YouTube Is Swallowing TV Whole, and It's Coming for the Sitcom
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It seems we are roughly in a place where power has equilibrated between creators giving the people what they want: advertisers have no choice but to go to mass media platforms, because one's under their control are dead. And "free speech" is increasingly been given an ahistorical radically liberal interpretation. Thus we can have multi-hour podcasts with politicians asked real questions on the audiences mind; we can have companies held to account for the real quality of their products; films, games, and other media can be reviewed by people who share the tastes of their audiences -- rather than have their tastes "made" by the nominated ad-friendly elite.
The whole traditional media ecosystem, of course, is in a full-blown panic about this -- and continues to blame the new media and their audiences (their customers, whom they long forgot existed as anything other than domesticated animals that will turn up to the only game in town). It's hard to tell how many involved realise they are purely a construct of an advertised-determined, government-sanctioned world -- a world that almost no one ever actually lived in.
My great concern with the "YT is being TV" direction is that this history repeats. Just as facebook (etc.) centralised and ad-santisied the "local, independent" internet -- so will, YT/spotify/etc. just return the mass media back into advertiser hands.
Many will say: this has already happened, etc. But I think: not quite. I think at the moment it feels like a balance. One hopes the internet stays free enough, in protocol, that if advertisers (and governments) try again to dominate and control the mass media, there are ready-made alternatives to spring up.
One of the initial reasons YouTube was better than TV was because it lacked so much ads everywhere. Same for the streaming services. They're quite literally shooting themselves in the foot with adding so much ads...
Now my fingers are itching to build a tiny little service for myself, where I can have a bunch of YouTube channels in a .txt file, and have yt-dlp iterate over them once a day and add automatically to Jellyfin, or something similar, almost solely out of spite. Realistically, I'll probably just avoid YouTube on the TV for a week, until I forget how painful that experience is.
Being able to pay to remove ads is one of the best things about the new media ecosystem. When I go to my parents house and see them watch cable it’s dystopic how many ads there are for a service with primarily trash content that’s still ridiculously expensive.
It's dystopic how much you're willing to pay for something that is already free and effortless.
I'm happy to pay to support the people making stuff I like - and the ability to do that directly instead of indirectly via ads (which I hate) is nice.
When you steal something from Walgreens, a legal person has had private property unjustly taken from them that prevents the rightful owner from using or obtaining benefit from the scarce physical good (in Walgreens' case, sale of that good).
Conversely, even full-blown piracy of copyrighted content does NOT deprive the owner of private property, there is no prevention of the rightful owner to watch the video, nor is the rightful owner prevented from obtaining benefit, because there was no scarce physical good lost.
Courts might say you can "own" an idea. I disagree, it's plainly and obviously ridiculous to compare a speaker or some snacks to a infinitely reproducible digital file, to say nothing of a single stream of an infinitely reproducible digital file that was intentionally uploaded to a platform that makes content available to non-paying users.
The mistake here is seeing it as a zero-sum game. The goal of IP rights is not to prevent party A from “depriving” party B of their property. Believe it or not, understanding that copying IP does not destroy the original is not some galaxy brain level thinking only available to the enlightened. Rather, the goal is to encourage the creativity and innovation that produces more of such intellectual property overall; offering a degree of control over your own IP is a mechanism[0] of getting there.
A shining example of that is copyleft licensing. The concept of IP ownership powers GPL: in order to say “you must contribute back or disclose your source”, in order to give the assurance that programmer contributions will benefit the world rather than get embraced and extinguished by a megacorp, you must be able to execute the aforementioned control over the IP. Free and open software—including gems like Linux (probably the most popular OS in the world), Blender, etc.—flourished because of this control, not despite it. Many people, in their self-righteous crusade for free movies and stuff, completely miss that point.
So, if anything, it is the opposite. The difficulty of stealing or copying a physical object already acts as a natural deterrent, which is why something that can be expropriated with no effort should require more explicit protection, not less. This should make intuitive sense to anyone who can see the value of intellectual property and it being the driving force of innovation.
