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Comment by loftsy | Hacker News Reader

I've always assumed that Google ads subsidises everything else at Google. So my concern with a split would be YouTube increasing price or less investment in the service.

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Youtube just had the revenue of $8.92 billion where the total was $88.27 billion. Not a small number. Is there any information how much is profit from that Youtube part?

There are no numbers on YouTube costs (which would be astronomical), and IMO it's unlikely YouTube is profitable on its own.

Any idea about costs and volume (traffic) over at Netflix, to compare apples with oranges?

I have a hard time imagining that youtube is subsidized given the ridiculous number of obnoxious ads you're forced to watch and the steep price of removing them. Surely if they were subsidized this wouldn't be worth the cost of ruining their product.

The steep price of removing them: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

At some point they'll just embed into the video stream. TBH I had assumed they were already doing this.

EDIT: Still, point taken. I'll try to figure out how to install this on my home router—I don't ever watch youtube from my browser.

There's a different extension to auto skip the (community defined) ad segments in videos. There will always be a way.

They have, and for that we have SponsorBlock https://sponsor.ajay.app/

And the irony is that if you pay for YouTube Premium, you still get these baked-in ads :/

What's ironic about it? YouTube premium removes ads that YouTube adds to videos. Those sponsor ads in the videos are put there by the content creator who made the video.

Yes sorry, perhaps not ironic, disappointing or deceptive would be more appropriate.

YouTube could enforce the content creator to tag the sponsored segments.

And what would be the reason for this subsidy? Do they think YouTube is going to keep growing and it's worth waiting for them to become somehow more popular? Would it be catastrophic for Alphabet if other large players entered YouTube's market?

And why would losing a subsidy mean increasing prices? As far as I can tell consumers think YouTube's offerings are overpriced as is and they could probably increase profit by lowering them, especially if it's not their parent's add subsidiary they'd be cannibalising.

Because google currently gets valuable ads data from youtube. So even if the product itself runs at a loss the net benefit is positive.

If its spun off then the platform has to stand on its own and it would need to make more money.

> it would need to make more money

Really? Why?

Can it? If so why hasn't it done that already?

because they are running it more lean to maximize the data gathering potential. which is what is valuable to the parent company.

YouTube ads generated almost $9B last quarter. I think that should be a viable business on its own?

I'd pay a modest fee for a non-tracking, ad-free, non-enshittified YouTube though. Compete for my money!

Like Youtube Premium? https://www.youtube.com/premium

Does it remove tracking and returns the dislike button?

No. It also doesn't make pigs fly, or put your pants on for you like in Wallace and Gromet.

No. I prefer newpipe

So you wouldn't actually pay a modest fee.

I would if YouTube were user respecting for paying users. I pay for a lot of other media fwiw

When you're paying for a service, you generally expect something better than a third-party can achieve by deleting parts of your free offering.

This is moving the goal posts and completely arbitrary. There are many services that are ad supported and have a paid version without the ads.

For some reason, free and ad free YouTube seems like a birthright to so many people.

If an entity takes measures to ensure that its service becomes the de-facto default in an area, that entity gives up its entitlement to dictate the terms of use of that service. We need something like this in our systems of ethics, or we permit Freedom Monsters (ref: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/259). Note that this isn't the only solution, but I expect other solutions to have the same shape.

If Google didn't promote YouTube so heavily, permitted channels to migrate to other services (like how they permit Blogger blogs to migrate to other websites), bundled a generic streaming video player with Android (e.g. VLC) instead of the YouTube app… then maybe I'd be more sympathetic to the position of content blocker opponents. To convince me to pay for YouTube, you have to offer me something other than "we've locked a capability of your computer away, but you can get it back if you pay us!".

Notably, there's no need to move the goalposts, as they remain unmet; the original premise was

> a modest fee for a non-tracking, ad-free, non-enshittified YouTube

And YT Premium is

[x] modest fee - I could argue that either way (is $14/mo really "modest"?), but let's allow it

[ ] non-tracking - not that I'm aware of

[~] ad-free - partially; right now YT itself won't add more ads, so you're just left with the ads that uploaders embed

[~] non-enshittified - depends what you mean; ex. I believe it does restore the ability to play audio with the screen off, but not downvoting

iOS can play audio with the screen off and doesn’t require YT premium. Bit of an OS hack but it’s just a few taps:

-Start your YT video (from iOS app) -Swipe up to have the floating player while it plays. -Swipe down from top center to bring down your notifications bar. The video will automatically pause but you’ll have the large play button right there. -Hit play -while still on the notification bar screen, and while the audio starts playing again: Swipe down from the top right corner to bring up your control center. - now turn off your screen and audio should still play.

This has been working for me for a while. Don’t recall where i first came across it but it’s been a few years now.

I don’t use it often because I have streaming services with higher audio quality but it’s nice to not worry about accidentally tapping the screen while listening to YT. Esp if you wanna keep the phone in your pocket. Also saves battery juice.

Cheers.

You can also start the video in the web browser (haven’t tried the app), turn off the screen, turn it back on, hit play on lock screen, turn the screen off again. Podcasts for poor people

Hackers will spend unlimited amounts of time and energy to argue why they shouldn't pay for something. I think it was the Dalai Lama who said that the highest ethical principle that exists is to use things without paying for them, and that it is in fact the people providing goods and services who are oppressing the people who are using them. But I could have remembered wrong.

Crazy expensive compared to what they actually make off of ads. Who can justify this?

Not for me, as long as its owned by Google, I'm not paying a cent.

There are options for you, like Floatplane and Nebula. The problem is universal - their curated content has limited appeal. The YouTube model is more attractive to people, so more people upload content to a larger audience. I have no confidence that a paid-only platform could reach 1/100th of the traffic YouTube gets in a similar timespan.

As a customer you really just have to ask yourself what you're willing to give up when paying for a YouTube analog. Content creators aren't going to engage in a mass exodus unless they're convinced their audience will follow them to other platforms.

Nebula is more like Netflix for vlogs and explainers as it lacks comments and livestreams.

You say "lacks comments" like it's a bad thing.

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