them wanting/needing more money and hoping blocker either leave (and stop costing them bandwidth) or switch to YT Premium.
I do believe that the worsening experience on YT could be a win by making platform I want to support such as nebula more attractive. Or that it could backfire with a global adblock adoption making the current ad economy less viable.
I'm just unsure if chrome/YT is not already too entrenched and that people won't use ad blocker or switch.