[0] If someone has an alternative mechanism in mind, I welcome a description of how it would work.
For a similar example, drug discovery often takes billions of dollars of investment - but once discovered is very inexpensive to copy. Does that mean once discovered it should be (nearly) free for anyone to manufacture?
What would you consider the second order incentives of that kind of societal structure?
These arguments when given a tiny bit of thought to the incentives they create fall apart instantly. It's a good way to end up in a communist type of social failure where nothing is created and everything is scarce.
The goal of these laws is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" - it's about creating incentives that benefit the creator and the society. That's the purpose.
Why must they be treated identically when it comes to intellectual "property" law?
Doesn't it make much more sense to offer more protection and incentives to lifesaving medications than to trite clickbait and video game livestreams?
Why are we conflating the value of those two?
Since we're not starting from a principled approach that acknowledges that nobody can "own" an idea, and instead going with a consequentialist approach - what are the horrific, severe consequences of not giving a few pennies in ad revenue to someone uploading a compilation video of other people's work that justify treating that the EXACT same way we treat lifesaving drugs?
To be clear, I'm not proposing graduated IP protection (I am the abolitionist camp when it comes to IP), I'm pointing out that if you're really primarily concerned about the harms of second order effects from lack of innovation incentives, then easily 90%+ of all copyright-protected content (memes, reaction videos, TikTok dances) should get zero protection under your own logic, as there is questionable social value (if not outright negative), and essentially zero negative ramifications of not incentivizing that kind of slop.
Consequentialism may not be the tool you want to rest your argument on if your argument is that every single video on YouTube deserves just as much copyright protection as pharmaceuticals.
You know servers aren't "free and effortless", right? Nor the storage drives or the bandwidth. Nor are the engineers or creators who make it all happen. If you block ads and you don't pay for an ad-free alternative, you're a leech on the system and making good actors pay more.
I don't really care about it too much - ads offend me too and I don't really respect modern IP law as it is handled, etc. But the sheer audacity on display in your comment is palpable.
If you're going to be a thief, at least be honest with yourself and don't act like all the bakers should be thieves too. That's just a world without bread.
Not that this implies you shouldn't get premium, but just worth keeping in mind I think.
There are many wonderful videos and video-makers on youtube - but I think the platform has been a net negative for creativity, and for humanity, in many ways. Hence I personally would never support them with my money.
We haven't ever ran the counterfactual, and maybe there's some reason we can't or won't. But I would absolutely love to see youtube without youtube - no middleman, direct payments to the video-makers.
I'm not proposing a technical discussion here on what such a platform might look like or whether it's feasible - I just mean culturally, I'd love to see what videos we would come up with if we weren't constantly adjusting to suit the all-powerful and unknowable "algorithm".
I think this pressure to conform to the algorithm, to always chase more views, subscriptions, and comments, to frame every choice around that, has probably been much more prohibitive on creativity than we are able to imagine.
yup, they should run this whole service free of charge, no ads and no subscription :)
The TV era held some promise but steadily declined, and the Youtube era has went similarly. The audiovisual onslaught continues. Technically competent people on here are innoculated against the realities of the average usage on these platforms, which equates to brain-rot of the lowest calibre.
this sounds amazing but it can’t be done. no one is going to 79 websites to watch things from 79 different artist. the middleman are core evil part not just in this area but many others but I can’t see how this kind of society we have built can function without it
I know that if you live in one place, in one time, and everyone does one thing around you and acts like it's the only thing that ever existed, that it's really (really, really) tempting to think it's the only thing that could exist. But it's completely false. Loads of obvious seeming things are totally false, and this is definitively one of them.
Not only is it possible that we'll have a totally different society one day, and maybe even one where we have no to extremely few middlemen, but since Pascal and de Fermat we've known it to be roughly 100% likely! You can completely depend on the fact it will happen!
