Sooner or later the pressure to grow revenues is going to force Meta to do ads on their subscription accounts (especially since they can charge a premium on those ads). Then they introduce "premium" subscription accounts with no ads, then those get ads, then there's the "excelsior" subscription account with absolutely no ads, and so on.
And I am pretty sure just initializing the ads engine takes a half of a second or so.
Ah, I guess UX is dead in 2023
Booking one ticket involves solving 2 captchas. They even tried to involve advertising into these captchas. You had to type out some specific detail from the ad to get past it.
German had a lot of useless steps. Austrian was pretty good, but slooow to open initially. LEO express (Czech, but commercial trains/buses) was pretty ok but sometimes having bugs.
I am kinda surprised how painful the train booking sites could be :D
Jet Blue is also showing mandatory ads on the video display in front of you. They last for around 5 minutes and you cannot turn off the display while these ads are showing. This is highly annoying.
I don't really object to ads as much as I object to the tracking that comes with them. Ad-free services that still do the tracking aren't really much of an improvement in my book.
2043: you have been fined for having an unlicensed social activity. Please ensure all future social activity is properly arranged via Facebook groups or a registered chat application.
You can’t “pirate” Social Media’s original intended functionality, social interactions, because the content isn’t really the point. The connections are.
*I mean, if we have to misuse the term, which is actually about threatening to kill/killing people and robbing their boats, to mean unauthorized copying
* In-feed ads. These include ads for content prominence (preferential placement for creators), articles with link-out, ads for Google products and services like purchasing movies and shows in their store, and ads for Google product features.
* Modal ads in videos which they facilitate. That is, pop-up ads in content.
* Ads for merchandise under the content.
* Ads for paid subscription to channels.
* In-content ads in the form of creator sponsorships. These are becoming egregious.
The official app is absolute GARBAGE now. I can't even turn off shorts anymore. I'm on the verge of cancelling Premium. Once the Digital Markets Act comes into effect in the EU in a couple of months I'll be installing alternative frontends for YouTube which include SponsorBlock.
this is weird. are we sure this is a thing in the EU? because the idea of having some sort of regulation forcing a private company to have their product offered by some other party raises so many issues. it's not like youtube is some sort of public good, it's a product offered by a private company.
who pays for the bandwidth, engineers, data centers? will the 3rd party pay for these things? if youtube is forced to break it's own TOS, and this leads to users moving away from YouTube but still somehow taking advantage of YouTube's offerings, why even provide the service at all, what exactly would be the point as the product would be loss making? and will capping access be back in the cards (we can't offer any more of these videos because it will cause losses)? and what about tracking viewers, how can we track these viewers when they're coming in from some 3rd party?
I feel like I'm misunderstanding something...
They would beat little to none of the video hosting and serving costs.
It's basically adding one more middleman, just like most energy companies in Europe.
what? in which country and how?
> and it's putting ads in its ad-free subscription
i pay for youtube premium. never seen an ad.
> Especially when they gained their monopoly status by operating at below-cost for years, preventing fair competition from even springing up in the first place.
i fear you are thinking about a different product. youtube is not a monopoly and it's not preventing fair competition as TikTok is even bigger.
In the EU it's ok to ask companies to do things, even if it costs them money.
If they go too far and Google leaves the EU market, I suspect nobody will be all that sad, goodbye giant competition, a boon for the local service providers.
I think what you are misunderstanding is: countries will sometimes be protectionist toward their own companies, but they don’t actually care if foreign companies have a viable business model, especially for non-critical things like YouTube. Asking the EU to care whether or not YouTube has a viable business model is not really reasonable.
"Enjoy ad-free music listening".
They still get paid to promote particular artists/songs to you on the home page.
Songs themselves include ads too (https://www.wired.com/2008/09/products-placed/) so "ad-free music listening" is no certainty, but I guess we can't blame spotify for that.
Plus, I'd guess it also depends on how you define what constitutes an "advertisement". For example, if Amazon/Apple/Netflix puts their newest show at the top of the "Featured" list, is that an ad? What if it is related to another show you watched? What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature? To the company, and per their T&C, these may not be "ads".
Yes, if you can't disable that feature. They're clearly pushing it regardless of my preferences.
> What if it is related to another show you watched?
Yes, if you can't disable that feature because they are most likely pushing the cheapest crap they can that keeps me watching.
> What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature?
Yes, if you can't disable that feature because I can't tell if they're just trying to be helpful or steer me toward something with higher margins for their benefit.
If I can't opt out then it's an ad
But perhaps there are laws requiring companies to get explicit consent and not simply consider it a change in the existing service nor automatically sign people up for the service with the new terms (ads)?
I think there should be. I'm not a fan of companies changing their terms at will without clear notification. Clear meaning a plain English description of what's changed, not just "We've changed our ToS, read this long legal document again."
Or rather their AI will by that time have disguised ads as to be not recognisable as ads :)
Even if the company could make the bottom line with only a subscription fee. Someone is willing to pay a lot for visibility, and they pay more the less other ads there is. So the paper/service/blog accepts one well paying ad. And nobody minds because it was just one ad.
But look at that money, let's do another ad, just once. But this isn't the first and only so they pay a little less. So maybe we could put in two ads, I mean they are relevant and nobody cares. And suddenly ads are a commodity but you already have a ad-selling department and people willing to pay a little...
I mean I don't think ads are exclusively bad, but it's just the nature of the system that they will get worse until they are bad.
True, but that's when you leave the service.