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Comment by Nicook | Hacker News Reader

Its encrapification is real. It has been slow though, mostly affecting niche interests and smaller creators. And the ad experience has definitely gotten worse, but adblockers help. Try using youtube without and adblocker.

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I pay for the subscription and don’t see any ads. It comes with YouTube Music. It’s great.

None of your videos have in-video ads? "This segment is sponsored by NordVPN!" style stuff?

Content creators still have their embedded ads. You just avoid all the non-skippable you tube ads

I use Youtube on a Chromecast with the SmartTube-beta app, which skips in-video ads, if they are demarcated by the creator - and most videos with in-video ads have that. The app just skips right by the in-video ad, as well as a bunch of other non-interesting video content if it is specified in the video timecodes by the creator.

Another great feature of SmartTube-beta - and it's the feature that brought me to that app - is the ability to completely remove all "shorts" from the entire app. No more shorts. I've configured the app to eliminate them completely like they never existed.

> if they are demarcated by the creator - and most videos with in-video ads have that

I'm almost positive that SmartTube is using the SponsorBlock database, which does not depend on creator-submitted demarcation, but rather on user-generated/crowd-sourced segment tagging. https://sponsor.ajay.app/

This sounds amazing. I personally resorted to FreshRSS and an extension that allows me to spoof feeds from YouTube and socials as if they were RSS. It’s not perfect, but it is a chronological plain-text (apart from hyperlinks) list of content that I feel materially healthier for having switched to. My past experiences with alternative frontend interfaces for YouTube is that they last a few months, then Google tweaks their API just enough to break them all for a few weeks.

I also pay for YT Premium, and I have maintained a family subscription since they initially offered one. I wish they would just provide Premium users with options for turning off shorts, comments (per-channel ideally, but across the board would be fine too), games, and everything else I don’t care to ever engage with.

I also run a self-hosted AdGuard service for DNS-level adblocking, but it sounds like Google’s getting around that as well. Next stop will be DNS with SSL and a proxy. I am a little concerned that I am having to establish what must appear from the outside to be a very sketchy anonymizing infrastructure, and it’s all just to use the web the way I always have, whilst avoiding the increasingly intrusive and anxiety-inducing tracking and advertising.

There's another plug-in called SponsorBlock that will skip over most of those.

In the old days people would pay to host video content and now people pay Google to watch other people's hosted video content. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing. I'm still waiting for the first company to start selling bottled air next!

You're talking as if video content has no intrinsic value of its own. Of course it does.

"Now people pay cable companies to watch TV shows. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing."

I mean, when it launched the point of paying for cable instead of getting TV for free via broadcast was no ads

Now cable has ads and costs a fortune; I didn't know anyone who has it. I do still watch a little broadcast though, the price is right even if the programming isn't great.

If there's nothing on I turn it off and look at my phone

> point of paying for cable instead of getting TV for free via broadcast was no ads

No, the point of paying for cable was to get more TV. Most cable stations have always had ads. You're probably thinking of HBO, which is a tiny subset of overall cable output.

The original point of cable was Community Antenna TV, where you'd get a much better quality signal (and often even additional out-of-market but nearby channels). Then broadcasters decided to go into specifically seeking nationwide coverage (Ted Turner was a pioneer in this area). They also decided, due to the sports leagues, that cable should only deliver local stations in the same market as your location through blackouts (through my childhood I went from getting three ABC affiliates and two CBS affiliates, to one of each). It became unprofitable to manage blacking out the out-of-market station any time they were both running network or sports programming, so the out-of-market stations were generally removed (I also wouldn't be surprised if negotiations for retransmission consent included terms preventing carriage of out-of-market stations).

I don't think there was a time Cable didn't have ads, certain channels like HBO yeah, but never cable as a whole. The attraction was just having way more content.

In the 1950s when Cable started in the US, there were no Cable channels. Cable was literally renting a pipe to a big antenna instead of your own small antenna in your house, so you got broadcast with better signal strength.

The first Cable channel was HBO. The second was TBS, it had ads from the beginning.

There are tons of companies selling bottled air. Here's a story from 7 years ago. There are lots more now: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jan/21/fresh-air-for...

I get a lot of value from youtube - hours of entertainment. Also I don't pay and use an ad blocker which is maybe a bit unfair but thanks to the people who do pay.

Using an adblocker certainly won't help smaller creators and niche interests. If you don't want ads but want to support creators, pay for Premium.

A lot of them have sponsors which pay more than the ads, or are on Patreon, or are also on other platforms that pay them a higher proportion or allow videos that risk demonetisation on Youtube, or sell merch, or something else.

Sure, and if you're a patreon supporter, or support them on a non-YouTube platform, great. But if they're monetized and you're just watching them on YouTube, which probably 90% of people do, then running an adblocker is preventing them from earning money they would otherwise have earned. Whether or not they're _also_ earning money via other means is irrelevant.

I have a question. How much do small creators get for views from Premium users? Say they get a few thousand views per video, would they get anything from Premium users?

I've seen some breakdowns, and (depending on the content, because different ad segments can be more or less lucrative) view time from Premium users tends to be worth more, and often way more.

As I understand it, a chunk of your membership fee is divided amongst all monetized creators you watch on a monthly basis, proportional to your watch time. A different chunk of your membership fee is divided between the creators and record labels, for your watch/listen time of Shorts and Youtube Music.

So the size of the creator is only relevant insofar as it can determine whether the channel is eligible for monetization. View time is not worth a different amount depending on the size of the creator.

Probably not much for a few thousand. My understanding is that it requires continually producing videos that attract 100k+ viewers. It doesn't pay a lot, but it attracts direct sponsors who pay better. The biggest money comes from selling your own products and services, like "How to make millions on YouTube" seminars.

Lol, if you want to support them pay their patreon. The few cents they get from you paying premium won't support them.

I don't understand what point you're attempting to make. Yes, of course if you pay someone $5 a month on Patreon, they'll be getting more money from you than if you just used Premium or disabled your adblocker. And if you paid them $100/month, that would be more than $5. So?

Why does that make it okay to use an adblocker?

Because google already has enough money and the people I watch won't be getting any useful amount of money anyway, so why go through it?

I use patreon for ones I care about. And many of the niche interests I'm interested in are demonetized anyways which is the crux of the issue.

My YT premium recently expired for a payment issue and ffs the ads are absolutely insane.

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