It's worth noting that sponsorship segments are supplemental income. The more they're skipped, the less they're paid out in the future. Some creators rely on that when their partnership money on the platform can't cover expenses on its own.
It sucks, but those are not priced into the payment for the platform to remove their ads. So this devaluation of sponsored segments can be seen in an increasingly large number of content creators having member-only videos that require a Patron subscription.
I'm not defending them or saying you should or should not watch the ads (I don't). But just explaining the reality and that there's not currently a great alternative.
I'm nominally a premium member (at least it's on trial) but I've not seen that button.
I'm about to ditch the trial but I might change my mind if the sponsorship stuff is automatically skippable.
For some videos that aren't marked by the creator, I think it's heuristics based, so more niche videos it doesn't always appear.
Perhaps I’m too “niche” :(
Giving into the wishes of tyrants (pay us or else we're going to saddle you with ads) never weakens the power of the tyrants, it only strengthens and encourages them.
Tell us your suggestions. Exposure bucks?
Also, they did provide free content produced by others without compensation. They have for many years, long before ads showed up.
Now, it is true they don't finance the production of that content up front, but then again they also don't get any rights to the works either. The original creators retain full ownership, unlike in traditional media production.
But you're no better than Google, in this case, taking the free content produced by others without compensation.
Except you're also acting self-righteous and superior about doing so.
They're worse than Google in this exchange.
I'm worse than them for the grave, unforgivable sin of... viewing videos that other people put on the internet (without compensation) for the sole purpose of enabling other people to view the video... while I had the "wrong" browser extension installed?
Am I getting all this correctly?
Literacy is dead.
I think ads are extremely valuable to brands, more than we realize. It's basically allowed propaganda for consumerist behavior. I don't think we can set a pricetag on ads, which is why I don't think they'll ever go away. This is just temporary, don't get used to it.
What about an LG TV, which is where I mostly watch YouTube? Think the platform is WebOS unless I'm mistaken.
Also... ads after only 2 minutes? Am I the only one who thinks that feels much worse to bear than longer ads more spaced out? There's something that feels odd with having to get interrupted by an ad after mere 100 seconds of watching something.
The problem is, it's increasingly less attractive. Like, the NordVPN, AG1 supplement or whatever else shill scripts, they're all the damn same, it's annoying, particularly if you know the product being shilled is a fucking scam like AG1.
With "traditional" media you at least had some regulatory requirements here in Europe - either ad blocks clearly labeled as "advertising", or a permanent "infomercial" text overlay. And anything that was advertising outside of these two factors meant fines, sometimes serious ones, for violating the regulatory framework ("Schleichwerbung", see Art. 13 European Convention on Transfrontier Television [1]).
But these days? You can't be sure that influencers comply with even the bare minimum of regulation that exists, and no one takes care about prosecuting anyway.
TV never protected people from scams, the law did. TV was the propaganda organ of a corrput elite --- see no more than george bush snr complaining about the simpsons, prefering the cosbys -- a man himself who turned up at the funeral on one of the most psychopathic of the Eron scammers, who was flown to his own inauguration in one of their private jets.
The original conservative cultural elite used the mainstream media to create an illusion of western life consistent with values they wish to see the public perform. Values they themselves did not practice.
They were not protecting people from scams. They were in on the largest scams in american history.
Indeed, that's my point. And that even for Americans, despite y'all's regulations (particularly when it comes to product placements) being far more relaxed than in Europe.
The problem is, the law hasn't even come close to catching up with reality for well over a decade. Influencers obviously - look no further than Fyre Festival or multi-million subscriber YouTubers that have a primary audience of children shilling online casinos [1] - but also the platforms themselves. YouTube is particularly egregious... in TV the regulation here is 12 minutes per hour and minimum 30 minutes between ad breaks [2], but YouTube? If you're not subscribing for Premium, it's a 30 second preroll and about a minute or two every 5-ish minutes - on top of the influencer's own ad roll that's usually 2 minutes per 10-minute video. That ad load is ridiculous.
