Why should I reward that by paying them?
Seems awfully convenient.
If I were blocking the ads, I wouldn't be aware of how bad it's gotten.
Their story reveals that all these people hating on YouTube are actually just selfish children doing mental gymnastics.
Their savior came, disrupted YouTube pretty deeply, then went bankrupt.
Nebula might have a shot at breaking the stranglehold, and I support them, but it remains to be seen if they can do it. A lot of content creators would have to move there, and there's a lot of random stuff (recorded lectures, video instructions, music, etc) that probably never will because it doesn't fit their premium original content model.
The whole point of Nebula is NOT to become another YT, it's meant to be curated source of media.
Nebula has no shot. It has a <1% conversion rate. Creators make almost nothing from it compared to their yt channel.
My point is that the fundamental problem with the Internet and Internet services is the users entitlement to free things. The Internet would be a dramatically better place if it worked for users and not for advertisers. Vid.me was dramatically better, but it died learning that 99% of people in threads like this is full of shit and actually just entitled.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/9agg5f/how_does_yo...
> Per user, creators usually get a LOT more from premium than ads. If I divide my monthly views by my monthly unique viewers, I get about 1.9 cents per viewer.
> The way premium works is, first youtube takes a cut--I believe it's 45%. The remaining amount is divided among all the creators you watch based on how much you watch them. I believe that's based on view time.
> So if the YT premium price is $13.99, the creators get 55% or $7.69. You would have to watch 405 different creators for each one to get 1.9 cents.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/16c80eb/how_do_you...
But what's with the weirdly aggressive second part of your message?
There are not enough people with your willingness to make this mechanism work by itself.
So the choice is either to have the content exist, but rely on ads, or not have the content exist. And it's not your choice - it's the content creator's choice.
For a long time, my criticism was that Youtube Premium is needlessly bundled with Youtube Music, which is redundant for me as a Spotify user and which I refused to pay for accordingly.
Now, in at least a few countries, there's "Youtube Premium Lite", which is basically regular Youtube but without ads. If you live in one of these, in my view that's close to the ideal scenario: Everybody gets to choose between watching ads and paying.
While time is finite and valuable, if I am already on YouTube, then I have already committed to choice of wasting that nebulous amount of time in the first place.
As much as youtube can waste time, I also feel like I’ve been given genuine value by certain people on the site, so I wouldn’t say it’s simply wasting time.
If one's patreon did have perks associated with it, then I would be more inclined to 'donate', as well.
Sounds like awfully convenient motivated reasoning.
Split up any and all monopolies, and nationalize what should provide a common good such as payment networks and internet infrastructure.
Yes, society has deemed that it’s fine to make use of the avenues that have been explicitly created to reduce your tax burden - that’s why they were created. Society is also relatively fine with using unintended loopholes for the same purpose (although it is a lot more controversial and criticized), because we don’t tend to punish people for breaking laws, rules and regulations that don’t exist. When we end up caring a lot about them, we plug the gaps
The other person was talking about straight up not paying for goods and services that are sold at a given price, which is stealing. The more apt comparison would be to tax evasion (actually breaking the law), which is a crime, widely considered wrong and punished accordingly
You only use this argument for Youtube content creators because it's trivial to avoid payment and then backsplain it with unique moral justifications.
“What goes around comes around,” shouldn’t be surprising.”
These "rules" weren't voted upon by either creators or consumers. Most of them are arbitrary and capricious. Features implemented by YouTube, like showing where people skip to the most, are also an attempt to cut into sponsorship dollars, was that within the "rules"?
Let me be clear: Following the "rules" under these monopolistic circumstances is the philosophy of cowardice in the face of power and doesn't hold as much intellectual merit as you might think.
I’m receptive to various arguments here that invoke power differentials, pragmatism, even deliberately breaking the terms of a service to help affect change, etc. I’m not necessarily someone who always follows the rules, and even though I do pay for YouTube I don’t view it as a real moral failing to use the free service with an ad blocker turned on
The comment I responded to didn’t have any of that, it just boiled down to “I can do it and they can’t stop me, so they can suck a dick”. Maybe not the end of the world when it’s directed towards Alphabet, but I hope that mindset doesn’t extend to everyone they interact with
My computer is my property, it will do what I ask it to just like my refrigerator, my tv, and my paper and pencil. I will remove corporate logos from my belongings, and entirely fail to look at the advertising that comes in my mail box. And if google tries to tell my computer to show me advertising, I am _entirely_ within my rights to tell my computer not to.
Metrocop: She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)#The_B...
We're already halfway there with ad blocker blockers anyway; once the sum of "lost revenue due to collateral damage of blocked users on old/non-DRM-supporting browser versions" and "increased revenue due to finally defeating ad blockers" is positive, it'll happen.
I've got bad news for you
Do you want to have a great YouTube experience? Paying for it gets you that.
I watch YouTube videos frequently. Never see an ad. It’s great.
