Sounds like Stockholm syndrome, to be honest, with Google laughing all the way to the bank.
I'm against it because advertising is not the only business model that works at scale. Google effectively introduced itself as a middleman between content creators and consumers, which they continue to do whether you pay with your attention/data or cash.
I happily support content creators who don't rely on advertising or Google itself. I just refuse to be forced into a corrupt business model.
anybody else is free to introduce a content discovery & delivery scheme that would obviate the need for a advertising-laden middleman, but for some reason people keep downloading the YouTube app
We know that subscriptions work at scale, mostly. YT Premium[1] has 100 million (Maybe 90M if there are 10M people only getting Music premium). But if YT was only available via subscription in 2010 during the gaming channel boom, it probably would have failed out of the gate.
But advertising is necessary to maintain the scale YT runs at today. 100 Million subscribers is nothing compared to the >2.7 billion humans that use it. Not all of them would pay even $2/month if you let them.
1: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-music-premium-1...
If someone is selling apples in exchange for punching me in the face (and actually watching me and doing that while I eat, for a more accurate analogy :), then I wouldn't like going to their store. I would prefer going to the farmers' market and buying directly from the farmer by paying for it with cash. Farm-to-table type of transaction. Would this make the farmer as rich as selling their apples to the face-punching store? Probably not. They would probably have to work harder for less money, because they would have to manage more of their business themselves, and their products wouldn't reach as many people. There would probably be less apple farmers overall as well. But would it be a more consumer-friendly business that is actually incentivized to put care in their product? Absolutely.
It's not my fault that there aren't more farmers' market equivalents on the web. I'll use them if/when they exist, but in the meantime I'll have to resort to acquiring my apples in alternative ways.
"The many monetisation models I claimed exist go to another school. In Canada."
This is not my problem to fix. I don't feel guilty in any way for refusing to participate in a business model I don't agree with.
That's a ridiculous comparison. To make it more accurate, though: if the restaurant was also storing a copy of my personal data, recording my every move, and interrupting my meal to shove food I didn't order down my throat, I certainly wouldn't tip anyone at that restaurant, and would prefer to eat elsewhere. The servers who choose to work there have no moral right to complain about me not tipping them, and eating food that is available for anyone to take without paying is certainly not equivalent to stealing.
Once, and if, I'm given the option to actually pay for the service I order instead of this insanely hostile experience, I'll happily tip for it as well.
You do. It's called YouTube Premium and it has no interruptions. You can turn off activity history and no data will be recorded nor will you get personalized recommendations. You have the tools at your fingertips, but instead you've convinced yourself that you're the victim in order to justify shorting the creators on whom you rely.
>would prefer to eat elsewhere
Okay, eat elsewhere then.
"Allowing" people to upload, "for free", content for YouTube to monetize is "very generous" of YouTube?!? I think you've got that severely bass-ackwards.
I'm well aware of that. Advertising is clearly the most profitable online business model. It has a low barrier of entry for users, it scales with the amount of users, and is simple to implement. Companies can collect user data and use it in perpetuity to monetize it in infinite ways beyond just ad impressions. Data is gold.
My point is that it's all corrupt to the core. It's driven by generating wealth for companies over anything else, least of all the well-being of people. It actually relies on manipulating the human psyche, pioneered by the machiavellian mind of Edward Bernays nearly a century ago. It inserts itself as a leech between the goods producer and people, to not only connect producers with interested consumers as its proponents would like us to believe, but to create consumers out of people who wouldn't otherwise be interested. And then the internet came along, and made it more profitable than it's ever been. Oh, and it's also being exploited to spread propaganda, influence elections and topple democracies, but no matter, the charts must go up and to the right.
So, yeah, sorry for the rant, but my point is that there are plenty of ways that companies can monetize their business that doesn't involve advertising. It might not be as easy or profitable, but I have this silly opinion that the well-being of society should be higher priority than generating wealth for shareholders.
You are using a lot of words to justify the fact that you would prefer to steal from the same creators that you rely on for information and entertainment. You do not care about their well being but you’re standing on that soapbox nonetheless.
And please, don’t tell me that you support them in other ways because I don’t believe you. People that are too cheap to pay for a service that all parties have agreed to the terms of are too cheap to support in other ways too. No to mention there’s no practical way to compensate every creator whose videos you may have watched.
Paying YouTube to not show me ads simply removes the inconvenience of not interrupting my watching experience. It doesn't get rid of any of the other issues I mentioned inherent to advertising as a business, which Google still is, whether I pay them or not. My data will still be used to show me ads on other Google sites, I'm still training their algorithms on how to keep me on their site for longer and how to better show me ads in the future, etc. And I'm supporting their empire, which I'd rather not do.
> And please, don’t tell me that you support them in other ways because I don’t believe you.
I don't care whether you believe me or not. The creators certainly don't get compensated nearly enough by alternative means, and I don't do regular donations or have any system to keep track of how much I've spent. It's surely a minuscule amount compared to what they earn from advertising. But it's not my problem they chose to rely on a business model I refuse to be a part of. If this bothers them, they're free to put up their content on other platforms, or behind a paywall. If, however, they upload their content on a public site, I have no qualms with accessing a public resource on my own terms. The fact you equate this to stealing is laughable.
A single user depriving YouTube of their revenue is inconsequential sure, but when hundreds of millions of people do it (like with blocking ads on desktop) it obviously runs the risk of making the entire company unviable. Hosting videos for free is a great way to lose a lot of money.
We can only hope.
Also, do you really think that any platform as big as YouTube can remain free forever? I will pay for things that bring value to my life. YouTube Premium brings value almost every day. I am pretty sure you pay for things that bring value or make thing easier for you in life, so maybe don't post these kinds of responses in the future as they are cynical and bring no value to the conversation.
I don't block YouTube, I just don't use any of their official frontends. There are plenty of alternatives in this space[1]. This might not work for everyone, but I get a much better UX with these tools. Not seeing ads is one benefit, but it's also about not being a participant in training algorithms that have a, mostly negative, psychological impact.
> I am pretty sure you pay for things that bring value or make thing easier for you in life
Of course. And I happily support content creators who don't rely on advertising or Google itself. I just refuse to be forced into a corrupt business model.
Anyway, I didn't mean to antagonize you, so apologies if my response came across that way.
[1]: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends?tab=readme...
Let me put it this way. I understand that you can block YouTube ads and have the techicnal means to block them at the DNS level. I also understand I can run different frontends for YouTube, but it is flat out easier and faster for me personally to not do that and to pay $22.99 a month for my entire family to enjoy ad free content. Time is money.
Also, I play a decent amount of video games and I send money monthly to content creators on said games I play. If something brings value to my life or makes things easier, I will pay for it. Just because I pay for something you do not like doesn't mean I don't support content creators via other means.
I just found your observation that YouTube Premium is a good thing peculiar, especially coming from someone who's experienced YT pre-Google. To me it only solves part of the problem that Google introduced themselves, while still making you a participant in the other less obvious problems with the business.