[1] https://www.ingame.de/news/illegales-gluecksspiel-marcel-eri...
[2] https://www.rnd.de/medien/eu-und-fernsehwerbung-warum-es-nur...
It's a match made in hell. The only real way to beat these is to stick to information sources that are small enough to not be a target. Or to just accept that much of what you see, hear, read, and think has been deliberately curated by a government that is aggressively hostile against your ability to access narratives and information they either disagree with or simply dislike.
Some might see a government scrubbing "malinformation", but the Chinese government would call photographs of Tienanmen Square "malinformation" even though they were real, important, and culturally relevant - they just stood in opposition to the Chinese government's efforts to quell any hint of opposition. Narrative control by silencing people who see things differently.
What the US government did here was no different.
There's nothing wrong with taste-making, having criticism structured and communicated in an intelligent way that gives an audience a way to look at things is valuable when engaging with art, including popular art. What you have instead now is entirely audience captured creators who will just produce viral and controversial content and tell audiences exactly what they want to hear. A literal echo chamber where any critic that would say something unpopular is immediately dropped because they can never offend their audience.
The advertisement is of course as omnipresent, and in addition without shame or guard rails. Now you have mainstreamed bogus medical advice, VPN ads, nutrition pills, cam and porn sites, and stuff you'd otherwise only found at the bottom of a email spam folder.
There's basically a complete collapse in audience and discourse quality. Very practical example, I came across an interview with Frank Herbert, and funnily enough almost every youtube comment on the interview mentions how articulate it is (https://youtu.be/26GPaMoeiu4).
That's what you had when culture was still discussed at a level that wasn't a Joe Rogan podcast. On TV we used to have interviewers who were at least intelligent enough to comprehend the topic they were interviewing on, instead of just sitting there stoned.
What if the "alternatives" are dominated and controlled by intermediaries that are 100% funded by advertising, e.g., YT is subsidiary of company that sells online advertising "services", YT is used to deliver ads and data obtained from YT is used to support the parent company's ad services business
Vast conspiracies? Check. Ignore that creators now are audience captured in a way worse, way more manipulative of the outcome, and way less free for the creators then previous capture, check. Ignore that 'unpopular manufactured' previous mass culture was popular, mass culture, check. People literally talked around the water cooler about 'did you watch XYZ'? Did you got see XYZ movie yet?
Your argument makes sense if you had no experience with the past and sounds plausible. It would be perfect for a Youtube video, especially one for someone audience captured by a 'we know the truth' type audience. They would eat it up.
1. That advertises played a shaping role in what could be broadcast on TV is not a conspiracy, but documented fact. That, eg., the FTC had "public airwaves" obsceneity rules that made saying "shit" on TV revolutionary in the 2000s is, again, a fact. And so on.
2. That the mainstream media of the past was highly limited is again, a fact. Fox news, indeed, only arose post elimination of the fairenes doctrine (again, another extrordainary gov regulation on speech for a so-called Free Speech culture). It took the end of the FTC's public airwaves rules, via private means; the end of the fairness doctrine, and the like, for any diversity to arise: this was cable. HBO was the first breaking through of what-the-public-wanted.
Therefore that the public engaged with the mainstream media is beside the point: it has nothing to do with my comment. My comment describes what happened when these extraordinary government and advertiser require restrictions were relaxed. (See, even hollywood before they existed: precode hollywood is a vastly more "modern" place than the gov-constructed fantasy land on TV which followed).
3. You diagnose problems with the present day mass media landscape ("audience capture") and the like. This was already a problem with TV, and indeed also caused by advertisers (see, e.g., the movie Network which basically diagnoses an aduience-captured TV host as necessary schiozophrenic).
The relevant comparison I am making is not between the sins of one and the sins of the other. It is to simply observe that the modern mass media is not a product, in origin, of vast state and ad-sponsored censorship. That TV was is extremely well-documented. I've given you many search terms in this reply.
Most neutrally, for example, consider the run up to the iraq war: what was said, what was printed, and so on.