But that's not how YT works. YT doesn't charge you for good stuff. It charges you for not delivering crap. That's not legitimate business, that's a racket. I have no qualm punishing YT for that. Content creators are free to find other ways to monetize their labor, if their labor is actually valuable. (And so many of the good ones do, quite successfully.)
This “It charges you for not delivering crap.” line is bullshit. Serving video content costs money, they’ve given you the choice of how to pay for it, and you don’t like the choices but want to keep getting the content.
21st century nation states can better solve video scale delivery without middle parasites like Google.
If it's that easy, why has nobody done it?
(Hint: governments don't want to run YouTube, probably shouldn't run YouTube, and nobody else wants or can afford the immense costs that come with running YouTube.)
Most governments operate a postal service. Why then should governments not provide bare bones email and video services? You have government agencies using Zoom and similar. The analogy would be discontinuing the USPS and sending official government post via a wholly unregulated Fedex. It's absurd.
Zoom and email are not natural monopolies.
USPS is not a natural monopoly, it's a government service that no one else wants to do (nor would they).
> if you watch the tracking you'll see that they just hand off to USPS in Anchorage.
Because it's cheaper to do so. They can't offer a competitive rate because USPS is eating the cost in that case. To be clear I don't think that's a bad thing it just needs to be pointed out that if USPS didn't exist Fedex (or whoever) would deliver but would charge a much higher price to the person shipping the package.
You are the one who brought up natural monopolies and I'm not sure why. Private couriers exist yet the government still finds it worthwhile to run a public one. I asked why the same should not be true of digital communication platforms for email and video. Recall that the context of my original reply was a government operated youtube.
Or maybe there just won't be any cat videos, because the state has decreed them unnecessary or even harmful? How about political messages, is the state going to allow those to be posted on its platform? There are bound to be a few that go against state policy...
You could argue that the same is true for broadcast TV, and I would 100% agree. The state has no business running or even funding public television.
The problem here is that we're already only having this debate because people refuse to pay, even when what they're paying with is functionally intangible (i.e. their letting an ad play on their PC for 30 seconds.
So any model which relies on people physically paying real actual money* is doomed to fail to begin with because you're not solving the issue.
There's also an issue with the payment model. Creating an account, sharing a bunch of personal info, and subscribing on a recurring basis is entirely different from the USPS model where I walk into the post office and pay a one time fee in cash to get my letter where it needs to go. I suppose an analogous service might charge $/gb/mo paid up front without requiring an account. Like catbox.moe except paid.
Also remember that legitimate creators keep being demonetised for no reason because AI moderation has a brainfart and no human is in charge.
And then there's the clusterfuck around malicious copyright strikes made for bad faith reasons by non-owners.
With public infrastructure there's at least some nominal possibility of democratic accountability - not so much in the US, large parts of which are pathologically delusional about public infrastructure as a concept, but it should be an option in countries with saner and more reality-based policies.
"The gov't should pay for it" is not a solution to private problems.
Because US citizens would benefit? Preventing outsiders from incidentally benefiting isn't a constitutional mandate (yet).
Would you oppose an anti-pollution measure even though it would also provide cleaner air to neighbouring countries?
I’m just glad others feel this way.
Why the hell can’t I have my own spam free email account from the post office? Because the ads, the precious ads.
On average creators get paid more for premium views than they get from ads .
The browser is my agent, just like my screenreader is.
Google is to blame here - and I'm saying that as an author who does advertise there because of marketshare.
Especially if I'm protecting myself.
But at the same time, these yt creators are relying on google ads . Which are intrusive, doesn't acknowledge and care about privacy. If you turn on ad privacy, you see gambling, scams ,crypto ads. How is that responsible? You as a creator is ok with getting money and ok with indirectly making people addicted, fall for scams? That's not right.
I am ok with sponser ads and am against sponsorblock. They are not tracking me, violating my privacy and telling me about new products .
youtube subscription doesn't stop youtube for collecting you data and use it for ads during other google service .
If they want to sell a service in exchange for payment, then they are free to do so. For legal reasons they are not doing that. The explicit legal definition used by lawyers and politicians is that advertisement supported services are not a payment, but an optional content that the viewer might or might not look at. This optional aspect of advertisement is how laws distinguish between it and a sale. From a legal perspective there is a difference between selling a sample product for 1 cent, compared to giving it away for free. One is a sale, and the other is a free giveaway, and thus they are under different legal definitions.
There are similar legal theory for when a platform should be held legal responsible their products, for their advertisement, and when local laws applies and how. News papers, radio, and TV has each been forced to handle local advertisement laws and regulation, and there is a reason why most had departments to curate which advertisement they could publish. They also get held responsible if they break local law.
even if I did pay for a subscription, they would find a way to jack up the price or insert new ads while collecting my data. The landscape isn't competitive enough. People like this idea that "if you don't pay for the product, you are the product" but it's not complete. Just because you pay for a product doesn't mean you're not the product. We used to pay for cable TV, only to still get ads. We used to pay for windows licenses, now with ads!
I will continue to waste their bandwidth while blocking ads until they hopefully go bankrupt and get replaced by some bittorrent-like p2p solution.