They refuse to correct for purchasing power parity and are left with nothing in the end. Steam seems to do very well in comparison.
(I don't watch YouTube even for free, but practically everybody I know does without paying anything, and it makes a lot of sense).
"Purchasing power parity" is a non-concept for almost 100% of companies and products. But YouTube Premium is priced differently in different regions. Sometimes much cheaper than $14.
They're explaining for people who don't seem to understand, why people are fine signing in to these kind of 3rd party apps in the first place, because the subscription price ends up being what these people earn in days, not hours.
Its not entirely ad free, just fewer ads, AFAIK sponsored segments remain so there are still ads, sometimes quite lengthy ones.
$14/month is $168 an year, and if you subscribe to multiple other video services the annual total is going to be quite high.
which is a very niche slice, and I have no idea how representative it is in aggregate. but sponsorships happen because they pay well enough to annoy every viewer, not just ones that aren't using the better-paying Premium - they generally are not cheap, to say the least.
If you look at Premium, it's about 100x more lucrative than regular views. So I'm pretty sure I'm providing more money to creators than the skipped ads.
LTT though is a rather significant outlier in terms of subscribers (16.6 million right now). For truly large channels it's reasonable for the equation to be different.
And the equation for them really is different. They're a company with ~100 employees¹ and YouTube and video sponsorships came out to just 11.6% (ads AND premium) and 9.2% respectively of their multi-person company income. People claiming "SponsorBlock steals from creators" aren't talking about LTT, they're talking about smaller creators for whom YouTube stuff is a majority of their income.
Plus, like. Ads+premium lumped into one. It wouldn't surprise me if premium was lower than sponsorships.
It completely changes if we're talking about non-Premium views.
I can try to hunt mine down, but most of the examples I've had were from a couple years ago, and YouTube's history is rather hard to search for stuff like that :| Not high odds of success.
I've been trying to find public numbers for English-language channels, but wow. So much slop.
As for the ads, YouTube Premium now has built-in sponsor skip. They can't really block sponsored segments, as that is a freedom of speech issue and also something they can't easily determine. Creators can just omit that some product is sponsored.
And the proliferation of AI videoslop is only making the 0.1x side larger and larger
I guess you could say YouTube surfaces a larger span of quality, from really shit quality to incredible high quality, which I guess is cool. But since they provide zero tools to actually discover the really high quality, and on top of that decide they know better what I want to watch than me (like the subscriptions page not starting with the last published video), does that really matter?
> as that is a freedom of speech issue
It isn't. Freedom of speech in the US (since Google is based there, and maybe you too?) is about the government placing restrictions, not companies or individuals. As a individual (or company), you're free to limit the speech of anyone who want on your platform, for any reason. You might face public outcry, but it isn't a freedom of speech issue as it's on a private platform in the first place.
> Freedom of speech in the US...
Freedom of speech is a subject which is much larger than the US constitution. I'm not saying YouTube isn't legally allowed to block sponsored segments. I'm saying that they might not want to because they don't want to limit their creators' speech in that matter. Especially considering how easy it would be to side-step. What would be their reason? They've already made it easy to skip sponsored segments.
Not true in the US, where the FTC requires (and has required for decades) disclosure by the creator to the viewer whenever a payment has been made to the creator to promote anything. On Youtube, this is typically done by the creator's saying (in the video) "this video is sponsored by Foo Corporation", or, "I wish to thank the sponsor of this video, Foo Corporation".
Personally, I'm unhappy with Premium's built-in sponsor skip. For one thing it becomes available to me only after enough previous viewers have manually skipped over the sponsored segment. For another, it sometime skips ahead too far (probably because the viewers who manually skipped weren't precise in skipping exactly to the end of the sponsored segment). I'd much rather Youtube allowed the uploader to declare (to Youtube) that the upload is free of sponsors (e.g., by checking a box) and then punishing the uploader somehow if he routinely declares falsely. With that information, Youtube could and IMHO should give me the option of telling Youtube somehow (e.g., by checking a box) that I prefer for sponsored videos to be omitted from my recommendations.
Although I like your idea about creators themselves having to declare to YouTube their sponsored segments.
Also, if the creator doesn't follow the rule, the sponsor can be fined by the FTC, so even before the FTC notices the violation, the sponsor will probably notice and refuse to continue the relationship unless the creator's videos comes into compliance with the rule.
Again, this rule has been in effect for decades in the US. Advertisements in the US must be labeled as such. Ditto paid endorsements.
* $0.00 plus additional risk that the author of the alternative you are using is compromised, you end up using a malicious version of that alternative, and get pwned.
Obviously for some/many, that trade-off is totally cool. But it needs to be included in the analysis, otherwise you're being dishonest.
https://tweakers.net/nieuws/213942/youtube-stopt-met-premium...
To save $1680 I'd prefer to just use an adblocker (which I have done for the past decade)
I think there is a good argument that having a single dominant platform has been harmful.
OpenAI thought of it first, should YouTube get a government backstop too?
- What happened to you?
- I figured that if I ran behind the bus, I'll save the $3 dollars the ticket costs-
The hacker father smacked his son hard on the head and cried:
- You fool! To run behind a bus like that! You should have ran behind a taxi instead and you would have saved at least $50 dollars!
Then they both watched YouTube together the rest of the evening, thinking eagerly about all the juicy money they would save over the next decade.
1. Save $14 for retirement and not watch Youtube
2. Save $14 for retirement and watch Youtube with ads
3. Pay $14 a month for Youtube without ads
The only option that's not fair is expecting private companies and creators to give you entertainment and its delivery with nothing in return
His rationale? "Nobody will cry over a few missing quarters and they are free to lock their doors anyway."
You are very intelligent.
You are able to make your own définition though. The clear mark of a very intelligent mind.
But I suppose strictly speaking, theft is not the same word as stealing. I was not smart enough to get that. You're right, and I apologize.
Not that ad-blocking is illegal, it's not, but it does bypass payment to creators for content they provide. Which functionally acts the same as theft.
My experience is that you are basically paying to remove the official ads from your disguised ads.
The various algorithm tweaks for engagement these past few years and the introduction of shorts have significantly degraded the content quality and many good channels have just thrown the towel.
I will happily pay for youtube when they show that they want to encourage good content and help empower the people who make that good content, but Google doesn't want to do that because Mr Beast slop advertising to your kids is more profitable.
So I pay for Nebula instead.
hasn't been in over a year
I just googled redtube and uh... are you sure?
Most youtube content being disguised ads, this cannot be true.
Do you have a source for this?
I do value watching unlimited youtube videos without ads, but if they're gonna add the ads back in, I'd easily stop paying for the one google product I currently pay for (and honestly the only reason I haven't already done this is laziness and convenience)
It launched at $9.99[1] and is now $13.99[2] which I believe to be a 40% increase, i.e. flat in real dollars. If like most people you subscribe for a year, it's only $11.67/mo.
1: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/youtube-free...