But more recently, consider what's printed or included on any TV programme about any of the major conflicts in the world. There is no context or analysis or history provided. There's, at most, two sides: the government's preferred case and the government's preferred opposition to that case.
This does not take much research, today at least, to discover -- frequently even mainstream expert opinion, outside of the government, says precisely the opposite. And that this is never broadcast or written about.
Vast swathes of the media elite maintain their access to information via governments, and the wealth via ad companies. They are empty moronic vessels who perform the most ill-informed scepticism you could imagine. But it all passes with the public who think that if there's a leftwing view and a rightwing view on an event, then the event itself isn't made up -- or the facts shared across them must be true. But, often enough: nope.
On the cultural side, the FTC and the Hollywood censors were in direct contact with TV production companies -- deleting scenes, and the like. Very contentful. All of this is well-documented.
This applies to American car culture also, as mentioned in this video on Tempe, AZ's "Cul De Sac" carless community: https://youtu.be/4UAZMEpOKTI
Something important to remember on this matter is that the American car industry almost collapsed during the GFC and had to be bailed out. Ford, GM, et al. exist today largely because their potential failure represented a national security concern, not because they make products that people desire (at least, at volume), or because those products enable a way of life that people desire.
>My great concern with the "YT is being TV" direction is that this history repeats. Just as facebook (etc.) centralised and ad-santisied the "local, independent" internet -- so will, YT/spotify/etc. just return the mass media back into advertiser hands.
Likewise, it would be nice if our realization that forced car ownership is bad for society didn't push us into a world where public transit was the only option, and owning a car too expensive to justify. In all, sociocultural monopolies seem like the thing to avoid. Not just a matter of not allowing one company to own a market, but not allowing one notion to monopolize our imaginations and ideals. Choice and competition in a capitalist society, whodathunk?
Did anyone else hear this narrated in Adam Curtis's voice, or is that just me?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
> HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI HyperNormalisation explained by Adam Curtis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to72IJzQT5k HyperNormalisation (2016)
Of course, it has to be your thing (and not all their productions are "my thing"), but I find it well produced and handled with certain love for the product and people working there.
I made this auto-redirect tool that automatically redirects you to a site's archive link :)
Plus I think the young likes the small clip type content than traditional entertainment. Just look at ticktoc (I never use it) how it is dragging all the young people to their content.
I an curious about seeing an age breakdown, but that is hard to get.
Not difficult as all, as there are plenty of studies and research in the area. Quick google gets a bunch of results, and of course you can ask Perplexity or any LLM that has research capability.
I find a lot of nonsense alt-history entertainment, but much less unbiased, un-audience captured actual history. And those that are unbiased quickly get attacked, pushing them to some opposite extreme than their attacked, attracting an audience drawn to that pushback and boom, another audience captured creator.
It is original content and well done.
The list of such shows is very long, pulling them out randomly since I just saw trailers for next seasons. Maybe your students are somehow outliers?
I guess you could argue that the stuff where Hank Green is telling me to consider buying a crash course coin is advertising? But by the same token arguably watching Carl Sagan play Blue Prince is advertising how great Carl is? Where are we drawing the line here?
But I bet the guy I replied to doesn't actually pay for premium. Most people who say "TV sucks because ads and YT is great because no ads and creators braining" mean that they can block ads on YT and those brainy creators can deliver stuff to them for free, so it's totally better than TV yeah. like it's "better" if you can steal stuff than if you have to pay for it)
But the path was paved way before last year. Think of how many podcasts started as one person on YouTube and became major multiplatform productions with dozens of creatives.
If "reality" isn't your thing plenty of narrative fiction has been picked up by Netflix and HBO, Cobra Kai probably the most recognizable but also maybe you've seen broad city or workaholics. In journalism we've seen Channel 5 get at least one HBO deal, etc
But I think you'll find that the majority of these creators are making enough revenue on YouTube that these deals are more an optional way to grow their audience than "the next step"
This reduces them to YouTube wrappers. A risky strategic position with advertisers, viewers and investors.
