Also most people would probably prefer not to pay for the ad fees that google extorts from pretty much any company.
You can pay for Google One right now, roughly exchanging cash for storage capacity on the otherwise free services. I see no viable competition for that model. Protonmail is comparatively expensive.
I really don't want the Internet to turn into the mess that is video streaming where every independent licensing agency tries to capture an audience for $15/month.
Another great example is Let's Encrypt. It's a public good to provide quality TLS certificates and the marginal cost is $0 with some sponsorship. I'd far rather other core Internet services like e-mail and basic file sharing are sponsored.
- one skippable 5s ad
- two skippable 5s ads
- one unskippable 5s and one skippable 15s ads
- aforementioned or two 15s ads, one skippable
- two 15s unskippable ads
- removed the prerenderer 'skip' button to make it more difficult to immediately skip
- removed the ad amount indicator and precise length indicator (now just a bar) to psychologically drive people into sunk cost feelings
God knows what they're cooking up next.
And for large swathes of content, there is no alternative to YouTube.
I'm a firm believer in the issue being one of pricing, not that the consumer is willing to pay nothing at all.
I have this view because we've already seen how users flocked to iTunes, then Spotify/Apple Music and Netflix/other streaming services when the pricing was right. We are also now watching as people depart streaming services and return to direct sales and P2P file-sharing due to incrementally higher prices.
To me that's a sure indicator of price being the problem, not an insatiable appetite for zero cost.
The math largely makes sense too. Particularly in music if you're the type that has a taste for a genre of music, rather than just wanting to listen to the top 40.
It's crazy to me how entitled people are and how completely blind they are to how the ad supported model works.
Then these same people complain that youtube has no competitors. Yeah, no shit, who in their right mind would invest in a customer base like youtubes? Oh, that's right, Vid.me, and they went bankrupt in a year. Wonder why...
Remove active content from online advertising and I'll disable my ad blocker.
No, that’s not how it works, at all.
I give money to some people on Patreon, I pay for Nebula, but I am never going to give Google a single euro willingly. I’ll leave YouTube in a heartbeat the moment the people I follow (whom I am already giving money otherwise) make their content available elsewhere.
It's good you do it, thank you, and people run at the opportunity to show everyone they are doing the right thing (creating an illusion of popularity), but I can tell you from having seen the stats - essentially nobody does it.
Nebula, which you mention, has about 700k subscribers. Yet they host YouTube videos for creators who collectively have over 120M subscribers...that is a 0.6% conversion rate.
I believe you, really. I still prefer that than people profiting off me without my consent.
There is hope, there are some media who manage with strategies ranging from complete paywalls (like Nebula, though I would be very curious to know how profitable it is for the uploaders) to the opposite (like the Guardian, who seem to be getting enough money despite very little friction to get to the articles).
Thinking about good old-fashioned newspapers, most of the readership did not pay, either. There is no reason why a combination of subscribers, non-invasive advertising, and sponsorship could not accommodate a certain number of freeloaders.
> Nebula, which you mention, has about 700k subscribers. Yet they host YouTube videos for creators who collectively have over 120M subscribers...that is a 0.6% conversion rate.
Nebula has a chicken and egg problem, and YouTube has an infinitely broader reach. It certainly is not perfect. That said, I don’t think Nebula needs to make as much money as YouTube, just enough so that people can make a living producing good stuff instead of slop optimised for ads.
YouTube is no longer using ads to pay the bills. They're using them to be user hostile.
Normally I would say "just use a different service". But YouTube is a de facto monopoly.
Hence, if YouTube wants to act user hostile, you are well within your moral rights to be service hostile.
The same people telling us to 'just watch ads' then complain when the web gets a bit more crappy the next week, when another service or site uses the shifted window of tolerable behaviour to become more user hostile in chase of a bigger cut of the loot.
And a lot of them already suffer from subscription fatigue.