YouTube Premium is a very reasonably priced service that actually results in more money going to the creators of videos than watching ads does.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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” :(
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.