They own the distribution. That's arguably a more-powerful position than owning a small piece of IP.
This wouldn't even require them to give up their YouTube streaming business, because it's not like YouTube is forcing creators to sign exclusive streaming deals (are they?)
(And if the answer is "essentially none", then when is Youtube going to be broken up?)
There’s lots to do outdoors. You can spend your TV subscription money on equipment for whatever hobby you enjoy. Plus, it’s (currently) hard for commercial interests to enshittify the patches of the world we’ve demarcated as public spaces.
What a bizarre and vile characterization. You know it damn well that's bollocks. Cracking some edgy jokes doesn't mean you're suddenly responsible for some insane asshole shouting you out before committing genocide. Absurd. Never ceases to disgust me when media reports on the story like this.
YouTube is useful for things like “how to build a giant 3D printer” or “compare this CNC machine with that one”. It’s ok for a general place to link a video to (though I generally just put them on my own server”. It absolutely sucks at entertainment.
And the reason it sucks so badly at entertainment is just greed - I tried the free trial of YouTube Premium this last month, because the one thing I loathe about YouTube over everything else is the number of adverts, and ‘premium’ promises an ad-free experience.
But no, this sucks too, it just sucks slightly less. You still get loads of ads in ‘premium’ except they’re called ‘sponsored content’. That’s just sophistry and frankly makes me dislike the platform even more. I hate being lied to as well as forced to watch ads (sometimes the whole thing, sometimes there’s a ‘skip’ button after 30 secs or so.)
I can put up with this shit when it’s some instructional video, when I can mentally ignore whatever crap someone is trying to sell me for 30 secs or so. I cannot and will not put up with it when I want to be entertained. Ads ruin the entire entertainment experience.
If traditional TV is having its lunch eaten by YouTube, then I guess I start watching less TV, or subscribe to Apple TV+ / movie-streaming services (without ads). There’s a lot to do in this life, TV is not a requirement…
An ad is an ad is an ad. If I pay for "no adverts" (as, unfortunately, advertised), it ought to be "no adverts". Calling an advert "sponsorship" is not a solution, it's lying.
I will not be continuing my "free trial" of premium YouTube at the end of it, it's not worth the money to pay for something it singularly fails to do.
In my location, the ads served up by YouTube were a whole lot worse than what you'd see in videos. Think unapologetically ragebait local political propaganda. Passing through adblocking, even multiple layers of it. And since YouTube is actually interested in serving you those ads, they'll engage in an increasing amount of technological efforts as time goes on to ensure you see them. That's when I decided I'll rather pay up, than to see any of those ads even just one more time. Compared to that, being yapped to about some water bottle merch some creator is selling is almost like heaven.
But yeah, if I didn't need to go the extra mile, would be happy about it too.
Content creators reap the benefits by essentially double-dipping while YouTube looks the other way, because, I would assume, it has no legal or financial impact on them. I put up with some of it because I really enjoy certain channels, but in other cases I have simply unsubscribed and have stopped engaging.
I have nothing against ads or making money in principle, but I detest being deceived and gaslighted, especially when I am paying for something.
Apple TV+ doesn’t have an ad-free tier. They have a tier they call ad-free where they still force you into pre-roll ads for apple products. Unfortunately that’s the same for most streaming services that claim to be ad free.
- I can always fast-forward through anything on Apple TV, and in fact for the ads you mention, there's a button in the lower-right corner specifically to do that. It's the same as the "skip intro" button, which I also habitually press.
- These ads never come up slap bang in the middle of the content, they're only ever at the start and that's it.
Together, these make it far far less intrusive.
[In Common People an apparently life-changing medical intervention is gradually monetised, jacking up fees, adding new "premium" tiers that degrade until they're no better than the old baseline and eventually by inserting advertisements directly into the patient's actions any time they aren't paying everything they have ...]
Use uBlock Origin and they are gone.